Confessions of a Cartel Hit Man Read online

  I later found out that in the ambulance my heart stopped twice.

  I remembered watching The Bride of Frankenstein as a young kid. There’s a scene at the end where the monster tries to touch the woman that Dr. Frankenstein just made for him. His bride. She pulls away, scared out of her mind at the way he looks. You could see in the monster’s face that he realizes there’s something unnatural about him, the woman, and the doctors that made him. The monster lets Dr. Frankenstein and his wife leave. Then he turns to the bride and the other doctor and says, “We belong dead.” He pulls the lever and the whole castle blows up. That phrase echoed in my head for years.

  Four days later they finally got all the dope out of me.

  They transferred me from the hospital ICU to the San Luis Rey mental hospital in Encinitas. As it happened, one of the Posole homegirls was there as well. She was there for drugs, running around with older guys, and basically screwing up her life. Like me.

  As soon as they let me walk around the ward, I wandered around, looking for a way to get out. They had a balcony on the floor, with wooden slats and beams that would let the sun in but were close enough together to keep people like me from jumping off it. I jumped on the railing and starting kicking the slats as hard as I could. I wanted to make an opening big enough for me to crawl through.

  Before I could make it through, a couple of the male nurses dragged me off the balcony and took me to the rubber room. They strapped me into a bed and I lay there screaming for hours to let me out. They shot me up with more drugs to stop me from screaming. It was like trying to put out a fire that won’t stop burning.

  As it happened, I went directly from San Luis Rey to St. Mary’s Church for my confirmation. My parents took us to a Mexican restaurant after the ceremony and I remember my father telling me that now I was a man in the eyes of God and the church. My mother gave me a little Virgin Mary medallion and told me to always keep it with me. My father gave me some money and, for the first time I can remember, he gave me a hug.

  The day after my confirmation, I ran away from home.

  I didn’t need a home. I had a whole neighborhood that would take care of me if I needed it. At least I thought that was the case. But the reality was that I was twelve years old and I was relying on other thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds to give me food, money, and a place to sleep. I lived on the streets for a little while. I slept on a mattress that someone had thrown away. There was a carport in the neighborhood that nobody used, so I carved out a space in it for the mattress and slept there at night.

  During the day I went to my cousin Roy’s house to take a shower, wash my clothes, and grab some food. I’d spend the rest of the day at the beach or hiding out in the canyon with the other truants and some of the older guys who were already up-and-coming gangsters. These were the only people I felt comfortable with. There wasn’t anyone telling me to write with my right hand. There were no inspections and sudden fists flashing across my face. These people from the neighborhood felt like the only real family I had. We shared everything—food, dope, guns, girls, advice—and we protected each other. If we had enough to share, we did. And when we didn’t, we’d rob it and share it.

  But I couldn’t hide forever. One day I was out on the street and high on paint fumes. The cops saw me stumbling around like a drunk and took me home.

  After a couple of violent arguments, I told my parents that I wouldn’t be running away anymore but as far as I was concerned, Fred wasn’t my father and I didn’t have to listen to him anymore.

  I tried going back to school, but I only went there to hang out with some girls I liked, make some dope connections, and make a few dollars selling dope. I’d show up for first-period class and then ditch. After roll call I’d either go to the canyon with the homeboys, go to the beach to sling some marijuana, or hang out at the football field at Jefferson High School. There were a lot of older Posole homeboys there and we’d smoke cigarettes, weed, and eat some Black Beauties.

  That Marine who gave us marijuana for mowing his lawn turned into a solid drug connection for me. Roy and I would buy ounces from him, break them down into nickel and dime bags, and sell them in school. I was buying clothes on my own, eating in diners and fast-food places. My mother asked me where I got the money and I told her it was from mowing lawns. She told me to give her some of it so she could save it for me. So I did.

  I’d been out of San Luis Rey Hospital for a few months and I was taking the Valium I had been prescribed. But the thing I wanted was oblivion. And this time I was going to make it stick. And before leaving my life, I was going to tell my story.

  I had an eight-track tape machine that had recording capability. I went into my room and spilled my guts into the tape. I recorded some music between the farewells. I had eighty-two Valium pills in the bottle. I hadn’t been taking them, but they kept refilling the prescription. They were ten milligrams each and I figured that would be enough to do the job. I wrote out a note and swallowed all eighty-two pills. Then I laid back on the bed and waited to die.

  3

  The Beach

  My father came home earlier than I expected and found me almost unconscious. He tried getting me to sit up or move. I wouldn’t. My mom came home right around the same time and she was the one that realized I’d just tried to kill myself again. “Listen to the tape,” I told them, “and just let me go.” No luck with that.

  The next thing I remember is being back in the ICU, having my stomach pumped and vomiting.

  Living in San Luis Rey was just as crazy as the life I’d been living on the streets. The patients did almost anything they wanted as long as it didn’t start any bloodshed or make the staff write out reports.

  I was thrown in with child molesters, heroin addicts, genuinely psychotic people who needed massive doses of medication and who sat in their chairs in front of the TV completely zoned out on drugs, and people who just couldn’t function for whatever reason. We didn’t talk about why we were all there. It was just assumed that you needed to be kept off the streets and medicated.

