This article was taken from the May 2013 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by <span class="s1">subscribing online.
Alfred Anaya <span class="s2">was a genius <span class="s2">at installing "traps" -- secret compartments in cars that can hide everything from weed to jewellery to <span class="s1">guns. And if they were used to smuggle drugs <span class="s2">without his knowledge, he figured, that wasn't his problem. He was wrong.
Anaya took great pride in his generous service guarantee. Although his stereo-installation business, Valley Custom Audio Fanatics, was just a one-man operation based in his home in California, he offered all of his clients a lifetime warranty: if there were ever a problem, he'd fix it for the cost of parts alone.
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Anaya's customers typically took advantage of this deal when their subwoofers blew out, or their fibreglass speaker boxes developed hairline cracks. But in late January 2009, a man whom Anaya knew only as Esteban called for help with a more exotic product: a hidden compartment that Anaya had installed in his Ford F-150 pick-up truck. Over the years, these secret stash spots -- or "traps", as they're known in the slang of mechanics - have become a popular luxury item among the wealthy and shady. This particular compartment was located behind the truck's back seat, which Anaya had rigged with a set of hydraulic cylinders linked to the vehicle's electrical system. The only way to make the seat slide forwards and reveal its secret was by pressing and holding four switches simultaneously: two for the power door locks and two for the windows.
Esteban said the seat was no longer responding to the switch combination. He pleaded with Anaya to take a look.
There is nothing intrinsically illegal about building traps, which are commonly used to hide everything from pricey jewellery to legal handguns. But the activity runs foul of California law if an installer knows for certain the compartment will be used to transport drugs. The maximum penalty is three years in prison. So Anaya thought it wise to deviate from his standard no-questions-asked policy before agreeing to honour his warranty. "There's nothing in there I shouldn't know about, is there?" he asked. Esteban assured him he needn't worry and drove the F-150 to Anaya's modest ranch-style house. A friend of Esteban, who introduced himself as Cesar, followed in a black Honda Ridgeline truck. The 37-year-old Anaya, a handsome man whose neck and arms are covered with tattoos of dice and Japanese art, tested the switches. He heard the hydraulics whirr to life, but the seat stayed firmly in place.
Anaya cut a hole through the upholstery with a 24-volt Makita drill. When he finally managed to remove the back seat, he saw what he'd hit: a wad of cash about 10cm thick. The compartment was overflowing with such bundles.
Esteban had jammed the trap by stuffing it with too much money - over $800,000 (£550,000).
Anaya stumbled from the cab, livid. "Get it out of here," he said to Esteban. "I don't want any problems."
Esteban Magallon-Maldanado and Cesar Bonilla-Montiel transferred armfuls of money from the F-150 to the Ridgeline's boot. They wanted to stay in Anaya's good books - his skills were very valuable. To distribute product, dealers need vehicles with well-disguised traps. The word in the underworld was that no one built more elegant traps than Anaya, whose hiding spots were invisible even to the experts. Magallon-Maldanado and Bonilla-Montiel, key players in a smuggling ring sending large quantities of cocaine and methamphetamine to the Midwest, wanted to use his services again.
Anaya, now feeling calmer, agreed to fix the F-150's trap for $1,500 (£970) -- a third of what he had originally charged to install it. A grateful Magallon-Maldanado then asked him if he could install a trap in the Ridgeline too. It already had one, but it was the work of an amateur -- a crude hole sawn into the base of the boot. Magallon-Maldanado wanted an electronic trap, like the F-150's, and he offered to leave a deposit so Anaya could buy the necessary hydraulics. Anaya, in debt to numerous creditors, accepted the job. He hadn't totally forgiven his visitor for failing to warn him about the money in the trap, but he figured he was still adhering to the letter of the law. He assumed that he was immune from legal trouble. He was, after all, just an installer.
