Inside A Drug Empire：The Rise & Fall Of El Chapo

Inside A Drug Empire：The Rise & Fall Of El Chapo

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:07):
Chapo Guzman is a brand, He's a mystique.

Speaker 2 (00:13):
He's a psychopath.

Speaker 3 (00:14):
He created a multinational drug trafficking organization.

Speaker 4 (00:20):
The basic equivalent of a FedEx in its logistics.

Speaker 5 (00:24):
Maximize the revenue and minimize the risk.

Speaker 6 (00:26):
As you can see, the tunnel has lighting and south
down into Mexico.

Speaker 2 (00:32):
He was the Copo of globalization.

Speaker 7 (00:36):
As would compare it to Amazon.

Speaker 8 (00:38):
His business sense is worthy of a Harvard degree.

Speaker 9 (00:41):
To be honest, with Netflix and Facebook, they were making
roughly the same amount of money.

Speaker 10 (00:47):
The government is seeking twelve billion dollars from El Chappo.
That's the profit of his sales.

Speaker 9 (00:56):
In the narco world, eliminating your competition literally means eliminating
your competition.

Speaker 11 (01:02):
All of this is happening as he's being pursued by
law enforcement agents.

Speaker 12 (01:07):
Had dupla go Ah do du pla.

Speaker 13 (01:11):
Go Chapel was the number one bad guy in the world.
But what set him apart was he was one hell
of a ceo.

Speaker 8 (01:20):
If you can believe it.

Speaker 13 (01:27):
How did he get to where he was and once
he got there, how did he hold that power for
that long?

Speaker 14 (01:35):
He was number one?

Speaker 15 (01:36):
He was the at honcho because El Chapol did an
incredible job with being consistent and delivering a great product.

Speaker 16 (01:49):
There are one hundred and ninety two million people that
consume mighteighty one on a regular basis worldwide. You have
sixty million people that consume some type of iroin. You
have twenty million people that consume cocaine.

Speaker 3 (02:04):
Pablo Escovad when he headed up the Meda in Cortel,
he only sold one product and that was cocaine. Chapo Guzman,
on the other hand, traffics in marijuana, heroin, cocaine, metham petamine,
fentan all So, Pablo Escovad in comparison to Chappo Wuzman,

(02:29):
is a choir boy. Chappo Wuzman undoubtedly is the biggest
drug trafficker that the world has ever known.

Speaker 17 (02:39):
Before he rises to the rank of Ceo Joaquin Who's man.
Luerra begins his career in the rural state of Sinaloa, Mexico,
where he learns about readily available products. Early.

Speaker 1 (02:58):
The Golden Triangle, where three Mexican states come together Sineloa, Durango,
and Chihuahua in the Sierra Madre Occidental Mountains, has long
been effectively abandoned by the central government.

Speaker 2 (03:13):
In Mexico.

Speaker 1 (03:15):
The people there live in incredible poverty, grinding privation. There's
no law enforcement, so to speak, and there are no
real economic opportunities.

Speaker 4 (03:26):
So Guzman's young years, he describes kind of growing up
in a world in which it was completely normal for
a family to have its own mini plot of marijuana
or opium poppies.

Speaker 12 (03:44):
We would squeeze the gum out of the poppies and
that would then be used.

Speaker 18 (03:46):
In the production of heroland.

Speaker 3 (03:49):
His uncle, Pedro Biles Pedees, was an early pioneer in
the drug trade and he's the one that started the
use of Engle engine aircraft to smuggle marijuana and then
also heroin close.

Speaker 14 (04:06):
To the US border, and this was in the mid
to late seventies.

Speaker 19 (04:17):
He got involved with his individuals at the beginning of
transporting marijuana or growing marijuana, and he knew who was
running the operations and he tried to get closer to
them and he did. He was very successful, and that's
where he learned the exchange of products.

Speaker 1 (04:38):
Del Chapo's nom de guero is nickname that he's had
since he was a child, is El Chappo, and it
literally means short fat.

Speaker 14 (04:47):
And he hates the name and Chapel.

Speaker 3 (04:50):
He prefers his given name Joaquin, and he's actually executed some.

Speaker 14 (04:57):
People that have called him and Choppo if he's a
bad mood.

Speaker 8 (05:02):
He worked in.

Speaker 2 (05:03):
Holly School as well.

Speaker 20 (05:04):
That's very significant because that's where the real base of
the cartel operations in Mexico were.

Speaker 2 (05:10):
That's where Felice Cayatla was.

Speaker 21 (05:13):
And that's when they became close.

Speaker 17 (05:18):
Felix El Padrino Guyardo is the boss of the Guadalajara Cartel,
Mexico's only large scale cartel in the nineteen eighties which
deals mainly in one product.

Speaker 4 (05:30):
The Guadalajara drug Cartel is the first time in which
the drug trie gets corporatized, so to speak, in Mexico.
It's mostly It begins as a massive, massive marijuana operation.
They dabbling a heroine here and there, and at that
time there was a huge addiction population in the United States.

Speaker 3 (05:51):
There was a huge demand obviously for cocaine, and the
drug cartels in Mexico knew that in order to be
resilient they had to have other products other than marijuana
and heroine.

Speaker 22 (06:10):
The day marks a major victory in our crusade against drugs.

Speaker 11 (06:15):
In the early eighties, the Reagan administration was like no more.

Speaker 4 (06:20):
They cracked down on Colombian cartels, and in particular the
way that Colombian cocaine moves, which is really a sea
route to the Caribbean Sea into southern Florida. The Colombian
business model has to change, and so they subcontract out

(06:41):
to the Guadalajara cartel.

Speaker 11 (06:42):
Because what does Mexico have.

Speaker 4 (06:45):
It has a porous two thousand mile long border with
the United States.

Speaker 14 (06:52):
Cocaine was the perfect answer.

Speaker 3 (06:56):
For the Mexican drug dealers because you know, there was
already a market for it.

Speaker 17 (07:04):
In nineteen eighty nine, the Mexican federal ase captured Guyardo,
forcing an early retirement. Before he goes away, Guyardo breaks
up his Guadalajara cartel, setting the stage for Chappo's first
major shift in products.

Speaker 4 (07:22):
In the wake of Felix Gaiardo's arrest, there is a
semi apocryphal meeting in which Felix Gerardo dizzies up.

Speaker 12 (07:32):
His empire, you know, like a dyant feudal king.

Speaker 3 (07:37):
The Tiajuana corridor went to the Ariano Felix brothers. The
Wuatas Corridor went to Amado Carrio whent this and the
Sinaloa corridor went to Chappo Gusman.

Speaker 4 (07:57):
It is in the demime Is of Guadalajara that Guzman
really kind of strikes out on his own, and it's
at that point that Guzman makes his first big pioneering move.

Speaker 13 (08:26):
Chopo was one of the first traffickers in Mexico that
decided he didn't want to get paid in cash.

Speaker 8 (08:33):
He didn't want the money.

Speaker 13 (08:35):
So what he did was he got a deal with
the traffickers coming out of Colombia and he said, I'll
move five hundred kilos for you through Mexico and I'll
deliver it to your sarrogates in Los Angeles. But I
don't want to get paid for I want two hundred
of those kilos.

Speaker 17 (08:49):
This would make Guzman a competitor, but with their roots
disrupted and their power diminishing, the Colombians needed his help
to get their drugs to US consumers.

Speaker 8 (09:00):
It seems strange that the Columbians agreed to it.

Speaker 13 (09:03):
So now he had his own cocaine and that's what changed,
I think the focus because they could begin to compete
against the Columbians in some key cities, and they ended
up dominating the market.

Speaker 7 (09:16):
El Chapa wanted to bring cocaine into the United States faster,
and he wanted to have a bigger role in that.

Speaker 23 (09:24):
He was very well positioned to capture that very large
revenue flows that came from cocaine.

Speaker 17 (09:33):
In the retail world, legitimate companies often evolved from being
suppliers to producing their own products.

Speaker 16 (09:41):
What we could find like similar companies following this business model.
One would be big retail chains like Walmart or Target
that produced their own their own brands in order to
get a higher profit and they drive off their competitors.

Speaker 24 (10:09):
The interesting thing was that El Chapo moved into methinphetamine.
So meth was a very very dangerous drug, very addictive,
and it was being produced here in super labs in
the United States and rural areas and rural parts of Canada.
As law enforcement once again put a lot of pressure
on that, Mexico and the Mexican cartels realize, you know what,

(10:29):
this is a void that we can just take over
the manufacturing right here in Mexico.

Speaker 5 (10:37):
Methan fitamines.

Speaker 19 (10:38):
It was so easy to do it at the time
in Mexico because you could buy these chemicals that are
needed without any issues, and yeah, they started taking over.

Speaker 9 (10:47):
A lot of companies do start just primarily as distributors
and then they start to realize that they can also
produce those same items. So a really good example of
a company that has done that is actually Netflix. They
start in the early two thousands of just distributing movies,
taking things that other people have made, and started to
sell those either through DVDs or now through streaming, and

(11:07):
today Netflix is one of the strongest producers of films,
and so they create their own in house studio and
they actually start producing and also distributing their own material
as well.

