Pubdate: Sun, 03 Dec 2006
Source: Observer, The (UK)
Copyright: 2006 The Observer
Contact:  http://www.observer.co.uk/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/315
Author: David Rose
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/people/Vicente+Carrillo+Fuentes
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/topics/Juarez
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/corrupt.htm (Corruption - United States)

THE HOUSE OF DEATH

When 12 bodies were found buried in the garden of a Mexican house, it 
seemed like a case of drug-linked killings. But the trail led to 
Washington and a cover-up that went right to the top. David Rose 
reports from El Paso

Janet Padilla's first inkling that something might be wrong came when 
she phoned her husband at lunchtime. His mobile phone was switched 
off. On 14 January, 2004, Luis had, as usual, left for work at 6am, 
and when he did not answer the first call Janet made, after taking 
the children to school, she assumed he was busy. Two weeks later she 
would learn the truth.

'It was love at first sight for Luis and me, and that's how it 
stayed, after two years dating at school and eight years of 
marriage,' says Janet. 'We always spoke a couple of times during the 
day and he always kept his phone on. So I called my dad, who owns the 
truckyard where he worked and he told me, "he hasn't been here". I 
called my in-laws and they hadn't seen him either, and they were 
already worried because his car was outside their house with the 
windows open and the keys in the ignition. He would never normally 
leave it like that.'

Luis Padilla, 29, father of three, had been kidnapped, driven across 
the Mexican border from El Paso, Texas, to a house in Ciudad Juarez, 
the lawless city ruled by drug lords that lies across the Rio Grande. 
As his wife tried frantically to locate him, he was being stripped, 
tortured and buried in a mass grave in the garden - what the people 
of Juarez call a narco-fossa, a narco-smugglers' tomb.

Just another casualty of Mexico's drug wars? Perhaps. But Padilla had 
no connection with the drugs trade; he seems to have been the victim 
of a case of mistaken identity. Now, as a result of documents 
disclosed in three separate court cases, it is becoming clear that 
his murder, along with at least 11 further brutal killings, at the 
Juarez 'House of Death', is part of a gruesome scandal, a web of 
connivance and cover-up stretching from the wild Texas borderland to 
top Washington officials close to President Bush.

These documents, which form a dossier several inches thick, are the 
main source for the facts in this article. They suggest that while 
the eyes of the world have been largely averted, America's 'war on 
drugs' has moved to a new phase of cynicism and amorality, in which 
the loss of human life has lost all importance - especially if the 
victims are Hispanic. The US agencies and officials in this saga - 
all of which refused to comment, citing pending lawsuits - appear to 
have thought it more important to get information about drugs 
trafficking than to stop its perpetrators killing people.

The US media have virtually ignored this story. The Observer is the 
first newspaper to have spoken to Janet Padilla, and this is the 
first narrative account to appear in print. The story turns on one 
extraordinary fact: playing a central role in the House of Death was 
a US government informant, Guillermo Ramirez Peyro, known as Lalo, 
who was paid more than $220,000 (UKP110,000) by US law enforcement 
bodies to work as a spy inside the Juarez cartel. In August 2003 Lalo 
bought the quicklime used to dissolve the flesh of the first victim, 
Mexican lawyer Fernando Reyes, and then helped to kill him; he 
recorded the murder secretly with a bug supplied by his handlers - 
agents from the Immigration and Customs Executive (Ice), part of the 
Department of Homeland Security. That first killing threw the Ice 
staff in El Paso into a panic. Their informant had helped to commit 
first-degree murder, and they feared they would have to end his 
contract and abort the operations for which he was being used. But 
the Department of Justice told them to proceed.

Lalo's cartel bosses told him whenever they were planning another 
killing, using a grisly codeword - carne asada, 'barbecue'. In the 
six months after Reyes's death, they used it on many occasions. Each 
time, says Lalo, he informed his handlers in Ice. They did not intervene.

