10THE VIOLENT BORDER
Customs agents in the Laredo Tenth Customs Agency District—which includes the 2,000 miles of border and Gulf coastline from New Mexico into part of Louisiana—spend much of their time battling the smuggling of narcotics and marihuana from Mexico.
Federal officers estimate that the business of peddling narcotics to addicts grosses at least a half billion dollars a year for the underworld, and the total may be much more. No one actually knows the amount of narcotics which is smuggled successfully into the United States. Some Customs agents estimate that law enforcement officers seize less than 10 per cent of the total. One agent said, “If I thought that I was getting ten per cent of the total being smuggled, then I could sleep well at night.”
Even though the size of the narcotics traffic is unknown, there is no doubt about the tremendous profits to be made from the illegalsale of drugs. Addicts will beg, borrow, steal and kill to obtain money with which to satisfy the terrible craving for narcotics once they are “hooked.”
Unofficial estimates place the number of narcotic addicts in the United States at about 50,000. The average heroin addict requires something like ten grains per day to satisfy his needs. This means that over a period of a year the average heroin addict will use about 7.6 ounces of the drug—or a total for all addicts of about 380,000 ounces of heroin or a substitute drug. In their best years, Federal and state law enforcement officers have been able to seize only a fraction of this estimated total.
Several years ago the Mexican marihuana dealers took no responsibility for delivery into the United States; all arrangements for smuggling across the border had to be made by the purchasers who came from the States. But in recent years there has been a change, and the Mexican operators have been willing to make deliveries to New York, Chicago, Detroit and other cities. Jack Givens, Supervising Agent for the Laredo district, believes this change in delivery method is an indication that the supply of marihuana in Mexico has outgrown the demand. This has put the pressure on the Mexican operators to give their customers better service, resulting in the delivery system.
In recent years some of the United States marihuana operators have begun to bypass border operators. They have been driving to the interior of Mexico, making their own deals with the growers and bringing the stuff back into the United States themselves. Customs inspectors are always on guard against marihuana being smuggled in automobiles—hidden in upholstery, in luggage compartments, in door panels, or in secret compartments built into the cars.
Customs agents believe that most of the heroin and other narcotics smuggled into the United States come by way of Europe from the Middle East and Far East. But Mexico still is one of the favorite routes for the narcotics syndicates seeking to reach the American addicts. In addition, Mexico remains the major exporter of marihuana. The Mexican government has been cooperating with the United States in seeking to suppress the traffic, and there is a close working relationship between the American agents and the Mexican police. But the long and rugged boundary betweenthe two countries makes it impossible to cover every smuggling point on the border.
Supervisor Givens has only thirty-nine agents and seventeen Customs enforcement officers assigned to him for the entire territory. The enforcement officers are a police force used primarily for guard duty and surveillance work under the agents’ direction.
This small force, despite the geographic difficulties, has a high esprit de corps. Each man works many hours overtime each month with no expectation of compensation. The records show that the agents average approximately 120 hours of overtime each month in excess of the overtime required of them and for which they are paid. Often the men find themselves working overtime knowing that their extra effort will be rewarded with pay averaging 19 cents an hour.
Why do they do it? One agent explained it in this way: “There’s more than money in this work once you become involved in it. Once you start working on a case, you simply cannot walk away from it at the end of eight hours. You have a feeling of achievement when you do break up a marihuana ring or pick up someone who is dealing in heroin.”
Patrolling the Mexican border has been a major problem for Customs since the frontier days. In 1853 the Customs Mounted Patrol was organized, and horsemen rode across the deserts and through the mountains on lonely patrols to intercept cattle rustlers, smugglers and aliens trying to slip across the border. The mounted guard inevitably gave way to the automobile. But the horsemen rarely had more hair-raising experiences than those of the modern agents mounted on wheels. Such an incident occurred on August 7, 1960, in one of the wildest chases in the memory of Customs agents along the Texas-Mexico border.
