cannabisnews.com: Small-Town Cops Rises to Top of Mexican Drug World





Small-Town Cops Rises to Top of Mexican Drug World
Posted by FoM on April 17, 1999 at 12:38:53 PT
Source: SF Gate
 MEXICO CITY When he was a rookie cop in rural Texas making $3.17 an hour, his bosses said he had ``a long way to go.'' Gilberto Salinas did go a long way, but not the way they hoped. When he finally was stopped two decades later, he was making $22 million a year as a lieutenant to one of the world's biggest drug smugglers. 
Today Salinas is a marked man in a Mexican jail, wanted alive by the United States -- and dead by the former associates he has ratted out. While a Mexican court tries him for drug smuggling, money laundering and organized crime, the United States is requesting his extradition. He could be the first suspect to be tried under a pending U.S.-Mexico temporary extradition treaty. In his journey from small-town cop to big-time smuggler, Salinas learned the intricacies of the drug trade and became familiar with the complex organization of the world's biggest cocaine and marijuana smuggling group. His enemies want that knowledge, coveted by anti-narcotics officials, to die with him. While Salinas isn't allowed to talk publicly, and his lawyer, Jose Omar Camarillo Garza, didn't answer repeated phone calls, his story can be assembled from public records, a confidential confession he is said to have made to Mexican investigators and interviews with authorities and Salinas' former friends and associates. It offers a look at one American's descent into an underworld of narcotics, money and murder, and a glimpse into the deeply secretive circles of international drug smuggling. The story begins with Salinas' demise eight months ago in the Caribbean resort Cancun. Police acting on a tip picked up an alleged drug smuggler going by the name of Gilberto Garza Garcia. The man soon agreed to cooperate in exchange for protection for him and his relatives, and even promised to lead police to his boss: Alcides Ramon Magana, alias ``El Metro,'' possibly the world's top druglord. But late last year, as police took him under guard to Cancun to capture El Metro, the suspect managed to slip away, according to a top Mexican justice official barred by law from speaking on the record. It was weeks before he was recaptured trying to enter Venezuela with false documents. He was returned to Mexico City. Then came a tip that opened the case. U.S. officials contacted Mexican judicial authorities with a request: They wanted to compare Garza Garcia's fingerprints with a fugitive from Texas by the name of Gilberto Salinas. The prints were a match. Confronted, Salinas opened up and gave authorities even more details of his smuggling activities. In all, prosecutors say, his confessions provide one of the most detailed looks ever into the world's largest drug-smuggling organization. According to a confession obtained by The Associated Press and dated Oct. 8, 1998, he provided the identities of the top officials in the group, detailed their smuggling routes and listed houses, hotels and discotheques they own. He implicated Mario Villanueva, former governor of the state that includes Cancun. As police prepared to arrest Villanueva on drug smuggling charges, the governor disappeared days before his term was set to end this month. Authorities suddenly realized how big a fish had almost gotten away. There is little in Gilberto Salinas' origins to indicate how far he would go. He was born in 1958 in Donna, Texas, a small town in the Rio Grande Valley near the Mexican border. His family lived in a one-story, wood-slat house in the town's roughest neighborhood. Salinas went to Donna public schools and is described by those who knew him as a mediocre student who spent much of his time playing pool in bars. When he graduated, he enrolled at nearby Panamerican University, where he majored in criminology for two years before dropping out. Salinas took a series of short-lived jobs: a painter, a fumigator, an employee at a seed company and at the local water department. But he found his first steady work in 1979 as a Donna police officer, for $3.17 an hour. His first evaluation, dated Jan. 1, 1980, was less than stellar. ``Officer Salinas is a Rookie officer and still has a long way to go,'' it reads. Nonetheless, and despite a three-day suspension for a barroom brawl, the larger police department in neighboring Weslaco soon offered Salinas a job for $750 a month. In May 1980, he took it. It didn't last. In December 1982, Weslaco police records show, Salinas was fired after internal affairs investigations into allegations that included burglary, loan fraud, associating with gang members and selling drugs out of his patrol car. He was never prosecuted on any of those allegations, but others cropped up soon enough. In April 1983, he pleaded guilty to possession of marijuana and got three years of probation. In 1988, he pleaded guilty to conspiracy to sell marijuana and received 10 years of probation. The quantities kept getting bigger. In October 1990, a grand jury indictment alleges, Salinas agreed to buy 3,000 pounds of marijuana from a government informant, a major shipment by any count. According to prosecutors, Salinas loaded a $405,000 down payment into the spare tire of a truck and went to the parking lot of a Whataburger restaurant in nearby Brownsville. The informant turned the cash over to police, who arrested Salinas and four accomplices. Salinas jumped a $100,000 bail bond, while his accomplices were convicted of drug smuggling and sentenced to 10 years each. One later escaped from federal prison. According to prosecutors, being a fugitive didn't slow Salinas down. In 1992, he was charged in drug cases in Gainesville, Ga., and Houston. He is a fugitive in both cases. In September 1996, Salinas reportedly had a son, and the mother died three days after giving birth in McAllen, Texas. When the obstetrician, Francisco Jusino, was soon murdered, authorities sought Salinas for questioning, Texas newspapers reported. The case is still open, and Salinas was never captured. By then, he was living just across the border in Reynosa, Mexico, working for what was known as the Juarez