 Hi, everyone. Thank you for joining the original gangsters podcast. I'm Jimmy Bucciolato with my co-host, Scott Bernstein. Hey, how you doing, buddy? We have an exciting show on tap, and one of the most accomplished writers when it comes to chronicling the cartel world down in Mexico. Yeah, our guests, they were super excited, and if I mispronounce it, correct me, but I think it's Yoan Grillo. Is that, am I pronouncing it? Good enough, absolutely. Yeah, the kids said all kinds of ways, so I don't really mind how it's said, but that's good enough for me. Okay, well, my last name is Bucciolato, and know what, so I have a Sicilian last name, Siciliano, and people mispronounce it all the time, so I'm patient. I appreciate that. But he's a celebrated journalist and author, as Scott points out. If you look at this guy's resume, I mean, Time Magazine, Associated Press, and two of his books that we want to talk about, and then a forthcoming book, but El Narco, Inside Mexico's Criminal Insurgencies, a book that I highly recommend. I use that a lot of the time in my Gangs and Organized Crime class, and then another text, Gangster Warlords, a follow-up text, Outstanding, Not Just About Mexico, But What's Going on in Central America, the Caribbean, South America. Shower Posse. So, yeah, the chapter on Jamaica is fascinating. So, and then he has a new book coming out, Blood, Gun Money, which we will also talk about, but thank you for joining us, and you want to just tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got involved in narco reporting, and then we'll ask you some specific questions about the cartels and the substance of your reporting. Yeah, sure. Great to be here and hi to all the listeners, all the watchers. I'm originally from the UK, grew up in the UK. I came to Mexico in the year 2000, so over 20 years ago now. And I came here to do journalism with the original idea of being here for a couple of years and moving on. It's been 20 years now. And I originally had ideas. I didn't come to look at drug cartels. I was more interested in, or had illusions, kind of fantasies about the ideas of running around with grillers who were fighting military dictatorships and that kind of thing. I kind of looked at the Civil Wars back in the 80s, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala. But I came here and realized that chapter was kind of over and just fell into reporting on drugs and gangsters right away, partly because I grew up in the UK in a city with a lot of drug use around kind of an opioid epidemic back then in the 1980s and various young guys, teenagers, young men, I knew died of heroin overdoses back then. So I began reporting on these gangsters, crime, drugs, kind of fell into it. And then while I was reporting on this over the years and I just managed to stay in Mexico, this situation blew up and the drug war really kicked off. Became like an armed conflict comparable to an armed conflict. Now we've seen about maybe 200,000 deaths related to this. Tens of thousands have disappeared. And so I realized I couldn't write this only anymore in just news stories. I began writing books about this and then got a lot of reaction and just kept on getting a lot of people interested in this subject. So it's been 20 years looking at the drug cartel violence in Mexico and then going around Latin America, looking at the United States, trying to follow up this crime issue, which I think is one of the most important issues of our time. Yeah, I mean, that's definitely something I want to talk about too, because I know you mentioned that initially that the political angle interests you. But if you read these books, you actually go into that a lot, the sort of political context, which I know I'm interested in as a not only criminologist, but a background in political science. So even though the shift is to drug cartels, there's absolutely a political context going on. I mean, would you say that there are pretty distinct parallels between what you came there to do and what you actually ended up doing? I mean, I can see from an outsider's perspective, there definitely seems to be some analogous relationship between the guerrillas and the narco terrorists. Yeah, absolutely. You see that if back in the 20th century, the late 20th century, you had in the mid to late 20th century, you had these civil wars breaking out and you had these strong guerrilla movements in a bunch of these countries, then now you've got these gangster warlords, these criminals who are involved in these weird armed conflicts. I mean, not weird in a good way, but weird in that they're very hard to understand and you haven't got clear battle lines. But sure, you see all the time you can see even sometimes you can see direct lines between these different groups. In the case of Jamaica, the case of Brazil, you can see those, for example, one of the big drug trafficking organizations in Brazil called the Red Commando began in a prison where gangsters like bank robbers at the time were locked up with political prisoners. And the regime, the military dictatorship at the time, thought, well, we're going to put in the political prisoners, you know, the lefty guerrillas, we'll put them in with the bank robbers and they're going to beat the crap out of them. And that will demoralize them. But the opposite happened. You start seeing the bank robbers saying, oh, that's kind of interesting. We like this organization. Yeah, we can kind of take this organization and bring it to us. So that was one of the birth of the Red Commando, which then really blew up in Brazil. And other commandos followed them. So that's why you see in these Brazilian commandos, this weird political-style language mixed up with this criminal language. The shower posse in Jamaica or the posses in Jamaica is another story there. They began as politicized street gangs in these ghetto areas. I mean, in Jamaica, they call them ghetto areas or garrison communities. They're called garrison communities because they're actually walled off. They're like garrisons, like fortresses, with only one way in and one way out. And you had, these were created as political voting bases. So the strong men, the dons of these areas, sometimes women as well, are rising up in these organizations. But a lot of strong men with these dons, with these names like Jim Brown as one of the old ones, influenced by the American football player, the U.S. American football player. They were political organizations, controlled or allied to political parties, stopping opposition parties coming in to delivering the base of votes in these areas. And then they got into drug trafficking, came to the U.S. and got into drug trafficking. So you can see these very, very specific links there. Then also, I mean, if you look in Mexico, which didn't have such a large guerrilla movement as many parts of Latin America in Mexico for various reasons, Mexico would repress its own, the guerrilla groups in Mexico, but also would allow political refugees from other places. And but the drug cartels, the cartel, the crime cartels, have so many more guns, so much more damage than any guerrilla group did here in many, many decades. So what they've done in terms of confronting the military, taking territories has been comparable to some levels of guerrilla fighting. Yeah, let me ask you about Mexico, specifically this case study. For, you know, I admit I'm not an expert on the cartel. So your book, El Narco, it was very helpful. And sketching out to me who the main players are. So for our audience members and for myself, who are less familiar with what's going on in Mexico, can you identify some of the major cartels there? Because we think of the Italian mafia here. You've got five families in New York. How does it work in Mexico? I think most of us are probably familiar with the Sinaloa cartel. But you talk about five or six major organizations in your text. If you could outline that for us, and then we'll eventually