Eventually, Rudy and his brother began working for a comandante of the Mexican federal police, predominantly transporting marijuana. Then one day his brother was in a car accident in Mexico and lost a load of dope, leading to his murder. Rudy was able to identify the body only by a tattoo on his brother’s calf—his brother had been shot so many times that his face was gone. Afraid for his life, Rudy agreed to take a hundred-pound load of methamphetamine from the Mexican border up to the Ozark Mountains. This was in 1999. According to Rudy, he had no idea what meth was, or even what he had delivered to the white men with long beards who met him in the wooded hills outside Rogers, Arkansas. From there, Rudy took a series of meatpacking jobs, first in Missouri and then in Iowa. All the while, he dealt meth, which was either sent to him one to five pounds at a time in the mail or given to him in bulk by traffickers to distribute at the packing plant.
Rudy called the DTOs’ infiltration of meatpacking plants “the perfect system.” The first thing you do once you cross the border, he said, is to steal someone’s driver’s license. Or you buy a stolen license at the meatpacking plant. (When Rudy said this, his handler—a sergeant in the Ottumwa Police Department named Tom McAndrew—laughed, and added that at least once a month, a confused first-generation Mexican American in California, Texas, or Arizona will call the Ottumwa police wondering why there is an outstanding warrant for his arrest in Iowa, a state to which he has never been.) Moreover, said Rudy, traffickers work long hours in the packing plants, just like everyone else, in an attempt to go unnoticed. As he put it, U.S. law enforcement is used to drug dealers who are flashy and don’t work. Mexican traffickers used this strategy of blending into the general population of immigrant workers to very quickly develop markets as far north and east as Michigan and Pennsylvania. The DTO’s domination and expansion of the meth market was so streamlined, in fact, that when Rudy went back to El Paso two years after his first delivery to Arkansas, crack and coke were no longer the smugglers’ drug of choice; crank was.
Eventually, Rudy was compelled by a speeding ticket and resultant immigration investigation to work as an informant for what was formerly the Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS), but since 2001 has been the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)—a department of the Office of Homeland Security. ICE agents told Rudy that he would be rewarded with a green card if he could help them indict and convict enough “coyotes,” as the human traffickers who bring groups of illegals across the border are called. Rudy agreed, but he played both sides of the fence: many coyotes also smuggle drugs, so Rudy used his connections at ICE to lessen his competition for the El Paso meth market. When ICE agents balked at their promise to give Rudy a green card, he left Texas and headed once again for Iowa. He’d heard that the Cargill Excel plant in Ottumwa was hiring, and he assumed the police and sheriff’s department there would be highly unsophisticated compared with DEA in El Paso.
Rudy got to Ottumwa in 2002. How exactly he came to be an in formant there he won’t say, though it was through a deal for some violation, whether for dealing meth or lacking papers. What is clear is how desperately Rudy is needed in Iowa. Tom McAndrew is the director of the Southeast Iowa Inter-Agency Drug Task Force, an umbrella agency including state, local, and federal antinarcotic agents. It was McAndrew who, as an undercover cop, busted Lori Arnold in 2001. Today, McAndrew calls Rudy the most overused informant in Iowa, pointing to the fact that Rudy, in addition to working for DEA, gets “farmed out to every police and sheriff’s department in the state, not to mention a couple other states when the need arises.” It’s for good reason. According to people at DEA, a critical difference between the Colombian and the Mexican dealers is that the Colombians have to rely on Americans to distribute and sell their product. Not so with the DTOs, who rely on a vast network of Mexican traffickers and dealers who are hard to track. The language barrier alone—particularly in rural areas where there may be many immigrants but few English-speaking ones willing to work against their own people—makes it difficult for DEA agents to penetrate the drug organizations. And according to Rudy, even native Spanish speakers would still need to have the proper connections to Juárez or El Paso or Matamoros to gain access to information. Talking to Rudy made it easy to see how the DTOs’ insularity—enforced with the threat of violence against a distributor’s family members who remain in Mexico—made him so formidable.
According to McAndrew, Rudy was one of only three Spanish-speaking informants working in a state rife with Mexican DTO operatives. As we spoke that night, McAndrew kept going to the lone window in the little room at the commuter airport and peering out into the darkness from behind the curtain. The reason McAndrew had finally agreed to let me talk to Rudy, he said, was to underscore what McAndrew and his men—along with the rest of Iowa law enforcement, whether DEA agents in Des Moines, Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement agents in Cedar Falls, or cops in Oelwein—were dealing with, and what limited recourse they had with organizations that had a militaristic level of organization, efficiency, and increasingly, violence. In the end, Rudy was good enough that he could, as McAndrew said, “bring in as many five-pound deals as we [could] handle.” But he was never going to infiltrate high into the traffickers’ organizations. They were too closed. In a way, it made McAndrew long for the days when Lori Arnold ran things, before the DTOs took over. McAndrew had fit right into Lori’s milieu.
Pointing at Rudy, McAndrew said, “This is it, man. Not that I don’t love you, buddy. But you and me against them—that’s pretty funny.”
In a May 12, 2008, New Yorker article, Malcolm Gladwell observes that world-shifting ideas, far from occurring to just one person at a time, crop up in something more akin to clusters. Alexander Graham Bell, Gladwell points out, is credited with inventing the telephone, though Elisha Gray filed a patent for the same invention on the same day. Calculus was discovered independently by Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz; the theory of evolution was formulated by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace at approximately the same time. For Gladwell, “the sheer number of multiples could mean only one thing: discoveries must, in some sense, be inevitable.”
Lori Arnold had certainly had an enormous impact on Ottumwa in her day, as well as on a good deal of the greater Midwest. But who knows how many others had spearheaded drug routes in the rest of the country—with or without the help of a superlab hidden on a horse farm. Though he didn’t quite have Lori’s vision, Jeffrey William Hayes of Oelwein was essentially trying to do the same thing. Had a few things gone differently, he might well have been the Lori Arnold of his time. Oelwein and Ottumwa might have reversed roles as planet and satellite in the meth solar system. The story of multiples is surely the story of meth, both in the case of Lori Arnold in Iowa and the Amezcua brothers in California, along with an unknown number of contemporaries.