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Author    Post   untanglingwebs El Supremo New, troubling heroin www.freep.com/article/20130613/NEWS05/306130029/heroin-... 9 hours ago ... Authorities say a particularly toxic heroin mix known by some on the street as ' black shadow' appears to be circulating in southeast Michigan ... Michigan news | Detroit Free Press | www.freep.com/section/NEWS06/Michigan-news New, troubling heroin addiction trend grips southeast Michigan. 12:09 AM. Authorities say a particularly toxic heroin mix known by some on the street as ' black ... Detroit Free Press | Detroit and Michigan www.freep.com/ Detroit Michigan News - freep.com is the home page of Detroit Michigan with in depth and ... New, troubling heroin addiction trend grips southeast Michigan ... Thu Jun 13, 2013 7:38 am  untanglingwebs El Supremo I have been observing the rise in "breathing problems" reported on the 911 emergency calls. I found it curious as my allergies would normally be bad this time of year and they are not. According to the article in the Detroit Free Press there is a toxic mix of heroin called Black Shadow hitting southeast Michigan that is causing overdoses and even death. The heroin is being mixed with acetyl fentyl, a toxic opiate derivative that has properties like morphine. This mixture has been linked to at least 12 deaths in Rhode island between march and Mid May. This heroin mixture can depress the respiratory system and slows the user's breathing. A high enough dose renders a person comatose and can cause death. If a person appears to be sleeping, the problem my not be observed in time to save their life. Hospitals are attempting to develop a mechanism and diagnostic tool for screening acetyl fentanyl. Specialists at the St John Brighton Center for Recovery indicate increased admissions for opiate addiction. They also indicated heavy use of vicodin and oxycontin is a frequent pathway to heroin addiction. Thu Jun 13, 2013 7:52 am  untanglingwebs El Supremo I have also noticed an increase in calls regarding seizures. Could this be related to drug issues? Thu Jun 13, 2013 11:40 am  untanglingwebs El Supremo Fentanyl is a narcotic analgesic acting predominately at the µ-opiate receptor. Apart from analgesia, the fentanyls as a group produce drowsiness and euphoria, the latter being less pronounced than with heroin and morphine. The most common side effects include nausea, dizziness, vomiting, fatigue, headache, constipation, anaemia and peripheral oedema. Tolerance and dependence develop rapidly after repeated use. Characteristic withdrawal symptoms (sweating, anxiety, diarrhoea, bone pain, abdominal cramps, shivers or ‘goose flesh’) occur when use is stopped. Serious interactions can occur when fentanyls are mixed with heroin, cocaine, alcohol and other CNS depressants e.g. benzodiazepines. The use of HIV protease inhibitors such as Ritonavir has been reported to increase plasma levels and reduce elimination of co-administered fentanyl. Overdose results in respiratory depression which is reversible with naloxone. Sudden death can also occur because of cardiac arrest or severe anaphylactic reaction. The estimated lethal dose of fentanyl in humans is 2 mg. The recommended serum concentration for analgesia is 1–2 ng/ml and for anaesthesia it is 10–20 ng/ml. Blood concentrations of approximately 7 ng/ml or greater have been associated with fatalities where poly-substance use was involved. While fatalities have been reported after therapeutic use, many deaths have occurred as a result of the misuse of pharmaceutical products. Both used and unused fentanyl patches have been injected, smoked, snorted or taken orally with fatal consequences. Thu Jun 13, 2013 12:47 pm  untanglingwebs El Supremo Drug Induced Seizures | Black blackpoppymag.wordpress.com/the-a-z-of-overdose/drug-in... Many drug users may have experienced a seizure at one time or another –and you don't ... With drug use, it is the major type of seizure that occurs most often. ILLICIT DRUG USE AND THE RISK OF NEW-ONSET aje.oxfordjournals.org/content/132/1/47 Abstract. The authors studied the use of heroin, marijuana, and cocaine before the onset of a first seizure in 308 patients with seizures and 294 controls at ... Thu Jun 13, 2013 12:51 pm  untanglingwebs El Supremo While there were multiple breathing problems reported in the last 24 hours, there were 2 that specified possible heroin overdose. Last night in the 2400 block of Tuscola a possible heroin overdose. Mid morning today in Thetford Township there was a possible heroin overdose involving a 43 year old male. Thu Jun 13, 2013 3:10 pm  untanglingwebs El Supremo There is a strong heroin distribution operation on Flint's east side. Kudos to Undersheriff Swanson for addressing the issue. Heroin use on the rise in Genesee County Posted: Jul 12, 2013 5:42 PM EDT Updated: Jul 12, 2013 6:09 PM EDT By Kristen Abraham - bio | email GENESEE COUNTY (WJRT) - (07/12/13) - It's considered an epidemic - heroin use is on the rise once again. The Genesee County Sheriff's Department reports two people overdosed on the drug just this Thursday. Undersheriff Chris Swanson says it's not just Genesee County seeing the trend - it's statewide, in fact all over the country. "On a daily basis, we're seeing anywhere from two to six overdoses in the county. Most overdoses are heroin, and second leading cause is prescription pills. Heroin is unforgiving," he said. We also talked to Genesee Health Systems formerly Community Health. Their data shows admissions for heroin addictions into treatment facilities are also on the rise. Seventy-eight cases were reported in 2008. More than 1,500 last year. Prescription pain killers and heroin use counts for almost half of their admissions. Experts in the field say it's a trend that isn't slowing down any time soon. Genesee County Sherriff's Department says there's influx of the drug coming in from the East Coast. Police say it's not just an inner city drug anymore, it's in the suburbs too. It has no racial or gender boundaries. Men, women, black, white are addicted to the drug. It's been two years since heroin overdoses took the lives of two Fenton teenagers. Lapeer County is also battling the drug. One way to fight back is by education. The sheriff's department established a program called "Chasing the Dragon", designed to teach teens about the dangers of heroin. "People need to know the crushing blows that it takes on families, devastation it causes. We keep fighting, and you can keep pressure on, educating, and have that law enforcement presence, we can't give up," Swanson said. If you'd like more information on Chasing the Dragon program, contact the Genesee County Sheriff's department. Fri Jul 12, 2013 6:16 pm  untanglingwebs El Supremo Investigators Seek Answers After Rash Of Heroin ODs July 1, 2013 7:22 PM CBS Detroit's YPSILANTI (WWJ) - Test results are pending in Washtenaw County to discover what may have led to a recent rash of heroin overdoses — including eight in two days and two fatalities. Michigan State Police Lt. Dave Peltomaa, who oversees the Livingston and Washtenaw County Narcotics Enforcement Team, says potentially dangerous mixing or “cutting” agents could be to blame. “We don’t know if it’s potency; we don’t know if there’s something added; we don’t know if whoever’s cutting hasn’t cut it enough, and so there’s more pure heroin in there,” Peltomaa said. “People who are getting it from a dealer, they don’t know what they’re getting. Obviously it’s having some tragic results,” he said. “People feeling like they’re bulletproof are taking the chance on this stuff and they don’t know what’s in it.” Peltomaa said people often start with prescription pain killers and then switch to heroin because it’s “much cheaper.” He said the drug is gaining social acceptance in Michigan’s suburbs as well as in rural areas. The uptick in local cases coincides with similar heroin overdose outbreaks in New York, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island, as well as in Canada. But whether there is a direct, said Peltomaa, remains unclear. “Most of what we see is brought into Detroit and then makes its way out into the suburbs,” Peltomaa said. “There really is no one (origin) point at this time that we can look to.” Tests are being done on recently confiscated heroin from within Washtenaw County in the hope of determining a cause. MORE: Heroin: ‘An Epidemic’ In The Wealthiest Suburbs Fri Jul 12, 2013 6:39 pm  untanglingwebs El Supremo While this shipment came from Pakistan, the Ann Arbor area reports large quantities of heroin coming in from Afghanistan. They cite big time dealers in Detroit supplying Ypsilanti and Ypsilanti Township which then serve as distribution centers for the rest of the county What's new http://www.cbsa-asfc.gc.ca/new-neuf/July. 2013-07-05 ... CBSA seizes 3 kg of suspected heroin in a passenger's suitcase at the ..... Canada-Jordan Free Trade Agreement (CJFTA) Rules of Origin Fri Jul 12, 2013 6:45 pm  untanglingwebs El Supremo Strategic Drug Threat Developments - Michigan High Intensity Drug ... http://www.justice.gov/…ic/pubs32/32774/strateg.htmThe availability and abuse of heroin are increasing in the Michigan HIDTA region . ... The Michigan HIDTA region comprises nine counties, including Genesee, ... They are located midway… Fri Jul 12, 2013 6:49 pm  untanglingwebs El Supremo I was surprised that Swanson indicated th heroin came from the east coast as a law Enforcement Agent told me a great deal was coming in from the Yucatan. This 2009 FBI report indicates south of the border connections and the prominence of Flint in the drug trade. Brown and Walling can concentrate their funding monopoly on downtown Flint, but that won't influence the public safety issue or the impact on the rest of the county. National Drug Intelligence Center Michigan High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area Drug Market Analysis 2009 March 2009 Strategic Drug Threat Developments •The distribution and abuse of cocaine pose the most significant drug threat to the Michigan HIDTA region; however, cocaine availability has decreased, indicated by increased wholesale cocaine prices, decreased cocaine purity, and a decline in the number of admissions to publicly funded treatment facilities for cocaine. •The availability and abuse of heroin are increasing in the Michigan HIDTA region. Law enforcement officials report that young Caucasian individuals are increasingly abusing heroin. Many of these individuals switched to heroin after initially abusing prescription