Life Sucks
Life was dangerous for Germain Devia before he ever came to Kansas City.
Now a short, stocky man of 31, Devia was born in Cali, Colombia’s third-largest city. Sugar and coffee barons built the city’s fortunes in the early 20th century. It was a key stop as tropical exports traveled to Western ports, and investors poured money into the burgeoning industrial center. By the early 1990s, Cali’s population was pushing 2 million. High-rises had gone up along the palm-lined Cali River. As soon as the evening breeze stirred the thick afternoon heat, stylish city-dwellers packed the chic restaurants on the Avenida 6 to grab a bite before heading out to all-night dance parties at salsotecas.
But the city was also known for the notorious Cali Cartel, which controlled 80 percent of the cocaine smuggled into the United States. The operation was so deeply ingrained in the regional economy that Cali fell into a deep recession when the drug ring was busted in the 1990s.
Fueled by money from drug trafficking, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) intensified its guerrilla activity in Colombia’s southwest capital. The communist organization, formed in 1966 to defend the peasant and working population from the National Front government, had evolved into a well-armed, well-organized network of guerrilla cells bent on kidnapping and killing enemies of the revolution.
More than 11,400 Cali residents were murdered between 1993 and 1998.
Security precautions permeated the city’s culture. Tall, wrought-iron gates made houses into fortresses. Living in the middle-class Marroquin neighborhood, Devia’s family was at high risk.
For 20 years, Devia’s father, Arabel, had been the South Section leader for the Liberals — a party focused on secularism, democracy and workers’ rights. Arabel had helped to organize elections and build community schools. That was enough to earn him written death threats and visits from armed FARC members demanding that he stop his political activity. Sensing that the tense situation would worsen, Devia’s mother, Flor, left the country in 1993 hoping to establish a life for her family in the United States.
Despite the intimidation, Devia started working with the Liberal Party when he was 19. He also joined the Colombian military, which often put him in direct confrontation with the masked militia groups. While he was doing administrative work for the Liberals in advance of the 1994 election, Devia says, the militants repeatedly threatened him.
Three years later, Devia’s sister, Cristy, and her boyfriend were returning home one night when gunmen opened fire, hitting the 16-year-old girl. The bullets shattered her right arm, punched through a lung and tore through an artery.
The family sent Cristy to Spain. Arabel later followed his daughter to Europe. Then Devia’s brother, Frank, was found dead. The death certificate says he committed suicide, but the FARC claimed credit.
Devia was already living in the United States. In 1998, he had taken a flight to Mexico City and stayed in the capital for several weeks before making his way to Nuevo Laredo, Texas. Crossing the border was a lot easier back then, Devia says. He made it across by brandishing his Colombian passport. From there, he traveled to Kansas City, Missouri, where his mother was working as a seamstress.
Devia says he came to this country to get an education and start a family. He did both. But last week, the U.S. government shipped him back to Colombia with a gray suitcase, a felony drug conviction and a hole in his skull.
Millie Molina met Devia in 2002, at Club Chemical in downtown Kansas City. He bought her a few drinks, and they danced and talked for most of the night. When she got home, though, the outgoing blonde with a salty sense of humor tossed his number in the trash.
He wasn’t her type, Molina recalls. He was a nerd. They started dating anyway after a friend convinced Molina to dig his number out of the trash. Soon they shared an apartment in Olathe.
Devia was working as a pallet filler at a grocery warehouse and going to school full time at Penn Valley Community College. In 2003, he transferred to the University of Missouri-Kansas City to finish a degree in computer science. After work and school and visiting his mom nearly every day, he stayed up most of the night trying to make extra cash by fixing up friends’ computers.
To make sure he could cover tuition and support his mother, Molina, and Molina’s son, Anthony, Devia now says, he started his own business — though not in computers. He and a couple of Mexican men set up KC One Auto Repair, a small garage surrounded by Mexican tiendas and dilapidated mechanic stands on Minnesota Street in Kansas City, Kansas.
Devia says the three men routinely bought old cars at auction, then used them for parts or fixed them up for resale. In a 2004 financial statement, Devia claimed to be earning $2,400 a month from the business.
Molina remembers that Devia always had money. Maybe she should have been suspicious, she says in retrospect. She’d come home from work as a debt collector at Chase Bank to find a Louis Vuitton purse on the couch or pricey, last-minute plane tickets to visit her family in California. For her birthday, Devia once bought her a mink coat. Another time, he brought home a bag full of emeralds — the gems traditionally used in Colombian wedding rings.
