SPIN | January 1997 

It was an autumn day in Mexico City; dense, yellow smog hung in the thin mountain air, waiting for the afternoon rain to rinse it away. As always, the streets of the enormous metropolis were jam-packed with urban hipsters, foreign tourists, and children selling pineapples, mangoes, chewing gum. In one restaurant, a group of men ate, drank, and talked through most of the day. They wore clothes that marked them as coming from Mexicos dusty frontier region, more than a thousand miles to the north. In their cowboy boots, blue jeans, and ten-gallon hats, they stuck out like Texas ranchers in Manhattan.

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When another set of men came in, the waiters and busboys dove for cover. Automatic weapons were drawn, and fired,. After several minutes of carnage, seven men were dead and several more wounded. Mexicos Citys tabloids feasted on the bloodbath for weeks. The police could only speculate what everyone in the restaurant already knew: The shootout was part of an escalating war between two of Mexicos most powerful drug cartels.

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One man walked out of that restaurant without a scratch: a man who has spent much of the last ten years traveling between Mexico and the U.S. via a series of aliases and forged documents, visiting Albuquerque, Houston, and Tucson to check on his multibillion-dollar business. He is known under various assumed identities in the most expensive restaurants and clothing stores on both sides of the border. In the Sierra Madre mountains where he was born, 200 miles south of El Paso, Texas, in the town of Huerta de los Carrillo, he is known as a saint. He has brought the poor ranching village an airport, a medical clinic, and school supplies, IN Ciudad Juarez, his corporate headquarters, he is known as "Lord of the Heavens," for his fleet of 727 and DC-3 jets that fly in cocaine directly from Colombia and Bolivia.

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On that November day in 1993, the Guadalajara gang members who burst into that Mexico Cityrestaurantmade a fatal mistake. They failed to kill Amado Carrillo Fuentes, the most wanted drug lord on both sides of theborder. Then again, the way some people talk about Carrillo its no wonder the hitmen missed him. He almost seems able to move around invisibly, like aspecter. No law-enforcement agency has reported seeing him in almost adecade.

 

When you drive over the cement canal that carries the Rio Grande between El Paso and Juarez, the image that sticks in your mind is not the dirty trickle of river beneath you but the barbed wire on both sides. A corridor of barbed wire, steel walls, and desolate wasteland stretches for almost 2,000 miles from San Diego to Brownsville, Texas, separating the southwestern U.S. from Mexico. If the U.S. government can do little to stop the flow of illegal immigrants across the this border, so far it can do almost nothing to stop the torrent of cocaine, heroin, speed and pot.

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In fact, the rise of the cartels has thrown Mexico into chaos, and even threatens its existence as a civil society. With every passing month, Mexico is developing into a narco-democracy where the drug cartels wield increasing control over the banking, judicial and political institutions. Ordinary citizens, and especially the 12 million Indians, are no longer part of the day-to-day concerns of the state.

Many Mexicans fear that if their government cannot control the rising violence and increasing flow of drugs, especially along the American border, then the U.S. military will intervene. Recently the U.S. gave Mexican authorities 73 helicopters for antidrug operations; perhaps the underlying message was, Take care of your problem, or we will. Reactionaries like Pat Buchanan and Rep. Bob Dornan (R. Calif.) dream of building a BerlinWall along the south-western border, patrolled by an ultra-high-tech military force. For their part, Mexicans have never totally trusted their own military. They have to wonder what the army, facing guerrilla insurrections in Chiapas, Guerrero, and other southern states, might do with this new deadly hardware.

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Carrillos Juarez organization alone is believed to gross some $200 million in drug money every week , a significant chunk of the annual U.S. drug trade, which is estimated at more than $100 billion. Seventy percent of the cocaine consumed in the U.S. comes across the Mexican border, along with a third of the heroin, 80 percent of the imported marijuana, and perhaps as many as the 24 billion doses of methamphetamine last year.

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Almost all of these drugs are imported by what is called the Mexican Federation, a loose coalition of four major cartels based in Juarez, Sonora, Tijuana, and along the Gulf of Mexico. "The Mexican Federation makes previous organized-crime syndicates that operated in the U.S. look like school-children," says Thomas Constantine of the Drug Enforcement Agency. "They can rival legitimate governments for influence and control."

