Money Crimes with Nicole Lapin - Partners in Crime: Griselda Blanco & Carlos Trujillo

Episode Date: November 27, 2025

When cartels write the rules, no one is off limits. This week, we investigate two horrifying cartel crimes: On September 3rd, 2012, an anonymous gunman shot and killed the "Godmother of Cocaine" Griselda Blanco. Three years earlier to the day in Ciudad Juárez, masked gunmen burst into a rehab, killing 18 patients. These killings weren’t random. They were messages written in blood. How do cartels keep getting away with it? Scams, Money, & Murder is a Crime House Original Podcast, powered by PAVE Studios. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. For ad-free listening and early access to episodes, subscribe to Crime House+ on Apple Podcasts. Don’t miss out on all things Scams, Money, & Murder! Instagram: @Crimehouse TikTok: @Crimehouse Facebook: @crimehousestudios X: @crimehousemedia YouTube: @crimehousestudios To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, Crime House community. It's Vanessa Richardson. And if you love digging into the most gripping true crime stories, then you need to listen to another Crime House original, Crimes of, with Sabrina Deanna Roga and Corinne Vienne. Crimes of is a weekly series that explores a new theme each season, from crimes of paranormal, unsolved murders, mysterious disappearances, and more. Sabrina and Corinne have been covering the true stories behind Hollywood's most iconic horror villains, and this month they'll be diving into the paranormal. Listen to Crimes of every Tuesday on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer. It's not just a saying. It's a means of survival. Because in the world, we're in. Entering trust is a trap, and betrayal is often fatal. I'm Carter Roy, and this is scams, money, and murder. And I'm Vanessa Richardson. Every Thursday, we'll explore the story of a money-motivated crime gone wrong,

whether it's a notorious con, fraud, burglary, or even murder. From the archives of Crime House, The Show, Murder True Crime Stories, and Killer Minds, These are some of our favorite cases that have kept us lying awake at night wondering if money didn't make the world go round, could all this have been avoided? And as always, at Crime House, we want to express our gratitude to you, our community, for making this possible. Please support us by rating, reviewing, and following, scams, money, and murder, wherever you get your podcasts. This week's episode comes from Crime House the Show, where the theme is cartel crimes. First, we'll start on September 3rd, 2012,

when retired drug trafficker Griselda Blanco was gunned down on the streets of Medellin, Colombia. Then we'll jump back to September 3, 2009, when a group of cartel gunmen stormed a drug rehab clinic in northern Mexico, they massacred 18 patients, all in the name of revenge. Today's stories focus on the transnational cartels. drug trade. From the kingpins and queen pins calling the shots to the foot soldiers carrying

out their brutal orders, these cartels aren't just above the law. In some parts of the world, they are the law. All that and more coming up. fresh meat. The 69-year-old grandmother-to-be was planning a party with her pregnant ex-daughter-in-law, and she wanted to be sure none of her guests went hungry. Decades earlier, when Griselda was one of the most powerful cartel bosses in the world, she was famous for throwing wild, drug-fueled ragers at her Miami mansions. Now that she was a born-again Christian, enjoying her retirement in Medellin, Colombia, her parties were all about the food. So that, day, Griselda and her ex-daughter-in-law went to a local butcher shop in her neighborhood, where

she bought $165 worth of meat. Once she'd paid up, Griselda stepped back outside and headed to her car. As she loaded everything into the trunk, a motorbike zoomed up the street and came to a screeching halt nearby. Before Griselda could even register what was going on, the driver pulled out a large pistol and fired two shots into her head. Griselda collapsed to the ground as the assassin roared away. Her distraught companion ran to her side, placing a small Bible on Griselda's chest as she bled to death. It was an ironic end for a woman who had once been called the Black Widow, the godmother

of cocaine, and La Dama de la Mafia, the lady of the mafia. As one of the world's most prolific cocaine traffickers, Griselda had ordered over 200 murders, and she was credited with inventing a popular cartel assassination technique, the motorcycle drive-by shooting. Now it seemed like Griselda was a victim of her own success. Griselda Blanco was born on February 15, 1943 in Medellin, Colombia. It was a tumultuous time to be in the Central American country. In 1948, when Griselda was just five years old, popular presidential candidate, Jorge Eliezer Gaetan, was assassinated,

