Rosella thought a few moments, then said, “The DEA? U.S. Customs? ICE? Border Patrol? Police in all border states? Riddled with corruption. All of them. Even FBI down there. You know what? It’s understandable. There’s so much money and so many reasons to take it.”
“From the Alejandro cartel?”
“No doubt.”
Rosella said she had been a New Mexico state trooper before she joined the DEA, and she’d met her husband shortly afterward. Eddie Hernandez was assigned to be her partner and trained her. Though they tried to keep their relationship professional, the attraction between them had been immediate and intense.
“I fell in love with Eddie the moment I met him,” she said, shaking her head. “It’s what made me blind to it all while I was at the agency. I didn’t last long. I got pregnant and resigned so we could marry. By then I already suspected Eddie wasn’t true blue but I ignored it. Until I couldn’t.”
“Extra cash around a lot?” Sampson asked.
Rosella looked in her lap and nodded. “Eddie said almost everyone working down near the border took some at some point. Especially if you had a family. See? That’s one way they get you.”
According to Rosella, the Alejandro cartel kept tabs on new agents and waited until they were in a financial squeeze before approaching them with a small bribe, something easy to take, easy to justify as a onetime deal. But the hook was set and they kept you on the line. “The money got bigger as you became a bigger fish,” she said.
“Like Eddie coming here to work intelligence?” I asked.
She nodded again. “It gave the cartel a direct line into what the honest agents were doing and what those agents knew about the cartel’s activities.”
“But I thought Eddie was part of the team that put away Marco Alejandro,” Sampson said.
“At a certain point, everyone on both sides of the border knew that Marco was going down. He’d gotten too big, too public. In the end, Eddie gave his allegiance to the cartel, not the man who founded it.”
“Where’s Eddie’s money?” Sampson asked.
“Various security boxes around the country,” she said. “And he changed a lot of it into cryptocurrencies. That’s where it’s all going these days, Eddie said. According to him, eventually cash will become irrelevant and governments will be unable to trace digital currency.”
“Do you know the names of other corrupt agents?”
Rosella straightened in her chair. “I do, but I won’t name them and I won’t tell you how I know until we’re safely in witness protection.”
“But you will testify as to what you know?” Sampson said.
She hesitated before nodding. “If that’s what it takes to protect my kids, yes.”
“Is Special Agent Hanson on the take?” I asked.
“I don’t think so,” she said. “Eddie seemed leery of her. But better safe than sorry. I hate to sound paranoid, but you have to protect us if I’m going to blow this wide.”
“We’ll protect you from the cartel,” I said.
“The cartel?” she said. “I’m more worried about whoever killed Eddie.”
“You have suspicions?”
Rosella pursed her lips and closed her eyes for a moment before saying, “A couple of years ago, two DEA agents were shot to death in the desert outside Nogales, Arizona. Eddie said he believed it was a rogue law enforcement insider, probably DEA, who’d gone vigilante against agents on the take.”
“Eddie knew who it was?” Sampson said.
“No, but the killer left a note on an index card on one of their bodies saying both agents were completely corrupt and deserved to die. Eddie said DEA covered the note up, but it was signed Maestro.”
Chapter
51
We waited until Ned Mahoney arrived to talk with Rosella Hernandez while her demand for federal witness protection worked its way up the chain of command at the Department of Justice.
Mahoney also had orders from the U.S. Attorney General’s office for DEA Special Agent in Charge Jill Hanson; she was directed to stand down, cooperate with the FBI, and immediately hand over all pertinent evidence. Including the confession.
Hanson was furious but did as she was told. Within minutes we had the evidence bag containing the bloodstained, unopened confession. We read it inside Rosella’s house as she worked with two officers from the U.S. Marshals to pack in anticipation of a move.
Written in a shaky scrawl, the late Eddie Hernandez’s confession corroborated and gave details on what his wife had told us. The agent had been compromised his second year with DEA, taking a twenty-five-thousand-dollar bribe to look away when the Alejandros ran ten pounds of illegal fentanyl across the border. It was a test and Eddie passed.