This Is for the Mara Salvatrucha (19 page)

O
n one of his routine visits to Brenda’s apartment not long after the New Year, Alexander noticed something was wrong. Brenda’s refrigerator was empty. He zeroed in on the ice cream. The last time he’d checked her fridge, the ice-cream container had been full. Days later it was completely empty. He doubted Brenda could eat that much ice cream in such a short amount of time.

He was suspicious, so he confronted Brenda directly. For the first time since meeting him, Brenda lied to Special Agent Alexander. She told him she had met her neighbors down the hall, and sometimes they came over to hang out. The last time they came over, she had offered them ice cream. He didn’t believe her, but realized there was little he could do about it, so he restocked the kitchen, then left, taking his worries with him. Then he began to put the pieces together. She had already been to visit Denis. It wasn’t a stretch to assume she had probably reconnected with her friends in the Mara Salvatrucha too. He was very nervous for her safety. On his way back to Washington, Alexander made a mental note to see if he could hasten Brenda’s induction into witness protection.

As soon as he arrived in Washington, Alexander visited Ronald Walutes, the attorney who wanted to use Brenda as a material witness for the government’s case prosecuting Denis for killing Joaquin Diaz. “This process is taking way too long,” Alexander told Walutes. By his
count, Brenda had been in the FBI safe house for five or six weeks. She was restless, and he was convinced she had slipped back into the gang life despite the shroud of secrecy he tried to keep about her. They had nowhere else to keep Brenda. The safe house was her last option.

The courts had made her an adult, but she was still every bit a teenager in need of social interaction and attention, which neither he nor Greg could fulfill. Alexander feared the worst. If they didn’t get her into witness protection soon, they might lose her.

There were disturbing signs, he told Walutes. Once when Alexander recharged Brenda’s phone with prepaid minutes, he checked her outgoing calls. There were always numbers he didn’t recognize. Every time he asked, Brenda had an excuse. Their hands were tied, and if Brenda wanted to play with her life and risk hanging out with the MS, it had to be her choice. No one was in a position to constantly watch over her.

Teenagers think they’re invincible, important, and smart. Brenda was no exception. She walked a tightrope between the promise of a bright future and the possibility of falling into her past. But she thought no harm could come to her. She trusted Denis not to say anything and thought she had outsmarted Pantera and the rest. Brenda was hanging out with a bunch of guys who believed every word she said. Pantera’s questioning eventually stopped, and Brenda was easily able to avoid Alexander’s questions. He chose not to become confrontational with her. It wouldn’t help to alienate her, he thought.

Brenda was always aware of when he was coming. Alexander had to let her know before he came by. He had his own key, but respected Brenda’s privacy. For many weeks, Brenda lived the good life. The government paid her room and board and her gangster friends gave her company with no questions asked.

On a cold morning in mid-January, Brenda received a call from Alexander. He was coming over to check on her. She hung up the phone and began running around the apartment waking everyone up. She told the gangsters that her dad had called. He would arrive at any minute and she had to clean up the place before he got there. They had partied all night. The place was a mess, and there were people everywhere, curled up in sleeping balls across the living room floor and squeezed into every corner of the bedroom. Brenda woke everyone up and told them to leave. It was strange behavior. She was not the usual, laid-back Smiley. Brenda was barely able to cover her fear. Her two worlds were about to crash.

Maria Gomez was one of the girls sleeping on the floor. She had been hanging out with Brenda for some weeks. They had met at a Virginia Inn when the Centrales clique threw a birthday party for Maria and Pantera just after New Year’s. Maria was not an MS member, but she was the mother of Araña’s daughter and the sister of another Centrales member.

As Brenda ran around kicking people awake, Maria saw that someone had slipped a letter under the front door next to where she slept. She couldn’t help but notice that the letter was from Denis Rivera.

Despite Greg’s warnings, Brenda kept in touch with Denis from the first time she visited him in prison before Christmas. She wrote him constantly from the safe house, using her new apartment as the return address. Maria knew of Denis Rivera, and thought if Brenda received letters from him, it was something normal, not out of the ordinary.

