The Best American Crime Reporting 2009 (20 page)

“The plaza,” he offers, “belongs to the Juárez cartel, and it seems like Chapo Guzmán wants this area. The army drives around, but the soldiers don’t do anything. There are a few cops here, but when the hit men come, it is like 1,000 against ten….”

He suddenly becomes animated and imitates the burst of an AK-47. He is fumbling now, reaching out for conventional expla
nations—a cartel war, the army, hit men—theories that worked in the past.

He is okay, for the moment: He is convinced that no one will kill a priest.

But what if the old rules that allow him to believe this no longer apply?

A week after our conversation, a man from Palomas crawls into the U.S. port of entry at Columbus. His body is covered in burns. Someone has spent a week pouring acid on his skin and applying hot irons.

This was apparently happening as the padre and I spoke softly of the slaughter.

O
NE MURAL DEPICTS A CONQUISTADOR;
another wall is a collage of snapshots of the asylum’s work; a sign by the gate says GOD IS GREATER THAN MY PROBLEMS. This is the office of El Pastor, José Antonio Galvan: the man who took in the battered remains of Miss Sinaloa and gave her sanctuary. He is sitting in front of me—a mop of graying hair, a fleshy body, a ready smile—showing me a movie about his asylum: men beaten by police and dumped on the streets, addled addicts with seeping
wounds, women who will never remember what happened to them and never want to remember.

El Pastor has seen a lot of violence in his city, and he tells me what is going on.

“Young people come to Juárez to have the American dream—it is so close,” he says. “They come from the south; they are hardworking, and they don’t know anything about the streets. But now the border is harder to cross, and soon they are selling their bodies and using drugs. After a year, they have gang tattoos. The capos now make enough money selling drugs here; they don’t have to transport them into the United States.

“You can’t do anything to be safe here,” he continues. “Cocaine is everywhere and cheaper than marijuana. They smoke cocaine with marijuana. We’re talking about people 18 to 25—the people who get executed. They are ghosts, human trash walking naked in the city.”

I ask El Pastor if he remembers a patient called Miss Sinaloa.

“Oh yes,” he says. “She was at an orgy. At the Casablanca.”

The Casablanca is a hotel where men bring women for sex and love and joy and whatever other terms they prefer. There are many such places in Juárez, a city where few can afford privacy in their homes and so must rent it at the moment of desire. In front of the hotel stands a large nightclub with red-tiled domes, a playground for cops and narcos alike—anyone who wants booze, dope, and women. This, El Pastor says, was where the cops took hold of Miss Sinaloa.

When the city police brought her out and dumped her with El Pastor, she had lost her mind. The asylum was her home for at least two months, but no one could reach her. She raved; she was very angry. And she was bald. The staff had to cut off her long beautiful hair because it was an occupational risk here: Some patients have shown a tendency to take another patient’s long hair and strangle her with it. In part she was locked up to protect her from the other patients, who crave her fair skin and beauty.
And in part she was locked up because otherwise she would go berserk.

El Pastor shows me her cell. It is maybe nine feet by five feet, and it is in here that, after two months, Miss Sinaloa seems to recover some of her mind. El Pastor locates her relatives, and they drive up from Sinaloa. They must be surprised that she is alive. I certainly am. After such a frolic, death would not be unusual, and Miss Sinaloa would be just one more mysterious body in Juárez. But something saved her. Perhaps it was her madness—the way she raged against the cops—that set her apart.

When the family comes to retrieve their daughter, the father concludes that El Pastor and his patients have been having their way with her. El Pastor is horrified, and there is a terrible argument, and then Miss Sinaloa leaves with her family for home. But as we stand in the dust and wind outside the asylum walls, and El Pastor recounts his reaction to that moment (“I am a family man!”), we both understand the father’s reaction. They are middle-class people, El Pastor notes, unaccustomed to having a daughter go missing on Juárez’s streets. They had a nice car, and they paid for all the medical bills Miss Sinaloa had run up.

