It was 1982, and William Hoffman, an American drug runner later tucked into the witness-protection program, was busy using rental cars to ferry 25-pound loads of Mexican marijuana from Brownsville to Houston.
Hoffman, according to records, would drive to a house on Houston’s Wallisville Road, where guys he knew only as “Guero” and “Gringo” would unload the pot.
But small-time was about to become big-time.
Through interviews, documents, and court testimony, the Houston Chronicle has reconstructed the origins of a tenacious syndicate which over 25 years rose from a borderland gang of pot smugglers and car thieves to a multibillion-dollar criminal empire known as The Gulf Cartel In MEXICO.
Hoffman’s own words, offered in testimony, provide a vivid street-level look at how — as Colombia’s mighty cocaine cartels had to abandon Miami and find a way to do business elsewhere in the United States
” the stage was set for explosive growth among Mexico’s drug gangsters who made Houston a national hub as they sought to infiltrate the United States.”
“As the heat came on in Miami in the early 1980s, they started to switch their routes,” recalled Peter Hanna, a senior FBI agent who made a career chasing the cartel.
“The Mexicans said, ‘Hey, no problem, we have been smuggling stuff into the United States for years.’ ”
Keeping a lower profile on U.S. soil than Colombians, who were as bold as they were extravagant, the Mexicans made money hand over fist.
Despite a quarter century of indictments and arrests of its leaders, and seizures of its drugs, cash and guns, the cartel has repeatedly reinvented itself to thrive at unprecedented levels.
As one federal intelligence agent put it, The Gulf Cartel has grown so quickly that it stands apart from other Mexican Drug Cartels and has clearly graduated from door-greeter to superstore-owner, with its territory the swath of Texas border stretching from the Gulf of Mexico westward to Big Bend.
The cartel pumps dope through pipelines connecting Latin America to Houston, and on to Atlanta, Chicago, Miami, New York and elsewhere. And when drugs are being smoked, snorted or swallowed here, the Drug Enforcement Administration contends they have been sifted through the cartel’s fingers.
While there are four or five major Mexican cartels, the Gulf Cartel is consistently considered at the top of the industry. The National Drug Intelligence Center estimates Mexican and Colombian cartels “generate, remove and launder” between $18 billion and $39 billion in wholesale proceeds each year.
“Inside the family, people will be killed by their own, everyone who has balls and greed wants to be the boss,” said Carlos, who asked that his last name not be used.
Having already corrupted members of the very armed forces sent to catch him, Cardenas used a confidant in Mexico’s Special Forces to help launch the Zetas, a band of brutal enforcers, according to an unclassified DEA report. This private army known for military precision and terror, at least in Mexico, was to serve as a hit squad to kill rivals.
Cardenas went too far in 1999 when he and a gang of henchmen caught an FBI agent and a DEA agent driving through Matamoros with an informant in their car. An armed standoff ended with the agents and their snitch fleeing back to the United States.
Cardenas, who quickly landed on the FBI’s most wanted list, was arrested in 2003 by the Mexican military after a shootout. But even from inside a Mexican prison, Cardenas ran the cartel and directed a turf war that tore apart Nuevo Laredo, authorities say.
It wasn’t until 2007, when he was extradited to Houston, that he lost power.
Under heavy guard, his location being kept secret for his own safety, Cardenas is believed to be cooperating with prosecutors in exchange for leniency and other considerations.
Stratfor, an Austin-based global intelligence company, contends the cartel can hardly survive the pounding it has taken on all fronts, and that the feared Zetas have founded their own crime syndicate that works with the Gulf Cartel when it is convenient.
“After nearly three years of bearing the brunt of Mexican military and law enforcement efforts, the Gulf Cartel is now a shell of its former self,” contends the 16-page report.
But some federal agents have said that while the Zetas have emerged and are a great threat, the dope will continue to flow and the cartels will fight to persevere.
“They are not going to go away quietly into the night,” the DEA’s Campbell said. “They are going to try and establish themselves as permanent fixtures.”
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