Kitabı oku: «Bones: A Story of Brothers, a Champion Horse and the Race to Stop America’s Most Brutal Cartel»

CHAPTER TWO
BLOODLINES
POMONA, CALIFORNIA
December 2008

The calculations started as soon as Ramiro’s loafers shuffled into the barn, kicking dust particles into the crinkles of the cowboys’ boots. As his eyes adjusted to the dark, Ramiro’s 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. There were some runners in the barns this morning. That was the only takeaway from a stroll through here, some babies that would be blazing down the track by spring.

It was winter in Pomona, one of the dozens of suburbs splayed east of Los Angeles that everyone’s heard of but few have visited, a kissing cousin to Covina and Pasadena. Ramiro was born, raised, and still lived in Monterrey, the industrial heartbeat of northeastern Mexico. But he spent a lot of time traversing these suburbs in rental cars. He went to the track in Los Alamitos for the races, the stud farm in Bonsall to buy breedings, private ranches, public auctions, and anywhere else he might find a quarter horse worth studying. This particular suburb was home to the Barretts auction house, where the final quarter-horse auction of 2008 was about to get started.

It was a small sale, 160 head, compared to 500 or even 1,000 at bigger auctions. Ramiro’s particular interests made it feel even smaller. He bought mostly yearlings, one-year-old horses that would hit the tracks as two-year-olds the following year. He also targeted weanlings, which hadn’t yet turned one, as well as embryos and foals still in utero, counting on the strength of their genetics alone.

This sale would feature a mix of all kinds of quarter horses, including foals, weanlings, yearlings, stallions, and broodmares. Still, Ramiro had reason to be excited. The Schvaneveldt Winter Mixed Sale, as this auction was called, was run by the family of one of the sport’s winningest trainers, Blane Schvaneveldt, and had attracted horses from the best bloodlines in the business. It was also a new venture, so attendance was sparse. That meant less competition on the way to the gavel.

Ramiro moved through the barns, peering through the metal bars of the stall doors. He made small talk in his choppy English with the other horsemen milling about—trainers looking for their next champions, breeders hoping to make a big sale. They were some of the best in the business. 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 five-foot-nine frame over 250 pounds. But at thirty-five 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. He could be a pain in their asses when it came time to collect, and the old cowboys occasionally had to remind Ramiro just how Ford Tough they were. But Ramiro knew—everyone knew—that when the auctioneer started bellowing his gibberish, Ramiro was welcome here. Especially these days.

The Great Recession was grinding toward its thirteenth month. Home prices were in a free fall. 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. A mixed sale like the Schvaneveldts’ averaged ten thousand dollars per horse in a good year; this year might only average six thousand.

That was bad news for the Schvaneveldts but good news for brokers like Ramiro. He was buying not for himself but for horsemen back 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.

Ramiro kept coming, and the money kept coming—eventually. Since Ramiro was a reliable big spender, the auction-house managers didn’t demand that he settle up before he hauled his horses off to Mexico, as they might with lesser-known buyers. They let him take possession of the horses and then pestered him throughout the year to send the balance. So long as he zeroed out his account before the next auction, he remained a valued customer.

Recently, though, Ramiro’s clients had been spending bigger and sending money less reliably. At a small sale in Dallas that summer, he’d spent $112,000 on four yearlings, more money than any other buyer. In two auctions in Oklahoma that fall, he’d spent $370,000 on twenty-eight horses—and then promptly bounced ten checks worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. At one in New Mexico, he’d spent $357,000 on eleven horses. And at another in California, he’d spent $405,000 on seventeen horses. 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. Today especially. The crowd was thin, which meant sellers would be either giving deep discounts or buying back their horses and waiting for a new day. But Ramiro’s Mexican clients seemed impervious to economic downturns. They wanted more horses, and the best horses, always.

Walking through the barns, Ramiro could get a sense of a horse’s demeanor, its build, its balance, all data points that might influence how high he might be willing to bid. Sometimes he asked one of the handlers to heave open a stall’s sliding door and walk the animal around, so he could see how the horse handled itself in space. But the real data was in the catalog he was holding. Each page was covered in size-nothing type detailing a single horse’s lineage—sire, dam, their sires and dams, and the career highlights of every horse along the line. Wins in “stakes races” were set in a heavier black font, which allowed seasoned buyers to assess the pedigree with a flip of the page. Their eyes were trained to scan for that coveted black type.

Like all buyers, Ramiro was especially interested in a horse’s sire. Like all buyers, he was especially interested if that sire was First Down Dash. A champion racehorse in the 1980s, First Down Dash was the sport’s most prolific breeder, responsible for hundreds of winners and millions in earnings.

The 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.

He started slowly. He placed a bid on a “foal in utero,” an embryo or fetus still developing in the womb. Buying an unborn horse was sort of a blind wager, with big risks and a big upside. Instead of buying on the strength of a horse’s pedigree and conformation—its genetic promise and its physical reality—here Ramiro was betting only on the horse’s lineage. He did it often. He nabbed that first embryo for $1,500, and several horses later, his hand rose on another. This one had been sired by famous First Down Dash, but it was still a long shot, given that the foal could be born with any number of defects, or could just be slow, or could goddamn die on its way into the world. Still, Ramiro bid $13,500 on it.

Ramiro kept on like that, stocking up on quality breedings for relatively cheap. He paid $30,000 for a horse called Bench Mark Dove, $16,500 for Azeann, $6,700 for Beduinos First Down. By the time the auction reached its final hour, he’d spent a little more than $100,000 on seven horses, including some of the sale’s most expensive.

Then the auctioneer called hip number 140, the 140th horse of the auction, its number penned on its hip. A handler walked into the ring beside a sorrel yearling colt. A white racing stripe bisected the horse’s face, falling down the steep angle from brow to nose.

“Tempting Dash,” the auctioneer bellowed. Ramiro’s hand twitched back to life.

The bidding 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 somewere around fourteen hands and weighed 850 pounds. Whatever the reason, Ramiro found himself the last bidder to raise his hand, with the price stuck at $21,500, a meager sum considering 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.