Hot-Wired Juana

Tez would have been making good money if he'd only cut the cocaine down to the usual steet level of about sixty-one percent pure. He could buy a kilo for about thirty grand, or about thirty dollars a gram, cut it to sixty-one percent and sell each gram for about fifty bucks. He'd end up with about sixteen hundred grams of cut cocaine worth just shy of a eighty thousand dollars and a profit of about fifty thousand. By the time that coke was sucked up somebody's nose, it was worth a hundred a gram, so the street dealer and the main distributor made good money too.

Tez apparently got greedy and was cutting his coke to about fifty percent. That gave him two kilos to sell and a profit of around seventy thousand. The street dealers were getting complaints from users and threatened to get their supply from a rival cartel based in Atlanta.

None of the CI's knew who pulled the trigger, but they were sure Menendez ordered the hit to show anybody else that fucking around with the system wouldn't be tolerated. It worked too. According to several different accounts, Tez had been replaced the next day by some guy named "Dog" and the complaints from the street stopped.

My own opinion was that Menendez wasn't all that concerned about how much money Tez was skimming off the top. He was just worried about losing business to the rival cartel in Atlanta. So far, in the US anyway, the cartels had managed to get along by staking out designated territories. If Menendez' dealers went to Atlanta for their coke, he'd have to do something that might result in a war between two cartels and a war wouldn't be good for anybody. The easiest and cleanest option for Menendez was to off Tez and put somebody he trusted in his place.

The GPS app on our computer and cell phones let us set a perimeter alarm for the SUV. That alarm was set to go off if the SUV left the compound. It did that on Wednesday night at about ten PM.

The SUV was busy that night. It went from the compound to a location in Shepherd Hills, then back to the compound, then on to Franklin, Murfreesboro, Gallatin, and Hendersonville, following the same method -- compound to city, back to compound, and then on to the next city. At each city, the SUV remained in place for about ten minutes. When it came back to the compound, it stayed there for about half an hour.

We logged the GPS coordinates of each stop, and the next day, another car and I drove to each location and took some pictures. By the third location I'd been to, the reason for the late night trips was becoming clear.

The location in Shepherd Hills was an abandoned warehouse about three blocks from where Tez had lived. The location in Franklin was a barn just outside the city limits, and the location in Murfreesboro was a grocery store that wouldn't have been open at that time of night. None of the locations had much if any street lighting, and each had a place a car could have parked that wasn't visible from the street or road.

My theory was each of the locations was a drop point. The SUV would deliver some quantity of pure coke to a main dealer for the area and pick up the corresponding cash. By making the deliveries at night it was less likely the SUV would be stopped by some cop and small amounts of coke and cash would be easier to hide inside the SUV.

If my theory was right, we'd have to expand our case to include those cities and probably some more. The next night it looked that might be the case. That night, the SUV went to Dickson, Columbia, Clarksville, and Springfield. When we looked at those locations, they were very similar in that all were a location not visible from the road or highway and all had poor street lighting.

The SUV stayed at the compound until it left again on Saturday morning. When it pulled out of the compound, my cell phone alarmed, so I called the Nashville PD and asked them to be on the lookout for it. Half an hour later, it was seen sitting at a grocery store on Nolensville Road, the heart of the Latino community in Nashville. The patrol officer who spotted it parked across the street until a woman came out with some shopping bags and got into the SUV. He reported her as being a young woman a little over five feet tall and weighing in the neighborhood of a hundred pounds. Her hair was black to dark brown.

We tracked the SUV for two more weeks until the batteries died in the trackers, and a pattern developed. Wednesday and Thursday nights, the SUV made the rounds of the larger cities around Nashville and on Saturday mornings, the SUV went to the grocery store on Nolensville Road. Monday afternoons, the SUV went to the same liquor store.

When we sat down to decide what we were going to do next, we had some tantalizing data, but still not enough to get a warrant to search either the SUV or the compound. What we were missing that might give us a warrant for both was proof the compound was where the drugs were coming from. It would also be vital to our case to figure out how the drugs got into the compound.

