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Source ISBN: 9780008245573

Ebook Edition © June 2017 ISBN: 9780008204822

Version: 2017-07-14

Dedication

FOR MELISSA

Epigraph

Every man suddenly became related to Kino’s pearl, and Kino’s pearl went into the dreams, the speculations, the schemes, the plans, the futures, the wishes, the needs, the lusts, the hungers, of everyone, and only one person stood in the way and that was Kino, so that he became curiously every man’s enemy.

—JOHN STEINBECK, The Pearl

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Map

Prologue: Pocket Trash

Chapter One: Foundations

Chapter Two: Bloodlines

Chapter Three: Follow Kiko

Chapter Four: Cuarenta

Chapter Five: El Huesos

Chapter Six: The Laundry

Chapter Seven: Wildcat

Chapter Eight: One Fast Booger

Chapter Nine: The Winner’s Circle

Chapter Ten: New Players

Chapter Eleven: Too Tempting

Chapter Twelve: Mountain Gods

Chapter Thirteen: FMES

Chapter Fourteen: Christmas Tamales

Chapter Fifteen: Where’s Papi?

Chapter Sixteen: Otherwise Illegal Activity

Chapter Seventeen: Operation Fallen Hero

Chapter Eighteen: Little Black Dots

Chapter Nineteen: Flush

Chapter Twenty: The Wire Room

Chapter Twenty-One: Homestead

Chapter Twenty-Two: Tripwires

Chapter Twenty-Three: Cartel Wedding

Chapter Twenty-Four: Land Rush

Chapter Twenty-Five: Paper Chase

Chapter Twenty-Six: Intervention

Chapter Twenty-Seven: We Hit the Family

Chapter Twenty-Eight: Exit Benefits

Epilogue: Kiss My Hocks

Footnotes

Reporting and Sources

Acknowledgments

About the Publisher

Map

PROLOGUE

POCKET TRASH

NUEVO LAREDO,

TAMAULIPAS, MEXICO

June 2010

As he walked across the bridge that morning, approaching the invisible line that separated him from Texas, it wasn’t hard for José to envision what would come next: the welcoming American half-smile, the face-down scan of his passport, the keyboard pecking, the faux-polite please come with me, sir, and the pat down, always a pat down, before a waterfall of questions about his brother. He’d be lucky to get out of there by lunchtime.

It was only eight in the morning, but already it was 80 on its way to 101, with the sun preheating the pedestrians on the Gateway to the Americas International Bridge. “Bridge One,” as the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents called it, was the span used by the thousands of people who crossed by foot each day between Nuevo Laredo, in northern Mexico’s Tamaulipas state, and Laredo, Texas. José inched across, U.S. passport at the ready.

He was forty-three. He was thick through the chest and shoulders, soft in the middle, filling out his five-foot-seven frame. His black hair was thinning on top and fading at the temples; his round face was Etch-A-Sketched with proof of his status as lifelong laborer and father of four. He’d been trudging across this bridge for most of his four decades.

Crossing was once a breeze. Mexican or American, you could stroll across the bridge in either direction, the Rio Grande slogging beneath you, and through the checkpoint in a matter of minutes, often by just declaring yourself a citizen. It was the ease of crossing that made living on the border alluring: the ability to visit a favorite relative, attend a birthday celebration or quinceañera, play in a soccer game, or party in a country other than your own. You crossed the border the way people in other towns crossed a railroad track, so fluidly that residents referred to the two cities as one: Los Dos Laredos.

Over the years, though, the one-thousand-foot walk across had become excruciating, even for those who weren’t yanked out of line the way José was. It started after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, when more agents were dispatched to keep the cable-news nightmares at bay. Armed with scanners, X-rays, and political consensus, Customs and Border Patrol agents, soon to be rebranded as “Border Protection” agents, started scrutinizing every crosser, looking for reasons to turn someone away. The line into Texas could take hours now, even if your name didn’t make the feds’ hard drives spin.

José made his way between the chain-link fence that lined this section of the bridge and the metal barriers that protected him from cars inching past to his left. At around five after eight, he finally approached the kiosk and handed the agent his passport.

Do you have any weapons?

No.

Do you have more than ten thousand dollars to declare?

No.

For years his answers had been good enough. Lately, though, when the feds scanned José’s passport, they got a notification from a proprietary security platform telling the agent there was some reason not to let José pass.

