Attack on Journalist Was a ‘Crime Foretold’ : Crime: Tijuana man and his son were ambushed after campaign to bring to justice the killers of another family member. A violent gang of rich young men turned drug traffickers are the suspects.

Last Monday morning, reporter Dante Cortez, a veteran of this border city’s police beat, and his 19-year-old son, Galileo, hurried out of their house on their way to a news conference.

They were wearing business suits--and pistols in their belts.

Dante Cortez had organized the news conference to criticize the police for failing to catch drug gangsters suspected in the murder of his eldest son. Cortez had been investigating the crime on his own and, for the past several weeks, had publicly warned authorities that he was receiving death threats.

Suddenly, a white Mercury Topaz pulled up and a gunman emerged, shooting the elder Cortez twice in the face. Galileo Cortez recalls the scene: His father collapsing in the street, his mother screaming from the house, explosions of sound and glass as Galileo emptied his .32 revolver at the Topaz, the shock shuddering through him when a bullet hit his belly.

Galileo Cortez felt fear and rage, but not surprise.

“This was a crime foretold,” said the solemn, wiry youth with short curly hair, during an interview in a small private hospital surrounded by police guards armed with shotguns. “Everyone knew it was going to happen. But I would have died happy. Because at least I was able to defend myself and my family.”

The two victims survived. And the crime has forced Baja California into a dramatic, painfully public test of the power of the state against the power of the underworld.

The ambush broke one of the unwritten rules of the Tijuana streets: It was the first attack on a journalist by suspected drug traffickers in the city’s recent bloody history. The three alleged assailants are suspects in a string of murders dating back at least three years; they reportedly belong to a violent gang of rich young men turned drug traffickers.

Despite evidence implicating the “narco-juniors,” the police have been intimidated by their influential families and reputed cartel connections, according to law enforcement sources. Now, during the final week of Baja’s gubernatorial election campaign, the authorities are feeling enormous pressure from a vociferous press corps, which has rallied around its wounded colleague.

“They have taken a very dangerous step by attacking my father,” Galileo said. “This is a war. I don’t know where it’s going to end.”

The investigation has been entrusted to a secretive special prosecutor’s unit created by the governor that has successfully handled other sensitive cases, such as last year’s murder of the city police chief. Gov. Ernesto Ruffo Appel told insistent reporters Thursday that arrest warrants have been issued and police are making progress.

“From what the attorney general tells me, we are making advances,” Ruffo said. “We hope to resolve this soon with arrests.”

In response to widespread doubts, a Baja investigator told The Times: “When we have enough evidence, we will go after the suspects, no matter who they are.”

Traffickers in Baja have shot police commanders and other public figures, but the senior Cortez is the first journalist in years to become a victim of drug-related violence. The still-unsolved assassination in 1988 of a prominent Tijuana columnist has been linked more to personal motives than drugs.

Cortez, 63, is a Tijuana archetype: the grizzled, street-smart police reporter.

Beefy, with tinted glasses and combed-back hair, Cortez could be mistaken for a detective of the judicial (state police), a look acquired during decades in the hard-boiled milieu where cops, gangsters and journalists converge. He chose sonorous names for his children (a daughter is named America.) And he taught his trade to his eldest son, Espartaco Dante, a strapping 22-year-old who worked as a photographer and cub reporter alongside his father for El Mexicano newspaper and a Mexican news service.

Galileo Cortez describes his brother and their friends as a group of middle-class kids who grew up going to the same schools, parties and nightclubs as the children of Tijuana’s wealthiest neighborhoods. These enclaves of ornately gated mansions--Cacho, Chapultepec, Hipodromo--rise into the hills behind the historic Agua Caliente racetrack.

Neither Galileo nor his brother has a criminal record, police say, though they did not shy away from fistfights. Galileo said: “We don’t let people push us around.”

As teen-agers, however, about 20 of their childhood acquaintances among the “juniors,” as the ostentatious offspring of the Mexican elite are known, went dangerously astray.

To a great extent, the soldiers of the drug cartels come from an unending supply of impoverished Mexicans, who are seduced by offers of a few thousand dollars to pull a trigger or drive a smuggling load across the border.

