The Underworld Podcast - The OG Mexican Narco: Pablo Acosta

Episode Date: October 7, 2025

Pablo Acosta ruled Mexico's drug trade from a dusty border town, turning Ojinaga into a narco-empire that funneled billions in cocaine, weed and heroin into America during the 1980s. Known as the Fox of Ojinaga, he was a ruthless trafficker who taught the narco-world that it was better to buy the authorities than fight them. His dealings with the Colombian cartels changed the Mexican underworld as we know it...until a coke problem and a bloody FBI-backed raid in 1987 turned a remote Mexican village into a war zone. This is the story of the man who pioneered the border drug corridor, leaving a legacy that still shapes the cartel wars today. https://quince.com/underworld for all your clothing needs, use code Underworld at checkout! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. It's the summer of 1983 in Chihuahua State, Mexico, just an hour or two from the border of Texas. And there's a cartel war that's been raging in the scrublands and canyons that dot the area, one of the most vicious that the region has ever seen at that point. And Pablo Acosta, otherwise known as the Ohanagan Fox, has had enough. He's gone with some of his goons to stake out the 12,000-acre ranch of Fermin Aravalo, another top trafficker in the area that he's been warring with for years.

Pablo and Vermein actually met in jail in the mid-70s when both were locked up on drug trafficking charges and became fast friends. Pablo was pretty small time then, and Fermin helped him out getting a lawyer, getting him money, and getting him released. Fermin had had his own thing going. He lived a fascinating life. He was a rodeo star. a bank robber, and a cattle rustler, well before becoming a drug trafficker.

He's famous in the area, rough, a real border outlaw cowboy who had good connections with all the growers in Sinaloa. He also had his two sons helping him. When he meets Pablo in jail, he's serving three years after getting raided, but he manages to run things even while he's locked up and his sons help out on the outside. Thanks to him helping Pablo out, the families actually get really close. But friendships never last in the narco world. In the ensuing years, Pablo ends up becoming the top dog in Ohanagua, the boss of the plaza. And Fermin, him and his two sons, they don't like that at all. Tensions rise. And then Pablo loses a major cross-border weed shipment in the States after the police are tipped off. And then starts losing internal flights

to Mexican authorities. He starts to get suspicious. Starts to think. think one of Fermian sons is selling him out. And finally, one of the sons actually rips Pablo off on a deal. Soon enough, some of Pablo's men come across both the Fermian sons and there's a shootout. One son is killed and the other wounded, and the tensions break out into full-on war. Bodies drop left and right over the next 18 months. Finally, Pablo decides, okay, this is it. It's time for a handshake or a showdown, Wild West style. These guys really are cowboys banded outlaws. So he stakes out the ranch until he believes it's relatively empty, and then he approaches the house, only to be met by Fermin's wife, who begins a back and forth with him.

She claims he's not home, that he left, and at one point, Pablo even hands his pistol to her and says she can shoot him if she thinks it'll bring her son back. It ends in a tense stand-off, but Fermin isn't there. He actually had snuck out of the house. On Pablo's way back, him and his men are then ambushed by Fermin and his man. But Pablo manages to turn the tables on them, and Fermin and his men are both killed. Pablo and his goons then had back to the ranch house to grab Fermin's wife and her maid

and take them both hostage, not knowing if there's going to be a second ambush. But there isn't. Then they actually bring the woman back to the scene of the shootout to show them her dead husband's body. Quote, We opened him up like a goat, Pablo was said to have told her, after one of his men used the machete to desecrate the body.

Shortly after, an arrest warrant is issued for him and his men, but he spends 200 million pesos or about a million dollars to kill it off. Pablo is now untouchable. The war is over, and he is the undisputed boss of Ohanagua and 200 miles of the Texas border. And it's a good time for a burgeoning drug trafficker to be in charge of that border. Because something that's going to change everything is just about to start showing up there in major quantities, coming straight off flights direct from Colombia.

