Copyright

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.WilliamCollinsBooks.co.uk

First published in the United States by One World, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, in 2017

First published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2017

This eBook edition published in 2017

Copyright © 2017 Joe Tone

Joe Tone asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1998

Map copyright © 2017 David Lindroth Inc.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

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

Copyright

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.

That was bad news for the Schvaneveldts but good news for brokers like Ramiro. He was buying not for himself but for horsemen back in Mexico, who trusted him to pick out well-bred babies and haul them back across the border. He never said who his buyers were; they were “Mexican businessmen” and nothing more. He could safely assume that everyone in the barns knew what kind of business those Mexicans were in. But the industry didn’t care, so long as Ramiro kept showing up to spend his clients’ money.

Ramiro kept coming, and the money kept coming—eventually. Since Ramiro was a reliable big spender, the auction-house managers didn’t demand that he settle up before he hauled his horses off to Mexico, as they might with lesser-known buyers. They let him take possession of the horses and then pestered him throughout the year to send the balance. So long as he zeroed out his account before the next auction, he remained a valued customer.

Recently, though, Ramiro’s clients had been spending bigger and sending money less reliably. At a small sale in Dallas that summer, he’d spent $112,000 on four yearlings, more money than any other buyer. In two auctions in Oklahoma that fall, he’d spent $370,000 on twenty-eight horses—and then promptly bounced ten checks worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. At one in New Mexico, he’d spent $357,000 on eleven horses. And at another in California, he’d spent $405,000 on seventeen horses. No other buyer came close to spending that much.

The checks eventually cleared; the wires eventually came through. But Ramiro was falling behind, despite spending hours fielding and making phone calls in an effort to settle his debts. The industry was losing patience. Twice recently, sale managers had pushed Ramiro against auction-house walls, demanding he pay off the balance of his bills.

Yet when Ramiro’s hand went up at the next auction, they never told him to lower it. They needed his clients’ money. Today especially. The crowd was thin, which meant sellers would be either giving deep discounts or buying back their horses and waiting for a new day. But Ramiro’s Mexican clients seemed impervious to economic downturns. They wanted more horses, and the best horses, always.

Walking through the barns, Ramiro could get a sense of a horse’s demeanor, its build, its balance, all data points that might influence how high he might be willing to bid. Sometimes he asked one of the handlers to heave open a stall’s sliding door and walk the animal around, so he could see how the horse handled itself in space. But the real data was in the catalog he was holding. Each page was covered in size-nothing type detailing a single horse’s lineage—sire, dam, their sires and dams, and the career highlights of every horse along the line. Wins in “stakes races” were set in a heavier black font, which allowed seasoned buyers to assess the pedigree with a flip of the page. Their eyes were trained to scan for that coveted black type.

Like all buyers, Ramiro was especially interested in a horse’s sire. Like all buyers, he was especially interested if that sire was First Down Dash. A champion racehorse in the 1980s, First Down Dash was the sport’s most prolific breeder, responsible for hundreds of winners and millions in earnings.

The auction house offered two positions from which to bid. One was inside, in the small gallery that circled the sales ring. The other was outside, around the artificial-turf walking ring, where the horses were displayed before being led up a faux-brick walkway and inside. Ramiro liked it outside. There was a bid-spotter out there, looking for flying hands, and it was a good place to get one last glimpse of a horse before the bidding started. Ramiro found his post along the rail and struck his usual pose, his belly flung out in front of him and his sales book resting on top of it.

He started slowly. He placed a bid on a “foal in utero,” an embryo or fetus still developing in the womb. Buying an unborn horse was sort of a blind wager, with big risks and a big upside. Instead of buying on the strength of a horse’s pedigree and conformation—its genetic promise and its physical reality—here Ramiro was betting only on the horse’s lineage. He did it often. He nabbed that first embryo for $1,500, and several horses later, his hand rose on another. This one had been sired by famous First Down Dash, but it was still a long shot, given that the foal could be born with any number of defects, or could just be slow, or could goddamn die on its way into the world. Still, Ramiro bid $13,500 on it.