El Paso, population 700,000, lies in Texas's far west. It is a 
V-shaped city almost bisected by the Franklin mountains, lashed by 
desert winds. Houston and Dallas are more than 600 miles away. Much 
closer, across a guarded fence and the river, here little wider than 
a stream, is Juarez. On the western side of the Mexican city are the 
barrios - dirt streets of ramshackle huts without sanitation, built 
from discarded wood and tyres, whose inhabitants live in sight of the 
gleaming offices of downtown El Paso.

Eastern Juarez is very different. There, in the campestre, the 
country club district, lie gated developments patrolled by security 
guards, armoured palaces of marble, with columns, fountains and huge 
golden domes. Most of the money comes from drugs. Los narcos control 
not only Juarez but the wider state of Chihuahua, ruling through 
corruption and fear. One organisation is paramount - the Juarez 
cartel led by Vicente Carrillo Fuentes. The US State Department 
claims he is responsible for shipping cocaine and marijuana worth 
billions of dollars a year and protects his business by killing. 
America is offering a $5m reward for his arrest.

His cartel has penetrated Mexican law enforcement at all levels. Like 
many of its operatives, Lalo began as a policeman - in his case in 
the Mexican highway police. Having resigned from the force in 1995, 
he began transporting cocaine by the ton for a gang based in 
Guadalajara. Professing disgust at his criminal associates, he 
started working for the US government in February 2000, supplying 
information not only to Ice (then known as US Customs) but also the 
Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the Bureau of Alcohol, 
Firearms and Tobacco, and the FBI. A few months later, with his 
handlers' encouragement, he was recruited into the Juarez cartel by 
Il Ingeniero, the Engineer, one of Fuentes's key lieutenants and a 
man notorious for acts of savage violence. His real name was 
Heriberto Santillan-Tabares.

'The money I got from the Americans I invested in business,' says 
Lalo, 36. 'I had a used-car lot, a furniture store and a cellphone 
accessory place.' He settled with his wife and three children on the 
US side of the border. 'I spoke to my handlers three or four times a 
day. But when I went across the bridge to Juarez, I had no back-up. I 
was on my own.'

Lalo claims to have facilitated numerous drug seizures and arrests. 
But on 28 June, 2003, his loyalty came under suspicion when he was 
arrested by the DEA in New Mexico, driving a truck he had brought 
across the border containing 102lb of marijuana. He had not told his 
handlers about this shipment and, in accordance with its normal 
procedures, the DEA 'deactivated' him as a source.

Ice took a different view. Agents in its El Paso office were trying 
to use Lalo to build a case against Santillan, and to nail a separate 
cigarette-smuggling investigation. At a meeting with federal 
prosecutors the week after Lalo's arrest, Ice tried to persuade 
assistant US attorney Juanita Fielden that, if Lalo were closely 
monitored, he would continue to be effective. Fielden agreed. She 
says in an affidavit that she called the New Mexico prosecutor and 
got him to drop the charges. Lalo was released.

A month later, on 5 August, Santillan asked Lalo to meet him at a 
cartel safe house at 3633 Calle Parsonieros, in an affluent 
neighbourhood of Juarez. The Mexican lawyer Reyes would be there too, 
Santillan said, and with the help of some members of the Juarez 
judicial police - the local detective force - they were going to kill him.

When Lalo arrived, two cops were already there. He went out to buy 
the quicklime and duct tape, and when he returned Santillan turned up 
with Reyes. The policemen jumped on the lawyer, beating him and 
trying to put duct tape over his mouth. Lalo, wearing his hidden wire 
supplied by Ice, recorded Reyes's desperate pleas for mercy. 'They 
[the police] asked me to help them get him to the floor,' reads a 
statement he made later. 'They tried to choke him with an extension 
cord, but this broke and I gave them a plastic bag and they put it on 
his head and suffocated him.' Even then, they were not sure Reyes was 
dead. One of the officers took a shovel 'and hit him many times on the head'.

