The Binge Crimes: Lady Mafia - Borderlands | 1. A Wild Place

Episode Date: September 7, 2021

It's the 1970s in Far West Texas, and local  bad boy Robert Chambers has always found his way to trouble—women,  drugs, rock stars, mountain lions. And when cocaine starts flowing  across the Mexican border like never before, Robert dives in headfirst. Want the full story? Unlock all episodes of Witnessed, ad-free, right now by subscribing to The Binge. Plus, get binge access to brand new stories dropping on the first of every month — that’s all episodes, all at once, all ad-free. Just click ‘Subscribe’ on the top of the Witnessed show page on Apple Podcasts or visit GetTheBinge.com to get access wherever you listen. A Campside Media & Sony Music Entertainment production. Find out more about The Binge and other podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts and follow us @sonypodcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I'm Indra Varma, and in the latest season of The Spy Who, we open the file on Daphne Park, the spy who killed a prime minister. As the Belgian Congo gains its independence, Officer Park sets out to build a spy network. Together, they're about to go to new extremes to keep Congo free of communists. Follow The Spy Who now wherever you listen to podcasts. Lico Miller's dad was a smuggler. My dad was basically a small-time border-selling-outs-to-the-locals type dude. And he didn't really do it for money because we were always broke.

But he liked to smoke and he liked to drink and he thought smuggling a little drugs here and there part of the adventure itself. That kind of amateur outlaw stuff was actually pretty common along the U.S.-Mexico border in the 1980s. Lico and his dad lived on that border in a little village on the Mexican side called Paso Lajitas. It was literally a stone's throw from the Rio Grande, next to an unofficial, unpatrolled crossing, a place where you could just drive your truck through the shallow river to get to the other side. Life in Paso Lajitas seemed kind of timeless. People shared meals, took turns at chores, watched over each other. And they liked

Lico's dad. He was worldly and kind, sometimes stepping in to teach the children when he wasn't off on some escapade. But this thirst for adventure, it would catch up with Lico's dad. He got in the way of the wrong people, and so did Lico. It was a balmy spring night in March 1987, and Lico had been out all day with his brother. When the two 15-year-olds got home, it was dark, and the boys sensed something was off. Then they heard the voice of Lico's dad coming from inside their house. He basically came out and said, hey boys, is that you? We said yes. He said, alright, things are going bad.

You need to go over to the other house. You know, keep a low profile. And what was going bad? They didn't know. But Lico's dad wasn't a guy who panicked. So they went to the house next door and waited. Then the shooting started. Just a bunch of shooting. Just bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam.

It was coming from Lico's house. Then there was yelling. They could hear another voice, one they didn't recognize. But it sounded like someone giving orders. It began to dawn on Lico what was happening. A man was holding his dad hostage. More shots. Bam! Bam! Bam!

And at that point, that man took my dad's pistol and shot holes on each side of his head in order to intimidate him. By now, Lika was lying on the floor, hoping, praying the shooting would stop, that somehow his dad would be okay and this guy would go away. And the shooting did stop. Quiet now. A dog barking. The crackle of a far-off radio. Then a voice. Lico's father's.

Whispering. Right next to the window. He had escaped his attacker. He needed his spare gun. Because Lico's dad knew this guy. He was a big-time drug trafficker, and he was impossible to miss. Black cowboy hat, tall, broad-shouldered, hulking.

The rumor was that underneath his trench coat, he carried two Colt.45 pistols. This guy was dangerous. Everyone in the Texas borderlands had heard the stories about what he'd done, his connections, what he was capable of. His name was Robert Chambers. Lico's dad, waiting by the window, he wasn't going to wait for Robert to catch up with him. He ran off into the night. But just when it all seemed to be over... This is the point at which a flare goes up.

