From Notorious Cruelty
Heidi Landgraf was an old hand at meeting with informants. But this guy, Jose Patino Moreno, was different. It was dangerous enough being an honest prosecutor in Mexico. But "Pepe" Patino, a soft-spoken family man, had spent more than a year now working closely with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, investigating a vicious drug syndicate that was pumping cocaine into America. The two brothers who ran this cartel -- Benjamin and Ramon Arellano-Felix -- were notorious for their cruelty. Rivals were murdered and informers routinely tortured and killed.It was April 2000, and the DEA had spent almost a decade trying to bring down the brothers -- especially Benjamin, who was the brains behind the operation. For most of these years, Jack Hook, one of Landgraf's colleagues, had spearheaded the DEA task force. Now, Landgraf was in charge, and Patino seemed to offer the best chance at a breakthrough.
She was worried for him, though.. "Aren't you afraid to work with these guys, Pepe?" she asked Patino. "Are you taking precautions?" "Heidi, you're kind of scaring me," Patino said with a nervous laugh.
"Just be careful," Landgraf replied.
Two days later, Patino's wrecked Chevy Lumina was spotted in a steep ravine off the road from Tijuana to Mexicali. Nearby lay Patino's body, along with those of another prosecutor and a Mexican military official.
This was no car accident. All three had been severely tortured. Virtually every bone in Patino's body was broken, and his head had been crushed in an industrial press. Forensic pictures showed just one recognizable feature: his distinctive black pen was still tucked into his shirt pocket.
Patino, it was later learned, had been betrayed to the cartel by a member of his own staff.
For Landgraf and her colleagues at DEA, this was yet another devastating setback. For 14 years, the Arellano-Felix organization, or AFO, had controlled the crown jewel of the trafficking business: the 100-mile, hardscrabble southern California border area known as the Plaza, which stretched from Mexicali to Tijuana. With over 80,000 cars passing through the border each day, the Plaza had become the gateway to the world's largest drug market. The cartel was believed responsible for up to 60 percent of the cocaine on America's streets.
Only the brutal rule of the Arellano brothers could have forged this drug empire. Born to a large, middle-class family in the lawless western state of Sinaloa, the brothers inherited the Plaza from their uncle, Miguel Angel Felix-Gallardo, the godfather of Mexican narco-traffickers. With Benjamin guiding the operation, and his younger brother Ramon in the role of enforcer, the Arellanos quickly became players in Tijuana society.
The two lived fast, throwing lavish parties and strutting through the border town squalor with movie star panache. Benjamin, cool and reserved, mingled well among the Tijuana establishment. With his minions, he became the stern strategist, devising the cartel's operations. Meanwhile, his ponytailed brother, Ramon, possessed a voracious appetite for women, cars, designer clothing -- and murder.
The brothers' cartel had moved tons of cocaine, marijuana and methamphetamine north into San Diego, with the drugs eventually finding their way to dealers in big cities like Los Angeles and Chicago. The AFO often got their haul past the U.S. border by greasing the palms of corrupt inspectors at the customs checkpoints.
"If you paid them $40,000 or $50,000, they'd just wave you on through," says one DEA official.
If anyone got in the way of this arrangement, he paid with his life. Authorities believe the AFO murdered hundreds, letting everyone know that theirs was the Colombian style of doing business -- plata o plomo<: silver or lead.
Shock Waves
Jack Hook's superiors in Washington saw the powerful cartels in Colombia as their bigger fight. They could pay only scattered attention to the AFO, even after Hook unearthed evidence that the cartel was employing gang members from the troubled Logan Heights neighborhood in San Diego as hit squads across the border. Everything changed, though, with one shocking murder.When Mexican drug lord Joaquin Guzman-Loera pulled into the parking lot at Guadalajara's airport on May 24, 1993, the assassins were waiting. Armed with AK-47s and grenades, the gunmen opened fire on Guzman's caravan of armored cars. Most of the cars sped away in the hail of bullets, but one -- a chauffeured sedan bearing a distinguished elderly gentleman clad in black -- remained. The gunmen threw open its doors, shot the chauffeur in the head, and fired 14 bullets into the chest of his passenger.