In contrast, the juniors had it all: sports cars, fashionable clothes, Acapulco vacations. But their riches bored them and their parents ignored them, according to Galileo and police sources familiar with the gang.

“From the time they were little, they saw everything in terms of money,” Galileo said. “In their adolescence, they had more money than affection. We had more affection than money.”

The wealthy young men descended into the fast-cash drug culture that has tainted the Mexican political and economic systems, crossing the line from wanna-be gangsterism into cross-border smuggling, mid-level dealing and murder, police say.

Some fell in with the Arellano drug cartel that controls the northwest border, police say. The three suspects in last week’s ambush have been linked to unsolved killings in Mexico and the United States--including the death of Espartaco and a quadruple murder in 1992, in which frenzied gunmen shot up a taxi with assault rifles, slaying a Tijuana boxing promoter and three other reputed drug traffickers.

Accumulating criminal records and at least one murder warrant, the youths have eluded a state police force that sometimes seems overwhelmed by the firepower and corruptive influence of the mafia.

Police have yet to publicly name the suspects, who are between 21 and 24 years old.

A few months ago, Galileo said, the narco-juniors clashed with the Cortez brothers and their buddies in a dispute involving girlfriends. He said the seemingly minor macho rivalry escalated in lethal fashion: Two of Espartaco’s friends were shot to death as they sat in a black BMW.

Then, on June 18, two helmeted riders on a motorcycle chased down Espartaco outside a party in a wealthy neighborhood and shot him seven times in front of more than a dozen onlookers.

The murder--and rumors that it was part of a purge within the Arellano cartel--devastated the Cortez family. The killers may have been involved in drugs, they said, but Espartaco was not.

After the murder, Galileo Cortez and his father conducted a kind of parallel investigation, making the rounds of their street contacts. They say they passed on information, including the names of the suspected killers, to detectives.

“I told them locations where they hang out, houses,” Galileo said. “It was very risky, but we wanted them to be caught. And this is what I want to ask the governor: Why didn’t they act sooner?”

Weeks passed. Callers threatened the family with death. A motorcycle sped repeatedly by the house. Gunshots went off in the street at night. Galileo left his cross-border job at a suburban San Diego golf club to barricade himself with his family.

He and his father met recently with the special prosecutor, Odin Gutierrez Rico, who took over the case and ordered the municipal police to guard the Cortez home. There is a dispute among the police about whether those instructions were heeded.

The Cortez family complains that the special prosecutor failed to pursue the leads aggressively. In response, state investigators say privately that the information was not solid enough to make arrests without further investigation.

The upshot: Last weekend, a frustrated Dante Cortez telephoned a group of his colleagues in the press. He invited them to meet him Monday morning at a downtown diner, where he would reveal everything he knew about the case. Somehow, the gunmen found out.

Galileo suspects a turncoat among his father’s fellow reporters.

“There is a traitor,” he said. “Someone must have leaked the information. We did not tell anyone else about the conference, not even the police.”

Although it is not unthinkable that a journalist could have gangland ties, a more benign explanation is that information spreads rapidly on the journalist-police grapevine in Tijuana. The underworld has many contacts.

On the morning of the attack, father and son were carrying bulletproof vests. Just before the gunfire, though, they stored the vests in the car trunk, not wanting to wear them with their suits. Galileo probably saved their lives by returning fire, causing the gunmen to flee.

In the aftermath, all the members of the Cortez family have taken refuge at the heavily guarded Hospital Notre Dame. They are waiting for Galileo and his father to recover. And wondering if it will ever be safe to leave.

Sitting stiffly on his hospital bed in a blue robe, his hand on his bandaged abdomen, Galileo looks defiant and sad as he recounts the events that led inexorably to the shootout in the street. At that moment, he and his father felt abandoned, left to fend for themselves.

But Galileo has not given up hope.

“My brother’s murder hurt me very much,” he said. “I have to tell you that I am Catholic, and I started to doubt my religion. But this has been a real miracle: that my father could be shot twice in the face and survive, that I survived. I have regained my faith.”