update it in terms of what's going on now. But what were like the major organizations when you were writing El Narco? Yeah, so this is a history, you know, a century in the making over a century now. If you look at the time that the United States restricted OPM and cocaine in the Harrison's Narcotics Tax Act, which came into effect in 1915, it was passed in 1914. Then right from then, you started seeing OPM being smoldered from Mexico into the United States. Right back then with these origins in Chinese communities on both sides of the borders. So you had a Chinese community in Sinaloa, Mexico, Chinese communities in California, and they were bringing OPM over there, working with corrupt politicians in the 1910s. But over the long time, you saw the emergence of cartels. And this was kind of in some ways an organic thing gradually formed. They gradually came together over time. Now, the concept of cartel came from Colombia. And the Medellin cartel was the first cartel we talk about in the early 1980s. It's not totally clear, even if that original name of cartel was how the cocaine traffickers called themselves. And back in those days, there's a lot of talk about OPEC, about the organization of petroleum exporting countries. And they were like a petroleum cartel. So it was like petroleum cartel would have a cocaine cartel, the idea of kind of power. Or even if it was something which was done by the agents or encouraged by the Drug Enforcement Administration when they're making cases, because the way that drug laws are built in the United States, you want to have conspiracy cases. You need organizations you can name and say everyone part of this, we can hammer. But anyway, this cartel idea came to Mexico in the 1980s. And the first cartel I talked about in Mexico was the Guadalajara cartel. Again, this might have been baptized by the agents, by the DA agents looking at it. But then you saw this growth of various cartels. So then you had from the Guadalajara cartel, which is sitting in the heart of Mexico, you saw the power more move the border with the Tijuana cartel. The El Chapo faction of the Sinaloa cartel, the Juarez cartel, and the Gulf cartel. So you had four major groups there. Then you just saw this series of splintering we've seen then. So the Sinaloa cartel then broke into Beltran Leyva cartel. The Gulf cartel had the set as a broker breakaway. There are now fours rising in the south, known as La Familia, Michoacana, which then broke up with the Knights Templar, the Mi Familia Michoacana. Then the Beltran Leyva cartel splintered, particularly into loads of groups. So as these were hammered by the Mexican Security Forces, by the United States, you see them breaking and splintering. So now you have got dozens and dozens of what I call cartelitos, like smaller cartels, or that name is also used in Colombia, which have a similar kind of structure and control of territory, but are much more localized, much smaller. And you have loads of these groups, I mean, Guerreros Unidos, Los Rojos, Cartel Independiente de Acapulco, I mean, new names coming up all the time. And you can go, these territories can sometimes be only in a part of the state, run by young guys with hundreds of guys with AK-47s following them. So that's part of why it's so violent, because you've got so many groups now competing. You still, they've also got a very, very powerful group that's emerged called the Jalisco New Generation Cartel. Fighting, so you've got big, powerful cartels, medium level and small alliances changing, people fighting over every inch of territory sometimes. Do you think there's a correlation between the US and Mexican governments hammering down the major bosses, and then when those major bosses are incarcerated, you start to see more fracturing, more splintering. Is there a correlation there? Yeah, without a doubt that happened. I mean, what's become known is the kingpin strategy. And if you look at the history of the United States, DEA was, you know, go after bigger and bigger targets. So El Chapo was kind of the ultimate target. And I think his trial was kind of a marking point in that mission, because it's hard to kind of beat that. But it was like, you know, go after the kingpins, you can't just get the bottom guys, you can't get the middle guys, take down the cut off the head of the snake. And then, you know, when you do that, so like, you know, as a very concrete example, you have a guy called Arturo Beltran-Leva, known as Barabas or Hefe Hefe, you know, he had a big beard, crazy guy, very, very powerful drug trafficker, as big as Chapo. He came from a village right next to where El Chapo is really. I've been up to the mountains where these guys are from. And you see El Chapo's village, it's called La Tuna, right next to it, it's called La Palma. And that's where Beltran-Leva family are from, the whole bunch of brothers. So extremely powerful drug trafficker, he was killed on DEA intelligence. They paid, this is what the head of DEA at the time in Mexico City told me, they paid $5 million for the information leading to the property where he was going to be at. They paid $5 million, they gave the information to the Mexican marines who are like an elite U.S. trained force. This is in Cuenabaca, city of Cuenabaca, a nice spa town, used to be a nice town, about an hour from Mexico City. So the marines went in there, big firefight, killed this guy. He had all these kind of crazy Santerra beads, these kind of beads from this Cuban style religion. And then the marines decorated his body with dollar bills. They like made it, you know, when they took photos, they kind of decorated his corpse. And then there was a funeral for one of the marines who was killed in the operation. And they gave him a, you know, a hero's funeral. And then afterwards, the cartel in revenge went and murdered the family of that marine at the wake. So they killed the mother, the brother, the sister, the aunt. You know, that was, you know, just, that was revenge. But you know, that's how, that's the level. When that happened, that was like, you know, how, you know, what are we dealing with here? But then Arturo Beltraleva, who controlled a huge amount of territory, he was knocked down. So then suddenly out of his empire, you suddenly had all of these groups emerging. These were these groups like Garedos or Nidos emerged, Los Rojos, so suddenly these new groups emerged who were like super violent. And they were like, run by these young guys who weren't as restrained, who were like, you know, young lieutenants. So there's one guy, a fragment of the fragment of the fragment, a guy called Eduardo Palaya. Young guy was like, he was like 22 years old. And he was controlling this little part of Guerrero State. Would like literally hundreds of kids following him. Now, some guys I know were following up on this and they were held up, some journalists were held up by his people. They had their vehicles taken, laptops, IDs taken, there's like 200 literally kids. There was kids as young as 10, 12 years old in this crowd on the road there. So it was kind of fragmenting and, you know, it's like if you had the American army broken up and then the lieutenants, you know, underneath, these kind of bloody lieutenants underneath fighting amongst themselves. I've done some writing on the Beltran-Liva murder or death in the firefight or whatnot. I'm sure nowhere even close to as versed in this subject as our guest. But correct me if I'm wrong. Didn't some of the information about where he was come from a pretty notorious narco who was American born named El Barbie, or El Barbie? Very possibly. I mean, like the DEA guy told me that he told me that they paid five million. He told me it was an American citizen. He didn't give a name. I reported this about some point in the last year. I got a tip from a DEA guy that that information had come from El Barbie. The guy in Texas, right? You know, El Barbie, yeah, yeah. I mean, like if they paid him five million dollars, that's pretty, you know, because he was pretty high-level criminal, if that was true. I don't know if your DEA guy said to you that he was paid for the information. I don't know. I didn't get that part, that there was money exchanged. I heard that there was information that was provided by, is it El Barbie or La Barbie? La Barbie, La Barbie, yeah, yeah. And he had been at one point aligned with Arturo Beltran. