Pubdate: Sun, 28 Jul 2002 Source: Los Angeles Times (CA) Copyright: 2002 Los Angeles Times Contact: http://www.latimes.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/248 Author: Anne-Marie O'connor SEDUCTION OF A GENERATION When the Arellano Felix Brothers Transformed Themselves into Vicious Drug Lords, They Had a Little Help from Members of Tijuana's Best Families. A hot day in Tijuana is cooling into a golden sunset. businesswoman Guadalupe Gonzalez is helping a customer select the perfect floral teacup from a china showroom that is a fantasia of fine figurines. Delicate swallowtail butterflies rest on china daisies. Mermaids hold out conch shells with tiny freshwater pearls. Porcelain brides and grooms painted in reassuring pastels gaze at each other with bland expressions of matrimonial joy. The elegant breakables in the tall glass cases seem too fragile for the tale that Gonzalez is telling. It is the story of her daughter Angelica's first marriage. And it was anything but bland. Angelica Bustamante is the granddaughter of Alfonso Bustamante, Tijuana's Rockefeller, the border pioneer who built the twin business towers that loom over this boomtown. Her path seemed preordained: an adolescence consumed with long days at the Tijuana Country Club, the possibility of college in San Diego, and marriage to another young scion of Tijuana's ruling class. Instead, when Angelica was 16, she tearfully revealed to her mother that she was pregnant. Her suitor was a rakish 19-year-old unknown with bedroom eyes and a crooked smile, a man known as "Kitty" to his friends. Like Angelica, Kitty partied with a popular crowd of teenagers who studied at the Instituto Mexico, one of Tijuana's exclusive private schools. They were hastily married not long before the birth of their twins in 1988. And that was merely the first chapter in a life never imagined by Angelica's parents. In May 2001, Arturo "Kitty" Paez, 34, became the first accused lieutenant of the Tijuana drug cartel to be extradited to the United States for cocaine trafficking. U.S. prosecutors say he worked for the notorious Arellano Felix brothers: Benjamin, described by law enforcement authorities as the cartel's chief executive, and Ramon, considered the "enforcer," the man who planned the murders of the cartel's enemies. Authorities on both sides of the border believe the organization was responsible for shipping billions of dollars of cocaine into the United States over the last decade. Benjamin Arellano Felix is currently housed in a high-security prison near Mexico City, awaiting trial on drug-trafficking charges. Ramon was shot to death by Mexican police in February. Angelica wasn't the only well-to-do Tijuanan to bring a reputed trafficker into the family. In 1986, Ruth Serrano Corona, the granddaughter of a top federal official in Tijuana, married Benjamin Arellano Felix. Ruth was with Benjamin in March when soldiers barged into their house in Puebla and took him away. And consider the saga of Lina Literas, one of Angelica's best friends, a beautiful young woman whose father's chain of border import stores supplied much of the crystal that graces the tables of Tijuana's elite. After a childhood of ballet lessons and society weddings, Lina married the baby-faced son of a courtly Tijuana colonel who had been a presidential guardsman. Emilio Valdez Mainero seemed an appropriately upper-tier husband, but he too allegedly found employment in the Arellano Felix organization, recruiting 'young assassins who belong to Tijuana's upper class'-some of them his childhood friends. Emilio ended up in a U.S prison, convicted of drug trafficking in 1998. Lina disappeared during the 2000 Thanksgiving weekend and turned up dead. Gonzalez shakes her head. "So many kids from society got involved with them," she sighs. "All the ladies my age, we all say that's the worst cancer to ever hit Tijuana." That cancer was the cartel. By the time Ramon was killed in Mazatlan in February, at least 25 young Tijuanans from established families had been killed or jailed in a 15-year period, all because of their connection to the cartel. They were graduates of the finest private schools, at home on both sides of the border, the children of families that knew or were related to some of the most powerful people in Baja California. Their fate poses an uncomfortable question for this cosmopolitan border city: How did a bunch of kids from Tijuana's wealthiest neighborhoods get mixed up with some of the deadliest men in the hemisphere? Tijuana is the Mexican city of reinvention. In the last 50 years it has been transformed from a dusty backwater of 65,000 to an electric border boomtown whose official population tops 1 million, though