1 KILLING BUT MANY VICTIMS

Ex-DEA agent Phil Jordan sees drug lords' hands in his brother's
slaying and related misfortunes.

EL PASO - In another place, it might have passed for simple
murder.

Maybe in a different family, it could have stayed a single
tragedy.

But when a car thief killed prelaw student Bruno Jordan five years
back, he did it in this desert city on the edge of Mexico. And he
killed the darling of a prominent El Paso clan, famous for both its
closeness and its two sons in law enforcement.

What followed was disaster--one that spread and twisted, contoured by
the family it visited and colored by the very border, chaotic with
dangers both illusory and real.

The first puzzle was the killing. On a chilly night in 1995, a
carjacker shot Jordan outside an El Paso Kmart. Burly and
sweet-tempered, Jordan had driven over as a favor to a friend. It was
the first fatal carjacking in the city's history.

Next came the unlikely suspect: an itinerant juggler from Mexico, 13
years old.

In an unprecedented move, the government of Mexico defended the boy.
The consulate financed his appeal, and he went free in May 1999.

Then, a second crime occurred, this one so wounding, so avoidable, it
seemed the grieving Jordans had incurred some kind of curse. Jordan's
cousin, a young star in the Drug Enforcement Administration, was
caught trying to hire someone to kill the now-freed teenager. Yet
despite surveillance tapes and a conviction to the contrary, Salvador
Michael Martinez insists he's not a criminal. He and his extended
family say he was framed.

It's a complex theory in which narcotraffickers, rival law enforcement
agencies and Mexico itself all helped to chart the Jordans' ruin.

It sounds far-fetched. It would be easy to dismiss if the story hadn't
happened on the border, and if it didn't pivot around Bruno's brother,
a former high official in the DEA.

Who grieves hardest in a mourning family?

When Lionel "Bruno" Jordan died, his older brother Philip was the one
who grieved most publicly. Now 57 and a Plano, Texas, security
consultant, Phil Jordan retired four years ago from the DEA. He spent
31 years at the agency, specializing in Mexico's cartels. He thinks
Bruno was murdered because of him.

Six feet, 3 inches, with the bearing of an ex-athlete, Phil Jordan
exudes canniness and candor. In 1964, he was recruited by the DEA from
the University of New Mexico, where he'd starred in basketball.

He hadn't planned it, but the job resonated with his family's sense of
justice. As a boy, he once reported to his parents that some local
toughs had tried to sell him pot. "My father and my uncles got in the
car, and they found the guys and beat the hell out of them," Jordan
says affectionately.

In 1995, after directing the agency's Dallas bureau, Jordan landed one
of the DEA's choice jobs--running the El Paso Intelligence Center,
known as EPIC, which is a super-sophisticated listening post that
tracks worldwide drug traffic with surveillance devices and informants.

In triumph, Jordan came home to start the job on Jan. 17, 1995. Three
days later, Bruno was killed.

The killing stunned El Paso, more used to violence on the far side of
its bridges. The city of 600,000 lies a quarter's toss from Mexico's
Ciudad Juarez, a growing whirlwind of 1.6 million. Each day, thousands
of people traverse the Rio Grande to and from El Paso, which is more
than 75% Latino.

But the brown river traces two universes. On one side, El Paso is one
of the United States' three safest large cities. Narco-importers
bypass it scrupulously; fewer than 20 homicides occur here a year.

Across the river, Juarez offers its inhabitants both opportunity and
easy death. Two industries propel it: maquiladoras, or piecework
factories, and narcotics transshipment by the Juarez drug cartel.
Notoriously bloody, the organization has been linked to more than 500
homicides in Juarez this decade. Nearly 200 people have simply
vanished from the streets.

At first glance, Bruno seemed the victim of a plain robbery. As a
favor for a female co-worker, he had driven her teal Chevrolet
Silverado truck to a nearby Kmart parking lot. But when he arrived,
witnesses say, a black pickup truck appeared and a youth wearing a
dark jacket leaped out.

He shot Bruno twice with a 9-millimeter pistol, then tore off in the
Silverado.

Bruno died that day, in a hospital five minutes from his parents'
house. Within one hour of the shooting, police arrested 13-year-old
Miguel Angel Flores, a Juarez street urchin, who was wearing a dark
jacket and walking near the Kmart.

