Original subtitles

[Melissa del Bosque] With the Zetas, it was just out of control,

subjugating the population, extorting them...

"We are the most brutal, the most awful."

"You just don't even want to counter us because we're that terrifying."

Their calling card was... brutality.

We'd be sitting there for hours and hours, days and days,

going, how are we gonna get these guys?

You actually have to have hard evidence...

...that you're going to put in front of a jury.

That's gonna take a witness of some type,

and say, "This is what happened."

That's how you get the leaders.

That's how you take down the organization.

[theme music playing]

[Steve Pennington] Throughout my career, I'd work these cases.

I would never discuss it with family members.

This particular time, I just mentioned to my family, it's, like...

"Why don't we teach you guys how to shoot guns?"

They just kind of laughed it off, like, heh, okay.

Couple weeks later, I bring it back up.

"Maybe it's a good thing if, you know, we all learn how to shoot guns,

maybe carry guns, maybe get a concealed license."

And, uh, my wife looks at me, she goes...

"What did you do?"

With the cartel, you have gone after their passion,

and you have gone after their family.

It's not a matter of if they'll retaliate against somebody.

It's a matter of when.

[bell clanging]

[horn blaring]

[Scott Lawson] In February of 2011,

myself, Jason, and Raul, we were all in our office,

just like any other, you know, normal work day.

And we get a call.

And what we learn is that a HSI agent named Jaime Zapata

had been murdered in Mexico by the Zetas.

He was doing a diplomatic mission,

traveling down a highway that was controlled by the Zeta cartel.

He was in an armored vehicle, uh, that had diplomatic plates.

Historically, cartels, it was part of that rule system, you know.

You see a US government vehicle,

it's best business just to let them carry on and drive through your area.

But, once again, the Zetas were different.

They tried to get Jaime to stop at a checkpoint.

He continued driving, he got in a pursuit with him.

[faint machine gun fire]

Jaime eventually was wrecked out into a ditch.

- [tires screech] - [metal crunching]

When he put his vehicle in park...

...there was a safety feature that unlocked the doors automatically.

[footsteps approaching]

There were Zetas standing on the side of the car, they saw it.

[machine gun fire]

Jaime's partner was hit, and survived, but Jaime was killed.

[TV News reporter] It has been 25 years since that has happened,

since a US agent was killed in the line of duty in Mexico.

These two agents were sitting ducks and sitting targets

in what was an intentional ambush by the Zetas.

[Avila, over phone] This is Victor Avila. I'm from ICE.

We are shot! We are shot!

All I could see is evil in their eyes, and they're yelling, "Get out."

[Avila, over phone] We are on the highway of Querétaro, Mexico.

We've been shot and attacked on the highway.

I am an ICE Special Agent.

[Avila] I'm yelling at them, "We are US diplomats,

we are US embassy employees, we are Americans."

This was not a case of potential mistaken identity.

They knew what they were doing and took an overt act to kill Jaime.

[embassy man, over phone] Highway? What is the highway, sir? To where?

[Avila, over phone] Mexico. Querétaro. They know where I'm at.

[faint chatter over phone]

[embassy man] Try to remain on the line, please.

[Eric Holder, on TV] Agent Zapata's story is one that we must not forget,

and it is one that we will not.

[Lawson] But it hit home, and it hit us in the heart,

because Jaime Zapata had worked on the same floor

in the same building in Laredo.

His supervisor and his partner were the Homeland Security equivalent

to us on the same hallway, so I worked with him on dozens of cases.

After Jaime Zapata's murder, there was this sense of,

that is one rule, one line that was never crossed,

and it had just been crossed.

I definitely have a place in my mind that the cartel could,

you know, target me at this point.

[Brian Schutt] We'd been dealing with the Zetas for a long time,

and we knew they're violent.

[autofocus beep]

Look, the Zetas have counter-surveillance.

[autofocus beep]

It's just like the military.

[camera shutter clicks]

They have all the capabilities that you do.

We know that Miguel and Omar,

they had connections to gangs over here in the United States.

You know, one phone call, and...

I always carried a gun, on duty, off duty.

The more we got into this, I was like, "I think I need to get an AR."

[producer] Why did you think you needed an AR?

More firepower.

They got stuff that go through car doors,

I want bullets that go through car doors.

[Lawson] After the death of Jaime,

all federal law enforcement agencies wanted to make a statement back.

