Psst. I’ll Meet You at Big Boy

In Hollywood’s “Casablanca,” everybody went to Rick’s Cafe Americain.

In the real-life Tijuana, a city with a cinematic air of border intrigue, everybody goes to Bob’s Big Boy. (El Big.)

Cops, reporters, spies, lawyers, political bosses and former, current and future government officials--they all haunt the diner with the statue of the short, fat guy in front.

The Big Boy franchise sits on Boulevard Agua Caliente, the city’s main drag, across from the bullring and not far from the racetrack. El Big serves around-the-clock coffee, burgers, enchiladas--a classic trans-border mix of cuisines.

But the hottest item is the conversation about news and politics, crime and conspiracy: a web of whispers as labyrinthine and melodramatic as the reality of today’s Mexico.

“Instead of chasing around town after the news, you go to Big Boy,” said Dora Elena Cortes, a Tijuana correspondent for the Mexico City-based El Universal newspaper. “And the news comes to you.”

The diner opened two decades ago. Its longevity has made it an institution.

Tijuana also boasts four Denny’s outlets. Such establishments are popular not only at the border, where U.S. culture has a heavy influence, but throughout urban Mexico. The preferred meeting places of the middle class seem to be roomy, brightly lit, generic coffee shops with glossy plastic menus and names such as Sanborns, Wings and VIPS.

“More than places to eat, they are places to sit and talk over coffee,” said Manuel Valenzuela Arce, a sociologist and expert on popular culture at the College of the Northern Border in Tijuana. “In the past, people would get together in the cantina, or in the park. With urbanization, they don’t do that anymore. . . . People need new spaces to meet and talk.”

Although the talk at Big Boy often revolves around sinister topics, the atmosphere is disarmingly homey--a juxtaposition typical of Tijuana.

The green-uniformed waitresses are friendly and efficient. Parents bring their boisterous children. The simple facade, circular booths and gleaming laminated tables invite you to linger. Ernest Hemingway evoked just such a feeling of shelter in his story “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” about an old man who sits at night in a pleasant Madrid cafe because he is alone and in despair.

Simultaneously, though, Big Boy exudes a sense of action, a whiff of the milieu where politics, police and the press intertwine.

Francisco Perez Tejada, last year’s unsuccessful gubernatorial candidate for the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), dodged the cameras on election night. But he surfaced here on a recent evening.

“It is a refuge for police and politicians,” Valenzuela said. “Probably some of the best and worst things that have happened to us in Tijuana were organized there.”

Indeed. During a roller coaster of Mexican crises starting in 1994, the city has been ground zero. And from the March, 23, 1994, assassination of presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio to other front-page crimes and scandals, El Big has been buzzing.

It was here that a reputed Lebanese gunslinger hung out with tough-looking characters until he turned up dead in a bullet-shredded Chevrolet Suburban on the night of March 3, 1994, a victim in the epic downtown shootout pitting federal agents against turncoat state police and their gangster bosses.

It was here that the ex-cops who formed Grupo Tucan, a dubious security team for the ill-fated campaign rally where Colosio was shot, huddled ashen-faced during the weeks when they were rounded up as suspected conspirators.

It was here that a regular customer with connections in the domestic espionage agency in Mexico City predicted--a few days before the fact--the government’s dramatic televised unmasking of Subcommander Marcos, the leader of the Chiapas guerrilla uprising.

It was here that police radios crackled with word of the murder of Jorge Alberto Duarte, the gentle and beloved warden of the Tijuana prison, who was gunned down in front of his home as he returned from work a year ago.

And it is here that reporters who cover crime and politics spend hours in a haze of caffeine and nicotine: exchanging tips, documents and theories, poring over bloody photos of the Colosio assassination.

In such treacherous times, sources are reticent about seeing their names in print, said Manuel Cordero, who works with Cortes at El Universal and is the consummate Tijuana police reporter.

“The first thing they say is: ‘You didn’t see me, buddy, you didn’t talk to me, you don’t know me.’ Then they tell you what’s going on.”

Cortes and Cordero are day-and-night denizens of Big Boy. They hold court--she sips coffee, he stirs a cup of tea--at a strategically located booth by the entrance.

Cordero is a martial arts expert and has a hard-boiled habit of referring to newsmakers as monkeys, as in: “This monkey is giving a press conference at 1 o’clock.” He once taught self-defense at the municipal police academy, so police respect him: some know from experience that he can beat them up.

Cortes is ebullient, cheerful and relentless. She talks at the speed of an AK-47 assault rifle. Her legion of sources encompasses relatives, high school chums, political insiders and a healthy percentage of the patrons at Big Boy.

Cortes and Cordero won Mexico’s National Journalism Prize for their coverage of the Colosio assassination. After almost four decades of combined experience on the border beat, it was a triumph for two maestros of Tijuana journalism, an art based on instincts, contacts and hustle.

The Mexican press has shaken off a history of government control; its evolution has sped social reform. Like watchdogs unleashed, Mexican journalists are confronting the powers that be with courage and ferocity. Although the pay and budgets are improving, the profession retains a muckraking swagger that has faded in U.S. newsrooms. And although fax machines and computers are tools of the trade, they still assume the phones are tapped and do business face to face in a safe place.

Like Big Boy.

The diner has distinct rhythms. Breakfast is busy: the regulars include a group of ganaderos, dignified and solid-looking men who make their money in the livestock business. Plunking down briefcases, unholstering cellular phones, they convert the tables by the windows overlooking Boulevard Agua Caliente into an informal office.

In the afternoon, when Mexicans eat their traditional late lunch, the crowd at Big Boy thins out--a sign that the appeal may be more social than gastronomic. The pace and the conversations pick up again as darkness falls.

One assiduous late-night customer is David Rubi, the legendary chief of the Grupo Tactico Especial (Special Tactical Group) of the municipal police.

Clad in his trademark black leather jacket and baseball cap, the granite-faced, mustachioed commander drops in after 10 p.m. for coffee. An earpiece wired to his two-way radio keeps him abreast of potential mayhem and catastrophe. A thin cigar smolders between his fingers.

The elite Grupo Tactico, part SWAT and part flying squad of yore, consists of about 60 youthful, athletic men and women who wear cool black uniforms and careen around town hanging off the sides of police pickup trucks. Their leader, probably the toughest cop in town, has fought on the front lines of the battles of “narco-politics” at the border.

Rubi played a historic role during the pandemonium after Colosio was shot. He intervened at the urging of the frantic crowd and blocked the path of military guards who were driving off with the captured gunman. As television cameras rolled, Rubi pointed his rifle at the federal guards and forced them to accept an armed escort to police headquarters. Conspiracy theorists are convinced that he prevented the death or disappearance of the assassin.

Rubi also led an all-out anti-drug campaign in which the Grupo Tactico racked up more seizures than the federal police. Corrupt federal commanders retaliated by assassinating Federico Benitez, the reformist city police chief.

So Rubi watches his back. And he has a cautionary tale about those who do not.

“I remember two young officers in Mexico City years ago,” he says. “Rookies. They arrested a drug trafficker. They were very polite: ‘Excuse me, sir, we are placing you under arrest.’ And he said, ‘I see. Would you permit me to go upstairs and get my suit jacket before we leave?’ And they said, ‘Not at all. Go right ahead.’ He went upstairs, got his gun and shot them both.”

A few war stories later, the commander polishes off his coffee and heads out into the Tijuana night.

But he will be back. Big Boy is a refuge; a clean, well-lighted place. Hemingway would have liked it. Even without the bullring across the street.