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My husband's from northern Mexico.

And we would go back and forth to his home town,

and the city completely changed.

Northern Mexico changed because of the Zetas.

We couldn't drive there anymore.

It impacted us personally.

But, you know, Americans, they don't understand

that it's just as much an American story as it is a Mexican story.

All of this devastation is fueled by our huge insatiable drug demand.

You know, billions of dollars of drug profits

from Americans buying drugs.

And the United States still manufactures

lots and lots and lots of guns that are heading south,

smuggled across the river.

And for that kind of money to move, everybody's involved.

Political leaders are involved...

military's involved...

And I'm not saying all of them are involved,

but some of them are involved,

because bribing people in power is part of the business model,

and that's what makes it work on both sides.

But I don't think people care.

Other than for entertainment.

So, when you actually have people of power

that are trying to make a change, and that really understand it,

it's a big deal.

I had enough about the scope of the business.

I had enough about what that business looked like,

and I knew this quarter horse racing business

was laundering money for the Zetas cartel.

And so we've got a story, we're ready to publish it.

But we decide to call the authorities.

After Ginger had emailed headquarters, there was some meetings on both sides.

We had a number of conversations with her, her editors and my management.

They told us if we published a story

before they were ready to arrest,

very sensitive sources inside the cartel could be hurt.

Would we consider holding our story.

As soon as they said people might get hurt, it was real.

I'd been reporting in that world. I knew how dangerous it was.

I'd been reporting about Ramiro Villarreal.

He got killed.

So I knew that this was serious.

What I asked for from the FBI was,

"I'd like to see some of the investigative documents you have.

I want to see the indictment.

Can I see what you're preparing to charge him with?"

They consider these documents super sensitive, but I said to them,

"Are you willing to do that? 'Cause if so then we'll hold, if not..."

So, in exchange for us giving her

a significant portion of my search warrant affidavit for the case,

she was gonna hold off on printing the story.

I said, I want to underscore how important it is

that this story be published by us before anyone else,

so I'm not waiting months for this.

They were willing to hold it for a short amount of time,

but we had to go to grand jury in like, the next six weeks.

That was a sort of compromise and sort of a big piece of friction.

She accelerated my timeline by a good half a year.

It was like, "Crap."

So now, I had to get my ass in gear,

and get the summary of facts done as quickly as I possibly could.

Get all affidavits written as fast as I po...

She made my life hell for like, three months.

The whole team, we were there,

going through crap left and right, trying to put it all together.

And I think we come up with, like, a hundred-and-some-odd-page

summary of facts, detailing everything that we had.

They took that, just did it for the indictment.

May of 2012, I went to grand jury, myself and Steve,

and we presented our case.

And now this is where you lay out all the facts.

I was gonna put all my cards on the table,

and if it wasn't enough, you know, that was kind of the end of the road.

But we got 15 indictments returned by the Western District of Texas,

which means the next step is to start preparing for an arrest operation.

We have to decide who's going where, and who's doing what.

These guys were residing across the Southwest.

We want to make sure we get all the arrests.

We want to try to search houses...

racetracks...

We want to search ranches...

So that's a big ordeal to start trying to plan,

'cause you want to do it simultaneously.

We call it a round-up. Trying to round up as many of the defendants

on the indictment on the same day,

because we're fearful they go into fugitive status,

or go to Mexico and we'll never see 'em.

This is the culmination of all the work.

And now it's time to go.

Basically started assigning different members of my squad

to different sites throughout the country.

I would go to Lexington, Oklahoma, which was José Treviño's ranch.

Kim and I, our assignment was Ruidoso.

Ruidoso Downs search warrants and Fernando Garcia.

And I was out at the race track in California,

the arrest team for Carlos Nayen.

I was in San Antonio, at the San Antonio headquarters,

watching on the screens and getting the feeds via either phone or video.

We had approximately 1,200 law enforcement personnel

spread across these multiple sites.

I've never been a part of anything, you know, close to that big.

And on June 12th, here we go.

So we started driving, we started following the SWAT,

and probably 50 to 60 agent cars.

What is about to transpire really starts overwhelming, you know, me.

