The Laredo-San Antonio Heroin Wars
Drug rings in Texas say they're tougher than the Mafia and they kill to prove it.
Rosalinda says: HOW MUCH IS THIS COPY OF THE TEXAS MONTHLY. AND WHERE CAN I SEND FOR IT, (November 27th, 2011 at 12:35pm)
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Weilbacher's felony squad had tapped enough information in San Antonio to identify Santoy as the Dons' broker and name ten other "shotguns" and "mules." Shotguns were the middle-echelon foremen who supervised the transactions; the mules were the lowest-ranking couriers who actually shuttled the drugs across the border. The way Weilbacher figured, when Santoy had a shipment moved across, the shotguns arranged for subsequent sales in San Antonio and watched the transactions from a distance, while the mules, many of whom were users, delivered the goods and picked up the money. The mules were thus easiest to catch, but they weren't much good to the detectives unless they knew something and were willing to talk. A favorite police tack was to drive up to a mule's house, sit down on the patrol car's hood, and talk things over with the mule in full view of the neighbors, the theory being that the mules might talk just to remove police from the premises.
"Tony de la Garza was a big dummy of a mule—scared of most everything," Harry Carpenter remembers. Tony had every right to be frightened in the summer of 1971. He had been the victim of a heroin bust earlier in the year but had beaten the rap because of unwarranted search and seizure. However, the higher-ranking Dons apparently weren't sure exactly what had been discussed in the office of the Bexar County district attorney. On September 13, 1971 Tony's pregnant wife survived a vicious beating and stabbing and told police her attackers were "friends" of her husband's. Four days later, her husband's dead body was found in Olmos Park.
Later in the fall, a Bexar County grand jury began to sniff out the possibilities of organized crime in the San Antonio area, and the odor was strong enough to catch the attention of Rep. Henry B. Gonzales. He flew from Washington with assurances of federal assistance in the investigation. "They've got some guys in Nuevo Laredo who think they can organize a Mafia structure there," he told the press.
Everyone appreciated the congressman's concern, particularly the Dons who had left San Antonio with the Narcs snapping at their heels. One of those Nuevo Laredo expatriates ventured back to San Antonio a few weeks later and allegedly remarked in drinking company that he was in the market for a hit man to take care of Gonzales. An Express News reporter heard the story and dismissed it as beery bravado and dubious hearsay, but San Antonio's other daily, the Light, broke the story a few days later with repercussions in the national press.
The author of the alleged assassination threat was Frederico Carrasco Gomez. Physically, Carrasco is a smaller, darker Bill Weilbacher. Born in 1940, Freddie first danced in the arms of the law November 28, 1958, when police accused him of shooting a young man lured out of a San Antonio dance hall by a 15 year old girl friend, stealing a getaway car, and fleeing to Del Rio. A few pages of police records later, Carrasco wound up in a federal pen in Atlanta after a narcotics conviction. Paroled, Carrasco returned to San Antonio, and extremely ambitious, soon leapfrogged past mules and shotguns on the way to the top. Weilbacher says that by November 1971, Carrasco was the number two man, "Don Ramon." While Jesse Santoy forayed abroad to assure future enterprises, his cousin Freddie engineered operations at home.
Part of Freddie's wardrobe is a pair of .45s that some people would credit with as many as 20 notches apiece, but while Santoy looked like a truck driver, Carrasco was never without a Windsor knot and stylish jacket. During that time he moved about in style with his wife Rosa, a trim, mileaged beauty who is the sister of a lower-ranking, Don, Tino Leyva.
In his leisure time Freddie set up his father, a former automobile porter, with a bar in Macdona and bought two lots there for $30,000. He sank about $20,000 more into the construction of another posh club of Moorish architecture, but the club never opened. Investigators began following the organization everywhere, at times outnumbering construction workers at the club site.
Detective Carpenter says, "About the fall of '71 the heat got so bad around here that Freddie thought he'd better move to Nuevo Laredo."
Freddie operated in Nuevo Laredo from a home that looked like a shack on the outside and a Playboy retreat on the inside. In the words of the San Antonio police report, he "moved back and forth across the border like a taxpayer." However, Freddie's darker nature had begun to surface. San Antonio police believe Pete Guzman, the number-three Don and the organization's contract killer, murdered Tony de la Garza under Carrasco's orders, along with two lower-ranking Dons. But even the higher ranking Dons were not above Freddie's suspicion. Weilbacher says Carrasco had decided "he wanted to kill everybody in the country, and Santoy wanted out."
