eBook
Related collections and offers
Overview
Martin Corona, a US citizen, fell into the outlaw life at twelve and worked for a crew run by the Arellano brothers, founders of the the Tijuana drug cartel that dominated the Southern California drug trade and much bloody gang warfare for decades. Corona's crew would cross into the United States from their luxurious hideout in Mexico, kill whoever needed to be killed north of the border, and return home in the afternoon. That work continued until the arrest of Javier Arellano-Félix in 2006 in a huge coordinated DEA operation. Martin Corona played a key role in the downfall of the cartel when he turned state's evidence. He confessed to multiple murders. Special Agent of the California Department of Justice Steve Duncan, who wrote the foreword, says Martin Corona is the only former cartel hit man he knows who is truly remorseful.
Martin's father was a US Marine. The family had many solid middle-class advantages, including the good fortune to be posted in Hawaii for a time during which a teenage Martin thought he might be able to turn away from the outlaw life of theft, drug dealing, gun play, and prostitution. He briefly quit drugs and held down a job, but a die had been cast. He soon returned to a gangbanging life he now deeply regrets.
How does someone become evil, a murderer who can kill without hesitation? This story is an insight into how it happened to one human being and how he now lives with himself. He is no longer a killer; he has asked for forgiveness; he has made a kind of peace for himself. He wrote letters to family members of his victims. Some of them not only wrote back but came to support him at his parole hearings. It is a cautionary tale, but also one that shows that evil doesn't have to be forever.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781101984642 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Penguin Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 07/25/2017 |
| Sold by: | Penguin Group |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 320 |
| Sales rank: | 925,393 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
1
The Letter
I was in Sandstone Federal Correctional Institution in Minnesota. It's a low security facility that houses mostly nonviolent offenders-white-collar criminals who commit their robberies with gold-plated pens and computer spreadsheets and snake their way through the SEC systems with the hope of getting away clean.
In addition to the financial hustlers, crooked politicians, and their bagmen, there were also people like me at Sandstone-confidential witnesses who testified in court against their former criminal associates. We weren't white-collar guys.
Some people call Sandstone and places like it White-Collar Country Clubs. And in some ways, that's accurate, at least compared to the supermax facilities. At least in Sandstone. You don't have the hard-core gangsters, the unrepentant racists, the cold-blooded killers, and the various sociopaths that could go off without warning like a stick of dynamite. You don't have to fight for your life.
In my case, I'd like to say it was doing easy time. But it wasn't. The real prison I inhabited wasn't Sandstone. It was my own conscience. It was the guilt. Although I'm now technically free, I still carry my prison with me. There's no escape from this one. There's no crashing through the wall or even receiving a pardon. In every legal way, I've paid my debt, done my time, and fulfilled all the obligations of testifying against the people who sent me out to kill. But the freedom that most people take for granted, the freedom of an easy conscience, is something that I'll never again experience.
My handler at the time, Steve Duncan, was one of the first people in law enforcement who I could talk to and not feel like he was just trying to get some more information out of me for his case. By 2008, I'd spent a lot of time with him. He spent time with my parents and helped to get them someplace safe out of the reach of the Arellano-FŽlix assassins.
One day I asked him if it would be okay for me to try to write a letter to the survivors of the people I killed and the ones who survived my attempt to murder them. He thought about it for a while and then said he thought it was a good idea. Not that it would reduce my sentence or get me any better deal with the US Attorney. That was all behind me at that point. My deal had been made. I knew I would be getting out of prison by a certain date and there was nothing I would get out of this except, hopefully, communicate my sense of remorse to the people I wronged.
There's no manual on how to do this. I started and stopped a number of times. And I tore up the first few tries because it literally made me sick to think of the harm I'd done. But those people deserved . . . something.
This letter is addressed to all those whose lives I've affected personally as well as all humanity. I apologize for not addressing you by name, but I don't feel worthy of that intimacy. Please don't mistake my humility for lack of respect.
My name is Martin Corona and I am a murderer. It's . . . something I live with daily in shame and disgust.
I once worked for the Arellano-FŽlix Drug Cartel. I served as one of their many puppets who were dispatched at the whim of the Arellano brothers to take the lives of those who posed a threat to their business . . .
I can begin by saying I'm sorry. But I can't help wonder what would that mean to me if someone took one of my loved ones away.
I don't seek forgiveness or empathy. Only an opportunity to tell you that I despise the man that I was and whom I must face each morning when I look in the mirror. I may have had a change of heart in my life, but it's still the same evil some of your loved ones had to look upon as they drew their last breath.
