Campsite Media.

When gayb Orties enlisted in the Air Force and left Brazoria County in nineteen ninety two, he was launched into the world by a stable, intact family, mom, dad, brother, sister, all living together under the same roof kids going to school, the whole family going to church.

Was almost Rockwellian.

But within three years the family Gabe left behind had fragmented.

First, his mom left his dad and moved into an apartment with Alicia, Gabe's little sister.

My mom's never been the disciplinariant.

This is Alicia, She remembers, the supervision being less than rigorous.

I had a lot of freedom that kids that age normally would not have.

You know.

It's like that apartment was mine and I could have my friends come and go, and my boyfriend Paunch, he was always coming to go in.

And then mom moved to Mexico with her new boyfriend.

I did go ahead and move in with Paunch and his family.

Were fourteen fourteen, okay, I was like Mike, what was going on there?

Gabe was back stage side by then at an Air Force base in Texas.

When mom left with this other man, sister got left behind and almost abandoned.

I can recall Gabriel trying to get me and pick me up and take me back to where he was roadside, and I think it was Abilene at the time.

It was.

He was like, I'm going to get you.

You know, let's pack up your stuff.

We'll put you in college, you know, we'll get you set up over there.

He shows up and my dad's there to say goodbye.

I get my bags, I go inside.

Gabe's out there waiting, and Paunch starts bawling.

I mean, he drops to his knees and he's like, don't leave.

So I felt bad.

So I go out there and I told Gabe and my dad I'm staying.

Gabe's like what, and I said, yeah, I'm gonna go ahead and stay.

About a month later, I find out I'm pregnant with my first kid, and I was like, God, Gabe's gonna Gaye's gonna be disappointed.

M h.

From Campside Media and iHeart Podcasts.

This is the Brothers or Tees Episode three, The Family Man.

I'm Sean Flynn.

H m hm.

Hm hm.

When Gab's Air Force tour and Turkey ended, he was just a few months shy of finishing up his four year commitment, so the Air Force made gave an offer he could stay in Turkey for those last few months, or if he signed up for another year, they'd send him back to Texas.

Abilene, just about dead center of the state.

So that's where I got sent its Dias Air Force Base.

He was a senior airman by then, still working security, mostly for B one bomber payloads.

At Dias.

In Abilene, he was much closer to Missouria County, which, despite the chaos, was still home.

But a month after he landed in the spring of nineteen ninety six, he met a woman in a local bar.

That said, probably the corniest thing ever, but I said, you have to be the most beautiful woman in this bar tonight.

And so so we're standing there, you know, talking, and a song comes on and she says, hey, I like this song, and she grabs him by the hand and we go out on the dance floor and the rest is history.

So that actually worked.

Euh.

Yeah.

Her name has been Linda, and she and Gabe got married in August of nineteen ninety seven, a little more than a year after they met, and they're still married and happily.

So yeah, Abilene worked out all right.

Three months after they got married, Gabe was honorably discharged from the US Air Force as an immediate practical matter.

That meant Gabe was unemployed.

He had nothing lined up, no prospects.

He applied at the local sheriff's office It's Taylor County, having been trained in security and law enforcement already, but he hadn't heard anything back.

He ended up going to a job fair where he got hired by the Texas Youth Commission.

In fact, he got hired on the spot right then and there, which probably should have been a hint.

It's essentially a detention facility.

It's almost like a prison for.

Youth.

He didn't like it.

Fortunately, he only had to stay there for three months because the Taylor County Sheriff.

Called and they offered me a position as a jailer inside the Taylor County Jail.

A jailer is a law enforcement officer, but not a cop, and the way most of us think of cops.

They work in the jail, as the word suggests, looking after inmates and keeping order.

But it's not the same as a prison guard either, because county jails mostly hold short timers.

Your weekend drunks, people who've been arrested but not convicted and are just waiting to make bail, and misdemeanor offenders serving short sentences of less than a year, usually days or months for relatively minor crimes.

And there are also people being held in pre trial detention.

