Ellis said, “My man tells me Muno Pena has a big marihuana deal going—one of the biggest. He’s getting ready to send a million dollars’ worth of the weed across the border—and we’ve got to stop it.”
The agent gave a low whistle. “So Muno Pena’s at it again. I thought he had had enough.”
“His kind never give up,” Ellis said.
At the end of World War II, Pancho Trevino had been the kingpin in the Mexican marihuana and narcotics traffic, operating out of Nuevo Laredo. Muno Pena was a competitor but on a fairly small scale until, in 1952, the Mexican government got on Trevino’s trail and threw him in jail. With Trevino behind bars, Muno Pena moved to the top. Pena remained on his home grounds in Mexico and never ventured north of the border. He had a highly organized syndicate and lieutenants who carried out his orders in the United States.
Ellis first ran into the Pena syndicate’s operations in 1955 when he was transferred to Houston, Texas, and went to work to break up a marihuana smuggling ring which included a former Houston police officer. After weeks of collecting evidence during days and nights of tailing suspects and checking records of tourist courts, hotels and telephone calls, Ellis and his colleagues had pieced together a case against the smuggling ring. In a Christmas-night raid they seized 75 grams of heroin, and in two other raids seized 250 pounds of marihuana. Eleven men and women were arrested and convicted in this operation, which was one of the biggest roundups ever made by Customs officers in the Southwest.
The Houston raids had hurt Pena badly, but now he was back on the scene with a scheme to make a quick fortune—if the tipster who had called Ellis knew what he was talking about. Ellis was reasonably certain the information was correct.
According to the Mexican informant, Pena had gone to the farmers in the Monterey district south of Nuevo Laredo and purchased their entire crop of marihuana, a ton of the stuff. He had brought it to his ranch near Nuevo Laredo and processed it in one of the adobe sheds on the place.
Trusted workers had placed armfuls of the dry weed on fine-mesh screens and rubbed it by hand. The fragments of leaves filtered through the screens onto sheets, leaving on the screens only the rough stems which later were burned. The fragmented leaves, as fine as cigarette tobacco, were carefully weighed into one-pound lots. Each lot was placed in a paper bag, which in turn was placed inside a plastic container and sealed with strips of adhesive tape. Then the plastic bags, in lots of thirty, were placed in cotton sugar sacks and stacked in a shed to await shipment. Now Pena was working on a deal to ship the entire lot to a distributor somewhere in the vicinity of Chicago. He had decided not to parcel out the processed marihuana in small amounts to buyers from the United States. Instead, he was going to bypass the middlemen and take the lion’s share of the profits himself.
Ellis knew that a ton of “wheat” (the underworld term for marihuana) would produce about 1,000 pounds of the narcotic weed suitable for rolling into cigarettes. A pound of marihuana would make approximately 1,000 cigarettes. This meant that the retail value of Pena’s shipment would run somewhere in the neighborhood of a million dollars. Never before had so bold a scheme been attempted in marihuana smuggling.
The important element missing in the informant’s information was how and when Pena planned to move the marihuana. Ellis had sent his man back to Nuevo Laredo to get this information if possible. Without these facts, Pena held the upper hand. Ellis had only fifteen agents to cover the 400 miles of border in his district—and there were thousands of places where marihuana might be smuggled across the river.