Nick Reding (20 page)

Even as I’m capable of criticizing my father’s legacy, I’m incapable of feeling anything less than terrific pride in his accomplishments.
His story defies sociology. It is an example of individual greatness of its own stubborn accord: the essential component of
the American dream. Nonetheless, there are consequences. The best of intentions sometimes don’t turn out like they’re supposed
to—just as methamphetamine, the miracle pharmaceutical of the 1930s, has today become a nightmare. Somewhere along the way
companies grew to have no respect for the people whose lives their products perhaps intended to improve, refusing to provide
workers with a decent wage or health insurance. Despite this, people fight to endure, just as they always have. And as they
fight, some percentage of them will look to a drug that falsely promises help in that cause.

Walking along the tracks that day, I found it hard to believe that, just as my father had predicted, three rooster pheasants
picked at waste grain in the frigid midday sun. Somewhere to the east, buried in the snow, was the ball field.

CHAPTER 12

EL PASO

B
y the beginning of 2007, the Combat Meth Act had been in effect for six months. As Phil Price, now a former special agent
in charge of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, had predicted two years earlier, the laws making it harder to buy cold medicine
had indeed reduced the number of Beavis and Butt-Head labs across the United States. The numbers of addicts, however, hadn’t
changed. This meant that those who had relied on home-cooked dope—15 to 25 percent of users, according to 2005 DEA estimates—were
now doing business with the DTOs, meaning that 95 to 100 percent of the meth consumed in the United States came from Mexican-run
labs. The DTOs had quickly adjusted to the difficulty of importing large amounts of pseudoephedrine into Mexico by purchasing
it from a growing number of middlemen—mostly in China but also, increasingly, in Africa. This, in turn, resulted in increased
production of the drug.

Also as Phil Price had predicted, the U.S. media by mid-2007 had completed an autopsy of the drug epidemic that, according
to drug czar John Walters, was now all but over. Excluding the work of Steve Suo and a few others, the media’s rabid coverage
of meth in 2005 and 2006 had treated the drug as a small-lab phenomena. Now that small-lab numbers had dwindled from Arizona
to New Jersey, state politicians, magazines, newspapers, and evening newscasters took this reduction as the sole indicator
that the epidemic was under control or cured. Seen another way, meth just wasn’t as interesting to report on once it could
no longer be cast as a fundamentally American morality play whose acts were once carried out ad nauseam in trailers, kitchen
sinks, and bathtubs across the nation. In many cases, the postmortem became a witch hunt, as bloggers and newspaper columnists
called into question whether the meth epidemic had ever existed in the first place. Nowhere was this suspicion more candidly
stated than in a March 2006 article in Portland’s
Willamette Week
, the rival paper of the
Oregonian.
Titled “Meth Madness: How The Oregonian Manufactured an Epidemic, Politicians Bought It and You’re Paying,” the article functioned
as a compendium of questions regarding Steve Suo’s and the
Oregonian
’s integrity. Furthermore,
Willamette Week
accused state and federal officials of using the meth story for their political gain.

The gist of the criticism, as summed up by the
Willamette Week
article, was that meth, as a media phenomenon, had been propped up by numbers and statistics that seemed questionable, if
not specious. For instance,
Willamette Week
took to task a report entitled
Multnomah County Meth Tax
written by an economic research firm called ECONorthwest. The report, oft-cited by Suo and both Oregon and national politicians—and
ultimately imitated by other firms in other communities like Benton County, Arkansas—claimed that every household in Multnomah
County paid the equivalent of $350 annually to compensate for the community problems caused by meth. That’s to say that every
household in the densely populated area, which includes Portland, was paying the rough equivalent of their yearly state taxes
to cover the rising costs of increased foster care, overtime staffing of police precincts, property damage, and missed work
time attributable to a surge in meth use.

The
Willamette Week
article contended that the statistics on which the report was based were a mix of fact and anecdote, and therefore the study
itself was preposterous. For instance, a Portland police chief couldn’t explain how he’d come up with the statistic that 80
percent of arrests in his precinct were meth-related. Nor, said the article, could the idea of a “meth tax” be taken seriously
when it includes the cost of “meth-fueled property damage” that cannot be conclusively linked to the drug. According to
Willamette
Week
, the
Oregonian’s
reliance on “bad statistics and a rhetoric of crisis . . . has skewed the truth [and] rearranged governmental spending priorities,
perhaps without justification.”