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely, yeah. So I mean, that kind of rumors been flowing around for some years, that it was La Barbie who gave this up. Now, it might have been that there was multiple things involved, like La Barbie gave some information and somebody else gave the actual address, physical address of the house. Or maybe it was La Barbie. But there's a bit of, but La Barbie's story is fascinating. He's from Laredo, Texas. A new one guy went to high school with him there and he said he was like a friendly jock was how he described it. He's a football star. Yeah, you see him, he's a beefy guy, but he was like a friendly, you know, he's a charismatic, friendly guy. His story of exactly how he got involved with the cartels, I think he was like dealing weed around Laredo. Brownsville, I think. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, around the area and he flipped over the board and now he, of his statements became, it was recruited. This was a time when Arturo Beltran Laver was fighting in that turf war in Nuevo Laredo. And this is where a lot of my reporting back then, this was about the 2004, 2005 time, I was reporting very intensely from that area at a time. So this is when the kind of turf war happened that I believe is the real beginning of the current Mexican drug war. You had this fighting in Nuevo Laredo between the golf cartel setas and the Sinaloa cartel, which at the time was the faction Arturo Beltran Laver with El Chapo Guzmán. Now back then, there was a murder of five gang bangers, five gang members, who the Sinaloa cartel had sent into the city and they were murdered and their bodies were piled up in this house. And there was a note there, I've still got the clipping in fact from that here, who said Arturo Beltran Laver and Chapo Guzmán send us more bendegos like these so we can kill them. So that was like showing the turf war and the fact that Arturo Beltran Laver was the guy involved in this thing. Now according to the information that Barbie then around this time recruited and started working with Arturo Beltran Laver and was kind of his mentor, his godfather into the organization. Then Barbie... Did he marry someone from that organization, like the daughter or the niece of someone in that organization? Yeah, possibly. I'm not totally sure of that. What I do know is that Barbie then turned up in Acapulco. When this turf war that began in Revelaredo then bounced down to Acapulco and he turned up there as one of the big players and then started carrying out some pretty brutal violence there in the name of the Beltran Laver organization, the Sinaloa Cartel book for the Baroque Off. When he... There was... I mean he gave this statement after he was arrested. He gave this kind of Bolshe interrogation video it was given at the time when it was kind of talking through this stuff and giving out the information and he was saying then that like Arturo Beltran Laver had gone mad and he'd fallen out with him and that was kind of clear that he'd been put into a corner. But yeah, I mean I think the full... I think Labarbe's full story is kind of waiting to be told probably by Labarbe himself. You know, he did commission a movie. You can find a movie online, a kind of low-budget narco film that's made about Labarbe which he said in the interview that he commissioned them to make a film by himself. So that actually flooded. I think there's a big Hollywood production in pre-production, isn't like... Well, I know they're developing one. Developing one? They called him Labarbe because he looked like a Barbie doll. He had blonde hair. Oh, yeah, I think I heard that before. Let me ask you, speaking of the political angle here, so you can see where these conspiracy theories develop and you talk about that in both of your books and maybe there's some truth to it. That if DEA gives this intel to the Mexican Marines, they have to assume there's a real possibility that the target is going to be killed and not arrested and extradited. That's why they murdered or not... Right. So this is where some of these conspiracy theories develop. You talk about the groups that were aligned against El Chapo that like DEA, State Department, CIA, that they're basically in cahoots with El Chapo, either tacitly or some kind of grand or conspiracy. What are your thoughts on that angle? I mean, I think you do mention that in your text a little bit. Yeah, yeah, sure. So like, I mean, you know, conspiracy theories and because the word conspiracy theory is kind of thrown around a lot now, it's even maybe conspiracy theories. I saw one person just be calling like conspiracy hypothesis, which you call them or, you know, like, like, because sometimes these conspiracies are true. You know, they turn out to be... There really are conspiratorial people involved. And at the same time, sometimes there are things which are, you know, like exactly exaggerate these things. So in terms of this bigger idea of the Sinaloa cartel being allied with the Mexican government and then the Sinaloa cartel being allied with the CIA or drug traffickers being allied up with the CIA. So in terms of the Mexican government, there's certainly, I mean, I think, you know, beyond, these are beyond theories. These are not very, very proven information about the way the drug cartels have worked with the Mexican government apparatus for 100 years. You know, if you go back to 1916, there was a governor of back California state there, believed to be working with these very early groups of Chinese Mexicans taking opium into the United States. And, you know, that was 1916. Now we go forward to 2021. We've got the former head of public security under Felipe Calderón, Genaro Garcia Luna, as the, who was one of the kind of real architects, the core people involved in the crackdown on drug cartels in prison in the United States on drug trafficking charges, saying that he took bribes and he worked with drug cartels. So in terms of the Mexican government working with these guys, or elements of the Mexican government, you know, we know that's for a fact. What is more complicated about this is that now the Mexican government or the Mexican government apparatus, state apparatus is a many headed beast. It's not like one, you know, one thing that is simply working with one cartel. You can have federal police working with one cartel and local police working with another. This again is being shown there in Michoacán. You had a case where a bunch of the Michoacán cartel, at the time of the familiar Michoacán, attacked and murdered loads of federal police officers. And then later on, you had one of the major cartel figures, a guy called Tyson, who came out in a confession and said that, well, he was a former state police officer and that the state, they were using state police cars to help with the attack. So the state police were working with the cartel against federal police. Back guns and my coverage in Nuevo Laredo, again, back in 2004, 2005. In the year 2005, I was there. It was on a Saturday morning. I was trying to get out of there back to Mexico City. And then this shootout began between federal police and local municipal police. So again, we have different, it's kind of many headed beasts and there's fights there breaking out. In terms of the CIA links or the corruption in the DEA, that's again, a more complicated thing. I think we can see there's issues. So there's issues. If we go back to the 1980s, then there's the kind of Dark Alliance series. And the whole story is around that. Gary