HOMEGROWN CARTEL

The Mexican Mafia Quietly Persists In Our Backyard

Last month's "Project Deliverance" federal drug-trafficking sweep
netted arrests and drug seizures across the country - but not in the
Alamo City. In the Western District, administered from San Antonio,
the operation produced arrests in El Paso, Midland, and Alpine,
charging defendants with links to Mexican drug-trafficking
organizations out of Ciudad Juarez. Following the sweep, authorities
trotted out more ominous assessments. "Drug trafficking across the
Southwest border has led to a surge of drugs in neighborhoods across
the U.S.," said Kevin Perkins, assistant director of the FBI Criminal
Investigative Division.

But if you haven't noticed a surge in your neighborhood, you're not
alone. In the first article in this series ["A dry spillover," May
12], the Current debunked official federal reports that San Antonio
serves as a logistical hub for Mexican drug-trafficking organizations,
and this latest federal enforcement action echoed our findings. This
year's National Drug Threat Assessment from the U.S. Justice
Department and the National Drug Intelligence Center indicated illegal
drug use has remained stable over the past five years, while the use
of some drugs, including cocaine and methamphetamine, has actually
declined.

Clearly, though, the fact remains that people in America use drugs,
and people in our city do as well, and criminal enterprises are in
place to supply local demand. In San Antonio, that by and large means
the Mexican Mafia, a Texas prison gang also known as the Mexikanemi.
The tightly organized paramilitary-style structure oversees virtually
all drug dealing in the city, either through retail sales, wholesale
supply, or the levy of a tax known as "the dime" on independent
narcotics distributors. Through sophisticated intelligence networks,
logistics operations, and collection systems, the homegrown and
largely Mexican-American gang wields a near monopoly on San Antonio
narcotics trafficking.

The Mexikanemi, distinct from the California-based Mexican Mafia, was
founded in 1984 by Heriberto "Herb" Huerta in a Huntsville prison,
where he was serving three life terms for murder conspiracy and
racketeering. Huerta, now in a supermax federal penitentiary in
Colorado, appointed himself president for life, and designated San
Antonio as the gang's permanent geographic capital.

Interviews with Bexar County prosecutors and agents from the local
office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation reveal a complex,
disciplined, and brutally effective organization that has grown and
evolved substantially since its foundations were first put in place.

A military town

San Antonio has a general, who is the leader of the Mexikanemi's "free
world" structure (though other subsidiary cities may have their own
operational generals). San Antonio's general has his captain, and the
captain has a lieutenant of lieutenants rounding out the city's top
brass, who divide our city into four quadrants. Each quadrant is
administered by a lieutenant, who relies on an elite staff of loyal
sergeants to "maintain order" at an operational level. Then there are
the soldiers. Of these, there are hundreds in San Antonio, and
thousands throughout the state and beyond.

Strictly speaking, the Mexican Mafia is not a narcotics-trafficking
business so much as it is a diversified services enterprise intent on
developing numerous revenue streams. Its Constitution states: "Being a
criminal organization, we work in any criminal aspect or interest for
the benefit and advancement of Mexikanemi. We shall deal in drugs,
contract killings, prostitution, large scale robbery, gambling,
weapons and in every thing [sic] imaginable."

Prosecutors and authorities have frequently celebrated this document's
existence because it lays out in black and white a fundamental
requisite for federal-racketeering charges. "It is a very nice little
paragraph," says Assistant Bexar County District Attorney Mary Green,
the tough-as-nails prosecutor who has made life miserable for
Mexikanemi members for more than a decade. "It basically proves a RICO
criminal enterprise."

RICO, short for the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations
Act, is the federal law that provides for extended criminal penalties
including hefty fines, forfeiture of property, and up to 20 years in
prison for each racketeering count. RICO prosecutions have been used
to wallop the Italian mob, the Hell's Angels, and other prominent
gangs. The U.S. Attorney has swung the RICO sledgehammer, an intricate
and time-consuming prosecution, on a number of occasions against
Mexikanemi. It seems, in fact, that roughly every five years, the
feds, working with state and local officials, swoop in and wipe out
the entire San Antonio leadership in this way.

Among the requirements for a RICO case is a provision that the crimes
in question involve interstate commerce. Green just concluded a
resoundingly successful and high-profile six-year RICO prosecution in
May, one that ultimately closed the books on dozens of cold-case San
Antonio homicides and dealt lengthy incarceration sentences to
numerous Mexikanemi officers.

