Smugglers 2 The Sheriff: Sex, Meth & Murder; The Cartel from Tucson to the Florida Keys

Smugglers 2

The Sheriff

Sex,
Meth and Murder

The Cartel from Tucson

to the Florida Keys

Gerald McCallum

Smugglers
2 The Sheriff ©2013

Gerald McCallum

All rights reserved

This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part by photocopying or by any other mean without written permission of the author.

Smugglers 2 is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogues are products of the author’s imaginations and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

ISBN-13:
978-1494436780

ISBN-10:
1494436787

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Smugglers 1 Nikki

Sex Cocaine & Murder In The Florida Keys

Prologue

The three young men, or should I say, the three college boys, never stopped talking as we drove to the spot. We had left their car far behind, and their constant chatter was a sign of fear and nervousness as the white Eldorado made its way out into the desert and the darkness. The Caddie swerved from time to time in an attempt to avoid rattlesnakes that curled up on the blacktop during the night for warmth.

The talk was just white noise now, and the words had no meaning as I pulled over and came to a stop.

Turning to face them, I said, “Boys, the men we are about to meet are Mexican drug dealers, so if you have any guns, now is the time to tell me. Not only will they have guns, but if they see yours, they’ll kill us and take the money. So you better tell me now.”

One of them had a gun, so I told him to put it next to the telephone pole beside the Eldorado. We’d pick it up on the way back. As he did this, I took another hit from a two gram bottle of toot and selfishly put it away. We drove about two more miles when I pulled over again.

“We’re here, who’s got the money?” As we all got out of the car, I reached down to the left of my seat and picked up my gun, a forty-five. When they were lined up, I pointed my gun at them.

“This is a robbery!” I said.

They started to bitch and moan about being ripped off, except one who said he would find me. I told them that if they didn’t want to die here, they better get on their knees and throw me the ten grand and their wallets. As they did this, I took out their driver licenses and picture IDs, leaving the money in the wallets and one driver’s license.

“You know who I am, but more importantly I know who you are and where your parents and brothers and sisters live.  Walk to your car and leave
now
, not in the morning, but now. If you don’t, my Mexican partners will kill you and your families back home, and if you ever come back here, you will die.”

As I left them I wondered to myself how I’d ever gotten to this
point.

How does a retired cop with five million dollars buried in his backyard stoop to robbing college kids of ten grand and a gun, which I picked up on the way home. I had been doing this for two years and no one had yet put up a fight.

If they did would I have shot them? Most likely, yes.

CHAPTER 1

It all started back in Texas with two boys, brothers who were fishing for bluegills at the “Pit,” a gravel pit pond. One of the boys spotted a car under the water while he was filling his bucket for the fish they were catching. He called out to his brother; then they ran home to tell their dad what they had discovered. Their dad called the Sheriff who agreed to meet them back at the pond shortly.

They stood on the cliff looking for the car which was not visible from that height. The boys climbed down over the rocks to the water’s edge with the men following at a slower pace. As they got to the shore line, they could see a glimmer of light bouncing off the car’s bumper.

The Sheriff called for a tow truck and a diver. When the diver came up from the water, he stated he had found not one but three cars. The winch brought up the first car where Isabelle’s body was found.

The wrecker set the first car on the road and then brought up the second and third. By this time word spread throughout town, and about a dozen town folk arrived at the scene.

All three of the cars had bodies in them. Two had been there for quite some time, but Isabelle’s was just days old and still pretty intact.

As the three cars were made ready to be brought to the station, the Sheriff noticed a few beer bottles floating in the water and had the divers gather them for possible evidence. After the bodies were moved to the morgue, everyone called it a night and went home.

It was after midnight by the time the Sheriff got to his place. He made himself a drink and sat down to take a load off and think over the day’s events. He fell asleep in his chair and woke up about two in the morning.

Unable to fall back to sleep, he decided to drive back to the station. Something was bugging him. Inside the garage, he turned on all the overhead lights where the vehicles were stored. As he walked around the three vehicles, he stopped at Isabelle’s old car, looked inside and then opened the trunk.

Inside, he found two suitcases. He opened the first one, and to his shock, it was filled to the top with Ziploc bags stuffed with money. Each plastic baggie contained twenty thousand dollars in one hundred dollar bills.

The Sheriff stood frozen for a long moment, then remembered to close his mouth. It wasn’t every day he found loot stashed in a trunk.