And Pablo's story, it isn't just about the evolution of a Mexican drug lord. It's about the drug trade itself, because Pablo is at his height at probably the biggest turning point in the drug war's history in Mexico, maybe even for the U.S. I don't know. and probably the biggest turning point for Mexico itself in the last 50 odd years. This is the underworld podcast. Welcome back to the underworld podcast where we tell fascinating stories about international organized crime every single week in the hopes that people like you will listen to it. And then meal kit companies and shampoo startups will give us significant amounts of money

to then interrupt those stories and pitch their products to you, are brilliant listeners in the hopes that you heed what we say about, said products and buy them. And we are, me, Danny Gold, and my co-host and hetero-life mate, Sean Williams. We're both journalists who have reported on this stuff all over the world. And Sean pretty much still does. Where even are you right now? No, I'm back in Wellington, mate. But yeah, I'm in between what's Saigon and Tokyo, where I'm going to be in a few days, which is going to be awesome. I even bought a gimbal and a lapel mic for my trip to Saigon. We're our next show is coming from from.

some crazy slum there. And I kind of lost my nerve. I realized that to be an influencer, you have to have completely, you have to have such a massive ego to walk around with a gimbal and a phone talking to no one. Yeah, so I just kind of filmed a bunch of stuff.

But yeah, life is good. Life is very good. And I like to see you rep in the Yankees as well. Shame about last night. Fire Aaron Boonderd. Fire. It's too much. I'm not happy.

But yeah, we should get this going. Oh, you see the mug, dude? Classy Hotel, you ever been there? It's like the one hotel that journalists stay at in northern Iraq and reveal in the Christian neighborhood where you can get hammered and eat giant stakes. It absolutely rules. Okay, here we go.

As always, there are a weekly bonus episodes at patreon.com slash aneworld podcast for $5 a month, or you can support us just $3 a month to help us keep this going. You can also sign up at Spotify or iTunes, UnderworldPod.com for merch, T-search and t-shirts and things like that. And email us at the Underworld Podcast at gmail.com for tips, complaints, compliments. Maybe you have a clothing company or sunglasses company and you want us to wear your stuff on the air. Send us free stuff. We will do it.

Okay. Are we good? Oh, yeah. I should mention there was a correction on that Epin Forrest Murders episode that we did. Yes. I mentioned that. Embarrassing for you. Very extremely, uh, bigly embarrassing.

Yeah, I said that the craze were running around London's underworld to the 90s. Actually, they've been in prison since the late 60s. They were doing stuff from behind bars, of course, and they didn't die for a long time. But, yeah, I don't know how that slipped through the net. I think I was too excited about conspiracy theories with the police. But, yeah, well done for calling me out on it, guys. And please do send all your complaints directly to the podcast email, not my email. cast email. You know, if you were actually in Japan right now, which you're going to be in next week,

I would make you cut off a segment of your pinky for breaking great shape on our name on the podcast for that. Yeah, I've got very small fingers, actually, so it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world. And I almost lost a finger once, but that's another story. But yeah, I am sorry. I am sorry. I will take the whip out and go and sit in the corner for a while and think about my actions. All right. Pablo Acosta Villarreal, the OG drug lord. In fact, the book about him is actually called Drug Lord. It's by Terence Papa, and it's the main source of pretty much this entire episode. It was written in 1990, so I can kind of tell you, you know,

before I think the Mexican cartel world was common knowledge to literally everyone. So I can kind of tell you, I think it's, it might be the first real book of the cocaine cartel era. And I believe it's also, well, at least in Mexico. And I believe it's also the basis for a lot of season one and season two of Narcos, Mexico. though, of course, you know, it's, it's, that whole thing is dramatized. There's a lot of fiction in it, even though it sticks to some reality. I'm rewatching it right now. It is fantastic.

Of the book itself, Papa writes, it captures, quote, the key moment when flights of cocaine from Colombia entered the Mexican economy. And you can only imagine how, however significant he thought that moment was when he wrote this book, it's nothing compared to what it ended up being. Traffker-Kimpins, like Pablo Acosta, they were a product of their environment, And I don't just mean like the atmosphere they grew up around, the people and the social conditions. I mean, their actual literal environment. And to understand that, you need to look at Ohanaga on a map.

