The Connect- with Johnny Mitchell - This Is How The Sinaloa Cartel Actually Works | Ep. 13

Episode Date: December 8, 2022

Johnny talks about his trip to Culiacan and goes in depth on how the most famous drug cartel in the world actually operates today, including the new "boss of bosses," the difference between drug trafficking organizations and the Cartel, and why and how the Cartel is now stronger than the government in Mexico. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The cartel is the law in Kulia Khan. That is no exaggeration. From the minute that my producer, Brian, and I stepped off the plane, we were being watched. All right, so they're not even letting us say who we're going to visit, but the truth is we're going to see soldiers for El Mayo Zambada. How dangerous is this, but we're about to go to the middle?

Well, I guess the dangerous part, it's actually like the trek, you know, like, or way there can be a... actually pretty dangerous because if someone knows what we're going to deal like who are we going to be with like that definitely going to start a fire you know i was terrified the whole time i mean we're in a graveyard they could have just killed us and dug a couple of holes right there and our mausoleums wouldn't have been nearly as nice hey what's up you guys welcome back to the connect my name is johnny mitchell as always make sure to like and subscribe turn on notifications follow us on instagram at mr johnny mitchell at not the connect and now support

us on Patreon. You guys, last week's episode, we were forced to take down, censor, do a bunch of cutting, and then re-upload it because the video got flagged on YouTube, the uncensored video. So that's why we've got the Patreon up there. It's not to try to fleece anybody. We know that, you know, times are tough out there. But if you want the best uncensored content, it's really the only place to do it. We are not allowed to put it on YouTube. So if you love the show, if you want all this behind the scenes stuff. If you want all this raw footage, you've got to see it on Patreon. Patreon.com slash the Connect show. All right, let's get into it. All right. So last week's episode, we talked about how the Sinaloa cartel is cornering the legal weed market or the soon-to-be legal

weed market in Mexico by selling retail bud in dispensaries. And it was fascinating to look at how this gigantic drug cartel is now going to be stepping into the legal drug space. But who is the cartel itself nowadays? How is it structured? How is it organized? Who's running the show now that Chapo's gone? That's what we spent a week in Sinaloa trying to find out. And let me tell you what?

Everything we thought we knew about the cartel is bullshit. All of those exposés by the mainstream media on what the cartel is really like, it's not true. It barely scratches the surface. We embedded for a week with the cartel and the top narco journalist in Mexico to find out how the Sinaloa cartel actually operates in this day and age. And this is what we found out. Hey guys, let's take a minute to thank our amazing sponsor for today's episode, Manscaped. Fellas, are you still walking around with the hairy dick and balls?

This is not in 1972. Get it together. You got to trim, make them smell. good have it all neat and tidy so when you do finally get laid you get a return customer if you did what I'm saying you guys finally a product that allows you to keep your junk clean but without cutting yourself making gigantic scabs on your genitals that look like some kind of herpes outbreak the platinum package includes the lawnmower ultra premium body wash premium two and one shampoo and conditioner and the ultra premium deodor all of Manscaped shower

gear is sulfate-free vegan and made to have your skin feel hydrated and smell You guys, the holiday season is upon us, and what better stocking stuffer than the Manscaped 4.0 platinum package comes with all of those different creams I talked about, the 211 shampoo, the body care, the skincare lotion, plus the lawnmower. This is an amazing product for you or your loved ones, still suffering from Harry Bush. Go out and get the Manscaped Platinum package, and right now you get 20% off your order. If you use promo code, Connect. That's manscaped.com slash connect for 20% off your order plus free shipping.

You guys support them because they support the show. Let's get back into it. So this is like it's the epicenter of the drug traffic in Latin America, probably. I mean, cocaine is to Medellín what all of the drugs are to Kulia Khan. So Kulia Khan is the capital of Sinaloa State, and that is also the headquarters of the Senaloa cartel. It's really just a glorified farming community. Its main export, besides narcotics, of course, is tomatoes. Their baseball team, which is huge down there, baseball is bigger than soccer in Senaloa. Their teams called the Tomateros, the tomato pickers. These people have perfected

farming for generations, so it's no surprise that people that knew how to grow tomatoes and onions also started growing weed and poppy back in the 70s for export to the U.S. That's how Chapo got his start, as a matter of fact. He was a farmer tending to the poppy crops in one of these big poppy fields in the mountains that surround Kulia Khan. Even today, it's still very much just an agricultural town. In fact, when we were staying at our hotel, some guy recognized me. He was a fan of the show, a Mexican American from Arizona, and he was there on business because he has a vegetable import company, and they buy their produce from Kulia Khan.

