Confessions of a Cartel Hit Man Read online

  7

  Surenos Don’t Stoop

  After spending my first time in the juvenile system, I developed a perverse taste for that kind of life. I felt like a young tiger who finally tasted living flesh and develops a taste for blood. The blood in this case was the camaraderie I felt for all these guys from different areas. It felt exciting and it was a novelty in my young life.

  They respected me and we were down for each other. In almost every significant way, it’s the same experience that soldiers have in war. It’s the brotherhood of the foxhole. Although I loved my homeboys and they were there for me as well, there’s that old saying that “you’ll never be a hero in your hometown.” What I found was that I could go into any neighborhood and be recognized as a respected Sureno.

  There’s a cruising boulevard in San Diego called Highland Avenue in National City. Sleepy, the guy I escaped camp with, was from National City. Gallo, the other guy on the escape, was from Encanto. So when we cruised either of those places, I’d run into their homies. And as soon as I introduced myself with my Nite Owl street name, the normally reserved and suspicious gangster attitude melted away. “Whoa, you’re that Nite Owl from Posole? My homeboy told me about you.” And the waters would part, the doors would open, and I was immediately accepted. Dope, pussy, a place to hang out and stay if I needed a bed for the night or a week—it was all just offered up based on nothing but my reputation and the respect I earned while in juvie. In retrospect, juvie was the beginning of the end for me. I have no idea what would have happened to me if I hadn’t had that kind of reception on the street after getting out of the juvenile system.

  Naturally, my appetite for acceptance just got bigger. I realized that my irrational acts of hoodlumism (a new word going around at the time) were actually being watched and monitored by people I didn’t even know existed.

  I spent the first few months out of juvie basking in this newfound respect and it sort of pushed me to punch up my résumé with even bigger acts of antisocial behavior. The one area that I pushed open was shooting dope. That was a stupid one. By that age I’d been using drugs—legally and illegally—since the age of eight. I naturally smoked weed, Sherm (PCP), drank beer, and when I was kicking it with the homegirls, their favorite of Thunderbird wine mixed with Kool-Aid.

  Getting high to have fun is one thing. Getting high to support a habit is officially graduating into a whole new world. The irrational motivation to shoot heroin has nothing to do with money or the simple necessity of making a living on the street as a criminal. You’re now serving a whole new demon—the heroin, meth, or coke demon that will make you take the sorts of chances you would never take as that cool, methodical criminal.

  When you’re high, you’re in a cloud of indifference mixed with invincibility mixed with paranoia mixed with—let’s face it—bliss. Nothing seems impossible or impossibly stupid. Rob a dope dealer? “No problem. Show me where he’s at.” Break into a house or a crowded store where they may have something worth stealing? “Cool. Just keep point for me. If they chase me, start blasting. The car’s around the corner.”

  And I couldn’t believe the sex that came my way whenever I was holding and giving away dope. I was a porn star. I remember once being locked up in a motel room with two girls for two solid days. I don’t think I wore clothes once in that forty-eight hours. We were loaded on meth and heroin and we literally partied like our very existence depended on it. Until we ran out of dope. That’s when the second demon comes into your world and reminds you that you’re human after all and that money is finite and the time comes when you have to pay for your sins. It’s the coming down and the withdrawals. This is the monster lurking in the syringe and when he comes screaming into your brain, it turns into a war for your soul. And most people lose the war at the first battle.

  I’m convinced that most girls selling their bodies on the street do it to support a habit. The monster will make you steal from your own family. I’ve seen young women make their kids go hungry by either spending their money on dope or selling their food stamps at a discount to get dope.

  I started becoming reckless and taking chances that just didn’t make sense had I been in my rational mind. I mean, who walks into a crowded department store flashing a gun, grabbing as many clothes as he can, and daring anyone to try to stop him? The answer is me.

  Here’s the thing, though. I never let the heroin, coke, or meth get the edge on me. I was disciplined enough to know where the line was. And I was smart enough to know that the shot callers would put a tecato jacket on me that I’d never be able to shed. So as hard as I partied, I never got hooked.