It's right there just across the border of West Texas, south of Marfa, right inside or I think next to Big Bend National Park. So it's a border town, but on a much smaller scale than Juarez and surrounded by like scrubland and national park and beautiful but harsh desert terrain. It's a major smuggling area for generations and not just for like illicit drugs, right? But it does get big during Prohibition when soldiers stationed near Marfa, that's in Texas, if you guys don't know, coming into the city, they cross the border and they spend cash in the red light district there. God, we just, we love a border town here and there's no better border town than the one where a country with super strict laws meets a country where no one gives a damn. And that, you know, was the U.S. during Prohibition, the one with super strict laws. and Mexico where no one gave a dam. So you've got Prohibition and Puritans one mile away,

and brothels and booze just one mile the other way. So you can only imagine how much business picks up and it reminds me of like the Ethiopian border towns near Sudan, and let me tell you, that is what you'd call coming from like, you know, a place where it's basically Sharia law or close to it into a place where it's somewhat lawless, and they're just, they are wild spots. Yeah, I remember a story about the,

the Burmese Chinese border from a guy I met in Yangon that was pretty insane. But is there a good party scene on the Ethiopia-S Sudan border? Have you been there? You know, I have been there. If you want to get in some cot and like chew it in a house with a mud floor or like, you know, some of the saddest, yeah, I wouldn't say party scene, but I would say it's lawless in a way that is a place to lose yourself or it's depressed. Definitely. Okay. But, you know, but there's comments there.

So it's dusty and small this town. And then it starts picking up during Prohibition. And then we have heroin post-prohibition, which had come to Mexico with Chinese migrant workers and then flourish as a crop in Senaloa. And then post-prohibition, Mexican criminal groups sort of ride and chased out the Chinese to take over control of those crops. Now, Pablo Acosta is a product of this region, right? He's from a peasant family in the northeast of the state of Chihuahua. One of the places where you wonder why anyone's sense, settled there in the first place. It just doesn't seem like it's meant to provide life for human beings. His family are sort of traveling itinerant farmers who wander around the border region looking for work. His grandfather, Lucas, is born in West Texas in 1888, one of 26 kids, and he ends up working mercury mines on the U.S. side of the border, and has a son, Cornelio in 1906, who's one of 10 kids. Lucas eventually settles on some farmland in the middle of nowhere near a spring. He has some goats and cows, has 10 kids himself. he made money selling mesquite wood across the border in Texas

and also did some petty smuggling. During Prohibition, he smuggles Soto, which is a lesser-known sort of cactus boosts from the region into West Texas. But that whole area is like kind of super fluid. I don't even know when it becomes the proper border defining line. I guess I should know that as an American. But it's really fluid.

You know, people just move back and forth across. There's not really anything really stopping you. After Prohibition ends, he harvest some sort of wax from plants in the desert, which it was weirdly illegal to smuggle it out of Mexico, where Americans would pay twice as much as Mexicans did. And he brought his son Cornelio. I keep wanting to say Cornholio, dude, but it's not Cornholio. It is Cornelio. That might be dating myself a little bit. But, dude, when Cornholio hit, it was like, it blew a lot of mind, man. If you were like 13 and that came out, you were like, this is, this is the greatest thing I've ever seen. It really, I don't know if you had that in London. Dude, just a, just a game changer. We didn't make any sense at school. No, it was incredible.

Anyway, where was I? It's up references. We are young. Cornelio, his son is there. They spend a week or two harvesting, avoiding Mexican agricultural police agents, then bring it through the desert into the U.S. to sell. Lucas, he knows the desert mountains super well, and he teaches a son that. And it was legit dangerous.