Devia was the kind of guy who’d slip $100 into Molina’s best friend’s purse when she was having a tough time making ends meet. So when he had $2,000 in cash and preferred to keep it in a box upstairs rather than in the couple’s bank account, Molina didn’t say anything.
But on August 22, 2004, she got a frantic call from Devia’s mother, saying agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement were taking away her son. Molina quickly shelled out several hundred dollars for an attorney to sort out Devia’s immigration status.
A couple of weeks later, a friend called and told her to turn on the news. Devia wasn’t in custody because of his status as an illegal immigrant. Instead, he’d been indicted in one of the biggest drug busts in Kansas history.
Mauricio Garces, Jacinto Hernandez and Bill Joe Antle were at the center of a drug ring that smuggled more than 24,000 pounds of marijuana and 640 pounds of cocaine from Mexico to the Kansas City area between 2002 and 2004.
Molina says she recalls Garces coming over to their house. Everyone called him “Loco” — a fitting nickname for a funny guy who was great with kids. Like Devia, he was from Colombia; he introduced Devia to a couple of other guys from their home country.
Hernandez and Antle owned Anaco Transmission, a tan-brick warehouse marked with a yellow sign on Merriam’s main drag. The no-frills shop was a straight shot south from KC One, and Devia says the three men became better acquainted because he bought parts and borrowed tools from them.
It didn’t take long for the UMKC student to understand that the transmission shop was dealing in more than auto parts.
And making millions doing it.
Federal prosecutors describe Hernandez as a skilled mechanic who got greedy. Established in 1996, Anaco Transmission was a profitable business until 2002, when Hernandez turned it into the headquarters for his drug trade. The operation quickly caught the attention of federal investigators, who would go on to detail Hernandez’ operation in documents filed in the U.S. District Court for the state of Kansas.
Early that year, Hernandez helped broker a deal with a Raytown man named Oswaldo Pozo to use Pozo’s house to receive large shipments of marijuana. Pozo would earn $5,000 for each load.
Between May 2002 and the summer of 2003, at least six semi-trucks loaded with sandbags pulled up to his residence. Each bag was marked with a number. Most were packed with nothing more than dirt. Soon the phone would ring and a nameless man in El Paso, Texas, would tell Pozo which sacks were stuffed with weed. Pozo would scoop out the sacks with a front-loader. Then he’d wait for Hernandez, Antle, Garces or others to shuttle it away for distribution.
Pozo also received at least two large shipments of cocaine, concealed in a false compartment in the gas tank of a Kenworth T-20 semi. For each 60-pound load, Pozo’s take was $7,000.
Hernandez, one of two ringleaders, didn’t scare easily. Twice in 2002, he was arrested, once with more than 350 pounds of marijuana, the other time with nearly 50 pounds. Prosecutors stressed that even when Hernandez knew he was under surveillance, he continued his drug smuggling.
In 2003, the Anaco owner bragged to an informant that he had distributed more than 60 kilograms of cocaine “in a matter of a few days.” Some of his customers were federal informants, who regularly purchased 1-kilo sacks of cocaine at the transmission shop. By the end of the year, Hernandez was also responsible for distributing hundreds of pounds of marijuana that were being held at a turf farm in Stillwell, Kansas.
By early 2004, feds had tapped Hernandez’s and Antle’s cell phones and were monitoring the comings and goings of Antle’s black Dodge Ram. In April, investigators learned from a wiretap on Hernandez’s phone that he and Antle were heading back from El Paso with a bounty of drugs. The next day, the black truck, towing an empty trailer, rolled through one of the garage doors at Anaco Transmission. Investigators intercepted calls from a major buyer accusing Hernandez and Antle of delivering less than they’d promised.
By the middle of that year, it was getting harder to do business. After one trip to the Texas border, Hernandez hopped a commercial flight back to Kansas City, and Antle drove home empty-handed when the deal fell through because they couldn’t find a safe location to load the drug cache. Back in Kansas City, phone conversations between the dealers started to focus on arrests, the fact that they were under surveillance and the shortage of drugs.
Then Garces — the social guy Molina remembered as Loco — implicated Devia.
Border Patrol agents in El Paso arrested Garces with 7 kilos of cocaine stashed in the false bottom of a flatbed trailer. That same day, investigators listened as Devia called Hernandez and asked him to pitch in $6,000 for Garces’ bail.
