No longer 'next door'

FBI agents planted an electronic beacon in the ransom money, which led them to the Chula Vista cul-de-sac, where they freed Gonzalez.

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The spare tire case

In tiny Pearsall, Texas, just outside San Antonio, a tow-truck driver was abducted and taken across the border last year by thugs allegedly connected to Mexican drug traffickers.

The men reportedly were angered at the disappearance of drug profits they had hidden in a spare tire of a car the driver had towed from an accident on Interstate 35, the main thoroughfare from San Antonio to the border city of Laredo. A federal grand jury in San Antonio indicted five men in April in connection with the international kidnapping.

The indictment said the defendants were offered as much as $15,000 to bring the driver to Mexico, court records show. They lured him to Frio County Regional Park in Pearsall by phoning in a fake request for a tow, then bundled him off to Piedras Negras, where he was "tortured and interrogated about the missing spare tire" and held for a week, the indictment alleged.

The assailants phoned his boss and threatened to "cut the head off of the driver" unless the supervisor brought the missing money to Eagle Pass, Texas, across the Rio Grande from Piedras Negras.

U.S. authorities were alerted, and after intense negotiations, the driver was released at the port of entry in Del Rio, Texas, upriver from Eagle Pass. The five men were arrested and are to stand trial in San Antonio on Monday.

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A toast to St. Death

Cartel members also have pleaded guilty in federal court this year as part of a murder-for-hire and kidnapping ring that stretched from the Rio Grande to North Texas.

Several men and two teenage boys on this side of the border were killed as part of a war that pitted the Gulf cartel against the Sinaloa cartel over the lucrative drug trafficking to North Texas and beyond. Hit men were paid in drugs and cash to help carry out the slayings, according to court documents.

Police in the U.S. learned about the abductions when the parents of the two boys, the youngest 14 years old, reported them missing. The investigation ended when one of the accused killers, Gabriel Cardona-Ramirez, also known as "Pelon" and "Gaby," bragged about how the boys were crying when he slashed them to death with a broken bottle, then poured their blood into a cup for a toast.