opioids; other abusers use both prescription opioids and heroin. Additionally, property crimes in the HIDTA region are increasing, some of which are attributed to heroin abusers who are committing these crimes to sustain their habits. •Marijuana production has increased in Michigan. The Michigan HIDTA reports that seizures of cannabis plants in the HIDTA region more than doubled from 9,964 kilograms in 2007 to 20,950 kilograms in 2008. •Local methamphetamine production and abuse have increased significantly in the past year. The number of methamphetamine laboratory incidents1 has more than tripled in the past year, primarily because local producers are increasingly using the "one-pot" method to produce the drug. (See text box.) "One-Pot" Methamphetamine Production Increases in the Michigan HIDTA Region The one-pot method is a variation of the Nazi/Birch method of production; however, in the one-pot method a combination of commonly available chemicals is used to synthesize the anhydrous ammonia essential for methamphetamine production. Individuals using this method are able to produce the drug in approximately 30 minutes at nearly any location by mixing ingredients in a plastic bottle or container. Other methods of methamphetamine production typically require hours to heat ingredients, usually on a stove, resulting in toxic fumes, primarily from the anhydrous ammonia. Producers often use the one-pot method while traveling in vehicles and dispose of waste components along roadsides. Discarded soda bottles may carry residual chemicals that can be toxic, explosive, or flammable. Law enforcement initiatives and increased public awareness campaigns have deterred methamphetamine producers from stealing anhydrous ammonia, a common farm fertilizer used in some methamphetamine production methods. As a result, local methamphetamine producers are increasingly using the one-pot method of methamphetamine production. According to NSS figures, the number of methamphetamine laboratory incidents involving the Nazi/Birch manufacturing method increased significantly from eight incidents in 2000 to 170 incidents in 2008. Additionally, the Michigan State Police report that the one-pot method has become the most commonly used production method in the state, accounting for 39 percent of methamphetamine laboratory incidents in 2007 (the latest year for which data are available). Figure 3. Methamphetamine Production in the Michigan HIDTA Region, by Manufacturing Method, 2000 and 2008 Pie charts showing the number of methamphetamine production incidents in the Michigan HIDTA Region, by manufacturing method, for 2000 and 2008. d-link Source: National Seizure System, data run January 5, 2009. •Methamphetamine abuse in the HIDTA region has increased sharply in the past year, as evidenced by a 30 percent increase from 2007 to 2008 in the number of treatment admission to publicly funded treatment facilities for methamphetamine. •African American traffickers, the primary distributors of cocaine, heroin, and marijuana in the region, are smuggling MDMA (3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine, also known as ecstasy) from Canada into the HIDTA region for subsequent distribution, resulting in increased availability and abuse among African Americans in Detroit. •Diverted controlled prescription drugs (CPDs) are widely abused in the HIDTA region; some OxyContin abusers are switching to heroin because it is less expensive. To Top To Contents HIDTA Overview The Michigan HIDTA region comprises nine counties, including Genesee, Macomb, Oakland, Washtenaw, and Wayne in eastern Michigan, and Allegan, Kalamazoo, Kent, and Van Buren in western Michigan. (See Figure 1.) The population of the HIDTA region is estimated at 5.8 million, with nearly 70 percent residing in the eastern counties of the region. Detroit, Flint, Grand Rapids, and Kalamazoo are the primary drug markets in the region; they serve as distribution centers for many smaller drug markets within the HIDTA region as well as markets in neighboring states. The Michigan HIDTA region is centrally located between major drug markets in Chicago and New York City and is connected by interstate highways and roads to other domestic drug markets as well as to source areas along the Southwest Border and in Canada. Traffickers transport large quantities of cocaine, marijuana and, to a lesser extent, heroin from the Southwest Border. They also transport high-potency marijuana and MDMA from Canada to the area. A shared international border renders Michigan particularly susceptible to drug smuggling from Canada. The Ambassador Bridge and the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel connect Detroit with Windsor, Ontario, Canada, providing numerous opportunities for the cross-border shipment of drugs and currency. (See Figure 2.) Additionally, there are more than two million registered watercraft in Michigan and Ontario, some of which are used by traffickers to transport illicit drugs across the extensive maritime border. The Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport is also used by couriers transporting drugs into and through the region. Figure 2. International Border Area Between Detroit, Michigan, and Windsor, Ontario Map showing the international border area between Detroit, Michigan, and Windsor, Ontario. d-link Detroit and Flint are the largest drug markets in the eastern counties of the HIDTA region. Detroit, in particular, serves as the primary distribution center for illicit drugs transported into and through the HIDTA region from various source locations. Flint is principally supplied with illicit drugs from Detroit, which is located approximately 70 miles south. Some Flint distributors have their own sources outside Michigan that supply them with wholesale quantities of illicit drugs. Cocaine and marijuana available throughout the eastern counties typically are transported from sources in Mexico and states along the Southwest Border, while heroin is transported from New York City, Chicago, southern California, Florida, and sources along the Southwest Border . High-potency marijuana and MDMA are transported into and through the eastern counties from Canada, primarily through Detroit ports of entry (POEs). Cocaine and bulk currency acquired from the sale of these illicit drugs in the United States are transported through Detroit to Canada. Diverted CPDs are commonly available and abused in the HIDTA region. Grand Rapids and Kalamazoo are the primary drug markets in the western counties of the HIDTA region. They are located midway between Chicago and Detroit, the cities of origin for most of the available illicit drugs in these markets. Cocaine, heroin, and marijuana are readily available in the western counties. Methamphetamine production occurs primarily in the western counties in the HIDTA region, where the number of laboratory incidents more than tripled from 2007 to 2008 after a steady decline since the December 2005 enactment of statewide pseudoephedrine sales restrictions. MDMA and CPDs are available and abused in the area; various independent dealers, often college students, transport these drugs into the region for personal use and limited distribution. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Footnote 1. Methamphetamine laboratory incidents include seizures of laboratories, dumpsites, and chemicals and equipment. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Fri Jul 12, 2013 6:53 pm  untanglingwebs El Supremo Six Arrested in Two Days for Trafficking in Heroin - Marion Online http://www.mariononline.com/…trafficking-in-heroin/31 May 2013 ... Detroit, MI Marion, Ohio Marion, Ohio Age: 22 Age: 24 Age: 24. Trafficking in Heroin Trafficking in Heroin Trafficking in Heroin. Cody Tharp ... You are here: Home / News / Six Arrested in Two Days for Trafficking in Heroin Six Arrested in Two Days for Trafficking in Heroin May 31, 2013 by Marion Online News MARMETThe METRICH / MARMET Drug Task Force completed a three week investigation Friday into the sale of heroin in Marion. During a round up on May 30 and May 31, 2013, detectives arrested six individuals, including a woman arrested for the same offense in April. MARMET said Nicole Freeman, arrested on Thursday, had been out on bond after she had been arrested on April 11, 2013 for trafficking in heroin. “It is very upsetting to deal with the same individual in a short period of time,” Lt. Chris Adkins stated. “Lots of law enforcement resources are used to lock the same person up over and over.” Members of the MARMET Drug Task Force, Marion Police Department, and Marion County Sheriff’s Office served a search warrant at 510 Oak Street based on information gained during one of the arrests. Investigators say they located 75 bindles of heroin inside the house worth $1,875 and seized $1,700 in cash. Those arrested included: Caleb C. Welch of Detroit, MI age 22 Trafficking in heroin Nicole Freeman of Marion, Ohio age 24 Trafficking in heroin Camryn Hensel of Marion, Ohio age 24 Trafficking in heroin Cody Tharp of Marion, Ohio age 28 Trafficking in heroin, Possession of heroin Talma Wuescher of Marion, Ohio age 30 trafficking in heroin Possession of heroin David Starks of Detroit,MI age 25 Trafficking in heroin trafficking in heroin Anyone wishing to report criminal activity is urged to call the TIPS line at 740-375-8477. Information may be left anonymously. Eight arrested on heroin-related charges in Lexington, records show ... http://www.kentucky.com/…ted-on-heroin-related.html16 hours ago ... Two Lexington men and six Michigan residents arrested Thursday at the downtown Hyatt hotel have been charged with heroin trafficking. Eight arrested on heroin-related charges in Lexington, records show Published: July 12, 2013 Updated 12 hours ago By Morgan Eads — meads@herald-leader.com Two Lexington men and six Michigan residents have been charged with heroin trafficking after arrests at the downtown Hyatt hotel, according to Lexington police and court records. All eight were arrested at 8 p.m. Thursday at 401 West High Street. In addition to trafficking in a controlled substance, all were charged with unlawful transaction with a minor and possession of marijuana. The Lexington residents charged were Khaaliq Owens, 36, and Brandon Pressley, 28. Those charged from Michigan were Whitney Austin, 23; Glen McGowan, 28; Thomas Brown, 39; Michael Johnson, 40; and Anthony Johnson, 39, all of Battle Creek, and Emanyo Brown, 36, of Southfield, according to police records. The eight pleaded not guilty at arraignments Friday. Preliminary hearings were