You know, the Mexican agents didn't mess around. It's the kind of thing where you're taking. donkeys through the desert canyons at night and occasionally getting into gunfights with them. In January of 1937, he has a son he names Pablo, Pablo Acosta, who grows up dirt poor in a literal dirt floor shack. Eventually, the family moves to a communal farm in former military barracks that the Mexican government was kind of setting up then, and his dad would go to the states for months at a time to work the fields there. Like I said, the border is basically a porous, fluid thing then. Eventually, the family moves to the states. They're between sort of New Mexico and

West Texas. And in 1958, Pablo's dad is murdered outside a bar by a man that Pablo's clan had a blood feud with. And it actually sounds super similar to the way Albanian honor kind of bloodfuge worked. Someone killed someone a while ago, and now the clans fight each other over it. And any man is basically a target. Pablo is actually with his dad when he dies. They're at a bar together. his dad steps outside when he's called out there he's shot Pablo hears the gunshot and runs outside to see his dad bleeding out and that is what we call an origin story right there yeah that's that's nefeld worthy that's up there um

i actually covered albanian blood feuds crazy stuff up in the north near scotra which is beautiful place full of mountains and stuff it was a this steaming hot day i think it was like 30 degrees and the guy gave me a bottle of what i thought was water out of a plastic bottle So I just necked it and it turned out it was home-brewed racky, like 80-proof. And the weather wasn't the only thing steaming that day, Danny. I can tell you. Yeah, I mean, if people knew how many assignments just end up with you getting drunk by accident. And not just you.

I mean, though you a lot. I mean, like a journalist in general. But yeah, I think we talked about the Albanian blood feud on our code quite a bit in a bunch of the earlier Albanian episodes we did like four or five years ago. But I remember there being an article in the Times, I think, in the 90s. about someone whose job it was to, like, rectify them, who ended up coming to the states, like, in the Bronx where a lot of Albanians had settled in the 80s and 90s, and, like, working to get people over them,

which I think is fascinating job, you know, conflict resolution or whatnot in that regard. So Pablo's in his 20s then. He has a fourth grade education, has been in some trouble with drunk driving, fighting, all stuff like that. He works on farms or in cottagenes, and he's quiet, but he loves to get drunk and scrap. One of his arrest, the police report says, quote,

Subject threw a pitcher of beer through a play glass window at the Steakhouse Bar, which, you guess it, sounds a lot like something a young Sean Williams was doing when his club played Millwall or he was hanging out in Berlin. Oh, wow, yeah. Okay, actually, you got your references, right? Yeah, I mean, I've heard you mention you hate Millwall enough that I finally have picked up on it, you know? In 1964, he gets approved as a U.S. citizen, and that same year, he graduates from drunken bar fights to drunken gunfights.

fights, which he does in a bar over a woman. He gets charged with assault with a deadly weapon, gets it reduced, and does 90 days in county for illegal use of a firearm. Shortly after, he gets married and settles in Odessa, West Texas, which is Friday Night Lights, baby, West Texas, forever. He gets a job in construction. It's an oil boomtown, and he falls in with some co-workers from Ohanaga, who have a little side hustle going. And no, it is not drop shipping or selling courses. they are smuggling small amounts of that sweet, sweet Mexican black tar heroin across the border. We do love drop shipping and online courses, though, right? Because we need that money, too.

I think the drop shipping craze is over, but I think the course thing is still. I mean, I've thought about doing like a media course, but it would actually be valuable. And I wouldn't be telling you to commit like tax fraud or that you're going to make a million dollars in some business selling, I don't know, houses that you buy foreclose. I would just be like, you're not going to make any money doing this, but if you want to learn, I will teach you for money. I mean, you could do, I mean, it can be both. You're not going to be like, yeah, I'm on board too. On May 28, 1968, he makes his first attempt at living that life

and is immediately caught after a tip off, which is embarrassing for a guy who becomes a drug lord. 31 years old, caught, convicted, sentenced to eight years. He ends up serving five. But again, Sean, it's not about how many times you get knocked down. It's about how many times you get up. And success, it's not a diagonal line, Sean. It's not an L. It's a lesson.

