El Rey Del Mar (The King of the Sea)
by Alpert L Pine
Copyright 2016 Alpert L Pine
Rowing Upstream Publishing
Contents
El Rey Del Mar (The King of the Sea)
About the Author
Also by Alpert L Pine
El Rey Del Mar (The King of the Sea)
The passing and laying to rest of drug lord and internationally notorious criminal Fernando Alberto Ruiz was given no more than a quick mention on the ten o'clock news here. It's a small tragedy when any person, even one responsible for as many deaths and broken lives as Ruiz, passes. There is always more to one man's life than a single sentence or two on the nightly news can report, and Fernando Alberto Ruiz's life was more full than most.
Here in the States he was little known, a name trotted out on the news networks from time to time—just a face for the seemingly endless drug violence that's overtaken the Southwest, from Mexico City to Phoenix, San Antonio, and Los Angeles. It is primarily due to a Hollywood box office dud, and the public's seemingly endless fascination with the mermaids of the Pacific Ocean, that Ruiz's name is recognized at all.
In Mexico, it's a different story. Everybody has heard of El Rey del Mar, The King of the Sea. In some places, mostly cities or regions under the rule of some other drug lord—one or another of Ruiz's many rivals—the populace hate and vilify Ruiz. In Bescalero, and throughout much of the Baja peninsula where Ruiz grew up and spent his entire life, El Rey del Mar is a hero who gave back to the community more than most, while battling the gringos North of the border, as well the corrupt policía of Mexico.
Born in 1958 on New Year's Day, Ruiz was the last of eight brothers and sisters. His family was poor and there was rarely enough food. Mrs. Ruiz cared for all the children and the home, and also worked in a neighborhood restaurant. Ruiz's father was killed in a botched mugging when Fernando was just two. His older brothers and sisters worked from the time they were eight or ten, and young Fernando did the same when he reached that age. When he was eleven, his mother and his two eldest siblings were killed in an auto accident. The bus they were travelling in lost control and left the highway at a high rate of speed, rolling over several times. The remaining Ruiz siblings were left to fend for themselves, homeless on the streets of Bescalero.
Like many youth who discovered there was money to be made from crime, Ruiz spent his teenage years in a local gang in Bescalero, mostly moving drugs and weapons. He was involved in several vicious attacks and kidnappings, and earned his first moniker, Claws, due to his proclivity for scratching his victims with his long, unclipped nails. However, despite his well-documented violent behavior, Ruiz is not suspected of taking an actual life until he was eighteen years old. He was one of the so-called Wild Aces involved in the Loreto Pier Massacre, otherwise known as the September Nineteenth Yucca Murders.
Fifteen members of a rival gang were lined up on a deserted beach, and forced to dunk their heads beneath the foaming surf. One by one as the victims surfaced, gasping for air, they were shot in the head by the Wild Aces. When the last of the captured men surfaced, he was shown the corpses of his former associates, and told to return to his employer, Alejandro Garbo, and tell him of the night's events.
This was the beginning of the First Baja Drug War, which would rage for the next five years. Hundreds of soldiers on both sides of the war were killed, and countless innocent civilians were cut down in the crossfire of sporadic, bloody and violent battles. Car bombings, shootouts, kidnappings, and assassinations became commonplace. The local police and the Mexican military were drawn into the war as a third party, but were ineffectual in bringing the violence to an end.
It was the death of Miguel Marquez, leader of the Wild Aces, and Fernando's employer, which finally brought an end to the worst of the violence. The remaining Wild Aces, Ruiz among them, were scattered. Hunted by both the law, as well as Alejandro Garbo's men, many were murdered. The rest fled to other parts of Mexico, or to the United States
Fernando Alberto Ruiz, at the age of twenty-five, was living on borrowed time. Camping on a beach in southern Baja, taking what he needed to live, he drank tequila every night while staring out at the crashing waves, waiting to be found by Garbo's men. He was waiting to die.
It was during this period of self-exile and self-hate on a barren beach in southern Baja, that Ruiz came into contact with the mermaids.
