Saint’s got drug dealers’ backs

Abigail Goldman, Las Vegas Sun

Friday, May 11, 2007 | 7:25 a.m.

From a shoebox under a counter in a small religious supplies shop on Charleston Boulevard, a saleswoman produces a miniature icon of a m ustachioed man, strung on a braided leather bracelet, selling for $6.95.

Behold the patron saint of Mexican drug traffickers: Jesus Malverde.

Malverde is one of several saints held dear in the hearts of the underworld. So revered are these religious figures among Mexican drug traffickers that narcotics detectives have come to recognize them, even study them, for clues into cartels.

Metro Lt. Marty Lehtinen, head of the police department's narcotics section, says his officers are accustomed to seeing massive altars to Malverde in the homes of drug dealers.

About 90 percent of Las Vegas' methamphetamine, Lehtinen says, is trafficked from Mexico. During investigations, his cops come across criminals with ceramic busts and statues and posters and necklaces, even cards of the hustler saints slipped into their wallets.

In the border town of Tijuana, Malverde is sold in a set with an image of Juan Soldado, the patron saint of illegal immigrants. A good-luck-getting-across gift.

Catholic authorities don't officially recognize Malverde, or any of the other narcotrafficker idols, such as Maximon, the Guatemalan patron saint of the underworld, or Santa Muerte - "Saint Death." Nonetheless, they are powerful totems for traffickers, who keep them for protection from police.

Malverde, it is said, can make a man and his drugs invisible.

Believers pay their respects with offerings : food, flowers, liquor, money.

"You have a criminal on their knees, praying that their dope load is protected en route," said Robert Almonte, a retired El Paso Police Department deputy chief.

Almonte has made a career of lecturing police officers on the relationship Mexican drug traffickers have with the spiritual world, a subject that piqued his interest while working as a narcotics cop. He's spent the past three years of his retirement studying the traffickers' saints in intimate detail, visiting their shrines in Mexico and cataloging his findings.

Almonte will lecture in Las Vegas later this month. He'll show police pictures of "spiritual world paraphernalia" that drug traffickers carry. But for undisclosed security reasons, Almonte's barring civilians (and reporters) from attending his seminar. The images are sacred to more than just Mexican traffickers.

"Officers have told me that because of this training, it helped lead them to drugs and drug money," Almonte said.

Still, he stresses that not all believers are crooks. Just some.

At the religious supplies shop, Malverde's face comes framed in a plastic pyramid no more than 2 inches tall, for the dashboard.

And the saleswoman isn't sure, but she heard that when developers tried to build over Malverde's burial spot in Sinaloa, Mexico, his sacred power made it impossible to bulldoze the terrain.

(Other sources say the bulldozer driver had to get drunk to summon the courage to raze Malverde's final rest.)

"Remember," she says, huckstering a hesitant buyer into taking an $80 Malverde painting, "They couldn't build on his grave."

Malverde is always in a white suit with a bandana tied around his neck, and has a mustache, heavy brows, blank brown eyes. Like most rogue saints, he's got a rough back story: Often described as a bandit, Malverde stole from the rich to provide for the poor - a 1900s Mexican Robin Hood - believers say.

According to legend, when the government got hold of Malverde, it left him swinging from a tree.

Since then his story has come to represent outlaws and drug traffickers, who adopted Malverde as their mascot of solidarity, Almonte says.

"A lot of these drug cartels and drug traffickers kind of see themselves that way," he said. "They make a lot of money, but in turn, they give a lot of money back to the community. They try to rationalize, try to justify what they're doing."

Thousands are said to visit Malverde's shrine in Sinaloa, a western state widely considered an epicenter of Mexico's drug trade and a favorite home for the country's trafficking tycoons. At the shrine, visitors have been known to leave hair, cigarettes, false limbs, false teeth and drugs - sometimes as thanks after a successful run.

"Everybody has their patron saints," Lehtinen says. "Why not drug dealers?"