gave Xalisco Boys the footholds in the first western U.S. cities as they expanded beyond the San Fernando Valley in the early 1990s. Every new cell learned to find the methadone clinic and give away free samples to the addicts.
One Xalisco Boy in Portland told authorities of a training that his cell put new drivers through. They were taught, he said, to lurk near methadone clinics, spot an addict, and follow him. Then they’d tap him on the shoulder and ask directions to someplace. Then they’d then spit out a few balloons. Along with the balloons, they’d give the addict a piece of paper with a phone number on it.
“Call us if we can help you out.”
The value of each Xalisco heroin tiendita was in its list of customers. “This is how they would build and maintain it,” said Steve Mygrant, a Portland-area prosecutor. “It was an ongoing recruiting practice, in the same way a corporate business would identify customers. They’d lose people along the way. So they were constantly engaged in this.”
In time, most cells developed addicts they could trust, and some of these, in turn, helped tiendita owners expand to new cities in exchange for dope. Some of their junkie guides became legend down in Xalisco. In Cincinnati, I spoke with a girl in the Lower Price Hill neighborhood, home to transplanted Appalachians and overrun with heroin. She had been rustling up business for a series of Xalisco dealers intent on shaping a customer list as they came and went over the years. This girl was, in her own words, “a known quantity” down in Xalisco, a town she had never visited. Xalisco Boys who were just getting started in Cincinnati asked for her, looked her up, and pushed dope in her face wanting her help in establishing heroin routes throughout the Cincinnati metro area. It made kicking the habit almost impossible.
“They can’t even say my name. But they tell them down there, ‘Ask somebody for White Girl. Lower Price Hill.’ One guy even came with a note with my name on it. Somebody had written my name and misspelled it,” she said. “Over these years, I get out [of jail or rehab] and they’re there looking for me. People will say, ‘How do you always got this connection?’ I don’t know. It’s not like I call Mexico and say can you send me a guy? But it’s always there.”
One prolific addict turned guide was a woman named Tracy Jefferson. Jefferson was a longtime drug user and manic depressive from Salem, Oregon. She hooked up with Luis Padilla-Peña, a Xalisco dealer in Reno, Nevada, in 1993. Padilla-Peña had come to the United States in 1990 and found work in Las Vegas with the heroin crew run by a friend from the Tejeda-Sánchez clan. From there, he went off on his own. His big break was meeting Jefferson. Over the next two years, she helped Padilla-Peña and his family carve out heroin markets in Salem, Denver, Seattle, Colorado Springs, Oklahoma City, and Omaha—usually by enrolling herself in methadone clinics and giving away free black tar to the clinics’ clients she met.
From Omaha, Jefferson said when she testified in federal court, she and the family were scouting Kansas City, St. Louis, and Des Moines. They would drop a town that didn’t generate at least two thousand dollars in daily profit. For this reason, she testified, they passed on Cheyenne, Wyoming, and Yakima and Vancouver, Washington.
Another such guide was a kid from Mexico who grew up in Reseda. He didn’t use drugs, but he had something else the Xalisco Boys needed. He was bilingual. He was from Mexico but was raised in the San Fernando Valley. In Reseda he met many Xalisco immigrants. In 1995, he was seventeen when a new cell leader hired him to work in Maui, Hawaii.
“None of them spoke English. That’s why I was important to them,” he said. “There were a lot of things they couldn’t do. When I got there, I helped them expand.”
By then, Hawaii had two Xalisco cells: one owned by David Tejeda, the other by a
One Xalisco Boy in Portland told authorities of a training that his cell put new drivers through. They were taught, he said, to lurk near methadone clinics, spot an addict, and follow him. Then they’d tap him on the shoulder and ask directions to someplace. Then they’d then spit out a few balloons. Along with the balloons, they’d give the addict a piece of paper with a phone number on it.
“Call us if we can help you out.”
The value of each Xalisco heroin tiendita was in its list of customers. “This is how they would build and maintain it,” said Steve Mygrant, a Portland-area prosecutor. “It was an ongoing recruiting practice, in the same way a corporate business would identify customers. They’d lose people along the way. So they were constantly engaged in this.”
In time, most cells developed addicts they could trust, and some of these, in turn, helped tiendita owners expand to new cities in exchange for dope. Some of their junkie guides became legend down in Xalisco. In Cincinnati, I spoke with a girl in the Lower Price Hill neighborhood, home to transplanted Appalachians and overrun with heroin. She had been rustling up business for a series of Xalisco dealers intent on shaping a customer list as they came and went over the years. This girl was, in her own words, “a known quantity” down in Xalisco, a town she had never visited. Xalisco Boys who were just getting started in Cincinnati asked for her, looked her up, and pushed dope in her face wanting her help in establishing heroin routes throughout the Cincinnati metro area. It made kicking the habit almost impossible.
“They can’t even say my name. But they tell them down there, ‘Ask somebody for White Girl. Lower Price Hill.’ One guy even came with a note with my name on it. Somebody had written my name and misspelled it,” she said. “Over these years, I get out [of jail or rehab] and they’re there looking for me. People will say, ‘How do you always got this connection?’ I don’t know. It’s not like I call Mexico and say can you send me a guy? But it’s always there.”
One prolific addict turned guide was a woman named Tracy Jefferson. Jefferson was a longtime drug user and manic depressive from Salem, Oregon. She hooked up with Luis Padilla-Peña, a Xalisco dealer in Reno, Nevada, in 1993. Padilla-Peña had come to the United States in 1990 and found work in Las Vegas with the heroin crew run by a friend from the Tejeda-Sánchez clan. From there, he went off on his own. His big break was meeting Jefferson. Over the next two years, she helped Padilla-Peña and his family carve out heroin markets in Salem, Denver, Seattle, Colorado Springs, Oklahoma City, and Omaha—usually by enrolling herself in methadone clinics and giving away free black tar to the clinics’ clients she met.
From Omaha, Jefferson said when she testified in federal court, she and the family were scouting Kansas City, St. Louis, and Des Moines. They would drop a town that didn’t generate at least two thousand dollars in daily profit. For this reason, she testified, they passed on Cheyenne, Wyoming, and Yakima and Vancouver, Washington.
Another such guide was a kid from Mexico who grew up in Reseda. He didn’t use drugs, but he had something else the Xalisco Boys needed. He was bilingual. He was from Mexico but was raised in the San Fernando Valley. In Reseda he met many Xalisco immigrants. In 1995, he was seventeen when a new cell leader hired him to work in Maui, Hawaii.
“None of them spoke English. That’s why I was important to them,” he said. “There were a lot of things they couldn’t do. When I got there, I helped them expand.”
By then, Hawaii had two Xalisco cells: one owned by David Tejeda, the other by a
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