The

Mule
by Simon Maxwell Apter

There are no whole truths; all truths are halftruths, h is irking to treat them as whole truths
that plays the devil.
ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD

Trafficker: Here's the smack, fucking asshole.

User: Here's the money, asshole.
ZULEMA, FORMER TRAFFICKER

1: All Right
Maria had been dead once, by her reckoning for a
good five minutes. She hadn't fallen unconscious
or drifted off to sleep, and she hadn't taken a
break to rest her eyes. As Maria tells the story,
she was coded and coldmotionless, overdosed,
and deceasedon a gurney in the intensive care
unit at an East Lansing hospital. This was back
in the late nineties. Her ex-boyfriend had just
died from a heroin overdose, and after receiving
the news, she'd put the phone down and picked
the bottle up in the same motion, the physics
of simultaneously catching one thing while
dropping another be damned. Sbe remembers
her death that day, the result of a telescopically
To ensure anonymity, all names in this essay have been
changed.

57

short and sweet bender of beer, Irish whiskey,

and barbiturates. She'd pounded and then paraded the empty bottles of booze and Seconol
in front of her roommate, who called 911 and
then instructed her not to sit or He down. But
Maria laid herself down on the couch anyway,
fell asleep, and that's when she died.
Sure, she knew enough not to lie down, she
would tell me later. Maria claimed to have a
sixth sense for extra-medicinal dosing, a clairvoyance that enabled her to size up a user and
then prepare any drug in an amount appropriate to court danger. Perhaps based on rough increments of twenty or thirty pounds, she could
gauge roughly how fucked up you'd get if you
weighed x pounds and snorted y lines of coke,
each containing z milligrams of powdered cocaine hydrochloride. Once, when a friend balked
at the outrageous amount of coke she had divvied out to a fellow travelerprobably enough,
she later said, to make just about anyone overdoseshe brushed it aside: "I think Johnson is
going to be allrightwith this." And he was, provided that all right meant not dead, but close to it.
Years later, by her own admissionto me and to
her probation officerMaria confessed that she
was "much more of a stimulant girl," and as such
really didn't warrant court-sanctioned drug testing for heroin or methadone, an unfamiliarity
which could possibly account for the absurdly
small size of the overdose of depressants that
led to her death. (The court included testing for
the entire slate of DEA-scheduled drugs as part
of her probation anyway.)
Drugs were her lifestyle and livelihood back
then, and a good businesswoman (which Maria
insisted that she was, rarely feeding her own demand by cannibalizing her supply) had to know
how to revive an overdose victim, if only to
hedge against losing a customer. Moreover, she
was no stranger to curing herself. In those days,
when she wasn't on the road between Mexico
and the market, she was intravenously injecting
(snorting didn't do it for her anymore) herself
with so much cocaine that she periodically had
to home-remedy her own overdoses. When she'd
gone too far, pushing her cardiovascular system
over the line, she'd rectify the situation with

58

VQR I FALL 2 0 0 9

immersions in bathtubs full of ice water. That

afternoon, though, with her vitals skewing in
the other direction, Maria just couldn't keep herself off the couch and awake. This was a suicide
attempt, after all, and like everything else she
did with narcoticsingesting and selling, smuggling and traffickingit had to be performed as
superlatively as possible. It had to be done right,
for maximum dramatic effect.
Her memories restart at the moment she
emerged from death. Her mother was holding one hand, her sister the other, and she was
awake and alive. EMTs had gotten the poison
flowing in the other direction, and biochemical normalcy began to creep in as the slough of
depressants drained out. When she got out of
the hospital, she went to her favorite stool at her
favorite bar, asked for a shot and a beer, swore
at the bartender who questioned the prudence,
and returned to daily life among the living.