Ramiro kept on like that, stocking up on quality breedings for relatively cheap. He paid $30,000 for a horse called Bench Mark Dove, $16,500 for Azeann, $6,700 for Beduinos First Down. By the time the auction reached its final hour, he’d spent a little more than $100,000 on seven horses, including some of the sale’s most expensive.

Then the auctioneer called hip number 140, the 140th horse of the auction, its number penned on its hip. A handler walked into the ring beside a sorrel yearling colt. A white racing stripe bisected the horse’s face, falling down the steep angle from brow to nose.

“Tempting Dash,” the auctioneer bellowed. Ramiro’s hand twitched back to life.

The bidding climbed through the low five figures. Ramiro steadily lifted his hand as the other bidders fell away. Maybe it was the horse’s May birthday, which meant he’d be one of the younger two-year-olds on the track the following year. Maybe it was his size; he was small, shorter and skinnier than the prime yearlings, which stood somewere around fourteen hands and weighed 850 pounds. Whatever the reason, Ramiro found himself the last bidder to raise his hand, with the price stuck at $21,500, a meager sum considering Tempting Dash’s lineage.

“Sold,” the auctioneer said, to the ruddy-cheeked fellow in the bright polo with the phone pressed to his ear. Another bargain for his clients back in Mexico.

CHAPTER THREE
FOLLOW KIKO
PIEDRAS NEGRAS, COAHUILA, MEXICO
Summer 2008

I’m here, where are you, are you coming? José was standing outside a gas station one summer evening, talking—and hoping—into his phone. He was in Piedras Negras, a snaking two-hour drive north of Laredo’s Bridge One, where he would soon find himself emptying his pocket trash for a rotating cast of badge-wielding Americans. This was a different crossing point on a different day, but José could expect the same riverside indignities whenever he decided to cross back into Texas, probably in a day or two. For now, though, there was a party to attend.

It was a family affair, thrown by his little brother in rural Coahuila, a Mexican border state about a seven-hour drive from José’s house outside Dallas. Leaving the United States didn’t come with the same harassment, since the Mexican authorities didn’t scrutinize José’s entries as the American ones did. Still, crossing into Mexico could be treacherous for José and people like him.

It was a travel experience unique to the friends, families, and associates of Mexico’s most-wanted criminals. Some American defense lawyers make the trip when they’re invited to off-the-radar meetings, traveling to undisclosed locations to update drug lords on the status of various cases against them, their families, and their organizations. The actor Sean Penn took the trip and made it famous with his 2015 visit to El Chapo—the long, blind journey into the remote Mexican countryside, no cellphones allowed.

José made the trip only occasionally, usually for family gatherings or parties like this one. For baptisms, Mother’s Day, and other occasions—tonight was a nephew’s birthday—his brother Miguel liked to throw the doors open at one of his ranches and invite in people he loved and trusted. He sent out for beer and made sure it was cold, sent out for cabrito and made sure it was perfectly smoked. With a busy family life in Dallas, José didn’t get there often. This time, he made the trek.

After crossing, José found his way to a gas station near the border, where one of his brother’s workers was supposed to pick him up and deliver him to the party. But visiting an extraordinarily wanted criminal is never that simple. José waited there for hours, while his little brother’s men surveilled the gas station to ensure that they didn’t catch a tail—that a Mexican soldier or cop, with an American agent as backup, wasn’t lying in wait, hoping José would lead them to his brother. José kept calling back to the party, calling and calling. I’m here, where are you, are you coming, but they didn’t come for hours.

Eventually, after the sun ducked behind Coahuila’s scrubby landscape, a pickup pulled up, and his brother’s guys drove José down a long road that snaked away from Piedras Negras and into the more remote countryside of Coahuila state, transitioning along the way from pavement to dirt and slipping through thickets of mesquite trees. Even five hundred miles from Dallas, it must have felt like home.

José had every reason to love life out there, in the countryside south of the river, surrounded by rolling hills, towers of hay, and roving bands of livestock. Some of the images he and his brothers clung to from their childhood were of them standing amid horses and cattle and whitetail deer in the open space of Tamaulipas.