I started thinking about my dad,

I started thinking about something that I poured, like, heart and soul into,

that our team had poured heart and soul into for the last three years,

was just hours away from coming to fruition.

We just had to finish it safely.

Tension goes up, 'cause you don't know what you're walking into.

Who's gonna be here when we show up?

I may know José Treviño's at his ranch,

but I don't know if he has cartel members there.

And you never know, you know, what the Zetas are capable of.

The Zetas, all right. An enforcement group at one point.

Highly trained. I mean, they're deadly.

And how do you mentally prepare for that when you're going to go do these warrants?

It is life or death.

We're going into someplace that if he shoots at us, it's gonna blow up.

If we shoot at him, it's gonna blow up.

I mean, I might die.

I made peace with God that...

You know what? It is what it is.

The SWAT vehicle stops just short of José Treviño's house.

Fifteen men exit the BearCat.

The first man goes to the front door, and inserts what we call flash-bangs.

The first bang goes off, and it's this huge, rattling boom

that just, you know, shakes me 50 yards away.

At this point, the entry team makes entry into José's house.

I'm sitting there, waiting on pins and needles,

just hoping to God that he's there.

Fernando was supposed to be at the horse track.

Kim's on point, and I would pace her.

And she would have her long gun,

she would be going down through the stalls.

"Don't miss that corner. Don't miss that corner.

Don't miss this corner. Shit, don't miss this corner."

We would look left, look right, check each stall, move.

And then we would move her.

Your line of thinking at the race tracks is,

you don't go by yourself, you always have a partner with you.

Until you can apprise the situation

and figure out what's going on, who's gonna cooperate,

you never know, especially in an area like that...

who could pop up with a gun. You just don't know that.

So we tell Kim, as I got her by the vest,

we'll take care of anything to the side.

You kill what comes at us.

This is definitely the most dangerous part of the investigation.

This is where all of the theory

and understanding of your targets has to come into practice,

and has to go to that moment where you take 'em into custody.

And that's what we did.

We arrest José and the rest of his family.

Carlos Nayen was arrested right away.

Fernando Garcia, he gets arrested.

So it's very anti-climactic. It's like, "Holy shit."

How do you come to an end, and not one shot fired?

But the day wasn't over.

Normally there would be this slow, methodical,

secure processing by the evidence response team.

But we interjected, where I would go in right after SWAT,

and just look for what we were calling "the golden phone."

I just took a glance at José, and then I ran into his house.

My job was to try to find phones with that number

that went back to 40 and 42.

It would be confirmation of my theory throughout this investigation,

that José had been updating Miguel at these auctions and at these races.

I immediately ascertained where the master bedroom was.

And right by the nightstand...

there was one phone.

And I opened it up, and it only had one number in it.

A 5-2 country code, which told me

that it was most likely Miguel's number that I was looking at.

So there's a satisfying moment to confirm

that he was directing José in the horse operation,

and to see that with my own eyes...

it was a... it was a great feeling.

After the initial wave passed

of all the various agencies securing the location,

and the warrants being executed,

we were gonna take a certain number of large assets,

cutting off their money supply as quickly as possible.

Our taskforce has always been a firm believer in,

not only do you take the body, you take the ill-gotten gains.

You hit 'em from both sides and you hit 'em as hard as you possibly can.

And so, these assets, for the most part, are race horses.

You know, you had a lot of people going... "I don't know about that."

Prosecutors', watchword is, if it poops or eats, stay away from it.

Who's gonna take care of 'em?

Who's gonna feed 'em, who's gonna clean 'em?

But we put together a framework for the United States government

to now become the temporary owner, carer, custodian, for over 400 racehorses.

This takes it to a whole different level.

We had ten seizure warrants

for the most valuable horses there at Ruidoso.

But then it turned out there were some additional horses at the track,

and they don't know where they are.

I'm looking for like, 20 horses.

And I know they're there.

It's like...

This is gonna be a long day,

'cause there's like 1,500 horses at the race track.

Those registered AQHA horses that are racing,

they have tattoos on the inside of their lip.

That was really the only way that we could identify José Treviño's horses.