[Rep. Michael McCaul, on TV] This is a huge travesty,

and this administration needs to hold the Mexican government

and these drug cartels accountable for what they did.

[Lawson] The emotions were really high.

Law enforcement throughout the country wanted to send a clear response

that let the Zetas know that they made a grave mistake.

In Mexico this morning, police have a prominent member

of the Zeta drug cartel in custody.

Without firing a shot, police captured Jesús Rejón,

also known as El Mamito.

[Doug Gardner] Mamito is also known as Z-Seven.

He was one of the original Zetas that was Mexican armed forces.

And had risen to a level of the leadership that was fairly high.

He was one of the key lieutenants.

[Lawson] The Zetas, with that military background,

have a very identified chain of command.

This region where Jaime was murdered

was directly under the chain of command of Mamito.

The suspicion was that he was the one who organized that or directed it.

And so, he was arrested by the Mexican authorities.

Mamito was not captured.

Mamito was turned over by the Zetas themselves.

[in Spanish] The Zetas lose their third most important man because...

...Jaime's death places a lot of pressure from the United States

and from the Mexican government,

there was a lot of pressure to capture the Zetas,

and as a trophy,

they decide to hand over the responsible person.

They leaked his location

to the Federal Police to locate him and capture him.

They themselves leaked that information.

The other option was to kill him, the Zetas themselves.

[Barack Obama] We thank our Mexican partners for their close cooperation

following the murder of one of our Immigration and Customs agents,

Special Agent Zapata.

I have reaffirmed to President Calderón that in this cause,

Mexico has a full partner with the United States.

Because whether they live in Texas or Tijuana,

our people have a right to be safe in their communities.

After the death of Jaime Zapata,

it wasn't just, you know, a south Texas Laredo secret.

Now, they're on the national stage.

My biggest fear was that every target I had

was gonna go to Mexico and be untouchable.

[phone line ringing]

- [Garcia] Tyler? - [Graham] Yeah.

- [Garcia] What's up, amigo? - What's going on, man?

[Garcia] Did you talk to José?

[Graham] Yeah, y'all are paid through the end of June.

The July bill for José is, like, 70,000.

[Garcia] Oh good, good.

'Cause you wanted to get that straight.

[Graham] Yeah. Shit, I guess I got to now.

Now that he's planning on moving the goddamn studs.

[Garcia] What he say now?

[Graham] Huh?

[Garcia] Did he tell you something, or...

[Graham] He told me he's building his own stud farm.

- [Garcia] Really? - Yeah!

Gonna build his own stud farm and do everything himself.

- That y'all would have all y'alls... - No?

[Graham] Y'all would have all your mares over there next year.

[Garcia] Oh, shit, I didn't know that.

[Lawson] So I get a call from the source, and he says,

hey, José Treviño, he thinks he's played this game long enough

that he doesn't need a breeding facility anymore.

He wants to buy his own breeding facility in Oklahoma.

José had spotted out approximately 60 acres

and purchased this land for about 600,000 dollars.

And he told the source, over the course of the year,

we're gonna start sending trailers picking up our horses

and slowly transporting our horses to Lexington.

[Pennington] José had established this ranch in Oklahoma.

[camera clicking]

They're trying to get their breeding services up and running,

get all the horses up there.

The stud horses and all the mares.

And eventually, if you start breeding,

you get fees in from different people that will pay you for the breeding fees.

You start also getting young yearling horses

that are starting to train and race,

and those horses start to make money.

With José's ranch in Oklahoma,

it would have been much harder to work our case

because then they would have had clean money right into his account.

[Jason Buch] Clean money is what matters, right?

A clean dollar is worth way more than a dirty dollar.

At some point, this became an opportunity to create

a self-sustaining business for their family.

Miguel and Omar craved that legitimacy.

In some ways, horse racing was a way into the upper echelons

of narco society and legitimate society.

But I also think to have this sustainable operation

to set his brother and the rest of his family up

with a long-term financial stability was a point of pride.

When I learned that José bought his own ranch,

I was, like, he's really believing his own BS.

He just went from winning horses that were handed to him on a platter

to thinking that he is ready to run

a multi-million dollar horse-breeding facility.

This was kind of a scary time for our investigation.

We wondered where we would be.

Did we have enough proof already?

Were we gonna be able to gather additional evidence?

Once José runs his own breeding facility,

we were gonna lose a lot of insight into how he was operating.

