The World's Most Evil Gangs (21 page)

There were other depressing side-effects of Calderón’s strategy. From 2006 to 2012, the President sent more than 50,000 soldiers onto Mexico’s streets, invested billions of dollars on equipment and training, attempted to reform the police and judicial systems, and strengthened Mexico’s partnership with the United States. But the Council on Foreign
Relations reported that a legacy of ‘political manipulation of law enforcement and judicial branches, which limited professionalisation and enabled widespread corruption’ had left the government with ‘only weak tools to counter increasingly aggressive crime networks’.

One of the main problems was local policing – or the lack of it. The drug cartels, with their massive resources, had repeatedly infiltrated the ranks of underpaid cops, from lowly traffic officers to the very top. The Calderón administration attempted to counter police corruption by dramatically increasing the role of the military in the fight against drug cartels. Not only were tens of thousands of military personnel deployed to supplement, and in many cases replace, local police forces, they were also recruited to lead civilian law enforcement agencies. Mexico’s judicial system, with its autocratic judges and lack of transparency, was also highly susceptible to corruption. The US Congressional Research Service noted that even when public officials were arrested for working with a cartel, they were rarely convicted.

Calderón’s militarisation strategy also resulted in accusations of serious human rights abuses. A 2011 report by Human Rights Watch found that ‘rather than strengthening public security in Mexico, Calderón’s war has exacerbated a climate of violence, lawlessness, and fear in many parts of the country’. The report, which looked at five states, documented more than 175 cases of torture, 39 disappearances, and 24 ‘extrajudicial’ killings. The Mexican administration countered these accusations by heralding the successes of its offensive against the cartels. Through bilateral cooperation with the United States, it boasted, the government had killed or captured 25 of the country’s top 37 most wanted drug kingpins.

A year before the change of presidential leadership, a report by the US National Drug Intelligence Center forecast: ‘Major Mexican-based trans-national criminal organisations will continue to dominate wholesale drug trafficking in the US for the foreseeable future and will further solidify their positions through collaboration with US gangs’. Nieto’s main election promise in 2012 was to switch the focus of the drugs war from tackling the gangs and hunting drug barons to reducing the crime and violence that affect the lives of ordinary citizens. He announced a national gendarmerie, initially 10,000 strong, to take over from the troops on the ground and focus on law enforcement. The federal police force would also be boosted.

Analysts differ on how to address Mexico’s growing internal strife but an increasing number reluctantly agree that the US war on drugs is a failure and necessitates a new approach. As President Nieto changed his internal strategy, gradual moves were being made at state level in the US towards legalisation and decriminalisation of marijuana, one of the primary substances involved in the drugs war, raising new questions about overall policy. Regardless of the various proposals, most observers are less than optimistic. An academic who is one of America’s leading experts on Mexican organised crime, David Shirk of the University of San Diego, said: ‘It is ultimately the great shame of the last decade that we’ve made all this effort, we’ve lost all of these lives, and at the end of the day we’ve made no real substantive progress in reducing the availability of drugs – and the cost is extraordinary violence.’

T
he spookiest drugs gang of all time were sickeningly brutal but also unbelievably brave … because they believed they could defy death! They used voodoo to ‘protect’ themselves, to wield power over others and to satiate their bloodlust.

The group were led by handsome Adolfo de Jesus Constanzo, born in Miami of Cuban extraction, who in the early Eighties moved to Mexico to offer his gang’s backing to local drugs lords. But the ‘services’ they provided were more vile than even the warring narcotics cartels were accustomed to. For Constanzo and his drug-crazed followers were adherents of the black magic arts of Palo Mayombe, a violent African cult who believe the spirits of the dead can be harnessed if the gods are regularly appeased with living human sacrifices.

Born on 1 November 1962, in Miami Beach to a 15-
year-old
mother, Constanzo grew up in Florida and Puerto Rico.
His mother followed the Santeria, or Saint’s Path, a
quasi-Christian
religion brought to the New World by African slaves hundreds of years ago and adapted to fit in with the ways of their Catholic masters. Palo Mayombe is the dark sister of the Santeria. If the Santeria, which involves sacrifice of animals, could be likened to ‘white’ magic, Palo Mayombe is definitely ‘black’. The religion accepts no afterlife, so an adherent is free to do whatever he wants here on earth; the spirits of the dead exist in a kind of limbo, forced to wander the material plane. Newly-dead spirits can be harnessed by a Palo Mayombe priest, if regularly fed with fresh blood.

The religion centres round a nganga – a cauldron kept constantly filled with blood, a goat’s head, a roasted turtle and, most importantly, a human skull – preferably that of a person who has died a violent and painful death. Non-believers, especially Christians, are considered to be animals and natural victims. The more painful and horrific their death, the more potent the spell that the high priest can cast.

