The Jordan Harbinger Show - 700: Ioan Grillo | How America Arms Gangs and Cartels Part One

Episode Date: July 19, 2022

Ioan Grillo (@ioangrillo) is a contributing writer at The New York Times specializing in crime and drugs. He is the author of El Narco: Inside Mexico's Criminal Insurgency; Gangster Warlords: Drug Dollars, Killing Fields, and the New Politics of Latin America; and Blood Gun Money: How America Arms Gangs and Cartels. [This is part one of a two-part episode. Stay tuned for part two later this week!] What We Discuss with Ioan Grillo: How did Ioan Grillo -- a journalist from the UK -- find himself covering the illicit guns and drugs trade from behind the scenes in cartel-controlled Mexico and other pockets of Latin America? The opulent cemetery where narcos are buried in multi-leveled, air-conditioned mausoleums that would make the ancient pharaohs blush. The most devastating examples of human catastrophe Ioan has witnessed while reporting narcos-related crimes over the past two decades. How much danger is a journalist like Ioan really in while reporting from the thick of such unfettered violence? How thousands of children are recruited or forced into doing the cartels' most bloody work. And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/700 Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course! Miss our interview with Freeway Rick Ross, the crack empire kingpin gone good? Catch up with episode 121: Freeway Rick Ross | Life in the Crack Lane here! Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people. We have in-depth conversations with scientists, entrepreneurs, spies and psychologists, even the occasional organized crime figure, investigative journalist, former jihadi or hostage negotiator, and each episode turns our guest's wisdom into practical advice that you can use to build a deeper understanding of how the world works and become a better thinker. If you're new to the show or you're looking for a way to, tell your friends about it, I suggest our episode starter packs is a place to begin. These are collections of our favorite episodes organized by topic that'll help new listeners get a taste of everything that we do here on the show. Topics like persuasion, influence, disinformation in cyber warfare, China and North Korea, scams and conspiracy debunks, crime and cults, and more. Just visit jordanharbinger.com slash start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Today, journalist and author, Yohan Grillo.

Now, this episode is heavy duty. if you've got kids in the car, now is a great time to go to another episode of the Jordan Harbinger Show. The drug trade is worth approximately $300 billion annually. This is why the most violent rise to the top. Everyone wants a piece, and they'll do just about anything to get it. The murder level in Mexico is just horrific. Over 5,000 bodies have been dug up in over 3,000 mass graves in Mexico. One mass grave near a middle-class neighborhood had something like 250 skulls in it. I mean, just think about that. Only the skulls. What does that mean?

33,000 murdered last I checked. And these are statistics that are rising by the dozens every single day. Just an unbelievable amount of sadness and horrific, horrific violence in Mexico. We're going to talk a lot about that today. As Yoan has been embedded in these cartels, has worked a lot in the scene, writing about drug dealers and cartels, really, from child saccharios all the way to drug traffickers that make it across the U.S. border. Human traffickers, gun traffickers.

We really do cover a lot. in this episode, some of it quite interesting, but all of it quite grim. There was a lot. We did two parts of this one, so here we go with part one with Yoan Grillo. What brings a guy from the UK, the civilized UK, to the west, the new country? I mean, I'm not even saying Mexico's uncivilized. I mean, you could have come to America and I'd ask you the same question. You know, like, what brings you to the danger zone? Yeah, so for a while I was interested in doing foreign journalism, international journalism. I kind of had this dream for a long time,

partly from watching movies, like the movie Salvador by Oliver Stone, which I remember liking that a lot, seeing that when I grew up and liking the idea of this kind of crazy character who's the kind of crazy drunken journalist in this Warren El Salvador, played by James Woods.

And it took me a while. I kind of messed around the different things in the UK, including pirate radio. Oh, yeah. That's so funny. I mess with private radio. and that's one of the reasons I do podcasting now is I was like,

it's illegal, it's impossible to do, it's expensive. And then podcasting came around and I was kind of like, this is the internet version of pirate radio, except I'm not going to go to prison, maybe. Yeah, yeah. So I was involved in the pirate radio scene in London in the 1990s. It was kind of a fun thing, a lot of pirate radio is happening. But anyway, I kind of got to university a bit later in life

and then had this dream of being a journalist. So I found out at that time, and this was going back to the year 2000, I found out that one way to beginning journalism then was to go to a different country and start in an English language newspaper. And so somebody said, you know, Mexico City is a good place to do that. I'd already lived in Spain for a year and spoke some Spanish. So I got a one-way ticket from London to Mexico City and got my backpack and flew over to Mexico City.

And then it took me a few months to get a job to land a job at the newspaper called The News. And I started writing there. And then that was 20 years ago. It's kind of moves to send. So you've been to Mexico for 20 years? Yeah, yeah. 20 years. Okay.

Yeah. Living in Mexico and covering the narco trade is no joke, as you are well aware. I mean, surely you are in the thick of it when it comes to corruption, hearing about executions and murders literally every day, I assume, or at least all the time. Does that not give you pause in terms of covering these people? Because it's a far cry from pirate radio to, like, decapitated bodies in the street. Yeah. Indeed.

So it was something that happened gradually in terms of. getting into this. When I arrived in Mexico, the drug war wasn't as bad as it is now, and it escalated while I was there. Before, it was a bit like an inside-the-paper issue, and then it became a front-page issue in Mexico and a big international story. And I was covering this as it escalated. One of the things I was doing, I got a job working for the Houston Chronicle, funny enough, at Houston, Texas, reporting from Mexico. And I started covering this increase in violence on the Texas-Mexico border in the city of Nuevo Laredo. And that was when we started seeing things get more crazy.

And back then, the newspaper was more relaxed. You say back then, what year are we talking about? Yeah, 2004, 2005. Okay. Because I lived in Guadalajara. Well, I spent some summers in Guadalajara 2000, 2001, 2002. And it was like, you didn't even hear about this stuff at all. Yeah.

You had to look for narcos. You had to look for drugs. They weren't all over. And you found them because your friends. at a club knew a guy who hung out at the club who had some drugs or whatever. I mean, you know, a friend of mine told me that. And like, you would party and you'd feel safe and like there weren't dangerous people running around that you could see.

And now, I've got show fans now in Guadalajara, guys that are like 30. And they're like, yeah, from when I was 12 riding my bike around everywhere to now, it's just a totally different place. Yeah, yeah. It's been very tragic. So back then, the newspaper would say, get up to Nueborello and cover this violence. And I would just go by myself, grab a plane to Monterey, rent a car, drive up there, run around trying to do this. And now newspapers, TV companies have got way more like protocols, way more security conscious.

