Drug Lord: The Life and Death of a Mexican Kingpin : A True Story - Softcover

Poppa, Terrence E.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0966443004 ISBN 13: 9780966443004

Publisher: Demand Pubns, 1998

Synopsis

An exposé of the connections between crime and government in Mexico, this is the story of Pablo Acosta, the notorious scar-faced Mexican drug lord. Controlling crime along 250 miles of the Rio Grande, he was responsible for creating a narcotics hub in northern Mexico that smuggled 60 tons of cocaine a year into the United States. This book chronicles Pablo Acosta's bloody rise and his spectacular fall at the hands of the same system that had protected him until he made the mistake of talking to a U.S. reporter—the author—about the arrangement. Also included are details about Pablo Acosta's successor, Amado Carrillo Fuentes.

About this title

About the Author

Terrence E. Poppa is an award-winning journalist and Pulitzer Prize finalist who owns and operates a private investigative agency. He lives in Seattle, Washington.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

FOREWORD BY PETER LUPSHA

Many books have been published during the last several decades about drug trafficking and drug traffickers. Few have risen above the limitations of the true crime genre. For the most part, these works offer little more than insights into the greed of particular individuals. It is refreshing therefore when a book comes along that goes beyond this narrow focus of an individual morality play, and offers perspectives and conceptual tools for understanding the activity's destructive origin. One such book is this one.
Drug Lord is a riveting portrait of Pablo Acosta, the scar-faced Mexican padrino who controlled crime along 250 miles of the Rio Grande. It is a linear work that traces the drug lord's rise from humble beginnings, his rapid ascension to power through murder and treachery, his smuggling of sixty tons of cocaine a year into the United States, his struggles to defend his expanding empire against rivals, the betrayals and over-indulgence that fostered his downfall, and his dramatic death at the hands of the same police system that had been giving him protection.
This story of a Mexican drug trafficker would be worthy even if it had been limited to biography. This is in fact the first inside look at a Mexican drug trafficking organization ever published. But Poppa's book is much more. By following the life and career of Pablo Acosta, the granddaddy of Mexican cocaine traffickers and mentor of Amado Carrillo Fuentes, the future "Lord of the Skies," Poppa lays out a brutal truth that many in Washington D.C. still refuse to believe. Namely, that drug trafficking in Mexico is controlled from the top by key agencies of government, political institutions and key officials among the elite. The drug kingpins, despite their riches and violence, are merely pawns in this system. They are the front men and the fall guys, the expendable employees. They are like Aztec princes of old who were allowed to have their time in the sun but whose hearts were cut out in ritualized sacrifice when the glory days were over.

The success of Pablo Acosta in reaching the pinnacle of organized crime power was not simply the product of violent individual entrepreneurship and gang leadership ability, but was actually the result of a license, a franchise given out by Mexican state and federal government officials to drug traffickers in return for a large percentage of the take and other services. Thus, Poppa was among the first to understand that this was not the work of a few bad-apple politicians and policemen, but was the product of an embedded system of organized corruption that runs from Mexico City through the state capitols and government officials down to the regions where the traffickers operate. These concessions were zoned out along administrative and jurisdictional lines. It was a system known as la plaza and is useful to quote what the author has to say about this at length here, for it forms the conceptual fabric of the entire book:

For decades Mexican informants tried to explain the idea to their law-enforcement contacts in the United States. When somebody had the plaza, it meant that he was paying an authority or authorities with sufficient power to ensure that he would not be bothered by police or by the military. The protection money went up the ladder, with percentages shaved off at each level up the chain of command until reaching the Grand Protector or the Grand Protectors in the scheme.
To stay in the good graces of his powerful patrons, the plaza holder had a dual obligation: to generate money for his protectors, and to lend his intelligence gathering abilities by fingering the independent operators -- those narcotics traffickers and drug growers who tried to avoid paying the necessary tribute. The independents were the ones who got busted by the Mexican Federal Judicial Police, the Mexican equivalent of the FBI, or by the army, giving Mexico statistics to show it was involved in authentic drug enforcement. That most of the seized narcotics was then recycled -- sold to the favored groups or outrightly smuggled by police groups -- was irrelevant. The seizures were in fact made and there were headlines to prove it.

