Nick Reding (16 page)

Clay was also boiling mad over police treatment of a young meth addict in town, Alan Coffman. Clay and Tammy had all but adopted
Alan, who was best friends with their son back when he was a kid because Alan’s parents were never around. Now twenty, Alan
had landed a good job as a welder in town. He’d started doing meth, and after an arrest had been compelled to become a confidential
informant by the Oelwein police. Alan had to wear a wire each night and make the rounds of the Oelwein bars, trying to make
deals with people on the police list of most wanted meth manufacturers while the cops listened. Many of these dealers and
batchers were Alan’s friends, and would kill him, he said, should they find out about the wire. If Alan could help the cops
get convictions, the charges against him would be dropped. If not, he’d go to jail. It was all part of Oelwein’s new hard-line
stance on meth. Clay thought this was a gross infringement of civil rights, though he reserved his disdain for the police
rather than aim it at his friends Murphy and Nathan.

So when Clay was pulled over while driving drunk on his way home from Hazleton, he unleashed a year’s worth of frustration
at once in the form of an expletive-laced tirade. The incident didn’t end well for Clay, who claims that the officer assaulted
him verbally and threatened him physically. In retrospect, Clay says, getting pulled over amounted to a kind of breakdown
for him, unleashing aggression and animosity that had been building for several years. Things in Oelwein weren’t good. Things
at the hospital weren’t good. His twin brother had moved to Cedar Rapids, his mother was dead, and his kids were grown and
out of the house. Insurance rates were making it harder to practice medicine, and the bud get cuts the hospital was facing
made it harder to get the most basic supplies Clay needed to do his job. In order to make money, he couldn’t be the old-fashioned
doctor that he’d once been, and that his father had been for fifty years. That’s to say, Clay couldn’t take his time with
people; he had about fifteen minutes to listen to and diagnose each patient. Dr. Clay couldn’t solve everyone’s problems in
fifteen minutes. And it was killing him.

As a result of the drunk-driving incident, Clay was charged and pleaded no contest to operating a vehicle while intoxicated.
The county installed an Intoxilock on his truck, which consists of a long tube attached to a breath-analysis machine on the
steering column. Clay had to breath into the Intoxilock, registering less than an illegal amount of alcohol on his breath,
in order to start his truck. He also had to attend substance-abuse meetings. For these, he chose an Alcoholics Anonymous group
in Iowa City, a two-hour drive southwest of Oelwein. It was these meetings, which he went to once a week in the relative anonymity
afforded by Iowa’s largest city, which had begun to mold Clay into a new man by May of 2006.

I went to Oelwein for two weeks in the spring of 2006 to spend time with Clay, Nathan, Jarvis, and Murphy, and also to In
dependence to visit Major and his son Buck. Phase II of Oelwein’s refurbishment was under way. The streets had been torn up,
and the new sewer lines had been marked in the dirt with wooden stakes topped with bright pieces of orange ribbon. The mood
around town was expectant, though there was a good deal of crankiness and doubt, if not outright cynicism, concerning the
notion that so much money had been spent in order, it was hoped, for Oelwein to lure businesses. After all, when was the next
time Oelwein would be able to come up with money for anything, never mind the ten million dollars Murphy and the city council
had raised in order to complete the refurbishments? Slowed by excessive spring rains, these improvements were nowhere visible.
Indeed, much of Main Street appeared to have been razed by an invading army. The questions were obvious: What if Murphy was
wrong? What if he’d gotten people on board, via tax hikes and referendums and bond issuances, only to invest that money poorly?
What the hell was Oelwein going to do then?

One night, just as I’d done the year before, I joined Clay at a party. Only this time, it wasn’t a Fourth of July shindig
at Clay’s house; it was a Saturday-night hoedown at a neighbor’s farm. A few dozen people had decided to get together in a
barn and eat from an enormous table covered in the usual potluck delicacies, which, for all their varying applications, traced
their origins to two sources: pig and potato. Soon people would start dancing in the dust and the dirt and the hay chaff,
once they finished their smokes and beers. Clay was set to go onstage—this time without Charlie. That in itself was a development,
a sign of progress, as though Clay were growing more independent, not just of his twin but also of his old self. For now,
he sat at a picnic table drinking Diet Coke. Not surprisingly, he was talking about the reformulation of his life in terms
of the Whorfian hypothesis, one of his favorite theories, which he sketched by drawing a number of concentric circles on the
back of a paper plate.