Does he throw in the towel and give up on his dreams? Of course not. Instead, he networks in prison like all winners do. Yeah, I think you should actually, I think you should do a course. I'm getting convinced. I mean, that was my practice route right there. So he, like me and Sean, is, charming and funny and good looking then and fearless, and he makes all sorts of new friends

and new contacts in prison, guys who have connections in the game on both sides of the border. One of those guys is named Shorty Lopez, which is just a sweet name, like quintessential, low-level drug trafficker name, you know? He's a heroin dealer in Odessa. They both get out around the same time, and Pablo decides no more smuggling it across the border. He's going to use his boy Shorty Lopez, who has set up shop in Ohanaga, to get the heroin and weed across, and then he's just going to worry about distribution in the U.S. Now, the drug scene Nohanaga is evolving in the early 70s.

The dominant smuggler at the time Pablo goes inside jail is a guy named Domingo Oranda, and he's like a lot of these early smugglers, right? Especially the guys who were doing that kind of cross-border stuff. He doesn't start out in narcotics or even booze, but regular commercial goods, like coffee, sugar, stuff that was being rationed in the U.S. during World War II. Smuggling is not just for illegal goods, right? it's for any good that is cheaper on one side than on the other. But yeah, he does, he does get into heroin eventually because profits.

And it's mostly sold to Mexicans or Mexican-American dealers in the U.S. Then the 60s comes, counterculture explodes, as does the market for weed, and he switches to weed. Ohanaga in 1970 is a dusty town of 10,000 people. It's struggling. Aranda's smuggling business is family-run, cousins and brothers and in-laws, they're all making money. but his rain on the top ends in the early 70s when he's murdered and his body is torched allegedly at the hands of a guy named Manuel Carrasco

who was one of his runners who is also nicknamed the snake for obvious reasons and he takes over the whole region the murder actually shocks Ohanaga which just isn't used to that level of violence at the time I think murder is generally they are probably used to a little bit but not like you know setting a body on fire Carrasco he's got bigger plans he pays off the local military and police who he befriends, and he really starts taking over. He's sort of like the next evolutionary point in the drug lord chart, right? The first guy who realizes you really need to work

with law enforcement and the government. And Shorty Lopez, he works for Carrasco, and Pablo starts buying weed and heroin from both of them. Yeah, this is the story of so many guys who got rich, right, figuring out that you can just bribe or work with the authorities rather than working against them. And that's going to be the same story with the guy in Vietnam that we're going to do next week, And the thing about that is that the fall from grace tends to be way more spectacular, which makes for very good podcasts. Yeah. Yeah, it does. I'm excited about that, actually.

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or auto and home insurance. With USAA, you can bundle your auto and home and save up to 10%. Tap the banner to learn more and get a quote at usaa.com slash bundle. Restrictions apply. Pablo's working actually as a roofer during this time, popping up a little on the radar of cops as he's moving like a key of heroin at a time. In November of 1976, though, he gets caught up after setting up a deal with a guy who had been under surveillance and inadvertently the cops sort of get onto him, right?

They're making an exchange that's in the desert. two of the buyers then spring out guns, they call out that their New Mexico State Police and their backup starts flying in in a van. Pablo sprints into the desert as it's already getting dark and he thinks he can get away. He somehow manages to escape

and hightails it to Mexico after hiding in a drain pipe and covering it with tumbleweeds. The cops, though, they know who he is and he knows that if he gets caught in the States now, he's going to do a long bid. It's 1976 now. Pablo is in Mexico for good,

and there's opportunity to be had I know Hanaga. Carrasco, the current boss of the area, he's on the run, right? There's some crazy shootout at a hospital. He actually shoots and kills a guy he was partying with and working with, who was from another sort of cartel. And I'm saying cartel, really, but these are like sort of small trafficking organizations. They probably have like 20, 30 guys.