Newspaper columnists from the
Wall Street Journal
, the
New
York Times
, and the
Miami Herald
agreed. John Tierney of the
Times
lamented that, thanks to meth, politicans had “lost sight of their duties.” Glenn Garvin of the
Herald
called the
Oregonian
’s coverage “nonsensical.” Craig Reinarman, whose criticism of the Reagan administration’s response to the crack epidemic
was put forth in the book
Crack in America
, worried that the exorbitant meth coverage by papers like the
Oregonian
had further directed money to law enforcement and prison, and “away from the underlying sources of people’s troubles,” as
he told
Willamette Week.
No one was more critical of the nation’s meth coverage than Jack Shafer of Slate.com, whose weekly columns tried to disprove
every study on which the concept of a meth epidemic had stood. Among Shafer’s favorite targets were the estimated hundred
million dollars annually that meth supposedly cost the state of Indiana, and a National Association of Counties survey that
found meth had sent more people to local emergency rooms in 2005 than any other drug.

It takes a considerable lack of irony for one newspaper to loudly and dramatically accuse another of histrionics. Nevertheless,
Willamette
Week
made one extremely valid point: drug studies and statistics are inherently flawed, insofar as the supposedly quantitative
data is based largely on hearsay, observation, and common sense—which, depending on where you stand, may or may not seem common,
and may fail altogether to make sense. It’s unfortunate, though, that
Willamette Week
—along with most of the other critics, Jack Shafer of Slate.com included—relied on equally unstable ground for their metrical
evidence. What the paper and Shafer pointed to were the NIDA and University of Michigan reports, which found, via a deeply
faulted system of their own, that meth use had remained stable or dropped in the United States between 2004 and 2006. Basically,
one quantitative analysis proved to be as invalid as the other.

Meantime, as
Willamette Week
tried to disprove ECONorthwest’s findings by referring to the University of Michigan report, it seemed to be important to
understand the true effect of recent changes in the meth market fostered by the passage of the Combat Meth Act. What would
the law—along with an absent media—mean in Lori Arnold’s hometown of Ottumwa? As an answer to that question, I was reminded
of two trips I’d taken there the year before.

On Halloween night of 2005, I’d met a former Mexican drug trafficker, along with his handler, in a small conference room at
the abandoned commuter airport outside Ottumwa. The trafficker asked to be called Rudy. Now twenty-four, he was born in Ciudad
Juárez, Mexico, then moved with his mother and brother across the border to the Juárez’s sister city of El Paso, Texas. There,
Rudy and his brother joined a gang and began dealing cocaine at the ages of thirteen and fifteen, respectively. By sixteen,
Rudy was traveling from Juárez to El Paso with up to fifteen kilos of cocaine in a backpack. The Rio Grande between the two
cities is dry for much of the year, said Rudy, and largely unguarded away from the busy international bridges. Rudy and his
brother would pick a promising spot, descend into the riverbed, and climb up the other side. When they were discovered, Rudy
and his brother would return to Mexico, have a soda to pass the time, and then try to cross again from a different spot a
few hundred yards or a couple of miles away; they were always successful, he said.

Eventually, Rudy and his brother began working for a
comandante
of the Mexican federal police, predominantly transporting marijuana. Then one day his brother was in a car accident in Mexico
and lost a load of dope, leading to his murder. Rudy was able to identify the body only by a tattoo on his brother’s calf—his
brother had been shot so many times that his face was gone. Afraid for his life, Rudy agreed to take a hundred-pound load
of methamphetamine from the Mexican border up to the Ozark Mountains. This was in 1999. According to Rudy, he had no idea
what meth was, or even what he had delivered to the white men with long beards who met him in the wooded hills outside Rogers,
Arkansas. From there, Rudy took a series of meatpacking jobs, first in Missouri and then in Iowa. All the while, he dealt
meth, which was either sent to him one to five pounds at a time in the mail or given to him in bulk by traffickers to distribute
at the packing plant.