And I saw this violence escalating and you saw this change. One of the big changes happened right there in Nueve Laredo. And this big change was if you look to some of the cartel hitmen going back to the 90s, let's say in Tijuana, these were guys who were like gang members. They're even gang members imported from the US. So these were like Mexican-American gangsters who were brought into Mexico. There's a whole bunch of them from San Diego, from a nearby called the Logan Heights,

who went down and they were committing these killings for the cartel. They were considered, you know, tough, ruthless at a time. And they'd be like guys with shaved heads, tattoos, you know, pistols, going in there. They tried to assassinate a journalist in Tijuana called Jesus Blancornelas. and one of the fact that it went wrong was they shot him four times the next bullet from the pistol ricocheted and shot the assassin in the eye.

Whoa, he must have got a rep from that one. Yeah, so the journalist survived those bullets, but it shows the fact he survived the fact these were not as heavy. When I started covering this in Nuevlaroedo, it started being very different. Suddenly I was covering these scenes like five corpses on a floor with a note by them.

These were gang members, and they were like, had these gang members and had a note by them saying, send more pendejos like these ones. or send more like idiots like these ones so we can kill them. And this was no longer regular gamums. These were former military guys in the Mexican military. And they were no longer fighting with pistols.

They were fighting with AK-47s, AR-15s, metal helmets, bulletproof jackets, radios, military-style stuff. And so you saw this escalation in the violence. I mean, this happened then and then I found myself. I mean, so I kind of got into this. I got to do 2008 when they started really escalating in a very, very big way. So we suddenly saw the cartel. related murders, the body count we believe were related to the cartels fighting each other, or the military killing people allegedly working with the cartels.

It went up from like 1,000, 2,000 a year to like 7,000 a year to like 15,000 in a year. And then kind of stuck up there, this high levels, 20,000 a year. And it's been up there and he's very, very high levels since. 20,000 in a year, you mean like cartel-related murders? Yeah. God, that number is staggering. Yeah. And when I was, you know, writing my first book, and we said,

And it's like, wow, we've got 30, 40,000 bodies from this conflict, this cartel conflict. And now we're talking about maybe 200,000, you know, over this time. Wow. Related to the fight between these different criminal organizations and the security forces, the military, the Marines, the federal police, fighting them as well. And they're leaving a lot of bodies as well. So you had this gradual escalation. And, you know, well, I got to 2008 when I was seeing this really escalate.

And there was one moment then when I was in state of Sinola, and I arrived at this small village where there had been two massacres. And I saw a bunch of people leaving the village in a trail of pickup trucks, like refugees, like literally leaving like, oh, pack up, let's go, let's get out of here. And I saw this kind of vision of these people that, I was like, wow, this is going to destabilize the country. This is something so big. This is not a crime story anymore. This is a national, international story. And that was when I thought, I can't do this anymore just in these news reports and newspapers. I've got to write a book about this.

And I proposed my first book, El Narko, then I'm about trying to make a bigger sense of this whole whole story. And then since then, I mean, it's been crazy. It continues to be crazy. I continue to work covering this. But sometimes I've tried to step away from it, try to think I'm going to do other stuff now. I'm not going to cover NARCO stuff anymore.

I'm going to find different stories. I'm going to get different countries. And it's quite hard to step away from. I keep on getting new jobs in a new, I just need to do a new TV series related to this. And it's like, it's hard when you can, kind of you start to establish a reputation for covering a particular topic like these, people keep coming to.

Is it Scarface that says every time I try and get out, they suck me right back in. Is that the quote? Is that from Scarface? Godfather three, I believe. Godfather three, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I always confuse these movies. Yeah, yeah. So that's your story as well.

Yeah, yeah. I guess so, yeah, it's hard to try to get out. But yeah, I still cover it. It's still crazy. You know, it's still as crazy as ever. In some way, some parts of it are more crazy or it's just like a level of madness. And at some point, this thing has to like stop. This thing has to calm down.

But it's going to be a few years before that happens. Okay. So, man, where do I even begin? Paint us a picture of some of the things that you've seen down there. You've done a good job of this so far. But there's got to be a few things that have stuck with you over the years. Because some of the things in the book, I read Blood, Gun Money, and I enjoyed it. It's an audiobook, right?

So you just pause and you just sit down wherever you are and you just kind of like take a couple of deep breaths because what you're hearing is so graphic and horrible that as a parent, you're almost sad that your kids are living in the same world as this kind of evil. I know that sounds dramatic, but it's so bad. It's so bad. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Let me think of a couple of these things, a few moments of what I've seen. So one that's not so bad, first of all, than a couple that are really bad. Sure. So one is this kind of the music scene, which is something I've been working on more recently. So I just come back in a way. I was filming in a graveyard in the middle of the countryside.

It's countryside and it very much becomes, I guess, bandit country. On one trip there, we were stuck in the mud and then a van came behind us or a SUV came behind us and they were all guys with camo AK-47s. And then they're the guys running this area. And then I was, you know, I realized over there said, oh, sorry we're in your way. And then they tried to get past us. They got stuck as well. And then I sort of laughing so sorry about this.

and they said, oh, don't worry. And they got on the radio and called a pickup truck to tow us out of the mud. And they were like young guys, and the funny thing is on the ground, they could suddenly be kind of friendly. And when we're filming there, we're filming this thing,

so in this graveyard, it was the anniversary of the death of this, one particular singer who was there. They were playing the songs of this singer where the local boss of this area came. And he said, oh, yeah, you're fine here, you're fine here, just don't worry about it. And there is kind of, you know,

people with guns, around. A lot of people taking, you know, lines of cocaine. There's a lot of cheap, cheap cocaine. You're getting these places, taking cocaine off, you know, off the, of grabbing keys and buying these different types of cocaine they sell locally and getting drunk. And there's music about this, this culture about these cartels. And the drug bosses, the top level guys will commission their songs by these musicians to sing about their exploits. So one of the singers, we interviewed as part of this, he said to me, oh, yeah, the El Mensho is one of this very, very, very famous wanted cartel boss.

He's like El Chapo's. I mean, yeah, he's up there on that same level with El Chapo, El Mio, these very, very big top level boss. Oh, El Mio, that was the guy I was thinking of, yeah. And El Mancho, like, contacted this singer through an envoy and said to him, how much you charge to write a song about me. It's kind of a hard thing because you get content, you can't really say no. Right.