Lights up the whole damn area. And then we hear a ruckus, and then we hear some pickup trucks and noise, lights on the American side. A second stranger arrived at their family compound. This one appeared to be a cop, an American, with a badge and a gun. But he was accompanied by Mexican police. What was an American lawman doing in Mexico? The cop walked into the house. I remember him being wiry, lean, carrying a submachine gun. And I remember him kind of being a little bit hunched,

a little bit tense, extremely mouthy, violent. And I can't remember if he hit me once or twice, but he claimed he was Rick Thompson. Rick Thompson, the sheriff of Presidio County, the vast area in Texas directly across the river. And the man who claimed he was the sheriff wasn't looking for the drug trafficker Robert Chambers. He was after Lico's dad, demanding to know where he'd gone. But Lico didn't know where his dad was, and he had his own questions. Like, why did a drug trafficker and a sheriff seem to be working together? Were they on the right side of the law, or were they both bad guys? Before Lico could think too much about these questions, the sheriff turned Lico and his brother over to the Mexican police,

and they took the boys to an abandoned hotel for days, asked them the same question, where is your father? When Lico and his brother couldn't answer, the cops beat them, but eventually they gave up and released the two boys. And the whole thing started to seem like a bad dream. Juan Lico still can't shake. One of the things to remember is all these events transpired when I was 15 years old. And I'm 49 now. So it's been an hour or two. And I still have fears. I still have things that don't make sense that can be

attributed to the time in my life when it happened. That's why, since then, Lico doesn't talk much about the things that happened that night. Well, when you're 15 and you get raided by somebody who claims to be the law, and they beat you up, and you end up chained to a hotel bed, and they threaten to pull out your toenails and rough you up a fair amount, you end up a little bit insecure about it i would say what happened to me caused a fair amount of ptsd if that's what they call it now and i think one of the things i learned early in this area was all publicity is bad that That's what I learned. And so that's kind of the rule I live by. I don't do interviews and stuff like that. This, you've courted me long enough.

I need to give you something because you've earned it. You've been obscenely persistent. And the reason for that persistence? I knew that Lico's story was one piece in a jigsaw puzzle of a far larger story, about how a sleepy, isolated region was dragged into a large, complex war. And I was being dragged into it too, tracking two men from that one strange night on the border at Paso Lajitas,

Robert Chambers and Rick Thompson. I had first heard about their story years ago, as some local gossip told at a dive bar, and I immediately got to work, putting together any scraps of information I heard around town, digging deep into the yellowing pages of small-town newspapers. My task seemed simple enough. Piece together the lives of Chambers and Thompson.

Try to make sense of why they joined forces. But I discovered their bond was something nearly everyone wanted to bury, because it forced the tight-knit communities of far west Texas to question who they could trust, their government, their law, even one another. That bond between the notorious outlaw and the iconic cop, it unleashed a saga that reverberates to this day. And it would all come to a head on a cold winter night in an empty fairground where a horse trailer sat stuffed

with a billion dollars worth of cocaine. From Campside Media, the first season of Witnessed, this is Borderlands. I'm Rob D'Amico, Chapter One, A Wild Place. Sorry for taking a minute there. How's your day going? Day's going good. I woke up in Presidio and went down to the Bean Cafe

and had a good bowl of menudo for breakfast. These days, Rod Ponton is a country lawyer. White hair, glasses, a little stooped, with a poker face that every so often breaks into a sly grin. Rod works in Alpine, Texas, in an area downtown that's a jumble of two-story buildings. Red brick, stucco, brightly colored murals of the high desert landscape. And entering his office, it's a throwback. Wood panels, sallow lighting, papers cluttered everywhere. He shows me around. This is my office in Alpine. I've got a wall with all of my diplomas and law licenses. Most of the work he does now,

handling legal matters for Presidio County or as a solo practitioner for clients, it's not making national news. Some nice old cowboy pictures from some cowboys branding on a ranch near here. And in the corner, there's some folk art of the patron saint of lawyers to look after lawyers in the downtrodden. You might already know Rod, because today he's best known for a famous technical gaffe. Mr. Ponton, I believe you have a filter turned on in the video settings. You might want to... Can you hear me, Judge? I'm prepared to go forward with it. I'm here live. I'm not a cat. Yep, that's Rod. He was the cat lawyer, 2021's viral internet sensation. But looking around his office, you soon realize that Rod

used to be well known for very different kinds of legal appearances. There's one pretty notable black and white photograph on the wall. Autographed picture of Henry Lee Lucas thanking me for getting him off of a captive murder case. Henry Lee Lucas. He was a serial killer who confessed to hundreds of murders. Back when he was a rookie, Rod was thrown this case that no one wanted. But he took it and recognized something a lot of people didn't. That Lucas, who had confessed to 300 murders, really didn't commit them. And that Lucas was confessing to anything the Texas Rangers were giving him.