They haven't been convicted of anything, and they are of course presumed innocent, but some of them are enough of a flight risk or enough of a danger to others that are judge has either denied them bail or set it so high that they can't post it.

That's where I got exposed to some of the gangs.

The American correctional system, and especially the Texas correctional system, has a lot of gangs.

In fact, the Texas Department of Public Safety's Criminal Intelligence Service has identifiedou of gangs, including nineteen they call security threat groups.

There's the Arian Brotherhood, Crips, Bloods, Mexican Mafia, Botteryo, az Teca, and on and on.

I saw how these inmates were trying to manipulate other staff.

I mean they're going to try, you know, I'm a new jailer, and certainly some of these gangs were trying to manipulate me, you know, get me to bring in something, to do favors for them.

A member of the Texas Syndicate.

The Texas Syndicate is one of those security threat groups, both a prison gang and a street gang, mostly of Mexican Americans and mostly in Texas.

He was very careful about how he described it, but he essentially said, how would you like for a envelope full of money just to show up in your in your mailbox every month?

I'm like, what do you mean?

He said, Well, he said, I can make that happen.

And I'm like, okay, what's the catch?

He said, well, you know, if we asked you maybe to do us and bring in some things into jail, you know you'll be compensated for it.

In most prisons there is a robust underground economy that only functions if goods, drugs, cell phones, cash, what have you are smuggled them from the outside.

And the easiest way to do that is to bribe a guard.

And he's like, it's no big deal, nobody will make cares, not hurting anybody.

He's like, what do you make ten dollars an hour?

Yes, yes he did, but he turned him down.

Thank you anyways, he tried every once in a while.

It's like that offer still stands if you want to, you know, man, we can help you out.

I know you're not making much.

At the same time, Gabe was saying no to the Texas Syndicate, even though he was barely scraping by his brother Larry, just a few hours down the highway, was very much saying yes to the gang life and that paid a lot better.

While Gabe was an Abilene trying to figure out what to do with his life, his little brother Larry was still running the streets in Bassouria County, few of.

Them anyway, It was maybe three streets.

This is Antonio, but that's not his real name.

Antonio agreed to be interviewed and recorded for this podcast, but because we talked about some sensitive things, we're not going to use his real name.

He and Larry have been friends since they were kids.

It was in three streets.

It was had everything sold up, not just drugs problems.

Antonio is in his mid forties, shaved, had lots of tats, built like a fire hydrant, squat and thick, and yet somehow genuinely surprised that anyone might find him intimidating.

It.

We met her house, a neat, little bungalow in a green and quiet neighborhood, and by we, I mean a whole bunch of us.

Gabe is there, as is his mom, Gloria, his sister Alicia and two of her kids, and Larry's friend Wade.

Again that his real name either.

Mean Shan, Larry was was.

I could call him my brother in law, but he was.

He was actually my brother.

My sister was his wife.

And I know they've been together at least thirty years.

Seventh grade, yeah, something like seventh grade.

I consider his family.

Even before Larry and Kissy even met.

We wouldn't go nowhere without each other.

If he was here, now, you know, we'd be ready, you know, we if they didn't go, I didn't go.

If I didn't go.

Sometimes they still go, but it just depends on what I had going on.

But for the most part year it was gonna be us three.

We was in the neighborhood that was just full of full of drugs and alcohol and everything that comes with that, which again are we known for the most part is what we've seen on TV.

So now we're actually living it and it's different.

Than what it what it was on TV.

The consequences, I mean, you know, people dying, getting shot, stabbed, cut fights, The drive bys started happening more frequently.

It was, it was always something going on.

We're sitting at a high top table just off the kitchen.

Antonio's drinking, michaelob ultras.

He's a little nervous.

It's still carb conscious.

He's also a gracious host.

You can hear both of our bottles rattling on the table.

We also had an audience.

Gab was standing there off to the side listening.

Sorry, if there's some criminal stuff, I know, we know Larry was involved, was involved with some stuff, and you can talk about it.

