“Good ideas,” concludes Gladwell, “are out there for anyone with the wit and the will to find them.” Once found, good ideas reinforce one another. This is one way of describing Rudy’s presence in Ottumwa, along with however many others who have landed there with the idea of going into the crank business: Lori built it, and the rest came.
It says a lot about what Ottumwa has become that Tom McAndrew, despite fifteen years working there, has never moved his family to Ottumwa from Kahoka, Missouri, seventy miles away. He would fear, he said, for the welfare of his wife and daughters. The night we all met at the commuter airport, Rudy concurred, saying, “I used to think El Paso was the worst place in the world. Now I think this is.”
It’s cliché to suggest that the undercover cop and the drug dealer are but one chromosomal mutation from being the same person. And yet in McAndrew and Rudy—the country boy and the street thug, whom McAndrew describes as “just a big old softy”—there was every reason to see basis in this stereo type. Rudy loved the rush of bringing McAndrew and DEA small-time Mexican meth dealers. Rudy’s job was essentially, he said, to “go around Iowa, making connections.” Being in danger was like drug for him. For McAndrew, the cat-and-mouse game he played with dealers was also like a drug; he just loved busting dealers, plain and simple.
The two men needed each other in ways that were readily apparent: McAndrew needed Rudy’s connections and Spanish skills; Rudy needed McAndrew’s supervision to work off his violation and stay out of jail. They both nodded knowingly and completed each other’s sentences during the two hours we talked that Halloween night. They were two of a very limited number of people in a vast, underpopulated area doing this one specific thing: infiltrating drug rings. So while they were wary, untrusting friends, they shared a curious kind of respect. McAndrew clearly didn’t like Mexicans, and Rudy clearly didn’t like whites. And yet, as with the cobra and the mongoose, where would they be without each other? The dynamic between them was most clear in something that McAndrew said that night while we drove back to town: he wondered if Rudy’s eventual career turn, once he’d turned in enough low-level dealers to McAndrew and DEA, would be to go back into the meth business. “That’s what I’d do,” McAndrew had said.
While we were at the airport, Rudy talked at length about the mistrust between native Ottumwans and the immigrants who came in ever larger numbers. McAndrew said he understood, but added drily that he didn’t feel welcome in town, either, given how many Mexicans there were. McAndrew and Rudy both laughed. Then McAndrew grew deadly serious. Recently, he said, Mexican meth traffickers had begun following his men around. Just a few weeks before, two off-duty agents with the Iowa Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement had gone into a pharmacy on Main Street and were followed by two young traffickers. The agents were told to stop investigating a particular meth case. If they didn’t, said the traffickers, the officers’ wives and children would be killed. To prove they meant business, the traffickers related the ins and outs of each family member’s daily routine: they’d been watching. (The violence did not include only Mexican drug traffickers. A few months before that, a meth addict had walked down Main Street with a shotgun, shooting at shop windows, lights, and bystanders for ten minutes before McAndrew’s men killed him. McAndrew himself had recently been run over by a car during a crank bust.)
Rudy had seen it all before in El Paso. He’d seen what happened in a trafficking war, and how, when things got serious, the DTOs sent in “the scariest people you ever saw—people who do things like what they did to my brother.” (Coincidentally, the month before, the new police chief of Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, was gunned down by traffickers just four hours after being sworn in.) Ottuwma would be fine, said Rudy, as long as nothing happened to make the DTOs want to further consolidate the market or fight over turf. “If that happens,” Rudy said, “watch out.” At that, McAndrew once again stood and looked out the window.
Ironically, ignoring the DTOs is in some ways to the advantage of local police and sheriffs’ departments of the rural United States for the reason that confronting them would almost certainly result in failure. In Oelwein, chief Jeremy Logan had been enormously successful in the fight against local meth production. When I asked him what he’d do about the DTOs, he said flatly, “Who knows.” Barring instances like the ones in Ottumwa, where traffickers threatened the local police, those in the employ of the major narcotics networks largely work unseen within the small-town immigrant community. As Rudy noted, part of the DTOs’ success is because their vendors go unnoticed, work long shifts, and remain highly mobile. Phil Price had once noted that the traffickers’ subtlety works nicely for everyone involved. “If Joe Blow torches his mom’s house,” he said, “you have to respond. But if smart traffickers are quietly moving hundreds of pounds, totally out of sight, you don’t really have to pick that fight. You’re a small-town cop and federal help is two hundred miles away, in the state capital. You’re probably smart not to look too close.”
How Ottumwa would deal—or not deal—with what was quickly becoming a newer, more violent phase of the meth epidemic was on curious display one sweltering July night, as Tom McAndrew oversaw the last of three exercises designed to train the Wapello SWAT team how to respond to a meth lab, along with the often-well-armed men who work at them. It was eleven o’clock, and we were sitting in the dark amid several hundred acres of chest-high corn adjacent to the Des Moines River. I was pretending to be a meth cook, along with McAndrew, a local pharmacist, and a fire-man from the nearby town of Eldon. Armed, like the SWAT team, with paintball guns, and protected by motocross helmets, we were to resist arrest as vehemently as we could once the SWAT team made their move on our position. We weren’t sure when that would be, and waiting to be attacked had everyone on edge. Especially since the day’s two previous exercises—one in an old barn, another at a former batch site in the woods—had gotten increasingly aggressive. We were all supposed to be acting. But the heat and the isolation had conspired with the adrenaline, nearly leading to two fistfights. The fourteen-man SWAT team took the training seriously, bearing down in full body armor, their paintball guns designed to look like automatic weapons. The tackling and cuffing took place at full speed. If one of us “killed” one of them, it was taken as a very real failure.
Now we’d been waiting for two hours in the heat of the river bottom while the unseen SWAT team belly-crawled toward our position through the corn. As we sat around a fire we built in the small clearing where our imaginary lab was, the adrenaline and fear keening through our bodies grew tempered by fatigue. So McAndrew, seated in a lawn chair with his paintgun across his lap and his motocross helmet propped on his forehead, began telling stories.
The first story was about a famous Ottumwa meth cook, who was thirty-five years old and lived in a nice three-bedroom house with his twenty-year-old girlfriend. This was back in the late 1990s, when McAndrew’s team was raiding an average of one meth lab every four days. (One task force member, Doug Hurley, personally helped to dismantle fifteen hundred meth labs in the first nine years he worked in southeast Iowa.)
What McAndrew and his men found in the kitchen of this particular house was a typical “user lab”: an electric heating pad, some chemistry glassware and tubing, a small machine that popped cold pills one sheet at a time from their aluminum-backed packaging, a few kerosene containers full of anhydrous ammonia, and some Coleman lantern fluid. It was enough to make three to five grams of crank at a time. Or, if done wrong, to blow up the house.