In Desperation

43

Clarksburg, West Virginia / El Paso, Texas

S teve Pollard had to be certain.

At the FBI’s crime data center outside Clarksburg, the fingerprint analyst needed to check another aspect of the Phoenix kidnapping.

Pollard’s standard operating procedure was to leave no stone unturned.

He’d already identified the two kidnapping suspects, Ruiz Limon-Rocha and Alfredo Hector Tecaza. Check that off. But he was troubled by the elimination prints from the Phoenix case. Pollard had used them to compare with Limon-Rocha and Tecaza’s impressions but was uncertain if the elimination prints themselves had been submitted through the network of crime databases.

Pollard was submitting them now. Better to do it twice than risk an oversight, he thought. Even though he didn’t expect anything, he had to exhaust all possibilities.

After submitting the elimination prints, Pollard was about to check the daily email on success stories circulated to all the fingerprint examiners in the section. But he didn’t get the chance. One of the databases yielded a hit on one of the elimination prints Pollard had just submitted. His eyes narrowed at he concentrated on the result.

What the heck?

It came out of the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, the national database that held details on a range of violent crimes, including serial murders and unsolved homicides, some going back over twenty years.

One of the submissions had yielded a possible match from an unsolved case. Pollard sat up, went to work making comparisons.

I don’t believe this.

A few minutes later he started making phone calls.

At that moment, in Texas at the El Paso Intelligence Center, DEA analyst Javier Valdiz was drafting a new intelligence note on the Norte Cartel for FBI Special Agent Earl Hackett in the Phoenix Division. This one would expand on the summary he’d sent earlier on Ruiz Limon-Rocha and Alfredo Hector Tecaza.

Valdiz worked quickly, marrying up-to-the-minute raw data with the history of the Norte Cartel. He consulted the org chart of cartels in Mexico, Central and South America and criminal networks throughout the Caribbean and their tentacles into the U.S. and elsewhere. The latest edition was complex, starting with leaders and commanders, flowing to plaza bosses, gatekeepers, soldiers, enforcers, transportation chiefs and sicarios. The genealogical aspect to the charts showed bloodlines going back generations, family networks, affiliations.

The Norte Cartel, also known as the Zartosa Cartel, arose from the barrios of Ciudad Juarez to challenge all existing cartels in a battle for control of the prized shipment routes into the U.S.

The Norte Cartel trafficked in marijuana, Colombian cocaine, heroin and methamphetamines. It controlled major distribution hubs in Florida, Georgia, Texas, Arizona, California, and in Chicago, New York, Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, London, Amsterdam, Paris, Madrid and Rome.

It was effective at bribing and threatening government officials, infiltrating police agencies and operating a near-perfect unit of elite, young, highly-trained assassins. Its membership was said to number two thousand, making it among the most powerful, deadly and vengeful of all the major narco organizations. To steal from the cartel meant grisly death. To challenge them in any way ended in torture, mutilation and decapitation, with corpses displayed as warning. The cartel had no alliances and waged war with all rivals, Valdiz wrote.

The Norte Cartel was led by Samson Zartosa aka Twenty-five, El Monstruo. DOB: Unknown. Height: Unknown. Weight: Unknown. Hair Color: Unknown. Eye Color: Unknown. Second in Command was Garcia Deltrano aka Thirty, Comandante. DOB: 16 July 1967. Height: 5'10". Weight: 180. Hair Color: Black. Eye Color: Brown.

Cartel history, intelligence and legend indicated Samson Zartosa rose from the gutter of a Juarez barrio to become one of the world’s wealthiest and most-feared drug lords.

Samson Zartosa’s father, a carpenter, was stabbed to death in front of his wife and their three sons by two men who’d come to their home demanding money. Samson, the eldest, was fourteen. He led his two younger brothers to find and kill their father’s killers, and their families.

It turned out that the two men were thugs in a feared gang.

Consequently, the Zartosa family’s stature and respect was instant. At fourteen, Samson assumed control of the murdered men’s barrio gang, and in a few years built it into a merciless drug cartel.

Along the way, tragedy befell the Zartosa family three more times. The boys’ mother died young of a heart attack. Eduardo, the youngest brother, was in his late teens when he was killed while on vacation in California. Hector, the middle brother, died two years ago during a gun battle with Mexican military forces that left twenty Norte members dead.

When Samson learned Hector had been betrayed by a DEA informant, he ordered the decapitation of the informant’s family members. Next, through threats and bribery, the Norte Cartel determined the informant was being guarded by Mexican and U.S. officials in a mountain hideaway. On the day a convoy was to transport him to an airstrip, two hundred Norte Cartel members surrounded the vehicles, extracted the informant and executed him on the spot.

This was the last known betrayal of the Norte Cartel until the recent rogue action by Salazar and Johnson. The latest up-to-the-moment intel showed that Salazar and Johnson were working for the Norte Cartel, handling security for the San Diego and Phoenix cells, when they attempted to set up a rival route and the upstart “Diablo Cartel,” using Lyle Galviera’s courier company.

Their operation, said to have involved upward of five million in stolen Norte Cartel money, resulted in their murders, Tilly Martin’s abduction, the disappearance of Lyle Galviera and the dispatch of a Norte Cartel assassin, believed to be destined for Phoenix.

Valdiz exhaled and began reviewing his note to clear with his supervisor when his computer pinged. He’d received an encrypted email from the FBI’s fingerprint unit in West Virginia.

His attention was drawn to the subject line: Alert re Phoenix Kidnapping amp; Cold Case.

What’s this?

He opened it and began reading when his phone rang.

“Valdiz.”

“Hey there. Steve Pollard, FBI’s fingerprint section in Clarksburg. I just sent you an alert on the Phoenix kidnapping.”

“It’s a hell of an alert.”

“I’ve alerted ViCAP people, everybody. We need to talk about this.”

“I think so. This changes everything.”