Confessions of a Cartel Hit Man Read online

  I gave him my twenty dollars and the next day he brought me a fat, two-finger lid. It was actually more than I paid for. Needless to say, me and my close boys became extremely popular in Ventura and we were invited to all the social functions. Every Friday they held inspection of all the units. The unit with the highest score was allowed to hold a social. If it was a girls unit, they could invite any boys they wanted. If it was a boys unit, they could do the same. So for the next four months, we, the ones who were holding, were invited to every social that the girls won. They weren’t big affairs. They served Kool-Aid, cake, and there was music and usually a movie after that. We provided the party favors. The party favors guaranteed us special favors with the girls, meaning that we’d all get laid.

  Dave and I got along so well that it got to the point where if I wanted to see a particular girl, he’d arrange to have her brought down to the kitchen supposedly for an interview for a job in the kitchen. Of course, once she got there, the girl and I would sneak off somewhere and screw like rabbits. One of these girls, Kitty from Eighteenth Street, became my girlfriend for the last four months that I was there. After I paroled, we stayed in touch and I drove up from San Diego to pick her up when she was released. All in all, my time in Ventura was very easy time.

  I think it was too easy. The truth was that I had no fear of going back. My time there showed me that I could continue to get high, get as much sex as I wanted, expand my network of friends and allies, and get taken care of by the state without having to hustle for every nickel or meal. It was that lack of fear that once again landed me in prison. Ninety days after being released, I was arrested for a parole violation and I was back in Ventura.

  I realize now that I was already becoming institutionalized. Being in prison wasn’t much different than being on the street because prison was becoming second nature to me. It was just the way I lived. This was my normal. I adapted to prison and street without breaking stride and I just didn’t care anymore one way or the other. And that easy geographical and emotional transition from street to prison just makes it that much easier to commit crimes. We weren’t offered any alternatives once we went behind bars. The system just recycles inmates like aluminum cans. From my point of view, the prison system is a business to keep the corrections officers and the whole prison enterprise on the receiving end of government spending. The people running the institutions don’t care whether you come back or not. In fact, if you asked them hard, I’m sure most of them would rather have you come back so they can keep the money merry-go-round moving, increase the size of the staffing, build more prisons, and keep the government union plans fully funded. There is no incentive in the system to educate inmates so they can be in a position to fend for themselves once on the outside. Inmates are money in the bank.

  8

  A Chance in Hawaii

  After I was released from Ventura, I wanted to be paroled to my uncle in San Diego, but the YA would only allow me to parole to my parents. And so I was going to live with my parents in Hawaii.

  Even though I really missed them while I was in jail, so much had passed between us that I knew it was going to be next to impossible to find some way of getting along. For one thing, I was no longer that troubled kid they saw when I left for YA. In every way that counted, I had a thug’s mentality. I was a lot harder now than when I went away. I’d been schooled by the system and by older gangsters. I’d fired guns in anger and been shot at. I’d robbed people at gunpoint, stolen property out of crowded department stores, ingested enough drugs to kill several horses, and the only people I respected were those with similar or bigger criminal backgrounds.

  After the plane landed at Oahu airport and the plane doors opened, the heat and humidity blasted me. The sight of my family made me break down and cry. Their OP floral shirts flapping in the breeze, they were insanely cute, as innocent as angels, and they were smiling, jumping up and down in their flip-flops as they saw me. For a glorious, brief, shining moment I forgot I was a thug, I forgot I was on parole. I was helpless as this enormous wave of emotion swept through me. My tough-guy dam broke. I cried, they cried. We hugged like we would never let go and stood there for a very long time blubbering and happy. Maybe there was a chance, I thought.

  Although my father wasn’t there because he was deployed to the fleet, there was another person at the airport that day with my family. An absolute knockout named Jasmine. She had green eyes, an amazingly happy disposition, and a body that made heads turn. By the time we’d gotten to the car, my mother warned me— actually, she made me swear—not to go after Jasmine, who she considered a good friend of the family. Jasmine’s husband was also a Marine and they lived in the same base complex as my family. My dad was a good friend of her husband.

  I came to find out soon enough that the rest of the families in the base housing complex didn’t have the scruples that my mother imposed on me. They called the complex Sodom and Gomorrah. In Oceanside and at Camp Lejeune, we had lived off base in our own home. In Hawaii, we lived on base in what could be called garden apartments. On the island the general feeling among the families was that this posting was an elaborate form of an extended camping trip. There was a lot of socializing going on, especially with the men, like my father was at the time, off with the fleet for two months and the women and children left behind on base to entertain themselves as best they could.

  I couldn’t have gotten a better reception when we reached the house. I had my own room, and my mom had bought me a lot of island clothes—OP shorts, floral shirts, flip-flops, drawstring pants, and dock loafers. Coming from YA, where the uniform of the day was khaki pants and Pendleton shirts, this was a strange transition for me. But not an unwelcome one. On base, I’d be just another Marine brat instead of an inmate. After I changed, my mom made a massive meal with all my favorite food for a welcome-home feast. Honestly, nothing had tasted this good in years. My mom is an amazing cook and I ate until I could barely move.

