1 Killing but Many Victims

In another place, it might have passed for simple murder.

Maybe in a different family, it could have stayed a single tragedy.

But when a car thief killed prelaw student Bruno Jordan five years back, he did it in this desert city on the edge of Mexico. And he killed the darling of a prominent El Paso clan, famous for both its closeness and its two sons in law enforcement.

What followed was disaster--one that spread and twisted, contoured by the family it visited and colored by the very border, chaotic with dangers both illusory and real.

The first puzzle was the killing.

On a chilly night in 1995, a carjacker shot Jordan outside an El Paso Kmart. Burly and sweet-tempered, Jordan had driven over as a favor to a friend. It was the first fatal carjacking in the city’s history.

Next came the unlikely suspect: an itinerant juggler from Mexico, 13 years old.

In an unprecedented move, the government of Mexico defended the boy. The consulate financed his appeal, and he went free in May 1999.

Then, a second crime occurred, this one so wounding, so avoidable, it seemed the grieving Jordans had incurred some kind of curse. Jordan’s cousin, a young star in the Drug Enforcement Administration, was caught trying to hire someone to kill the now-freed teenager. Yet despite surveillance tapes and a conviction to the contrary, Salvador Michael Martinez insists he’s not a criminal. He and his extended family say he was framed.

It’s a complex theory in which narcotraffickers, rival law enforcement agencies and Mexico itself all helped to chart the Jordans’ ruin.

It sounds far-fetched. It would be easy to dismiss if the story hadn’t happened on the border, and if it didn’t pivot around Bruno’s brother, a former high official in the DEA.

*

Who grieves hardest in a mourning family?

When Lionel “Bruno” Jordan died, his older brother Philip was the one who grieved most publicly. Now 57 and a Plano, Texas, security consultant, Phil Jordan retired four years ago from the DEA. He spent 31 years at the agency, specializing in Mexico’s cartels.

He thinks Bruno was murdered because of him.

Six feet, 3 inches, with the bearing of an ex-athlete, Phil Jordan exudes canniness and candor. In 1964, he was recruited by the DEA from the University of New Mexico, where he’d starred in basketball.

He hadn’t planned it, but the job resonated with his family’s sense of justice. As a boy, he once reported to his parents that some local toughs had tried to sell him pot. “My father and my uncles got in the car, and they found the guys and beat the hell out of them,” Jordan says affectionately.

In 1995, after directing the agency’s Dallas bureau, Jordan landed one of the DEA’s choice jobs--running the El Paso Intelligence Center, known as EPIC, which is a super-sophisticated listening post that tracks worldwide drug traffic with surveillance devices and informants.

In triumph, Jordan came home to start the job on Jan. 17, 1995. Three days later, Bruno was killed.

The killing stunned El Paso, more used to violence on the far side of its bridges. The city of 600,000 lies a quarter’s toss from Mexico’s Ciudad Juarez, a growing whirlwind of 1.6 million. Each day, thousands of people traverse the Rio Grande to and from El Paso, which is more than 75% Latino.

But the brown river traces two universes. On one side, El Paso is one of the United States’ three safest large cities. Narco-importers bypass it scrupulously; fewer than 20 homicides occur here a year.

Across the river, Juarez offers its inhabitants both opportunity and easy death. Two industries propel it: maquiladoras, or piecework factories, and narcotics transshipment by the Juarez drug cartel. Notoriously bloody, the organization has been linked to more than 500 homicides in Juarez this decade. Nearly 200 people have simply vanished from the streets.

At first glance, Bruno seemed the victim of a plain robbery. As a favor for a female co-worker, he had driven her teal Chevrolet Silverado truck to a nearby Kmart parking lot. But when he arrived, witnesses say, a black pickup truck appeared and a youth wearing a dark jacket leaped out.

He shot Bruno twice with a 9-millimeter pistol, then tore off in the Silverado.

Bruno died that day, in a hospital five minutes from his parents’ house. Within one hour of the shooting, police arrested 13-year-old Miguel Angel Flores, a Juarez street urchin, who was wearing a dark jacket and walking near the Kmart.

“The whole city was very, very perturbed,” recalls Paul Strelzen, host of the area’s top-rated radio talk show and a Jordan family friend. “People really cared about the Jordans.”

Despite the quick arrest, police never got the gun, the truck or a usable confession.

