A Cousin’s Story of Cocaine Trafficking : Camarena case: A government witness gives an inside look at the Guadalajara drug cartel. He tells how he bungled his way from drug handler to money courier.

Frank Retamoza insists he had no intention of joining the family business when he traveled south to Tijuana in 1980 to visit his cousin at the El Presidente hotel.

But his tall, square-jawed cousin presented a tempting role model. Surrounded by his usual fawning delegation, including four bodyguards, Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo was on his way to amassing cash and property worth an estimated $1 billion as one of Mexico’s most notorious drug lords.

Two years later, as the American-born Retamoza tells it, his cousin gave him a chance to come along for the ride, sending him two kilos of cocaine. The bumbling Retamoza bungled the sale, getting ripped off by the buyer. But eventually, Retamoza said, his cousin found a job that suited his skills--money courier.

Driving his camper virtually every week from Los Angeles to Guadalajara, Retamoza said, he made one delivery after another during the high-flying days of 1984.

Asked in court last week how much cash he transported over an eight-month period, he replied matter-of-factly: “The total was about $150 million.”

Retamoza now is a prized witness against the Guadalajara drug cartel, whose members are accused of killing U.S. drug agent Enrique Camarena. Retamoza and about 30 family members are in the federal witness protection program at a cost of more than $400,000 to the government.

“I was afraid because I know my cousin,” Retamoza explained during frequently halting testimony over two days. He decided to become a witness, he said, because of “my own personal feelings about all that, (the) trafficking.”

“You saw the light?” a skeptical defense attorney asked him.

“I always did,” Retamoza replied.

The first week of the trial of four defendants in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles dealt little with Camarena’s 1985 torture and murder. Instead, the focus was on drugs, with the prosecution using a series of witnesses to outline the vast empire of drug traffickers who allegedly saw Camarena, the aggressive Drug Enforcement Administration agent, as a threat.

One witness told the jury of a network of marijuana ranches protected by Mexican authorities. Other witnesses told how a front company was used to buy airplanes to carry cocaine to remote landing fields in Arizona and California.

But no one provided such an inside view of the enterprise as Retamoza, who literally was part of the family.

Of the small group of young drug lords who rose to power in Mexico during the 1980s, Felix was reputed to be the wealthiest, acquiring 25 houses, seven ranches, hotels and a collection of antique cars. While many traffickers were unrefined men, Felix mixed easily with political leaders and society families. The DEA called him “El Padrino,” the Godfather. He is now in prison in Mexico on drug charges.

Retamoza was born in the United States, he said, moved for a time with his family to Mexico, but returned in 1973 when he was 19. He settled in San Pedro, working as a machinist.

The purpose of his 1980 trip to Tijuana, he said, was to talk to Felix about payment for some land in Sinaloa once owned by his mother. Felix “said he was going to pay,” but never did, Retamoza recalled.

But Felix apparently saw possibilities in his first cousin, later giving him $20,000 to buy walkie-talkies in Los Angeles, Retamoza said. He said he toured electronics stores and bought “all of them” that he could find.

In 1982, Retamoza said, Felix arranged for a woman to give him two kilograms of cocaine in a Hollywood parking lot. He was supposed to sell it for $55,000 per kilogram to a man named “Mike,” but made the mistake of handing over the drugs with only a promise of payment. “I never found him again,” he said.

He told his cousin by phone what had happened.

“Was he upset?” asked Assistant U.S. Atty. Manuel A. Medrano.

“Yes, he was.”

Later, they tried it with four kilos, Retamoza said. He sold two of them through relatives, “got ripped off” for the third and had to return the rest, unsold.

“Was Felix Gallardo mad at you again?” the prosecutor asked.

“Yes, he was,” Retamoza said, explaining that his cousin told him he owed $80,000 for the lost drugs.

They began sending him cars from Mexico. A woman he knew as “La Tia,” the Aunt, would deliver them at various locations, and he would drive to his home or one of a friend, he said. Then they would remove the fuel tank and find the hidden compartment in which cocaine was stashed. He processed 40 to 60 carloads that way, he said, a total of “600 to 800 kilograms,” nearly a ton.

Someone else would pick up the cocaine. He didn’t have to sell anything.

In 1984, they let him meet two 600-kilo loads at clandestine airstrips. He brought the drugs to stash houses in Lake Elsinore and Santa Monica, he said.

Retamoza said he then flew to Guadalajara to see Felix. “I needed to discuss with him what I was doing,” he explained. “I wanted to see what was the remainder of the debt.”

His cousin grew angry when he suggested he should be earning more money for his work, Retamoza said. “He threw me out.”

But he was called back in the room, he said, for some advice from his cousin’s business partner, Juan Ramon Matta Ballesteros: “In this business, you have to start at the bottom. I did that, too. You have to be patient,” Retamoza said Matta told him.

Matta also told him there was a “new business” and things were “going to be getting better,” Retamoza said.

U.S. law enforcement officials describe Matta, a Honduran native, as the key link between Colombian cocaine growers and Mexican drug traffickers. Already serving a life sentence for drug trafficking, Matta allegedly helped establish the new route for shipping the drug to the United States after crackdowns by authorities in the previously favored route, through South Florida.

“He said that in a year I could make a million dollars,” Retamoza recalled.

In fact, he said, he went on to earn $500,000 for new duties, which began with a 36-hour motor-home trip to Guadalajara in March, 1984.

Retamoza’s mouth went dry, his voice turning to a squawk, as he told how Matta and Felix counted the money he brought that first time. On the stand in a gray suit, his hair and mustache neatly cropped, he reached for a glass of water.

“There was some money missing . . . $150,000,” he said.

“And you were held responsible?” Medrano asked.

“By both of them.”

But they gave him more assignments. They showed him “night vision” goggles and asked him to buy some in the United States. And there were about two dozen more camper trips, he said, with cocaine profits assembled from various Los Angeles distributors, who would page him by beeper.

“We didn’t make a trip for less than $5 million,” he said.

Retamoza described himself as a good soldier, keeping records in code and carefully destroying them after each delivery.

But they stopped calling him to make the Guadalajara runs in early 1985, he said, about the time DEA agent Camarena was killed.

Retamoza said he surrendered to authorities last year because, “I wanted to say what I knew.”

As they have with all informant witnesses, defense attorneys challenged Retamoza’s motives, suggesting he would lie to keep from going to jail for his own crimes. In exchange for his cooperation, the Justice Department asked U.S. attorneys in six jurisdictions--three in California, the others in Florida, Arizona and Washington--not to prosecute him.

“You have to do whatever they want, don’t you?” asked Matta’s attorney, Martin R. Stolar.

“I just want to say the truth,” Retamoza retorted.

Retamoza said he lives under an assumed name with his wife and three children and is paid $1,675 per month for expenses by the government. His brothers and sisters also entered the witness program with their families, but he does not know where they are, he said.

During his cross-examination, Stolar noted that no one made Retamoza enter the drug trade after the visit to his cousin in Tijuana.

“What forced you?” he asked the witness.

“Circumstances,” Retamoza said.