But before leaving Brenda’s apartment that morning, Maria saw what she thought was an undercover police car in the parking lot. It immediately made her suspicious, but she kept her thoughts to herself, knowing rumors were not appreciated with the Centrales clique. Besides, it was just a car with tinted windows, a flat paint color, and one spotlight on the driver’s side.

Alexander arrived moments after Brenda cleared out the apartment. He ran through the routine questions. Did she need anything? Was she okay? Did she have enough food? Satisfied that Brenda’s needs were met, Alexander left.

Maria’s suspicions were confirmed less than a month later. When she was cleaning out a purse Brenda had borrowed from her weeks before, she found three business cards stuffed into the small inside pocket. Brenda had memorized the numbers and stored them in a safe spot—but then had forgotten that they were there. All the cards belonged to local police, including Rick Rodriguez, one of the cops the MS was trying to kill. It was a paper trail that led from Brenda directly to the Arlington police.

Maria grew worried for Araña. They had not been together for some time, but he continued to support her after he moved out of her parents’ house five months after their daughter was born. If Brenda was talking to police, then at least Araña needed to know.

Like Pantera, Araña wore a tattooed teardrop at the corner of his left eye. He had killed for MS and would likely do it again. Yet there was more to Araña’s life than the gang. He was older and more re
sponsible, often working two jobs to send money back to his mom in Mexico. He regularly traveled back and forth across the border to visit his family, returning illegally to the United States to work. Sometimes it took him weeks to return.

Araña also gave money to Maria to help raise their daughter. If Brenda was talking to the cops, he could be deported, meaning a certain disruption in the monthly payments Maria relied upon to take care of their daughter. She was more worried about the money than whether Brenda had betrayed the Mara Salvatrucha.

She told Araña about the business cards, but he didn’t want to believe Brenda was actually talking to the police. They were close. She was his homie, and he was her best friend in the clique. Sure, she could have cards, but he reasoned it was probably just some game she was playing with them. Brenda was smart. Maybe she was playing that cop Rodriguez. If she could get him to trust her, she could help set up his murder. There was no way she was ratting out MS homies. Besides, he hadn’t heard anything from any other gang members he trusted about Brenda’s possible treason. He told Maria to keep it to herself. Maria did as she was told and soon left the country to visit the father of her second child, who was living in El Salvador.

Not long after Brenda returned to the street scene, rumors began circulating on the street that Brenda was talking to the cops. Members of another MS clique in the northern Virginia area, the Silvas Locos Salvatrucha, were talking about how she had been seen with cops in the fall. No one in the Centrales clique wanted to believe them.

There were always rumors about this or that MS homie talking to the cops, and they always flared up right after an MS member was arrested and then set free. The paranoia was normal but not by itself a cause for alarm. Until there was concrete evidence, the Centrales could ignore what the Silvas said.

Brenda was still safe, but both Denis and Araña knew something. Denis protected her for selfish reasons. Araña was confused about what the cards meant. He was not at all convinced his homie Smiley would betray the MS, and he decided to keep his own council on what Maria had shown him. But he couldn’t shake a need to know why she had cop business cards, especially Rodriguez’s.

While Araña considered the possibility of Brenda ratting out her homies, Alexander and Greg worried about Brenda’s seemingly flip-pant attitude toward her security. All the men could do was wait and
hope that every time they called she would pick up, or when they came by to visit, she would answer the door.

The day she didn’t answer was on the Monday before Valentine’s Day nearly three months after Alexander had moved her into the safe house.

A
lexander arrived at the safe house with his partner and knocked on the door. There was no response. Alexander used his key to unlock the bolt and with the other hand slowly opened the door, calling out for Brenda. He was enraged by what he found inside. The whole apartment was torn apart. Cigarette butts and empty Corona bottles were strewn about. Furniture was ripped and broken. There was food smeared on the floor and walls.

But there was no Brenda. The apartment was empty.

