Dreamland (4 page)

Immigrants avoided West Virginia. Only 1 percent of the state’s population is foreign-born, ranking it last in that category in the United States. West Virginians with aspirations streamed north, thinking always of returning. The state does significant business in family reunions. Many of the families who remained lived on government assistance.

Huntington’s population fell from eighty-three thousand in 1960 to forty-nine thousand today. The three R’s became “reading, writing, and Route 23” as people headed north on the famous highway to Columbus, Cleveland, or Detroit. In 2008, the city was selected as the fattest in America; it had, the Associated Press reported, more pizza places than the entire state of West Virginia had gyms and health spas.

Through all this, what grew steadily in Huntington, besides the waistlines of its dwindling population, was drug use and fatalism. Dealers called the town Moneyington. Dealers from Detroit moved in and cops grew suspicious of any car with Michigan plates.

Yet Mexican drug traffickers avoided the town, police told me. This made Huntington rare. Mexican traffickers operated all over America—in Tennessee and Idaho and Alaska. But not in West Virginia. West Virginia was one of the seven states with no known Mexican drug-trafficking presence, according to a U.S. Department of Justice 2009 report I had seen. Police had a simple reason for this: There was no Mexican community in which to hide. Mexican immigrants followed the jobs, functioning as a sort of economic barometer: Mexicans in your community meant your area was growing. Huntington and West Virginia had no jobs, no Mexicans either.

So, I wondered, how is it black tar heroin from Mexico could have killed so many people here over so many months? And what’s more, since when did West Virginia have heroin of any kind?

I began my journalism career as a crime reporter in Stockton, California. Up to then, I knew heroin only from the 1970s movies about New York City:
The French Connection
,
Serpico
, and
Prince of the City
; the drug was always white powder. New York City was our national heroin hub. But in Stockton I saw only this stuff called black tar. Narcotics officers told me black tar was made in Mexico. It was semiprocessed opium base. Like other forms of heroin, it could be smoked or injected, and was just as potent as the more refined white powder I’d seen in
The French Connection
. The difference was that it had more impurities. Also, they said, black tar was a West Coast drug, sold in California, Oregon, and Washington. Denver had a lot, as did Arizona. But it was unknown east of the Mississippi River. For years, DEA reports showed that as well.

So what was black tar heroin now doing east of the Mississippi River?

Those questions brought me to Huntington and that Ohio River bank. I was a reporter for the
Los Angeles Times
on a team covering Mexico’s drug wars. My job was to write about Mexican trafficking in the United States, a topic no one covered much at all. Searching for a story to do, I had come upon reports of Huntington’s 2007 black tar outbreak and called a Huntington police narcotics sergeant.

All our black tar heroin comes from Columbus, Ohio, he told me.

I called the DEA in Columbus and spoke with an especially loquacious agent.

“We got dozens of Mexican heroin traffickers. They all drive around selling their dope in small balloons, delivering it to the addicts. They’re like teams, or cells. We arrest the drivers all the time and they send new ones up from Mexico,” he said. “They never go away.”

He discoursed at some length on the frustration of arduous investigations ending with the arrest of young men who were replaced so quickly. They hide among Columbus’s large Mexican population, he said. The drivers all know each other and never talk. They’re never armed. They come, give false names, rent apartments, and are gone six months later. This was not the kind of heroin mafia Ohio and the eastern United States was used to.

“Crazy thing,” he said. “They’re all from the same town.”

I sat up in my chair.

“Yeah, which one’s that?”

He called over a colleague. They talked in muffled tones for a couple minutes.

I had lived in Mexico for ten years as a freelance writer after I left Stockton. I spent a lot of time in small towns and villages writing about people who migrated north. I wrote two books of nonfiction stories about Mexico. Many of the stories took place in the smallest villages, known as
ranchos
.

Ranchos were villages on the outskirts of civilization. Throughout history, rancheros had moved to the outback to escape the towns’ stifling classism. They formed outposts and tried to carve a living from tough land that no one else wanted. Rancheros embodied Mexico’s best pioneering impulse. They fled the government’s suffocating embrace. They were dedicated to escaping poverty, usually by finding a way to be their own bosses.

Rancheros had little access to education. They learned a trade from relatives—farming or ranching, mostly. But I also knew villages where all the men were itinerant construction workers. Families from one village in the state of Zacatecas I knew started tortilla shops all over Mexico; in another, men hired out as cops around the state. I wrote about Tocumbo, Michoacan, where everyone learned to make popsicles, and run popsicle shops, known as Paleterias La Michoacana, that spread across Mexico, transforming the town and the lives of these rancheros. I had also been to Tenancingo, Tlaxcala, where the young men are all pimps, exporting country girls to Mexico City and to Queens, New York, and building garish mansions back home.

The DEA agent came back to the phone.

“Tepic,” he said.

No, that’s wrong, I thought. Tepic is the capital of one of Mexico’s smallest states—Nayarit, on the Pacific coast. But it’s still a big city, population 330,000. The agent wasn’t lying. But my hunch was that the family and personal connections crucial to the system he was describing would only be forged in a small town or rancho. By the time I got off the phone, that prospect had me mesmerized. I imagined some rancho of heroin traffickers expert enough to supply a town the size of Columbus.

It helped that I loved ranchos. They were lawless, wild places, full of amazing tales of family feuds, stolen women, pistoleros, caciques (town bosses), and especially the tough guys—
valientes
—rebels who backed down from no one, and thus leapt like superheroes from the rancho into a place in Mexican movies, novels, and ballads.