He unzipped the second suitcase. It too was filled with doubled freezer bags full of neatly stacked one hundred dollar bills.

After pondering the situation for a minute, he took the suitcases, put them in his car and drove home.

Once home he opened one baggie after another and spent the rest of the night counting the money.

He stopped after counting five million dollars. Where in blazes did this money come from? Was it hot, stolen, counterfeit, or was it from a drug deal gone bad? In any case, he knew he would take his find to the grave with him, as he wasn’t about to tell anyone about this bizarre discovery.

The sheriff sat down and pondered this new situation. He’d keep the money, no doubt about it. He also knew he dared not spend any of the cash for years or at least until he found out where it had come from. If it was from a bank robbery, he knew all the serial numbers would be recorded, and for a set-up drug deal, also.

He did know one thing for sure; twenties were much easier to pass than one hundred dollar bills, especially with so many hundreds with concurrent numbers. He knew he really had to get the investigation under way to start answering some of these questions.

In the morning he went to the police garage, which by this time was full of cops and news people and a bunch of kids outside the door.  There were only three cops on the entire force and a secretary/office manager of twenty years (who was really the boss). Let’s just say that it wasn’t exactly like “CSI.” The most up to date equipment they had was car radar, and the cars were from four to seven years old. After some small talk, he instructed the others to open the trunks on all the cars and search them thoroughly. They all went to work on this with the Sheriff taking the lead.

Several hours later they had come up with several prints from three of the cars. Some were found on the suitcases and the others were found on the cars themselves as well as on all three of the beer bottles. Later that day after the Sheriff ran the prints through the system, one came up as an arrest and the other two were identified through military and state records. They were all local guys.

The Sheriff sent his men to pick them up, an easy task.  On the way back into the station one of the three started crying and spilled the beans after he realized the cars had been found in “The Pit”.  The other two caved and confessed, and in a matter of two days, the murder and rape of five young women had been solved. The three agreed to a plea deal to avoid the death penalty, but they would never see the light of day again
.

.

CHAPTER 2

About six months later, I took early retirement. I sold everything and moved to Tucson, Arizona, claiming that I was “burned out” after my many years on the force and the investigation that followed after finding the cars and bodies. Two years went by while I settled into a small house with a heated pool and hot tub and was known as the retired cop who lived on a pension and kept to himself. I also had a much younger Mexican girlfriend living with me from time to time.

“They” did not know, of course, about my past life and extracurricular activities, so I laid low and did all the remodeling and painting on my new house the first year. By the second year, I had laid my plans and had gotten “hooked up”. Being an ex-cop, getting “hooked up” with the underground element was pretty easy, and it was necessary to make some money to supplement my retirement pension. It was going to be awhile before it would be safe to spend any of the “buried” money.

Part of my plan was to set up a bartender who would turn me on to college kids who came into town looking to score some Mexican pot to take home to sell on campus. It was easy money, and they were young enough to be easily scared with little chance of gun play.  This lasted a couple of years, and with paying the bartender two grand per set up, word started to get out, so I had to back off.

After several months of no activity or cash flow, I had to make a move. I had heard that some big-time dope dealers from Mexico hung out at Bill's Oyster Bar, so I started to spend most of my days and evenings there with my girlfriend, Elena, who spoke Spanish, of course.  I had met her at a hot tub orgy with five men and three girls and took her home with me because I thought she was very pretty. I loved that she was open for all kinds of sex, whether it was one on one, a ménage a trois or any combination of the sexes. Besides, it didn’t hurt that she was nineteen and I was fifty.

One Friday night we were sitting at the bar when three Mexicans walked in and ordered drinks. The bartender nodded to me, signaling that they were heavy into the drug business, so we joined them.  We had a great time drinking together and laughing at each other's jokes. Elena called one of her friends to come to the bar and hang with us. The Mexicans loved this, and later we all went to my house where I fired up the hot tub, got out the cocaine and we all got laid.

I didn’t see or hear a word from the Mexicans for a few weeks; then one afternoon out of the blue they walked into the bar. We hooked up and drank the day away. Later I asked Jose, the leader, or as they called him, Tiburon—shark—if he could hook me up with an ounce of blow for the going Mexican rate. He looked at me and then said something to one of his friends who pulled out a baggie and gave it to me.

Tiburon said, “No charge for you my friend.” I thanked him, of course, and we left that night the best of friends. I went home, called Elena, did some blow and spent the next two or three hours with my face buried in her womanhood. God, she tasted and smelled as only a nineteen-year-old could to a fifty-year-old man.

