TIJUANA — The informant paid his own way to Mexico City and strode into a hotel room in an upscale neighborhood, willing to end the reign of one of Mexico's most brutal crime bosses.
He wanted money, he told four Drug Enforcement Administration agents, but that wasn't his primary motivation. The Tijuana drug cartel insider said he had grown disgusted by the savagery of Teodoro "El Teo" Garcia Simental — the pudgy kingpin whose criminal mayhem was generating headlines around the world.
Baja California, once a popular destination for day-tripping Americans, had become one of Mexico's most violent regions. Army soldiers patrolled in convoys and manned bunkers flanking highways. Torture victims' bodies hung from overpasses, and once-crowded beaches became playgrounds for mob bosses and their entourages.
Sitting across from the agents in a double-locked hotel room that day in late 2009, the informant handed over his cellphone. It listed a number he said was Garcia's. An agent wrote it down.
"This is something I can do to clean up my country," the informant said, according to an agent, who added: "He wanted to do his obligation as a citizen."
That meeting, not previously disclosed, set off an investigation that quickly culminated with Garcia's arrest during a predawn raid on his hideout in La Paz, in southeastern Baja. In a drug war plagued by setbacks and mistrust between U.S. and Mexican law enforcement, the capture was an example of binational cooperation that brought instant, lasting results.
The hunt for cartel chieftains yielded another major success Monday, when Mexican marines seized Miguel Angel Treviño Morales, the notorious commander of the Zeta organization. Like Garcia, he was known for extreme brutality.
When Garcia was captured three years ago, the beheadings, massacres, high-speed chases and daytime shootings stopped in Baja. Restaurant tables in Tijuana started filling up again, cops were no longer targeted, and some of the thousands of people who had relocated to San Diego started moving back into the city.
In the years immediately before the raid, such a scenario was hard to imagine.
Garcia was a "Batman"-esque villain whose lieutenants included a man sporting skull tattoos for every murder he committed and a former bricklayer whose sole job was to dissolve enemies in barrels of lye.
The Tijuana organized crime group that spawned Garcia, better known as the Arellano Felix drug cartel, had long operated in Tijuana, largely tolerated under an unwritten code: Criminals were free to move their drugs to the U.S. as long as they kept their bloodletting among rivals.
Garcia broke all the rules.
A onetime enforcer, he assembled his own crew and started targeting the citizenry, kidnapping hundreds and holding them for ransom. Garcia extorted shoeshine vendors and human smugglers alike and roamed his east Tijuana stronghold in a convoy of 10 vehicles.
In April 2008, Garcia's clash with a cartel rival left 14 dead on a highway, triggering a drug war that introduced a style of terror that would become commonplace across Mexico. Garcia's rivals weren't just killed; they were mutilated and had their tongues cut out. They were rolled in carpet and set aflame. Many were beheaded and tossed onto busy streets.
U.S. authorities in San Diego watched the carnage with growing concern. They had demolished the cartel's upper ranks through arrests and prosecutions, only to watch the once-obscure Garcia ascend. In a 2008 intelligence report, the FBI expressed concern that drug war violence would spill over the border, noting that senior members of Garcia's gang lived in downtown San Diego.
Some federal agents and prosecutors wanted to indict Garcia and have him extradited to the U.S.; others said the situation was too urgent to wait for a case to be put together.
"We always wanted to press charges on Teo, but when you're listening to death and destruction every day and the kidnapping of people, you just can't allow it" to go on, said one high-ranking U.S. law enforcement official who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of security concerns.
Garcia expertly eluded capture. He constantly switched phones and rarely called twice from the same location. Police informants alerted him at the first sign of trouble, most memorably in 2009, when Garcia and his cronies escaped a raid at his rented oceanfront cottage by running down the beach.
U.S. authorities did have a tenacious ally: Tijuana's then-secretary of public safety, Julian Leyzaola. His 2,000-officer police force had once functioned as little more than an arm of organized crime, but Leyzaola had purged hundreds.
The remaining cops were caught between the professional demands of Leyzaola and the death threats and bribes of the shadowy crime boss. Forty-five officers eventually died at the hands of Garcia's gunmen.
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