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[Quote"]When he was eight years old, Alfred Anaya destroyed his mother's vacuum cleaner in the pursuit of knowledge[/pullquote]
When he was eight years old, Alfred Anaya destroyed his mother's vacuum cleaner in the pursuit of knowledge. "I took it apart because I wanted to find the motor inside," he recalls. "I was so young, I thought the motor would work all by itself even after I took it out. I didn't realise it needed to be plugged in to go." His mother was upset but hardly surprised to discover her ruined vacuum, because she knew all about her youngest son's rabid curiosity. Alfred was forever disassembling Sony Walkmans or clock radios so he could fill his favourite junk drawer with circuit boards, which thrilled him with their intricacy.
Anaya idolised his father, Gabriel, a hard-working cement mason who had emigrated from Mexico. Before adolescence, Alfred started missing school to help him pour concrete at shopping arcades. He used discarded materials from these sites to build labyrinthine clubhouses in the backyard of his family's San Fernando home. By furtively borrowing his dad's circular saw, he customised his structures with pulley-operated drawbridges, camouflaged trapdoors and secret rooms.
In his mid-teens, Anaya developed an obsession with cars. He saved up $500 (£320) to buy a wrecked 1963 Volkswagen Beetle, which he lovingly restored. After dropping out of school at 17, he started to hang out at a local stereo shop, Super Sound Electronics. He swept floors and washed customers' cars for nothing, just so he could peer over the shoulders of the shop's installers as they moulded speaker boxes and snaked cables through the boots of cars. He cajoled Super Sound's owner into taking him on as an apprentice and quickly established himself as a rising star. Years of reading blueprints with his dad had given him a knack for visualising how to meld stereo components into a car's contours. "When you customise cars, you got to have an imagination, you got to be able to see the way it's going to look when you're done putting in this outrageous sound system," says Tony Cardone, a childhood friend of Anaya who also became a stereo installer. "That's one thing Alfred has always been really good at." Anaya also excelled at fabricating candy-coloured subwoofer enclosures with voluptuous curves; he often did this by stretching fleece pyjamas on top of wooden frames then pouring on molten resin that hardened as it cooled.
Anaya had learned that sometimes the best approach was to conceal his work. "Sound always sounds best when you have no idea where it's coming from," he says. "You want people to feel like they're listening to magic." Anaya taught himself to build speaker boxes that fitted <span class="s5">into the irregularly shaped voids behind door panels and back seats.
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That skill came in handy when customers started asking for traps, to hide their weapons, cash or weed from both cops and robbers. Anaya was happy to provide this service, which appealed to his sense of mischief. The first trap he ever saw, designed by a Super Sound mentor, was carved into a dashboard, with a door hinged on a power antenna that could be extended or retracted via remote control. Anaya ached to build similarly ingenious compartments that would dazzle his fellow gearheads, who adored innovations that seem plucked from the world of James Bond. "Blowing everyone's mind, that's what's so rewarding about what we do -- the feedback and adrenaline you get from that,"
Anaya says. "I wanted my compartments to be more sophisticated than anybody else's."
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By 2002, Anaya had become one of the most sought-after installers in southern California, with a client list that included rappers, pro basketball players and porn stars.
Mobile Electronics honoured him as one of the top 100 installers in the nation, and his systems were later featured in the bikini-laden pages of magazines such as Lowrider and 8 Lug. Anaya capitalised on his fame to open his own shop, Valley Custom Audio Fanatics, in San Fernando. A year later, shortly before he married a woman called Aimee Basham, he persuaded an investor to help him move into larger quarters in nearby North Hollywood. Anaya spent a month making the new shop's centrepiece, a three-metre fibreglass display case fashioned to resemble an alien's spine. His dad Gabriel, who was suffering from terminal colon cancer, visited the store shortly before its opening. Alfred spotted his withered father beaming with pride at what his son had accomplished. "Maybe the greatest memory I have," Anaya says.
