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The Life And Death Of A Cartel Horseman. From around 2. 00. Miguel Treviño Morales, a leader of the infamous Los Zetas cartel, spent and made millions of dollars buying, breeding, and racing American quarter horses, with help from his law- abiding American brother and a wealthy young Austin rancher. This excerpt from Bones: Brothers, Horses, Cartels, and the Borderland Dream, a new book from journalist Joe Tone, tells the story of two operatives whose love of horses led them on a collision course with Treviño, the FBI, and each other. The calculations started as soon as Ramiro’s loafers shuffled into the barn. His eyes adjusted, and his brain started receiving dispatches about what he was seeing: thick haunches, hinged backs, steep shoulder slopes, and all the other variables that make the difference between racehorse and runner. It was winter in Pomona, Calif., where the final quarter- horse auction of 2.

Ramiro moved through the barns, making small talk in his choppy English with the other horsemen—trainers looking for their next champions, breeders hoping to make a big sale. They were some of the best in the business. Watch Heavy Metal Streaming here.

Ramiro knew them all. They knew him, too. They knew him by various nicknames, including “the Horseman” and “Gordo,” which they recognized as the Spanish word for “fat.” It made sense, given the way his cheeks and midsection curved like birthday balloons, pushing his 5- foot- 9 frame over 2. But at 3. 5 years old, Ramiro was handsome, too, with eyes that played puppeteer to an electric smile, hair that crashed like a Malibu wave, and polo shirts in every color of Ralph Lauren’s rainbow. He was a fresa—a “strawberry,” a preppy—through and through. Most of the quarter- horse cowboys knew Gordo by his real name, José Ramiro Villarreal Guajardo. Even if Ramiro didn’t exactly fit in—if his loafers seemed impractical, his polos a little bright for this hour, his double- fisted cellphones more than a little obnoxious—Ramiro knew the sellers welcomed the sight of him.

The Great Recession was grinding toward its 1. A drought was ravaging Texas and other parts of the West, driving up hay prices. That meant the wealthy ranchers, oilmen, and businessmen who drove the quarter- horse industry were doing what wealthy people did in historic droughts and capital- R recessions: selling their planes and selling their horses. Sale prices were falling. That was bad news for the sellers but good news for brokers like Ramiro.

He was buying not for himself but for horsemen back home in Mexico, who trusted him to pick out well- bred babies and haul them back across the border. He never said who his buyers were; they were “Mexican businessmen” and nothing more. He could safely assume that everyone in the barns knew what kind of business those Mexicans were in. But the industry didn’t care, so long as Ramiro kept showing up to spend his clients’ money.

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Recently, though, Ramiro’s clients had been spending bigger but sending money less reliably. At a small sale in Dallas that summer, he’d spent $1. In two auctions in Oklahoma that fall, he’d spent $3. At one in New Mexico, he’d spent $3. And at another in California, he’d spent $4.

No other buyer came close to spending that much. The checks eventually cleared; the wires eventually came through.

But Ramiro was falling behind, despite spending hours fielding and making phone calls in an effort to settle his debts. The industry was losing patience. Twice recently, sale managers had pushed Ramiro against auction- house walls, demanding he pay off the balance of his bills. Yet when Ramiro’s hand went up at the next auction, they never told him to lower it. They needed his clients’ money. Watch Phantom Pain HDQ. The Pomona auction house offered two positions from which to bid.

One was inside, in the small gallery that circled the sales ring. The other was outside, around the artificial- turf walking ring, where the horses were displayed before being led up a faux- brick walkway and inside.

Ramiro liked it outside. There was a bid- spotter out there, looking for flying hands, and it was a good place to get one last glimpse of a horse before the bidding started. Ramiro found his post along the rail and struck his usual pose, his belly flung out in front of him and his sales book resting on top of it. His hand flew all morning, as he stocked up on quality breedings for relatively cheap. By the time the auction reached its final hour, he’d spent a little more than $1.

Then the auctioneer called hip number 1. Tempting Dash,” the auctioneer bellowed. A handler walked into the ring beside a sorrel yearling colt whose sire, First Down Dash, was the most famous, and most prolific, in the history of quarter- horse racing. Quarter horses are shorter and stockier than their thoroughbred cousins, bred to run short, straight races with a lot of bumping. Its roots can be traced in Colonial America, but nowadays it’s the dusty brand of horseracing preferred by the cowboys of the American Southwest and Mexico. The bidding for Tempting Dash climbed through the low five figures.

Ramiro steadily lifted his hand as the other bidders fell away. Maybe it was the horse’s May birthday, which meant he’d be one of the younger two- year- olds on the track the following year. Maybe it was his size; he was small, shorter and skinnier than the prime yearlings, which stood somewhere around fourteen hands and weighed 8. Whatever the reason, Ramiro found himself the last bidder to raise his hand, with the price stuck at $2. Tempting Dash’s lineage.“Sold,” the auctioneer said, to the ruddy- cheeked fellow in the bright polo with the phone pressed to his ear. Another bargain for his clients back in Mexico. Ramiro grew up in a middle- class family in Monterrey, Nuevo León, a cosmopolitan city once known as a haven from the violence of Mexico’s drug war.

His obsession with horse racing seemed born from native talent. As a teenager, he’d cobbled money from friends and relatives to buy cheap horses at auction and race them at the small tracks that dotted the Mexican countryside. His horses always outperformed their purchase price, which got the attention of other horse owners. Ramiro started making a living by picking and buying promising young quarter horses for ranchers and other wealthy businessmen. Eventually Ramiro’s keen eye got the attention of the drug criminals, including a high- ranking member of Los Zetas, the notoriously savage drug gang that ruled much of northern Mexico. The Zeta, Jesús Enrique Rejón Aguilar, used the code name Z- 7, meaning he was the seventh special- forces soldier to defect from the Mexican military to join Los Zetas.

But everyone called him “Mamito,” a play on Mamita, the common term of endearment for Latina women. Mamito’s plate was full. He paid bribes to state policemen and soldiers, and he collected pisos, taxes, from traffickers who wanted to move drugs through the Zetas’ territory. If they didn’t pay those pisos, he was usually ordered to kidnap them, torture them, and, if necessary, kill them.

But like many of the high- ranking Zetas, Mamito found time for racing quarter horses. He noticed Ramiro’s talent for picking horses and tapped him to pick some winners at the auctions in the United States and bring them back to Mexico to race. Watch Hitman Online Etonline more. Throughout his 2. Ramiro had built a sustainable income as a broker, but Mamito’s business offered more revenue. The more expensive the horse, the higher Ramiro’s commission, and Mamito wanted some of the priciest horses. Ramiro started showing up at the big auctions in Oklahoma City, Dallas, and southern California, bidding on horses from Mamito’s favored bloodlines, including First Down Dash. Mamito then found a legitimate Mexican businessman to pay off Ramiro’s debts at the auction houses, instructing them to send a check or a wire and promising to repay them from his stash of drug money.

Ramiro operated like this throughout most of the 2. Though he was buying for narcos, he had managed to remain independent, a safe distance from their business and their culture.