There were centuries of tradition in ranching this territory. It was here that, in the 1600s and 1700s, Spanish missionaries established ranchos and missions on both sides of the river. When they couldn’t find enough Spaniards to staff them, they turned to the Indians they’d managed to convert. This introduction to horsemanship would backfire in later decades, when Mexican and American soldiers encountered more and more Comanches who were lethal on horseback.

It was also here, in the mid-1800s, that Richard King, a United States Army steamboat captain, recruited Mexican vaqueros, cowboys, to staff his King Ranch in newly established Texas. A century and a half later, the 825,000-acre Texas ranch is so famous that its name graces a line of Ford pickups. It’s also credited with the proliferation of the quarter-horse breed.

And it was here, across those same centuries, that Spanish, Mexican, and even some Anglo ranchers developed the heavily Spanish, Catholic culture, known as Tejano, that would come to define the region long after more aggressive Anglo settlers arrived to dispossess the Mexicans of their land and power.

By the time José Treviño Morales was born, in 1966, these borders were settled. Ranching still ruled. His father worked as a vaquero on ranch land south of Nuevo Laredo, where he taught José and his brothers to care for cattle and the sensible cow ponies that roamed their home state of Tamaulipas. But sometime before José hit high school, his dad left the family. It’s unclear whether he abandoned them, migrated in search of work, or disappeared under some other circumstances. Whatever the reason, he was gone, and so was the rancho lifestyle José and his brothers knew. There was nothing for the remaining Treviño clan in the countryside, so they moved into urban Nuevo Laredo and tried to survive.

The economics of that state of Mexico had long been fraught. Cities in the southeast were positioned along the Gulf of Mexico and offered jobs at the ports and in the oil industry. In the West sat Ciudad Victoria, the state capital. But the state’s northern tip, where José grew up, was an economic fault line, always shifting and occasionally rupturing.

During World War II, as the American agriculture industry struggled to find cheap labor, the United States and Mexico developed the Bracero Program, which invited Mexican laborers to cross legally into the United States to work farming jobs left unfilled by soldiers. The program offered a minimum wage, temporary housing, and health benefits, and it drew hundreds of thousands of seasonal workers every year, especially from borderland cities like Nuevo Laredo.

It also upended the culture of migration between the two countries. By the mid-1960s, the United States had issued more than four million work visas to Mexican farmworkers. Then, under pressure from American labor groups, the United States suspended the Bracero Program. But the migratory spigot wasn’t so easy to turn off. With Mexican families now accustomed to work-driven migration, and with fifty thousand American farms now accustomed to a steady flow of cheap labor, workers stayed, and workers kept coming—papers or not. Together with new visa limitations and waning Mexican farm jobs, the end of the Bracero Program sparked the influx of undocumented Mexican immigrants to the United States, which helped double the country’s Mexican-born population every decade through the 2000s. Instead of a hub for seasonal migrant workers, Nuevo Laredo became a key passageway for undocumented immigrants.

A year after the Bracero Program’s demise, the Mexican government launched the Border Industrialization Program, designed to absorb the suddenly idle labor force along the border. The program allowed American and other foreign manufacturers to build maquiladoras, factories, in Mexico and import materials tax-free. Hundreds of new factories created thousands of low-skill, low-wage factory jobs assembling electronics, toys, and other Black Friday grist. But manufacturers, in Mexico and across the globe, targeted women for the jobs, banking that their inexperience in the workforce, combined with old-fashioned sexism, would keep wages low. Eight out of ten maquiladora jobs were filled by young women.

That didn’t help the Treviño boys. The Treviño boys—all the Tamaulipas boys—needed jobs. José and his brothers washed cars and worked as gardeners, doing whatever they could to bring in money. But it wasn’t enough. If they didn’t want to smuggle drugs, the best place to find work was north of the river.