Rudy called the DTOs’ infiltration of meatpacking plants “the perfect system.” The first thing you do once you cross the border,
he said, is to steal someone’s driver’s license. Or you buy a stolen license at the meatpacking plant. (When Rudy said this,
his handler—a sergeant in the Ottumwa Police Department named Tom McAndrew—laughed, and added that at least once a month,
a confused first-generation Mexican American in California, Texas, or Arizona will call the Ottumwa police wondering why there
is an outstanding warrant for his arrest in Iowa, a state to which he has never been.) Moreover, said Rudy, traffickers work
long hours in the packing plants, just like everyone else, in an attempt to go unnoticed. As he put it, U.S. law enforcement
is used to drug dealers who are flashy and don’t work. Mexican traffickers used this strategy of blending into the general
population of immigrant workers to very quickly develop markets as far north and east as Michigan and Pennsylvania. The DTO’s
domination and expansion of the meth market was so streamlined, in fact, that when Rudy went back to El Paso two years after
his first delivery to Arkansas, crack and coke were no longer the smugglers’ drug of choice; crank was.

Eventually, Rudy was compelled by a speeding ticket and resultant immigration investigation to work as an informant for what
was formerly the Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS), but since 2001 has been the Immigration and Customs Enforcement
(ICE)—a department of the Office of Homeland Security. ICE agents told Rudy that he would be rewarded with a green card if
he could help them indict and convict enough “coyotes,” as the human traffickers who bring groups of illegals across the border
are called. Rudy agreed, but he played both sides of the fence: many coyotes also smuggle drugs, so Rudy used his connections
at ICE to lessen his competition for the El Paso meth market. When ICE agents balked at their promise to give Rudy a green
card, he left Texas and headed once again for Iowa. He’d heard that the Cargill Excel plant in Ottumwa was hiring, and he
assumed the police and sheriff’s department there would be highly unsophisticated compared with DEA in El Paso.

Rudy got to Ottumwa in 2002. How exactly he came to be an in formant there he won’t say, though it was through a deal for
some violation, whether for dealing meth or lacking papers. What is clear is how desperately Rudy is needed in Iowa. Tom McAndrew
is the director of the Southeast Iowa Inter-Agency Drug Task Force, an umbrella agency including state, local, and federal
antinarcotic agents. It was McAndrew who, as an undercover cop, busted Lori Arnold in 2001. Today, McAndrew calls Rudy the
most overused informant in Iowa, pointing to the fact that Rudy, in addition to working for DEA, gets “farmed out to every
police and sheriff’s department in the state, not to mention a couple other states when the need arises.” It’s for good reason.
According to people at DEA, a critical difference between the Colombian and the Mexican dealers is that the Colombians have
to rely on Americans to distribute and sell their product. Not so with the DTOs, who rely on a vast network of Mexican traffickers
and dealers who are hard to track. The language barrier alone—particularly in rural areas where there may be many immigrants
but few English-speaking ones willing to work against their own people—makes it difficult for DEA agents to penetrate the
drug organizations. And according to Rudy, even native Spanish speakers would still need to have the proper connections to
Juárez or El Paso or Matamoros to gain access to information. Talking to Rudy made it easy to see how the DTOs’ insularity—enforced
with the threat of violence against a distributor’s family members who remain in Mexico—made him so formidable.

According to McAndrew, Rudy was one of only three Spanish-speaking informants working in a state rife with Mexican DTO operatives.
As we spoke that night, McAndrew kept going to the lone window in the little room at the commuter airport and peering out
into the darkness from behind the curtain. The reason McAndrew had finally agreed to let me talk to Rudy, he said, was to
underscore what McAndrew and his men—along with the rest of Iowa law enforcement, whether DEA agents in Des Moines, Bureau
of Narcotics Enforcement agents in Cedar Falls, or cops in Oelwein—were dealing with, and what limited recourse they had with
organizations that had a militaristic level of organization, efficiency, and increasingly, violence. In the end, Rudy was
good enough that he could, as McAndrew said, “bring in as many five-pound deals as we [could] handle.” But he was never going
to infiltrate high into the traffickers’ organizations. They were too closed. In a way, it made McAndrew long for the days
when Lori Arnold ran things, before the DTOs took over. McAndrew had fit right into Lori’s milieu.

Pointing at Rudy, McAndrew said, “This is it, man. Not that I don’t love you, buddy. But you and me against them—that’s pretty
funny.”

In a May 12, 2008,
New Yorker
article, Malcolm Gladwell observes that world-shifting ideas, far from occurring to just one person at a time, crop up in
something more akin to clusters. Alexander Graham Bell, Gladwell points out, is credited with inventing the telephone, though
Elisha Gray filed a patent for the same invention on the same day. Calculus was discovered independently by Isaac Newton and
Gottfried Leibniz; the theory of evolution was formulated by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace at approximately the
same time. For Gladwell, “the sheer number of multiples could mean only one thing: discoveries must, in some sense, be inevitable.”