It began when Agent Fred Rody, Jr., received a tip that an American was in the red-light district of Nuevo Laredo, trying to arrange for the purchase of 20 pounds of marihuana—obviously to be smuggled into the United States.
Further checking disclosed that the man was John Vaccaro, a known narcotics dealer working out of New Orleans. Vaccaro had been convicted of a marihuana violation in New Orleans and been placed under surveillance earlier in the year when he had visited Laredo. At that time agents had tried to intercept Vaccaro, suspectedof smuggling marihuana, but in a wild chase on the highway Vaccaro pulled away from their car, even though their speedometer was registering 120 miles an hour. He also succeeded in eluding the police roadblocks which had been thrown up in front of him.
Agents kept a close watch on Vaccaro’s car after Rody received his report. Finally they saw someone approach his automobile and place a suitcase in the front seat of his car. Then they saw Vaccaro, his wife, and their fourteen-year-old daughter enter the car.
When Vaccaro drove down San Bernardo Avenue and then onto U.S. Highway 59, he was followed by agents in three automobiles. When the Vaccaro car slowed in heavy traffic, the agents bracketed his car with one car in front, one behind, and the other alongside. Agent T. S. Simpson leaned out of his car and shouted, “Stop! We are Customs agents.”
Vaccaro pulled his car to the side of the road and slowed down as though to stop. Suddenly he slammed his foot on the accelerator. His car leaped forward between two of the agents’ vehicles and roared off on the left side of the highway, forcing terrified drivers to swerve into the ditch to avoid a collision. The agents gunned their cars in pursuit.
Simpson and Rody watched the speed indicator on their automobile reach 110 miles an hour, but Vaccaro’s car still pulled away from them.
Agent Grady Grazner in a 1957 police interceptor-model Chevrolet moved past the Rody-Simpson car and slowly began gaining on the Vaccaro vehicle. His speedometer was reading 130 miles an hour when he moved up behind Vaccaro’s automobile with his siren screaming. Grazner nudged Vaccaro’s automobile with his bumper and signalled for Vaccaro to pull over and stop. The woman and girl in the car were looking out the rear window, screaming and motioning Grazner to pull away from their car.
For several miles the cars raced along at well over 100 miles an hour. Grazner fired four warning shots into the air trying to force Vaccaro to stop. He was afraid to fire directly into the vehicle because of the women inside.
Gradually Grazner’s car moved up on the fleeing automobile.As the front wheels of Grazner’s car reached the left rear wheels of Vaccaro’s car, the marihuana dealer suddenly swerved. The blow of his car knocked Grazner’s vehicle to the side of the road. The car rolled over six times and bounced a distance of 471 feet. The only thing that saved Grazner’s life was the fact that he was strapped into the seat by a safety belt.
Police had been alerted ahead by radio. In the little town of Ferret, Texas, Vaccaro saw the roadblock ahead. He tried to bypass it by darting down a dirt road, but he was overtaken and brought to a halt.
Police found only fragments of marihuana in the Vaccaro car. When a search of the highway was later made by a helicopter, the pilot spotted a suitcase lying beside the road. Vaccaro had left his fingerprints on the suitcase when he tossed it out of his speeding automobile. It was stuffed with marihuana.
When Customs agents took Vaccaro into custody, Grazner said, “Why did you try to kill me? You might have killed your wife and little girl too.”
Vaccaro spat on the agent and said insolently, “What in the hell are you talking about?”
Vaccaro was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison for this venture into violence.
* * * * *
The city of Laredo, Texas, dozed in the blazing noonday sun on an August day in 1957. Not many people were on the sun-baked streets at this hour, and even the Rio Grande had slowed to a lazy trickle. The only visible activity was at the Customs stations at the International Bridge spanning the river between Laredo and its twin city, Nuevo Laredo, on the Mexican bank of the river. The bridge was one of the major communications links between the United States and Mexico, but with the sun high in the heavens even the traffic across the bridge was moving at a listless pace.
