1: All Right

Maria had been dead once, by her reckoning for a good five minutes. She hadn’t fallen unconscious or drifted off to sleep, and she hadn’t taken a break to rest her eyes. As Maria tells the story, she was coded and cold—motionless, overdosed, and deceased—on a gurney in the intensive care unit at an East Lansing hospital. This was back in the late nineties. Her ex-boyfriend had just died from a heroin overdose, and after receiving the news, she’d put the phone down and picked the bottle up in the same motion, the physics of simultaneously catching one thing while dropping another be damned. She remembers her death that day, the result of a telescopically short and sweet bender of beer, Irish whiskey, and barbiturates. She’d pounded and then paraded the empty bottles of booze and Seconol in front of her roommate, who called 911 and then instructed her not to sit or lie down. But Maria laid herself down on the couch anyway, fell asleep, and that’s when she died.

Sure, she knew enough not to lie down, she would tell me later. Maria claimed to have a sixth sense for extra-medicinal dosing, a clairvoyance that enabled her to size up a user and then prepare any drug in an amount appropriate to court danger. Perhaps based on rough increments of twenty or thirty pounds, she could gauge roughly how fucked up you’d get if you weighed x pounds and snorted y lines of coke, each containing z milligrams of powdered cocaine hydrochloride. Once, when a friend balked at the outrageous amount of coke she had divvied out to a fellow traveler—probably enough, she later said, to make just about anyone overdose—she brushed it aside: “I think Johnson is going to be all right with this.” And he was, provided that all right meant not dead, but close to it. Years later, by her own admission—to me and to her probation officer—Maria confessed that she was “much more of a stimulant girl,” and as such really didn’t warrant court-sanctioned drug testing for heroin or methadone, an unfamiliarity which could possibly account for the absurdly small size of the overdose of depressants that led to her death. (The court included testing for the entire slate of DEA-scheduled drugs as part of her probation anyway.)

Drugs were her lifestyle and livelihood back then, and a good businesswoman (which Maria insisted that she was, rarely feeding her own demand by cannibalizing her supply) had to know how to revive an overdose victim, if only to hedge against losing a customer. Moreover, she was no stranger to curing herself. In those days, when she wasn’t on the road between Mexico and the market, she was intravenously injecting (snorting didn’t do it for her anymore) herself with so much cocaine that she periodically had to home-remedy her own overdoses. When she’d gone too far, pushing her cardiovascular system over the line, she’d rectify the situation with immersions in bathtubs full of ice water. That afternoon, though, with her vitals skewing in the other direction, Maria just couldn’t keep herself off the couch and awake. This was a suicide attempt, after all, and like everything else she did with narcotics—ingesting and selling, smuggling and trafficking—it had to be performed as superlatively as possible. It had to be done right, for maximum dramatic effect.

Her memories restart at the moment she emerged from death. Her mother was holding one hand, her sister the other, and she was awake and alive. EMTs had gotten the poison flowing in the other direction, and biochemical normalcy began to creep in as the slough of depressants drained out. When she got out of the hospital, she went to her favorite stool at her favorite bar, asked for a shot and a beer, swore at the bartender who questioned the prudence, and returned to daily life among the living.

2: I About Had a Fucking Heart Attack

The first run, from Tampa to McAllen to Greensboro, was a bit of a lark. Maria was living in Tampa—Gibsonton, Florida, actually, the widely-acknowledged circus freak capital of the world—and she was bored. So when a friend, someone she knew to be a Mexican drug cartel–affiliated smuggler, appeared at her door with a business proposition, she leapt at the opportunity. He said to her and her friend, “You girls want to make about $5,000 for driving for us for a few hours?” She was more than willing. “I’m just like, ‘Sure, fuck it,’” she says. “What do I have to do, you know?” Maria had been selling drugs for years (since the early nineties when, as a thirteen-year-old girl growing up in the upper Midwest, she felt the dude at the junior high school who charged $7 for one joint, $10 for two, was ripping her off), but this new opportunity was like getting called up to the majors. She signed on with a Mexican drug-trafficking organization, one of a handful smuggling contraband into the United States over the South Texas border (and one still operating profitably today). Maria attributes her big break to her years of work in the loose-joint-and-dime-bag trenches, selling small amounts of product and networking and schmoozing the underworld. That knock on her door in Florida had been serendipitous but not random. “I just happened to be in the right spot at the right time,” she says. “But then it also helped that I knew people from up north who were involved in kind of the same stuff. I had my own thing going because of some of [my] connections—and they all connected to each other.”