But that happy moment was soon overshadowed by Valley Custom Audio's financial woes. Like many people blessed with formidable creative talent, Anaya was a horrendous manager of both time and money. He took on too many projects and failed to keep track of expenditures. Stressed by the burdens of business ownership, he began to drink too much, downing beer after beer as he struggled to finish cars that were weeks behind schedule. His personal finances became a mess too, thanks to a crushing mortgage and his lavish spending on motorcycles, strip clubs and camping trips with Aimee and their own family.
In 2007, Anaya was forced to move the failing business to his home. But Anaya's troubles persisted: shady customers stiffed him for thousands, yet he kept buying the finest subwoofers and Snap-on tools with credit cards. The only bright spot was a burgeoning trade in traps. He charged $4,000 to $5,000 (£2,600 to £3200) , far more than a typical stereo installation. Best of all, these customers paid on time and in cash. By the end of 2008, trap building represented about 70 percent of Anaya's workload.
Building a trap was illegal only if done with the "intent to store, conceal, smuggle or transport a controlled substance". Based on his consultations with fellow installers, Anaya believed he would cross that line only if a client specifically mentioned drugs. So he'd turn away anyone who used drug-related lingo when ordering a trap. As long as a customer was discreet, Anaya saw no problem with taking their money.
The forefather of modern trap-making was a French mechanic who went by the name of Claude Marceau (possibly a pseudonym). According to a 1973 US Justice Department report, he personally welded 170 kilos of heroin into the frame of a Lancia limousine that was shipped to the US in 1970 -- a key triumph for the fabled French Connection, the international smuggling ring immortalised in the eponymous film.
Traps like Marceau's may be difficult to detect, but they require significant time and expertise to operate. The only way to load and unload one of these "dumb" compartments is by taking a car apart, piece by piece. That makes economic sense for multinational organisations such as the French Connection, which infrequently transport massive amounts of narcotics between continents. But domestic traffickers, who must ferry small shipments between cities on a frequent basis, can't sacrifice an entire car every time they make a delivery. They need to be able to store and retrieve their contraband <span class="s3">with ease and then reuse the vehicles again and again.
Early drug traffickers stashed their loads in obvious places: wheel wells, spare tyres, the nooks of engine blocks.
Starting in the early 80s, however, they switched to what the US Drug Enforcement Administration refers to as "urban traps": medium-size compartments concealed behind electronically controlled façades. The first of such stash spots were usually located in the doors of luxury sedans; trap makers, who are often moonlighting as car-body specialists, would slice out the door panels and then attach them to the motors that raised and lowered the windows. They soon moved on to building traps in dashboards, seats and roofs, with button-operated doors secured by magnetic locks. Over time, the magnets gave way to hydraulic cylinders, which made the doors harder to dislodge during police inspections.
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By the early 90s, however, drug traffickers had discovered that these compartments had two major design flaws. The first was that the buttons and switches that controlled the traps' doors were aftermarket additions to the cars.
This made them too easy to locate -- police officers were being trained to look for any widgets that hadn't been installed on the assembly line.
Second, opening the traps was no great challenge once a police officer identified the appropriate button: the compartment's door would respond to a single press. Sometimes the police would even open traps by accident; a knee or elbow would brush against a button during a vigorous search, and a brick of cocaine would appear as if by magic.
Trap makers responded to traffickers' complaints by tapping into the internal electrical systems of cars. They began to connect their compartments to those systems with relays, electromagnetic switches that enable low-power circuits to control higher-power circuits. (Relays are the reason, for example, that the small act of turning an ignition key can start a whole engine.) Some relays won't let current flow until several input circuits have been completed -- in other words, until several separate actions have been performed. By wiring these switches into cars, trap makers could build compartments that were operated not by aftermarket buttons, but by a car's own factory-installed controls. "With the relay switches, you can have access to the compartment only if you do a series of events in exactly the right sequence," says Michael Lewis, the sheriff of Wicomico County, Maryland, who became a nationally recognised expert on traps during his 22-year career as a state trooper. A typical sequence will consist of pushing a variety of switches a specific number of times: a window switch three times, a door lock four times, the rear defroster twice. But for trap makers who are particularly adept with relays, the complexity of the unlocking sequence is limited only by their imaginations. Many rig the electronics so that the compartment won't open unless all of the vehicle's doors are closed -- something that is rarely the case during a roadside search. Another tactic is to link a trap with the pressure sensor beneath the driver's seat, so that the compartment can't be opened unless someone is sitting behind the wheel.