  But the dope was my demise at this point in my career. I was convicted of shoplifting when in fact I could have gotten an armed robbery charge. That’s how I found myself back in custody and headed for the California Youth Authority. This is state time and one step down from prison. And this is also the place where all the rules change. And this was also the only way I was going to kick the habit and slay the monster. This is where the Big Homies keep an eye on you and give you structure. If you screw up here with them, you’re marked forever as useless to them and you’re just another throwaway that they can exploit and use any way they want.

  The first stop was Norwalk Southern Youth Correctional Reception Center (SCRC). It’s the place where they send delinquents like me from all over Southern California. This is where they evaluate you for medical issues, mental problems, and where they basically try to see what kind of badass or mental case they’re dealing with. For me, it was my next big opportunity to do what business and corporate types call networking. It was a chance to meet new camaradas from Los Angeles, Long Beach, Ventura County, Venice Beach, and the San Fernando Valley.

  In the world of Surenos who want to make crime a career, friendships made here often lead to lifelong associations and sometimes to lifelong feuds. This is where the future leaders, Big Homies and shot callers, all came from. Let’s remember that the original founding members of the Mexican Mafia prison gang met each other in these reception centers as young men my age. And they did more to change the face of organized crime in California than the Italian mob could ever hope to accomplish on the West Coast.

  At that time, the gangbanger cholo attitude had just started to migrate from the varrios into mainstream culture. Even though it wasn’t until 1988 when Dennis Hopper directed and released Colors that, suddenly, the shadow existence us gangsters were living was on movie screens for the whole country to see. The movie got really close to the truth, and while it wasn’t as ugly as real life, it gave the general public a taste of what was happening under their noses. It was to us what Goodfellas would become to the Italian mob two years later. Having spent time with some of the Italian mob bosses in places like Sandstone federal prison, I got the idea that they thought their movie was as close as anyone could have gotten to the truth of their organization.

  At Norwalk SCRC, we started seeing white, suburban kids showing up dressed like us, trying to act like us, and wanting to be one of us. Most were sad imitations, but just the fact that they were emulating our culture was putting ideas in our heads. Like maybe we were a bigger deal than we ever thought we could be.

  In Norwalk, I was officially starting to be schooled in Sureno politics. Now keep in mind, when we say Sureno politics, what we actually mean is Mexican Mafia politics. Just like in the movie, the Italians rarely call themselves the Cosa Nostra. They use the goodfellas shorthand to indicate the existence of an entire world of criminals. It’s the same thing with Surenos. Nobody tosses that word Mexican Mafia around lightly. The code word is Sureno.

  We had six buildings in Norwalk and each building had an official Sureno Rep. These Reps were the shot callers for each unit. And there was a hierarchy in each unit. There was Prez (short for president), Vica (pronounced “veesa,” a corruption of vice president), and Third Man. It was their job to educate you in the South Side mannerisms. We
had to absorb the culture as laid down by the shot callers. First and foremost, you had to stick up for your own people. That means Surenos stick together against everyone else. The other thing is that if we had beefs on the outside with rival gangs, the beefs would be suspended while in the facility. Sureno unity in any institution was way more important than local gang fights. We were told to bury the hatchet and deal with whatever problems we had after we got on the outside.

  Surenos had to walk a certain way. No shuffling of feet, no downcast eyes, no stooped backs. We walked like warriors surveying the battlefield after a victory over the enemy—shoulders back, head straight forward, and a swagger. We owned the facility and everybody had to know it just from watching us walk. We couldn’t eat or drink anything with blacks.

  Our clothes had to be clean, sharp, and on point. The Reps even told us how to carry our cigarettes. Back then, we all smoked Camel nonfilters and they only came in a soft pack. We were told to crease the corners of the soft pack so as not to crush the cigarettes when we put the pack in our pockets. Why? Because they wanted it that way. It was like the Army telling you to put military folds on the blankets. You had to be squared away in every single thing you did, from the pack in your pocket to the appearance of your room. If you failed in certain areas, you were reprimanded and checked. Too many reprimands and you started carrying a reputation as an unreliable Sureno. No career advancement for you.