José’s big brother Kiko—short for Juan Francisco—went first, in 1978. He had shaggy black hair and a jawline that cast a shadow on his long, muscular neck, which was often exposed by a gaping shirt collar. Kiko was the oldest of the thirteen Treviño children, and he was smooth, able to talk himself up without stumbling into braggadocio. He was savvy, too, not just dreaming of a better way but figuring out a plan. He served as the de facto patriarch after their dad left, and he modeled manhood for his six younger brothers, marrying a local girl and raising a border-zigzagging family in the tradition of Los Dos Laredos.

Kiko’s in-laws were bricklayers in Dallas, so Kiko decided to try laying bricks in Dallas. It was a good time, and a good place to start a career in construction. Thanks to an oil boom, Texas’s population was growing twice as fast as the country’s, as workers and moneymen came to cash in. By 1980, one hundred thousand people were arriving in the Dallas–Fort Worth area every year.

Some of the new Texans were Mexicans and Mexican-Americans like Kiko and his family, but many were middle-class and wealthy white Americans. They needed houses, and schools, and strip malls. They needed Mexicans to build them.

Kiko had never laid a brick, but he learned to do it by watching his in-laws work the trowel. José came a few years later, when he was fifteen, bailing on high school. By the mid-1980s, Kiko had his own company, Treviño Masonry, and a crew of thirty-two fellow Mexicans building three houses at a time. He and José got their work visas, and got their Social Security numbers, and got their tax bills, and paid their tax bills. They banked enough money to buy a few shoebox houses in the working-class neighborhoods southeast of downtown Dallas. After laying bricks all day, they spent their nights remodeling those houses for their families. More work as bricklayers would mean more houses to buy and remodel, and more houses would allow more of their kin to move north. Their sisters had already made their way, and Mom was spending a lot of time in Dallas, too.

By the early 1990s, José was pulling in $43,500 a year, a decent wage for a no-diploma son of Tamaulipas. Kiko was doing well, too. But Kiko craved more, and he saw it in the arrival of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

It was well known that NAFTA would open the floodgates all along the United States’ two-thousand-mile southern border, increasing imports from $40 billion to almost $300 billion over the next two decades. Laredo would benefit especially from its place at the southern tip of U.S. Interstate 35, a thumping artery that stretched north from Laredo through San Antonio, Austin, Dallas, Oklahoma City, and beyond. Once NAFTA passed, Interstate 35 would be clogged with thousands of eighteen-wheelers, carrying goods through Texas and into the Midwest.

In 1992, the year before lawmakers passed NAFTA, Kiko bought a 1958 tractor-trailer and returned to the Mexican side of the border. He started moving loads of raw materials from Nuevo Laredo to the maquiladoras of interior Mexico. But he wasn’t just preparing for NAFTA’s promised impact on U.S.-Mexican trade; he was also betting on the effect both governments refused to acknowledge: the increased flow of drugs across those same borders.

By truck, train, car, and foot, traffic across the border was expected to skyrocket when the law took effect on January 1, 1994. Every vessel that crossed offered an opportunity to satisfy America’s unquenchable thirst for illegal narcotics—cocaine, from the wilds of Colombia but shipped through Mexico; heroin, from the poppy fields of Sinaloa; and weed, from whatever patch of land industrious growers could find. Kiko started using his new truck to transport marijuana.

Not much is known about Kiko’s previous history as a smuggler, if he had any. But he had come up during a golden age of pot smuggling, after America developed its taste for weed but before its government declared war on it. If you grew up poor in Nuevo Laredo, the business, and the connections, came easily whenever you decided you wanted in.

Kiko wanted in. He bought weed from suppliers in Mexico and smuggled it across the river into Laredo, presumably tucked away in his new tractor-trailer. Then he hired couriers and paid them a few thousand bucks a load to transport it to Dallas.

In previous eras, shipping narcotics north on Interstate 35 was the easy part: keep the speed limit and stay inside the lines and no one would bother you. But in the 1970s, the United States Supreme Court had ruled that Border Patrol agents at checkpoints within the country’s borders could stop and question motorists regardless of whether they suspected wrongdoing. Now, at checkpoints like the Laredo North station, located thirty miles north of the border on Interstate 35, agents could stop and question any motorist. And they could pull cars and trucks into hard secondary with only the slightest hint of probable cause.