many believe it is twice that size. As in Los Angeles, the past is not taken quite so literally. Once people move to Tijuana, they are pretty much whoever they say they are. Many people who come to this freewheeling experiment in urbanism shed the reserve and formality of central Mexico. Tijuana citizens have acquired a reputation for being extroverted, unpretentious and open-minded. A large middle class feeds a pulsing youth culture of crowded discos and hip rock bands. Upper-class circles are as newly minted as the modern Tijuana Country Club, built in 1948 on the grounds of the old casino, a remnant of the time that the city was a Prohibition getaway for Hollywood movie stars. Families with such names as Bustamante, Fimbres and Anchondo coalesced into tight-knit circles that formed the core of Tijuana society. But by the mid-1980s, even this reliable terrain began to shift. The devalued Mexican peso was relegating some upper class Tijuana families to the middle class. A new, cash-rich generation of drug traffickers was jostling for control of Tijuana; they took advantage of police and government corruption, and of the city's strategic location at the doorstep of the world's largest narcotics market. The Arellano Felix brothers did that and more-they exploited one of Tijuana's treasures: its youth. To Dario Garin, the president of the Tijuana Country Club, the Arellano Felixes' allure boiled down to two simple things: Money. "And power," Garin says with a wry, world-weary air. "They have lots of money. And they go around spreading it everywhere. "I believe it was the Arellanos' strategy to infiltrate the young so they could establish themselves in society." The Arellano Felixes, a prosperous family of seven brothers and four sisters, were from Sinaloa, the Pacific Coast birthplace of many Mexican drug traffickers. Mexican police say some of the brothers were the proteges of a well-connected relative, the Sinaloa drug kinpin Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo, who was jailed in 1989 in connection with the murder of U.S. DEA agent Enrique Camarena. At first, no one on either side of the border took much notice when some of the brothers drifted into Tijuana in the early 1980s. They seemed small-time. In 1980, Francisco Arellano Felix, owner of a Mazatlan disco, failed to appear in a San Diego court to answer charges of selling half a kilo of cocaine. Drug Enforcement Administration officials say Benjamin Arellano Felix first appeared on the radar for a petty 1982 drug arrest in Montebello; he was with his former wife and brother Eduardo. The brothers skipped bond and returned to Mexico. It was around that time that Benjamin began coming to church with one of the prettiest girls in town. Father Gerardo Montano says he was first introduced to Benjamin by Ruth Serrano Corona, a striking blond in her early 20s who was very devout and very proper, when he was parish priest at San Francisco Javier church. He says her stepfather owned an elegant Tijuana restaurant and her grandfather had been head of immigration and a political party chief. Like more than a few well-connected Tijuanans, Ruth was born in San Diego County. She had volunteered at the church since she was 16, reading Scripture at services and carrying the wine, chalice and water. Her new boyfriend was "a very polite young man, and very much in love with Ruth," says Montano. Benjamin, the priest adds, said he was a contractor. But Tijuana's upstart investigative newsweekly, Zeta, identified Benjamin and Ramon Arellano in 1985 as the mysterious men behind a marijuana warehouse guarded by municipal police. And by the following year, Benjamin had enough notoriety in certain circles that he raised eyebrows when he and Ruth arrived at the "Miss Mexico" pageant in Tijuana and were shown to a VIP area usually reserved for business sponsors and their friends. Ruth gave birth to their first child-also named Ruth-in San Diego a year later, and Montano baptized her. "I never saw anything strange about them in the religious meetings," the priest says. "They wore gala attire. Benjamin was very well-mannered, very cultivated and gracious, always very gracious." If Father Montano was in denial, he wasn't alone. Benjamin opened a nice seafood restaurant in town. He would sit at nearby Sanborn's cafe on Avenida Revolucion, poring over his ledger books, wearing a distinctive white linen suit and carrying an executive attache case. He offered businessmen generous credit to tide them through the tight economy. Perhaps they were grateful enough to ignore the fact that Benjamin had begun to move about with an armed security detail, rare for an ordinary entrepreneur. Cristina Palacios de Hodoyan opens the door to a foyer filled with a large doll collection and other touches of the decorative juvenilia that adults somtimes use to reinforce a sense of innocence. She is the mother of Alfredo Hodoyan, 31, the childhood friend of Emilio who is accused of taking part, at the behest of the cartel, in the spectacular gangland slaying of Baja California's federal police commander in September 1996. Cristina, 62, rolls her eyes dismissively at any suggestion that Alfredo was the killer, the "Wolf" described by prosecutors. Not Alfredo-tall, good-looking, bilingual, U.S.