The Work of The Devil
After Mark Kilroy disappeared in Matamoros during spring break, authorities feared the worst. But they had no idea how bad the worst could be.
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On Sunday night they headed for Matamoros. First, they dined at the Sonic Drive-In in Port Isabel, where they met some girls from the University of Kansas who were also on the way to Matamoros. The girls followed Brent’s Cutlass along the narrow, dangerous 24-mile highway that cuts across the tip of Texas. They parked both cars on the Brownsville side of the international bridge and walked across. They spent the whole evening at a place called Sgt. Pepper’s, then the boys and the girls went their separate ways.
Monday was another glorious day on the beach. Mark struck up a conversation with one of the contestants in the Miss Tanline contest, a coed from Southwest Texas State University. In the early evening the boys checked out a condo party that some of Mark’s former frat buddies at Tarleton State were throwing — Mark had attended TSU before transferring to UT. About ten-thirty they decided to go back to Matamoros. Again they parked on the Texas side and walked across.
That night the border town had gone mad. The full wave had hit, and 15,000 spring breakers jammed the narrow sidewalks and spilled into the streets. The nightclubs on the main tourist drag, Avenida Alvaro Obregon, had placed sandwich boards along the way, advertising specials on margaritas and beer. Once within the first block past the bridge, the boys looked for the bar with the shortest waiting line. They selected Los Sombreros, a spot with a lot of neon and music loud enough to shatter brick. They didn’t know it, but Los Sombreros wasn’t exactly your old college inn. In July 1988 the son of the owner of another nightclub had been killed in a shoot-out at Los Sombreros, supposedly by a Hernandez gang member known as El Duby. A Matamoros cop who had been following El Duby had disappeared and hadn’t been seen again. Barroom shootings were not novelties in Matamoros. Neither were people disappearing off the street. That happened every night, though usually not to gringos.
From Los Sombreros the boys wandered deeper into the madness, to the London Pub, which for the purposes of spring break had renamed itself the Hardrock Café. It was even louder and wilder than the first place, and the boys stood at the bar, dodging beer cans thrown from the balcony. Mark met some girls, and for a while the others didn’t see him. It was nearly two o’clock when Bill Huddleston suggested that they head back to the island. When Bill, Bradley, and Brent walked out of the bar, they saw Mark leaning against a Volkswagen, talking to the girl from the Miss Tanline contest.
All up and down Avenida Alvaro Obregon, people were leaving the bars, most of them heading back to the bridge, but some moving aimlessly in the other direction or ducking down side streets to smoke a joint. Making progress in any direction was like swimming in a whirlpool. Bradley and Brent had walked ahead of the other two boys and were waiting in front of Garcia’s, the gringo watering hole and gift shop, adjacent to a wooded area where vendors get their last shot at tourists crossing the bridge. Mark stopped in front of the steps of a private home to say goodbye to the girl from the Miss Tanline contest, then waited for Bill to catch up. Bill remembered Mark asking him if something was wrong. “I’m just tired,” Bill replied. “Just not in a partying mood.” Then he ran ahead and ducked behind a tree to relieve himself. When he joined Bradley and Brent in front of Garcia’s two minutes later, Mark had vanished.
The three searched for their friend until long after the bars had closed and the streets had emptied. But there wasn’t a trace. It was as though Mark Kilroy had dropped off the face of the earth.
Sitting in his pickup truck watching the spring breakers flow along Avenida Alvaro Obregon, Serafin Hernandez Garcia might have pondered the irony of his new religion, if he hadn’t needed to pee so badly — and if he were the type to ponder. Nobody had mentioned this part. Nobody had told him that one of his jobs was to kidnap people so that his uncle Elio and the Cuban could sacrifice them to the gods. The gods were insatiable. True, the Hernandez family’s marijuana smuggling business had recovered from last year’s series of misfortunes. Things had never been better on that front. Also, since embracing the Palo Mayombe religion, Serafin’s grades had improved. (He was a law enforcement major at Texas Southmost College and proud of it.) Serafin had converted to Palo Mayombe to please Elio, who was only two years older and more like a brother than an uncle. He had also done it because he thought it would bring him luck. Now it was too late to back out.
There were dozens of Hernandezes on both sides of the border — brothers, cousins, nephews, in-laws. Twenty-year-old Serafin represented the new generation: middle class, relatively well educated, conditioned to a life of plenty. For as long as he could remember, the drug business had provided. Poverty was something the old people talked about, something long before Serafin’s time. His father, Serafin Hernandez Rivera, and grandfather and most of the others had been born and raised on an ejido near the village of San Fernando, on the highway between Matamoros and Ciudad Victoria. Ejido Ramirez was as poor as they came until Saul Hernandez Rivera came up with the idea to use the ejido as a marijuana area. Ten years later they were rich. They owned ranches and villas all over Mexico, drove expensive cars, and were able to educate their children. Serafin was born in Mission, Texas, and educated at Nimitz High in Houston, where his father ran the Texas end of the family’s business. For the past seven years his family had lived in Brownsville.