But, you know, it doesn't necessarily want to. But he said, I'll give $40,000 to write a song about you. And then Mention got back to him and said, I'll take him. and said, I'll take two of those. Oh, yeah. One for me and one for one of my top gunmen. And he had these, you know, wrote these songs, played me the song, he'd done. It wasn't out on social media and stuff.

Like a lot of these songs, you see songs about big, big traffickers, and you can see them on YouTube about big names, with millions and millions of views. But this was, you know, just out there. So that's one thing about the narco culture. It's like branding. It's almost like how McDonald's gets Justin Timberlake to do the da-da-da-da. They're like, no, no, I want.

like a cool gangster rap with mariachi music behind it. Yeah. Talking about how I killed all these rivals, it's a commissioned piece of art. Yeah. That's so bizarre. So more that gangster culture in this city of Kula Khane, Sinola. There's a graveyard called the Gardens of Umaya,

which is a graveyard that many narcos have their graves there, and the girlfriends and wives of narcos. And I've been going there since 2008, going there for, I guess, yeah, 13 years, 14 years. And it's been, you know, growing in size and growing in the size, the Narcos have these big, like, masoleums. Some of them have like three levels and air conditioning. These kind of crazy things. I went there more recently just in the last month and now it's more controlled. They don't want people taking photographs, video of it anymore. You used to just go in there,

take photographs, video, it would be fine about it. Now that it's more controlled about this. You've got it shielded off and they've got people saying, you can't, you can't film here. The ostentatious nature. It's a very interesting sign there. And this idea, almost like a celebration of death in a way, but they kind of made it. These people made it. So it's the idea of the people within this culture. They made it by getting a corrillo about them, getting a song about them. They made it by getting a massive, massive grave.

They kind of made it in life. And it's this kind of a part of the culture there. Maybe some people don't know that Sina Loa is to Narcos like Sicily is to the mafia. Is that accurate? That's right. I'll say that. Like, Sinolaola was the place that the opium, began going back to the early 20th century.

Now, there's interesting stories about that, which is actually Chinese immigrants to Mexico, who began this. They grew up and sold it to Chinese immigrants in the United States. Really? Mexican Chinese, selling it to American Chinese, was one of the beginning of this cross-border drug trade. One of the first cases on file is 1916,

a group of Chinese Mexicans, but bribing a Mexican governor, even back then, driving around then and these big flash cars at the time. one called a Saxon, six, if I remember, there's some car of like the, you know, the time. That kind of ostentatious side of the Sinoloan culture, it is a very mad place.

But it's a place with a lot of high energy, a place with a lot of these, you know, like the culture is so deep, and you just become very, very normal in these areas. And, you know, the narco culture is very much, you know, that's the way people are. There's this word they use there called Balientes, which kind of could be literally translated as being like a brave ones.

And I heard Balientes used a lot about, narcos. But I think it means something a bit deeper than that. Balliente is the kind of idea they have of a strong man who's got no fear and stands up to defend his family, stands up to defend his honor, you know, if it might be standing up against the government, if it intervenes with him or the Americans or whatever. And that idea of valiante is kind of filled by the narcos, a lot of them they can consider themselves valiantes. So that kind of fits and there's so ingrained in the culture there. It's so mixed in there. You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest,

Yoan Grillo. We'll be right back. If you're wondering how I managed to book all these amazing folks from the show, these authors, thinkers, and creators every single week, it's because of my network, and I'm teaching you how to build your network for free over at Jordanharbinger.com slash course. This course is about improving your networking and connection skills naturally and inspiring others to develop a personal and professional relationship with you.

It'll make you a better networker, a better connector, and most importantly, a better thinker. That's all at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. And by the way, most of the guests on the show, they subscribe and contribute to that same course. Come join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. Now, back to Yoan Grillo.

So is there a Chinatown area, or like a Chinese area still of Sina Loa? It was just like descendants of... Interestingly, what happened was there was a wave of anti-Chinese racism in Mexico in the 1920s and 1930s, which also some of the revolutionary generals encouraged and used. And they used a lot of very extreme anti-Chinese violence, including, in fact, Pancho Bia was involved in a very big massacre of Chinese community in Mexico.

And they were also, in Cididdley, they were like loading these Chinese immigrants onto trains and taking them out and then taking over their businesses, a lot of them out of good businesses. So they took over their businesses, but also they took over the drug business. So that Chinese community was kind of decimated. Yeah. Now, there is a big Chinese community still in Mexicali. I think it's the biggest Chinese community in Mexico. Very good Chinese food there in Mexicali. And there's an interesting area there there's an underground area, in fact, of Mexicali where some of the Chinese community, at one point, we're living underground and built this whole... Literally underground. Yeah, literally underground area

they built. And it's very, very hot there as well. So it's kind of cooler underground. Wow. So for that image of something which you see and is quite attractive, this very flaccount. amboyant narco culture, but then I'll flip it and talk about something which is a very, very bad side. Yeah. So one of the worst days I saw in this, so it was just 2012. And I was here in Mexico City, and I got a phone call from editor saying, we got news of a big bunch of bodies that have been found up near Monterey. Can you get up there on cover it? So I said, sure, ran to the airport, got on the first plane.

And it was 49 bodies, which were all dumped on a road in a town called Cadare. just outside of Monterey. Now, all 49 bodies were all decapitated, all had their hands cut off and their feet cut off. Why? The idea of decapitation gets into a big thing of spreading terror, a terror tactic, the idea of your confronting an enemy

and trying to control the territory. So you do this by striking terror into them. The same way they've done since you go back to the Romans, and the Romans are trying to conquer Gaul, they kill rebels and hang up every mile, they've got another one hanging from a crucifix. You strike terror. This is anti-insurgency tactics.

The way you see this, you know, trying to fight the insurgency in Guatemala. You see people will cut the heads off people in front of villages. So part of that is you've got like an army trying to control territory and they use terror to try and control it. Now, you initially had these like five decapitated heads and then it would go up. You know, you had like two and then five and then 12 and then 18. And then 49 was like the escalation was the biggest number. After that, it kind of got like doing other. stuff. It kind of hit a peak then. So I've been covering this for years, these decapitated heads and

arrived at scenes with decapitated heads. But this was 49. The thing about this is you dump 49 bodies. They've got no faces. They've got no fingerprints. Oh, I get it. Okay. I was wondering what the point was. Very hard to identify them. So we go to this place and they brought them into the morgue in Monterey. And I'll go into the morgue and it's this stink of rotting flesh. It's a very distinct smell. And unfortunately, some of these scenes or particularly arriving, And sometimes when you find these graves, you start to learn and have this smell of like rotten human flesh. And, you know, horrific sight. And I went outside of the morgue.