It's not gonna come back to anymore names and dates, but.

We don't do that anyway, So just.

Saying like, don't hold back because there's probably stuff you ever talked about that.

I don't know.

So anyway, Sorry, there's a movie playing on the TV, one of the Fast and Furious franchise, but it's on mute.

Everyone is listening to Antonio.

And wadeh What was in the eighties, I think crack hit that neighborhood, Real.

Hoard ninety one, ninety two.

Yeah, ninety one ninety two.

Crack has just powdered cocaine alchemized into a cheap, smokable rock.

For the buyer, it hits harder and faster, and for the seller it's more lucrative because they can retail smaller quantities to more people.

It first showed up in significant quantities around nineteen eighty in Miami and then pretty quickly spread to most major cities.

It took a while a decade apparently to filter into smaller out of the way markets like Brazoria County.

That epidemic there was.

It hit the little of the community we grew out of, hit that neighborhood, real hoard and Larry got to watch all that with us.

And you know when your kids and you see that easy money coming in in it, how do you say it's hit ticing.

Yeah.

Antonio and Wade got into the game too, started selling, started making that easy money.

It was all about being cool.

That's really was the motivating factor behind all of that.

Was just to be cool.

The girls liked the cool, dougish bad boys, so that's what we became.

You feel a bulletproof, you know, at eighteen and nineteen, I thought I was grown, and I knew what I was doing.

I had no clue.

But neither of them lasted very long in the game.

Wade got arrested when he was still in his late teens, and then he got called over to his grandmother's house.

And when I got there, I thought somebody had died because there was a lot of people there, a lot of people, And by this time, I don't even know who I am.

I just I'm getting in a lot of trouble.

So I got out of the car, and as I'm walking in the yard, I see both of my grandmothers sitting beside each other, my paternal and my maternal grandmother.

So something has to be wrong for both of them to be here.

My paternal grandmother, she just had her head speaking to your soul.

I have an older brother that was in prison at the time, and she said, so your brother on his way out and you're on your way in.

Huh.

It was the disappointment, the dissatisfaction, the disgust, the hurt that I seen in her face and then in her eyes.

That's what really got to me.

So that was it for me.

That was my first and last time getting in trouble.

Antonio was out soon after.

So one of the last times I went to jail, I told the police officer he had got to call my mom, right, and he come down on me real hard.

All you a gangster, you bad ass, and you this and that and that and that, and look at you wanting to call your mom.

And I told him, I said, well, my mom's disabled.

If I don't call her, she's gonna step all night worry and he's gonna make herself sick.

And he and he looked me in my eyes and he told me, he said, do you think you're some of the problem.

Sat in there a week, the city jail and people thinking about it, thinking about it, thinking about it.

He was right.

That was enough for me.

He wasn't even in there on a drug charge.

In fact, Antonio has never been arrested for drugs.

I just got lucky myself and never got caught in some of the things I've done.

And Larry, I guess, didn't have that kind of look.

No, he did not.

Now honestly, I kind of lost track here's gab, but I do recall him in and out, in and out.

It was all drug related charges.

And maybe it's some probation violations.

The first time Melinda met him was us going to Missouri County jail and me talking to him behind the glass because he was locked up.

I'm like, Hey, this is mike fiance Melinda, and she's like hi, you know, waving behind the glass.

So maybe Larry didn't have Antonio's luck, but he also had different circumstances, different incentives, different talents.

Let's start with the talents.

Larry was good at the game.

He'd moved on from slinging a pocketful of rocks on a street corner.

That's retail, the drug trade equivalent of working the counter at seven to eleven.

By the late nineties, he was working with larger quantities of weed and cocaine and cash, and he'd moved into manufacturing, which is what law enforcement calls it when you cook pottered cocaine and the crack.

And the reason we know he was good at it is that, despite his well known reputation, despite what his family and friends knew, his criminal records at that point reflected none of it.

He wasn't just good at that.

Larry was good at taking care of business.

You know.

He was good at taking care of things.