Kiko’s drivers moved a few hundred pounds of weed at a time. Usually they concealed it amid construction materials in a trailer. Other times, they used a ranch just off the highway to avoid the checkpoint altogether. They paid a few hundred bucks per trip to enter the ranch on one side of the checkpoint and exit on the other.

Kiko was hardly a kingpin. Other Texas smugglers around that time imported ten times what he did. But he made enough to expand his trucking company. He moved back to Nuevo Laredo, sleeping in a small living space behind his office while his wife and kids stayed back in Dallas. He had nine employees, including a bookkeeper, messengers, and drivers who delivered paper, aluminum, and other raw materials to factories across Mexico.

Between legitimate shipping and marijuana smuggling, Kiko was making enough to keep expanding the Treviño clan’s nest in Dallas. He bought new trucks for his shipping business, a new pickup for himself, and a motorcycle for his son.

José, now in his mid-twenties, stuck to bricklaying. He met a woman named Zulema, an American citizen eight years his junior. She had dark-chocolate eyes and wavy black hair, and her round cheeks gave shape to a determined face. She shared José’s Mexican heritage, privilege-free upbringing, and bottomless work ethic. She was just seventeen when they married, around the time Kiko pivoted into smuggling. She gave birth to their first child, Alexandra, a couple of months later.

José became a naturalized citizen and kept working the trowel for whatever contractor would take him. He rose before the sun and put in long days, building homes and schools and stores in and around Dallas. He wanted nothing to do with smuggling. If he lived with some festering indignation over his family’s economic abandonment—by his father, by his fatherland, by his adopted homeland—he never expressed it to the people around him. Instead, he was building a life the way he stacked bricks in the morning shade: slowly and dutifully, actively rejecting the smuggling heritage of his hometown.

But occasionally, big brother Kiko called in a favor.

José likely longed to say no. But he was lugging that word of rejection uphill. He possessed a deep sense of what social scientists call “familism,” a commitment to family over self. Social scientists routinely pin that quality on immigrants, especially Mexican ones, citing a cocktail of factors: religion, large family size, and economic necessity. And maybe immigrants do rely more heavily on family, as a tool against marginalization, using flexibility and fluidity as antidotes to systematically limited opportunity. But also, it’s just what some families do: They stick the hell together. They say yes.

The Treviño brothers’ early years in Dallas would have tantalized those familism-obsessed social scientists. The siblings found each other work, built each other homes, shared cars, and cared for each other’s kids. This unflagging devotion to family may or may not dissipate in future generations, but José’s generation was the first. If big brother asked, José said yes.

Whenever Kiko’s drug couriers arrived in Dallas with the weed, they would hole up at the La Quinta, the Travelers, or some other access-road dump, waiting for one of Kiko’s workers to pick up the delivery. Before they returned to Laredo, they wanted their few-thousand-dollar delivery fee. A few times, they beeped José to collect it. He got the cash from Kiko and delivered it to the motels.

Kiko’s enterprise didn’t last long. Late in 1993, before NAFTA even took effect, Kiko’s couriers tried to pass through the Laredo North checkpoint at three-thirty in the morning. A drug-sniffing dog named Wondo perked up, leapt onto the tires, sniffed, leapt back down, and sat up straight. The agents knew what that meant, so they opened the trailer, and the dog started jumping like, Let me in. He was an old dog, so for him to be jumping, that meant something.

The agents waved the truck into secondary. The trailer was stuffed with Saltillo tile, destined for the kitchen of some Spanish-style McMansion. The agents hoisted themselves in and clinked their way to the back, following Wondo. That’s where they found the duffel bags, stuffed with 280 pounds of cellophane-wrapped marijuana.

Kiko went to trial in 1995. José wasn’t indicted, but his name did come up a couple of times. That probably explained why José wasn’t in the courtroom to see Kiko sentenced to twenty years—two decades in a Colorado federal prison for moving a drug that, by the time he got out, would be legal in the state where he served his time.

