Crossing the Line (5 page)

“All right. Listen up. We had a satellite company out of Colorado take a digital picture for us from four hundred and twenty-three miles up. Here’s where we’re at, and here’s Hidalgo’s place. That so-called town we drove through, Potash, is eight miles to the southeast.”

Our little crater with its five buildings stood just to the west of a wide red river. The buildings were little more than square-shaped pinpricks. Roan River was shown as being maybe a quarter-inch wide, which translated on the map to almost a hundred yards, just on the other side of the hogback ridge behind us. On the other bank, a little to the north, was a U-shaped building and two long rectangles.

The U-shaped building, we were told through a haze of smoke, was Hidalgo’s residential compound on the bank of the river. It consisted of a single sprawling house set around a turquoise swimming pool—an unusual luxury in Wyoming and something that must be enormously expensive to heat and clean. The house and the pool overlooked the river. The two long rectangles, farther away from the reddish stripe of water and maybe a half-mile from the house, were two trailers. These had once housed miners, but were now inhabited by Hidalgo’s bodyguards. The mine was nearby, evidenced by an acre or more of broken stone that had been dragged out of the earth.

Tom pointed out the silver roof of another trailer—this one far smaller—that was nestled in some trees south of the whole complex and alongside the only road that led into it. We were told men with automatic weapons were almost certainly watching the road twenty-four hours a day.

“What’s he doing operating a mine here?” I asked.

“Laundering money, we think,” Mary said. “Or setting it up so that he can launder money. The mine has been abandoned for years, but we have some satellite pictures that show him moving trucks and machines into the mine. Things have been getting a little hot for him in Mexico, too. There have been a lot of killings lately, and the new government under Vicente Fox has once again sworn to eradicate the past decades of corruption that have allowed the cartels to flourish. They have even been making some noise about shutting down the tourist hotels and pharmacies Hidalgo’s been using to legitimize his illicit proceeds.”

That brought me to one of the questions that had been bugging me all along.

“What the hell’s he doing in Wyoming?”

“His old buddies down in Baja have been trying to knock him off,” Tom said, looking at the map, not me. “The survivors of his wars with Carrillo in Juárez and the Arellano-Felix brothers in Tijuana have gotten sick of Hidalgo’s thugs pushing them around and taxing them. Plus the boys operating out of Sonora and Tamaulipas think he’s too greedy and too ambitious. Everyone’s gunning for each other. A couple of hundred have died this year already. Mostly soldiers, but a few big boys and even some of Hidalgo’s hired judges and politicians. It’s a war zone. So Hidalgo, no fool, has come north to sit it out for a while. Until his hired guns can find and finish taking out the last of the Arellanos and their politicos in Baja. Then he’ll finally have a secure hold there.”

I’d read about the drug war in Baja, but thought it was pretty much over. Hidalgo and his Mexicali Mafia had won against the Arellano-Felixes, just as they’d partially dismantled the Juárez cartel by taking out Amado Carrillo. Of the several Arellano-Felix brothers who had operated out of Tijuana, one was believed to be dead and one was in Mexican custody. They’d been put in their respective places by Hidalgo and his legion of
sicarios
and bribed Mexican justice officials.

The news of government corruption in Mexico was something that didn’t surprise me. Past presidents had been proven corrupt, as had army generals and, recently, a former Attorney General himself. A few years ago a top law-enforcement official testified to the Mexican Congress that up to eighty percent of police officers, prosecutors, and judges were in the employ of the cartels. The DEA put the number at closer to ninety percent. Presidente Fox admitted that the pervasive influence of dirty money had infected law-enforcement organizations throughout the country. It was a country where every time a new drug-fighting agency was created, it was shut down within a year or two for rampant corruption. Mexico’s unofficial motto was
Plata o plomo
—“Silver or lead”—as in
You can take my money or you can eat a bullet.

I’d spent much of my childhood on Grandfather’s
estancia
in Argentina and knew that Latin “government” was often merely a commodity, something that was bought and sold. Politicos like my notorious grandfather left office either rich or dead.

“But why here? Why Wyoming?”

Tom allowed himself a bitter chuckle and looked across at me.

“To enjoy our nation’s constitutional protections, QuickDraw. Its police and its laws. Formal procedures like arrest warrants and Miranda rights, and cops who are straight, who execute warrants and not their suspects. Most of the time, anyway,” he said, giving me a significant and nasty look. “Plus, this lovely state of yours has no income tax. Maybe Hidalgo’s thinking about applying for residency. He should fit right in.”