  A few days later, my mom said that she was going to the Staff Club just to socialize and hang out with the other Marine wives. She said that Jasmine was coming and asked me if I wanted to go with them. She said the drinking age was eighteen, and since I was old enough, she told me I could drink but not to overdo it. I’d been a regular drinker and doper for years, so it was a little funny to hear my mom talk to me like I was a teenager fresh off the turnip truck, but I promised I’d keep it under control.

  I’d been locked up for eighteen months at this point and I was ready to do some partying without the fear of being reported by the staff, obeying a curfew, or hitting on whatever girl I wanted to without being punished for socializing after lights-out.

  Before we left, I went to my sister’s room. She was twelve at the time and I asked her to show me what people were dancing like those days. Sure enough, she put on a record and showed me. Ultimately, it wouldn’t matter if I could dance, glide, or stumble around like a lame mule. I didn’t know it, but I was about to land in the middle of a swinger’s paradise.

  When we got there, the first thing I noticed was that the women outnumbered the men by about four to one. Most of the men in those units were off with the fleet, and their wives were making the best of being fleet widows. My mom, innocent as she was, introduced me to her friends in an effort to just get me decompressed from institutional life. The way she saw it, I needed to acclimatize myself to the outside world, and hanging around with other families in our situation would go a long way toward getting me readjusted.

  We were only there about an hour when a blond twenty-eight-year-old that my mom introduced me to earlier asked my mom if I could drive her home. “I’m too drunk to drive and I don’t want to take a chance. Can your son drive me?” My mom says sure. “But you come right back, mijo. Don’t go wandering away.”

  I drove her home and walked her into her apartment to make sure she didn’t fall or anything. We literally barely got through her front door when she was all o
ver me like a cat in heat. Remember, I was eighteen at the time and she was a married woman of twenty-eight. It didn’t seem to matter to her. I didn’t leave until twelve thirty that night and made my way back to the club. I’d been gone for hours. By the time I got back, my mom was a little tipsy but she wasn’t so tipsy that she couldn’t figure out what had happened. I drove her and Jasmine back home feeling like I’d just landed on Fantasy Island, where every wish I wanted was fulfilled.

  For the next few months, I literally did not do much more than go to the club, troll for women, and score. And the odd thing is, I didn’t have to do much trolling. The women were as bad as I was. I was going home with a different Marine wife almost every night of the week. It got so bad that my mom finally had to step in and tell me to stop it. A lot of the women’s husbands were in the same company that my father was in. And if it started getting around that Fred Corona’s son was banging their wives while they were on fleet duty, there could be a lot of trouble for my dad, their wives, and the whole unit. It actually got to the point that it got boring. Not the sex, but the monotonous repetition of doing the same thing night after night.

  After a few months of this, I’d started getting friendly with Ropati, this Samoan kid who lived next door to us. He was the same age as me and we were together so much that people started thinking we were brothers. He started teaching me Samoan and I started teaching him some Spanish. He, naturally, knew how to surf, so he got me to the point where I could stand on a board and do fairly well. I taught him how to lift weights. It wasn’t long after we got friendly that we fell into a routine that would have been the envy of every eighteen-year-old in the world. Or even Hugh Hefner.

  In the mornings we’d go surfing. The afternoons we spent at the base gym working out. We’d go home, eat, take a nap, and by the evening we’d be at the Staff Club or the base golf club. Honest to God, sometimes we were both hitting two to three girls a day. This was paradise. I had three girls I was seeing regularly. One was a twenty-year-old Hawaiian punk rocker name Kahleo who worked at the base PX (Post Exchange). She had a knockout body, crazy-colored hair, and she sang in a punk band.

  Then there was Heather, a really cute white girl with brown hair who served drinks at the Staff Club. She was really possessive. And then there was Tammy, a petite blonde the same age as me whose favorite pastime was getting naked at the beach. Tammy and I would meet in the morning and go down to the beach. She’d tan while Ropati and I surfed. After that, Tammy and I would find some secluded spot in the bushes and spend the early afternoon having sex. After that we’d go swimming to wash the sand off places where sand shouldn’t have been.

  This brief period really was the best time of my life. I was carefree, happy, and for the first time I felt like I could put my past behind me and start fresh. I was so optimistic that I even went down to the recruiting office and tried to join the Marines. When the recruiter got to the part in my résumé about being a convicted felon, he made a face and said it would keep me out of the service. “Come back when your dad is back from fleet duty. We might be able to do something.” Honestly, it was a big disappointment. I wanted to join, hoping that the experience would wash off all the bad and make me into a new person. Meanwhile, I continued my playboy lifestyle and waited for my dad to come home. But by the time he did, my life would be heading in a completely different direction. I’m fairly certain I wouldn’t be where I am today if the Marines had taken me that day. But those are the breaks.