Webb's reporting. Exactly, yeah. Exactly, exactly. The elements of that are true. And if you look at some of the CIA's own admission, then elements of this are true. But we have to really distinguish between what's true, what sometimes the enemies attacked it, misrepresenting what he was saying. He perhaps overplayed a bit in some of his reporting, some elements. So what is true, I think, is that you have back then CIA involved and supporting the war in Nicaragua. So their priority is we've got to defeat or destabilize a socialist government in Nicaragua. That's our mission. And so we're going to support these guys, the Contras, a bunch of guys against the government with guns. I mean, right wing guerrillas, paramilitaries, counter-revolutionaries, based in Honduras. So then they're allying with drug traffickers to support them. And you see that, that's basically an admission there. Now, it gets more complicated as to how that plays out. Exactly now, just in the lower cartel and all the kind of modern times. It's not, I think it's quite simple. It is like a very, very simple thing of the CIA working, but you can see the levels of corruption. That with the DEA as well, you can see in their own practices. Unfortunately, if they get information from one cartel and you take another, then they're already involved in certain suspect practices. And another interesting case study, not only Nicaragua, but in Colombia, we know that DEA and US military were working with the right wing paramilitaries to try to take down Pablo in the 90s. So there was some other sketchy things going on with US military law enforcement with narco traffickers. Yeah, yeah. I mean, Pablo Escobar was in some ways, a lot of the drug traffickers in Medellin are very right wing. They're probably the very right wing and very paramilitary. And the FARC were the Revolutionary Armed Forces Colombia with the left wing grillers. So a lot of the drug traffickers supported the paramilitaries and the paramilitaries got as a drug trafficking. And then you got basically these paramilitary drug traffickers. So when you had a civil war there, but also the FARC was involved in drug trafficking. So you had the regular narcos, the paramilitary drug traffickers and the left wing grillers drug traffickers. And they're all murdering a bunch of people. And then into these cauldrons of violence, the US is involved and all these different forces are involved. So these are very messy situations. And I mean, absolutely. I mean, you get involved. There's some dark alliances as the series is called. Yeah, let's also segue into your new book. And let me give you something I found out. When I was teaching in Arizona, I was doing some field research in San Diego with San Diego PD, the gang unit, but also some of the military police with the US Navy. And they had a real concern about gang members in the military there down in San Diego and specifically outlaw bikers. And there were some concerns that outlaw bikers were stealing weapons from the arsenal. And you're right in San Diego, right? You're right by TJ, Tijuana, and selling weapons to the cartels south of the border. So I always thought that that was an interesting situation going on. So talk to us, walk us through that. I know and it seems like the emphasis for your new book is going to be about, right? We know the drugs are coming north, but there's weapons going south. So let's talk about that. Absolutely. Yes. And my new book, Blood Gun Money, How America Arms Gangs and Cartels, is about the gun black market, the firearms black market within the United States and how it goes into Mexico, Central America across the hemisphere. And in fact, across the world, you know, you see these guns from the retail, from the black market in the United States, turning up in the Philippines, turning up in like a long way away. Now, this links, this, now I'm going to look at the gun black, the firearms black market, but it's completely entwined with the drug black market. So, you know, you see this at every level. If you go, if you look at these, you know, in Baltimore, I have a chapter from Baltimore, Maryland in this and talk to the gun traffickers there, the gun people selling guns in the corner and lots of them they're exchanging guns and drugs and selling guns to drug dealers. You see El Chapo, the machine, the lower cartel, this came out of the trial. They're moving guns south by the thousands, by the tens of thousands, you know, the guns are going south. You see this again with the revolutionary armed forces of Colombia and the movement of weapons, but also they're involved in cocaine. So drugs and guns are linked together, you know, it's entangled. Now, there's gun trafficking that you see you have in the United States, a legal firearms market, retail market and more guns and civilian hands than the next 25 countries combined. The last count estimated 393 million likely over 400 million now. But you also have, you know, within this massive amount of black market firearms. So most of the guns being used in killing really in the United States in the homicides are illegal because most of the people use a lot of them are felons or drug dealers who have these guns. So you see this black gun, black market and then it just flows down to Mexico, this trafficking down to Mexico, biker gangs of players, as you say, but also all kind of players there. And the estimates, you know, there's been traced in the last 12 years, 164,000 weapons taken from criminals here and traced directly to the United States. But the estimates are like in the last 10 years, been like more than 2 million. What about, do you talk about the examples of just going to gun and knife shows and making legal purchases like straw man purchases? Would you say that's still a major problem with this situation? Yeah, absolutely. So there's basically four main ways that guns go into the black market. And the first way is the private sale loophole. So gun shows are the private sales. But if it's a private sale, then it could be somebody who's a criminal, who's a gangster, and they are going no ID buying the guns. And I interviewed a gun trafficker in Sida Juarez in the prison. It was in prison for federal gun trafficking charges. And he was doing this. He was going to the U.S. buying these guns in the black market and taking them to Mexico. But another bigger way probably is straw purchasing, meaning you pay somebody who hasn't got a criminal record. You pay them to go and buy guns. And it's often as lit as $100 a gun, even less, because the punishments are very low on this. They're often only get probation. But these people are going in sometimes buying half a million dollars worth of guns and so forth. Now, what a lot of some people who know this would also immediately jump out and talk about a case called Fast and Furious, if you're aware of that case. So you're obviously also then again, you have more conspiratorial things there. The idea they were letting the feds knew that those guns were walking, they were allowing this to happen so that they could trace the weapons. But then they didn't. But then they lost track of them. And then some bad things happen as a result of that. Yeah, absolutely. So you had the ATF with a sting operation under Barack Obama in 2009 to 2010, a big sting operation. The idea they would put up a big conspiracy case, again, go off the kingpins. And they let 2000, close to 2000 guns walk into Mexico. In one case, they were used by a bunch of criminals who shot dead a Border Patrol agent from the elite Bortak unit. They shot him dead. And that's when this kind of story broke. And that was a big scandal as well. So they get that gets back into a lot of these conspiracies about, you know, people see that in like, you know, America, Mexican government working with the cartels, even giving them guns. And that, you know, raffles a lot of feathers. So we talk about who's behind the weapons trafficking. In some cases, they're