2:1 About Had a Fucking Heart Attack

The first run, from Tampa to McAllen to
Greensboro, was a bit of a lark. Maria was living in TampaGibsonton, Florida, actually, the
widely-acknowledged circus freak capital of the
worldand she was bored. So when a friend,
someone she knew to be a Mexican drug cartelaffiliated smuggler, appeared at her door with
a business proposition, she leapt at the opportunity. He said to her and her friend, "You girls
want to make about $5,000 for driving for us for
a few hours?" She was more than willing. "I'm
just like, 'Sure, fuck it,'" she says. "What do 1
have to do, you know?" Maria had been selling
drugs for years (since the early nineties when, as
a thirteen-year-old girl growing up in the upper
Midwest, she felt tbe dude at the junior high
school who charged $7 for one joint, $10 for
two, was ripping her off), but this new opportunity was like getting called up to the majors.
She signed on with a Mexican drug-trafficking
organization, one of a handful smuggling contraband into the United States over the South
Texas border (and one still operating profitably
today). Maria attributes her big break to her

years of work in the loose-joint-and-dime-bag

trenches, .selling small amounts of product and
networking and schmoozing the underworld.
That knock on her door in Florida had been
serendipitous but not random. "I just happened
to be in the right spot at the right time," she says.
"But then it also helped that I knew people from
up north who were involved in kind of the same
stuff. 1 had my own thinggoing because of some
of [myl connectionsand they all connected to
each other."

hollow bumpers had been packed with bricks

of marijuana, sealed with Styrofoam, and then
painted black to match the rest of the car, but admittedly, "if you really know cars and you know
what you're looking for, you're going to notice
something like that," Maria says.

"They tell me that the next morning they'll

come pick me up, and we'll go have breakfast.
At that time, they gave me a route and a car and
just kind of sent us on our way." They headed
north-northeast through Texas to Houston, Dallas, and points beyond. Still green to the game,
Maria wouldn't be handling the contraband on
this first trip, just driving the car. "It takes a
while before you bring the trucks to actually go
over the border and get the stuff," she explains.
"That took several years for me." Eventually,
she'd earn enough respect and influence within
the cartel to control multiple layers of distribution and logistics herself, but this time, she had
to content herself with the 1,500 miles from
McAlIen to Greensboro. The trip hit its only
snag when, halfway to the Carolinas, a Georgia
State patrolman pulled over their Mustang. The

as a muleyou last about a year or two before

you get popped." Or busted. Indeed, the overriding philosophy of smuggling is More Trips,
Less Weight, so the more available mules, the
better. More runs also means more busts, but a
critical mass can be reached by determining how
successful US interdiction efforts can maximally
bethat is, what share of smuggled drugs the
government might expect to seizeand then by
overwhelming the border with enough product
to make that share irrelevant. By the mid-nineties, for example, when Maria began working for
her cartel, Jurez Cartel kingpin Amado Carrillo
Fuentes, nicknamed "Lord of the Skies," could
expect the DEA to take about 7 percent of the estimated 150 tons of cocaine he sent into El Paso
each year. With the width of the Rio Grande serving to multiply fourfold the value of the drugs.

"We were riding around with two hundred

pounds of weed stuffed in the car. I basically
told [my partner] I'd kill her if she didn't just
listen to me and stay calm. She was about to
start crying." Though there's objectively someShe and her friend left for Texas the next day. thing extraordinary about a marijuana-laden
"We had no idea what we were doingit was so Ford Mustang barreling up a Georgia highway
fucking stupidand we go meet the Mexican at one-hundred-plus miles per hour, the traffic
guys and they give us a sweet Mustang and we stopand her first introduction to trafficking
start driving. The two of us drive all the way to proved quite ordinary. "We did get a one-hunMcAllen, and we're supposed to call when we dred-and-seventy-something-doUar ticket for
get down by the border. So we call, and they're being so high over the speed limit," she says with
just like. Take this exit and pull into the first a weary laugh too tired-sounding to be quite a
hotel you see.' So 1 do, and it's this little dive-y giggle, "but my partner had to eat that because
shithole roach motel and I pull in there. And it wasn't me driving."
I'm standing in the parking lot when this fuckYears later, reflecting back on the incident,
ing Porsche pulls up and almost hits me in the Maria tells me that she in fact had little to worry
leg while it pulls into the parking spot. And two about from the Georgia State Patrol. "He didn't
Mexicans get out. They already knew my name, really fuck with us too much," she explains. This
and they already knew who I was, which was is why the cartels select white girls as mules. "It's
kind of creepy." They also knew the names of kind of a safety net." Attrition also accounts for
her family members and where they could be the cartels' appetite for young white girls. "Most
located. With standard introductions unneces- people who get into that profession," she says,
sary, they set to work on the details.
"like mesome average white girl that starts out