Sometimes, the authorities would protect their man from rivals; other times they would not, preferring a variety of natural selection to determine who should run the plaza. If the authorities arrested or killed the plaza holder, it was usually because he had stopped making payments, or because his name had started to appear in the press too frequently and the trafficker had become a liability. Sometimes international pressure became so strong that the government was forced to take action against a specific individual --regardless of how much money he was generating for his patrons.
It was a system that enabled the Mexican political and police structures to keep a lid on drugs and profit handsomely from it at the same time.

This, in a few clear and concise paragraphs, is the history of drug trafficking in Mexico for at least the last half of this century, if not longer. Because of such insights, graphically illustrated in the life and death of Pablo Acosta, Poppa's book rises far above the level of anything that has ever been written about the subject. It is a deft allegory, a bold paradigm, a courageous denunciation that cuts through the smokescreen of official posturing, blanket denials, and sophisticated coverups.
As allegory, it shows that Mexico's drug kingpins are, in truth, simply the replaceable cogs used and exploited by an official system of political and governmental corruption and control. Replace Pablo Acosta's name with that of any drug trafficker, past or present, and it is the same story. Change the name of Ojinaga -- Pablo Acosta's town -- to Mexico, and you have the big picture.
Thus Poppa's Drug Lord is the biography of Rafael Caro Quintero, the Guadalajara drug thug who was arrested after American pressure over the murder of DEA agent Enrique Camarena. It is the history of Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo or of Juan Garcia Abrego, traffickers who lost their plaza franchises and their freedom after changes in Mexican political administrations. It is the profile of Rafael Aguilar Guajardo, a trafficker-turned-Mexican-federal-security-police-commander who was assassinated two days after threatening to reveal his high-level Mexican government contacts. It is the career of Amado Carrillo Fuentes, the infamous cocaine trafficker who died recently under surgery after indicating he was shifting his operations from Mexico to Chile. It is the story-in-the-making of the Arrellano Felix brothers -- Benjamin and Ramon, of the so-called Tijuana cartel -- currently the big names in drug trafficking today. The names are many, but the story remains the same.
These insights and the tenacious bravery that it took to uncover the truth easily rank Poppa as one of the most remarkable journalists of the last decade. Indeed, the history of the origin of this book is almost as gripping as the book itself. A prize winning journalist and a Pulitzer Prize finalist, Poppa arrived as a border reporter and a correspondent for Scripps Howard News Service in 1984, a time of political turmoil in Mexico and fear that a revolt in northern Mexico was just around the corner. He explored the election-rigging practices of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, known as the PRI, the party that emerged from the Mexican Revolution that has monopolized power even to this day. Very quickly, Poppa began to see the connections between crime and the institutionalized power system. He wrote numerous reports about the theft of American automobiles by Mexican federal and state police agencies, providing photographic and documentary evidence. Later, he began to see the connections between the traffickers and the PRI's federal and state police agencies. The entrenched interests quickly took note of this unwanted exposure. Soon, he was being portrayed on a state-controlled Mexican television station as a CIA spy. Reams of "Wanted" posters bearing his photo and branding him as an "anti-Mexican agitator" were being handed out from Mexican state police agencies. Each published report brought fresh threats against the author, threats that culminated in the kidnapping and torture of an American freelance news photographer, Al Gutierrez, by one of the border traffickers and a promise to kill Poppa in reprisal for stories that he had written.
In response, the author's news organization bought him a handgun and sent him on the road. That allowed him to get out of Dodge while things cooled down, but at the same time to explore the growing cocaine trafficking corridor that was appearing through north-central Mexico. He ended up in the stronghold and hideout of Pablo Acosta, then one of the most powerful drug traffickers of northern Mexico, feared for his reputation for killing rivals and then dragging their bodies behind his Bronco through the desert until there was not much left except a shredded torso. Poppa spent two days with Acosta, tape-recording hours and hours of interviews with the fearsome trafficker. Between drags from crack-laced Marlboros and swigs of El Presidente brandy, Acosta spoke of murders, smuggling and protection. When the newspaper reports based on the meeting were published, an embarrassed Mexico City sent a squad of crack federal police after Acosta. They trapped the drug lord five months later and killed him in a machine-gun battle reminiscent of Vietnam for its intensity.
