Second of four parts
Gabriel Dieblas Roman took orders from cartel bosses in Mexico, hard men who ruled by fear, but he wouldn't approve a shipment without talking to a plucky, middle-aged woman from Compton.
The strands of the Sinaloa drug cartel web
Inside the Cartel
Channeling the Mexican cartel's nonstop river of cocaine onto trucks bound for cities in the U.S. requires a vast labyrinth of smugglers working in L.A. And women like Lupita, a no-nonsense psychic with a short fuse.
A sidewalk shrine glows in front of Guadalupe "Lupita" Villalobos'… (Don Bartletti / Los Angeles…)
Guadalupe "Lupita" Villalobos ran a storefront botanica where Virgin of Guadalupe statuettes sat beside grinning Saint Death skeletons. She would threaten to turn neighbors into toads, and her clients believed she could divine the future by studying snail shells scattered on a tabletop.
Roman, a client, called her one day for advice on an important matter.
Sounding anxious about a pending cocaine shipment to the East Coast, he asked Villalobos to "give it a little look."
"When is it leaving?" Villalobos asked.
"Tomorrow," Roman said.
A rattling sound came over the phone, then the jangle of objects spilling on a hard surface.
"Well, everything is normal," Villalobos told Roman.
But she wasn't finished.
"Be careful, there is surveillance," she said.
Be wary of a young gordito, a chubby guy. "It seems that he has trouble with the police."
Roman knew who she meant.
"That son of a bitch is worse than a parrot," he said.
The L.A. hub
The Sinaloa cartel, Mexico's most powerful organized crime group, has its version of a corporate headquarters in gaudy mansions and hilly estates that dot the state of Sinaloa. But its U.S. distribution hub sits 1,000 miles northwest, in the immigrant neighborhoods that line the trucking corridors of Southern California.
Drugs move from Colombia to Mexico, then across the Imperial Valley to stash houses and staging areas around Los Angeles. There, scores of distribution cells take over, packaging the cocaine and concealing it in tractor-trailers headed across the United States.
As one of dozens of transportation coordinators for the cartel, Roman bought tractor-trailers, hired drivers and arranged for loads of frozen chickens as cover. He received the drugs from Eligio "Pescado" Rios, who operated a string of stash houses.
Together they formed part of a pipeline that extended across the country to a distributor living near Yankee Stadium in New York.
The shipments were relatively small, from 300 to 600 pounds, to reduce losses in the event of a seizure. Yet the drip-drip-drip of the Rios-Roman pipeline was believed to deliver a ton of cocaine a month to the Northeastern U.S.
Neither man was getting rich. Roman drove an old Ford Mustang, Rios a banged-up white truck he called "La Paloma" (The Dove).
Roman's family lived in a tiny house in the high-desert town of Hesperia. Rios rented a room atop a garage in Paramount. Neither flashed weapons or had serious rap sheets.
They were like hundreds of other modestly paid workers -- truckers, money couriers, load coordinators -- who kept the drug supply chain humming. Rios and Roman had something else in common: Both were very superstitious.
They relied on psychics to guide their operations, and they gave them a cut of the profits. The psychics provided advice on timing. Cartel psychics have also been known to put curses on law enforcement officers, "cleanse" stash houses, perform elaborate candle-lighting ceremonies or smear goat entrails across floors.
The strange rituals and breathless divinations were overheard by agents of the Drug Enforcement Administration investigating a major distribution network of the Sinaloa cartel. The probe had been dubbed Imperial Emperor, after a suspect named Kaiser, German for "emperor."
DEA agents in Los Angeles also took inspiration from their suspects. Rios' nickname, Pescado, means "fish" in Spanish. They dubbed their piece of the case Psychic Catfish.
Bust in Paramount
On March 1, 2006, Rios received a call from Carlos "Charlie" Cuevas, one of the cartel's lead smugglers on the California-Mexico border. Cuevas was arranging a large cocaine delivery from Mexico that night. The shipment would arrive in three Chevrolet Avalanches at the Rosewood restaurant in Paramount, southeast of Los Angeles.
Rios drove to the diner and took a seat. DEA agents waited nearby in parked cars. They had been tracking him and eavesdropping on his phone calls for weeks.
One of his stash houses was a few blocks away, on 1st Street in Paramount. Two of his brothers lived there. On weekends, they grilled carnitas on the patch of front lawn and cranked up their brassy Sinaloa music like any other family in the immigrant neighborhood. Inside, the only furnishings were a few mattresses and a television.
Rios used a toolbox built into the bed of his truck to move drugs from his stash houses to staging areas: warehouses or homes with double lots that could accommodate tractor-trailers. Mechanics and packers moved the cocaine to the trailers, taking hours to hide it in the guts of the refrigeration units. The trucks then left for the East Coast, with two drivers to keep them moving around the clock.
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