scheduled for 8:30 a.m. July 19. The bond was lowered from $35,000 to $20,000 for all eight except Michael Johnson. Johnson refused to comply with the judge's request to state his real name. The Hyatt hotel on West High Street was unable to be reached for comment. Morgan Eads: (859) 231-3335. Twitter: @heraldleader Sat Jul 13, 2013 8:12 am  untanglingwebs El Supremo Local 7 action news Local communities work to fight the epidemic of heroin use Posted: 11/20/2013 Last Updated: 12 hours and 31 minutes ago • By: Julie Banovic By: Julie Banovic MONROE, Mich. (WXYZ) - It's becoming an epidemic that is killing teens and young adults in southeast Michigan. Macomb and Oakland counties have reported a rise in deaths related to heroin. But they’re not the only ones. Heroin use has hit one community especially hard. “ That good. It’s that addictive. If he had to choose he’d rather have heroin,” said Thayer Stump. Thayer’s friend told him he would choose heroin over sex. Whether you inject or inhale it. The immediate rush of pleasure is what gets users hooked. “It’s like you have to have it again. They say it’s an unbelievable feeling, said Bob Zubkoff. “My brother tells me it’s the love of his life,” said Megan McCollum. These families say heroin has been breaking hearts in Monroe for long enough. Every time you get on Facebook or you open the newspaper another one of your friends are gone,” said Thayer. As of early November 33 people have died from drug overdoses in Monroe this year; 13 of the deaths directly related to heroin. Soon they will surpass last year’s numbers where 40 people died from drug overdoses; fourteen of those deaths directly related to heroin. When asked Thayer if he ever talked to his son about drugs and about drinking he said, all the time. I begged him. No dad, I don’t do that stuff,” said Thayer. Thayer’s 18-year-old son T.J. tried heroin for the first time in February. It was also his last. “They left him there. Left him there to die,” said Thayer. T.J and two of his friends partied in a hotel room until T.J. overdosed and died. His friends were too afraid to call 911. They were high too and didn’t want to get in trouble. “So if they would’ve called 911 I would still have my son today,” said Thayer. When Bob Zubkoff’s son Jake died from a heroin overdose he was only 22-years-old. “This was like a total shock. I still don’t understand it,” said Zubkoff. The dealer who sold his son heroin served four years in prison. She recently got out. Now he’s afraid she will help drive someone else’s child to their death. “I’ve seen kids walk up to my son’s casket at the funeral home and just bust up crying like oh my God. And then three months later they’re dead,” said Zubkoff. Megan McCollum is afraid her brother will end up in a grave just like Zubkoff and Thayer’s sons. “Burying him. That I will bury him. I wait for it every day,” said McCollum. She said her brother has overdosed a couple of times and he’s already wrecked a few cars. “It’s been very close. That’s why I wait for it every day,” said McCollum. She said there is nowhere in the county for teens and young adults to get long term professional help. “Give us the resources we need for these kids,” said McCollum. McCollum is organizing a rally for November 22 in front of Monroe’s City Hall to let city officials know they do not want to be known as the heroin capitol of the region. “We’re done watching our kids die. We’re done,” said McCollum. If you or someone you know needs help with a heroin addiction and treatment, you can call SEMCA (800) 686-6543. They are also online at SEMCA.org. A 24 hour crisis hotline in Macomb County: (586) 307-9100. If you need access to a substance abuse helpline in Macomb County you can call :(586) 541-2273. If you live in Oakland County and need treatment or information you can call Prior Authorization and Central Evaluation (PACE) at: 248-858-5200. Read more: http://www.wxyz.com/dpp/news/region/monroe_county/local-communities-work-to-fight-the-epidemic-of-heroin-use#ixzz2lMrHSLaB Fri Nov 22, 2013 5:21 am  untanglingwebs El Supremo Important point in this article is the control of price by the cartels before it reaches street gangs. This link is believed to increase the gang on gang violence because of the need to push the product. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Heroin Pushed on Chicago by Cartel Fueling Gang Murders By John Lippert, Nacha Cattan & Mario Parker - Sep 17, 2013 12:01 AM ET . Bloomberg Markets Magazine Mexico Drug Lord Holds Sway Over Chicago Crime Rate The two Mexican couriers were hauling a tractor-trailer full of cash: $3 million collected for drugs sold on the streets of Chicago. Juan Gonzalez and David Zuniga were driving their rig through Indiana in October 2011, transporting the money to Mexico. As they stopped to fix a flat tire, three members of the Gangster Disciples, Chicago’s biggest street gang, held them up at gunpoint. Chicago, its skyline seen here from the South Shore neighborhood, is struggling to contain gang violence fueled by heroin and other drugs -- 80 percent of it from the Sinaloa cartel that Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman runs from the remote mountains of northern Mexico. Photographer: Jon Lowenstein/Bloomberg Markets Jack Riley, head of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration for a five-state region that includes Illinois and Indiana, says Guzman supplies most of the narcotics fueling Chicago’s violence. Photographer: Jon Lowenstein/Bloomberg Markets. Harold ``Noonie'' Ward, a former Gangster Disciples leader, says he helped develop drug routes in the 1990s that Guzman has taken over. Today Ward is chief executive officer of Block 8 Productions LLC, a record and film company. Photographer: Jon Lowenstein/Bloomberg Markets . The gang had bought the drugs -- and now these members wanted the money back. They pistol-whipped and handcuffed Zuniga. As the gangsters were hooking their own purple Kenworth cab to the money-laden trailer, Gonzalez fled through a cornfield and called the police. After a 15-mile chase north along Interstate 65, lawmen intercepted the rogue truck, arrested the gang members and recovered the loot, Bloomberg Markets magazine will report in its October issue. Gonzalez, who worked for Mexican drug lord Joaquin Guzman, made a surprising request that fall day: He wanted proof for cartel leaders that police had confiscated the $3 million. “He knew, without a receipt, they’d kill him or his family in Mexico,” says Jack Riley, head of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration for a five-state region that includes Illinois and Indiana. Such is the fear that Guzman inspires on both sides of the border. Operating from heavily guarded compounds in the Sierra Madre of northern Mexico, Guzman’s Sinaloa cartel supplies 80 percent of the heroin, cocaine, marijuana and methamphetamine -- with a street value of $3 billion -- that floods the Chicago region each year, the DEA says. Job seekers in Guzman’s 150,000-strong enterprise must list where their relatives live. Get Shorty As far as the authorities can tell, 5-foot-6-inch (1.68-meter) Guzman, a grade school dropout known as El Chapo (or Shorty), has never set foot in Chicago. Yet during the past seven years, Guzman, who’s now in his late 50s, has seized control of the supply and wholesale distribution of drugs in Chicago and much of the Midwest. This steady flow of dangerous substances is sparking pitched and often deadly turf wars between Chicago’s splintered, largely African-American and Latino gangs. “Most of Chicago’s violent crime comes from gangs trying to maintain control of drug-selling territories,” Riley says. “Guzman supplies a majority of the narcotics that fuel this violence.” Confounding Police The Department of Justice indicted Guzman in absentia in Chicago in August 2009, charging him with conspiring to transport drugs across international borders. He has so far confounded all efforts by Mexican and U.S. authorities to put him and his cartel out of business. Two years after officers thwarted the Indiana hijacking, police still intercept drugs or cash heading in or out of Chicago every couple of weeks. That pales in comparison to what they miss. “We’re lucky to stop a 10th of what’s going through,” says Terry Risner, sheriff of Jasper County, Indiana, 80 miles (130 kilometers) southeast of the city. The pipeline of Sinaloa drugs to Chicago runs through the predominantly Mexican neighborhood known as Little Village on the city’s southwest side, authorities say. Yet four years after federal prosecutors indicted twins Margarito and Pedro Flores for being key Guzman distributors in Little Village, police don’t know who has succeeded them. ‘Home Port’ The drugs continue to pour in. In a 2006 conversation monitored by Mexican police, Guzman said he wanted to make America’s third-largest city his “home port.” He’s done that, says Art Bilek, a retired detective who’s executive vice president of the Chicago Crime Commission, a public-safety group that in February named Guzman the city’s public enemy No. 1. “We had freelance distributors in Chicago before,” Bilek says. “Guzman has taken them over one by one. He centralized everything -- the shipping, warehousing and distribution of drugs, and the collection and transport of money back to Mexico.” Chicago had cartel drugs in the past but not cartel leaders, Bilek says. “Now, Guzman has top people in here to make sure things run smoothly,” he says. The link between drugs and crime, including violent crime, would be hard to overstate in Chicago. Eighty-six percent of adult males arrested in Chicago last year tested positive for drug use. Chicago, with a population of 2.7 million, had 506 murders in 2012, the highest per capita among the four most populous U.S. cities. ‘Heroin Epidemic’ So pervasive is narcotics commerce along the Eisenhower Expressway, the city’s main east-west artery, that federal authorities have nicknamed it the Heroin Highway. The expressway leads to suburban DuPage County, where State’s Attorney Robert Berlin recently declared a “heroin epidemic.” Since the start of 2012, an average of one heroin user has died every eight-and-a-half days in the county, Berlin says, many of them in their teens and twenties and snorting Sinaloa’s product. As the setting sun casts long shadows on a hot Friday in June, young men in low-riding jeans cluster on porches and around liquor stores near Pulaski Road and Van Buren Street, ready to do business. Keeping an eye out for police, the men lean into car