A few months later, Poppa wrote one of the most comprehensive newspaper series ever written up to that time about the nature of crime in Mexico and its ties to the government of Mexico, a report that led to an invitation to testify before the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Investigations. Simultaneously, two of the most notorious traffickers named in the series, Rafael Aguilar Guajardo and Gilberto Ontiveros, put up $250,000 in cocaine to have Poppa kidnapped, taken into Mexico, and killed. This threat was picked up by an informant of the U.S. Customs Service. Federal agents warned Poppa of the threat and advised him to take precautions. Poppa, in turn, reported the threat to a United States senator who turned to the U.S. Customs Commissioner for help. The threat was investigated from Washington, the information was determined to have come from one of the service's best placed sources in Mexico. Several days later, Poppa was invited to the Customs enforcement office in El Paso where he was shown a memorandum that had been sent to every enforcement office along the border, giving the American feds instructions to inform their counterparts in Mexico that the United States intended to shut down the border from San Diego to Brownsville if there are any further threats against the reporter. Two days later, Customs learned that the traffickers had withdrawn the $250,000 contract.
It was at that point that Poppa quit newspaper reporting to began an investigation into the Pablo Acosta organization, work that led him into the heart of the biggest cocaine corridor ever created in the Western Hemisphere. The result is this book.
The author was on the trail of one of the worthiest stories of our times, that the real problem facing the United States as a drug crime victim is a governmental system south of the border of exploitation and corruption that controls and manipulates the traffickers for the benefit of the system. The result has been a flooding of North America with drugs and the pervasive misery and social disruptions they have caused. At the time this book first came out, the north-central Mexican state of Chihuahua was already being used as the main corridor for bringing cocaine to the United States. The governorship of Chihuahua under Fernando Baeza Melendez, the Fifth Military Zone in Chihuahua City, the federal police headquarters there and the state police agencies throughout Chihuahua, not to mention the key federal agencies such as Customs, were securely under the control of this embedded protection system. It is estimated that 400 tons of cocaine were flown into northern Mexico from Colombia during the first two years of this operation. Of that, twenty-two tons were discovered in 1989 a warehouse in Sylmar, just north of Los Angeles. Many of these facts have subsequently come to light.
The history of the last seven years, therefore, has been the history of the corroboration this incredibly fascinating work. Hardly a month goes by without some new revelation. Many of the people in Poppa's book continue to make the news, such as Guillermo Gonzalez Calderoni, the Mexican federal police commander who hunted down and killed Pablo Acosta. This top-ranking Mexican federal police commander later defected to the United States. In exchange for safe harbor here, he passed on information to the FBI about his government's drug trafficking involvement, including details of fabulous wealth the brother of the Mexican president at the time was amassing thanks to protection he was giving to a Gulf Coast trafficker, and the scheming by this presidential sibling to buy up state-owned port facilities on the Gulf of Mexico to facilitate drug transshipments. Poppa was the first to write about Amado Carrillo Fuentes, Pablo Acosta's partner and successor who eventually became the most powerful of the Mexican drug traffickers of the 1990s until his freakish death in 1997 while undergoing plastic surgery. Scandals involving Mexican generals on Carrillo Fuentes' payroll have made the headlines.
In light of all of these revelations, it is indeed interesting to listen to the self-serving speeches of Mexican presidents blaming the drug trafficking problem on consumption in the United States. The most recent example is President Ernesto Zedillo's demand that the United States make "reparations" to Mexico to make up for the "filthy mess" drug consumption in the United States supposedly caused down there. Poppa's book is a valuable tool for correctly interpreting these grotesque distortions. Such rhetoric is likely to grow in frequency and hysteria the more the truth about the mafia nature of the Mexican system comes out.
The mills of the gods grind slowly, but they grind fine. Things are changing in Mexico. The major parties and institutions and elites and their embedded systems of corruption are still in place but cracks in the structure are showing. The Institutional Revolutionary Party is as decrepit and faltering as the Communist Party was in the Soviet Union a decade ago. Elections in July of 1997 created new coalitions in the Mexican Congress and for the first time have opened the door to investigating and cracking the system of corruption and its connections to trafficking. Whether this opportunity can be successfully exploited, however remains to be seen. For the elites and institutions of Mexico, particularly the military, which is likely to fill and control any vacuums in drug trafficking, are extremely powerful. We are likely to see many traffickers and drug lords like Pablo Acosta come and go, and plaza franchises change hands all along the border before we see real change in the Mexican system. Thus, while Poppa's book tells a story at one point in time, it is still as relevant and important reading today was when it was first written. For, while the players change, the play continues. And sad to say, most Americans and many policy makers in Washington still do not understand.
Drug Lord is an exciting and important book which can help to change this. I urge you to read on.

