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Maybe because we won every battle but lost the war, Keller thinks. All these deaths for a futile war. On previous trips, he’d seen men lean against the Wall and sob like children. The sense of loss heartbreaking and overwhelming.
Now Keller is at war again—against his own DEA, the US Senate, the Mexican drug cartels, even the president of the United States.
Art Keller has spent most of his life fighting a war on the other side of the border, and now he’s home. The war has come with him.
“If the Sinaloa cartel is unstable, Mexico is unstable.”
So many journalists murdered, Keller thinks, as the cartels realized that they needed to control not only the action, but the narrative as well.
Keller has no way to account for that kind of courage. So it makes him furious when American politicians paint all Mexicans with the broad brush of corruption.
You’re a ghost yourself, he tells himself. A ghost of yourself, existing in a half life. You’ve come back to Mexico because you’re more at home with the dead than the living.
Keller knows that they can never have what they once had. There’s too much shared sorrow between them, too many loved ones killed, each death like a stone in a wall built so high that it can’t be breached.
All veterans of an unspeakable war, she thinks. From which there has been—in the pop-speak of the day—no “closure.” No victory or defeat.
Even if you could control the traditional press, corralling social media is like grabbing mercury—it slips out of your hand and breaks into a thousand more pieces.
It’s funny, he thinks, how the big decisions in your life don’t always follow a big moment or a big change, but just seem to settle on you like an inevitability, something you didn’t decide at all but has always been decided for you.
“We wear our sorrow like it’s some sort of medal,” Keller says. “Drag it around like a chain, and it’s heavy, Mari. I don’t want to let it beat us, make us less than we are. We’ve lost so much, let’s not lose each other, too. That’s too big a loss.”
Art Keller is a good man to have as a boss and a dangerous man to have as an enemy.
Adán Barrera, drug trafficker and mass murderer, became a combination of Houdini, Zorro, Amelia Earhart, and Mahatma Gandhi. A misunderstood child of rural poverty who rose from his humble beginnings to wealth and power by selling a product that, after all, people wanted anyway, and who is now a benefactor, a philanthropist harassed and hunted by two governments that he brilliantly eludes and outwits.
We’re in a double bind, Keller thinks. The Sinaloa cartel is the key driver behind the heroin traffic. If we help take the cartel down, we destroy the Pax Sinaloa. If we lay off the cartel, we accept the continuation of the heroin crisis here.
They talk a good game, they wave around gold-plated pistols and AKs, but they’ve never walked the walk. Spoiled, entitled and vacuous, they think they’re just owed the money and the power. They have no idea what comes with it.
But they made less millions than they had the year before, and it was human nature that, even if you’re rich, being less rich feels like being poor.
A ready-made market that’s just waiting for us to take advantage of. And the Americans have created it themselves.” The giant American pharmaceutical companies, he explained, had addicted thousands of people to legal painkillers. Pills. Oxycodone, Vicodin and others, all opium derivatives, all the fruit of the poppy. But the pills are expensive and can be hard to obtain, Adán explained.
She’s right, Keller thinks. Mari’s charm has proved to be an effective antidote to what has been referred to as his “anticharm,” and she has opened doors (and kept them open) that would otherwise be closed to him.
The knock on me is that I’m not an administrator and don’t have a clue how to run a gigantic organization. That rap is accurate—I don’t. What I do have is you. I will give clear, concise direction and I trust you to make the organization work toward those objectives. What I expect from you is loyalty, honesty and hard work. What you can expect from me is loyalty, honesty, hard work and support. I will never stab you in the back, but I will stab you in the chest if I catch you playing games. Don’t be afraid to make mistakes—only slackers and cowards don’t make mistakes. But if we have a
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Adán Barrera’s Pax Sinaloa ended before he was even lowered into the ground, Keller thinks, watching the news on Univision.
It’s tempting to think that the root causes of the heroin epidemic are in Mexico, because he’s so focused on interdiction, but the real source is right here and in scores of smaller cities and towns.
Opiates are a response to pain. Physical pain, emotional pain, economic pain. He’s looking at all three. The Heroin Trifecta.
You’re standing on the Rio Grande with a broom, he thinks, trying to sweep back the tide of heroin while billionaires are sending jobs overseas, closing factories and towns, killing hopes and dreams, inflicting pain.
