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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While in the southlands another San Antonio Don apparently fell from Carrasco's favor. Long-time gang member Pete Guzman, who was wanted for the Olmos Park murder of de la Garza the mule, had advanced to the rank of number-three because he had the readiest trigger finger of the bunch, but he began to brag that Carrasco was merely his lieutenant. The boast probably indicates a rift between the two, for Pete Guzman very shortly stole a passport and returned to San Antonio. Guzman returned to San Luis Potosí during the spring, and in a fit of badly miscalculated machismo shot a bartender for tolerating the presence of a Mexican homosexual in his establishment. Pete got out on bond, but his high profile had apparently become a liability. Someone rewarded Pete with 45 bullets, clothed his body in trousers, slippers and bathrobe, and laid him to rest in a ditch.
"Freddie says he didn't kill Pete," Weilbacher says, "but I don't believe him."
A Mexican national named Benito Juarez Melendez claims to have taken Guzman's place as Carrasco's top lieutenant, but he may have been just another mule. Like all new initiates into the gang, he had to take the blood oath of sincerity and silence. According to Melendez, Freddie received shipments of heroin and cocaine in Guadalajara, cut the drugs, and relinquished them to Melendez, who ran them to the frontier.
Carrasco was again living regally, but on September 20, 1972, federales broke into gang residences and found 213 pounds of heroin, an amount twice that involved in the fabled 1962 French Connection, but inflation had hit the street too: The Guadalajara haul was valued at $100 million.
At first the federales didn't know exactly whom they had, but then they found a copy of the secret San Antonio police report. A routine cast, a trophy catch. A Guadalajara newspaper headlined the story, "Now After the Vile Birds of the Narcotics Traffic."
The federales packed Carrasco, eleven subordinates, and the tribal women off to jail. One of the subordinates said he was an honest agriculturist and functionary in local Indian government, another claimed he was in international cosmetics, two more said they were "simple peasants, country folk." But the federales would have none of that; they had that confidential report, courtesy of Xerox and a security leak. Carrasco protested the retention of his wife by first trying to jump out a window, then holding a sliver of glass against his throat at a suicidal angle for five hours. The federales released Rosa, but her husband's troubles were just beginning.
Who should show up at that point but the author of the report, the Fat Man himself. What Bill Weilbacher was doing in Guadalajara is still a subject of spirited speculation, but there he was. The Mexicans were apparently in the throes of translating the report and all they knew was that Weilbacher's name was on the report, so they threw his ample behind in jail. A slightly incredulous Fred Carrasco told Weilbacher, "I never thought I'd be glad to see you."
Freddie congratulated Weilbacher on the accuracy of the report, and he also communicated fears he would never leave the Guadalajara jail alive. There was some substance to his fears. Freddie's half-brother, Robert Zamorra Gomez, was one of those arrested, and Weilbacher says he saw Zamorra escorted beltless into a cell. Three days later, Zamorra was found strangled with his own belt. Hanged himself.
On September 26 Freddie appeared in court with his lawyers, and with tears in his eyes said the federales had stripped him, beat him, tortured him with electric cattle prods, and stuffed his head into a bucket filled with human urine and excrement. Moreover, he accused three federales of murdering his half-brother. The magistrates listened, and sent him back to jail.
The federales released reports to the press that Freddie made a full statement, but Weilbacher contends he confessed nothing. However, Benito Melendez, the new addition to the gang, apparently forgot his oath and sang like a canary. According to published accounts, Melendez confessed that the gang had been involved in major trafficking, but he denied that the Dons had anything to do with the Perales assassination. Melendez supposedly fingered Pedro Gaytan as an "intellectual author" of the plot and laid the blame for the actual deed on the globe-trotting attorney, Francisco Bernal, Pruneda Clansman, Fermin Reyes Martinez, and two other trigger-men.
Carrasco subsequently made his way out of the Guadalajara jail, and when safe on Texas soil, he mailed letters naming the three federales he said murdered his half-brother. But the affair had cut his international roving grounds in half. Shortly after the Melendez confession the federales arrested Martinez, and Bernal skipped the country. Regardless of the validity of the Melendez confession, Freddie Carrasco was in trouble on both sides of the border and, more critically, on both sides of the law because one of his gang had hung the assassination of Perales on the Nuevo Laredo traffickers.
Freddie moved around in South Texas with three bodyguards, reportedly lingering in Macdona long enough to attend a family conclave, drinking beer in a south San Antonio cantina, surfacing in Bandera, Del Rio. San Antonio cops, South Texas sheriff's deputies, and Texas Rangers banqueted in Uvalde to prepare themselves for the final confrontation with Freddie Carrasco. Officers throughout the southwest were looking for him, but in May Freddie was still at large. Weilbacher explained, "He's got a lot of money and only two or three people know where he's at. Everybody's afraid of him."