plunging Colombia into a civil war known as La Violencia. More than 200,000 people would die over the next 10 years of chaos and warfare. Growing up in this environment, Griselda got used to bloodshed in an early age. There were often bodies in the streets, and sometimes she and her friends would dig holes to bury them in for fun. And Griselda's home life was just as brutal. Her father wasn't in the picture, and her mother was an alcoholic who frequently beat her. Under these circumstances, it didn't take long for Griselda to start solving her problems with violence.

When she was just 11, Griselda and her friends hatched a plan to make a little money. They kidnapped a young boy from a wealthy neighborhood and tried to hold him for ransom. But the boy's family refused to pay up. While they debated what to do next, one of Griselda's friends handed her a gun and dared her to shoot the boy between the eyes. Griselda probably felt some hesitation about taking someone's life, but she'd also seen what happened to people who showed any sign of weakness. So she put the barrel of the gun up to the young boy's head and pulled the trigger. This was the first of many, many murders she'd be involved in throughout her life. As Griselda began her life outside the law, she decided to break free from her mother's influence, no matter the cost.

At 14 years old, she left home and spent the next several years living on the streets as a sex worker. We don't know much about her life during this period, but by the time she was in her early 20s, Griselda was married to a man named Carlos Trujillo. They most likely met on the street since they moved in similar worlds. Carlos made a living, forging immigration papers and smuggling people into the United States. By the late 1960s, when Griselda was in her mid-20s, they'd had three children together and made the move to the U.S. themselves, settling in Queens. New York. But the marriage wouldn't last. Some say their relationship ended in divorce. Others say

Carlos died from cirrhosis of the liver, and others believe Griselda killed him because of a business or personal dispute. Either way, by the early 1970s, Carlos was out of the picture, and Griselda had found a new husband, a Colombian man named Alberto Bravo. From the outside, Alberto appeared to be a legitimate businessman who owned some garment factories back in Colombia. In reality, he was just as much of a hustler as Griselda's last husband. Alberto used his businesses as a front for a series of cocaine labs. It was a smart and risky move. Cocaine was much more profitable than any clothes those factories could produce, especially if you could get it into the U.S. At the time, one pound of cocaine was worth about $35,000.

in the U.S., the equivalent of over a quarter of a million dollars in 2025. Griselda saw how much money Alberto was making and thought they could do even better. Working together, they developed a system to start moving huge quantities of the drug into America. Although she now lived in New York, Griselda often traveled back to Colombia, and she'd seen firsthand that police and customs agents were less likely to search female travelers. So she recruited a small army of female drug mules in Colombia to smuggle cocaine into the U.S. And she and her husband put his garment factories to work producing lingerie lined with hidden pockets to carry the product. In 1971, police found a set of this

specialty underwear in an airport bathroom stall. The bra and panties contained seven pounds of cocaine, sewn into 58 different pockets. Griselda's methods were so successful that within a couple of years, she and Alberto were moving one and a half tons of cocaine into the U.S. every month. They were earning as much as $10 million per week. When the godfather came out in 1972, 29-year-old Griselda saw herself in the story of a powerful boss who ruled a vast criminal empire. Soon she took to calling herself the godmother. But by the mid-1970s, cracks were beginning to form in the godmother's empire. She'd taken to smoking uncut cocaine, which made her paranoid and short-tempered, and there was trouble on the horizon for her business as well.