We'd watched that compound for months without seeing anything going in or coming out except the cars that belonged there, the cars of a few employees and the trucks of the lawn care company that changed every month. We'd checked out all the lawn care companies, and all were legit. The few employees who drove to work parked their cars in a lot between the two fences and walked to the house. Nobody did anything with those cars and the employees couldn't have carried any significant quantity of drugs on them.

It was an irate fisherman who gave us the last clue. Well, in actuality, he gave it to the Nashville PD and they relayed it to us without knowing if it meant anything. They just knew we were interested in anything happening close to the Menendez compound.

The fisherman had a special spot down on the spillway from the dam on Pearcy Priest Lake he said attracted a lot of big catfish. According to him, going through the gates in the dam used to regulate the water level shreds some of the smaller fish and the catfish treat the place like a buffet.

Anyway, he said the only night he could go fishing was on Sunday night because he worked third shift and Sunday was the only night he was off. He evidently loved to fish for catfish, because he got to his spot about eight PM and stayed until three in the morning.

His complaint was that at about one in the morning, a boat would come from the Cumberland River and down past his fishing spot. He thought the boat chased away the fish and he wanted the police to stop it.

Judging by the amount of coke the Nashville PD had been confiscating from street dealers, and knowing they probably got maybe ten percent of the total, the amount coming into Nashville was more than Menendez could get in a car or two a week. We'd watched for any trucks coming to the compound, but none except the pickup and trailer of the lawn care guys had. What we hadn't considered was transport by water, but in the area, it made perfect sense.

The "General Jackson" is an old looking, but newly built stern-wheeler riverboat that offers Cumberland River cruises with dinner and live entertainment. She was built in Indiana and then was taken down the Ohio River to Kentucky Lake and from there, through the locks to the Cumberland River and on to Nashville.

That waterway also ends up at the Mississippi, so bringing drugs up the Mississippi was entirely possible. There are over a thousand barges every month making that trip and going through the locks. It's slower than trucks and cars, but barges don't get pulled over for speeding or defective equipment, and that's how most drug couriers are found. The river always has pleasure boats on it, and they go through the locks just like the barges do. Nobody would suspect a fishing boat or two on the river, and on the weekends, there are thousands of boats out there.

When I looked at the map, the spot where the fisherman claimed a boat was scaring his fish was about half a mile from the Cumberland and there was an access road that ran along the spillway. At that time of night and out under the trees along the bank, it would be a simple matter to unload a boat to a truck, drive the truck around the dam to another relatively hidden spot, and load the drugs onto another boat. From there, it would take maybe half an hour to get across the lake to the boathouse on the Menendez property.

The next Sunday night, I had two Special Ops teams on site, one where the spillway empties into the Cumberland and another across the lake from the boathouse on Menendez' property. They had night vision binoculars and night vision cameras so they could watch and record anything that happened.

At 12:30 AM Monday morning, a pickup with a topper drove down the access road and parked at a spot close to the spillway. At about 1:00 AM, a pleasure boat about twenty-five feet long made the turn from the Cumberland into the spillway. It pulled up to the bank where the pickup was parked, and the Special Ops team recorded four men from the boat and the two in the pickup transferring something from the boat to the truck. It took only about fifteen minutes. Then, the pleasure boat headed back to the Cumberland and the truck took the access road towards Lebanon Pike.

At 1:30 AM, the truck came down Bell Road and stopped a hundred yards north of a fisherman's access area directly across the lake from the Menendez compound. The truck flashed its lights one time. The Special Ops team heard an outboard motor start and a few minutes later, a bass boat pulled up to the shore. In another fifteen minutes, the bass boat backed away and headed for the Menendez compound. The pickup drove back up Bell Road.

The Special Ops team took video of the bass boat going inside the boathouse, and a few minutes later another pickup truck came through the gate in the fence at the boathouse. Four men got out of the pickup and were seen carrying bundles from the boathouse to the truck. When the last bundle was loaded, all six men got into the truck and it went back towards the house.

