This Is for the Mara Salvatrucha (18 page)

The prosecutor finally broke the silence. She wasn’t willing to wait another moment.

“I’ve had it,” she huffed. “I’m done. I’m outta here. If anything changes, Rodriguez, get to me before I start the trial. Once it starts we’re not stopping,” she said, already walking back to the courtroom.

“Denis, this is it,” Rodriguez said, making his final play. “She’s heading to the floor. When that judge comes back to the bench it’s over for you.”

Denis continued to stall, looking at his lawyer.

Rodriguez had reached his limit. He was angry and convinced Denis wouldn’t talk. “I don’t care if you open your mouth, at this point I’m not going to listen. Even if you tell me who’s doing it or when or where, it’s done,” Rodriguez said.

Then the lawyer spoke. “Okay, here’s what he’s told me. It’s Porky. Porky is the one,” the lawyer said.

“You mean Curly?” Rodriguez turned to ask Denis. The two street names were used for the same guy.

“Yeah,” Denis said in a low voice. Rodriguez gave Denis a physical description of Porky. He agreed it was the same guy.

Once Denis confirmed they were thinking of the same guy, Rodriguez walked out of the room and into the hall, where he could think back to an arrest he had made months ago.

Porky was an MS member and rumored to be an arms trafficker who lived in Arlington. Weeks before Denis and Brenda were arrested,
Rodriguez had visited him on a regular basis just to make his life difficult. When Porky robbed a check-cashing store, Rodriguez arrested him, and put him behind bars for a long time.

After the robbery and before the arrest, Rodriguez had called Porky’s apartment number to see if he was there. A male voice answered the phone, and Rodriguez pretended he worked at a local garage and wanted to make sure Porky was home because the boss would call soon with a job offer. The guy on the phone told him Porky was home and wouldn’t leave. With the trap set, Rodriguez and his partner drove over to the apartment and knocked on Porky’s door. He answered and they arrested him for the robbery. It was a humiliating experience—one that Porky never forgot.

Rodriguez stood outside the holding cell where Denis and his defense counsel waited to be called to court. He was spinning his wheels. In just a few minutes someone would arrive to escort Denis to the holding room just outside the courtroom. He had to figure out why Denis gave him Porky’s name, and quickly. Was Denis lying? He asked himself if Porky was actually capable of pulling off the planning and organization to kill a cop. Did he have enough pull in the MS to put a
luz verde
on Rodriguez, then order younger members to kill him? Could Porky be part of a larger plan to bring in members from another state to kill him? Rodriguez concluded that it was a stretch. Porky had means and motive. There was reason and history, but one thing was missing. Porky didn’t have the backbone to organize the death of a cop.

Denis was just being clever. Rodriguez remembered that Porky and Denis had been in jail together since the summer. At least five, maybe six months had passed. It was possible Porky was just running his mouth about how he wanted to kill Rodriguez. Most gangsters behind bars at the Arlington County lockup talked tough to keep up their hardened street attitude, but few ever did anything about it. Rodriguez considered Porky a screwup, and even if he had the
cojones
, he doubted the kid had enough pull in the MS to put out a hit on a cop.

Denis had likely heard Porky’s complaints, Rodriguez reasoned. Many of the MS guys in the Arlington jail complained about Rodriguez. Porky stood out, but Denis knew it was just talk. He had used the bogus information about Porky to prompt his lawyer to begin the interview process with Rodriguez. He had wanted to play the detective a bit, get some free phone calls to his homies, get off the cell block for
interviews, and take a stab at reducing his sentence. Rodriguez would follow up on the Porky angle just to be absolutely sure, but now he was convinced that Denis had never sincerely wanted to help.

Rodriguez left the holding cell area disgusted with Denis. He had allowed himself to consider Denis was willing to talk. But the kid was too far gone. He was willing to tell Rodriguez about small-time crimes, but killing a cop was a big deal inside the Mara Salvatrucha. Once the order was put out, only the highest-level leaders were involved in the planning and execution, not someone like Porky, or even Denis for that matter.

There were many working parts in plans to kill a cop, and much of the discussion occurred among leadership at the highest level. MS leaders had identified Detectives Rodriguez and Ignacio as a problem. They knew both had to be removed from the scene but were well versed about what happened when a cop was killed. Police, hell-bent on vendetta, would crawl the streets until a suspect confessed the deed. MS activities across at least three states in the mid-Atlantic region would have to be put on hold. And the murder would never blow over. The cops would hunt down the assassins until they arrested someone. A sacrificial lamb had to be planted and offered in the perfect way so the cops believed their investigation had led to the arrest, not the MS’s careful planning and flow of misinformation. Such a planning process took months, Rodriguez thought as he took the stairs up to the courtroom floor, rounded the corner, walking past the doors of the courtroom where Denis would have his hearing, and ran into the last person he expected to see at Denis Rivera’s trial.

