Palm Beach Broke by Tom Turner

Author:Tom Turner [Turner, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tribeca Press
Published: 2019-01-15T05:00:00+00:00

* * *

Crawford and Ott had a reservation the next day to Mexico City. It made one stop—in Detroit—which struck Crawford as anything but a direct route. But, surprise, surprise, Vera had put them in first class. “Nothing but the best for my detectives,” she said when Crawford thanked her.

“I was going to book you guys into the Four Seasons but thought Norm might have a problem with how much it cost,” Vera said. “So, I got you into the Presidente InterContinental. Obama stayed there, so I guess it’s pretty good.”

“So, it’s just for presidentes?” Ott asked.

“Yeah, apparently they’re making an exception.”

Before they left, Crawford had to break the news to Dominica McCarthy that she wasn’t going to get the chance to play CFO of NextRed. She was surprisingly disappointed, and made him promise that she’d get to play a supporting role in some future op.

In the hours before they caught their plane, they did as much prep work as they could squeeze in. Thus far, they had set up two meetings in Mexico City. The first was with two detectives in the Mexico City Police Department, who were part of an elite anti-drug, anti-gang taskforce. The second meeting was with two DEA agents who had extensive dealings with Zamora Cinco, and were intimately familiar with its leader Rafaela Arroyo. Crawford also hoped to squeeze in some face-time with an FBI agent stationed in Mexico City. And most importantly, he wanted to meet with Mexican police in Rafaela Arroyo’s backyard, to subtly leak the story about Weston Paul ending up with fifty-three million dollars from his brother’s company.

They had read reams and reams of newspaper articles and watched innumerable YouTube videos. While drug trafficking and murder had been part of Mexican people’s lives for many years, its impact was no less toxic in many parts of America. Chicago, known to some as Murder City, was a leading center for drug distribution and a place where gangs were deeply entrenched. Its scourge had also been felt in Miami and many other American cities for decades.

The numbers Crawford read were staggering—since Mexico’s militarized war on drugs was launched in December of 2006, more than two-hundred-thousand Mexicans had been killed and thirty thousand had gone missing and were presumed dead. Violence reached record levels in 2017 with 29,168 homicides. Despite the war on drugs and gangs, the numbers were going up, not down.

“You know what I read,” Ott said, sipping a scotch in seat 4A next to Crawford. “How private planes would fly into Tijuana from Guatemala, and right there at the airport was this tunnel that went underground across the border to this place called Otay Mesa—”

“Yeah, south of San Diego.”

“Oh, you read about it, too. Yeah, almost a half-mile long, complete with lights, a ventilation system, railway, and an elevator.”

“Belonged to the Sinaloa cartel, supposedly.”

Ott nodded. “Pretty slick,” he said. “Go underground from Tijuana Airport in Mexico and end up in some industrial park in California.”

“Yeah, these guys sure know how to dig tunnels, I’ll give ‘em that,” Crawford said.

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