Police and federal agents in New York were aggressively investigating who was smuggling so much cocaine into the country. In 1975, Griselda learned that the DEA had arrested one of her dealers. Desperate to avoid jail time, he'd told them all about her role in the drug smuggling operation. The police were on their way to arrest her, and she needed to get out of the country fast. Griselda had planned for this, though. For months, she'd been keeping a private jet on 24-hour standby just in case things went bad. When she had... in her plane full of bodyguards landed in Colombia, Griselda was determined to eliminate any other weak links in her organization. So right away, she reached out to her husband, who was already

in the country. Alberto had been spending a lot more time there lately. Griselda was convinced he was cheating on her. Not only that, she thought he was trying to muscle her out of their business with help from one of their rivals, a small-time drug runner named Pablo Escobar. But Griselda wasn't ready to give up on her marriage, or at least that's what she wanted her husband to think. She and Alberto made arrangements to meet up outside a popular Medellín nightclub to hash out their differences. However, the meeting did not go well. Griselda and Alberto had a tense argument about the state of their drug empire. Reportedly, he told her she'd gotten too full of herself and her,

godmother image. In response, Griselda pulled out a gun and shot Alberto in the head, sparking a brief but deadly shootout between their bodyguards. When the shooting stopped, Griselda was wounded and six bodyguards lay dead in the street along with Alberto. With her husband out of the picture, the entire cocaine smuggling operation belonged to her. and the godmother was just getting started. By 1975, Griselda Blanco was a 32-year-old multi-millionaire and wanted by the FBI. But that was the least of her worries. When she found out her husband, Alberto, was conspiring against her,

Griselda returned to Colombia and killed him in a dramatic shootout at a Medellin nightclub. Once he was dead and buried, it was time to get back to work. She had an empire to run. For the next few years, Griselda stayed in Colombia, waiting for the heat to die down in the U.S. She used that time to solidify her relationships with the farms and labs that supplied her distribution network. She also organized a meeting between Colombia's biggest cocaine traffickers to brainstorm more efficient smuggling routes. Even then, she made time for her personal life. In 1978, 35-year-old Griselda married for a third time.

Her new husband was a bank robber named Dario Sepulveda, and they soon had a son together. In honor of her favorite movie, Griselda named her fourth child Michael Corleone. Blanco. But she didn't spend long on maternity leave. There was more money to be made. While little Michael was still a baby, Griselda decided it was time to return to the United States. She settled into a six-room penthouse in Miami and went to work making South Florida the cocaine capital of America. At the time, Miami wasn't a cocaine hotspot, but that quickly changed once Griselda got to town. Within a few months, the income from her drug empire had tripled. By some estimates, her expansion into Miami made her a billionaire. The godmother

made the most of her ill-gotten gains. She bought lavish mansions in Florida and all over Colombia, filling them with rare and expensive trinkets, things like a tea set that once belonged to Queen Elizabeth II, a pearl necklace formerly owned by Argentina. Tinian First Lady Ava Perron, and a gold-plated, emerald-encrusted Uzi machine gun. And her wealth didn't do anything to curb Griselda's erratic behavior. She loved to host wild cocaine-fueled parties, where she allegedly forced men and women to have sex with her at gunpoint. Clearly, Griselda was enjoying the high life, and it wasn't long before other dealers

wanted a piece of the action. But the godmother didn't take kindly to competition. In 1979, she started sending armed thugs and hitmen into the streets of Miami to take care of her rivals. The chaos that unfolded became known as the Cocaine Wars. In the three years after Griselda arrived in Miami, the city recorded over 1,500 murders. So many dealers and enforcers were getting killed that Miami, Morg ran out of space. The city had to rent a refrigerated truck to store all the extra bodies. Griselda was the driving force behind many of these murders. Police estimate she ordered

at least 200 killings in South Florida, and probably more, and she wasn't concerned about collateral damage. In one case, she sent her hitman to kill a rival dealer, but they accidentally shot his two-year-old son instead. According to the hitmen, Griselda was angry at first, but after giving it some thought, she was glad the child had died, because it meant her rival was suffering. Griselda also wasn't afraid to invest big money in her wartime operations. In 1979, she bought a $14,000 armored truck disguised as a party supply shop van. Her hitmen used the vehicle to ambush a pair of rival dealers at a strip mall liquor store

in broad daylight, leaving two people dead and a bystander wounded. But Griselda's investment was wasted. The hitman had to abandon the truck after getting stuck in rush hour traffic during their escape. This mishap inspired Griselda to start sending out her assassins in two-man teams on motorbikes. It turned out to be such a useful strategy, her competitors started using the motorcycle drive-by as well. To this day, some Latin American countries still ban two men from riding on a motorcycle together. But as Griselda waged war against her enemies, she eventually found another rival closer to home, her husband, Dario Sepulveda. The stress of running a cocaine empire can take a toll on a relationship, which Griselda had experienced firsthand.