And there was a woman outside. There was a bunch of people outside. And there were like people trying to find their family members who had gone missing. So, you know, I was interviewing them. And I talked with this woman. And I said, I'm trying to find my son. And she was a school teacher. I said, what, you know, what happened to your son?

So we were sitting at home here in Monterey. there was about a year before this. They were sitting in their house. She was sitting there with two of her sons. One was 18. He was a philosophy student. One was 15 in high school. Sitting there with a two sons watching TV on an evening.

Suddenly the door is broken open. And about 15 guys storming the house. And these are the guys are talking about. The guy's bulletproof jackets, AK-47s, helmets, summon them in ski masks, storming. And when you have these murder squads fighting around, they can just like, they're fighting different forces, but they can just like ravage the local population,

just look for money, look for easy picking. So they storm in the house and start grabbing stuff and they get the family on the floor. And they're about to go and they turn around and they say to the mama, which of the kids is the eldest? And she's like too stunned to answer. You know, what are you saying? You know, which of these kids is the eldest?

You know, why are you asking this question? She's like, and the elder son doesn't want the younger son son take and says, yeah, I'm the eldest. Oh, man. So the guys take him. You come with us. Take him. Obviously completely distraught.

No sign. The next day she gets a phone call. Okay, you deliver a bunch of money. We'll give you some back. You know, what's at that moment? She calls relatives, gets the money together, goes and drops it off at a certain place. Calls a number. No answer.

And a year later, she's arriving at this scene. Anytime she hears, she's seen on the news, 49 bodies discovered, like, is my son among them? Right. Was he forcibly recruited? Because this happened sometimes the people are grabbed and kidnapped. And then they forcibly put these people they were, you know, into like themselves, into give them a gun

and carrying out violence or doing different missions for them. Now, you know, when you're getting, when you hear 200,000, doesn't mean much that number in a way of emotionally, but when you think of that story

the pain on that woman's face and she was describing her life and her life was just destroyed, she couldn't work, she could go out to being a teacher, she was just like, you know, I can't live anymore. And the worst thing about that forced disappearance,

which is effectively is you've taken somebody, you've forcibly disappeared that person, is there's no closure. There's no, Knowing. Now, sometimes there's been cases of people, mostly women who have been really pushing for this, mostly the mothers. And there's some and two cases I know where they pushed and pushed and searched and finally identified the bodies of their children. One of them in Veracruz in a mass grave, which I also went to this mass grave of that 297 remains of 297 people in a mass grave. Wow. Which was on the back of a housing area. Again, this stuff, seeing this is kind of crazy. It was in a cowsfield on the back of a housing area. And the housing area was like kiddies bikes, basketball hoops.

And this kind of ideal of building a middle class home, this kind of dream. And down the back of that was this mass grave. Now, when they were uncovering the bodies, and in fact, that was only discovered because these mothers have been pushing trying to find where their lost children were and somebody gave them a map which showed this place. Sure. I mean, people have to, you can't bury 300 people without digging, a huge as hole next to a housing development.

So people knew that that was there and they just didn't do anything. It happened gradually. They would go to dumping ground so that people would see like vehicles, sometimes with police. And this is this horrific idea of police corruption or police when the police are completely involved in this thing, you know, they're part of the model. Right. It's not just not police turning up blind eyes, often police being active members to these organizations.

But then when they were uncovering these pits and that same stink I've described, that distinct smell of human flesh was reeking into this housing area. And they made a formal complaint saying, we're complaining about this because we're trying to live here and we've got this smell coming in. And those kind of details, I guess, are some of the stuff which sticks with me of seeing what this conflict has been, how it really is hurt regular people. So that glamorous side on one, and I can, you know, I can get it and I can enjoy narcos and I can see that glamorous aside, but it's that human catastrophe. And this is true. At one time, somebody was pitching a film idea on my first book, and he was saying it's kind of scar phase versus meets the killing fields.

And it's kind of true in some ways, it's kind of a scarface meets the killing fields. It's kind of a true description of this. Have you been to the killing fields? In Cambodia, I haven't, no. I can't compare it because I haven't seen a mass grave in Mexico. But back when I went, you could walk around and they told me, oh, don't go today because it's raining. And I was like, well, it's going to rain. tomorrow. They're like, I just don't go at all. It's awful. So I was like, well, I'm just going to go. And it stopped raining. And I thought, great, it stopped raining. Not a big deal. You know, I'll bring an umbrella. Well, it had been raining for a couple of days. Just drizzle. And when I got there, they were like, oh, be careful. It's really muddy. You can slip and fall. And I wouldn't go

back all the way around because there's still these sort of low pit areas. And, you know, it's slippery back there. And I'm, you know, I was young. I was like, I don't care. I'm going to go back there. So I walked all the way around and they have these giant, I guess they're like Watts. They're like these buildings, these sort of temples and they're filled to the brim with skulls. Just, you know, there's thousands of skulls in there. I have to Google this, but I guess maybe they found the bodies in the pits and then they put them to rest in the skulls after the fact and that those were not there when they were the killing fields, but there's these pits. And I was walking and I saw like bits of fabric sticking out of the ground. And I bent down to look at it and

I realized this is someone's clothing. They're still there. I'm walking on top of where this person is buried, and this is like a shirt or something that's sticking out of the ground all these years later. And as I sort of wrap my mind around that, I see this sort of U-shape in the mud, and I look closer at the U-shape because why would there be a U-shade, like a little horseshoe, like a tiny horseshoe. And I realized it was someone's lower jaw with teeth still in it poking out of the wet ground. It's not like a museum, really. They have a little bit of that in the front, but it's just still almost like, There's still people's body parts poking out of the ground.

It's horrible. I guess what are the differences between, I mean, these are episodes of mass violence, but the level obviously is a lot higher in Cambodia and the killing fields. I think that was something like a third of the population were killed in the Cambodian genocide. You know, we're talking about millions of people. And in Mexico, it's been about 200,000-plus murdered in the last 15, 16 years because of this particular conflict. other people have been murdered for other reasons in the country at the same time, obviously.

And a lot of those, I mean, the buried bodies are some of them, they're a smaller percentage. There's more people just killed on the streets. There's a lot of shootouts, a lot of execution-style hits. It's still a low intensity. If you call it a conflict, and I do think it's kind of a form of armed conflict or some form of organized mass violence, it's still low intensity compared to something like Ukraine. A lot of the time, these assassins picking people off.