The killers were exultant. They were almost certain the man in black was Guzman, and the Arellanos had placed a $30,000 bounty on him -- reward money they thought would soon be theirs. They slid their AK-47s into duffel bags, jumped into a car and sped away.
Other AFO associates, meanwhile, made their way past security at the Guadalajara airport and then boarded a commercial flight. In the air, the men ordered champagne, drank and laughed. Over and over, they regaled each other with what had happened -- how their people had killed Joaquin Guzman-Loera!
But the man in black was not Guzman, or even a member of his cartel. He was Juan Jesus Posadas-Ocampo, a Roman Catholic cardinal who had traveled to the airport to receive Monsignor Girolamo Prigione, the Vatican's papal nuncio, and had unwittingly mixed in with the drug lord's caravan.
Posadas's death sent shock waves through Mexico, an overwhelmingly Roman Catholic country, and made headlines worldwide. It also galvanized U.S. law enforcement to finally bring down the cartel. A special task force composed of agents from the DEA, FBI, IRS and other agencies was created in San Diego. But the real action unfolded just down the street, in Hook's office, where he set an elaborate sting in motion.
Hook saw the Logan Heights gangs as the cartel's greatest vulnerability. If he could get confessions from gang members about their work for the cartel, perhaps he could bring a case against the brothers.
The bait would be drugs. Hook had an informant's car wired for video and sound, and fronted him enough money to make deals. After a half-year, Hook's team had sufficient evidence of drug buys to make a move. One night his agents swept through seedy neighborhoods in Logan Heights, bursting into homes, apartments and bars, and arrested dozens of gang members. Then they put the squeeze on for everything from petty drug possession to weapons violations to immigration laws.
Faced with stiff jail sentences and deportations, some in the gang cracked. They told Hook how they were flown down to remote ranches in Mexico, supplied by the cartel with guns and trained to be assassins and AFO bodyguards. They reported directly to Ramon, they said.
Not long after, Ramon landed on the FBI's "Ten Most Wanted" list, and the State Department placed $2 million bounties on both brothers' heads.
Within six months, Hook was supervising the task force. Right away he pressed for indictments, hoping to get a bead on the brothers' whereabouts and identify more and more associates.
But by then, Benjamin and Ramon had slipped underground. The two used multiple safe houses across the country, traveled under false names and left few trails.
Whenever they did venture out in public, it was always with an army of bodyguards. "A lot of people think you can just go arrest guys like this with a squad of six, seven people," says Mike Vigil, the DEA head in San Diego. "They don't understand. Quite frankly, it's easier to get to the President of the United States."
Vengeance
In August 1998, Hook was transferred to DEA headquarters in Washington, and handed off the challenge of nailing the Arellanos. It was Heidi Landgraf's turn.Landgraf had wanted to prove her grit early on in her DEA career, and she did more than that. For two years she posed as Heidi Herrera, a money launderer for Sicilian and Colombian crime families. Landgraf traveled the globe, meeting one-on-one with some of the world's most ruthless characters and running their cash through undercover bank accounts.
When the sting concluded, nearly 200 drug lords, their cadres and $50 million were seized. Landgraf and her colleagues in the operation were rewarded by having a $4 million bounty placed on their heads.
Shortly after, Landgraf joined the task force in San Diego, where she was charged with cracking the "narco juniors," the sons of wealthy Tijuana families who were captivated by the splashy lifestyle of the Arellanos.
Landgraf already knew what she was up against. Two years before, in 1996, Mexican police had picked up one narco junior, Alejandro Enrique Hodoyan, and forced him to talk. "The Arellanos give you a chance to work and they pay with favors," Hodoyan said. "They give you houses; they give you cars." More often than not, the work was murder. "They don't put a price on anyone's head, they just say, "F--- him," Hodoyan said. "Killing is a party, an amusement. After a murder they just laugh and drive down to Rosario for a lobster."
Hodoyan was eventually turned over to the task force, whose agents warned him that the AFO had put a mark on his head. But Hodoyan refused protection and returned to Tijuana in February 1997. He disappeared less than two weeks later.