Speaker 3 (11:20):
The reason that Uzman started to engage in the manufacturer
of synthetic drugs is because it was less risky for him.

Speaker 14 (11:29):
They didn't have to.

Speaker 3 (11:31):
Engage in crop cycles, and apart from that, they controlled
every facet of the manufacturer and production and distribution of
synthetic drugs.

Speaker 5 (11:46):
Math is very high profit.

Speaker 24 (11:48):
The volume of the illego drug that were smuggling it
is smaller, so it's easier to conceal and hide, and
the profit margin is huge.

Speaker 9 (11:56):
Making a kilo of meth will cost between three hundred
to five hundred dollars in Mexico, but by the time
it finally crosses the border into the United States, that
same kilo, once it's divided, that can sell for upwards
of sixty thousand dollars. It's wild to think about that.
There are a lot of legitimate companies that have markups
that are similar to the markups that we see in
the illegal drug trade. Things like SODA's that you get

(12:19):
at a restaurant cost the company pennies to make, but
you end up buying it for two or three dollars.
Dollar wise, it doesn't seem like a really large markup,
but percentage wise, you're talking about one thousand percent markup.

Speaker 23 (12:34):
What you're seeing is something of a shift from plant
based substances into synthetic substances that does change the game
in some ways.

Speaker 16 (12:48):
Synthetics is a winner, for example, especially in Kalisco where
you have these beauty products laboratories. So Reviewer Legal Operation,
I want to say that you're making beauty products and
you buy a machine to do pills, you're able to be.

Speaker 11 (13:06):
Like a wolf under the ship's skin.

Speaker 16 (13:08):
In these industrial hubs, they're registered as beauty products by
they produce or illicit drugs.

Speaker 17 (13:19):
In a strategic move. Guzman decides to push his new
product using a bait and hoop technique similar to those
used by legal companies.

Speaker 18 (13:29):
So you see it at Costco.

Speaker 9 (13:30):
If you're going and getting a free sample of say pretzels,
you may try a little bite of it, but then
the hope is that you buy an entire box of
pretzels later. Also, Perdue pharmated that with oxycotton, where they'll
give you a seven day or a thirty day trial
and the hopes that you'll try it, realize it's a
good product and then you'll end up consuming a lot
of it later. Very similar to what al Chappo is doing.

Speaker 7 (13:52):
El Chappo creates a home world math that AHI passes
out as free samples. Yep, here's your coin and a
free sample of myths. And this is quite a lucrative business.

Speaker 25 (14:07):
You know.

Speaker 7 (14:07):
It's the free free month trial of Amazon, only far
more addictive. He was very intelligent when it came to
how to operate a business. He was constantly looking out
and then looking back inward with a focus again to
United States of America and what he could bring in
terms of new product.

Speaker 17 (14:33):
In the late nineteen nineties, a new legal drug creates
an epidemic that Guzman realizes he can exploit.

Speaker 22 (14:41):
Our best, strongest pain medicines are the opioids.

Speaker 26 (14:45):
Crucially, after the opioid crisis in the United States got
underway as a result of massive overprescription of prescription opioid
like oxycotin, the Sinela cartel pushed into the area and
the need there was a pioneer.

Speaker 17 (15:02):
More than two million Americans have become dependent on or
abused prescription pain pills.

Speaker 13 (15:08):
America at that time was in the grips of an
opioid crisis, and I think Chappo saw it before most
in law enforcement did, and he planned on it, and
his business model was to exploit.

Speaker 22 (15:18):
That the rate of addiction amongst pain patients who are
treated by doctors is much less than one percent.

Speaker 9 (15:26):
Purdue pharmacil a lot of oxycotton over the two thousands
and early twenty tens, and we've seen devastation happening from that.

Speaker 18 (15:33):
They downplayed the risk of addiction heavily.

Speaker 9 (15:36):
They really targeted multiple studies that found very slight risk
of addiction and kind of ignored all the other studies
that said, no, this is actually really addictive. And so
the toll that oxycottin has had on America has been devastating.

Speaker 16 (15:54):
Big Pharma was the kickstarter for the sin cat. Why
all these drugs are in very gray area. But what
happens is that a doctor gives you this drug in
order for you to reduce your pain, but they do
not treat the syndrome, so you're just relieving pain, not

(16:14):
the real cause of the pain that you have.

Speaker 23 (16:18):
When the US and FTFDA started to crack down and
produce farmers, a lot of this users of oxy content
of prescription drugs started shifting to heroin, and that led
to an explosion in heroin production in Mexico in the
yearly tens.

Speaker 13 (16:35):
And heroin at this point was different heroin. It's far
more pure. There was no need to inject it. You
could smoke it and snort it, much like cocaine. It
literally was in different user groups than we've ever seen before,
from housewives.

Speaker 8 (16:50):
To doctors to pilots.

Speaker 13 (16:52):
People found themselves hooked on prescription drugs.

Speaker 8 (16:56):
For a variety of reasons, and chop O is there
to fill their addiction.

Speaker 24 (17:02):
If you look at what al Chaplo did and like
he's the master of adapting right, adapting to the market,
so producing different types of drugs from methanmphetamines to opioids, right,
and they just kept taking.

Speaker 5 (17:15):
Over more and more of the illegal drug trade.

Speaker 17 (17:20):
In the early twenty tens, Guzman diversifies into another synthetic drug, fentanyl.

Speaker 27 (17:28):
There is a crisis rattling through America, a drug problem
the like of which this country has never known. Ventanyl
an opioid, a man made form of heroine. Thousands of
users in this small corner of the country alone have
paid with their lives in the past few months.

Speaker 14 (17:49):
Los Mexicanos particular.

Speaker 28 (17:53):
Sam moltespertos in la la sustanciasuno piazzo is m maspot Arena.

Speaker 3 (18:03):
Chapou's man determined that they could manufacture ventanyl with great ease,
keeping in mind that ventenol is fifty times stronger than
heroin and one hundred times stronger than.

Speaker 26 (18:19):
More fee Synthetic drugs such as fentanyl are enormously potent
for weight, So if it takes few trailer trucks of
cocaine to supply the entire US market for a year,
it will take only a tiny fraction of one trailer
truck to supply the entire US market for.

Speaker 8 (18:42):
A year fentanyl.

Speaker 3 (18:44):
One kilogram of fentanyl produces one million fatal doses.

Speaker 7 (18:51):
So El Chapol establishes himself as the quintessential one stop
shop to get all the drugs you want. You can
get everything in one place, any drug that you can
think of, and if you can't think of it, he's
thought of it.

Speaker 3 (19:06):
The Cina loa Cortel, they know that by getting into
diversification of their product line that they can be more
resilient and they can expand their business just like any
global corporation.

Speaker 9 (19:27):
My favorite example of a kind of a legitimate company
having a diverse product line is the Walt Disney Company,
starting with cartoons and then moving into movies. Then all
of a sudden they're selling theme parks. Today, they're selling toys,
they have cruise lines, they're investing in other production companies.

(19:49):
They really have kind of their foot in a lot
of different areas. So then that way have something where
to decline, like the cruise industry shrinks down, they don't
have to worry about it. They still have movies and
they still have theme park and so they're able to
move around between different markets.

Speaker 2 (20:04):
In gas Chapel, s.

Speaker 29 (20:08):
Permipio Conro distinto Delia.

Speaker 9 (20:32):
Mastering distribution is an incredibly important component in any business.
If there's any kind of delay in getting that product
to the customers, that allows another company or another organization
to step in. So mastering the distribution channels to make
sure that your product gets there very quickly is one
of the ways that cartels and ensure that they're incredibly
profitable for the top of The risk associated with moving

(20:55):
that products from Mexico to the United States is at
its riskiest when it's actually crossing the border. Once it
crosses the border, that's where the biggest markup is going
to come in terms of the price of that final product.

Speaker 5 (21:08):
They want to maximize their revenue and minimize their risk.

Speaker 24 (21:11):
You look at how the Cinelo cartel operates their distribution network, right,
and if you look at the United States, we have
a vast land border with Mexico, right.

Speaker 5 (21:21):
So the whole goal is they want to be the
needle in the haystack.

Speaker 24 (21:24):
Somebody will find that needle occasionally, but it's okay because
you might seize one load and there's a dozen more
coming across. They're very diversified in how they bring in
their drugs in the United States because they do it
like a shotgun approach because they know someone will be seized.

Speaker 7 (21:39):
The cost of doing business when it comes to drug trafficking,
it means that you may be investing millions of dollars
in a shit that never makes it to the United States.
So you actually have a system in place that allows
for huge losses. That is the cost of doing business
when you're trafficking drugs.

Speaker 18 (21:56):
Over the border.

Speaker 17 (22:01):
Because the drug seizures mean a lot of the distribution
process is out of Guzman's hands, he works to control
as much as he can, taking a queue from legal businesses.

Speaker 3 (22:14):
Sinaloa under Chapin Uzman decided very much like Walmart and
many corporations, to develop their own transportation system, their own
logistics system.