And now her third marriage was on the rocks as well. In 1983, Griselda learned that Dario had been cheating on her. Dario knew Griselda wasn't going to take the news well, so he left Miami and returned to Colombia, and he took their five-year-old son, Michael Corleone, with him. But Griselda wasn't the sort of person to let something like that slide. Shortly after Dario and Michael resettled in Mevelyne, the father and son were out driving in the city when they were pulled over by police.

The officers ordered Dario to get out of the car. When he did, they snapped a pair of handcuffs onto his wrists. Dario seemed to sense that something was off and took off running down the street. The so-called police opened fire, gunning him down in front of his son. As it turns out, these were assassins dressed in fake uniforms. They'd been sent by Griselda to finish off her philandering husband and bring Michael back to the States. And now that Griselda had killed two of her husbands,

the godmother picked up a new nickname, Black Widow. From killing her rival's children to having her own husband assassinated in front of their son, Griselda's behavior was drawing a lot of attention and making her even more enemies, growing increasingly paranoid that she would be assassinated, by one of her rivals, Griselda took Michael and left Miami. For their new home, she chose the polar opposite of South Florida's glitz, glamour, and grime, the sleepy, family-friendly

suburb of Irvine, California. But despite her fresh start, it didn't take long for her past to catch up with her. Throughout the cocaine wars, the Miami police didn't realize that Griselda was involved in so many of the murders. They didn't even know she was back in the United States. At the time, very few detectives in Miami spoke Spanish, which made it hard to interrogate suspects and figure out who was calling the shots. Law enforcement only realized Griselda was back on American soil when a DEA informant spotted her shortly after she moved to Southern California. And once they knew she was in the country, they acted quickly. On February 17, 1985, 42-year-old Griselda Blanco answered the door of her suburban home to find a gaggle of

DEA agents waiting for her. Ten years after she'd first fled charges in New York, the authorities finally had the godmother in custody. But although the government was finally aware of Griselda's many crimes in Miami, they weren't able to make a case just yet. Instead, she was convicted on the New York cocaine trafficking charges from 1975 and sentenced to 15 years in prison. It looked like this was the end of the road for Grisel de Blanco, but she still had a few more tricks up her sleeve. Even behind bars, the godmother was an unstoppable force. After taking a leading role in Miami's cocaine, Wars, Griselda Blanco left Florida behind and went into hiding in Irvine, California.

But only a year later, in 1985, the 42-year-old was arrested and sentenced to 15 years in prison for cocaine trafficking. Even after Griselda was locked up, federal prosecutors weren't ready to walk away from the case, though. They knew she'd ordered up to 200 killings back in Miami and were determined to hold her accountable for those crimes. But even life in jail wouldn't be much of a punishment for Griselda. Although the government had confiscated as many of her assets as they could find, they couldn't put a stop to Griselda's drug empire, which was still earning her as much as $50 million a year. She used that money to bribe guards and other inmates, anything to ensure her prison experience was as comfortable as possible.

Her visitors noticed that while the other prisoners all wore prison jumpsuits, Griselda was dressed in silk and red pumps with plenty of makeup. And in the late 1980s, as she neared 50 years old, Griselda got herself another accessory, a new boyfriend. His name was Charles Cosby, and he was a black 18-year-old crack dealer from the streets of Oakland, California, just a few miles away from Griselda's prison. He'd heard stories about the fierce female drug lord

who'd taken control of Miami, and when he learned that she'd been locked up nearby, he knew that he had to meet her. As it turned out, one of Charles's friends had been a drug mule for Griselda, and she put them in touch. He opened with a love letter. Part of it read, quote,

