Dreamland (36 page)

“They went,” said one cop I met, “and took over the OxyContin Belt in America.”

The Xalisco Boys, in fact, were hardly the country's only heroin dealers. Detroit, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York had drug gangs who'd controlled the trade for years. Nor were the Boys the only Mexicans trafficking in black tar heroin. Northern California was controlled by traffickers from the Tierra Caliente, a humid and notoriously violent part of west-central Mexico; no Xalisco Boy ever stepped foot in Northern California. Sinaloans controlled the Chicago and the Atlanta markets, both of which were major distribution hubs; the Boys for sure weren't going there.

Yet all these gangs were known for their violence and gunplay. To me, that made them almost passé—like Wild West gunslingers. None of them controlled the drug from its production in Mexico to its sale by the tenth of a gram on streets across the United States. The Xalisco Boys did. They were dope traffickers for a new age when marketing is king and even people are brands.

Purdue branded OxyContin as the convenient solution to disruptive chronic-pain patients. The Xalisco Boys branded their system: the safe and reliable delivery of balloons containing heroin of standardized weight and potency. The addict's convenient everyday solution. The one to start with and stay with.

Like Purdue, but quite unlike traditional heroin dealers, the Xalisco Boys didn't sit around waiting for customers to come to them. They targeted new ones using come-ons, price breaks. They followed up sales to good clients with phone calls that amounted to customer satisfaction surveys. Was the dope good? Was the driver polite? Drivers would travel across town to sell a fifteen-dollar balloon. Addicts learned to play one crew off another. “The other guy was giving me seven balloons for a hundred dollars; you're only giving me six.” The effect was to keep the addict not only using but drumming up more customers to get bigger discounts.

Meanwhile Xalisco dealers were constantly monitoring good customers for signs that any of them were trying to quit. Those addicts got a phone call, then a driver plying them with free dope. One Albuquerque addict told me this story: He called his Xalisco dealer, whom he considered his friend, to say he was going into rehab. Good idea, the dealer said. This stuff's killing you. An hour later the dealer was at the addict's door with free heroin. Now that you're quitting, the dealer said, here's a going-away present as a way of saying thanks for your business. The addict kept using.

A woman in Columbus told me her dealer welcomed her home from jail with a care package of several balloons of tar heroin to get her using again.

The more astute among the Xalisco traffickers realized that they owed much of their success to prescription opiates. A few had heard of OxyContin. Most of the Xalisco Boys I interviewed, though, had not. They were oblivious. They knew nothing of the history of heroin in America. They didn't know how their customers came to the drug, that they were now selling to a historically new clientele, customers no one expected to be using the drug. Why would they? They spoke no English and holed up in Spartan apartments when they weren't driving, and thus had little feel for the United States. They weren't sociologists. Most weren't about to converse with the addicts about how they got into dope. To them, the less face time with addicts, the better. They were quick-hit artists. They were selling well and didn't care why.

But their delivery system and cold-blooded marketing, combined with an enormous and growing clientele newly addicted to pills, were the reasons for their success. By the 2000s, these ranchero farm boys, from a county of just forty-five thousand people in a state most Americans couldn't find on a map, had become the most prolific single confederation of heroin traffickers in the United States, aggressively seeking new markets while supplying dope in at least seventeen states, including unexpected places where heroin was all but unknown before they showed up.

The Final Convenience

Charlotte, North Carolina

Few parts of the United States benefited more from the economic expansion that began in the mid-1990s than Charlotte, North Carolina. Its metro area, which includes part of northern South Carolina, grew fastest of any metro region between 2000 and 2010.

NationsBank of Charlotte acquired Bank of America in 1998 and the city became B of A headquarters. New York retirees, in turn, flooded the town and Charlotte learned what a bagel was. Six other Fortune 500 companies appeared, as did NBA and NFL franchises, and a silver skyline. Charlotte’s metro area includes almost fifty golf and country clubs. The town’s southern end absorbed the better-off newcomers, who transformed it from cow pastures to a sprawl of McMansions and shopping malls in less than a generation.

