Sometimes, when busting up a Mexican drug cartel, you follow the cocaine. Other times you follow the cash. But for one particularly impactful investigation, law enforcers followed the horses.
The equines in question were quarter horses, which, among America’s cowboys and Mexico’s vaqueros, are not unlike thoroughbreds. They compete in quarter mile races. Fans bet on outcomes and purses can nip into the millions. However, corrupting the enterprise were top-tier crooks in Mexico’s Los Zetas drug cartel.
“Those horses led to uncovering extortion, racketeering and kidnapping,” Dan Johnstone, co-director of the new Apple TV+ documentary “Cowboy Cartel,” which drops today, told The Post.
“[The uncovering contributed] to the Zeta’s downfall.”
In January 2010, the FBI’s Laredo, Texas, office received a tip the Zetas – then the most violent drug operation in Mexico – were using quarter horses to launder money on their turf in the US.
Succeeding through what an official described “total barbarity,” such as leaving 49 headless torsos on a Mexican highway as a warning for anyone who considered crossing them – the Zetas brought gang violence to gut-churning levels.
A local police chief in Mexico announced that the cartel did not scare him. In 24 hours, he was dead.
Back in Texas, a North Dallas bricklayer by the name of José Treviño Morales purchased a horse called Tempting Dash, paying a record setting $875,000 at auction, which raised eyebrows.
José was the US-based law-abiding brother of Miguel Angel Treviño Morales, aka Z-40, known for being the 40th member of the Zetas and its leader.
It was one of many horse purchases bankrolled through a flotilla of shell companies loaded with drug money. The quarter horse enterprise, it became clear, was a money laundering operation for the Zetas in the US.
It also provided an opportunity for race fixing, which elevated the valuations of the horses.
According to a court affidavit, Miguel bigmouthed he gave $10,000 to Texas track employees who were paid to “hold back horses” in a million-dollar race.
José’s runner in one such race, Mr Piloto, finished in first place.
Aiming to shut it all down, the Feds needed an agent who could convince Tyler Graham, and zeroed in on a third-generation rancher unknowingly maintaining horses for José, to cooperate as a confidential informant.
Chosen to do the convincing was Scott Lawson, a southerner straight out of graduating FBI Quantico.
“Scott knew cowboying and was roughly the same age as the confidential informant,” said co-director Castor Fernandez. “They had similar background.”
In Austin, the men discussed race horses and breeding.
Realizing that Graham was “in over his head” and unaware of his bloodthirsty client, Lawson dropped the bombshell: “You just bought a horse for the brother of the leader of the most violent drug cartel in Mexico. With the Zetas, you either work with them or they kill you.”
Graham turned snitch.
He became a great resource. Feds eavesdropped on the buying, selling, training of horses, all done in the course of laundering drug money. Straw buyers purchased horses at auction.
The investigation chugged along until 2012, when disturbing information landed. Jose, as Lawler put it in the doc, began “believing his own BS.”
He planned to take his collection of horses and create his own breeding/training facility in Oklahoma. That presented a problem. “Once Jose runs his own facility, we lose a lot of insights,” Steve Pennington, the IRS’s long-haired, Porsche driving, crack investigator said in the documentary.
“He would get control of the paperwork and our access would diminish.”
It also would have been a narco terrorist dream. “They craved legitimacy,” said Pennington, pointing out the horse ranch could have settled into being a self-supporting enterprise.
“To set his family up with long-term financial stability would be a point of pride.”
But it was not to be. On June 12, 2012, a posse of FBI agents raided the home and stables of José Trevino.
Dozens of confiscated boxes contained documents that provided a clear paper trail. A cell phone in the drawer of José’s bedside table contained just one number, which the feds believed was for brother Miguel.
In 2013, Miguel was arrested by Mexican authorities.
The trial of José landed in the government’s favor. Once law abiding but ultimately corrupted by his brother, José is now serving a 20-year-long term in federal prison.
With most of the original members of Los Zetas captured or killed, today the group has mainly devolved into splinter groups or been absorbed into newer cartels.
Looking back on it all, Fernandez said it is a cautionary tale of how the cartels operate and what they aspire to: “The violence is abhorrent and pervasive. But, in the end, [cartel leaders] have bigger goals of legitimacy, where they can get real money, real power, real influence. That makes them more dangerous.”