At this hour, Dave Ellis, agent in charge, walked from his office in the old courthouse and sauntered to a battered automobile parked on a side street. He slipped behind the wheel and drove at a leisurely pace to the eastern edge of the city, where he turned off the street and parked beside the loading platform of a vacant warehouse. He switched off the engine, lit a cigarette and sat waiting.
When Ellis arrived at the office that morning he had found a cryptic note on his desk which said: “Meet me at the usual place.” It was signed with the code name of one of the most reliable informers in all of northern Mexico.
Ellis hardly looked the part of an experienced Customs agent. He was nearing forty, but he looked ten years younger. The horn-rimmed spectacles he wore gave him an appearance of grave studiousness.
What few people knew was that Ellis’ boyish face was deceiving. He had been toughened in a hard school of experience. He had survived a bullet through his chest leading a platoon into battle on Okinawa in World War II, and he had been with the first contingent going into Korea at the end of the war when no one was quite certain whether the Japanese were going to surrender or make a fight for it. He had returned home in 1946 to pick up his interrupted career as a Customs agent and had earned a reputation as one of the hardest-driving men in the field.
One lesson he had learned well was that no agent could operate successfully without reliable sources of information. That was why he waited patiently on this hot day to hear what it was that his tipster had on his mind. He had been at the rendezvous point only a few minutes when a car drove up beside his own and a Mexican got out, entered his car and began talking rapidly.
The Mexican was one of the key figures in a network of informers which the Customs agents had organized south of the border to help combat the smuggling of heroin and marihuana. The informers were a part, or on the fringe, of the Mexican underworld. They cooperated with the American agents for one reason only—U.S. dollars. If the information they provided resulted in the arrest and conviction of a smuggler, along with the seizure of the contraband, they were paid for the information from a special Customs contingency fund. In the case of marihuana, the payment was $5 for each pound of the weed,cannabis sativa, which was seized.
Ellis talked with his informant for perhaps thirty minutes. After the man returned to his car and drove away, Ellis headed back to the courthouse.
As he entered his office, an agent asked, “What was it all about?”
Ellis said, “My man tells me Muno Pena has a big marihuanadeal going—one of the biggest. He’s getting ready to send a million dollars’ worth of the weed across the border—and we’ve got to stop it.”
The agent gave a low whistle. “So Muno Pena’s at it again. I thought he had had enough.”
“His kind never give up,” Ellis said.
At the end of World War II, Pancho Trevino had been the kingpin in the Mexican marihuana and narcotics traffic, operating out of Nuevo Laredo. Muno Pena was a competitor but on a fairly small scale until, in 1952, the Mexican government got on Trevino’s trail and threw him in jail. With Trevino behind bars, Muno Pena moved to the top. Pena remained on his home grounds in Mexico and never ventured north of the border. He had a highly organized syndicate and lieutenants who carried out his orders in the United States.
Ellis first ran into the Pena syndicate’s operations in 1955 when he was transferred to Houston, Texas, and went to work to break up a marihuana smuggling ring which included a former Houston police officer. After weeks of collecting evidence during days and nights of tailing suspects and checking records of tourist courts, hotels and telephone calls, Ellis and his colleagues had pieced together a case against the smuggling ring. In a Christmas-night raid they seized 75 grams of heroin, and in two other raids seized 250 pounds of marihuana. Eleven men and women were arrested and convicted in this operation, which was one of the biggest roundups ever made by Customs officers in the Southwest.
The Houston raids had hurt Pena badly, but now he was back on the scene with a scheme to make a quick fortune—if the tipster who had called Ellis knew what he was talking about. Ellis was reasonably certain the information was correct.
According to the Mexican informant, Pena had gone to the farmers in the Monterey district south of Nuevo Laredo and purchased their entire crop of marihuana, a ton of the stuff. He had brought it to his ranch near Nuevo Laredo and processed it in one of the adobe sheds on the place.
