Campsite media.

Let's pick up with when you came back.

Who's still in the.

Area when I went back to Jackson as a trooper.

Yeah, yeah, So when I got back down there as a trooper, I mean, it's everybody.

Most people don't leave that area for whatever reason.

I always describe it as it's like a bucket of crabs, you know, just as the crab is almost out of the bucket, you get somebody that pulls you right back in.

So when I go back home, essentially it's all my family, most of my friends, people I grew up with are generally still in that area.

Spring of two thousand, after almost eight years away, Gayboard Tees trooper Gayboard Tees is going back to Brazoria County with a badge.

It's going to get awkward.

I have a lot of family down there that are not upstanding citizens, and I have a brother who has a reputation for himself, And there was a possibility where I was going to encounter some family members during those traffic stops.

Oh, that was more than a possibility, it was damn near certainty.

In fact, very early on, when Gabe was still riding with his training officer, local police stop someone who had outstanding warrants with the Department of Public Safety.

State troopers who work for DPS are responsible for arresting those people.

And I remember Lake Jackson Police Department called and says we've got somebody on a traffic stop who has DPS warrants.

And I show up and I see it's my uncle and he says, oh, hey me, I was hoping it was you.

And my field training officer looks at me like, what are you going to do?

And I'm gonna do what I was trained to do, and I like say, hey, uncle, sorry, I gotta do this.

He was very proud of me when I graduated from the DPS Academy and became a trooper.

So he put his hands behind his back and he's like, hey, Neil, if you're just doing your job, don't worry about me.

We'll be fine.

From Campside Media and iHeart podcasts.

This is The Brothers or Tees episode four Homecoming.

I'm Sean Flynn.

Gabe would come around and he has his stance about him, his personality.

This is Vanessa Orties.

She's one of the many to his cousins in Brassoria County and she was especially close to Gabe's brother Larry.

We used to be like, oh God, he's here to kill the fun.

He was wound up really tight and I'm like, God, let up relax a little bit.

He was just always in cop mode.

Of course, Gabe was always in cop mode.

Most cops are always in cop mode.

It's a cop thing.

And Gabe really liked being a cop.

I'm like, hey, this is it.

I've reached the pinnacle being at Texas DPS state trooper.

You know, we're looked at as one of the elite law enforcement agencies.

It's very very revered.

Well not by everybody.

And this is the fundamental tension in Gabe's homecoming, the tension really in this entire story.

Two brothers who were once very close now have a seemingly impermeable barrier between them, a thick blue line, if you will.

The drama, the potential for conflict and tragedy is almost too obvious.

Like in overwritten movie script.

I number that Gabe when he'd be coming home, it was going to be stay trooper, part of the law, you know, keeping law, and and and Larry breaking law.

This is Gloria, their mom.

I would even tell Larry I says, you know, your brother is a stay trooper and you're over here messing up Gabe.

Larry, you need to slow down.

You really need to slow down because things are starting to get bad.

What would you say?

He to say, Oh, Mom, you just worry too much.

You just ain't nothing gonna happen.

I'm gonna be fine.

He thought he was never gonna.

Get caught, but he got caught a lot.

Yeah, but every time he thought he was never gonna get caught again, so he was constantly just taking that chance.

Okay, spoiler alert.

Larry was never caught by Gabe, mainly because Gabe's job wasn't to invest tokap drug dealers.

He was patrolling the highway.

More importantly, he didn't know exactly what Larry was up to, which was by design.

I mean, I obviously knew that he was involved in drug dealing.

Clearly he had done that in front of me several years before, and I knew he had a reputation.

But anytime I would have my conversation with my brother, it was, yeah, I'm not doing that anymore, you know.

And he would work legitimate jobs off and on.

Larry worked a lot of legal jobs We talked to one of his old bosses, and he had nothing but good things to say, industrious, diligent, dedicated.

But those jobs were off and on because Larry kept getting arrested.

There's a time period where he was locked up so much that you kind of just lose track of when he was in jail and when he was out.

