American Cartel (2021) s01e01 Episode Script

1
[Adam Bercovici] It was
November 15th, 2003.
And I was, uh, you know
having a margarita.
And my phone rings,
and it was John Miller, who was
our Civilian Deputy Chief at the time.
And I'll never forget
what he said. He said,
"How fast can you get 30
guys down to Burbank?"
And I go, "What's up, boss?"
And he says, "I've got one dead and one
circling the drain, both Burbank officers."
[Stehr] This stuff doesn't happen
in the city of Burbank, and it did.
[sirens wailing]
[Mike Pavelka] What started
as the murder of my son,
got bigger, and bigger,
and bigger.
[officer 1] They had a direct pipeline
source to a super lab from Mexico.
[TV presenter] Rival drug
cartels have waged a deadly war
[TV presenter 2] Victims
suffered a violent death.
[TV presenter 1] 12 more
dead bodies.
[policeman 2] Influence and
might, they've got it all.
[Mike Pavelka] It was shocking to me,
that someone at the top of city government
was swept up in the
investigation.
[Bercovici] A lot of people
watch The Wire, but we lived it.
[Stehr] Burbank is
a nice suburb.
It's a bedroom community.
And of course, we
have the studios.
Great little downtown area.
[Stehr] We have a smaller department
of approximately 170 officers.
Before the incident,
no one during my, uh,
entire time on the department,
had ever been shot and killed.
[multiple gunshots]
[Stehr] It's not one of
those days you forget.
At 6:30 in the evening,
my cell phone went off.
And it was the watch commander
advising me that there'd been a shooting.
And he told me that this
one was really bad.
Ah, it looks like we have one officer
possibly dead, we have another officer shot,
maybe automatic weapons.
[siren wails]
[Stehr] I had been promoted
nine months earlier to captain,
and I was still getting
to know um, the job.
I left the restaurant immediately
and I just thought, um,
"This really can't
be happening."
Came up to the scene which was at
the Ramada Inn, on San Fernando road.
It was almost
a surreal location. I mean,
there was a sea of police cars and
paramedics treating Greg Campbell,
treating Matt Pavelka,
our two officers shot.
Greg had a background in
military and a background in SWAT.
Everybody knew Greg.
Matt was a newer officer, I
believe he had nine months on.
We were trying to figure out
what had happened.
Uh, we just didn't know,
I had gotten information that Greg
Campbell had pulled into the parking lot.
They made a traffic stop, he requested
backup and that's all the information we had.
Last I heard, both officers are in the
surgery and being operated on at this time.
[Stehr] I asked someone to
take me quickly through the scene.
It was just an overwhelming
looking crime scene.
Um, bloody gruesome scene.
[police officer] Around
this side, yep.
[Stehr] First thing I noticed, you
know, there was a black Escalade.
And on front of the black Escalade, a dead
suspect was handcuffed to the front bumper
by the responding officers.
But I felt this probably involved
a whole group of people.
Because I saw shell casings,
which appeared to be everywhere,
six handguns on the ground,
three car doors open on
the suspect vehicle.
There was meth in the car
and I saw an automatic
weapon on the front seat.
We were worried about the
safety of our neighborhoods.
Because whoever did it,
shot two officers.
Obviously they wouldn't
hesitate to shoot anybody else.
[police radio chatter]
So due the enormity
of the situation,
the amount of outstanding
suspects, two officers shot,
um, searches that
needed to be done,
Burbank PD could never supply
that amount of officers.
I requested outside assistance
from our neighboring jurisdictions.
Glendale PD,
Pasadena PD,
Los Angeles Police Department,
California Highway Patrol,
Sheriff's Department,
US Marshals, the FBI.
So it was a huge response.
2003, I was the
officer-in-charge
of one of LAPD's
most elite units,
Major Crimes.
Our unit was created after
9/11, to aggressively
pursue terrorism in LA.
[Bercovici] We did amazing stuff,
we got a rocket launcher off the street.
We were kicking doors, grabbing
computers, grabbing suspects,
finding Hezbollah and Hamas and Al-Qaeda
operatives in the city of Los Angeles.
It was crazy, so crazy that the FBI calls
me one time and goes, "Who are you people?"
You know, I did like
investigating things.
I liked being able to put
the pieces together and
we had surveillance teams and
then we also had investigators.
We were all the same unit.
My second night with the unit,
I'm in an unmarked Trans Am
with a LAPD guy
that I barely know.