So, you know, gone around covering the violence, you know, arriving at crime. scenes where I've been, you know, used to be with scanners, used to be driving around with scanners, basically the police radio nowadays, there's, you know, there's almost a lot of time contact with police or, you know, Twitter groups and that kind of thing sometimes giving information. But like driving around to these crime scenes, driving around when the, when there's fresh, you know, borders, it's often the execution style hit, they call it, Echolabel, they call it Spanish, they ambush and just like, you know, that's a lot of the deaths of that way. You hear about officials getting shot literally hours after giving a speech about corruption, for example.

You're covering this. You're writing about it. Are you not worried about them coming after you at all? I mean, anybody covering this is obviously like a fear in anybody has doing this when you're around, a lot of violence around a lot of violent people. Like, what if I upset them? You know, what if, you know, so that's obviously a fear of anybody covering this. Now, in Mexico, there's been more than 150, now it's, you know, more than 160 journalists have been murdered in the time. time that I've been here. The vast majority have been people who are born and bred here from Mexico. Now, that's not to say I'm in some way immune to this, but often it is people who are from these small towns or these cities where the cartels are strongest where the violence is happening and people who live in these areas. So even being living in Mexico City gives a certain level of

protection. You know, Mexico is a big country in as many different situations. Mexico City is very different than it is when you're in Kulekansenaloa, when you're in Veracruz, when you're in Venezuela, Tama-Lipas. When you're in those areas, and when I'm in those areas, it's often very scary, but then you can, you can encounter these cartel figures, and you know what it's like, they're right there. And then, you know, for people who live there, they're right there. You can go to the cinema, you go to the supermarket. These guys are there. You see these same guys. They know where you live. You're very, very close to them. Anything you do, they can get you actually very easily. When you go there for reporting and come back to Mexico City, that provides

a certain distance there. But saying that, I don't feel at all that, you know, immune. There's certainly been various incidents that have happened over the years. There's been some scary moments. There's been some threats that I've received. But also, I work with two journalists specifically who have been murdered, one in the state of Michoacan, who disappeared, and one in Kula Kuala, who was a friend called Habibaldes, a very prolific journalist. list. He wrote eight books. He was a great kind of columnist for his local newspaper, a very generous guy. The first time I met him was 2008 when I was up in Sinola and I got his number from a friend and I called him up and found him. He said, oh, you can't meet me in this

can't meet me in this canteen. And I walked to the canteen and he was sitting there at a table by himself with a glass and a bottle of whiskey. We got there. We got hammered, really, really funny stories, really, really, you know, very charismatic generous guy. And then he was murdered in 2017, just outside of his office. He was shot 12 times. And so I've seen a lot of this death around and known or interviewed or had interactions with, you know, pretty more than 20 people who have been killed, you know, for different things. And it continues to be the case.

A friend of mine runs, I know it's an Instagram account. There's probably also like a blog. She runs a blog called, I think it's Demolair is the name. and probably butchering the pronunciation, but she's a fan of the show. She's a journalist down in Mexico. She posts everything anonymously because her beat is narco-trafficking, and she just knows they would come after her in a heartbeat. You probably know her, but you probably know her real name,

or you know who she is, because I don't know how many journalists there are that are probably keeping a high, have a high profile like she does, but are also trying to post anonymously to stay safe. I'll look it up, I'll probably missing the pronunciation. But yeah, I mean, there's been various anonymous things as well. And some of the people who are living in these areas have, you know, there's been certain blogs that have been done to people.

Some of the local newspapers say in Nueva Laredo, where the newspaper there after various attacks said, we're not going to cover crime anymore. It's not going to cover it. Yeah. We can cover the social events. We can cover what the mayor is doing about, you know, building a new school.

We can't cover crime. So you had this filling in the gap, these like anonymous writers like the ones, like the ones you're saying, who were like giving information. Now, there's also been murders of some of the alleged anonymous writers. Now, are they the real ones or not? You know, did they really find out from somebody or from some technology or find out who it was and murder them? Or did they murder somebody else and claim it was them? And you had the fear anyway. Sure. But even people then were scared about writing anonymously and what could happen.

Tell me about some of these Sicario kids you meet down in South America because these, it's so sad. They're damaged and they're full of hate. And also, they're extremely dangerous. Yeah. So I spent a lot of time over the last 20 years interviewing killers, as well as interviewing traffickers and some of the high-level bosses. You find different types of people, but I definitely see different personality types around some of the different functions.

So when we talk about the sagadios, the hit men, the murderers, the muscle, and you see people who have nerves. So not anybody at that moment can put out a gun and shoot somebody. do it again and again and again. Not anyone can do that. Certain people can. Now, also, it's often people who are prepared to do that, who have hate inside them, who have had a bad child, that a bad experience, and afterwards they feel well,

I'm going to kill people. I don't care. So, you know, I have one interview with another kind of head of Sicadios in a group called the Barrio Azteca, which is a cross-border group based in Texas and Sierra Juarez, Mexico, particularly. And he was describing how they recruit these young Sicayios. And they look, deliberately look for, okay, who's among these kids, who is people who we can tell they've got the hate, they're angry, they're about, you know, we don't want somebody's got a nice home life stuff. We want somebody who's being damaged.

A profile I do go through in blood, gun money was one particular Sicario down in Honduras, south of Mexico and Honduras was a guy whose nickname was Fressa, meaning strawberry. I was doing some other work and I made him and he was kind of helping take care of a journalist down there. he was an old friend of his from school and he was kind of hang around with him armed because some other guys were after his journalist and then I went back and I sort of looked to Segarios and this guy mentioned, oh, you, when he talked to Fressa. And I actually already gone out for him

and gone out drinking at a club with him and he was a good company. And I knew he was kind of involved in stuff. I didn't know how deep. I said, oh, I didn't know he was like, he said, no, no, he's kind of gone up a bit in the ranks there, and you should interview him. So we went and sat down for an interview with him.

He actually survived the shooting as well between this couple of times, survived. He had a lot. He had a stomach with a bunch of big bullet holes in his belly. He described how when he was a kid, he'd been abandoned by his parents. So his mom and dad basically left him with nothing on the street. And he said he was just had this hate about why they left him. You know, why do my parents leave me?

Why do they, you know that? Why do I suffer? Why do other people not suffer? So this drove him a lot. Now, sometimes I interview people. I think this guy's a psychopath. You know, this guy just doesn't care. Yeah.