And the stable manager, he showed me how to lip the horses,

so I could look at the tattoo

and go, this is the horse we're looking for to seize.

I love horses, so for me, I really didn't mind,

but for people who've never been around horses,

you might not know horses are prone to bite.

What about Steve Junker?

Would you consider him a horse guy?

Steve didn't talk much about the horses.

I'm pretty sure it wasn't high on his list of,

"Hey, let's go deal with the horses."

Did you lip horses?

Fuck, no. I don't know shit about horses.

If it was a fat horse, I didn't bet on it.

That's what I knew about horses.

Lean and vascular, there's your money.

That's all I knew.

And Kim is like, "Come help lip this horse."

"Go fuck yourself. I'm not lipping a horse.

I'm not sticking my hand in the mouth of a horse.

Not gonna happen."

I spent two or three hours making sure all the search teams were organized,

kinda telling them, this is not a drug case,

we're looking for paperwork.

A lot of evidence had already been sacked up,

marked, exhibits, that type of stuff.

Scott Lawson starts to kind of rumblin' through things, whips out this check.

"Steve! Take a look at this."

"Holy shit, that's gold."

What it was, June 7th, 2011.

Check written to Francisco Colorado Cessa, 400,000 dollars, Fly First Down.

That check was never cashed.

So José never really paid Francisco Colorado Cessa

400,000 dollars for that horse.

That's part of the laundering process of how things went

in trying to make José look clean.

Where we were at, we seized like, 22 horses,

so we had three semis show up to transport the horses.

The ultimate destination for where the horses were going

was kept very secret.

'Cause when you take their assets, that pisses 'em off.

Everything went as planned.

We pile in our car and we head out.

And that was the last piece of our work at Ruidoso.

At the end of the day, Scott had done an amazing job.

Through all of these search warrants, through all this time,

and through all of these arrests, going against

the most deadly, violent cartel in the world at that time,

nobody was hurt, nobody got injured, and that was amazing.

This was, you know, the triumph of a tip that had a lot of naysayers, you know,

and we had built this thing with a team that put the hours in,

and believed in it, and, and now we were almost at the finish line.

After we had arrested José and all the persons we could find in the US,

José was taken to an FBI office in Lexington.

I was like, "Wow. I've been on this case for the last three years,

and here I am now, for the first time, sitting across from José Treviño."

I read José his rights,

and I remember looking at José and getting a very defiant look.

"I'm gonna be fine, because you're not gonna find anything."

That's how I read José.

Typically, what you're doing in the early interview

is just letting them provide a story.

You know, you're gonna listen, and you're gonna absorb.

He said, "I'm living the American dream.

I've worked hard, I've earned this money."

He had rehearsed this story and practiced it.

Of course, I already was way past that.

And then I started dangling things over him to let him know

that we didn't just trip over a stick and fall on his house that morning.

We had a lot of evidence,

a lot of things we wouldn't know unless we were on the inside.

One of the big things was, there was a moment where

José was directed to take this Excel spreadsheet to Coahuila, Mexico,

and leave it to explain some of the expenses he was asking for.

And that wound up in our hands,

so José knew where he took that piece of paper,

and I was able to convey to him that you know that I know.

When I presented that to José, his whole demeanor changed.

And he got very upset, and he said, "I think I want an attorney."

So the interview with José was stopped.

But we planted a seed that we knew what we knew,

and they had some things to think about.

Once you do the raids,

we did all those search warrants, now we have...

I couldn't tell you how many boxes of evidence we had.

We took a bunch of stuff. All kinds of records.

A lot of it was just loose paper.

Some were somewhat organized,

but mostly it was just the FBI just taking everything and putting it in a box

and labelling where it was coming from.

And so trying to unravel all the shell companies,

all the shell men, the AQHA records...

I wouldn't say it was daunting, but it was... it was, difficult.

Then the judge sets a trial date.

So we basically just, everybody just moved to Austin,

and we're going through all that evidence as quickly as we can.

In the meantime, we're now out in the open.

They knew our names, but they knew my name from the ranch.