So I've been importing Mexican fruits and vegetables my family has for more than 50 years. So yeah, we're down here filming an episode right now. And you said you were going to start to go to some places that you had talked about. Yes, sir. I just saw that. Yeah. That's hilarious. That's awesome.

The difference with Kulia Khan today is that thanks to the drug money, there's BMW and Mercedes dealerships everywhere, there's high-end condos being developed all around the outskirts of the city. But the culture is very much that of like an old-school. Mexican ranchero type environment. And you're going to see in a second why that culture allowed an organization like the Sinaloa cartel to thrive. Sinaloa has always had a lot to prove. So if you remember from last episode, we talked about how Miguel Anghel Felix Gallardo, the founder of what became the Sinaloa cartel later, had to move to Guadalajara in order to kind of get his respect in order to begin the drug empire. He couldn't do it in Sinaloa. The Sinaloans were

looked down upon by these more cosmopolitan centers in Mexico as, you know, the country bumpkins, right? They couldn't get any respect. They were looked down as these lower class farmers. But 50 years later, they've got the last laugh because the cartel del Sinaloa is stronger than ever. The cartel is the law in Kulia Khan. That is no exaggeration. From, From the minute that my producer Brian and I stepped off the plane, we were being watched. It's kind of why I think that somebody in this room right here is watching us and is going to let the cartel know that we're here and what we're doing. It's estimated that between 50 and 100,000 people are on the cartel payroll in Kulia Khan.

And in a city of 800,000, that's almost an eighth of the population. So they have people working at the airport, at the car rental place. Obviously, all of the police are on the payroll. Many of them are actually trigger men or hit men for the cartel. In fact, when we were walking around the center of the city and the hotel we were staying at, we looked around and we could see all of these high-end CCTV cameras everywhere. Now, a place like Kulia Khan does not have the infrastructure

to support like New York City type surveillance. Those were cartel cameras. And it was actually reminiscent of the way the Kali cartel operated in Colombia back in the 90s. So if you watch season three of Narcos, they reference the way that the Kali cartel had the entire city of Kali wired up. So ordinary citizens would have their phone tapped by the telecommunications company so the cartel could record everything that was going on. That's how they earned the name the KGB cartel, because it was like the Soviet Union. It was Big Brother watching the people wherever they went. That's kind of the way.

it works with Sinaloa cartel in Kulia Khan. When you see these things on TV, you think that's crazy. That's an exaggeration. Not in the slightest. Not in Kulia Khan. It cannot be stressed enough. The cartel is the government down there. And for being from a kind of farming hick town, the Sinalowans are way advanced with technology.

So the hotel we were staying at, Hotel Lucerne, right? It was only about a block away from the headquarters of Los Chapitos, who are the wing of the seen a lower cartel running Kulia Khan right now. And this hotel was not in the ghetto. This was in the center of the city, in the tourist area. One of the camera guys with us, Diego, was using his drone to kind of fly it over the hotel to get some footage of the city.

And as he's flying that thing up, there's anti-dron technology. There's a radar scrambler used by the cartel that picked it up and actually disabled the drone as soon as it made it into the air. And that thing turned off, And the drone fell and splintered into a million pieces. Diego lost his drone.

So these guys are cutting edge. They're no dummies. And because of all this spying, we were told Brian and I that we could not leave the hotel without a Mexican escort. And many times when we wanted to film stuff, we were told that we had to turn the camera off, or we couldn't go here, we couldn't go there. It was very stifling.

And we wanted to check out the Narco Graveyard, which is the famous graveyard for, the cartel members. You've probably seen the vice news piece on it where it's like gigantic mausoleums that are nicer than most people's houses in Mexico. And we were told that we could not go to this cemetery and we could definitely not film there. So of course one afternoon, Brian and I left the hotel to do just that. The graveyard was wild. I mean, driving around that thing, you see they're spending hundreds of thousands of dollars American to build these gigantic mausoleums for dead cartel members. And they really do build these mausoleums like luxury homes.