  Her name was Chou. She was a Japanese girl with short black hair and skin as smooth and cool as polished porcelain. She had intensely black eyes that seemed to run about a mile deep, and I literally fell in love with her the first time I saw her. She lived a house down from us. The very first time I saw her, she was wearing tan shorts, a white spaghetti-string blouse, and white sandals. She was carrying towels and walking with a little boy about three or four years old. My heart almost stopped.

  The very next day, Ropati and I were working out in my backyard when that same little boy I saw her with came ambling up to us. He asked me, “What’s your name?” I told him and he took off running the way he came. Five minutes later, he comes back and asks me, “How old are you?” I asked him, “Who wants to know?”

  “My auntie,” he said.

  “Well, why don’t you take me to her,” I said, “and I can tell her myself.”

  He took my hand and led me to her house, which, as I said, was only one house over from ours. I noticed all the shoes at the front door, so I took mine off and went into the living room. From the kitchen I heard a female voice ask, “What did he say, Justin?” So I yelled out to her, “Why don’t you ask me yourself?”

  She was startled, of course. And a little embarrassed. But when we saw each other we started laughing. A feeling shot through me that I’ve only ever felt three times in my life. This first time was with Chou. Then with my wife (my daughter’s mother), and then with my Carolina Cardinal, someone who isn’t part of these confessions. I’ve never as completely and thoroughly given my heart so freely as with those three women.

  Unfortunately, none of them ended with happily-ever-after. Each of those relationships ultimately fell apart and I became a harder person. They helped drive me along the road to the person I am now—guarded and genuinely frightened of giving myself completely to anyone.

  For the next few weeks, I courted Chou in the most chaste way I knew how. We behaved like a Gidget movie. Picnics at the beach, surfing, snorkeling, bowling, going to movies, and all the conventional rituals that were alien to the way I’d been relating to women. A lot of the time I brought my little brothers with me so her nephew, Justin, would have someone to play with. I spent all my time with her and ignored everyone else. Even my best friend, Ropati, had a hard time getting my attention. She had a powerful spell on me that, in fact, made me want to be a different person than the one I was.

  The day came fairly quickly when she wanted to stay home and watch TV one night. It was a night of revelation for me. We made the most intense love I’d ever experienced. It was deep and, if there is such a thing, magical. We could not get enough of each other.

  A few weeks later, I realized that I’d abandoned my best friend, Ropati, and cut off virtually everyone else in my life. We saw each other constantly. She was the first thing I thought of when I woke up in the morning and the last thing I thought of at night.

  My mother pulled me aside one day and told me that I should be careful and not get Chou pregnant. I guess she saw the extremes that I lived by. I was either banging every woman on base or thoroughly besotted by this beautiful young woman. There was no middle ground and I can see now how that was the way I lived my life. No half measures. No halfhearted commitment. It was all or nothing.

  I don’t know if my mom’s warning was a jinx, but one day Chou told me that she had missed her period. She thought she might be pregnant. A lot of men dread to hear those words and a lot more start heading for the door. I was thrilled. The notion of having a child, marriage, starting a life together, filled me with joy. I wanted this more than I realized. She asked what I wanted to do. “I want to be with you forever,” I told her. She hugged me and started to cry. At first I thought they were tears of happiness. Then she dropped the bomb and said that she had lied to me. She wasn’t eighteen years old. She was only sixteen. Naturally my heart sank.

  We talked some more and I told her that I loved her and that I wanted to have a child with her and that I would love the child in a way that I had never been loved. I was happy and ready to commit myself to spending the rest of my life with her and the baby. It was probably immaturity on her part, but she said, “Let’s run away.” That’s something I know how to do really well. I’ve been running away my whole life. But this time I didn’t want to run away. I was getting along with my family for the first time I can remember. I actually felt like I belonged there with my family, her, and the baby. Why would I want to run away
? This is the world that I was looking for.

  I knew that my dad and her brother-in-law would both be back from fleet duty in a few weeks. So I told her to just hang on for a little while. When they got back we would talk to them and put everything on the table. We were in love, she was pregnant, and we wanted to get married.

  In the meantime, Chou and I went to my house to tell my mom. It came as no surprise to her. She smiled at Chou and me. They liked each other and I immediately felt hope that this situation might work out after all. But my mom, practical down to the bone, asked Chou if she’d been to the doctor. She said she had not seen a doctor yet but that she was never late. My mom gave me the keys to her car and told me to take her to the clinic to make sure. Chou and I with her nephew, Justin, in tow went to the clinic where, four hours later, they confirmed that she was pregnant.

  We agreed that we wouldn’t tell her sister until after my dad and brother-in-law got home. We went to my house and showed my mother the paperwork from the clinic. “I knew this was going to happen. I warned you, mijo,” my mom said. Then she tells Chou, “I guess I’m going to be a grandmother, mija,” and she gave Chou a big hug. She also gave us some more advice.

  “You need to tell your sister because I don’t want to be part of any secrets. And you better tell your father as soon as he gets home next week. He’s looking forward to seeing you, but this is the kind of thing that you have to tell him yourself.”