And in a country where the weak are always prey, where the favorite verb is
chingar,
to fuck over, the desire to place blame is irrepressible.

B
UT HERE IS A QUESTION:
Why is it that we must believe that these murders happening all over the city—like this one of a small-time grocer who sold a little coke to neighbors in his poverty-stricken neighborhood—are simply the result of a battle between big cartels and the Mexican government over who will control this crossing into the United States?

Every day in Juárez, at least 200,000 people get out of bed to pull a shift in the maquiladoras. The exact number varies: Right now roughly 20,000 jobs have vanished as a chill sweeps through world markets; just after the millennium, about 100,000 jobs left the city for mainland China, because as
Forbes
magazine pointed out, the Mexicans wanted four times the wages of the Chinese. (Those greedy Mexicans were taking home $60, maybe $70 a week in a city where the cost of living is essentially 90 percent that of the United States.) The barrios where these maquiladora workers live are drab, dirty, and largely unvisited by anyone but their inhabitants. Turnover in the grinding maquiladoras runs from 100 to 200 percent a year. The factory managers say this is because of the abundant economic opportunities of the city. And in a sense, they are right: A drug peddler, for example, makes a maquiladora worker’s monthly wage each week. And there’s even more money to be made in other trades: A few years ago, the going rate for professional murders in Juárez was $250 apiece.

But in America, we know nothing of such matters. Officially, Juárez has healthy wages and almost no unemployment. It is a beacon of the global economy that was poised to become a modern city in a Mexico that was to become a modern nation. But when Mexico instead lingered in the shadow of tyranny and poverty, this was ignored by successive American administrations, since a quiet neighbor was and is the best kind of neighbor for a global economic empire. When Mexico persisted in being a trampoline for drugs to bounce from the cocaine belt of South America into the United States, it was the fault of American habit and addiction. Finally, when these habits could not be contained, the North American Free Trade Agreement was ballyhooed as the answer that would bring prosperity and end the violence.

What America got from NAFTA was cheap prices at Wal-Mart, lower wages at home, and an explosion of illegal immigration from the barrios of places like Juárez into the United States. What Juárez got was more drugs and more violence.

The main reason a U.S. company moves to Juárez is to pay lower wages. The only reason poor people in Juárez sell drugs and die is to earn higher wages. The only reason they go north is to survive.

I
HAVE A VISION
in which all the dead in Juárez since January will gather in the plaza before the cathedral downtown. They will sit in rows of chairs just as in Thornton Wilder’s
Our Town.
There will be 500 separate tales of how they loved things and enjoyed life and how they were murdered and who murdered them. It is a play, of course, that will never end.

I will sit with Miss Sinaloa, and I know I will be mesmerized by the accounts but she will be bored. Her perfect face will be blank, her beautiful eyes, cocooned in makeup, will wander to the hills outside town where she stayed in the asylum. By now her hair will have grown out and the handprints on her buttocks will
have vanished. She will retain nothing but barbed memories of her time at the Casablanca.

But of course, nothing she knows will matter to most people—just as the dead of Juárez will vanish and this killing season will be forgotten. You can believe in the war on drugs, in battles between the cartels, in secure borders, in free trade, in official states and statesmen. You don’t have handprints on your ass and bite scars on your breasts and fragments of your mind that tell you of places that presidents never mention. I prefer the company of Miss Sinaloa, her skin so fair, her bruised thoughts more knowing than the governments that pretend to rule the chaos that now rules Juárez.

And as I watch this new
Our Town
in the plaza before the cathedral, one image sticks in my head—a fragment whispering of a murder. There is a barrio near here where people scavenge old televisions and bits of metal from both Juárez and El Paso and sell them. A man peddles cocaine on the street and is warned to stop, but he is in his thirties and has no other livelihood. So he persists, and then armed men come with masks and blow his brains out. He falls dead on the street near his mother’s house.