I mean, you can take these, drop them in a neighborhood in Los Angeles, and they would sell for millions of dollars. I'm telling you, they had garages for luxury cars, they had gigantic manicured lawns, they had bars. These are for dead people, okay? It was surreal. Spring weekends are all about family, sunshine, and evenings on the patio. Before everyone arrives, I stop by my local Total Wine and More to grab a great bottle to share.

With such a wide selection and the lowest prices, it's easy to find something amazing for everyone to enjoy. If you're not sure what to pick, their friendly guides can help. Find what you love and love what you find only at Total Wine and More. Top Total Wine and More, in store or online. Spirits not sold in Virginia and North Carolina. Drink responsibly. B-21. It was eerie.

When we first pulled in, there was a group of guys standing around one of these mausoleums, and it looked like they had just buried one of their comrades. So that was a very scary thing. I was terrified the whole time. I mean, we're in a graveyard. They could have just killed us and dug a couple of holes right there, and our mausoleums wouldn't have been. in nearly as nice. So we pull out of the cemetery and we're on this highway and we need to turn around

to head back to town, which was the other way. But we missed the exit. So we had to keep going the opposite direction towards the next turn and all of a sudden in the distance we see there's a police checkpoint. Now remember, we are not supposed to be out in this part of town, especially not at the graveyard of these narcos, and definitely not without a Mexican escort with us. So at this point, obviously, I'm shitting myself with fear. Remember, we don't know if these guys are on the payroll of the cartels. I mean, they most definitely are, but we don't know which faction of the cartel they're working for.

We don't know if this is set up just for us. The only people you want to have an interaction with in Mexico, less than the cartels, are the cops. As we pull up, I had my cash out, I had my story straight. I was getting ready to bribe my way out of this, talk my way out of this, maybe gun it, but thank God they just waved us through. Okay, so we just passed through a police roadblock,

and you just felt like the fear that ordinary Mexican citizens feel whenever they see the cops, like that, you know, that anxiety, that's what the police do to people here. That's why the cartel thrives and exists, because they treat people better and are more fair than the cops. Because the cops can take you to jail, they can fuck with you, they can rob you.

The cartel's not gonna do any of that. They just need you to not inform on them. That's literally all that they expect of the people. And if you wanna work for them, they pay you fairly. So I don't know if what they're doing is actually looking for opposition. Maybe they're on assignment from the cartels looking out,

for, you know, looking out for an enemy of theirs. Who knows, right? I don't know how deep it gets. Or maybe they're just, again, as we've been talking about, they're just keeping up appearances like they are looking for someone when in reality, they're just, you know, passing the time. Anyways, fuck the cops. Up there and here.

And we made it back to the hotel safe. But as soon as we got back, a couple of the guys from the Mexican crew said, hey, we heard you were just at the graveyard. The reason the cartel wants to know everything and everybody's whereabouts at all times are because they are a law enforcement body and they operate just like that off of intelligence, intel. I think their philosophy is anybody who could potentially be a threat, we want to just know where they are so we can keep them at bay. If we have to run, if we have to fight, at least we know their whereabouts so we can then decide what to do. So it's a little it's a little cumbersome. It definitely feels, you know what it feels like? Being in Quigalekan feels like being in

like a dictatorship. It feels like how it will be in North Korea. You're not supposed to utter the truth about the politics, you know? Therefore, you're really not supposed to talk about, you know, guys like Amayo, Chapo, openly. You're not supposed to utter their names. So it's a little tricky trying to get interviews. It's tricky trying to get the truth out. That's why we've been spending a lot of time with these guys just sitting around getting fucked up is because that's what makes them drop their guard, you know? Hey guys, today's episode is brought to you by Mood, an online CBD and Delta 8 dispensary. Do you live in a state where cannabis is still illegal?

Don't worry, Mood has you covered. Mood will ship any Delta 8 or Delta 9 product to your door, completely discreet and totally legal. These guys have an amazing assortment of Delta 8 and Delta 9 products, just like any regular dispensary, that include gummies, edibles, pre-rolls, flour, vapes. Right now, Mood is offering our viewers a free five-count pack of gummies if you use promo code, Connect free at checkout.