While this sort of vengeance would chill the task force's informants, corruption in Mexico remained the biggest problem for Landgraf. The U.S. officials met regularly with their Mexican counterparts to pass intelligence and collaborate on strategy. But all too often it was a one-way street: Sensitive information would go south, but nothing ever came north.
"We'd all get together and make nice, exchanging pleasantries and information," an agent recalled. "Which is all well and good, except -- do something with the information!"
The frustration became so great that at one meeting with Mexican officials, the acting U.S. Attorney in San Diego, Charles La Bella, blew up. The reason the brothers were still in business, he yelled, was that the Mexican authorities refused to do anything about them.
Says one agent, "I think without saying it, the message from Chuck was: The reason you're not picking them up is because you're on the payroll."
Nothing seemed to be clicking for Landgraf. It surprised few people when, in April 2001, she accepted a transfer to Washington.
Jack Hook took the reins in San Diego again. If he was going to get the task force back on track, he'd need some breaks.
The first one came in the form of Vincente Fox, Mexico's newly elected president, who had campaigned on bringing down the drug cartels. Fox proved he was serious about it: He gave enforcement power to the military, always the least corrupt of Mexico's institutions, and ensured that only his most trusted aides would review sensitive information.
The second break was even bigger. On February 10, 2002, Ramon and a team of assassins were traveling to Mazatlán to murder a rival drug lord, Ismael Zimbada, when guns were turned on them instead. Officially, a shootout took place after Ramon's Volkswagen Beetle zoomed the wrong way down a one-way street. But some investigators believe Zambada's corrupt police simply struck first. Ramon was killed.
Caught Napping
The cartel responded quickly to the news, whisking Ramon's body away from the morgue before it could be positively tagged. But the task force had continued to nurture a network of informants, and it paid off. One obtained phone numbers of cell phones found at the scene of the shooting, and slipped them to Hook's team.Things moved fast after that. Recent calls from the phones were traced to an exclusive enclave in Puebla, on the outskirts of Mexico City. Mexican agents had tracked a money courier for the cartel to that town, too, and there had been eyewitness accounts of a little girl who had a deformed chin and whose family had just moved into a tony house in a quiet cul-de-sac -- a girl who bore a strong resemblance to Benjamin's daughter.
Neighbors had assumed that the owner of the house was just an ordinary businessman and father. But after a few weeks of surveillance, law enforcement knew that "Manuel Trevino" was only the latest cover for a drug lord whose empire was crumbling.
On March 9, 2002, at 1 a.m., a group of Mexican commandos broke down the door to the three-bedroom manse. They rushed in, past a shrine adorned with lit candles and a picture of Ramon, past stacks of money on the floor.
There, roused from bed where his wife still lay, was Benjamin Arellano. At first he looked dazed, uncomprehending, as the handcuffs were slapped on him, but soon he grew resigned. Not a shot had been fired.
Jack Hook was asleep in San Diego when his phone rang at 2 a.m. Within minutes, he was relaying the good news to his team. Then he sat back, his adrenaline pumping, far too excited to go back to sleep. Instead he started mapping out his next steps -- getting a provisional arrest warrant for Benjamin, trying to extradite the drug lord to the United States.
Three thousand miles away, in Washington, Heidi Landgraf also got word and was quickly summoned to DEA headquarters.
She was elated and stunned. "I always thought Ramon might go down," she later told a reporter. "But Benjamin? Never in a million years."
Benjamin was taken away to La Palma, a maximum security prison outside Mexico City, where he remains today. Hook knows that hurdles remain before he'll see Benjamin on trial in an American courtroom. For one thing, a recent ruling by the Mexican Supreme Court forbids extradition in cases where the prisoner faces the death penalty or life in prison.
But for Hook, it isn't enough to see the AFO dismantled. He wants justice. "You have to believe that, one day, you're going to put the arm on them all," he says. So, on July 8, 2003, federal officials unsealed two indictments against the AFO, charging Benjamin and his network with racketeering, trafficking and murder. Individually, these charges might not mean the death penalty or life in prison, so they may get around the Mexican ban.
With a bit more luck, Hook will be on hand to receive the biggest Arellano shipment across the border: that of the cartel itself.