Pubdate: Sun, 10 Jan 2010
Source: Dallas Morning News (TX)
Copyright: 2010 The Dallas Morning News, Inc.
Contact: http://www.dallasnews.com/cgi-bin/lettertoed.cgi
Website: http://www.dallasnews.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/117
Author: Scott K. Parks, The Dallas Morning News
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/topic/La+Familia
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/meth.htm (Methamphetamine)

CARTELS HOME IN ON DALLAS

Distribution Influx Means Drug Houses Could Be Next Door

No one would have wanted Balmer Valencia Bernabe for a neighbor if 
they had known how he earned a living. And no one did know until 6:30 
a.m. on Oct. 21.

Ovella Thompson awakened that Wednesday morning to the sound of 
federal agents breaking down the door at a creme-colored brick home 
across the street. Their search warrant alleged that Bernabe, an 
illegal Mexican immigrant, used the Garland "stash house" near Lake 
Ray Hubbard to store methamphetamine, vehicles, cash and ledgers 
documenting his business dealings.

Twenty miles away, at approximately the same minute, a young father 
named Rafael awakened in his Love Field-area home and pulled back the 
curtains to watch federal agents bust into a house across the street 
and arrest Bernabe. "You could hear the cops screaming," recalled 
Rafael, who asked that his last name not be used. "Who could have 
known? He and his wife have kids. He looked like a normal guy."

Bernabe, at age 34, is anything but a normal guy.

Although he has pleaded not guilty to drug charges, federal 
investigators say he exemplifies how Mexican drug cartels have 
extended their operations to the retail level in the United States.

Once upon a time, the cartels were content to stay in Mexico and 
wholesale their drugs to Americans willing to smuggle them across the 
border to reap huge profits on the streets of large U.S. cities.

Now, the cartels are vertically integrating their "companies" in much 
the same way oil companies expanded from drilling to refining to 
selling gasoline on street corners early in the 20th century.

"Dallas is a hub for drugs just like American Airlines uses Dallas as 
its hub for air travel," said Phil Jordan, a retired agent for the 
Drug Enforcement Administration in Texas.

When he was arrested in October, Bernabe had been living in the 
predominantly Hispanic neighborhood just west of Love Field since 
August 2005. He had been deported as an illegal immigrant and had 
re-entered the U.S. illegally.

Court records say he often traveled between the U.S. and Mexico. 
Federal agents identified him as one of five Dallas-area cell leaders 
for La Familia, an organized-crime group based in Michoacan, Mexico.

La Familia specializes in manufacturing and selling methamphetamine, 
a powerful, addictive stimulant known as "ice." Prolonged use can 
result in brain damage, heart failure, kidney failure, liver damage 
and vitamin deficiencies that cause skin disease, bone weakness and tooth loss.

Meth can be so exhilarating that users will engage in risky sexual 
behavior. Historically, the drug has played a role in promoting the 
HIV epidemic, according to public health experts.

"Meth is a horrible drug," said Dr. John Carlo, medical director at 
the Dallas County health department.

Posing As 'Normal Guy'

No one knows how many hundreds of pounds of meth Bernabe might have 
moved through North Texas during the last 41/2 years. And no one 
knows how many drug dealers Mexican cartels have dispatched to Dallas 
to pose as a "normal guy" in the neighborhood.

Bernabe lived in a modest wood-frame rent house - valued at $66,000 
on the tax rolls - with his wife, Dominga, and their four children. 
Of course, he could have afforded something much nicer. But the Love 
Field neighborhood that runs along the western edge of the airport 
was a perfect place to hide in plain sight.

Police and Love Field-area community leaders estimate that a third of 
neighborhood residents, like Bernabe, are in the U.S. illegally. They 
speak only Spanish, which is accepted in the neighborhood. Roosters 
run free in some yards. Outdoor statues of the Virgin Mary are 
common. The ever-present roar of jetliners landing and taking off can 
be deafening.

Federal authorities have charged Bernabe with meth distribution and 
money laundering. They consider him a flight risk and are holding him 
in jail without bail. But his wife and children still live in the 
house on Cortland Avenue a couple of blocks south of a Catholic 
church and an elementary school.

Agents say Bernabe is not the kind of drug dealer who sold dime bags 
out of his house.

La Familia manufactures meth in remote laboratories scattered around 
the state of Michoacan in central Mexico. Bernabe grew up in a rural 
area around Apatzingan, a city of 100,000 people in Michoacan.

Apatzingan is well-known to drug enforcement agents as a hotbed of 
drug-dealing activity and a home base of La Familia. Television 
reports of gunfights between warring cartel factions and between the 
cartel and police in Apatzingan shocked the nation in 2009. One video 
showed schoolchildren scrambling under their desks to avoid gunfire.

Authorities believe most of the Michoacan meth arrives in the U.S. 
hidden in 18-wheelers carrying fruits, vegetables and other products 
from Mexico.

Bernabe never touched the drugs or kept them at his Love Field house. 
He used cellphones to direct his operation, ordering subordinates to 
pick up large quantities (often a pound or more of meth), deliver 
them to a buyer, collect the cash and then make arrangements to ship 
the cash back to Mexico, authorities say.

In one case, drug agents allege that a female courier working for 
Bernabe boarded a bus bound for Michoacan with $157,000 in cash. In 
another case, drug agents reported finding $107,000 in cash welded 
into the gas tank of a blue Ford Yukon bound for Mexico.

