Confessions of a Cartel Hit Man Read online

  This letter is addressed to all those whose lives I’ve affected personally as well as all humanity. I apologize for not addressing you by name, but I don’t feel worthy of that intimacy. Please don’t mistake my humility for lack of respect.

  My name is Martin Corona and I am a murderer. It’s . . . something I live with daily in shame and disgust.

  I once worked for the Arellano Félix Drug Cartel. I served as one of their many puppets who were dispatched at the whim of the Arellano brothers to take the lives of those who posed a threat to their business . . .

  I can begin by saying I’m sorry. But I can’t help wonder what would that mean to me if someone took one of my loved ones away.

  I don’t seek forgiveness or empathy. Only an opportunity to tell you that I despise the man that I was and whom I must face each morning when I look in the mirror. I may have had a change of heart in my life, but it’s still the same evil some of your loved ones had to look upon as they drew their last breath.

  There is nothing I can do to repay the sins I’ve committed. I can literally offer you my life and it’s one thing I would freely lay down if it would reverse the past. I’ve tried to take it by my own hands on more than one occasion but for some reason, I’ve been spared.

  My other alternative is to continue the mission that I’ve set for myself. That is, to speak out against the people and the beliefs that I once claimed loyalty to. I never had any personal intention to harm you or anyone. I never woke up one day and decided to go on a killing spree . . .

  “I’m sorry,” is all I have to say . . .

  Respectfully,

  Martin Corona

  Duncan forwarded the letter to some of the people I indicated. Most of them did not respond. One of them, a young female, contacted Duncan and told him she would like to meet me one day. But not just yet. Not enough time had passed and she wasn’t ready to relive the nightmare I’d put her through. But the one thing that she wanted me to know was that she forgave me. She didn’t blame me.

  I’ll tell you, it was the first time in decades that I was truly humbled and felt like a member of the human race again. To know that at least in her eyes I wasn’t this subhuman monster seemed to lift at least a little of my guilt.

  It wasn’t long after her response that I began thinking about writing about my life. If I could make her understand, it was possible to make other people see that evil isn’t always forever.

  I don’t believe anyone is born into the world to be evil. Something significant had to come along to be a turning point. Sometimes it’s a circumstance like poverty, drug-abusive parents, sexual abuse, physical abuse, or maybe the overwhelming feeling that you just don’t matter to anyone. And if you are finally convinced that you don’t matter, it can cause you to do extraordinary things that finally get you noticed. What makes a kid want to commit suicide at the age of twelve? Or bring a gun to school? Or rebel so bad that their parents “don’t even know who you are.”

  I’ve heard that one. Who knew who I was back in the nineties when I leaned down low, focused, armed, looking for the right moment to act? I mean, is anyone going to tell me that I was born to be sitting in a car, living my own version of a Mack Bolan novel? Watching three dealers serve dope fiends in the middle of the street in Los Angeles, in broad daylight, and I’m doing my best to figure out how to kill them without getting caught? And at the same time make sure that everyone connected to those three knows that my bosses, the Arellano Félix brothers, don’t take no shit from their enemies?

  Two days after that initial recon, two of those dealers will have clocked out permanently and the other would die six months later from mercury poisoning from the mercury-tipped slugs that I had fired into him. The fact of the matter is that my crew was crazier than anything Mack Bolan could have done and we were not fictional characters. We were for real and we didn’t play at being assassins. I was one of the Arellanos’ top hit men and that day I was making good on the contract the Arellanos had put out on Chapo Guzman and anyone connected to him. What brought me to that particular street with my machine gun loaded with mercury-tipped bullets? I wasn’t born evil, but my life is what I made of it.

  2

  Posole

  The family situation I was born into looks unremarkable from the outside. My father, Fred, was a career US Marine master gunnery sergeant who wore the uniform for thirty-three years. The anchor and globe they gave him when he finished boot camp was just acknowledging the code that he’d operated under for his entire life. In my mind, he had sprung full-blown as a Marine. I was insanely proud of my father. It didn’t go the other way.