Less than a month later, Devia called Hernandez again. This time, he wasn’t looking to help Garces.
In a June 2 call, Devia told Hernandez that he wanted “notebooks.” Hernandez said he didn’t have any. Devia settled for “50 girls.”
On June 13, Hernandez called Devia back because he had possibly found a customer. On June 15, Antle disclosed in a cell-phone conversation that Devia was going to deliver something to him. Two days later, cameras recorded Devia entering Anaco Transmission.
According to court records, that was Devia’s only alleged drug transaction during the three-year operation.
By midsummer of 2004, the cell-phone chatter was turning urgent. Antle and Hernandez knew the police were following them. In late June, police trailed Lewis Lamonte Smith — a regular customer for large quantities of marijuana — after he’d visited the two Anaco owners. Smith tried to evade the cops by ramming a squad car, but they busted him with 300 pounds of weed in his trunk.
Antle and Hernandez were next.
On August 3, Hernandez called to let Antle know he was on his way to El Paso. “Everything is ready and people are desperate,” he said. Antle headed for Texas, too. As soon as he got there, he bought a 1994 Jaguar convertible, loaded it onto a trailer behind his black Durango and started back toward Kansas City.
He didn’t make it past Emporia. When the Kansas Highway Patrol pulled him over, Antle called one of his contacts in Kansas City and said he had a “big, big, big problem.” The next day, he explained to Hernandez that officers had impounded the vehicles and were waiting for a search warrant.
Hernandez knew that the authorities wouldn’t miss the 638 pounds of marijuana, 2 kilos of cocaine and $2,000 hidden in the two cars. He told Antle, “Man, are we fucked.”
On August 22, Devia was heading home from the auto shop when federal agents stopped him. They said he was driving a stolen car and asked if he was from Colombia and if he was living legally in the United States. He said he was and that his immigration papers were at his mother’s home. When the agents discovered that Devia was lying about his immigration status, they took him into custody.
Two weeks later, Hernandez’s operation unraveled completely. Devia was one of 21 people indicted in U.S. District Court.
The bust had been “a top priority of the United States Department of Justice,” U.S. Attorney Eric Melgren wrote in a press release.
In court documents, Devia appears to have played a minor role. His name appears once in a 53-point description of the operation. Among the more than 500 exhibits that prosecutors submitted into evidence, Devia had participated in five phone calls and appeared on one videotape. Still, a conviction would carry a minimum jail sentence of 10 years.
Key players earned sentences of up to 25 years in prison. Antle will spend nine years behind bars; Garces will serve 10.
Hernandez faces harsher punishment. He took a plea bargain last August, but prosecutors returned with a request for a tougher sentence, which attorneys are still negotiating.
Prosecutors charge that he was at the heart of an operation that was “as severe as drug trafficking crimes get” and that he caused “incalculable” harm. He will likely serve more than 25 years, if not a life sentence.
When he was arrested in 2004, Devia says, he was determined to fight the charges. Early hearings suggested that he might have to wait until January 2006 before the complex case was ready for trial.
Devia started acting in his own defense. He petitioned the judge for a transcript of the grand jury minutes. He filed for a list of the evidence against him.
More than 14 months after Devia was pulled over, Devia’s attorney filed a motion to dismiss the charges, arguing that Devia’s right to a speedy trial had been violated.
By then, though, Devia wasn’t focused on proving his innocence. He was desperate to get to a doctor.
The private, maximum-security Leavenworth Detention Center sits at the top of a gently rolling hill 5 miles north of Interstate 435. The watch tower at the center of the complex evokes a small, out-of-place airport. Herds of black cattle graze up to the tall, barbed-wire fence.
Prison officials there weren’t especially sympathetic to Devia’s head problems.
Since 1992, the Leavenworth Detention Center has been operated by the nation’s first and largest private prison company, Corrections Corporation of America. With 65 facilities under its management, CCA’s clients include dozens of federal, state and municipal corrections agencies that pay the Nashville company to house and care for more than 70,000 inmates. Starting in September 2004, Devia was one of 800 at the Leavenworth outpost.
When Devia arrived at Leavenworth in August 2004, he told officials about his harrowing medical history, which dated back to a motorcycle crash in 1997. Devia, then in the Colombian military, was heading home one evening when he heard gunshots. He started picking up speed toward the city, but then his brakes went out; he leaped from the moving vehicle and hit his head on a tree. When he woke up in the hospital, a chunk of bone was missing from his head.