During a three-year investigation, agents followed Bernabe everywhere 
he went and electronically monitored his phone calls. They followed 
him and his family to church at the Cathedral Shrine of the Virgin of 
Guadalupe in downtown Dallas. They watched him and his wife - usually 
driving a 2006 black Chrysler 300 - drop off the kids at Obadiah 
Knight Elementary School and T.J. Rusk Middle School.

When he played volleyball with friends or visited Lone Star Park for 
the horse races, agents were there and listening to his phone calls, 
which were always conducted in Spanish. He never worked a regular 
job. Investigators identified and arrested 15 subordinates who they 
say worked for him.

Drug trafficking experts characterize La Familia as a violent 
organization, but Bernabe was not known to carry a firearm and none 
was found in his house or in his vehicles when he was arrested, 
according to court records. No one saw him drink to excess or use drugs.

"My father isn't just a good father; he's a very good father," said 
Bernabe's 13-year-old son, the eldest child. "I miss him. I really miss him."

He said his mother tries to comfort him and his younger siblings. 
"She says God and the Virgin will send him back," the son said.

His mother has told him that she is looking for a job now that 
Bernabe is gone. Although they can't be sure, federal agents suspect 
she and the family are living on drug money stashed in a secret hiding place.

Bernabe faces a minimum of 10 years in prison. He has retained the 
services of Wichita Falls lawyer Robert Estrada, which means he and 
his family and friends have access to thousands of dollars to pay 
legal fees. Otherwise, he would have pleaded poverty and relied upon 
a court-appointed lawyer.

Estrada went to visit Bernabe recently at a federal lock-up in Mansfield.

"I think he's scared, which is only natural," Estrada said. "What I 
can tell you in his favor is that he is a good father and a good husband."

House No One Lived In

Bernabe, who never completed high school in Mexico, wasn't very good 
at escaping the notice of federal drug agents. But he tried.

Investigators describe him as unsophisticated and lacking knowledge 
of U.S. conspiracy laws. He thought he couldn't be busted if he never 
touched the drugs and simply directed the actions of his subordinates 
in La Familia.

In 2008, he bought a typical suburban home - three bedrooms, two 
baths and an attached two-car garage - on Overglen Drive in Garland. 
He paid $108,000 in cash for the house but persuaded the seller to 
keep the property in his name, according to court records. He thought 
he could stay off the drug enforcement radar screen if he kept his 
name off property records.

Bernabe also gave people cash to buy cars and trucks to use in his 
drug-dealing operations, drug agents allege. His name never showed up 
as owner of several vehicles now in the possession of the DEA.

Bernabe's closest neighbors on Overglen included a preacher and his 
wife, a disabled man battling cancer and a cable company technician. 
None of them knew that no one actually lived at the house.

Before Bernabe bought the house, a 6-foot-tall chain link fence 
enclosed the back yard. Later, neighbors thought it strange when a 
6-foot-tall wood privacy fence popped up just inside the chain link 
fence. It looked weird.

Bernabe also put up a padlocked gate across his driveway in the 
alley. Several signs announced Brinks Home Security as the property's 
protector. A birdhouse hangs from a tree limb in the front yard.

No one was home when federal agents and Garland police raided the 
house. Agents confiscated a cellphone, a plastic bag containing "a 
white powdery substance" and bags of documents and paperwork. The 
federal government now claims ownership of the house under forfeiture 
laws designed to take property that drug dealers use for criminal purposes.

More than two months after the raid, some neighbors still were not 
aware of what had happened at Bernabe's house.

Nancy Morgan went to work and came home every day with no knowledge 
that the house three doors down was "a stash house" and not really 
anyone's home.

"It really is shocking not to even know," she said after a reporter 
told her the story. "It almost makes you want to pack up and leave."

Ovella Thompson, who is 71 and retired, lives across the street from 
the Bernabe house. She prefers to put a positive spin on why a drug 
dealer chose to corrupt her neighborhood.

"This is a quiet neighborhood," she said. "I believe he chose this 
street because it's safe and well-kept and pleasant - a place police 
would never look."

'Cheese,' Not Meth

Grauwyler Park, a library and a recreation center anchor the 
neighborhood west of Love Field. Because children and teens 
congregate there, drug dealers have plagued the park.

Wilma Avalos, a community activist and homeowner, said her 
neighborhood is the kind of place where a drug dealer might meet 
children getting off a school bus in the afternoon. And it's the kind 
of place that reveres Our Lady of Perpetual Help, the neighborhood's 
big Catholic church.

For several years, Avalos and police officers who patrol the area 
have focused on stopping the distribution of "cheese," a form of 
heroin. Meth really hasn't popped up as a problem in their 
neighborhood. They hadn't heard about the October arrest of Balmer 
Bernabe on Cortland.

"We have to keep our ears and eyes open and I'm glad this one is 
gone," Avalos said when told about Bernabe's arrest.

Steve Fuentes, a Dallas police officer who spent almost two decades 
working in the neighborhood, said he understands why Bernabe chose to 
live on Cortland, a lightly traveled dead-end street lined with 
modest homes, many with neatly tended lawns.

"Sounds like he was doing the devil's work," Fuentes said. "So, he 
avoids notice in a quiet neighborhood in the center of the city and 
close to things like the Mexican grocery stores over on Harry Hines. 
And he doesn't deal out of his house."

Still, the question persists: How many Balmer Bernabes are dealing 
large amounts of recreational Mexican poison in the Dallas area?

"Who knows?" Fuentes said. "How many Tiger Woodses are out there on 
the pro golf tour?"
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