But the Rangers knew that Lucas couldn't have done these murders. It was nearly all bull. Lucas had made up wild stories and told them to cops and prosecutors, who were only too happy to close their unsolved cases. Rod was able to show in court that Lucas simply couldn't have been responsible for dozens of killings he'd confessed to. And Lucas was just the start. After this, Puntin made a career for himself defending clients that a lot of lawyers might choose to steer clear of. Well, you're just doing your best for these people.

They certainly deserve a defense. These people? Well, he's not only talking about serial killers. Because after Lucas, Rod made his name defending high-ranking drug smugglers, often facing decades of prison time. Too many people think that a drug lawyer must be involved in the drug trade, and I never was involved at all with any of my clients. Rod became a go-to guy for the cartels that operated just across the Rio Grande.

He brokered deals for lesser charges, figured a way to get traffickers out of the stiffest sentences. Back then, I was just trying to be the best lawyer I could, work for my clients. You know, I wasn't losing a lot of sleep over what other people thought. In fact, you could say Rod leaned into this reputation. He dressed in black, all black. Black cowboy hat, black suit.

He had a bushy black mustache that curled around the corners of his mouth. But Rod didn't defend drug smugglers because he liked playing the bad guy. This period of time was the first step of the cocaine explosion of the United States. And for the right kind of criminal defense lawyer, this cocaine explosion was going to be really good business. Some experts say cocaine, not coffee, is Colombia's biggest export earner, contributing as much as 25% of the country's overseas earnings.

The sheer size of the drugs industry tends to distort the economy. And a condominium unit in Val Harbor that allegedly housed visiting traffickers all belonged to Pablo Escobar Gaviera. Escobar, indicted for smuggling nearly 60 tons of cocaine into Florida, hid ownership in Panamanian. Miami was kind of wild west because it was the point of entry for so much of the cocaine. So you'd have great chases across Biscayne Bay and cigarette boats with customs. Miami used to be the cocaine capital of the United States. The cocaine started pouring through here in the 1970s as two things happened. Coke got popular in the United States, and Colombian drug cartels got better at making it and transporting it. You've heard some of the names, real and fictional. Pablo Escobar,

the Cali Cartel, Scarface, Miami Vice. Yeah, well, I mean, in the 70s, late 70s, early 80s, the Colombian cartels were smuggling a lot of their merchandise through Caribbean routes, which the DEA started focusing on and started shutting down. That's award-winning journalist Melissa Del Bosque. Once the DEA shut down the Caribbean cocaine route through South Florida, the Colombian cartels, they simply relocated their operations. And so they started moving their business through Mexico using Mexican drug organizations sort of as middlemen, helping them transport the cocaine to the United States. Melissa reports on immigration and U.S.- Mexico border policy, a beat that includes drug cartels and smuggling networks, and their devastating human

costs. And those Mexican drug cartels, they got a lot more powerful in the 1980s when they started smuggling a new product, cocaine. But the cartels couldn't distribute that cocaine throughout the U.S. themselves. They needed organized manpower. Really, drug smuggling is all about transportation. It's about the movement of trucks and planes. It's like a FedEx business, basically. And cartel FedEx? It needed helpers on the American side.

In places like far west Texas. They were recruiting for a range of positions. Drug mules to bring shipments across the border. Customs agents to look the other way. Truck drivers to take big loads deep into the U.S. The approach is usually fairly casual. You just go out for drinks. You go to see a baseball game. It starts off slow,

sort of like a courtship. And they sound you out to see how amenable are you to helping them out for a price. And it sort of builds from there. I mean, this is the way I've heard it described by many people who got into smuggling business. And before they know it, they're in the middle of the business, and it's too late to get out. And all this is why I came to be sitting in the office of the cat meme lawyer, Rod Ponton. I was trying to understand how a remote region

with a tiny population and a laid-back vibe had become an epicenter of the international drug trade, and how one particular Texan, part of an old ranching family with deep ties to the borderlands, had gotten in the middle of that business. You never found him without a.45 stuck in his belt in the small of his back. The kind of work he was in on the river was the kind of work where you needed to be armed, I think. This was one of Rod's clients, and he helped make sure the cocaine explosion kept expanding across America long after the DEA crackdowns in South Florida. Someone who, by the time he came to know Rod Ponton, didn't want to just dabble in smuggling.

