Now in his mid-thirties, Forty had existed in this underworld for more than a decade. He had managed to stay alive, but two of his brothers had been killed in Mexico: Jesús, reportedly gunned down by fellow Zetas for ignoring company rules, and Fito, the hunting guide, murdered by Forty’s rivals despite apparently staying out of the smuggling business. Forty knew his time would come, too, and the heat was cranking. In the summer of 2009, after El Huesos went blazing across Forty’s new hometown track, the United States Department of Justice unsealed indictments in New York and Washington, D.C., naming Miguel and his brother Omar as principal leaders of the Zetas. The government was offering a $5 million reward for information leading to Forty’s capture. He knew what that meant: the snitches were lining up at the feds’ door.
So, Forty decided it was time to secure some assets for his family. If El Huesos ran well in the States, he would win his money not under Ramiro’s name but under José’s.
Like all of Forty’s schemes, this one was fraught with risk but filled with upside. If it failed, he might needlessly drag José, José’s family, Ramiro, and others onto the feds’ radar. If it succeeded, whatever money he could earn in the horse business would forever stay in the Treviño family, untouchable by the whims of the drug war.
His associates were skeptical. They worried that it would draw too much attention from the Americans. But Forty was done playing by the old rules, the ones that said that Mexican traffickers couldn’t operate in the United States without American law crashing down on them. Fuck the Americans, he seemed to be saying: They snort our drugs, they use our beaches, they buy their cheap shit made by our poor workers. The least they can do is lose to our horses.
Whether Forty ever discussed this plan directly with José remains unknown. Talking on the phone was impractical, given the likelihood the feds would be listening, and it was hard to meet in person. Forty going to Dallas was out of the question, and José didn’t often come to Mexico. But it was around this time that José found his way across the border, to the gas station, onto the ranch, and under that palapa, to sip beers and talk with Poncho Cuellar—about loving the country life but not wanting anything to do with drugs.
Forty had a different plan for José, and he’d told Poncho to put it in motion. Poncho knew the horses, knew the Horseman, and had connections on both sides of the border. He was the perfect guy to kick off what they called Operativo Huesos.
Say you’re at a party. You didn’t want to come, because you’ve been running in the mornings, trying to form a habit as the self-help book you’ve been skimming suggests. Being at this party is not going help you keep your streak. But you came! You’re here! You’ve also been trying to say yes more, to form a habit of being open to things, like that other self-help book recommends, so you turned on music and drank a Modelo in the shower and made a thing of it. You got here and you’re here and—
Wait, what? Your friends still fuck with drugs? Your friends still fuck with drugs, as evidenced by the fact that you’re in a bedroom, pushing aside a pile of coats and sitting on the edge of a low-slung IKEA bed. Katy is pulling a bag from her pocket, and it’s been so long that you honestly don’t know what she’s going to dump from it. You hope it’s not weed, because you could have smoked that at home, and you hope it’s not Molly, because people in their thirties should not be doing drugs with cute nicknames, and you hope it’s not heroin, because you read the news. You sort of hope it’s not cocaine. But you also hope it is.
It is. Katy angles the baggie and taps her finger to shake the coke loose. It falls in a line, forming a little ski run on the metal serving tray she’s hunched over, a few moguls but nothing you can’t navigate. She starts smoothing it out, and you, being an educated, Narcos-binging citizen of the world, start thinking about the journey that cocaine made—from the jungles of Colombia; to the safe houses of Mexico; to the border; over the border or maybe under it, if you prefer Weeds; to Katy’s dealer; to Katy; to here, in the bedroom with the cheap bed and the coats.
You’re thinking about it wrong. The cocaine’s journey is interesting, but the more epic odyssey is the one that will be taken by the twenty in your wallet, which you’re planning on leaving on the tray for Katy after using it to snort that line, and which Katy is planning on using to buy more cocaine.
Here’s what happens to that twenty. Say it’s 2009, and say you live in Dallas. In these days, in these parts, most of the rolled-up cocaine twenties wind up in the possession of a Dallas-based kingpin named Junior. Though only in his late twenties, Junior is one of the largest regional cocaine distributors in the United States, responsible for moving one thousand kilograms of cocaine every month. That means he’s responsible for sending around $20 million a month in cash back to his supplier in Piedras Negras, Mexico, who is a Los Zetas operative named Poncho.
To help him pull this off, Junior owns, under various names, at least a half-dozen stash houses spread across Dallas, some for drugs and some for money. He also keeps a fleet of “trap cars” to move the money south. He owns tractor-trailers that he packs with millions of dollars, stuffing stacks of cash into the recesses of Whirlpool washers and LG ovens. He owns a minivan, too; a 2003 Toyota Sienna. Junior paid some guys in Guadalajara $18,000 to get it retrofitted with a secret compartment that can be accessed only by starting the car, engaging the parking brake, putting the car in reverse, turning on the defrost system, and selecting a specific fan combination—in that order. It’s some real MacGyver shit, but it fools the dogs every time.
Sometimes, if Junior’s drivers aren’t satisfied with their trap-car options, they improvise, like the time one bought a horse hauler, hollowed out the bottom, stuffed it with cash, piled hay on top of it, and then bought a cheap, old horse to complete the effect. No one’s sure what happened to the horse, but the money made it across, no problem.
Above all, Junior prefers to use pickups, with the cash vacuum-sealed and floating in the gas tanks. He hires drivers to haul anywhere from $300,000 to $800,000 back to Mexico at a time. They usually cross in Eagle Pass without issue.
Once they get the money across, the drivers find their way to one of the Zetas’ stash houses in Piedras Negras, and Poncho and his team go to work “cleaning up” the bills. They start by removing anything smaller than a twenty, as well as anything that’s been ripped or written on. They use these small and damaged bills to pay off drivers, lookouts, and other workers who help the drugs and money flow smoothly. They package up the remaining money—the big, clean bills—and deliver it to a man named Cuno.
Cuno is the Zetas’ accountant in Piedras Negras. He keeps meticulous records, using both a paper ledger and laptop to track every shipment of cocaine that comes in or goes out, every American dollar that accumulates, every buyer, and every supplier. Thanks in part to Junior’s steady shipments, there is always $30 million, $40 million, $50 million stacked high in Cuno’s stash house. Much of it will be counted, packaged, and shipped back to Colombia. But much of it will be distributed to the cartel leadership, including Forty. And Cuno’s money house is just one of several where the Zetas have millions piled.
All told, as Katy texts her dealer and you roll up a second twenty, the Zetas are clearing $350 million, most of it in U.S. dollars. It is a fraction of the American drug market, estimated to be tens of billions of dollars, but still far too much to leave piled in Cuno’s stash house.
Forty and the others can spend some of this money freely in Mexico. They can buy cars, homes, horses, and sex, all with “dirty” American cash. Some of the Zeta bosses even buy exotic animals. According to narco lore, Forty and the Zetas’ leader, Lazcano, liked to feed their lions and tigers with the corpses of Zeta rivals.
But Forty knows that eventually his run will end and he will disappear—into