That was enough evidence to get a search warrant for the house, other buildings on the compound, and any vehicles including any boats. All we needed now was to make sure Menendez was there so we could arrest him when we found the drugs. Since nobody had seen him, we didn't know if he was still there. We needed somebody on the inside to tell us.

Getting a cop inside that compound was probably impossible. If Menendez had just been a distributor, we might be able to get an undercover cop inside that part of the organization as another street dealer, but Menendez would be too smart to let anybody he didn't know get that close to him. It would have to be somebody he had checked out thoroughly and trusted. To get an undercover cop that close would mean getting him in as a street dealer and then having him work his way up through the organization. We'd done that before and it takes years.

I started thinking about who Menendez already knew that we could turn into an informant. The names came down to just one - Juana Marie Pena, the woman who'd said she cooked for Menendez.

The plan was to arrest Juana and question her. During questioning, I was going to tell her she was being charged with drug trafficking and with the murder of Tez and was looking at life in prison unless she cooperated. The cooperation meant she was to wear a little transmitter that would send everything she said and heard to a receiver we'd have in a phone company truck a few hundred yards from the compound.

That Saturday, we stopped Juana as she came out of the grocery store and put her in what looked like a delivery van. I was waiting in the van, and when the plain-clothes officer helped her in, I told her to take a seat. She looked terrified, but that was going to work in my favor. I read her her rights and when she said she didn't need an attorney because she hadn't done anything wrong, I started my questioning.

"Miss Pena, do you know who you work for?"

She nodded.

"I work for Mr. Menendez."

"Do you know what Mr. Menendez does for a living?"

Juana thought for second and then shook her head.

"No. I just know he's a rich man."

Juana scratched her nose then and that change in body language told me she was lying.

"Miss Pena, I know you're lying to me, so I'll get to the point. A few weeks ago, you drove your SUV into Shepherd Hills. I don't know why you would go there unless it was to deliver drugs. A week later, a drug dealer named Tez was shot behind a bar in Shepherd Hills. Your SUV drove up in front of the bar and parked, and the driver got out and walked into the bar. The bar security camera recorded that.

About two minutes after the shooting, another security camera recorded the same person walking out of the alley. Five minutes after the shooting, that same security camera in front of the bar recorded the same person walking up the street beside the bar, getting into your car, and driving away. Since you drive that SUV, you must be that person. I've got you on video so you'll at least be convicted of murder and you'll spend the rest of your life in prison."

I shrugged then.

"You might not have it all that bad at first. I hear some of the women in prison like young girls like you. It'll get harder as you get older though."

Juana's eyes filled with tears then.

"I went to Shepherd Hills to take some food to an older woman I know. That wasn't me in your videos. I never go to bars."

I wasn't going to let up on her, not just yet.

"Your crying doesn't do anything to me except tell me you're lying. I know you killed Tez. The only thing I don't know is why you did it. Care to tell me?"

Juana looked up at me and wiped her eyes.

"I'm not lying. It wasn't me. I know about it but I can't tell you who it was."

In spite of what I'd told her, by now I didn't think she was my murderer. I've seen fake tears more times than I can remember and these weren't fake. I wasn't going to let up until she agreed to do what I wanted though. I know, it sounds cruel, but what Menendez and his coke was doing to people and families all over the Nashville area was more than cruel. It was inhumane.

I leaned toward Juana, an interrogation technique that is supposed to intimidate the person being interrogated.

"If you didn't do it, and I'm not saying I believe you, why can't you tell me who did? That just makes me think you killed the guy and are trying to blame somebody else."

Juana looked even more afraid when she spoke.

"If I tell you...my sister...Mr. Menendez has my sister and he said if I tell anybody anything, he'll either kill her or make her be a prostitute. He almost did when I got the ticket for running a red light. I had to...there are three men who stay in the house and he said it was either me or Maria. Maria's only seventeen. I couldn't let that happen to her."

