1
The first shot splintered the corner of the wooden booth above my left ear where I was sitting in the small restaurant and set me in motion. The second shot pierced my right thigh, stopping me dead in my tracks and throwing me to the floor. The third shot never came. I would later learn that the shooter got spooked by a passing truck carrying soldiers from TIngo Maria to Naranjillo, Peru. But at that moment, all that I could think of was the pulsing pain in my right thigh as a pool of blood began to form on the dirt floor beneath where I was laying.
I’m not sure what happened next. Unlike in the movies, you can’t just shake-off a bullet wound and I’m told that I passed out from the loss of blood. I awoke sometime later at the DEA forward base camp in Tingo Maria as a U.S. army medic hung over me patching up my leg. He told me that the bullet missed my femoral artery by less than an inch. Had it struck there, I would have bled out before they could get me back to the base.
Things were a blur after that. I was medevacced back to Miami where I underwent 4 hours of surgery to repair the muscle and was told that I would live – I might end up with a slight limp and had to watch out for blood clots, but they expected a near full recovery of the leg. By the time that I had my first visitor, it could have been 2 or 3 days after I had been shot – I couldn’t tell.
It’s a surreal situation. One minute, I was the hunter going after one of the most dangerous criminals on the face of the earth. In very short sequence, I became the prey. It’s also surreal that I had stopped one moment to get something to eat at a small dump of a place consisting of a metal roof, dirt floor, a few tables and a wood-burning grill in Tingo Maria and now I was laying on a spotless white bed in a modern hospital in Miami. It’s like waking up from a dream and wondering if everything that you seemed to remember was real or a fantasy. The bandage on my leg and the pain underneath told me it was real. But it would take a second or two for my brain to process this and firm it completely in reality.
I was released from the hospital a few days later and was remanded to the care of physical therapists. I was told to return to the doctors in 4 – 6 weeks for a check-up and sent on my way. I was expected to simply return to the life that I had before getting shot and to live each day to the fullest. They say that sudden trauma causes you to have a new outlook on life. Many people are known to slow down and try to enjoy life, while others trade their life for completely new one.
For me, the outcome was different. Getting shot just made me mad. It also made me more stubborn and caused me to develop focus. Where in the past, I would often juggle several different tasks, to the detriment of them all, now I found myself focusing on one thing at a time. I would spend hours on end focusing on accomplishing one feat to perfection. At first, it was my recovery.
In addition to my twice-per week sessions at the clinic, the physical therapist gave me a set of exercises to do for 30 minutes a couple of times per day. By the end of week two, I was doing 4 full hours per day of the exercises he had given me, plus a lot more of my own. I returned to work the third week, remanded to a desk, but woke up at 4:00 am each morning to get in three hours of exercise before work and another two after returning. I also spent my lunch hour walking. I wasn’t very productive at work, so requested some personal leave and spent the next three weeks focusing entirely on my body.
By the end of week six, I was feeling stronger than I had felt in a long time. My right leg, which had atrophied a bit in the beginning, was now almost indistinguishable in muscle mass and strength from my left. My lungs had benefitted from the hours of treadmill and bicycling and my upper body was more lean and muscled than I could remember. My focus had done wonders for my body. It had served me well in rebuilding my health. It was now time to shift that focus to another task.
And that task was to hunt down and kill the motherfucker who had ordered me dead.
2
While I didn’t know exactly who pulled the trigger, I knew exactly who had ordered it. His name was Jaime “El Pacho” Contreras Vargas. He was not the largest drug trafficker in Peru, but he was by many accounts the most violent.
I came across El Pacho almost by accident, when assigned to the DEA office in Lima, Peru. I had only been there a few weeks when the U.S. Secretary of State announced a visit to Peru in the near future. The safety of the Secretary is the responsibility of the Diplomatic Security Services, but as often happens when a dignitary travels overseas, federal agents from any of the agencies assigned to the U.S. Embassy are pulled to provide collateral support. Being the new guy, I was assigned as liaison to the Peruvian National Police to provide security for the vehicles when not in use. A shit job by all means, but one that is important nonetheless.
My liaison was a Peruvian National Police lieutenant by the name of Tulio Vargas. Tulio was usually a very responsive guy, picking up his phone on the first or second ring whenever I called. One Saturday afternoon, however, that was not the case. I called him 6 or 7 times, leaving messages each time, with no response. I finally heard back from him at about 10:00 PM, when he called me from a bar. I asked for the address, and headed out to meet him.
By the time that I had arrived, Tulio was half-drunk and in a foul mood. When I asked him what had happened, he told me that it had been his worst day as a police office. When I asked him to elaborate, he told me that he arrested a 12-year-old kid by the name of Lucho that afternoon for murder. He then went on to tell me the kid’s story.
Lucho lived in Villa El Salvador, the largest slum area near Lima. Lucho lived in a shack with his mother and younger brother from a different father. To make ends meet, his mother worked as a prostitute. When she would bring someone home from one of the nearby bars, Lucho and his brother were told to play outside until the mother had finished with her business.