Twelve of Carrasco's San Antonio runners reportedly had a right to be. Police theorize that when Carrasco got jailed in Guadalajara his San Antonio operators apparently wrote the boss off and pocketed his share of the take. According to the police theory, Carrasco returned to Texas to find he had missed out on some deals with profit running to six figures, and he allegedly drafted an execution list bearing the names of 12 of his remaining subordinates.
On March 10 Gilbert Escobedo, 33, the money-man of the organization, sat at the bar in a San Antonio "ice house" nursing Schlitz beer. A barmaid says a man matching Carrasco's description came in so well-dressed and courteous that she suspected he was a vice officer. She says the man sat at a booth, ordered a beer, chatted with her briefly, then said he needed to talk to the man on the barstool. The man resembling Carrasco walked to the bar, pulled two pistols, shot Escobedo enough times to be sure, then calmly turned toward the door. A brave witness tried to apprehend the gunman, and got clipped over his ear with a gun butt for his trouble.
On April 8, Roy Lopez Castano and Agapito Ruiz, the mules who had taken Tony de la Garza's place in the organization, sat in a car on FM 1518 in southeast Bexar County. Ruiz had recently been served with a federal grand jury subpoena, and the police were looking for Castano. Ruiz' legs were folded beneath him in a posture of amenable conversation when he was shot in the back of the head. Castano was shot in the back of the neck, apparently ran nearly half a mile, then took a fatal slug in the chest. The San Antonio police announced that Carrasco was wanted for questioning.
On Mother's Day a man matching Carrasco's description appeared at the information desk in crowded Mission County Park in San Antonio and paged Joe Garcez. A slender young man by that name promptly vaulted a fence and ran for his life, or so it appeared to the startled picnickers. Garcez and his glowering young friends Valentine Salinas and David Garcia had been arrested holding 300 grams of heroin and $13,000 in cash shortly before Carrasco's bust in Guadalajara. They got out of jail, however, and Garcez and Garcia continued to deal with a ruthlessness that convinced Weilbacher's lieutenant, Harry Carpenter, that they were bound for the top.
Garcez and Garcia luxuriously renovated a 1930 Ford with their dividends, and they were driving the coupe in south Bexar County the night of June 6 when another car pulled alongside and a 9mm Luger slug shattered the driver's window and lodged in the brain of Garcia. The coupe overturned, scattering soft-drink bottles and horror comic books, then Garcez apparently got out and tried to run. Police found him the next morning a few feet away, three 9 mm slugs in his back. Agapito Ruiz and Roy Castano also died from 9 mm bullet wounds, and their bodies were found at a site about a mile away from the overturned Ford. Police surmised there might be a connection.
Of the 12 names on Carrasco's alleged list, five are now dead, two are comparatively safe in state prison, and the rest, as a Bexar County lieutenant put it, are running and hiding.
At this point, San Antonio radio stations, television stations, and newspapers start appealing to secretive informants. Officers are warned they shouldn't try to take Freddie on alone. "Bad hombre" becomes the watch-word of law-and-order coffee breaks throughout South Texas. The FBI tries to promote Freddie to the Ten Most Wanted list. But Freddie makes no attempt to flee the state, moving around with apparent realization that he has an early date with the Texas soil. He reportedly swears he is not going alone; a state narc contends Carrasco called Weilbacher and told him his number was nearly up too. The fat man dismisses the suggestion with a flip of the french cuff. "Those bastards will have to stand in line to get me," he says. "But what I am afraid of is that some highway patrolman is going to pull him over and he's going to come out shooting."
We asked Weilbacher for a more intimate reading of the man he has hunted for two years. "I think he's crazy—and I don't mean he doesn't know what he's doing. He wants to be some kind of folk hero, the kind of guy they sing about in beer joints."
Freddie Carrasco has very likely been accused of more crimes than he had time to commit, but the whole affair is an indication of just how pervasive drug trafficking has become in San Antonio. Gruesome as the figure of Freddie Carrasco is, he is at worst only one small link in a huge international chain, and even the San Antonio cops concede the extinction of one gang can't stem the flow of drugs into the city. The mules will continue to make the transfers, and Carrasco's ethnic brothers and sisters will continue to take the rap. Chamber of Commerce poets call San Antonio one of America's four unique cities, and they're right. But before long, unless something is done, the novelists and screenwriters are going to start looking past San Antonio's beauty, tradition, and sloe-eyed mystery to the distinctive guns and needles of America's potential black-market drug capital.
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