“The case against Flores was lousy,” says Dave Contreras, who prosecuted him in two trials for the El Paso County Attorney’s Office. Because other evidence was inconclusive, the case hinged on identification: Two witnesses said Flores was the shooter, three said he was not.

The boy, who didn’t testify, insisted that he was en route to a nearby friend’s house. In the first trial, jurors twice deadlocked in favor of acquittal. On their third try for a verdict, a juror who was a seamstress discovered a marijuana cigarette in the lining of Flores’ jacket, which she was examining as evidence. Half an hour later, Flores was pronounced guilty.

The extraneous new evidence led to an appeal though, and this time the jury deadlocked, 11 to 1, in favor of acquittal. A third trial ended in a hung jury too, but jurors declined to give a vote tally.

Publicly, Flores always maintained his innocence. Yet when he was first in custody he told a policeman he had killed Bruno. Though juveniles sometimes confess to crimes they haven’t committed, “we’ll never know,” Contreras says. “We’ll never know.”

The boy finally went free in 1999. The killer remains a mystery.

Not to Phil Jordan.

Flores pulled the trigger, he believes. But the killing was ordered by drug traffickers.

“There is no doubt in my mind that Bruno was killed coldbloodedly, to send me a message,” Jordan says. “Why? Because I had all my career exposed corruption in Mexico.”

Though by no means alone, Phil Jordan built a reputation for criticizing Mexico’s authorities. Infuriating officials on both sides of the border, he publicly called Mexico uncooperative, corrupt and undeserving of certification as a drug war ally. The North American Free Trade Agreement, he argued, only eased the flow of drugs across national boundaries.

Although the U.S. spent almost $18 billion on fighting drugs in 1999--compared with $1.5 billion in 1981--illegal drug use has stayed the same for almost a decade, surveys show. Throughout that period, many experts say, U.S. anti-drug efforts were undermined by mammoth bribes paid by drug traffickers to the Mexican officials charged with stopping them.

In 1998, the U.S. General Accounting Office reported, these payoffs were “estimated for one organization to be as much as $1 million per week to Mexican law enforcement officials at the federal, state and local levels.”

“I’ve seen the corruption from a professional level--and now from a personal level,” Jordan says. During his own career, Jordan says, raids repeatedly were thwarted when Mexican police supposedly cooperating with him tipped off the drug traffickers.

With this perspective, Jordan developed a theory of how his brother died. The co-worker who’d asked Bruno to move her truck, Phil Jordan thinks, was helping her ex-boyfriend steal the Silverado for delivery to traffickers.

Those traffickers, Jordan believes, may in turn have ordered Bruno’s death to intimidate him--just as he was taking over EPIC. Then, he claims a consulate source told him, Mexico defended Flores with money from the Juarez cartel.

Jordan readily admits that he has no hard evidence, only countless private interviews with police and drug world contacts. But if the crime itself raised questions, the aftermath did too. In everyone’s opinion.

Just after the conviction, Flores’ 16-year-old brother, Jose, appeared dead on a Mexican bank of the Rio Grande. The Mexican coroner deemed it a drowning, but a sister who identified the boy reported he was badly beaten.

No accident, says Jordan. Informants, he says, told him the dead youth worked for the same traffickers responsible for Bruno’s death and was far more enmeshed with them than 13-year-old Miguel.

“He knew too much,” Jordan says of the older boy. “He knew how the [drug] operation worked.”

Mysterious as it was, though, the death didn’t conform to the usual vocabulary of drug hits, which, meant to serve as warnings, tend to be unambiguous.

Meanwhile, some observers saw irregularities in the case against Miguel. How could police miss the marijuana cigarette found in Flores’ jacket? Fearing that the boy was being railroaded, the Mexican consulate took over his appeal and successful defense.

Yet law enforcers who know the border say Jordan’s claims about drug lords’ involvement are plausible.

“It’s impossible to discount,” says one former DEA official. “The DEA’s relationship with Mexico, and threats and harm to DEA employees over the years, is not a good record.” At the same time, he adds, if Bruno’s death had been a warning, by now the DEA would know about it.

Consular spokesman Marco Antonio Fraire, meanwhile, vehemently rejects Jordan’s claims about the defense. Fraire has heard the allegations and says they’re ravings from a troubled man. “We do not give any kinds of comments to declarations coming from persons with emotional and mental problems.”