strawman purchases and maybe just some like independent arms trafficker. But we did mention that the outlaw bikers, are there any specific organizations you've identified as being heavily involved in weapons trafficking, like like a criminal organized crime organization or a gang? Or is this usually like freelance arms traffickers or is it both? It's both. But like in the trafficking into Mexico, that the cartels controlled and oversee basically all the trafficking that's happening into Mexico and out of Mexico. So if you look at the profile of a couple of different people involved in this gun trafficking to Mexico, I talked to, they're all cartel related or affiliated in some way. So there was one, this one thing was a group of them. It was a group of three guys, one based in Dallas, a couple based in Chihuahua. But they would pay off the cartel money for permission to do the trafficking. And they would be selling to the cartel gunman and affiliates. Another guy I interviewed and profiled there was an American citizen who was involved in laying cable for fiber optics around the border area. And he was also being paid by a cartel, affiliated by a cartel to do this stuff. So the cartels, now you mentioned the outlaw bike gangs, they're also, now the ATF really love to go after these guys. I've got also in the book a profile of an ATF agent who went undercover in three biker gangs, the warlocks, the Mongols and the bagos. He did big operations until they've been involved in moving guns around for some time. But the ATF, the ATF have been hitting them very, very hard for various reasons. The ATF have been really nailing the biker gangs. I think the Hell's Angels have a pretty significant presence in that gun running circuit or network. And I've heard the Mongols and I've heard the banditos. Those are the three gangs that I've heard. Warlocks is more of a- That's Florida, isn't it? Yeah. Warlocks is more like East, Southeast coast. So yeah. So the guy did, the guy, this ATF agent in our profile, who's called Coz, he infiltrated first the bagos in Los Angeles. Oh, the bago. Yeah, the bagos. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Bagos, all the case. Then he did the warlocks and he did it out of Virginia. And basically, and it was a case that spiraled down to Florida, because they began in Florida, but it was like Virginia, Florida, Maryland. And they did quite a big case. Now, most of it was the ATF, but they weren't really doing them on gun trafficking related charges. It was more felons with firearms, and then they just did them on drug charges. And then the Mongols, they went back and did the Mongols in Los Angeles. And that was a big case. And the ATF agent himself, in this undercover work, himself got shot at, himself got his head bust open, himself carried guns for gangsters. So he had a lot of crazy stories about that. The bikers are really out there, man. I mean, they're the fringe of the fringe. Of the underworld? Yeah. I mean, I've gotten some exposure to them the last 10 years. And, you know, you go into some of these clubhouses and you're at some of these parties and it's really like you're like in the middle of a movie and you're expecting, you know, bar room brawl or you're expecting Peter Fonda or Dennis Hopper or Jack Nicholson from Easy Rider to pop out. Can we go backwards for a second? We mentioned or you mentioned the new generation Halisco cartel. And so I guess I'm asking you to either give me a yay or a nay. The U.S. government DATF seems to be making the argument at least to the press. I've heard this from a number of my sources in federal law enforcement that El Mencho is the new El Chapo. El Mencho is the boss of the new generation Halisco cartel. I've done a little bit of reporting this last year about how one of their and just so the audience knows El Mencho is like El Chapo, is on the run, has been on the run for quite a while, unlike El Chapo. And again, please step in and tell me if I'm misstating any of these facts because again, you are the expert. El Mencho cut his teeth in the underworld in California, I believe in northern California, did prison time in the California Department of Corrections, I believe, and then eventually migrated south and got hooked up in the cartel world. One of the ways that they are strategizing, so I guess this is a multi prong question, so give me a yay or nay and then expand on what I'm saying. One of the interesting strategies to me in terms of law enforcement looking to or American law enforcement looking to catch El Mencho the way they caught El Chapo was that they're squeezing his kids. They have both his son and his daughter who were running big parts of his operation on the streets locked up in American prisons right now awaiting trial and they actually nailed the daughter coming to a court hearing for her brother El Mencho's son who they call El Menchito or the little baby Mencho. His kids are American citizens, aren't they? I don't know maybe Yoncan. So can you expand a little bit on El Mencho and whether or not is it propaganda that he's the new El Chapo or is he really the new El Chapo? Well, like I think with the whole Chapo phenomenon, then El Chapo became the most notorious Mexican cartel leader ever. And I would say you've had three of the most notorious gangsters in the last century have been El Chapo, Pablo Escobar and Al Capone. They're the three big names and no one the name recognition on them goes beyond anything else. So the really El Chapo so El Chapo's infamy didn't necessarily mean that he was was the most powerful gangster in Mexico and necessarily the richest. He just had this level of notoriety and infamy that was so big. Now part of that was escaping to federal prisons. Part of it was the songs about him that was created through the whole narco culture. And he was part of the Sinaloa Cartel, a very, very powerful cartel. So I think some of it can be the name has a ring El Chapo Guzman. It has El Chapo as this kind of ring that really catches on. And then the journalists themselves and then the meeting with Sean Penn, it all adds up and adds up. The mythology feels on itself. Exactly. It became like a bigger like a whirlpool, a bigger and bigger thing, which then eventually got to the trial. And then they created a three month trial with 56 or 54 witnesses. And I really went, I went to, now from the point of view of the DEA, that was like the cumulation of this kingpin strategy. But once you take down El Chapo, where can you go from there? You can't create the same. The agents want to make names for themselves. They want to become the guy who got El Chapo. But you can't really beat that. I think one of the reasons they started now going after the political protection, the generals that is like, we've done the biggest drug trafficker. Now we have to go after politicians to get kind of these things. Now, but in terms of being a gangster warlord, El Mencho is undoubtedly a seriously powerful gangster warlord. Now, I mean, he has gotten a name for very violent paramilitary style actions. So El Chapo managed to have a reputation of being one of the better bad guys. So El Chapo's not as, you know, I'm not as violent or predatory and his criminal activity is the set as or some of the other people. El Mencho has a reputation and his people have a reputation of hitting back hard. And they kind of making these videos. There's a famous video which came out last year, which you probably have seen with all of these guys in camo gear with these guns and these heavily armored cars going, and it's like all of these guys and there's like, I mean, like huge amounts of this. I mean, it was the cradle really had an impact this video. So like making videos, propaganda videos have shown heavily, heavily paramilitarized people, but also in terms of actions. So the attempts to capture him. There were several attempts and he launched his, his men to blockade the state of Halesco. So you had this one