SIMON MAXWELL APTER

59

that missing 7 percent made hai'dly a dimple in

either the cartel's profits or in the street price for
the user. The trophies from the War on Drugs
framed photographs of smiling nares posing in
front of mountains of seized drugsdon't represent even the tip of the iceberg.
Back on the highway, Maria, her partner,
and the Mustang's two hundred pounds of
weed made it to North Carolina. "We rented a
hotel, called, and told them where we were at,"
she recalls. "They come pick up the car, hand

to me that I don't think I really felt the fear," she

says. "I don't think the fear was that real in my
head yet. Going through the Mexican border
I've done it so many fucking timesout of the
hundreds of times I've done it, my car was probably only searched tliree times."
The key, she says, is looking comfortable
and having your story straight, just in case. "It's
easy. Basically, whatever car 1 was driving, I
came up with a personality to fit that. So sometimes I would have a tailored suit or something

"Evety time you pull up to a border crossing, there's five or six

K-9s running around, a billion fucking cops. That's part of
what makes it more fun, because you know you're getting away
with something right under their noses."

you an envelope with a shitload of money, and

then they're like, 'All right, see you later. We'll
call you next time.' Pretty simple. That was the
first time." There would be hundreds more, and
eventually she earned enough credibility to be
trusted to operate south of the border. "When
you go down to Mexico, you'll go to Reynosa
and they'll give you bodyguards. You're not in
tourist-Mexico, just Mexico-Mexico, which isn't
really safe if you're just a young white girl wandering around. So I'd have a security guard. And
I also got close enough with the cartel leaders
that I'd actually end up staying at some of the
members" house. Their wives were really nice."
But accommodation at the cartel members'
houses could pose its ovioi hazards, especially
as Maria climbed the ranks and became aware of
more and more of her married colleagues' sexual
indiscretions. She learned to keep her mouth
shutor risk their wrath.
"The next morning I'd drive up, almost to the
border, and that's when my security guard would
get dropped off." From there, it was northward
to the river. "The thrill of it was so invigorating

60

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on and I'd be pretending to be a businesswoman.

I'd have a whole story ready because when they
pull you outand they do pull you outthey're
going to question you one at a time, maybe four
or five different cops, so you've got to have your
story, you've got to have your nerves together.
Your stories always have to match, because
they're going to try to trip you up if they think
you're doing anything. I really kind of took pride
in it in a weird way. I loved it so much. Every
time you pull up, there's five or six K-gs running around, a billion fucking cops. That's part
of what makes it more fun. because you know
you're getting away with something right under
their noses."
In a study of female traffickers in Jurez
published in Anthropological Quarterly in 2008,
Howard Campbell describes how mules revel
in using feminine wiles to trick male border
agents, creating an interesting dynamic in which
the traditional machismo of the business is both
subverted and celebrated. "I think women have
a big idea for smuggling," an informant tells
continued on page 63

Campbell. "[They're] better than men. They

have more nerve to do it, especially as drivers
. . . Women are trusted more by the drug traffickers and by the border inspectors, customs,
and immigration. You smile and chitchat with
them. Some of them go so far as to actually hand
over their telephone numbers. . . The customs
agent will say, 'Hurry on home and I'll give you
a call later.' So you know that person is not going
to search your car."
Besides surprisingly naive border agents, the
1RS had to be duped, too. No one pays taxes on
smuggled drugs, and it's conspicuous to live lavishly with zero legitimate income. So, officially,
in Tampa, Maria was a roofer. All she'll say about
her roofing exploits is that she was worse at it
when she was stoned, and that she had in fact
almost fcdlen off a roof one afternoon for just
that reason. She wore extra-short shorts in the
Tampa sun just to piss off her co-workers' wives,
her fuck-you attitude, which was generally reserved for law enforcement agents, extended to
the blue-collar wives of Hillsborough County.
She didn't like roofing, but preferred instead
picking up inconspicuous cars in Tamaulipas
and taking them up north with drugs in all the
previously empty crevices and recesses, packing
the weed and the amphetamines and the coke
so the dogs couldn't get to itpool cleaner the
best deodorizer, she said, but baby laxative
could work too, and be a useful cutting agent
laterpreferred the trunks filled with decadesin-prison cargo to the roofers' nine to five. But
roofers don't get busted by the DEA, their stock
in trade piled up into a neat mountain for a classic seizure photo.