In San Antonio conspiracy charges arising from the arrest of Azcarraga Milmo on the Nuevo Laredo bridge were still pending against Santoy. Internal Revenue agents had expressed an interest in $70,000 he had accrued during the first six months of 1972, and he was under almost constant surveillance: A Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs official estimated his agency expended 10,000 man hours on Santoy during the year-long investigation. On April 18, police found a red Mustang near Ft. Sam Houston with its engine still warm, three bullet holes in the driver's window, a bloody shoe in the floorboard, and a bloody Santoy fingerprint on the windshield. The San Antonio papers naturally surmised Jesse had gone to his reward, but a week later he checked out of a San Antonio motel in apparently good health. Santoy told one officer that the ambush was a ruse designed to get him off the hook, and told another the attack was terribly genuine, that the blood had come from his broken nose. In either case, it is probably safe to say Jesse wanted out.
As the result of a separate investigation, a federal grand jury in Houston indicted Santoy of conspiracy with Houston and Lafayette, Louisiana, men to sell heroin and requested his arrest.
On August 9, agents of the BNDD served the warrant on Castroville Road, near the San Antonio Airport and found in Santoy's car forty pounds of lactose—the milk sugar used to cut heroin. In a development that may or may not be related, San Antonio users started dropping like October flies. In less than a week five users violated themselves expecting the purple rush of heroin and got a fatal jolt instead. A normal fix contains about 15% heroin; they were getting 75% pure stuff.
Out on $150,000 bond, Santoy checked into a San Antonio osteopathic clinic complaining of chest pains the first week in November and got his trial postponed. A month later, Santoy conferred with his attorney, told him they would meet in court the next day, and vanished. Santoy was subsequently indicted for the Azcarraga Milmo conspiracy and a judge set his bond at $500,000, but Santoy must have been smiling at his trackers like an upper-handed fox. When last seen Jesse was in Spain, reportedly moving in the company of his old buddy Azcarraga Milmo, who had shot his way out of the Webb County jail with the aid of an ambivalent trusty.
While Santoy tripped through questionable ambushes and pulmonary pains in the United States, the heat on Carrasco had increased on the Mexican side of the river. Most members of Carrasco's San Antonio gang were busted or dead by early 1972, but along with his top lieutenant, Pete Guzman, Carrasco put together another Nuevo Laredo organization. However, Carrasco was an interloper south of the Rio Grande, and everybody seems to agree he had to affect some sort of accommodation with the powerful Gayton-Pruneda-Bernal detente in order to operate in Nuevo Laredo. Additionally, Carrasco's gang apparently got caught in a crossfire between the federales and the native Nuevo Laredo traffickers. Carrasco's gang was probably involved in a February 1972 shootout in Nuevo Laredo that claimed the life of a federale, and a month later another gun battle in Monterrey resulted in the capture of two of Carrasco's subordinates. There is also some indication that a Pruneda subordinate was "accidentally" shot in one of the battles.
At the beginning of summer 1972 the Mexican government dispatched the dedicated federal police chief, Everado Perales to clean up the area, and in six weeks he kicked a sizeable dent in the trade, intercepting record shipments of the contraband powder. But on July 28 an ambitious hit man collected a Mexican Mafia marksmanship medal by placing four submachine gun rounds in a tight pattern in Perales' left temple. From a moving car. In broad daylight.
The Mexican government shuttled troops into the area, and Rep. Gonzales flew home with the historically reminiscent suggestion that the State Department pressure the Mexican government into allowing American "hit-squads" of American federal agents to pursue the traffickers across the border. Shades of General Pershing, the Seventh Cavalry, and Pancha Villa.
Nuevo Laredo had clearly become habitable only for grandmother whores and the horniest of drunks, and Carrasco apparently took his gang south to the Mexican interior. Wilson McKinney, a scholarly reporter working the federal beat for the Express-News, translated reports of Freddie's movements in the Mexican press.
Most of the pieces in the puzzle of Freddie's whereabouts came from press accounts of alleged confessions from gang members. The individual crimes and amounts of drugs Freddie supposedly dealt in are only allegations, but Freddie nevertheless emerges as the top man in a large scale trafficking organization.
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