Don Winslow - The Power of the Dog

You can play in these towns, but you have to play nice.

And they are certainly playing tonight, Adan thinks as he watches Fabian Martinez dance with three or four blond German girls.

There is too much business to take care of, the unceasing cycle of product going north and money coming south. There are the constant business arrangements with the Orejuelas, then the actual movement of the cocaine from Colombia to Mexico, then the endless challenge of getting it safely into the States and converting it to crack, then selling it to the retailers, collecting the money, getting the cash back into Mexico and cleaning it.

Some of the money goes into fun, but a lot of the money goes into bribes.

Silver or lead.

Plata o plomo.

One of the Barrera lieutenants would simply go to the local police comandante or army commander with a bag full of cash and give him the choice in those exact words: “?Plata o plomo?”

That’s all that needed to be said. The meaning was clear-you can get rich or you can get dead. You choose.

If they chose rich, it was Adan’s business. If they chose dead, that was Raul’s business.

Most people chose rich.

Cono, Adan thinks, most of the cops planned on getting rich. In fact, they had to buy their positions from their superiors, or pay a monthly share of their mordida. It was like a franchise operation. Burger King, Taco Bell, McBribes. Easiest money in the world. Money for nothing. Just look the other way, be someplace else, see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil, and the monthly payment will be there in full and on time.

And the war, Adan reflects, watching the partiers dance in the shimmering blue light, has been a further boon for the cops and the army. Mendez pays his cops to bust our dope, we pay our guys to bust Mendez’s dope. It’s a good deal for everyone except the guy whose dope gets popped. Say the Baja State Police seize a million dollars of Guero’s cocaine. We pay them a $100,000 “finder’s fee,” they get to be heroes in the papers and look like good guys to the Yanquis, and then after a decent interval they sell us that million bucks’ worth of blow for $500,000.

It’s a win-win deal.

And that’s in Mexico alone.

There are also U.S. Customs agents to pay to look the other way when cars full of coke or grass or heroin come through their stations-$30,000 a carload, no matter what’s in it. And still, there’s no way to guarantee that your car is going to go through a “clean” checkpoint, even though you’ve bought condo buildings whose top floors overlook the crossing stations and you have lookouts up there who are in radio contact with your drivers and try to steer them toward the “right” lanes. But the Customs agents are switched often and arbitrarily, and other agents are monitoring radio bands, so if you send a dozen cars at a time through the border crossings at San Ysidro and Otay Mesa, you expect nine or ten of them to get through.

There are bribes to city cops in San Diego, Los Angeles, San Bernardino, you name it. And to state police, and sheriff’s departments. And secretaries and typists in the DEA who can slip you info on what investigations are going on, with what technology. Or even to that rare, rare, DEA agent you could get on the arm, but they are few and far between, because between the DEA and the Mexican cartels there is a blood feud, still, from the killing of Ernie Hidalgo.

Art Keller sees to that.

And thank God for that, Adan thinks, because while Keller’s revenge obsession might cost me money in the short run, in the long run it makes me money. And that is what the Americans simply cannot seem to understand-that all they do is drive up the price and make us rich. Without them, any bobo with an old truck or a leaky boat with an outboard motor could run drugs into El Norte. And then the price would not be worth the effort. But as it is, it takes millions of dollars to move the drugs, and the prices are accordingly sky-high. The Americans take a product that literally grows on trees and turn it into a valuable commodity. Without them, cocaine and marijuana would be like oranges, and instead of making billions smuggling it, I’d be making pennies doing stoop labor in some California field, picking it.

And the truly funny irony is that Keller is himself another product because I make millions selling protection against him, charging the independent contractors who want to move their product through La Plaza thousands of dollars for the use of our cops, soldiers, Customs agents, Coast Guard, surveillance equipment, communications… This is what Mexican cops appreciate that American cops don’t. We are partners, mi hermano Arturo, in the same enterprise.

Comrades in the War on Drugs.

We could not exist without each other.

Adan watches as two Nordic-looking young women stand under the waterfall, letting the spray soak their thin T-shirts to display their breasts to any and all admirers, of which there are quite a few. The disco music is pounding, the dancing frenetic, the drinking hard, fast and constant. It’s El Dia de los Muertos, and most of the people in the crowd here tonight are old friends from Culiacan or Badiraguato, and if you’re a narco from Sinaloa you have a lot of dead to remember.

There are a lot of ghosts at this party.

It’s been a bloody war.

But, Adan thinks, hopefully it is almost over, and we will get back to pure business.

Because Adan Barrera has reinvented the drug business.

The traditional shape of any of the Mexican pasadores was the pyramid. Similar to the Sicilian Mafia families, there was a godfather, a boss, then captains, then soldiers, and every level “kicked up” to the next. The lower levels made very little money unless they could build levels beneath them, who would in turn kick up, but make very little. Anybody but a fool could figure out the problem with the pyramid-if you get in early, you’re gold; if you get in late, you’re fucked. All it did, in Adan’s analysis, was create motivation to go out and start a new pyramid.

The pyramid was also too vulnerable to aggressive law enforcement. All you had to do, Adan thought, was look at what had happened to the American Mafia to see that. All you needed was one dedo, one snitch, one dissatisfied soldier at the lower levels, and he could take the cops up and down the integrated pyramid structure. Every single one of the heads of New York’s Five Families was now in prison, with their families going into serious and inevitable decline.

So Adan tore down the pyramid and replaced it with a horizontal structure. Well, almost horizontal. His new organization had only two levels: the Barrera brothers on top, everyone else underneath them.

But on the same level.

“We want entrepreneurs, not employees,” Adan told Raul. “Employees cost money, entrepreneurs make money.”

The new structure created a growing pool of highly motivated, richly rewarded independent businessmen who paid 12 percent of their gross to the Barreras and were happy to do it. There was now only one level to kick up to, and you ran your own business, took your own risks, reaped your own rewards.

And Adan saw to it that the potential rewards were greater for the emerging entrepreneurs. He rebuilt his Baja cartel on that principal, allowing-no, encouraging-his people to go into business for themselves: lowering their “taxes” to 12 percent, giving low-interest loans for start-up capital, providing them with access to financial services-i.e., money-laundering-all in exchange for simple loyalty to the cartel.

“Twelve percent from many,” Adan had explained to Raul when first proposing the drastic tax reduction, “will be more than thirty percent from a few.” He had observed the lessons of the Reagan Revolution. They could make more money by lowering taxes than by raising them because the lower taxes allowed more entrepreneurs to come into the business and make more money and pay more taxes.