She and her friend left for Texas the next day. “We had no idea what we were doing—it was so fucking stupid—and we go meet the Mexican guys and they give us a sweet Mustang and we start driving. The two of us drive all the way to McAllen, and we’re supposed to call when we get down by the border. So we call, and they’re just like, ‘Take this exit and pull into the first hotel you see.’ So I do, and it’s this little dive-y shithole roach motel and I pull in there. And I’m standing in the parking lot when this fucking Porsche pulls up and almost hits me in the leg while it pulls into the parking spot. And two Mexicans get out. They already knew my name, and they already knew who I was, which was kind of creepy.” They also knew the names of her family members and where they could be located. With standard introductions unnecessary, they set to work on the details.

“They tell me that the next morning they’ll come pick me up, and we’ll go have breakfast. At that time, they gave me a route and a car and just kind of sent us on our way.” They headed north-northeast through Texas to Houston, Dallas, and points beyond. Still green to the game, Maria wouldn’t be handling the contraband on this first trip, just driving the car. “It takes a while before you bring the trucks to actually go over the border and get the stuff,” she explains. “That took several years for me.” Eventually, she’d earn enough respect and influence within the cartel to control multiple layers of distribution and logistics herself, but this time, she had to content herself with the 1,500 miles from McAllen to Greensboro. The trip hit its only snag when, halfway to the Carolinas, a Georgia State patrolman pulled over their Mustang. The hollow bumpers had been packed with bricks of marijuana, sealed with Styrofoam, and then painted black to match the rest of the car, but admittedly, “if you really know cars and you know what you’re looking for, you’re going to notice something like that,” Maria says.

“We were riding around with two hundred pounds of weed stuffed in the car. I basically told [my partner] I’d kill her if she didn’t just listen to me and stay calm. She was about to start crying.” Though there’s objectively something extraordinary about a marijuana-laden Ford Mustang barreling up a Georgia highway at one-hundred-plus miles per hour, the traffic stop—and her first introduction to trafficking—proved quite ordinary. “We did get a one-hundred-and-seventy-something-dollar ticket for being so high over the speed limit,” she says with a weary laugh too tired-sounding to be quite a giggle, “but my partner had to eat that because it wasn’t me driving.”

Years later, reflecting back on the incident, Maria tells me that she in fact had little to worry about from the Georgia State Patrol. “He didn’t really fuck with us too much,” she explains. This is why the cartels select white girls as mules. “It’s kind of a safety net.” Attrition also accounts for the cartels’ appetite for young white girls. “Most people who get into that profession,” she says, “like me—some average white girl that starts out as a mule—you last about a year or two before you get popped.” Or busted. Indeed, the overriding philosophy of smuggling is More Trips, Less Weight, so the more available mules, the better. More runs also means more busts, but a critical mass can be reached by determining how successful US interdiction efforts can maximally be—that is, what share of smuggled drugs the government might expect to seize—and then by overwhelming the border with enough product to make that share irrelevant. By the mid-nineties, for example, when Maria began working for her cartel, Juárez Cartel kingpin Amado Carrillo Fuentes, nicknamed “Lord of the Skies,” could expect the DEA to take about 7 percent of the estimated 150 tons of cocaine he sent into El Paso each year. With the width of the Rio Grande serving to multiply fourfold the value of the drugs, that missing 7 percent made hardly a dimple in either the cartel’s profits or in the street price for the user. The trophies from the War on Drugs—framed photographs of smiling narcs posing in front of mountains of seized drugs—don’t represent even the tip of the iceberg.