Speaker 9 (22:29):
Walmart's a really great historical example of kind of mastering
the transportation part of the process. As walmartts bigger, they
realize that all of a sudden they need more control
over the process, so they start their own trucking industry.
They have their own drivers, their own fleet, and so
that allows them to really make sure that products get
to the consumers as quickly as possible, rather than waiting

(22:51):
on another company or outsourcing your trucking industry to someone else.

Speaker 18 (22:55):
It gives them full control.

Speaker 7 (23:01):
Ol Chapo was all about cutting costs. It means that
he bought his own jets so that he could bring
drugs into the US.

Speaker 3 (23:11):
He had his own pilots, he bought trucks, he bought
maritime ships. He had seat captains that would take his
ships anywhere around the world. It was much cheaper because
he didn't have to pay a middleman.

Speaker 11 (23:31):
So here's a guy. He's functionally illiterate.

Speaker 4 (23:34):
He rises over the course of thirty or forty years
to run a criminal enterprise that is the basic equivalent
of a FedEx in its logistics. So Chapel Guzman is
doing everything that FedEx is doing, but illegally. He is
in charge of an operation where the product comes out

(23:57):
of the jungles of Columbia.

Speaker 11 (23:59):
It is trend shipped over borders to Mexico.

Speaker 4 (24:02):
It is divvied and repackaged and warehoused and you know,
prepared for travel. It is then smuggled by every means
you could possibly imagine over the border. And by every means,
I mean inside false compartments, in cars, in the back
of tractor trailers, stuffed down the blouses of women, inside

(24:24):
statuettes of Jesus, inside crates of meat. All of this,
of course, is happening not only as he's being pursued
by law enforcem agents, but in rivalry with murderous colleagues.

Speaker 1 (24:53):
The Sinaloa cartel has been incredibly successful in getting their
dope into the United States. In fact, we're only capturing
about ten percent. That is because the Sino la La
cartel is incredibly adept at finding a variety of different
routes of getting that dope in the United States. First
and foremost, the vast majority of illicit narcotics come through

(25:15):
legal ports of entry on semi tractor trucks on large
shipping container vessels. They're constantly looking for ways of obscuring
the true nature of the cargo.

Speaker 3 (25:29):
And getting the drugs across the border with vehicles going
through legitimate ports of m try many times there are
camouflaugs with legitimate cargo with produce. Chapu's monument came up
with an idea of putting drugs into cans of jalapeno

(25:53):
peppers under the brand name of La Commadre.

Speaker 9 (25:58):
He would take six chili can and then stuff cocaine
inside of it, but he wouldn't fill the entire truck
full of these cocaine cans. Instead, he'd only fill about
a third of the cans with cocaine and ended up
moving tons of cocaine into the United States hidden inside
of a semi truck full of hall of Peno peppers.

(26:22):
It's incredible how they're able.

Speaker 7 (26:23):
To do this, Like how many people are really going
to open the pepper cans to see what's inside. They
do now, But at the beginning when Chappo was first
doing it, when he first created it, nobody thought to
check that La caa madre might not be healepeno peppers,
It might be you know, cocaine.

Speaker 3 (26:46):
They also use trains that go between the US and
Mexico to smuggle drugs. They have even used catapults to
laying drugs across the border, and then they have used
ultra light aircraft which can smuggle up to one hundred

(27:09):
and fifty pounds of marijuana, cocaine, synthetic drugs.

Speaker 14 (27:15):
So they have a vast array of smuggling techniques.

Speaker 29 (27:27):
Costas and I was internationallysts limits America and Americas and
surco aloshispecies of marinos.

Speaker 30 (27:46):
I got fo.

Speaker 29 (27:49):
I got back.

Speaker 24 (27:55):
So semi submersible vessel is a basically like a submarine,
but it doesn't have the sophistication to actually.

Speaker 5 (28:02):
Go all the way under the water.

Speaker 24 (28:03):
It has to have a ventilation system that pops up
out of the water so that they can actually be
able to breathe. It's a genius sparents million dollars it
would cost on a vessel that they use one time.

Speaker 5 (28:18):
They just scrap it when they're done.

Speaker 17 (28:20):
These subs can carry nearly six thousand kilos of cocaine,
which is worth about one hundred and sixty five million dollars.
Transporting a sub back to Mexico comes with additional risks,
so it's easier to scrap it because the cost of
the sub is less than one percent of the profit.

Speaker 19 (28:41):
I mean, you had to give them credit their imagination.
I mean, the way they were able to sweep.

Speaker 11 (28:48):
They were ahead of us. There was nothing this guy
didn't try.

Speaker 4 (28:55):
He started using tunnels to move cocaine, not through the
border with the United States, but under it, and so
he becomes quite proficient in hiring the right people and
setting it up to make these tunnels. The engineers who
he hires are really sophisticated guys. You're talking about, you know,

(29:20):
architects with university degrees.

Speaker 1 (29:24):
Il Choppel rightfully deserves the nome de Gueer a Moniker,
the king of the Narco tunnels. These are very large tunnels,
very sophisticated that German tunneling engineers help the sin loa
Cartel develop that are replete with lighting, ventilation, hydraulic pumps
to remove groundwater in some cases elevators.

Speaker 3 (29:46):
Chappelsman's tunnel builders could build a tunnel a mile long
with a deviation of maybe a quarter inch, and it
would take into account the curvature of the earth, so
they were able to pinpoint, for example, a warehouse in

(30:10):
the San Diego area very easily and come out exactly
where they wanted to come out.

Speaker 6 (30:20):
As you can see, the tunnel has lighting and it
does have good airflow, indicating that there's some type of
ventilation system forcing air in from Mexico. Right here we
have a shaft that goes down about rescormating sixty to
seventy feet at about a forty five degree angle, and
down at the bottom of this steep decline is the
rest of the tunnel. Which runs south down into Mexico,

(30:43):
and there is a rail system for a cart.

Speaker 14 (30:46):
These are rails. They run all the way back down
to Mexico, the southwest border right now.

Speaker 3 (30:54):
As a result of Chappo's man, if you were to
take a giant kninth and cut a ross the two
thousand mile border, it would look like a block of
Swiss teas.

Speaker 7 (31:08):
And it allowed him to bring cocaine shipments in under
twenty four hours from Mexico into the US. This was
unheard of at the time, and it gained him the
nickname l Rapido, or the fast One.

Speaker 4 (31:21):
No one can believe how fast he gets his drugs
across the world.

Speaker 11 (31:24):
No one does it as fast as this guy.

Speaker 13 (31:26):
If you shotgun the border with ten cars each having
fifty kilos in it, here's a pretty good.

Speaker 5 (31:31):
Chance half of those we're going to get.

Speaker 8 (31:33):
But if you got that one load through.

Speaker 13 (31:34):
The tunnel, and it's thousands of pounds of dope dispersed
to the United States, it's a home run.

Speaker 8 (31:41):
And this goes back to the business sense he had.
The larger the.

Speaker 13 (31:45):
Load he could get across the border, the higher the
profit margin.

Speaker 8 (31:48):
Now here's the dark side of the tunnels.

Speaker 13 (31:51):
He would pay Mexican peasants a lot of money allegedly
to dig in those tunnels. But once those tunnels were completed,
you never saw those people again.

Speaker 3 (32:06):
He had a whole infrastructure that supported the SENA on
the one corantel and the movement of drugs throughout the world. Again,
better than most legitimate corporations.

Speaker 7 (32:24):
If you were to compare l. Chapple's distribution company to
any other legitimate business, I would compare it to Amazon.

Speaker 24 (32:36):
What's interesting is that if you look today at Amazon,
there's a demand to get your package from Amazon faster.

Speaker 2 (32:42):
You know, even two days.

Speaker 5 (32:43):
It's not enough sometimes, Right, So what does Amazon do?

Speaker 24 (32:47):
They create distribution hubs and areas that will actually be
able to service their customers faster and more convenient. Right,
it's all about customer service. So low cartels no different.

Speaker 3 (32:57):
Right.

Speaker 24 (32:58):
They've created a network distribution points throughout the United States
that helps them serve their customer quickly.

Speaker 7 (33:07):
El Choppel sort of did a similar thing. He established
himself as the fastest distributor. You will get your package
much more quickly than anybody else. The package just happens
to be a kilo of cocaine as opposed to something
that is delivered at your doorstep.

Speaker 18 (33:28):
In the early two.

Speaker 4 (33:30):
Thousands, Chicago becomes Guzman's main distribution hub. And you know why,
for the reason that you know, Chicago was always the
main distribution hub when it was cattle that they were
moving into the stockyards and the rail yards. It's central,

(33:51):
it's in the middle of the country. It's a perfect
place to bring drugs in and send it out into
the hinterlands or to the coasts.

Speaker 31 (34:02):
In Chicago alone, over ninety percent of the marijuana, cocaine, heroin, methathetamine,
and other synthetic drugs that are being sold on the
streets while we're standing here have come from the Sonola Cartel.

Speaker 13 (34:18):
Chaplo and Sineloa love Chicago just like Fortune five hundred
companies do. It's such a strategic logistical home run.

