DISORGANIZED CRIME

SAN ANTONIO - On a hot August night last year, a cramped apartment on a
faded block of West French Place became a slaughterhouse.

Inside, police found five bodies, four of them teenagers. Each lay
face-down, tightly bound with duct tape, shotgunned to death. It was the
worst mass murder in San Antonio in recent memory. It also was a mistake,
police said. One that would prove costly to the Texas Mexican Mafia, a
violent, prison-born crime organization that calls San Antonio home.

Also known as La Eme (Spanish for the letter M), the Texas Mexican Mafia
long ago spilled out of the Texas prison system, where it began as a
protective organization for Latino inmates in the early 1980s.

Through intimidation and brute violence, La Eme has gained control over
heroin trafficking, extortion and prostitution in San Antonio and throughout
South Texas. Now, thanks to aggressive recruiting in and out of prison, La
Eme seeks new territory in El Paso, Lubbock, Bryan, Dallas and Fort Worth.

At the same time, the apparent pointlessness of the French Place murders
underscores faltering discipline within La Eme, authorities say. And it
signals a dangerous instability in what the FBI calls the most powerful
crime organization in South Texas.

On July 20, following a lengthy investigation by the FBI and San Antonio
police, a federal grand jury indicted 16 La Eme members, including key
leaders. They were charged with racketeering, extortion and murder in
connection with the French Place slayings.

Federal prosecutors believe the indictments severely damaged the leadership
of the gang. Among those arrested was Robert "Beaver" Perez, an alleged La
Eme general, who, according to prosecutors, has orchestrated 14 murders
since 1994. They include the assassination of a gang rival and the five
people killed on French Place - where the gang mistakenly thought drugs were
stashed.

"French Place didn't break the case on the Mexican Mafia. But it lit the
fuse," said FBI Special Agent Mike Appleby, who has investigated the
organization for nearly six years. "It does show just how La Eme has
changed.

"Five years ago, retribution was dealt out only to the offender, not his
family," Agent Appleby said. "Today, they largely kill each other in
disputes over drugs and money or in power struggles for gang leadership. If
family members or bystanders get hit, too, that's tough."

Like some homegrown Cosa Nostra, La Eme has operated for more than a decade
in a shadowy world of drug dealing, extortion and assassination.

In 1992, the known membership of La Eme in Texas prisons totaled about 700.
Today, prison officials confirm 1,425 members, making La Eme the largest of
10 active prison gangs, said Sam Buentello, director of the anti-gang
division for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.

Membership in La Eme outside prison is less precise. Law enforcement
officers estimate it's in the low thousands.

In 1993, when gang warfare sent San Antonio homicides spiraling above 200,
La Eme was considered responsible for 73 murders. Now, with homicides
averaging about 120 a year, La Eme is still responsible for about 10 percent
of the city's violent deaths, according to San Antonio police homicide Lt.
Ed Quintanilla.

"They look like any street thug. But the big difference between La Eme and
the regular street criminal is that the street criminal is only in it for
himself," Lt. Quintanilla said. " La Eme is in it for the organization.
They've taken the pledge. It's their way of life."

Taking a hit

Heroin remains the drug of choice for La Eme, both to sell and to use.
"Almost every one of them is a heroin user. They shake down the small-time
street dealers. They prey on people in the housing projects. They pretty
much stay in their own neighborhoods and don't branch out to the rest of the
city," Agent Appleby said.

"They're like fire ants, though. Get in their way and they swarm all over
you," he said. "If you are driving around on the weekend and stop at a
convenience store to get a Coke and look funny at these guys, they will kill
you."

Inmates take La Eme home with them when they leave prison, Mr. Buentello
said. From San Antonio headquarters, tentacles reach out to Corpus Christi,
El Paso, Houston and Dallas and smaller cities in South Texas. La Eme also
has a small presence in California and the Midwest, thanks to the federal
prison system.

"La Eme is now actively recruiting youth gangs. For many of these kids,
moving up to La Eme is seen as a promotion," Mr. Buentello said.

Dallas connections

In Dallas, La Eme's presence is felt but isn't a major factor in
gang-related crime, according to Lt. Victor Woodberry, head of the Dallas
Police gang unit.

"We know they're there, particularly in the Southeast side of Dallas," he
said. "We have 8,700 street gang members in the city, and 63 percent of them
are Hispanic. Our biggest concern is their recruitment of young gang members
to move heroin and marijuana."

La Eme is the brainchild of San Antonio native Heriberto Huerta, who formed
the gang in 1984 in the state prison at Huntsville while serving a sentence
for drug distribution, authorities said.

In his Constitution of the Texas Mexican Mafia, hand-drafted in Spanish in
his cell in Huntsville, Mr. Huerta articulated a manifesto to a life of
crime - and a strict code of unquestioned obedience to the organization.