You know, he was going to make it happen regardless, you know that I had to say about him.

He was going to get by and he was going to make sure that everybody that road Woodham was going to be okay too.

In the beginning, it was all an adolescent goof Remember that movie they all watched, South Central waydus Don't Fuck with Dooce kids playing gangster.

But Larry's not acting out a movie anymore.

He has real responsibilities, people depending on him, people to take care of.

Larry is now the man of the family fractured though it might be.

Gabe's off working corrections.

His father's a wreck.

Remember his dad was a heavy drinker.

We were over there a few quite a few times, and his dad was going through some difficult times and Larry had to be the adult in the house.

You know, he was there by himself, just him and his dad.

Everyone else was gone.

While Larry is keeping tabs on his dad, he's also raising two daughters.

Kissy, his girlfriend who would become his wife, was pregnant with someone else's baby when they first got together.

Nadlin, who Larry would raise as his own, was a toddler, and then Larry and Kissy had a daughter together, Larissa, who's eleven months younger than Nadlin.

The pinnacle of the point on his legacy is taking care of his family, home, his household.

That was it.

That was probably the motivating factor for everything that he did, was making sure that my sister and them kids we all right, We're taken care of.

And finally there's Alicia, Larry and Gabe's little sister.

Fifteen years old when she got pregnant for the first time.

When I told Larry, he was just like, well, you're gonna have to woman up now.

Like it's it's not it's not games, it's it's you know, you got to you got responsibilities coming Now's family was like, hey, you got to get a job.

You got a baby to take care of, and they helped us get her own place.

I learned how to cook from Poncha's momd home and she's the one that told me, look, if this is what you're going to do, You're you're going to live together.

This is how it.

Needs to be.

I'm playing Susie Hellmaker at the age of fifteen.

It was definitely it was hard because I was still a kid myself.

Alicia had already dropped out of school, asaid Larry and Paunch.

They would all eventually get their GEDs, but in the moment, Alicia, teenage Alisha and her teenage boyfriend.

They have a child to raise.

It's not easy.

Punch got a job detailing cars, but it barely paid the bills.

And then Alicia got pregnant again.

She needed money.

Her mom's out of the country, her dad's in a depression.

She doesn't want to ask Gabe.

Gabe was just even disappointed, I know, he was.

Who's she going to turn to?

Her big brother Larry.

I was like, let Punch is not making enough money.

We got to we gotta make it.

You know, we got diapers, we got we got clothes.

You know, we gotta pay for bills.

So Larry kind of took us under his wing and showed us the game, as they call it, and he was like, okay, He's like, I'm gonna put you on.

And so sure.

Enough we started selling crack cocaine.

H Larry Todd, Aleisha and her boyfriend how to make crack in their kitchen.

It's not complicated.

You basically boiled cocaine and baking soda and then let it harden into something you can break into smokable retail rocks.

When when we started making it, the money was coming in.

We got cars like jet skis, were we were doing pretty good when it came to money.

I mean, we were this close to a person signing over their d to a two better home for us.

Also there was weed.

Alicia was telling that too.

Gabe has never heard any of this.

He's standing nearby.

Is Alicia's telling me this story, and I expect him to be shocked, maybe even a little hurt, because what she's saying is appalling.

His brother taught his little sister how to commit multiple felonies that could have put her in prison for decades, and yet he seems bemused because it's also kind of sweet.

Keep in mind that at that time in his life mid twenties, Gabe is not impressed with his siblings' life choices, maybe even disappointed.

As Alicia put it, Larry and Alisha are both high school dropouts.

Larry is in and out of jail, and Gabe tried to bring Alicia to Abilene so she wouldn't become.

Well what she became, an unwed teenage mother with a boyfriend who details cars.

Now more than twenty five years later, there's this wrinkle.

Sure, maybe Larry was by some measures a fuck up, but he was loyal, protective.

He was trying honestly and sincerely to help his little sister in the best way, maybe the only way he knew how.

There is decency in that.