Doctors in Colombia told him they’d had to remove some of the bones that make up the skull, because he had blood in his brain cavity. In 2001, when Devia was living in the United States, he had a second surgery at St. Luke’s in Kansas City to reconstruct his skull with a prosthetic bone and fill the depression behind his right temple.
His condition required constant monitoring and visits to a neurosurgeon. He might need a third surgery.
The same month that he was incarcerated, Devia says, his regular headaches grew worse. He put in medical requests to see physicians at the prison.
Devia claimed that nurses advised him to buy Advil or Tylenol from the inmate canteen. Over-the-counter meds did little for his condition and, he says, at the start of 2005 the incision point for the previous surgeries began to open and swell.
He was bleeding regularly, and by April, pus had started to seep from the wound. In May, pieces of the prosthetic bone could pass through the dime-sized hole in his temple.
He wrote to Molina every day, telling her that he wasn’t receiving adequate medical attention.
Then he started sending her what looked like slivers of sheetrock. He told her to keep the tiny pieces of skull as evidence.
At her house just north of Bannister Road, Molina digs out a large blue duffel bag. It’s full of notes and drawings and crafts made from sock string and molded bread. She finds an envelope that rattles. Inside there’s a small bone shard that looks like a dried-out baby tooth.
“You don’t know how crazy it was to get that in the mail,” she says.
CCA declined to comment on Devia’s incarceration at Leavenworth. The U.S. Marshals Service pays CCA $81.69 per inmate per day; that price includes medical treatment within the facility. Steve Owen, a spokesman for CCA, tells the Pitch that the company is licensed by the American Correctional Association, which mandates the “highest, comprehensive set of standards” when it comes to health care.
Devia acknowledges that, on several occasions, prison workers took him to St. Joseph Medical Center in Leavenworth for tests and scans. They gave him antibiotics to counter the apparent infection. But their response, he says, was slow and sporadic.
In October 2005, Devia’s attorney filed a motion for medical care, alleging that Devia’s condition had worsened since he’d come under CCA’s supervision. An assistant U.S. attorney shot back that Devia’s claims against CCA were “misleading” and that Devia was awaiting a bone scan. U.S. Circuit Court Judge John Lungstrum dismissed the motion.
Marshals escorted Devia to the University of Kansas Medical Center in late December, where a neurosurgeon evaluated him. Months passed, and CCA never gave him the results from the KU tests. Finally, in February 2006, a doctor at St. Joseph confirmed what Devia suspected: His skull was infected.
Devia tried to protect his deteriorating scalp with Band-Aids. But in April, his infection caused a violent vomiting spell that required a trip to the emergency room at St. John’s. The next month, Devia was shuttled back to the University of Kansas Hospital. There, the attending doctor, Ania Pollack, noted that she observed “seeping pus” and described Devia’s condition as severe.
Devia says he pleaded with her to order emergency surgery. Instead, the marshals shipped him back to Leavenworth.
He’d been in prison for nearly two years. And he had yet to go to trial.
Back in Kansas City, Flor Devia began petitioning for international assistance, calling the Colombian consulate in Chicago and asking officials there to demand better medical care for her son.
“I was everyday crying,” Flor says, sitting at the small card table in her second-floor apartment on the city’s Northeast side. In the CCA visiting room each week, she says, “I would see little more, little more, little more swelling. Then it was his whole face.”
One day, unexpectedly, Devia wasn’t there when Molina and Flor went to visit.
On June 20, Devia says, two guards woke him before dawn. They took him to KU Hospital for an 8 a.m. surgery that would last more than seven hours.
According to Pollack’s notes, the lesion on Devia’s head had grown to the size of a quarter. She peeled back the skin and discovered scar tissue between the scalp and the skull. After scraping the area clean, she removed two screws that were holding the prosthetic bone in place and used a high-speed air drill to break it away from the skull.
“Underneath the bone flap, there were multiple areas that appeared gelatinous,” she noted.
Several hours later, a plastic surgery team stitched up the wound and inserted a drain to discharge fluids.
Devia woke up under the watch of two federal marshals, bound to his hospital bed with cuffs at his hands and feet.
“I was in pain, 30 stitches in my head,” Devia says. “I was like a mummy. I couldn’t stand up or nothing.”