windows, quickly consummating their transactions. Gang members pay for their turf with blood. Harold “Noonie” Ward, a leader in the Gangster Disciples before going to jail in 1994 for selling drugs, links the persistence of street violence to Guzman’s stranglehold over supply. Ward says Chicago gangs were once able to pick among several Latin American vendors. Supplier’s Power With Guzman gaining near-monopoly control, they can’t negotiate prices: He personally dictates how much distributors pay his operatives, court documents allege. In the past decade, wholesale heroin prices have doubled in Chicago to the current cost of $80,000 a kilogram, says Nick Roti, head of anti-gang enforcement for the city’s police. For street sellers to keep profits flowing, they must seize ground in sometimes lethal block-by-block combat. “The supplier has all the power now; he can set prices,” says Ward, 51, who’s chief executive officer of Block 8 Productions LLC, a record and film company. “It used to be honor among thieves,” he says of gang protocol that punished renegade behavior like the hijacking in Indiana. “Now, it’s by any means necessary.” Memorials that have sprung up south and west of downtown reflect a grim statistic: The city suffers an average of more than five shootings and more than one murder every day. Two Chicagos The crimes tell a tale of two Chicagos. The number of murders in the city is half what it was during the crack epidemic of the early 1990s. Yet on portions of the South and West sides, killings are actually more common today, according to research done by Daniel Hertz, a graduate student at the University of Chicago. On the north side, with its parks and high-rise residences abutting Lake Michigan, murders have declined so much that the area now rivals Toronto as an oasis of urban safety, he says. “Over the last twenty years, at the same time as overall crime has declined, the inequality of violence in Chicago has skyrocketed,” Hertz wrote. The city prepared for another potential bout of bloodshed when schools reopened in late August: After Mayor Rahm Emanuel permanently closed 47 elementary schools in June, mostly in the murder-plagued south and west, the city agreed to hire 600 monitors to escort children through gang boundaries to their new classrooms. Three days into the academic year, dismissal at one elementary had to be delayed because an 18-year-old woman was shot a few blocks from the school. Obama Link Across the street from the community center in Altgeld Gardens, a housing project on the far South Side where President Barack Obama once worked as an organizer, names of gunshot victims line a yellow-brick hallway. In the South Shore neighborhood, a deflated heart-shaped balloon droops above candles, teddy bears and two white crosses. Police say the victim, 24-year-old Jordan Jefferson, was a Black P. Stone gang member who was on parole for a narcotics violation when he was gunned down on June 30. A note written on the wall behind the makeshift shrine reads: “Love you always. RIP. Your Mom.” Losing Children Eight people were killed during the Labor Day weekend. Four days around the Fourth of July holiday were even bloodier: 47 shootings left 11 people dead, according to the Chicago police. Two boys ran up behind 14-year-old Damani Henard and shot him in the head as he rode the bike he’d received for eighth-grade graduation home from playing video games. Factions of the Four Corner Hustlers are battling over the neighborhood, and Damani was an unintended victim, police say. “The streets of Chicago belong to gangbangers,” says Damani’s mother, Yolanda Paige, who, on the day Damani was killed, had made him tacos before leaving for a 16-hour day working two jobs as a nursing assistant. “We’re losing our children,” she says. Guzman grabbed control of Chicago partly by exploiting the disarray among its gangs. From the 1970s into the 2000s, organized mega-gangs divvied up drug-selling territories from public-housing towers, says Jody Weis, a former Federal Bureau of Investigation agent and Chicago Police Department superintendent from 2008 to 2011. The city razed the housing projects just as federal prosecutors were using new racketeering laws to convict and incarcerate gang leaders. Warring Factions Rudderless, Chicago’s more than 70,000 gang members split into an increasing number of warring factions. When police searched for the reason murders were on a pace to climb past 500 last year, they identified about 625 gang offshoots, including 100 they hadn’t previously known about. “The biggest driver of violence in Chicago -- and where it’s becoming difficult to address -- is the factionalizing or breaking down of the bigger gangs into these smaller cliques,” Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy says. Guzman stepped into the vacuum in Chicago by first winning a key stronghold in Mexico: the transshipment border town of Ciudad Juarez. He was born 300 miles south in the mountain village of La Tuna de Badiraguato, according to Malcolm Beith’s “The Last Narco: Inside the Hunt for El Chapo.” Relatives sponsored his rise in the drug trade, the book says. Guzman set his sights on Juarez, a sprawling city of 1.5 million, when cartel leader Amado Carrillo Fuentes died during plastic surgery in 1997. Severed Limbs Incarcerated in a Jalisco, Mexico, prison on murder and drug-trafficking convictions, Guzman escaped in a laundry cart in 2001 and unleashed a spree of assassinations starting seven years later, police say. By 2012, he’d won much of Juarez and the route through El Paso, Texas, and highways north. A 26-year-old member of the rival Aztec gang recounts those deadly days. Sitting in a sweltering room on a west Juarez street where a table fan strapped to a wooden beam provides no respite from the suffocating heat, the man runs his forefinger under his chin to show how he slit throats. He recalls how hard it was to sever the arms and legs of one of his victims with a hacksaw because bones are so strong. In all, more than 10,000 people died in the mayhem that cemented Guzman’s grip on the Juarez crossing. Mexican Mud Today, Sinaloa hit men and kidnappers called the New People patrol the city, says Alejandro Hope, a former intelligence officer for Mexico’s government and now a security analyst at the Mexican Competitiveness Institute. The New People and allied gangs lure recruits -- and gain information -- with gifts, says the gang member, whose waist swims in his baggy jeans. “They know all of our movements because they’re our friends,” he says, asking not to be identified because he feared reprisals. Chicago’s connection to Mexican drugs goes back decades. Local Mexican-Americans sold brown heroin called Mexican mud in the 1970s, says Luis Astorga, a sociologist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Guzman inherited and improved that network along with channels that Ward, the former Gangster Disciple, says he set up in the early 1990s in Detroit, Minneapolis and elsewhere. ‘Logistical Genius’ Law enforcement officials say Guzman chose Chicago for the same reasons Sears, Roebuck & Co. once centered catalog sales in the city: It’s a transportation hub where highways and rail lines converge and then fan across the Midwest. The disappearance of factory jobs and the struggle of public schools on the city’s South and West sides also give Guzman tens of thousands of willing salesmen who are jobless and poorly educated. In 2009, a Guzman distributor ran 11 warehouses and stash houses in Chicago and southwestern suburbs. One was in Bedford Park, steps from a facility used by FedEx Corp., operator of the world’s largest cargo airline. “He’s a logistical genius and a hands-on guy,” Riley says, adding that Guzman is also a billionaire. “If he had turned his talents to legitimate business, he’d probably be in the same situation moneywise.” The Chicago police strategy of saturating high-crime areas with patrols appears to be cutting the homicide rate. Murders through Sept. 8 fell 21 percent -- to 297 from 377 -- from the 2012 period. Yet the authorities have made scant progress in cracking Sinaloa’s supply chain. More Arrests? In January, 70 investigators led by the DEA set up what they call the Chicago Strike Force in a three-story building. One investigation spurred the indictment and arrest of 21 defendants in June for distributing heroin and cocaine in Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin. Riley expects more arrests, though the narcotics keep flowing. “The rivers of drugs coming into Chicago are diverse and sufficient to meet demand,” says John Hagedorn, a criminologist at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “This is not a war you can win.” Civic leaders and police vowing to reduce the gunfire have homed in on gang-against-gang retribution. On the fifth floor of their South Side headquarters, police use facial-recognition software to scan images from 24,000 city surveillance cameras. Within minutes of a shooting, they send e-mails and texts about gang affiliations -- and potential locales for retaliation -- so patrols can swarm the trouble spots. Cure Violence In the neighborhoods, a Chicago nonprofit called Cure Violence tries to reduce shootings by removing potential attackers and victims from the streets. Frankie Sanchez, a former gang member who works with the group, drove members of the Gangster Two Six Nation, one of Chicago’s biggest Latino gangs, to a Wisconsin lake after several shootings in June. After another, he hustled them to the city’s Grant Park. The tactic worked: Nobody else got shot, at least not in the critical period immediately following the crimes. In addition to destroying lives, the violence is bad for business, says Toni Preckwinkle, Cook County Board president. “It’s terrible for our region because it makes it seem like this is an unsafe place to live and work,” she says. While the city’s tourism numbers have held up so far, Moody’s Investors Service in July cited crime when it reduced Chicago’s general-obligation debt rating by three grades -- a magnitude unprecedented for a major U.S. city, according to data since 1990. “The city’s budgetary flexibility is already burdened by high fixed costs, including unrelenting public safety demands,” analysts wrote. ‘Evil Mexicans’ Skeptics in Mexico say U.S. authorities are defending their own interests by exaggerating Guzman’s impact. “It’s easier to sell the need for a bump in your budget if you speak about evil Mexicans than if you present a complex web of gangs,” says Hope, the Mexican Competitiveness Institute