But this guy, Fraster, was not like that. He was somebody I think he did care, but he had it's like very. very, very troubled time. He was on the street and he was surviving and they had another kid when he was 13, I believe 13 years old around that age. Another kid said, I know we can get some money. There's a house with some money there. Just going to rob it. So a bunch of these kids went and robbed this house, went to rob, supposedly rob this house. And actually there was a family there. It was a kind of adopted family and they butchered the family, the parents and the kids. and the reason actually was the kid himself

who used to live in this house and had been abused there and wanted revenge on the whole lot and he described when they butchered this family and it was like, I was like, I was like, go open, I could feel him the way he was describing this and even the way they were doing this, there were kids, but they were like,

isolating them one by one and killing them saying like, you hold there and then take them out one by one and killing them. Now obviously, how do you come back from that? And then he was recruited. Yeah. And then he carried out a professional hit went on a bus, shot somebody, the blood kind of got over him. Often that's the first case when they could get too close.

And then he became a pretty hard and professional hitman and killed a bunch of people, a lot of people. And he described also where they get contracts to decapitate people. You were asking before about decapitation. So they specifically request that because it's like an extra insult to the injury. Yeah.

And they wanted it on video so that they wanted to see, okay, you've carried this out. Wow. And often it was treachery, that kind of thing. Someone was just so furious. If that guy betrayed me, I'm going to get him back. And he described the moment where they cut the head off these victims. Well, you'd have victims who were there and how they would kind of be reacting when you kind of got the machete out.

And then when they cut the head off and the body would still be kind of be nerves and still be kind of moving. Now, it was one of the most brutal interviews I've ever done and it was more painful because I had spent time with him. And it wasn't that evil guy you could imagine in all sense. And he had his own children. And he was like, I want to try and give them a life he didn't have. And he was kind of living in a middle class house relatively in Honduras. And then we got to about a year after that. I got a phone call from Honduras.

They killed Fressa. You know, they shot him dead. You know, he was killed, kind of live by the gun, by the gun. But one of the interesting things I asked him, I said, you know, and I asked him, you know, what are your religious beliefs? and he said like I've kind of been to church, I've been different churches, but I don't know if there's any redemption

for the things I've done. And he kind of felt that himself as well. Within this violence and this cycle of violence, you do see this kind of both victims and victimizes, these kind of endless roles there. You know, how do you break out of this cycle? And it's not excusing the horrific thing some of these people do.

And some of them, you know, these people, you know, need to be in prison or, you know, need to be taken out of circulation. Yeah. They should not be on the streets. But, you know,

you have to break out and try and stop. the next generation, because as we speak, I mean, there's, and I said this, it's sad to say, I remember talking about these, having these conversations 10 years ago. You know, like now we're in, what, 2020, like going back, my first book I'm out in 2011, having these conversations then saying in 10 years, time, will it be any better? It's not. The kids when I first was covering Nueva Lueblo and other in 2004, you know, they were like babies

then, and now they're full-grown killers. So how do you try and break the cycle and work with the new generation coming through? This is the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Yoan Grillo. We'll be right back. Thank you so much for listening to and supporting the show. It's your support of the sponsors of the show that helps keep the wheels turn in here. All those links and discount codes that are all in one place, a very searchable place,

Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. That has all of the discounts. There's a search function there now. It works on your phone. You can also search for the sponsors using the search box on the homepage of the website as well. So please consider supporting those who support this show. Now for the rest of Part 1 with Yoan Grillo. It's scary to think we live in a world with this sort of unchecked evil.

And these kids, they're not making tons of money to kill people. Life is really cheap, right? I mean, it's not a high-ticket item. Yeah, I mean, it varies, and you have this. I mean, it used to be higher to kill people. And then you still get some professional killers who command decent amounts of money, but they still tend to live, you know, what I've seen, some of these killers. They go through becoming killers, and then they actually,

become the top guys in the organization. They're around power. They get close to the power. They start investing in the drug deals. They start becoming more heads of the organization. Now, they run the organizations very violently because they've come through as being hitmen to their first recourse is murder. But other times you see some of these hitmen who kind of attain like a middle class lifestyle, but they're from these very poor neighborhoods. And sometimes you see people who are carrying out murders for $50. I mean, at that price, literally no one is safe. You're only kept safe by the idea that most people don't have the guts, if you can even call it that,

to have their ex-girlfriend murdered for some reason or their former business partner shot because they're still pissed off about something from five years ago. You know what I mean? Like 50 bucks? You know, it's no longer the cost. And if I think what, 90% of murders go unsolved in Mexico. So it's not even fear of getting caught. It's just, can I sleep at night if I do this?

Or maybe I don't know any hit men and I don't run in those circles. Like, that's the only thing keeping this from being the way that everybody settles everything, seemingly. Yeah, yeah. You wanted to get to any natural limits. The organized crime violence, it does spill down to regular things of society. So there's, like, one guy interviewed who was selling guns. He was a former military guy who started selling guns when he was in the military. He was actually selling the guns the military would seize.

Oh, wow. So the military would seize a big stash of guns. And there'd be like a deal, like, you sell these off in the streets. And then in a big network, to the military was a good. place to have a big network because you sit in a barracks and you've got like one guy from Guerrero, one guy from Veracruz, one guy from Chappas, like who wants to take guns back to their own places. Then he left the military and he was still selling guns kind of at a trickle, but he was also carrying out some hits. But it comes and starts to be like what you say like not just

organized crime hits, but like regular like vengeance for jealousy or that kind of thing. And I look at organized crime as having two main areas. One of the areas of organized crime, is providing services that the legal market won't provide. So it can be drugs, it can be prostitution, it can be gambling, in different places. Another side of organized crime is getting money, kidnapping, extortion, armed robbery, just taking money. For a society, I think providing services is less damaging. It's when you get very, very heavy extortion and kidnapping,

being that it starts to really have a downward spiral. The drug market is a bit of a two-edged swords because it both provides money, but it also brings in violence and corruption. When you talk about professional killers for hire, it's weird because it's taking, but it's also providing a service. Now, when you have a dysfunctional justice system, like in Mexico, and that's another thing that organized crime steps to do, and part of understanding how these cartels have got so big and how the death count is so bad, is to understand this is not only about drugs. These are some quite fundamental. issues about society, about what these cartels have got into.