Speaker 8 (34:27):
In addition to that, it's probably.

Speaker 13 (34:29):
Fourth or fifth largest concentration of Mexican outside of Mexico.

Speaker 24 (34:36):
So when it came time to bribe and intimidate people,
they had a source of people that were already assimilated
in to society doing legitimate work, and that they could
then corrupt and intimidate into being their distribution network.

Speaker 13 (34:51):
Chapo Guzman in my opinions, the most dangerous criminal in
the world, second to none as far as I see it.

Speaker 32 (35:00):
At the current rate, someone is shot in Chicago every
two hours nineteen minutes. A significant factor in the gun
violence is the heroin trade.

Speaker 20 (35:07):
Chicago gangs get their funding and their power from narcotic sales.

Speaker 6 (35:12):
One hundred percent of their narcotics are supplied by the
Mexican cartel.

Speaker 7 (35:16):
The cost of doing business is sometimes your very life.
In these communities, being involved is not fully voluntary. Yes,
it puts food on the table for these families, but
you know, there's not another option. There's an expression plata o.

Speaker 1 (35:35):
Bloomeo, So I can either take the bribe, the plata
the silver, or the bullet, the.

Speaker 2 (35:44):
Plomo the leg.

Speaker 7 (35:47):
There is no middle way. There's no I don't want
to be involved. There's you're involved, or you're dead.

Speaker 17 (36:01):
By diversifying both product and distribution, Chapo Guzman crafts a
massive reach for himself, which means exponentially increasing profit margins.

Speaker 9 (36:11):
If they take a nine million dollars shipment fifteen tons
worth of product, that if they're able to get that
over the border, they can sell that for upwards of
forty million dollars inside of Los Angeles, they can sell
it for almost fifty million dollars in Chicago and close
to eighty million dollars in New York City.

Speaker 4 (36:29):
The further cocaine has to travel from its source, the
more the smuggler can charge for it. So in about
two thousand and ten eleven, Guzman starts making a big
push into Canada, because why a kilo of cocaine is
worth more in Toronto than it is in Chicago.

Speaker 9 (36:58):
The markups in the cocaine market are really great opportunity
to look at just how profitable the whole process can become.
So you take a kilo of cocaine starting in Colombia
maybe costs about eight hundred dollars, but then as it
moves into Mexico, it may go up to two thousand dollars,
and then as it moves into the United States on

(37:18):
a wholesale side, it may triple get close to fifteen
thousand dollars. But then they start breaking it down and
they move it into the actual smaller parts that are
actually sold in the street, and that could be upwards
of that same kilo once it's divided, costing a total
of maybe one hundred and twenty two thousand dollars. You're
talking about a markup that's essentially doubling, than tripling, then

(37:40):
seven times as much. By the time you get to
the whole production process, you're looking at something like a
thirty one thousand percent markup.

Speaker 3 (37:50):
And the Sinaloa Cortel makes much more money than any
petroleum company and any other global enterprise, and that is
why Sinaloa continues to flourish as a criminal enterprise.

Speaker 9 (38:09):
Most estimates of the Sinaloa Cartel's revenues kind of in
the early twenty tens was around two to four billion dollars.
Very similar companies at that time were Netflix and Facebook.
They were making roughly the same amount of money kind
of in the early twenty tens.

Speaker 11 (38:23):
But what do you do with the money?

Speaker 4 (38:26):
The money is both the point, but it's also a
challenge because you don't just take the money and put
it into your bank account.

Speaker 12 (38:36):
So you have to then hide the proceeds on the back.

Speaker 7 (38:41):
There's this whole other part of the cartil infrastructure that
doesn't get represented in the movies, right, and that's the
accounting side.

Speaker 1 (39:02):
Ironically, the hardest part for the narco traffickers is not
getting their cocaine or their heroin, or their methamphetamine or
their opioids into the United States or into Europe or Asia.
It's getting the cash proceeds, the profits back to them
in Mexico.

Speaker 15 (39:22):
I mean, money becomes a certain problem when you have
a lot of it. You know, more money, more problems.
For the most part is the cash business, you know,
and when you have a lot of money and weighs
a lot, that can be incredibly hard.

Speaker 9 (39:36):
When we're talking about millions of dollars, given that a
lot of the actual street trade is in relatively small bills,
so they may be in fives and tens and twenties.

Speaker 17 (39:45):
To put this in perspective, a million dollars in twenties
equals about one hundred ten pounds in fives. We're talking
over four hundred and forty pounds. And the cartels have
to get this cash back to Mexico.

Speaker 15 (39:59):
And for paesels, do you got to think about how
you you know, you move that around.

Speaker 6 (40:06):
It's about a five foot drop and then about a
twelve foot transition to this shaft.

Speaker 1 (40:12):
With these tunnels, they're able to not only ship massive
amounts of drugs under the border, south to north. They're
able to bring cash back to those same tunnels from
north to south.

Speaker 24 (40:23):
But if you have a bag full of cash here
in the United States and you smuggle it down to Mexico,
you're still.

Speaker 5 (40:29):
Going to have a problem you of a back full
of cash.

Speaker 1 (40:35):
Large and narcotrafficking organizations like the Sino La Cartel, they
operate like multinational corporations, are able to pay some of
the best accountants and bankers in the world from all
over the world to help them launder their illicit profits.

Speaker 9 (40:52):
Money laundering is a way to take money that has
essentially nefarious reasons that it was collected and then essentially
clean that money and make it look or appear like
it came from legitimate purposes.

Speaker 24 (41:05):
So if you look at the money on an operation
of Al Choppo's Cenelo cartel, it's really interesting because they're
diverse fight in that area too. There are once again
opportunists like water trying to find a crack to be
able to exploit right just seep right into that. One
of those ways that they do it, for example, is
after those drugs are sold in the United States, they've.

Speaker 5 (41:23):
Amassed all this amount of cash.

Speaker 24 (41:25):
They employ thousands of people in the United States that
take that cash and deposit it in the US bank accounts.
Right you call that smurphing deposits three thousand, five thousand,
anything blow nine thousand dollars not to trigger the bank
that you could be doing something to farious. Another method
is called trade based money laundery, is where you take

(41:48):
that bag of cash and you buy a commodity. So
let's say you go and buy a bunch of truck
tires right now, you export those to Mexico and you
can sell them, and now you have your cash in
Mexico and from an elegit that source.

Speaker 20 (42:01):
So you're bringing the dollars back in and changing them
back into the peso economy.

Speaker 2 (42:07):
And one of the things the cartels have.

Speaker 21 (42:09):
Long used to launder their money is property.

Speaker 2 (42:16):
In Mexico. They have used lawyers to buy the properties.

Speaker 21 (42:19):
It's not in their name. They've used family members sometimes.

Speaker 3 (42:26):
Chapouseman has invested a lot of money and laundered a
lot of money through the purchase of dairy farms, ranches,
daycare centers, commercial buildings, and shopping malls.

Speaker 17 (42:45):
El Chapo also boldly uses legitimate banks to launder money directly.

Speaker 4 (42:51):
In fact, there was a huge case in which HSBC
was prosecuted in the same.

Speaker 12 (42:57):
Courthouse where Guzma was ultimately prosecuted for.

Speaker 4 (43:02):
Taking upwards of a billion nearly a billion dollars in
Sinaloa cartel products.

Speaker 3 (43:10):
Chapouzman would deposit it in HSBC. HSBC would send it
to bank accounts here in the United States, and then
those banks here in the United States would send them
back to Sinaloa accounts in Mexico, and that process would

(43:32):
completely launder the money because it would make it look
like legitimate money.

Speaker 20 (43:40):
What people noticed around mid two thousand and six, when
the first warnings of the financial crisis were coming, money
was pouring into the big banks, especially HSDC, from Sinaloa,
which is a red flag state.

Speaker 2 (43:53):
The warnings meaning any money that comes.

Speaker 21 (43:57):
In from Sinaloa should be triple checked where it came from.
The banks didn't care.

Speaker 20 (44:03):
They knew that they were going to need money with
the upcoming crisis, so they were willing to overlook those
red flags.

Speaker 9 (44:10):
HSBC customers had to submit names, but they didn't necessarily
have to be authenticated. Normally, if you deposit large amounts
of cash, you have to actually show where that money
is coming from, but they weren't really requiring customers to
explain where that cash was coming from.

Speaker 17 (44:28):
Turns out, nearly two decades earlier, it was a challenge
of moving cash that actually first put out Choppo on
the DEA's radar.

Speaker 20 (44:38):
It wasn't until about in the late nineteen eighties that
Choppo Husman came to be known to US authorities.

Speaker 13 (44:47):
We were beginning to shift our emphasis to the emerging
traffickers in Mexico and we heard about a shadowy figure.
They called them the short one, hence Chopo, but we
had no idea really who he was.

Speaker 21 (45:09):
In nineteen eighty nine, his brother was caught in Arizona.

Speaker 20 (45:15):
After driving across the border several times in a sort
of relatively suspicious way.

Speaker 21 (45:26):
So the guy pulled him over.