CHAPTER 11
With Fermin Arevalo finally out of the way, Pablo could sit back and revel in his fame as padrino, a role that required displays of generosity.
It actually felt good to give things to people. Frequently, he started the day by spreading thousand-peso notes around to the grimy chicleros and shoeshine boys in the town square or at the hotels. If he didn't go himself, he sent someone in his name.
People, most frequently destitute older women, rang the bell on the high wrought-iron gate in front of his home on Calle Sexta. If he was at home, he never failed to allow them in and hold audience in the manner befitting a padrino. He listened to them in respectful silence and spoke to them kindly. He was moved by the desperation in their eyes. It reminded him of his mother's eyes, and the eyes of his aunt Hermenegilda when they lived in those miserable hovels down by Santa Elena at Ejido Providencia, when the money and food had run short and there were so many hungry bellies.
Pablo also understood what it took for proud people to come to him and beg. He never "gave" them what they asked for; he "loaned" it, knowing that the semantic white lie allowed the petitioner to save face.
"No tenga cuidado, seora. Don't worry about it. You can pay me back when you have the money."
Someone once reminded him that loans are meant to be paid back.
"Forget it," he answered. "They are poor people. How do you expect them to pay me back?"
Pharmacists in Ojinaga became familiar with the sight of elderly women and men coming in with a note from Pablo saying "Go ahead and fill out the prescription. Someone will come by later with the money." Then one of his men, quite often his nephew Pedro, would drop into the pharmacy later in the day and peel off what was owed from a fat wad of money.
Sometimes Pablo picked up the cost of transporting sick people to the general hospital in Chihuahua City or paid for the entire cost of their surgery or medical treatment. On other occasions he had some of his men go out and round up a cow, usually from one of his own ranches, but he wasn't always a stickler about where the animal came from. He would have the animal slaughtered and would give the meat away to hungry families.
Recalled a close friend of Pablo's who witnessed some of the informal audiences at Pablo's home: "He often talked about their poverty. He would ask me, 'Why doesn't the government do more for them? Why are they paid so little? In the United States, people are always paid more or less well, enough at least to get by on. Here they are paid a salary of misery.'"
For Pablo, giving was not as compulsive as it had been for Shorty Lopez. He gave with the idea of getting something back, even if only a sliver of useful intelligence from some toothless old peasant up the river. What was a crisp twenty-dollar bill for a tip that American police were patrolling the river, say down by Lajitas? Or that a truck carrying six hundred pounds of marijuana had come through his plaza and the owner hadn't sought his permission or paid him tribute?
Over the years, Pablo had a fortune in water pumps, fencing, plastic irrigation piping, and other equipment trucked in from the United States. The materials got distributed to a lot of ranches, gratis. Those ranchers would look the other way when Pablo's men drove through or landed an airplane late at night. He had purchased their silent complicity.
There were times when the petitioners were not welcome. A former friend of Pablo's recalled the day he and the drug lord of Ojinaga were in the Los Alamos Bar across the street from the ranch-style home of the garrison commander. Next to the general's residence was an apartment building reserved for garrison officers, and they frequented the bar. On this particular occasion, a lieutenant in civilian clothes walked up to Pablo and without beating around the bush asked for some money. The soldier explained that he had vacation time coming and he wanted to visit his family in Michoacan. Pablo pulled some money out of his shirt pocket and gave the officer the equivalent of a hundred dollars in pesos. The officer looked at the money with an air of dissatisfaction and said, "Couldn't you make it more?"
Pablo took out the wad of money again and gave him another hundred, then watched as the officer stuffed the money in his pocket and walked out.
Pablo was the beneficiary of the arrangement with the military. Without it, there was no way he could do what he was doing. Soldiers protected his fields, soldiers protected his shipments. Yet even he was disgusted by the behavior of the army lieutenant. "It's really a disgrace that a man with such a position could lower himself so shamefully," he told his friend.
Everybody was hitting Pablo up for money, and he had to work hard to make money for himself. It was almost like a system of taxation. He built a bridge over an arroyo on the road to El Mulato; he built an old people's home in downtown Ojinaga. He added rooms to the agricultural high school and paid for furnishings; he clothed and equipped soccer and baseball teams; he had Ojinaga schools painted and repaired. To officialdom he gave away scores of the automobiles and trucks stolen in the United States and taken to him in Ojinaga to be traded for drugs. It was easy to get them registered in Mexico, stolen or not, and they made terrific gifts to protectors.
Few mature adults in Ojinaga were fooled by Pablo's running of their town. The alliance of crime and authority was scarcely disguised, and many citizens understood it for what it was: a form of contempt for the people. When a new garrison commander came to town, he sent troops to block off the street in front of Pablo's house on Calle Sexta?not to arrest Pablo but to prepare the way for a courtesy visit by the new general. The soldiers weren't posted outside to stop the crooks but to detain and question honest citizens who inadvertently turned down Pablo's street while the general was with Pablo, possibly working out the plaza payment with him.
The young were the most taken by Pablo, and gauging his influence among them was as simple as asking questions in the street. Said a young road worker one blistering afternoon in Ojinaga about a year after it was all over, "If anyone ran this town, it was Pablo. The guy had balls to spare. He was the one who told the military and the police what to do. If someone stole some grass from him, all he had to do was to call the military and the police and they would keep looking until they found it. He knew how to spread the money around."
The road worker, covered from head to foot with sweat and dust, continued: "Yeah, he got a lot of respect, he and his men. If they'd said to me 'Hey, grab this machine gun and pistol and come join us,' I would have grabbed the machine gun and pistol and joined them."
The young laborer was asked if he was ever invited to join them.
"Nah, they never did. But if they had, I would have gone with them for sure. That's the way to make money. And that's the way to get a lot of..."
He thrust out his skinny hips to show what he meant and smiled through the dust on his face. "Pablo had a lot of girlfriends, mano. And he had something big to love them with too."
He spread his callused hands widely to show how big he thought Pablo's was.
"That guy had it all!"