“Maybe we should tell Agent Burns a little bit more about him,” Mary said.

“I’d appreciate that,” I snapped at Tom. God, the guy was a prick.

Until a few weeks ago, when I’d learned from Roberto about his deal with the Feds, I hadn’t been entirely sure that Hidalgo wasn’t just another myth. Like the
chupacabra,
the goat-sucking demon that had much of Latin America terrified a few years back.

Tom produced a single piece of white cardboard from his briefcase. He slapped it down on the table in front of me, over the map. It was an enlargement of a passport photo. I could tell because of the dark ridges where the stamp had been.

“This is the best one we have,” Mary said. “With a little luck, in the next couple of days we’ll get something a lot better.”

The photograph, grainy from the enlargement, portrayed a chubby, dapper-looking man in a suit and tie. He was smiling easily at the camera from beneath a Saddam Hussein–style mustache. His longish hair was slicked back but not so much as to make him appear a greaser. He was handsome, but plain. Nothing like what I expected, not some red-eyed and dripping-fanged devil. But on closer examination, I saw that his eyes were bright and hard. They stared straight at the camera—straight through it. The eyes gave me the creeps. Although I’d done a hundred undercover investigations against suspects whose photos I’d studied, I already felt more than a little exposed.

“He’s gotten fat,” Roberto commented, glancing at the picture. “Serves him right. Guy always ate like a pig. Eats those Twinkie things—
Gansitos
—all day long.”

“Tell me what you know about him,” I said to Mary.

Mary closed her eyes for a moment, as if preparing for a recitation. When she opened them she spoke quickly.

“From what our task force has pieced together over the years, and from what, in the last two weeks, we’ve learned from your brother—”

“Which is suspect,” Tom interjected. “To say the least.”

Roberto only raised his eyebrows as he fingered the leather cord around his neck.

Mary continued, “Jesús Ruiz Hidalgo-Paez, also known as El Doctor because of the chain of pharmacies he owns, was born in 1965 in Culiacán, the capital of the western state of Sinaloa. It was and still is something of a bandit state, where many of the citizens worship a thief who was hung there by the Mexican army in 1909.”

I’d seen the medallions hanging from the necks of the transporters we occasionally arrested as they drove through Wyoming on I-80. The highway was the principal way Mexican narcotics were moved across the border from the Southwest to the East Coast. Malverde, I remembered, was the name of the mustachioed saint I’d seen depicted in swinging gold. Supposedly he was some kind of Robin Hood, and in recent years he’d been adopted as saint by the narcos.

“His family was what passes in Mexico for middle class, his father being some kind of minor government functionary. When he was seventeen, Hidalgo began working for a man named Rafael Caro-Quintero, one of the country’s earliest large-scale traffickers. He’s now in prison, by the way, in part for the murder of a DEA agent, one of only two American cops the cartels have dared touch.”

I nodded. I’d heard about that. And I knew the second cop had been their colleague, but I wasn’t ready to talk about him yet. “About fifteen years ago, right?”

Tom spoke before she could confirm my recollection.

“Quintero
runs
the prison. At least when he’s not partying back in Sinaloa, on parole. He keeps African lions there. He likes to entertain his party guests by throwing suspected informants into the pen with them.”

Mary continued her recitation as if neither one of us had spoken.

“Hidalgo started out as a sort of minor bagman for Quintero. He paid out the bribes to the local politicians and law enforcement. He was apparently good at this, because soon Quintero was flying him to Mexico City to make the payoffs there, too. After a while Quintero discovered an additional job for his protégé; he made Hidalgo his chief enforcer. Even when he was only twenty years old, Hidalgo understood better than anyone the power of fear and brutality. He capitalized on it, taking it to a level far beyond anything Mexico had yet seen. He earned a very serious reputation. And this made him even more popular and more effective as a bagman in Mexico City.”