Speaker 20 (45:30):
And Chappa's brother, Arturo, had one point two million dollars
in the compartments of the car he had stashed away.

Speaker 3 (45:43):
There's been a lot of drug lords that have been
stopped in Mexico at roadblocks and they carry a million
two million dollars in cash. Why because to them a
million or two million dollars is nothing. It would be

(46:05):
like you and I having five dollars in our billfold's
that's what it means to him. And they carry it
simply because if they get arrested, they have ready cash
that they can use to bribe the police officers to
letting them go.

Speaker 17 (46:28):
This time, law enforcement didn't take the bribe and instead
looked into who this guy, Arturo Guzman was.

Speaker 20 (46:37):
They put a few pieces together and they started to
realize that he was not a mule. He was not
just carrying the money across He was a member of
a family, one of the leaders of the single organization.

Speaker 19 (46:51):
Our job there was to find them, see how they
ran the operations. Who was in charge of not only
the production, who's in charge of the distribution, the money laundering,
How did the money get around, who was controlling that,

(47:12):
and who were the players.

Speaker 7 (47:15):
Like any business model, cartels have a very explicit structure
and organization, and there are tiers and there are ranks,
and you can move up through those ranks, and you
can also kind of specialize in what you do.

Speaker 3 (47:40):
Chapou'sman is the CEO of the Sinaloa cartel, and Mayo
Sambana is like the chief operating officer for the Sinaloa cartel.

Speaker 26 (47:56):
Like Chapel. He played really tremendously crucial role for the
Cinela Cartel. Samboda was sort of the deputy but a
very powerful, very influential deputy to El Chapel.

Speaker 1 (48:11):
Del Chapel, Guzman and Almoisimbalda were extraordinarily good and identifying
the best and brightest talent that they could.

Speaker 14 (48:22):
Get.

Speaker 11 (48:22):
Three different lines of business.

Speaker 16 (48:25):
One was a financial side of the business that people
that would lunder the money.

Speaker 4 (48:29):
You're talking about accountants, money launderers, lawyers, a kind of
whole financial apparatus that is set.

Speaker 1 (48:39):
Up individuals with MBAs from some of the best universities
in the world, with doctoral degrees in making businesses profitable.

Speaker 16 (48:48):
And these people that worked here did not know that.
People that were working on the harvesting and on the
logistical sites.

Speaker 4 (48:56):
You've got the logistics guys, the transport right drivers, pilots, mechanics,
warehouse people.

Speaker 18 (49:06):
Real estate people.

Speaker 1 (49:08):
They had the best and brightest in terms of engineers
to build tunnels, to build submarines.

Speaker 4 (49:16):
You got your broker in Olivia, you got your broker
in Peru, you got your broker in bogatav You got
all these people who are out there scouting for.

Speaker 11 (49:25):
Products, making the deal, yeah, yeah, do that deal right.

Speaker 4 (49:30):
And Guzma was a micro manager, so he was oftentimes
agreeing haggling on price all over the globe.

Speaker 16 (49:41):
And then he had the prediction site. The people with
the guns, the people that would intimidate.

Speaker 7 (49:48):
You have people seegariols, you're trained assassins. You have la
guardia you know, or guardsmen. These with the people that
might you know, surround an event. As security. You have
people who are stationed on mountaintop's a sort of a

(50:10):
security system within a region to make sure that they
know everybody who's coming in and everybody who's going out
do You also.

Speaker 16 (50:17):
Have people that had contact with the government official senilar
to do the bribery and corruption.

Speaker 26 (50:24):
Another element of Chapel's acumen was his strong focus on
building up political support, political capital the local communities.

Speaker 11 (50:39):
You've got a whole political corruption team. You've got the
guys who are in the.

Speaker 4 (50:45):
Fancy Mexico city social clubs and restaurants who were talking
to the right people in the government to make sure
that nothing really happens. Think of them as lobbyists. They're
you know, narco lobbyists. Google does the same thing Hugo's
got a Washington team, right. All they do is plead
their case to the lawmakers in Washington. Guzman had something similar,

(51:08):
but on the dark side of the law.

Speaker 16 (51:15):
And then you have a group of people that do
their intelligence. These are guys that tap the phones, figure
out who the people are.

Speaker 11 (51:23):
In human resources.

Speaker 16 (51:24):
In let's say Walmart, you go in and you give
your file, or you have your employee, you give your
Social Security number, your tax returns references, and that's it.
Here the intelligence Department does a little bit of a
further due diligence. They interview people, They tap your phone,
and they look at who your neighbors are. They do

(51:46):
a very thorough background check on you, and then they
see the money that you have. If you have more
money in your account or in cash that the Carptil
has given you, there's going to be a big problem.

Speaker 7 (51:57):
You have to explain that.

Speaker 16 (51:59):
Are you still from us?

Speaker 11 (52:00):
Are you selling information?

Speaker 28 (52:03):
Quarentino's Sindo Carter principal. This device jape as the Rutas
head into the windas the compras, the Prezios head into
the thenas the Americancia, the Talmanaa, and.

Speaker 3 (52:29):
It's broken up into components, and these components don't know
everything that is going on in the Sinaloa cortel because
he compartment manalizes the cortels.

Speaker 16 (52:44):
Having them separated enabled him that if somebody was cut
in one of these transactions, they would not affect the
other side of the business.

Speaker 23 (52:54):
You have people connected in several myriad ways, many of
whom dont work full time for this criminal structure, which
have a foot on the chriminal economy and a foot
in the legal economy. At the same time, you have
people that one day will transport caroing and the next
day will transport tomatoes. This is more like the gig

(53:17):
economy type of type of arrangement thingboard uber.

Speaker 4 (53:23):
So it just makes it all the more difficult when
you realize that the guy's operating on five comments, communicating
around the clock. It's an astonishing feat of business action.

Speaker 7 (53:41):
Lawyers in his frail side, he really could have probably
been the manager of just about any company.

Speaker 19 (53:46):
Now look at forward Share with a Coca Cola company.
You have different people in charge of different things. Is
a business, you know, so yeah, call it cocaine, call
it you know, Coca cola. Apple is a business. And
you have this guy that really knew how to run
his business.

Speaker 23 (54:07):
But let's not kid ourselves. This was not a good article.
This guy is responsible with thousands of debts.

Speaker 17 (54:30):
Despite his business acumen, Guzman is not always successful at
staying ahead of the law. In nineteen ninety three, he
is arrested and sentenced to twenty years in a maximum
security prison known as twenty Grande, but he doesn't step
down as CEO.

Speaker 2 (54:48):
In prison, he basically lived like a king.

Speaker 20 (54:51):
Get everyone on his payroll, from the guards to the cooks,
the everything, and through his lawyers and his brothers, he
continue you to run the cartel.

Speaker 1 (55:01):
He was able to maintain communication with his co conspirators
to figure out how to grow his business, stay safe,
build alliances, and kill his enemies.

Speaker 4 (55:13):
Guzman spends eight years in Puent de Grande, and it
is only when the Mexican Supreme Court legalizes extradition to
the United States and it is suddenly possible that Guzman
will be facing a much sterner form of justice in

(55:33):
the United States that he contrives to escape.

Speaker 20 (55:39):
He escaped in January two thousand and one. How he
escaped remains a little murky. The official version and the
one recounted by most journalists is that he was rolled
out in a laundry cart by a lower ranking prison official.

Speaker 3 (55:56):
When Chapouzmund escapes, he heads to the mountainous area in Sinaloa,
and he's safe there because it's very difficult to conduct
hooraid by land, because of the rings of security.

Speaker 14 (56:13):
That he has.

Speaker 28 (56:15):
Juando libertad in don the real mentes.

Speaker 2 (56:33):
He was the coppo of globalization.

Speaker 20 (56:35):
He saw a market opportunity that would lead him to
send scouts everywhere from Egypt to Thailand, to Nigeria, to
Holland to Argentina, both to produce and to distribute.

Speaker 2 (56:52):
And to traffic.

Speaker 20 (56:54):
He saw globalization opening doors that he never imagined.

Speaker 3 (57:00):
The scenaaloa cortel is like a furnace that has to
be fed otherwise the fire is going to die out,
and that is the end of the scenaaloa cartel. So
they have to continue to expand in terms of taking
over territory, taking over a business, and it's more like

(57:23):
a hostile takeover than anything else.

Speaker 15 (57:38):
Settling the disputes is not the same in the street
and actual business on the street. You know, when somebody
has be for problems with you, you can't you can't
go to a lawyer, you know what I mean.

Speaker 16 (57:53):
If you have two criminals, do they trust each other?

Speaker 14 (57:56):
No, They're gonna do by the by laws?

Speaker 1 (57:59):
Probably not.

Speaker 16 (58:01):
Are they going to have this problem again?

Speaker 14 (58:03):
Probably yes.

Speaker 16 (58:04):
So you have these recurring problems going again and again
because at the end of the day, somebody crosses the
line and somebody's more ambitious.

Speaker 11 (58:14):
Than the other.

Speaker 9 (58:23):
In the narco world, eliminating your competition literally means eliminating
your competition.