attempt on May 1st, 2015, in which there were more than 40 blockades. And I mean, blockades, they would hijack trucks, burn trucks over the road and to stop any military movement. And in that same situation, they fired on a military helicopter, supposedly with an RPG seven and shot down the military helicopter with an RPG seven. So really kind of this, and then if you see the give back to the guns, it's the Halesco new generation cartel have been assembling their own AR-15s buying bulk parts in the United States, bringing them down to Mexico and assembling them in little workshop, little factory workshops down here. They've seen weaponized drones, links to the Halesco cartel. Now there are rumors. There's a lot of smoke and mirrors. There are rumors that he's dead. And it's now like a ghost of him living on with this thing. There's talking about kind of different power groups within the cartel. They were recently linked to the attack on the former governor, assassination of the former governor of Halesco, Sandoval in the state. So you have, yeah, I mean, they're big players and they're turning up, they're turning up everywhere, every state you seem to go to in Mexico. This is besides the Halesco new generation cartel. Now, if the DA will be able to take them down, I think it depends a lot on the Mexican government now. And there's a lot of tension now between Mexican law enforcement and the Mexican government and the United States law enforcement. Have we ever seen a situation or at least in your reporting where the U.S. government has tried to squeeze a narcos family? I mean, I can't remember El Chapo's kids being locked up in U.S. federal prisons or Pablo's kids being locked up. And that seems to me like that's somewhat of a Pablo's family. They stopped in Germany. Remember they won't let them get on the plane back to Colombia, I remember. I think it's not that out there. I'm trying to think of some cases in Mexico. Certainly, I mean, you know, these two talks to the ages, they say like, you know, look at the families, trace the families, that's how you can try and find them. You know, that's one of the things they say. I'm trying to think of some specific cases where the United States has tried to use that as leverage in some of the older cases of some of the, I mean, certainly going after their people close to them and trying to get them to flip on them. But yeah, no, no cases that spring to mind, spring to mind. But I mean, to me, it's really like you're already after this very dangerous, you know, crime lord, drug lord, war lord that has a reputation for extreme violence. And then it seems like by locking up his, his beloved daughter and son who are doing a lot of his bidding, it's almost like sticking your, your whole fist into the hornet's nest. I mean, they've taken on it. They have got me like a lot of so much of these drug cartels off a lot of family operations and family orientated because, you know, they trust. So you think about how they went after the Tijuana cartel. It was going off the family member, family member. With El Chapo, there was like taking down of various family members of El Chapo. They've got, they've got various families of El Mayo. So you have El Mayo's son, El Mayo's brother in prison in the United States. And then in fact, they witnessed against El Chapo, El Maíto. And El Maíto, the son of El Mayo was one of the, he originally, his defense originally was actually using the conspiracy theory we talked about earlier of saying, well, actually the US government supported the Sinaloa cartel. So what I was doing was sanctioned drug trafficking. That was his defense originally. I covered some of the Chapo trial and it was crazy stuff. It was movie stuff, as you say. And the lawyers said they originally tried to have the defense, it has a technical lawyer name for it, the authority defense saying the original defensive El Chapo was going to try and be, well, the US government supported the Sinaloa cartel. And the US attorneys knocked that out. So like, you know, we're not going to allow this happening in the US in this court. We're going to run this show. Let me ask you about the actual drugs themselves. My understanding is that the demand in the United States for fentanyl is so large right now that actually like the farmers that farm opium and marijuana and coca leaves are worried about this, that there could be some real economic problems because those drugs are the old school drugs, heroin, marijuana, cocaine are not in as much demand as opposed to the fentanyl, which we know a lot of that is coming from the cartels too. Any insight into that? Is that like this kind of the economics of it? Yeah, sure. I mean, you see the market moving around over the years. So marijuana was a big cash crop for the cartels for many years. As marijuana was legalized in the United States, then you had, sorry, sorry. I have a dog here and when there's musicians who play on the street, it's quite all right. He starts howling. He starts howling like singing with this. He likes this certain music and he starts howling. I can hear my dog howling in the background now. He's coming in, my headphones on. It's quite all right. When I go and make fun of him, he gets embarrassed when I make fun and won't do it, but like as I'm not there right now, he's howling away. So you see these like marijuana was a big cash crop for a lot of years. You had the legalization in past the US. So you saw this massive collapse of Mexican marijuana. Now you still see today marijuana going over the border and you still see marijuana being grown in Sinaloa and in Guerrero and in Michoacán and that money going to the gangsters kind of frustrating. I thought we'd just get marijuana out of the way now and say just legalize the thing now. We've got a half legal anyway and then take that out of the hands of the cartels, but there's still marijuana money being made, but it kind of saw a dive. So after the dive of marijuana, that coincided with a big up to up tick in opioid addictions. So then it was like heroin, heroin, heroin, heroin prices are going up. Everyone getting to grow an OPM to make heroin. So there's a big boom in the heroin. Now, again, it's hard to figure out these markets. You have a mix of supply and demand in this. Now you have like people wanting more heroin. So they bring in more heroin and it reached a level where they can't get anymore. You can't, you know, they're not going to take anymore. They're taking so much already. So then you have this big boom and everyone making heroin and then they're kind of oversupply to these sort of dive in the opium prices. Now also with the fentanyl coming in. What happens actually a lot of the time you see them making heroin here, they're pumping the heroin with fentanyl. There's heroin laced with fentanyl and you talk to heroin users in the United States or they want heroin with an extra kick. Heroin laced with fentanyl is the thing. But because also fentanyl and like these synthetic drugs the same as crystal meth, they're very, very cheap overheads. You can make them anywhere in terms of you don't have to only make them in a traditional drug producing area where you have to grow crops. You can just make them in labs anywhere. So you get these labs all over Mexico and you can start banging out fentanyl or importing fentanyl from China. It's a big one, the big one China and the crazy mess in the United States and it's sad. I mean the level of deaths right now, overdose deaths in the United States is devastating. Yeah, I know we're almost out of time but one thing that I also wanted to ask you, Scott and I are very much interested in, I teach courses on crime and film, crime and media. So Scott and I are both very much interested in the like pop, how representations of gangsters and the underworld in popular culture. And one thing that's interesting in your book, you talk about both examples of Mexican drug lords but also in Jamaica and how that