Bones by Joe Tone

Author:Joe Tone
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2017-08-08T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

OTHERWISE ILLEGAL ACTIVITY

AUSTIN, TEXAS

January 2011

Not long after he got home from Ruidoso, Lawson drove north to Austin again, to present his findings to an assistant United States attorney. The case was starting to crystallize in his mind, including a growing list of targets he hoped a prosecutor could put away. At the top was José Treviño.

Lawson believed that José was what he said he was: a humble, hardworking bricklayer who’d steered clear of his brother’s drug business out of respect for American law and decency. And he could see that what José was doing now—buying horses, breeding horses, racing horses—was not directly hurting anyone, except perhaps his rival quarter-horse men. Yet after tailing José through Ruidoso, he’d found himself disgusted with José’s apparent choice to help his brother. To maintain even a benign familial relationship with a criminal of Forty’s breadth was, to Lawson, questionable. To help him was abhorrent. And while Lawson wasn’t yet sure how he’d prove it, he knew José’s behavior was also criminal. He planned to enlist the full force of the federal government to help prove himself right.

First, he needed a prosecutor willing to work the case. There were plenty to choose from. There had been ever since Giuliani enlisted more federal prosecutors in the drug war, and since the laws were shaped to make drug money easier to seize—too easy, many argued, because they could be seized and liquidated without a conviction, alleged property rights be damned.

With suspects in Dallas, Austin, Laredo, New Mexico, and California, Lawson could have plausibly asked prosecutors in five or more cities to take on his case. But he’d settled on an assistant United States attorney in Austin named Douglas Gardner. Gardner had been a prosecutor for the United States Marines, with the close-cropped hair and chiseled physique to prove it. He had a reputation for taking on tough targets.

Lawson pitched it passionately, walking the prosecutor through how the case could yield millions of dollars in seizures, take out some of the Zetas’ key money launderers, and maybe even lead to Forty himself. Gardner was skeptical, if only because it violated a day-one lesson from federal-prosecutor school. “You don’t seize live animals,” as Gardner put it, “because then you’re going to have to take care of them.” But in the end, he agreed to help. Horses, cash, property—whatever they had to seize, Gardner reasoned, it would help put a dent in the Zetas’ flourishing business and send a message that United States industry was off-limits.

With Gardner on board, Lawson wrote a confidential report outlining what made the case worthy of the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces, which would mean more funding and manpower.

[The] investigation targets the family members of LOS ZETAS cartel leader MIGUEL ANGEL TREVINO MORALES (TREVINO), who operate on his behalf in the United States,” Lawson wrote. “Specifically, the OCDETF targets the brother of TREVINO, JOSE TREVINO MORALES (JOSE) and other associates, who are laundering millions of dollars of illicit funds owned by TREVINO through the AMERICAN QUARTER HORSE ASSOCIATION (AQHA) horse racing industry.

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