He's going to eventually get control of all of the paperwork,

making it more difficult for us to show the criminal roots of the money.

We just knew that our access could be diminishing

and we needed to get on with this thing.

[Pennington] That kinda put us in a crunch

because we needed to take 'em down before it got out of hand.

The purchase of the ranch, that, to me, is an important investigative target.

It was a multimillion-dollar investment and operation.

I remember my editor once said,

"How are you gonna be able to prove

that this business is illegal?"

Like, how am I gonna be able to prove that there's laundering?

We were certainly looking at the money that was going in and out.

We were looking at their winnings.

So I started thinking, "How do I get inside?"

[indistinct chatter]

I was able to go to a couple of racetracks,

talk to a couple of trainers,

taking advantage of the possibility

that people might underestimate me and what I was doing,

and use that to my advantage.

And once I began to really make progress,

I went back and spent lots of long dinners with the informant, who helped me.

The more I was able to show him how much I had done, the more he gave me,

and he was in the center of all of this.

[producer] So, you don't want to name your informant?

I don't. I'd rather not.

After that, I began talking to DEA sources who I trusted,

who said the FBI, they're looking at this organization,

that they're investigating this horse farm.

I was like, okay, that's how I'm gonna prove

that they're doing something illegal, 'cause the US is looking at them.

There's my story.

This investigation, it was overwhelming.

Just overwhelming. It was a huge puzzle.

[Kim Williams] It's difficult.

It's all paperwork and spreadsheets.

[copier whirring]

Mounds of boxes and documents.

[Pennington] You're trying to piece all this stuff together.

It was by far the largest case I had ever worked on.

It was very exciting, very stressful, but highly entertaining.

[Schutt] We start getting boxes and boxes of records from the horse sales.

Going, okay, here's a horse they paid 50,000 dollars for.

It earned 20,000 dollars.

Through its progression,

they spent 400,000 dollars on vet fees, track fees,

all these bills that they have for this horse.

They lost money on this horse.

[Pennington] We knew that the structured funds,

the money to pay the horse traders and the vets,

we had some proof it was drug proceeds, but not solid proof.

In the United States, we end up giving subpoena to the banks.

We can't issue a subpoena to a bank in Mexico.

The drug cartels and organized crime

will purposely use foreign bank accounts, corporations, companies,

because it makes it harder for US law enforcement to prove the case.

That was our first stumbling block.

I got absolutely no records

that were of any provable authenticity from Mexico.

Bank or otherwise.

You know, the...

This whole case is, they're making big heaps of money, right?

I mean, they are sophisticated.

They know what they're doing.

[producer] How did you end up bringing Michelle into this investigation?

Um, I did not bring her on the case, uh...

I'm doing this case, I'm sitting back there,

and Michelle's like, "Hey, what are you working on?"

I saw this cartel case starting to develop.

She's not shy.

I was like, "I promise you, I will drop everything that I am doing,

and I will do this case with you."

Uh, yeah, she invited herself. [chuckles]

That's really the truth. Isn't that...

- Is that fair, Michael? - [Michael Fernald] Yeah.

[Michelle Fernald] I wanted to know what was going on with the money

that's coming from the businessman, Francisco Colorado Cessa.

I mean, we needed to be able to prove, in essence, that any of the funds

that Colorado Cessa had used to purchase the horses

came from dirty money.

We needed another financial expert,

and I knew no one else better than my husband, Michael Fernald.

[Michael Fernald] So I was interested in Colorado Cessa,

and I think there was a link there that they were missing.

I was interested in how cash rich was Colorado Cessa,

because he wasn't buying horses on credit, he wasn't using a credit card.

So he had to have liquidity, he had to have cash.

I thought there were more layers, more information to go through.

I wanted to just kind of peel that onion back.

And then, through my analysis,

I found several accounts at UBS in Miami.

- [salsa music playing] - [gulls squawking]

He had a line of credit,

about a twenty-six-million-dollar line of credit within UBS.

I knew that in order to get a line of credit,

he had to supply financial statements from his business at ADT Petroservicios.

Once I got those financial statements, it really opened a window into ADT

that I wouldn't have had otherwise.

ADT was a oil remediation company

and their source of revenue, main source of revenue,

ninety percent of it at least, was through contracts with PEMEX,

a Mexican-owned oil company.

