A REVEALING STORY OF DRUGS, MONEY AND MURDER

Down by the River By Charles Bowden, Simon & Schuster, 431 pages,
$27

On the evening of Jan. 20, 1995, a suit salesman in El Paso, Texas,
stepped out of a car and was shot dead by a thief with an Uzi who made
off with his car. The victim was a cheerful, easygoing man of 27 who
lived with his parents and was engaged to be married.

The shooter was a 13-year-old illegal immigrant from Mexico who was
caught right away. The murder was about as ordinary a tragedy as could
be imagined, of consequence to few save the friends and family of the
two people involved.

The killing of Bruno Jordan is not the stuff of which successful
true-crime books are usually made. There were no celebrities involved,
no high-tech investigative techniques employed, no white-knuckle
stalking of a criminal mastermind. The shooter was caught within minutes.

Yet "Down by the River" is an extraordinary book--daring,
genre-bending, literary and wise. It may be the truest true-crime
story I've ever read, precisely because most murders are as squalid
and anonymous as Bruno Jordan's. Author Charles Bowden has written 14
previous books, including several about Mexico, and reading "Down by
the River" I got the sense he originally wanted to write an
investigative expose of the futility of the war on drugs and the way
it thoroughly corrupts Mexican society.

But as anyone who has covered Mexico knows, Americans will do anything
for their southern neighbor except read about it. So Bowden took the
literary path, stepping into the story of Bruno Jordan's murder as
though boarding an elevator to ride it down to the murky levels of
human tragedy and official folly. "Down by the River" is an intimate
and excruciating portrait of the way murder-borne grief can tear a
family to ribbons.

It is also as fresh and damning an indictment of the drug war as
you're likely to read.

The Jordans are Mexican-Americans, and the portrait of their grieving
brings to mind James Agee's classic "A Death in the Family." Bowden
understands, as Agee did, that even in a family as warm and close as
the extended Jordans, a violent death seals every member into his or
her own private bubble of grief and guilt.

The latter especially befalls Bruno's oldest brother, Phil, who is a
high official in the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, or DEA. As
older brother and cop, Phil is obsessed with solving the mystery of
Bruno's death.

Nothing adds up. A car a day is stolen in El Paso, but hijackings are
rare. A 13-year-old might have a Saturday night special, but where did
this one get a $1,000 Uzi? The boy was seen jumping from the passenger
side of a car that drove off; who was the driver?

The kid won't say, not even when faced with a 20-year sentence, not
even when Phil arranges to offer him and his entire Juarez family the
ne plus ultra of rewards: green cards.

Phil reads the boy's silence as a sure sign Bruno's killing has
something to do with him, that it was a warning or payback from the
drug cartels across the river.

For the rest of the book, Phil, who had Anglicized his name from
Felipe, "never smoked a cigarette, taken a drug, or been drunk.

Not once" descends into a kind of madness.

He sells or hocks everything he owns, without telling his wife, to
raise the half-million dollars he fruitlessly doles out to private
investigators and snitches.

By the end he's buying $500 worth of lottery tickets a day in a
feverish effort to square his debts and buy more snitches.

His marriage and his career at the DEA fall apart, yet still he hunts,
Ahab-like, for the truth of his brother's death.

Bowden breaks away from this narrative at startling intervals to
inject dense, journalistic paragraphs on one of three themes: the
breathtaking wealth and boundless violence of the Mexican drug
cartels; the stunningly arrogant corruption of Mexican President
Carlos Salinas de Gortari, his brother Raul, and the upper class of
Mexican society; and the depthless poverty in which most Mexicans
live. Each of these themes comes to constitute a narrative of its own,
running in the background of Bruno Jordan's murder.

The figures associated with the cartels numb the mind; in the hundreds
of billions of dollars, they dwarf the legitimate Mexican economy. The
savagery of the drug business, excluded from the usual means of
adjudicating disputes through courts and lawyers, is hideous.

One woman who may have ratted out a drug lord is found dissolved in a
barrel of acid, identifiable only by the registration numbers on her
breast implants.

The audacity of the Salinas administration in laundering money,
protecting drug shipments and slaughtering opponents, though often
told, is retold here with gripping fury. And the despair into which
all this corruption has plunged most Mexicans is described in poetic
terms that are nearly biblical. A black cloud of smoke boils out of an
arroyo where peasants are heating their adobes with burning tires.

A body is left on the street "graced with a bow of yellow ribbon, a
gift to the authorities from the people who despise the authorities."
A drug agent skydives because it "fixes him, . . . flushes the poison
out and clears his mind." Bowden is swinging for the literary
bleachers in "Down by the River." That he occasionally strays into
florid excess speaks to the linguistic risks he's willing to take.
This isn't your typical airport-paperback true-crime yarn.

Rarely do the themes of cartel, corruption and popular misery
explicitly intersect. But Bowden is a master of the literary non
sequitur, and the effect is to make clear that Mexico's "legitimate"
aristocracy couldn't exist without the drug cartels and vice versa,
and that the other 80 percent of Mexico's population owes its poverty
to the narco-aristocracy's callous disregard.

This is tough stuff, and Bowden names names liberally. As a journalist
of longstanding physical cowardice, I shudder at his audacity.

And the death of Bruno Jordan? We never learn why Bruno died. Bowden
has used the killing to take us on a journalistic tour of Mexican
horror, a tour most of us probably wouldn't have taken without the
intrigue of the murder. The implication throughout is that the
background will provide the key to the drama.

But Bowden has brought us a mystery without a solution, and though it
comes as a shock, the after-effect is satisfying. It might have been a
carjacking. It might have been a cartel's revenge.

It might be that Bruno himself was mixed up in the drug
trade.

This is how those murders end. "Phil Jordan knows, at some level he
keeps hidden from himself, he knows it was not simply a botched
carjacking," Bowden writes. "But his knowledge earns him nothing."

You finish "Down by the River" knowing enough about the illegal drug
business and the war against it to understand you don't know a thing
about the illegal drug business and the war against it. That is
literature as public service.