they're infatuated with the Godfather movies. And so if you could tell us about like some in your encounters, the guys you've interviewed, the guys you've researched, how into are these, do these guys watch these movies, Scarface, Goodfellas, The Godfather and like what's their takeaway? Yeah, sure. So you get a weird interaction between fact and fantasy and these things going around. So you have the Godfather, you know, just in Jamaica they were saying they were like, they all love the Godfather. That the name they have dons for the Jamaican posse leaders came from the Godfather. Because I said, you know, when did you start calling them dons? I said I was about about the time the Godfather came out. You know, like Don Corleone, suddenly it was like, you know, the Don and it becomes a Donna's Coke, the Don of the Chao posse. So they have his influence there. I mean, Scarface, I went into one prison in Nuevo Laredo, where this drug boss in the prison, that he was like running crazy stuff in the prison, he had a pool table, a disco sound system inside the prison, and they went in and took it out. And he had a massive life size photo of Al Pacino from Scarface. I put all this stuff out of the prison. Now in Honduras, I said like down there, like when the gangs become more aggressive. And they said, well, that was after the film Blood in Blood Out started being seen in Honduras. They loved it. They called it Batas Locos. And there's a gang inspired by the film, a gang called Batas Locos, which is still around, in fact, today, and they still control territory. And then we said, before that film came out, they were like, more like dressed like the guys in the Michael Jackson Bad video. And then after Blood in Blood Out, they were like, I have good charlots and all that whole kind of thing. So you get this weird mix of fantasy and fiction. I'm going to talk to Pablo Escobar's son about did he watch the TV series about his father? He said he watched every one. He watched all these series. He said they're all wrong. I want to make my own one, which is right. You saw Al Chapo watching the series, The Queen of the South and becoming infatuated with the actress, Kate Castillo, which then led to the whole Sean Penn encounter. So absolutely, I mean, the gangsters are watching these TV series. And you get a weird mix where this kind of stuff is like fantasy playing out. But what you don't see, I think, is the real pain in the TV series. And maybe the gangsters themselves like to forget about that side as well, kind of hide that side. Is it art imitating life or is it life imitating art? That age old question when it comes to this kind of stuff? Yeah, I think it's an interaction. I think there's a double play there, both sides. But then like, but if you know, I was thinking before, if you really wanted to make a more realistic TV series about this or film, it's going to be more like the killing fields than, you know, the noise up in the Scarface. So like you see these things like a mass grave, the mass grave of 250 corpses in the state of Veracruz, being the place on a cowfield. And this is backed up to a regular housing area of like middle class housing. And as they were digging up these mass, these corpses, the family were like smelling the smell of death. I interviewed one of the mothers searching for her son for years, took six years of searching for her son before his body was identified in this mass grave. So so absolutely, I mean, these kind of darkness of those kind of things, a lot of the drug traffickers or people involved in this you meet are not rich. They're actually a bunch of broke or working class guys. I mean, like it's like anything. I mean, you have like the Coca Cola Corporation. I mean, you've got the guys at the top and then you've got guys working in bottling plant. And in the drug trafficking industry, you've got loads and loads of guys who are doing a bunch of things and they're not super rich. And you've got a lot of these guys who are killers. I mean, now killers being paid $100 for murders. I mean, what's that in a hundred bucks, you kill somebody, kill somebody else, not a hundred bucks. People who are paid on salaries of things like, you know, 500 bucks a month, some of these low level guys. I mean, I tell people all the time that that's probably the biggest fallacy when it comes to real life gangsterism and, you know, me being someone that has made my career as chronicling it. And I'm like, you know, the fallacy is that all these guys are Tony Montana. I mean, in reality, they're more like workers left lefty from Donnie Brasco, who's taken a hammer to a parking meter that the majority of the guys are spokes on a wheel that if they just worked a normal job, a nine to five job, they'd be making as much money as they are on the street. Yeah. Yeah, there's a class system. Let me ask one final question. You seem like just based on a couple of references you made a bit of a cinephile, your reference killing fields, a great movie with Sam Watterson. You mentioned a blood and blood out, which is I think one of the more underrated gangster movies. When people talk about Mexican gangsters, they seem to always talk about American me, which by the way, I love that's a good move. I love American me. Yeah, but blood and blood out is kind of the a similar retelling of that same story kind of taken from a little bit of a different angle. So, you know, based on the fact that you obviously watch a lot of movies or you seem to be well versed on gangster movies, what would you say are the most accurate depictions of the stuff that you write about the cartels and and Mexican drug lords? Like, do you make the movie traffic to me comes to mind, which I which I really enjoyed so cario is amazing. What are the movies that stand out most to you in that genre? Yeah, you know, I was thinking about doing a video, even if like the top ones, but I have a kind of mixed feelings because also I have a, you know, sometimes it seems like bad taste to be glorifying the films. Yeah. When you spend time with our families and you know, they're like these mothers who are like their son was dragged away by government and you know, there's like people kind of sitting there eating popcorn with his stuff. But in terms of the movies, first of all, I think the Brazilian movies are some of the best of the Americas, Latin America. I mean, I love city of God. City of God. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I was with I was in a years ago in a conference with the the writer who wrote the book it was based on. And he was an interesting is an interesting character who was actually a guy who grew up in this neighborhood and kind of wrote that story. And but it was I mean, the city of God, I think it's kind of now that shows certain kind of low level things. But I love the spirit of the movie. Now, there's a very a couple of pretty in some ways controversial films out of Brazil. You can find elite squad one and two. And elite squad one called squad on the Alicia, I think you can see how the pronouncing in my Portuguese pronunciation is terrible. But the that movie profiles this cops. Now the first movie when it came out and it shows these cops. I mean, like plastic bags over these guys heads, like real nasty stuff. I mean, really intense favela fighting. I mean, you've seen, you know, there was a call of duty warfare simulation of the favela fighting. And it was kind of looks pretty much how it looks in some of these favelas. You know, he's got a crazy allies and there's a bunch of these guys with guns. I mean, the Brazilian stuff is out there to see because that's where you walk into these favelas, these these ghetto neighborhoods. And there's absolutely, you know, like crazy people with guns, people with grenade launchers selling drugs openly like really crazy stuff. But that the first movie elite squad shows the police. And first of all, the police criticized it. But actually it became kind of a cult