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EL PASO - Jose Daniel Gonzalez was living the sweet life in America. He bought the $365,000 two-story Mediterranean with the tile roof and swimming pool. He started a trucking company, and was raising a family. But on a Friday night in May, he was executed in his front yard - eight shots, tight pattern, close range.
According to police detectives, Gonzalez knew the man who ordered his killing. He also knew the man who stood on his lawn and watched him die. These things are often personal, especially among high- level drug traffickers.
A gangland-style slaying is no big news across the river in Ciudad Juarez, the bloodiest city in Mexico, where more than 1,300 people have been killed in 2009, and only a handful of cases have been solved, despite the presence of 10,000 soldiers and federal police officers in President Felipe Calderon's war on drug cartels.
But in El Paso, where local leaders boast how safe their city is and the 12 homicides this year have almost all been solved, the Gonzalez killing was as disturbing as it was sensational. For people here, the blood splashed on a pretty American street was a jarring sign that Mexico's drug violence is spilling across the border into US suburbia.
Most unsettling for many, especially El Paso police officials, was that both Gonzalez and the man accused of ordering his killing turned out to be ranking drug traffickers from the notorious Juarez cartel, as well as informers for the US government.
"So this is how these people end up in our country," said El Paso police Lieutenant Alfred Lowe, the lead homicide detective and 29- year veteran whose team made the arrests in the Gonzalez case. "We bring them here."
As a spectacular wave of drug violence washes over Mexico, the Obama administration, the US Congress, and leaders in Southwestern states are spending billions of dollars and massing thousands of agents to keep the chaos from crossing the border. But to fight the drug traffickers, federal antinarcotics agents have brought Mexican cartel members north of the border, to use them to gather intelligence and to build cases.
That has led to friction between US law enforcement agencies. In meetings with federal counterparts, El Paso Police Chief Greg Allen, who lives close to the Gonzalez home and heard the shots the night of the slaying, said he has complained about a lack of cooperation and information-sharing. Allen told reporters he raised those complaints in meetings with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, known as ICE, which, according to police and court documents, arranged for Gonzalez's visa to live in the United States.
Lowe said ICE agents were uncooperative during the investigation, misleading El Paso officers by failing to provide accurate names, photographs of suspects, and timely intelligence that might have helped solve the homicide more quickly.
"We've never worked well with ICE," Lowe said.
ICE officials declined to comment on the specifics of the Gonzalez case or on the conduct and cooperation of their agents. "As a matter of policy, we don't confirm or deny confidential sources or sources of information," said Richard Rocha, spokesman for ICE in Washington. "All allegations of misconduct are taken seriously and if reported will be fully reviewed."
As the investigation into the Gonzalez killing progressed this summer, police said they were further surprised to learn that the man charged with orchestrating the slaying was a fellow drug cartel member, a specialist in assassination - and a federal informant for ICE living in El Paso.
Ruben Rodriguez Dorado, a Mexican citizen, was detained this month and charged with murder in the Gonzalez case. Before he was a suspect, police detectives said, they were introduced to Rodriguez by ICE agents, who presented him as an informant who might be able to help on the case.
When he met with El Paso police, who said they were not given his name, Rodriguez bragged that he was "the main man in El Paso" for the Juarez cartel. Detectives said they later learned that his specialty was arranging hits for hire. "He told us that he was high in the food chain and that he'd ask around and see what he could find and that he would let us know. Of course, he didn't let us know anything," Lowe said.
El Paso police arrested three American teenagers they said Rodriguez recruited to his crew: US Army Private First Class Michael Jackson Apodaca, 18, who allegedly pulled the trigger, and Chris Duran, 17, who drove the getaway car, according to the court papers. Both were charged as adults with murder, along with a 16-year-old who police said did surveillance for the gang. His name is being withheld.
Caption: El Paso's lights are visible across the border wall in Juarez, Mexico, where more than 1,300 people have been killed this year. Sarah L. Voisin/the Washington post
