El Barquero pulled his car off the dirt road and up to the metal gate that guarded the road to the farm. The four men who stood beside the gate drinking cerveza and smoking cigarettes around a small gas lamp eyed him with suspicion. One of the guards picked up his assault rifle and cautiously approached the car as the other three slowly moved around the car to block its movement forward or back. One of the men circling the car produced a field radio and spoke into it. El Barquero rolled down the driver’s-side window and looked at the armed man who approached. As he neared the window, another guard used a long, black metal flashlight to illuminate El Barquero’s face. El Barquero didn’t flinch in spite of the blinding light; instead, he stared directly into the eyes of the approaching silhouette of the man with the gun. Coming closer, the guard turned and nodded to his partner to shut off the light as he recognized the powerfully built man behind the wheel.
“They’re in the barn,” he said as he pointed down the road. “The Padre has been waiting for you. Let him through.”
Two of the men pulled the metal gate aside to allow the car to pass. El Barquero pulled his car onto the dark, rutted gravel road that would take him the last few miles to his destination. He had been in the car for more than six hours, including the time waiting to cross the border. He was now about twenty miles outside of Piedras Negras in the Mexican State of Coahuila, across the border from Eagle Pass, Texas. It was near the western edge of his cartel’s territory along the Texas border. He had driven straight through from Houston, where he had finalized the details of his latest gun delivery for the cartel. This was the largest shipment he had ever made. It was a plan he had been grooming and cultivating for nearly six months.
Normally, he sourced firearms in relatively small quantities. For years, the easiest way had been to employ dummy buyers to purchase weapons legally from gun shops, firearms shows, hunting and fishing retailers, sporting goods stores, pawn shops, private dealers, and even chains of mega-warehouse stores. The lax background checks employed by these legitimate dealers made accumulating pistols, rifles, shotguns, and even semi-automatic assault-style weapons that could be converted to fire in full automatic mode relatively easy. The weapons purchased were perfectly legal except that the dummy buyers would then pass the weapons on to El Barquero, who would mark up their price and move them across the border. His buyers were paid for their work, sometimes in cash, sometimes in drugs…and sometimes when they had outlived their usefulness, they paid him with their lives. The problem with this method was that it was time-consuming. The National Rifle Association and its numerous influential Washington lobbyists had made civilian purchases of powerful assault weapons relatively uncomplicated for someone with a clean record. Law-abiding citizens needed assault rifles for hunting and to protect their homes, and the Second Amendment protected that right, they argued. However, you still couldn’t send a dummy buyer into a sporting goods store to buy one hundred Colt AR-15s without drawing suspicion. It took time to accumulate a significant amount of merchandise to transport.
Over time, even using dummy buyers became more difficult. Increased pressure to stem the tide of guns illegally finding their way onto the streets caused U.S. authorities to increase the level of scrutiny regarding federal background checks and the amount of time it took to purchase guns. They also increased prosecution of unscrupulous gun dealers who skirted these requirements.
El Barquero had turned to other methods, including hiring partners to specialize in following and casing police vehicles, particularly unmarked ones. Numerous assault rifles were stolen from the trunks of unattended law enforcement vehicles parked in driveways while the officers were off duty. Even parked police cruisers on the street were targeted.
He also used some of his shadier contacts at gun stores to put him in contact with locals who were large gun collectors. He used the guise that he was interested in buying or selling rare and valuable firearms. Sometimes he was able to personally meet the collectors at local gun shows as well. After learning their identities, he would stake out their homes and break in during the night. He was good with alarms, and after subduing the homeowners in one way or another; he would pilfer their stores of weapons. The locks and hinges on their gun cases proved little challenge for the small amounts of shaped charges of high explosives he employed if the owner wouldn’t cooperate.
He had learned his trade as a senior officer of the Mexican army’s elite Special Forces Airmobile Group. He had been trained by some of the world’s best counterterrorism and counterinsurgency operatives. Over the years, the Padre had approached him numerous times, attempting to persuade him to leave the military and come work for the cartel. Despite the Padre’s repeated promises of wealth and power, El Barquero had always refused. Few people declined the Padre’s requests and lived. He was the exception. It wasn’t until his pregnant wife and unborn son were killed in a violent carjacking that he finally gave in. His world was empty. He had nothing left to live for.
But even invading homes was hit or miss, as antique guns were of little use to him. Occasionally, however, the robberies paid huge dividends. The number of private collectors who hoarded assault rifles, machine guns, and even large-caliber sniper rifles was amazing, particularly in Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana. He handled these jobs himself, as the risk of being caught was high if the alarm wasn’t handled properly, and hired agents couldn’t always be trusted to permanently silence a gun owner who would rather have his guns pried from his cold, dead hands than turn them over without incident.
Breaking into the homes of gun collectors led to breaking into gun stores, which had proven successful as well. He avoided stores in major metropolitan areas, tending to focus on small towns and cities where he felt his crime was easier to commit.
He even considered stealing guns from small-town police departments or out-of-the-way military facilities, but ultimately the plans proved to be too complicated for him to facilitate on his own. For a job like that, he needed someone on the inside. That was how he found Sanders.
Sanders had been a good man most of his life, until his wife left him for another man. She even took their two children with her. Over time, his drinking had progressed to the point where he was clearly going to lose his job. It was just a matter of time. Somewhere along the way, at his lowest point, he fell victim to the intoxicating grip of heroin. El Barquero had met him earlier that year in a small tavern in New Orleans a few blocks off Bourbon Street in the French Quarter. Sitting at a table in the back of the dimly lit and empty bar, he bought Sanders a few rounds while he listened to the man’s woeful tale of losing his wife, his kids, his money, and now he faced the ever-growing prospect of his Louisiana National Guard unit being deployed to the Middle East by the end of the year. Noticing the track marks on his arm, it didn’t take long for El Barquero to ask him if he wanted to follow him back to his motel room, where he could help the sweating and shaking man get well. Sanders reluctantly agreed but began to have second thoughts as they drove toward the city limits. As Sanders entered the dark room on the second floor of the dingy motel, he worried that he had made his last mistake. Unfortunately for him, it was only the first mistake in his relationship with El Barquero. The enormous Mexican gave him some money and enough junk to keep him high. For the better part of the next twelve days, Sanders rarely removed the chain on the door except to let his new benefactor in to hand him some food or more of the heroin that numbed his body and washed away the pain in his head and in his heart.