Fierce Little Scratches

The two worlds couldn't be more different.

The young men of Xalisco toil in the sugarcane fields outside of town, nestled in the hills of southwestern Mexico. They dream of making enough money to pay a band to play all night in the town square, and buy new pairs of dark blue Levi's 501 jeans.

Both groups came to Portland—and their worlds collided in an epidemic of black tar heroin, addiction and death.

Over the past 15 years, law-enforcement and public-health officials nationwide have watched a catastrophic surge of Americans—many of them affluent, white teenagers—become hooked on opiates.

The rate of people dying from heroin overdoses in the United States nearly quadrupled from 2000 to 2013—becoming the nation's top cause of accidental death.

Those deaths have followed the spike in doctors doling out prescriptions to the painkiller OxyContin. That drug has the same psychoactive chemical as heroin: the morphine molecule, which produces rapturous highs and is highly addictive. Addicts often turn to heroin—cheaper and easy to find.

The deadly intersection of prescription painkillers and heroin in Oregon has been reported before. WW has charted the epidemic, and The Oregonian investigated Mexican drug cartels in a 2013 series.

Dealers known as the "Xalisco Boys," all hailing from the same county in the Mexican state of Nayarit, didn't operate as a cartel. Their innovation was a system to retail heroin, setting up low-profile franchises in 25 U.S. states with drivers delivering heroin directly to their junkie customers. 

The Xalisco Boys found vulnerable customers among the 25,000 Russian-speaking immigrants and their families living in the bedroom communities of East Portland. 

The result? Heroin deaths in Oregon, already higher than the national average, tripled over the past decade (see chart below).

Quinones reads from Dreamland at 7:30 pm Tuesday, April 28, at Powell's City of Books.

The following excerpt is just a glimpse of what he reveals about Portland. —Aaron Mesh

Russian Pentecostals leaned on the severe God of the Old Testament to shepherd them through Soviet oppression.

Among them was a young couple, Anatoly and Nina Sinyayev, who arrived from the city of Baksan around 1992. Anatoly was a welder. Nina's father was an evangelist, touring Germany and Israel to preach the gospel. When the Soviet walls tumbled, the Sinyayevs took their two toddler daughters and fled to Portland.

Nina's first baby in America was also their first son, Toviy, born in 1994. From then on, she was always pregnant. The couple had ten more children.

Anatoly was always working. They moved eight times, mostly in the Portland suburbs of Gresham and Milwaukie where Russian Pentecostals concentrated. They attended a conservative Russian Pentecostal church, and raised their children in their faith. 

But their American dreamland contained hazards they hadn't imagined. Remaining Christian in America, where everything was permitted, was harder than maintaining the faith in the Soviet Union where nothing was allowed. Churches were everywhere. But so were distractions and sin: television, sexualized and permissive pop culture, and wealth.

Leaders turned to the prohibitions that had sustained the faith during the dark decades back home. Girls couldn't dye their hair, pierce their ears, or wear makeup. Young men and women could not talk, or date. If a man wanted to marry, he went to his pastor, who asked the young woman if the suitor interested her.

Russian Pentecostals didn't associate much with American society, which they viewed as a threat. Families with televisions were deemed less holy, and they hid the machines from visitors. Pastors called TV the devil with one eye.

The Sinyayevs' daughters were not allowed to wear nail polish or mingle with Americans. But Anatoly kept a television in the basement and turned it on when he thought his children weren't listening. They watched it when he wasn't home. The Sinyayevs' second child, Elina, was their most stubborn. A pretty girl with an aquiline nose, Elina raised her siblings while her mother was pregnant and railed at the church teachings that ruled her home. 

"All they preached was that women should wear long skirts, head coverings, no makeup," she said. "They never teach you about love. They didn't want us to know God forgives.” 

As they moved into adolescence, the Sinyayevs' oldest children hid their lives from their parents. Elina applied makeup on the school bus each morning, and exchanged her long skirts for pants. After school, she donned Pentecostal clothes, removed her makeup, and arrived home looking as plain as she had when she left. 

Meanwhile, the U.S. economy frothed. Russian Pentecostals opened auto shops and trucking and welding businesses. After years of Soviet penury, they were suddenly doing quite well, and some grew rich. Pentecostal kids were steeped in consumerist America at school and old-world Russia at home. They endured church but valued wealth. They eschewed college, worked to buy what they wanted, and quietly rebelled against their parents' old ways.

Then OxyContin appeared.

In 1999, Multnomah County medical director Dr. Gary Oxman recognized a heroin epidemic no one had spotted. His investigation revealed dozens of heroin overdoses had been overlooked, and the mortality rate of drug deaths was higher than anyone had imagined, climbing 1,000 percent over eight years. He led a marketing campaign telling junkies to call 911 if a friend overdosed—and the deaths fell.

But five years later, in 2004, Oxman saw the numbers start to rise again.

"What we had here is a medical community that's gone along with the idea that pain is the fifth vital sign," Oxman said when we met one day years later at a cafe in Northeast Portland. "It's not this wild abuse. It's that we have a whole medical community prescribing moderately too much.” 

Gary Oxman had seen this story a decade before, of course. 

