Dreamland (27 page)

He tutored his new Xalisco Boys. Never leave the house with anything in your pockets. Take only what you can swallow if you get pulled over. And never carry a gun. An illegal who is arrested gets deported; an illegal with a gun gets ten years.

Some of them still dressed as they had back home, with cowboy boots and belt buckles. “Go to the stores downtown,” he told two of them one day. “Look at how they dress the mannequins at JCPenney’s. Buy clothes like that so you blend in with the people here.”

He insisted they send money home weekly. Most didn’t need to be told, and religiously sent money to Mom via Western Union. Those who didn’t, he knew he would be hearing from their parents. For some kids, he sent the money to their parents’ house himself.

Sell to whites; that’s where the money is, he told them. Steer clear of blacks. He didn’t have to insist too strongly on this point, either. His runners came with their own ideas forged by the negative view of black people common in Mexican culture that was, in turn, reinforced by the stories of returning immigrants who lived in Compton, Watts, and South Central Los Angeles, where powerful black gangs terrorized vulnerable Mexicans. So the Xalisco Boys stayed away from black neighborhoods, and this was one reason why, as their system expanded, Nayarit black tar was primarily sold to, and used by, whites.

Otherwise, he had a live-and-let-live attitude. The U.S. market was large enough and tar heroin was addictive enough. It never occurred to him to sell wholesale. Retail, he made almost triple what he would have made selling heroin wholesale. He had a bunch of poor ranchero kids down in Nayarit eager to drive around with tiny balloons in their mouths—so his risk was minimal, and they were only deported when arrested because they usually prssessed such small quantities of dope. Selling small quantities allowed him to get the most money out of the dope he got up from Mexico. Plus, as he hired more of these men, his standing in Xalisco improved and he got respect every time he returned.

Columbus had been at the bottom of Ohio’s heroin distribution chain. At the time the Man arrived, heroin in Columbus was at most 3 percent pure, old addicts told me, and even that was hard to get. For years before his arrival, in the entire city of Columbus, Ohio, heroin was sold at precisely one street corner: Mt. Vernon Avenue at North 20th Street.

The city instead had always been a pill town. Pills were easier to trust than low-grade heroin. “The advent of black tar heroin in this community suddenly put a much purer-grade heroin on the streets of central Ohio,” said Ronnie Pogue, cofounder of Columbus’s lone methadone clinic, CompDrug. “The hunger for heroin, which had always been there, immediately saw an upward spike, because you also saw a spike in the overdose rate.”

Columbus had the only methadone clinic for hundreds of miles around. Long before the Man arrived, the region’s opiate addicts had been traveling into Columbus to score whatever they could find in front of the clinic. As word spread of the high quality of black tar, these pilgrims became some of his first clients—users from Zanesville, Toledo, Chillicothe, from northern Kentucky and western West Virginia. Some of his best clients were from Ashland, Kentucky, who had bought for years in front of Columbus’s methadone clinic. They bought his tar and went back to Ashland and sold it for triple.

Black tar became the talk of Columbus’s drug underworld. It was the most powerful heroin anyone had tried. Plus the Mexicans soon had a delivery driver in each area. With that, heroin found its way to suburban kids. “They broke this city down into ‘Domino’s: thirty minutes or less,’” one veteran addict told me. “When you’re dope sick, that makes a big difference. Then, every time you found them somebody new, it was a free balloon. Usually it was seven balloons for a hundred dollars. But if you brought them enough people and were spending with them, you could get as many as thirteen balloons for a hundred dollars.”

With addicts transformed into a new sales force, the Man was soon making so much money that he had to concentrate less on running the cell and more on getting cash back to Mexico. He formed a network of young women. A tailor in Los Angeles made them corsets with pockets that held a hundred thousand dollars in cash. He sent the women on airplanes to El Paso where they crossed his money to Ciudad Juárez and from there back to Xalisquillo. For more than a year, he sent two girls a month back to Mexico with a hundred thousand dollars in pure Columbus, Ohio, profit tucked in their corsets.