But Phil Jordan was not the one most undone by Bruno’s death.

*

“Expresivo.”

“Nervioso.”

“Sentimental.”

Nestled round the table in their El Paso kitchen, Bruno Jordan’s parents are describing their extended family’s character. In this high-strung clan of about 200 relatives, Bruno was peacemaker.

Practical, he studied prelaw at the local University of Texas branch, moonlighting as a salesman at the Men’s Wearhouse. The family darling, he lived happily at home, long after his four siblings left.

His sister, Virginia Castaneda, recalls the time Bruno’s best pal stole his girlfriend. Bruno, Castaneda says, had no aptitude for bitterness. “We said, ‘Stay away from that family; they’re not your friends,’ ” Castaneda says. “Bruno said, ‘Don’t worry about it.’ ”

He then entered a radio love letter contest, winning with a very melancholy, very public valentine to the woman who betrayed him.

So it was classic Bruno, running an errand for a co-worker at the Men’s Wearhouse. After the shooting, police scooped up Flores, a reedy boy who earned small change juggling in El Paso traffic dressed as a clown. In and out of court for five years, Flores finally was deported and now works in a Juarez maquiladora.

What lingered was a sad miasma at the Jordans’ house, a once-modest box that expanded over time with the long-limbed, athletic family.

“Before, it was joy,” says Bruno’s 79-year-old father, Antonio, a retired uniform-fitter at nearby Ft. Bliss. He used to love when Bruno, his friends and relatives converged here, amid the framed photos and silk flowers, for noisy barbecues.

“When Bruno died,” his father says, “it tore our family apart.”

Defiant and demure, Bruno’s mother, Beatrice, still adheres to her lifelong Olympian housekeeping standards. But her home now floats with apparitions. Recently a mute man in brown shoes startled the housekeeper by appearing out of nowhere in the hall, then vanishing. That was Bruno, says his mother, in the shoes she’d bought him right before he died.

*

It’s early spring in Texas’ Hill Country, and for someone awaiting sentencing for attempted murder, Sal Martinez samples his martini with disarming coolness.

Dining with his Jordan cousins at a Mexican restaurant near a slow river, Sal, cleanshaven, black shirt showcasing gym rat muscles, is bent on enjoying family while he can.

Above all else, he is sociable. Voted most popular in high school, he starred as a football cornerback. As a young adult he was a stalwart at the Jordan barbecues; afterward, he and Bruno would light off together, hitting nightclubs, betting at the dog track.

But while Bruno dreamed of striding courtrooms as a prosecutor, Sal idolized the DEA. He earned a criminal justice degree, worked as a state trooper, a U.S. Customs Service agent, then eight years ago joined the DEA.

In 1997 he got a post with the adrenalin he craved: Monterrey, Mexico, where, he says, his Latino looks and language skills helped glean intelligence about the Juarez cartel. With the permission of the Mexican government, the DEA employs many in such work--including Phil Jordan earlier in his career.

“Sal wanted to be like Philip,” Beatrice Jordan recalls. Always talkative, Sal chattered often about his important cousin--including, apparently, with a Mexican police chief and informant named Jaime Yanez.

That wasn’t all he talked about. In May 1999, on the day Flores was freed, a distraught Sal told the Mexican police officer he wanted to have the young man killed.

Yanez told the FBI. They sent him back, now with a wire, and taped Martinez offering $10,000 plus a gun to kill young Miguel Flores. In September 1999, Martinez drove to an Exxon station in McAllen to hand the policeman an envelope. Inside were Flores’ photograph and address.

The FBI arrested Sal in December. In February, after months insisting on his innocence, Sal abruptly pleaded guilty to attempted murder. In May, he was sentenced to seven years in jail.

“If you think you were entrapped, then take back your plea. I’ll give you a change right now; we’ll go to trial,” Judge George P. Kazen told him.

Sal glanced at his wife and whispered with his lawyer. Then he admitted to the charges. He had no choice, he said in a written statement afterward. His parents were both ailing, and a court fight with the government would have ruined them.

“The only person scheming was the informant. He found a weak spot in me,” Sal insists during the weekend in the Hill Country. “He pursued it, to retrieve my emotions and the pain of Bruno’s death.”