Unstinting supplies of Xalisco black tar heroin lashed Portland addiction and death rates ever higher through the 1990s. Oxman, the group of recovering addicts known as RAP, and others toiled to bring down those numbers, and the numbers did drop. But by 2004, OxyContin was undermining that work. "People are getting recruited into opiate addiction through pills," he said. "Then, because of the cost of the pills, they transfer to heroin."

Oxman plotted the data on a graph, as he had for a heroin overdose study in December 1999. The same steady rise in opiate overdose deaths began again in 2004.

Mostly, opiates consumed young people in Portland who had never used them, virtually all of them white. As a group, it appears none fell to it harder than the children of Russian Pentecostals who came fleeing persecution and found U.S. pop culture a greater challenge than anything a Soviet apparatchik could invent.

Elina believed she was the only one in her family using heroin. But one night at home she looked at her sister and brother and watched them nod off and knew the truth. Two decades after Anatoly and Nina left the Soviet Union for the freedoms of America, each of their three oldest children was quietly addicted to black tar heroin from Xalisco, Nayarit.

Police arrested Elina's sister for petty theft and Toviy for shoplifting. Anatoly and Nina frantically began checking their children's arms. Elina, meanwhile, shot up in other parts of her body. 

One afternoon in March 2011, Toviy told his mother he had the flu. He went out with Elina and they returned hours later. He seemed different but Nina had too many kids to pay close attention. The next morning, she found her eldest boy in bed, unconscious and gasping for breath. Paramedics couldn't revive him. He lasted for three days on life support.

The Portland suburb of Milwaukie is so small and quiet that its police department has only two detectives. That morning, one of the two, Tom Garrett, was on call. He found balloons of heroin and a syringe in Toviy's bedroom. 

Over the next eighteen months, the death of Toviy Sinyayev became a test case for Clackamas County. 

Meanwhile, at home, Nina checked the arms of her daughter, Elina, which were always under the long-sleeved blouses of Pentecostal piety. There she found bruises and fierce little scratches.

Dealers from Xalisco, Mexico, started selling drugs in Portland around 1991. But few police realized the dealers came from the same part of Mexico or understood how they operated. Toviy Sinyayev's overdose in 2011 helped Oregon cops discover how Xalisco heroin cells worked, and taught them a new strategy to fight back.

A dozen harried days had passed since Toviy's mother found him comatose in his bedroom. Under pressure, his sister Elina told police that their dealer was a Russian Pentecostal heroin addict named Aleksey Dzyuba.

They put a wire on Elina. She called Dzyuba. Going through withdrawals and with her brother on life support, Elina met the dealer in a Safeway parking lot, surveilled by a dozen undercover officers. She bought heroin from him, and passed him some marked cash. As he drove from the parking lot, officers descended and arrested him.

With that, a strategy that Portland had adopted to combat the Xalisco Boys was set in motion, named for a college basketball player who died in 1986 after using cocaine a friend had given him.

A so-called Len Bias case is based in federal law. Under that law, a person who supplies drugs that cause a fatal overdose may be charged with a conspiracy that results in death—a charge that carries a twenty-year prison sentence. Cops have to prove the person died from the suspect's drugs; a chain of custody has to be established.

But if they can do that, they have a powerful prosecutorial tool and one that was getting a closer look in many parts of the country as the opiate epidemic and fatal drug overdoses spread across the nation. One place that refined the strategy was Portland. 

The benefit prosecutors see in Len Bias is that it allows investigators to work up a chain of drug distribution. To save himself from a Len Bias prosecution, a dealer needs to flip, and quickly, burning the dealer one link above him in the chain, hoping for leniency at sentencing time. The last man detectives can trace the drugs to faces the twenty years if convicted—a fateful game of musical chairs.

Thus, a heart-to-heart takes place in an interrogation room. Investigators can't threaten a suspect, but they do tell him what he faces under federal law. "The tone in the room definitely changes," Garrett said. "You're not joking with them. It's a very powerful conversation."

Speaking through a Russian interpreter, Dzyuba bridled at this idea. People die every day for their addictions, he told his interrogators. He wasn't to blame for their choices. Finally, though, a defense attorney explained the situation. Dzyuba gave up the name of the junkie dealer he bought from. With that, Garrett and his colleagues began working up the chain.

Dzyuba's dealer gave them the name of his supplier, who in turn gave them his dealer. This dealer, three levels up from Toviy, said he bought daily from a Mexican he knew only as Doriro.

This is how, on April 12, 2011, Garrett and his colleagues began calling the number of a man from Nayarit they would later learn went by the name Joaquin Segura-Cordero.

They received no answer. They called through the afternoon. Nothing. 

JOAQUIN SEGURA-CORDERO

IMAGE: Multnomah County

Both heroin chains led to Segura-Cordero, who, as it turned out, was a kind of regional sales manager for a Xalisco heroin cell. Normally, as a Xalisco regional manager, Segura-Cordero would have been insulated from the kind of day-to-day heroin sales that would expose him to arrest. But Segura-Cordero had faced a classic small-business problem: a labor shortage. 