The difference between a hedge fund manager and a cartel boss? Wharton Business School.
Tens of billions of drug dollars—in cash—go down to Mexico alone every year, so much cash they don’t even count it, they weigh it. It has to go somewhere, the narcos can’t stick it under their pillows or dig holes in their backyards. A lot of it is invested in Mexico, the estimate being that drug money accounts for 7 to 12 percent of the Mexican economy.
It’s the dirty secret of the war on drugs—every time an addict sticks a needle into his arm, everyone makes money. We’re all investors. We’re all the cartel.
“Smack is killing kids here now,” Mullen says. “Which is why we have an ‘epidemic.’ When it was blacks and Puerto Ricans, it wasn’t an illness, it was a crime, right?”
The revolving door of bust-and-convict doesn’t. I arrest addicts, they shoot up in jail. I take dealers out, new ones take their place. I seize heroin, more comes in.
“You feel like you’re trying to sweep back the ocean,” Keller says.
Art Keller is more liberal, wants to see a relaxation of drug prohibition laws, reduction of mandatory sentences and more focus placed on treatment than prohibition. Howard is a hard-liner on prohibition, a “lock ’em up and throw away the key” conservative.
So all we’ve really done is to create job vacancies worth killing for.”
“You want to lose,” Andrea says. “All degenerate gamblers, what they really want is to lose. Something about punishing themselves, I don’t know.”
La Eme, the Aryan Brotherhood, and the Black Guerrillas all started when the prisons desegregated and threw the races together on the same cell blocks and yards. People being what people are, they started killing each other right away and quickly formed into the gangs to protect themselves. When the prisoners got out, they took the gangs to the streets, spinning a revolving door that never stopped.
Eddie laughs his ass off when he hears dumbass ignorant politicians like John Dennison say they’re going to send the gangs “back to where they came from.” They were hecho en los Estados Unidos. Made in the USA.
Eddie had heard the saying that love brings people together, but he knew that hate is the stronger bond. Hate is the Krazy Glue of social emotions.
Cruelly, he has just enough self-awareness to know that he’s a monster, but not enough to escape his monster’s cage.
You killed the wolf, Keller thinks, and now the coyotes are loose.
And he starts to enjoy it, discovers that when he stops the partying, the boozing, the drugging, that he likes taking care of the business—the strategizing, the allocation of resources and personnel, even fighting the war against Elena and Tito.
“Good,” says Caro. He struggles up from the chair. “Now I’m going for a nap. When I get up, I don’t want to see any of you, and I don’t want to hear that you’ve killed each other. I was at the table when M-1 put this thing together. I was in prison when all of you let it fall apart.”
It’s the way of the world, Nico thinks. Everyone passes up to someone. Maybe somewhere at the very top, there are men who just collect and collect, but he has no idea who those people are.
Nico is sad to leave but doesn’t really know why. He can’t realize that it’s one of the few places he’s ever received kindness.
Then he went off on some World War II analogy about some city that Churchill let the Germans bomb even though he was forewarned they were going to bomb it. “It would have tipped the Germans that we had their code,” Mullen said, “which might have lost the war. So Churchill had to let thousands of innocent people get killed in order to win the war.”
“I can’t promise,” Lerner says, “that our connections would or would not take any specific actions—” “Of course not,” Echeverría says. Okay, Keller thinks. “But you will always find an ear,” Lerner says. My God, Keller thinks. My God. If John Dennison wins the election— The cartel has bought the White House.
Keller wakes up the morning after the election thinking that he doesn’t know his own country anymore. We’re not, he thinks, who I thought we were.
What depresses him is loss of an ideal, an identity, an image of what this country is. Or was. That his country would vote for a racist, a fascist, a gangster, a preening, crowing narcissist, a fraud. A man who boasts about assaulting women, mocks a disabled man, cozies up with dictators. A demonstrated liar.
Have a ten-dollar bill change hands in the projects, you go to jail. Change three hundred million on Wall Street, you go to dinner at the White House.
“Develop some false information,” Keller says, “and feed it to Blair.” An echo test.
“What if I told you,” Keller says, “that there’s a real concern that drug cartels are purchasing influence at the highest levels of the United States government?”
Forty years. Fighting that war, doing wrong for the greater good, making deals, playing God, close-dancing with the devil.