The upshot of the exercise was essentially that Clay, unanesthetized by booze, was freer to hear the disparate rhythms of
his life’s burdens, and that this clarity was helping him to minister to his needs. Clay was finding out who he was. As a
side benefit, he was turning into one hell of a musician; he’d stopped standing onstage in his own selfish, alcohol-fumed
cloud and had started to learn how to be a part of something bigger than himself.

“I’ve been reduced to a precognitive state now that my booze-hole no longer needs constant filling,” Clay said. “I’m learning
all over how to communicate. This Whorfian shit really works, okay?”

As Clay and I sat there talking in the barn, I was reminded of something that had happened almost exactly a year before, when
Nathan had seen Jenny for the last time. It, too, was a moment of clarity—a clear line between the beginning of one thing
and the end of another. Nathan and I had gone to Waterloo to see the exhumation of a murder victim. Afterward, Nathan had
gone briefly to Jenny’s place in a three-story apartment complex next to a park on the East Side. The murder involved two
identical twin brothers in their late twenties named Tonie and Zonie Barrett, from Waterloo. Zonie had just gotten out of
jail for attempted murder; according to the confession that Tonie had given the Oelwein police the previous evening, Zonie
had instructed Tonie on how to kill his girlfriend, Marie Ferrell. Marie was a recent arrival in Oelwein and had lived downtown
on the second floor of an old building just across the street from the movie house, kitty-corner from Leo’s Italian Restaurant.
Nathan said that Marie had been encouraged by a DHS caseworker in Waterloo to move to Oelwein, for the reason that so many
people—Nathan and Jamie and Murphy among them—resent: lower taxes and a lower cost of living. Apparently, Marie had been cheating
on Tonie.

Tonie had let himself into Marie’s small apartment on Main Street in Oelwein and bludgeoned her to death. Then, as his twin
Zonie had instructed, Tonie rolled Marie’s body in a blanket and drove her to Waterloo. There he stashed her beneath one of
a long line of disassembled tractor trailers that had been sitting in disuse for a decade or more outside the abandoned Rath
meatpacking plant. He’d dug a shallow grave, put the blanket-wrapped body in it, and covered the whole thing with an old wooden
shipping pallet. That was four days before the rains started.

By the time Nathan and I got to Waterloo to see Marie’s body exhumed, it had been lying there in the 105-degree heat for the
better part of a week. It had also rained five inches the night before. According to Tonie’s videotaped confession, he’d “missed”
his girlfriend, as he put it, and wanted to “check on her,” which he did twice, apparently just crawling beneath the eighteen-wheeler
and squatting there for an hour or two at a time. On one of those visits, he took advantage of the privacy offered by the
line of flatbeds in the dead of a sultry June night and moved his bowels next to the grave. The smell of human feces—compounded
by the rain and the heat and the raw, visceral stench of the woman’s decomposing corpse—was indeed remarkable. So much so
that nine vultures had gathered on the ledge of the packing plant’s roof as Buchanan County detectives readied themselves
to remove the body by rubbing Vicks vapor rub beneath their noses.

Maybe being that close to a body had solidified something for Nathan. After all, it was only a week since he’d buried his
brother and unburdened his heart to Jamie Porter. It’s hard to say exactly why Nathan got in his white Diesel Jetta and drove
from the disinterring of Marie Ferrell—whose case he would eventually try and win—straight to Jenny’s apartment. But that’s
what he did, and when we arrived, Nathan walked familiarly through the glass security door at the side of the building and
up the stuffy back stairs to the second floor. Jenny’s door at the end of the hall was open. As it happened, she was moving
to another apartment in town now that her roommate had decided to move in with her boyfriend.

Jenny’s place smelled like fabric softener, for she’d been washing her clothes. Jenny sat on the floor with her legs tucked
under her and her back against the foot of the couch, surrounded by boxes of varying sizes. When Nathan walked in, she rose
and they stood a moment, facing each other. The pause was awkward. Then Jenny, who is five three, hugged Nathan—or, rather,
disappeared against his nearly seven-foot frame. Neither of them said anything for a while. Then Jenny said, “I’m almost done.”

Nathan looked around and nodded. There were small nails in the walls at even intervals where Jenny had hung her photographs;
next to them were the roommate’s pictures, which had yet to be removed. In the little eat-in kitchen, an open cabinet revealed
four shelves, two of them cleared of plates and glasses, and two of them still fully stocked. It was as though the whole place
had been cleaved in two, and the half emptiness filled the place with a heavy sadness.

