Los Brothers
During the 1970s, the Mexican heroin business expanded massively. In less than a decade, it went from 20 to 95 per cent of the US market. Desperate demand drove the creation of a new generation of cross-border trafficking networks.
Perhaps the most notorious were the Hernández brothers. Juan and Roberto Hernández Chavira were born in the late 1920s in Boyle Heights, Los Angeles. Their parents were originally from the state of Nuevo León in northeastern Mexico. Their father died when they were young. And they grew up poor. After brief stints in meatpacking factories both realized that they could use their bilingual skills to import Mexican narcotics and flog it on the Los Angeles streets around 4th and Fresno. Throughout the 1950s they stole cars, sold them in Tijuana, bought heroin with the proceeds, and then paid mules to take it back north. They were a team. Juan was “Big Brother”; Roberto was “Little Brother”; together they were “Los Brothers”. Initially they were not terribly careful. They both got caught on multiple occasions; and both became addicted to smack.
In the late 1950s, however, something changed. Roberto met a girl from Los Angeles, the daughter of a Mexican father and an American mother. Her name was Helen Campillo. They got married and she changed her name to Hernández. According to the drug agents and journalists who later interviewed the couple, Roberto was the muscle (“with a voice like a character from a Edward G. Robinson movie”). Helen was the brains and the organizational skills behind Los Brothers’ step up to the big time. (They usually relegated Juan, a frail, chain smoking drug addict to a kind of Fredo figure).
Around 1957 Juan, his wife Evelyn, Roberto and Helen moved to Tijuana. They made contacts with Mexican narcotics producers as well as the Mexican end of the French Connection. These provided the two couples with the drugs. They then used their associates in Los Angeles to establish a distribution network. There were mules that took the drugs over the border for a fee. There were the wholesalers that stored the product in rented apartments. And there were the retailers who sold it on the street.
It was Helen who introduced the security measures. From now on there would be no face-to-face contact between the Los Angeles and the Mexican ends of the operation. The retailers would phone the Hernándezes and make an order. This would be conveyed to the wholesalers in the form of a daily “load list”. The wholesalers would make deliveries to dead drops throughout the Los Angeles area. The retailers would then pay the Hernándezes with Western Union money orders or cashiers checks.
Everything was in code, from the names of the drugs (heroin, for example, was “boys”) to the weight of the product and the telephone numbers of the retailers. To disguise the numbers, they were subtracted from ten. Thus 6 ounces of heroin became “4 [10 - 6] boys”. Telephone number 732-5805 became 378-5205.
Gradually the Hernández network grew. By 1968, Customs officials estimated that the couples were earnings from $80,000 to $100,000 a week. In fact, from 1 October 1968 to 7 December 1968 they had trafficked 52 lbs of heroin and 9 lbs of cocaine to their Los Angeles wholesalers. Together it was worth $344,000.
Money bought luxury and by the late 1960s they had $5m dollars of resort properties in Puerto Vallarta, a cabaret in Tijuana, a chop shop on the road from Mexicali to Tijuana, and a discoteque in Ensenada. They had one house in Tijuana’s exclusive Lomas de Chapultepec and were building another.
The Hernándezes plan was careful but it was not failsafe. And in 1968, Customs officials managed to turn two key members of the operation. They were Roberto’s chauffeur and Helen’s “telephone man”. They managed to get hold of the enterprise’s “customer book” and testified against the couples. It was a massive bust. Over 100 wholesalers and retailers were implicated; 49 were sent to jail.
The two couples, however, were not among them. They stayed in Tijuana. At the time this was a common practice among Mexican American drug traffickers. If they were busted in the United States, they fled to Mexico. As dual nationals, they were allowed to stay. At the time Mexico did not have a working extradition treaty for drug offenses with the United States. In fact, the practice was so common it got a name. It was called a “free fall”.
Stuck now in Mexico for good, the Hernández story moved from small-scale smuggler to trafficker legend. First came the Grand Guignol. In August 1968 another Tijuana smuggler paid a hitman to kill Roberto Hernández. He shot him twice in the back of the head. One bullet came out of his eye, the other smashed his jaw. He was in a coma for over three weeks. It should have been the end. But Helen managed to pay for an expert neurosurgeon to save him. He was blind but he was alive.