Mary went on to explain how at the age of twenty-six, Hidalgo was permitted to start his own trafficking operation provided he pay a tax to Quintero’s successor, his brother Miguel. This was at a time when American law enforcement was finally shutting down the air trafficking from Colombia via the Caribbean and had put a stop to the Juárez cartel’s fleet of 727s that flew as far north as Manhattan. The method Hidalgo used was simpler. Young illegal immigrants—mostly just kids in their teens and early twenties—entering the U.S. anyway were paid anywhere from a hundred to a thousand dollars to carry fifty-pound packs of cocaine with them. With thousands of people crossing daily, all of them desperate for a few dollars, he had no trouble finding eager recruits. And if some were caught by La Migra—the INS—it was no problem for Hidalgo. Profits were so enormous that he could afford to lose ten loads for every one that got through. Later he upped the quantity by loading trucks with cocaine and heroin, then bribing American border guards to wave them through. The low-paid officers had a hard time resisting a twenty-thousand-dollar payment for simply waving a certain truck through. Especially when the alternative—for refusing the offer—might be death.

Hidalgo was innovative in another way, too. Instead of working for the Colombians, where nearly all cocaine comes from, Hidalgo bought it from them directly. He had it transferred onto fishing vessels and speedboats out near the Galápagos Islands then brought north thirty-seven hundred miles into the Sea of Cortés. It was trucked in to the border town of Mexicali, where it was cut and processed and then smuggled through the desert.

His success angered the Tijuana cartel being run by the Arellano-Felix brothers. They claimed all of Baja, and believed that Hidalgo needed to pay them a tax, too. Hidalgo refused. Soon he was also refusing to pay Quintero, his former mentor.

“Starting about ten years ago, the other cartels began using all their pull with the government to get Hidalgo arrested,” she said. “There have been several attempts, but each time the judge who signed the indictment was murdered within twenty-four hours. So the established cartels began kidnapping Hidalgo’s men in the hopes of hijacking his operations. They tortured his lieutenants and other flunkies but discovered only a single amazing fact: Hidalgo’s men wouldn’t talk. Their loyalty to Hidalgo was fanatical. The reason soon became apparent. If anyone was even suspected of talking, his entire family would be killed. Everyone, from grandparents to grandchildren to distant cousins. A whole extended family, wiped out.”

I looked at my brother, wondering if he’d known about this when he knew Hidalgo. Wondering, also, if it was such a good idea for him to be talking about the narco.

“This true, ’Berto?”

“Yeah. Probably.” He shrugged. “I heard the rumors, but never saw anything like that. Jesús denied it when I asked him about it. When I started to think maybe it might be true, I split.”

Tom snorted again derisively. Disbelieving.

But I believed my brother. Roberto had always been passionately intolerant of abuses against women, children, and dogs. It’s what had caused him to kill a man in a bar in Colorado, and thus earn a manslaughter conviction. The man had stuck his hand up the dress of a young woman Roberto was with. Once, with me at a sidewalk café in Boulder many years ago, he’d broken the nose of a Denver news anchor who’d slapped a woman. He’d only gotten a misdemeanor assault charge out of that one.

“All I did was some guiding for him,” Roberto continued. “You know, taking mules—the kids with backpacks—through the desert in Arizona and California. They were dying like flies from the heat and lack of water. Plus they were getting ambushed by guys from other cartels, and those gringo vigilante ranchers.”

I could picture it: Roberto showing a bunch of hardscrabble kids how to live off the land while avoiding all the desert’s dangers, not to mention the authorities. Leading them through the wilderness like a manic messiah. He would have thought it was fun. For a while, anyway. Until he learned just how vicious his employer could be.

“Hidalgo’s signature, by the way,” Mary said, getting us back on track, “is a little something he borrowed from his colleagues in Bogotá. There it’s called the Colombian Necktie. The narcos slit an informant’s throat and pull the tongue out through the wound. Only in Mexico it’s called
la corbata de Jesús,
after Hidalgo. The Colombians generally shoot their victims first. Hidalgo likes for them to drown on their own blood.”

She resumed her lecturing tone.

“Over the last ten years Jesús Hidalgo has become the leading importer of Colombian cocaine into the United States. We, along with the DEA, estimate that Hidalgo is responsible for something like a quarter of what enters our country from the Southwest border region. After more than twelve assassination attempts that we know about, Hidalgo bought this property in Wyoming as a sort of safe house.” She pointed at a window freshly covered by tar paper at the rear of the room. “Not in his own name, of course, but in the name of one of his attorneys. As Tom said, he’s protected here by all the liberties and rules of our laws. Because of the layers and layers of lieutenants he uses, their absolute loyalty, and the simple genius with which he covers his tracks, we don’t have enough evidence to even get a search warrant, much less an indictment.”