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Although its cocaine that links Carrillos cartel-the largest of the four-to the most powerful international traffickers, perhaps his best profit ratio comes from the homegrown opium and marijuana harvested in the Sierra Madre, his home country. He buys drugs from numerous local bosses, who intimidate the Indians into planting and harvesting the crop.

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Its almost a textbook business model. Sierra Madre Indians generally dont use drugs and often dont even know what they are planting, so there is no product skimming. The weather is hot, making the region perfect for multiple crops. The local police force often moonlights as intimidation squads for the narcos. And best of all, while the cartel only serves as a high-priced transport company for Colombian coke, it controls all the marijuana and heroin grown in the narco-villages of the Sierra, from planting to processing to transportation, warehousing, and distribution in the United States.

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"Its pretty calm up here today," says the driver of the gloss-black Ram Charger, as he fiddles with the radio dial, trying to get the station playing weepy ranchero music to come in clearly. "Maybe tomorrow it wont be." He is wearing the ubiquitous regional uniform: ironed Levis, cowboy boots, and a ten-gallon hat, to go with his pencil-thin mustache.

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Were riding the Parral highway into the Sierra Madre, some 500 miles of high mesas, jagged peaks, and deep canyons that make up the most remote and rugged topography in Mexico. The drivers leans over to me and points out the window, toward the wreckage of a DC-3 jet rusting in an empty field. "One of Carrillos angels that didnt make it," he laughs. The rumor is, he tells me, that the Mexican army retrieved 300 kilos of cocaine from the crashed jet, but the crew somehow got away and the take was reported the next day as just five kilos. "Thats the war on drugs," he adds.

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A little further on, the driver starts telling me about Baborigame, perhaps the most notorious narco-village in the Sierra Madre. There may be a million acres of drug plantations around the town. A known drug trafficker named Manuel Rubio even rigged the mayoral election so he would win. The cops all work for him and the army leaves him alone. When the mayors sister-in-law Trinidad, known as the "ugly fat woman," shot five Tarahumara Indians, she spent only three days in jail.

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Between the drivers seat and mine is a six pack of Tecate and a cellular phone. Sometimes theres a nine-millimeter automatic with a 50 bullet clip stashed in the passenger-side console, but not today. I decide not to ask why.

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A deep canyon opens up to our left, lined in dense pine forest. "Two thirds of the remaining pine forest in Mexico is up here," the driver says. When he turn his face to look at me I catch a glimpse of his left eye, which is a watery white, the color of nonfat milk.

 

Now he gestures ahead of us, the mountain peaks draped in a brown haze. "The fires are always burning here. Its part of the harvest." He catches me looking at his damaged eye a split-second too long. Embarrassed, I quickly refocus my gaze forward.

 

He tells me about another nearby village, Colorades de la Virgen, where three men were crucified in the church, in front of the congregation, and left there for three days. Perhaps 150 Indians have been murdered in the area around Baborigame during the last few years, he says.

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The drivers name is Edwin Bustillos, and he has been a relentless witness to the killing, torture, and burning in these mountains over the past decade or so, as narcotics growers and traffickers have followed the logging companies and their recently built roads deeper and deeper into the homeland of the Tarahumara, one of North Americas most isolated and most intact indigenous cultures. Lots of people in these mountains wish Bustillos were dead because of the work he does for the Indians. He suffered a serious spinal injury when he was run off the road by armed men in a truck. This gives him a hunch when he drives and a limp when he walks. He suffered a head injury and several broken ribs when he was beaten unconscious by five men. Two of them, he says, were police officers.

Bustillos himself is part Tarahumara; he grew up in the Sierras, attending Indian schools. He now runs an environmental group called the Advisory Council of the Sierra Madre, based in a rented three-bedroom house in the city of Chihuahua, a four-hour drive from the mountains. The councils original intention was to organize agrarian workshops to teach the Tarahumara how to increase food production during drought years. But since the violence began in 1991, Bustillos and his staff of 13 work seven days a week trying to protect the Tarahumara culture and homeland from extinction. He often appears in court to represent Indians in land disputes. He has never lost a case. His work has brought him international attention, including the prestigious Goldman Award for environmental activism, but this sort of bravery has a price.

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Besides the attacks on him, the violence has also spilled over to Bustillos family. His uncle, a volunteer with the council, was stabbed with screwdrivers in his shoulders, elbows, and knees, and buried alive under a thin layer of dirt. He survived for four days by eating insects and collecting the dew off the trees before a search party found him. Bustillos uncle doesnt go out much anymore, and Bustillos himself rarely travels alone.

