The Traffickers

TWO

1344 W. Susquehanna Avenue, Philadelphia Wednesday, September 9, 5:35 A.M.

Paco “El Nariz” Esteban, a heavyset, five-foot-two twenty-seven-year-old with coffee-colored skin and a flat face whose most prominent feature was a fat nose twice as wide as it was long, stood in the middle of the brightly lit, newly renovated laundromat. He had his stubby fingers splayed on his ample hips as he surveyed his midnight-to-eight work crew feeding motel bedsheets and towels to the machines.

Built into one long white wall were twenty stainless-steel commercial-quality washing machines. Another interior wall held a line of twenty-five commercial-quality clothes dryers. Waist-high four-foot-square thick-wire baskets on heavy-duty casters either were waiting in front of a washer or dryer, or were full and being wheeled by Latina women in jeans and T-shirts from the wall of dryers to a long tan linoleum counter at the back of the room. There, an assembly line of more Latinas folded and stacked freshly laundered sheets and towels before sliding them down the tan counter to be sorted and packed for transport back to the various motels. The large windows and front door to the street were papered over, and milky paint-splattered plastic sheeting sealed off a side room that was still under construction.

Paco “The Nose” Esteban soaked up the atmosphere of the laundry at this early hour-the soft conversations in Spanish of the workers, the Latin music station playing on a clock radio in the back corner, the hum of washers and dryers. It created an almost peaceful sound, the kind of rhythm that came when good people were accomplishing honest work.

El Nariz took a quiet pride in his crews-he also had ones working as housekeepers at the motels-and what he thought of as his role as their mentor and protector-indeed, their paterfamilias, as he could trace his relationship by blood to a majority of his workers.

Like El Nariz himself, those in his handpicked crews were simple hardwork ing people. Almost all had fled the raw-dirt tin-shack squalor of the slums of Mexico City.

El Nariz-whose own formal education would be described as the School of Hard Knocks in a place like South Philly, where he now lived-had no idea about official census numbers. Moreover, he did not give a rat’s ass about them. He simply understood that what he had now was a helluva lot better than what he’d lived in in Mexico.

Had he even the slightest interest, however, Paco Esteban easily could have learned that Philadelphia, founded October 27, 1682, was the largest city in Pennsylvania. That in its 135 square miles the population numbered-officially, not including those such as El Nariz and his illegal immigrant crews, who wished to remain under the radar and therefore went uncounted-nearly 1.5 million, or roughly more than 11,000 people in every square mile, with about one in four in poverty. That Philadelphia was the fifth-largest city in the United States. And that its urban area, with some 5.3 million people, was the U.S.’s fourth largest.

Also with a cursory search, Paco Esteban could have as easily learned that Mexico City had nearly six times as many people (8.8 million) as Philly within an area only a little more than four times as large (573 square miles), or 15,400 people per square mile. And that Mexico City’s metro area swelled with nearly 20 million people-40 percent of whom lived in poverty with no better than a snowball’s chance in hell (or Mexico) of ever enjoying a finer quality of life.

But Paco Esteban didn’t need numbers to tell him what he already damn well knew: that life here, while not perfect, was far better than in Mexico. As it was of course for everyone in his crews. They had come to America via various routes-not a damn one of them legal-most planned and financed by El Nariz himself, as had been done for him seven years earlier.

Esteban had been twenty-two years old when he’d hopped across the U.S. border-literally, as his smuggler had led his group of four Mexican nationals to the flimsy rusty fencing that separated the two countries and showed them how to boost one another over it into Nogales, Arizona. The smuggler had announced that his amigo-like him, another “coyote,” so named because of their wily, evasive traits-waited on the other side to take them to a nearby drop house.

At the small four-bedroom ramshackle house, where coyotes armed with shotguns and pistols guarded doors leading to the outside, they had joined dozens of other illegal immigrants. These were almost all men, but some women and children, too. The majority were dark-skinned ones Esteban recognized as being from Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America, but there also were ones with much lighter skin who appeared to be European, Middle Eastern, and, clearly, because of their eyes, Asian, all keeping clustered to their own kind and very quiet.

While everyone so far had successfully evaded arrest by the various U.S. agencies policing the border-that alone, El Nariz quickly came to understand, was a significant accomplishment-they still were in danger. He saw that except for mostly moving during the night, not much effort was given to discreetly carrying out the smuggling; this was simply a numbers game to the coyotes, and the coyotes even warned them point-blank that not everyone was going to make it, so they damn well better give it their best shot.