3: So, Where's the Stuff?

Maria left federal prison in Tallahassee in the
winter of 2004 and she began to make her way
legitimately. No trip to Malverde's shrine near
Culiacn to thank him for only being busted for
pot (and, well, conspiracy to distribute and possession with intent to distribute), for getting out
of the organization alive and with fingerprints
intact. She swore off whatever glamour and pres-

tige the cartel had offered her before prison (and

that beckoned afterward). Legality began with a
seventy-two-hour Greyhound ride to Portland,
Oregon, which is where she met me. Aside from
her beauty, her vicious acid tongue, and her forearm tattoo of a woman sodomizing a man with
a twelve-gauge, she could also roll the world's
greatest joints. It was an odd boast, made with
crystals of THC stuck to her fingertips, as if her
joint-rolling skills, and not her ability to elude
the cops or the DEA, had enabled her to rise in
the cartel during those pre-penitentiary years.
Her fingers had flitted over the orange package of one-and-a-quarter-inch Zig-Zag cigarette
papersshe refused to roll with anything else
her nails had creased the rice-paper leaf, and
her tongue had sealed the Cannahis sativa and C.
indica blend into the paper tube with a mix of saliva and natural gum glue. She worked a Bic (the
only acceptable tighter, really) flame over the
seam of adhesive, strengthening the bond and
instantly evaporating any excess water in the
rice paper. It was beautiful, and it was perfect.
It looked like an unfiltered cigarette, an unwrinkled Lucky Strike straight out of the factory and
neat and uniform enough to be put on display at
R. J. Reynolds's headquarters in Winston-Salem.
It was illegal, naturally, but there was something
artistic to itnot a van Gogh, for sure, or even
a doped-up Basquiat, but still.
It was a special joint, too. A girl named Juana,
the girlfriend of some kind of a bigwig in the organization, was the original roller of this kind of
marijuana cigarette. She had divined the structure and methodthe extra longitudinal fold
two-fifths of the way in, the temporarily-employed false curl at the edge, the papers-package
scoopand hers were, in fact, the only joints
her narcotraficante boyfriend would smoke, until
she taught the girl who now sat in a studio apartment rolling one for me, and he agreed to smoke
those joints too, because they were just as good.
There was no tobacco mixed in with the marijuana in these joints (a drug- and money-saving
technique customarily employed when rolling a
European or American spliff); tobacco "ruined
the taste of the weed," she told me as she rolled,
and if you were part of a Mexican cartel, as she

SIMON MAXWELL APTER

63

had been, and were privy to endless supplies of

Mexican-grown marijuana (a favorite tale of hers
involves a soundproofed basement, a hatchet, a
sledgehammer, and brick after brick after brick
of unbelievably well-packed marijuana) then
you could literally afford the luxury of smoking
straight dope, of not ruining the acrid, earthy
taste of the weed.
Of course, part of that taste came from whatever masking agent had been used to hide the
dank aroma of drugs from sniffer dogs and cops.
"They grow the weed in Mexico, and then it's
pressed," Maria explains. "What they do is,
they wrap it several times, put motor oil on it,
lace it with cayenne. Then they'll wrap it over
again and they'll put pool chemicals on the
wrapping." It's not a perfect system, although
it does keep the marijuana undetected and dry.
"It's definitely a lot crappier by the time you
get it to where you're going because it's been
dried and compacted and wrapped in a bunch
of weird shit." As driver, she rarely loaded trucks
herselfor even saw them loaded. "Most of the
time I didn't because I'd be out running or flying back to come pick up another load they'd
already set up."
The cartels are built around a kind of franchise-based model, and in the late nineties, after
a few years of smuggling, Maria got the cartel's
equivalent of a "charter" to set up her ovm racket
in Michigan. "1 had my sister set it up, so I'd run
up there and meet her. We'd take the car apart
ourselves, get all the shit out, saw it down, weigh
it, and turn around and sell it. A week later I'd
come back [to Mexico], and I'd have to give
[the cartel] so much money, and then my sister
and 1 would split the rest." And it was lucrative.
"There are some trips where you'd take a little
bit of weedthat would typically be like three
grand. If you were doing a little bit of weed viith
a little bit of ecstasy or something like acid, then
that would be a five-grand trip. You start moving stuff like heroin and cocaine, and you're getting almost eight to ten grand a trip." For Maria,
whose most expensive purchases were (and are)
typically tattoos, her job inspired her inner Robin
Hood. "I got to use it to take my friends out, spoil
my firiends" she said. Parents sometimes com-