So like when you think cartel, when I'm saying this, don't think like, you know, Sinola or CJ&G, right? These are much smaller operations. So after he kills this guy. after they both get into a shootout with the police, it's a weird situation, but Carrasco seemingly does it because he owes the guy a debt.

He blames it on the cops, gets found out, gets a price put on his head, and flees. And Pablo's buddy, Shorty Lopez, he takes over that top spot. He, in turn, puts Pablo to work as a bodyguard and driver. It is actually funny, too,

how much of these guys start as drivers, you know? Pablo is allowed to still kind of do his own deals in the U.S. just as long as Shorty gets his Plaza boss cut. So Plaza, right? The way the plaza works, and Plaza's territory, right?

Center of the town, whatever, it's generally what people say when they say. Plaza, you guys know this. But the way the plaza works there is the various territories that people need to pay off to be in control, like authorities, police, politicians, the military. So who is running the plaza

doesn't always mean the drug trafficker or a cartel, though it means that too. It also means who gets the payoff. as Papa writes, quote, traffickers like Pablo Costa operated under a system that was almost like a franchise. They had to pay a monthly feed to their handlers, police or government, for the right to work a specific zone. It was a form of private taxation based on the volume of sales,

with the money going to people in power. I guess this is like getting to the heart of why Latin American crime is so violent in a way, right? Like, there's the McKizmo thing as well. But if you're working on this plaza system, I mean, how are you supposed to keep it or hold it down? If you're basically franchising it out, renting it out to incredibly venal, dangerous men with a lot of guns, right? That's like a recipe for constant conflict. I don't know.

Is that one of the reasons? It's like, it's crazy how it's so much more violent than in Asia, for example. I don't think, I don't think that's necessarily it for why it's so violent. I mean, everywhere people fight over territory for drugs, right? I don't know. I mean, it's the amount of money, the power vacuum, the lack of, of police, the corruption of the forces. Yeah, the corruption is.

I mean, they're just like, look, these were in border areas were, and it obviously ramps up the longer it continues. And I think, you know, a lot of these areas are like border areas that were wild west that had like a culture already of like, um, of like using violence to solve. You know, it's no different than I think the American West was, but probably like 100 years ago. Yeah, yeah. Or like my next episode, state line mob in like the 40s and 50s. But I think that it, you know, because it's continued so long, it ramps up. You've always got to, got to, got a, I don't if impresses the right word, but you've got to one up the person that you're competing with and the

violence just, and you can kind of see in this episode how the violence starts ratcheting up. And in general, like, things that weren't done, get done. Then the next guy has to do it and the next guy has to do it. But it's an interesting question of what exactly leads to like these insane levels of violence, and I think the money is definitely a big part of it for sure. Pablo opens up a restaurant and a clothing shop. He also deals in stolen cars from America. He starts really training with a pistol. He loves to fake draw on his friends, which I'm sure they really enjoy, which is like, you know.

Good one, Pablo, pulling your gun on me again for the sixth time today. Hilarious stuff, funnier because you're wasted and it's definitely loaded. You know, just not a nice thing to do to your friends, Pablo. It's the era, though, of old school simple deals. People from as far away as like North Carolina or Montana, they'd go to the riverbank on the U.S. side, they'd yell across to a Mexican, strike up a deal, then come across and get it.

Big Ben doesn't have a ton of patrols, and weed use is growing enormously, and it's a simpler time, but things change quick on the border. Carrasco shows up, he's back, and he's pissed that Shorty has taken his spot, even though he had fled. He lays in ambush form,

who Shorty actually gets tipped off but decides he's going to go through it, anyway and gets killed. Maybe that's why the violence is so bad there because guys are like, oh, there's an ambush, I'm going to go through it anyway. Yeah. You know, not, they're not thinking with their heads. In a grisly foreshodding of the decades to come, one of the killers uses a machete to sort of scalp him, like, take off the top part of his head and his skull, and they make pendant necklaces of that top part of his skull, which is just cool stuff, guys. Yeah, like, which part of his skull? I mean, I'm trying to, I'm trying to imagine this. I'm thinking