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Leaning over to me one more time, Bustillos points to his eye. "This is the only thing that didnt happen to me up here," he laughs. "It was an accident when I was a kid." Bustillos hasnt told me yet that he has also suffered a heart attack and a stroke-or that he just turned 30 years old.

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Over the centuries, the deep canyons of the Sierra Madre have attracted Pancho Villas rebels, Apache raiders, and generations of hikers and anthropologists. This labyrinth of rock is also home to the Tarahumara, or Raramuri, the running people. More than 60,000 of the reclusive Tarahumara, as well as a smaller population of Tepehuane, have lived in this treacherous canyon system for 600 years, their culture relatively untouched.

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The Tarahumara have long been known among marathon athletes as the best distance runners in the world, able to run dozens of miles without stopping, or run a deer to death for dinner. But this area is best known to outsiders as the desolate frontier where Humphrey Bogart went looking for gold in the classic move The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. All the gold ran out long ago, but today the mountains are teeming with a new breed of prospectors, the narcotraficantes, or drug traffickers.

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Although the drug lords have worked with many Sierra Madre Indians for more than 25 years, rising demand on the streets of North America has led cartel bosses to push their local chiefs to increase production. They need more and more land, and more and more labor. After centuries of fending off everyone from the Spanish conquistadors to the Jesuit priests, the Tarahumara are now in imminent danger of losing their land, their culture, and the entire ecosystem that supports them to these new invaders.

Bustillos tells me that since the coming of the Spanish 400 years ago, the Tarahumara have sought refuge in the most remote regions of the mountains. They tend to avoid outsiders, whom they call Chavochis, which means "web faces"- that is, people with beards. (Like many Indians, Tarahumara have virtually no facial hair.)

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"The Tarahumara believe only in the useful and the unuseful," Bustillos says. "If the sun has been out too long then it is not useful, but the rain is. That is why they do not take drugs; it is not useful to them." To the Indians, a rock that grinds the corn is alive, because it is useful, while a helicopter that flies over their fields is dead, because they see it as useless. This makes it difficult for outsiders to communicate with the Tarahumara-not because they are hostile but because they cant see much use in talking to you.

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As Bustillos and I enter the dry, dusty town of Guachochi, we pass a few large, new haciendas that sit behind walls topped with razor-edge glass. Guachochi is a modern-day boomtown that has grown from 2,000 people to 25,000 people in the last decade. "When the average Indian grows opium or marijuana, its maybe a plot the size of a living room, and he makes 200 pesos($15) per pound," says Bustillos. "Hes just trying to keep the narcos off his back and make a little extra for himself." He points to the luxury homes with expensive cars out front as we pass. "The local Jeffs(chiefs), they usually get a little more."

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Bustillos pulls the Charger up in front of a tan hotel with barred windows. A sign showing a handgun in a circle with a slash through it hangs above the entrance: Youre supposed to check your guns at the door. "This is owned by a good trafficker," Bustillos says. "He buys the Indians blankets in the winter and builds them a school when they need one. For me, if a narco respects the Indians traditions and land, then I will not bother them and hopefully he will not bother me. The violent ones are the problem."

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In 1993, Maria Theresa Jardi, state prosecutor for Chihuahua, tried to have Artemio Fontes, a major Sierra Madre drug boss who works with both the Juarez cartel and the notoriously violent Sinaloa drug gang, arrested for murder and trafficking. When officers arrived at his door he answered in a bathrobe, a cup of coffee in one hand and in the other an amparo- a court order technically absolving him of any crimes he may have committed.

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"Mexico has its own sense of justice, which I cant seem to figure out," says Jardi, who now heads the human-rights department at a Jesuit university in Mexico City. She is highly skeptical of government efforts to control the narcos. "No matter what anybody tells you about how many crops they destroy or how many they have arrested, they are lying," she says. "The state attorneys office, the police, its everywhere." Mexican Attorney General Antonio Lozano Gracia said last year that up to 80 percent of his police force is either on the take or under direct intimidation from the drug lords.