And we're going 120 miles an
hour, busting intersections.
A helicopter comes
down and swoops in.
The guy I'm with is yelling at me, 'cause
they've got guns and are pointing them at us.
"Try to get a shot at these guys," and
I've got an MP5, I unbuckle my seatbelt,
I stand up in the tee-tops.
And the surrealness of it, I was,
like, "This is right out of a movie."
[Bercovici] We were at the
top of our game.
But when that day in November arrived,
you know, Burbank needed our help.
As we were setting up a
perimeter and closing the freeway,
we got word that Matt
Pavelka had passed away.
[Stehr] So you have to
understand.
We haven't lost an officer in the
line of duty for over 50 years, it was
that shocking of an event
for our department.
Matt was a newer officer but he
was still part of the Burbank family.
Everybody knew everybody.
Getting that call, being told
of what happened in Burbank,
I remember standing up,
and the next thing I know, I'm in
the car [laughs] and I'm driving.
[Bercovici] It was like an out
of body experience.
Get a page from Adam Bercovici
and it was a 911 page.
And I called him.
My first indication that it was a big
deal was he was unusually somber.
Adam called and asked me to
call people that were underneath us,
so that we would all
start responding.
You know, these things are all kinda
going through our minds, you know,
you know, "Why are we
going to Burbank?"
"Your officer's down,
what happened?"
[Applin] The whole drive
thinking about the family.
I didn't know him but
it became personal
kind of immediately because I was,
like, "That's any one of us, you know."
[sighs]
Sorry.
[exhales heavily]
I was
dreading somebody having
to knock on my door.
You know that somebody somewhere
is going to somebody's house,
to tell them that their son
isn't coming home.
[Mike Pavelka] I had just
spoken to Matthew
that evening, just before he
went on shift.
'Cause he was supposed to come to
Palm Springs the next day and I had set up
a tee time for us to
play golf together.
I remember him sitting at the
dining table, in the chair on the phone
when they told him
that Matt had died.
And he looked at me
and he said, "Matt's gone."
So I mean, this was, like,
really shocking stuff, how
how my life and my wife's life
had changed in an instant.
[Sue Pavelka] Matt was a jokester,
he was always pulling jokes on people.
But he wanted to
make his dad proud.
When he was little, he couldn't
wait to see his dad in the police car.
Later when he was growing up,
he would stick up for, you
know, other other kids.
That's just all he ever
wanted to do, you know,
be in a police car and
wear a badge.
His life was going exactly
the way he wanted it.
Nice girlfriend, brand new house,
even had a new truck and a job he loved.
My wife and I used to talk
about it afterwards and say,
if Matthew had to choose which
way he would die in his life,
he would want to
die in a gun battle.
And don't forget we
were kinda told that,
"Greg might not make it,
he has a head wound."
And in my mind, I thought,
"Boy, you know,
this might not happen once,
this might happen twice."
[Stehr] Looking back,
I had no idea
of all the drugs that were involved,
how many gang members were involved,
how it was actually working
drugs for the cartel.
But at that time, we needed to find
those responsible for killing Matt Pavelka.
Ah, I think I heard that recording
several days after the incident.
Someone had made a copy as
they were doing the investigation,
and I'd heard it.
Yeah, it's still tough. Uh, to
think that was his uh, I mean
Young officer crying for help. He's
screaming for help and that's his last words.
[siren wailing]
[police radio chatter]
Well, it was on this corner,
I pulled up that night
and it had just stopped raining,
that's when I met Tim Stehr.
[Bercovici] I introduced myself, I did
not know him. I said, "I'm Adam Bercovici,
I'm from Major Crimes division.
I've got about 100 people coming
here, detectives surveillance units."
All of us in law enforcement
joined together.
But we all understood from the very
beginning that this was Burbank's case.
[police radio chatter]
It was assumed that
we were searching for
at least two, maybe
three different people.
We got to go, we got to
play, we got to move it.
We're on the hunt for a cop killer. I
mean, the clock was ticking on us.
[Bercovici] So we had one dead
suspect, who was killed in the shooting.
And then the Escalade that
the suspects had been in.
But that's the only information or
intelligence we have at the time.
Some of the arriving officers
were some of our gang detail.
And they recognized
the dead suspect.
[Stehr] He says, "I think
that's Ramon Aranda.
Think he has a tattoo on him."
Someone had moved his shirt, you could
see Aranda was tattooed all the way across.
That's how we were able to confirm that
he was a Vineland Boyz gang member.