So Gabe, the eager rookie cop, kept some distance between him and his sweet yet lawbreaking brother.

Honestly, at the time, I don't know that I ever hung out with my brother, just he and I.

It was always at a family gathering where I would see my brother.

It was at a barbecue, it was at a king set, I was at somebody's birthday, Easter, some occasion where the family was getting together, but never just my brother or not because I knew what he was involved in, and so I always wanted to have that separation.

His cousin, Vanessa, just to close this loop, would eventually come to understand this.

She and Gabe would make their peace.

We spent some time together, and he has played well.

You know, Larry used to hang around some like suspect people.

He's like, I got shit to lose.

Well, duh, Now, I get it, so I've apologized to him, like, man, my bad, I'm like you all right.

Despite those family complications, Gabe loves what he's doing when he checks ten forty one.

That's what droopers say when they come on duty.

He's excited.

He's got a fresh shift ahead of him, a clean slate.

He's not his own boss.

Rookie troopers actually at the bottom of the pecking order, but he has a lot of autonomy.

He can roam the whole southern half of Bassouria County.

He can park his big Crown Victoria on the side of the road and the clock speeders he gets drunks and reckless drivers off the road.

Yes, it's still occasionally awkward.

Because Gabe grew up in the southern half of Missouria County.

I stopped the occasional family member or you know, a friend I grew up with in high school.

I ended up taking a couple of those guys to jail, you know, for DWI.

And that's always difficult to do.

And while he's mostly working traffic enforcement, stopping someone for say, weaving or failure to use a turn signal can every so often lead to other types of crime, mostly drug related.

You know, some user amount stuff, and I think I got a couple of pounds one time got a keylo cocaine out of a stop.

And then he had the big one.

There's a box fan, a small cargo truck coming out of Freeport, speeding north on Highway two.

Eighty eight.

Troopers were encouraged to stop commercial vehicles like a box fan for any reasonable infraction because accidents involving trucks generally caused more damage and more injuries and death than your standard sedan.

So the idea is to keep truck drivers on their toes.

Gave flips on the cruiser lights and pulls over the box van for speeding.

The driver spoke in very broken English, and there was no markings on the vehicle.

He said it was coming from Freeport and he was going to Houston, and that he had just delivered some pignatas at the Kruger grocery store.

I asked him for his manifest or you know, some documentation to verify his load, and he's going through the glove box and he's got nothing, I mean, absolutely no paperwork whatsoever.

So I asked him, like, hey, can you can you open the vehicles so we can verify your load.

And his shoulders just dropped.

He you know, put put his head down as soon as he opened it.

You know, the the odor of marijuana just hit us in the face.

It was bundles and bundles of marijuana and ended up being about twenty nine hundred pounds, just over twenty nine hundred pounds, and behind all of the bundles there was three piatas back there that was you know, he's being a little honest, I guess.

And so the next day on the front page of the Brass Sport Facts was me and my partner standing next to twenty nine hundred pounds of marijuana bundles with a SpongeBob natta.

It was actually two six hundred and ninety five pounds of wheat, which is still a lot of wheed.

When you're making a drugstop, does it ever cross your mind that, well, it's the same shit my brother's doing.

Well, you know, there was a couple of times where I stopped some guys that were really close friends and my brother and would smell marijuana, and that gave me probable cause and I'm like, hey, guys, I got to search vehicle and y'all have anything on you, and I wouldn't never find anything.

But I knew that these guys were running around my brother and that you know, they were probably all involved in the same thing.

One thing I asked, gave about several times because I find it so baffling, was why his superiors thought Brazoria County was a good place to put him.

He grew up there and he knows the lay of the land that local customs, and I suppose that counts for something.

But his only brother is known to be involved in drugs, and not as a recreational user.

Also, Larry wasn't the only Ortiz tangled up in the drug trade.

There was an uncle too.

Officers from the Department of Public Safety were investigating a smuggling operation that led them to a house in a rural part of the county.