The next afternoon I went back to the Oyster Bar to find that Jose and his men were already there drinking and carrying on.  I told Jose that if he ever needed any help I could perform magic. He looked at me and said he would let me know, and that we would talk, but not there and not then. We continued to party and then later he suggested we take a ride, and we did.

He told me he had a package in Mexico and that he wanted to get it into the states. “It weighs about one hundred pounds. If you can do it I'll pay you fifty grand”, he said. After discussing it further and getting more details from him, we set up the move.

There were three cars I took to do the job that were “smoke” and totally clean of any kind of drugs. I set them up with clothes hanging on a bar in the back seat. The drivers were getting two thousand per car, and they were going to be stopped and searched for sure. Just before we left for the border, I took a Windex spray bottle, filled it with tap water, put a gram of coke in it and let it dissolve. I then sprayed it all over the tires on the three cars. We all got in line at Lukeville Crossing, and once the drug dogs caught the smell of the toot on the tires, they went crazy and sat down. The four border patrol men and their dogs were very busy and waved Elena and me through. One easy way to make fifty thousand!

After two trips through Lukeville and one through Nogales, I quit because there were too many people who came to know about the deal. The Mexicans started doing it themselves but didn't take any precautions, and if they went to jail for fifty years that was the chance they took. I knew that I had to back out very carefully because even though you may think you are good friends, I realized it's sometimes safer to leave no witnesses than to let you out. I got lucky on this one.

After a month or so of partying, I bought Elena a new Mustang convertible, a big engine five-speed, so I needed some more money. I met up with Tiburon at my house and expressed my needs and asked if he had anything for me.

Of course, he wanted me to go back to what I had been doing for him. I was very cautious in asking him if he had anything else I could work on. He told me that there was one thing that was hindering his business—the new radar dirigibles that the US had. They had placed them on 600-foot tethers where they scanned the borders day and night with radar, detecting smugglers. It cost the government six million dollars, plus maintenance.

It took me a couple of weeks to come up with a plan to combat the dirigibles. I met with Tiburon and told him I had a plan, but there was no room for me in it. I told him if he liked it and it worked, he could give me something. He agreed, so I laid out the set up for him.

I told him that the dirigibles couldn’t fly in wind, lightning or storms with wind gusts. At all other times, they were up and locating people in the desert with their radar. I explained to him that the solution I came up with was very cheap and easy. He simply needed to put a kid with a cell phone and a pair of binoculars on a mountaintop on his side of the border. The kid would be instructed to call when the dirigibles just went up or just went down. These would be the safe times to move.

Jose just started to laugh, patting me on the shoulder as he laughed even harder. In his broken English he said, “That's very smart and cheap, too; they spent six million, and we spent one hundred dollars. See you tomorrow at the oyster bar.”

I was content in the fact that I probably made twenty to fifty grand and slept like a baby that night. The next afternoon, I went to the oyster bar to see Tiburon and get my cash. After some small talk and drinks at the bar, he sent me outside with one of his men to get paid. When he opened the trunk of his car, it was totally empty except for a gift bag from one of the shops at the mall. He handed the bag to me just like he was handing me a Christmas present with a sweater in it.

God, what balls, or was it just stupidity? I thought to myself. When I looked in the bag there was a tightly wrapped package at the bottom of it, and I asked “What's in the package?”

“A kilo,” the guy said.

After putting the package in my trunk, we went back inside.  When I saw Tiburon, I thanked him, because I knew no matter how much fun we had together, or how good my ideas were, if I made him mad, I could end up with my head on one side of the street and my body on the other. I expressed my gratitude and kept on drinking.

Later, back at my house, I thought to myself, ‘Now I have to sell the kilo to get my money, and I have to sell it without getting caught or killed. Since pure cocaine goes for six hundred per ounce in Mexico, I could make a killing, especially with cut.

A distributor I knew said that he could move it in a week, so I gave him a pound at eight hundred an ounce counting cut. He came back in three days with over twenty five thousand and asking for more.

Well, I thought this wasn’t so bad. In fact, it was cause for a celebration.  I called Elena and a mutual male friend and the three of us started our own orgy. We decided to try the hot tub first, which had a few feet of foamy bubbles. You can get these great bubbles, by using an old trick. You put the hot tub on bubble and add dishwashing soap. You can actually get as much as four feet of bubbles to play in. Before long, we were all hotter than branding irons and went inside to make more drinks, do more lines, and go to bed. A ménage a trios is my favorite and the hottest! My secret turn-on is watching a man make love to my woman.