No one but Ruiz will ever know for sure the circumstances surrounding that first meeting, and his subsequent befriending and bonding with the mermaids of the Pacific Ocean. Why did they choose him? Even after they knew more about the type of man he was, why did they remain loyal to him?
Few have had the privilege of seeing the mermaids, and even fewer have ever had the opportunity to speak with them. They are very selective about whom they choose to reveal themselves to. We know this much for certain: sometime during his stay in southern Baja, Fernando Alberto Ruiz became one of the few humans to be accepted by the mythical mermaids of the Pacific Ocean.
So secretive and reclusive are the mermaids, to this day there are still men and women, otherwise intelligent and rational individuals, who refuse to believe in their existence, despite the wealth of evidence supporting their reality. One need look no further than the famous photograph of Ruiz, taken in the early 2000's, alongside the mermaid he called Ilsa-Doll, whom he referred to on many occasions as his wife. Many other amateur photographs and stories of mermaid encounters also exist.
Regarding Ruiz's earliest contact with the mermaids, Elian de Soto, the first biographer of El Rey del Mar, once suggested that it was a failed suicide attempt—that Ruiz, in drunken despair, assuming he'd be hunted down by Garbo's men at any time, threw himself into the ocean only to be rescued by one of the mermaids. As Ruiz was living alone on the beach at this time, and the mermaids have never been questioned on the matter, it's impossible to know the truth.
It's worth noting that not long after floating the idea publicly in the late 1990's, de Soto was found murdered in his office in Mexico City, possibly (some say) the victim of a hit ordered by an embarrassed Ruiz, in order to shut up the journalist. Further supporting this theory is the fact that Jorge "Georgie" Cabrera, one of Ruiz's closest associates in the early years of El Rey del Mar's drug smuggling operation, and who was supposedly de Soto's source for the suicide story, also died under mysterious circumstances. Georgie claimed (according to de Soto) that Ruiz once told him the suicide story personally, when the two friends were on a week-long bender, high on mescaline and marijuana, and drunk on tequila. Two weeks after de Soto was found murdered, Georgie Cabrera drowned in a toilet in San Bernardino.
Before his unfortunate death, however, Georgie was one of Ruiz's oldest allies. They met in a bar in Tijuana, and claimed—as they would often loudly, drunkenly tell anyone who hadn't personally heard it from one or the other of the two men—that they had nearly drawn knives on each other in the restroom. Only a confused, coked-up American tourist, with cocaine residue on her ample cleavage and smelling like tequila and lemon, walking into the wrong restroom, prevented the two men from having it out right there. "There was suddenly something a little sweeter to stick than ol' Georgie," Ruiz would declare when telling the story, bursting into drunken laughter and ordering more shots for everyone in the bar. Of course, it's also well known that in his later years, Ruiz developed a distaste for non-mermaid females. Georgie's version of the tale—usually only told when Ruiz wasn't around—had the American tourist slapping El Rey del Mar across the cheek and leaving the bar with a grinning, giddy Georgie. What the two men's tales did agree on was the friendship that grew up from that chance meeting, which had very nearly e
nded in violence.
Things moved quickly for Fernando. Within a year of first encountering the mermaids, Ruiz was head of the second largest drug operation on the Baja peninsula. Only old Alejandro Garbo commanded more men and dealt in greater sums of drugs, weapons, and money. The upstart, Ruiz, not yet known as El Rey del Mar, was closing the gap rapidly.
By 1988, at only thirty years of age, Ruiz had grown his empire to a size which rivalled that of his nemesis, Alejandro Garbo. Still harboring the bitter memories of being witness to so many of his friends in the Wild Aces dying at the hands of Garbo's goons, and also of the many months that Ruiz himself spent on the run, certain that any day he too would get a bullet in the head, it was inevitable that Ruiz would eventually renew the violence of those earlier years in an attempt to gain revenge and to bring down once and for all his rival, Alejandro Garbo.
Known colloquially as the War of the Land and the Sea, the Second Baja Drug War was even more violent and bloody than the first. Fueled by intense hatred for Garbo and an ever-increasing bankroll—thanks largely to the efforts of the mermaids and their nearly imperceptible and untraceable