  By that time I’d already had sex with a few of the girls from the neighborhood. As awkward and fumbling as the sex was with girls my own age, I was at least familiar with the mechanics. But at San Luis Rey I got a real education from a beautiful thirty-year-old woman who everybody called a nymphomaniac. I had no idea what that was. But I found out fast what they meant. I knew she was screwing everybody in the building who wasn’t too stoned for sex, but at that age, who cared? It was fun.

  By the time I was released four months later, I found I was a little calmer in the brain and less manic. I was diagnosed with severe depression, given more pills, and sent back home. The fact that my home was what made me depressed didn’t seem to matter.

  Once I hit the streets, I started selling and using drugs again. But this time I was a little more organized and businesslike about dealing. Even though I was technically a Posole homeboy, I made it a point not to dress like a gangster. I let my hair grow out to look more like a white boy and less of a Chicano hood. I didn’t wear bandanas or Pendleton shirts with just the top button done up. I wanted to pass as what we called a “casual,” just a regular non-gang-affiliated kid. The reason was that I didn’t want to stand out when I was selling dope on the beach.

  San Diego is a big tourist destination. We have great beaches and the sort of beachside towns that attract people from all over the world. Tourists came to San Diego to party and I had the idea that I could help them party as much as they wanted.

  That summer, I bought a beach bike, a fanny pack, and a Panama hat, and dressed up to look like a surfer. I was still only thirteen and even the cops, as hip as they are about gangsters, would never single me out as a drug dealer. In the mornings I’d stuff my fanny pack full of weed, acid, PCP, cocaine, pills, or whatever I could get my hands on and cruise the beaches.

  These days, everyone is familiar with the te
rm profiling. John Douglas, the FBI agent who essentially invented the term, developed the technique and codified it. The truth is, one of the first things you pick up on the streets is the ability to tell friend from foe and differentiate the harmless from potential danger. When I first came across John Douglas’s book about profiling in the California prison system years later, I realized all us little homies had been using Douglas’s techniques without actually being aware of them. On the streets, and especially in the prison system, profiling individuals is what keeps you alive.

  During those long sunny days at the beach, I developed the sixth sense of who I could approach and who to avoid. The Europeans were easy to spot. They didn’t dress like us and obviously I could always pick up on an accent. They were the easiest and safest people to approach. And I found out early on that they were in San Diego for the full Southern California experience—the beach, the sun, the girls, and the drugs. This is what they saw in movies and read about in the papers. I saw myself as just another beach life icon. There were the fast-food stands, the umbrella rental guys, the lifeguards, and all those tanned and hard-bodied girls. They were all part of the show and I was the friendly neighborhood dealer. I taught myself to play the part to perfection.

  After all, I was just a harmless-looking teen and I learned to develop an approachable and easygoing attitude. I smiled a lot, learned a few phrases in German, French, and Italian for the benefit of my clients, and never pushed hard. I got to actually be friends with a lot of my clients. They’d invite me to parties and I learned how to handle myself around these twenty-year-olds. Those four months hanging around with the nympho at San Luis Rey completely demystified the female gender for me, and I discovered I could approach any girl I wanted and strike up a conversation. I was amazed at how easy it was if you watched the body language, the eyes, and what they did with their hands. The key is to look and act harmless. Which I was. I didn’t want to rob or assault them. All I wanted was their money in exchange for drugs.

  I was making a lot of money for a guy my age, but I was spending it just as fast. I was on a great ride and didn’t think about tomorrow or the next day or next week. The beach and the tourists would always be there if I needed money, so I spent it on clothes and partying with the homies from Posole.

  But summer doesn’t last forever. Not even in Southern California. The tourists went home, the beach was once again repopulated with the locals, and my tourist market dried up. It was time to go back to school and figure out what to do until next summer.

  Compared to the beach life, going back to school was like going to a concentration camp. In retrospect, I realize that I was caught between multiple worlds. There were the full-blown Pee Wee Gangsters with the shaved heads, the Dickies pants, and the bandanas. These were the guys that knew they were going to be gangsters and had pretty much taken all the necessary steps to make crime a career goal. I’d meet up with a lot of them later on in the California prison system.

  And then there were the casuals who reminded me of sheep. They shuttled between school and home, did their homework, and never had any fun. And then there was that white world of the beach, the nice houses, and the new cars when the kids turned sixteen. These were the kids that floated through life without ever having to actually face it. They went to school, surfed, partied, and eventually landed a job that kept them floating into middle age. They never had to hustle dope or work on a loading dock or in a warehouse for their money. I envied and hated them at the same time. They had the one thing I was missing: stability.

  As that year dragged on, it dawned on me that one of these days I’d have to make some kind of decision. Which world would I join? I could go back to mowing lawns and going to school, and become a sheep. Even though I could read and write above grade level, and mathematics was easy for me, my gut told me there was no future in academics for me. It was boring. I was too manic for that. The white world was out of the question. I wasn’t white and the only status my family could claim was a ball-busting Marine gunnery sergeant. Besides, I didn’t want to become a pocho, or a coconut—brown on the outside and white on the inside. A lot of blacks I met were the same way. The neighborhoods they came from were like mine and “acting” too white made you an outcast.