Doug Gardner had asked me to interview the family,

so I brought in Pepe, José Treviño's son.

The one from the picture of Tempting Dash

winning the million-dollar futurity in Grand Prairie, Texas.

I said, "Tell me about it."

And he was like, "That's my soccer number."

And then I thought I had him when he goes,

"I've been told I have to tell you that's my soccer number."

So somebody's schooled him.

And as we were finishing up, he got mouthy.

And I was like, "Look, Pepe, you're free to go,

but if you think you're gonna jump bad or go get a gun or something,"

I said, "I'm just gonna put a bullet in your head.

I'm not gonna fuck around with you."

And I remember him going out, and he got on his Blackberry,

which we knew that the Blackberries were a sign

of communication with Miguel and Omar.

And a couple days after that, as I'm walking down my driveway,

a black Suburban comes down my street,

and it goes from the right side to the left side,

and the back passenger window came down.

And I remember, I looked at him, he looked at me.

And I was like, "Holy fuck, this is fixing to hurt."

And then he went to the other side, the window went up, and they went on.

And I remember calling Brian, and I said,

"Look, I'm not being paranoid, this just happened."

And he's like, "Shit, I'm sitting at the table with a gun in each hand."

You start getting words from informants, like,

"Hey, y'all need to watch yourselves."

I'm out mowing the yard on Saturday morning,

and I see a long-haired Hispanic guy walking down the sidewalk.

And he's got full camo on, which...

You might see somebody in a camo jacket, but this is full camo,

and I'm like, "This is not good."

So I walk back to my car, open the trunk up, get my AR going.

I'm ready. It's... It's gonna happen.

And then he continued walking, and I was like,

"Okay, is he doing a recon, or what is he doing?"

Makes you wonder, it was like,

"What are they up to? Who do they have watching us?"

So we had nine folks arrested,

and then Francisco Colorado Cessa flew into Houston and turned himself in.

He was a Mexican businessman in bed with the Zetas.

He had an unlimited amount of funds,

and I think he was used to getting his way in Mexico,

and he thought he would get his way here in the United States as well.

Leading up to our trial date, all but five pled guilty,

so we had five persons that wanted to, you know, have their day in court,

and that was José Treviño, Francisco Colorado,

Fernando Garcia, and the Huitrón brothers.

The Huitrón brothers were trainers of horses for José in the Austin area.

What was really important getting close to the trial

is trying to figure out how we bring all these Zeta cartel members

into the same town at the same time and keep everybody safe.

From the people on our side, to the people we indicted.

It was just a huge undertaking.

We had information that they were going to try and come kill some of the officers,

agents, prosecutors, witnesses.

We knew going in to our case

that we needed to be prepared for urban combat.

And it really came into play when we went to court.

Because now they had us pinned.

They knew that we had to come into one location.

There was gonna be a Federal Protective Service command van.

There was a big RV sitting out front.

Extra security in the court room, extra marshals,

extra court security officers.

Yeah, I've never seen anything like it.

Prosecutors in Texas are set to open their case

against leaders of a violent cartel

accused of buying racehorses to hide drug profits.

The case centers on José Treviño,

the brother of two top leaders of the Los Zetas cartel.

I've covered a bunch of cartel trials.

None of them generated as much interest as this one,

just in terms of media being there, the crowd being there.

There's agents everywhere.

Courtroom was packed. Standing room only.

I've never seen it, before or since, like that.

We were there to listen to testimony.

You're helping the prosecutors,

remembering key pieces of evidence, passing notes, things like that.

The families of all these people are there present,

so you're, like, in the courtroom with the family members of these people

who are being accused of these horrendous acts on the stand.

We are going to try this jury trial

with some of the greatest criminal defense attorneys in the state of Texas.

José Treviño's defense attorney wanted the jury

to believe that he's an honest horse guy.

And then, with the deposit from the winnings of Tempting Dash,

José Treviño was able to purchase, breed, train

and race quarter horses in the United States.

We had to prove that it wasn't lucky,

it wasn't an inheritance, it wasn't lottery.

The cartel set him up and ran that money through his account.

And that's what we did.