of like some nice big circle pendant like some hippie lady who wear in New Mexico I don't know like maybe is, does that sound good? I feel like this could be a nice little accessory actually. It doesn't it doesn't sound good. It sounds awful. Carrasco is sort of out of the picture

too right after that at the moment because and there's no big boss in Ohanaga which means no one's paying off the authorities and no one's controlling the plaza. So the authorities of course get to work. They start picking off traffickers left and right because they're not getting their payday. And in 1977,

towards the end of the year, Pablo is one of those guys who gets popped. He's sent to jail, I think in Chihuahua City, which is the capital of Chihuahua State, which is where Ohanaga is, and he's actually helped out by a bigger trafficker from the area from the Cold Open, Fermine Aravalo.

Remember that name, because they're not going to be buds for long. Fermin gets him a lawyer, some cash, he's let go. So now it's 1978, and Ohanaga has a power vacuum. You've got to have a boss man to pay off the real boss men, the politicians, the military, the cops. But these guys are all like, you know, these bandit outlaws who don't really know how to do this.

They probably don't even own suits. The Ohanaga traffickers, they call a conference, they got to figure this out, they choose a guy to do it, and he literally just heads down to the Chihuahua City sort of area to meet the federal police commander and figure out how much to pay him. The federal police commander eventually sees him, takes him to a dungeon to figure out this deal, tortures him for three days, and then asks for, 10k a month, which eventually he ups to 35k a month. You don't hear much about dungeons anymore, do you? It's gone out of fashion. No, no. I like it. No. I like it. No. You know, the guy goes back

in Ohanaga. He warns Pablo and the others. If you think we're bad, like this guy, the federal police commander, what is the DFS, I think is the acronym in Mexico. He's a real psycho. And that's, generally the case. But the deal is struck and Ohanaga is calm and everyone gets along for the next few years. Until that guy gets arrested by the DEA in Vegas and is sentenced to eight years, and someone else needs to take its place to control the plaza. So, so by this point the guys are, they are big time, like, they are cartels considered pretty massive by the DEA, right? I mean, I don't know if they're considered Matt, like in, in that era, yes, but compared to what we have now, I mean, no, these guys aren't even moving cocaine yet. So, like, they've got money.

they don't have like, you know, buy a private zoo money or like have guys trained as special forces that go and kill 47 people money. So like they're big time in that little border region, but I don't think they're big time at all because also Coke hasn't hit, you know? But if it has, it's like tiny amounts. Really, it's not much.

Pablo in the meantime, he's really gotten it together. You know, he's this gregarious, charming guy. People like him. He knows how to talk to folks, especially those with authority. He's also a great businessman, right? He's making money and he knows how to spread it around. He's got small planes he's using the traffic.

He's got to know the players in Chihuahua City. He's figuring out how to pay off the police and the military. And he takes it one step further than anyone had before. He gets in with these guys so good. He's getting official papers from them, stuff that lets him and his people legally carry guns and badges. He even gets his men officially onto the federal police force. Within no time, he's practically untouchable.

in that region of Mexico. He does stuff like set it up with the military where he harvest his fields, his weed fields, and then he lets them come in right after and burn them so then they can kind of show off like they're doing their job. In 1981, though, Pablo, he loses that big plain little weed that we talked about in the cold open, and a pilot that he has that he really liked.

He accidentally runs into the propellers after panicking when cops show up. A bunch of his men are arrested, including his brother. Pablo, of course, thinks it's a tip-off. He blames one of the sons of, for me and Aravalo, that same trafficker that we've been talking about. Yeah, I mean, that is gross, but it also sounds, this is starting to sound a bit slapstick, like a Will Ferrell movie or something.

Wiley, Coyote, that kind of vibes. Yeah, does he step into a propeller at any point? Wiley, Coyote? That would have been a, I think so. I'm going to show my son that episode. Geez. Yeah. Maybe he doesn't.