But his body is not what I imagine.

What I see is his mother. It is night now. The body has been taken away and there is a light on, the screen door is pushed open and an old woman with a blank face stares down at the street. She is there alone, and her son is not coming home. Her face is a portrait of Juárez: silent, enduring, doomed.

C
HARLES
B
OWDEN
is the author of twenty-two books, including
A Shadow in the City: Confessions of an Undercover Drug Warrior; Down by the River: Drugs, Money, Murder, and Family; Juárez: The Laboratory of Our Future,
and
Blood Orchid: An Unnatural History of America. Inferno,
with photographer Michael Berman, was a finalist for the Orion Book of the Year for 2007. His most recent book is
Exodus,
with photographer Julian Cardona.
Trinity
and
Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing
will both he published in 2009.

Bowden is a correspondent for
GQ
magazine, and his work has appeared in
Harper’s, Mother Jones, National Geographic,
and
Esquire.
A Pulitzer Prize nominee and winner of the Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction and the Sidney Hillman Foundation Award, he lives in Tucson, Arizona, with a standard poodle, a desert tortoise, and a witch.

Coda

I have been going to Ciudad Juárez for fifteen years because I could sense the future was unfolding there—violence, poverty, American-owned factories with low wages, and a vast drug business. Starting around January 2008, Juárez probed further into its destiny. In 2007, there were 301 murders, in the following year 1,607, including dozens of police. The pace has continued into 2009. All this will be in a forthcoming book,
Miss Sinaloa.

FROM
OC Weekly

I
F
T
HIEN
M
INH
L
Y HAD LOOKED UP
as he Rollerbladed in slow circles on the Tustin High School tennis courts, he would have seen a few stars flickering in the partly cloudy night sky over the nearby Santa Ana Mountains. The 5-foot-6, 117-pound immigrant with a gentle demeanor and a curiosity for discovery had been back in Orange County for a year after returning from graduate school at Georgetown University, and he was still mulling his next career move. Doctor? Lawyer? He’d even voiced a hope to one day serve as the first Vietnamese American ambassador to his birthplace.

The 24-year-old’s boyish looks belied his tenaciousness. With his family, Ly—born in Tuy Hoa, a coastal village in Central Vietnam—fled brutal conditions in communist Vietnam via boat in 1983 after his father, an officer in the South Vietnamese military, was released from a concentration camp. After a stint living in an Indonesian refugee camp, the family arrived in California. Only 12 years old at the time, Ly led his non-English-speaking parents and two younger siblings through the early difficulties of life in an alien
country. The family eventually opened a video rental shop in Santa Ana. A few months before he went Rollerblading on that cool January 1996 night, he had used a blue-ink pen and a yellow Post-It note to memorialize a thought he’d stick to a page in his diary.

“I live in today and not very far into tomorrow,” he wrote. “I do my best every minute of the day, and when it’s over, I know there is more to come.”

But hazel-eyed death—dressed all in black, with Jack in the Box on his breath and carrying a butcher’s knife—appeared suddenly from the darkness, taunted Ly on the tennis courts, mocked his fear, showed him no mercy and robbed him of his dreams.

Time has a habit of letting us forget tragedies, even ones that spark outrage, like this one did in Little Saigon and in Asian communities across the nation. It’s been 12 years, but a key question about the murder is now the subject of a debate at the California Supreme Court. In coming weeks, the justices will finally announce if Ly really was the victim of a hate crime. For the killer, that decision is a matter of life or death.

L
ESS THAN A QUARTER-MILE
from Ly’s home, on an apartment wall over a futon, was taped a big-toothed caricature of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. with a gaping bullet hole between his eyebrows. The image came with a message: “If we could have killed four more, we would have had the rest of the week off.”

But that wasn’t enough for Gunner Jay Lindberg. The 21-year-old Orange County native had used a yellow crayon to add the word “DEATH” to the upper-left corner of the poster on his bedroom wall. A second, mass-produced poster on the same wall showed two young white girls playing joyously.

