specialed88
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- Dec 1, 2008
By Ed Lavandera
- U.S. teens are accused of acting as Mexican cartel hit men in Laredo, Texas
- One allegedly told police: "I loved ... killing that first person"
- Police detective: "One thing you wonder all the time is what made them be this way?"
- Prosecutors say both teens were given military-style training in Mexico
CNN
LAREDO, Texas (CNN) -- Rosalio Reta sits at a table inside a Laredo Police Department interrogation room. A detective, sitting across the table, asks him how it all started.
Reta, in Spanish street slang, describes his initiation as an assassin, at the age of 13, for the Mexican Gulf Cartel, one of the country's two major drug gangs.
"I thought I was Superman. I loved doing it, killing that first person," Reta says on the videotape obtained by CNN. "They tried to take the gun away, but it was like taking candy from kid."
Rosalio Reta and his friend, Gabriel Cardona, were members of a three-person cell of American teenagers working as cartel hit men in the United States, according to prosecutors. The third was arrested by Mexican authorities and stabbed to death in prison there three days later.
In interviews with CNN, Laredo police detectives and prosecutors told how Cardona and Reta were recruited by the cartel to be assassins after they began hitting the cantinas and clubs just across the border.Watch how the teens turned into drug cartel hitmen »
CNN has also obtained detailed court records as well as several hours of police interrogation videos. The detective sitting across the table from Reta and Cardona in those sessions is Robert Garcia. He's a veteran of the Laredo Police Department and one of the few officers who has questioned the young men.
"One thing you wonder all the time: What made them this way?" Garcia told CNN. "They were just kids themselves, waiting around playing PlayStation or Xbox, waiting around for the order to be given."
Over a nearly one-year period starting in June 2005, the border town of Laredo, Texas, saw a string of seven murders. At first glance, the violence looked like isolated, gangland-style killings. But investigators started suspecting something more sinister.
Then Noe Flores was gunned down in a clear case of mistaken identity. Investigators found a fingerprint on a cigarette box inside the suspected shooter's get-away car. That clue unraveled the chilling reality and led police to arrest Gabriel Cardona and Rosalio Reta.
Prosecutors say they quickly discovered these two teenagers were homegrown assassins, hired to carry out the dirty work of the notorious Gulf Cartel.
"There are sleeper cells in the U.S.," said Detective Garcia. "They're here, they're here in the United States."
The cases against Cardona and Reta -- both are in prison serving long prison sentences for murder -- shed new light into the workings of the drug cartels.
Prosecutor and investigators say Reta and Cardona were recruited into a group called "Los Zetas," a group made up of former members of the Mexican special military forces. They're considered ruthless in how they carry out attacks. "Los Zetas" liked what they saw in Cardona and Reta.
Both teenagers received six-month military-style training on a Mexican ranch. Investigators say Cardona and Reta were paid $500 a week each as a retainer, to sit and wait for the call to kill. Then they were paid up to $50,000 and 2 kilos of cocaine for carrying out a hit.
The teenagers lived in several safe houses around Laredo and drove around town in a $70,000 Mercedes-Benz.
As the teens became more immersed in the cartel lifestyle, their appearance changed. Cardona had eyeballs tattooed on his eyelids. Reta's face became covered in tattoo markings. (Prosecutors say during his trial Reta used make-up to cover the facial markings.) And both sported tattoos of "Santa Muerte," the Grim Reaper-like pseudo-saint worshipped by drug traffickers.
"These organizations, these cartels, they function like a Fortune 500 company," Webb County, Texas, prosecutor Uriel Druker said. "We have to remember that the United States is the market they are trying to get to."
In Cardona's interrogation tape, there are clues that "Los Zetas" are reaching deeper and deeper into the United States. Cardona is asked, "Where else are the Zetas?" And Cardona responds, "I've heard in Dallas and Houston."
And that's why the cartel recruited these young Americans. Cardona and Reta could move freely and easily back and forth across the border with Mexico.
Just hours before they were arrested, federal authorities taped a phone conversation between them in which Cardona brags about killing 14-year-old Inez Villareal and his cousin, a Cardona rival.
Cardona laughs as he describes torturing the two boys and dumping their bodies in large metal drums filled with diesel fuel. He says he made "guiso," or stew, with their bodies.
As the call ends, Cardona says, "There are three left to kill, there are three left."
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- A bloody war between Mexican drug cartels is no longer solely a south-of-the-border problem, members of Congress said Tuesday at a hearing on the issue.
A member of the Mexican Federal Police patrols in Ciudad Juarez during a recent operation to fight drugs.
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The violence accompanying those battles has crept into the United States, and is believed to largely be fueled by money and guns pouring over the border from America, said Sen. !%%+ Durbin, D-Illinois.
"The drugs are coming north, and we're sending money and guns south," said Durbin, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Drugs. "As a result, these cartels have gained extraordinary power."
About 90 percent of guns seized in Mexican raids are traced back to the United States, according to the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, he said. About 2,000 firearms cross the border into Mexico daily, according to the Brookings Institution, he added.
The subcommittee held a joint hearing Tuesday on the issue with the Senate Caucus on International Narcotics Control. The hearing focused on ways the United States can assist Mexican President Felipe Calderon's efforts to combat drugs and violence.
In addition, American communities are seeing an increase in violent crimes related to the Mexican drug trade. In Phoenix, Arizona, in 2008, 366 kidnappings for ransom were reported -- more than in any other U.S. city, Durbin said, citing federal statistics. The vast majority of those, he said, were related to Mexican drug cartels.
"We're not winning the battle," Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard told lawmakers. "The violence that we see in Mexico is fueled 65 to 70 percent by the trade in one drug: marijuana."
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Goddard said he believes the United States can do more to remove the profit from such operations, as well as attempt to reduce the demand for the drugs.
It's not only border states that are being affected, either. Authorities believe the cartels have reached into 230 American cities, up from 50 in 2006, Durbin said. In his home state of Illinois, far from the Mexican border, he said, cartels are believed to be operating in three cities: Chicago, East St. Louis and Joliet.
Lawmakers and witnesses at the hearing universally applauded Calderon's efforts to deal with drug violence through actions such as sending troops into Ciudad Juarez. "I think he needs every single bit of our support," said Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-California.
However, the violence has skyrocketed, Goddard said, with a new and appalling trend: assassinations of police officers, prosecutors and other officials who are combating cartels.
Perhaps even more horrifying, as the violence increases, so does the possibility that innocent citizens will be caught in it, he said. In at least one instance in Phoenix, criminals making a home invasion had the wrong house, he said.
"The casual fallout is going to be significant if we can't do something to try to assist Mexico in stopping it south of the border," Goddard said.
Efforts by Arizona authorities to fight the violence include intercepting wire transfer payments to smugglers of drugs and of human beings, Goddard said. Between 2003 and 2007, he said, Arizona seized about $17 million in such transfers.
However, a more comprehensive and regional effort is needed, he said, as the cartels, faced with increasing law enforcement surveillance in one area, will simply take their crimes somewhere else.
And authorities must target the masterminds and leaders behind the violence, he said: "Just arresting and deporting foot soldiers is a waste of critical assets."
Close the border.