On top of that, you can get anything on their website for 20% off by using the promo code Connect 20 at checkout. That's Connect 20-0 at checkout for 20% off of anything in their online store. These guys are amazing. Delta 8 and Delta 9 get you fucked up just like regular weed. but it's completely legal. Support them because they support us. All right, let's get back into it.

So besides having more firepower and more surveillance technology than the police, the cartel in Sinaloa has laws within the cartel itself. Obviously snitching, ratting, working for the other side. That's instant death. But what I mean are codes of conduct. Last night, that guy was just telling us, like, dude, we're a new generation of, you know, like not a ghost, but we're still. following the old rules of no señores, right?

Like the honorability, to behave well, to take care of your city, to take care of your people. Sure. One of the things that he told me that was really fucking, that is really bad looked into the organization is hitting a woman, you know? Like, you don't need your wife. Oh, sorry.

Take that part out. I was for sure thought you were gonna go the other way. How else do you make him do what you want her to do? Okay. All right. Thank God. Yeah. It's like, no, but it's actually the opposite.

You're not. Right. I mean, the organization is looking at you not beating your wife. Right. You don't beat your wife. So you were not allowed to sell fentanyl. That's a big one. No selling fentanyl within Cina Loa state.

That is automatic punishment by death. Fentanol is only for export. And that's because they know how dangerous it is. Because fentanyl, and that's a truth. It's not consumed in Mexico. No one really does fentanyl in Mexico. Right. And we don't have not a single overdose on fentanyl in Mexico.

Right. And that's because the orders are like just to export it. Right. Oh, and by the way, there's all this talk stateside in America about the cartels spiking the cocaine with fentanyl intentionally, right? And I can see why people would think that. I mean, I have friends who have died from fentanyl-l-laced cocaine. But it is not the Mexicans who are spiking it. I mean, I can guarantee you that.

In fact, to reduce the chances of that happening, the cartel has now started pressing fentanyl into pink pills and smuggling those across the border. That way, if some dumbass American dealer is cutting up fentanyl and putting it into cocaine, that Coke will have a pinkish hue to it. Now, how does it get into the Coke? Right? That's the thing. I just, I spoke with one of the producers down here recently because, because of all the fucking bullshit about the rainbow fentanyl targeting kids in the U.S. Right.

And they were like, that's fucking bullshit. We actually colored the fentanyl so they don't mix it because they are mixing it with cocaine or white heroin. So do you think it's just a mistake when it gets into the coke or the heroin on the state side? It could be like contamination. But what I mainly think, and these guys also believe that, is that U.S. street drug sellers are lazing one thing with the other. So that's right there. That's the pro tip. If you see some pink Coke, stay the fuck away. That's got fentanyl in it. So not only are the cartels not lacing cocaine with fentanyl, they're trying to minimize that. It's American dealers on this side that are doing it because they're bad business people and they're trying to stretch their profits and they're killing their own customers by doing so. So how it was explained to us is that if you're caught violating one of these rules, and it's not punishable by death, you will get basically kidnapped by your own clan or your own family, you know, get the hood tossed over your head, thrown in the back of a truck, driven out to the countryside.

You probably think you're going to die, is how they explained it, and you're made to pull your pants down, get on your knees, bend over, then members of your own. clan will take a giant wooden paddle and start spanking your ass. And they'll hit that shit hard. It's kind of like a caning in the Middle East or, you know, in Singapore, you get lashes for, you know, violating the morality code. That's kind of the same thing here. It's very much village justice. They take this heavy ass wooden mallet and will just hit your ass however many times the infraction that you did merited. So if you hit your wife and you got caught drinking and driving, they might give you seven smacks on the ass. It makes sense because they're very good at baseball. So they channel their fucking, you know what I mean? They channeled their inner

childhood, their dreams. Those swanios de they say baseballista, when they're gonna be, they're Pagando, Pagando, yeah. That's literally what they do. In fact, while we were in one of the dispensaries filming, on the wall, there was a sign that said, be discreet or you will get the paddle. And there was a picture of a paddle on the sign. So this is a known thing.

Even amongst people that aren't in the cartels, they know about these cartel spankings. You know, it's like being in college during rush week and you're getting hazed at a fraternity. It's fucking insane. But who's running the show these days now that Chapo is gone, right? Who is controlling the hierarchy and forcing all of these laws? That's what we wanted to figure out.