The room had a dirty white bedsheet for a curtain. On top of a
small, cheap television and a cheaper VCR sat a plastic skull wearing a helmet with a swastika, two cross-country running trophies and miniature models of 1950s cars. A nightstand contained three bottles of Jack Daniels; books on violence; videos depicting gruesome real-life deaths; correspondence with the Aryan Nation, KKK groups, White Aryan Resistance, the New Order (a successor to the American Nazi Party) and National Association for the Advancement of White People; a folder with a list of people he wanted dead (mostly ex-friends and co-workers); a black notebook with thoughts on a coming intergalactic battle; an obnoxious spoof of an application to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP); and a red-letter edition of the King James Bible, in which he had scrawled personal addresses for white supremacists in various states and this ominous note: “It’s not God’s will that everyone be healed in this life.”

A quick-tempered box stocker at a Tustin Kmart with a penchant for picking fights with Asians, African-Americans and Latinos—anyone, really—Lindberg didn’t graduate from high school and possessed few social skills but was artistically gifted. He’d converted both a white 2.5-pound Gourmet’s Choice fruit container and a cardboard San Francisco 49ers checkers box into storage for his marijuana stash after redecorating them with swirling, hand-drawn psychedelic images of anger, death and Hitler. If pot soothed other people’s minds, it only fueled Lindberg’s fantasies of becoming, he wrote, “the king of all evil and distruction [sic].”

Lindberg, who also took methamphetamines, never lived up to his narcissistic imagination. During an eight-year crime spree beginning at age 12, he proved himself to be little more than a thug who preyed on the defenseless. His victims included a cop’s 11-year-old son, whom he chased and shot in the throat with a BB gun; a day laborer, whom he attacked with a tree limb for the money in his pocket; a skateboarder, whom he repeatedly kicked in the stomach as he stole the board; the peers he angrily chased, firing a shotgun, over a perceived slight; an on-duty prison guard,
whom he brutally ambushed; and an elderly woman, whom he pummeled during a home-invasion robbery for drug money.

But he committed his most heinous act on Ly. At 8 p.m. on Jan. 28, 1996, Lindberg took Domenic Michael Christopher, a Kmart co-worker, to his apartment after they finished a shift that consisted largely of watching the Super Bowl on television in the store’s break room. According to his own writings, Lindberg hoped to mold the impressionable 17-year-old, who liked karate and hadn’t been in trouble before, into his protégé. They smoked pot, talked about “robbery and shit like that” and left on foot—Lindberg carrying a butcher knife he’d stolen from his grandmother’s kitchen, according to police files. They stopped for dinner at Jack in the Box, and then walked the streets searching for a victim. At one point, they encountered a group of teenagers standing in a front yard, attempted to start a fight, failed and moved on.

Minutes later, they found and trapped the unsuspecting Ly, whose last seven minutes of life were the stuff of horror flicks. Lindberg called him a “Jap,” demanded his car keys, cursed him, punched him, stomped on his head, kicked his face, slashed his throat and stabbed him 22 times—in part, to celebrate a victory earlier that evening by what Lindberg hailed as “America’s team,” the Dallas Cowboys.

Among Ly’s final words were “What the fuck?”

L
AW-ENFORCEMENT OFFICIALS SAY
Lindberg was the first person Orange County sent to San Quentin State Prison’s death row under California’s hate-crime statute. Christopher, his now-
remorseful accomplice, is serving a sentence of 25 years to life and is eligible to request parole in 2023.

Lindberg’s days are filled with exercising, writing pen pals, creating art, playing chess, day-dreaming about Nordic lore and writing satanic poems that mock Ly’s death. Thanks to an automatic appeal of every death-penalty case, he’s also waiting for word from California’s highest court on the pending hate-crime question. The answer could remove him from death row.