Cartel, an international drug smuggling organization headed by Amado Carrillo Fuentes. Carrillo Fuentes, a Mexican known as ``Lord of the Skies'' for his use of jumbo jets to carry drug shipments, had managed to muscle into an industry long dominated by the Colombians. While little is known about Salinas' early days in the Fuentes organization, he allied himself with El Metro, a former bodyguard of Carrillo Fuentes who had moved his base to the Caribbean resort of Cancun. El Metro would be in the right place at the right time. More effective enforcement from the United States was making the use of big jets too risky, and the Juarez Cartel was moving drugs in smaller shipments over new routes -- most of them passing through the Caribbean coast of Belize, Guatemala and southern Mexico. When Carrillo Fuentes died during plastic surgery in July 1997, El Metro became a top leader -- some say THE top leader -- of the smuggling organization that grew out of the legacy of the Lord of the Skies. El Metro was the head of the group's operations in southeastern Mexico. And Salinas, Mexican justice officials say, was his No. 2 or No. 3. El Metro enlisted Salinas to move marijuana and cocaine from northern Mexico into the United States in a complex operation that involved plane drops off the coast of Belize and high-speed boats to take the drugs ashore, according to Salinas' confession. The drugs then were smuggled inside gasoline tanker trucks to the northern city of Reynosa, just across the border from McAllen. The group would pay off police in Mexico in exchange for free passage -- $50,000 a shipment, according to Salinas' confession. There, according to the confession, Salinas would repackage the drugs in airtight, 44-pound tubes and have workers swim across the Rio Grande with the floating cylinders. Trucks would be waiting on the other side to take the tubes to McAllen, where they would be repackaged again by another operative, known as ``the Russian,'' into fruit and vegetable trucks and driven to Chicago and New York. Salinas charged $1,200 for a kilogram of cocaine. It was more expensive than most, but he guaranteed delivery. According to the confession, if the shipment didn't arrive, he would pay for it. Altogether, he said, he moved about 1 1/2 tons a month. That works out to an income of $22 million a year. Last month, after police wrapped up months of interrogation, Salinas was formally arrested, and his status changed from protected witness to regular prisoner. He was charged with drug smuggling, money laundering and organized crime, and has gone to trial before Judge Cuauhtemoc Carlock Sanchez. Salinas' case is linked to almost 40 others, most of those arrests made on the basis of information Salinas provided. Together, evidence in the cases already fills 130 volumes -- all of it sealed. Carlock Sanchez said he has worried about Salinas' prospects of making it through the trial, which he estimated would take the full year allowed by law. ``I'm aware that his life could be in danger inside the prison,'' the judge said. ``I asked the prison director to implement security measures.'' And yet Carlock has turned down prosecutors' requests to have Salinas moved from the medium-security Reclusorio Sur on Mexico City's southern outskirts to a better protected facility. The judge said he knows the case and wants to retain control of it. Sending Salinas to another prison would take the suspect out of his jurisdiction. U.S. drug officials have informed the Mexican government that drug smugglers have put out a contract to help Salinas escape and kill him, according to Mexican officials. Even as Mexico puts Salinas on trial, the United States is trying to get him back. Court documents show the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration is requesting Salinas' extradition in at least four cases: the 1990 marijuana smuggling case, the bail-jumping charge and the two 1992 indictments. ``We consider this a significant fugitive that's important to prosecute,'' said Assistant U.S. Attorney Jody Young, based in Brownsville. Under Mexican law, Salinas will be prosecuted first in Mexico, and must serve out his sentence here before he is sent to the United States for trial. But under a 1997 temporary extradition treaty between the United States and Mexico, at the end of his Mexican trial he could be sent to the United States for trial, then back to Mexico to serve out his sentence, and then back to the United States to serve out a sentence there. The U.S. Congress has approved that treaty, but Mexico's Senate is still considering it. The Mexican judicial official said Salinas could be the first suspect extradited under the treaty. If he were brought home, it would only add to a notoriety that surprises those who knew Salinas back in Texas. Jose Perez, a lieutenant in the Weslaco Police Department, was Salinas' best friend from junior high into their early 20s. He still wonders what happened. ``I remember how we used to talk about all the different drug figures in the community,'' he said. ``There were a lot of people who really envied them for amassing so much money, for having big homes, for driving Town Cars, Cadillacs. ``But I'll tell you. For years I've been putting people behind bars for dealing drugs. And I never expected him to go the opposite way.'' 
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Comment #2 posted by FoM on April 17, 1999 at 19:32:08 PT
Thanks for Everything!
Thanks for telling me! I won't e mail you anymore until I tell you I am going too. I'll post in here or one of the boards to get your attention first. Look around the boards. They can't hit all of them at one time! This is very dangerous! I've lived in a nightmare for a year and maybe people will see now why I have been so afraid to talk to people! It is 10:25 EDT Here now! Peace, FoM!
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Comment #1 posted by DdC on April 17, 1999 at 19:17:00 PT:
Good Post. Off topic message for FoM
FoM, hate to use this space but I've over posted at politics and I wanted to tell ya its 7:12 pm pac. I got your message but couldn't answer it. Be careful. PnWFFFFDdC
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