He wanted to be a player. He was doing other things that, if you're living the high life with no visible means of support, we have a pretty good idea out here on the border of what you're doing. Yep. Robert Chambers. That's after the break. I'm Afua Hirsch. I'm Peter Frankopan.

And in our podcast, Legacy, we explore the lives of some of the biggest characters in history. This season, we are looking at the life of the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill. It's fair to say he's a complex and controversial character. Almost 150 years since his birth, how does his legacy hold up today? Follow Legacy now wherever you get your podcasts. Or binge entire seasons early and ad-free on Wondery Plus. From the award-winning creators of the hit podcast Father Wants Us Dead comes the stunning

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One investigator sees a conspiracy. Is he way off base or does privilege help you get away with murder? In the Shadow of Princeton is available wherever you get your podcasts or you can binge it ad-free by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. Hi, may I speak to Suzy?

This is Shane. Hi, this is Rob D'Amico. I'm a journalist based in Austin, Texas, and I'm doing a podcast on the old Sheriff Rick Thompson and Robert Chambers case. Oh, interesting. Susan Woodward Spriggs is in her mid-60s, lives in Alpine, Texas, the same town where Rod Ponton has his office. But she grew up in a more remote part of the Big Bend region. That's where the Rio Grande makes a wide-looping turn as it cuts through the Chihuahuan Desert. I grew up on Woodward Ranch, which is about, oh, 80 miles from Mexico. And grew up out out Wild West and it was wild.

Robert Chambers was raised in a place like this too. And Susan and Robert, their families knew each other, faced similar hardships. Back in the 1960s, during their childhoods, ranching was no longer bringing in much money. There's not much opportunity for young men out here on the border. You're either come from a family that's got money or you try to find other ways to make money. But for kids like Susan and Robert, the old ranches were still every bit as vibrant as they'd ever been. Playgrounds for exploration, or towering mountains of red rock framed vast expanses of grassland. And there were arid stretches full of cacti, agave, and ocotillo. It was a beautiful way to grow up. Lots of creeks, lots of horses, lots of caves.

I'd go out and hike naked in my hiking boots, full moon. So I could do that on the ranch, right? There's nobody else around. I knew that. I wasn't scared. Lots of places for a child to be wild and free. Susan describes it almost like a children's picture book. The wild animals weren't wild.

They were friendly houseguests. I mean, it wasn't uncommon for ranchers to have pet wild animals. They had raised pet deer and a pet javelina that unfortunately slept between my parents. Oh, my God. Wait a second. What is a javelina? They resemble a wild pig.

Where did the javelina sleep? In bed with my parents. They're kind of stinky. They have a musk to them. So even now, if the windows are open or something, I can smell them out in the wild. Part of my wild childhood. When Robert was a kid he spent time on his family's own ranch living wild and

free but for high school he went up to the biggest town in the region Alpine which is where he met Susan and became close friends with Susan's older brother Trey. Alpine High School back in the late 60s and early 70s, it was a little rough. And Robert and Trey stuck together. Robert was huge, even in grade school. Tall, blonde. And I think that's where they made friends on the playground. They befriended each other so that they could kind of survive in that

environment. All I ever remember hearing was them getting into fights and coming home. Black eyes, that kind of thing. But Susan really didn't pay attention to Robert until a few years later. It was the mid-1970s. She was in her early 20s with a kid on the brink of a divorce. Robert was around the same age, and he was hard to look away from. He was back from the Marines, so there he was. And my state of mind was not good. I was pissed. So it was real easy to have an affair with him. Oh, he was tall and blonde and tan and handsome. Just really handsome.

Just irresistible, unfortunately. The Robert that Susan knew then in the mid-70s, he graduated from his tough high school reputation to something of a local bad boy, not much more. But even back then, he had his own self-serving moral code. Robert played the guitar beautifully and was a good singer, too. Really? Mm-hmm.

