Dreamland (41 page)

When new viruses appear, the discovery is often made by a local physician who stumbles upon a patient with disturbing new symptoms.

Something similar happened when the Xalisco Boys spread east of the Mississippi River, where Purdue’s promotional campaign and new opiate-prescribing practices were creating the epidemic’s first addicts. Instead of doctors, though, it was usually patrol cops or a local narcotics detective who figured out what was happening. They encountered black tar heroin, saw it delivered like pizza, and wondered, What the
hell
?

So it was in 2005, in the Nashville suburb of Murfreesboro, where a patrol cop came across an off-duty juvenile-court bailiff smoking a black, sticky substance. It tested later as heroin. With the help of the accused bailiff eager to reduce his charges, Murfreesboro police put together a few buys and found it came from Mexicans who delivered the drug; when the bailiff called and ordered more, they came with it. The case expanded and made its way to the desk of Dennis Mabry, an investigator with the Nashville DEA task force, who didn’t understand it any better than the Murfreesboro cop. As he and his partner tried to make sense of it, his task force boss, Harry Sommers, dropped by.

Since Tar Pit, Sommers had left his supervising job at DEA headquarters in D.C. He was now in charge of the agency’s office in Nashville. But Sommers hadn’t forgotten Tar Pit and the Xalisco Boys’ system of selling heroin retail. Six years later, he was startled to see they had spread.

“We had not stopped them,” he said. “These guys were moving into new territory.”

Sommers outlined the Xalisco call-and-deliver system for Mabry. “This is who you’re dealing with,” he said. “They’re all from Nayarit.”

Neither Mabry nor his partner had heard the name before. But before long Nayarit was all they thought about. That bailiff’s case ballooned to consume fifteen agents for a year. They followed drivers, watched buys go down, and tapped cell phones. The cell of Nayarit heroin delivery boys generated ten thousand cell phone calls a month, more than any wiretap translator could keep up with. The case connected investigators to fifteen cities in eight states. It came to be known as Black Gold Rush.

The Xalisco Boys “got here and took over and made a ton of money,” Mabry told me. “They knew how to do it and were professionals. They’d carry the balloons in their mouths. They’d get stopped by police and swallow the balloons.”

What Mabry was seeing, it turned out, was a branch of the Xalisco networks that belonged to the Sánchezes, legends in the Nayarit heroin trade. Their story, near as I could piece it together, is typical of how a Xalisco clan spread its heroin operations. The Sánchez clan is rooted in villages near Xalisco—Aquiles Serdán, Emiliano Zapata, and others. Like the Tejedas, the clan is a product of the isolation the Mexican rancho breeds: a bewildering intermarried web of cousins, brothers, sisters, half siblings, in-laws, second cousins, stepfathers, mothers and fathers, aunts and uncles.

The sugarcane-farming Sánchezes were among the first to set up heroin operations in the San Fernando Valley in the early 1980s. From there, they spread to Las Vegas. One trafficker I spoke with said an addict, an Argentine woman they knew as La Sasha, led the first Sánchezes from Las Vegas to Memphis in the early 1990s. Memphis “became one of the biggest markets for a while,” he said.

In 2004, a Memphis junkie led the Sánchezes to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, where he enrolled in the local methadone clinic and gave away their dope to the clients, police said. Police later arrested the junkie on a trafficking charge. But by then the Sánchezes had a foothold from which they expanded to Columbia and Charleston and eventually controlled much of the heroin trade in South Carolina.

Since then, the Sánchez clan has reportedly defended its turf in a very non-Xalisco way, threatening with violence new cell leaders who move into the state.

“You’re not allowed to be working in South Carolina without their approval,” said one DEA source in Charlotte. “Considering Charlotte is close to South Carolina, we’d expect more overlap of [Charlotte’s Xalisco] crews into South Carolina and we don’t see much, if any.”

In Nashville, Mabry and his partners listened in as the local family boss, Javier “Chito” Sánchez-Torres, spoke often by cell phone with his uncle, Alberto Sánchez-Covarrubias, in Nayarit. Javier had done time in South Carolina for heroin trafficking. He was released in 2003 and somehow ended up in Nashville.