"The whole city was very, very perturbed," recalls Paul Strelzen, host
of the area's top-rated radio talk show and a Jordan family friend.
"People really cared about the Jordans."

Despite the quick arrest, police never got the gun, the truck or a
usable confession.

"The case against Flores was lousy," says Dave Contreras, who
prosecuted him in two trials for the El Paso County Attorney's Office.
Because other evidence was inconclusive, the case hinged on
identification: Two witnesses said Flores was the shooter, three said
he was not.

The boy, who didn't testify, insisted that he was en route to a nearby
friend's house. In the first trial, jurors twice deadlocked in favor
of acquittal. On their third try for a verdict, a juror who was a
seamstress discovered a marijuana cigarette in the lining of Flores'
jacket, which she was examining as evidence. Half an hour later,
Flores was pronounced guilty.

The extraneous new evidence led to an appeal though, and this time the
jury deadlocked, 11 to 1, in favor of acquittal. A third trial ended
in a hung jury too, but jurors declined to give a vote tally.

Publicly, Flores always maintained his innocence. Yet when he was
first in custody he told a policeman he had killed Bruno. Though
juveniles sometimes confess to crimes they haven't committed, "we'll
never know," Contreras says.

"We'll never know."

The boy finally went free in 1999. The killer remains a
mystery.

Not to Phil Jordan.

Flores pulled the trigger, he believes. But the killing was ordered by
drug traffickers.

"There is no doubt in my mind that Bruno was killed coldbloodedly, to
send me a message," Jordan says. "Why? Because I had all my career
exposed corruption in Mexico."

Though by no means alone, Phil Jordan built a reputation for
criticizing Mexico's authorities. Infuriating officials on both sides
of the border, he publicly called Mexico uncooperative, corrupt and
undeserving of certification as a drug war ally. The North American
Free Trade Agreement, he argued, only eased the flow of drugs across
national boundaries.

Although the U.S. spent almost $18 billion on fighting drugs in
1999--compared with $1.5 billion in 1981--illegal drug use has stayed
the same for almost a decade, surveys show. Throughout that period,
many experts say, U.S. anti-drug efforts were undermined by mammoth
bribes paid by drug traffickers to the Mexican officials charged with
stopping them.

In 1998, the U.S. General Accounting Office reported, these payoffs
were "estimated for one organization to be as much as $1 million per
week to Mexican law enforcement officials at the federal, state and
local levels."

"I've seen the corruption from a professional level--and now from a
personal level," Jordan says. During his own career, Jordan says,
raids repeatedly were thwarted when Mexican police supposedly
cooperating with him tipped off the drug traffickers.

With this perspective, Jordan developed a theory of how his brother
died. The co-worker who'd asked Bruno to move her truck, Phil Jordan
thinks, was helping her ex-boyfriend steal the Silverado for delivery
to traffickers.

Those traffickers, Jordan believes, may in turn have ordered Bruno's
death to intimidate him--just as he was taking over EPIC. Then, he
claims a consulate source told him, Mexico defended Flores with money
from the Juarez cartel.

Jordan readily admits that he has no hard evidence, only countless
private interviews with police and drug world contacts. But if the
crime itself raised questions, the aftermath did too. In everyone's
opinion.

Just after the conviction, Flores' 16-year-old brother, Jose, appeared
dead on a Mexican bank of the Rio Grande. The Mexican coroner deemed
it a drowning, but a sister who identified the boy reported he was
badly beaten.

No accident, says Jordan. Informants, he says, told him the dead youth
worked for the same traffickers responsible for Bruno's death and was
far more enmeshed with them than 13-year-old Miguel.

"He knew too much," Jordan says of the older boy. "He knew how the
[drug] operation worked."

Mysterious as it was, though, the death didn't conform to the usual
vocabulary of drug hits, which, meant to serve as warnings, tend to be
unambiguous.

Meanwhile, some observers saw irregularities in the case against
Miguel. How could police miss the marijuana cigarette found in Flores'
jacket? Fearing that the boy was being railroaded, the Mexican
consulate took over his appeal and successful defense.

Yet law enforcers who know the border say Jordan's claims about drug
lords' involvement are plausible.

"It's impossible to discount," says one former DEA official. "The
DEA's relationship with Mexico, and threats and harm to DEA employees
over the years, is not a good record." At the same time, he adds, if
Bruno's death had been a warning, by now the DEA would know about it.