But another example of that is you had this, remember in Mitch Okand, state called Mitch Ok, a very, very big organized crime there. And the mafia there, the cartel there would also provide a debt collecting service. If somebody owes you money, they'll collect the debt and they'll take a third for themselves. This guy owes you $10,000. We'll get it for you and we'll take, you know, $3,300. Now, in a country where you've got dysfunctional justice, if it's very, very much, very hard to get it back to the courts, that's quite an attractive prospect. So you get this kind

of weird thing of these cartels filling certain functions that the state is failing to do. I've heard that the problem with taking out some of these drug kingpins, so the bosses, is that when their lie lieutenants take over, they fight over the territory and they fight over the business and that increases violence. Because a lot of the guys that are fighting over territory, they're not, if they're not the boss boss, right, they're not as well connected, they're not as well respected. Maybe they're not as smart or educated or well-versed in the business. So like you said before, maybe they don't know how to solve problems or run the business effectively, and it creates conflict, which then increases violence. And we had an episode about kidnap insurance, episode

651 with Anya Shortland. And she explained that in criminal enterprises, like let's say, Somali hijack, kidnap boats for ransom, that kind of thing, you actually want some level of stability. You want big gangs. You want consistent people in charge. You want them handling things because they self-regulate in a way. They're more stable. So they set up and enforce rules so that things don't get out of control. Kind of like for people who watch narcos, you sort of are living it. But people who watch narcos, it's like no fighting between Plaza Tijuana and Plaza Juarez because you're just wasting resources and money, like focus on the business. Whereas if that central control doesn't exist. That central power doesn't exist. Those guys are like, well, I want to take over your

Plaza and you want to take over ours. So they've spent all this time killing each other. And the kidnapping analogy is, look, they kidnap somebody, but maybe they don't torture the hostage because then the military gets called and everyone ends up dead instead of getting paid. But when newbies or idiots are getting into the game, they do stupid crap to cement their power and their reputation. It's bad for business. And obviously, it's bad for anybody around the business. And in Mexico's case, correct me if I'm wrong, but it's better to be around a bunch of narcos moving cocaine. then around a bunch of narcos shooting at each other

with truck-mounted 50 caliber machine guns in the middle of downtown Juarez or wherever. Yeah, so that thing about the structure of organized crime, it makes it, you've got very shitty options here in terms of what the government and what society can do about this. You're very right. Sometimes when you have powerful, stable organizations,

the murder count will go down. One example of this is Sao Paulo in Brazil. They've got a very powerful mafia there called the PCC, the first commander of the campaign. capital, and they reduce the murder rate very deliberately. They say, like, you know, you can't murder unless we give you permission to murder, otherwise we're going to punish you. And the murder rate goes down, but you've got extremely powerful organized crime force, which if they don't get what they want, and this happened, they suddenly rose up and

blockaded the entire city and started burning down banks and buses and making hell for the government. So you've got a very, very powerful mafia in control. It's a bit similar to that in, I would say, in Kulia-Kan, Sinola right now, in this capital of Sinalo Kulekan. You've got a very powerful mafia there in the sons of El Chapo, Los Chapitos. They've got a very powerful grip on that city. They also fronted the government in 2019 when one of them was arrested. The government backed off and released them. They had 700 to 800 government on the street. They've got incredible powerful control of that city. But the murder rate in Kula Khan has gone down compared to some of the years in the past when there was more fighting. On the flip side,

you have situations where you have states where you've broken down, you know, you've gone after the boss and then, you know, and then you end up with the fragment of the fragment of the fragment. So one of the very powerful leaders in Mexico used to be a girl called Arturo, Beltra and Lever. He was killed in Coenabaca in 2009. He had a big empire which spread through Morelos, Guerrero, a lot of states in southern Mexico.

After he was taken down, they started breaking off. You've got the fragments, the fragments. So suddenly you got these people like these little groups that could, control small areas of the countryside, controlled heroin there, and they're really, really violent. And they're very young, crazy people. There's one of them called Eluelo Palaya, one guy in his 20s with like hundreds of teenagers with AK-47s, like controlled. They held down, they had a bunch journalists and took all their stuff. Another group that was called the Guerreras Unidos were the ones involved in likely in the kidnapping and disappearance of 43 student teachers.

Why student teachers? I heard about that. And I'm like, they're just teachers. What's What's the, why? Why do that? It's a crazy case, a very, very sad case. There's a lot of very heated case in Mexico. My own analysis of that, going deeply into that, trying to understand it. And I could be wrong, but I look quite hard at what we do know and talk to a lot of survivors and tried to make sense of this, was that it was an escalating situation that happened. And really, it comes down to this issue of you had this kind of narco state where you had

the local authorities totally mixed up with the cartel and the police from the cartel intertwined, the mayor, all of them involved. And there was an escalating situation that ended up with both the mayor being angry and the mayor's wife being angry about a bunch of out-of-town student teachers causing trouble when she was giving a speech in the town, combined with a bunch of these kids taking a bus and they were using these buses to transport heroin. And then the confrontation kind of escalated and these kind of escalated in some ways themselves, assassins themselves started firing at the kids.

So suddenly other people around town to go and the shooting happening. So it's kind of escalating it themselves, the attackers. And then suddenly like orders coming and these kind of commands doctors are saying, just take them and then, you know, ending up with this extermination. It's just so horrible. Just killing 42 student, right, student teachers. 43, yeah, 43. Yeah.

Yeah. It's just like for no, I mean, these are not violent people. They're not mixed up in the cartel. It's just really just, they're just trying to be teachers. Unfrickin believable. I guess when you create these killing machines and where that happened, I mean, there have been a series of, you know, we look at these mass graves and they've been closed by to there in a place called Tasco.

One of the first big mass graves was in a mine in Tasco where loads of bodies dumped in this silver mine. When you start creating these killing machines and so you have this escalation of the cartels, the state or elements of the state being taken over by these cartels. So they're running and working with elements of police forces and governments. And then they're fighting to control territory. And then it becomes like, you know, we've got to exterminate anybody working in the other cartel.

Then they get used to like massacring 50 people here, 100 people there, laying mass graves. So it becomes routine for them. And then suddenly you've got a bunch of student teachers run into this and they can take them out as well. I know that policemen get murdered in Mexico all the time. Which is, I guess it makes sense, especially if they're mixed up with the cartels. A lot of that just seems like some are mixed in with cartels and are part of a rival gang. And also, if you're well armed, you could probably just take on the police if they try and stop you from doing anything. But it was something along that, I think you wrote this.

First three months of 2019, one policeman murdered per day in Mexico, which is 15, 16 times higher than the United States average. Yeah, a lot of the time the cops can be bad cops who are being murdered. So they're working with one particular cartel, the other cartel takes them out. Or they can be working with a cartel. They can take some money from a cartel and then they don't deliver. So the cartels, all right, you didn't deliver. I paid you that money. And then how come my safe house got busted?