Speaker 16 (58:29):
The way that business disputes in market share and territory
markets is done in this business is through warfare through blood.

Speaker 33 (58:39):
Forty nine found dead outside Mexico's wealthiest city. They're dismembered
bodies scattered on a highway leading from Monterey to the
Texas border. The victims our casualty of the escalating fight
over profitable smuggling routes into the US.

Speaker 26 (58:55):
Al Chappa has repeatedly tried to cease over the trafficking
access points to the United States that had for decades
been the location of major rival groups, the Juarrees Cartel
and the Juana cartel.

Speaker 3 (59:08):
When the Sina Laoa cartel went to a hostile takeover
of arrival gangs, territory.

Speaker 14 (59:15):
They would kill the upper tier of that cartel.

Speaker 3 (59:19):
They would eliminate them because they didn't want them to
initiate an offensive later on against them.

Speaker 17 (59:27):
In the mid two thousands, Chapo Guzman decides to acquire
the rival Warez.

Speaker 23 (59:34):
Cartel, so he tried to mustle his way into Kwaris.
He launched a savage warriors got quartas from beginning thousand
and eight. Between thousand and eight, two total eleven ten thousand.

Speaker 2 (59:44):
People were murdered and shot twice.

Speaker 23 (59:46):
That's one in one and thirty inhabitants in the city.

Speaker 3 (59:49):
Chapo Guzman has always used violence to control his cartel,
to basically go after his rivals.

Speaker 20 (01:00:01):
He's not just some poor kid from Sinaloa who got
mixed up in the drug tray.

Speaker 21 (01:00:06):
By all definitions, a psychopath.

Speaker 14 (01:00:13):
And there was one occasion where he beat an individual
with a.

Speaker 3 (01:00:18):
Stick, according to witnesses, and then he shot the man
in the head.

Speaker 14 (01:00:26):
He was still alive, gasping.

Speaker 3 (01:00:29):
For air, and he ordered his man to throw him
into a makeshift grave and he was buried alive.

Speaker 14 (01:00:38):
So that type of.

Speaker 3 (01:00:41):
Horrific violence is very intimidating to anybody that crosses Chappo Busman.

Speaker 17 (01:00:54):
Although takeover is an illegal business world don't result in
piles of dead bodies, they can be hostile too, so.

Speaker 9 (01:01:02):
A legal example of a hostile takeover is kind of
the late two thousands takeover of Anheuser Busch by NBEV.
InBev really wanted to move into the US market. They
have lots of beers across South America and even in Europe,
but they didn't have a real strong standing in the
United States. So what they started to do was make
an offer of purchasing shares of the Anheuser Busch company.

Speaker 17 (01:01:25):
When Anheuser Busch learned of Innbev's offer to a majority
of shareholders, they tried to fight the takeover with lawsuits,
but in the end, the shareholders voted to accept the offer.

Speaker 9 (01:01:37):
So taking over Anheuser Busch allows them essentially to capture
about half of the American market, which is one of
the richest markets.

Speaker 18 (01:01:43):
In the world.

Speaker 17 (01:01:47):
One guideline about a hostile takeover is to make sure
your own company remains cohesive during the proceedings.

Speaker 20 (01:01:55):
By that point, Chopper thought that you could wage war
and maintain at home.

Speaker 17 (01:02:02):
As Gizman tries to take over Warez, he faces an
attempt at a corporate takeover from the inside.

Speaker 26 (01:02:12):
The Beltran Labor Brothers were part of the core organizing
leadership of the Sinela captitl along with Chapo Guzman and
Elmaios Zambado, but there is a major falling out in
the two thousands two thousand and eight thousand and nine
between El Chapel and the Beltran Labor Brothers. The Beltran
Leava infection decided to split off and stop what doesn't

(01:02:34):
want to put up with it, especially as the Beltran
Lava Brothers also tried to put new allies.

Speaker 14 (01:02:40):
But like with any criminal enterprise, there's no honor among thieves.

Speaker 17 (01:02:49):
Ultimately, the brothers put a hit on El Chapo's son,
launching a massive blood feud with the Sina Loa cartel.

Speaker 20 (01:02:59):
The homicide numbers skyrocketed in two thousand and eight when
his son was killed and they went to war.

Speaker 4 (01:03:06):
And what Guzman would often do is buy the local
police forces, corrupt them, and turn them into his proxy armies.

Speaker 14 (01:03:16):
On the ground.

Speaker 1 (01:03:19):
Del Chapo Guzman was able to effectively and cynically use
the Mexican military and the National Police to fight some
of his battles for him and to stand back and
allow the Mexican authorities to effectively take out his competitors,
either by arrest or by killing them in armed combat.

Speaker 3 (01:03:41):
Eventually, our Turo Beltran Labor was killed in a shootout
with security forces. Hector bertran Leva was captured in Guernavaca.
So they're pretty much depunked criminal organization at this point
in time.

Speaker 1 (01:03:58):
When these battles and these wars that left literally thousands
of not just rival cartel members, but police officers and
prosecutors and judges and completely innocent civilians of Mexico dead,
Chapo Guzman at that point had really established himself as
being incredibly competent and allowed these other high ranking narco

(01:04:19):
traffickers to effectively kill one another off.

Speaker 17 (01:04:22):
Yet as the violent source, so do Chopo Guzman's profits,
and he begins being featured in the mainstream financial press.

Speaker 1 (01:04:43):
In addition to being the world's most powerful, wealthiest, most vicious,
most feared narco trafficker in the world, Chapo Guzman is
a brand, He's a mystique.

Speaker 30 (01:04:58):
The Americas has fifty billionaires, down from sixty three. The
big news there is that we put on a drug
trafficker basically one of the biggest providers of cocaine to
the US, and his name is Joaquin el Chapo Gusman Luerra,
and he is not available for interviews because he's.

Speaker 5 (01:05:21):
On the run.

Speaker 30 (01:05:23):
He's one of the world's most wanted people.

Speaker 4 (01:05:27):
Forbes puts him on its list of richest people on
the planet Forbes Billionaire List. His number is seven hundred
and one. The first time there's a seven hundred and
first richest guy.

Speaker 12 (01:05:40):
On the planet.

Speaker 4 (01:05:41):
And so all of a sudden, apparel starts showing up
baseball hats with seven oh one.

Speaker 12 (01:05:48):
T shirts was seven oh one, and those who know
know that that's his Forbes number.

Speaker 4 (01:05:55):
He really starts to become a figure of celebrity at
that point.

Speaker 23 (01:06:03):
The guy loved being seen as this major taikoon that
got blowing back, and he loved the idea of being
a being a legend, being guy in movies, being a celebrity.

Speaker 9 (01:06:20):
Like any other successful CEO, al Chapo understands the importance
of branding and making sure that their reputation is well respected.

Speaker 18 (01:06:26):
In the area.

Speaker 15 (01:06:31):
Drugs don't sell him another fuck itself. You know, you
definitely have to brand yourself. I think it is extremely important,
you know, to bring that branding, that marketing into your game.
The way Al Chapo branded himself was like he's running everything,
so you're always going to trust the best product.

Speaker 17 (01:06:51):
He introduces branding with his initials JGL for Joaquin Guzman LAWAA,
and thanks to Mexican popular culture, finds a good way
to advertise.

Speaker 26 (01:07:03):
So El Chapo wants to be known as the big godfather,
as the powerful figure, as the innovator, and that's one reason.
So it's all his personal preference is one of the
reasons why he invests in hiring singers and musicians to
sing narco corridos about him and often pays them very

(01:07:25):
significant amount of money to create songs about him.

Speaker 20 (01:07:30):
Narco corrillos is a type of music dedicated specifically to
drug traffickers and their exploits.

Speaker 2 (01:07:38):
They tend to talk about the bravado of killing someone.

Speaker 3 (01:07:43):
There are probably dozens narco corridos and Chapel's Man made
by some of the most famous bands in Mexico.

Speaker 9 (01:07:55):
So if we think about the songs that narco corridos,
it's essentially advertising for the cartel and going to sing
about the cartel and positive lights or things that benefit
the cartel.

Speaker 26 (01:08:11):
So in El Chapol's case, it's both personal vanity, but
it's also serves his strategic purpose of facilitating an aura
of unti chability and building a network of support that
allows him to evade an escape law enforcement.

Speaker 4 (01:08:28):
When a criminal is able to essentially raise his middle
finger over and over and over again to a government
that has over and over and over again failed its
own citizens, it proves to people that the government is
as bad as they've always thought, and they kind of

(01:08:49):
align sympathetically with someone like Chapel Guzman for that reason.

Speaker 23 (01:08:57):
She's the poor kid that made good. She's the local
kid who became a celebrity who became part of the
Forbes list of billionaires.

Speaker 5 (01:09:05):
So of course you have right place. Yeah, I'm here.

Speaker 17 (01:09:13):
His celebrity status is so strong that people take to
the streets to show authorities they are on his side.

Speaker 7 (01:09:21):
El Chapela knew how to reach the people. He was
dealing mostly with very poor people, and he had himself
been very poor, and so he did lots of outreach.
Many churches, schools, buildings were erected in his name, sort
of almost like an elected official.