From then onwards, Roberto didn’t take any risks. He carried a live grenade around for protection. At times he kept it in a leather pouch attached to his belt. Other times he hung it around his neck. At meetings he would take it out and throw it up and down like a baseball. Helen told a nun who later worked in the Tijuana prison “Most wives say to their husbands don’t forget your lunch box. And I would say to Roberto don’t forget your hand grenade.”
Suitably equipped, the Hernándezes continued to traffic from the other side of the border. In 1970, however, U.S. pressure started to tell. And the Mexicans were forced to act. They sent the notorious PJF commander, Arturo “el Negro” Durazo Moreno up to Tijuana. He caught two Hernández mules, forced them to confess, and got Juan, Roberto and Helen sent away for 11 years each. They were imprisoned in Tijuana’s La Mesa jail.
This then really should have been the end. But the Hernándezes caught another break. They were allowed to continue to run their drug wholesaling business from within the prison. Durazo was probably involved in this. He already had links to the French Connection through his brother-in-laws, the Izquierdo Ebrards. He was unlikely to want to shut down two of the organization’s most profitable distributors. And perhaps most damningly of all, when they were busted again in 1974, it was clear that a lot of their heroin still came through the last remaining node of the French Connection.
But it was also a function of La Mesa prison. La Mesa – like most Mexican jails – was a strange mixture of the brutal and the unrestricted. A cold, sterile Panoptican it was not. Guards could be tough. On entering, prisoners had to perform the “grito” or shout. They walked down a tunnel of prison guards and shouted out their name and their crime three times. The guards screamed in their face and hit them if their didn’t shout loud enough. Beatings and the extortion of prisoners were frequent. And if prisoners really misbehaved they were sent to F Tank, a separate section separated by barbed wire where 60 or 70 of the prisoners with severe mental illnesses were kept.
Courtyard of La Mesa Prison
But there was also freedom or at least a free market. The jail’s 800 men and 50 women slept in bunks on either side of a two-acre dust yard. Richer prisoners could pay to build their own private two-storey houses replete with multiple rooms. (The Hernández’s was pure 1970s luxury with chintzy gold wallpaper, leather sofas strewn with orange cushions TVs, hi-fis, and a fitted-out kitchen. Roberto even had a mobile tape deck where he listened to the audiobook version of The Godfather.) The yard – dubbed El Pueblito – was a veritable bazaar. There were small grocery stores, a line of butchers, taco stands, two formal restaurants, clothing and shoe stores. They were all owned by the prisoners. Some even had monopolies over certain products. One had a contract with Pepsi; another with a local cosmetics firm.
Wives, girlfriends, and children were allowed in every Thursday and Saturday. They could even stay overnight if they paid. One journalist who visited the place in 1971 was surprised to note that,
“There’s a fiesta atmosphere about La Mesa on these days. Strolling mariachi bands, family groups walking arm in arm around the prison yard, or dining in restaurants or gathered around the gazebo in the garden of the prison park listening to a concert.”
It was here that the Hernándezes continued to run their drug wholesaling operation. In 1972, Mexican secret agents infiltrated the prison and observed the scheme first hand. Roberto and Helen had paid an electronics specialist to set up a system of radios. These allowed them to contact drug vendors in Mexico, stash houses in Tijuana, and distributors in Los Angeles. As before Helen organized the transfer of narcotics from one point to another through a system of numerical codes. They were now involved in moving heroin but also cocaine, marijuana, and amphetamines. On the outside, Juan’s wife Evelyn met the clients and set up the stash houses. Money was now paid into bank accounts in Mexico or Switzerland.
The head of the prison was completely aware of the racket. In fact, he brought in police to periodically bust rival traffickers. He had even banned letters being sent out of the prison to prevent any scandal. It was what one police official called “the General Motors of narcotics”. And it was happening in a prison just over a mile from the border.
Quite how much the Hernándezes were making from this racket it is difficult to say. When PJF agents eventually raided the jail in October 1974, they claimed to find evidence that the three traffickers had houses in Mexico City, Guadalajara, Acapulco and Tijuana. They also had over $20 million dollars in the bank. And there were jewels, gold necklaces and bracelets scattered over Roberto and Helen’s upscale prison house.
But Roberto, in a rare interview in 1977, was more downbeat. “Are they still saying that much? We never made that kind of money. There’s big money in drugs, but not much of it stays in our hands. By the time you’ve paid your people, paid off this guy and that guy, you don’t end up with much”.