They were smuggling hundreds thousands of pounds in marijuana, and my uncle he showed up during the investigation to the house, and we believe he was there to pick up one of the trucks and drive the trucks, which makes sense because a few years later he drives a grain hauler through a border patrol checkpoint.

A grainhuler loaded with five tons of weed.

Well, what he immediately tells these narcotics agents is, oh, your DPS, my nephew is a state trooper.

You guys probably know him.

It's his name is gab Ortiz.

And so that raised a red flag with some of the folks in narcotics.

Well, yeah, that would Those flags were quickly lowered.

I remember this particular trooper said, Gabe, no way, he's honest, man, This guy's got a lot of integrity.

No matter how many times I asked him, Gabe never had a sensible answer, or any answer or really other than that.

Uncle.

Notwithstanding, it was never an issue because both of them, Gabe and Larry, made sure it wasn't.

I remember being told that he was being investigated or he was being looked at by certain agencies down there for distribution or you know, manufacturing.

When they're telling me these things, obviously it's not what I want to hear.

I was hoping that my brother would get out of the game completely.

But I was keenly aware of what he was involved in, and so I made it very clear to the agencies that I worked with that hey, I understand it.

I'm a state trooper.

And that's my brother.

And this goes for any of my family.

If somebody's violating the law, then I fully expect law enforcement to do their jobs.

If any of our family members or my brothers is committing some type of crime, then you got to pay for it.

And as for Larry, he respected his brother, he respected his job.

Not ever did he ever ask me to, you know, let him know if I'm ever being investigated or he did ask for a few favors, and I actually did give into one favor at one point, but it was the only the only time that I ever helped him out.

It was a big one too.

As a general practice, when people are first convicted of a crime, especially young people and especially non violent crimes, they are not immediately locked up.

Murderers, rapists, those sorts, yeah they're going to go to prison.

But a young adult picked up for SAE possession or trespassing, that person is going to get a few chances to reform, to straighten up and fly right.

The first time you get probation, you know, second time, they send you to a substance abuse treatment center or you know, boot camp or something similar.

Larry ran out of chances.

He had have been arrested numerous times by this point, so he'd been through all those.

In October two thousand and one, he was picked up for a possession of a controlled substance drugs with intent to distribute.

In addition to that being illegal, it was also a violation of his probation, which he'd been on for a burglary seven years earlier.

And so this was a time where he finally was getting sentenced.

A judge gave him five years in the Texas Department of Corrections big boy prison.

He spent the time after he was arrested in before he was sentenced, in the Bresouria County jail.

His bail was set at eighty thousand dollars, which he had no hope of paying.

Gabe said that it was during that stretch between the arrest and prison that Larry asked him for the favor.

He says, hey, bro, I know that the sheriff has the authority to allow somebody to fail their state prison time out of the county.

In other words, instead of spending five years in a big, violent prison, Larry wanted to do his time in the familiar county jail, where he was relatively comfortable.

Everybody knew him, you know, very charismatic personality.

Everybody liked him.

In the jail.

The officer so I remember, he asked me if there was any way that I could talk to the sheriff, And so I talked to the sheriff in Sheriff King's old school country guy, and he said, oh, yeah, Gabe, we can definitely help him out.

He said, I don't mind that he's been good to us, and he's well respected, you know, he respects all the staff, and so you, being his brother, he said, I don't mind doing that for you.

As it turns out, in order to be transferred back to a county jail to finish a sentence, and then mat first has to leave that jail and physically go to prison, go through the whole intake process to a fishhouly become a prisoner of the state of Texas.

They call it catching the chain, and he catches chain and goes to one of the state prisons.

While he's there, he sees some of his friends from the neighborhood, which are predominantly black, and brother used to run around with the crips outside of prison.

Well in the state prison system, if you're not black, you can't be a crip.

So that doesn't fly.

Prison gangs are almost exclusively based on race.

Some of them are just flat out racist, Area Nations, Nazi low riders.

The names give them away.

The rest are more defined by race, Black, Latino, Asian, Mexican, and sometimes more finer parsing within those broad categories.