  It may sound crazy, but I came to know and love the structure. Frankly, it wasn’t much different from the discipline of the Marine master gunnery sergeant who raised me and drilled me on making beds and doing things the military way. But instead of being constantly critical, the shot callers were complimenting me on being a model Sureno. By the time I finished my second stint in YA, I was appointed as Vica in my unit. A title. That was worth more to me than a hundred “attaboys” from the outside world.

  Part of the program at Norwalk was determining how dangerous you were to society and where they’d send you. Since I had the escapes from camp on my record, going back there was out of the question. I would be going somewhere “behind the fence,” where escape was harder if not impossible. The charge of felony shoplifting that landed me in Norwalk, coupled with the escape risk, was enough for them to send me to the Ventura Youth Correctional Facility in Camarillo.

  Camarillo is just north of the San Fernando Valley in its own little valley. Geographically, it’s a great place to live. There’s still a lot of farmland and agriculture. And the weather never gets too hot or cold because it’s right on the coast. But the facility where I’d be going was, even then, legendary for being mismanaged and abusive. They had isolation cells—like the junior versions of the SHU (Security Housing Units) of adult prisons like Pelican Bay. This despite the fact that Ventura was considered a medium security facility.

  To begin with, Ventura was a coed facility. To me, that’s just asking for trouble from the start. You have to wonder what brainiac thought mixing up delinquent males and females in the same place was ever a good idea.

  In a lot of ways, it was like a crazy fun-house-mirror version of the worst college you can imagine. For one thing, we were allowed to wear our street clothes. We didn’t have uniforms. And we went to school every day in mixed-gender classrooms. And just like school on the outside, girls would fight over guys. The guys would fight each other to get the attention of the girls, and everybody was always looking for a place to take a girl who was more than willing to be shown a good time. It was a festival of adolescent raging hormones mixed with drugs and criminal attitudes.

  Officially, sex was forbidden. Imagine trying to enforce that rule when you’re managing a bunch of delinquents. So, officially, when some of the girls would get pregnant, we’d call them Immaculate Conceptions. The girls would never admit to having sex. And the boys would never cop to it because it would land them in the hole. And the staff would give up trying to get to the truth because a pregnant female was just a reminder that they weren’t doing their jobs.

  Part of the program in Ventura was that you were assigned a job. They had jobs in the kitchen, groundskeeping, cleaning up the classrooms, the library, and the housing units. They also had jobs “off campus,” working out in the free world. I got lucky enough to land a job at the infamous Camarillo State Hospital. This is the main Southern California hospital reserved for the criminally insane. Again, you have to wonder who came up with the brilliant idea of sending a bunch of criminally inclined teenagers into a hospital full of people who were criminally insane.

  Every afternoon at one thirty, a vanload of us was driven through the town of Ventura to the hospital. When we got there, we were given our assignments and briefed on the safety rules as well as the security limits they put on us.

  The hospital had a cafeteria where the hospital patients could buy burgers and fries and other kinds of junk food. Some of the more reliable patients were given little envelopes of cash so they could buy their food. After gaining their confidence, we would clip some of that money out of their envelopes and use that money to buy drugs right there at the hospital.

  This one time, I had eight Black Beauties on me that I’d just bought. The irony of me being in custody because of drugs, and then being sent to a place where I could buy all the drugs I wanted, was lost on me at the time. But that was the system then and I don’t know if it’s changed much since. It was a day I was working in the kitchen with a guy named Dave. He was a young guy around twenty-four years old who was a hired civilian who had gotten a job at the hospital. Dave was a very cool guy who never treated us like rising young criminals. He gave us free food and sort of treated us like younger brothers.