analyst. In Chicago, the DEA-led strike force concentrates its anti-Guzman efforts in Little Village, where immigrants have congregated for a century. On a sunny June afternoon, traffic snarls on 26th Street as diners enjoy tortillas and roast pork at $25 for four people. The Two-Six gang takes its name from this thoroughfare, which is lined with currency exchanges for buying identification cards and wiring cash back to Mexico. The DEA is zeroing in on so-called choke points in Little Village where drugs change hands between distributors and street gangs. “The middlemen tend to be Mexican gang members from the Latin Kings, Two-Six and Maniac Latin Disciples,” says Roti of the Chicago police. “From there, it flows to African-American gangs, who control the street.” ‘Right Connection’ Luis Lopez says he’s proud to be a Two-Six member. Since grade school, he says, he never wanted to do anything but join members of his extended family in the gang. From the sidelines of a softball game in July, Lopez, 18, describes the links between Little Village and Mexican smuggling. “Since we’re Latino, we know more people who are tied to the cartel,” he says. “The black guys, they need us for drugs and guns because we have the right connection.” The top-ranked Sinaloa operatives in Little Village are obsessed with secrecy, criminologist Hagedorn says. They deal whenever possible with family members and have no interest in leading a Chicago gang. “Why would you want that hassle when you’re busy making money?” he asks. Snortable Heroin Little Village police commander Maria Pena understands how gangs operate after growing up in nearby Logan Square. “In my district, Latinos are more territorial than gangs in other parts of the city,” says Pena, a 25-year veteran who once walked a beat. “They won’t allow opposition gangs to come through. They only sell drugs to known individuals.” A few blocks north of Little Village, black gangs peddle Sinaloa drugs near the Eisenhower Expressway, the Heroin Highway. Riley says Guzman keeps the price of cocaine artificially high to push a more profitable and easily transportable product his chemists refined -- a snortable heroin that lures suburbanites wary of needles. “They think if they snort or smoke it, they won’t end up injecting,” says R. Gil Kerlikowske, director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy. “Very quickly, they do.” Flores Twins The Flores twins in Little Village were the cornerstones of Guzman’s U.S. business from 2005 to 2008, federal court documents allege. They took delivery of 2,000 kilograms (4,400 pounds) of cocaine a month from Sinaloa and associated cartels, plus heroin, the documents say. Their trafficking approached $700 million in 2008. The twins used local warehouses to break down loads from Mexico for retail distribution around Chicago and shipment as far away as Vancouver. They encoded ledgers to track cash sent to Mexico for drugs purchased on credit and to note which couriers handled each step of the process. The system ran smoothly until early 2008. Guzman began a war with boyhood friend Arturo Beltran Leyva over, among other things, the loyalty of the Flores brothers, according to federal court documents. As the Guzman-Beltran Leyva battle claimed hundreds of lives in Mexico, the twins offered during the summer of 2008 to help the DEA investigate Guzman, Patrick Fitzgerald, then-U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, said in court documents. The twins recorded their phone calls with Guzman and their visits to his mountain stronghold. In an October 2008 meeting that included Margarito Flores, Guzman and subordinates complained that Mexican authorities had ceded power to the U.S. in the war on drugs. Setting Prices “They are f---ing us everywhere,” he said. In a taped phone call in November 2008, he approved Pedro Flores’s request for a 9 percent drop in the charge for Chicago heroin -- to $50,000 a kilogram -- citing poor quality. “That price is fine,” Guzman said. The Flores twins also taped Jesus Vicente Zambada Niebla, son of Ismael Zambada, who court documents identify as a principal Sinaloa leader along with Guzman. Mexican soldiers arrested the younger Zambada in March 2009. He was extradited to Chicago, where he’s awaiting trial on drug-trafficking-conspiracy charges. He pleaded not guilty on all counts. Charges against the Flores twins are still pending. Police deconstructed a further piece of Guzman’s Chicago network with the August 2010 arrest of Erik Guevara, whom they say has family ties to Sinaloa in Mexico. They charged Guevara, 31, with conspiracy to supply heroin after discovering a secret compartment under the floor of a house in suburban Forest Park, Illinois, court records allege. Grandma’s House The building had been owned by an 86-year-old woman who died five years earlier. Guevara, who lived nearby, appropriated the vacant home to stash money and drugs. He was arrested in 2010 with 7.7 kilograms of heroin stuffed in a drive shaft he was transporting in his Jeep, the Justice Department says. He pleaded guilty and began a 30-year jail sentence in January. Sinaloa leaders orchestrate punishments from afar. In 2011, they sent a list of targets to a clan of Chicago roofers who served as cartel enforcers by night, says John Blair, intelligence director for the Cook County Sheriff’s Office. The dossier contained names of people Guzman’s cartel believed had robbed it in Mexico. Blair suspects roofer Arturo Ibarra was among Guzman’s U.S. hit men. Police shot and killed Ibarra as he fled from a north side neighborhood just as two men named in the dossier lay bleeding to death from stab wounds. ‘Unlimited Resources’ The Gangster Disciples who tried to hijack Guzman’s cash in 2011 have avoided Sinaloa reprisals so far, says Jasper County prosecutor Kathryn O’Neall. An Indiana judge sentenced the trio on May 28 to three years in prison for money laundering. Gonzalez and Zuniga, who cooperated with authorities, weren’t charged. Guzman’s grip on the U.S. Midwest may actually be strengthened by a move Mexican authorities hailed as a victory in their war on trafficking. In July, they arrested Miguel Angel Trevino Morales, head of the Zetas cartel, which Sinaloa has been battling over a route through Nuevo Laredo on the U.S. border. “Trevino’s arrest makes it easier for Sinaloa to conquer territory,” says Jorge Chabat, a security analyst at the Mexico City-based Center for Economic Research and Teaching. The reach of Sinaloa and its elusive leader extends from the rugged Sierra Madre to the dusty streets of Juarez to Chicago and beyond. “They’re the pre-eminent organized crime group in the world today,” the Chicago Police Department’s Roti says. “They have almost unlimited resources.” Get your free issue of Bloomberg Markets! SUBSCRIBE TODAY To contact the reporters on this story: John Lippert at jlippert@bloomberg.net; Nacha Cattan in Mexico City at ncattan@bloomberg.net; Mario Parker at mparker22@bloomberg.net To contact the editors responsible for this story: Flynn McRoberts at Fmcroberts1@bloomberg.net; Laura Colby at lcolby@bloomberg.net Sat Nov 23, 2013 6:18 am  untanglingwebs El Supremo Why Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel Loves Selling Drugs in Chicago Chicago is key to a business moving tons of drugs for billions of dollars. Here’s how the whole operation works. By Jason McGahan Published Sept. 17, 2013  On the night that Jesús Vicente Zambada Niebla strode into the lobby of the Sheraton Maria Isabel Hotel in Mexico City, the price on his head was $5 million. The handsome 33-year-old, nicknamed El Vicentillo (Pretty Boy Vicente), was a notorious drug capo. He was also the only son of Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada García, the No. 2 boss of Mexico’s powerful Sinaloa cartel, the biggest supplier of illegal narcotics to the United States. For years, the younger Zambada had been on the run from the federales as well as from U.S. authorities. But that night in March 2009, he strolled into the hotel for an unlikely midnight tryst with—of all people—two agents from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. Related Content The Cocaine Trail to Chicago According to court documents, the meeting had been arranged by Humberto Loya Castro, a consigliere to the cartel (and, since 2005, a DEA informant). Zambada didn’t know it, but he was walking into a trap. His fate had been sealed eight months earlier, when two drug wholesalers from Chicago—the Flores twins, Margarito Jr. and Pedro—flipped on their Sinaloa employers. That led authorities on both sides of the border to make a series of arrests all the way up the cartel chain of command to Zambada. Hours after Zambada left the hotel, just before daybreak, he and his entourage of five heavily armed bodyguards were loading their vehicles in the driveway of Zambada’s safe house in the leafy neighborhood of walled estates called Lomas de Pedregal. Sixty regulars from the Mexican special forces surrounded them. Caught off-guard and outnumbered, the men surrendered their arsenal of AR-15 semiautomatic rifles and .38 Super pistols. Pretty Boy Vicente was taken into custody without firing a shot. Never heard of the Sinaloa cartel? If you’re in law enforcement, you certainly can’t say the same. Last February, the Chicago Crime Commission branded Sinaloa’s leader, the elusive and fearsome Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán Loera, Public Enemy No. 1—a distinction last held by Al Capone. “What Al Capone was to beer and whiskey, Guzmán is to narcotics,” Art Bilek, the commission’s executive vice president, said at the time. Except, Bilek added, Guzmán “is clearly more dangerous than Al Capone was at his height.” (Zambada is plenty dangerous, too: Prosecutors say he commanded logistics and security for the cartel, including assassinations. He is suspected in a number of slayings, including the murders of government officials.) The cartel’s scope is staggering. About half of the estimated $65 billion worth of illegal cocaine, heroin, and other narcotics that Americans buy each year enters the United States via Mexico, according to law enforcement experts (though the drugs often originate in South or Central America). More than half of that is believed to be supplied by Sinaloa. Drug enforcement experts estimate, conservatively, that the cartel’s annual revenues exceed $3 billion: more than those of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange Group. In Chicago, the cartel has a near monopoly. “I’d say 70 to 80 percent of the narcotics