Blow (15 page)

The big trouble came in the fall of 1970. It was the time when rock-and-roll fans had to adjust to the fact that the Beatles were breaking up; Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin were both dead of drug overdoses. The FBI finally nabbed Angela Davis in a motel room in Manhattan, and someone, a farmer most likely, spotted George's man Orlando burying a three-hundred-kilo stash of pot at the north end of the landing strip and phoned this piece of information in to the Durango office of the Federal Judicial Police. The call eventually was patched through to a boyish, clean-shaven officer of the Federales named Alfonso, who wore heavy, horn-rimmed glasses and combed his hair back in a D.A., in the manner of Buddy Holly. After listening to the farmer, and since no one in George's organization had thought to bribe the police up there, Alfonso had little choice but to perform his duty. Consequently, when George flew to the Durango airport on a commercial flight, rented a car and drove out to the airstrip to dig up the load and get it ready for when Bob came in, he found his car being converged upon by police cruisers staking out the field and himself suddenly very much under arrest.

At the time of George's apprehension, the federal police were, and to only a slightly lesser extent are still, an extremely powerful political entity, just about a law unto themselves. Regarding persons who came into their custody, they conducted themselves pretty much as they wanted to, despite the provision in Article 19 of the Mexican federal constitution, which was written to protect citizens against wantonly cruel treatment at the hands of the police. The article says, in part: “All mistreatment in apprehension or in prisons, every molestation inflicted without legal motive … are abuses which … shall be corrected by the laws and repressed by the authorities.” As Alfonso saw it, he had no end of “legal motive” here where this smart-ass gringo with the big shoulders was concerned. When he was brought to the police station, George had not only refused to sign the proffered confession but did so in an insolent manner, telling the Federale that he could go fuck himself and suggesting the same for his piss-ant deputies as well. This was an ill-advised response to the situation, as George shortly found out. The next thing he knew, he was taken to a little room, his clothes were stripped off, and he was placed in a chair and doused with a bucket of water. One of the policemen approached him holding in his hand a black truncheonlike implement, eighteen inches long, that turned out to be an extra-high-voltage cattle prod, capable of making a two-thousand-pound bovine creature do an involuntary
tour jêté.
The deputy poked the thing in the direction of George's testicles, and when contact was made, an electric shock surged through his lower region that made George double over in agony and exhale a large amount of air.

After the cattle prod incident, George, still naked, was taken to another room and shoved inside a little wooden box, called a
joula,
which resembled a doghouse and was constructed so as to force a man inside it to sit in a severely bent-over position, his head pressed to his knees and his legs crossed Indian-style. The lid of the box was locked down tight, so the only light came in from two air holes about an inch in diameter. That's how George spent his first twenty-four hours in custody. Late the following day, stiff and fairly bursting with the desire to modify his behavior toward the police, he was brought once again into the presence of Alfonso. The Federale said there were two ways to go here. One was for George to exercise his right under the Mexican constitution, get a lawyer and challenge the arrest in the courts. Given the backlog in the system, it might take two or three years for the case to be heard, and since it was unlikely that bail would be granted to a foreigner, George would have to spend the intervening time in jail. The alternative was: How much money did he think he could raise to buy himself out of this mess?

“I did not have a difficult time choosing,” George says. “We settled on a figure of fifty thousand American dollars, twenty-five for him and twenty-five for the federal circuit judge to sign the papers.” George told the Federale it would take a little time, since he had to call Los Angeles to have Annette get the money—twenty thousand dollars as a down payment to show his good faith. She would have to make contact with a man named Esposito, a bail bondsman in L.A. whom George knew from the drug business and who would bring the money down to Durango. Esposito had a cousin who was high up in the Federales in Mexico City who could vouch for him to Alfonso. After Annette reached him, Esposito called down and he and Alfonso had a conversation. “When he hung up, he turned to me and smiled and said, ‘Okay, Jorge. It's gonna be okay. You come and stay at my house, with me, until the money comes. I will make you comfortable. You will be my guest.' He also said he was sorry for all this, and the next time I wanted to use the airstrip I should notify him in advance. We could work something out.”

