The Border Fence, Brownsville 
Anatomy of a Drug Cartel
The trial of Juan García Abrego showed how Mexican kingpins smuggle Colombian cocaine to American cities—and how Texas banks wind up with some of the profits.
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When asked more specifically what the public officials were being paid for, Reséndez said, “So they could turn the other way.” If García Abrego’s men wanted to move a major shipment of drugs into the United States, they waited until all the agents in the field received a prearranged call on their radios ordering them to return to headquarters for a meeting. After the area was cleared of law enforcement, workers drove the cocaine down to the Rio Grande in pickup trucks. They often floated the drugs across the river on rafts. Once on the other side, the cocaine was stored in safe houses the cartel had set up throughout the Rio Grande Valley, such as a modest white bungalow in Harlingen, where Department of Public Safety officers once found nine tons of cocaine packed in cardboard boxes, flour sacks, and duffle bags.
The Promised Land
To a degree, the corruption that the Gulf cartel and its sister organizations spread throughout Mexican society crossed over into the United States, where low-ranking government employees have been found on the cartels’ payrolls. Growing reports of vice along the border have led elected officials to call for congressional hearings and law enforcement agents to form a border-corruption task force. But north of the Rio Grande the Gulf cartel operates primarily by stealth.
Within the United States the organization established small groups of people, or “transportation” cells, in Houston, Dallas, and other Texas cities, who knew and trusted one another. For the most part, the cells operated independently of one another, and the beauty of the system was that the members of one cell couldn’t implicate anybody outside their own group. Ground-level employees—the ones who actually handled the drugs, and therefore the people who stood the greatest chance of getting arrested—knew just the first name or the nickname of the man they worked for, and nothing more. Only the cells’ leaders would be in contact with anyone in Matamoros. By these methods the senior players in the Gulf cartel eluded U.S. law enforcement for more than ten years.
One of the longest-lived transportation cells in Texas was run by Tony Ortiz, also known as el Pescado, because he once owned a fish market in Houston. Ortiz was smart and careful, and it was many years before he found himself inside prison. He met his subordinates at hotels like the La Quinta on the Southwest Freeway, never at his home. He didn’t have a telephone and nothing was in his name. “We put a couple of pagers under ‘Mohammed,’” he remembered during García Abrego’s trial. “Weird names. They didn’t belong to anybody.” Above all, Ortiz never touched the cocaine himself. “It is too much of a risk. When I can pay somebody else, why take a chance?”
Ortiz started out transporting marijuana in 1976. At first he worked for himself, but after he met Luis Medrano in the early eighties, he began distributing pot for him too. When Medrano started working for the Gulf cartel, Ortiz agreed to transport cocaine for the organization from the Rio Grande Valley up to Houston. He sent his first four shipments of cocaine to Houston on United States Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) buses. Employees of the INS regularly drove illegal immigrants apprehended in the Valley north to Houston airports to be deported, and Ortiz recruited a former INS officer named Joe Polanco, who had friends at the agency, to stash drugs on the buses as well. Unlike civilian vehicles, the INS buses never had a problem getting past the federal patrols manning the Sarita checkpoint on U.S. 77. “They just wave it on,” Ortiz recalled.
Joe Polanco was caught in 1990 when FBI agents stumbled onto him in Houston, staying in an apartment that belonged to Ortiz. Polanco was subsequently convicted of drug trafficking. Ortiz evaded arrest for a while by moving to San Antonio and dropping out of sight, and he stopped using INS buses to move cocaine. From then on he relied entirely on commercial freight companies. Ortiz, who had run his own business, knew he could mix narcotics with the lawful commerce flowing along the nation’s highways. He also knew it was hard for the police to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate merchandise if both were packaged and handled the same way.
Through intermediaries—his name was never on a lease, never on a shipping receipt—Ortiz established a series of front businesses. One was a company called A-OK Transmissions in Harlingen. The company, which had little to do with transmissions, operated out of a tan metal warehouse that functioned just like the distribution hub of an ordinary business: The workers packed the individual bricks of cocaine, still bearing the “Gordos” label, into large metal containers, which were welded shut or padlocked and then encased in wooden crates. Finally, the crates were loaded onto small panel trucks and driven over to a shipping business. Ortiz used companies like Southwestern Motor Transport and Central Freight to get the drugs to Houston and Yellow Freight to distribute the drugs around the nation (neither the companies nor the drivers knew about their illicit cargo). Transmissions weren’t the only cover Ortiz used; often he packed cocaine in freezers (useful in masking the cargo’s scent), disguising it as frozen food. Another masquerade was a business called J and T Plumbing and Fixtures. “That was a front business,” Ortiz testified. “Very front. They didn’t know anything about plumbing.”