In recent years, trap makers have competed to see who can dream up the most elaborate opening tricks. The acknowledged masters of this art are the Dominican-born installers of the Bronx, many of whom work in car-body shops on Jerome Avenue, a gritty strip that DEA agents call the Silicon Valley of trap making. "The Dominicans started doing voice activation about six years ago," says Lewis, who teaches classes in trap recognition to law-enforcement agencies. "I have videotape of a Dominican trap -- you have to activate cruise control, pull one window up while you pull another window down, and you speak. It's pretty badass."
But the ultimate measure of a compartment's worth is not how hard it is to open but how hard it is to find. A cop may never be able to guess the event sequence that opens a trap's door, but that obstacle is irrelevant if the compartment's existence is betrayed by faulty craftsmanship -- a stray wire poking out, say.
If there's any visual hint that a car contains a trap, police can often get a warrant to tear it apart. Even the best compartment cannot withstand the incursions of drills and saws.
Anaya attracted a loyal clientele because his compartments were undetectable. His customers, who gambled hundreds of thousands of dollars every time they put a shipment on the road, appreciated his attention to detail. Anaya's understanding of the legal nuances wasn't their problem.
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Sometime in late 2008, Anaya received a call from a customer who lived in the San Diego area. The man wanted him to fix a trap in Tijuana. Anaya was scared to venture across the border; as much as he hated to renege on a warranty, he refused to go to Mexico.
Anaya thought he had protected himself by turning down the job, but the damage had been done when he answered the phone. This customer was the target of a DEA investigation, and agents had eavesdropped on their conversation.
The DEA decided to tap Anaya's phone too, in an effort to identify other drug traffickers who were having traps built by Valley Custom Audio.
Shortly after that tap went live on January 30, 2009, agents heard Anaya tell Esteban Magallon-Maldanado that he had finished repairing the Ford F-150.
Magallon-Maldanado and his partner, Cesar Bonilla-Montiel, picked up the vehicle at once -- they had an important delivery to make.
Their associates in Kansas City, Kansas, were expecting a shipment of six kilos of cocaine and two kilos of methamphetamine. Running drugs to Kansas was a highly profitable enterprise for Magallon-Maldanado and Bonilla-Montiel. The two men frequented underground cockfights, where they would arrange to purchase cocaine and meth from a pair of high-level Mexican wholesalers they knew only as Suki and Gordito. They would then hire drivers to transport the product to Kansas City, where <span class="s3">further distribution was handled by a brash dealer called Curtis Crow.
On this particular trip in February 2009, Magallon-Maldanado and Bonilla-Montiel hired a cocaine addict named Jaime Rodriguez to drive the F-150 to Kansas City. Rodriguez was nearly at the end of the 2,500km journey when the Kansas Highway Patrol pulled him over for speeding. A suspicious officer sent the vehicle to be searched by a K-9 unit at a Topeka garage. The dog indicated the possible presence of drugs, so a trooper combed the truck by hand. But he couldn't find the trap behind the seat.
Rodriguez was allowed to drive away with more than eight kilos of drugs. There could be no greater testament to Anaya's value to the business, though Anaya himself knew nothing of this near miss.
[Quote"]I had a feeling that no matter what decision I made, something bad was going to happen. But I couldn't do anything that would put my family in danger.[/pullquote]
Over the next several weeks, Magallon-Maldanado and Bonilla-Montiel paid Anaya to build traps in three more vehicles: the Honda Ridgeline that they had used while getting the F-150 fixed, a 2007 Toyota Camry and a 2008 Toyota Sequoia. The Ridgeline made a run to Kansas in March, and the Sequoia and the Camry were part of a convoy in April. <span class="s3">Those trips brought Crow nine kilos of cocaine and four kilos of meth.