-born; a graduate of the prestigious St. Augustine Academy in San Diego. She shakes her head. Alfredo was openhearted, generous-wasn't he always issuing invitations to play basketball at the Hodoyans' hoop? And Emilio-Did you know his father was the cousin of a Mexican president?-lived right around the corner. So did skinny little Fabian Martinez, who was so shy that his father, a respected pediatrician, organized a baseball team so his son would have children to play with. It's hard to believe Fabian grew into "the Shark," alleged by Mexican police to have killed at least a dozen people on behalf of the cartel. Authorities said terrible things about other neighborhood boys, too. Boys whose parents Cristina knows from school PTAs. Boys who played with Cristina's sons at the Tijuana Country Club years ago. Those were simpler times. They began to change around 1985, when Cristina picked up her daughter at a rock concert and was introduced to a flamboyant teenager with flashy gold chains on his wrists and a big gold medallion around his neck. He was Ramon Arellano Felix, the blue-jeaned kid brother of a big family new to Tijuana. "No one knew who they were," Cristina says. But soon all the teenagers knew Benjamin's kid brother, 12 years his junior. Ramon roared through the streets on a motorcycle, wearing splashy Versace shirts, black leather pants and an easy smile. Cristina's older son, Agustin Hodoyan, would wave when Ramon drove by in a red sports car, rock-and-roll booming from his stereo. Once, Agustin served as a translator for Ramon and an attractive young American at a party given by Lina Literas' boyfriend, Emilio. "How could you not know him?" Agustin asked after Alfredo's arrest in 1996. "He was a party boy. Every Friday or Saturday night he would be at a party or a disco. He was fun." But "I never wanted to ask him for a favor," Agustin said, "because nothing is free." Not everybody had those reservations. Ramon's habit of treating everyone to champagne endeared him to the Instituto set. His manic charisma drew the admiration of kids such as Emilio Valdez Mainero, the kind of young men who are known in Mexico by a not entirely flattering term: "juniors." Eventually Ramon's friends would be tagged by the press as "narcojuniors." People whispered about what Ramon and his brothers did. But in those days, explains one self-described "narcojunior" who is now a protected witness, "the guys with the nicest cars and girls were the drug dealers. This is happening at an age where that stuff is very important to you." Judging from U.S. court files, Ramon's Rat Pack also knew he was not the most predictable party guest. According to those same documents, Emilio and Ramon were attending a birthday party at Tijuana's Club Britania in late 1988 when an unwelcome guest arrived. The young man had just run off for three weeks with Ramon's sister. Ramon walked out of the crowded party and shot and killed his sister's boyfriend and two friends parked outside. "If he got drunk or started using, you didn't even want to be around him," the protected witness says. But if being an enemy was dangerous, being a member of his entourage could be a rush. Kids admired his long hair, his rococo Chinese dragon bedside lamps, and the respect and fear he inspired. "It's unbelievable the power you feel," the witness says. "You have no rules. You're young. You have women all over the place. It's like this big adult playground. It was a very unique time of my life." it's unclear whether Angelica Bustamante and Lina Literas knew exactly what they were getting into when they started going to the kind of parties where the bad-boy charms of Emilio Valdez Mainero and Kitty Paez were drawing sultry glances from teenage girls. Angelica belonged to a sheltered, well-chaperoned world of weddings and baptisms. But Kitty, with his jeans, T-shirts and irresistable grin, was considered the coolest guy in his Instituto clique. He had a nice car, his own place, money, and a lot more independence than his peers. Friends say that when he dropped by the Instituto one day to pick up some seniors, Angelica was thrilled