  Eventually, the decision was made for me. Not that I resisted very much. I already had a halfway criminal mentality just from being around the neighborhood. That world is always “Us Against the World” anyway. Slinging drugs and stealing wasn’t just tolerated. It was celebrated.

  The day I was first sent to juvenile detention camp wasn’t much different from any other day in school. I’d sold some marijuana to my cousin Yolanda. Like a fool, she and some of her girlfriends went into the school bathroom to smoke it and they got caught.

  I happened to be in school that day and the principal tracked me down and asked me to go to the office. When I got there, Yolanda and all her girlfriends were sitting on a bench outside the office. When they saw me, they all put their heads down and couldn’t look at me. Right away I knew this was trouble.

  There was a school cop in the office with the principal and the first thing they did was search me. I was lucky that I didn’t have anything on me at the time. But they accused me of selling drugs. They said the girls ratted me out. They cuffed me on the spot and marched me out of school in full sight of everybody that knew me. I should have felt humiliated but I wasn’t. I took the arrest like a badge of honor. I didn’t see myself as a criminal yet, but if they wanted to treat me like one, then fuck it. Make me a criminal. I could handle that easier than being Fred Corona’s disappointing son. I was halfway hoping that it would reflect badly back on my stepfather, and he had it coming to him anyway.

  4

  Gladiator School

  By the end of that afternoon, I was being processed into Rancho Del Campo, a minimum security facility for the California Youth Authority. Nobody calls it Juvenile Hall anymore. In our world, it was just YA, for Youth Authority. We also called it Gladiator School.

  On the street, neighborhood gangs are like self-contained little families. We look out for each other. If somebody has money problems, needs a place to stay or even a meal, we’ll take the last dollar in our pockets to help out a homeboy. In YA, that doesn’t exist. At least not to the same degree. If you’re in there with some of your homeboys, you definitely associate with them and form a little clique of your own. If you’re lucky, you come from a gang that’s really deep, a gang that has a lot of active members. Even if another gang outnumbers you in YA, just the fact that you come from a very active gang gives you a certain status. If you come from a gang that has a reputation as being a party gang and not an actively criminal gang, you have no status at all. And you either become a victim or prove yourself as a soldier.

  The best of all possible worlds is to be housed with your homeboys and with gang members who are not rivals on the street. In my situation at that time, Posole was not at war with other bigger gangs like Shelltown and Logan Heights. So, officially, I didn’t have enemies in YA. But unofficially, the personal beefs between individuals are always a problem.

  When you put a bunch of young, aggressive kids who can’t handle their lives on the streets in the same building, it’s a matter of when, not if, fights break out. Nobody in YA wants to be thought of as a pussy or a guy who can’t handle himself in a fight. So people look for ways to prove themselves. Somebody looks at you funny and a fight breaks out. Somebody thinks you cut in front of him on the food line and you’re liable to be wearing your lunch and smashed in the head with the tray. The one thing you never want to do is walk away or back down from a challenge. Once you do that, you’re forever branded as a guy with no heart. They’ll take your personal property, money, or commissary items at will and you’ll wear that jacket for as long as you’re in that world.

  In my case, I didn’t have a personal reputation. I was just another kid from Posole who hadn’t earned any stripes or
done anything to distinguish myself other than sell some dope. And everybody did that, so it didn’t particularly mark me as someone to be feared or respected. It didn’t take me long to figure out that my lack of status had to change if I wanted to survive in YA. The one thing I did right was not snitch on my dope connections. I didn’t rat out the Marine or any of the wholesale dealers I was buying my dope from. That got me a little status.

  Just like in the California prison system, the YA system has two sets of rules. There are the house rules imposed by the authorities. And then there are the more important rules established by the Sureno (Southern California gangsters) hierarchy and the EME (the Mexican Mafia). The house rules essentially don’t matter. If you break the house rules, all they can do to you is give you more time in custody and fatten up your inmate jacket. Breaking the EME or the Sureno rules, however, is extremely dangerous to your health. And the EME has eyes and ears everywhere in the California Department of Corrections (CDC) and YA. Once you’re in one of those institutions, you can’t hide from them.

  The YA system is basically the farm team for the Mexican Mafia. YA is where a future EME member begins to make a reputation for himself. The carnals (full-blown EME members) are always scouting for new recruits. They enhance their power, status, and money-making ability in the prison system by being able to issue orders to solid, reliable soldiers on the outside and in the prison system. An EME member with a crew of twenty guys who will do what he tells them is a powerful man. If those twenty guys can control an entire neighborhood like Posole or Logan Heights, that EME carnal is the monarch of a kingdom. He literally has the power of life and death. So for a carnal to stay in business and keep the drug money flowing into his prison bank account, he’s got to keep an eye out for up-and-coming talent. If you want a career as a criminal, YA is the place where you start making your bones and establish yourself as a soldado.