Consular spokesman Marco Antonio Fraire, meanwhile, vehemently rejects
Jordan's claims about the defense. Fraire has heard the allegations
and says they're ravings from a troubled man. "We do not give any
kinds of comments to declarations coming from persons with emotional
and mental problems."

But Phil Jordan was not the one most undone by Bruno's
death.

Nestled round the table in their El Paso kitchen, Bruno Jordan's
parents are describing their extended family's character. In this
high-strung clan of about 200 relatives, Bruno was peacemaker.

Practical, he studied prelaw at the local University of Texas branch,
moonlighting as a salesman at the Men's Wearhouse. The family darling,
he lived happily at home, long after his four siblings left.

His sister, Virginia Castaneda, recalls the time Bruno's best pal
stole his girlfriend. Bruno, Castaneda says, had no aptitude for
bitterness. "We said, 'Stay away from that family; they're not your
friends,' " Castaneda says. "Bruno said, 'Don't worry about it.' "

He then entered a radio love letter contest, winning with a very
melancholy, very public valentine to the woman who betrayed him.

So it was classic Bruno, running an errand for a co-worker at the
Men's Wearhouse. After the shooting, police scooped up Flores, a reedy
boy who earned small change juggling in El Paso traffic dressed as a
clown. In and out of court for five years, Flores finally was deported
and now works in a Juarez maquiladora.

What lingered was a sad miasma at the Jordans' house, a once-modest
box that expanded over time with the long-limbed, athletic family.

"Before, it was joy," says Bruno's 79-year-old father, Antonio, a
retired uniform-fitter at nearby Ft. Bliss. He used to love when
Bruno, his friends and relatives converged here, amid the framed
photos and silk flowers, for noisy barbecues.

"When Bruno died," his father says, "it tore our family
apart."

Defiant and demure, Bruno's mother, Beatrice, still adheres to her
lifelong Olympian housekeeping standards. But her home now floats with
apparitions. Recently a mute man in brown shoes startled the
housekeeper by appearing out of nowhere in the hall, then vanishing.
That was Bruno, says his mother, in the shoes she'd bought him right
before he died.

It's early spring in Texas' Hill Country, and for someone awaiting
sentencing for attempted murder, Sal Martinez samples his martini with
disarming coolness.

Dining with his Jordan cousins at a Mexican restaurant near a slow
river, Sal, cleanshaven, black shirt showcasing gym rat muscles, is
bent on enjoying family while he can.

Above all else, he is sociable. Voted most popular in high school, he
starred as a football cornerback. As a young adult he was a stalwart
at the Jordan barbecues; afterward, he and Bruno would light off
together, hitting nightclubs, betting at the dog track.

But while Bruno dreamed of striding courtrooms as a prosecutor, Sal
idolized the DEA. He earned a criminal justice degree, worked as a
state trooper, a U.S. Customs Service agent, then eight years ago
joined the DEA.

In 1997 he got a post with the adrenalin he craved: Monterrey, Mexico,
where, he says, his Latino looks and language skills helped glean
intelligence about the Juarez cartel. With the permission of the
Mexican government, the DEA employs many in such work--including Phil
Jordan earlier in his career.

"Sal wanted to be like Philip," Beatrice Jordan recalls. Always
talkative, Sal chattered often about his important cousin--including,
apparently, with a Mexican police chief and informant named Jaime Yanez.

That wasn't all he talked about. In May 1999, on the day Flores was
freed, a distraught Sal told the Mexican police officer he wanted to
have the young man killed.

Yanez told the FBI. They sent him back, now with a wire, and taped
Martinez offering $10,000 plus a gun to kill young Miguel Flores. In
September 1999, Martinez drove to an Exxon station in McAllen to hand
the policeman an envelope. Inside were Flores' photograph and address.

The FBI arrested Sal in December. In February, after months insisting
on his innocence, Sal abruptly pleaded guilty to attempted murder. In
May, he was sentenced to seven years in jail.

"If you think you were entrapped, then take back your plea. I'll give
you a change right now; we'll go to trial," Judge George P. Kazen told
him. Sal glanced at his wife and whispered with his lawyer. Then he
admitted to the charges. He had no choice, he said in a written
statement afterward. His parents were both ailing, and a court fight
with the government would have ruined them.

"The only person scheming was the informant. He found a weak spot in
me," Sal insists during the weekend in the Hill Country. "He pursued
it, to retrieve my emotions and the pain of Bruno's death."