64

VQR I FALL 2 0 0 9

plained to Maria that her gifts to their children

were too lavish, she recalled wistfully. As an entrepreneur as well as a mule, the profit margins
were outrageous.
"[The drugs] were fronted to me, and they'd
still pay me for [smuggling it]. So they'd say,
'Okay, we're going to give you two hundred
pounds,' and the cost for me would be a hundred dollars a pound. Well, in Michigan, you can
sell it for nine hundred dolais a pound. So I'm
getting two hundred pounds, and I'm making
eight hundred dollars off of every pound, and
they're still paying me for the run." Once, while
she and I watched Blow, the Johnny Depp biopic
about cocaine smuggler George Jung, she sighed
longingly during the scene in which Jung and his
associates run out of space in their Winnebago
to store all their profits (which they estimate by
weighing, not counting, the twenties and hundreds). 'T know what that's like," she said. "You
make a lot of money, and once the cartel saw
how much money I made, they were like, 'Oh,
we want a little more.'" So the Mexicans tripled
their take from each one-pound brick, a tribute
tax to which she readily acceded. "We're still
fucking getting two-fifty apiece for each fucking pound for two hundred pounds. That's a lot
more money than most kids our age will ever
have." The increased wholesale price also included a promotion for her. "Once they trust you
and once they realize how much money you're
making for them, they've got reason to take care
of you. And even while I was operating my own
thing, I still wanted to run all the time, and I
got to the point where they were like, 'Hey, you
don't have to do this anymore. You can kind of
just sit back, relax, and make money now.'" She
demurred. "I'm like, 'No, I actually like doing
it.' I've always heen a workaholic and I treated
this exactly the same way. I loved my job. I took
pride in doing it. Worked hard at it."
"My favorite cars to run were Mustangs,"
Maria told me. "But unfortunately, they're
probably one of the most dangerous [models].
They're the hardest ones. You've got the hoilowbumper trick, in the front and the back, and then
you can do an extension on the gas tank, but if
you want to take any more quantity than that, it's

going to all have to go in the paneling, so it's kind

of risky." The process is decidedly low-tech and
low-mainte nance. Though the Mexican illegaldrug industry boasts of unofficial numbers on a
par with UPS's $51 billion annual revenue (and
blows that legitimate corporation's $5 billion
annual income out of the water), there are no
tracking numbers or barcodes attached to the
shipments of product; what matters is pickup.

cities." Homeland Security maintains these additional checkpoints, like the one in Falfurrias,
to direct and funnel potential drug traffic toward
major cities like San Antonio and Houston. She
says, "[I] hit George West, Texas, and I was driving through there and my license plate was just
stuck in the dash. I was in this total redneck
truck and I looked like a total redneck. I get
pulled over by three cops.

"Tifie/ started questioning me, and they've got dogs running In

and out of the car, and they start taking it apart right in front
of me. They start taking the door paneling off, and I started
freaking out, you know?"