There is nothing I can do to repay the sins I've committed. I can literally offer you my life and it's one thing I would freely lay down if it would reverse the past. I've tried to take it by my own hands on more than one occasion but for some reason, I've been spared.
My other alternative is to continue the mission that I've set for myself. That is, to speak out against the people and the beliefs that I once claimed loyalty to. I never had any personal intention to harm you or anyone. I never woke up one day and decided to go on a killing spree . . .
"I'm sorry," is all I have to say . . .
Respectfully,
Martin Corona
Duncan forwarded the letter to some of the people I indicated. Most of them did not respond. One of them, a young female, contacted Duncan and told him she would like to meet me one day. But not just yet. Not enough time had passed and she wasn't ready to relive the nightmare I'd put her through. But the one thing that she wanted me to know was that she forgave me. She didn't blame me.
I'll tell you, it was the first time in decades that I was truly humbled and felt like a member of the human race again. To know that at least in her eyes I wasn't this subhuman monster seemed to lift at least a little of my guilt.
It wasn't long after her response that I began thinking about writing about my life. If I could make her understand, it was possible to make other people see that evil isn't always forever.
I don't believe anyone is born into the world to be evil. Something significant had to come along to be a turning point. Sometimes it's a circumstance like poverty, drug-abusive parents, sexual abuse, physical abuse, or maybe the overwhelming feeling that you just don't matter to anyone. And if you are finally convinced that you don't matter, it can cause you to do extraordinary things that finally get you noticed. What makes a kid want to commit suicide at the age of twelve? Or bring a gun to school? Or rebel so bad that their parents "don't even know who you are."
I've heard that one. Who knew who I was back in the nineties when I leaned down low, focused, armed, looking for the right moment to act? I mean, is anyone going to tell me that I was born to be sitting in a car, living my own version of a Mack Bolan novel? Watching three dealers serve dope fiends in the middle of the street in Los Angeles, in broad daylight, and I'm doing my best to figure out how to kill them without getting caught? And at the same time make sure that everyone connected to those three knows that my bosses, the Arellano FŽlix brothers, don't take no shit from their enemies?
Two days after that initial recon, two of those dealers will have clocked out permanently and the other would die six months later from mercury poisoning from the mercury-tipped slugs that I had fired into him. The fact of the matter is that my crew was crazier than anything Mack Bolan could have done and we were not fictional characters. We were for real and we didn't play at being assassins. I was one of the Arellanos' top hit men and that day I was making good on the contract the Arellanos had put out on Chapo Guzman and anyone connected to him. What brought me to that particular street with my machine gun loaded with mercury-tipped bullets? I wasn't born evil, but my life is what I made of it.
2
Posole
The family situation I was born into looks unremarkable from the outside. My father, Fred, was a career US Marine master gunnery sergeant who wore the uniform for thirty-three years. The anchor and globe they gave him when he finished boot camp was just acknowledging the code that he'd operated under for his entire life. In my mind, he had sprung full-blown as a Marine. I was insanely proud of my father. It didn't go the other way.
My family on my mother's side arrived in Oceanside, California, in 1917. They drove from Texas in a car and an old truck. In 1916, Pancho Villa stopped a train in Mexico and killed eighteen American citizens in cold blood to register his displeasure that President Woodrow Wilson was not backing Villa's faction in the revolution. That same year, Villa invaded the town of Columbus, New Mexico, burned it to the ground, and left another nineteen US citizens dead in the streets. When I think about that, I wonder if the violence I would eventually inflict in Mexico and the US drove some of the hundreds of thousands of illegal border crossers into California and the Southwest.
My grandmother's family found whatever jobs they could in an area that was still heavily agricultural and predominantly Mexican. My father's family had migrated from Mexico and settled in Texas. As soon as he could enlist, he did. He was assigned to Camp Pendleton, just north of San Diego, California. Oceanside is basically a bedroom suburb of Camp Pendleton. They used to say, "You can't swing a dead cat in Oceanside without hitting a Marine."
When my grandmother was young and living in Oceanside, she did field work. She picked oranges, lettuce, and strawberries. To make a few extra dollars, my great-grandmother and great-grandfather began cooking in the evenings for the unmarried workers who didn't have families. After a day stooped over cutting lettuce, they and my grandmother would go home and cook massive amounts of posole.
The British have their steak and kidney pie and boiled beef. The Italians have pasta, and the Germans have their sausages and sauerkraut. Mexicans have posole. It's a corn-based stew that originated in pre-Columbian Central America. It's as much a sacrament in Mexican life as Communion and baptism. You eat posole when you're sick to make you feel better. You eat it when you're well to stay healthy. And you eat it in honor of a culture that seems to have dissipated and dissolved under the hooves and flintlocks of Western European immigration. The woman who produces posole isn't exactly worshipped, but pretty damned close.