Surveying the groups in the house, El Nariz had comforted himself with the thought: You don’t have to be the fastest-just not the slowest.

Cellular telephones-ones the smuggled immigrants had brought or ones provided by the drop house for an added fee-were being used by the immigrants to call their benefactors in the United States to wire payments of $1,500 to $2,100 via Western Union to the smugglers so that the immigrants could move on to the next leg of their journey.

Western Union promised, for a fee of about a hundred bucks, that anyone could “Send money in minutes by telephone, online, or from one of our 320,000 Western Union Agent locations worldwide! We accept cash, credit, and debit cards!”

Depending on their funds and desire to do so, the journey’s next leg could mean being taken in a car or a bus-or packed miserably in the back of an eighteen-wheeler trailer-on to California, New Mexico, Texas, or even far across the country.

Paco El Nariz Esteban had made his way, under a tire-topped tarp in the back of a Ford pickup with SMITTY’S ROADSIDE SERVICE, SERVING SOUTHERN ARIZONA SINCE 1979 painted on its doors, up Interstate Highway 19 the forty-odd miles to Tucson, Arizona. There he’d joined his uncle, himself a Mexican national illegally in the United States, and who’d floated El Nariz his smuggler’s fee of $1,700.

El Nariz began working at construction jobs. It was brutal, menial work in the Arizona sun, but in six months he’d scrimped together four grand, more than enough to repay his uncle. El Nariz then made contact again with his smugglers, and used the rest of his savings to bring up his wife from the Mexico City slums and, with a small loan from the uncle to cover the difference, his wife’s brother.

Not two weeks later, they were all celebrating the arrival of El Nariz’s wife and brother-in-law. And not quite nine months later, the reunion that El Nariz and his wife had enjoyed that night found them, courtesy of the Primeros Pasos Clinic at Saint John’s Hospital of Tucson, the parents of a newborn son.

And immediately upon his birth on American soil, Ricardo Alvarado Esteban, in accordance with the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution-to wit: All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside-had become a legal citizen of the United States of America.

When the proud papa, now twenty-three years old, was presented with the “First Steps” clinic’s bill for services rendered to Se?ora Esteban-said bill having been translated to Spanish for him by the bilingual aide from the hospital’s financial office-he could not begin to understand such an enormous dollar figure, never mind try to figure out how to repay it. If it had taken six months to save $4,000, he figured that was looking at five-plus years’ savings just for this one bill.

El Nariz decided his next steps after Primeros Pasos were to pack up the family and move to another state.

He felt bad about not paying the bill. But his uncle-a carpenter’s helper whose wisdom came from being three years older and in America for four more-helped him rationalize it by saying El Nariz should feel even worse about the laws of the United States that had caused him to have to risk his life and that of his family by sneaking into America as a criminal, then for little money sneaking around to do the difficult work that the gringos seemed more than happy to hire him to do.

The uncle rationalized that if they as immigrants were treated better-treated as El Nariz’s son would be as an American citizen-then they, too, could be better paid and more able to repay such debts.

“It is really the fault of the norteamericanos and their unfair laws,” El Nariz’s uncle concluded simply. “Comprendo? ”

The uncle then reminded El Nariz of other family he had in Pennsylvania-ones who’d helped with the uncle’s coming to America-and they were in a place outside Philadelphia that was friendly to immigrants. It was called Nor ristown, and, as in Tucson, there was an established community of Mexican immigrants, but unlike in Tucson, they were more or less left alone by la migra, the various authorities enforcing the laws of inmigraci?n.

And there was plenty of work up there, including construction. Perhaps best, there wasn’t a desert sun to suffer under as he toiled.

In Pennsylvania, El Nariz started out doing day laborer jobs. Then, through a family referral, he’d found work renovating a hotel in Philadelphia’s Center City. He secured the job of swinging an iron-headed sledgehammer to bust out each room’s old bathroom tiling because he agreed to the pay. He later learned that it was next to nothing that the other laborers were being paid, but he did not complain-it was far more than the four dollars a day that the minimum wage in Mexico City had paid, which damn sure was nothing.

The demolition job in the city had caused him to find nearby housing for his family-whom he’d then sent for, wife and son arriving a month later by bus at the Philadelphia Greyhound Terminal in Center City-and that turned out to be a South Philly three-bedroom row house, one in disrepair on Sears Street, between the Mexican markets on Ninth and the Delaware River.