Okay, so it used to be that the Sinaloa cartel was made up of four or five different families run by their own kingpins within Sinaloa. But in the last 20 years, as these guys have gotten killed or gone to prison, the cartel has now been consolidated into two primary factions. There's Los Chapitos, the people that are. are loyal and work for and with El Chapo's son, right? And he's the one that they tried to capture a few years ago in Kulia Khan, just a couple blocks from where we're staying actually.

So there's those people, Los Chapitos, right? And they run all of the city of Kulia Khan. They monopolize the drug market in Kulia Khan. All of the pot, Coke, heroin, ecstasy, everything that gets sold in the city of Kulia Khan is controlled by Los Chapitos. The other wing are the people who are with El Mayo Zabada, the guy who's still on the run to this day, the old man, he's up in the hills somewhere right now, and those are los maitos. They control everything else around Kulia Khan and in Sinaloa State.

So they have all of the drug routes. They control the fentanyl cooks in the mountains. They have the poppy fields. They control most of the weed grows. They have presence in the major border cities, Tijuana, Nogales. They're moving cocaine from Guatemala. into Oaxaca, they have entrenched connections with Colombian drug cartels.

The Maitos dwarf the Chapitos in terms of military power, capital, and political influence. And the relationship between Los Chapitos and the Mayitos and the way that that agreement came to be after the demise of Chapo is so fascinating and complicated that we decided to do a complete episode on it, which will be coming coming out in a few weeks.

But the only thing you need to know for now is the last remaining kingpin, true kingpin, dawn of dawns, is the old man, Ismail El Mayo Zambada. He's the last man standing. He has yet to be captured, never spent a day in jail. He is the most wanted drug kingpin in the world. There's a $15 million bounty on him by the DEA. And we went to meet his personal security team one night

while we were in Kulia Khan. So it's fascinating to think that the most wanted drug kingpin in the world was only a couple of miles from the city center. And Elmayo is close to the city right now. Last night, we were out about 20 minutes outside the city. And in the middle of nowhere, we met with some of his personal bodyguards.

And when I say bodyguards, I mean, these are like 20-year-olds. And you think, well, how is this possible? How is he kind of hiding in plain sight? But remember, I told you that the cartel is the law Kulia Khan. So not only do they have police and military that they pay off, but they have a huge security apparatus dedicated just to guarding El Mayo. So we were told that there are eight different layers of security around El Mayo at all times. So the closer you get to El Mayo physically, the more security layers and the more eyes on you you will have. So you penetrate one layer,

that security team radios the next layer and on and on and on and on. And on and on. the closer and closer you get to the man himself. All right, so we just got word that we're going to be heading up to the hills or the mountains surrounding Kulia Khan to meet with some private security for one of these, you know, families, one of these groups. But, you know, it's nighttime. I guess there's been military in the area all day.

We've been waiting for like seven hours to try to go up and get this shot with them, but they have to wait for the army to clear out. So who knows what we're about to see? We drive for about a half an hour outside of the city. This is about midnight. How dangerous is this what we're about to go do? Well, I guess, like the dangerous part, it's actually like the trek, you know, like, or way there can be actually pretty dangerous.

Because if someone knows what we're going to deal, like who are we going to be with? Like that's definitely going to start a fire, you know, like someone's following us. Of course, they have several enemies around the city. because they work for a very specific passion. Right, right, right. But I mean, as soon as we get there, we're safe, you know. Like, so the, and getting out again, it's, it's again a bit tricky. So I guess, yeah, like when we're rolling, that's the part where we want to be careful, you know.

So we're about to be, so it's about to get dangerous as soon as the cameras turn off. Yes, exactly, yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. Pitch black. We don't know where the fuck we're going. All right, so they're not even letting us say who we're going to to visit, but the truth is we're going to see soldiers for El Mayo Zambada. So yeah, we'll see if we can get a fucking interview or not. You know what I mean? Like money moves everything here.

So I got about a thousand bucks in cash, American dollars, and we'll see if that will move the needle at all. Finally, we pull into this little village, I'll call it, because it's not the suburbs. It's way out in the boonies. We pull up to this house, and there's about eight or nine guys. young guys standing around smoking weed, they've got guns on their hips and walkie-talkies. This is El Mio's personal security team.