According to Tulio, one night approximately three years before, when Lucho was only nine and his brother seven, their mother brought home a rough-looking man from the bar and, as usual, told Lucho and his brother to play outside. Approximately 30 minutes later, the man left the house and headed back towards the bar. When Lucho and his brother entered their house, they found their mother lifeless, strangled to death.
Lucho immediately went after the man and watched him enter the bar. But what was a nine-year-old boy to do against a grown man in a bar. As he waited outside fuming, he was approached by another, much stockier man. While Lucho had never seen this man before, he seemed to be someone of power. He also seemed to be someone that Lucho could trust at that very second. So when the man asked him what he was doing there, Lucho explained that his mother had just been murdered, and the man that killed her was in that bar.
The man asked Lucho what he was going to do about it. Lucho responded, as a kid might, that if he had a gun, he would shoot the killer as he came out of the bar. The larger man then proceeded to hand Lucho a pistol. When the killer came out of the bar, Lucho walked up to the man and shot him three times, killing him.
At that point, the man offered Lucho a job as a paid killer. He offered Lucho U.S. $50 for every person that he killed and would provide Lucho with free food every day at one of the man’s restaurants. Alone, and now left to care for his 7-year-old brother, Lucho accepted.
According to Lucho, he killed upwards of 20 people over the next three years. Lucho stated that he hated the job and knew that it was wrong, but had no choice. When Tulio arrested Lucho earlier that day for the murder of a 14-year-old girl, Lucho broke down crying and actually thanked Tulio. Lucho stated that he would confess to all of the crimes committed on the condition that somebody would take care of his now 11-year-old brother. Lucho was worried that, without him, his brother would be forced into the same lifestyle.
When asked about the man, Lucho identified him as “El Pacho” – Jaime Contreras Vargas.
At that time, “El Pacho” ran the majority of the drugs sold in Villa El Salvador. “El Pacho” had an army of hitmen that he employed both to ensure payment for his drugs, as well as to scare off any potential competitors. As far as Lucho knew, he was the youngest of these hitmen.
Tulio stated that arresting Lucho was a low-point in his career. While Lucho was definitely responsible for all of the murders, life had really handed him no choice. Tulio came straight to the bar after the arrest and had been drinking most of the afternoon.
I became obsessed with the story. I felt sorry for Lucho, and contempt for “El Pacho”, and swore that I would put him in jail before leaving Peru.
That never happened.
While DEA agents are assigned to foreign offices to ostensibly assist the locals with their drug problem, the truth is that DEA was only interested in larger organizations with connections to the U.S. As “El Pacho” was a local trafficker with no known international ties, he was left for the locals to deal with. And since “El Pacho” had money and an army of hitmen, the locals stood no chance of obtaining an arrest.
Four years earlier, I had left the Lima Country Office for a position back at the DEA Miami Field Division. My language skills and knowledge of Latin America made me a shoe-in for a senior agent position.
During my first three years in Miami, I largely forgot about “El Pacho” as I worked against members of the Mexican and Colombian cartels. Until one day when I caught a case against a Peruvian national identified as Luis Contreras Vargas, who turned out to be the brother of “El Pacho”.
Luis was in Miami and had offered to sell an informant 2 kgs of cocaine. The agent that usually handled that particular informant had been transferred to Los Angeles, so being the duty agent that day, the informant was turned over to me.
The informant told Luis that he had a buyer for the cocaine, introducing me into the mix. After flashing the money to Luis, he produced the 2 kgs of cocaine and was arrested on the spot with no incidents. A subsequent questioning of Luis showed that he was not the smartest tool in the shed, in addition to the fact that he was a heavy user of his own product.
I testified during the trial of Luis Contreras Vargas, where he was sentenced to serve 15 years in prison based upon my testimony. It made the pages of several newspapers, and was even featured in a documentary on NBC on the war on drugs.
A review of phone records lifted from Luis’ cell phone in his possession at the time of arrest showed numerous calls to a number in Peru that turned out to belong to “El Pacho” himself. A subsequent investigation revealed that “El Pacho” had grown significantly in the three years since I had left Peru. In a bold move, “El Pacho” took out his main supplier a few years back. But instead of wiping out his underlings, “El Pacho” offered to keep them on working for him, even increasing their wages. So, in addition to distributing, “El Pacho” had become a producer of cocaine, with three known laboratories operating in the jungles of Peru. And now he had distributed to the U.S., which gave me the venue for pursuing the organization.
For the next year, we pulled phone records for “El Pacho’s” number and worked informants in Peru to determine his location. The morning of the day that I was shot, the Peruvian National Police, with participation of the DEA (me and one other agent), executed a search warrant on a rural property on the outskirts of Tingo Maria where “El Pacho” was said to have been staying, but we came up empty – no sign of “El Pacho” and no drugs.
Unlike his brother, “El Pacho” was a very intelligent and resourceful individual. He was also ruthless and very prone to use violence to make a point – thus the hit he put out on me. But I couldn’t let it go. I could have no peace and never return to my life knowing that he was still out there. What he did to that poor kid was inexcusable. But what he did to me, was personal.