Read Online Dreamland by Sam Quinones - Free Book Online

from now fat and happy,” the doctor said.
    Dennis Chavez opted for the latter. He backed off the steroids and coffee, and stopped power lifting. He took up aikido and long rides into the Colorado mountains on his Harley. Later, he founded a club of officers who rode motorcycles and raised money for charities.
    He mellowed. His police work changed, too. His affinity for sleuthing didn’t flag. But no longer the pit bull, he had to develop other skills. Among these was the cultivation of snitches and, with that, a personality that other people wanted to be around. Finding informants was not hard, really. He’d arrest a guy and tell him he could work off the case by setting up others. Eventually that could lead to cash payments to the informant. What was hard was managing the relationship, particularly when the informant went from working off his case to making a salary from it. The best snitches were the ones who stayed in it and would do anything for their handlers. These relationships required finesse and a soothing personality that let an informant know that Chavez liked him and would protect him. It meant going against the book from time to time—accepting Christmas presents, for example, and giving them in return.
    Informants became particularly important when, in 1995, Dennis Chavez joined the narcotics unit of the Denver Police Department. He was bequeathed his first long-term informant by a sergeant leaving the unit. The sergeant introduced Chavez to a man immersed in Denver’s Mexican heroin underworld.
    Chavez never had much connection to Mexico. His father had forbidden Spanish in the house so his children wouldn’t speak accented English. But Chavez could see the Denver drug world changing. Mexican American dealer families were going to prison, dying, moving away. Mexicans stepped into the void, and when that happened, Chavez began hearing about the state of Nayarit all the time. The heroin in Denver was all black tar now.
    In the late 1980s, he saw guys from Nayarit walking around downtown selling heroin to anyone who’d walk up to them. He arrested many of them, and found Nayarit on a map, but it still didn’t mean much. He saw them move into cars and drive it around to customers. Mexicans were arrested at the bus station with backpacks and a kilo or two of the drug. But Chavez still had no sense for how this fit together, if it did at all.
    Until one day, when his informant said to him, “You know they’re all from the same town, right?”
     
    I met Dennis Chavez at a Mexican restaurant in north Denver, where he told me the story of how he began tracking the Nayarit heroin connection. He said he was intrigued by what the informant told him—that all that he was seeing related to heroin in Denver originated in one small town in Mexico. He prodded the man for more.
    What Chavez had been seeing on the streets, the informant said—the dealers, the couriers with backpacks of heroin, the drivers with balloons of heroin—all looks very random and scattered, but it’s not. It’s all connected.
    They’re all from a town called Xalisco. Ha-LEES-koh—he said, pronouncing the word. Don’t confuse it with a state in Mexico pronounced the same way, but spelled with a j . The state of Jalisco is one of Mexico’s largest and Guadalajara is its capital. This town, he said, spells its name with an x . The informant had never been there, but believed it to be a small place.
    All these guys running around Denver selling black tar heroin are from this town of Xalisco, or a few small villages near there, the informant told Chavez. Their success is based on a system they’ve learned. It’s a system for selling heroin retail. Their system is a simple thing, really, and relies on cheap, illegal Mexican labor, just the way any fast-food joint does.
    From then on, Chavez sat with the informant, at bars and in a truck outside the man’s house, as the informant talked on about these guys from Xalisco and their heroin