  My family on my mother’s side arrived in Oceanside, California, in 1917. They drove from Texas in a car and an old truck. In 1916, Pancho Villa stopped a train in Mexico and killed eighteen American citizens in cold blood to register his displeasure that President Woodrow Wilson was not backing Villa’s faction in the revolution. That same year, Villa invaded the town of Columbus, New Mexico, burned it to the ground, and left another nineteen US citizens dead in the streets. When I think about that, I wonder if the violence I would eventually inflict in Mexico and the US drove some of the hundreds of thousands of illegal border crossers into California and the Southwest.

  My grandmother’s family found whatever jobs they could in an area that was still heavily agricultural and predominantly Mexican. My father’s family had migrated from Mexico and settled in Texas. As soon as he could enlist, he did. He was assigned to Camp Pendleton, just north of San Diego, California. Oceanside is basically a bedroom suburb of Camp Pendleton. They used to say, “You can’t swing a dead cat in Oceanside without hitting a Marine.”

  When my grandmother was young and living in Oceanside, she did field work. She picked oranges, lettuce, and strawberries. To make a few extra dollars, my great-grandmother and great-grandfather began cooking in the evenings for the unmarried workers who didn’t have families. After a day stooped over cutting lettuce, they and my grandmother would go home and cook massive amounts of posole.

  The British have their steak and kidney pie and boiled beef. The Italians have pasta, and the Germans have their sausages and sauerkraut. Mexicans have posole. It’s a corn-based stew that originated in pre-Columbian Central America. It’s as much a sacrament in Mexican life as Communion and baptism. You eat posole when you’re sick to make you feel better. You eat it when you’re well to stay healthy. And you eat it in honor of a culture that seems to have dissipated and dissolved under the hooves and flintlocks of Western European immigration. The woman who produces posole isn’t exactly worshipped, but pretty damned close.

  My grandmother became the “Posole Lady” in Oceanside. She sold the stew out of her kitchen and often delivered it. She became so connected to her cooking that the area in Oceanside she lived in eventually came to be known simply as Posole. For most of the twentieth century, Posole was just the name the locals called the area. By the 1960s, when neighborhoods began giving birth to street gangs, Posole became the name of our gang as well. Posole was my home gang. It was under the Posole umbrella that I began my criminal career. In a strange way, I felt like I owned the neighborhood because my family had been there longer than anyone else. My grandmother’s cooking gave the entire neighborhood its name.

  By the time a teenager is ready to be jumped into a gang, he is literally prepared to kill and die for his neighborhood. To an outsider, this level of commitment to the gang and the neighborhood seems insane. Maybe you need to have been raised in the varrio to understand how young men can turn their backs on their families and, frankly, the entire noncriminal world and volunteer for a suicide pact with their homeboys. I was probably a lot more committed to the gang than most of my homies. I lived the gang life right up to the point that it was going to kill me. I bought the ticket to the horror show and stayed for the entire nightmare performance. And I was one of the leading players.

  Blood connecti
ons to the barrio weren’t limited to young males. The girls had their own little cliques and groups. When my mother was growing up, she belonged to the Tangerines. It wasn’t a gang in the strict sense of the word. It was more a social club or what would pass for a sorority in college. They had their own Tangerines jackets and they wore the same kind of hairstyle and makeup. The friendships they made as teenagers would last a lifetime. They would marry their girlfriends’ brothers or cousins. And a lot of them would get pregnant with guys they never married but never really stopped socializing with in the neighborhood. Decades later, the whole neighborhood would basically become a huge extended family where everyone knew everyone else’s history and we were all connected one way or another. I guess this social system played out in every Hispanic neighborhood in California.

  When I was eight, my father was ordered to Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. Prior to this, the only place I’d been outside of California was to Mexico for holiday trips. In those days, Mexico wasn’t the free-fire cartel killing ground that it became. There was always drug dealing and smuggling, but nothing on the scale that I would witness in the nineties.