Latino immigrants came for the jobs, too. Attracted to the state by agriculture and pork slaughterhouse work, they filled in fading North Carolina rural towns, then moved to the more stable work in Charlotte. The city’s Latino population grew faster than any in the country.

Prescription pill use rose in Charlotte just as it did across the country with the pain revolution. In time, that meant more opiate addicts. For years, heroin in Charlotte was powder brought in from New York, uniformly weak and sold solely by young black men on a few streets off Statesville Avenue in the north part of town. Their clientele was limited to the modest numbers of addicts in the metro area.

The Statesville area was where, in the early 1990s, Brent Foushee got his training as a young narcotics officer.

In his younger days, Brent Foushee spent two summers selling Bibles in Mississippi and the coal-mining regions of eastern Kentucky. It was, he thought later, the kind of work that stunted one’s growth as a human being. He was awful at it. As he sold the New King James version, he endured occasional lectures from Pentecostals who favored the original King James and believed the new version to be heresy.

In Pikeville, in a mining region of Kentucky, a place Foushee came to regard as the end of the world, he lived in a trailer park. His neighbor was the owner of a coal mine who was hiding out because his workers had gone on strike and he was running the mine with nonunion labor.

Yet Foushee came to believe that it was there, selling the Bible, where his training as a narcotics officer began. A natural introvert, he had to force himself to knock on the doors of people he didn’t know and keep talking.

Years later, he joined the Charlotte Police Department. Early on, his narcotics sergeant ordered him to make a heroin buy on a street near Statesville Avenue. Foushee had three weeks earlier been there on patrol, in uniform.

“They’re going to know I’m a cop,” he said.

“Naw, don’t worry. Just do it,” said the sergeant. “You’ll be all right.”

So that afternoon, in plainclothes, his hair now longer and unkempt, Foushee walked onto the street. Whistles and hoots sounded the alarm.

“Five-oh! Five-oh!” the dealers called, the street code for “Cop!”

Foushee approached a dealer, doing his best to look strung out.

“I need something, man,” he said.

“You a cop, dude,” the young dealer said.

“No, man, I ain’t a cop. I’m sick. I need something.”

“You a cop, motherfucker.”

“No, no, I ain’t.”

“Who that, then?”

The dealer pointed into some woods fifty yards away and to Foushee’s partner, a large man trying to hide behind a sapling.

“Dude, that’s my fucking brother! He’s watching me to make sure I don’t use his shit after I buy it. Man, you going to sell me this or not?”

Sure enough, the dealer sold him the smack.

Keep talking, Foushee learned. Like a salesman. If you’re talking you’re still alive. Talk was the undercover cop’s great gift and Foushee came to rely on it in times of stress. The kid wasn’t stupid, Foushee thought later. He was just begging to be persuaded, letting greed control his better judgment. Street dealers made money on each sale and thus wanted to be convinced. Talk long enough, desperately enough, and you could usually get them to sell to you. Talking and convincing people, using his wits, were what selling Bibles trained him to do.

But Foushee also noticed that very little of what he learned selling Bibles and buying dope applied once the Xalisco Boys arrived in Charlotte. Within years of the Man’s first visit to Charlotte, the Xalisco Boys were crawling all over the town. Foushee watched as heroin got cheaper, more potent, more available. The market for the Statesville dope got real thin. Unlike the dealers near Statesville Avenue, these Mexican guys drove cars. Even if you did speak Spanish, which Foushee did not, you couldn’t talk with them, because the deal took place in a matter of seconds and they were gone.

Before the Xalisco Boys, department policy forbade an undercover cop from getting into a dealer’s car alone. But the Xalisco Boys never sold outside their car. So one day, Foushee called the number and was told to park at a shopping center. Soon, a small red four-door car passed with a Mexican at the wheel. The driver raised an eyebrow. Foushee pulled out after him.