But the cars Anaya had worked on were losing their powers to deceive. On April 5, the California Highway Patrol stopped the Sequoia and found the trap with ease, seizing more than $106,000 (£68,300) in cash. The tap on Anaya's phone, combined with surveillance of his house, was giving the DEA all it needed. Unaware of the DEA's scrutiny, Magallon-Maldanado and Bonilla-Montiel feared that Anaya was a snitch. They cut all contact with the trap maker and got rid of any vehicles he had touched.
The inevitable end came in September 2009, after a driver who had been caught with eight kilos of cocaine agreed to co-operate with the DEA. Virtually all of the ring's participants were rounded up, save for Magallon-Maldanado, who went on the run. (He was finally captured in Riverside, California, in March 2012.) Anaya, of course, did not hear about these arrests; he hadn't been contacted by Magallon-Maldanado or Bonilla-Montiel since the spring. He was now busy with two personal crises: mounting debt -- nearly $55,000 (£35,400) -- and the dissolution of his marriage to Basham, who was fed up with his workaholism and carousing.
On November 18, as Anaya drove his Ford F-350 through a Home Depot car park, he noticed a dark sedan that seemed to be shadowing him in an adjacent aisle. When the sedan stopped in front of him, the men who got out identified themselves as DEA agents. They took Anaya to the DEA's office in downtown Los Angeles, where they questioned him at length. He spoke freely about his traps, estimating he had built 15 over the past year.
The agents told him that he could avoid any potential legal complications by doing them a big favour: they wanted him to fit his clients' cars with GPS trackers and miniature cameras. They told him to take a few days to mull over the over, then they released him.
A day after the arrest, Anaya drove to his father's grave to meditate on the choice before him. "I had a feeling that no matter what decision I made, something bad was going to happen,"
Anaya says. "But I couldn't do anything that would put my family in danger." He worried that traffickers would kill his children, nieces and nephews.
When Anaya told the DEA that he was too frightened to become an informant, the agents made another proposition: they would set up Valley Custom Audio in a deluxe shop, complete with every piece of equipment that Anaya desired. They wouldn't ask him to place any surveillance in cars, but the shop would be bugged.
He again refused. On December 10, he was arrested and later charged in LA Superior Court for "false compartment activity". He was initially denied bail, in part because an illegal assault rifle had been discovered in his house. His lawyer advised him that, given his clean record, he was unlikely to spend much time in jail.
But in March 2010, Anaya received grim news: the federal government was planning to prosecute him in Kansas -- a state he'd never set foot in.
Prosecutions of trap makers are very rare. There is no federal law against building hidden compartments, even if they're made with the intent of smuggling drugs. The Justice Department occasionally goes after trap makers for violating statutes that ban the sale of drug paraphernalia, but these are difficult cases to make; they require hard evidence, such as an audio recording, that proves the defendant was explicitly told how his compartment would be used. Anaya was never caught on tape discussing drugs.
But the prosecutors in Kansas went after Anaya for a much graver crime than selling paraphernalia: they indicted him as a full-fledged conspirator in the California-to-Kansas tracking operation. Even though he had never seen or touched any drugs and had been shunned as an informant after building just four traps in exchange for less than $20,000 (£13,000), Anaya faced the exact same charge as Magallon-Maldanado, Bonilla-Montiel and Crow. This aggressive legal stratagem was almost without precedent.
The only similar case on record was that of Frank Rodriguez Torres, a New York trap maker who was extradited to North Carolina in 1998.
He was sentenced to five years in prison.
By the time Anaya was placed in custody in Kansas in April 2010, virtually all of the case's 23 defendants were scrambling to cut deals. But he resisted his court-appointed lawyer's advice to plead guilty; he still couldn't see how building traps made him a trafficker, and he was confident that a jury would sympathise.