That's when we need officers that
know everything about this gang.
[Bercovici] And that is when I
remember Dan Fournier's name came up.
[Fournier] So before 2003,
I was working at first as uniformed
gang officer and then detective.
So I knew this gang.
Right here, you can see on the
telephone pole.
There's going to be marks like
this all over this neighborhood.
But this is how they kinda mark
their territory. You guys can see here.
So you got Vineland Boyz, VBS
is Vineland Boyz, that sort of thing.
Lets the community know
that this is their hood.
So you can see here it's Sun
Valley, that's going to be SV.
Sun Valley is pretty much ground
zero for Vineland Boyz gang territory.
[Dan] It's on our
border of Burbank.
It's in LA's jurisdiction.
You know, but it's close, you
know, they're within a mile
of where that shooting
took place.
[Bercovici] So we knew the
name Vineland Boyz.
But at that point what I remember,
is that it was kind of a low-level gang.
[Applin] That gang wasn't on
our radar, in the same way
Latin Kings or Bloods or
Crips sect would be.
Vineland Boyz wouldn't have been a gang
that would jump in my mind as doing this.
I would've thought it would've been
MS-13 or some other type of gang.
[dog barking]
Any gang can perform in a violent
manner and that includes the Vineland Boyz.
Status. Gang members crave
the status,
the recognition, the identification
and how do you attain your status?
[Mundo] Anything ranging from
burglary to murder.
But as a general rule,
you don't attack a cop.
So, if somebody opens fire
on a law enforcement unit,
either he's high on dope or
he's some young guy
that wants to make
a name for his gang.
[man 3] Within two hours
of the incident,
we had gotten the registered
owner of the Escalade.
Came back to an Ameer Khan.
[Bercovici] When they put him through
the system, it came back that he was a
Vineland Boy, in terms of
his gang associations.
So one of the first missions that
I set our surveillance teams on,
was to go locate that
residence and sit on it.
[man 4] All right, 32, I no
longer have him, he's all yours.
[woman] Got it.
[Bercovici] One thing we know for
sure, Ameer Khan is a Vineland Boy,
Aranda, who's dead,
is a Vineland Boy.
It would lead us to believe that
our suspects were Vineland Boyz.
[Stehr] It was about a quarter
mile north of the Ramada,
we got the biggest break for us.
One of the K-9 teams was
sweeping up the freeway,
on the southbound lanes.
And they're the ones that
discovered a jacket,
hanging on the fence,
next to the freeway.
Inside that jacket had
a magazine, that matched the
assault rifle that was in the vehicle.
So that could be an indicator that
it was obviously tied to this crime.
[Stehr] And it also had a
room key for the Ramada.
It was at this point that John Williams,
who was one of my senior supervisors,
was able to go into the Ramada Inn and
find out who that keycard came back to.
We went to the manager and she gives us the
name of the two people that were in the room.
One is Ramon Aranda, which is
known to be the suspect who was
shot and deceased at the scene.
But the other name she
gives us is David Garcia.
[Williams] That name is passed on to Diane
Kewin, so we can begin to start working him up.
[Diane] So there was more
than one David Garcia.
So we got information
on the David Garcias
and worked up all the houses,
their associates, the family members,
people that they'd been known to hang out
with, locations that they've been spotted.
We don't know who
the shooter is.
In a case like this, we
need an eyewitness.
[Bercovici] Our only eyewitness
is in grave condition,
in the hospital
and he may not make it -
Greg Campbell.
My name is Greg Campbell, I'm a retired
detective from the Burbank Police Department.
I remember seeing the gun, I remember
drawing my weapon and I remember firing it.
So, that evening I
shouldn't have been working.
I was going to take my son to Oakland the
next day for a Oakland Raiders football game.
And my command staff had
given me the night off.
But I didn't want to leave the
crew short.
We hit the street about 6:00.
Uh, I wasn't assigned any particular beat
in the city, I was a city car all the time.
My first and usual stop was
the Ramada Inn at Burbank.
It was dark, it was cold,
it was just starting to rain.
[Campbell] I was driving through the
parking lot on the north end of the hotel.
And I saw a black
Cadillac Escalade.
It was brand new,
no license plates.
That could either be because it is brand
new or they've taken the plates off of it.
[siren wailing]
[police radio chatter]
[Campbell] It was occupied by
two people, smoking marijuana.
I asked for identification from Ramon
Aranda who was the driver and the passenger.