During supreme court oral arguments in June, deputy state public defender Ronald F. Turner pleaded Lindberg’s case. He told Chief Justice Ronald George and six associate justices that his client’s death-penalty punishment must be overturned. Turner argued that two special circumstances the jury found to be true—that the murder was committed during the commission of an attempted robbery and that Ly’s race was a key factor in the crime—were, in fact, false.

“We’re not dealing with a rational individual here,” said Turner. “This was just a thrill kill, a bravado murder…motivated by male testosterone and nothing else.”

In a February 2005 letter to the
Weekly,
Lindberg echoed Turner’s assertion. “[The Orange County district attorney’s office] blew up the white-supremacist issue,” he wrote. “I’m not like that. I did have some things [reading materials] but it was something I had in prison in Missouri and I only viewed it with passing interest long ago.”

I
F
L
INDBERG HADN’T WRITTEN
that letter describing the killing to a cousin in New Mexico and the cousin’s wife hadn’t contacted authorities, there’s a good chance the case would remain unsolved to this day.

Of course, Lindberg’s “Jap” was Thien Minh Ly.

At Tustin High, Ly wowed teachers by enrolling in advanced-placement classes in calculus, physics, Spanish, English, civics and economics—quite an achievement for an immigrant who’d known English fewer than six years. He earned an eighth-place ranking in a class of about 400. At UCLA, he served as president of the Viet
namese Student Association. In August 1995, he emerged from Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., with a master’s degree in physiology.

The devout Buddhist returned to his parents’ OC home to decide his next move. Friends saw that he carried a study guide to the law school admissions exam, but he also spoke about his interest in medicine. While he debated his decision, he volunteered at a legal clinic established to help poor Asian immigrants in Southern California.

“My brother was such a loving, kind person,” Ly’s sister Thu says. “I can’t describe to you the pain his death caused my family. There were so many tears. How could this happen to him? It tore our hearts apart…. He inspired me to be the best person I can be.”

Though it’s been more than a decade since the crime, Thai—Thien’s younger brother—still can’t talk about it, according to Thu, who is married with several young children and living in San Diego. She dedicated her life to her slain brother, entered the military and served four years as a naval officer in places such as Kuwait and Iraq.

“He wanted me to be a strong and intelligent woman with the courage to find my own adventure,” she told the
Weekly.
“I often wonder what he would think of how I turned out if he were here. Such a thought often brings both smiles and tears.”

I
N ANTICIPATION OF THIS STORY,
I initiated contact with the condemned Lindberg at San Quentin several years ago. In return, I received handwritten letters loaded with smiley faces.
Lindberg also likes to tell people that he’s insane, a word that’s tattooed on his upper left arm.

When I told him that I was going to write about him and requested a face-to-face interview, he first told me that a key witness who’d pissed him off during the Ly trial had died. He wrote, “Sounds like foul play!” Then he explained the conditions of our meeting.

“You’ll be locked into a small cage with me, and won’t be allowed a recorder or anything,” he wrote. “At first I was going to say NO. But if your [sic] wanting to do it then OK. Here’s your visiting form. You just fill it out and send it with a letter to me. Always, Gunner.”

The Department of Justice’s death-row-visitation form is lengthy, containing detailed questions about addresses, phone numbers, financial information, work history, schooling and relatives. It’s a treasure trove of personal data. And Lindberg wanted me to provide him with mine.

Suspicious, I called a high-ranking prison official, who laughed when I told him what Lindberg suggested.

“He knows damn well that he’s not supposed to receive that,” the official told me. “You have to be exceptionally careful with these people. Are you sure you want to be locked in the same room with him?”

I remembered that Senior Deputy District Attorney Debbie Lloyd, who prosecuted Lindberg, had told me that he is “a sick, sick dangerous man.”

“Would he be chained to a chair or a table?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “Like he told you, it’d just be you and him in a small room.”

No, thanks.