The “Other Side” of Cartels: Management, Finance, Transportation

Cuevas picked his drivers with great care, rejecting people with visible tattoos or serious criminal records and sending those he hired on dry runs to test their nerves. He kept the Calexico border crossing under constant watch, focusing on the mobile X-ray machine that could see inside vehicles. It was used sparingly, and the moment inspectors drove it away, his crew went to work. It really sounds as though Mr. Cuevas was leaving no rock unturned.

Over the years, his cars consistently eluded detection. “I was great at it. I had never lost a car in the border,” Cuevas said. “Dogs never hit it or nothing.” In mid-2006, however, he seemed to lose his touch. Was there a snitch?

 In June, authorities had followed one of his drivers to Cudahy, near Los Angeles, and seized 163 pounds of cocaine from a stash house. (From the dealer’s perspective…”Ouch!” From the user’s perspective…”Oh sheee—it”)

 A month later, police outside El Centro stopped his best driver, a hot dog vendor from Mexicali, and found $799,000 in a hidden compartment. Do you think this was by happenstance? We feel his organization had been penetrated by someone from a law enforcement agency.

 Cuevas had to make the cartel whole, either in cash or by working the debt off by supervising shipments without receiving his cut. Hundreds of pounds of cocaine, meanwhile, continued to pour in every week from Sinaloa, and he was under intense pressure to keep the goods moving.

Now, on this August evening, a customs inspector had pulled his load car, the Accord, into the secondary inspection area.

 “Dude, I think your guy got busted,” Lopez told Cuevas over the phone. “They’ve got him in handcuffs.”

Behind the dashboard and in a rear-quarter panel of the Honda, inspectors found 99 pounds of cocaine. The driver was arrested. Everybody else scattered. Lopez drove home, unconcerned. He had spent only 15 minutes at the border crossing and never got near the drugs.

Dude, I think your guy got busted,” Lopez told Cuevas over the phone. “They’ve got him in handcuffs.”

 Cuevas ordered his crew to dump their cell phones, in case anyone had been listening in. At the DEA’s bunker-like surveillance post in nearby Imperial, the wiretap chatter went silent.

DEA agents had not expected a bust and were not happy about it. The agents had planned to let the driver cross the border and then follow him to his Los Angeles connection. Now they would have to regroup.

 Two days later, the agents sat in a van down the street from Cuevas’ two-story home in Calexico, waiting for the lights to dim. Cuevas’ neighbors in the subdivision of red-tile-roofed tract homes included firefighters, Department of Homeland Security officers and state prison guards.

 After months of tailing Cuevas, the agents knew he favored Bud Light beer, burgers at Rally’s and tacos at Jack in the Box.

For several years, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration put the distribution side of Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel under a microscope. This series describes the detailed picture that emerged of how the cartel moves drugs into Southern California and across the United States. We implore you to visit the travel slide shows, Border agents, and interactive slides with how million of pounds of cocaine is distributed in the United States. Please follow this link by clicking on it. 

” Reprinted in parts by permission.”