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My next stop is Baborigame, but Bustillos isnt coming with me; he has other business, and jokes that I may less likely to have an "accident" without him. To get there from Guachochi, I have three options: a two-day walk through the canyon, a 12-hour drive on a four-wheel dirt road around the canyon, or a 12-minute flight over the canyon. "The town is tense, very tense," Bustillos says. "And it is a Tepehuane town, which means they all have guns." The Tepehuane tribe, numbering no more than 8,000 people, have always been more aggressive than the reclusive Tarahumara. It was the Tepehuane who led a revolt against the Spanish in 1611. At first, the Tarahumara joined the Tepehuane uprisings, but all efforts at joint rebellion ended almost three centuries ago, when a Spanish captain put the heads of 33 Tarahumara rebels on stakes near the town of Sisoguichi.

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But the new incursion by the drug lords has rekindled the spirit of resistance among the Tepehuane. One night a few months ago, when the tension in Baborigame was running hot, some 60 Indian men with machine guns gathered. "They wanted to go after Fontess men and the mayor, but I told them it would only get them killed," Bustillos says. "The traffickers think the Indian is stupid and lazy. But if they can organize 60 guns in an hour, what could they do in a week with a population that knows every secret spot in the mountains?"

Baborigames roads are not paved with gold, or even asphalt. Expensive four-wheel-drive rigs cruise the dirt streets, blasting ranchero music on their stereos. Almost the only activity is the helicopters landing and taking off in the army fort, down by the stream. The fort is a perfect square of pointed trees tied together by rope, in the fashion of Daniel Boone-era Kentucky. The houses are rundown, tin-roofed shacks. There is no running water, electricity is rationed, and supplies are wholly dependent on the rough mountain road to Guachochi.

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Even though there have been as many as three murders a week in this region, there is no longer an official police force. The residents have refused to pay their salaries, claiming the police are corrupt. "Why should we pay for them?" asks Loredo Rivas, Bustilloss volunteer assistant here. "They are the ones stealing our land beating our people." Instead, Mayor Manuel Rubio, the former trafficker who allegedly rigged the election, has deputized an assortment of his thugs.

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Rubios office has a desk, a ham radio, a poster of a Dos Equis girl, and not much else. His gaunt deputy mayor, a dead ringer for Ichabod Crane, greets me and reports that, regrettable, "the mayor is out of town for a few days." When I ask about the violence, he tells me the only problems in town are caused by drunk Indians. Selling alcohol is illegal in Baborigame, and its about the only law Rubios goons actually enforce. This of course dives up the price of black-market liquor, and someone tells me later that-in the great company-town tradition- the deputy mayor is himself the biggest booze dealer on the black market.

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Loreto Rivas picks me up in his battered Chevy truck. We drive down another bumpy dirt road, across the sewage-infested river, through a barren field, past the primary school with its mural of Disney characters. In the back of the pickup is Raul, a shy Tarahumara who has been adopted into this mostly Tepehuane town. I ask him why he is here. He points to his nose, which looks like it has been pounded flat by a hammer. I point to my nose, thinking it is a greeting. He sticks out his neck and raises his head higher until his chin is almost in his face. He points to his nose again. There it is: a bullet hole that starts in his nose and exits behind his ear. The exit wound is a circle I could shove my little finger in up to the first joint.

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Raul ran into the infamous Trinidad, the "ugly fat woman" who carries a gun and lives in the forest with six-cowboy thugs who protect her cash crops. He smiles and says, "I am lucky. It was a Saturday night special, very close to my nose." He was lucky. On that same day, he says, his father and four of his friends took bullets in the head from the same gang. They all died.

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"Can I meet this fat lady?" I ask. "You can ask around," says Rivas with a smile. That day I ask seven people if they will take me to see Trinidad. They all say no. When I ask Bustillos about this later, he laughs. "She is a dangerous woman. No one is going to walk six hours to see her and then get shot in the dark coming home," he says.

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Behind Rivass tin-roofed cement house is a much smaller wooden cabin with empty windows and a bare floor. Three children under age ten live here with their mother, Marina Chaparro Rivas. Her husband, Guadeloupe, Loreto Rivass brother, has been hiding in the mountains for two years. Guadeloupe walked out of a bar one night and was attacked by two men who work for Artemio Fontes. He grabbed the first mans knife and stabbed him with it. That man survived. The other attacker shot Guadeloupe in the shoulder, but Guadeloupe wrestled him to the ground, grabbed his gun, and put a fatal hole through the mans stomach.