Now, to the average person with a kind heart and hope for humanity, this self segregation is distressing, this sort of thing we as a society are supposed to rise above.

That average person, however, is not doing time in a maximum security prison.

There are strength in numbers, there's protection in numbers, and the most efficient way to organize people into recognizable groups with significant numbers is by race.

And here comes Larry Mexican American, Larry new Guy talking to black inmates.

He called those his homeboys.

You know, those are his boys from the street, guys he used to run around with, probably sling dope with.

And he didn't see anything wrong with that.

But obviously what he didn't know that rules of prison were you get a run around with your own kind.

And so the Texas Syndicate or Mexican Mafia, when they saw him running around with black inmates, basically charged him up and told him that hey, home, that don't fly in here.

We don't know what you think you're doing, but you better make a decision.

You want to run with us or suffer the consequences.

What would the consequences.

If he would have been severely beaten, severely beaten and if not raped or both at that point, he'd have been somebody's pitch really in prison.

I mean, that's a bottom line.

If you go against any one of those organizations and they're giving you an ultimatum, then I mean, you're going to be beaten and raped or like I said, or both.

And they basically give him twenty four hours to make a decision.

In the middle of the night, the guards wake up Larry, they tell him to pack up.

He's like, what's what's going on, and they're like, we're transporting you back to Brazori County Jail.

And so essentially he told me, he's like, you saved my life because I didn't know what I was going to do.

Larry did the rest of his time in the Brazoria County Jail home.

Basically where Gabe says, the jailers and deputies all liked him.

Gabe was still in the county too.

He still loves being a cop, and yeah it's mostly traffic stops, but he's ganning a tremendous amount of experience.

You know, the Sheriff's office got a call for service that was a domestic or family violence, if they were getting ready to execute a warrant and they needed perimeter support, we would back them up.

Gabe was on the Civil Disturbance Management Team, a very polite way of saying riot squad.

He learned accident reconstruction, how to reverse engineer skid marks and wreckage into a viable picture of why there was skid marks and wreckage.

Was also a drug recognition expert, so anytime somebody was under the influence of something other than alcohol, they would, you know, somebody would call us to do an evaluation and determine, you know, what type of drug that may be under the influence of.

So I did a lot of different things besides, you know, the typical traffic enforcement.

He's ambitious, he wants to move up.

He's gotten a taste of big time crime fighting.

Hell, he's gotten his picture in the paper with a SpongeBob Pinatta in two six hundred and ninety five pounds of weed, and after four years he was eligible to test for promotions.

He took two one for narcotics and the other for what's called special crimes.

He passed both.

I actually preferred going into special crimes because we weren't just limited to working narcotics investigations.

We could also work investigations.

We had personnel that were assigned to the US Marshall's Task Force on Special Crimes.

We worked sex offender compliance.

There was a lot of racing investigations, course track, dog tracks, the whole gamut, so there wasn't anything that we were restricted from working.

November two thousand and four, game Is promoted to sergeant investigator in the Special Crimes Division of the Texas Department of Public Safety.

After I knew I made the list for special crimes, the commander calls me and offers me a position in El Paso.

El Paso is in the southwest corner of the state, about eight hundred miles from Missouria County, and I.

Was really hoping that there was going to be some other options besides El Paso.

There were no other options.

So called my wife after and she says, where are we going?

And I told her ol Paso, and she really thought I was joking.

She's like, no, really, where are we going.

Neither of us had ever been to l pass so no family ties, we didn't know a single person at all, and it was twelve hours away from Lake Jackson, and so we knew that going ol Passo was, you know, essentially going to keep us from regular visits with the family.

And the family functioned so not to mention, it was a culture shock going to ol Paso, just because of the Spanish being so different, and the food is different, you know, everything is really really different about Passo, and some of the other started investigators made it sound like it was a horrible place to go.

I even told my wife, I will go by myself, and I'm pretty sure i can transfer back to Texas, I jokingly said, or somewhere close, and you know, we don't all have to move and I'll be back with a few months.

And she says, no, baby, I really believe this was meant to be and we're going to go out there as a family, and we all decided to back up and move to Opasso.