B
renda Paz sat on a bench by the wall, chatting pleasantly with Denis Rivera’s sister.

Forcibly closing his jaw and regaining his composure from the shock, Rodriguez immediately turned to call Greg.

The cell only rang a few times. As soon as Greg answered, Rodriguez told him: “Hey, Brenda’s in the courtroom. What’s up with that?”

Greg was just as surprised. He had just finished a separate case in the same building and was on his way back to the office when he took Rodriguez’s call. He immediately did an about-face and rushed to the floor where Brenda had been seen. Just as Rodriguez had said, Brenda was sitting on a bench outside the courtroom next to Denis’s sister. She had already spoken with Denis and was waiting for him to get out of court so she could see him again.

Greg was incredulous when he walked up to her, and she turned around, happy and excited to see him.

“I found the metro!” she exclaimed.

“Honey, you can’t do this! You can’t do it!” Greg hissed through pursed lips, cursing under his breath and counting the ways Brenda had seriously jeopardized her security.
Stupid, stupid, stupid!
his mind screamed as he walked with Brenda away from the bench and Denis’s sister.

“I found the metro and I came here to visit Denis because I knew he
was in jail and I knew the court date was here today,” Brenda said, bubbling with teenage excitement and clearly happy she managed to find her way out of the safe house to see her boyfriend. She was oblivious to Greg’s frustration and the danger to herself.

“And the Rivera family, you know, they’re so nice. His sister, she’s really nice. And the mother, she’s like my mother and—”

“Honey, no, no,” Greg said, cutting her off. He tried to remain calm.

“There could be MS here. Maybe they don’t know about you, maybe they do, but you just can’t take that chance. You just can’t take that chance.” Greg repeated himself, trying to impress upon Brenda the weight of the danger. Greg could only assume the MS had already marked her for death.

G
reg was wrong: Brenda was safe. Even if local MS leaders knew Brenda was cooperating with the police, there would be no immediate order to kill her. Denis was protecting her.

Once Brenda was free, Denis was one of the first people she had decided to visit. It took her some time to figure out how to find him, but within days of his trial, she was able to visit him in prison. She told him about what had happened since they were separated, skipping over many of the details but not holding back the fact that she had talked to the police. Denis could have reacted with promises of death, but he had a reason to stay calm. He needed Brenda.

Through the winter, Denis had diligently doused any rumors of Brenda’s treason within the local leadership ranks of the Mara Salvatrucha in Virginia. Days before his trial, Denis had to consider his future: he was looking at a heavy stack of time in Red Onion, a Virginia state prison with a nasty reputation for murder, gang rape, daily beatings, and other horrible stories. He had to make sure a hard reputation would precede him before he arrived. Brenda was part of that insurance plan.

After his first of many trials in Virginia, the reality of countless years behind bars spread before Denis like an endless highway. He was resigned to his fate and needed all the help he could muster to stay alive and out of the hands of prison predators. And that was only at
the state level. The Joaquin Diaz murder case would be tried in federal court, which meant federal prison time—maybe life. He needed Brenda to tell as many people as possible of his horrible misdeeds and penchant for violence—to paint a picture more menacing than the reality Denis’s pretty face relayed.

When Alexander found out Brenda had left the safe house to visit Denis in prison and at court, he instructed Greg to have another chat with her about the dangers of associating with MS members. Alexander wanted to remain nonconfrontational with Brenda and saw Greg as her primary disciplinarian. He hoped Brenda looked up to and respected Greg enough to listen to him.

After Greg’s admonition at court, he took Brenda to dinner before dropping her off at the Farragut North metro station in D.C. She took the Red Line back to the safe house. When she opened the door on a cold, empty apartment, Brenda felt an emptiness in the pit of her stomach. No one was there to welcome her. There were no hugs, no inquisitive looks or questions about where she had been or what she wanted for dinner. She was alone. The kitchen was cold. So was her bed. It was so quiet she could hear the refrigerator hum. The phone never rang. Her magazines, books, and GED practice books were piled up on the table in the living room. Her recent conversation with Denis’s sister made the stark silence of her apartment even more glaring. She desperately wanted companionship, a reason to laugh, or something to keep her from descending into past memories and the thoughts that clawed at her consciousness.

