A hit man at 13

After a long wait in the visiting room of the maximum security wing of the ‘Gib Lewis Unit’, Rosalio Reta finally arrived for our interview. He was only five feet tall, but even so projected an air of menace. The demonic face tattoos helped. That face was the last thing many people saw before they died, I thought. When he started talking, his voice was soft and mellifluous.

Until his arrest in 2006 Reta was a sicario, a hit man responsible for at least 30 murders in the USA and Mexico. He started at the age of 13, when he executed a man as an audition to join the Zetas. His fluent Spanish and American citizenship meant he could operate on either side of the border without attracting attention. Reta boasted to police that he enjoyed killing: ‘I volunteered. “Me, me, me, me, I’ll kill them!”’ Killing made him feel ‘like Superman’. He enjoyed the ‘James Bond game’ of tracking his prey. This is why I wanted to interview him: you don’t meet such openly enthusiastic killers very often.

Impressed, the Zetas dispatched the young killer to a camp in Mexico where for six months he received training in surveillance, tracking, hand-to-hand combat and the use of weapons. Then he returned to his hometown of Laredo, where he and two other teenage assassins lived in a fancy neighbourhood, awaiting the summons to murder. Reta and his pal earned up to $50,000 per hit and were also rewarded with big bags of coke. If the neighbours noticed anything, they kept quiet.

Now 23, Reta claims that his earlier tough talk was just bluster. He was only 16 at the time, he said, he was scared. His new story is that his criminal career was an accident: ‘I met this person who had a friend and his brother was working for some people in Mexico.’