When Lalo returned to El Paso on the day of Reyes's murder and told 
his Ice employers what had happened they were understandably worried. 
They knew that, if they were to continue using Lalo as an informant, 
they would need high-level authorisation. That afternoon and evening 
he was debriefed at length by his main handler, Special Agent Raul 
Bencomo, and his supervisor. Then he was allowed to go back to Juarez 
- - Santillan had given him $2,000 to pay two cartel members to dig 
Reyes's grave, cover his body with quicklime and bury it.

Meanwhile the El Paso Ice office reported the matter to headquarters 
in Washington. The information went up the chain of command, 
eventually reaching America's Deputy Assistant Attorney General, John 
G. Malcolm. It passed through the office of Johnny Sutton, the US 
Attorney for Western Texas - a close associate of George W. Bush. 
When Bush was Texas governor, Sutton spent five years as his director 
of criminal justice policy. After Bush became President, Sutton 
became legal policy co-ordinator in the White House transition team, 
working with another Bush Texas colleague, Alberto Gonzalez, the 
present US Attorney General.

Earlier this year Sutton was appointed chairman of the Attorney 
General's advisory committee which, says the official website, 'plays 
a significant role in determining policies and programmes of the 
department and in carrying out the national goals set by the 
President and the Attorney General'. Sutton's position as US Attorney 
for Western Texas is further evidence of his long friendship with the 
President - falling into his jurisdiction is Midland, the town where 
Bush grew up, and Crawford, the site of Bush's beloved ranch.

'Sutton could and should have shut down the case, there and then,' 
says Bill Weaver, a law professor at the University of Texas at El 
Paso who has made a detailed study of the affair. 'He could have told 
Ice and the lawyers "go with what you have, and let's try to bring 
Santillan to justice". That neither he nor anyone else decided to 
take that action invites an obvious inference: that because the only 
people likely to get killed were Mexicans, they thought it didn't much matter.'

In the days after Reyes's death, officials in Texas and Washington 
held a series of meetings. Finally word came back from headquarters - 
despite the risk that Lalo might become involved with further 
murders, Ice could continue to use and pay him as an informant. And 
although Santillan had already been caught on tape directing a 
merciless killing and might well kill again, no attempt would be made 
to arrest him.

Lalo's statement, made in Dallas in February 2004, is a record of 
cruelty and violence, the words of a man who thought himself 
untouchable because of his relationship with Ice. In the months after 
Washington decided not to move on Santillan, the garden of the house 
at 3633 Calle Parsonieros began to fill with bodies. One day in 
September 2003, 'Santillan called to ask me to bury a guy who had 
apparently died of a heart attack at the moment he was kidnapped', 
Lalo's statement says. 'Another execution I remember was on 23 
November... Santillan ordered me to have these drug mules meet him in 
the little Parsonieros house ... Loya [a corrupt police commander] 
put tape around their heads, but they could still breathe and one of 
them began to moan loudly, so Loya shot him in the head... but he 
didn't die immediately.' They were killed because they were careless 
in their smuggling work.

Then, and on other occasions, Santillan told Lalo in advance he was 
going to hold a carne asada. The deposition gives details of 13 
murders, all but one of whose victims were later found buried at 
Number 3633. Each time Lalo crossed into Mexico his Ice handlers 
sought and obtained formal clearance from headquarters to allow their 
source to travel to a foreign country while working for a US agency. 
Throughout the period, Lalo says, he continued to talk to his handler 
Bencomo up to four times a day - usually in person, at the Ice El 
Paso office. He says his meetings with Santillan were all covertly 
recorded, while documents show that Ice had arranged for Lalo's phone 
to be bugged.

Curtis Compton, Bencomo's Ice supervisor, insisted in an affidavit 
that it did not know of any murders before they occurred: 'We only 
learned about the murders through interviews of Lalo after the fact. 
I acted in good faith that all my actions were legal and proper.'