His first reaction was to call Greg and tell him Brenda was missing. She had disappeared and Alexander had no idea where she was or how long she had been gone. He was upset and angry and didn’t try to hide it from Greg.

Worried, but not surprised with Brenda’s behavior, Greg began working the phones, calling everyone he knew on a short list of people connected to Brenda to try to get a lead on her. He told them he was her lawyer and had some money in an escrow account he needed to get to her. It was a common excuse he had used in the past, and it normally worked.

After he spoke with Greg, Alexander and his partner picked through the mess, trying to make some sense of what had happened. Then there was a knock on the door. Alexander looked through the peephole and saw that it was a kid with tattoos snaking up his neck.

Alexander flung open the door, grabbed the kid, jerked him inside, and slammed the door shut. He got in the kid’s face and demanded answers. The luckless kid at the other end of Alexander’s wrath was a young MS member. He quickly told Alexander there had been a party on Saturday, two nights before. He was there but ran when the cops showed up.

“Who owns this apartment and where are they?” Alexander asked, interested to see what the kid knew.

The kid replied the owner wasn’t around and left just before the cops showed up. Alexander then told the kid to get lost and immediately got in touch with the Montgomery County Police Department, which had jurisdiction over the area. Within a couple of hours, Alexander had the police report and a better idea of what had happened.

The police had responded to calls from Brenda’s neighbors who were complaining about the noise. Kids were running up and down the halls shouting. The apartment had become the center of a high level of rambunctious activity. When the police arrived, they found the place mostly empty. The apartment still smelled of weed and cigarettes. Whoever was there left only minutes before the police arrived. There was one girl left who said three guys had raped her. The police interviewed her, but she didn’t remember much.

Alexander’s anger returned. He couldn’t believe what had happened. In one fell swoop, Brenda had burned a safe house, ruined a perfectly good apartment, endangered her life, been involved in underage drinking and drug use, and possibly been complicit in the gang rape of a runaway girl. He was in a bind. If they found Brenda, he couldn’t put her in another FBI safe house. If they didn’t find her, he didn’t want to think about what might happen.

Frustrated, he called Greg a second time to try to figure out what they would do.

“Greg, look, we’ve got to do something here,” Alexander began. “If she stays on the street, she’s putting her life at risk.”

A full-scale manhunt involving the police or the FBI was not prudent, because it brings more attention to the individual. Luckily, when Greg took Alexander’s second call, he already knew Brenda was safe for the time being. Brenda had called him, but she was not interested in being found and didn’t tell Greg where she was.

“But that’s what she wants to do. She wants to stay on the streets,”
Greg told Alexander, clearly not happy with Brenda’s decision, but not in a position to force her to do anything.

“She doesn’t want to go back to the safe house, and she does not want to go to a hotel,” Greg said. He felt obligated to respect Brenda’s rights even if he knew her judgment was clouded and might get her killed. Brenda had told him she’d found a place to squat in a garage at a friend’s house. Anything, she said, was better than hanging out alone at the FBI safe house.

“She feels like she’s okay to stay on the streets until the government is ready to physically relocate her,” Greg concluded. He was frustrated but determined to remain calm and collected about Brenda’s extremely poor judgment. He had to remember she was an adolescent, despite the gravity of her current situation and what she had already experienced.

Greg was also just beginning to understand the real depth of her loneliness. Brenda could not deal with being alone. That was why she chose to risk a safe environment by inviting MS members to stay with her. Their partying forced her to flee local police and live in an un-heated garage in the middle of winter. Rather than be alone and safe, she chose to run around with men who would not hesitate to kill her if they knew she was talking to the cops.

Brenda had made her decision. She told Greg she would live the street life as long as she could before entering the Witness Protection Program, but that didn’t stop Alexander, Rodriguez, and Porter from looking for her, or Greg from doing everything he could to convince her to come back into custody and assured safety. His contact with her was limited. Brenda had left everything at the safe house when she ran away with the MS. She had even left her cell phone, severing the only way Greg had to contact her. He could only wait for her to call.