Then Jenny looked high on the wall adjacent to the kitchen entryway, where a series of three plates had been hung decoratively
down the middle of the wall. Two of them were packed; but the third, the highest, was still hanging. Jenny would have needed
a stepladder to get it off the wall, though even then she might not have reached it. In a flash, Nathan had noticed her gaze
resting there, and without a word, he had unfurled his full height, stretching out his hand and gently lifting the plate from
the two small wall-hooks.

Nathan handed the plate to her. He said, “Well then, I guess I’ll just get out of your hair while you get the rest of this
done.” He bent down and kissed her on the cheek. Then he ducked as he went back out the door. Without saying much, he’d said
all there was to say. Then he headed home to Oelwein.

CHAPTER 9

THE INLAND EMPIRE, PART TWO

W
hile Lori Arnold was in prison in Alderson, West Virginia, from 1991 to 1999, Cargill consolidated more and more of the meatpacking
industry—and the food industry in general, along with Tyson, Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), Swift, and ConAgra. Like the big
pharmaceutical companies, the food industry grew both its lobbying power and its political leverage alongside its profits.
Meatpacking companies began openly courting immigrant workers from Mexico—many of whom were illegal, had no identification,
and whose movements were nearly impossible to monitor. (According to a
New York Times
article from 2001, a government study found that 40 percent of agricultural workers in the United States are here illegally,
while Immigration and Naturalization Services estimated that one in four meatpacking workers in the Midwest is illegal.) As
meatpacking plants employed illegals at abysmally low wages, the economies of places like Ottumwa suffered still more. Meantime,
DEA had a continued lack of success fighting the meth industry, thanks to the powerful pharmaceutical lobby.

With each Mexican drug-trafficking organization controlling one segment of the U.S. and Mexico border, essentially splitting
the 2,500 miles into 500-mile increments, these organizations could tap into the expanding immigration routes throughout the
United States—routes blazed by the very illegals who were coming to work in the packing plants. In those illegals, the five
major DTOs had a built-in retail and distribution system that, because it is so hard to track, is all but impenetrable by
law enforcement. In 2001 a CBS news report on
60 Minutes Wednesday
made the point clear when it found that 80 percent of the workers at a Cargill plant in Schuyler, Nebraska, were Hispanic
and 40 percent were there illegally. For thirteen hundred dollars, two CBS correspondents were able to purchase stolen social
security cards and birth certificates.

This was the environment in which Lori Arnold says she found herself when she got out of prison in 1999. Her husband, Floyd,
was in Leavenworth, where he would soon die of a heart attack. Her son, Josh, was eighteen, had graduated from high school,
and was working at a Foot Locker shoe store. In eight years, Ottumwa’s Mexican population had grown from zero to the highest
per capita in the United States, thanks mostly to the Cargill-Excel plant, where, according to Lori, wages were pegged at
five dollars an hour. She was living with her parents, and she took a job at the plant trimming hams. Wearing fifty pounds
of protective steel mesh, Lori had ten seconds to sever the cone, or bottom, of a twenty-five-pound hog hind; remove the fat;
heave the ham onto a conveyor belt above her head; and resharpen the knife before the next one reached her. The room temperature
was maintained at just above freezing, and her feet would freeze inside steel boots. Lori was continually dumping hot water
over her boots to try to regain feeling in her toes. Each eight-hour shift, she got two breaks: fifteen minutes in the morning,
thirty minutes at lunch. The union had long been dissolved as a condition for keeping the plant open, and she had no insurance,
and no access to worker’s compensation should she be hurt. To Lori, who’d been just spent seven years in prison, and had once
hidden in her car with her newborn son while Floyd shot at them with a .44 Magnum, life had never felt so hard.

It wasn’t long after Lori took the job at Cargill-Excel that she also began taking stock of the schism in the local crank
market. After Lori had gone to jail, the good crank stopped coming to Ottumwa from California—and from her superlab. In Lori’s
absence, many of the blue-collar white addicts had come to rely on the local batchers who made their own Nazi dope, of which
there was never enough to go around, as the cooks could only make a few grams or ounces at a time. Meantime, Mexican dealers
out of Des Moines, Iowa, and Sioux Falls, South Dakota—in an attempt to take over relatively lawless Ottumwa as a lucrative
distribution point—had begun flooding the market with Red-P methamphetamine. Red-P dope, or crystal meth, was made at Mexican-run
labs in California’s Central Valley and in the state of Michoacán, in west central Mexico, and then driven through ports of
entry like Nogales, Arizona, before being distributed throughout the West, the Great Plains, and increasingly, the Southeast.