"In our case," she said, "the interstate-commerce portion was proved
by the drug business that the Texas Mexican Mafia is involved in.
Neither heroin nor cocaine is produced in the United States, and we
had a great deal of testimony about the sheer quantities of both
heroin and cocaine the Texas Mexican Mafia distributes, and has for
years and years, decades even. [Our witnesses] testified about kilos
and kilos and kilos over years and years and years. It follows that,
if they are getting it from outside the U.S., ergo it involves
interstate commerce."

Starting on a dime

Most of Mexikanemi's "kilos and kilos and kilos" that Green cites are
not dispensed at the street level by the actual prison gang. Some
soldiers do deal - in fact the rank-and-file members are each allowed
up to three retail operations - but midlevel and retail drug
distribution in San Antonio is dominated by street gangs and
freelancers.

The primary mechanism that Mexikanemi uses to control the city's
narcotics commerce is the infamous "dime." Under this system, all of
San Antonio's drug dealers must pay 10 percent of their sales to the
organization. Soldiers who exceed the three-store limit must as well.
The system requires an almost omniscient knowledge of the city's
narcotics market - a permanent level of intimacy law enforcement may
only envy.

The gang relies on its extensive network of street intelligence to
build and maintain its dime registry. Whenever members become aware of
a new outlet for drugs, they conduct a sort of buy-and-bust sting
operation. They set up outside the physical location and provide a
low-level user with some cash with which to score. If the druggie
returns with product, he or she keeps the merchandise and is sent
away. The soldiers file a report with their superiors.

Next comes the courtesy call. The Mexikanemi welcome wagon visits the
dealer and calmly explains the criminal tithe in San Antonio to the
pusher. During this initial interview, the extortion executives assess
a dime amount to be paid based on sales volume, including any back
taxes and penalties that may be owed. In lieu of cash payment,
property such as a car may be confiscated. If all goes smoothly, the
new retail outlet is folded into the registry, and the dealer becomes
part of the mafia's permanent tax base.

Things do not always go smoothly. Some peddlers, usually just
illegal-substance abusers with an entrepreneurial flair, balk. In such
cases, enforcers organize a "door kick." In this exercise a squadronof
mafia soldiers stages a home invasion. Gunmen burst in, occupants
are rounded up and bound in a central location, the premises are
searched, and all cash, drugs, and valuables are taken. Before the
visitors depart, the dealer is given another chance to join the tax
rolls.

"Most people tend to agree to the terms of the dime after that," Green
notes wryly. The up side for dealers is a certain level of protection,
the suppression of direct competition, and a stable supply of product
supplied by Mexikanemi wholesale. Meanwhile, the Mexican Mafia's vast
extortion infrastructure means that it skims lucrative profits from
the trade without necessarily exposing itself to the quotidian risk of
street-level retailing.

"We had one informant outfitted with a GPS device," recalls Green. "He
went out in one afternoon by himself and collected payments from 20 or
30 houses." That was one soldier, on one afternoon. There are hundreds
of soldiers canvassing points of sales on an ongoing basis in San
Antonio, as well as via chapters in cities including Houston, Austin,
Laredo, and Dallas, and tentacles throughout the smaller counties of
Southern Texas. Authorities estimate that their total take just from
the dime tallies roughly half-a-million dollars per year. "All of that
money is funneled back up the hierarchy, back to the general in San
Antonio," says Green. Dipping into the dime is a good way to shorten
life expectancy.

The arrangement thus guarantees a market for the narcotics that the
organization either acquires from middlemen smugglers or occasionally
imports directly via contacts in Mexico. Despite widespread public
concerns - fueled by irresponsible politicking by public officials -
regarding the infiltration by Mexican cartels of San Antonio and other
U.S. cities, the predominant model has actually evolved under the
aegis of sophisticated and powerful indigenous U.S. prison mafias,
which in turn forge commercial relationships with foreign traffickers.
Other powerful prison gangs, such as Barrio Azteca or the Texas
Syndicate, ply San Antonio as well, generally under treaty with the
Mexikanemi. In turn, the San Antonio organization can also operate in
a limited manner in cities where they are not the dominant force.

The mean streets

At the retail level, street gangs and independent dealers generally
manage the sale of illegal substances in San Antonio. Street gangs
operate below the level of hardcore prison gangs, lacking the tight
vertical organization of the latter, though some of the larger,
national gangs have developed impressive hierarchies. Nationwide
players such as the Latin Kings, the Bloods, and the Crips operate
outposts in our city. But San Antonio also plays home to local
neighborhood bands that wreak mayhem and mischief, peddle drugs, and
whose members may eventually wind up incarcerated and potentially in
one of the prison gangs that recruit on the inside.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, street gangs mushroomed throughout
Bexar County, and deadly turf battles, often predicated on commercial
space for drug-dealing, overwhelmed the police. Law enforcement
considers 1993 to be the peak year for gang violence. The San Antonio
Police Department recorded a stunning 1,262 drive-by shootings that
year. Homicides totaled 222.