According to medical records, KU physicians said that Devia would require six weeks of continuous IV infusions to root out the persistent infection in his skull. Just five days after the surgery, though, a nurse noted that she’d been in contact with CCA nurse Phyllis Warder and was told that “U.S. Marshall will not pay for patient to stay here for 6 weeks.”
According to KU Hospital spokesman Dennis Minich, the cost of the hospital suite and nurse care alone rang up to $66,743.44 during Devia’s two-week stay. That doesn’t include the cost of the surgery itself, a figure the hospital declined to release. To date, the hospital has received one check from the feds for $6,887.47 for Devia’s care.
Marshals transferred Devia to St. John. Physicians recommended that he be prescribed two drugs, but the marshals agreed to only one. Physicians noted that Devia would need a follow-up at a neurosurgery clinic to monitor the infection and to discuss a replacement for the missing bone flap that had left his brain unprotected but for a thin layer of scalp.
Devia says he spent his six hospital-bound weeks considering his situation. He says he had already dismissed one court-appointed attorney for being unresponsive to his requests. He says Patrick D’Arcy, his second attorney, wasn’t much better.
Then D’Arcy told him that the government was offering a plea agreement that would get him out of prison right away.
He took the deal, pleading guilty to conspiracy to distribute more than 1,000 kilograms of marijuana and more than 5 kilograms of cocaine. Prosecutors offered Devia a sentence of time served.
That didn’t mean he could return to Molina’s house and pick up his studies at UMKC. Part of the deal was immediate deportation.
Released from CCA custody, Devia was transferred to Caldwell County Detention Center an hour north of Kansas City in rural Kingston, Missouri.
He was afraid that if he returned to Colombia, he’d once again be targeted by communist rebels. He wanted to fight the deportation order.
On December 4, 2006, Devia was escorted into a small office at the Department of Homeland Security near Kansas City International Airport to try to convince federal officials that sending him home to Colombia would put his life in danger.
The asylum officer dispatched from Chicago listened as Devia and his immigration attorney, Kristy Cuevas, explained his family’s persecution by FARC guerrillas. They spent the afternoon answering follow-up questions from bureaucrats in Illinois.
A month later, Cuevas had good news for Molina. The asylum office had determined that Devia did have a “credible fear of persecution or torture” if he returned to his home country. Still, the final decision would be up to an immigration judge who would preside over a February trial via video link from Chicago.
Two days before the immigration trial, Molina drove Devia’s now-2-year-old son, Germain Jr., to Caldwell County. In the gravel parking lot, Molina touched up her lip gloss and readjusted a new black-and-red shirt that showed so much cleavage, it earned her a reprimand from jail administrators. In the visiting room, she lifted up the toddler at Devia’s window. Germain Jr. babbled into the phone and kissed his dad through the glass.
The tone of the visit turned somber. Devia’s prospects for staying in the States didn’t look good.
He couldn’t petition for political asylum because he’d been convicted of a felony.
The next-best alternative was a limbo status called “withholding of removal,” which would allow Devia to stay and work in the United States. But he wouldn’t be eligible for permanent citizenship, and if he ever left the country, he wouldn’t be allowed to return. Instead of convincing the judge that he could face danger in his home country, Devia would have to prove that his persecution was “probable.”
If that didn’t work, Cuevas would ask the judge to grant protection under the Convention Against Torture — an international treaty adopted by the United Nations in 1984. But that was an even tougher sell. Devia would have to prove that it was “more likely than not” that he would be harmed in Colombia. Very few petitioners meet that standard.
As Molina and Devia spoke on the phone that bridged the glass, one thing was clear: The dent in his right temple is as big as a golf ball.
Molina told him she was having trouble raising the final $800 of the $1,400 she needed to pay Cuevas. They discussed whether they should forgo more legal assistance in a lost cause and start saving up some money for Plan B: a coyote to get Devia back across the border.
Two days later, the trial didn’t take long. The judge denied all of Devia’s claims but wished Devia well.
Speaking to the Pitch by phone from an immigration holding facility in Kansas City the day after the deportation ruling, Devia said he didn’t know what he would do once he got back. Molina, Germain Jr. and his mother would follow him to South America in coming weeks, but living in Colombia wouldn’t be safe.
Devia said he would try to call a cousin who may still live in Cali when he landed. He will arrive with $70 in his pocket. One of his first tasks will be to hire a bodyguard.