Awaiting Esposito, George would go out on the town at night with Alfonso's deputies, hitting the
zona,
or red-light district, where the women did their business behind partitions of blankets strung up on clotheslines, and for free if you were a friend of the constabulary. In a few days Esposito showed up with the twenty thousand in cash, promising to return a week later with the balance, and George was coming to regard this business of being in Mexican police custody as not so terrible, when all was said and done.

But before the final payment was made and the release signed, a federal prosecutor from Mexico City unexpectedly showed up on the scene with his own idea as to how the case was going to be handled. It seemed that the federal authorities, who had been exceedingly irritated by Operation Intercept and the fuss the United States was creating over drug smuggling, wanted to use this big marijuana bust in Durango as a way to show that gringo president Nixon with the nose that looked like a mashed
tamale
that the Mexican government was doing more than it got credit for when it came to stamping out the international marijuana peril. Instructed to milk the case for all the publicity he could get, the prosecutor loaded the three hundred kilos George had been arrested with into a truck, notified the local newspapers and the TV people, and drove the pot and George and the arresting police officers out to the airfield. There he piled up the duffel bags in front of the big hole they'd been buried in, set George up in front of the bags, positioned the policemen off to the side pointing at him with their carbines, and told the press to fire away. A news photo of the scene ran the next day on the front page of the local paper under a blaring headline that read,
NORTE AMERICANO NARCO TRAFICANTE CAPTURADO EN LA PISTA
,
pista
meaning “airstrip.” This interruption of their impending deal with George hugely pissed off Alfonso and the judge, as well as the deputies, who were to share in the pay-off and muttered to George as they drove him back from the press conference that they should shoot the son-of-a-bitch prosecutor and bury him in the hole that had been dug for the pot.

To everyone's relief, the prosecutor flew back to Mexico City the next day. Nevertheless, he'd kicked up such a fuss with the news story that the Federale determined reluctantly that for form's sake George would have to spend time in the state
penitenciaria
until the thing blew over. About three months should be sufficient, he thought. Then they could get on with the arrangement.

*   *   *

In its report on the Mexican penal system issued in 1991, Americas Watch, the organization that monitors human-rights violations in the Western Hemisphere, criticized the prisons for being dirty and overcrowded, for not providing inmates proper medical care or a well-balanced diet, and for tolerating a high level of corruption among the officials and guards. “Corruption is an endemic feature of life in Mexican prisons,” the report said. “Prisoners in almost all the prisons we visited reported that drugs, alcohol, and heterosexual and homosexual prostitutes are available for a price. We heard many accounts of prisoners paying other prisoners for protection, and bribing guards for jobs, visiting privileges, food and other necessities. Corruption seems to be accepted by both officials and inmates as an inevitable part of the prison system.”

This was all so much for the better, as far as George was concerned. In Mexico, as he found out, the prisons themselves aren't the problem, it's being there without money or friends or influence, so you can't glom on to the wide array of goods and services that can make your stay less arduous, not to say agreeable. Without resources, as noted by Americas Watch, you could be in for a bit of trouble, especially if you were an American.

Newly completed that year, the prison sits about a mile out of town, encompasses fourteen hectares, or thirty-four and a half acres, surrounded by a twenty-foot-high granite wall, and holds about twelve hundred men, along with a couple of dozen women housed in a separate unit. The men live in groups of cells in one of several unattached buildings, or “houses,” located inside the wall. The first inmates George met in his house were two American schoolteachers from Arizona, Terry and Jerome, who had a harrowing story to tell. Two years before, they said, they and their wives had been touring the Sierra Madre in a brand new camper van when they were stopped by the police. They were beaten up, their wives were raped, marijuana was planted among their belongings, their van was stolen by the authorities, and they themselves were thrown in jail. Their families back home had only a small amount of money to send down for legal help, and in the two years their Mexican lawyers had achieved no discernible progress in moving the case toward resolution. Terry and Jerome now despaired of ever getting out.

