Lights and Sirens
Part 42 of A Policeman's Tale of the American Riviera
“International crime eventually ascends through politics, diplomacy, and statesmanship to a level of supracrime, where, having triumphed absolutely, it rules even that which had been created to destroy it, and is eventually not recognized as crime at all.”
~James Mills, The Underground Empire
Saints and Sinners
What happens in Mexico doesn’t stay in Mexico. A gunfight for control of the plaza in Culiacan or Juarez sends tremors into every city in the United States where cocaine and methamphetamine, where heroin and fentanyl, are bought and sold. Which means every city in America—every town, every village, every sleepy little neighborhood on the American Riviera. Control of the rat lines, the smuggling routes, changes hands at the end of a Cuerno de Chivo, an AK-47, or a crew-served weapon welded into the back of a technical and manned by psychos high on their own products. Fighting in Sonora could easily mean dead bodies in Chicago, or Atlanta, or Los Angeles, and often does. People may watch the news and see fifty people have been shot over a Memorial Day weekend in Chicago, where there are 150,000 gang members responsible for 61% of the homicides, but the context is usually missing.
Why all of this killing? What are they killing each other for?
They are killing each other, when it isn’t just a moronic beef between teenaged hoods with machine guns, for control of the corners, for retail market share. The wholesale market belongs strictly to the Mexicans. They bring it up from mother Mexico and sell it in bulk and the Gangster Disciples, the Vice Lords, and the Latin Kings fight for their corners like pit bulls.
After a while you learn that the only reliable measure of success—or failure—is in the price of a pound or a kilo. If you read about a big border smash or a seizure on the high seas, that is great news and looks like a win for the good guys. But what about the street price for an ounce? Did it go up? If it didn’t go up then the big above-the-fold story and the press-conference seizure didn’t matter that much—because it had almost zero impact on the supply. You begin to understand what you are actually up against—because it is an underground empire—and you learn to despise the politicians who throw up their hands in perpetual defeat and vilify the cops for trying to keep a flood tide of poison from destroying the country from the inside out.
You wonder how anyone can waffle on the issue. Do they not see what drugs are doing to the Republic? Have they not been anywhere in America? Do they not see what is happening to children and their mothers and their families? Whose side are they actually on? That’s a valid question, and you will learn more about the answer than you ever wanted too, even as your dreams are full of trains, planes, and automobiles stuffed to the gills with dope and death, all pouring across the border and into the republic where family’s and entire neighborhoods are destroyed by narcotics, and you fall asleep to surreal visions of an overdose, down on the kitchen floor with the needle still in his arm—while his mother wails in your ear.
When you hit enough doors, the right doors, you will start to see the shrines. The Witch Doctor on Castillo was a Santeria priestess—with a priest’s plumbing—because she was from Cuba, but her services—some chicken blood sprinkled here and there and some bongos and nonsense chanting with shango rattles—were decidedly of an interfaith variety. She was happy to bless any and all for a price, and ward off the evil spirits—which only and ever meant the cops. They pray for success in dealing death. And all of this flirting around with the occult somehow links to Warner Brothers, because the traffickers have adopted Tweety Bird as an unofficial symbol. Tweety Bird is a clue wherever you see it. Sometimes it’s a stuffed animal, or a cheap plastic toy on the shelf, or they will slap a Tweety Bird sticker on their car—because Sylvester, and that’s you—may try to swallow the bird, but he always spits her back out in a cloud of yellow feathers.
They deal in death, but they aren’t without a sense of humor.