to be noticed. "He was cute, he was charming, he was very athletic, and he had all the girls crazy," a former schoolmate of Angelica's says. "Girls always want to be with the guy who has all the girls crazy." That did not qualify Paez as a suitable fiance for the daughter of the president of the Tijuana Convention and Visitors Bureau. Officially, Kitty owned a liquor store in Rosarito. But how had a penniless 19-year-old come up with the money for a liquor license? "Kitty Paez? I'd never heard of him," Gonzalez says. "It would have been fine with me if they hadn't gotten married at all. But it wouldn't have mattered. She would have kept seeing him. When her father found out she was expecting twins, he said, 'She's getting married.' " Then-Tijuana Mayor Federico Valdes said he officiated at the wedding. Lina was a far savvier player in the social scene. "Lina was gorgeous," her brother Jaime says. "She has always had many admirers. She was the perfect girl." Her mother tried to discourage her romance with the swaggering Emilio. But when Lina became pregnant, her family reluctantly consented to their marriage, a relative says. "She was very young. He was very handsome," another mother says. Court documents say Ramon was named godfather of their son, Emilio Alfredo, in 1991, though relatives say he didn't show up for the baptism. ("These people have last-minute commitments and problems," one relative says. "They're like doctors. Their beeper goes off and they have to go.") An invitation that found its way into U.S. court files directed the juniors to a splashy post-baptism disco party hosted by Ramon and the baby's other godfather, Kitty Paez. "Ramon became the godfather of a number of children in Tijuana," Cristina de Hodoyan said in 1996. "Let's face it, it was often for the money. He would pay for a big baptism party." The Arellano Felixes and their entourage became "the beautiful people, the 90210 of drug cartels," says Gonzalo Curiel, the assistant U.S. attorney assigned to the case. "The Arellanos and the narcojuniors were celebrities." Her body turned up four days later with the corpse of her married boyfriend. Police told the family that he appeared to have been tortured in front of her. Emilio told her family "he won't rest until he finds out what happened," a relative says. "She died with the person she loved, like a soap opera," her brother Jaime says. "That gives us peace. Lina's father passed away four months later. Her mother is raising her three grandchildren. The protected witness returned to the scene of an all-night drinking session and found two hungover gunmen playing soccer with a ball that, upon closer inspection, turned out to be a third gunman's head. Now he's trying to sell his story to Hollywood. Ruth Serrano Corona was with her husband Benjamin when Mexican soldiers burst into their bedroom in March. Benjamin's personal assistant turned out to be Manuelito Martinez, Fabian's brother. Fabian is presumed dead. Kitty Paez was arrested by U.S. request in downtown Tijuana in 1997. He and Angelica had been divorced for a year, her family says. Her family says she has since remarried, but the San Diego Union-Tribune reported that she showed up with the children at Kitty's sentencing hearing in January as he choked back tears and apologized to "society in general" for "everything I did." His freewheeling life was reduced to clinical legal descriptions of meetings where Ramon plotted "violent acts" by narcojuniors. Kitty was sentenced to 30 years. There are still society kids who brag that they know two of the younger Arellanos, Eduardo and Javier, who, some DEA officials believe, are living under armed guard in Tijuana, trying to stave off competitors and paying $1 million a week to police. "I don't think they'll fool them again," Tijuana Country Club president Dario Garin said. "People have had the experience, and it was a very bitter one. It won't be so easy now." But in March, another Tijuana "junior," Walter Ruiz Fimbres, 21, turned up in Chicago newspapers, arrested in Deerfield, Ill., with a carload of marijuana, and was slapped with a $10-million bond. And Tijuana discos are still prowled by charming strangers who seem far too eager to buy drinks for the whole table. "History keeps repeating itself," Jaime Literas says. "They keep meeting these people, in a party, at a disco, they buy bottles of champagne, and they become the new members of the narco-society. It's the same now: You go to a party, you meet these guys and you don't even know their names, just pseudonyms. They have new cars and they invite the girls to a disco and meet their cousins. Little by little, they get to know a lot of people." - --- MAP posted-by: Josh