Lalo's last country clearance was issued on 13 January, 2004. Once 
again Santillan had called him, asking him to come to Juarez to 
unlock the Parsonieros house for a carne asada. Next morning Luis 
Padilla disappeared.

Although the Padillas had attended Socorro high school in El Paso and 
lived in the US from childhood, both remained Mexican citizens, 
resident aliens with green-card work permits. Their children, Luis 
jnr, Jacqueline and Jasmine, were born in the US. Luis snr was two 
years ahead of Janet at school and they did not speak to each other 
until they attended a mutual friend's quinceria, a 15th birthday party.

Janet smiles at the memory: 'I liked everything about Luis straight 
away. He was silly, funny, a popular guy; he played a lot of sports. 
He was very religious and I started going to the same church, where 
he was president of the youth section.' For their first date he took 
her to a Mexican restaurant, and then a children's park: 'We just sat 
there on the swings, talking as if we'd known each other for years.' 
In 1996, when Janet was 16, they got married. They spent their 
wedding night in Juarez.

By 4pm on 14 January, Janet was on the point of phoning El Paso 
police when she received a call from a friend in Juarez. 'She told 
me, "I've just seen Luis over here. He was with some cops - they were 
putting him in a truck". I couldn't figure it out. He shouldn't have 
been in Mexico at all. At 8 o'clock I couldn't stand it any longer 
and I went over there myself. I went to all the different police 
stations. Nobody had him. Nobody knew where he was.'

Since they married Janet and Luis had only ever spent a night apart - 
when Luis junior was born; they had been living in Dallas, but she 
wanted to give birth in El Paso, in order to be near her family. In 
the fortnight after his disappearance, Janet and the children stayed 
with relatives. 'I couldn't go home. I couldn't be on my own. When he 
was lost, not knowing what had happened drove me crazy. When at last 
I heard something, at first I felt relief. A lot of people disappear 
in Juarez and you never know what happened to them.'

On 26 January, Janet got a call. Juarez police told her they had 
found some bodies. She was to meet them at the city mortuary. First, 
she was shown some photographs, but none was of Luis, 'I had to do it 
in person. I went in there and they had four bodies at that time. 
There were still ropes around their heads and their eyes were 
sticking out because they had been suffocated. It was horrible, 
horrible. One of them had a tattoo, one had silver teeth, another was too fat.'

Janet still did not believe this could have anything to do with Luis. 
'He never took drugs and he never drank, beyond the odd beer. He 
never got into fights. He was still really into the church and he'd 
just been asked to coach middle-school sports. How could he be 
narco-fossa?' The police phoned again. This time they asked her to 
meet them at 3633 Calle Parsonieros. The place looked familiar. 'The 
hotel where we spent our honeymoon night backed on to the garden.

'I saw his shoes and his jacket. I went into the garden and they were 
probing the ground with a pole. That's when they found his body.' The 
police exhumed him, 'but it was hard to ID him because he was so 
decomposed. I looked at his hands and touched them. The flesh fell off.'

Two other men had been murdered on 14 January, both of them from 
Juarez. The next day Santillan told Lalo he had been asked to kill 
them as a favour for some associates of Vicente Carrillo Fuentes - 
Santillan had nothing against them personally. In such circumstances, 
murderers can make mistakes.

While Santillan and Lalo went on killing, Bencomo, his Ice colleagues 
and Assistant US Attorney Fielden were assembling their case. In 
December 2003 Fielden drew up a sealed indictment against Santillan. 
But although there was already some evidence of his involvement in 
killings, the indictment was only for trafficking, not murder. Before 
they could lure him to America and arrest him, they needed permission 
from the DoJ. They got it on 15 January, a day after Luis Padilla died.

But this did not bring the House of Death killings to an end. Under 
torture, one of Santillan's victims had revealed the address of Homer 
Glen McBrayer - a DEA special agent resident in Juarez who operated 
under diplomatic cover. At 6pm on 14 January, two men rang his 
doorbell continuously for 10 minutes. Afraid, his wife phoned him at 
work. McBrayer rushed home and ushered his wife and daughters into 
their car. As soon as they left the estate where they lived, they 
were stopped by a Mexican police car. Two civilian vehicles hemmed 
McBrayer's car in. Their occupants got out and waited while McBrayer 
talked to the cops. They were Santillan's men.