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Two of Marinas children stare at my white face, fascinated. Marina rarely looks at me, instead rocking slowly in her chair and gazing out into the empty field. Deep lines run down her brown, angular face, making her look years older than 30. "Guadeloupe didnt want to give up our land," she tells me in a barely audible voice. "They wanted to grow the drugs and we said no, so they tried to kill him." I ask if she thinks she will ever see him again. "I dont think so. Not the way it is." I ask her about Rubio. She sighs and shakes her head no. She wont talk about him.

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In fact no one in Baborigame wants to talk about Manuel Rubio. Some people direct me to his house, others to the army fort. At Rubios house, his wife, Trinidads sister, repeats the party line: Hes out of town. At the fort, the commander tells me I cant ask questions without written permission from Mexico City. When I say Rubios name, he smiles slightly. "That is a civilian matter. We dont concern ourselves with that."

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Outside the tiny chapel, the late-afternoon sun casts an orange glow through the towns permanent smoky haze. Instead of a white collar and black cassock, Father Chaves is dressed in cowboy boots, a black shirt unbuttoned halfway down his chest, a baseball hat with HOUSTON on the brim, and a ten-inch ivory-handled hunting knife sticking out of his overly tight black Levis. Bustillos had warned me about the priest: "Chivas is the worst man, a very corrupt man. He tries to use the fear of the church against the Indians."

I ask Chivas why so many Indians in the area have lost their land to drug production. With his hand on his hips, he tells me, "The Indians borrow money and they cant pay it back, so they put up their land for collateral. Thats the way it works." I ask him about all the reports of murdered Indians in the Baborigame region. "Yes, I have buried a lot of them here. Sometimes four or five bodies would be thrown in the church at one time, during service." Did he report these crimes to the bishops in Mexico City or Chihuahua? "No, these are local matters and should be handled locally."

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Then I bring up the rigged 1995 mayoral election, in which the collective Indian vote of more than 7,000 people (cast by consensus, as in many Mexican villages) was effectively erased, and Rubio "won" by one vote out of only 251 cast. Chaves shrugs it off. I mention that Rubio was indicted in 1988 on charges of trafficking in cocaine and heroin, as well as possession of illegal arms and stolen cars. (Rubio was arrested with three pounds of cocaine and one pound of heroin, but was released after three days in jail.) Father Chivas leans in close to me, raises his eyebrows, and points a finger: "Was. He was a trafficker."

 

From the window of my hotel, the town looks virtually empty. There are no people on the unlit streets, and wont be until first light. The front door of this dilapidated old hotel is bolted shut. I have nothing more to do here. No one will take me to see Trinidad, the army commander wont talk to me, and Rubio is not to be found. Fontes is holed up in his Chihuahua compound. Behind him somewhere is Carrillo, the Lord of the Heavens, slipping from Juarez to Houston to Mexico City like a shadow.

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Baborigame isnt what I expected. The tons of drugs and billions of dollars generated down here are all somewhere else. The dope has been shipped north, into the bloodstreams of gringos. The money is in the bank accounts of Mexican cops, corrupt DEA agents, politicians, and dealers large and small on both sides of the border.

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A chair falls over, somewhere in the back of the hotel. A man comes stumbling toward me out of the darkness. His face is shadowed by a cowboy hat. He sways right up to me, so close I smell the beer on his bushy mustache. His eyes are dark brown but his skin is light; hes no Indian. Looking around, I see that the women in the kitchen have disappeared, the kids in the television room are gone. I stand to face the man, as calmly as I can. After a moment of silence, he mumbles, "I want to buy you a drink." At last I meet Manuel Rubio, the duly elected mayor of Baborigame.

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I accept his offer, as long as he agrees to go outside for a picture first. When he sees Loreto Rivas outside the hotel, Rubio erupts. "Are you with this man?" he demands. I admit I am. Rubio begins to pace back and forth angrily, speaking so rapidly I can barely understand him. "Edwin Bustillos and this man are the problem here, do you understand me?" he says. "They are agitators." I take the film out of the camera and hide it. By the hotel door are five Indians who werent there a minute ago. As Rubio continues to berate me, white flecks of spittle forming at the corners of his mouth, a black Suburban pulls up besides him. The drivers leans out for a whispered conversation with the mayor. Suddenly Rubios mood has changed. He slaps me on the back and invites me inside for the drink.