The shootout with Fermin both helped Pablo by enhancing his aura of invincibility and hurt him by giving him a high profile on both sides of the border.
A newspaper story appeared in one of the Ojinaga weeklies a few days later giving the bare facts and simply noted that Fermin Arevalo and Adalberto Hinojosa, the ranch foreman, had been "ruthlessly murdered" around five in the afternoon the previous Wednesday at Fermin's El Salto ranch. The article omitted Pablo's name, even though his role in the death duel had been the talk of the town for days.
Embellishments to the stories about the showdown quickly began to circulate. In one, Pablo sliced off Fermin's penis and testicles and then went back to the ranch to present them to the widow with a question: "Which part of Fermin would you prefer?" Another version had Pablo filling Fermin's abdomen with stones and then dragging the body behind the perforated Bronco until there was nothing left of Fermin but a shredded torso.
Dr. Artemio Gallegos, whose office had been the scene of a shootout that brought Manuel Carrasco's Ojinaga career to an end, performed the autopsy at the funeral home. He counted fourteen bullet holes in all and sewed up the long abdominal incision Zacarias had prepared for him. The doctor certified that the dead trafficker wasn't missing genitalia or limbs.
The embellishments made Pablo appear formidable, unbeatable, ferocious: a warning to would-be rivals for the Ojinaga plaza. Only Pablo and the four men with him at El Salto knew how close they had come to being the losers that day.
Pablo nurtured the image of his invincibility with a deft gesture: he had the shot-up red-and-white Bronco towed to Ojinaga and placed on blocks right next to the main highway barely a city block away from his home on Calle Sexta. The vehicle remained enthroned there for years, a warning to anyone who would challenge him.
The high profile also had disadvantages. To the Americans, Pablo had become one of the best-known drug traffickers in northern Chihuahua. His notoriety helped other big dealers maintain their own anonymity, an asset in the drug business. Drug bosses in the interior of Mexico instructed their runners to claim, if they were caught, that the load belonged to Pablo. Rightly or wrongly, much of the narcotics seized in West Texas was assumed to belong to Pablo. It was one of the prices a drug lord paid for fame.
Another price Pablo paid was bearing responsibility for violent acts of which he had no part. As with the loads of narcotics, any shooting was automatically attributed to him. And with murder and mayhem seemingly breaking out all over, Pablo was beginning to look very bloodthirsty indeed.
For authorities across the river, the problem was that that violence was beginning to spill into Presidio and the Texas borderlands to the east and west.
Just two months before Fermin's death a couple of men shot each other to death inside a pickup truck in downtown Presidio in what was presumed to be a drug-related altercation. They had been driving down the main drag with a third man sitting in between when they started blasting away at one another with pistols. The pickup crashed into the wall of a Texaco gas station. When onlookers opened the door on the driver's side, the driver fell out dead. The same when they opened the other door; the passenger tumbled dead to the ground. The man in the middle was in a state of shock; crisscrossing his chest were graze wounds from the gunfight between his companions.
It later turned out the two dead men had begun a drinking spree at Pablo's house. The conclusion was that the shooting was drug-related and Pablo was behind it.
Then, several months after Fermin's death, someone drove up behind a pickup truck on the highway to Redford and opened fire on some kids in the back. A twelve-year-old boy was killed. Texas authorities didn't have a clue to the murder, but word spread that it was Pablo Acosta's doing, just like all the other shootings.
And more than ever before, American lawmen were getting shot. The year before Fermin's death, someone from El Mulato, a village downriver across from Redford, shot and seriously wounded a U.S. border patrolman. Shortly after that, some Texas narcotics officers waiting to nab some drug smugglers down by Redford were greeted by a spray of machine-gun fire from across the Rio Grande.
These and other incidents caused authorities in Presidio and Brewster counties to worry that it was just a matter of time before their jurisdictions would become uncontrollable battlegrounds. What happened in Mexico was not their business; what happened on the Texas side of the river was. Not long after the death of Fermin the sheriff of Presidio County, Rick Thompson, sent an "envoy" to Pablo to relay a simple request in the hope of forestalling such a development: "I asked one thing of Pablo," Thompson recalled. "I asked him that anything explosive, the killings and things, remain outside of my county. I didn't want any bodies scattered on this side of the river with no explanations."
Pablo never sent a reply to the sheriff but in November 1983 he invited one of the Texas Rangers stationed in Alpine, Clayton McKinney, to meet him in Mexico. McKinney and a Texas Department of Public Safety narcotics officer met Pablo on a hill outside Ojinaga. In an arrogant display of his power, Pablo posted eighteen well-armed men around the hill. Pablo never said exactly why he wanted to meet the American lawman??neither when he extended the invitation nor when McKinney showed up. But it became apparent as they talked amid the greasewood bushes and brown desert grass that the Ojinaga drug lord wanted to set the record straight about all of the shootings. He was not behind the killings that had occurred lately, he insisted; and even the death of Fermin Arevalo was overblown by the border rumor mill; he and his men had gone to the El Salto ranch to try to work things out and Fermin had ambushed them. What is a man to do in such a situation but defend himself, Pablo asked the Texas lawman?
Pablo evidently wanted to appease the Americans. He had authorities on his side of the river under control. Now it was to his advantage to work out some sort of mutual backscratching arrangement with the gringo law. Being in charge in Ojinaga, Pablo could provide some cooperation in investigations when it wasn't forthcoming from the Mexican authorities, a frequent complaint among American law enforcement.
Pablo and Clayton McKinney held further meetings.