Back on the highway, Maria, her partner, and the Mustang’s two hundred pounds of weed made it to North Carolina. “We rented a hotel, called, and told them where we were at,” she recalls. “They come pick up the car, hand you an envelope with a shitload of money, and then they’re like, ‘All right, see you later. We’ll call you next time.’ Pretty simple. That was the first time.” There would be hundreds more, and eventually she earned enough credibility to be trusted to operate south of the border. “When you go down to Mexico, you’ll go to Reynosa and they’ll give you bodyguards. You’re not in tourist-Mexico, just Mexico-Mexico, which isn’t really safe if you’re just a young white girl wandering around. So I’d have a security guard. And I also got close enough with the cartel leaders that I’d actually end up staying at some of the members’ house. Their wives were really nice.” But accommodation at the cartel members’ houses could pose its own hazards, especially as Maria climbed the ranks and became aware of more and more of her married colleagues’ sexual indiscretions. She learned to keep her mouth shut—or risk their wrath.

“The next morning I’d drive up, almost to the border, and that’s when my security guard would get dropped off.” From there, it was northward to the river. “The thrill of it was so invigorating to me that I don’t think I really felt the fear,” she says. “I don’t think the fear was that real in my head yet. Going through the Mexican border—I’ve done it so many fucking times—out of the hundreds of times I’ve done it, my car was probably only searched three times.”

The key, she says, is looking comfortable—and having your story straight, just in case. “It’s easy. Basically, whatever car I was driving, I came up with a personality to fit that. So sometimes I would have a tailored suit or something on and I’d be pretending to be a businesswoman. I’d have a whole story ready because when they pull you out—and they do pull you out—they’re going to question you one at a time, maybe four or five different cops, so you’ve got to have your story, you’ve got to have your nerves together. Your stories always have to match, because they’re going to try to trip you up if they think you’re doing anything. I really kind of took pride in it in a weird way. I loved it so much. Every time you pull up, there’s five or six K-9s running around, a billion fucking cops. That’s part of what makes it more fun, because you know you’re getting away with something right under their noses.”

In a study of female traffickers in Juárez published in Anthropological Quarterly in 2008, Howard Campbell describes how mules revel in using feminine wiles to trick male border agents, creating an interesting dynamic in which the traditional machismo of the business is both subverted and celebrated. “I think women have a big idea for smuggling,” an informant tells Campbell. “[They’re] better than men. They have more nerve to do it, especially as drivers . . . Women are trusted more by the drug traffickers and by the border inspectors, customs, and immigration. You smile and chitchat with them. Some of them go so far as to actually hand over their telephone numbers . . . The customs agent will say, ‘Hurry on home and I’ll give you a call later.’ So you know that person is not going to search your car.”

Besides surprisingly naïve border agents, the IRS had to be duped, too. No one pays taxes on smuggled drugs, and it’s conspicuous to live lavishly with zero legitimate income. So, officially, in Tampa, Maria was a roofer. All she’ll say about her roofing exploits is that she was worse at it when she was stoned, and that she had in fact almost fallen off a roof one afternoon for just that reason. She wore extra-short shorts in the Tampa sun just to piss off her co-workers’ wives, her fuck-you attitude, which was generally reserved for law enforcement agents, extended to the blue-collar wives of Hillsborough County. She didn’t like roofing, but preferred instead picking up inconspicuous cars in Tamaulipas and taking them up north with drugs in all the previously empty crevices and recesses, packing the weed and the amphetamines and the coke so the dogs couldn’t get to it—pool cleaner the best deodorizer, she said, but baby laxative could work too, and be a useful cutting agent later—preferred the trunks filled with decades-in-prison cargo to the roofers’ nine to five. But roofers don’t get busted by the DEA, their stock in trade piled up into a neat mountain for a classic seizure photo.