Speaker 9 (01:09:40):
Right like paving a road is relatively cheap for a
drug organization, but it can pay really big dividends in
terms of making sure that that area supports the activity
that's happening.

Speaker 18 (01:09:55):
It was solely that.

Speaker 17 (01:09:58):
In twenty twenty, when COVID nineteen ravages Mexico, Sinaloa, cartel members,
including al Chappo's daughter Alejandrina, make a show of handing
out care packages with the drug lord's photo on them.

Speaker 18 (01:10:12):
Even during a crisis like COVID.

Speaker 9 (01:10:14):
We see the same thing happening with legitimate companies, where
Walmart is advertising that they care about the consumers and
that they hope everybody gets better.

Speaker 3 (01:10:22):
Chapposman learned that by building churches, by building schools, he
was basically creating a large group of the population in
Mexico that would protect la cartel.

Speaker 18 (01:10:38):
We are supporting because he is a very good gentleman.
He has been very good to us.

Speaker 7 (01:10:44):
You have to remember that within small towns where the
government is not doing much, that person is going to
be revered. That person is going to be respected, but
certainly by no means diminishes the extreme violence that these
cartels also perpetuate.

Speaker 29 (01:11:08):
AA Andelfondo Cetrata, the de linquenteq in suacti that la
morte a personas yes or lessons polite versa.

Speaker 18 (01:11:26):
PR doesn't always have to be good.

Speaker 9 (01:11:28):
A lot of times, public relations is part of a
cartel's brand in the sense that you need to make
sure that you're willing to use violence and that your
competitors or your customers know you're willing to use violence.

Speaker 17 (01:11:41):
Yet it seems a lot of logo people are willing
to ignore the violence, perhaps due to the power of
Guzman's rebel mystique.

Speaker 7 (01:11:51):
He was the face of the cartel and he sort
of got this brandished image as sort of an untouchable guy.

Speaker 17 (01:12:00):
Showing Chappo Guzman's two thousand and one escape from Puente
Grande in the laundry. Cart Us and Mexican forces spend
more than a decade trying to hunt him down.

Speaker 3 (01:12:10):
There's a multitude of agencies that are tracking Choppo Uzman
talking about the FBI, we're talking about DEA, Homeland Security,
and others obviously to include the Mexican Marines, and they're
tracking his telephone communications, They're tracking communications, family members, organizational members,

(01:12:37):
so that is the way they track him into Masdlin,
into the Mira Mark condominiums.

Speaker 14 (01:12:52):
The Marines.

Speaker 3 (01:12:53):
They kick in the door, they subdue the loan bodyguard
that Chappo Uzman has and Chappo's mind is in a
bedroom with his wife and twin daughters, so he gives
himself up and that is the second capture of Chappo Wuzman.

Speaker 17 (01:13:15):
After this twenty fourteen arrest, the Mexican government makes sure
the drug lord is incarcerated in their most secure penitentiary
called Altiplano.

Speaker 1 (01:13:27):
When El Chapo Guzman was finally caught the second time,
his lieutenants immediately went to work on building what I
certainly consider one of the most impressive tunnels of any
sort that has ever been constructed.

Speaker 3 (01:13:44):
Members of the Sienaaloa Cortel they buy a piece of
property a mile away from the prison and they start
to build the tunnel.

Speaker 1 (01:13:55):
It's rumored to have cost approximately two million dollars. Was
an effort by my understanding, very sophisticated German tunneling engineers.

Speaker 4 (01:14:09):
The Pista resistance is that they lay a kind of
railroad tracking and create this makeshift vehicle.

Speaker 12 (01:14:18):
That is a kind of rail cart powered by a motorcycle.

Speaker 3 (01:14:43):
They dig and they finally get to a cell, and
they are precise with their measurements because they go right
into a shower, and the shower has a small five
foot wall, and they start to punch out to inch
by twenty inch.

Speaker 14 (01:15:01):
Bold chappomsmant.

Speaker 3 (01:15:04):
When he hears the pounding, he stands up from his
bed very calmly and walks back to the shower.

Speaker 1 (01:15:14):
The tunnel was so precise that he literally took three
or four steps across his very small cell, stood for
one second behind a privacy partition in his shower area,
and dropped into a hole in the ground and escaped
on this modified motorcycle on rails to race away over

(01:15:38):
a mile.

Speaker 3 (01:15:39):
The Freedom Chapousman was taken by vehicle to a clandestine
airstrip where a single engine aircraft was waiting, and they
took him back to Sinaloa within a few minutes.

Speaker 1 (01:15:55):
His ability to have engaged in these incredible Houdini like
escape has created this folklore image of him across the.

Speaker 29 (01:16:04):
World la infree hill Una presson major to is a
Poetosa denuebo.

Speaker 7 (01:16:24):
Mas.

Speaker 23 (01:16:26):
After his escape, I thought he was going to be
very cautious. Surprisingly, he was not. The whole Hollywood thing that.

Speaker 34 (01:16:37):
Surrounded nature of escape and the global fascination that created
led him to believe that some legend and led him
to to allow himself to take undessary risks.

Speaker 24 (01:16:50):
He was this mythical, bigger than life person and that
went to his head. But in days of being out
of Prince then went back to some same old communications
network and methods that we're able to feed right upon
a wiretap again tracking them.

Speaker 17 (01:17:08):
For almost six months, El Chapo Guzman remains on the run,
with Mexican and US law enforcement closing in.

Speaker 4 (01:17:19):
They track his communications, they find him, They pin him
down to a safe house in the town of Los Mochis.
The Mexican Marines hit the safe.

Speaker 25 (01:17:35):
House lass.

Speaker 29 (01:18:00):
That juaquing uzman Loira el Proo ma Uscado del Mundo.

Speaker 24 (01:18:05):
He literally could have rode off in the sunset and
just avoided law enforcement for the rest of his life,
but that greed, fame and fortune, he just couldn't.

Speaker 5 (01:18:14):
His ego wouldn't allow him to do that.

Speaker 24 (01:18:16):
For al Chapo being the hell of sell Cartell's who
he was, so him to be able to step away
from that was just not in his DNA.

Speaker 1 (01:18:25):
El Chapo Guzman began to believe his own hype that
he was untouchable and is Elmaya's ambaba, who's only given
as far as we know, one formal interview to a
media organization. Put his finger on it, say he got sloppy,
and that sloppiness coupled with his arrogance, that his feeling

(01:18:51):
of being untouchable.

Speaker 11 (01:18:53):
Ultimately it led to his downfall.

Speaker 29 (01:19:00):
In Mundo del traffic Rogas no is salida, no is
salida launica, coloro la is la morte.

Speaker 17 (01:19:30):
On January nineteenth, twenty seventeen, the CEO of Sinaloa is
extradited to the US, then arraigned in a Brooklyn federal court.

Speaker 23 (01:19:46):
Chapo knew that when he was extraded to US that
would be the end of his career.

Speaker 11 (01:19:51):
The battle was lost at extradition.

Speaker 4 (01:19:54):
Well, you have to remember that Kuzman's escapes in Mexico
were feed did essentially by two means, one money and
two because his network was there, and the money and
the network just weren't translatable to an American setting, and

(01:20:15):
so once he hit American soil, it was over.

Speaker 17 (01:20:22):
The trial begins in November twenty eighteen.

Speaker 7 (01:20:26):
El Chapo's trial was unlike any other trial i've ever covered.
So when you enter the courthouse, they had bomb sniffing dogs,
they had snipers on the roof.

Speaker 17 (01:20:37):
Guzman faces ten charges, including drug distribution, conspiracy, conspiracy to
launder narcotics proceeds, and engaging in a criminal enterprise.

Speaker 4 (01:20:50):
As part of that continuing criminal enterprise, he was accused
not only of smuggling illegal drugs over the border and
distributing them in the UN States, but he was accused
of using enormous and insane amounts of violence to keep
his empire moving forward.

Speaker 7 (01:21:11):
What's interesting is we have this trial where El Chopo's
extradited to the United States, but really most of the
atrocities that were committed will never be accounted for because
that would have had to take place in a Mexican courtroom,
and it didn't, and that's because of the levels of
corruption there. So holding him accountable here, most of his
crimes have truly gone unpunished. The trial against elchopol was airtight.

(01:21:36):
They had evidence. They had over a million text messages
between cartel members, they had videos, they had photographs, they
had sized shipments. They had fifty six witnesses, fourteen of
whom had worked deeply within the cartel.

Speaker 4 (01:21:56):
The way that Choppo's lawyers went about defending him was
essentially by attacking and attacking and attacking the witnesses who testified.

Speaker 12 (01:22:05):
Against him, So that was the essence of their defense.

Speaker 4 (01:22:11):
The trial was a spectacle in and of itself, perhaps
culminating in the moment when the actor who played the
young Chopo Guzman role on Narco's Mexico, a lovely guy
named Alejandro Edason, showed up in the courtroom to do

(01:22:36):
some reconnaissance and research on Guzman and obviously.