With Kiko in prison, the Treviños kept grinding. Zulema earned a high-school diploma online and slogged through the best work she could find. She made $6 an hour working food service at a middle school; $6.50 as a McDonald’s crew member; and, now, $500 a week working full-time for a temp agency.

José found a steady masonry gig with a residential contractor in the suburbs, and he stuck it out there for six long years. In 2007, he landed a full-time job with a contractor who did brickwork on some of the city’s most prestigious projects: the new basketball arena at Southern Methodist University; the new campus of Booker T. Washington High School, one of the country’s best performing-arts schools; and the new Cowboys Stadium, a monument to American excess fans dubbed “the Death Star.”

José surely knew he worked harder than his paychecks suggested. The incomes of immigrants were systematically stubborn, especially in Texas, where so-called right-to-work laws suppressed union organizing and wages. Texas bricklayers made less than those in most every other state, and 50 or 60 percent less than those in Illinois, California, and New York.

José did manage the occasional pay bump, and he was up to $20 an hour by 2009, from $16.50 when he’d started his previous job. He could load up on hours, too. He’d clocked 240 hours of overtime in his first full year at his new job, including 28 overtime hours one week when the average temperature was 104 degrees.

Still, it was hard to do any more than survive. That’s why they were stuck on their stubby street in Balch Springs, one of the inner-ring suburbs southeast of Dallas. Seventy-five percent of the suburb was black or Hispanic. Almost a quarter were immigrants. Half of the people there spoke something other than English at home. A quarter lived in poverty. The rest lived where the Treviños did, just above it, with the city’s median household income barely scraping forty grand.

If this was the American Dream, it was a sweaty, stressful version of it, land of the free but also of the overdraft fee. The Treviños kept a savings account, but it had never held more than $100. Their checking account had topped out in recent years at $8,692, and that was after a $4,900 tax refund. Most months it hovered around a couple grand. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to take the kids back-to-school shopping at American Eagle and Limited Too; to dine on whatever they could afford at Carnival, the Latin-food grocery chain; to load up at Walmart; to make small donations to the March of Dimes; and to pay for Alex’s braces. And, soon, to help Alex pay for college.

She was their biggest investment, really, the asset they nurtured in hopes that it would pay off for future Treviños. In this and other ways, José and his brothers seemed rooted by the same qualities. They were strivers, willing to bust their butts for what they felt they deserved, and willing to take risks to accelerate their return on investment, which was sluggish by design and decree. They just assessed that risk differently. Kiko had tried to complement his legal shipping business with illegal shipping. His other brothers, the ones José was visiting at the ranch, had written off their own futures in pursuit of riches that paid out sooner and bigger.

José was playing a longer game. If he stayed the course, his American Dream would be deferred to his daughter and her siblings. José may never experience the payoff, but perhaps one day he could see it in her round, beaming face. He made sure to pay the orthodontia bill.

Despite the relentlessness of this life, and despite the travel ordeal, José managed to get to Piedras Negras for the party at Miguel’s ranch. There were four or five structures on the property, including stables for the horses and a sprawling house, and outside a cook grilled meat and veggies. José found his way under the palapa and sipped from his beer.

A man named Poncho approached. Poncho was one of Miguel’s guys, known for his skills as a logistics manager, overseeing the exportation of vast quantities of cocaine into the United States, and the importation of millions of dollars back into Mexico.

José told Poncho about his life. How he’d grown up like this, in the country, among the animals. How he worked as a bricklayer—“like a regular person” were the words that would stick with Poncho. They sat there for hours, drinking and talking.

From the palapa, José could surely see that his brother had managed to remake their old life on this ranch. A couple of calls and Poncho could cut José into all this, no sweat. But José told Poncho no, that he “didn’t want to have anything to do with what was crooked.” The code of familism seemed to have found its limit. So they just sat and drank beers while the sun set on the ranch of the man they called “Cuarenta.”

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