So part of their downfall for this case

was they just poured so much money into this so fast.

Initially they were paying by hard cash, but that was too cumbersome.

And so then they started paying by wire transfers,

and then they started flying these businessmen over.

One was Colorado Cessa, who was working with the Zetas, and writing checks,

and then, Mr. Del Rayo was being extorted by the Zetas as a businessman.

When you flashed the photographs of him with the butt of the gun...

...and the round marks on his head,

and the crippled hand in which he signed that check...

and it was live in front of you,

the power, the control

that the cartel has over people in Mexico, it was...

I get chills right now even talking about it.

Our system is an open court, open to the public, so...

Treviño's sisters were in the courtroom.

Retaliation was a concern.

Miguel and Omar were still in Mexico.

We know that they can send some of their sicarios over here.

Maybe they can do something, assassinate one of the witnesses,

intimidate the jurors,

maybe take out one of the law enforcement witnesses.

I was asked if I would be a security team for the prosecutors.

So we had a secret code, and it changed every day,

to let me know they were okay.

But not everything happens okay.

Two in the morning, our alarm system went off.

And I thought to myself, "Here we go."

We're laying there in bed, and...

he immediately jumps in to agent...

Not father, not husband... But to agent mode.

First thing we did, we got the kids all sequestered into our room.

As soon as we're able to secure them...

Michael starts clearing the house.

Me on the phone, calling 9-1-1.

"This is Michelle Fernald, I'm with the US Attorney's office,

I'm trying the horse case right now.

My home alarm just went off, I need someone ASAP."

And I cleared the rest of the house until the police arrived.

And that seemed to be the capper for us, that this is real.

These are the things you hear about happening to other people.

And your protection over your children is obviously what comes first,

and as a mother, to make sure that your kids are okay.

I mean, that was another reason we're doing the case.

I don't want that cartel in my kids' backyard.

I want to make sure that I can make this community as safe as possible,

that I can bring to justice the people that are responsible

for terrorizing other individuals and other citizens

on both sides of the border.

The trial pulled back the curtain on the Zetas,

because there were these people who had just this crazy inside knowledge

of the functioning of the cartel.

It could be very fascinating how they would move the money,

or how they were rigging races, or things like that.

Or it could be very, like, horrifying.

You know, there were all these people

connected with the money laundering conspiracy

who were murdered because law enforcement had gotten on to them,

and that was very intense.

But that doesn't necessarily get a jury to convict José Treviño.

I mean, he's not accused of any of that stuff,

and so they needed the right people to testify.

Other than your name, Mr. Rejón, do you have any nicknames?

I do.

And what are those?

The Gentleman, Zeta Siete,

The Guy With the Glasses, Mamito.

My expression... I was so shocked that they almost ran me out of court.

"Wow! Mamito! He's going to be here!"

When Mamito took the stand, and that the US government was letting him,

it was a big deal.

Mamito was extradited into the US for Jaime Zapata.

The US agent was killed in the line of duty in Mexico.

We are shot! We are shot!

But he didn't do the killing, and he was very open about it.

He was like, "I do not want to be blamed for that, I didn't do it."

He goes, "I was made to be the scapegoat for that."

He was arrested, and then when he felt that he was betrayed by the Zetas...

he agreed to cooperate.

Against José.

Mamito was my Hannibal Lecter.

He was the most violent ruthless person

that I would ever sit across a table from.

He had this very, sort of, dead look to his eyes, you know,

the sort of 50-yard stare.

Like El Cucuy, you know, he's like...

the boogeyman.

Mamito was a critical witness,

because he knew the entire operations of the Los Zeta cartels.

Not just the drugs, not just the horses,

he knew the entire story.

Without witnesses like that, well, they are very...

It's very dirty to place your hands with theirs.

Without witnesses like that, we cannot make our cases.

Approximately how much cocaine would you estimate

that you or the Zetas moved into the Unites States in a year's timeframe?

Some 40 tons of cocaine or more.

And how much money did the Zetas make in any given year?

Three hundred and fifty million, about.

Did 40 or 42 become interested in quarter horses?

That's right.

Are you familiar with this horse? Tempting Dash?