In time, authorities grew to believe that this uncle, Alberto Sánchez—or Uncle Beto, as he was known—was a major source of heroin in the United States. Beto Sánchez was one of the Xalisco pioneers in the heroin business in the San Fernando Valley, informants said, and among the first Sánchezes to sell heroin in parks in Van Nuys, the district in Los Angeles, before the Xalisco crews began using cars and pagers. One informant said Beto Sánchez killed a client in a fight in a park in the early 1980s and returned to Mexico, though Mabry never could find a record of the killing.

Still, Mabry said, “Every time we’d arrest someone, it’d be, ‘Beto is my cousin. He’s my brother-in-law.’ They all knew Alberto Sánchez. They were all related to him somehow.”

Uncle Beto frequently instructed his nephew on new markets that might be exploited, on when the next supply was arriving, and, especially, on managing drivers, moving one guy, bringing in another to take his place. “It was like trading cards or players on a sports team,” Mabry said. “He’d move guys who didn’t get along, or they got along too well and would screw off, spend all night drinking.”

Alberto Sánchez’s cousin, Gustavo, was his right-hand man and full-time recruiter, trolling Xalisco for potential new drivers. Not only did the family constantly recruit new drivers, but they also never stopped seeking new territory.

Sometime in the early 2000s, according to addicts and police, the Sánchezes sent some workers from Nashville up to start an Indianapolis cell. As time passed, the Sánchezes felt they needed someone to bring more energy to the task.

I had several chats with the trafficker they sent next. This fellow met Javier Sánchez-Torres at a party in Los Angeles. The heroin boss recruited him to come to Nashville to work.

“I began as a driver with balloons in my mouth,” the trafficker told me. “After six months, I began to train other drivers. I’m in the house, answering the phones and sending people where they have to go.”

By then, he said, the Sánchezes were well aware of OxyContin’s role in the business. “It was part of the marketing strategy,” he said. “Chiva is the same as OxyContin; just OxyContin is legal. OxyContin users change to chiva. They can get our stuff more easily than going to a doctor for the pills.”

As the trafficker earned the Sánchez family’s trust, he drove resupply trips from their hub in Nashville to regional cells in Memphis, Charlotte, and Columbia, South Carolina. In 2006, with the family needing new management in Indianapolis, he was given three ounces of heroin and told to go grow the market. He rolled into Indianapolis brimming with the energy and optimism of a newly promoted regional sales manager.

“Let’s make good money. Let’s get this thing going,” he kept saying. He recruited older addicts to spread the cell’s number around town, offering them free heroin for every couple hundred dollars in sales they generated. The addicts formed an eager sales force.

“They were looking more for volume than anything, to get it out there,” said one Indy addict who worked for him. “You sell the product low enough and it’ll create its own demand.”

Soon, suburban kids and students from Indiana University in Bloomington were coming in to buy. Xalisco black tar spread out for a hundred miles around Indianapolis.

Occasionally, drivers were replaced; all were from villages near Xalisco, Nayarit. The trafficker I spoke with said he paid drivers fifteen hundred dollars a week, with all expenses covered, including money for beer and prostitutes. When a runner was ready to return to Nayarit, the trafficker would give him three ounces of heroin for free. The runner would sell it, keep the profits, then drive the car back to Nayarit with enough cash to build a two-story house, or buy a business.

“People who are poor and want to progress, you give them a hand,” the trafficker said.

Back in Xalisco, by then, more and more young men were turning to chiva for that hand up.

All around the town
were the signs of what could be accomplished by selling heroin. Women’s clothing stores. Law firms. New markets. Beer dispensaries were six to a neighborhood now—and they were new ones with wooden floors, security cameras, and computerized cash registers. Large houses, owned by young men, were everywhere. No one could build such houses on the wages made working sugarcane.

At the Feria del Elote, cell leaders sponsored basketball teams, importing semipro squads from Monterrey, Mazatlán, Hermosillo. Each team had at least one African American, hired to improve the team’s chances. In the town’s horse parade, which once featured common farm animals, saddles worth five thousand dollars sat atop horses worth four times that.