Our male counterpart was gone when we awoke at two. I got up and made coffee and Elena stayed in bed for the rest of the day. Although a little hung over, I felt better after riding my bike and going for a swim. About four in the afternoon, I woke Elena up and then went to the Oyster Bar to talk to Tiburon. He and his crew were already there and there were a dozen Harleys outside. He was at the table talking to one of the bikers, and the rest were at the bar.  An hour or so later I saw them stand up and shake hands over something, and the biker and his gang left. Tiburon came over to me laughing and smiling. It was obvious he was in a good mood and proud of himself.

When the moment was right, I whispered to him that I would like to get some more of the stuff in the package.

“I don't do that, you need to talk to him,” Tiburon said and pointed to a man down the bar. “Cinco”, he said as he signaled to him.

What a name for his second in command, I thought.

Cinco, to my surprise, would not sell me a kilo; he would only front me four kilos, and I would have two weeks to pay for it. This is how they get you started dealing for them. The first one is free, then you get used to the easy money, and you get taken in a little at a time. It’s always on a nibble, not a bite.

Before long, I was moving weight, not like the movie “Blow”, but as much weight as one man could safely move with two distributors.

As the months went by, I got closer and closer to Tiburon and saw the men from the motorcycle gang meeting with him from time to time.

One day Tiburon said to me, “I have a small problem that you might be able to fix for me. I need five hundred keys here next week. Can you do that?” he asked.

“Sure,” I replied, not knowing whether I could or not, “but this must be just between us,” I added.

I went home and thought about how I might get over one thousand pounds across the border. It came to me that the border in Nogales is only fifty miles away, but it was the wrong crossing point. The point would need to be Lukeville in the US. This crossed into a really sleepy border town called Puerto Penasco—Rocky Point that only got busy on weekends when the town went from ten thousand to thirty thousand.

I called one of my friends who had a small plane and asked him if he wanted to make one hundred thousand dollars. I was happy that he not only said yes, but I knew that he had a great plane, and he had been going to Rocky Point over the past several months filming the seacoast for a land developer. The developer wanted to make a film to advertise lots he wanted to sell to Americans.

When I went to meet my pilot friend the day of the trip, I saw that his plane was minus the back doors where a camera was set up in one doorway on a tripod. All the employees at the airport knew the pilot by name and were very friendly and comfortable with him.

The flight was very cold and windy, as the mountains we had to fly over were ten thousand feet high.  When we got to Rocky Point, we flew to the coordinates I had been given and landed on a gravel road about eight miles outside of town. A car was waiting for us, and they went right to work loading the plane.

Suddenly they pointed toward town, quickly tossed the rest of the bundles in the plane, got back in their car and high-tailed it out of there.

We could see that behind us was a pickup loaded with men in the back of it, speeding toward us. As we climbed quickly into the plane, the pilot gave it full throttle, and we went taxiing down the hills and valleys of the gravel road with no time to even put on seatbelts. The telephone poles seemed like picket fences as we flew by at a high speed.  All the while, we were hoping that there would not be a car coming over the next hill in the opposite direction.

We heard gunfire just as we lifted off the ground. A bullet went through the instrument panel on the dash and hit the air speed indicator as we banked over the ocean. The pilot said he didn’t need it anyway as he had made so many trips for the land developer that he could do it blindfolded.

When we got outside of Tucson we flew to a prearranged spot in the desert, traveling really low and slow.  I pushed the bundles out to the desert floor to await pick up.

We went on to the airport and set down. The inspection was quick, and they did not find anything wrong, so we were on our way again in just minutes.

Later that night when Cinco got to my house, he had my money, half in cash and half in goods.  I then met up with the pilot to pay him his one hundred grand in cash. Needless to say, he was happy as he had his money and was ready to go again.

I knew Tiburon and my pilot must never meet because neither of them would need me then.

Later that week I met Tiburon at the Oyster Bar and asked him if he could influence the men in the pickup truck at Rocky Point.

“Of course” he said. “I will give them their choice of metals.”

“Gold or lead?” I asked.

“Mexicans don’t like gold; it’s silver or lead”.  Tiberon said. 

He then asked me who the pilot was and I told him he was my co-pilot.