film. And some of the supporters of the right wing Bolsonaro are kind of fans of this, this idea this kind of desperado cops doing this kind of crazy war in these neighborhoods. Now other films from Mexico. You had a while ago, an interesting film called Sin Nombre without name without a name. I was a great new film. I mean, it's kind of an art film. It's to some extent, which is up for the Oscars. I'm no longer here. And that is based in Monterey, 50 Monterey, New York. And that profiles Monterey during some of the worst violence there. And it looks very physically looks very realistic. I covered a lot of violence there and it kind of brings it back. In terms of some of the big American films on this, I don't they don't really do it for me. I mean, the series Narcos is more realistic or more closer to some of this stuff. I guess some of the older I just get blood in blood blood out is, you know, is a kind of touching movie. But maybe the great, great movie on this hasn't been made. But then maybe it can't be made because maybe say it maybe has to be like two kind of dark, not the killing fields, which people don't really want to see in a cinema. No, I even city of God, I think is a difficult film to watch. I mean, I agree with you. It's well done. It's an important film, but it's, I mean, it's not the Godfather. It's intense. It's very intense. There's nothing romantic. There's nothing romantic about it. There's no candy coating or chocolate covering to make it go down easier. No, I agree. Yeah. It's a difficult film to watch. Yeah. It's not in the same category, Scarface or Godfather in the sense of like, you know, it seems like, oh, I want to be a game. There's some fun. There's some fun to that. It's not just so like utterly, you know, get into the most blackhearted individuals and, and, you know, profit and violence above humanity. Yeah. And I think it's important for you to point out, and you do in your text, the humanity that the human rights catastrophe we have here. And I know it's, it's sad to think about, but it's the reality. I mean, possibly, I don't know, over a million casualties, the drug wars. He said we're over 200,000 with just in the last yeah, 10 years. Yeah, it's a real human rights catastrophe. In Mexico, in Latin America, you've got more than two million homicides. Or two million. In the last, in the last two decades, just in Mexico, it's 200,000 in the whole of Latin America. More than two million, not all carter related, but two million homicides. Overall, I mean, it's bigger, you know, whereas a lot of the world got less violent, Latin America got more violent. But going back to some of the TV and film references, I mean, I love, I'm not sometimes because the Mexican stuff is so intense, because I've covered it. And I also have lost friends in this violence here. Then I find it hard as well to watch some of the, the, the depictions come to emotionally close. Now you could say that, you know, I love watching Vietnam war films. And you might be somebody from Vietnam is like, you know, I can't watch Vietnam. I can't watch a lot of platoon or apocalypse now. You know, I can't, you know, go to, you know, you know, we saw, you know, crazy stuff, but I enjoyed it. And I grew up watching, you know, the American stuff and still, still like, I mean, Goodfellas is one of my favorite movies of all time as well. I mean, I think that's out of this world. It's the perfect, the wire wire was great. No, when I did the work for Blood Gun Money in Baltimore, Maryland, I hooked up with a guy who was the security, including he did security on the wire among things, but he was a bouncer basically. And he was the guy who could introduce me to drug traffickers and gun traffickers. And what one of the first people he introduced me to was, he said, we're going to go and meet Mr. Barxdale. And I was like, I know it's like Mr. Barxdale, you know, you're, you're having fun. I mean, you met Bodie Barxdale. We went there and we met, Bodie was the guy's uncle. I met the guy, Dante, who in the film was called D'Angelo. Right. And he just died. He just got killed. Just got shot dead. So this is going back a couple of years. I met him in the city. We talked to him. He told me then he was writing a book. Now he got killed, rise. His book came out. But then if that was because he was just naming names in the book, they were angry that he was coming out with these stories. But then they already made, you know, they talked to him and he said, and he said, yeah, they, they killed them. They killed me in the second series, you know, second season of things. So yeah, that's again bizarre stuff of, of kind of reality. And the wire is kind of such a reference point for the stuff in Baltimore, isn't it? And it was a, I've done a lot of reporting on this and writing. It was pretty much all a true story. And, and they were, even though they were, the show was taking place in the 2000s, they were dramatizing stuff that had all happened in the 80s under little Melvin Williams, who was the real Avon Barksdale. And then Bodie Barksdale, they, they, they named a character, Bodie in the, I think it was Bodie Brotus in the, in the show, but Yeah, it seemed to be a lot of authenticity. There was well researched that But Bodie Barksdale was, was a, was serious as cancer man. He was, he was a little Melvin's top enforcer and a guy had a lot of bodies. In Baltimore, one of the lawyers for El Chapo, a guy called William Perpera, or William Perpera, another Italian by Zan. Another of the lawyers of El Chapo, that's the Baltimore based lawyer. And he'd, he'd represented loads of these guys. And a guy from the, from the 80s called Rudy Williams, I believe, is that the name, who was like, apparently he sounds quite a similar story to the, like the American kingpin. He was apparently bringing in a heroine from Asia back then and is still doing time. But yeah, it was a kind of interesting link between Baltimore. Was, wasn't, was Rudy in LA or Rudy was a Baltimore guy? Yeah. The name comes out there. I think it was, I think it was a Rudy, but maybe it was two Rudy's there. So we, we really appreciate your time. And this was amazing. So thank you so much for coming on. And so just tell our audience members, how can they find out more about your work and about your books and, and other appearances? Yeah, sure. So you can see some of my stuff on www.joangrillo.com. That's I-O-A-N-G-R-I-W-L-O. Call the links, the staff, anyone, you know, please find the book, especially the new one, Blood Gun, Blood Gun Money. What's the, what's the, the Blood Gun Money, the new one just out on a bookshelf. Marco gangster warlords. You can see other stuff. I was on the Joe Rogan experience among other podcasts. And you can see that in now on Spotify. They moved to Spotify, the, the Joe Rogan experience stuff. Yeah. We're hoping that your appearance here will generate the same kind of excitement. Joe Rogan appearance. Absolutely. And I have stores, I have stores in the New York times. I have stores in, you know, still keep a bang out regular media stuff as well. Okay. Well, thank you again. I just want to remind our audience members that like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter. We're going to have a YouTube presence soon. So by the time you're listening to this episode, this video should actually be up as well. So make sure you support us on social media. That helps us, you know, continue to put out great content, get great guests. And thanks for everyone for listening. And you stay safe, man. He's in Mexico City. Yoan Grillo is in Mexico City. So be safe. And I hope you'll come on the show again. And we really appreciate your time. Keep fighting the good fight, man. You do an amazing job. You're a just a fantastic journalist that is an inspiration for someone like myself. Great. It'll be great to be up next time when the pandemic will over up in the, up in the studio in, in Michigan. Yeah. Detroit. Yeah. Detroit, baby.