Having showed his diplomatic passport, McBrayer phoned a DEA 
colleague, who arrived within minutes. Unwilling, perhaps, to abduct 
two US agents, a woman and two children on a busy street, the cartel 
men backed off. As the standoff unfolded, Santillan twice called 
Lalo. He asked him to find out what he could about an American called 
Homer Glen - the corrupt police had not given McBrayer's surname. 
Santillan, claimed Lalo, said he thought he worked for the tres 
letras - code for the DEA - and intended to blow up his house.

The McBrayers were lucky to be alive, and the DEA, kept in the dark 
about the continued use of Lalo after the first murder six months 
earlier, reacted with fury. Even as Ice debriefed Lalo, it refused 
the DEA access to him and to recordings of the events of 14 January. 
Every principle governing informant handling and inter-agency 
co-operation appeared to have been flouted, and the Mexican 
government was not told of the carnage taking place on - and under - its soil.

Ice got Lalo to arrange a meeting with Santillan in El Paso and on 15 
January Il Ingeniero was arrested. Two days later, Ice finally told 
the Mexicans that the garden at 3633 Calle Parsonieros was a mass 
grave. After bureaucratic delays, digging began on 23 January. On 18 
February, Johnny Sutton filed a new indictment against Santillan, 
charging him with trafficking and five murders - including those of 
Reyes and Padilla.

The House Of Death suddenly seemed set to become a major national 
scandal. Bill Conroy, a reporter who works for an investigative 
website, Narconews.com, was about to publish an article about it. On 
24 February, Sandy Gonzalez, the Special Agent in Charge of the DEA 
office in El Paso, one of the most senior and highly decorated 
Hispanic law enforcement officers in America, wrote to his Ice 
counterpart, John Gaudioso.

'I am writing to express to you my frustration and outrage at the 
mishandling of investigation that has resulted in unnecessary loss of 
human life,' he began, 'and endangered the lives of special agents of 
the DEA and their immediate families. There is no excuse for the 
events that culminated during the evening of 14 January... and I have 
no choice but to hold you responsible.' Ice, Gonzalez wrote, had gone 
to 'extreme lengths' to protect an informant who was, in reality, a 
'homicidal maniac... this situation is so bizarre that, even as I'm 
writing to you, it is difficult for me to believe it'.

But Ice and its allies in the DoJ were covering up their actions, 
helped by the US media - aside from the Dallas Morning News, not one 
major newspaper or TV network has covered the story. The first signs 
came in the response to Gonzalez's letter to Gaudioso - not from Ice, 
but from Johnny Sutton.

He reacted not to the discovery of corpses at Calle Parsonieros, but 
with concern Gonzalez might talk to the media. He communicated his 
fears to a senior official in Washington - Catherine O'Neil, director 
of the DoJ's Organised Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force. Describing 
Gonzalez's letter as 'inflammatory,' she passed on Sutton's fears to 
the then Attorney General, John Ashcroft, and to Karen Tandy, the 
head of the DEA, another Texan lawyer.

Tandy was horrified by Gonzalez's letter. 'I apologised to Johnny 
Sutton last night and he and I agreed on a "no comment" to the 
press,' she replied on 5 March. Gonzalez would have no further 
involvement with the House of Death case and was ordered to report to 
Washington for 'performance discussions to further address this officially'.

Gonzalez was told that Sutton was 'extremely upset'. Gonzalez, who 
had enjoyed glittering appraisals throughout his 30-year career, was 
told he would be downgraded. On 4 May, DEA managers in Washington 
sent him a letter. It said that, if he quietly retired before 30 
June, he would be given a 'positive' reference for future employers. 
If he refused, a reference would dwell on his 'lapse'. Gonzalez 
resigned, and launched a lawsuit - part of which is due to come to 
court tomorrow.