  This one day, he was looking really tired and worn-out. I asked him if he was feeling okay and he said he was but that he’d been up all night after going to a Santana concert in Ventura. He said he’d gotten fucked up on liquor and dope and he was dragging his ass. He said he’d do anything to get rid of his hangover. I asked him if he thought some Black Beauties would straighten him out. “Fuck, yeah,” he said.

  We kept working together for a little while, but when I had a chance, I snuck into his office and left three Black Beauties under a pile of papers. Before I left, I told him to go check in his office and we went back to our units.

  The next day, after breakfast was over, he caught my attention and said he wanted to talk to me. For a second I was panicked. I thought he was going to turn me in. He asked where I got the pills from. I denied everything and claimed I didn’t know what he was talking about. Then he looked at me for a long while and said, “I’m not going to bust you. I just want to make sure you’re not setting me up.” I finally convinced him that I wasn’t doing that. I told him he was very cool with all the inmates and we thought he was a friend. Then he said, “Go check the cleaning supply room. There’s something in the paper towels.” I went there and found a small manila envelope. I looked at him. He smiled. I took the envelope and went back to my unit. Once I was back in my cell, I opened the envelope and saw three joints. I smelled one, and sure enough, it was weed.

  The first thing I did was break one in half. I had to look out for my boys Grumpy from Culver City and Shorty from Verdugo. These were my go-to homies. Even though we were from different varrios, we all looked out for each other.

  I also had this neighbor in the cell next to mine. He was a white guy with red hair and he had an amazing resemblance to Ralph Malph, the character from Happy Days, the TV show. By this time, my family had been stationed to Hawaii and I wasn’t getting any family visits and not much mail. “Ralph” apparently figured this out and was always telling me stories about his family and constantly trying to set me up with his sister.

  I sent the last of the weed to one of the homegirls from my neighborhood. She was serving eight years for a robbery and an attempted murder charge. I figured she could use it. That’s the way it is in prison and YA. You’re all in the same miserable boat,
so if you can make one day pass a little nicer for someone else, you do it. Or at least, that’s how I operated. Pot was my comfort drug since I was twelve and I figured they would all appreciate a taste of it.

  The next day, when I saw my opportunity, I pulled Dave to the side and thanked him. He just laughed and asked if I enjoyed it. “Hell, yeah,” I said. Then I asked him if we could work out some sort of deal. I didn’t know if this was some kind of test or not, but he asked me where I got the Black Beauties. I told him I couldn’t tell him because I didn’t want to get anybody in trouble. “Just like I wouldn’t tell anybody where I got the weed,” I said to him. It was the simple truth. It was the safest and best way to operate. You don’t go blabbing about stuff that doesn’t need to be blabbed about.

  That’s the hook. If you can earn someone’s trust so that they know you have their best interests at heart, then you build their confidence and a relationship of trust. He realized I wasn’t giving up my pill contact and so he felt enough trust to try me out. I explained to him that I had a source of cash and maybe we could work something out that would benefit both of us. I guess I was learning the art of the deal. Both parties walk away with something they each want and neither is trying to burn the other.

  He asked me how much I wanted. Remember this is around 1979 and 1980. Weed was being sold in “lids” and a lid was measured by the thickness of one finger. A finger lid cost ten dollars. Two fingers was twenty dollars, and so on. These days, especially with the arrival of legal medical marijuana, you get a tiny ziplock bag for between twenty and fifty dollars, depending on all sorts of factors.

  I had to admire him for the fact that he was giving me straight street prices. Most people in his position, knowing that I was in an institution and couldn’t shop around for a better deal, would have jacked me up for as much as he could get. Dope in prison can go for double or triple the street price simply because of the scarcity of supply. Simple economics. I’ve known corrections officers to this day who boost their salaries by tens of thousands of dollars per year just selling cigarettes in prison. Same goes for cell phones and other “items” that are scarce in prison. But Dave wasn’t a hustler or out to make a fortune selling weed to teenagers. I had a sense I reminded him of a family member or a close friend, because he always treated me right.