"It was really rough," remembers Sergeant Rocky Dyer, a narcotics
officer who has worked on the city's gang crime for more than 20
years. "It took a lot of effort, more gang intelligence, community
initiatives, and coordination with federal agencies." By 1997,
drive-bys had fallen to 212, and by 2001 still further to 89. Some of
the tactics were draconian, and frequently drew criticism from
civil-rights groups. Suspected gang members were prohibited from
loitering or associating in public under civil nuisance-abatement
laws. "We threw a lot of them in jail," Dyer says.

"You talk to a lot of the old-school 'original gangsters,' and they
are trying to stay out of it and keep their kids out of it," says
Sergeant Joe Myers, who heads up the SAPD narcotics task force. "They
say it's just not worth it."

Modus vivendi

Outside of the city's grittier neighborhoods, and especially in San Antonio's
more affluent areas, freelancers abound. One retired dealer who sold
marijuana and cocaine out of a northside suburb near the medical center
explained his M.O. to the Current: "I would only sell to people I knew or
through trusted referrals. I wanted to avoid the 'door kick' from the
Mexican Mafia, so I was paranoid about everything. I did everything to keep
my neighbors out of my business."

On one occasion, he says, a small entourage of friends had gathered to
trip on hallucinogenic mushrooms that he had procured along with a
shipment of marijuana worth about $3,000. The drugs lay in the open in
his apartment, ringed with paraphernalia of all sorts, when the police
suddenly started pounding on the door. "One of the neighbors had
called in a noise complaint," he says. "I panicked; I was ready to eat
all the 'shrooms I had. But we fell to a hush, and I snuck to the door
and locked it. I knew they couldn't come in without a warrant. We just
kept quiet, and the cops finally stopped banging and left."

In a low-income neighborhood on the West Side, it is hard to imagine
that a police contact would end there. Perhaps a warrant would be
sought; at the very least future visits would be expected. It is not
as though the northside pot and cocaine dealer was an urbane purveyor
of illicit goods. He described high-powered weapons, such as AK-47s,
lying around "for protection." Suburban drug dealers favor a discreet
profile, and shun actions that attract official scrutiny. But, he
said, they carry out their own door-kicks, robbing one another when
news gets out of a large shipment, for example. Our source eventually
went to prison on an unrelated felony-assault charge; upon release, he
quit the business.

However, there is a sort of equilibrium that city law enforcement has
struck with the narcotics business, a modus vivendi with staid
merchants that allows them to focus resources on drug dealers who
regularly engage in the kind of ancillary criminal violence that makes
headlines and creates public pressure on law enforcement.

In a sense, this uneasy truce extends to street gangs and even the
Mexican Mafia. FBI agent Michael Carlyle spends his days monitoring
the Mexikanemi as part of the bureau's Safe Streets initiative. He
acknowledges that the gang is not nearing extinction - but it's been
effectively subdued. In August 1997, San Antonio was rocked by a mass
murder, execution-style at a West French Place duplex. It was a
Mexikanemi-ordered robbery gone terribly, terribly wrong, and some
youthful customers who had stopped at the home for a minor drug buy
were caught in the crossfire. The SAPD was at loss to resolve the
case, and FBI agent Michael Appleby was called in. The veteran
gang-buster was able to fold the West French homicides into a
sprawling RICO case the federal government had already been
assembling, and won significant convictions. Appleby received the
National Award for Excellence in Law Enforcement for his work.

Since then, the FBI maintains constant low-intensity pressure on the
Mexican Mafia. "We can't always go out and arrest them, but whenever
we get the chance, we talk to them. We want them to know they're being
watched," Carlyle says. "When their activity increases, we knock them
down. We concentrate on the leadership structure, and just knock it
down with a RICO. The lower levels are often afraid to elevate. It's
the cycle of life, it may never end, but if you let them have free
rein, where would it ever end?"

"If we hit them over and over again, then perhaps these people will
figure out that it's not the path to go down," says Mary Green. "But
these prosecutions have gone on for decades and criminal activity
seems to continue. The last several big prosecutions have disrupted
them and interrupted the flow of both the money and the drugs, but
they always do seem to reform with different people in leadership
roles, and so it starts again." .