Godmother, I think you're the greatest queen to ever sit on the throne. I've admired you since I first heard of you, I appreciate you, and I salute you for being a real woman. A few days later, she called him from prison, because despite all the luxuries she'd been able to buy for herself, Griselda was still lonely. Soon, the two of them were talking every day, and before long, she invited him to come see her. On visiting day, Griselda paid all the other women on her cell block a hundred, hundred dollars apiece to tell their loved ones not to come, ensuring that she and Charles would be the only ones in the visiting room. She also paid off the guards to leave them alone. When Charles

arrived, they talked about their lives. She told him about the drug business, and they took advantage of the privacy to consummate their relationship. Then Griselda gave him a job. A few days after their prison rendezvous, Charles received a delivery from one of Griselda's couriers, over 100 pounds of Colombian cocaine. Before he met Rizelda, Charles had been selling rocks of crack cocaine, a cheap street drug that was popular in low-income communities. Griselda had just given him over 100 pounds of powder cocaine, which was much more expensive. This massive supply of high-quality drugs made Charles one of the most successful drug dealers in his neighborhood almost overnight. And a couple weeks later, before he'd even finished selling the first batch, Griselda's employees

delivered another 100 pounds to his house. There was no way he could move this much product on his own. So with Griselda's coaching, he started hiring his friends to help him sell it. Within a month, at the age of just 18 years old, Charles Cosby had earned half a million dollars selling Griselda's cocaine. It was so much cash that Charles, who still lived with his mother, had trouble fitting it all in his bedroom. Before long, Griselda put him in charge of managing her entire drug empire while she was locked up. His job was to travel the country to meet with her lieutenants, then returned to visit Griselda in prison. He'd give her status reports about her operation,

and then they'd have sex in a supply closet the guards had set aside for them. Charles also transported large amounts of cocaine to her operations in different cities, taking home a 20% cut of the profits. Griselda's business and love life flourished for several years, but in 1995, 10 years into her 15-year sentence, the law caught up with her again. That year, DEA agents arrested one of Griselda's long-time hitmen, Jorge Riberito Ayala, and threatened him with a life sentence,

unless he agreed to testify against 52-year-old Griselda in court. Ayala agreed and told investigators about her involvement in multiple murders in the 1980s back in Miami. Prosecutors used this information to indict Griselda, on three counts of homicide, including the killing of her rival's two-year-old son. If convicted, she'd face the death penalty, but she'd cheated death before, and she was determined to do it again. So Griselda hatched a plan to secure her freedom. Calling back to her childhood experience of kidnapping a rich boy for ransom, she ordered Charles to kidnap the adult son of a former president.

John F. Kennedy, Jr. According to Charles, Griselda believed that if they were able to kidnap J.F.K. Jr., who was a popular New York City socialite, they could convince the government to set her free. Then, as soon as she arrived in Colombia, she would call the kidnappers and tell them to let their hostage go. This plan was a long shot at best,

but Griselda had enough money and influence to try to make make it happen. She gave Charles a hundred thousand dollars and sent him to New York with four of her thugs to put the plan into motion. When they got to the city, Charles and the kidnappers bought a windowless white van, as well as some nice clothes to blend in. Then they staked out Kennedy's neighborhood. Charles later told journalists that at one point they'd spotted Kennedy and were about to jump out and throw him in their van, but they called it off when a police car drove by. After that, they didn't get another chance and eventually abandoned their mission. Griselda's operation continued to unravel from there. In 1998, shortly after the failed kidnapping,

Charles was summoned to a federal court hearing in Miami. There, prosecutors working on Griselda's case presented him with evidence of his deep involvement with her cocaine operation. They told him that he could either testify against the godmother in court or spend decades in prison on drug trafficking charges. Charles had several meetings with the government's lawyers in Miami as he weighed his options. After one of these meetings, he was approached by a female secretary from the federal prosecutor's office. She smiled and pressed a note into his hand, then walked away. In the note, she told him she said,

thought he was cute and asked if he wanted to meet up later. Charles had been offered one opportunity to betray his girlfriend. Now he had another. In the end, Charles wound up saying yes to both. Over the next six months, Charles helped prosecutors build a case against Griselda, while also meeting up with his new girlfriend for sex after hours, and he wasn't the only witness she was interested in. The hitman who'd agreed to testify against Griselda, Jorge Riberito Ayala, had also been having phone sex with this secretary from his jail cell, and he was interested in another secretary in their office as well. The women would later tell reporters that he wooed them with love letters, gifts, and hand-drawn sketches of flowers and Garfield the cat. This information