delivery, and whose fault it is if something goes

missing. One way to dispatch a rival (or undesirable employee), she says, is to set him up with an
empty truck; when it (and the trafficker) arrives
at its destination, the load is presumed stolen
and the driver held responsible. What happens
next is up to the accusers. The setup is a constant fear.
"With the guy who I usually coordinated everything, we always picked a route that went out
the east side of Texas," says Maria. "Well, this
other guy was working with me one day and he
was tike,'You know what? lust take 281 out."'US
Highway 281 bisects Texas from south to north
and is one of the most heavily patrolled smuggling routes in Texas. With an interior checkpoint at Falfurrias, about eighty miles north of
the border, the cat-and-mouse dynamic is fairly
blatant. Directing her up 281, she says, should
have made her suspicious of a setup. "I'd already
made it through both checkpointsthrough the
Mexican border and the US borderand then
you have a third border patrol checkpoint about
an hour and a half or two hours alter you get out
of McAllen or Harlingen or any of those border

"They started questioning me, and they've

got dogs running in and out of the car, and they
start taking it apart right in front of me. They
start taking the door paneling off, and everything else, and I fucking just started freaking,
you know? 1 didn't fi"eak out around them, but
I was definitely freaking out on the inside, and
I was like, 'Well, this is it.' And they didn't find
anything, and they took the car apart. And
started thinking, 'Fuck, I'm getting set up.
Someone wants me gone, so they're sending me
with an empty carload and then they're going
to say, 'Oh, she must have taken it.' But it turns
out that they had put an extension on the gas
tank, and that's where the shit was. That was
really nerve-racking."
Once, years later, in Oregon, before Maria
and I drove to a friend's house in The Dalles,
about eighty miles east of Portland, she demonstrated her own packing skills with makeshift
materials from the kitchen, bathroom, and
bedroom. We were taking two joints down I-84,
hardly the stuff of legend (or, in her case, what
would once have been hardly an afterthought),
but 1 figured the added risk factor of her pro-

SIMON

MAXWELL

AFTER

65

bation and the specter of a return to prison if

she got caught made up for the lack of "weight"
that we'd be moving. She placed a paper t o w e l Bountyon the coffee table and sprayed it liberally with Windex, which she said would be the
substitute for pool cleaner. There's a fine line between soaking and spritzing, and she was careful
not to get that inner membrane of paper towel
too wet. The living room soon smelled of ammonia. She then covered the Windex-dampened

going to be approached by other people"'corporate headhunters. Sometimes, she said, they'd

be looking to bring you over to their organization; at others they'd be trying to set you up, to
hit at a rival cartel by sending one of its best assets to prison. To get revenge on a smuggler who
had murdered her father, one mule described to
anthropologist Campbell how she "dressed like
a hooker," "went to sleazy bars" along the border,
and arranged a bogus deal with her mark, who

"/ should have known better than to go in with this guy because
he's a greedy idiot. He made a deal with somebody who offered
him way too much money for the amount of shit that was coming
in, which should have been the first warning sign."

paper towel with red-pepper flakes and ground

cayenne. A layer of Saran Wrap. Then ground
black pepper. More Windex and cayenne. Then
she picked up the whole reeking package and set
it on the two sheets of aluminum foil that would
form the outer shell. Once she'd prepared the
package, she swathed the two AA-battery-sized
joints in Saran and nestled them inside the innermost layer of Bounty. The final bundle was
about half the size of a Quaker granla bar, and
she stuck it in her cleavage. Hours later, when
a Wasco County sheriff's deputy pulled us over
for driving suspiciously slowly and seemingly
aimlessly through the streets of The Dalles in
a furtive search for Maria's friend's house, the
packaging proved its worth. She even congratulated me for playing things so coolly. I looked at
her and felt quite small.
Trafficking is a talent just like hitting threepointers or diagnosing biopsies, and by 2001, as
a dependable young white girl who hadn't been
"popped," she was a known somebody; in straight
America, she'd have been fast-tracked for a corner office. Her bosses advised her: "They'd tell
me, 'Hey, when you start getting good, you're