 

We have barely been served out beers when two soldiers burst through the front door. The younger one immediately stations himself in the back of the barroom, his M-16 casually pointing toward our table. The other one has a thin mustache that looks like it was painted on in grease pencil. He shakes hands with Rubio, politely introduces himself as Carlos, and relieves me of my passport, camera and backpack. The mayor keeps slugging back the beer as Carlos starts to ask me questions: Who am I, who do I work for, why am I here.

I have a tape recorder running in my shirt pocket and a roll of film in my pants. Illogically, I imagine that if I disappear, these, somehow, will not. I try to picture how things got to this point. The U.S. consulate in Juarez called the Chihuahua police. They called the army. The army called the priest. The priest called Rubio. It all seems so clear: I have come to the worst village in the Sierra Madre, where the man who is paid to get his hands dirty is sitting across the babble from me.

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But as abruptly as he began, Carlos stops interrogating me and gives me back my gear. "I have traveled to America a few times," he says with a genuine smile. "Tell me, where do you live?"

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For the next two hours, I have a reasonable, if drunken, conversation with Rubio about his town. He defends his election, saying his critics are all lying. His criminal record is based on lies too. The Indians create their own problems, he tells me, by not understanding how it is down here. When I ask about drugs, Rubio admits, "Yes, there is a problem down here." With a shrug of shoulders and a drunken grin, he adds, "Its Mexico."

He says his sister-in-law, Trinidad, has problems "protecting her cattle,"- thats why she and her men are so heavily armed. He doesnt know anything about the altercation that left Rauls father and friends dead, shot a point-blank range. I have a list of 139 orphans in the Baborigame area whose fathers have died violent deaths in the last five years. I have a list of widows. I have a stack of paper with 2,000 signatures and thumbprints of people calling for Rubios impeachment, or at least a new election. I have a copy of Rubios rap sheet from the prosecutors office.

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But theres no point in confronting this guy. Hes not "the man" in this game. All Rubio does is collect the goods and ship them off to someone like Fontes, who then wholesales them to someone like Carrillo. Rubio is a low man on the corporate food chain, and the Sierras-and for that matter, all of North America-are full of them. So I dont even show Rubio my stack of documents. He wants to drink and, after all, its his town.

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Before leaving Mexico I spend the night back in Juarez, the border town where bodies often show up on the airport road. A former police chief was once found dead, along with his two sons, in a Honda Accord on the main bridge to El Paso. Cops, of course, are suspect everywhere in Mexico and doubly so along the border. Last year the federales bused a group of state narcotics officers who were transporting a shipment of marijuana for Carrillo.

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I spend the afternoon looking for hints of Carrillos presence. The police will say nothing, and my hotel manager strongly urges me not to ask questions. At one high-end restaurant, though, the maitre d smiles and tells me, "He is a man with a good appetite." Although he hasnt officially been seen for years, Carrillo is felt and heard on pop music cassettes with titles like Cantinos del Contrabando, "songs of the contraband." These tunes idolize the smugglers who never made it across the Rio Grande, or the upstart who lost an arm or leg because he tried to steal from a drug lord.

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I dont find Carrillo; instead I see the maquiladoras, border-zone factories that are by-products of NAFTAs free-trade policy. More than 300 factories are packed into Juarez, belching toxic poisons into the streets and rivers, making everything from car parts to aluminum cans. ON the hills are the shantytowns where tens of thousands of new arrivals use the wooden pallets given to them by the factory foremen to build their new homes. From up here, where there is no running water, no electricity, no sewer, you can see Interstate 10, on the other side of the border, leading from El Paso to Los Angeles. For the Mexicans who gets paid $3 to $5 a day in these factories, carrying a kilo across the river offers the chance to earn my money than theyll make legally in a year.

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Months later, I call Edwin Bustillos at his office in Chihuahua. He recently received a warning from the federal government to "stop making trouble and quiet down." In Baborigame, one of Loredos Rivass brothers died a mysterious death after drinking a beer with a small-time narco. Before hanging up, I ask Edwin about his Ram Charger. It always struck me that he drove exactly the same car as all the narcos. He laughs. "I couldnt decide between the Suburban, which has good cargo room, or the Charger, which has a good , strong engine," he says. "Then I realized all the traffickers are driving Chargers. They must know something I dont, because they are winning."