  Once, smuggling was almost considered an honorable profession on the Mexican border. Old-school paisas (Mexican villagers) hauled turquoise, mescal, gold, and silver into the US on donkeys. During Prohibition, they smuggled liquor imported from Europe and Mexican-brewed tequila. These farmers and traders had no ambition of becoming internationally celebrated criminals. They were subsistence smugglers who knew their way across the desert and could pick out their route over the mountains and across the desert by moonlight or a Zippo lighter. Those routes used by the mescal haulers are still in use today, but the subsistence smugglers were replaced by cartels like the Arellano Félix brothers, who became rich enough to buy the Mexican government.

  I remember sitting in the rear bench seat of the Ford Torino station wagon we had and watching the Baja California landscape roll by the tinted windows. That was the brief time in my life when I was still a goofy kid who liked reading and writing, was good at math, and could not resist taking mechanical things apart. Years later, as a freshly released convict from the California Department of Corrections, I was driven down the same Highway 1D, the Tijuana to Ensenada road, in a blacked-out Chevy SUV armed with a full-auto AK-47. We had hand grenades and pistols too.

  My parents and I made the trip to Camp Lejeune in that Torino. To save money, we slept in the car. In North Carolina, we lived off base in military housing. There was a clear, fast-running creek behind the house that held fish and frogs. Beyond the creek, there were dense woods that went on for miles.

  In addition to teaching me how to fish, my father would take me into the woods and teach me bushcraft. He taught me a half-dozen ways of making a fire using nothing but what was available on the ground. Catching, skinning, gutting, and eating squirrels was as natural as picking up a pork chop under plastic in the supermarket. And then there was the endurance program. We hiked and hiked for miles, soaked through with sweat or rain. Mud-caked boots. Eating and drinking whatever we could find in the woods.

  I was by nature left-handed. But my father saw that as some sort of moral shortcoming.

  Fathers deal with their sons. They toughen them up. They train them. Drill them. Dads make sure the beds are made, the yard is cleaned up, the garbage taken out, the clothes all folded and stacked in a footlocker. Dads conduct surprise white-glove inspections at night, and failure to execute correctly results in being hit with belts, broomsticks, and closed fists. I didn’t know any different. I tried to become right-handed.

  As in Oceanside, all our neighbors in North Carolina were in the Marine Corps. The Barkers lived two houses down from us. They were officer class. He was a captain. His wife, Margie, was an energetic Georgia girl who had a passion for growing vegetables and flowers. They had two blond daughters who were five years older than me. Margie and my mom became great friends and the two of them created a community garden. In the summertime, Margie would borrow me and we’d spend entire days together weeding, pruning, watering, and raising massive heads of lettuce. When we weren’t in the garden, she took me to her house and taught me how to pickle and can just about anything the garden produced.

  I played Little League baseball. I joined the Scouts and earned all sixteen merit badges. I played football.

  Margie and her family were what I considered the rock-solid template of what a military family was supposed to be. Captain Barker was all business, but he wasn’t mean or violent. I noticed the way he handled the two girls and his wife, Margie. There was love in that family. There was no yelling or broomsticks broken. There were no surprise 3:00 A.M. inspections and no double-time hikes in the woods. Margie and my mom remained friends for thirty years. When we were reassigned back to Camp Pendleton, the Barkers were already there. The two Barker girls would become babysitters for my little brother and sister.

  After a year in North Carolina, my brother Fred was born. My grandmother came from Oceanside to live with us to help my mom. It was after Fred was born that the situation with my father got really bad.

  My father and I would be in the car, with me riding shotgun. Suddenly, he’d scream as loud as he could and squeeze my thigh as hard as he could. According to him, he was teaching me how not to flinch in an emergency situation. Sometimes, without screaming, he’d swing a fist at me, just missing my face. If I flinched, I got punched.

  We transferred back to Oceanside. While we were in North Carolina, my dad had rented out our house in Oceanside. The tenants had trashed the house so badly we had to move in temporarily with my grandmother until our house was fixed.