The Xalisco system expanded during the 2000s to include families from all over the region. The pioneers from the Tejeda-Sánchez clan had for many years only recruited people they were in some way related to. That changed after Operation Tar Pit sent close to dozens of these workers to jail. The U.S. heroin market was expanding, fueled by Americans’ addiction to prescription opiates. Xalisco bosses quickly reconstituted their cells, bringing in workers now from families they were not related to. Over the next few years, as Xalisco cells multiplied, their demand for labor grew voracious and the opportunity to work heroin was now open to many more families. Most of a generation of young men found work in it.

One driver I spoke with, just beginning a prison sentence, told me he began to think of going north when a heroin trafficker he knew in his village built a house with an automatic garage door. Old people stood in amazement and watched it open and close. He saw other drivers, guys he grew up with, return and buy beer for everyone in the plaza. Girls flocked to them. Without land or prospects, he signed up, too.

“It was like a little weed that just keeps growing until it invaded the whole village, and eventually it didn’t matter what your last name was,” said a former driver I spoke with, who went by the name of Pedro. “Anyone with desire to go up and try his luck could do it.”

To most of ranchero Mexico, chiva was a disgusting thing. “But like the song says, ‘Dirty money removes hunger, too,’” Pedro said. “When my brother went up north, my mother was saying I don’t know how you can sell that garbage. But when she saw the money she was very happy.”

Cell leaders had to recruit drivers from new ranchos and, especially, from Nayarit’s capital city, Tepic, nearby. The new recruits no longer had family connections to the heroin pioneers. What’s more, they had work already; they were painters, construction workers, bakers, butchers. But these were dead-end jobs in Mexico, and humiliating when many other young men had new trucks and houses and money for the banda. So, before long, driving a major U.S. metro area with your mouth crammed with balloons of heroin was a viable economic option—kind of like SSI in eastern Kentucky—for a much larger swath of restless young men in and around Xalisco, Nayarit.

In several Xalisco neighborhoods virtually every able-bodied young man had gone north to sell heroin. The working-class Landareñas and Tres Puntos neighborhoods, not far from the town’s rodeo arena, were among them. The flat neighborhoods, with some still-unpaved streets, were a mix of modest houses of concrete block, mechanics shops, mom-and-pop markets, small beauty salons, and crowing roosters. The neighborhoods became sources of labor supply for the Xalisco heroin stores in the United States. Selling heroin up north became fashionable, almost a rite of passage, for Landareñas and Tres Puntos young men. Most would learn little of America beyond strip mall parking lots in the Xalisco heroin hubs of Columbus, Charlotte, Denver, Portland, and Salt Lake.

Pedro had done many dead-end jobs in Nayarit. His father taught him to hate drugs. Pedro never listened to the ballads—the
narcocorridos
—that recounted how traffickers died in a blaze of glory.

But “I was tired,” he said years later, “of work that led nowhere.”

A brother-in-law was offered work selling heroin. Soon several of Pedro’s brothers went north, too.

“If they need anyone, let me know,” Pedro told his brother-in-law.

By then Pedro had watched the business spread across Xalisco. He remembered as a boy seeing a man who’d just returned from the United States. He was sitting atop a fine Thoroughbred horse that no one in town could afford. He was drinking beer, this man, and was the subject of gossip around town. Since then, at least two dozen of Pedro’s friends had gone to work as drivers in the Xalisco heroin system as it spread across the United States. Every one of them went with the dream of earning enough to start a car shop, or open a tortilla stand, or buy a taxi. Not one ever did. True, they built houses and bought clothes for their families, those Levi’s 501s especially. But they spent the rest on beer, strip clubs, and cocaine, and walked the streets of Xalisco for a week or two the object of other men’s envy. When their money dried up, jonesing for that quick cash, they went north as heroin peons again and again. The Xalisco labor pool never dried up. Young men were always eager to return and push heroin, strung out on the high of coming home a king.