This time was no different. An agent escorted him into the fading beige U.S. Customs and Border Protection building. It was a maze of offices and interrogation rooms, connected by hallways with moldy tile and wheezy elevators that seemed forever on the verge of breaking down. The whole building smelled a little like a teenage boy’s locker. There were holding cells for criminals caught crossing, furnished with nothing but metal toilets and wooden benches, handcuffs attached and waiting. There were rooms for counting currency, equipped with computer terminals and scales. There was an intake center for families, mostly Central American mothers and children who were fleeing gang violence and hoping for asylum. There were dog cages but usually no dogs. They were all outside sniffing.

An agent patted José down and escorted him into an interview room. They called this “secondary inspection” or “hard secondary.” For José, a more apt name might have been a “We Know Who Your Brother Is, So Sit the Fuck Down for an Inspection” inspection. When José drove across, which was infrequent, they would comb his car and his person for guns, drugs, large amounts of cash, or anything else actionable. He had walked across this time, so they had to settle for what they called his “pocket trash”: the contents of a bag he was carrying and the pockets of his clothes.

Agents moved in and out of the room. They didn’t announce it, but José could guess what they were doing: making calls to whatever agency might have some questions about his little brother.

Thirty years before, when José was just a teenager, he had crossed this river on his way to lay bricks in Dallas. In time, people like him—Mexicans crossing north in search of work their homeland couldn’t provide—would be weaponized and dragged to the front lines of America’s culture war. But back then, for teenage José, it was as simple as crossing the bridge, driving seven hours north, finding a job, and going to work.

He laid his share of bricks in those early years. A few of his brothers did, too. They were constructing what could have been the foundations of a working-class American life. But before long, José was the only Treviño Morales brother left in Dallas. Now, as his wait on Bridge One stretched into its second sweaty hour, two of those brothers were dead. One was in an American prison. Another was enmeshed in Mexico’s trafficking business.

Then there was Miguel, the brother these feds so badly wanted to know about. He was a leader of Los Zetas, a criminal organization raking in hundreds of millions of dollars every year, much of it controlled by Miguel. Because of this vast accumulation of power and wealth—and because of Miguel’s unrivaled lust for mass, public, and grotesque violence—he was one of the most wanted drug lords in Mexico.

It had been this way for several years now. So for several years, this was who José was when he showed up at the border: the bricklaying brother of one of Mexico’s most wanted men. For all this harassment, José was never any use to the feds. He’d spent three decades as a mason; his callused hands had helped build Dallas’s exurban excess and then revive its urban core. No matter how hard the feds tried, they had never been able to connect brick-laying José to brick-smuggling Miguel.

But José was no longer a bricklayer, and that interested the feds. Recently, he had remade himself into a successful racehorse owner. He’d taken the racing business by surprise, quickly maneuvering into its upper ranks by hanging on to the fluttering silks of an undersized colt and partnering with a down-on-its-luck stud farm. Now, after winning a couple of big races, José was buying up some of the most expensive breeding mares in quarter-horse racing, the brand of racing preferred by the cowboys of the American Southwest and Mexico.

José’s new career opportunity had come just in time. In thirty years of laying bricks, he had never been able to do much more than keep his family afloat, even as his cartel-affiliated brothers in Mexico amassed cash, property, and power. Now his teenage daughter wanted to be the first in his extended family to finish college, with her three younger siblings hopefully not far behind. A few more breaks on the track and José might be able to pay for it all.

But his success at the track also made these crossings more titillating for the agents who swarmed these borderland interview rooms. Because however mysterious José’s little brother was to them, there was one thing they all seemed to know: Miguel loved horses.

About ninety minutes after José got pulled in, an agent from Immigration and Customs Enforcement showed up to ask all the usual questions.

I’m not proud of my brother, José said.

My brother has made my life hell, José said.

I don’t know where my brother is, José said.

He almost definitely didn’t. Few people knew where Miguel was at any given time. The moment people did know, his whereabouts changed.

At about ten-fifteen that morning, two hours after José had been pulled out of line, at least three since he’d stepped into it, the agents handed him back his belongings. There were some clothes, boots, toiletries, and a few coloring books and crayons, which he was bringing back for the youngest of his four kids. They were waiting for him in Dallas, and he was finally on his way.

CHAPTER ONE

FOUNDATIONS

You’ve seen a horse race. Maybe you’ve leaned over the rail at your local track, hollering at the seven because you bet the seven, for reasons that made sense at the time. Maybe you’ve donned a floppy hat and gotten hammered off mint juleps, running in from the kitchen to catch the end of—or maybe a replay of?—the Derby. Maybe you’ve been in a Vegas sportsbook, where not even the immortal gods of American football can muscle the ponies off those little TVs in the corner.