Constanzo, though never rich as a child, lived fairly well. His mother married a prosperous small businessman, who took the family to Puerto Rico. When his stepfather died in 1973, his mother re-married and moved back to Florida. This marriage was not a success, however, and ended in acrimonious divorce. At just 12 years of age, Adolfo found himself the head of the family. To support them, he began shoplifting and trading in drugs. Through his teens, he earned a police record for theft and for a while the Miami drugs squad had him under observation.

At about this time, he realised he was bisexual. He was later to sire two children, but during his teens, before he could slake his lust elsewhere, his principal sexual satisfaction came
through frequenting gay bars. It could be that things got too hot for the slim, dark and handsome youth with piercing eyes, or simply that he saw his main chance south of the border. At any rate, at the age of 21, Constanzo headed off to Mexico City, the smog-bound, sprawling urban mass where grinding poverty held hands with undreamed-of opulence. It was to the wealthier quarter that he gravitated.

Rich, bored businessmen and their wives were turned on by this youth and his exciting occult religion. Telling fortunes with apparently uncanny accuracy earned him his own small fortune. His fame as a sorcerer spread and he soon became the darling of the wealthy and the powerful. But it was the often superstitious leaders of narcotics cartels who fêted him the most. At a time when the richest market for illegal drugs, the United States, was cracking down hardest on the trade, credulous drugs family godfathers turned to him for advice and magical protection. Incredibly, Constanzo was able to demand up to $50,000 a time for spells to protect the smugglers.

It was subsequently discovered that much of his ‘divination’ came through corrupt Mexican police and customs officials. Florentino Ventura, the head of Mexican Interpol, was later to shoot his wife before turning the gun on himself when investigations got too close. However, the source of Constanzo’s knowledge mattered not at all to the drug barons. His word quickly became law. And all the while, to ensure that his protective spells came true, dismembered and decapitated corpses were regularly found floating in rivers and lakes outside Mexico City.

By now, Constanzo was calling himself the ‘padrino’ (godfather) of his own Palo Mayombe group, selling his services to the highest bidders, who for a while happened to be
the close family of drugs overlord Guillermo Calzada. The ambitious Constanzo suggested to Calzada that because his magic was the source of the family’s success, he deserved half the proceeds. Calzada perhaps understandably refused and Constanzo left in a rage. A few days later he called to express regret for his demands and offered, as a sign of remorse, to perform a special ceremony that would give extra protection to the whole cartel.

On 30 April 1987, Calzada, his wife, his mother, his partner, his secretary, his maid and his bodyguard met Constanzo in an abandoned factory. All seven reappeared a few days later when their bodies were dragged from a river. They had been dreadfully mutilated before being killed. Their extremities – their fingers and toes and, in the case of the men, their genitals – had been sliced off. Significantly, their heads were missing. These had gone to feed the padrino’s nganga.

Constanzo was now hooked on his own mumbo-jumbo, believing ever more implicitly in his voodoo powers. Flush with cash through drug dealing and extortion, he moved his gang of savage killers to Matamoros, near the Texan border, where the narcotics cartels were even richer. There, in his remote Santa Elena ranch, he enjoyed a strange ménage-à-trois with his American ex-girlfriend, Sara Aldrete, and his two homosexual lovers, Orea Ochoa and Martin Quintera, who were treated as servants by their boss.

As he had done in Mexico City, Constanzo, with Aldrete’s help on this occasion, inveigled his way into the family of another drugs overlord, Elio Hernandez. Again he presented the Palo Mayombe rituals as the key to the family’s prosperity – and, sure enough, his business picked up. The Hernandez gang was now totally under the spell of the Constanzo’s voodoo
group, and by 1988 the area round Matamoros was thick with dismembered corpses. Between May that year and March 1989, Constanzo tortured and ritually sacrificed at least 13 people. The victims were usually rival drug dealers but sometimes included strangers picked up at random.

On one occasion, the victim was a police undercover agent who had infiltrated the gang but had been discovered, possibly through a tip-off from one of the police officers on Constanzo’s payroll. On another occasion, Hernandez himself was ordered to supply the coup de grâce to a struggling young victim at the bubbling nganga. Only after slicing off the youth’s head did he recognise the green and white striped football shirt he was wearing. He had killed his own cousin.

Constanzo’s normal method of sacrifice was to have the victim brutally beaten, then dragged into a shed containing the sacred cauldron. Here he would cut off the nose, ears, fingers, toes and genitals of the hapless wretch and partially flay him. Then the others would be ordered out while Constanzo sodomised him. Only then would there be a merciful release through death.