Strong emotion and expression are family traits, and no Jordan
questions Phil's outspokenness. The Jordans cleave to each other,
their identity, their view of right and wrong.

Decades removed, most of the family roots lie in Mexico. To this day,
the Jordans chat companionably in Spanish among themselves.

But family patriarch Eugenio Forti, Phil's grandfather, came from
Italy in 1915. There is some irony about his departure. Forti's
brother was murdered by someone who owed him money, the family says.
With the help of a relative, Forti killed the murderer. Then he fled
to Texas.

Forti was a newspaper columnist and storekeeper. He married a Mexican
immigrant in the neighborhood where his family lives today. Now sown
with warehouses, the area is hemmed by the Bridge of the Americas
highway and jarred by trucks rolling into Juarez. But although Mexico
lies only three blocks away, the Jordans shun it.

"We're Texicans," says Sal, grinning. More thoughtful, he adds, "With
us, there is a certain animosity, and you feel embarrassed, about
Mexico. There is a lack of discipline there."

The attitude is common among border Latinos, University of Houston
sociologist Nestor Rodriguez says. To some, he says, it reflects loss
of family links to Mexico. In other cases, he says, it's
overcompensation by people who want to distant themselves from their
ancestral origins. And to others like the Jordans, who still have
family there but see them only in this country, "Mexico, especially
the border area, is an area of social disorganization, social
pathology," Rodriguez says.

Phil Jordan, though, says it's professional experience that has shaped
his view of Mexico and his family's misfortunes.

This is what he thinks: The Mexican policeman passed information not
only to the DEA and FBI but also to the Juarez cartel. Seeing Sal's
emotional fragility, the policeman goaded him into speaking wildly. He
then collected an informant fee from the FBI, and perhaps also from
drug traffickers, bent on punishing Phil Jordan.

Then, Jordan speculates, the FBI stalked Sal as a common criminal
rather than helping him as they would a troubled agent.

Neither DEA nor FBI officials will discuss the case, releasing only
printed statements that condemn Martinez's crime.

For their part, several drug war veterans concur with some of Jordan's
suspicions but flatly question his discernment overall.

"For Phil, a Hispanic, to be a special agent in charge was a tribute,"
a Latino DEA official reflects. "In DEA, I think there's only 22
people with that title. And Sal--he was a very, very qualified agent."

But the agent scoffs at Jordan's belief he is a target. "It's always
about Phil, isn't it?" the agent says.

"To say, 'Sal committed a wrong and we're going to prosecute because
we always prosecute,' that's just not true," says prosecutor
Contreras, a former FBI agent. "Feds work informants who are sometimes
involved in illegal activity and don't prosecute them.'

The case against Flores just wasn't strong, Contreras says. Yet, he
adds, "I can see why Phil drew the conclusions he did. You get kind of
paranoid in this work. You know what's happening 24 hours a day out
there, and you start wondering about that car behind you."

Even radio host Strelzen shakes his head at Jordan's set-up theory. "I
think it's a cut-and-dried thing. Sal meant to do it," Strelzen says.

As for the callers to Strelzen's show, somehow they seemed less
shocked at Sal's crime than by Bruno's death.

"Did it surprise us that the Jordans were going to put a hit on
someone? No. We knew of Phil's background in law enforcement. We knew
of his love for his brother," Strelzen says. "We in El Paso knew
justice was not done. Sometimes you take the law in your own hands."

On the bright Laredo morning after Sal receives his sentence, two tall
men flank him in the sun outside the courthouse.

To Sal's side stands Phil Jordan, broad-shouldered, silver-headed, his
despair manifest only in his voice. Verbose as ever with reporters, he
is so hoarse the words come out in whispers.

Nearby, a lank man in weathered jeans listens quietly. It is
journalist and author Charles Bowden, working on a book about the
family since Bruno's death.

Bowden thinks Phil Jordan's name politicized this case. He doesn't
know if Sal meant what he said in those taped phone calls. Even so,
it's place as much as family that defines this tragedy, he says.
"There is a myth the border is a separate world. That's nonsense,"
Bowden says one day. "But it is a place where two very different
worlds rub up against each other, an impoverished nation and the
richest nation in the world, and that creates carnage on both sides.

"Imagine that both countries are tectonic plates," he says. "This is
the earthquake zone."