here are controlled by Sinaloa and Chapo Guzmán,” says Jack Riley, director of the DEA’s Chicago office. “Virtually all of our major investigations at some point lead back to other investigations tied to Sinaloa.” In August 2009, five months after Zambada’s capture, a federal grand jury in Chicago indicted him and 45 others tied to a Sinaloa-led drug ring in the city. Patrick Fitzgerald, the U.S. attorney at the time, called the indictments “the most significant drug importation conspiracies ever charged in Chicago,” claiming that the cartel imported and distributed nearly $6 billion worth of illegal narcotics mostly to the Chicago area between 1990 and 2008. The announcement was a big one, to be sure: Zambada would be the highest-ranking cartel leader ever to be prosecuted in the United States. But a major turning point in the war on drugs? Not exactly. More than four years later, Zambada—who currently resides in a federal prison in Milan, Michigan—still has not been tried, in part because of endless wrangling by prosecutors and defense attorneys on the size and scope of the pretrial legal discovery. At presstime, a status hearing was scheduled for September 25. Whenever Zambada does get to the Dirksen U.S. Courthouse, all eyes in the narco world will be watching. In court filings, Zambada has already made the explosive claim that he was working as a secret informant for the DEA. In exchange for information on rival drug lords, he says, U.S. authorities offered him immunity from prosecution and turned a blind eye toward the Sinaloa cartel’s illegal activities. (Prosecutors deny these allegations.) Whether or not Zambada’s statements prove true, the trial should provide a rare and enlightening window into the inner workings of the Sinaloa cartel’s massive drug distribution operations in the United States and its deep roots in Chicago. And if anything, experts say, those operations have only increased in the past four years. (Chicago constructed this story from thousands of pages of federal court records, police reports, and court testimony from related cases, as well as from official government reports and dozens of interviews with federal and local law enforcement officials and attorneys for some of the defendants; through a spokesman, prosecutors in the Zambada case declined comment.) Sure, Zambada’s capture—and the dismantling of one of the Sinaloa cartel’s large Chicago-based drug distribution operations, run by the Flores twins—may have hurt business for a time. But the cartel’s two leaders, Guzmán and the elder Zambada, are still at large. And the illegal narcotics trade is remarkably resilient. Indeed, today the Sinaloa cartel and its rivals are selling record amounts of heroin and methamphetamine in Chicago, according to drug seizure data and law enforcement officials (see “Sizing Up the Big Four,” below). In May, the regenerative powers of the cartel led Chicago’s police superintendent, Garry McCarthy, to call America’s war on drugs a “wholesale failure.” The failure is as much Chicago’s as the nation’s. For this city has replaced Miami as the primary U.S. distribution point for illegal narcotics—mainly cocaine, heroin, marijuana, and methamphetamine—imported from Mexico. In a 2010 report, the U.S. Department of Justice named the Chicago metro area the No. 1 destination in the United States for heroin shipments, No. 2 for marijuana and cocaine, and No. 5 for methamphetamine. Chicago is the only U.S. city to rank in the top five for all four major drug categories. No wonder Sinaloa boss Guzmán was quoted in a recent New York Times Magazine article calling Chicago his cartel’s “home port.” The Cartel’s ‘Home Port’ Chicago is the only U.S. city to rank in the top five for all four major drug categories. No.1 destination in the United States for heroin shipments No. 2 for marijuana and cocaine No. 5 for methamphetamine SOURCE: U.S. DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE It might seem odd that a city some 1,500 miles north of the Mexican border has become the nation’s narcotics center. But there are four main reasons: transportation, ethnic makeup, size, and gang culture. Chicago is the transportation hub of America, a fact not lost on the Mexican cartels (just as it wasn’t on Capone and his fellow bootleggers almost a century ago). It’s ideally located within a day’s drive of 70 percent of the nation’s population. Six interstate highways crisscross the region, connecting east and west. Only two states (Texas and California) have more interstate highway miles than Illinois. As for rail transport, Chicago welcomes six of the seven major railroads and accounts for a quarter of the country’s rail traffic. Water? The Port of Chicago is one of the nation’s largest inland cargo ports, and the city is the world’s third-largest handler of shipping containers (after Singapore and Hong Kong). And let’s not forget about Midway and O’Hare: More than 86 million passengers and 1.5 million tons of cargo passed through these airports combined in 2011, the latest year for which data are available. Second, the Chicago metro area has a large Hispanic immigrant population, making it easy for Mexican cartel operatives to blend in. (Only Los Angeles, San Antonio, and Houston have more residents of Mexican descent, according to the 2010 census.) Because many of these immigrants—especially those who are here illegally—are poor or underemployed, the area provides a fertile recruiting ground for cartel operatives. According to a Cook County law enforcement officer familiar with the local drug trade, the Pilsen and Little Village neighborhoods, which are more than 80 percent Hispanic, are el eje (the axis) of drug distribution in the city. They’re conveniently located near the Stevenson, Dan Ryan, and Eisenhower Expressways, Metra’s Burlington Northern Santa Fe line, and a major industrial corridor off Blue Island Avenue. (With 1.3 billion square feet of warehouse property, Chicago has one of the largest concentrations of industrial space in the nation, offering plenty of room for cartels to hide contraband.) Third, the city is a huge market in its own right. Chicagoans’ taste for drugs is as big as—if not bigger than—that of most other Americans. For example, according to a report by the Office of National Drug Control Policy, 86 percent of people arrested in Cook County in 2012 tested positive for at least one illegal narcotic—the highest percentage of any big city. Twenty-two percent tested positive for more than one. While the amount of cocaine seized annually by law enforcement officials in the Chicago area has been declining in recent years, the amount of heroin has skyrocketed, rising sixfold from 2002 to 2012. Chicago’s rate of heroin-related emergency room admissions is three times the national rate. Methamphetamine sales are way up, too. As U.S. authorities have cracked down on home-produced meth, the cartels have been breaking badder: inundating Chicago and other U.S. cities with extremely pure, relatively cheap meth straight from “superlabs” in Mexico. In 2002, law enforcement officials in Chicago seized 3.5 kilograms (8 pounds) of meth; in 2012 they seized more than 70 kilos (155 pounds). Finally, Chicago’s deeply entrenched street gangs offer a ready-made retail network. Law enforcement officials estimate the number of street gangs in the city at more than 70 and the number of members at between 70,000 and 125,000. The DEA’s Jack Riley likens them to “100,000 Amway salesmen” for cartel-supplied drugs. “It’s easy for the cartel to get the drugs to Chicago and then have people put them on the street,” explains Christina Egan, the former deputy chief of the narcotics and gangs unit for the U.S. attorney’s office in Chicago. “There’s a huge demand, and with the gangs in Chicago, it’s easy to service that demand.” As often as not, the avocados for sale at your local supermarket were grown in Mexico, then shipped across the border at Laredo, Texas—a 1,400-mile journey that takes two days by truck or two and a half by rail. When the shipment arrives at a warehouse of one of the big grocery chains or food service operators somewhere in the city, the produce gets divvied up. Some portion stays in Chicago, to fill produce sections or get sold to local restaurants or at farmers’ markets. The rest is broken down further and then transported to other cities, such as Minneapolis, Cleveland, and Philadelphia, where the cycle begins anew. At each step, the price of avocados goes up. For illegal narcotics, the process is much the same. Take cocaine, which derives from the coca leaf. While coca, unlike avocados, isn’t grown in Mexico—it comes from South America’s Andes Mountains—cocaine is arguably a Mexican export. A recent U.S. State Department report estimated that as much as 90 percent of all cocaine consumed in this country comes from Mexico—$37 billion worth each year, according to the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime. That’s far more than the $7 billion combined value of fresh fruit (excluding bananas) and vegetables imported annually from Mexico. SIZING UP THE BIG FOUR: While the amount of cocaine seized in Chicago by law enforcement has dropped substantially from 2002 to 2012 … Sizing Up the Big Four SOURCE: U.S. DRUG ENFORCEMENT ADMINISTRATION While mighty Colombian cartels once ran the supply side of the business, Mexican bosses wrested control years ago. Under the watchful eye of cartel operatives, coca leaves are converted into cocaine, usually in Colombia, Peru, or Bolivia, in labs near the fields where they’re grown. The drug is then packaged into “keys,” brick-shaped bundles weighing a kilogram each. To avoid detection by drug-sniffing dogs, each key is sheathed in a rubber membrane, swathed with plastic wrap, and then wrapped once more in duct tape. The keys are smuggled into Mexico and then on to the United States—by land, air, or sea—using methods as varied as they are ingenious: stashed under fresh produce, in cans of jalapeños, in the bellies of frozen shark carcasses, in trap compartments of cars, trucks, motor homes, container ships, small aircraft, even submarines; taped to the bodies of backpackers traveling by bus; catapulted over border fences; concealed in the trunks of corrupt local sheriffs; or trundled through underground tunnels (some so well constructed that they have air conditioning), a tactic purportedly devised by El Chapo himself. Smuggling cocaine is, of course, a much more expensive and labor-intensive business than shipping avocados. The cartels have armies of workers on their