There was a long period of time where ADT was suspended from PEMEX contracts,

and over the course of that same period,

Colorado Cessa spent millions and millions of dollars

purchasing, training, breeding quarter horses,

when he didn't have a source of revenue.

They barely had enough money to pay their expenses,

and certainly couldn't do both.

He couldn't pay the expenses of ADT

and simultaneously spend ten million dollars purchasing horses.

Um, not legitimately, at least.

Holy crap, this is... this is actually something.

But that by itself was not enough.

We were still missing the proof

that the money coming in from Francisco Colorado Cessa

was dirty money from 40 and 42.

We were missing the link that showed

that was drug proceeds flowing through the businesses

back into the United States.

- [Garcia] Amigo? - [Graham] What's up?

[Garcia] ¿Qué pasó y cómo estás?

[Graham] Uh, what do you think...

What do you think your schedule on your little brother is

for starting to shovel some money in here?

[Garcia] He hasn't shoveled no money yet?

- [Graham] Zero. - What the hell?

[Garcia] I'll ask, I'll ask, but hopefully soon.

- I think it'll be soon. - [Graham] Yeah.

All right, well, you know, at least a piece of it, I mean...

I'm not, just like I told Victor the other day,

I said I'm not in any rush to...

for y'all to pick up horses or nothing like that,

but, man, I'm starting to get pretty far out there.

I'm needing to pay some bills myself, you know?

[Garcia] On breeding fees and stuff like that?

[Graham] For shipped semen and farm fees for this year...

I mean, hell, I just bought $70,000 worth of alfalfa, you know?

[Garcia] 70,000 dollars' worth of alfalfa?

[Graham, chuckling] Yeah.

[Lawson] José was slowly moving all of his horses to Lexington, Oklahoma,

but he still got over 200 of their horses at the source's ranch.

And we're now in the breeding season.

And the bills are mounting up at Southwest Stallion Station.

They have accrued over 600,000 dollars.

And then, this new voice calls.

[line ringing]

[Graham] Hey, this is Tyler. What's going on?

[man] Nothing. How you gonna be today?

[Graham] Uh, I'm pretty free.

[man] Are you at San Antonio?

[Graham] No, I'm in Elgin, at my ranch.

[man] I wanna... I want to explain you.

I need to give you three checks.

[Graham] Okay.

[man] I just... I just wanna, uh, make you feel, uh, comfortable

and secure about the checks.

[Graham] Yeah, so, I mean, do you wanna try and meet me

in San Antonio today or...?

[Lawson] The source agrees to meet this individual,

and receive these checks that are gonna total 550,000 dollars.

The source goes to the parking lot, the gentleman walks around.

We're like, who is this guy and why is he paying the bill?

[camera clicking]

And it ends up being Alfonso Del Rayo.

The same Alfonso who came to the January 11th Heritage Place auction.

You know, who wrote $310,000 worth of checks for José Treviño.

Another Mexican businessman in bed with the Zetas.

They're using his accounts to send

what normally appear to be legitimate, you know, business money

to America to buy horses for the Zeta cartel.

I already knew that this was another Colorado Cessa.

But what was different was,

this one was talking directly to my source,

on my recorded line.

We were looking at it as another opportunity

to follow the money to the cartel.

[faint traffic hum]

[dog continues barking]

Miguel and Omar Treviño and the entire Zeta drug cartel

was being investigated by a number of different agencies.

In particular, HSI, Homeland Security Investigations.

HSI's main focus was catching criminals coming over the border.

So naturally they were looking at a lot of the same guys that we were.

Including Victor Lopez.

From HSI's perspective, they'd identified Victor Lopez as a money courier.

Victor often took short flights,

returning one hour after arriving at his destination city.

So HSI's plan was to follow Victor

and stop whoever he met with in Oklahoma.

Victor flies to Oklahoma City.

He walks out in the parking garage.

He gets in a vehicle.

Victor gets out of the vehicle, walks back into the airport.

In Oklahoma City, HSI does surveillance on this vehicle.

They make a traffic stop.

And lo and behold...

It's José Treviño.

I was like, wow, okay. [chuckles]

I was, you know, pissed off.

I was like, we had had a conversation about Victor before,

and kind of told, "Hey, this is part of something bigger."

When José was stopped, he had approximately 5,500 dollars on him.

It's not illegal to have 5,000 dollars in your pocket.

So they let him go.