Back in Lori’s drug-empire heyday, in the late 1980s, Mexican-run superlabs had produced anywhere from ten to twenty-five
pounds of meth every two days. By 1999, thanks to the failed DEA legislation monitoring red phosphorus and pseudoephedrine,
superlabs were capable of producing up to a hundred pounds a day of crystal meth, which is up to 95 percent pure and therefore
offers a much cleaner, more powerful high than the P2P crank of Lori’s early days. Given its purity, the “tweak” associated
with coming down off a crystal binge—the paranoia, the Parkinson’s-like shaking, and the schizophrenic hallucinations—was
popularly considered to be far easier to handle than it had been with P2P. So, too, did crystal’s translucent quartz-like
appearance help diminish meth’s reputation as a “dirty” drug and, as many people at DEA suppose, make meth attractive to a
broader range of people. (Eventually “chrissy” would become the drug of choice among urban gays in New York and Los Angeles.)
As Lori said, “Crystal was both a crank addict’s and a crank dealer’s dream.”

Still, it was difficult for the Mexican traffickers to take control of the retail meth market. Many whites in Ottumwa, meth
habit or no meth habit, resented Mexicans for working at the packing plant for so little money; it was their fault, it was
said, that the wages at Excel—and along with them, the hopes of Ottumwa—had plummeted. Mexicans were framed as interlopers,
and mistrust or even outright racism was common. Then there was the language barrier. Mexican dealers had a hard time finding
customers, despite the fact they employed a strategy of giving away small amounts of highly pure meth in order to create a
base of addicts: the same strategy Lori had used on her first night selling crank back in 1984.

By 1999, according to both Lori and a former Mexican employee, Ottumwa’s Excel plant had become a clearinghouse for illegal
immigrants. That same year, Cargill-Excel placed newspaper advertisements in the poor, industrial border towns of Juárez and
Tijuana offering two free months’ rent to workers who could make it to Ottumwa from Mexico. For Cargill and the rest of the
packing conglomerates, employing illegals would appear to have been the best of all possible situations, for the simple reason
that these employees, lacking legal identification, didn’t technically exist, and therefore had no rights. Nor were they apt
to argue with the harsh conditions of an industry that continues today to have the highest rate of employee injury in the
United States. A failed 2001 federal criminal case brought against a Tyson plant in Shelbyville, Tennessee, made clear that
corporations would essentially not be held liable for employing or recruiting illegal immigrants to work in the plants. Despite
the fact that two Shelbyville managers were caught on tape by federal investigators asking human traffickers for five hundred
undocumented workers over four months, Tyson’s defense team successfully maintained that it’s too difficult for Tyson employees
to determine who’s who among legal and illegal employees. The ruling institutionalized the notion that employers of immigrants
are not beholden to offering the same rights to workers that other companies must, for the simple reason that they don’t know—and
don’t need to know—who works for them. Alternatively, how can there be any hope of enforcing laws on people who are not who
they say they are? According to two former employees of the Cargill-Excel plant in Ottumwa with whom I spoke (both of whom
were in the United States illegally), the going rate on stolen social security cards at the plant in 2005 was one thousand
dollars, though the most prolific vendor offered the equivalent of a package deal if you wanted more than one.

On the one hand, what Lori saw back in 1999 made her angry. Who did these Mexicans think they were, she thought, taking jobs
from Americans and then selling them dope? On the other hand, Lori could plainly see that the middle of the value chain, the
most dynamic part of any economy, was totally undefined: it was wide open because the white addicts simply didn’t like the
Mexican dealers. All that was needed was someone with the guts and the connections to approach the Mexican Mafia, as Lori
calls them, and start helping them move all their good, cheap dope.