came out in mid-1998, right before the 55-year-old Griselda's murder trial was set to begin. And it was a major bombshell. The fact that members of the prosecution were having sex with both of the key witnesses destroyed the government's case. It was such a blatant conflict of interest that the judge dismissed the entire case. Whether or not Griselda had anything to do with that, the result was the same. The godmother had cheated death once more, but it came at the cost of her relationship. She and Charles never spoke again. Even after the crushing loss in court, the authorities weren't ready to let such a notorious drug kingpin off the hook.

Shortly after the murder case fell apart, a special prosecutor in Miami salvaged as much evidence as possible and brought new charges against Griselda. Eventually, she pled guilty to lesser charges, three counts of second-degree murder. These convictions didn't make her eligible for the death penalty, but they did add another 60 years to her sentence. After chasing her for more than two decades, prosecutors could rest easy knowing that Griselda would spend the rest of her life in a cell,

even if it was a comfortable one. But in 2002, just a few years into her extended sentence, 59-year-old Griselda suffered a heart attack. Her recovery was slow and difficult, the result of a lifetime of regular cocaine abuse. Two years later, she was granted a compassionate release from prison on the condition that she leave the United States and never return. So, in 2004, at 61, Griselda Blanco returned. to Colombia a free woman. When she landed in Colombia, everyone, including Griselda, expected her to be killed almost immediately. During her time as the cocaine godmother, she had made enemies all over the U.S. and Colombia, and it seemed like only a matter of

time until one of them took revenge. But surprisingly, nobody did, at least not right away. So Griselda moved back to her hometown of Medellin, where she used some of her fortune to buy a villa in an exclusive gated community, complete with armed guards. Many of her new neighbors were high-ranking judges, politicians, army officers, and police officials, an ironic twist for one of the most prolific cocaine traffickers of the 20th century. Over the next eight years, Griselda Blanco left the cocaine business. found God and lived a quiet life in Mevelyne. When she left her compound, she walked the streets without bodyguards. But Griselda's quiet retirement in Medellin came to an end on September 3, 2012, when she was 69. On her way out of a local butcher's shop, she was shot and killed by an assassin on a motorcycle.

Her killer was never caught. To this day, we don't know who. ordered the hit or why they waited eight years to do it. Griselda Blanco had climbed from the lowest rungs of society to the top. She'd become rich, famous, feared, and respected. She lived much longer and more comfortably than many of her fellow dealers and kingpins, and she left behind an enduring legacy. Her youngest son, Michael Corleone, went into the family business after her death. Today, he owns a legal marijuana brand. One of their most popular strains of weed is named Griselda.

Coming up, another violent episode from the long-running Latin American drug wars. Three years before retired drug lord Griselda Blanco's life ended on the streets of Medellin, drug cartels in Mexico were ushering in a new chapter in the country. the country's own brutal drug war. But unlike Miami's cocaine wars in the 1980s, the victims weren't rival dealers. They were people trying to kick their addictions and get clean. A little after 7.15 p.m. on September 3, 2009, 20 residents of the El Aliviani Drug Treatment Center had gathered in a conference room for their evening meeting. The rehab center was located in a pink painted house in the Mexican city of Ciudad Juarez. It was just a few blocks away from a towering

iron wall that ran along the U.S.-Mexico border, with Juarez on one side and El Paso, Texas on the other. Despite its proximity to the United States, or maybe because of it, Juarez is a dangerous place. In 2008, the city of 1.3 million people saw a record 1,500 murders. The sky has been. The sky high homicide rate was a direct result of the Mexican government's bloody war against drug cartels. But what happened that evening at La Alibiani would shock even longtime veterans of the conflict. As the evening meeting got underway, a group of masked gunmen armed with AK-47s descended on the clinic and smashed through the front door. Moving quickly, the attackers charged through the house and burst into the meeting room. The intruders grabbed the residence.

