STEVE MANOS, B'VILLE REPORTER HERALDED CARTELS

By Juan Montoya

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Gulf Cartel was just starting to take root and to spread its tendrils across Matamoros, northern Tamaulipas, South Texas, eventually spreading into the rest of the United States.

At the time, few people in law enforcement and the general public had heard of names like Juan Garcia Abrego or even knew the Gulf Cartel existed.

Around this border, locals were acquainted with old time underworld caciques like Juan N. Guerra, of El Tahuachal, the owner of the Piedras Negras Restaurant in downtown Matamoros. Guerra "Don Juan" had arrangements with federal customs officials and had the law sewn up with payoffs for the better part of 40 or 50 years. None other but he and his organization controlled the border. But that would all soon change.
(That's a photo published in El Norte showing Don Juan wearing a white hat and his nephew Garcia Abrego standing with drink.)

There was at the time, a reporter who was with the Brownsville Herald named Steve Manos, a Midwest native who took to the seamy side of the border underworld with gusto.

Manos had the classic Greek god good looks and a charming personality that allowed him to endear himself to his sources.

At the time, the undisputed lord of the drug and rackets underworld was Casimiro "Cacho" Espinoza. Manos was working the cop beat for the Herald and soon got wind that the majority of car thefts reported in Brownsville were being conducted under the direction of Cacho, his underlings and his enforcers.

Being an inquisitive sort, Manos sought out a way to interview Espinoza for a series of newspaper articles. He used the contacts in Brownsville to work his way in for an interview. And he did.

This was no easy feat. In 1975, Cacho had sidled up to a fellow underworld criminal named Rubén Galván Bochas and – after ordering a whiskey – shot him four times without warning. Thousands of dollars later a court found that he had acted in self defense.

According to stories written by El Bravo's Oscar Treviño Jr., "every police agency were at his service. He had ears and eyes spread all over the city. His nickname was pronounced in hushed tones. Everyone knew what rackets he controlled."

Cacho not only controlled the stolen car racket in Brownsville, but also the marijuana, cocaine and heroin traffic. Along the way, he left a trail of murders and terror. Paranoid and vain, he muscled out the competition.

Among some of those competitors was the rising star of the Matamoros and Tamaulipas underworld Juan Garcia Abrego, the premier leader of the fledgling Gulf Cartel. Abrego, the nephew of Juan N. Guerra.

But all that came after Manos sought and got the interview with Espinoza.

According to eyewitnesses, Espinoza had Manos brought to his home and wait in a room where he was made to undress and stand before several men and a few women in his nakedness. After enduring the humiliation, Cacho had him brought before him where he granted Manos the interview, denying, of course, that he engaged in any criminal activity.

After the interview was published in the Herald, word came out that Cacho was not pleased with the article and let it be known that he would seek retribution from the reporter. It wasn't that the story was not true, but rather that the criminal did not imagine that Manos would publish it in a newspaper for the world to see.

Some of us who used to know Steve saw he grew visibly worried about the threats and changed his car for a motor scooter that he would hide in the newspaper's mail room so that none of Cacho's people would see it parked out in the side parking lot. After a time, he even took to carrying a gun for protection.

Eventually, the pressure got too great and – with his wife Jolinda expecting a child – he had to leave town and seek safer pastures.

However, Cacho did not fare as well. More and more he saw himself surrounded by Garcia Abrego and the new cartel. Treviño says that when he demanded $50,000 from his longtime associate Oscar "El Profe" Lopez Olivares and went to collect on the appointed time, El Profe was waiting for him with seven armed men. El Profe had worked with Garcia Abrego and U.S. federal authorities say Garcia Abrego ordered the hit to eliminate Cacho as his competition. 

El Profe later became a protected witness and provided information to U.S. prosecutors against Garcia Abrego, for whom he worked in the mid to late 1980s.

Cacho had been wounded in the gun battle and was taken to the General Hospital in Matamoros. Treviño wrote that a bullet had pierced his right lung and that it exited in his lower back. He had been ambushed by a gunman from the roof of El Profe's house.

After the surgery, the police decided to move Cacho to La Clinica Raya, which was near his house and, supposedly, well protected. This didn't stop a commando of gunmen who shot their way in and attempted to finish the job. Cacho, however, wasn't killed there there, but died on the way to Monterrey where he was being transported for medical care.

With his death, Garcia Abrego became the de facto kingpin of the drug trade in northern Mexico and the Gulf Cartel reached it heyday. The rest, as the man said, is history.

Those of us who read Manos' articles in the local newspaper at the time did not know that Garcia Abrego's organization would eventually grow into a hub of a narcotics smuggling syndicate of staggering dimensions that presaged the turning of most of Mexico into a battleground for turf among a profusion of drug cartels. Manos' articles were the first glimpse we had of the horror that was to come.