When the trial started on January 25, 2011, the lead prosecutor, an assistant US attorney named Sheri McCracken, argued that Anaya was one of the main reasons the smuggling ring had evolved into a multi-million-dollar enterprise. The organisation "moved up in the world when they met Mr Anaya", she told the jury. "He built supreme compartments, and because he did that, drug hauling became easier...
But for Mr Anaya's compartment building, lots of loads would be lost."
The primary evidence against Anaya was the testimony of Bonilla-Montiel. In court, Bonilla-Montiel described the incident with the F-150's broken trap, when Anaya had glimpsed more than $800,000 (£515,000) in cash. The prosecutor contended that seeing such a large sum was tantamount to seeing drugs, since Anaya must have deduced the source.
Bonilla-Montiel also shared a potentially damning anecdote regarding the negotiations over the Honda Ridgeline's trap. "We asked him to build us a hidden compartment for ten kilos," he testified. "I remember we had problems because he asked, 'Well, what's a kilo look like?' I remember I saw a brick on the ground, and I said, 'It's a little bit bigger than this. I need you to do it for ten.'" This was the only evidence that directly linked Anaya to drugs. But it was unrecorded and uncorroborated, and Anaya's attorney painted Bonilla-Montiel as a man who would say anything to reduce his own sentence. (Anaya points out -- correctly -- that his San Fernando home contains no brick.) McCracken's case may have been largely circumstantial, but the jury bought into her narrative; it convicted Anaya on all counts.
At his sentencing on January 4, 2012, a visibly nervous Anaya addressed the court for the first time, expressing his feelings of regret and confusion, "I built these compartments just like any other business that I had. If I had known there was a law against it, I wouldn't be here. If there was a law that says these compartments are illegal to build, I would not build them."
McCracken had no pity. "He makes the drug world work," she told the judge. "He is equivalent to what I consider somewhat of a genius that takes cocaine and moulds it into shapes so that it can be moved in plain sight."
The judge agreed with McCracken's harsh assessment. He sentenced Anaya to 292 months -- more than 24 years -- in a federal prison with no possibility of obtaining parole. Curtis Crow and Cesar Bonilla-Montiel, the men at the top of the organisation, had received sentences just half that length.
A common hacker refrain is that technology is morally neutral. The culture's libertarian ethos holds that creators shouldn't be faulted if someone uses their gadget or hunk of code to cause harm. But Anaya's case makes clear that the US government rejects that permissive worldview. The technically savvy are on notice that calculated ignorance of illegal activity is not an acceptable excuse. But at what point does a failure to be nosy edge into criminal conduct? "What's troubling people is that this conviction seems to impose a sort of liability on people who create state-of-the-art technology," says Branden Bell, an attorney in Olathe, Kansas, who is handling Anaya's appeal. "The logic is: because he suspected his customers of something, he had a duty to ask. But that duty is written nowhere in the law."
The challenge for creators is to guess when they should turn their backs on customers. If someone uses robots to patrol a smuggling route or protect a meth lab, how will prosecutors know whether the bot company acted criminally? If it accepted payment in crumpled $20 bills? If the customer picked up the merchandise in an overly flashy car?
Anaya can attest to the sorrow of becoming a test case. When wired visited him at the Victorville Federal Correctional Complex, in the Mojave Desert, he was coming to grips with the desolation of prison life. He's baffled that he might spend the next two decades in prison for doing something not specifically forbidden by federal law. "If it takes me never building another compartment again for me to get out of here, that's what I'm willing to do," he says.
As he waits for his appeal, Anaya is trying to earn money, fixing his fellow inmates' radios. Years ago his childhood junk drawer was filled with circuit boards. Today, his prison locker overflows with spare parts.
Brendan I Koerner is the author of The Skies Belong to Us, which will be published on June 18 (Crown Publishing)
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