It may have been misguided and it was most definitely illegal, but maybe there was a touch of nobility too.

In the middle of all this, when Gabe is working at the jail in Abilene, Larry pays him a little surprise visit.

And he's still wearing blue and you know he's still you know, there's still claiming crips, and I just kind of saw him evolve and I knew he's still he's in the dope game.

A lot of people in that area were involved in the dope game and selling crack cocaine.

Gabe is surprised to see his brother because he hasn't known Larry as the sort to make a six hour drive from Bassouria County.

But again, Gabe didn't know everything going out at home, didn't know who Larry was running with, didn't know where Larry was coming from or going to, And it's just as well.

Really that Gabe didn't know any of that.

He was still working in the jail, but he was restless.

And Neil wanted to go out into the field and work the streets.

He wanted to be a cop.

And how many details does it want to be cop?

Really want to know about his little brother, the street corner crack dealer.

Well, as it happened, there was another jailer, older guy, late fifties, maybe sixty, who started working around the same time as Gabe.

His name was JC.

He looked like a guy off the tombstone, but he had the handlebar mustache, gray hair.

He looked kind of weathered, but a guy you knew that you didn't want to mess with.

I remember j C asking me.

He said, Gabe, what are you doing here?

And I was like, what do you mean?

What am I doing here?

Man?

I was got out of Air Force.

I needed a job.

JC had already had a long career in law enforcement.

He said, this is a retirement job for me.

And he said, Gabe, you're too young and you're too sharp to be working in the jail.

You've got a lot of potential.

Have you ever thought about applying to DPS and I was like, I don't know that I've ever heard of DPS.

DPS is the Texas Department of Public Safety.

It's the umbrella agency for all state level law enforcement like the Texas Rangers and the Highway Patrol and law enforcement related things like the crime lab and driver's licenses.

It's big, but in the moment, Jase was thinking only about the Highway Patrol.

He said, Gay, next time a trooper comes in here, I think you should talk to him and ask him about the job, because I think you'd be a great state trooper.

Not long after, a trooper came into the jail with somebody he'd arrested.

He basically explained everything to me, and he said, if you're interested, I've got an application out in the car, and you've got two weeks to have it completed and turned in to meet the deadline for the next recruit school.

So we go out to his car get the application.

It must have been one hundred pages, or at least it seemed like one hundred pages.

I take this home and I start filling this out, and my wife is like, what are you doing.

I was like, I'm filling this out to be a state trooper.

She's like, what's a state trooper?

And I'm trying to explain to her what DBI.

I didn't even know, you know, earlier that day.

And I'm like, Babe, I'm going to get a fifteen thousand dollars year pay raise.

I was making twenty thousand dollars a year at the time, so that was almost, you know, double what I'd be making, and so it just alive.

It was financially motivated, but it was also something that I knew I wanted to do.

I wanted to be out in the street.

State troopers, for the most part, are not kicking down doors and busting cartels and sending bad guys to prison.

You do a lot of traffic enforcement, speeders, drunks, car wrecks, and a lot of them work in rural areas because those highways need to be patrolled too.

But for Gabe, it's a wrong a couple of rocks up the law enforcement ladder, and this application it was good.

And that's how I ended up going to the academy in nineteen ninety nine.

And then where were you posted your first one?

So my first duty station was Lake Jackson, Texas.

Lake Jackson is in Brazoria County, the place Gabe thought he'd left for good more than seven years earlier.

I'd been going for a number of years, so yes, it was a homecoming.

Things have changed.

And knew that at some point I was going to encounter a lot of people that I knew, you know, family members, people I grew up with, And how was I going to deal with that?

That's next time.

I'm The Brothers or Tease.

The Brothers Orties 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 Orties was written, reported, and hosted by me Sean Flynn.

Laane is our senior producer.

Story editing by Audrey Quinn, Sound design, mix and engineering by Garrett Tiedeman.

Original music by Garrett Tiedeman.

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 Lawn, Ashley Warren, and Sabina Mara.

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