The case of a dozen items that left the burning warehouse in the industrial zone in the northern colonias of Mexico City was driven to Benito Juarez International Airport on the city’s east side. Within an hour the case was airborne, traveling on a mixed cargo commercial jet headed for Chihuahua City, the capital of one of Mexico’s northernmost states.
In Chihuahua City, it was off-loaded, along with several crates of brass, fiberglass, and plastic stamp plates used in the manufacture of thermostat components for refrigeration units in one of the scores of maquiladoras on the edge of the city. At the maquiladora, everything was loaded onto a warehouse dock. The raw materials used for the thermostat components were eventually taken into the warehouse to be distributed, while the box of counterfeit product waited alone at one end of the dock.
Within fifteen minutes, a panel truck pulled up to the dock. A man got out of the passenger side of the truck and loaded the box through the rear door, stacking it alongside twenty-three other boxes with identical markings. The truck drove away, and in another ten minutes its headlights picked up the highway sign the driver was looking for: Chihuahua State Highway 16. The truck turned and headed for the Mexican border town of Ojinaga, across the Rio Grande from Presidio, Texas.
The foreman on the loading dock at the Chihuahua City maquiladora pocketed five hundred U.S. dollars for ignoring the cardboard box on the side of his dock for fifteen minutes.
It was a three-hour drive through the dark Mexican desert to the Ojinaga border-crossing station, and the van arrived at the tollbooth at 6:30 A.M. The guards on the Mexican side were used to seeing the Rivera Materiales Refrigeracion van that came through the border station twice a week from the maquiladora in Chihuahua City, and they waved the van through.
On the U.S. side, it was another matter. One guard, a sour gringo who had the reputation of being one of the strictest inspectors at the station, was, in fact, on the smugglers’ payroll. He could be bought off on any particular shipment so long as the contraband wasn’t drugs. He wouldn’t do drugs because he never knew when a drug-sniffing dog would be brought to the station on a deliberately unscheduled visit.
Now, in fact, there was a drug-sniffing dog on duty in these early-morning hours, and the guard expertly covered his anxiety as the animal and its trainer did their business, going over the twenty-four cases of sixteen-ounce cans of V-belt aerosol lubricant for commercial refrigeration compressors. The Rivera truck brought through a variety of products twice a week. When the dog lost interest, his trainer called him off, and the guard waved the van on. Then he poured another cup of coffee from his thermos and looked across the empty bridge to Mexico, satisfied that the serious sweat that he had expended during the last ten minutes had been worth the thousand dollars a minute that he had been paid.