They shared the house with two other illegal immigrant families from Mexico, subletting the place-no signed lease, cash only-from a relative of one of the families. He was a punk, all of twenty-one years old. But he had been born in the United States and thus had the appropriate papers to satisfy the owner-a tough Vietnamese, an immigrant himself who had become a proud nationalized American and who’d moved out near his two shopping-strip restaurants in the upscale suburb of King of Prussia-in order to sign the original lease.

While the living conditions-particularly the crime-of Philly’s run-down neighborhoods were hardly postcard perfect, the Estebans found them no worse than the rough Tucson barrio in which they had lived. And they were, of course, a vast improvement over the hopeless impoverishment of the third-world slum that they had fled. Just having reliable potable running water and sanitary sewer systems was a gift from God. And here there was the availability of free public schooling and, as they had found at Saint John’s in Tucson, medical care at clinics and hospitals.

During the renovation job, the hotel had reopened in stages, and well before its laundry room was complete, thus requiring that the sheets and towels and tablecloths and anything else in need of laundering be taken off site. Paco Esteban was offered-and quickly took, having tired of the pain from swinging a bone-rattling sledge-the job of collecting the large laundry bins, then loading and off-loading them when the trucks came.

In the year that Esteban’s family had been in Philadelphia, his wife’s brother also had arrived at the Filbert Street bus terminal, and they had pooled their savings and paid for the passage of more of his wife’s family members-a male cousin in his late twenties who escorted his two teenage nieces-up from Mexico City. For various reasons, the first of the other families in the row house had moved out, then the second, and Esteban’s extended family filled their spaces.

The new arrivals found work, but, as El Nariz had experienced, it was spotty and sometimes dangerous, and, if it could get any worse, it wasn’t unusual to work for days-and then never to get paid.

To what authority could they complain and not have to explain their situation?

El Nariz believed that he could do better, especially now that he saw how many damn towels got dirty in one hotel in a single day. He knew he couldn’t personally handle such a large volume-not yet-but maybe he could do the towels and sheets that came from a smaller place.

He’d gotten the idea because one of the cousin’s nieces now worked as a housekeeper at a motel in Northeast Philly. And after learning from her how many sheets and towels the motel needed laundered on an average day, he’d worked up some numbers and put together a proposal. He then approached the head of the motel’s housekeepers, a plump, balding Puerto Rican woman in her forties who, most important, spoke both Spanish and English.

She agreed, after haggling for a handling fee in cash up front, to present El Nariz’s proposal to the motel manager, a white male of sixty who was so morbidly obese that his engorged gut had popped off two buttons on his greasy polyester shirt, and his striped polyester necktie hung only as far as the bottom of his rib cage, unable to cover his sweaty T-shirt exposed by the missing buttons.

El Nariz had had no real idea of what such a job ultimately could bring. But apparently it was more money than his proposal requested. The manager had asked El Nariz a few perfunctory questions, which were translated by the Puerto Rican head of housekeeping. The manager then had grunted, and after some moments declared, “Aw, why the hell not? Less for me to deal with, especially keeping the damn employee books.”

Esteban’s initial excitement was tempered by the fact that the manager had been slow to pay for the laundry services. But Esteban did not complain-he quietly had begun using the motel’s machines to clean the laundry of another motel that had accepted his proposal, this one more lucrative.

Apparently, though, the late-paying manager was nonetheless pleased with Esteban and his crew’s work, as he eventually did pay and, further, offered Esteban the laundry detail of another motel, one across the river in Camden, New Jersey, that he managed.

Not long after that, El Nariz had offers of more work than he could handle. His limitation wasn’t manpower. His stable of available workers continued to grow. And with more in the process of being brought up from Mexico City-including two who’d been caught by the U.S. Border Patrol near Laredo, Texas, and sent back south, only to get across the Rio Grande unnoticed on their next attempt-they soon filled additional South Philly houses, the rent paid of course in cash.

El Nariz’s limitation was, instead, infrastructure. The motel’s old machines, even if they weren’t breaking down, simply could not keep up with demand.

So, as Esteban found himself having to feed coins to the heavy-duty machines of a real laundromat, he came up with another idea. He again worked up a proposal, and not only had the laundromat manager accepted it-leasing the facility during after hours on a cash-only off-the-books basis-the manager, who Esteban learned also was the owner, offered him the same deal with some other laundromats that he had in Philadelphia.

El Nariz suddenly found that he had more machines than he could use in one location, and when ready to expand, he had others that would be closer to the various motels he serviced.