Trusted workers had placed armfuls of the dry weed on fine-mesh screens and rubbed it by hand. The fragments of leaves filtered through the screens onto sheets, leaving on the screens only the rough stems which later were burned. The fragmented leaves,as fine as cigarette tobacco, were carefully weighed into one-pound lots. Each lot was placed in a paper bag, which in turn was placed inside a plastic container and sealed with strips of adhesive tape. Then the plastic bags, in lots of thirty, were placed in cotton sugar sacks and stacked in a shed to await shipment. Now Pena was working on a deal to ship the entire lot to a distributor somewhere in the vicinity of Chicago. He had decided not to parcel out the processed marihuana in small amounts to buyers from the United States. Instead, he was going to bypass the middlemen and take the lion’s share of the profits himself.
Ellis knew that a ton of “wheat” (the underworld term for marihuana) would produce about 1,000 pounds of the narcotic weed suitable for rolling into cigarettes. A pound of marihuana would make approximately 1,000 cigarettes. This meant that the retail value of Pena’s shipment would run somewhere in the neighborhood of a million dollars. Never before had so bold a scheme been attempted in marihuana smuggling.
The important element missing in the informant’s information was how and when Pena planned to move the marihuana. Ellis had sent his man back to Nuevo Laredo to get this information if possible. Without these facts, Pena held the upper hand. Ellis had only fifteen agents to cover the 400 miles of border in his district—and there were thousands of places where marihuana might be smuggled across the river.
This time the tipster ran into a blank wall. He learned that the sacks of marihuana were still stacked in the shed on Pena’s ranch. But that was all he could learn, except that in the past Pena had smuggled shipments of marihuana across the Rio Grande at a bend in the river about five miles upstream from the little West Texas town of San Ygnacio. When the water was low, the carriers were able to walk across the stream. If the river rose from sudden rainfalls, the marihuana was floated across the river on inflated inner tubes or on inflated rubber boats. In each case, an automobile was waiting at a designated spot to receive the contraband.
Ellis ordered a continuous surveillance of the river bend. For more than three months agents kept watch in relays, hiding in the mesquite near a small roadside park on top of a hill overlooking the sweep of the river. But the watches were fruitless. Each timeEllis inquired about the sacks of marihuana at Pena’s ranch, he was told they were still there.
In December, Ellis was reading the routine reports from New York of marihuana seizures that had been made in the city. These reports were circulated periodically to all agents-in-charge throughout the United States. There seemed to be nothing unusual in this particular batch of reports until Ellis came across an account of the arrest of one Wilfredo Fernandez, who had been caught with 16 pounds of marihuana in his possession. The line which drew his attention said that the marihuana was packed in one-pound lots in paper sacks which had been enclosed in plastic and sealed with adhesive tape. Ellis sensed that, somehow, Muno Pena had outwitted him, and the very thought enraged him. He sent a message to New York for more information on the arrest of Fernandez and where he had obtained the marihuana.
Fernandez, it developed, had been arrested in November for possession of cocaine. When his apartment was searched, agents came across the packaged marihuana. Fernandez sullenly admitted that he had bought it in Chicago from a dealer he knew only as “The Lawyer.” The Lawyer had taken him out on Lawrence Avenue, where they had met a man who appeared to be a Mexican, driving a stake truck with a green body. The Mexican had taken the marihuana from a large cotton sack—and then driven away. He had never seen the Mexican before and didn’t know where he lived.
“He was a skinny fellow about five feet eight tall, and he had black hair and a pale complexion,” Fernandez said. “That’s all I know.”
Ellis knew in his heart that this marihuana had come from Pena. And later he was to learn how cleverly Pena had outwitted him. Pena had stacked the sacks of processed marihuana in the shed on his ranch where any of the workers could see them as they passed by. But what the workers didn’t know was that one night Pena had removed the marihuana to a hiding place known only to himself and substituted other sugar sacks which looked identical.
One night Pena had taken the sacks to the river, where he met a confederate. They had carried the sacks across the river to the highway where the confederate had hidden his automobile, towhich was attached a U-Drive-It trailer. The marihuana was stacked in the trailer and then covered with a mattress, a set of bed springs and a few household articles. These were lashed down with a tarpaulin over them—and then the driver headed north. To all outward appearances, he was a worker moving with his household goods from one job to another.