He followed the red car into a residential neighborhood and through several streets until it pulled over. Foushee radioed his location to his backup and walked over to the driver’s window. The guy’s car was immaculate. In the heroin world, most cars Foushee had seen were strewn with festering food, crumpled cigarette packs, and grimy clothes. But here was an older car, a heroin delivery vehicle, without a speck of trash. He handed sixty dollars to the driver, who spit three balloons into his hand, gave them to Foushee, and drove off. Foushee stood in the street and watched him go, saliva-covered balloons in his hand, feeling witness to a revolution. He later wrote a thesis on the Xalisco system for a master’s degree in criminal justice.

In time, the Xalisco Boy drivers proved easy to bust. But the cells were all but impossible to eradicate. Prison sentences that North Carolina imposed for heroin trafficking of seven to twenty years barely affected them.

This especially bothered Sheena Gatehouse, who became chief of the drug unit at the Mecklenburg County district attorney’s office as the Xalisco system spread. Gatehouse had joined the prosecutor’s office just out of law school. She spent her first years prosecuting misdemeanors and small drug cases, usually marijuana. She left to become a defense attorney and handled the first of the region’s OxyContin abuse cases—her clients being the children of doctors. In 2009, she returned to the prosecutor’s office.

Black tar heroin dominated the caseload. The Xalisco Boys were relentless, and what made them so was that the workers, the drivers, were disposable. The bosses didn’t seem to care how many got arrested. They always sent more.

Addicts were overdosing and dying around Charlotte. Gatehouse’s office instituted a new rule: no easy deals on heroin cases. Twenty-year sentences grew common. Yet this didn’t affect the Xalisco system, or the prevalence of their heroin. The price kept dropping. Balloons containing a tenth of a gram started at five for a hundred dollars, then went to ten for a hundred. Finally, by 2011, you could buy fifteen balloons of potent Xalisco black tar heroin for a hundred dollars—$6.50 a dose, about the price of a pack of Marlboros—in Charlotte, North Carolina, a town that barely knew the drug a few years before.

One bust in 2012 made her question the approach. Cops spent months buying from Xalisco drivers. The investigation involved a dozen officers. Finally, they busted the drivers and a dispatcher. They also took down some addicts, seizing their cell phones. Three days later, those confiscated phones started ringing: Xalisco dealers were calling; the store was back in business, they said, with new drivers up from Mexico. Officers hadn’t even finished processing the evidence from the bust and the store was running again.

The drivers were not career thugs, as far as Gatehouse could tell. They were farm boys hoping for a better day through black tar. Sheena Gatehouse went back and forth on the wisdom of the tough approach. The damage they did clearly required it. But, she said, “we’re sending a farm boy away for twenty years and have had no impact.”

More kids back home clamored for the chance to replace those just arrested. What’s more, each bust seemed to provide an opening for more crews, so that one busted crew was replaced not by just one but sometimes by two. With competition, addicts had more numbers they could call and Xalisco customer service kept improving.

At the Carolinas Medical Center, Bob Martin saw the change as well. Martin, a former New York cop, came to Charlotte in 1996 for a job as director of Substance Abuse Services at CMC. During his first years, when he heard of a big heroin bust, he threw up his hands. His beds were certain to fill with junkies checking in to ride out the drought.

But by the early 2000s, whenever police corralled a dozen Xalisco heroin dealers, Martin saw no new flood of addicts rushing to his beds. There was no drought. The bust didn’t affect the area’s supply of heroin.

“No matter how many million-dollar busts you guys do,” he told the officers, “it doesn’t show up on our radar.”

Martin also noticed an entirely new kind of junkie.

Half of CMC’s patients addicted to opiates now had private health insurance. Martin studied the zip codes where they lived and found that they came from the town’s wealthiest neighborhoods—Raintree, Quail Hollow, Mint Hill—in south Charlotte that had once been cow fields. These areas were also home to nine country clubs and the region’s best shopping malls.