'I've been written off,' he says. 'They dismiss my complaints, saying 
I'm just a disgruntled employee. But once they knew about the carne 
asadas, they were legally and morally obligated to do something. They 
already had a solid case against Santillan for drugs and murder. What 
the fuck else did they need? As for the DEA, they held my feet to the 
fire and joined the cover-up.' He had been neutralised, but there 
remained the danger that details of Ice's relationship with Lalo 
would surface at Santillan's trial.

Janet Padilla had also been dealt with. Ice has no legal 
responsibility for investigating murder, but after her husband's 
funeral Lalo's former handler, Bencomo, came calling. 'He told me 
that he was going to help me find my husband's killers and bring them 
to justice,' Janet says. 'He said to tell him anything I knew, 
because he would be in charge of the case. I saw him three or four 
times, and later I also met Juanita Fielden.' It did not occur to 
Janet that she ought to contact the police or other agencies.

For Janet, Santillan's indictment for murder was a moment of hope: 'I 
thought I was going to get justice for Luis.' But on 19 April Sutton 
announced a deal with Santillan - in return for his pleading guilty 
to trafficking and acceptance of a 25-year sentence the murder 
charges were dropped. 'All of the murders were committed in Juarez, 
by Mexican citizens, and all of the victims were citizens of Mexico,' 
Sutton said.

No one had any further use for Lalo. In August 2004 someone tried to 
shoot him at an El Paso restaurant - instead killing an innocent 
bystander. After that, he was taken into protective custody. And 
then, on 9 May 2005, Ice, the agency that had cherished him, decided 
that his US visa was irregular and began legal proceedings to deport 
him to Mexico - without doubt a death sentence. He is now in a 
maximum-security jail in the Midwest, fighting his former employers 
through the courts. In October The Observer won clearance to visit 
him with his lawyer, Jodi Goodwin. On the eve of the interview he was 
abruptly moved to a different facility where officials said a visit 
was impossible. Goodwin passed on a message: 'I'm not mad, I'm sad 
and disillusioned. Every time I did a job and brought them 
information, I was congratulated. Now they want to deliver me to my death.'

'If Congress and the media start to look at this properly, they will 
be horrified,' Sandy Gonzalez says. 'It needs a special prosecutor, 
as with the case of Valerie Plame [the CIA agent whose name was 
leaked to the media when her diplomat husband criticised Bush over 
Iraq's missing weapons of mass destruction]. But Valerie is a 
nice-looking white person and the victims here are brown. Nobody gives a shit.'

For the three children who lost their father, and their mother, now 
struggling to make ends meet, it is difficult to cope. 'It's worst at 
night, when I put them to bed,' Janet Padilla says. 'I guess that's 
when it hits them. I tell them, "come on you guys, we got to make a 
prayer. Don't worry. Your daddy's watching you." But you know, it's 
very hard to make it as a dad as well as a mom.'

WHO'S WHO

. Sandy Gonzalez: Special Agent in charge of the DEA in El Paso who 
was forced to resign after complaining about the official handling of 
the House of Death case

. Vicente Carrillo Fuentes: Believed to lead the Juarez drug cartel. 
The US has a $5m bounty on his head.

. Heriberto Santillan-Tabares: Known as 'the Engineer', he is a key 
henchman of the Juarez gang and the man who arranged the killings at 
the House of Death.

. Guillermo Ramirez Peyro: Known as Lalo, he is a US government 
informant who worked as a henchman inside the Juarez drug cartel. Now 
in a maximum-security US jail.

. Fernando Reyes: A Mexican lawyer, murdered at the House of Death. 
His killing was tape-recorded by Lalo

. Johnny Sutton: US Attorney for Western Texas and ex-adviser to 
Bush. Approved indictments against Santillan.

. Raul Bencomo: The Ice Special Agent who was Lalo's main handler. 
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