His product was coming in from a man named Oscar Hernandez-Garcia, a member of the Tejeda clan who operated a heroin supply business out of his apartment in Panorama City in Los Angeles. Hernandez-Garcia, known as Mosca (Fly), had developed a business as a wholesaler, supplying black tar to Xalisco cells from Portland and Phoenix to Columbus and Hawaii.

The Man used Federal Express to bring the product from Mosca’s apartment in California. He would go to California, and buy a small electric oven from Target or Kmart, open the back of the oven, stuff it with tar heroin, then take it to FedEx for packaging. Police didn’t often search a package that FedEx prepared. He sent the ovens to a pliant Columbus addict who lived in the basement of his senile parents’ home, and paid him in heroin.

With Columbus humming along, he looked for new markets.

One addict, a kid named Mikey, told him people in Wheeling, West Virginia, would go crazy for black tar. Mikey introduced him around Wheeling. There, the Man made a startling discovery.

Mikey introduced him to a woman in her late thirties, a heroin addict. She showed him a bottle of pills, wanting to trade them for his tar. OxyContin, the pills were called, she said. He’d never heard the name and turned her down. But it struck him that she drove a new Dodge Durango and owned a house. He’d never known a longtime heroin addict who had a house and new SUV. So he listened to her. OxyContin, she told him, contained a pharmaceutical opiate, a prescription painkiller similar to heroin. He got to know the woman better. Turned out she traveled the area buying these pills cheap from seniors, then sold them to Oxy addicts in the hills of Appalachia. She bought her daily heroin with the money.

He couldn’t have known it then, but, arriving in 1998, he had happened onto the biggest metro area in a five-state region where, two years into the Purdue Pharma promotional campaign, opiate addiction was exploding due to abuse of this new drug called OxyContin. By his own good fortune, not far away was Portsmouth, Ohio, where scandalous pain clinics were just starting to follow the lead of Dr. David Procter into a new business model of writing prescriptions for millions of these pills to long lines of addicts. Meanwhile, the pain revolution was in full swing in U.S. medicine. Specialists were urging well-meaning doctors everywhere to prescribe opiate painkillers for pain, convinced that when used this way they were all but nonaddictive.

Central Ohio, in other words, was about to be a great place to be a heroin dealer.

His black tar, once it came to an area where OxyContin had already tenderized the terrain, sold not to tapped-out old junkies but to younger kids, many from the suburbs, most of whom had money and all of whom were white. Their transition from Oxy to heroin, he saw, was a natural and easy one. Oxy addicts began by sucking on and dissolving the pills’ timed-release coating. They were left with 40 or 80 mg of pure oxycodone. At first, addicts crushed the pills and snorted the powder. As their tolerance built, they used more. To get a bigger bang from the pill, they liquefied it and injected it. But their tolerance never stopped climbing. OxyContin sold on the street for a dollar a milligram and addicts very quickly were using well over 100 mg a day. As they reached their financial limits, many switched to heroin, since they were already shooting up Oxy and had lost any fear of the needle.

Black tar was potent, far cheaper, and his delivery system made it easier to get than the pills. Plus tar could be smoked—didn’t have to be injected, which attracted kids to whom needles were at first anathema. The way he saw it, every Oxy addict was a tar junkie in waiting, and there were thousands of new Oxy addicts. All he had to do was work it.

His Nayarit brothers might never have figured this out. Like many Mexican immigrants who lived in Spanish-only enclaves, they were oblivious to subtle trends in the American society and culture in which they lived. As traffickers, they cared only to sell their dope and send money home. Drivers were short-timers all, on salary, there for six to nine months, holed up in apartments, and knowing only a few words of English (“no credit” or “fifteen minutes”), exchanged with desperate addicts who spoke no Spanish. Discovering emerging markets required an English speaker who understood the street.

Landing in Columbus just as the region around it was becoming ground zero in America’s opiate epidemic, he could see opportunities developing simply because, he told me once, “I could talk to the white people.”