My grandmother became the "Posole Lady" in Oceanside. She sold the stew out of her kitchen and often delivered it. She became so connected to her cooking that the area in Oceanside she lived in eventually came to be known simply as Posole. For most of the twentieth century, Posole was just the name the locals called the area. By the 1960s, when neighborhoods began giving birth to street gangs, Posole became the name of our gang as well. Posole was my home gang. It was under the Posole umbrella that I began my criminal career. In a strange way, I felt like I owned the neighborhood because my family had been there longer than anyone else. My grandmother's cooking gave the entire neighborhood its name.
By the time a teenager is ready to be jumped into a gang, he is literally prepared to kill and die for his neighborhood. To an outsider, this level of commitment to the gang and the neighborhood seems insane. Maybe you need to have been raised in the varrio to understand how young men can turn their backs on their families and, frankly, the entire noncriminal world, and volunteer for a suicide pact with their homeboys. I was probably a lot more committed to the gang than most of my homies. I lived the gang life right up to the point that it was going to kill me. I bought the ticket to the horror show and stayed for the entire nightmare performance. And I was one of the leading players.
Blood connections to the barrio weren't limited to young males. The girls had their own little cliques and groups. When my mother was growing up, she belonged to the Tangerines. It wasn't a gang in the strict sense of the word. It was more a social club or what would pass for a sorority in college. They had their own Tangerines jackets and they wore the same kind of hairstyle and makeup. The friendships they made as teenagers would last a lifetime. They would marry their girlfriends' brothers or cousins. And a lot of them would get pregnant with guys they never married but never really stopped socializing with in the neighborhood. Decades later, the whole neighborhood would basically become a huge extended family where everyone knew everyone else's history and we were all connected one way or another. I guess this social system played out in every Hispanic neighborhood in California.
When I was eight, my father was ordered to Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. Prior to this, the only place I'd been outside of California was to Mexico for holiday trips. In those days, Mexico wasn't the free-fire cartel killing ground that it became. There was always drug dealing and smuggling, but nothing on the scale that I would witness in the 1990s.
Once, smuggling was almost considered an honorable profession on the Mexican border. Old-school paisas (Mexican villagers) hauled turquoise, mescal, gold, and silver into the US on donkeys. During Prohibition, they smuggled liquor imported from Europe, or Mexican-brewed tequila. These farmers and traders had no ambition of becoming internationally celebrated criminals. They were subsistence smugglers who knew their way across the desert and could pick out their route over the mountains and across the desert by moonlight or a Zippo lighter. Those routes used by the mescal haulers are still in use today, but the subsistence smugglers were replaced by cartels like the Arellano FŽlix brothers, who became rich enough to buy the Mexican government.
I remember sitting in the rear bench seat of the Ford Torino station wagon we had and watching the Baja California landscape roll by the tinted windows. That was the brief time in my life when I was still a goofy kid who liked reading and writing, was good at math, and could not resist taking mechanical things apart. Years later, as a freshly released convict from the California Department of Corrections, I was driven down the same Highway 1D, the Tijuana to Ensenada road, in a blacked-out Chevy SUV armed with a full-auto AK-47. We had hand grenades and pistols too.
My parents and I made the trip to Camp Lejeune in that Torino. To save money, we slept in the car. In North Carolina, we lived off base in military housing. There was a clear, fast-running creek behind the house that held fish and frogs. Beyond the creek, there were dense woods that went on for miles.
Table of Contents
Foreword vii
Part 1 Sorrow
1 The Letter 3
2 Posole 9
3 The Beach 21
4 Gladiator School 27
5 The Ones That Got Away 39
6 Power Boosting 47
7 Surenos Don't Stoop 55
8 A Chance in Hawaii 69
9 Baby 83
Part 2 Education
10 Big D's Tickets 95
11 Circus Circus 107
12 Small Fish, Big Ocean 115
13 The First Order of Business 129
14 Mainline 139
15 I Want to Kill Him 149
16 The Hole 159
17 Plastic Knives 169
18 Real Great Dudes 177
Part 3 Profession
19 A Big Enterprise 189
20 Bullet Hoses 199
21 The Fai Guy 213
22 Getting It Done Right 225
23 Respect 235
24 Wasn't for Her 249
25 Bad Karma 261
26 Neglected Business 275
27 "Are You Against Us?" 281
28 Out of My Life 291
Related Subjects
Customer Reviews
Explore More Items