That someone, though, wouldn’t be Lori Kaye Arnold. Lori was on probation for what seemed to her the rest of her life. She
had to urinate in a cup every couple of weeks so her parole officer could send the sample to the state lab in Iowa City for
drug tests. She had a son to get to know after serving eight years in prison. Lori had amends to make, and Narcotics Anonymous
meetings to attend, and a lot of sober time to get under her belt before anyone would start trusting her again. She had new
friends to find, too—the people she used to hang around with were either in jail or still using meth, and she knew damn well
she couldn’t be near them. She would need to work hard if ever she wanted to pay off her back taxes or move out of her parents’
home. If she could just get her own apartment, Lori thought, she might finally start making up for lost time—maybe her son
could even move in with her. And so for a year and a half, Lori left Cargill-Excel most evenings and worked the night shift
at Wendy’s, trying not to think about the business that had made her the most famous woman in Ottumwa ten years before.

And then one night, Lori went to a bar. It was a Friday, and Lori, fresh off her shift trimming hams, was damn square sure
she deserved a cold one. In fact, she deserved about eight cold ones, which would be one for every year since she’d had the
last beer. Then an old friend offered Lori a bit of crystal meth nicely arranged in the middle of a piece of aluminum foil.
Lori lit a match, held it beneath the foil to liquefy and then vaporize the dope, and smoked it through a glass tube. For
a woman like Lori, who eight years before used to snort an eighth of an ounce of meth a day, smoking one measly foil somehow
didn’t seem like that big of a deal.

Nor did she think it was anything to worry about when, a few days later, she decided to make a quick fifty bucks selling a
small amount of crystal that a friend needed to get rid of in the worst way. Lori had just that week started renting her own
apartment; now she wanted, as a means of making things up to her son, to help him pay off some old debts. So Lori quit the
night-shift job at Wendy’s and began selling small amounts of meth. Then, because she just couldn’t pass up such a peach of
an opportunity, she approached a Mexican trafficker in Des Moines and made a deal with him. By 2001, two years after she got
out of prison, Lori was moving so much Mexican-made crystal from so many different traffickers that she bought a nightclub—just
as she’d done back in 1989—to help launder the money.

At the time, Lori was hitting the meth pretty hard herself. She does not, she says, remember sleeping more than one night
a week, at most. Because she was still on parole and had to submit to urinary analyses every couple of weeks, she paid the
four-year-old daughter of one of her employees five dollars apiece for cups of urine to sneak into her tests. She bought a
house and paid her son’s debts. She bought another Jaguar. She got reacquainted with an old boyfriend and planned to marry
him soon. Then, on October 25, 2001, she sold a quarter pound of meth to an undercover narcotics officer in the Ottumwa Police
Department. Shortly thereafter, Lori was arrested, tried, convicted, and once again sentenced, this time to seven and a half
years in the medium-security federal work camp for women in Greenville, Illinois.

The woman who founded the Midwest meth trade fifteen years before had now helped usher in the drug’s new era by teaming up
with the DTOs, which had grown in part out of Lori’s original link to the Amezcua brothers. Once again, the tenth-grade dropout
from Ottumwa was at the head of a trend sweeping across the nation. By 2001, all the pieces were in place. The newest era
of the meth epidemic was in full swing.

The United States is broken into seven regions by the Drug Enforcement Administration. Operations in each region, all of which
are secret, are coordinated by a special agent in charge (SAC), whose DEA experiences run the gamut from U.S. street assignments
to operational tours of duty in foreign countries. SACs are invaluable in understanding the recent history of narcotics in
the United States and in the world—for instance, the broad context in which Lori Arnold’s Stockdall Organization fit in with
the DTOs. In 2006, the piece of the puzzle that was still missing for me was exactly how the DTOs had become so powerful so
quickly. While the discovery of the industrial meth market had been an instrumental part of the process, that alone didn’t
account for how five mega-organizations had evolved from the business put into place by the Amezcua brothers before their
capture in 1996. Ironically, I was told by two former DEA SACs that it was a blow to the Colombian cocaine cartels in Cali
and Medellín that provided the final, triumphant piece for the formation of the five Mexican DTOs.

Operation Snowcap was the code name for DEA’s 1987 multinational cocaine-control effort in Central and South America. The
approach was twofold: to seize large amounts of cocaine and to cripple Colombian distribution routes that passed through Guatemala.
By almost any measure, Snowcap—coupled with operations to limit distribution via the so-called Caribbean Corridor feeding
the Miami port of entry—was a huge success, resulting in a dramatic decrease in the amount of Colombian cocaine entering the
United States. But Snowcap also had an unforeseen consequence: it redirected the distribution of cocaine from the Colombian
cartels to what were then small-time Mexican narco-operations.