Life Sucks

Molina remembers that Devia always had money. Maybe she should have been suspicious, she says in retrospect. She'd come home from work as a debt collector at Chase Bank to find a Louis Vuitton purse on the couch or pricey, last-minute plane tickets to visit her family in California. For her birthday, Devia once bought her a mink coat. Another time, he brought home a bag full of emeralds — the gems traditionally used in Colombian wedding rings.

Devia was the kind of guy who'd slip $100 into Molina's best friend's purse when she was having a tough time making ends meet. So when he had $2,000 in cash and preferred to keep it in a box upstairs rather than in the couple's bank account, Molina didn't say anything.

But on August 22, 2004, she got a frantic call from Devia's mother, saying agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement were taking away her son. Molina quickly shelled out several hundred dollars for an attorney to sort out Devia's immigration status.

A couple of weeks later, a friend called and told her to turn on the news. Devia wasn't in custody because of his status as an illegal immigrant. Instead, he'd been indicted in one of the biggest drug busts in Kansas history.

Mauricio Garces, Jacinto Hernandez and Bill Joe Antle were at the center of a drug ring that smuggled more than 24,000 pounds of marijuana and 640 pounds of cocaine from Mexico to the Kansas City area between 2002 and 2004.

Molina says she recalls Garces coming over to their house. Everyone called him "Loco" — a fitting nickname for a funny guy who was great with kids. Like Devia, he was from Colombia; he introduced Devia to a couple of other guys from their home country.

Hernandez and Antle owned Anaco Transmission, a tan-brick warehouse marked with a yellow sign on Merriam's main drag. The no-frills shop was a straight shot south from KC One, and Devia says the three men became better acquainted because he bought parts and borrowed tools from them.

It didn't take long for the UMKC student to understand that the transmission shop was dealing in more than auto parts.

And making millions doing it.

Federal prosecutors describe Hernandez as a skilled mechanic who got greedy. Established in 1996, Anaco Transmission was a profitable business until 2002, when Hernandez turned it into the headquarters for his drug trade. The operation quickly caught the attention of federal investigators, who would go on to detail Hernandez' operation in documents filed in the U.S. District Court for the state of Kansas.

Early that year, Hernandez helped broker a deal with a Raytown man named Oswaldo Pozo to use Pozo's house to receive large shipments of marijuana. Pozo would earn $5,000 for each load.

Between May 2002 and the summer of 2003, at least six semi-trucks loaded with sandbags pulled up to his residence. Each bag was marked with a number. Most were packed with nothing more than dirt. Soon the phone would ring and a nameless man in El Paso, Texas, would tell Pozo which sacks were stuffed with weed. Pozo would scoop out the sacks with a front-loader. Then he'd wait for Hernandez, Antle, Garces or others to shuttle it away for distribution.

Pozo also received at least two large shipments of cocaine, concealed in a false compartment in the gas tank of a Kenworth T-20 semi. For each 60-pound load, Pozo's take was $7,000.

Hernandez, one of two ringleaders, didn't scare easily. Twice in 2002, he was arrested, once with more than 350 pounds of marijuana, the other time with nearly 50 pounds. Prosecutors stressed that even when Hernandez knew he was under surveillance, he continued his drug smuggling.

In 2003, the Anaco owner bragged to an informant that he had distributed more than 60 kilograms of cocaine "in a matter of a few days." Some of his customers were federal informants, who regularly purchased 1-kilo sacks of cocaine at the transmission shop. By the end of the year, Hernandez was also responsible for distributing hundreds of pounds of marijuana that were being held at a turf farm in Stillwell, Kansas.

By early 2004, feds had tapped Hernandez's and Antle's cell phones and were monitoring the comings and goings of Antle's black Dodge Ram. In April, investigators learned from a wiretap on Hernandez's phone that he and Antle were heading back from El Paso with a bounty of drugs. The next day, the black truck, towing an empty trailer, rolled through one of the garage doors at Anaco Transmission. Investigators intercepted calls from a major buyer accusing Hernandez and Antle of delivering less than they'd promised.

By the middle of that year, it was getting harder to do business. After one trip to the Texas border, Hernandez hopped a commercial flight back to Kansas City, and Antle drove home empty-handed when the deal fell through because they couldn't find a safe location to load the drug cache. Back in Kansas City, phone conversations between the dealers started to focus on arrests, the fact that they were under surveillance and the shortage of drugs.

Then Garces — the social guy Molina remembered as Loco — implicated Devia.