And we were told because these guys were the first layer of security around El Mio that it was very likely that he was in the area, like maybe a half a mile away from where we were at. And it was a surreal evening. These are young guys. I'm talking 23, 24 years old, that had braces, acne, potheads, smoking, smoking. smoking weed the whole time, sniffing coke.

It was a birthday party, actually, for one of the bodyguards, one of the cicadios. And the door to the house that they were stationed at opens up, and a man walks out carrying a birthday cake for this guy. And next to him is his little daughter. Couldn't be more than four years old, and she starts singing like some Mexican tune,

and I assumed it was like a rendition of Felice Coupilagos. I thought it was a birthday song, right? But later on, I found out this little girl was singing a narco Corrido song dedicated to El Mayo. How creepy is that? Then we proceeded to party. They brought out a couple cases of beer, rolling joints, sniffing coke, which is we found out, like, how these guys party. There were no chicks anywhere. This was very much a Sinaloan birthday party.

And we talked. We talked and talked and talked. These were young guys. A lot of them were real nice, dude. funny dudes had Instagram accounts. I showed them some of my stand-up comedy. They seemed to take to it. The only time it felt like we were in a cartel drug business

was as we're partying and bullshitting and laughing. It's cool, man. They got fucking fruit looms and shit. Nobody wants to eat. Nobody wants to eat. Nobody wants to eat those cojones. One of the guys gets a call on his radio that a kitchen has been hit.

We heard that over and over. A kitchen has been hit. Ce le fio la Cossina. And basically either a meth or a fentanyl cook that was happening, and one of these little villages around Culliacan was raided by the military. But these guys didn't bat an eye at it. They didn't give a shit. The guy turned his radio off.

That's how little they were concerned about law enforcement. And we asked him what happens during one of these raids. They told us that the military will actually light the entire thing on fire. They will blow up the... lab. And the reason that they gave these kids this job of guarding El Mayo and not, you know, some ex-military guys, is because the odds of Mayo getting raided by the Marines or by the Federales, because of all that other security that they have, because everybody in Kulia Khan is paid off. The odds of him getting rated are so slim that they don't really need like their top Navy seal

like dudes guarding the guy because they already have that taking care of in the outer layers of his security team. If there is a raid, if the military somehow does make it past the first couple of layers of Mayo's security team, everybody already has that old man on the move and they are heading to a ranch somewhere else in Sinaloa. Oh, this right here. This is a Rosario, a rosary given to me by the kid whose birthday it was. The Sicario working for El Mayo, it was his birthday party, and he gave me this hand-beated rosary.

I was speechless. I was like, I can't accept, and he was like, you must, please. You can never take it off, he told me. And I am being true to my word. I'm never taking this thing off. This is a Rosario from a Sicario, not only in the Sinaloa cartel, but who is guarding the number one drug trafficker on earth,

I'll never forget that. So it was such an amazing dichotomy. On the one hand, you know, these guys don't think twice to kill or to protect drugs like fentanyl that are wreaking havoc on America. But on the other hand, as individuals, they're really nice dudes, right? They're just like anybody else. They're normal guys that want to have a good life. They're like your pothead friends that are fucking hilarious, right?

And then they start to talk a little more, and they tell us a story about how they caught one of these federal police trying to raid a house where they were guarding El Mio, and they fucking shoved a broomstick up his ass and tossed him into a river. So that kind of makes you pause a little bit, because, you know, Mexicans are some of the sweetest, people on earth, right? They're very, it's a very friendly, polite, giving culture. You know, one of these guys gave me their fucking rosary, and the kid's got a nine millimeter on his hip,

and he's probably killed other kids his age or younger. So it was a surreal evening. Unfortunately, we were not able to get these guys to let us film them. We had gone way too high up in the security level of Elmayo Zamada, and there was just no way that his primary security detail was going to allow themselves to be filmed for a channel like this. The only thing they did let us film was me on camera with a bunch of their pot, rolling joints, speaking broken Spanish. Well, they all made fun of me behind the camera. So we got some like, we got some culliacan outdoor bud, fire.