But the whole scene, the location
we're at, the vehicle they were in,
it just didn't look right.
I called for backup.
They assigned Officer Pavelka.
[Burbank Dispatch] 1L12 back 1L32 Code
6 on a black Escalade at the Ramada Inn.
2900 North San Fernando.
Uh, when he approached, he
approached the passenger side.
Then I called the driver
to step out of the car.
When he opened the car,
uh, I missed the red flag.
[Campbell] Because typically when somebody
opens a car door and they step out of the car,
they rotate out of the
car counter-clockwise.
But as Aranda's stepping out
of the vehicle,
he rotated to his right
in a clockwise manner.
I see his right hand, but the
very last thing I see is his left hand.
And I transmitted, you know,
"10-32 shots fired, Ramada Inn."
Um, not necessarily his shots, but I
was about to fire my gun, I had no doubt.
And then he fired. His first
round hit me in the stomach.
When I doubled over, the
second shot went into my head.
The bullet fragmented and as
soon as that spinal cord was hit,
I went down, completely
paralyzed from the neck down.
Pavelka came around
to engage Aranda.
After Aranda was down, the
passenger got out of the car.
And he engaged Pavelka
from the back.
Um
and I learned this from a security
camera that caught part of that shooting.
Standing over him, the
passenger emptied his magazine.
And then he changed guns
and fired some more.
You know, obviously unnecessary.
He was going to put some
bullets into me to kill me,
but he saw the pool of blood that I
was lying in and decided that I was dead.
[sirens wailing in distance]
Um
When the first
officer got there,
he thought that I was dead but he
reached out and cradled my head.
And apparently when he cradled
my head, his finger
to the wound at the back of my head, it, uh
it shook me back into full consciousness.
He said, "We're gonna go out and get these
guys right now, you gotta go to the hospital."
I said, "No, I'm gonna go with
you." I said, "Just get me on my feet."
I said, "For some reason,
I can't stand up."
And I didn't understand
the injuries that I had.
So they loaded me in the ambulance
and the ambulance got me down to USC.
Just by coincidence that night there
were navy surgeons in the hospital,
helping out the other doctors,
dealing with gunshot wounds.
Which probably ultimately
saved my life.
The prognosis at the time was that I was
going to be paralyzed from the neck down,
for the rest of my life.
Late that evening, Greg
Campbell had become conscious.
We were able to
show him pictures.
Detectives started showing up
with, uh, photographs, six packs.
[Campbell] Finally they showed me one and
I said, "Yeah, that's the guy right there."
I said, "He was the passenger."
[Stehr] He positively
identified David Garcia
and he also confirmed that
it was only two people.
Said if one suspect is dead,
then the only other suspect
is David Garcia.
Greg Campbell recovers enough
to identify Garcia as the shooter,
now we're in business.
[Diane] You have to do things
quickly because they'll be moved
and shuffled and taken by different
people, that we don't know who they are.
If the suspect I'm looking for I know is a
Vineland Boy, we can look at Vineland Boyz.
[Stehr] Ramon Aranda and David
Garcia were Vineland Boyz gang members,
Aranda had been around
a lot longer.
David Garcia was 19 at
the time of the shooting.
He didn't have the record of some of these
people, but he sure was in for the whole
the whole bang.
I tried to give Matthew advice
in my experience
in 30 years on the LAPD
and I said "If you get shot"
"on this job, my bet would be
that it's going to be
"from a young kid,
because they have no"
"They have no fear."
[Bercovici] We knew that we
had to get surveillance assets
into the Vineland Boy
neighborhood.
[female police officer]
32, Radio check.
[male police officer]
Down Clear, 32.
[Armando] Watching David
Garcia's house,
following David Garcia's relatives,
following other gang members.
[Bercovici] We needed to start capturing
plates, capturing car information,
we needed to get
that intelligence.
'Cause he's going to get
put into hiding some place.
In a surveillance team,
the collective mindset was
to leave no stone unturned.
[male police officer] Keep
an eye on sectors five and six.
What surveillance does,
it gives you the one-up.
You're able to see what's
happening in an area
or see what a suspect or associates
are doing, without their knowledge.
[Armando] Family members,
girlfriends, associates.
That might be a place where
somebody might be hiding.
[Armando] Just had a
pedestrian walk up to our location.
Can't tell if he went
inside, stand by.
[policeman] Copy that.
And remember, too, that
neighborhood was hot.
Hot, hot, hot.