"He had several runners arrested, so he'd run out of runners," said Steve Mygrant, one of the prosecutors in the case. "He was having to expose himself. He was taking calls and making deliveries himself."

Mygrant is a Clackamas County prosecutor deputized to try federal cases. Segura-Cordero was his first Xalisco Boys case. By the time I spoke with him, a couple years after Toviy's death, Mygrant sounded both harried and amazed by the Xalisco system.

"It used to be you go into the ghettos to buy heroin from street corners," he said. "Now these organizations are coming to the neighborhoods, to suburbia. They come to you. That's unique to this organizational model. They're all coming out of Nayarit and all operating off of this dispatch style. Like the fishermen in Alaska; they work seven days a week and go back home and play."

The Segura-Cordero case showed that Xalisco heroin spread for 150 miles around Portland. It went out to the quietest rural counties, where kids, addicted to pills, learned to drive to Portland, buy cheap black tar, and triple their money back home while feeding their own habit. In classic Xalisco style, every junkie became a salesman. 

I thought back to the conversation with that fellow in prison from whom I first heard the name of the town of Xalisco so long ago now. He had lived in Portland, working legally as a mechanic as he watched the Xalisco system expand. 

"In Portland," he said, "I'd see [the police] grab people with twenty or thirty balloons and they'd let them go. That's why people began to come to Portland, because they weren't afraid. They saw there were no consequences. 'We get caught with this and they let us go.'"

Word spread back in Xalisco that cells did well in Portland, and, furthermore, arrested drivers were only deported. More cells crowded into town, he said. 

This reminded me so much of small-town Mexican business culture. I once visited a village in central Mexico—Tzintzuntzan, Michoacán. Tzintzuntzan had at least two-dozen vendors all selling the same kind of pottery on its main street. Once one person did well selling pottery, everyone started doing it. No one thought to vary the offering. 

The stores stretched for five or six blocks—with each selling identical pots and bowls, eager to undercut the others. Mexican small-business culture, born of crisis and peso devaluations, was risk averse and imitative. 

That described the Xalisco cells. They came and imitated those who'd come before. In so doing, they dropped prices and raised their potency and the natural result, particularly as OxyContin tenderized the market terrain, was more addiction and overdoses. 

None of this was on a kingpin's order. It was something far more powerful than that. It was the free market.

Portland's catch-and-deport policy was an important reason why. The policy was designed for the small-time street addict/dealer who city officials didn't want taking jail space from more serious felons. The Xalisco Boys' drivers worked hard to look small-time. In reality, they were the only visible strands of large webs that sold hundreds of kilos of black tar a year across America, by the tenth of a gram.

So for many years, when they were caught they were deported and faced little jail time, and no prison time. As farm boys on the make, they drew a very different message from leniency than what these Portland officials intended. To them, catch and release looked more like an invitation.

By the time OxyContin came to Portland in the mid-2000s, the city was famous back in Xalisco, Nayarit. The Boys crowded into the Rose City. What's more, the arrival of OxyContin meant they no longer had to rely on the old street clients. There were now many hundreds more to help jump-start a heroin cell. The addicts were younger and wealthier. Seizures of a few ounces of heroin were big news a decade ago. Now cops routinely found pounds of the stuff.

Len Bias became Portland's new strategy to combat the Xalisco Boys. In Portland, and for presumably the first time in the history of heroin in America, police began responding energetically—two or three detectives at a time—to a dead junkie in a gas station bathroom. The deceased's cellphone was mined for contacts that could lead them up the Xalisco ladder. Runners were no longer automatically deported. They were told they faced twenty years in federal prison.

For Len Bias to work, federal, state and local government agencies had to cooperate completely. The state medical examiner had to be willing to quickly perform an autopsy; the local DA had to give up the case if it appeared the feds had more leverage. 

Joaquin Segura-Cordero was one example. He was sentenced to fourteen years in prison for selling dope that killed Toviy Sinyayev in a suburb of Portland and Jedediah Elliott out in the Oregon countryside 150 miles away. 

I walked a few Portland blocks to the office of a public defender to speak to an attorney who had agreed to talk to me as long as I left his name out of it. He had convinced many Xalisco Boys that their cooperation was the only way to avoid twenty years in prison under Len Bias. 

The attorney had a standing order to detectives to call him immediately when a Len Bias case began. He supported quick cooperation with investigators—a controversial idea among defense attorneys. 

"The value of your information is at its maximum the closer you are to the time of your arrest," he said. "If you're in really quick you can derive great benefit for your client.” 

Still, he didn't see much effect from prosecutors' new strategy. The pills were so widespread; new kids were getting addicted every day. They were switching to heroin all the time. 

Against that backdrop, he figured, prosecutors were only temporarily disrupting the market. 

"My dental hygienist came to talk to me," he said. "Her son was involved with heroin to the point where he was stealing stuff out of stores. This is a middle-class person you'd think would never be touched by something like this. But it's so prevalent. It's almost like you were trying to stop drinking coffee [with] a Starbucks on every corner.” 

Excerpt from Dreamland by Sam Quinones. Copyright © 2015 by Sam Quinones. Reprinted by permission of Bloomsbury Press. All rights reserved.

WWeek 2015