Bones: A Story of Brothers, a Champion Horse and the Race to Stop America’s Most Brutal Cartel. Joe Tone

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СКАЧАТЬ THE LAUNDRY

      Say you’re at a party. You didn’t want to come, because you’ve been running in the mornings, trying to form a habit as the self-help book you’ve been skimming suggests. Being at this party is not going help you keep your streak. But you came! You’re here! You’ve also been trying to say yes more, to form a habit of being open to things, like that other self-help book recommends, so you turned on music and drank a Modelo in the shower and made a thing of it. You got here and you’re here and—

      Wait, what? Your friends still fuck with drugs? Your friends still fuck with drugs, as evidenced by the fact that you’re in a bedroom, pushing aside a pile of coats and sitting on the edge of a low-slung IKEA bed. Katy is pulling a bag from her pocket, and it’s been so long that you honestly don’t know what she’s going to dump from it. You hope it’s not weed, because you could have smoked that at home, and you hope it’s not Molly, because people in their thirties should not be doing drugs with cute nicknames, and you hope it’s not heroin, because you read the news. You sort of hope it’s not cocaine. But you also hope it is.

      It is. Katy angles the baggie and taps her finger to shake the coke loose. It falls in a line, forming a little ski run on the metal serving tray she’s hunched over, a few moguls but nothing you can’t navigate. She starts smoothing it out, and you, being an educated, Narcos-binging citizen of the world, start thinking about the journey that cocaine made—from the jungles of Colombia; to the safe houses of Mexico; to the border; over the border or maybe under it, if you prefer Weeds; to Katy’s dealer; to Katy; to here, in the bedroom with the cheap bed and the coats.

      You’re thinking about it wrong. The cocaine’s journey is interesting, but the more epic odyssey is the one that will be taken by the twenty in your wallet, which you’re planning on leaving on the tray for Katy after using it to snort that line, and which Katy is planning on using to buy more cocaine.

      Here’s what happens to that twenty. Say it’s 2009, and say you live in Dallas. In these days, in these parts, most of the rolled-up cocaine twenties wind up in the possession of a Dallas-based kingpin named Junior. Though only in his late twenties, Junior is one of the largest regional cocaine distributors in the United States, responsible for moving one thousand kilograms of cocaine every month. That means he’s responsible for sending around $20 million a month in cash back to his supplier in Piedras Negras, Mexico, who is a Los Zetas operative named Poncho.

      To help him pull this off, Junior owns, under various names, at least a half-dozen stash houses spread across Dallas, some for drugs and some for money. He also keeps a fleet of “trap cars” to move the money south. He owns tractor-trailers that he packs with millions of dollars, stuffing stacks of cash into the recesses of Whirlpool washers and LG ovens. He owns a minivan, too; a 2003 Toyota Sienna. Junior paid some guys in Guadalajara $18,000 to get it retrofitted with a secret compartment that can be accessed only by starting the car, engaging the parking brake, putting the car in reverse, turning on the defrost system, and selecting a specific fan combination—in that order. It’s some real MacGyver shit, but it fools the dogs every time.

      Sometimes, if Junior’s drivers aren’t satisfied with their trap-car options, they improvise, like the time one bought a horse hauler, hollowed out the bottom, stuffed it with cash, piled hay on top of it, and then bought a cheap, old horse to complete the effect. No one’s sure what happened to the horse, but the money made it across, no problem.

      Above all, Junior prefers to use pickups, with the cash vacuum-sealed and floating in the gas tanks. He hires drivers to haul anywhere from $300,000 to $800,000 back to Mexico at a time. They usually cross in Eagle Pass without issue.

      Once they get the money across, the drivers find their way to one of the Zetas’ stash houses in Piedras Negras, and Poncho and his team go to work “cleaning up” the bills. They start by removing anything smaller than a twenty, as well as anything that’s been ripped or written on. They use these small and damaged bills to pay off drivers, lookouts, and other workers who help the drugs and money flow smoothly. They package up the remaining money—the big, clean bills—and deliver it to a man named Cuno.

      Cuno is the Zetas’ accountant in Piedras Negras. He keeps meticulous records, using both a paper ledger and laptop to track every shipment of cocaine that comes in or goes out, every American dollar that accumulates, every buyer, and every supplier. Thanks in part to Junior’s steady shipments, there is always $30 million, $40 million, $50 million stacked high in Cuno’s stash house. Much of it will be counted, packaged, and shipped back to Colombia. But much of it will be distributed to the cartel leadership, including Forty. And Cuno’s money house is just one of several where the Zetas have millions piled.

      All told, as Katy texts her dealer and you roll up a second twenty, the Zetas are clearing $350 million, most of it in U.S. dollars. It is a fraction of the American drug market, estimated to be tens of billions of dollars, but still far too much to leave piled in Cuno’s stash house.

      Forty and the others can spend some of this money freely in Mexico. They can buy cars, homes, horses, and sex, all with “dirty” American cash. Some of the Zeta bosses even buy exotic animals. According to narco lore, Forty and the Zetas’ leader, Lazcano, liked to feed their lions and tigers with the corpses of Zeta rivals.

      But Forty knows that eventually his run will end and he will disappear—into the ground, into a prison cell, or into hiding. He knows that for his money to last beyond his time as a kingpin, and for his family to make use of it beyond the underworld, he has to somehow turn your tainted twenty into a crisp one pulled from the ATM. He has to launder it.

      The first step to laundering drug money is called “placement”—getting it out of the safe house and into a legitimate financial system. The easiest places for criminals to start the laundering process are banks, which, despite increased regulation, accept and move trillions of dollars of drug proceeds. As the Zetas rose to power in the 2000s, the Mexican branches of HSBC, a British bank, accepted large cash deposits so willingly that cartel operatives started making them in boxes designed specifically to fit through teller windows. Around the same time, a Zeta operative opened an account with Banamex USA, a division of Citigroup that operated along the Mexican border. In his application, the operative described himself as a small-time cattle breeder who would deposit only hundreds of dollars a year. Then he deposited $60 million in drug proceeds without raising a single red flag at the bank—not even after he was indicted on money-laundering charges.

      Eventually, the banks, like the operatives using them, get caught. The only difference is what happens next. For “cleaning” just $550,000 of drug proceeds, launderers caught in the United States can face up to twenty years in federal prison, and the feds can seize every dime they can find. When investigators discovered that HSBC allowed Mexican and Colombian traffickers to launder $900 million through its U.S. bank, among other violations, the Justice Department called it too risky to the international financial system to indict any bank officials. Instead, they reached a settlement with the bank, which would forfeit about a billion dollars, plus pay a $700 million fine. With $2.7 trillion in assets, HSBC managed to survive.

      Once in bank accounts, drug money can easily be “layered”—moved from account to account in an effort to distance it from the initial deposit and confuse investigators. It can be whisked across borders, into businesses and investments. Eventually it can land in the hands of family members living cleanly in Mexico, the United States, or elsewhere. By then, it’s harder for the feds to trace or seize.

      The Zetas bosses flow a good chunk of money through small businesses. They use your rolled-up twenties to open nightclubs, restaurants, car washes, and other businesses in Los Dos Laredos and across northern Mexico. The other cartels do the same. One Gulf Cartel money launderer СКАЧАТЬ