New York, New York
Some of the cocaine Artiz delivered to Houston was sold to dealers there, but most of it was ultimately destined for Chicago, New Jersey, and New York City. In New York, the Gulf cartel’s largest market, the drug was worth four times what it was in Mexico. The Gulf cartel employed numerous people to deliver cocaine there, and many of them contacted the same person once they arrived: the notorious Tomás Sanchez González, better known as Gringo. Gringo began working for the cartel as a flunky, helping to load and unload drugs from vehicles in Houston. He worked his way up, overseeing the cartel’s sales of cocaine in New York to local dealers. Gringo ran the cartel’s operations there for several years, until he angered the group’s top leadership by assuming too much independence. Among Gringo’s crimes was siphoning off $8 million of the organization’s profits and attempting to go into business on his own, only to lose the cocaine he had bought with the cartel’s money in a bust. Eventually he was assassinated, apparently on the orders of Luis Medrano.
The full story of Gringo’s career vanished with his death, but he oversaw an operation that raked in tens of millions of dollars a week. On January 4, 1989, police detectives raided a Gulf cartel warehouse on Fifty-seventh Place in Queens. Inside they found a 24-foot-long moving van bearing a cache of weapons and two dozen U-Haul boxes full of U.S. currency. The boxes were labeled “Gogrin,” which the detectives concluded was code for “Gringo,” and they contained $18.3 million. The truck bore the logo of a business called Zoom Furniture; although Zoom was a legitimate business, its trucks were used by the cartel to transport drug money back to Houston.
During their surveillance of the cartel in the New York City area, detectives discovered a set of cryptic financial records in a home in a respectable Long Island neighborhood. A typical entry read: “Salio, 12/10/88: $5,395,000.” Another: “Salio, 12/12/88: $2,152,000.” Every couple of days, in other words, several million dollars was salio, or sent, first to Houston and from there to Matamoros. For anyone who had ever wondered what caused the drug trade to so completely infect the streets of large American cities, here was the answer: money, literally tons of it. In an era of instant electronic wire transfers, the Gulf cartel was clumsily, mechanically hauling back revenues any Fortune 500 company would appreciate. Tony Ortiz recalled once helping unload a tractor-trailer in Houston carrying $24 million. When asked to estimate how much money he had personally sent to Matamoros for the cartel, Ortiz replied: “Man, I don’t have the slightest ideas. . . . Millions. Millions of dollars.”
South to the Rio Grande
For a would-be aristocrat like GarcÍa Abrego, lugging around boxes of dollar bills was clumsy, not to mention indiscreet. To spend the cash with propriety, he had to get it into a bank. American banks are more secure than Mexican financial institutions, but the problem was how to get an American bank to accept his cash—how to disguise the fact that the money came from a drug-trafficking empire. Taking the money straight to an American institution was too risky, because all cash transactions of more than $10,000 are reported to the federal government. So García Abrego orchestrated a convoluted ballet designed to obscure the origins of his wealth. First he smuggled his profits to Mexico, where financial transactions are not as carefully scrutinized, then he tried to make it appear as though the cash had been earned legitimately, and finally he sent much of the money back into the U.S.
The eighteen-wheelers full of cash made it to Texas easily enough, but smuggling the boxes of bills across the border was tricky. It is illegal to transport more than $10,000 in cash out of the U.S. without declaring the action to U.S. Customs, something García Abrego wanted to avoid. His most reliable stratagem involved paying Mexican Customs agents to drive the cash over the border for him. On April 11, 1990, two such agents, Juan Miguel Lizardi García and Alberto Laurent Ayola, were caught red-handed trying to cross the Gateway International Bridge from Brownsville to Matamoros in a dark blue Jeep Cherokee Wagoneer. U.S. Customs agents found $2.4 million in cardboard boxes under a vinyl sheet in the back of the Jeep.
But most of García Abrego’s couriers were not caught, and over the years they managed to smuggle enormous sums into Mexico. Once the money was there, García Abrego had different means of sneaking it into the banking system. Apparently one method (Mexican authorities are still investigating the allegations) was to deposit the cash into corporate accounts held by two businesses that he controlled, TREFIMEX and CAIMSA. TREFIMEX was a transportation business ostensibly owned by García Abrego’s son, Juan José García González, though García Abrego himself secretly ran the company’s operations. CAIMSA manufactured industrial machinery parts, and among its directors was Rubén García Robles, a cousin of García Abrego’s. García Abrego also laundered drug profits by using the dirty money to buy the dozens of ranches and houses that he owned.
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