So imagine that I started years ago buying this shit, 50, 100 pounds. at a time from you know my Cina Loan growers in Northern California and now I'm here in Senaloa smoking weed with the growers you know what I mean so I got a little army right behind the camera I got a little a hercito over here you know what I mean and uh fucking good dudes man these motherfuckers are potheads by the way they like you here if you have money I've noticed that I feel like a sugar daddy I'm just taking out my wallet I feel like uh you know I should have a young hot wife the way I'm just paying for everything. You know what I mean?

You know what I'm going to put? But no, but it's all good dude. I love it. I'm fucking stoked. Yeah, exactly. That was always, um, papi, you have your billets? Yes, yes, yes, yes,

do you. Really? Yeah. Yeah. If you'd have the opportunity to get to get to the business, you've just two years in the car.

Yeah. Would I go back to it? Yeah. Like to it? Yeah. Or, come and to sell. Just, only, if it were, if it were grand, like, like, kilos of pereico, you know what I mean?

No, no, no, no, not, I'll regasar to the carcel for, for mota. It's likely that Elmayo will never be caught. He's made it this far. I don't know what kind of deal he has with the CIA or with the American and Mexican governments, but that guy's never going down. And he's already positioned himself to pass the business along to his last two remaining sons, the ones who haven't been arrested, the ones are still in Mexico, to take over after he passes. Okay, so you have some background on the cartels. But how does the organization work as a business entity? How are they organized? How do they move drugs from

South America, Kulia Khan, to the United States? How does it work logistically? How does it work logistically? It's nothing like what you think. You always used to hear that from the mainstream media. Oh, Chopo runs the Sinaloa cartel like a Fortune 500 company. Maybe back in the day, it used to be like that, right? They used to have everybody paid on salary from the captains all the way down to the guy that was smuggling the drugs across the border. It was set up like a traditional hierarchical corporation. No more.

It used to be a vertical organization. That used to be like the Sinaloa cartel with one boss and then would you have like the all the Cicarios or what we call like managers and sellers and transporters and all of those guys were under a payroll, right? Like they were working for the cartel. The freelance kind of like work didn't really exist. Wasn't was not as popular in the world before and now everybody's a fucking freelance. It's really hard to get a salary right now. You have to serve certain role within an organization to have a salary. Nowadays, in Sinaloa, the business of selling and trafficking drugs is completely separate from the cartel.

So according to Luis Chaparro, our friend and narcojournalist for Vice News, the way it works now is that there are about 20 different families or clans who coordinate all of the drug traffic within Kulia Khan, and throughout Sinaloma. And these families are dynasties. They are the oligarchs of the drug cartels whose roots go back to the 70s with Miguel Anghel Felix Gallardo. And they're the drug dealers.

They're the ones who coordinate the marijuana grows within and outside of Kulia Khan. They coordinate the cocaine shipments from Colombia. They organize and execute the meth and fentanyl cooks and get that smuggled to the border and across to the United States. All of the activities related to drug, drug dealing and drug smuggling is what these families do.

So these families, they exist and their families, they're not proper like criminal organizations, you know, because they are not an organization. They're a family. Some of them are laundering money, some of them are, you know, like, head of, you know, cicarios or bringing in guns or actually exporting drugs as well,

transporting and all that stuff. But they do have to serve one of these two factions. And to give you an idea of the kind of money, these families are turning over. We went to a section of the city. It was to like three or four blocks, and it was a money exchange place. It was a place where you could take American dollars and go exchange it for pesos. That's a brilliant, perfect money laundering operation if you think about it, because the cartels probably own the money exchange places too. So not only are they cleaning up their pesos and

turning them into dollars, they're also using legitimate businesses as fronts to move the money through. It's fucking crazy. Our producer Brian went to one of these little streets the other day that had just a bunch of different tiny little stands with ladies working behind them. It is estimated that the families of Kulia Khan just in the city laundered $7 million a day just in that quarter mile section of the city. That's $2.5 billion a year out of one borough of one small city.

So just imagine the money from the rest of the Sinaloa. state or the entire Sinaloa Federation. I mean, they're doing untold billions in revenue every year. And they operate completely independently. Nobody tells them what to buy, how much to buy, how much to cook, who to sell it to, where to sell it? The only catch is, each one of these families must swear an allegiance to one of the two cartel factions, either Los Chapitos or Los Maitos and get their blessing before they start a drug activity. So, say a family from Kulia Khan wants to import, let's say, a ton of Coke from Colombia, 2,000 keys. He has to go to one of the families that he has an allegiance to to let them know what's

going on, because these families have to kick up a percentage of their profits from the drug trade to the cartel. And in return, what the cartel provides is safety. So they're the ones who pay off the cops in the military. They are the ones who have the protection of the politicians. and they also are the ones who own the drug routes. Now, what are drug routes? Drug routes are the literal geographic routes that the cartel has established for moving drugs along.