It was essential to the success of the ceremony that there should be as much pain as possible and the victim should die screaming. The spirit had to be confused and terrified as it left the body, making it easier to subjugate. And it was this particular evil that was to bring about Constanzo’s downfall. In March 1989, the chosen victim was a small-time Mexican drugs dealer unknown to the gang. Every torture was applied to him, but the tough little man would not cry out, even when his upper body was skinned. He endured every torture, even castration, but died silently.

Constanzo declared the ceremony a failure and sent his men
out to kidnap a softer touch. He was easy to find. A group of students were celebrating the end of term at their university by crossing the border for a night of cheap alcohol, perhaps a woman or two and possibly a session of pot smoking or cocaine snorting. When one became separated from his colleagues, he was pushed into the back of a truck and driven to the Santa Elena ranch.

His name was Mark Kilroy, a 21-year-old medical student, and he must have screamed sufficiently to satisfy Constanzo before his brains were tipped into the nganga, for the padrino declared the ceremony a great success. The gang was now unstoppable. With an American spirit as well as any number of Mexican spirits to protect them, they believed themselves not only safe but invisible to the law. This time, however, the cultists had over-reached themselves. Kilroy’s parents, aided by the boy’s uncle, a US Customs official, fought for a thorough investigation by the lax Mexican authorities. The manhunt that ensued across both sides of the border had a swift result.

Mexican police set up a roadblock near Matamoros. One of the Hernandez brothers, Serafin, was at the wheel of a truck when he approached it – and, having been told by his leader that he was invisible, drove straight through it! The cops scrambled into their cars and followed at a discreet distance as Hernandez led them directly to Constanzo’s ranch. There they found some evidence of drug trading – but no sign of Constanzo himself. Hernandez was arrested and taken to local police headquarters, where he was subjected to a ‘Mexican interrogation’. With the help of a little soda laced with Tabasco squirted up his nostrils, an agonising, though undetectable torture, he broke and revealed the horrors of the hellish ranch. Returning to the ranch, he pointed out a
number of shallow graves around the nganga shed. He also began to name names.

Detectives rounded up several of the cultists who, puzzled by the lack of promised protection, were forced to do the dirty work of digging up the bodies. One of the first they unearthed was that of the American student, Mark Kilroy. The grave was marked by a short length of wire sticking out of the ground. Subsequent examination revealed that the wire had been threaded the length of the boy’s spine. Once the body had decomposed sufficiently, it had been Constanzo’s intention to pull out the backbone and add it to the stomach-churning mix in his nganga.

Constanzo, along with his favoured inner circle, fled to Mexico City, where they laid low in an apartment in a poor part of town – Constanzo foolishly leaving his luxury limousine in the street nearby. On 6 May 1989, two beat cops spotted it and strolled over to investigate, thinking it might have been stolen. When Constanzo saw them, he assumed the game was up and opened fire from the apartment. An armed siege ensued.

Inside the apartment, panic reigned. As Constanzo’s gunmen were exchanging fire with police, the padrino himself was stuffing armfuls of cash into a fire. As Sara Aldrete cowered with Orea Ochoa under a bed, Constanzo and a hitman nicknamed El Dubi emptied their guns into the street. At other windows, more cultists were spraying the police with bullets. When they were almost out of ammunition, Constanzo suddenly became calm again. He called together El Dubi and his current lover, bodyguard Martin Rodriguez, whom he led into a walk-in wardrobe. Then he ordered El Dubi to shoot them both. When the gunman simply stared aghast, Constanzo
slapped him across the face and ordered: ‘Do it or I’ll make things tough for you in Hell. Don’t worry, I’ll be back.’

Those were his last words. He and his lover died in a hail of lead. The rest were taken alive. In all, 14 cultists were given lengthy jail terms on charges from multiple murder to drug running. There being no death penalty in Mexico, the maximum sentence that could be handed down was 50 years for aggravated homicide. Oddest among the accused was Sara Aldrete, the all-American ex-college student from Brownsville, Texas, who had thrown away a glittering future as an athlete to join the cult. At her trial and in subsequent interviews, she proclaimed her innocence and complained bitterly about the treatment she said she had endured at the hands of the police. ‘I could not leave the gang,’ she explained in her defence, ‘because they threatened to use witchcraft on my family.’ She was sentenced to 62 years without possibility of parole.

The detailed confessions of the other cultists allowed police to close the files on a number of mystery killings. There had been 15 human sacrifices at the Matamoros ranch, two at another ranch nearby and several in Mexico City. Added to these were the slayings of rival gang members and those of Constanzo’s own followers who had been killed to maintain discipline. In Matamoros, the police had the nganga and the shed in which it was housed exorcised by a white witch and a priest. Then they doused the building with petrol and burned it to the ground. Constanzo’s body was claimed by his mother and taken back to Miami, where he was cremated.