You know, my biggest fear was,

man, now we had him and Victor, after a meeting stop.

That meeting was specific to our horse operation.

He's gonna know that law enforcement's onto him.

With every passing day, with this crescendo effect

of more and more agencies knowing who these guys are,

more and more pressure being put on the Zetas,

I just felt like the whole thing was gonna shrivel apart.

In my opinion, it's time to go.

It's time to strike, it's time to indict.

I needed more time.

Again, I knew it was going on,

but I didn't feel I could prove it at that point.

I always say, how do you eat an elephant?

One forkful at a time.

Steve and his crew, they've spent hours

going through the subpoena records from AQHA,

veterinarian records on how they're paying money, bank records...

It was, um... cumbersome. And difficult.

The drug business is actually a multi-billion dollar industry.

The Zetas were moving 350, 400 million dollars a year.

Uh, so, quickly, three or four years, you're into billion dollar plus.

At that point in time, we actually documented...

- [faint machine gun fire] - [auction bell clangs]

...twenty-six million, one hundred and some odd thousand dollars,

I believe it was, that was laundered

in the purchase and the care of the quarter horses.

[line ringing]

- [del Rayo] Tyler? - [Graham] Yes, sir.

[del Rayo] It's Alfonso.

I-I-I just want to ask you

if you could give me a couple hours of...

so you can get the check done.

[Graham] Yeah, I can hold it for a couple hours.

[Lawson] So after the source gets the checks,

Alfonso asks the source,

I need you to please cash one a week over the next three weeks.

[del Rayo] You're only going to be able

to cash one, or deposit one...

...this week.

- [Graham] Okay. - Friday. And one...

[Graham] All right.

[del Rayo] And one the next week.

And I'll be in Mexico next week

because I got to fix some money

that didn't come through, you know?

- [Graham] Yeah. - As soon as I fix that,

I'll just give you a call to let you know

and deposit the last one.

[Graham] Okay.

- [del Rayo] You know what I mean? - Yeah.

[Lawson] I'm sitting in the wire room,

listening to these progression of calls from Alfonso to the source.

But this felt different.

You could hear fear in his voice.

[del Rayo, stammering] I just wanna make you feel sure

that the money is gonna be paid.

- Just... - [Graham] Okay.

[del Rayo] Just making sure,

'cause, you know, people... people in Mexico is pushing me.

- Asking... - [Graham] No.

[del Rayo] ...if I already gave you, if I already paid you.

There seems to be like a progressional sense of despair as the calls go.

Interpreting that in real time, it felt like

whoever was pressuring Alfonso to make these payments

was putting a lot of heat on him.

It began to feel different

than Francisco Colorado Cessa's bold, untouchable confidence.

This felt like a shaky man that was in fear for his life.

That was kind of revealing to me that, you know,

maybe Alfonso was not necessarily a willing participant

in the situation he had found himself in.

[Graham] Hey, y'all have never talked to Alfonso, have y'all?

[Garcia] Nope, no, never.

Did you? What about you?

[Graham] No, he won't answer his goddamn phone.

It's kinda making me nervous.

[Garcia] Yeah, no, everything should be okay.

Let me call the... the accountant,

see what he says.

Alfonso Del Rayo goes silent,

and we don't hear anything from him for weeks.

So we're using all of our brains to scheme and think

about all of these collective resources

to try and get Alfonso Del Rayo into the US,

to track the next time he may have to travel.

Then I just kinda started thinking,

we've got his Nextel number,

it came across when he calls the informant.

He speaks English.

I'm just gonna try and give him a call.

Obviously I was thinking, Alfonso answers,

we say hey, we're the FBI, we'd like to speak with you,

that he changes phones, stays in Veracruz,

and I never hear or see from him again.

But the one thing Dad always told me,

if you want to be successful as an investigator,

first you need some ability to read people,

but then you need to know that you can trust your instincts.

I do the Nextel, you know, beep beep, till Afonso...

[phone beeps]

It was a calculated risk.

That comes with all this anxiety of, you can't fall on your face and fail.

But there is something about Alfonso's presentation,

both at Heritage Place and my interpretation of his conversation,

that made me think, uh,

that he may be looking for a lifeline,

and looking for an opportunity, a way out.

[phone chirps]

He answers, and I say, "Hey, uh, I'm Scott Lawson,

and, uh, I'm with the FBI."

And there was a slow pause, you know.