George had every good reason to believe this was not the fate that awaited him. He'd already cut his deal with Alfonso, who wanted not only to get the rest of the money but also to explore further business arrangements that might be worked out regarding the landing strip. George had been delivered to the prison gates by his not-terribly-sober claque of Alfonso's deputies, who said they'd miss George's company and would try to make his prison stay endurable. It happened that they were members of the police baseball team, which came out to the prison each weekend to play the inmates. So they'd see him that very Saturday, bring plenty of tequila with them, and some pot, and some girls, too, how would that be eh, Señor Jorge?

But even for inmates lacking his connections, life in the Durango prison was not as onerous or as rigidly monitored as it was in similar institutions in the United States. For one thing, inmates were allowed out of their cells from six in the morning until seven at night, when they were free to roam about the large prison grounds, read books, work for small pay in the prison shops if they wanted to. You couldn't get out, of course, but despite its wall, the Durango prison did not give inmates the feeling they were in a cage. For only a small bit of money they could supplement the prison fare with chicken and green peppers and onions, which they could cook up on hibachis scattered about the yard and sit and eat with their friends. There was a
bodega
on the grounds. Every weekend the inmates' wives and children were allowed in, and they would bring the makings of family picnics, which they ate at tables under umbrellas to keep off the sun. On Saturdays there were ball games—soccer, baseball, basketball—and also guitar playing for dancing. Every three weeks an inmate could spend all night with his wife in a private motellike unit on the prison grounds. Women inmates with newborns could keep their children with them until they are three years old. “I'll take a Mexican prison over an American one any day,” says Ellen Lutz, chief of the Mexican desk of Americas Watch in Los Angeles and the principal author of its prison study. “They're loaded with corruption and violence, but there is a much higher level of human dignity allowed the inmates than in the United States. In Mexico, you're confined, yes, but you're not treated like an animal.”

What George remembers most about the prison was Sunday afternoons, approaching five
P.M
., when the families would have to leave. As he wrote to Annette: “Sunday afternoons, good-byes are said between tears and kisses, children holding on to their fathers' pant legs. There are sisters and brothers-in-law, nieces and aunts and uncles. It's sad to see them go, but they'll be back. I think about this. Mexico, a primitive country, has a more humane penal system than the United States. Why? Monday the place returns to normal, back to tedium, but you remember the good time you had, and now we can wait for the next one.”

George also got busy doing what he was good at, which was making friends with people who might do him some good. “When I first got there, I asked these guys Terry and Jerome who runs things around here, and they said, wait until tomorrow and you'll meet him. This guy ran the baseball team, and he had all the dope, he had liquor. In your cell you could build anything you wanted, and he had this little stove made out of a ten-gallon oil can; he'd cut out the bottom and you put charcoal in there. He had guys who were gofers, who would get him food and cook it. So I met him, he invited me over and asked me what I did. I said I was a marijuana smuggler, and I could get transportation into the United States. That was it. Within twenty-four hours, I was the second
jefe
of the prison, the assistant gringo boss.”

The man who had appointed George his number two was Manuel Perez, a native of Mazatlán. He had also been sent there for marijuana smuggling, along with his wife, Martha, who lived over in the women's unit. Manuel was getting out in six months, and after George described his operation, the two resolved to go into business together. “The bust had been all over the papers, the plane and landing strip and all, and Manuel said he had a bunch of people working for him, just like Sanchez and Ramón, and he could get whatever I wanted. Suddenly here I was all set up again. I often think about why people down there trusted me, how I got them to do things they'd never do for other Americans. Why? I think I had some kind of presence, the way I presented it all, and because I had no fear, and I treated people well. I loved most of them in Mexico, and I didn't hold it back. I grew to love Manuel. A lot of Americans came down there and treated them like they were shit, second-class people, people like Ramón, he was always getting screwed. But I really loved them. I think they saw that. Above everything else.”