Читать книгу Bones: A Story of Brothers, a Champion Horse and the Race to Stop America’s Most Brutal Cartel - Joe Tone, Joe Tone - Страница 13

The crowd formed early for the Futurity Nuevo Laredo, the town’s big annual race for promising two-year-old quarter horses. The race typically drew about two thousand people, but there was an early buzz and a swelling crowd at this year’s event, which marked a new era: it was the first big race at the town’s new track.

Fans settled into the shiny bleachers that flanked the track, shaded by sweeping steel overhangs. Others found tables inside the air-conditioned restaurant that was perched at the top of the grandstand, protected from the elements by tinted glass. When all those seats filled up, people stacked themselves four or five deep near the sturdy new rail, relying on their collective canopy of wide-brimmed cowboy hats for shade.

The trainers on the backside had no such worries, prepping their horses in covered stalls built from brick and painted a pristine white. And all across the track, from the shit shovelers in the stalls to the cops roaming the concourse, people whispered gratitude for the track’s benefactor and foreman, Forty. He loved horse racing so much that he’d built his hometown a new track, using farm equipment bought with drug proceeds in the United States and shipped back across the border. Pretty soon his most prized colt would burst from the track’s new starting gate.

Like José, Forty talked longingly about the family’s upbringing on the ranches of Tamaulipas, and about his family’s collective passion for days spent under the beating sun, among roaming cattle and sensible horses. If their father’s departure had cost the Treviños a romantic countryside life, Forty seemed hell-bent on re-creating it.

And he’d found a man who could help him do it. His name was Mario “Poncho” Cuellar. An experienced trafficker in his forties, Poncho had been on hiatus from the cocaine-smuggling business for a few years, trying to make a go of selling and junking old cars along the border between Piedras Negras and Eagle Pass. He was also spending more of his time racing horses. A few years back, Poncho had started buying racehorses in the United States and shipping them to Mexico to race against his friends. To get the best horses he used the best broker, Ramiro Villarreal.

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. Zetas had run horses in the States before, usually under Ramiro’s name or some other front. As usual, Forty didn’t find his predecessors’ strategy aggressive enough.

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.