at gunpoint and herded all 20 of them into an open-air courtyard at the center of the building. They lined them all up against a wall. Then they opened fire and left just as quickly as they'd arrived. 17 of the 20 residents were killed on the scene. Another died at the hospital the following day, leaving only two survivors. Details about the victims are scarce, but most of them were young men who were trying to turn their lives around. In the aftermath of the attack, one local woman learned that three of her relatives had been killed at the clinic, her 16-year-old son, her 21-year-old cousin, and her 28-year-old brother. Another was a 17-year-old boy who'd been seeking treatment for his addiction to marijuana. To this day, the killers have never been

identified, although it was clearly a coordinated cartel attack. On the same day, the deputy public safety director for the Mexican state of Michoacan was assassinated, along with two of his bodyguards. It seemed like Mexico's drug cartels were trying to send a message, but to whom? And what did they have to gain by targeting a house full of innocent people trying to get clean? To understand why Mexico's drug cartels are so violent, it's important to understand where all those drugs are going, the United States, which is the world's largest consumer of cocaine, heroin, marijuana, and all other illicit drugs. Getting those drugs into America has always been a lucrative business. As far back as

prohibition, Mexican bootleggers took advantage of the long and lightly guarded U.S.-Mexico border to supply thirsty Americans with illegal alcohol. When more Americans developed an appetite for illegal drugs in the 1960s, Mexican smugglers moved to supply this new demand. At first, there was just one cartel in Mexico, the Guadalajara cartel, established by a former policeman named Angel Gallardo in 1980. By 1989, the Guadalajara cartel had grown so large that Gallardo decided to break it up into multiple smaller operations.

This way it made it harder for law enforcement to take down the entire group with a single sweep. At a conference in Acapulco, members of the Guadalajara cartel divided up the country into different regions and formed several new cartels that would have exclusive control over each. The Sinaloa cartel would run smuggling operations along Mexico's Pacific coast. The Tijuana cartel would handle all the drugs flowing into California through Tijuana, and the Juarez cartel was in charge of all the smuggling routes that entered Texas through Ciudad Juarez. Although there was some violence between the cartels throughout the 1990s, it was mostly a peaceful period as the different organizations stuck to their respective territories.

But things started to change in the early 2000s when the Mexican government declared war. For many years, Mexican law enforcement looked the other way on cartel activities in exchange for bribes. But in 2006, newly elected president Felipe Calderon announced that the cartels would no longer be allowed to operate with impunity. In December of that year, he deployed the army to the state of Michoacan, where local cartels had overwhelmed the police and killed more than 500 people in drug rights. related murders. But the drug gangs fought back. In the ensuing violence, 60 soldiers and 100 police officers were killed, as well as at least 500 cartel gunmen. As the violence in Michoacan raged on, the military launched more operations against the cartels, killing or arresting major drug kingpins across the country. The government's war against the drug cartels plunged Mexico

into chaos and violence. Once the other cartels saw that the government was willing to attack them, they started targeting Mexican police and military units. In 2008, Hidman assassinated the commissioner of the Mexican federal police in Mexico City and killed two other high-ranking officials in shootouts. Later that year, cartels abducted seven off-duty soldiers and a police commander tortured them and decapitated them. Their severed heads were left at a shopping center in the city of Chulpun Shinger,

along with a note threatening the military to cease their operations. The government refused to stop and was able to get major cartel figures off the streets, either by killing them or sending them to prison. But taking out the kingpins led to brutal clashes between rival cartels as they tried to fill the resulting power vacuums. In Tijuana, in April 2008, 15 people died in a shootout between rival gangs competing for control of the city's smuggling operations.