Mine was a romantic infatuation. I didn’t have to live in a rancho. They were brutish places and received outsiders uneasily. Rancho families wove together in vast clans, where everyone was related to almost everyone else. You did not penetrate that easily. To learn their secret stories, you had to spend a lot of time. But I could sit for hours listening to old men tell how their village had, say, split in half over a family feud. The stories melded fact and myth into accounts of doomed bravery or steel-cold vengeance. One tale I included in a book was about Antonio Carrillo, who went to the United States in the 1920s, worked in a steel mill, bought a pistol, then wrote to the man who killed his father, telling him his time had come. He went home and in the town plaza he shot the man to death with that pistol.

I learned, too, that
envidia
—envy, jealousy—was a destructive force in the rancho. That people were related didn’t mean they got along. Families split over what one had and another did not. In the rancho, I saw that immigration was powered by what a poor man felt when he returned home with new boots, a new car, better clothes. That he could buy the beer in the plaza that night, pay for his daughter’s
quinceañera
equal to that of the daughter of the local merchant, and act the magnanimous
don
if only for a week; that was a potent narcotic to any poor man. A have-not’s success was sweeter if he could show it off to the backbiters back home. Thus few Mexicans started out aiming to melt into America. Returning home to the rancho was
the
point of going north. This homecoming had no power in anonymous big cities. Migrants wanted to display their success to those who’d humiliated them years before. In the rancho.

I’d learned too that venturing into the unknown was in rancheros’ DNA. The United States was the one place where the promise of the unknown had paid off. In turn, the Mexican rancho had become a huge influence in American life. It gave rise to millions of our new working class. Mexican immigrant customs and attitudes toward work, sex, politics, civic engagement, government, education, debt, leisure—they were forged in the rancho. They arrived intact in the United States, and changed slowly.

I ponder this all that day after the chat with the Columbus DEA agent. Only a small town or rancho could forge the connections that sustained the kind of heroin business the agent described. A village of master heroin retailers. Could it be?

I wrote to a dozen of the drivers arrested in Columbus who were doing time in federal prisons. I asked if they wanted to talk to a reporter. Weeks passed. I heard nothing from them. I was about to turn to other stories when one of them called collect. He’d worked, and was arrested, in Columbus. He was now doing many years in prison. He had lots of information. Most startling: Columbus was not the only town they worked, he told me.

“They’re in many others. All over the country,” he said. Salt Lake, Charlotte, Las Vegas, Cincinnati, Nashville, Minneapolis, Columbia, Indianapolis, Honolulu. They were working full-time in seventeen states. They’d been in another seven or eight states at one time or another. He went on. The cities he mentioned all had large white middle classes that benefited hugely from the economic booms of the previous dozen years, and now had large Mexican immigrant populations as well. I hardly associated these cities with heroin. Were there heroin markets in these towns? I wondered. Yes, he assured me, they were big and getting bigger. He hadn’t even mentioned America’s traditional heroin capital, I noticed.

“No, in New York are gangs, with guns,” he said. “They’re afraid of New York City. They don’t go to New York.”

Mexican traffickers afraid of gangs and gunplay? From one tiny town? Selling tar heroin in not just Columbus, but as much as half the United States, including now a bunch of cities east of the Mississippi River for the first time?

Right there, I was hooked.

Cops say they’re from Tepic, I said finally.

“No, they’re not from Tepic,” he said. “That’s what they say, but they’re not.”

Liberace in Appalachia

South Shore, Kentucky

In tiny South Shore, Kentucky, huddled next to the Ohio River, Biggs Lane amounts to a rural strip mall.

For its entire hundred yards, Biggs Lane hugs Route 23. Wright Pharmacy has been on Biggs a long time. Near Wright’s is a dentist’s office and a chiropractor, a gas station and a Subway sandwich shop. Farther down is a flooring shop. Next to that stands a good-sized beige metal-framed building.

To the south of Biggs is a street named Tootsie Drive and a neighborhood of small white wood houses that would be called quiet except that would be redundant. Everything in South Shore, Kentucky, population 2,100, is quiet, including the majestic Ohio River a hundred yards north. Across the river is Portsmouth, Ohio, wedged onto land where the Scioto River angles into the Ohio. In Portsmouth and South Shore is where another part of our story begins.

In 1979, the same year that Hershel Jick up in Boston wrote his letter to the
New England Journal of Medicine
, a doctor named David Procter moved into that beige metal-framed building on Biggs Lane in South Shore and called his new clinic Plaza Healthcare.

Procter had come to South Shore at the behest of Billy Riddle, the town’s family doc. Billy Riddle had been in South Shore for years. He delivered many of the kids in town, and treated every ailment as best he could. He had trouble turning down patients and needed help. Somehow he found Procter, a Canadian, who’d just completed an internship in Nova Scotia, and enticed him to South Shore in 1977.

But within two years, Riddle had separated his practice from Procter’s and changed the locks on his doors. Not long after that, in 1979, Billy Riddle died of a heart attack and then only David Procter remained.

Procter was a talkative and easygoing fellow. But he was flashy in a way foreign to the Ohio River valley. He wore diamond rings. He wore fur jackets. He drove a Porsche. “He dressed like Little Richard or Liberace,” said one nurse.

Portsmouth is an industrial town in the rural heartland, an outpost on the Ohio River far from other towns. In their glory days, river towns were places for rambunctious men to explode after days cooped up on barges. Portsmouth once felt it necessary to outlaw swimming naked in the river. Back then, seven shoe factories and the country’s largest shoelace manufacturer were in downtown Portsmouth. A brickyard, a foundry, and the massive Detroit Steel Company attracted people from Ohio and Kentucky and employed thousands. Detroit Steel made bombs during World War II. Hundreds of people attended the inauguration of its new blast furnace in 1953, marveling at its size and happy with the jobs it would provide. Meanwhile, railroads took Portsmouth’s steel and shoes to the rest of the country. For years, sons took jobs at the factories where their fathers worked, and, like a Bruce Springsteen song, that’s how life went.