In fact, that's probably why I stopped seeing him, because he played your cheating heart for me. Actually, you know, I don't think he approved of us having an affair, because he knew my husband through high school, but it wasn't like he was going to stop me, you know, but he played your cheating heart. The time will come when you'll be blue. Your cheating heart will tell on you. It was like Robert knew the rules, could even sing about them. But those rules were for other people, like Susan. And if the rules

got in the way of what he wanted, he wasn't going to bother with them. In that same era, Robert also dated a woman named Nancy Burton. When I first contacted Nancy, she'd been reluctant to talk to me. We would exchange text messages. She'd give me a little information. She'd text that she might be willing to talk. Then she'd disappear. It went on like this for over a year. Then one day, she invited me to her home in Alpine

and started to tell me all about her memories of Robert Chambers. Okay, so my sister and I were at a Fourth of July dance, and my sister met Robert's roommate, and then I met Robert. I was young and dumb. The rest is history. Nancy met Robert Chambers when he was in his 20s. And Nancy? Nancy was still in high school. Yeah, it was. Oh, my parents had a conniption fit. This was the 70s in Texas. Willie Nelson, Chris Christopherson, Waylon Jennings. Shaggy redneck iconoclasts were big, and Robert Chambers was like a local version of those guys. He drove around the big bend in his pickup, wearing a pair of blue jeans and no shirt, showing off his muscles. And he seemed to have connections all over. Like if a rock band passed

through town, Robert would be hanging out with them, and he'd take Nancy along. I met the Eagles, met Don Henley as a young punk girl. I had no idea who they were. My stepmother would be waiting for me when I'd get home, tapping her foot. I got in a lot of trouble. Other times with Robert were much more low-key. There were lazy days down on the border. We hung out, we'd go down to the river,

spend a lot of time in flatbed boats, fishing down on the border. We hung out. We'd go down to the river, spend a lot of time in flatbed boats fishing down on the river. I think he's the first person I ever got on the Rio Grande in a motorboat with. So there was the Robert who hung out at the cool parties or relaxed down on the river.

But even to Nancy, it was clear there was another side to him too, perhaps a darker side. His reputation preceded him. And then the group that he ran around with were also known in this area. You know, the term outlaw, that's what we used. You were outlaws. And spending time with Robert, Nancy saw what being an outlaw meant. I'm talking about drugs. They were everywhere. Yeah, I can actually see it in my head right now.

The place that he lived downtown was full of it, full of pot, full of cocaine. When you walked upstairs, it was a big open room, big open room, and then the kitchen. And then when you walked in the back is where the bedrooms were. And he would have bundles of pot, and then he would have the smaller packages of the cocaine. And I was in a Ziploc baggie, or the corner of of a bag and we would have these parties and just bags of powder would get poured out on the table. And we would smoke and party and drink and do stupid stuff. When Robert went out on the town, you couldn't miss him because of his lion, a pet mountain lion named Miko that he took around on a leash.

Robert and Miko could be found at a honky-tonk in Alpine called The Chute, a place with a big open dance floor, bars on either side, buckets of beer. Robert owned it with another one of the outlaws. Because it was Robert's and Jack's bar, they could do anything they wanted. Robert would show up with the guys and his outlaw crew. Then he held court, left no doubt about who was in charge of the place. The group had their own corner of the bar. They called it the penalty box. Because we were such troublemakers, maybe?

Nobody messed with us. Nobody messed with us. Nancy ended up marrying a guy named Les Brown, one of Robert Chambers' self-proclaimed outlaws. But Nancy and Les kept hanging out with Robert. And when you were around Robert or Les, violence was never very far away. My husband at the time, he and another guy were always fighting. If they ever saw each other, they would get into a fight. They used to have shootouts. Whenever we would walk out of the bar, they would shoot at each other. I really don't know how I, I'm still alive. Nancy knew that Les and Robert were involved in drugs. After all, she'd been to Robert's house in Alpine. She'd seen what was there. And as she got older, as she became a little more clear-eyed about what was going on, she started having a different perspective.

I was probably 18, 19 years old before I figured out, you know, this just doesn't seem right. Where in the hell did he get all the money from? Where is this coming from? What did you do to get this? It wasn't just that Nancy was getting older. As the 70s came to a close, the border was changing on both sides. And the life that Robert and his outlaws were living,

it was getting more intense. There was a lot of smuggling going on. To what extent, I really don't know. Stuff like that really frightened me. For as long as people could recall, smuggling had been a part of the culture of the Borderlands. As Susan Woodward Spriggs remembers, in the Big Bend region, a lot of people did it. Most of them, like Lico's dad and Pasa Lajitas, not serious criminals. People just trying to get by.