I believed she was telling me the truth because she was looking at my eyes instead of hanging her head, and she wasn't fidgeting around. This was the opening I'd been hoping for.

"OK, Miss Pena, if what you say is true, I can get you and your sister out of there and somewhere Mr. Menendez can't touch you. You just have to do something for me in return.""

Juana looked up at me and her eyes opened wide.

"What would I have to do?"

When Juana got out of the van, she was wearing a tiny little microphone and transmitter in her bra. The battery would only last about three days, but I hoped that would be long enough. It was turned off, but we'd shown Juana where the little switch was and practiced with her until she could turn it on and off even if blindfolded. That was in case the guards had some sort of detection equipment that might pick up the transmitter signal. Once she was through the gates and in the house, she was to turn it on and leave it on unless she had to go back out through the gate.

She was worried about being late, so we gave her a reason and also got a preliminary search of the SUV in the process. There was no spare in the spare well in back because there wasn't room for one. It was hard to tell unless you measured the depth, but the well for the spare had been raised about two inches to create a hidden compartment under it. From under the SUV it looked like the original spare well. What they'd done is cut out the spare well from another Land Rover and welded it inside the original, then ground and polished everything smooth and painted it. The inside of the well was carpeted, and under that carpet was an access panel about a foot square.

We'd seen similar modifications before, and that explained why Menendez had bought a used SUV. It would look odd for a new SUV to not have a spare if it was searched, but an older one without a spare wouldn't raise much suspicion. If the driver was asked about it, he or she could just say they'd had a flat and were having the spare repaired. That hidden compartment was probably where the drugs and money had been put on the collecting rounds. The lack of a spare was the excuse we needed for Juana.

It's surprising what you might find in the trunk of a TBI car. We try to be prepared for about anything that comes along. The Special Ops officer driving the van punched a hole through the tread of the left rear with an ice pick and then drove a nail in the hole.

The plan was after we left, Juana was to use her cell phone to call the compound and tell them she had a flat tire. They would know she didn't have a spare and would have to send someone to change the tire, and that would explain the delay. I had one plain car stay in the lot just in case something unexpected happened, but about half an hour later, another black Land Rover SUV pulled in beside Juana's. The guy got out, changed the tire with his spare, and then drove off. Juana got in her SUV and the plain car followed her back to the compound.

I had the phone company van already across from the drive to the compound, so I drove out, parked out of sight of the first guard station, and walked to the van. About ten minutes after I got there, Juana's whispered voice came over the speaker in the van.

"I'm inside. I hope you can hear me."

We listened in to a lot of conversation that was boring and had nothing to do with drugs. Two of the guys were evidently boxing fans, and they kept up this running trash talk about how this Mexican flyweight was going to beat the shit out of this other Mexican flyweight. A third kept telling them to shut the fuck up because he was watching a soccer match.

It was almost 4:00 when we heard Juana's voice again.

"Jose, will Mr. Menendez be having dinner tonight?"

I held my breath and hoped that was a question Juana asked every Saturday night. She played it right even though the answer she got was pretty crude.

"You fucking whore, why do you ask me a fucking question like that. Mr. Menendez always eats Saturday dinner here. If he didn't think you were so fucking special for some fucking reason, I'd slap the fuck out of you and then shove my cock down your fucking throat and choke you with it."

I think we all breathed again when Juana said, "Yes, he does but sometimes he orders out. I just need to know how much food to cook, that's all."

If Menendez was going to be there, we had to go that night. By 5:00 I had two Special Ops teams standing by in a park about five miles from the compound. They were all in civilian clothes, so to anybody watching, it looked like they were playing softball. The armored vehicle and van were parked behind a maintenance building and their gear was in the vehicles. The leader of the team in the armored vehicle had a search warrant in his pocket.

I had another two Special Ops teams in unmarked and camouflaged boats anchored in the bay behind the next point of land on the lake. They were all in civilian clothes too so it looked like they were fishing, but their gear was on the deck under some tarps.