The Vineland Boyz produced
David Garcia
and the violent mindsets, where they're
going to shoot and kill police officers.
[Armando] 32, this might
be a problem.
[policewoman] Roger.
Bad things could happen.
I think it might be one
of our players, stand by.
[police radio chatter]
There's no room for error.
Anyone, uh, in the
area Bueno Vista
and San Fernando, who hears
anything suspicious in their yards,
under no circumstances,
should you go outside.
Make sure the doors and
windows are locked and secured.
He's very armed and dangerous.
[Albanese] Suspect who was
identified was David Garcia.
What he did to Matthew, there
are no adjectives to describe it.
[gunshots]
Beyond deplorable, despicable.
To put it in technical terms, the
suspect was an evil son of a bitch.
So I was definitely focused on making sure
that we kept our head right in the game.
A lot of agencies immediately became involved
including the District Attorney's Office.
We were focused on getting the
shooter, David Garcia, in custody.
[Richman] I am a judge now but back
in 2003 when this shooting took place,
I was a Deputy
District Attorney.
It's very unique for a DA, at
least in Los Angeles County,
to respond to a crime scene.
But anytime that you have a
police officer killed, uh
certain things just
get out of control.
[arguing]
As a detective, you know, one of
your own was murdered, you wanna
just, you wanna get this guy.
Burbank Police, which hadn't had an officer
killed in 50 years or something like that,
I mean, they were just completely
overwhelmed, emotionally.
And then we have to keep
emotion out of the situation.
When I When I showed up
that night, there was grief.
You could feel the grief in
the air, people were very upset.
And that's a natural human
quality to be upset
and to mourn someone you care
about, especially a young guy like that.
But we're not gonna act on
revenge, nothing to do with revenge.
We were working a complex
investigation to to hunt his killer down.
If there is emotion, we need
to focus it into professionalism
and into staying on
top of things.
[Stehr] Deputy Chief Mike
Hillmann from LAPD
was in charge of Metropolitan
Division, was in charge of SWAT.
We had aviation units, we had
SWAT, we had K-9s,
I had well over 150 police
officers from Metro.
[Stehr] He's the one that
suggested that, "Why don't you let
our guys do the search warrants?
Because of this level of
emotion on your officers."
There were so many names that were thrown
out there, the focus was David Garcia.
But there were other minions
that we were looking at.
[Hillmann] Was he sequestered
with other gang members,
with his girlfriend, with
his mother? Don't know.
[Applin] He could be any
one of these houses.
He's a member of this gang
and these are his people.
He clearly has absolutely zero, zero
trepidation about taking on the police.
He's got that "I will kill
to get away" mindset.
So this is going to be a tactical
problem that requires a SWAT team.
I heard a Burbank detective
off to my left,
in the corner talking to one of his
colleagues about doing some search warrants
on gang member houses and
there were several targets.
Maybe nine or ten or 11, I heard
these numbers getting thrown around.
And I thought, "This is probably a
place where the FBI SWAT team
might be able to lend a hand."
So I asked Adam, he was,
like, "Great idea."
So that's how I ended up going
out to my car to get my gear ready.
Checking weapons and flashlights
and making sure everything is good.
[dog barking]
[multiple SWAT officers
shouting]
[police radio chatter]
It's in the wee hours of morning,
SWAT served the warrant
and then we follow in as
the investigators after.
Did not find Garcia.
[Williams] But what we did
find has all indications that
he had been there and a lot of
items were moved out quickly.
We learned that Garcia's brother had taken
a number of items that were in his room
and placed them into a green,
like, sailor's bag or duffel bag.
And took them across the
street to a friend's house and
told him to hide them for him.
We got wind of that and I
wrote a warrant to that house.
So we hit that house and
we got the duffel bag and
the whole bottom part
was filled with ammo.
There was, like, four
or five hand guns.
And a fully automatic
MAC-10 machine gun pistol.
To us, it's significant,
especially being fully automatic.
It means, you pull the trigger and it
continues to fire until the gun's empty.
Typically, your average everyday hood
is not going to have a weapon like that.
Especially not going to have
full automatic capability.
We also found methamphetamine.
Quality of the methamphetamine more of
what you'd call ice, it's a more pure form.
And in large amounts.
This is something we typically wouldn't
see on the streets, this is indication of
a larger lab, somewhere
like in Mexico.
Back in 2003, that normally
doesn't happen [laughs].
So all that information
came back to us.
