“Me neither,” Keller says. “But it’s the one we have.”
“Hey, we’re at the chapel, you want to go in?” Mullen asks. “I mean, if we’re going to have a come-to-Jesus talk, we might as well come to Jesus.”
They go through the heavy oak doors, which are flanked by carvings of leaping animals. The large room is dominated by an apse at the end with a hanging crucifix. The side wall contains frescoes honoring the Virgin Mary.
“They moved this here from Spain,” Mullen says. “Beautiful, huh?”
“It is.”
“Why are you really here?” Mullen asks. “I know it’s not for me to give you a tour and show you things you already know.”
“You talked about triage,” Keller says. “Short-term and long-term solutions. I want you to know my long-term intentions. I’m going to move DEA onto a new course, more in the direction of what you were talking about earlier. Away from the revolving door of arrest and incarceration, more into rehabilitation. I want us to back local initiatives with federal power and remove federal obstacles.”
“Can you?” Mullen says. “Your people aren’t going to like it.”
Keller knows what Mullen isn’t saying but what he’s thinking, that DEA has a vested interest in keeping the drug war going—its own existence.
“I don’t know,” Keller says. “But I’m going to try. If I’m going to succeed, I’ll need support from police forces like NYPD.”
“And the short term?”
“Until we change the baseline,” Keller says, “we have to do everything we can to slow the flow of heroin.”
“No argument from me.”
“I’ve come to the conclusion that I can’t do much in Mexico,” Keller says. “They’re too protected. If I’m going to attack the problem, it has to be here in New York, which has become the heroin hub.”
Mullen smiles. “Any other epiphanies, Art?”
“Yeah,” Keller says. “We can’t answer the question of why people do drugs. But we do know why people deal them. Very simple—money.”
“So?”
“So if we really want to do something, we go after the money,” Keller says. “And I don’t mean down in Mexico.”
“You know what you’re talking about here.”
“Yeah, I do,” Keller says. “And I’m ready to go there. I guess the question is, are you?”
Keller knows what he’s asking of the man.
It’s a potentially career-ending move.
You go after junkies and street dealers, they don’t have a way to fight back. You attack the centers of power, they have more than enough ways of fighting back.
They can bury you.
Mullen doesn’t look scared.
“Only if you’re going to go all the way,” he says. “I’m not interested in sending a few patsies to Club Fed for a few years. But if you’re going to take this wherever it goes, then … what do you need?”
A banker, Keller tells him.
A Wall Street banker.
On the train back, Hidalgo has another burger and tells Keller that actually it isn’t so bad.
“That’s good,” Keller says.
Because you’re going to be spending a lot more time on the Acela.
It’s the start of Operation Agitator.
Guerrero, Mexico
Heroin reminds Ric of Easter.
The poppies shimmer vibrant purple in the sunlight, and the flowers that aren’t purple are pink, red and yellow. Set against the emerald-green stalks, they look like candy baskets.
The plane banks hard against the Sierra Madre del Sur as it angles for its landing at a private airstrip outside the Guerrero town of Tristeza. Ric’s father has brought him here as sort of a tutorial, “to learn the business from the ground up, as it were.” It’s part of his ongoing “Your Generation” lecture series, along the lines of “Your generation is separated from the soil that has made you all rich.”
As if, Ric thinks, my lawyer father spent a single day in the fields. His closest brush with being a campesino was a thankfully brief attempt to grow tomatoes in the backyard that ended in a declaration that it was more “economically efficient” to buy them at the market, notwithstanding a previous installment in the lecture series entitled “Your Generation Doesn’t Know Where Its Food Comes From.”
Yes, we do, Ric thinks.
Calimax.
The plane lands with a hard bounce.
Ric sees the Jeeps full of armed men beside the airstrip, waiting to take them up the winding dirt roads into the mountains. A convoy is necessary because this part of Guerrero is increasingly “bandit country,” relatively new to the Sinaloa cartel.
The cartel’s fields in Sinaloa and Durango can’t keep up with the growing demand for heroin, so the cartel has expanded into Guerrero and Michoacán.
Both states are producing more and more opium paste, Ric knows. The problem is that the infrastructure hasn’t yet caught up to the production and they have to rely on smaller organizations as middlemen between the growers and the cartel.
Not a bad thing in itself, if the middlemen weren’t at war with each other. So this beautiful country, Ric thinks as the Jeep passes through stands of tall ocote pines, is rife with gunmen on the hunt for one another.
First there are the Knights Templar, mostly in Michoacán, the survivors of the old La Familia organization, still possessed (and that is the word, Ric thinks) with a crazy quasi-religious zeal to eradicate “evildoers.” Sinaloa tolerated them as long as they were helping to fight the Zetas, but now their utility is fast coming to an end and they’re more trouble than they’re worth. Especially as these “do-gooders” are heavily involved in meth, extortion and murder for hire.
The Knights insist on fighting Los Guerreros Unidos, a splinter group of the Tapia organization founded by the old Tapia gunman Eddie Ruiz, now residing in an American penitentiary.
Ruiz was the first American to be the head of a Mexican cartel. Ric met him once or twice as a kid, but mostly knows him from the famous YouTube videos when “Crazy Eddie” filmed himself interviewing four Zetas before he executed them. Then he sent the tapes to all the television stations and put the clip out on the internet.
It started a trend.
Now “Eddie’s Boys,” as Guerreros Unidos are sometimes known, are running amok in Guerrero, Morelos and Edoméx, killing rivals, kidnapping for profit, extorting businesses and just generally being a pain in the ass.
We can’t step on them because we need them, Núñez has told Ric. Especially here in Guerrero, where they control Tristeza. A city of about a hundred thousand people, Tristeza has importance beyond its size because it sits on the crossroads of several highways, including the all-important interstate down to Acapulco. The mayor of Tristeza is a longtime member of GU, and we need, at least for the time being, to stay in her good graces.
GU has a blood feud with Los Rojos, yet another splinter group of the Tapia organization, which, it should be fairly noted, was itself a splinter group of the Sinaloa cartel.
“The conflict is over smuggling routes,”