Somewhere, someway, you’ve seen a horse race. Most likely you saw thoroughbreds, the horses that were loping down the backstretch when you stumbled in from the kitchen. Maybe you watched a steeplechase, for the novelty of seeing these graceful beasts leap through a manicured obstacle course. But it’s unlikely that you’ve ever knowingly watched a quarter-horse race, and, for our purposes, you’ll need to see one, if only in your mind’s eye or on YouTube.

Be forewarned: There are no mint juleps here. The best we can offer is a lime in your Corona.

The colonists who settled Virginia and the Carolinas invented quarter-horse racing in the 1600s. It was more or less an accident.

They’d brought a handful of Arabians and thoroughbreds with them on the voyage, and between shifts tilling the New World, they started racing through the main streets of their newly settled villages. The races were informal and short, usually about a quarter of a mile, run between two horses down straight streets lined with villagers. But winning them became a point of pride, and over time, the colonists discovered that breeding their horses with those ridden by the natives resulted in even faster racehorses. They called this new breed the quarter-of-a-mile running horse, accurately if not cleverly.

Around this time, a British military captain visited North Carolina and wrote home about his experience. He marveled at the lush tobacco fields, the “shocking barbarities of the Indians,” and the horses:

They are much attached to quarter racing, which is always a match between two horses to run a quarter of a mile, straight out, being merely an exertion of speed. They have a breed that performs it with astonishing velocity … I am confident there is not a horse in England, or perhaps the whole world, that can excel them in rapid speed.

In the 1800s, as settlers moved west, they encountered a racing culture similar to the one established by those original colonists. Three centuries of ranching across Mexico—including in the northern state of Coahuila y Tejas—had propagated a breed of stock horses built for working the farm. They were short, muscular, and placid amid the chaos of a cattle herd. They were “cow ponies,” first and foremost. But they could run, too, if only for a few hundred yards, and their serenity with a rider in the saddle made them easy to settle down at the starting line.

The Southwest in the nineteenth century was defined by bloodshed, as Coahuila y Tejas became the Republic of Texas, and then an American state. Throughout it all, though, the white American settlers, Mexican ranchers, and Native Americans challenged each other to quarter-mile races all across the disputed territory. Gamblers would line the track, forming a human rail, with money and property at stake. One race was said to attract such prolific betting that it bankrupted and shuttered an entire Texas town.

The eastern settlers touted their “quarter-of-a-mile running horses.” The Texans swore by the speed and smarts of their cow ponies. An imported stallion named Steel Dust quickly extinguished the East-West rivalry. He was already thirteen when he arrived from the East in 1844, but he beat every cow pony they lined him up against. Before long he was being bred with ranch horses from across the new state of Texas, infusing the Spaniards’ placid cow-pony breed with a burst of speed and additional weight.

The resulting horses were, as one quarter-horse historian described them, “small, [with] alert ears, a well-developed neck, sloping shoulders, short deep barrel, a great heart girth, heavy muscled in thigh and forearm, legs not too long, and firmly jointed with the knee and pastern close.” They were rarely taller than fifteen hands* but could reach twelve hundred pounds. (Thoroughbreds are lither, averaging sixteen hands but just a thousand pounds.) The new breed of horse was even better on the farm and unbeatable in a rodeo ring or on the track, provided the track wasn’t longer than a quarter mile. They called him the American Quarter Horse.

By the 1940s, an industry had sprung forth around the breed. In Texas, a group of cowboys founded the American Quarter Horse Association, to manage and regulate breeding and competition. In New Mexico and California, businessmen pushed for pari-mutuel betting, allowing racetracks to collect the bets and manage the payouts. That lured horsemen and gamblers from Texas, Oklahoma, and Mexico for weekends spent drinking and betting on the races, which could now feature six or eight horses instead of two.

The quarter-horse meccas built in the 1940s and ’50s still anchor the sport today, especially Ruidoso Downs, in the mountains of New Mexico, and Los Alamitos, in the palm-studded suburbs of Orange County, California. They host futurities, for two-year-old racehorses, and derbies, for three-year-olds, with millions on the line. And on any given day, at tracks sprinkled across the Southwest and Mexico, quarter horses as old as five, six, even seven run races with a few grand on the line and a few hundred people in the stands.

The best of these horses are descendants from American Quarter Horse royalty—sired by name-brand stallions like First Down Dash, Corona Cartel, or Mr Jess Perry. They’re ridden by jockeys who often learned to ride in unsanctioned match races in the countryside of Texas, Oklahoma, or Mexico. Many of the best are Mexican immigrants.

