kept them moving on through the 1990s in search of new, less-saturated markets. When they did this, they defied the norms of Mexican drug trafficking.
Most Mexican traffickers naturally followed the immigrants from their home states. This was astute and common sense, for no immigrant group has settled in such numbers in so many parts of America as Mexicans had by the end of the 1990s. Mexican immigrants were in rural areas where local police were often monolingual and understaffed. Those areas had cash-only businesses—Mexican restaurants and money-wiring services—that could be used to launder cash. By the 1990s, small towns and communities in rural Colorado, Georgia, and Arkansas, where Mexicans worked in meat plants, became major hubs for traffickers, places where they divided the dope loads they’d brought in and with which they supplied much larger towns. Mexican traffickers did this by following the immigrants. Thus by the 1990s, for example, it was possible for Sinaloan traffickers to find drug markets in many parts of America using Sinaloan immigrant communities as their point of contact and place to blend in. Michoacan traffickers did the same in the many U.S. regions where Michoacan immigrants became essential parts of the local economy.
But Nayarit is Mexico’s fifth-smallest state, with barely a million people. Its migrants are few and have congregated mainly in Los Angeles and Reno. To find new heroin markets, the Xalisco Boys would have to move where they had no natural family or rancho connection. That’s exactly what they did. Like Spanish conquistadors, venturing beyond the comfortable hometown networks became part of the Xalisco Boys’ DNA.
To do this, though, they needed guides. Spaniards relied on Indians who hated the Aztecs to guide them across the New World to Tenochtitlán, the capital of the Aztec Empire, now Mexico City. Junkies did the same for the Xalisco Boys. The Xalisco Boys supplied these junkies’ habits in exchange for help in moving into a new area, and in renting apartments, in registering cellular phones, and buying cars.
“You get one person to show you around and pass around the [phone] number and it’s like bees to a hive,” one imprisoned Xalisco Boy told me. “They all know each other. It’s like having a scout. That’s what happened in Las Vegas. A female addict there told some of the families, ‘I know people in Tennessee.’ So they went with her to Memphis. It became one of the biggest markets for a while.”
They went to towns with large Mexican populations, where the Boys could blend in, and where no gang or mafia controlled the drug trade. But junkies got them there and found them their first customers. Junkies allowed the Xalisco Boys to expand far beyond where they might have had they only relied on Nayarit immigrant connections. With faith in the addictive power of their dope, the Xalisco Boys harnessed these junkies who led them to rich new markets where almost no Nayarits lived, but where thousands of middle-class white kids were beginning to dope up on prescription opiate painkillers.
Junkies could track the telltale signs through the streets of a new city to the hidden customers that the Xalisco Boys might never find otherwise. Junkies knew the slang and could read looks of desperation.
Most important of all—and crucial to the expansion of the Xalisco Boys—was that junkies could navigate America’s methadone clinics.
The painkiller known as methadone was synthesized by German scientists in the effort to make Nazi Germany medicinally self-reliant as it prepared for war. The Allies took the patent after the war, and Eli Lilly Company introduced the drug in the United States in 1947. U.S. doctors identified it as a potential aide to heroin addicts.
That idea was taken up by Dr. Vincent Dole, an addiction specialist at the Rockefeller Institute in New York City. Methadone, Dole found, was the only opiate whose addicts did not demand increasing
Most Mexican traffickers naturally followed the immigrants from their home states. This was astute and common sense, for no immigrant group has settled in such numbers in so many parts of America as Mexicans had by the end of the 1990s. Mexican immigrants were in rural areas where local police were often monolingual and understaffed. Those areas had cash-only businesses—Mexican restaurants and money-wiring services—that could be used to launder cash. By the 1990s, small towns and communities in rural Colorado, Georgia, and Arkansas, where Mexicans worked in meat plants, became major hubs for traffickers, places where they divided the dope loads they’d brought in and with which they supplied much larger towns. Mexican traffickers did this by following the immigrants. Thus by the 1990s, for example, it was possible for Sinaloan traffickers to find drug markets in many parts of America using Sinaloan immigrant communities as their point of contact and place to blend in. Michoacan traffickers did the same in the many U.S. regions where Michoacan immigrants became essential parts of the local economy.
But Nayarit is Mexico’s fifth-smallest state, with barely a million people. Its migrants are few and have congregated mainly in Los Angeles and Reno. To find new heroin markets, the Xalisco Boys would have to move where they had no natural family or rancho connection. That’s exactly what they did. Like Spanish conquistadors, venturing beyond the comfortable hometown networks became part of the Xalisco Boys’ DNA.
To do this, though, they needed guides. Spaniards relied on Indians who hated the Aztecs to guide them across the New World to Tenochtitlán, the capital of the Aztec Empire, now Mexico City. Junkies did the same for the Xalisco Boys. The Xalisco Boys supplied these junkies’ habits in exchange for help in moving into a new area, and in renting apartments, in registering cellular phones, and buying cars.
“You get one person to show you around and pass around the [phone] number and it’s like bees to a hive,” one imprisoned Xalisco Boy told me. “They all know each other. It’s like having a scout. That’s what happened in Las Vegas. A female addict there told some of the families, ‘I know people in Tennessee.’ So they went with her to Memphis. It became one of the biggest markets for a while.”
They went to towns with large Mexican populations, where the Boys could blend in, and where no gang or mafia controlled the drug trade. But junkies got them there and found them their first customers. Junkies allowed the Xalisco Boys to expand far beyond where they might have had they only relied on Nayarit immigrant connections. With faith in the addictive power of their dope, the Xalisco Boys harnessed these junkies who led them to rich new markets where almost no Nayarits lived, but where thousands of middle-class white kids were beginning to dope up on prescription opiate painkillers.
Junkies could track the telltale signs through the streets of a new city to the hidden customers that the Xalisco Boys might never find otherwise. Junkies knew the slang and could read looks of desperation.
Most important of all—and crucial to the expansion of the Xalisco Boys—was that junkies could navigate America’s methadone clinics.
The painkiller known as methadone was synthesized by German scientists in the effort to make Nazi Germany medicinally self-reliant as it prepared for war. The Allies took the patent after the war, and Eli Lilly Company introduced the drug in the United States in 1947. U.S. doctors identified it as a potential aide to heroin addicts.
That idea was taken up by Dr. Vincent Dole, an addiction specialist at the Rockefeller Institute in New York City. Methadone, Dole found, was the only opiate whose addicts did not demand increasing
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