I got all these emotions running through me,

like did I just royally screw up, you know.

He responds back, "Uh, uh, yes," you know, "How can I help you?" type of thing.

So I decide to basically just kinda put my cards on the table

and say, we're interested to hear, you know, your side of the story.

And he tells me a story that I never would have expected.

[Del Rayo] On December tenth, at 4:30 in the morning...

...I was kidnapped by a group of between 12 and 15 people.

They told me that they were Zetas.

They wanted from me fifteen million pesos,

which is about four and a half million dollars.

[grunting]

They beat me up.

They beat me up pretty bad.

I was hit all over my body,

with the end of AK-47, AR-15.

- And they broke two of my fingers. - [bones crack]

- And I was also hit in my head. - [grunts]

I thought I was going to be killed.

And for some reason, after nine days,

they let me free with no pay at all.

A week and a half after that,

I was called by a person named José Guillermo Herrera Mendoza,

which at the time was Secretary of Communications of Veracruz,

one of the top positions in the government of the state of Veracruz.

He told me that he needed to talk to me.

After two or three days, he got to my home with Carlos Nayen.

He started explaining to me that I was saved by his boss,

and because of that, I had to do, as a payback,

I had to come over to Oklahoma City

between the 13th and 15th of January and buy a horse.

He told me that I had to do the best to be on time to Oklahoma City,

in case if I wouldn't show, I would be in problems again.

I flew to Oklahoma City.

They explained me the horse I had to buy.

[faint auctioneer's chant]

It was called Blues Ferrari.

They started explaining me,

you're going to have to raise your hand,

letting them know that you're interested in that horse.

And then, someone is going to push,

and then, you have to go and push again.

Whatever reason, you gotta buy him.

Carlos, he called me back.

He told me that the things were pretty bad,

and they needed me to get more money.

I asked him how much.

He told me that he needed between 650 to 700 thousand dollars.

I had to come over myself and give him those checks to this guy, Tyler Graham.

- [del Rayo, on phone] Tyler? - [Graham] Yes, sir.

It's Alfonso.

[del Rayo] And I was told those payments were needed for the company

which they used to take care of the horses.

I told them that I didn't have the money,

that I would have to look around to have to get it.

I had to look for what to sell to get the money,

and he told me that I had to do it as fast as I could.

I started receiving calls from on my radio with death threats,

about if I didn't get that money...

- [impacts] - [grunting]

...I would get killed, or my family.

[del Bosque] Alfonso del Rayo was kidnapped

because he was a wealthy person with political connections.

And I think Miguel and Omar realized while they were holding him

that he would be another useful façade for them, like Colorado Cessa,

that they could use in the US to go and buy horses for them,

without raising any kind of, you know, flags.

[Lawson] So I tell Alfonso, "I give you my word

that I will take this all the way to the prosecutor,

but I have to have you here. You have to come here."

Alfonso said he wanted to bring, you know, his evidence of his kidnapping.

[camera clicking]

And he wanted to bring his family.

He said, "I need a week to get my affairs in order, and I'll come."

So then it was just a waiting game.

He's associated with the cartel,

and I was just hoping that he could get through that week safely

and be able to make it, you know, to the United States.

[horn honks]

[Lawson] So we're right at the heart of the investigation,

we're running fast, running hard.

We go to lunch, come back, and my phone is sitting there,

it's turned on, and there are seven voicemails on the phone.

I'm like, that's kinda odd.

The very first voicemail is from my older brother.

And, uh... he basically says,

"Hey bro, answer the freaking phone, it's about Dad."

[sighing] So, I called him as quickly as I could.

He's like, you know, Dad's had a heart attack,

they're doing CPR, and they're trying to get him stable

to put him on a helicopter to take him to Jackson hospital.

There's not many things that have ever made me feel, like,

uncontrollably emotional, but, you know, with my pride

and not being weak in front of the guys in the office,

like, all that went out the window.

I started, you know, sobbing.

[emotional chuckle] And, uh...

I landed in Nashville at midnight, got a rental car,

drove two hours to the hospital, and my dad was in a coma.

Um... we spent the next 12 days, uh, in the hospital.

Never really got out of the coma, but there was a day or two

where there could be some hand squeezes and...

On April the 30th, I saw the heart rate go to 180,

and being a cop for a long time,

I saw that what I call as "rescue breathing."

I told my brothers and my sisters, I said...