And, sure, every so often getting high, too. Running guns and drugs and whatever across the border. And when I talk about breaking down pounds, they were kilos, I mean. We didn't care because we were smoking pot like it was going out of style. To break down that much marijuana in the middle of a room was like we were partying. It was a beautiful thing.

But what had seemed to Susan like a beautiful thing back in the carefree 70s, by the 80s was mutating into a darker, more violent reality. So we spent time at Robert's Ranch, and I remember Robert was driving a truck that they had a bullet hole in it. That should have been my first, that should have been a wake up call, but no. More after the break.

What was the last thing that filled you with wonder that took you away from your desk or your car in traffic or your sink full of dishes? As an actor, it's very freeing being part of these shows. You can step in the booth and kind of be anything. Well, for us, and I'm going to guess for some of you, that thing is... Anime! Hi, I'm Nick Friedman. I'm Lee Alec Murray. And I'm Leah President. And welcome to Crunchyroll Presents The Anime Effect. It's a weekly news show. I literally, when I saw it, when I found out about this, I literally had like a nervous breakdown in a good way.

With the best celebrity guests. I've never pirated anything, but I'll steal it if I have to. That was how I felt when I started to get really hooked on Black Butler. Oh, it's coming back. It's coming back. So join us every Friday, wherever you get your podcasts and watch full video episodes on Crunchyroll or on the Crunchyroll YouTube channel. Welcome to Origins with me, Kush Jumbo. The show where the biggest names in entertainment tell me the stories that made them who they are today. Origins is a conversation about my guests' early inspirations and growing up. Guests this season include Dame Anna Wintour, Poppy Delevingne, Pete Capaldi and Golda Rushavelle, a.k.a. Queen Charlotte in Bridgerton.

I only kind of discovered my sexuality when I went to drama school. Join me every week to hear where it all began. From Sony Music Entertainment, this is Origins with Kush Jumbo. After cocaine smuggling into the U.S. moved from the Caribbean to Mexico in the early 1980s, a few cartels consolidated power. Journalist Melissa Del Bosque knows that history well. The Guadalajara cartel in the west, the Gulf cartel in the east, and, you know, they were family alliances. And you see a lot of these cartels based around singular figures and families, basically,

who have sort of united and created these cartels with the help of the police and the military. The drugs entered the U.S. through key border towns. In the drug world, they're known as plazas. And oddly, one of the most important plazas in Mexico was a remote city of some 20,000 residents, directly across the river from the Big Bend region of Texas. The cocaine coming in from Florida moved to, of all places, Ojinaga, because Pablo Acosta ended up being the guy that could bring it across the border in large quantities

for the Guadalajara cartel that was working with the Colombians. Rod Ponton, the former drug lawyer, he knows Ohinaga well. Texans visited Ohinaga all the time, with its rows of palm trees, bustling shops, and a mission-style church on its town square. They call it OJ for short. And when Rod was starting his legal career in the early 1980s, a man named Pablo Acosta ran the plaza there. By that time, Acosta was something of a legend on both sides of the border. He'd grown up in poverty and worked his

way up through the narco ranks, slowly biding his time, doing stints in prison, and staying alive through feuds until he became an honest-to-goodness drug lord, overseeing a 200-mile stretch of the border like it was his personal property. In the 80s, he was shipping 60 tons of cocaine a year to the United States. Acosta was short and stocky, with scarred cheeks and a bushy mustache. And he had a nickname, the Onaga Fox. And he was wily, yes, but also ruthless. The DEA pegged him for at least 20 murders, and figured the real number was at least double that. He would gun you down if you broke his rules.

But that doesn't mean he was totally unhinged. He obeyed a code. No, he struck me as one of those guys that was an old school smuggler who, you know, he gave his word and it was a word and a handshake. And when I was starting off in border reporting in Mexico, I was always told that you could just say so-and-so. Pablo Acosta said I could be here, and then everything would be fine. And I think he was that kind of guy. When Nancy was dating Robert back in the 70s, she knew about Pablo Costa's reputation.

