Chasers Read Free

students. “But I don’t know any old drug dealers. Most, if at all lucky, live only as long as an abandoned dog.”
    He fought against the encroachment of the drug cartels by keeping the children under his domain constantly busy. He helped to organize baseball and basketball tournaments, got some of the town businesses to kick in money and build a new track and grandstands for the school. He then took a handful of teenagers, used to running up and down the rugged mountain terrain surrounding the town, and turned them into one of the most élite track-and-field teams in South America. Before long, college recruiters and professional scouts from as far north as Detroit and Chicago ventured down, looking to offer fast and easy money along with full-ride four-year scholarships to the young padre’s crew. Father Angel’s dreams for a better world and a safer and more rewarding life for the students under his care seemed on the verge of a hard-fought victory.
    Then reality intruded, and Father Angel’s dreams were swallowed up by a whirlpool of deceit, corruption, and murder, leaving in its wake only the ruined and the ravaged. It began with a street shooting, a weekly occurrence in an area blighted by drug-related crimes. The victim was named Edgardo Vizcaino, a promising sixteen-year-old, four-hundred-meter track star. His older brother Alberto was a runner for the Diablos de Dios, a local drug gang on the payroll of the big guns in Bogotá. Alberto had grown weary of running drugs in and past an elaborate network of police blockades and federal sting setups, risking a long stretch in prison in return for the short end of the money train. He was looking to start his own shop, and let it be known that he would take down the leaders of the Diablos de Dios if the action called for it.
    In the drug world, as in any criminal endeavor, the road to an early death is paved with indecision. Alberto spoke rather than acted, and that allowed the Diablos to pounce. And their way was a seek-and-destroy quest to rid themselves of any and all potential threats. Alberto’s battered and torched body was left hanging from the low branch of an old tree. Then they pressed their agenda forward and set about murdering each member of the Vizcaino family, saving Edgardo, the youngest and most vulnerable, for last.
    Angel was never sure exactly what it was about the murder of Edgardo Vizcaino, as opposed to any of the other horrible crimes he had seen perpetrated on people too weak or unwilling to fight back, that forced his hand. But that early morning, as the body of a boy he had grown to respect as much as to love was being prepped for burial, he decided that the time for reflection and prayer had ended. The Diablos were not interested in the words of a priest. They would respond only to action.
    The war raged for three years.
    In that time, Father Cortez morphed from a benevolent small-town priest into a man so deadly and ruthless that the local papers began to refer to him as the Black Angel. He still sought out the area’s young and gifted, but instead of putting their skills to the test on a running track he ran them out into the line of fire armed with Mac .9s and turned them into dealers and killing machines.
    By the late fall of 1982, Angel Cortez ruled over a criminal enterprise that stretched from the sandy streets of his small village to the high-rises of Bogotá and into the deep money of Mexico City and South Florida. There were 350 full-time dealers under his domain, 175 mules running cocaine packets across various state and national boundaries, and an army of 200 heavily armed hitters, each quick of trigger and Nike fast on the escape, making police detection close to an impossible task. His determined vow of poverty had now been replaced by a quest for riches, with a stream of offshore sheltered accounts totaling nearly $6 million. And all that gun power sitting on top of the small mountains of cold cash pointed the former priest