Ellis asked Chicago Customs agents to check on long distance telephone calls made in November by The Lawyer. And within a few days he received a list of names ranging from barkeeps to uncles, aunts, and cousins, horse track bookies, and pool parlor operators.
Meanwhile, agents in Laredo had been checking on Pena’s associates and on his family. They made a list of everyone known to have any connection, even casually, with Muno Pena.
It was when Ellis checked these two lists of names that he found there was one name which appeared on both lists. The name was Isuaro Garza. The agents’ information was that Garza was married to Muno Pena’s sister. Mrs. Garza and her three children lived in Laredo and maintained a home there. But Garza, for some months, had been living on the outskirts of Kenosha, Wisconsin. Occasionally Mrs. Garza and the children would drive north to spend a few days with Garza. They never stayed for long and always returned to their Laredo home. No one seemed to know what Garza was doing in Kenosha.
Ellis thought he knew what Garza was doing there. He was certain that Garza was the man from whom The Lawyer had obtained the marihuana—and that Garza was Pena’s man, making deliveries in Chicago from the 1,000 pounds of marihuana smuggled across the Rio Grande.
Ellis was so positive of this connection that he appealed to Washington for permission to take six agents from the Laredo office—men long accustomed to working on this type of case—for an investigation of Garza. But headquarters was in the midst of an economy wave. Ellis was told that funds were tight and that it would be impossible for him to take six men from Laredo on an uncertain mission. However, he was given authority to go to Kenosha himself and to take along one aide. If he could make a case against Garza within ten days, well and good. But at the end of ten days he must return at once to his post in Laredo.
Ellis chose Agent G. L. Latimer to accompany him. The two set out for Kenosha, driving day and night, through a snow storm which was sweeping the Middle West. They located Garza’s home. He was living in a small white frame house just outside the northern edge of the town.
“There were two or three feet of snow on the ground,” Ellis recalls, “and it looked like we were going to have to stake out the place by living in sleeping bags. But there was a motel nearby which was closed for the winter. We got permission from the owner to slip into the court from which we could see Garza’s house. We were sure he was our man—but we wanted to know who was calling for the marihuana and where it was hidden. We wanted to catch the whole apparatus if possible. So day and night we watched Garza’s house.”
Occasionally Garza would leave the house for a trip to the grocery store, to go to a movie, or to visit in the city. The agents were unable to detect him making any deliveries. But on the tenth day—the last day of grace for Ellis and Latimer to be away from their Laredo posts—a car drove up to the white frame house. A man entered and shortly came out carrying a package which he stowed in his automobile. When he had driven a short distance from Garza’s home, he was halted. Ellis found the package filled with marihuana. It was in a paper sack enclosed in plastic and taped with adhesive.
With this evidence, a search warrant was obtained and the agents advanced on Garza’s house. It was nearing midnight when Ellis knocked at the door. A light came on and then the door was opened and a voice said, “Who is it? What do you want?”
Ellis shoved the door open, revealing a skinny Mexican standing in his long-handled underwear, shivering from the cold.
“We are U.S. Customs agents,” Ellis said. “We have a warrant to search this place.”
Isauro Garza submitted meekly. A loaded pistol lay on a table near his bed, but he gave no resistance. The agents found 720 one-pound sacks of marihuana hidden in closets and in the attic—the largest haul of marihuana ever to be made in the United States. Its retail value was $720,000.
Garza feigned surprise over the discovery of the marihuana. He told officers he “had no idea what was in the sacks.” He said aman named Tony called at his home one day and left a truckload of sacks. Tony asked him to keep them for him. Another fellow named Pepe came from Chicago three or four times. “He picked up some of the stuff and gave me $600 for rent and expenses—but I didn’t know what it was all about,” Garza said.
A jury thought otherwise. Garza was sent to prison for five years. And Muno Pena? He had lost another round to Dave Ellis, but he continued his operations on a smaller scale. Customs agents are waiting for the day when he places one foot across the border—and then he’ll be out of circulation for quite a while.