Pretty much everyone who lived in the Big Bend region did. But one day, around 1980, Nancy got a little more insight than she wanted. It was a little after lunchtime, and she and her husband, Les, got a visit from their friend, Robert Chambers. Robert came by the condo and asked Les, or told Les, hey, come on, go with me, let's go to OJ. So Les said, come on, Nancy. They drove west a little over an hour, then headed through Customs and over the bridge into OJ. Robert drove them to the edge of town, to what appeared to be a guarded compound.

It was a really, really tall, tall cinder block fence, and it had like rebar sticking out of the top of it. And I saw machine guns and men on the wall and... We pulled up and Robert got out of the blazer, opened the door and stepped down and took a couple of steps to the front of the blazer. A man emerged from inside the compound. And came out with all those men around him with those big guns. He had scars on his face, he had a mustache, blue jeans on, pointy, pointy, pointy cowboy boots on. And a Pearl Snap shirt on. And a hat. When I saw the guns, when I saw those men with all those guns,

it scared the crap out of me. I honestly thought we were dead. The Scarface man walked over to Robert. They couldn't have looked more different. Robert, tall, blonde, in his 20s, and this other man, a couple decades older, short and wiry, but exuding swagger. They started talking, and it dawned on Nancy who this other man was. He was Pablo Acosta, the Onaga Fox. Pablo started thumping on Robert's chest with his finger. I remember hearing,

I don't go through that country, I go over that country. Meaning Pablo didn't drive the drugs, he flew over. Nancy couldn't make out the rest of the conversation, but she could see their faces. And Robert, her friend, the guy she knew as a local drug dealer, the self-appointed boss of a bunch of small-town outlaws, he didn't seem scared. Not by the biggest drug lord in northern Mexico thumping on his chest.

He wasn't backing down. In fact, he seemed visibly angry. And Pablo looked pissed off, too. To Nancy, that seemed very dangerous. And voices started going louder and louder. And I do remember the men on the wall turning around and looking at us. And all I could think about was, what's my dad going to say? What's my dad going to think when they find my body?

Nancy was bracing for the gunfire. The end. As Robert turned his back to Pablo, took a few steps toward the pickup, Pablo's men, the guys with the guns, stared on. But Robert made it to the truck, slammed the door, ignition, stepped on the gas. And we got out of OJ as quick as we could. We went straight to the bridge. What had been decided back at the compound, Nancy didn't know. In that moment, the only thing that was clear to her was that Robert had bigger ambitions than she'd ever imagined.

And, for now at least, he hadn't gotten what he wanted from Pablo. How did Robert seem on the ride back? Angry. He was mad. Very, very, very angry. If Robert got upset, first off, his face would turn just bright red. And he was real blonde, blonde. If you upset him in any way, he would get angry. God, he would just fly off the handle.

Literally, he would just fly off the handle. This temper of Robert's, it would become his calling card, something I'd hear about from almost everyone I spoke to but in the blazer fleeing Onaga Nancy was even angrier and I think I did tell Robert don't you ever do this to me again don't you fucking ever put me in that position again

how did that change the way you looked at Robert did you think about it more or were you still just kind of young and naive I thought Robert was a dumbass and I did not realize he was playing with fire like he was. And he was kind of slipping into a real violent world at that time. That's when I figured Robert was in really, really deep. Nancy wasn't the only one who saw where Robert was going. As Robert got deeper into that violent world, American law enforcement was also starting to take notice.

Rob, I can't talk about that one. Okay. Is it sensitive? Can you tell me why it's sensitive? Well, the source is still out there, so the source is still at risk on that one. That's next time on Borderlands. Borderlands was reported and hosted by me, Rob D'Amico, and written by me, Eric Benson, and David Waters.

Eric Benson is our supervising producer. David Waters is our executive producer. At Campside, the executive producers are Josh Dean, Vanessa Grigoriadis, Adam Hoff, and Matt Schaer. Our field producers are Ryan Katz and Travis Bubenik. Our associate producers are Leo Schick and Lydia Smith. Fact-checking by Alex Yavlin. Special thanks to Rajiv Gola and Ashley Ann Thank you. If you enjoyed Borderlands, please rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts. It helps other listeners like you find the show. And make sure to subscribe or follow the show on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.