Bones: A Story of Brothers, a Champion Horse and the Race to Stop America’s Most Brutal Cartel. Joe Tone

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      DALE, TEXAS

      October 2009

      One prolific stallion—a horse like First Down Dash or Corona Cartel—can turn a stud farm’s luck around. He can come out of nowhere, too, taking his genetic gifts and somehow multiplying them, changing the course of his lineage. That’s part of the allure of breeding, in horses as in all animals: the potential to make something better of the next generation, and the next.

      Knowing all that, Tyler Graham paid close attention when Chevo bragged about Tempting Dash. “I’m gonna win it!” Chevo had said, and he had won it, not once but twice under the lights at Lone Star Park. If he kept winning, Tyler’s relationship with Chevo might one day put him in position to lure Tempting Dash to Southwest Stallion Station to breed.

      Tyler was a big college football fan, his Aggies specifically. When he talked about running a stud farm, he sounded like a college coach. First came the scouting. After Tempting Dash’s big win, Tyler and his dad drove down to Chevo’s training center. It would be a while before Tempting Dash would retire and start breeding. He had more races as a two-year-old and likely a three-year-old season, which could be almost as lucrative as this one. But Tyler knew he needed to get in line early if he wanted the horse to eventually stand at Southwest Stallion Station.

      They arrived at Chevo’s place to find a party in progress. Smoke, scented with the flesh of pig and goat, rose over the property. Mexican men leaned over the rusty rails, waving five-dollar bills as yearlings clambered past with kids on their backs. The Grahams found a ranch hand and asked if they could see Tempting Dash. He walked them into the stables. They peered inside a dark, rotting stall.

      “No,” Tyler’s dad said, looking at the short, thin colt. He hadn’t seen the horse up close at the race, but he was pretty sure this wasn’t him. “We want to see the horse that won the futurity last night.”

      “That’s him.”

      They walked into the stall.

      “This is the horse that set the track record?”

      “Yeah.”

      They’d gone looking for Godzilla and found a horse built more like an insurance-shilling gecko. He couldn’t weigh a thousand pounds. They asked the guy to pull Tempting Dash out of the stall and walk him around. He did, and they started drawing invisible lines across his body, this way and that, doing their horseman geometry. That’s when they saw it. His short back created a tight, fast hinge. His deep heart girth gave him great lung capacity. The slope of his shoulders, the proportions of his legs. It all added up to “one fast booger,” as Tyler’s old man put it.

      Tyler already knew Ramiro “the Horseman” Villarreal—everyone in the business did—but Chevo had made it clear that Ramiro was the owner in name only. It wasn’t clear who the real owner was, but Tyler knew how to find out: by getting to the racetrack in Dallas.

       CHAPTER NINE

       THE WINNER’S CIRCLE

      DALLAS, TEXAS

      November 2009

      Night fell on Lone Star Park, a winter night in name if not forecast, and the horses clicked beneath the grandstand and through a parting sea of horse-racing fans, who themselves were swarming from the track to the ornate saddling paddock. This ritual had repeated itself before each of the night’s ten races: the grooms paraded the horses from the track, beneath the grandstand, through the crowd, around an ornately landscaped walking ring, and into the saddling paddock, where the horses were prepped by their trainers, loved by their owners, mounted by their jockeys, and led back through the crowd, toward the starting gate, to wait for the gates to fly.

      At other tracks, this ritual took place on the inside of the track and felt like something private for the horse’s connections. At Lone Star, it happened behind the grandstand. A crowd formed. Bettors squinted and looked for signs of a winner. Kids marveled from high on their daddies’ shoulders.

      The crowd grew especially large before the Texas Classic, the biggest race of the night. Outside the paddock, the onlookers studied the horses, which snorted and neighed as their trainers jostled to get riding saddles and blinkers in place. The crowd strained to find the favorite and found him in the seventh paddock. If the horse was small, he didn’t look it next to his squat, mustachioed trainer, Chevo, or the man who was now listed as the owner, José Treviño.

      After Tempting Dash’s record-breaking win in the Dash for Cash, Operativo Huesos had been put into motion. Forty tasked Poncho, the Piedras Negras trafficker, with making sure Tempting Dash was legally transferred into José’s name from Ramiro’s. That way, any money the horse won could be kept in the Treviño family. José, Ramiro, and Poncho met in Mexico to finalize the deal. Thirty years after leaving Tamaulipas, José was back in northern Mexico, taking on the challenge and responsibility of owning an animal, and he seemed thrilled. Thrilled, and yet insistent that the deal come with a clear paper trail. He and Ramiro signed a sales agreement. Poncho asked his wife, a notary, to authenticate it after the fact.

      José would never say publicly what he knew of Forty’s plan. He had a chance to buy Tempting Dash for cheap, he’d say, and he took it. The stated sale price was twenty-five thousand dollars, a bargain given that the horse had already won a half-million-dollar race. So they backdated the agreement to September, before Tempting Dash’s first big win. Later, if anyone wondered why Ramiro would sell a winning horse so cheap, the paper trail would show that he sold it before Tempting Dash ever won a thing.