Shootings and killings in Presidio didn't exactly come to an end as a result of these unusual contacts. Just after the first meeting a Mexican game warden shot another man to death just outside Presidio. But Pablo did bring about some changes. Following the unusual meetings with the Texas Ranger, no more American officers were getting shot at. The U.S. Border Patrol later picked up reports that Pablo had spread the word; anyone shooting at an American officer was going to have to answer to Pablo. "If it looks like you're going to get caught with a load," Pablo reportedly told all of his people, "drop everything and run. If you can't run, surrender. I can always get you out on bond. I don't want any U.S. lawmen getting killed."
According to McKinney, Pablo later was also helpful on occasion in recovering some stolen cattle and some stolen vehicles and in providing help in other investigations when assistance could not be obtained from Mexican authorities. Once he sent somebody across the river on an "errand" for him late one night. The errand boy was someone the Americans wanted for jailbreak and was someone Pablo evidently considered dispensable. When the man got to the other side of the river, Pablo, parked on the opposite riverbank, flashed his high beams and the fugitive was caught.
There were other instances of "cooperation." But years later, reflecting on that first meeting with Pablo Acosta, McKinney said he never could really understand what had been in it for the drug lord. As long as Pablo stayed in Mexico, he could not be arrested by American policemen anyway; and in light of all of the criminal activity his organization was involved in, the help he gave U.S. law enforcement in certain instances did not amount to much. McKinney speculated that Pablo had another motive, one stemming from a very logical assumption: Pablo knew that, sooner or later, his power in Mexico would come to an end. The moment could come when he might actually want to surrender to the Americans. Pablo wanted to have some contacts in place to help smooth the way.

Edition details

• Publisher: Demand Pubns
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0966443004
• ISBN 13: 9780966443004
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 364