Speaker 2 (01:22:41):
Chip Chup chup chup chup chep.

Speaker 11 (01:22:42):
The rumors start going around chattered. Oh man, that's the
guy from Netflix.

Speaker 4 (01:22:46):
He plays Chapo, and you suddenly saw Guzman sit up
beaming in ecstasy, looking looking looking. Boo finds him and
waves at Alejandro Etta, the guy who plays him on TV.
That's the most exciting thing to chop Ol Guzman. The
guy who plays me on TV is here.

Speaker 11 (01:23:04):
Now, that's.

Speaker 18 (01:23:07):
Bobcad.

Speaker 7 (01:23:08):
You know, I didn't know what to do.

Speaker 16 (01:23:10):
I just paying my respect to saying like through the distance,
and it was a very surreal moment.

Speaker 7 (01:23:16):
I have to be honest, this is a man who
likes a good story, and he wanted to be the
protagonist in it. He actually wanted to have a movie made.
This was his movie. He didn't get the movie, but
he got the trial.

Speaker 17 (01:23:30):
After four months of testimony, the jury finds Joaquin Guzman
guilty on all counts, and the judge sentences the sixty
one year old drug lord to life in prison plus thirty.

Speaker 32 (01:23:44):
Years in some The jury found that Guzman led the
Sinaloa Cartel, one of the largest and most dangerous drug
cartels in the world, that he is responsible for violence,
including murders, and the smuggling of massive amounts of narcotics
into the United States over a period of decades.

Speaker 3 (01:24:06):
Chapu's mind was taken by US marshals through the Supermax
Benitentiary in Florence, Colorado. This is the prison that replaced
Elka Dras. That is where they have some of the
worst criminals in the United States.

Speaker 4 (01:24:30):
I think there's always been a lionization of outlaws in
all cultures.

Speaker 12 (01:24:36):
Choppo has played that up.

Speaker 14 (01:24:40):
He likes that.

Speaker 4 (01:24:41):
Even now incarcerated in you know, America's most secure super
max federal prison. You know, he's got a licensing deal
going through his through his family to put his face
on beer and clothing.

Speaker 2 (01:24:57):
That's what he does. He loves that stuff.

Speaker 17 (01:25:04):
In addition to his life sentence, El Chapo is ordered
to forfeit twelve point six billion dollars, although due to
the cartel's nearly untraceable accounting practices, the actual money is
hard to find and so far he has paid nothing.

Speaker 9 (01:25:24):
So we see legitimate companies find regularly for behavior that
they've done, but the punitive damages associated with doing this
is really relatively small, and a lot of these companies
set aside money to make sure that if they have
fines or fees, that they can pay those fines and
fees later, and so they've kind of essentially built in
a nest to pay for fines and fees when these

(01:25:46):
things happen. A really good example of a company getting
hit with fines and fees is HSBC for what they
did in terms of helping launder money.

Speaker 4 (01:25:57):
It is a remarkable piece of irony at HSBC essentially
admitted to taking eight hundred million dollars north of eight
hundred million dollars of cartel money, and no one ever
went to jail over.

Speaker 9 (01:26:16):
Purdue Farmers was in a very similar situation where in
two thousand and seven, federal prosecutors wanted to indict three
of the executives of Purdue Pharmaceuticals for misrepresenting the addictive
qualities of oxy cotton, but the Sackler family eventually would
appeal to the Justice Department.

Speaker 3 (01:26:32):
There's a best difference in the American judicial system when
it comes to legitimate CEOs and the CEO's criminal enterprise.
You take, for example, the CEOs of Purdue Pharma that
actually created the opio epidemic here in the United States.

Speaker 35 (01:26:57):
I want to express my family's deep so sadness at
the opioid crisis. Oxyconton has a medicine that Purdue intended
to help people, and it has helped and continues to
help millions of Americans.

Speaker 3 (01:27:12):
They don't show up to criminal court. They show up
to civil court wearing Georgia Armani suits in a stretch limo.

Speaker 10 (01:27:22):
In July two thousand and four, I got the call
that no mother ever ever wants again.

Speaker 14 (01:27:29):
They don't go to prison.

Speaker 36 (01:27:31):
My son Jeff was prescribed oxy cotton after a knee
injury in his junior year of high school.

Speaker 3 (01:27:37):
They usually end up paying a fine, which is a
pittance of the damage that they created.

Speaker 7 (01:27:45):
No one told us the risks of addiction.

Speaker 36 (01:27:48):
Certainly no one told us that my son might die
of an overdose ten years later, which is what he
did on August fifth, twenty fourteen, and now our family
approaches another holiday season without my son.

Speaker 18 (01:28:01):
The government is seeking twelve billion.

Speaker 10 (01:28:03):
Dollars from El Choppo as the profit of his sales.
The federal government audit of the Sackler family is that
your family, you and your fellow members of the Sackler family,
have twelve billion dollars in profits from your aggressive marketing
and sales of oxy cotton.

Speaker 8 (01:28:26):
Is there any reason why.

Speaker 10 (01:28:30):
That money, every single dollar, should not be returned and
recovered by taxpayers per distribution to families.

Speaker 16 (01:28:40):
I don't think this is something I can go plan on.

Speaker 12 (01:28:43):
Actually, p due Farmers.

Speaker 9 (01:28:46):
Is issue to find of about six hundred million dollars,
which is actually only about six months worth of sales
for oxy cotton. Executives were basically given misdemeanor charges and
the Sackler family, which is a billionaire family, essentially got
off scott free.

Speaker 18 (01:29:00):
So no one.

Speaker 9 (01:29:01):
Individual is really held responsible for all those deaths that
have occurred because of their marketing tactics because of their misrepresentation.

Speaker 20 (01:29:11):
I don't think Cho thinks too much about the consequences
that his drug is due to society.

Speaker 21 (01:29:18):
I just don't think it's really crossed his mind that much.

Speaker 23 (01:29:32):
I think there are both ethical and strategic reasons for
going after people like Kilchapo. Ethically because the guy should
pay for his ships for his crimes most definis. But
does change structurally the business.

Speaker 4 (01:29:47):
No, just because Chapo Guzman was convicted on all accounts,
that essentially meant nothing to the flow of drugs across
the border. In fact, within days of his conviction, US
officials on the Arizona border found the largest shipment of

(01:30:12):
fentanyl ever.

Speaker 11 (01:30:15):
Being smuggled across.

Speaker 3 (01:30:16):
The drugs that you see next to me were attempted
to be smuggled into the United States from Mexico concealed
within a tractor trailer transporting produce.

Speaker 7 (01:30:26):
If you look at heroin production up thirty seven percent
in twenty sixteen and twenty seventeen, those are the years
that El Chapel was arrested in extra did to the
United States. So more and more drugs are passing over
the border, not less, not.

Speaker 17 (01:30:42):
Fewer drug related deaths in the US are also on
the rise, steadily increasing every year. Since Guzman's arrest.

Speaker 24 (01:30:51):
There's often a debate about the Warren drivers, and I'll
say this, we cannot expect law enforcement to arrest their
way out out of a serious illness like drug.

Speaker 2 (01:31:03):
Addiction one one four.

Speaker 7 (01:31:06):
Can you start me a medic as well? He's od.
Prosecutors would say, well, we're showing that nobody is untouchable,
and there's something to that. But drug trafficking will continue
to happen as long as there is a demand for it.
It is supply and demand. And why do we have
such a demand for it in the US. I mean,

(01:31:27):
that's a question that we need to be really reflective on.

Speaker 5 (01:31:30):
You have self work, you have self respect.

Speaker 21 (01:31:32):
This disease will bring in your knees and you won't
have that anymore.

Speaker 5 (01:31:37):
Alise yourself.

Speaker 1 (01:31:40):
Someone who has been intimately involved in the so called
global we're on drugs for a very long time, I
firmly believe that we have been gravely mistaken in focusing
almost exclusively and solely on the supply side of the
equation and not nearly enough on the demand side, and

(01:32:02):
that we ought to look at more creative and effective
ways of dealing with addiction.

Speaker 18 (01:32:07):
Think everything they have step fat our alcoholics.

Speaker 23 (01:32:10):
There's no magic bond that there is no short term
solutions us. But this should be about not helping people
that have.

Speaker 11 (01:32:16):
Problems, Thank you very much.

Speaker 17 (01:32:20):
In twenty twenty, Oregon becomes the first state to decriminalize
small amounts of drugs, including heroin, cocaine, and meth. Now,
instead of facing arrest, a person caught with drugs will
be fined one hundred dollars unless they agree to see
an addiction specialist. It's still too early to assess how

(01:32:43):
effective the change will be, but all the time, money
and lives lost on capturing Joaquin al Chapo Guzman seems
to have done very little to stem the tide of
one of them the greatest dangers facing America.

Speaker 1 (01:33:04):
Some have argued that perhaps with the capture of Chapel Guzman,
it has bought a little more time for the Sinaloa
Cartel to adjust, to streamline its operations, to slow the
growth to a point that is tenable to make it
continue to represent the largest narco trafficking organization for the
next decade or so.

Speaker 13 (01:34:04):
A