door, this guy hollers, “Mike!” And here were these Tennessee people back in town, and they had somehow run into Dave. Once again, fate played a huge part in all this.
I knew Jack got arrested in the Navy because some dumbass was walking around with his phone number in his pocket, so I always gave my phone number out in code. It was a simple one—probably wouldn’t fool anybody for long. Of course, these guys forgot the key to break the code. They said they’d been trying to find me ever since we did that first deal in the desert.
The guys were from Tennessee—Tommy Pitts and John Wheeler. They turned out to be a really good connection in the early time. They put together some decent buyers of their own and took a lot of weight. If I remember right, I think we started with around 200 pounds. After that, they wanted more and more. Dave could never keep up with anything like that—the suppliers he had were spotty. So Jack and I took ’em on, and Dave was more or less a partner. That’s when things started getting serious—that’s when we got with Hector and really started to roll.
Hector Ruiz Gonzales, aka El Arabe, was a well-connected Mexican whose stock in trade was heroin and opium. He was astute enough to recognize a growth industry when he saw one. As the pot phenomenon began to gain momentum, Hector was front and center. And by his side was Mike Halliday, whom he had met through Panchelli and nurtured from one small deal to the next.
Though no one realized it at the time, Mike had landed a twenty-four karat connection. From stubborn persistence and a snarl of disparate parts, he untangled his way to numero uno—the man who controlled the biggest fields in Northern Mexico. Just like Panchelli and the boys at Phelps Dodge, Hector took an immediate liking to Mike. They were similar in age and temperament, firmly attached to the values of machismo, and united in their desire to plumb the border and open the spigots wide. To Hector, Mike was still a small buyer with the potential to grow. To Mike, Hector was the mother lode.
In this case, the mother lode would actually turn out to be Hector’s grandmother. Her name was Ignacia Jasso Gonzalez, but she was better known as La Nacha.
La Nacha was a one-woman cartel before the cartels ever rose to prominence. And she was the absolute monarch of Northern Mexico’s illicit drug trade. In fact, La Nacha ruled the wide-open badlands for more than a half-century. To this day, her name is uttered in hushed tones of respect along Mexico’s northern border.
La Nacha was likely to have been born sometime in the early 1890’s, which would make her around seventy-eight when Mike Halliday entered the picture in the early ’70s. She had ascended the ranks through marriage to a smuggler called El Pablote, her first boss, her mentor, and a man who would himself become a drug kingpin in Mexico. Together, they would remove the Chinese opium dealers who held a tight rein on the Mexican drug trade. The Mexicans hated the Chinese drug dealers. Few took notice and even fewer took exception when La Nacha and El Pablito eliminated them with extreme prejudice.
But payback’s a bitch. After the untimely assassination of El Pablote in 1927 or so, La Nacha was left to run things on her own. She discovered an aptitude for the business and grew it impressively, rising above the law. Her activities were hardly a secret, but widespread “donations” kept her safely outside the extremely short reach of Mexican law enforcement. She applied la mordida (the bite) with a liberal hand.
How much money she made was anybody’s guess. In 1973, the El Paso Herald Post reported that La Nacha had amassed close to $4.5 million in safe deposit boxes throughout Cd. Juarez. Yet she refused to budge from Bellavista, the working-class Juarez neighborhood where she lived most of her adult life.
By many reports, La Nacha ruled with a benevolent hand, funding programs for hungry children and unwed mothers. Who knows? But her power was absolute as she reigned supreme over the shooting gallery near downtown Juarez, where opiates were dispensed to anyone with the price of a fix.
MIKE HALLIDAY
La Nacha was never called La Nacha in Mexico. She was La Senora. She dealt heroin out of a little house in a row of houses in a neighborhood. The house next door was Hector’s office. Hector ran the shooting gallery for his grandmother. It had a screen door. There would be a guy who just stood there. His job was to let you in. Once you got inside, there was an old car seat and a little table with a bottle of water and a bunch of needles. Hygiene was non-existent.
Another guy would sit at the little table with a moneybag and three different pouches. He had a gun next to him. They sold it three different ways—$40 for a gram, $10 for a hit, or $5 for the really shitty stuff.
After being a lookout for years, then working the door for years, this guy finally gets the chance to sell the actual heroin. You know how much he gets paid for selling heroin? Nothing—not a dime. What he gets is the chance to rip people off—especially the gringos. They’d ask for $10 worth, he’d give them $5 and they wouldn’t know the difference. The Mexican junkies and most of the real hardcore junkies, they could tell. But the guy could make a lot of money ripping people off at $5 a whack, because it was a 24/7 business.
And every Monday without fail—rain, shine—there was a guy who would sit in a lawn chair out at the corner and wear a big straw hat. He had a spiral notebook and a bag of money. If you were a Mexican cop, all you had to do was drive by, sign your name, put down your badge number. That’s it, you’re $10 richer.
So when the Federales came to town a couple of times a year, the local cops would be sure and tell La Nacha in advance. She’d shut down and go spend a few days at the ranch. That woman was better protected than the President of Mexico. She had so much money you wondered why she lived where she did. But she owned four blocks in every direction from her house. And along with all the houses, she owned the people. So if anybody wanted to get to her, they had to go through four square blocks of Mexicans. And they all had guns.
The early success enjoyed by Mike and Jack was not so much a case of outsmarting the authorities as an absence of any authorities to outsmart. In 1968, under Lyndon Johnson, the Bureau of Narcotics, administered by the Treasury Department, was combined with the Bureau of Drug Abuse Control (BDAC), which operated as part of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. The newly formed Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD) was the latest in an alphabet soup of drug enforcement agencies.
Immortalized in the Academy-Award winning movie, “The French Connection,” the BNDD made its bones in the international heroin trade. Marijuana had not yet gotten their attention. What little resistance Mike and Jack encountered came in the form of the Border Patrol, an overworked, understaffed agency with an impossible job and inadequate funding. Three thousand miles of border divided by several hundred agents equals token resistance. Their focus was on illegal aliens. If they happened to stumble on a drug crossing, so much the better. But it wasn’t high on their list of priorities.
Hector kept the loads coming. The Tennessee connection began to absorb up to 1,000 pounds at a time. Significant buyers in Colorado and Florida were coming into play. The loads grew quickly as Jack Stricklin focused on the distribution side while Mike Halliday spent his time in Mexico, where he was beginning to discover that the business of pot adhered to an entirely different code of conduct.
MIKE HALLIDAY
It was sometime in the early ’70s. Mexico had decided that the United States had something wrong with their horses—some kind of equestrian flu. I think they called it Operation Grand Vision. They wanted to make sure no American horses were being smuggled into Mexico.
So the local army decided okay, our job is to go and make sure nobody crosses the border. Well, it took them zero minutes to find out where the best smuggling routes were. There were places that were just so heavily used for smuggling, they might as well have had traffic lights. The only ones that didn’t know about ’em were our own feds. So the Mexican Army sets up camp at the spot we liked to use—right there at the bottom of the levee.
We found out about it pretty fast. Hector, Panchelli, and myself—we