Brenda’s loneliness gnawed at her logic and reason. She had a complex, deeply rooted emotional response to solitude. Alone in the safe house, there was far too much time to think about what she was doing, what she had done, and where she was headed. She alternated between wanting to return to the streets and embrace her homies’ love or brace herself for what could be months of loneliness before she left the dark path she had started down when she met Veto in Texas. Surrounded by silence, she had trouble envisioning a brighter future when she could go home to California with something to show for all this time she had been away.

Brenda was scared and longed to reach out to someone who could just give her a smothering hug and tell her everything would be all right. She wanted to be someone’s little girl. She wanted to be someone’s best friend. She wanted to be part of a long conversation about anything. In
that apartment, Brenda had no one but herself to keep company, and her mind refused to stop spinning out memories from her recent past.

Memories of violence bubbled to the surface of her consciousness. The blood, the screams, the rapes and abuse, and the images of pain were all cataloged in her head—as organized and neat as all the information she had recounted for the police. Her memory was photographic, and when she was forced to observe the violence perpetrated by her especially dedicated Mara Salvatrucha boyfriends and their followers, the scenes repeated in her mind’s eye like a horror film. Except it was real. These things had happened to her and to people she knew—stabbings, cigarette burnings, rape, vicious beatings, murder. Brenda had seen much more than the average MS recruit, and when she was alone, those images swirled in her mind.

She kept those demons at bay around other people. She pushed the images and memories out of her mind with conversation, laughter, and the warmth she felt from the attention and companionship of friends and loud groups. Once under her control, the images didn’t bother her, and she could talk about what she had seen and done with her usual bubbly charisma, despite the grim nature of her stories and the reality she described.

Brenda was a federal witness, waiting on the U.S. Marshals to enter the Witness Protection Program. She had graduated from local police informant to something much more important. But the price she paid for that status increased with every day she spent alone. Brenda knew she had to stay away from her MS friends, but the long hours of solitude defeated her better judgment. She needed company, if only to distract her from herself and her demons.

Greg and Alexander were not always around, and calling her mom was too expensive. Fatefully, the cell phone that kept her in touch with Greg and Alexander, the men who would escort her to a better future, was an ever-present liaison to her past. Between visits from Greg and Alexander’s weekly checkup, Brenda commanded her own time for the first time since her arrest in June. She realized she could do whatever she wanted with no reprisal from Greg, Porter, Alexander, or anyone else. She could get away with just about anything. Solitude pushed her out the door. Her newfound freedom pulled her back to the streets.

With the taste of laughter on her tongue, Brenda made a decision. Almost as soon as she got home from Denis’s first trial, she decided to call her friends. The only real friends she had—the Mara Salvatrucha.

B
renda called her friends from the Centrales Locos Salvatrucha clique, the same group of guys she had hung out with when she first arrived in Virginia. She had been off the streets for a long time, though. There were questions. Explanations were required.

She remembered the things Greg and Porter had taught her. She lied about where she had been, what she was doing for the past six months, and why she was suddenly back. Brenda told them she was arrested and then held for questioning for a number of crimes they tried to pin on her, but she never told the cops anything. They kept her in juvenile detention and only recently let her out when her lawyer, some gringo, got her off the hook. When she got together enough money to call, she did. And now she was back. It was a lie delivered with enough truth to make it plausible. The respect she had earned held, as it had the night she snuck out from the Less Secure Facility in late July, and the Centrales members welcomed her back with open arms and little suspicion.

The clique’s leaders, Oscar Grande, known as Pantera, and Cabro, got in touch with Denis to ask about Brenda. When Denis confirmed that Brenda was legitimate, they accepted it as truth. What was between Denis and Brenda was not their business. No one knew Denis was protecting Brenda to save his own skin.

Respected by Pantera and Cabro, Brenda was accepted as an honor
ary member by the rest of the Centrales members in Virginia. Apart from Pantera and Cabro, she reconnected with the men she liked the most during those summer days before she was arrested with Denis. Two of her favorites were Ismael Cisneros, known as Araña, “the spider,” and Pantera’s little brother, Joaquin Grande, known as Diablito, “little devil.”

Araña was an older MS member with a violent past. He grew up in Mexico City, where he was beaten as a child, so much so, a neurologist would later testify that it was the likely cause of his severe brain damage. His decision-making ability was severely inhibited. Abusing PVC pipe glue was thought to be another cause.

Araña had a small head, too small for a man his size, and it tilted to the right. He was slight of build and moved with a jerky motion. He kept his hair closely cropped, so it did little to cover up the scars on his forehead and the back of his head, where his dad had beaten him with a beer bottle. Araña was an experienced MS member, and, like many others, he considered it his only family. He also knew the reality of deportation. In 1999, he was arrested for a malicious wounding in Virginia and was deported to Mexico. Within three days he had worked through Mara Salvatrucha contacts to illegally cross the border and get back to Virginia.