That's your fault. I'm going to take you out now. Or it can be because you've got a good cop or a cop is not mixed up and they're in the way and they're like, you know, we're going to take you out because we're going to put pressure. So also you see some of the cartels having a logic. And there's an academic called Ben Lessing. who created a term for this called violent lobbying. He divided these attacks on the police, two categories.

He said violent corruption, which was what we're describing. Violent lobbying, where you have a cartel who wants to pressure the government. So the government's trying to have a big offensive in a certain area, and it's taking out its safe houses, taking out its drugs, taking out its people. So they say, okay, we're going to start killing police officers or killing civilians until you back off. So we're going to use violence and, unfortunately, it works. You know, you see this working all the time in Mexico and other countries in Brazil, using violence against a government that's violent but weak in some ways.

I guess the Mexican government or state apparatus is kind of violent, corrupt, but also quite weak in some aspects as well. The level of violence there is it comparable to medieval Europe? I mean, it just seems like people are just killing each other on impulse almost or just it's like I expect people to settle things with a duel, like a gun duel outside of a bar. I mean, I know that's not everybody, but it just seems like the Wild West, but worse somehow. Yeah, so compared with the medieval Europe, if you look at medieval Europe and say medieval England, you had about 20 murders per 100,000.

Now, in all of Mexico right now, you've got higher than that, you've got about 25, but in certain areas, you've got many times higher than that. Certain states, you've got over 100. Wow. So like five times higher than medieval Europe. Now, whereas in medieval Europe and you had, if you look at the murder weapons there, you had like daggers and swords and staffs, the big majority in Mexico of gunshots. But like, I would say, you know, what really drives the high murder rates is not the killing on impulse. It's more like the big machines of murder.

It's more big reasons. I think even maybe if you just had, if there wasn't like be organized crime, just people like suddenly get pissed off with somebody and then resort to violence and kill somebody, that wouldn't be as high. as it is in parts of Mexico right now. In some cases, you have two cartels clashing to control the territory. So you've got all of the resources in that territory, which is not only drugs, but drugs are still a lot of money in drugs. So you've got like taking drugs to Americans, heroin, fentanyl, crystal meth, cocaine, even marijuana still, you know, elements of marijuana, huge amounts of money there. Selling the drugs locally in that area, a bunch of money there. But it also can be stealing oil from the government pipelines, shakedowns of businesses. It can be mining,

basically shaking down gold mines, wildcat mining, prostitution, human smuggling. If you're controlling a territory that's on the border with the United States, then these days people are paying up to $10,000 to these human smugglers to go to the United States. And the human smugglers either are working directly for the cartel or just paying off some money for the cartel. So the Carthales owning a piece of that. So sometimes you have two big organizations clashing to fight for territory. And that's something when you get these really, really big body counts. Another reason you get really big body counts when you have one organization, there's a big civil war in that organization. They know where they live. You know, like suddenly that they're in one place. We know where

you live. You know, suddenly who are you with you? With that guy or with that guy. And so there's often these are the reasons when you get these really high body counts. If you look at the worst murder rates in Mexico. Right now, states of Zacateca, so we look at the city of Tijuana, where there's rival organizations fighting for control of these states. If you're looking for another episode of the Jordan Harbinger Show to sink your teeth into, here's a trailer

for another episode that I think you might enjoy. Tell me about the neighborhood where you grew up. South Central Central Massachusetts. Yeah. Well, most people play the game Grant Def Otto. So I'm sitting on the porch and I don't know what I'm going to do and my partner calls me and he's like, man, I got the new thing.

And it was cocaine. Cocaine was really, really expensive then. Yeah. You know, a gram of cocaine back then was like $375. Wow. So it was dozens of times more expensive back then than it is now. Like 300 times. Wow.

And it's also the most expensive thing that you can fit in your hand that cost that much money probably. Maybe you have watched. Yeah, absolutely. At that time, they said cocaine was more expensive than gold. How much money are we talking about here? I probably was making about $55,000 off of a kilo. I think you made up around about $1,000. billion dollars in the 80s in LA.

That's what I heard on the documentary. For two years, I made like $600 million. Not profit for me, but money that went through my hands. Before I started making a million every day, we was making $500 every day. Before we were making $500. Before we made $400. Before we were making $4, we made $100. So you scaled up to a million dollars a day?

Yeah, yeah. I had days that I went through $3 million in one day. How are you even counting that much money? Oh, you have money counters. Yeah. And you have a team of green. girls that sit there and they count money all day. You know, you have a house and this house would have like a slot in the door, and people would just come in and drop duffel bags through the door.

So I wanted to know what was the difference between real business and the cocaine business. And what did you find? There's none. For more of Freeway Rick's story as one of the biggest drug dealers of all time, including his ties to the CIA, check out episode 121 of the Jordan Harbinger show. That's it for Part 1, tuned for part two, mostly on gun trafficking as well. Our conversation will continue right here in a few days. Links to all things Joanne will be in the website and the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com. Books are always at Jordan Harbinger.com slash books. Please use our website links if you buy the books from guests. It does help support the show. Transcripts are in the show notes. Videos are up on

YouTube. Advertisers, deals, and discount codes are all at Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. Please consider supporting those who support this show. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. Our free course using software systems and tiny habits to network and create connections is our six-minute networking course. It's free. It's over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. I'm teaching you how to dig the well before you get thirsty. And most of the guests on the show, they subscribe to the course, they contribute to the course. Come join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. This show is created an association with Podcast One. My team is Jen

Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogart, Millio Campo, Ian Baird, Josh Ballard, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show is that you share it with friends and you find something useful or interesting. If you know somebody who's into Mexico, drug cartels, gun trafficking, human trafficking, please share this episode with, and hopefully they're not criminals. You know, they're just interested in the practice thereof in general. Share this episode with them. The greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you listen, and we'll see you next time. When it's time to scale your business, it's time for Shopify.

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Finding a new great podcast shouldn't be this hard, so let me save you some time. If you like the Jordan Harbinger show, you'll probably like Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. It's one of those shows that makes you smarter in a practical, useful way. Same curiosity vibe we go for here, just in a fast, focused format. Mike brings on top experts and asks the exact questions that you'd want to ask, and the topics are all over the place in the best way. recently they've covered things like why we care so much what other people think the benefits of laughter why sports fans get so invested and what makes people like you or not the through line is always the same smart ideas you can actually use in real life something you should know has been featured in apple's shows we love and it's got thousands of five-star reviews because it's consistently interesting so if you want another show that scratches that i want to understand how people in the world really work itch search for something you should know wherever you get your podcasts look for the bright yellow light bulb and start Start listening. You can thank me later.