Despite spending the last two decades in state and federal prisons, Mr.
Huerta, 44, remains La Eme's president and chief executive officer,
according to federal investigators and prison officials.

Commander in chief

Under his command, La Eme is overseen by a hierarchy of generals, captains,
lieutenants and soldiers, who imposed a 10 percent street tax, called "the
dime," on criminal enterprises working in gang territory. Allegiance to La
Eme is for life. Violation of the rules is treason.

Mr. Huerta also conceived La Eme as a quasi-religious organization, overlaid
with deep strains of racial pride, Latino mysticism and references to
Aztlan, the mythic homeland of descendants of the Aztecs. Members are known
as Mexikanemi, street slang for "free Mexican."

He directed the organization's business from behind bars through coded
messages to trusted generals, through prison mail or via conference calls
conducted during routine phone calls to his mother in San Antonio, according
to some of the 17,000 intercepts the FBI had on the phones, pagers and cell
phones of La Eme members.

In echoes of the current indictments, federal prosecutors charged Mr. Huerta
and 31 others affiliated with La Eme in 1993 on multiple criminal
racketeering and drug trafficking charges.

On Feb. 24, 1994, a federal jury in San Antonio found Mr. Huerta guilty.
Also convicted were Mr. Huerta's wife, Cindy Huerta, and mother, Sofia
Nanez, who helped smuggle heroin to him in prison.

Now serving a life sentence at the maximum security federal facility at
Florence, Colo., Mr. Huerta is isolated from other inmates and can make only
one call per week, federal investigators said. "It's cut down on his
effectiveness" Agent Appleby said. "But Herbie is still the boss."

The disruption in the leadership caused by the 1994 convictions didn't end
La Eme, Agent Appleby said. It, however, put cracks in La Eme's leadership
and structure.

"Herbie lost a lot of respect internally when he got his mom and wife sent
to prison. There are also questions of how the money collected from the
'dime' is being spent," Agent Appleby said. "Factions have developed, and
there's not that sense of total allegiance to a leader or to the
organization."

For example, the murder contract was once considered an honorable act within
La Eme, Agent Appleby said.

"They call it 'bringing down the light,' and it was for serious violations
of the gang's laws and required a vote by the membership and approval by the
membership," he said. "Now, minor infractions that used to get you a beating
will get you killed. We've seen where a dispute over an $80 dope deal
results in a green light."

How deeply La Eme has changed emerged during the French Place investigation.
Binding victims hand and foot with tape and the overkill brutality were
unmistakable trademarks of the Texas Mexican Mafia, according to
authorities.

Rodolfo Vara, 49, a disabled veteran, lived at the duplex with his daughter,
Elbira Vara, 19, and her boyfriend, Ricardo Gonzalez, 18. None were
associated with La Eme or drug dealing. Neither was Chris Tobias, 18, and
Edward Mendel, 18, who had dropped by to see the younger couple at the wrong
time.

"It wasn't supposed to be a hit. We have information that the local
leadership heard drugs or money were at the apartment and sent six soldiers
to rob it. They apparently had the wrong address or bad information," an
investigator said. "As the soldiers ransacked the place and roughed up the
older man, the daughter insulted their manhood with an insult in Spanish.
They went berserk and killed them all."

Paying the price

On Aug. 14, 1997, six days after the killings on French Place, the body of
Robert de los Santos, identified by police as one of the shooters, was found
dumped on a road in an isolated part of south Bexar County. He had been
choked, stabbed and run over by a car. Another shooter, Adam Tenorio, was
found stabbed to death a week later.

"We believe they were ordered killed because they'd been talking too much,"
an investigator said. "There are some indications, however, they were hit
because higher-ups wanted to know what happened to the drugs or money that
was supposed to be at French Place."

La Eme's unpredictability makes doing business with the gang a scary
venture, said an attorney who once defended gang members years ago.

"The new guys are loose cannons," said the attorney, who asked that his name
not be used. "I stay as far away from them now as I can. One day, you're
great; the next day, they think you're a federal snitch because you didn't
get them out of jail."

Although he acknowledged that gang members engaged in criminal activity, the
attorney said that the older members held certain admirable values.

"The old guys would treat you with respect and expect the same. They acted
like gentlemen. This new bunch has no respect," the attorney said. "They
kill people based on rumor. The old guys didn't kill the innocent."

San Antonio police say they are pleased they've been able to hit La Eme hard
twice in four years. They say they're glad to see the leaders behind bars.
But they harbor no illusions.

"They are part of an organization where everyone is expendable. When you
take them out, whether it's the leaders or the soldiers, there is someone to
take their place," Lt. Quintanilla said. "They're not going away."

Mr. Huerta said as much in La Eme's constitution. "Above these sacrifices,
in bad times or good times, there is no one or anyone that can kill or
destroy our sacrificing spirit," he wrote. "Brothers, truthfully I say to
you, we will win."

Checked-by: Don Beck