When Brenda fell in with the Centrales, Araña had already earned a comfortable position of respect and power within his clique. In late 2001 he preferred to work hard, spend time with his kids, and hang out with the gang mostly on weekends. But he was still as dedicated as any other member of the Centrales.

Slowly, with some care at first but with more vigor after the first couple of calls, Brenda arranged to meet up with Diablito, Araña, and Pantera at destroyer parties. At the first party she immediately had to explain her long absence. But it wasn’t a big deal. She had Denis’s backing, and the clique leaders weren’t asking the questions. They were satisfied.

Once she fell back into the gang life, Brenda tried to keep her street life separate from her life at the safe house, but it didn’t last long. Before Christmas, some of the more suspicious guys from the Centrales followed her from a fast-food restaurant by her apartment building where she normally broke off from them to walk home. When they realized she had an apartment, she had to open it to them. Another quick lie settled all doubt. She told them her dad had sent her money to rent the place. Again, there was some truth to the lie. Someone else
did pay for the apartment and food, but Special Agent Alexander was not her dad.

Back within the gang’s embrace, Brenda fell into the same routine of dating the leader. Just as Rodriguez told Denis during their first interview days after his summertime arrest, his girlfriend wouldn’t wait around for him forever. Once Centrales members started hanging out at the FBI safe house, it wasn’t long before Brenda was sleeping with Pantera. He was considered the clique’s second in command. It was a position he had earned over the years of doing work for his clique.

Cliques within the MS generally had two leaders, sometimes called the
primera palabra
and
segunda palabra,
meaning “first word” and “second word.” When the clique leader could not attend a meeting, the second word would lead the meeting and make decisions. The power carried by the
segunda palabra
in larger cliques sometimes extended beyond the members immediately below his position. Larger, more respected cliques like the Centrales had some influence over smaller cliques in the local area. Because many of them mixed at destroyer parties and other MS functions, the
segunda palabra
of a larger clique garnered power and respect in an entire region. And then there was the promise that one day the
segunda palabra
would be first.

Pantera carried a number of tattoos above his neck, including a teardrop just below the outer corner of his left eye—indelible evidence of murder for the gang. His long eyelashes did little to cover his dark, penetrating stare. His eyes were like orbs with no distinction between pupil and iris. Pantera kept his head shaved but maintained an un-shaven look on his jowls, chin, and moustache. His skin was a living parchment, full of amateur tattoos that told a story of a heart and soul given to the Mara Salvatrucha, a choice he had made long ago. Despite the numerous tattoos, Pantera was an attractive man. Dressed in tattoos and his preferred outfit of Dickies pants slung low on his hips, a white muscle shirt, white Adidas shoes, and a blue bandanna hanging out his back pocket to show color, Pantera was the embodiment of Hollywood’s version of a Latino gangster.

Pantera had arrived from El Salvador at a young age. His parents were both forced to work, leaving Pantera, his brother, and his sister alone to take care of themselves. When he was old enough, Pantera joined the MS and didn’t look back. There was no other life. He would not hesitate to kill for the gang or die for his homies.

Through Christmas and the New Year, Pantera continued to ask
Brenda where she got the money for an apartment. He still thought something was up. She repeatedly told him and her other homies that her dad put her up. Brenda added that he would come by from time to time to check on her, which was why sometimes she was out of touch for a few hours or even the whole day. But this was a thin lie, and one she did not deliver well.

Yet Brenda managed to live a double life. She was the perfect informant and teenager with a future to Greg, Alexander, and the other cops. She took practice GED tests and had polite conversations with lawyers, cops, and FBI agents. It wasn’t hard and they were eager for anything she told them.

For her homies, she was Smiley, having a good time at parties at night and by day supporting her homies when she could in any money-making scheme they had going.

For many weeks Brenda’s double life was harmless. Together with her homies, it was like old times, hanging out drinking Corona beer, telling stories of conquest and crime, and roaming the streets looking for excitement and avoiding the cops. With the newly found freedom legal adulthood allowed, the Mara Salvatrucha lifestyle flowed back into her life. She was living a dangerous lie, but it kept the loneliness at bay. Through her young and impatient eyes, it was worth the risk.

Greg and Alexander, as much as they wanted to keep her safe, were limited in what they could do. The FBI was not a babysitting service, and Brenda was legally released from Greg’s care. He was still there for her as much as he was able, but he had to get on with his own life. The decision to stay safe and focus on the path to a bright future was ultimately Brenda’s alone. It was her dangerous game to play.