[voice shaking] "It's almost the end."

[sniffles]

And even though the heart rate was there and the breathing was there,

I saw a tear coming out of his eye, and he...

[trails off, trembling] And he held my hand.

And three hours later, he was gone.

[emotional chuckle] Sorry. I didn't know that it was gonna...

[sniffs]

[sighs gently]

My relationship with my dad was... was unique, uh...

His father died at 61.

His brother died at 58.

I say all that to say, I had this timetable in my head

from the time I was like, 12,

that you're gonna have your dad till about 60.

So when other guys were running off in college

and not taking advantage,

I took advantage of times, so...

I had this weird peace with where we were gonna be with this,

and I still have a great peace about it, but...

Uh...

I don't know where else to go with that, you know.

[chuckles]

[faint traffic hum]

[Pennington] For the next month,

we were working super long hours, and just a lot of stress.

We knew that we didn't have much time before the next domino would fall...

...and we would potentially lose members of the organization, or evidence.

So we kicked it into high gear.

[phone ringing]

We got the financial evidence from the auction houses, from the banks.

We got the flow of the money, we got the structured funds.

Truck loan, and then... Boom.

[cell phone chiming]

Texas Department of Public Safety,

the state troopers that went up and down the interstate,

called me and said they had a guy stopped, coming south,

from Dallas heading to Eagle Pass.

I knew that Eagle Pass was a strong part of the Zeta organization.

Asked me if I'd be interested in coming up and seeing what I could see.

I'm like, well, hell yeah.

Make it up there, start documenting the evidence,

and this guy had 462,000 dollars in bulk cash.

As I start following the leads,

trying to find out who knows what about this guy,

a San Antonio PD officer assigned to the DEA task force

had information this guy's involved with cocaine.

Call him up. He goes, "Yeah, come on down."

Travel down to San Antonio, meet with the task force officer.

Lay out what I had from the bulk currency,

he lays out what he has for that connection.

I say, I think this is tied in with another case we're working,

which involves the leader of the Zeta cartel laundering money

through the American quarter horse industry.

And the guy says, "Stop."

He goes, "I got somebody you got to talk to."

This guy proceeds to tell me

that he was a member of a cell based out of Eagle Pass

that would get cocaine from 40 and 42.

They would transport the cocaine to Dallas,

give it to their distributor in Dallas,

who would then sell it, get all the cash together,

truck it back down into Mexico,

to 40 and 42's accountant.

Oh! That seems interesting.

Then he goes, "We were taking cash

and we were paying a lot of the horse expenses for 40 and 42,

with the drug money we just got back from Dallas."

They were given specific instructions:

You give this cash to this set of horse trainers.

You give this cash to this person to buy this horse in Oklahoma.

You give this cash to this guy,

who is buying a lot of horses for the organization.

And then after that, I was like, holy shit.

Okay.

Step by step.

This guy was saying, "Yeah, we were instructed to give the money,

this cash, for these horses, to Ramiro."

I'm like... that's what we need.

[Gardner] His value was to link the money for the horses coming from drugs.

"I'm part of the cartel,

this is dirty money that I've gotten through the sale of cocaine,

and I've been asked by Miguel or Omar Treviño

to give that money to their brother, for his horse racing operation."

It sort of puts all the paperwork into context.

Now we can prove that the money to buy the horses is drug proceeds.

And so, I get on the phone with Scotty,

and I said, "Look, you gotta hear what this guy's saying.

We just got a huge break in the case."

[Lawson] So then, it was, uh, my turn to talk to Poncho Cuellar.

And amazing pieces of information started coming out.

He said, "Are you familiar with the Ruidoso Downs victory?

The All American Futurity winner, Mr. Piloto?"

Course we were, right? He says, "We bribed that... that race."

[announcer] Grade one All American Futurity.

There's an individual in each stall,

and their job is to keep their horse's head straight,

so that when those gates fling open...

[announcer] They're running.

[Lawson] ...every horse is on a straight path coming out.

So if you can bobble its head just a little bit

and then bump into the horse beside it,

that's all it takes to prevent that horse from winning.

They were paid 10,000 dollars apiece to the gatekeepers to throw that race.

Watch it and study that film.

[analyst] The two and the three get bumped in this race.

You'll see these go nose to nose.

[analyst] Well, the two annihilates the one right out the gate,

and the four horse is lugging in badly.