Let's say Los Mayos want to own the route all the way from South America to the border. Right. So you'll see first a lot of violence in Chiapas and then a bit in Durango, and then Takatecas, and then, you know, like that, until they own the whole route.

But in order for that, to happen, they have to have the protection of the military and the politicians in the particular towns of the route along which the drugs pass. You need to have the perfect trifecta, right? Like local governments, the state governments, and cartel working together on the same side. So pay attention. If I'm an independent operator in Kulia Khan, I've got $10 million, let's say, an operating capital, and I want to move a shipment of methamphetamine.

from Kulia Khan up to the Arizona border, the city of Nogales, right? There is a specific route in which I have to move that product along. And the routes are always changing, right, depending on who's in power politically and who the cartels are at war with. So what I would do as an operator is I would go to, you know, the head of Los Maitos, right? People loyal to El Miles Ambada. And I would say, hey, this is my plan. where is the route right now? And here is when I plan on moving the drugs. Is everything safe?

And they're the ones who have that information. So if a big meth shipment is coming from Kulia Khan to Nogales, which is in Sonora State on the border of Mexico and the U.S., that's a drug route, the politicians have to be on the side of whatever cartel is moving that shipment, right? So the cartel will come to the governor or the chief of police of that particular border city and say, hey, look, we need this route. We need you guys to protect the drugs or at least look the other way or we're going to start dropping bodies and that's going to be bad for you politically. They also sweeten it though.

They say, look, you take this cash that we're bribing you with and you allow these drugs to pass through. We are going to not only pay you money, but we're going to fix the transit system in your town. Or, hey, you need new roads. No problem. get those paved for you. So it's a mixture of plateau diploma, right? Take the money, the silver or the lead, you know? So it's a constant dance that the cartel does. And what that's doing is that's making these routes safe for the organizations in Kulia Khan, the drug dealers, to move their product.

And that's how it works now. These drug cartels are essentially just paramilitary groups. They are armies who guarantee the safety and protection of the drug shipments from different organizations within Kulia Khan. They work in perfect harmony together, the drug dealers and the cartel, but they're completely separate. So these dynastic drug families in Kulia Khan, a lot of these guys will never even touch a gun or talk to one of these foot soldiers guarding a cartel kingpin. These aren't gangsters. These are businessmen. This decentralization between business and muscle has made the Sinaloa cartel even stronger. Because not only is it impossible to take the whole organization down when there's no longer a hierarchy,

since the COVID pandemic, when the border got shut down, what these drug traffickers have now started doing is telling their buyers on the American side, hey, we will move the drugs as far north as the border. you gotta come and get it and smuggle it across yourself. So think about that. Many of these seniloan drug traffickers are not even smuggling the drugs to the other side anymore. They're operating completely within their own country, which they have under their control.

This completely contradicts all of the bullshit that you hear in mainstream American media about the cartels infiltrating your community and the tentacles that are, wrapping around American cities. They're not even moving the drugs across the border themselves. It's Americans. They're selling wholesale to American buyers at the border

and then retreating to the safety of their Mexican community. When the pandemic started, they cut off all of their Mexican traffickers to the U.S., right? Like people who were trafficking for them on a freelance basis. We're mostly Mexican. You will see the news from CDP or, you know, like for Border Patrol. And most of them were we got a Mexican mail on a pickup truck carrying like a certain amount of trucks, you know. And right after the pandemic, it was all U.S. citizens.

So they are using now exclusively U.S. citizens. All right, you guys, that's with today's episode. Thank you so much for watching. Make sure to tune in next week when we air our exclusive interview with Luis Chaparro, our friend, and the number one Cartel, journalist in Latin America. And as always, make sure to like and subscribe, follow us on all the socials, and if you want these episodes fully uncensored, make sure to sign up for the Patreon. Patreon.com slash The Connect Show. All right, we'll see you next time.