  I could not sit still in class. I occasionally flew into rages and pounded on classmates with my fists.

  When I was seven, my mother took me to the hospital on base and had me examined by a psychiatrist. The doctors prescribed phenobarbital. During the school year, I’d go to the nurse’s office at noon every day and she’d give me my drugs. More often than not, I’d be asleep in an hour with my head on my desk, thanks to the pills.

  One of my teachers, Mrs. Marsky, became concerned enough with my daily ritual of falling asleep that she contacted my mother. The teacher was told it was doctor’s orders and she had no say in the matter. So by the time my cousin Tommy Garcia and I started getting high on street drugs at age twelve or thirteen, I’d already been a pill popper for half a decade.

  I got out of the house and hung with Tommy, my cousin Roy Rivas, and some of the homeboys in the neighborhood. Tommy’s home life was only a little better than mine, so we would go home just to sleep. We weren’t quite throwaway or runaway kids because we had a home to go to. We just chose to avoid contact with our families.

  Neither of us felt we really belonged anywhere except on the street. That’s where our real friends were. I was twelve and already had one foot out the door. That was when my grandmother took me into her room and took a photo album out of the closet. She showed me a picture of my mother standing next to a Marine. This Marine was not Fred Corona, the man I knew as my father.

  “That,” she said, “is your real father. He got your mother pregnant just before he left the Marines. He wanted to take her back to Michigan where he came from, but your mother wanted to stay here.”

  After that, Tommy and I did everything we could to stay on the streets and make a few dollars. We started a lawn mowing business. Our clients were all Marines, enlisted men as well as officers. Tommy and I were incredibly conscientious with the lawn mowing. When we finished a job, it was done to military precision. It would have gotten nothing but a grudging okay from my father, but the people we worked for were extremely happy with the work. On a good week, we could each make $150. In 1976, that was very decent money for a couple of twelve-year-olds.

  Then one day we were cutting the lawn for an enlisted man who was having a party at his house. We could see that this party was offering more than beer and
liquor to the guests. Tommy had already once tried marijuana and recognized it when he saw the Marines at the party passing joints. Tommy asked the Marine if he could give us some dope instead of cash for the lawn. He was happy to do it and he gave us a couple of joints.

  After we were done mowing lawns for the day, Tommy and I went to a canyon where a lot of kids hung out to drink, ditch school, get laid, or get high. It was a party canyon. This was the first time I’d actually smoked cannabis, and at the time, it appeared like a salvation. Unlike the phenobarbital that made me groggy and then put me to sleep, cannabis was my happy drug. I could continue to function but still be high enough to put the brakes on my anxiety. It was a mental and emotional vacation. This was the drug I needed.

  My mom had had a few surgeries and they gave her painkillers. I don’t actually remember if my intention was to sell them or to give them away or take them, but I stole them from the bathroom cabinet where she kept them and took them to school. They rattled in my pocket all day and then I decided to take them. I had no fear of death, but I did think, if I’m going to die, I might as well do it in school with my friends around me. I swallowed the entire bottle of painkillers in the school bathroom.

  I went back to class. A half hour later, it looked like the blackboard was melting. The voices around me started sounding very far away and I couldn’t feel my arms or legs. The last clear memory I have is Barbara Soto’s voice asking me, “Are you okay?” She was one of the homegirls that hung out with us Posoles. Then I remember her screaming and apparently I hit the floor like a deadweight.

  I sort of came out of it a little bit. I remember being on the floor of the nurse’s office, the same nurse that fed me the phenobarbital, and two paramedics were working on me. I had no fear, no anxiety. It was the most peaceful feeling I’d ever had in my life. I actually felt myself floating to the ceiling and I remember looking down at myself and the paramedics and just feeling serene. Years later, I found out they call this a near-death experience. I never saw the white light you’re supposed to see, but I clearly remember looking down at myself and feeling nothing but peace. I was ready to go to wherever was the next place you go. Heaven, maybe, if I was lucky. I was still Catholic enough to believe in that.