payrolls to keep their operations humming: drivers, pilots, lookouts, dispatchers, distributors, stash house operators, money couriers, and enforcers, not to mention a vast bribe network of corrupt cops, politicians, security officials, and soldiers. The drug trade is also fraught with peril. One Colombian trafficker-turned-informant in the Zambada case testified about a time around 2004 when he was scudding along the Caribbean shore with a fleet of cigarette boats. Hidden aboard in secret compartments, the man said, were some 2,000 bricks of pure Colombian cocaine—two metric tons in all. The boats were on their way to rendezvous with Vicente Zambada and other Sinaloa cartel operatives on a remote beach near Cancún. The informant recalled how Zambada—a pistol holstered to his belt, flanked by a small army of cartel gunmen dressed in federal police uniforms—counted out the kilos. He stabbed a knife into one of the packages to examine the quality and color of the powder. Once he found that everything was up to snuff, his men loaded the coke onto commercial trucks, burying it under loads of fresh fish and ice. Meanwhile, Zambada radioed ahead to Mexican police to ensure safe passage; he had “paid for the road” with bribes, the informant explained. Court filings show that Zambada’s smugglers typically transported the keys across the U.S. border at the busy crossing in Calexico, a hardscrabble town in Imperial County, California. (They also used crossings near El Paso, Texas.) His drivers would then take the keys to stash houses and staging areas, usually warehouses near Los Angeles. From there, the drugs got trucked to major “transshipment” cities—Chicago one of the most crucial—and then on to smaller distribution outposts such as Indianapolis, Cincinnati, and Detroit. The bulk shipments that arrive in Chicago are typically divided up. Tons of drugs, literally, stay here. Often large quantities are reloaded and sent as far away as New York, Philadelphia, and Atlanta. Locally, importers break down the keys into smaller loads of 5 to 60 kilos for their wholesale customers. They, in turn, break the packages down into half or quarter kilos; middlemen repackage the cocaine into still smaller quantities and sell to street-level dealers, who further divide it into grams and even tinier dime bags. As cocaine moves down the supply chain, resellers eager to maximize profit almost always “step on” or “cut” it with things that resemble cocaine, such as powdered vitamin B12, lidocaine, or baby laxatives. By the time coke hits the streets, it’s usually only about 65 percent pure. And as with avocados, the price gets marked up at each link of the delivery chain (see “The Cocaine Trail to Chicago”). While Sinaloa and other Mexican cartels value the ability to control bulk exports of cocaine, they traditionally haven’t been as interested in controlling the entire U.S. distribution chain. Involvement in street sales, for example, would increase their exposure to busts. But that attitude seems to be changing. An Associated Press investigation published last April found that in recent years the cartels have been stealthily dispatching senior operatives to live and work north of the border. The goal: to maximize profits by cutting out middlemen. The Department of Justice has estimated that Mexican cartels now operate in more than 1,200 cities and towns in America’s interior. Just a few years ago, that number was 230. What’s more, the cartels have begun producing large quantities of drugs on U.S. soil to avoid the expense and danger of smuggling across the Mexican border. Police and ordinary Americans alike are increasingly discovering massive, well-hidden marijuana farms. Last year in northern Wisconsin, for example, a bear hunter near Clam Lake happened upon what the DEA said was a Sinaloa-run pot farm with 10,000 plants, tended round the clock by a dozen migrant workers wielding AK-47s. Authorities have found similar fields around Chicago. A Cook County sheriff’s deputy and a Chicago police officer on a routine helicopter patrol last year spotted a pot farm the size of two football fields brazenly planted right off Stony Island Avenue and 105th Street. (Law enforcement officials suspect one of the Mexican cartels.) “The plants are pretty big,” the officer told reporters. “They’re as big as Christmas trees.” Vicente Zambada’s father, Ismael Zambada García—a former farmhand from Culiacán, in the Mexican state of Sinaloa (from which the cartel gets its name)—is not nearly as well known as his internationally notorious partner in crime, Joaquín Guzmán. It was Guzmán (whose nickname, El Chapo, means “shorty”) who gained legendary status after a 1993 shootout at the Guadalajara airport that left the city’s archbishop dead. It was Guzmán who made a Hollywood-esque break out from Mexico’s maximum-security prison Puente Grande in 2001—bribing his way out of his cell and escaping with the very same police SWAT team that had been called in to find him, the legend goes. It was Guzmán whose cat-and-mouse games with the pursuing military are extolled in the popular drug ballads known as narcocorridos. And it was Guzmán who was regularly listed by Forbes as one of the world’s richest billionaires and “the biggest drug lord of all time.” Yet in Mexico, some say that it’s Ismael Zambada, nicknamed El Mayo, who calls the shots in the Sinaloa cartel. Six years older than Guzmán, Zambada, 65, is as understated as his partner can be flamboyant. He is also more cautious. As El Mayo told the Mexican magazine Proceso a few years back: “I’m full of fear. Always.” Perhaps that’s one reason the Sinaloa cartel has the reputation for being focused more on the business of drug trafficking and less on violence than rival cartels. For El Mayo, commerce and relationship building trumps bloodshed. That’s not to say that Sinaloa bosses are above the ruthless torture and gruesome killings that come with the drug trade. Just look at the allegations against El Mayo’s son. Like the rest of the younger generation of cartel capos—“narco juniors,” as the Mexican media often refer to them—El Vicentillo grew up privileged. He attended middle school and high school in San Diego, according to the Mexican newspaper La Jornada. Citing military intelligence, it also reported that he received a degree in engineering in San Diego, though the paper didn’t include his alma mater’s name. As the organization’s third in command, the younger Zambada was, according to prosecutors, in charge of receiving shipments of cocaine and heroin, getting them to the U.S. side of the border, and negotiating prices with wholesalers. The job could turn violent. For example, Mexican authorities accused him of masterminding the deadly 2000 highway ambush of Tijuana’s police chief. Days after the slaying, six suspects arrested by police admitted that they were part of a hit squad for the younger Zambada, said Baja California attorney general Juan Manuel Salazar Pimentel. Salazar said the men also confessed to killing 14 others on Zambada’s orders, including a former state judge. In a conversation alleged to be between Zambada and one of his street soldiers, mentioned in the indictment against Zambada, the underling told his boss about the new police chief in Culiacán. Zambada demanded that the chief be brought to him: “He is either going to work with us, or you know what will happen to him.” On another occasion at a high-level meeting held at a remote mountain compound in Sinaloa—later recalled by Margarito Flores—prosecutors say Zambada asked Margarito to help him acquire military-grade weapons from American soldiers. “Twin,” he called, “you know guys coming back from the war. Find someone who can give you big, powerful weapons, American shit. . . . We don’t need one, we need a lot of them—20, 30, a lot of them.” After the meeting, while the Floreses were waiting to be picked up at an airstrip, Margarito told the DEA that Zambada had coaxed him further. “You’re good with me,” Zambada told him. “You want to be really good with me, get me my shit, my guns. vulgar language the money, vulgar language the drugs. I want to blow shit up.” Like Vicente Zambada, the 32-year-old Flores twins, who grew up in Chicago’s Little Village neighborhood, were born into the drug trade. Sources say that their father, Margarito Flores Sr., was a Mexican immigrant who ran drugs for the Sinaloa cartel. He went missing in Mexico in 2009 and is believed to be dead. His sons eventually took over the family business. The Flores brothers were included in Patrick Fitzgerald’s 2008 indictment. Also like Vicente Zambada, they have not yet seen the inside of a courtroom: They’re in protective custody in an undisclosed location. But court filings and testimony from others in their Chicago-based narcotics ring show that they kept tight-fisted control over their operation, running it with the assembly-line efficiency of a Domino’s pizza chain. Margarito handled the Mexican supply side of the operation; he negotiated prices and dealt with the Zambadas, taking calls from them instructing him where and when to expect the loads. Pedro ran the local distribution. When a load arrived in Chicago, Pedro would call one of his “legs”—couriers with names like Fat Sosa or Nose. He’d instruct them to go to such and such warehouse to meet the semi-truck, pack it up, and drive it to this or that stash house. Then he’d direct them to make the drop-offs: Go see Ron Ron with 50 keys at Q Billiards on Cass Avenue in Darien, he’d say, or Old Man with 30 at the Outback Steakhouse in Calumet. “It was just like unloading groceries,” Jorge Llamas, a courier who worked for the Floreses for seven years, later recalled in court testimony. Llamas said the brothers kept 50 disposable cell phones on hand. To tell them apart, they used color-coded stickers on which they’d written the nicknames of their customers. Antonio “T-Bag” Aguilera testified that the twins kept separate stash houses for drugs and cash. The drug stash houses were located in suburban Romeoville, Plainfield, and Justice, as well as in Chicago’s West Town neighborhood, at Erie Street and Hoyne Avenue. Most of the money stash houses were also in the southwestern suburbs, in Hinsdale, Palos Hills, Burbank, and Plainfield, with one on the city’s West Side. The twins proved so skilled at ferrying drugs that they became preferred customers of the Zambadas—an honor cemented one day in 2005, when the patriarch allegedly clapped them on the back and called them “his people.” They were his compadres, and that meant they received the lowest