[Junker] Mr. Piloto, he breaks right.

[announcer] Mr. Piloto, the big longshot getting involved.

And then cuts.

[announcer] Mr. Piloto was way out, visiting the fans on the outside fence.

"Mr. Piloto was out visiting the fans."

Why? The track was packed.

They paid off for that.

[Lawson] The grounds crew, they were bribed

to make the outside, where Mr. Piloto was stationed,

you know, hard and compact,

and then make it softer for the rest of the horses.

So it's hard to get good footing, it's hard to get started,

and really keep apace.

[analyst] The final clocking for this year's All American Futurity,

21:55, Mr. Piloto.

- [analyst 2] Did that say 21:55? - [analyst] 21:55.

[analyst 2] That's surprisingly slow for this field.

The whole point of bribing the gate starters is not just to win the race,

but have a champion horse, which increases the value of that horse,

which increases the stud fees,

and gives the cartel an opportunity to legitimize their horseracing business.

And then he said something that really blew us away.

After José gets stopped by the police in Oklahoma City,

Victor does what, you know, a good soldier would do for the cartel.

He self-reported to Miguel and Omar.

Well, unbeknownst to him, José is calling to Nuevo Laredo.

He's saying, there's some heat on Victor,

and Victor needs to go.

It was José who asked for Victor to be taken care of.

So in our mind, you know, José had taken that next step

of, you know, clean brother to "I just got lucky with a horse"...

- [announcer] Tempting Dash. - [announcer 2] Mr. Piloto!

[announcer] An eye-catching win.

...to "I'm walking around with my chest puffed out"...

You've really got something special here, don't you?

- Well, I think so. - [laughter]

...to "I'm buying my own ranch"...

- to now he's actually... - [gunshot echoes]

...ordering people to be murdered that have brought heat upon him.

[Pennington] So we get our big break.

It felt great.

But Doug's like, "Okay, we still got a lot of work to do."

We had to boil down the immense amount of information,

trying to identify as many of the defendants

on the indictment as we could.

Four hundred boxes... potentially 200 witnesses...

break down that account into its component pieces...

taking everything and putting it in a box and labelling...

gathering all the records that every one of the co-conspirators had...

texts, emails, photos...

trying to be methodical on approaching this case.

I was like, "Yeah, I know."

We want to make sure we get all the arrest warrants.

We want to try to search everything that we possibly can.

Houses, race tracks, ranches...

So I'm just kinda going through, I'm trying to get all the stuff,

put it in some type of order.

And then we get the word, there's a reporter out of New York,

poking around, asking questions...

[Lawson] Folks that I had interviewed start calling me,

and say, uh, "Who is Ginger Thompson?"

And we're like... "What?"

I had heard from one of my sources

that they were close to putting together an arrest plan.

We said, "Okay let's reach out.

Let's reach out to the authorities and tell them we've got this."

She calls us, says, "I'm gonna run the story."

They wanted to put, um...

an FBI investigative director on the phone with me and my bosses,

and could I give them until the following week for that call,

and I said, "Oh, no. No. Um...

No. If there's something you want to talk about, let's talk about it.

We've got a story we're ready to publish."

If she does this story before they make any arrests,

Fernando, Carlos, José,

anybody who is on this side of the river,

is not gonna be on this side of the river for long.

They're gone.

[Thompson] They got on the phone with me and my editor,

and told us that there was an investigation underway.

They were very close to making an arrest.

They had sources, very sensitive sources inside the cartel,

who could be hurt if we published a story before they were ready,

and would we consider holding our story.

And we both said, "We're not sure.

We will discuss this and get back to you."

It was literally an "Oh, shit" moment.

Everybody stops, 'cause there's three years of investigation

have gone into this case.

Hours and hours and hours away from your family.

Boxes and boxes and boxes of evidence.

Millions upon millions of dollars.

Putting your own safety at risk.

Fear in everyone, right?

For me, it was exciting.

Two years of this investigation.

It could all be ruined overnight.

We... we understood.

There probably were informants deep inside the cartel.

We took that very seriously.

But we had an exclusive, and we wanted... we...

and we managed to put it together without much help from them.

She's got a lot of information.

She's done a lot of work, a lot of good work,

and she's on point with a lot of stuff she's got.

And she wants to release the story fairly soon, and I'm like...

..."Fudgeknuckers."

["El Origen" by Hans Baumann playing]

[song ends]