That's when we started to
realize that we had more than just
some gangsters gone rogue.
We got more than just a simple cop
killing. We got something else going down.
[Bruce] All SWAT officers
are high risk.
I can remember one of the team leaders
once, we had a bunch of gear laid out.
And he asked, "What's the most
important gear on the table?"
And a couple of us were, like, "It's this
helmet, because if you get shot in the head"
"No, it's this." And he's,
like, "None of that, it's this."
This is life and death, a mistake
has serious consequences.
I spent most of my career
at Metro and in SWAT.
We were hiring people for what
they had between their ears.
First house we hit, it was dark, it
was about three or four in the morning.
Got off the running boards and
made a nice, quiet stealthy approach.
[Applin] We breached the door.
[SWAT officers shouting]
We had flashbanged
the front door.
But there was a second room.
And we were going to
flashbang that room,
and as I looked in, I saw
what looked like a bassinet.
Even though I'm getting told
behind, "Bang it, bang it, bang it,"
I knew the right thing
to do was not throw it.
So I stepped out of line
like you're trained to do,
and I said, "No bang," and
they went in and made entry.
And there was a kid,
there was a baby in there.
[police radio chatter]
[dispatcher] 10-4.
First thing I thought was,
"Why isn't somebody in this
house screaming for their baby?"
I've been on a lot of search
warrants and if there is a kid there,
there's a mama who's
coming to get that kid.
Whether they are a hardcore criminal
or not, that motherly instinct trumps all.
In this particular case when we
asked, "Hey, where's the mom?"
Crickets. "Meh, I don't know."
"Where's Mom?"
How did this baby get left in this drug
house, with a bunch of gangbangers?
At this point, I realized that not
only was this gang pretty violent, right,
but they don't value life the
same way that you or I do.
[Fournier] This is what the
gang does to people.
A couple of years prior to this,
you know, when David Garcia was
you know, a kid, he was
on the swim team.
For a 19-year-old to turn into such
a ruthless killer just, unbelievable.
Lot of poverty, a lot
of broken homes
and this was just a void.
There's a void in their lives.
This is a brainwashing
process that is taking place.
In my case, I felt
like I was a nobody.
'Cause my dad treated me
like a nobody.
The gang made me somebody.
Somebody special,
somebody to be reckoned with.
It's a big lie.
When I committed my
first homicide,
I killed a fellow street gang
member with a machete.
His head got chopped off.
My state of mind was to unleash
the anger and the fury that
I had built inside of me.
Uh, David Garcia, he got
sucked in by the Vineland Boyz.
I can't speak for him but I can say that
when he opened fire on that police officer,
with intent to kill him,
I don't think, in his mind,
he's really thinking about
what he's doing,
and that's what I'm trying to
convey - that these guys don't think.
I'm not suggesting that we should
feel sympathy for David Garcia.
He committed an
irreversible act.
And at the end of the day,
if you kill a human being,
you're responsible for that act.
We hit, I think, two
houses that first night.
And it was a dry hole, we didn't
find David Garcia, he wasn't there.
[Williams] And when we did, I
wanted to stay right on top of this thing.
I've been involved in other
cases like this,
where as soon
as you take the pressure off,
they're gone.
[phone ringing]
- [woman] Hello?
- [man speaks in Spanish]
[Stehr] If you're trying to find somebody,
you wanna hear what people are saying.
[woman speaking]
[Stehr] So we had wiretapped
search warrants.
So we're listening into the family and
friends talk, with the judge's permission.
And in those private
conversations,
they don't know themselves
where David Garcia is.
That is highly in my
experience, highly unusual.
They need some kind of support.
[Applin] Typically was, like,
the baby mama house,
somebody that they
were connected to,
like a girlfriend or
something like that.
And when those people don't know
where this fugitive is -
and in this particular case,
David Garcia's own
family doesn't know -
that's a real big tell to me,
that he's got a whole other
network that he's tapping into.
We begin to think that there's
a sophistication involved,
that there's something
else going on,
because they're staying
off the radar.
I don't know the first time
I had the word "cartel"
or that the Vineland Boyz were
connected to a cartel.
At the time, we didn't know
that, but in retrospect,
a lot of the stuff that we had seen
kinda started making sense a little bit.
At that particular time, I had no
idea where this was going to go.
My focus was on
finding David Garcia.
He could be anywhere in the
United States, he could be in Mexico,
he could've gone
to Canada, we don't know.
[Stehr] He could be anywhere.