prices for cartel cocaine and, later, heroin. El Mayo even cut the twins in on a share of the cocaine loads he bought, at cost, straight from the Colombians. The twins were also part of a very select club of people who could call Guzmán directly. Like the top cartel bosses, the Flores brothers rarely handled the drugs themselves. Rather, they arranged for handoffs to smaller wholesalers who would sell bulk quantities down the drug chain. Nor did the twins personally deal with street-level dealers—a popular misconception reinforced by police and drug enforcement officials, who often link the cartels to the city’s gangs and the deadly violence they perpetrate. Law enforcement’s logic seems to be that because Mexican cartels supply nearly all of Chicago’s drugs, and because the gang members who peddle the drugs are responsible for 80 percent of the murders and shootings in the city, the cartels are responsible for bringing the violence of the drug wars in Mexico to the streets of Chicago. But are drug cartels the primary cause of Chicago’s violent crime problem? Some criminologists say—and simple logic suggests—that they’re not. Pressed for a specific example of a direct cartel-to-gang pipeline, Andrew Bryant of the narcotics division of the Cook County state’s attorney’s office concedes: “I can’t give you a chain all the way from the top to the bottom.” The connections between a cartel and street gangs, he says, are very loose. As one senior member of the Latin Kings puts it: “This is far more complicated than a bunch of Mexicans getting together and bringing drugs into Chicago.” He calls the link between the Flores brothers and the streets the “gray area” of the drug trade. It appears that no one involved in the Flores brothers’ huge narcotics ring had strong ties, if any at all, to Chicago gangs. The twins employed old friends from the neighborhood, not gang members. Antonio Aguilera, for one, was a boyhood friend of the twins’ older brother. Jorge Llamas rescued Margarito Flores from a beating when they were teenagers. Other crew members were brought in by friends or friends of friends. Violence is bad for business; it scares away customers. A 2000 study by University of Chicago economics professor Steven Levitt and Columbia University sociology professor Sudhir Venkatesh found that the availability of drugs and their prices fell by 20 to 30 percent during gang conflicts. Which is why the drug trade has actually unified rival gangs, or at least pushed some into an imperfect détente, says Brian Sexton, head of the narcotics unit at the Cook County state’s attorney’s office. “They’ve realized that . . . if I can sell you dope, and you can sell it, and I can keep selling you dope, and I’m making money, what do I care about Folks or Peoples?” A lot of the murders and shootings that the police call “gang related” aren’t tied to actual gang activity, according to criminologists and police sources. The offender or victim may be in a gang, but the dispute was a personal one. One classic study by the Chicago sociologists Richard and Carolyn Block examined gang homicides from 1987 to 1994—the height of the crack wars and a period when gang violence soared. The Blocks found that just 3 percent of the gang-motivated homicides were drug related. “The connection between street gangs, drugs, and homicide was weak,” they said. Similarly, the Mexican cartels seem to have tried to minimize violence on this side of the border. Michael Clancy, a defense attorney for Ron Collins, a regular wholesale customer of the Flores twins, says he was a bit surprised to see how nonviolent the whole operation was. “It was strange,” he says, “to see such a big drug organization that didn’t have any acts of violence. I mean, there was nothing even close to a violent act in anything involving the twins’ organization.” The couriers who later testified said that the twins forbade them to carry guns. Few couriers had prior convictions. Nicholas Roti, the chief of the Chicago Police Department’s Bureau of Organized Crime, says that the cartel operatives try to stay “very low key.” He adds, “This is their retail outlet; they don’t want to mess this up.” So much money was flowing in that perhaps exacting violent retribution just wasn’t worth the effort. Explains Clancy: “If someone rips you off or someone stiffs you on 50 kilos, [do] you go out and do an act of violence against that guy and bring a bunch of heat on you and your organization? Let it go. You’ll sell another 50 kilos tomorrow.” (That number is entirely possible. In signed affidavits, the Flores twins said they moved upward of 46 tons of Sinaloa-supplied cocaine into Chicago between 2006 and 2008. That’s roughly 1,700 kilos a month.) If the quantity of drugs sold sounds staggering, the amount of money made is even more mind-blowing. Court filings estimate that the twins’ drug operation brought in $700 million a year. One courier for the Floreses estimated that he alone handled a quarter of a billion dollars in a three-month stretch in late 2008. Cesar Perez, another courier, recalled collecting untold millions “in rubber bands, plastic bags, paper bags, shoe boxes, duffel bags, luggages [sic].” In other testimony, a special agent with the DEA described an October 2008 raid on one of the Floreses’ cash stash houses in Hinsdale. The agent said they found several money-counting machines and nearly $5 million in cash, arranged neatly in tall stacks. A million dollars might take two hours to count; a quarter of a million around 40 minutes. The counters used latex gloves to handle the money—no fingerprints—and kept ledgers of all payments; there was never more than $7 million at any given time in the stash houses. Once a week, Pedro instructed his crew on how to ship cash back to his bosses in Mexico: separate the bills by denomination, bundle the money, bag the bundles in plastic, vacuum- and heat-seal them, stick in some fabric softener to mask the scent, and then wrap them again in plastic wrap and duct tape. Like a dispatcher, Pedro then directed the couriers to drop-off spots where tractor-trailers were waiting to haul the money to L.A. and eventually across the border. The twins had more money than they knew what to do with. According to public records, Pedro owned homes in Chicago, Romeoville, and Berwyn. Records show that Margarito shared the Chicago house with his brother but also lived in Phoenix. Pedro bought two barbershops, both called Millennium Cuts, in Berwyn and West Lawn; he also opened a restaurant, Mama’s Kitchen, in West Rogers Park. Margarito managed a local rapper named Magic. (Mama’s Kitchen is now closed. The barbershops are still open, but the parent corporation that Pedro formed has since dissolved.) But money isn’t helping either the Flores brothers or Vicente Zambada now. The twins live a constricted existence in protective custody, and Zambada continues to molder in jail in rural Michigan, five hours from Chicago. (He was moved there in October 2011 after his attorneys complained that he needed access to the outdoors; in the South Loop’s Metropolitan Correctional Center, where he had been held previously, his only access to fresh air was the roof. Prosecutors had refused to allow him to go up there, arguing that he could escape or be shot by a sniper.) Meanwhile, Zambada’s lawyers are racking up untold hours demanding reams of documents and reports about covert drug operations that the U.S. government says are classified. By law, the judge assigned to the case, Ruben Castillo, must review and rule on the admissibility of every document requested by Zambada. Complicating things further, his lawyers want access to documents from Mexican authorities, too. As for prosectors, they keep adding new defendants to the case; criminals, they say, are part of Zambada’s vast drug conspiracy. Prosecutors have built much of their case against Zambada on evidence from their star witnesses, the Flores twins. They’re trying to withhold any discovery related to the Floreses until a week before the trial begins. One point of dispute is the terms of the twins’ agreement to cooperate with the U.S. government. It has come out in the legal proceedings against the former Flores crew members that the twins, in exchange for providing incriminating information and the wiretap recordings that were used to indict Zambada, were permitted to continue importing cocaine and heroin by the ton into Chicago and distributing the drugs throughout the country. Related Content The Cocaine Trail to Chicago This arrangement—which prosecutors have admitted to in court—raises serious questions about the government’s use of informants and the often blurry methods it uses to combat drug trafficking syndicates. They are the same kinds of concerns that have come up recently in the gun-smuggling operation known as Fast and Furious, in which agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives and the DEA allowed low-level cartel smugglers to buy and transport guns across the border to help them catch higher-level cartel leaders. (Officials have argued that enlisting the cooperation of lower-level informants to catch the big fish is a necessary evil.) Prosecutors might have another good reason to keep the Flores brothers as far away from a courtroom for as long as they can. Last year, Saul Rodriguez, a Chicago drug trafficker who had befriended Zambada when the two were imprisoned at the Metropolitan Correctional Center, testified in another trial that Zambada told him that he wanted to have Pedro and Margarito Flores assassinated. Rodriguez said Zambada transferred $6,600 to one of Rodriguez’s lawyers in exchange for information he claims he gave the kingpin about the twins. “He was repaying the favor,” Rodriguez said of Zambada’s alleged payment. (Alvin Michaelson, one of Zambada’s attorneys, calls Rodriguez’s claim “utter nonsense.”) As the legal maneuvering in Zambada’s case goes on, drugs supplied by the Sinaloa cartel continue to inundate the city. In a rare interview with Proceso in 2010, Ismael Zambada, when asked about the arrest of his son, insisted that the drugs will keep flowing no matter what—even if El Chapo himself is brought down. “When it comes to the capos, jailed, dead, or extradited,” he said, “their replacements are ready.” This article appears in the October 2013 issue of Chicago magazine. Subscribe to Chicago magazine. Sat Nov 23, 2013 6:33 am    Display posts from previous:   All Posts1 Day7 Days2 Weeks1 Month3 Months6 Months1 Year Oldest FirstNewest First

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