El Paso, Texas
By eight o’clock the next morning, the Rivera van was pulling into another warehouse district, this one on the outer edges of El Paso. At a regional distribution center for refrigeration products and supplies, the twenty-four cases of aerosol V-belt lubricant were off-loaded in their usual section of the warehouse. The inventory foreman checked them in, and the van headed to the Cordova Bridge on the Rio Grande and back to Mexico.
The floor foreman directed his three employees to move various stacks of inventory to new locations, a temporary reshuffling, he said. The jobs took them to the far side of the warehouse. When they were gone, he went to the waiting cases of Dempsey’s Best lubricant and found the one with a red dot on the lower right corner of each side.
Opening the case, he removed four cans with red dots on their concave bottoms and substituted them for four regular cans in a second case. He resealed the second case, added red dots to each of its lower right sides, and labeled the case for pickup by the Rocky Mountain Refrigeration Supply van.
He followed the same procedure with another four cans of the red dot lubricants, again opening an unmarked case of lubricant and substituting four red dot cans for regular cans and resealing the case, adding red dots to the lower right corner of its four sides, and labeling it for pickup by the Ames Midwest Air Conditioning Supplies van. He resealed the original red dot case, which now contained only four cans with red dots on their bottoms and eight cans without red dots, and relabeled the case for pickup by the American Industrial Refrigeration Supplies van.
Within an hour, all three vans had picked up their cases of Dempsey’s Best aerosol V-belt lubricant. Hidden among these cases in each van was one containing four cans with red dots. These red dot cans were headed for a dozen different destinations in a dozen different states. Within forty-eight hours, every red dot aerosol can would be in the hands of the men who would use them.
The El Paso warehouse foreman who enabled the distribution knew nothing about what he was doing except that he had agreed to shuffle cans with red dots and to keep his mouth shut about it. In exchange, he would receive twenty thousand dollars for his troubles.
At three o’clock in the afternoon, he received a telephone call from Juarez confirming that all the red dots were safely on their way. Mission completed. The money was his. He told his boss that he was coming down with a stomach virus, then took the rest of the afternoon off. He drove across the Cordova Bridge, headed to a motel in Juarez to collect his money.
But he never returned.
On the Mexican side of the border, murder went for 3,500 American dollars a pop. It was a bargain. Money well spent, from a security point of view.