*

Strong emotion and expression are family traits, and no Jordan questions Phil’s outspokenness. The Jordans cleave to each other, their identity, their view of right and wrong.

Decades removed, most of the family roots lie in Mexico. To this day, the Jordans chat companionably in Spanish among themselves.

But family patriarch Eugenio Forti, Phil’s grandfather, came from Italy in 1915. There is some irony about his departure. Forti’s brother was murdered by someone who owed him money, the family says. With the help of a relative, Forti killed the murderer. Then he fled to Texas.

Forti was a newspaper columnist and storekeeper. He married a Mexican immigrant in the neighborhood where his family lives today. Now sown with warehouses, the area is hemmed by the Bridge of the Americas highway and jarred by trucks rolling into Juarez. But although Mexico lies only three blocks away, the Jordans shun it.

“We’re Texicans,” says Sal, grinning. More thoughtful, he adds, “With us, there is a certain animosity, and you feel embarrassed, about Mexico. There is a lack of discipline there.”

The attitude is common among border Latinos, University of Houston sociologist Nestor Rodriguez says. To some, he says, it reflects loss of family links to Mexico. In other cases, he says, it’s overcompensation by people who want to distant themselves from their ancestral origins. And to others like the Jordans, who still have family there but see them only in this country, “Mexico, especially the border area, is an area of social disorganization, social pathology,” Rodriguez says.

Phil Jordan, though, says it’s professional experience that has shaped his view of Mexico and his family’s misfortunes.

This is what he thinks: The Mexican policeman passed information not only to the DEA and FBI but also to the Juarez cartel. Seeing Sal’s emotional fragility, the policeman goaded him into speaking wildly. He then collected an informant fee from the FBI, and perhaps also from drug traffickers, bent on punishing Phil Jordan.

Then, Jordan speculates, the FBI stalked Sal as a common criminal rather than helping him as they would a troubled agent.

Neither DEA nor FBI officials will discuss the case, releasing only printed statements that condemn Martinez’s crime.

For their part, several drug war veterans concur with some of Jordan’s suspicions but flatly question his discernment overall.

“For Phil, a Hispanic, to be a special agent in charge was a tribute,” a Latino DEA official reflects. “In DEA, I think there’s only 22 people with that title. And Sal--he was a very, very qualified agent.”

But the agent scoffs at Jordan’s belief he is a target. “It’s always about Phil, isn’t it?” the agent says.

“To say, ‘Sal committed a wrong and we’re going to prosecute because we always prosecute,’ that’s just not true,” says prosecutor Contreras, a former FBI agent. “Feds work informants who are sometimes involved in illegal activity and don’t prosecute them.’

The case against Flores just wasn’t strong, Contreras says. Yet, he adds, “I can see why Phil drew the conclusions he did. You get kind of paranoid in this work. You know what’s happening 24 hours a day out there, and you start wondering about that car behind you.”

Even radio host Strelzen shakes his head at Jordan’s set-up theory. “I think it’s a cut-and-dried thing. Sal meant to do it,” Strelzen says.

As for the callers to Strelzen’s show, somehow they seemed less shocked at Sal’s crime than by Bruno’s death.

“Did it surprise us that the Jordans were going to put a hit on someone? No. We knew of Phil’s background in law enforcement. We knew of his love for his brother,” Strelzen says. “We in El Paso knew justice was not done. Sometimes you take the law in your own hands.”

*

On the bright Laredo morning after Sal receives his sentence, two tall men flank him in the sun outside the courthouse.

To Sal’s side stands Phil Jordan, broad-shouldered, silver-headed, his despair manifest only in his voice. Verbose as ever with reporters, he is so hoarse the words come out in whispers.

Nearby, a lank man in weathered jeans listens quietly. It is journalist and author Charles Bowden, working on a book about the family since Bruno’s death.

Bowden thinks Phil Jordan’s name politicized this case. He doesn’t know if Sal meant what he said in those taped phone calls.

Even so, it’s place as much as family that defines this tragedy, he says.

“There is a myth the border is a separate world. That’s nonsense,” Bowden says one day. “But it is a place where two very different worlds rub up against each other, an impoverished nation and the richest nation in the world, and that creates carnage on both sides.

“Imagine that both countries are tectonic plates,” he says. “This is the earthquake zone.”