Then, in 2007, Forty and the Zetas showed up in Piedras Negras. Their relationship with the Gulf Cartel on the rocks, the Zetas were branching out from mere enforcement, starting to buy, smuggle, and sell their own cocaine. The Zetas asked Poncho to go to work for them. He wanted to say no, but the way they asked—stripping him to his underwear, binding his hands and feet, killing his friends who’d tried to refuse—made him think otherwise.
They delivered five hundred kilos of cocaine to Poncho. He went to work, smuggling it through Eagle Pass. Business got good fast for the Zetas in Piedras Negras, and Forty started spending more time there. He bought multiple ranches, sometimes by force. (Plata o plomo is a versatile ultimatum.) Then, with Poncho’s help, he started stocking his new ranches full of high-end quarter horses and hosting regular races. More than ever, racing became a fixture in Zeta culture.
Traffickers have a hard time articulating their passion for horse racing, which is hardly a staple of Mexico’s modern sporting culture. Soccer dominates the landscape, especially in cities. In the country, charrería, a more artistic cousin to American rodeo, rules. But in their rural hideaways, traffickers, especially those from the Gulf and Zeta cartels, have embraced match racing as one of their go-to pastimes.
There is a romance to it, a link to Mexico’s past. If they knew their homeland’s history, they could picture Hernán Cortés’s army arriving at Veracruz in the early sixteenth century, overwhelming the natives with his lance-wielding soldiers, who blazed across the battlefield on hulking creatures the natives had never seen. Actual racing, too, could be traced back to Cortés’s first days on Mexican soil, when he ordered his soldiers to race in pairs across the sand in an effort to impress the natives.
Early Spanish colonizers of Mexico organized races not unlike the ones being run in Virginia and the Carolinas: You bring your fastest horse, I’ll bring mine, and we’ll put some property on the line. In the mid-nineteenth century, horse owners joined forces and created clubs that could compete against each other in occasional meets, but they were still informal—parties, basically, with two runners and lots of side bets as the entertainment.
Later in the 1800s, as Mexico’s ruling class thrived under military dictatorship, Mexico City’s elite appropriated the sport. They formed a Jockey Club and organized regular races attended by buttoned-up generals and elegantly dressed women. But the sport has always thrived in Mexico when it has embraced its ranching roots, pitting one horse, one ranch, one town against another with as much pride as money on the line.
All of this is romanticized in countless corridos, the traditional, poetic folk songs that chronicle working-class Mexican history and culture. The most traditional corridos tell epic tales from the revolución; today, so many songs are devoted to drug criminals that they’ve given birth to a new subgenre, narcocorridos. But horses and match racing have always played key roles in corridos, reminding working-class Mexicans of the animals that helped their countrymen win wars, land, money, and pride.
The traffickers are also drawn to the controlled violence of quarter-horse racing, an adrenaline-pumping competition that rarely ends with anyone dead. Gambling helps fuel the intensity, like dice, cards, and sports betting for other gangsters. There is a soothing escapism to horse racing, too. When you’re as deeply entrenched in the drug trade as Forty and his compadres, there is hardly a person in your life untouched by its pistol-whipping reach, or one whose loyalty can’t be questioned. The horses just nuzzle and run.
By the time Forty arrived in Piedras Negras, Zetas and other narcos all across Mexico and South America were obsessed with weekend match races. As Forty bought up horses and land in and around Piedras Negras, he began holding regular private races there. Bring your best runners, Forty would say to Poncho and other associates, and they would race all afternoon. Sometimes it would be just the bosses and their inner circle, plus the armed guards clustered in armored SUVs that formed a perimeter around the property. Other times they invited people from the nearby towns and villages, to create goodwill and build their network of potential lookouts. There was always beer in the cooler and some cocaine in case a boss wanted a taste.
They bet big, $100,000 or more for each race. Forty usually took it home. Sometimes he had the best horse. Sometimes the winner was reluctant to collect. Sometimes Forty’s opponents told their jockeys to take it slow to avoid disrespecting the boss. It was around this time that Forty ordered his sicarios to take out a man nicknamed “El Gato” at a track in Saltillo. The conventional wisdom was that Forty had ordered El Gato killed because he was a rival trafficker, which he was. But Forty’s beef wasn’t work related; he told friends he killed El Gato because El Gato’s horses had been outrunning Forty’s. After the murder, Forty ordered his associates to keep racing, and bragged when his horses took home the money.
Horses consumed Forty, and he was amassing some truly fast ones with the help of Poncho and Poncho’s favored broker, Ramiro. None was faster than an undersized yearling that had arrived in Piedras Negras late in 2008. His name was Tempting Dash.
At the auction in California, Ramiro had actually intended to purchase Tempting Dash for a gangster named Jesús Enrique Rejón Aguilar, nickname “Mamito.” He was Z-7, the seventh Special Forces defector to join the Zetas. But after Ramiro had hauled Tempting Dash to Poncho’s ranch, Forty had decided to keep the colt for himself. He’d ordered Tempting Dash shipped to Monterrey to be worked into shape by one of the best trainers in Mexico.
There’s a cutoff for racehorses just as there’s a cutoff for kindergartners, and breeders, like overattached parents, work hard to be on the right side of it. For racing purposes, all horses born in a given year are considered one-year-olds the following January 1. Breeders, then, naturally prefer foals to be born as close to January 1 as possible, but never before, so their one-year-olds become two-year-olds with the earliest possible birthdays.
Tempting Dash was born in May. So when he arrived in Monterrey, he was young and skinny, still growing into the frame bestowed on him by his famous sire. The grooms in the stables started calling him “El Huesos.” “The Bones.” It stuck, becoming the name Tempting Dash raced under in Mexico.
Early that spring, before El Huesos even turned two by the calendar, Forty put his new colt to the test. He entered him in a qualifier for the annual Futurity Nuevo Laredo, one of the first futurities on the Mexican quarter-horse calendar. El Huesos stumbled in the trials, failing to qualify for the main event. But he did earn a spot in a consolation match race the day of the big futurity, and Forty’s trainer made sure the colt was ready.
It’s unclear whether Forty was there that day. He would make appearances at that track and others over the years, but his fugitive status made his presence hard to guarantee. If he was there, he was probably hanging near his fleet of pickups, surrounded by watchful bodyguards and left alone by whatever local cop might see him.
El Huesos versus El Caramelo was the eighth race of the day. For Forty and his fellow Zetas, things weren’t going as planned. They’d entered horses in most of the races that day, but the big futurity and the bulk of its quarter-million-dollar purse had been won by a horse owned by Los Piojos, a small, rival drug gang whose dominance on the quarter-horse tracks was driving Forty mad.
El Huesos was Forty’s last chance to show his hometown what was up. At just 250 yards and with a five-figure purse, the race was mostly designed to test the young colts’ speed in competition. But a race was a race, so the crowd stuck around, huddling in the shade of the bleachers.
The gates flung open. The jockey riding El Huesos pulled the horse hard left, toward his opponent, then in front of him, then away, leaving him in a literal cloud of dust. No one was quite sure how hard the opposing jockey was trying, given that El Huesos was rumored to be owned by Forty, but official heats like this were generally run fair and square. Either way, everyone agreed: El Huesos could fly.
After that, Forty decided he wanted to race El Huesos in the United States.