It's Tempting Dash on top.

Yes.

When Tempting Dash is racing on October 24th of 2009...

It's Tempting Dash in his...

was the true owner 40?

That's right.

And it's Tempting Dash with another win!

What did 40 tell you about why he wanted

to put Tempting Dash into his clean brother's name?

He wanted to put it in his brother's name

because the horse was going to run in Dash for Cash.

It's Tempting Dash!

And if he won the Dash for Cash, his value would increase.

And that way, they would be able to get the money,

and the money would stay within the family.

Why don't you keep your cash in Mexico

instead of spending it on horses in the United States?

You have to clean it up because it comes from drug trafficking,

so you can't spend it, you can't put it in a bank.

It's invested.

Boom. That's what we needed for the case.

Mamito testified the seed money for this enterprise,

to purchase Tempting Dash, was derived from illegal activity.

Which then made the entire company an illegal business

operating on behalf of the Zetas.

And it's going back to José Treviño.

The judge gets the foreman's paper,

and then he asks all the defendants to stand.

This is probably, like, professionally, the most nervous time of my life.

You know, like, a not-guilty verdict,

everything would just be deflated immediately.

It was now on the national news,

and there's a lot of eyes looking at this case.

Today, a federal jury found the brother of two top Zetas cartel leaders

guilty of laundering drug money through horse races.

Treviño could face up to 20 years in prison.

His brothers remain at large.

When I heard the guilty word,

I knew that all the others were probably gonna be following suit,

and we definitely saw it as a huge success.

My statutory maximum punishment here is only 20 years,

so José Treviño will receive 20 years and Colorado Cessa received 20 years.

And then, you know, we had this crazy twist.

A man serving 20 years in prison for laundering drug money here in Texas

will now serve five more years for trying to bribe a federal judge.

Prosecutors say he was trying to get a lighter sentence.

There's this bust in the parking lot of the federal courthouse,

where these agents find this golf bag filled with cash,

that was supposed to be for the judge.

As crazy as thinking the cartel is laundering money through quarter horses,

it's even crazier to think that these people

are trying to bribe a federal district court judge.

So it's like, this trial just never ended.

Our task force took on cases

where other agencies could not make the case.

But we were able to follow the money and take 'em down with paper.

And I'm very proud of that.

This was my first large inter-agency case.

And, you know, it was the biggest money-laundering investigation

in Texas history. You know, I'm like...

You start seeing those kinds of articles, you're like, allow yourself...

allow yourself to believe a little bit of it, right?

Working on the border, on the US side, you know,

my eyes were opened quickly to things I never knew existed in the world.

There's such a filter in the news and the understanding

of what's going on in Mexico.

What I loved about this case was, it was an opportunity

to put a spotlight on the plight of, you know, the general Mexican citizen,

what they're living through daily, what a lot of US citizens live through...

Yes, he's hit in his head.

The depravity of what is involved with the drug culture.

It's not just drug-related persons getting harmed in Mexico, it's good people...

We are shot! We are shot!

Trying to do the right thing.

I think that's the value in this case, is...

the exposure of what was going on right beneath our eyes, you know?

You can look at the situation with the Zetas cartel,

and the bribery and the corruption, as a bucket.

And everybody's got a bucket that can get so full,

and every high-profile homicide,

and every time the Treviño family name gets said in court,

is a drop in the bucket.

And no matter how much bribe money the Treviño family have been paying,

eventually the, the bucket overflows.

Tonight, Miguel Ángel Treviño Morales is in custody,

captured yesterday by Mexican marines.

They say his capture was the biggest victory against organized crime

since Mexico's new president took office seven months ago.

Omar Treviño Morales, known as Z-42,

yesterday he was captured in a suburb of the northern city of Monterrey.

This comes less than a week after the arrest of another cartel leader.

The cartel became weaker as a result of arrests that began from this case.

Following the trial, people felt safe enough to talk to me,

in ways that they never would have before 40 and 42 were arrested.

You know, being a part of any investigation

that had the opportunity to push back in an impactful way

against the Zetas, against 40, against 42...

It was the chance of a lifetime.

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