His arrival was a fateful coincidence. Other traffickers might have filled the eventual demand for heroin created in this region where prescription pill abuse got bad first. Later, many did. But few were so ready to take advantage of it, so aggressive in their marketing, and so quickly replenished as the Xalisco Boys and the Man who brought them there.

Wheeling taught the Man that new markets were now everywhere the pills were. With the Boys working his store in Columbus, he found a place in Carnegie, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Pittsburgh, and close enough to service other towns like Steubenville and Wheeling.

He also eyed Nashville. Its Mexican population was growing, nearing eighty thousand people. The town, he heard, was swamped in OxyContin. He set up one of his Columbus drivers, along with a new kid up from Xalisco, in a store that was soon booming. Choose the right town and you can’t miss, he thought to himself. The Nashville store covered his expenses for the expansion he eyed throughout the mid-South.

At the urging of another addict, he took a trip down to Virginia, through Roanoke, Richmond, and Newport News. It was another large market, but the federal government had too many installations there. Langley and a naval base made him nervous. He went through Chattanooga, Tennessee—a town with a lively underworld, but too small. Mexicans in cars would stand out. He drove down to Pensacola and Jacksonville, but left.

“Florida is dominated by Colombians and Cubans and Puerto Ricans. That kind of race, they ain’t got no understanding,” he said. “Kill, kill, kill—they think they can solve everything by killing. I wasn’t gonna kill nobody over drugs. I’d probably be buried the rest of my life in prison.”

He nixed Philadelphia, too. It had a huge heroin market, but it was run by the Mafia and street gangs. He didn’t even consider New York or Baltimore. It was crazy to think that a bunch of Mexican farm boys could break in there. Why would they want to? The country was full of towns like Columbus—wealthy places with growing numbers of addicts and no competition.

So the contours of the Xalisco heroin nation took shape, based largely on the territory the Man carved out by avoiding the biggest cities where heroin markets were already controlled, and by following the OxyContin.

He tried to keep his eastern tienditas a secret to his Nayarit friends. When he went back to Reno or Los Angeles to arrange deliveries, he always told friends that he was working in New York City. But in a small town like Xalisco, people talked. After a year in Columbus, his drivers went home for the Feria del Elote and started bragging about the great heroin market they were working up in central Ohio. By the fall of 1999, two more crews were in Columbus. One belonged to a former driver, now venturing out on his own. Two more followed. A kind of “Go east, young man” ethos took hold among the Xalisco Boys. The price of heroin in Columbus fell. No crew leader could cut his dope unless he wanted to lose his clients. So the product stayed strong even as it got cheaper.

Competition, as always, attuned the Xalisco crews to customer service. They even crossed the city to keep a customer, and gave away free dope to any client hinting at quitting.

One woman I met lived twenty-five miles outside Columbus and at one point she hadn’t called to buy for three days. A Xalisco Boy called her.

“Señorita, why haven’t you been buying recently?”

“I don’t have any money,” she said.

He drove out to deliver fifty dollars’ worth of heroin to her, for which he required no payment. No, it’s free, he said.

“He wanted to keep me using, and buying from him,” she said. She did both.

A year or so after the Man settled in Columbus, he drove to Charlotte looking for bigger profits. Addicts told him he would make a million there. No one there had seen anything like black tar heroin. Heroin, in fact, had only a small market in Charlotte. He met junkie contacts at the town’s methadone clinic and gave them free samples. Soon, business boomed again. He pulled a driver out of Columbus and another out of Nashville and they set up the black tar heroin franchise in Charlotte.

A couple weeks later, the Sánchez family, from the ranchos near Xalisco, arrived. They had an addict guide of their own—a big Native American fellow. The Sánchezes owed their expanding heroin empire to addicts. Addicts had guided the family out of San Fernando to Las Vegas, then to Memphis and Nashville and from there to Charlotte. The Man didn’t know them, only knew of them. They were cousins of the late David Tejeda, from the rancho of Aquiles Serdán, down the road from Xalisco. Now they were in Charlotte, too.

It was bound to happen. It was a free market, after all.

Bodies Are the Key to the Case