And in November, a cross-border battle between Mexican and Guatemalan drug cartels left 18 people dead. By the beginning of 2009, more than 6,000 people had died in just over two years of Mexico. drug war. In many cases, those victims were innocent civilians, either caught in the crossfire or purposefully targeted by cartels to intimidate others into cooperating. It was this

atmosphere of senseless, constant violence that led to the massacre at El Aliviani. The rehab clinic wasn't exactly what it seemed to be from the outside, although the Mexican government was spending millions on police and military operations against. against the cartels, they didn't invest nearly as much in drug treatment and recovery options. Instead, a network of informal, loosely regulated rehab clinics sprang up across Mexico, catering to the millions of people who'd grown addicted to the drugs flowing through the country. As the drug war raged on and casualties mounted, the drug cartels began turning to these clinics for recruitment. In many cities, including Juarez, cartel members would change.

check-in, posing as addicts. Once enough members had gained access, they would threaten the existing staff to let the cartel take control of the clinic. Then, with the cartel calling the shots, the curriculum would start to change. The cartel-run clinics still worked to get patients to kick their drug habits, usually with a tough love, religion-based system that included both prayer and beatings. But the lessons were also designed to encourage vulnerable desperate people to work for the cartel, almost like brainwashing. Patients who went through cartel-run rehab programs were taught that God had blessed the organizations and that killing on behalf of a cartel was a divine act.

At the end of a cartel-run rehab course, addicts would get the hard sell. The people in charge of the clinic would tell them that because the cartel had helped them get clean, now the patients had to work for them to pay off their debt. Anyone who said no would be killed on the spot. Everybody else would get rolled into the cartel lifestyle, either as drug mules or as hitmen, known as cicadios. Multiple cartels had infiltrated clinics in this way, using them both as recruiting centers and as places for their hitmen to lay low between jobs. Rival cartels now knew that if they attacked a drug rehab clinic, they could kill their enemy's soldiers and disrupt their flow of recruits. This turned rehab clinics into attractive targets. The massacre at the

La Aliviani Clinic wasn't an outlier. It was just one of five massacres at Mexican rehab centers in 2009. But one thing set the La Alibiani shooting apart from the daily onslaught of cartel violence, the person responsible for the killings actually got caught. In March of 2012, Mexican authorities captured the leader of the Juarez cartel, Jose Antonio Acosta Hernandez, commonly known as El Diego. He was extradited to the United States to stand trial on racketeering and drug trafficking charges. While in custody, he confessed to ordering more than 1,500 murders. Among them were the 18 people killed at the La Aliviani Clinic on September 3, 2009.

As El Diego told investigators, he ordered the attack on the clinic because he'd heard that members of the rival Sinaloa cartel were there. Whether they were using the clinic as a safe house or as a recruiting center, El Diego couldn't let it stand. So he gave the order to massacre everyone inside. To him, it was just the cost of... of doing business, another battle in a long, bloody war, and eventually it came to an end. In 2019, after 13 years of battling the cartels, newly elected Mexican president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador declared the government's war on the cartels was over. He offered amnesty to low-level drug traffickers and announced that the government would focus on alleviating poverty

and social inequality. Despite these reforms, Mexico's homicide rate has only slightly declined. In 2024, the country reported more than 30,000 cartel-related homicides, a slight drop from the 33,000 a year at the height of the drug war. Although the government is done with the war on drugs, the cartels are still at war with each other, and day after day, ordinary Mexican citizens, pay the price.

Looking back at this week in crime history, we can see that the drug trade is a cutthroat business. With so much money at stake, the only way to get ahead and make your fortune is to be more brutal than everybody else. For Griselda Blanco, that meant killing anybody who stood in her way. For Mexico's cartel leaders, it meant meeting their enemies wherever they were,

even a rehab clinic. As we saw today, that kind of ruthless approach can work for a while, but eventually the violent pursuit of a big payday usually leads to one of two places, a drive-by assassination in the middle of the street, or a long time in a small cement cell. Thanks so much for listening. I'm Vanessa Richardson, and this is Scams, Money, and Murder. If you enjoyed this episode, you can check out more just like it by searching for Crime House the show wherever you get your podcasts. Scams, Money, and Murder is a Crime House original. Here at Crime House, we want to thank each and every one of you for your support. If you like what you heard today, reach out on social media at Crime House on TikTok and Instagram. Don't forget to rate, review, and follow, scams, money, and murder, and crimehouse the show, wherever you get your podcasts. And to enhance your listening experience, subscribe to Crime House Plus on Apple Podcasts. We'll be back next Thursday.

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