tight rein on the Mexican drug trade. The Mexicans hated the Chinese drug dealers. Few took notice and even fewer took exception when La Nacha and El Pablito eliminated them with extreme prejudice.
But payback’s a bitch. After the untimely assassination of El Pablote in 1927 or so, La Nacha was left to run things on her own. She discovered an aptitude for the business and grew it impressively, rising above the law. Her activities were hardly a secret, but widespread “donations” kept her safely outside the extremely short reach of Mexican law enforcement. She applied la mordida (the bite) with a liberal hand.
How much money she made was anybody’s guess. In 1973, the El Paso Herald Post reported that La Nacha had amassed close to $4.5 million in safe deposit boxes throughout Cd. Juarez. Yet she refused to budge from Bellavista, the working-class Juarez neighborhood where she lived most of her adult life.
By many reports, La Nacha ruled with a benevolent hand, funding programs for hungry children and unwed mothers. Who knows? But her power was absolute as she reigned supreme over the shooting gallery near downtown Juarez, where opiates were dispensed to anyone with the price of a fix.
MIKE HALLIDAY
La Nacha was never called La Nacha in Mexico. She was La Senora. She dealt heroin out of a little house in a row of houses in a neighborhood. The house next door was Hector’s office. Hector ran the shooting gallery for his grandmother. It had a screen door. There would be a guy who just stood there. His job was to let you in. Once you got inside, there was an old car seat and a little table with a bottle of water and a bunch of needles. Hygiene was non-existent.
Another guy would sit at the little table with a moneybag and three different pouches. He had a gun next to him. They sold it three different ways—$40 for a gram, $10 for a hit, or $5 for the really shitty stuff.
After being a lookout for years, then working the door for years, this guy finally gets the chance to sell the actual heroin. You know how much he gets paid for selling heroin? Nothing—not a dime. What he gets is the chance to rip people off—especially the gringos. They’d ask for $10 worth, he’d give them $5 and they wouldn’t know the difference. The Mexican junkies and most of the real hardcore junkies, they could tell. But the guy could make a lot of money ripping people off at $5 a whack, because it was a 24/7 business.
And every Monday without fail—rain, shine—there was a guy who would sit in a lawn chair out at the corner and wear a big straw hat. He had a spiral notebook and a bag of money. If you were a Mexican cop, all you had to do was drive by, sign your name, put down your badge number. That’s it, you’re $10 richer.
So when the Federales came to town a couple of times a year, the local cops would be sure and tell La Nacha in advance. She’d shut down and go spend a few days at the ranch. That woman was better protected than the President of Mexico. She had so much money you wondered why she lived where she did. But she owned four blocks in every direction from her house. And along with all the houses, she owned the people. So if anybody wanted to get to her, they had to go through four square blocks of Mexicans. And they all had guns.
The early success enjoyed by Mike and Jack was not so much a case of outsmarting the authorities as an absence of any authorities to outsmart. In 1968, under Lyndon Johnson, the Bureau of Narcotics, administered by the Treasury Department, was combined with the Bureau of Drug Abuse Control (BDAC), which operated as part of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. The newly formed Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD) was the latest in an alphabet soup of drug enforcement agencies.
Immortalized in the Academy-Award winning movie, “The French Connection,” the BNDD made its bones in the international heroin trade. Marijuana had not yet gotten their attention. What little resistance Mike and Jack encountered came in the form of the Border Patrol, an overworked, understaffed agency with an impossible job and inadequate funding. Three thousand miles of border divided by several hundred agents equals token resistance. Their focus was on illegal aliens. If they happened to stumble on a drug crossing, so much the better. But it wasn’t high on their list of priorities.
Hector kept the loads coming. The Tennessee connection began to absorb up to 1,000 pounds at a time. Significant buyers in Colorado and Florida were coming into play. The loads grew quickly as Jack Stricklin focused on the distribution side while Mike Halliday spent his time in Mexico, where he was beginning to discover that the business of pot adhered to an entirely different code of conduct.
MIKE HALLIDAY
It was sometime in the early ’70s. Mexico had decided that the United States had something wrong with their horses—some kind of equestrian flu. I think they called it Operation Grand Vision. They wanted to make sure no American horses were being smuggled into Mexico.
So the local army decided okay, our job is to go and make sure nobody crosses the border. Well, it took them zero minutes to find out where the best smuggling routes were. There were places that were just so heavily used for smuggling, they might as well have had traffic lights. The only ones that didn’t know about ’em were our own feds. So the Mexican Army sets up camp at the spot we liked to use—right there at the bottom of the levee.
We found out about it pretty fast. Hector, Panchelli, and myself—we go down there in the middle of the day and find the head guy. We told him we were going to be coming through there at night with some TVs from Mexico. We tell them, “We’re gonna be driving this vehicle across right here, and it’s gonna be about ten tonight.” Of course by now a couple hundred dollars have changed hands, so the guy said, “No problemo. You bring all the TVs you want. We’re ready for you at ten.”
That night, I drove the Scout. By now we had bought one of our own. Dave and Jack were up on the highway. We had our radios and scanners going, everything looked okay. I turned off the lights because it was a fairly full moon. I came down the levee and headed into the river.
The minute I got down the bank and into the riverbed, I swear I could hear the firing pin hit the first bullet. All of a sudden—Bam, bam. Holy shit they’re shooting at me!
It’s really kind of funny. The first thing you do when you’re getting shot at from behind is crinkle up your neck. Like somehow, that’s gonna stop a bullet. In real life, what really saves you is when you got 600 pounds of pot behind you. It takes a pretty high-powered round to get through that.
Well, I’m coming up the other bank, and then I had to get up on the levee where I’d be perfectly silhouetted. It was almost like shooting ducks in the carnival. Bam, bam, bam! Jack is on the fucking radio, “Hey, Dave, are you shooting your gun?”
And I’m screaming “Is it clear? Is it clear? Get me the fuck out of here!”
I mean we got out of there in a hurry. I figured the gas tank would explode at any moment. I was driving like a maniac. Somehow I got out of there without getting killed.
When we got back to my house—we were living down the Valley at that time, pretty close to the river—we looked over that Scout, there was not one fucking bullet hole to be found anywhere! That’s impossible—that Scout had to be shot to hell. But we couldn’t find one bullet hole.
The next day we went back to the river and asked the commander, “What the hell was that about?”
Those cocksuckers were still drunk. They must have spent every dime we paid them on tequila and beer. “Oh, amigo, we want to make it look good—yes? I tell the guys, when the gringos come, you shoot over the head—Bam, bam, bam, bam. Good one, huh?”