The supposedly good thing about Opasso for a DPS sergeant is that one can transfer out after a year or two, which is what Gabe expected to do.

But his opportunity came too soon.

And sure enough, a month later, a vacancy posted in San Antonio.

But I didn't make much money as a trooper, and we were in no position to move anywhere and pay for a move on our own, and so we just decided to stick it out and stay in Opasso for a number of years.

Those few years turned into eight eight years, basically as far away from Brazoria County as you can get and still be in the state of Texas.

Gab and his family were there for so long that his brother Larry, finished that five year sentence in the county of jail, got out, did some more illegal stuff, and went to prison again.

But this time he would do the whole stretch in a real prison without his brother there to help him out.

Larry would have to figure out how to navigate those prison gangs, and oddly enough, so Agabe.

That became his next area of expertise, gangs.

That's next time, I'm the brothers Ortiz.

Later this season, we're going to take a closer look at prison gangs.

To better understand what Larry would have had to navigate if he hadn't been sent back to the county jail.

I spoke with Mike Tapia, a sociologist at Texas A and m COMMERCE who's been studying gangs for more than a decade.

He walked us through the evolution of prison gangs, how they began, and where they're going, and why it's hard to run a prison without them.

Here's a preview.

It's as important to note the structure of the prison itself, how Texas in particular managed, you know, this large group of unruly men, and the system that they devised.

It's a crappy job to be a correctional officer.

The standards are pretty low to get in, the pay sucks, and it's a thankless job.

It's a be a very dangerous position.

And so one way to control populations in prison is to let them police themselves.

And sort of sort of a social Darwinism kicks in, and so those that emerge as leaders, as charismatic, as strong physically and intimidating get some responsibility.

They're offered responsibility to sort of manage help the guards man and wardens, and so forth manage populations and keep people in line.

And so it's it harkens back to that age old question who runs the joint?

You know, And if you ask prisoners, they'll give you one version, and if you ask administration, they'll give you another.

Right.

So the State Supreme Court of Texas made that practice illegal, and so they told prisons prison administrators, you can't keep letting inmates police their own kind.

You know.

It's called the turnkey system.

And these guys had keys, you know, they had access to different parts of the prison and everything.

So they were, for all practical purposes, unpaid employees, you know, of the prison who got certain benefits.

So when did this turnkey system start?

Oh, I'd say that it's probably always been there.

It seems like just to be part of the nature of the beast of locking people up.

I mean, it's it's almost impossible to diminish it or make it obsolete, you know, just because of the very nature of being locked up with other individuals, some strong leader will emerge.

Now they call it a pod dog, right, and so that's a big part of how and why these groups form, you know, just political you know, microcosms in the penitentiary.

Actually, so you covered my next question.

Despite whatever the Texas Supreme Court might have ruled, is it even possible to make the system go away?

No?

I mean they also ruled that it's illegal to group inmates on the basis of race.

But there again, you know, for Hamopheli's sake, that will never go away, and that is another strong basis that I should and leave that out.

I would even say that probably is one of the primary reasons that prison gangs did form.

Also is for self protection and preservation for racial conflict reasons, you know, blacks against whites against Mexicans, essentially in Texas prisons.

The brothers Ortiz is a production from Campsite Media in partnership with iHeart Podcasts.

Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

The brothers Ortiz was written, reported, and hosted by me Sean Flynn.

Lane Rose is our senior producer.

Story editing by Audrey Quinn, sound design, mix and engineering by Garrett Tiedeman, original music by Garrett Tiedeman.

The fact checking by Savannah Wright.

iHeart Podcasts executive producers are Lindsay Hoffman and Jennifer Bassett.

Campside Media's executive producers are Josh Deen, Vanessa Grigoriatis, Adam Hoff, and Matt Cher.

A special thanks to our operations team Doug Laywyn, Ashley Warren and Sabina Mara.

If you enjoyed The Brothers Orties, please rate and review the show wherever you get your podcasts, and thanks for listening.