The races typically cover between 350 and 440 yards. The best feature a little bumping out of the gate and all the way through the finish line. The fastest 440-yard races are run in about 20 seconds, compared to the two minutes it takes the top thoroughbreds to circle Churchill Downs. The short track leaves little time to overcome a stumble. The horses are loaded up, rearing and kicking up dust, and everything goes still. The gates fly and and the race is already almost over. The horse that best taps into its English-Spanish-Mexican-Tejano cow-pony DNA has the advantage, using its hulking haunches and quiet demeanor to go from dead still to full speed in a few strides.

Now maybe you can see it, even if you’ve never seen it: stocky horses raised by cowboys, racing on short tracks, ridden by jockeys trained in the thick brush of cow country, all a safe distance from the floppy-hatted dignitaries of the Jockey Club. They call thoroughbred racing the sport of kings? This is the sport of cowboys. Muddle your mint elsewhere.

CHAPTER TWO

BLOODLINES

POMONA, CALIFORNIA

December 2008

The calculations started as soon as Ramiro’s loafers shuffled into the barn, kicking dust particles into the crinkles of the cowboys’ boots. As his eyes adjusted to the dark, Ramiro’s brain started receiving dispatches about what he was seeing: thick haunches, hinged backs, steep shoulder slopes, and all the other variables that make the difference between racehorse and runner. There were some runners in the barns this morning. That was the only takeaway from a stroll through here, some babies that would be blazing down the track by spring.

It was winter in Pomona, one of the dozens of suburbs splayed east of Los Angeles that everyone’s heard of but few have visited, a kissing cousin to Covina and Pasadena. Ramiro was born, raised, and still lived in Monterrey, the industrial heartbeat of northeastern Mexico. But he spent a lot of time traversing these suburbs in rental cars. He went to the track in Los Alamitos for the races, the stud farm in Bonsall to buy breedings, private ranches, public auctions, and anywhere else he might find a quarter horse worth studying. This particular suburb was home to the Barretts auction house, where the final quarter-horse auction of 2008 was about to get started.

It was a small sale, 160 head, compared to 500 or even 1,000 at bigger auctions. Ramiro’s particular interests made it feel even smaller. He bought mostly yearlings, one-year-old horses that would hit the tracks as two-year-olds the following year. He also targeted weanlings, which hadn’t yet turned one, as well as embryos and foals still in utero, counting on the strength of their genetics alone.

This sale would feature a mix of all kinds of quarter horses, including foals, weanlings, yearlings, stallions, and broodmares. Still, Ramiro had reason to be excited. The Schvaneveldt Winter Mixed Sale, as this auction was called, was run by the family of one of the sport’s winningest trainers, Blane Schvaneveldt, and had attracted horses from the best bloodlines in the business. It was also a new venture, so attendance was sparse. That meant less competition on the way to the gavel.

Ramiro moved through the barns, peering through the metal bars of the stall doors. He made small talk in his choppy English with the other horsemen milling about—trainers looking for their next champions, breeders hoping to make a big sale. They were some of the best in the business. Ramiro knew them all.

They knew him, too. They knew him by various nicknames, including “the Horseman” and “Gordo,” which they recognized as the Spanish word for “fat.” It made sense, given the way his cheeks and midsection curved like birthday balloons, pushing his five-foot-nine frame over 250 pounds. But at thirty-five years old, Ramiro was handsome, too, with eyes that played puppeteer to an electric smile, hair that crashed like a Malibu wave, and polo shirts in every color of Ralph Lauren’s rainbow. He was a fresa—a “strawberry,” a preppy—through and through.

Most of the quarter-horse cowboys knew Gordo by his real name, José Ramiro Villarreal Guajardo. Even if Ramiro didn’t exactly fit in—if his loafers seemed impractical, his polos a little bright for this hour, his double-fisted cellphones more than a little obnoxious—Ramiro knew the sellers welcomed the sight of him. He could be a pain in their asses when it came time to collect, and the old cowboys occasionally had to remind Ramiro just how Ford Tough they were. But Ramiro knew—everyone knew—that when the auctioneer started bellowing his gibberish, Ramiro was welcome here. Especially these days.

The Great Recession was grinding toward its thirteenth month. Home prices were in a free fall. A drought was ravaging Texas and other parts of the West, driving up hay prices. That meant the wealthy ranchers, oilmen, and businessmen who drove the quarter-horse industry were doing what wealthy people did in historic droughts and capital-R recessions: selling their planes and selling their horses. Sale prices were falling. A mixed sale like the Schvaneveldts’ averaged ten thousand dollars per horse in a good year; this year might only average six thousand.

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