66

VQR I FALL 2 0 0 9

was picked up by US authorities as he tried to

cross the international bridge between Jurez
and El Paso. Though vengeance served as a motive in this instance, in the pure zero-sum game
of trafficking, the revenge begets the loss of a
mule and the subsequent weakening of a rival
organization, which in turn opens up a slot into
which an opportunistic cartel can slide a moneymaking tentacle. It's very much a ter rito ry-andturf-oriented enterprisethe main trafficker
in this essay maintained Florida/Carolinas- and
Minnesota/Michigan-based circuits for her
carteland the removal of a given territory's
supplier can create a lucrative vacuum for any
organization vtalling and able to exploit it. With
finite turf, of course, comes corporate poaching.
"I remember taking one run up to Minnesota, and when I got to the hotel, there was a
knock on the door," she says. "It was these dudes
I knew from another carte!, and they were like,
'Come on, we want to take you out for dinner
and drinks,' and I was nicking scared because I
didn't know what the fuck they were going to
do to me. I waited until they left and I called
the guys I worked for and I was like, 'Hey man,

this is totally fucked. I just got approached.' And

he was like, 'Well, I told you that was going to
happen." That guy ended up getting stabbed for
approaching me, which is pretty fucked up. And
he's the guy who eventually fucked me in the ass."
When "eventually" arrived, and it all went
horribly wrong, she wasn't surprised. The deal
stank from the beginning.
"Undercover walks up to my side, the window,
and I roll it dovm, and he's like, 'So where's the
stuff?' And I was like, 'What the fuck are you
talking about?' He ended up opening the door,
yanking me out, and within two seconds we were
surrounded by about eight huge white vans. Cops
came charging out of them with semiautomatic
rifies and handguns and I get slammed to the
ground. It was Uke a movie." The arrest went
down in the parking lot of a Bradenton, Florida,
mall. "You can tell them anything you want;
you're not walking away. At that point I knew it
was going to end one way or the other, so I wasn't
totally distraught by it. I was just like, 'Fuck it. It's
over.'" Drug traffickers are fatalists. They have to
be. One can bat .930, as did Amado Carrillo and
his mules, but anytime one runs drugs, there's
that 7 percent to think about. The end had come
in Bradenton by way of Minnesota. It was the guy
who had been stabbed for knocking on her door
and trying to recruit her to a different cartel.
Recruitment hadn't worked in Minnesota, so
things were ratcheted up to coercion. According to a memorandum filed by her lawyer, "The
Defendant was told to serve as a driver for the
drug operation. She was offered three thousand
dollars as payment for her services. When she
later wanted to get away from these individuals,
she was told that she would continue driving for
them. She would get only one thousand dollars
in compensation but she and her family would
be safe. As the leadership of the enterprise all
were armed and dangerous, she felt compelled
to comply or else risk the safety of herself and
her family." Her "services," as it turns out, were
closely monitored by the DEA, and the drugs
she was unwillingly running were destined for

an undercover agent (and a framed narcs-andcache photo).

"I should have known better than to go in
with this guy because he's a greedy idiot," she
explains now. "He made a deal with somebody
who offered him way too much money for the
amount of shit that was coming in, which should
have been the first warning sign." That "somebody" was an undercover DEA agent, and the
"deal," according to court documents, was an
arrangement to receive monthly deliveries of
upwards of two hundred pounds of marijuana.
"If they're too anxious to get a hold of [the shipment], then there might be an underlying reason why, so you should just be cautious and steer
clear of it," she reflects in hindsight. Though
she had gotten herself stuck In an impossible
picklea retribution-seeking trafficker on one
side, the government on the othershe still sees
her capture and imprisonment as the result of
poor execution, not of a poor plan to begin with.
She kept her mouth shut about her original employersthe first cartel that had come knocking
in Tampa that one afrernoonand maintained
a loyalty to the industry that had nurtured her
and provided for her. She was rewarded with the
opportunity to go back.
The Mexicans had offered to burn (or s l i c e she told two different versions of the proposal)
her fingerprints off, to erase her identity, and
to let her back into the organization when she
got out, but she had decided it was more important to be able to see her mother, a law-abiding
schoolteacher. "If you stick with us, we'll take
care of you," her bosses had told her, but upon
her release from prison, she decided it was time
to quit. "The next time I get caught, it's not going
to be forty-one months. It's going to be like ten
or twenty-five yearsif I'm lucky enough to go
to prison and not get killed by someone. I didn't
like prison enough to do it twice." She said she'd
never go back. Not to trafficking, not to prison.
She was just an American citizenpassport revoked, yes, and weekly urine sample required,
truebut a citizen, a free woman. D

SIMON

MAXWELL

APTER

67

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