Serafin Senior was the oldest of four brothers — 5 years older than Saul, 17 years older than Ovidio, and 23 years older than Elio. But Saul was the one with balls. That’s what it took to run marijuana out of Matamoros in the early eighties. U.S. drug interdiction in the Caribbean had caused traffic to be rerouted through Mexico to Texas, greatly enhancing business — and murder — in Matamoros. Dealers and second-echelon mobsters killed each other regularly, usually by way of machine-gun attacks on downtown streets. In 1984 a team of assassins in a homemade armored truck attacked a clinic where a minor mob boss named El Cacho was being treated, killing six innocents. The raid allegedly was ordered by another mob boss, El Profe, whose pistol had put El Cacho in the clinic in the first place. Though the Hernandezes were small-timers, they had the protection of a prominent and powerful Matamoros businessman who, according to reports in the newspaper El Popular, was the boss of bosses of organized crime in the border town. In July 1986 the publisher and a star reporter of El Popular were gunned down in front of their paper. The chief suspect was Saul Hernandez. Six months later Saul was cut down by machine-gun fire in front of a restaurant. His assassins were said to be drug rivals.
When Saul died, so did the moxie, skill, and connections that had made the Hernandez family successful. For the first time in memory, the family found itself bitterly divided. As the eldest brother, Serafin Senior tried to assume leadership, but he was hopeless. A month after Saul’s murder Serafin Senior was arrested in the U.S. after a bungled attempt to land a load of dope on an airstrip in Grimes County. He hasn’t yet been brought to trial, but his arrest compromised the Texas end of the business. On the Mexican side, meanwhile, Elio had seized power. Though he was the youngest of the brothers, Elio was most like Saul — ruthless, clever, ambitious, and willing to try new things. Some of the Hernandez cousins, nephews, and in-laws remained loyal to Serafin Senior, but many more fell in with Elio, including Serafin Junior and Ovidio.
Then there were other problems within the family. One of their pistoleros, El Duby, was wanted by authorities for questioning in the July 1988 shoot-out at Los Sombreros. Ovidio was feuding with a cousin, Jesus Hernandez, over a dope transaction in which Ovidio apparently pocketed $800,000 that belonged to Jesus. In the summer of 1988 a frightened Elio notified the police that Jesus had kidnapped Ovidio and Ovidio’s two-year-old son and threatened to kill him unless the money was repaid. When his loved ones were released unharmed, Elio refused to press charges.
What the family needed, Elio decided, was protection. In the world of the Hernandezes, the best protection was magic. Witches and curanderos were as much a part of their daily lives as lawyers and doctors were to, say, the Kilroy family. How a simple man like Elio hooked up with a prince of darkness like Adolfo de Jesus Constanzo is still a mystery. There are three theories, all plausible: (1) Constanzo had connections with powerful drug lords in Central Mexico and had worked with the Hernandezes on previous deals; (2) El Duby knew Constanzo through his own connections in Mexico City; (3) Elio’s girlfriend, Sara Aldrete, dabbled in black magic and had met Constanzo through friends in Mexico City’s Cuban community.
Aldrete had read books on Santeria, an Afro-Caribbean religion that relies on animal sacrifices to achieve power and punish enemies. Constanzo had grown up in a Cuban neighborhood near Miami, where the practice of Santeria was common. His mother was said to be a witch who placed hexes on neighbors and left headless chickens and goats on the doorsteps of her enemies. When Constanzo was eighteen his mother sent him to study another Afro-Caribbean religion called Palo Mayombe. But whereas practitioners of Santeria used animal parts in their rituals, practitioners of Palo Mayombe used human parts that were stolen from graves.
Elio contacted Constanzo at a luxury apartment in Mexico City that the Cuban shared with a circle of male companions. Constanzo was a shadowy, duplicitous, charismatic young man who frequented the gay bars of the city’s Zona Rosa and affected a flashy lifestyle. He was 26, older and far more sophisticated than Elio and others in the Hernandez gang. He was glib, relatively well educated, and highly persuasive. There was a Manson-esque intensity about him, an aura that was partly rehearsed, partly instinctive, and fully evil. The Cuban offered to act as the Hernandez gang’s high priest, protecting its members from all enemies and promising riches beyond their dreams — in return for a share of their drug profits.
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