Bones: A Story of Brothers, a Champion Horse and the Race to Stop America’s Most Brutal Cartel. Joe Tone
“My skin is already beautiful,” he told her.
“Do you miss me?” she asked.
“All day long,” he said.
Ramiro spoke with friends about wanting to move in with her, but they rarely saw each other. She lived in Guadalajara, a territory controlled by the Zetas’ rivals in the Sinaloa cartel. Ramiro wasn’t going there. And she couldn’t come to Monterrey. Not now. The turf battle between the Gulf and the Zetas was in the process of shattering the city’s relative placidity, as hooded gunmen bombed police stations, traffickers jacked cars to use for transportation, and the American consulate sent anxious cables back to Washington: “It is now clear that the ongoing war between the Gulf and Zeta drug trafficking organizations (DTOs) has reached Monterrey.”
The increasing violence had Ramiro spooked. When friends back home told Ramiro of the bloodshed, he responded by saying he would remain in the States for a while. He stayed in San Antonio a lot, though he preferred California. He talked about moving there someday.
Spooked or not, Ramiro at least appeared to have a luxurious life under Forty and the Zetas. As he traversed Mexico and the American Southwest, he racked up $300 bills at steakhouses and found time to jaunt to Las Vegas. And, damn, could he shop. He preferred the colorful short-sleevers at Lacoste, where those little gator logos could make $240 or $360 of Ramiro’s money disappear in an afternoon. But he also made trips to Louis Vuitton, Nordstrom, Neiman Marcus, and other high-end stores. His voracious spending kept his checking account from ever climbing, but there was always enough to spend. If seventeen grand went out one month, twenty grand came in.
There was no sign of business slowing down. With every passing year, the Zetas’ zeal for horses seemed to increase. The group’s leader, Lazcano, was prone to throwing private parties anchored by match races, including one where he injected his horse with so much cocaine that it died on the track. But it was second-in-command Forty who really changed Ramiro’s business. Forty didn’t want Ramiro just to buy horses in the United States; he wanted Ramiro to run them there. And he wanted them to win.
For Ramiro, even getting the horses into the country required some ingenuity. A highly contagious tick-borne disease called equine piroplasmosis had broken out in Mexico. Then it started to show up in horses in South Texas, after an outbreak at the famous King Ranch. Health regulators were panicking. The Texas Animal Health Commission had once crossed into Mexico to test horses before they could be imported, but the violence made that too dangerous. Instead, they set up bays at border checkpoints to quarantine and test horses. Since some of the horses the Zetas wanted to race in Mexico likely carried piroplasmosis, there was no hope of legally trucking them across the river. Even if they weren’t infected, there was a waiting list and paperwork and other bureaucratic hurdles that Forty and the Zetas had no time for.
So Ramiro smuggled them across. There was a tradition of informal movement of horses across the border, just as there was with smuggling drugs and humans. Mexicans, Tejanos, and Americans, both native and imperialist, had ridden horses across the river in battle and in search of new land to ranch. But by 2009, the folks on the American side of the river were actively policing the border for rogue horse crossings. The United States government had even employed cowboys to roam the borderlands in search of livestock that had either strayed or been smuggled across the border. They caught and captured hundreds every year.
They didn’t catch Ramiro’s horses. He hired associates from the racetracks to ride the horses across the river at night, at the same low-flowing sections where the Zetas crossed some of their cocaine. Once they were across, he made sure they got wherever they needed to go.
After Tempting Dash won his heat in Nuevo Laredo, Ramiro had smuggled him across to run in the States. Once the horse was safely in the States, Ramiro knew just where to take him: Chevo’s place.
Chevo and Ramiro had met at the track years before, and they’d struck up a partnership. It was easy enough to understand what Ramiro saw in Chevo. Since around 2006, he had become a fixture in the stables at some of the sport’s biggest tracks—Sam Houston Race Park in Houston, Retama Park in San Antonio, Lone Star Park in Dallas, and Remington Park in Oklahoma City. He worked his horses hard, and more and more they were finding their way into the money.
Ramiro also may have appreciated Chevo’s willingness to test the limits of his horses, and the limits of his sport’s feeble doping regulations. Horse racing had for years been known as a place where performance-enhancing drugs were abused with too little oversight or punishment. Even in higher-profile thoroughbred racing, trainers were known to use any substance they could to gain an advantage. Steroids helped horses recover more quickly from workouts. Painkillers helped mask injuries, allowing horses to pass prerace medical exams. Stimulants made them run faster.
Like other sports, thoroughbred racing had promised to crack down but lagged behind industrious cheaters, who always found a drug their horse wouldn’t be tested for. Cancer drugs were popular. Viagra, too. It would take an especially attentive lab worker in Denver to identify one of the stranger painkillers trainers were using: a natural opioid squeezed from the back of an exotic South American frog.
Quarter-horse racing had been even slower to change. Needles remained rampant and testing limited. Even when a doper was caught, the punishment was often laughably light.
Two years earlier, five of Chevo’s horses had tested positive for elevated levels of banned substances, including phenylbutazone, an anti-inflammatory drug that’s legal in training but banned on race days. Too much “bute” can cause ulcers and other issues in horses, but if the sport was taking it seriously, it wasn’t reflected by its discipline schedule. Those five bad tests cost Chevo only about twelve hundred dollars in fine money, and no track time was taken away.
Later that year, another of Chevo’s horses tested positive for too much nicotinamide, a form of vitamin B3. That earned Chevo a six-month suspension from the track in Houston, but those six months basically covered when the quarter-horse season was dark. He was back at Sam Houston the next summer, racking up small-time fines for entering ineligible horses into races. He was also at Texas’s other tracks, like Austin’s Manor Downs, where he was suspended for three months after a horse tested positive for an unnamed substance, and Dallas’s Lone Star Park, where he was fined $250 for having two hypodermic needles in his truck. Later, his horses would test positive for elevated levels of clenbuterol, a respiratory drug that mimics a steroid and helps horses build muscle.
Whatever Ramiro saw in Chevo, they made formidable partners. The summer Tempting Dash arrived in the States, they teamed up on a few winning horses. Chevo finished the season as Sam Houston’s second-winningest trainer, taking down $75,000 in earnings. Ramiro finished as one of the track’s top “owners,” though his horses all actually belonged to Forty or other narcos.
So, Ramiro told Chevo, let’s keep it going. He hauled Tempting Dash down the gravel road that led to Chevo’s falling-down training center southeast of Austin. Chevo and his brother had built it a few years back, after Chevo, who’d learned to train in Mexico, started winning races. They’d constructed crude stables from sheet metal and plywood, poured dirt for a quarter-mile track, and trucked in a used starting gate. The plywood was rotting now; the white fence posts that formed the track’s rail were rusted. Trash piled up outside the two-story house the brothers had built on-site for the grooms and assistant trainers who came on staff to help. Even by the standards of quarter-horse racing, a sport proud of its comparative humility, the place was a dump. For Chevo, it was an American Dream fulfilled.
Ramiro had gone out there to watch Tempting Dash run the day before Forty-Two called him. The horse was a bit of a diva; whenever no one was tending to him, he huffed and kicked dust onto the rotting plywood that formed his stall. They took him out and walked him on the red-and-white hot walker, the sort of equine merry-go-round trainers use to cool down a hot horse or warm up a cold one. They hosed him down in the bathing pen, its red paint chipping a little more with every spray. They led him through the deep training pool Chevo’s crew had constructed, and Tempting Dash, head held high, clung to the bit with his teeth, as the white racing stripe that bisected his face peeked out of the murky water.
Eventually,