Buried Secrets by Edward Humes

Author:Edward Humes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: TRUE CRIME/Murder/General
Publisher: Diversion Books
Published: 2014-02-24T05:00:00+00:00

The cult continued to feed on itself for its next two victims, as Constanzo continued to hammer home his lesson of obedience or death. In December, the lives offered to Constanzo’s evil gods belonged to Salvador’s two police assistants, the same men who had helped the gang with Constanzo’s $800,000 cocaine rip-off. Though they had been initiated as followers in Mexico City and accepted Constanzo as their godfather, Salvador grew to distrust Joaquin Manzo and Miguel Garcia.3 Constanzo decided to make examples of these wayward godchildren as well.4

Sent to the border on a fool’s errand, the two police assistants were met at the McAllen airport by members of the gang. They climbed into a new Thunderbird and disappeared.

When their bodies were uncovered later at the ranch, the coroner found that forty-year-old Manzo had a fractured jaw and that his heart had been ripped from his chest. Before he died, his eyes and mouth had been covered with gray tape, then he had been shot once in the mouth.

His partner, Garcia, had his throat slit. Blood pumped from his opened jugular into Constanzo’s cauldron.5 He was castrated, then his heart was carved out as well, placed next to Manzo’s in the nganga as a twin offering to the gods.

When the ceremony was done, Constanzo turned to their first grave and pulled the wire from the ground. He stared at the grisly thing dangling from its other end—the accordion coil of a man’s vertebrae. “Clean it up, Elio,” he said with a smile, “and you’ll have a necklace that brings you luck forever.”

Without hesitation, Elio reached for the prize.

A fourth member of Constanzo’s following died violently in 1988, though this time it was not the cult’s doing.

On September 17, Florentino Ventura, the head of Interpol for Mexico, spent a day drinking and partying in Mexico City with his best friend and their wives. By the evening, however, Ventura and his wife fell into a violent argument. Ventura drew out a gun and killed his wife, then shot his friend’s wife for attempting to intervene. Then, according to the best friend, who was not injured and who provided the account to police, Ventura turned the gun on himself, firing a single bullet into his head.

Constanzo was not present at the shooting, though he was in Mexico City at the time. Ventura’s motive for committing the double murder–suicide remains unclear, but he had become increasingly devoted to Constanzo in the months before his death, seeking more and more magical protection from his padrino’s bizarre ceremonies. He even helped Salvador obtain the seventy-five kilos of cocaine brought to the border for the August rip-off ploy.6 But though the frequency of his cleansings and readings picked up, they brought Ventura little peace.

His last act for the cult was to intercede on Constanzo’s behalf when El Padrino and his brother, Fausto Rodriguez, visiting from Miami, had a run-in with police near Constanzo’s suburban home in Atziapan. Constanzo had been arrested for lacking proper import and ownership papers

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