Maybe I just have a bad memory of things. The sons of Aravallo, they kind of stay outside. the whole Ohanaga circle. They didn't really deal with the plaza situation. They had their own situation. Their dad, Fermin, gets out in 1979. But when Pablo takes over the plaza, tensions are starting to build. They're not thrilled they've got this young upstart in charge.

Then Pablo loses that plane. And then Pablo loses a few more internal weed flights. And he's not really sure. But in 82, he does that deal with one of the sons on a weed load, and he thinks he's ripped off. So he's getting really hyped up. Some of his men, including his top enforcer, who's a real psycho named Marco Daharo.

They spot the brothers in town, and they shoot them up. Pablo will later claim he never gave those orders, but one of the sons is killed and the other survives, and after that, it is war. Marco will eventually earn the nickname, the butcher of Ohanaga. So you can kind of get his vibe from that, you know? His mom was actually a smuggler, too. He had been a police officer and bodyguard for a customs official in Sonora, who was transferred to Ohanaga in 1976.

The official was, Marco goes with it. him, Pablo puts him on in 1979 as like a gopher, driver, bodyguard, guy who like guard shipments and guards fields. Still, the families are close enough that there's this crazy story where Pablo's wife, she goes to the funeral of the son that's killed, thinking there's no way your husband was involved, which is, you know, it's vicious the game, just vicious. Two months later, Pablo and his top enforcer Marco, they're ambushed and their truck crashes, but Marco is able to get out of the truck and kill the enemy gunman and injure a few more.

So now we're getting that crazy violence starting to ramp up. Like, I would be interested if anyone's got any ideas on this, like, why this world is, is like ultra-violent even compared to the rest of the world. Just, yeah, email us. I actually know. I bet some people have got some interesting ideas about it. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Pablo is, he's furious at this, obviously, that he's been ambushed and set up. He gets patched up in a hospital.

He was grazed in the head and rounds up his gunmen to go barge into the other hospitals looking for the injuries. Sicarios, even using their federal police badges to do it. He's trying to find out who for sure ordered it, even though he kind of already knows. They end up kidnapping one of the guys they find. They take him out to the desert where he confirms that the Aravallo has paid him $500 to try to kill Pablo. Of course, they kill the guy and they dump his body in the desert. And the war is building.

Both men are recruiting. They're recruiting soldiers. Within a month, there's another shootout. Interestingly, a state police commander is with the Aravallo man. when they're ambushed. And later, he'll try to arrest some of Pablo's men, but he's blocked because the federal police prevent him from doing so.

So everyone's got their law enforcement guys that they're paying off, but Pablo's woned up them because he's got the federality's, not just the state police. Within a few months, Pablo's brother and his bodyguard are gunned down at a dance, and during this three-year war,

at these 26 people are killed, which, you know, this sounds crazy to us, but what's also crazy is that that's basically like a week or even like two days, right now in the current cartel war, maybe even one day. Eventually, we get that scene from the cold open, the showdown, the kidnapping, all that. And Pablo comes out victorious, and he's now officially El Padino, the godfather. He's got soldiers protecting his weed field, not like his soldiers,

like actual Mexican military soldiers, are protecting his weed fields and shipments. He's slipping 1,000 peso notes to the beggars and shoe shine boys in town. He's lending out money to the poor he never expects to get back. He pays for medications, hospital visits, gives out water pumps and irrigation supplies to the local farmers. He's winning people over to his side. He builds bridges, figuratively, and actually literally, he supports the sports teams. I mean, you guys know the playbook at this point. Says a young man in town to Terrence Papa, quote, if anyone ran this town, it was Pablo. He was the one who told the mayor to tell, blah. Says a young man in town to Terrence Papa, quote, if anyone ran this town, it was Pablo.

He was the one who told the military and the police what to do. If someone stole some weed from him, all he had to do was call the military and the police, and they would keep looking until they found it. So he now, he has this aura of like invincibility. His name is spreading as one of the top traffickers in the region, and soon enough he'll be the top boss of this 200-mile stretch of borderland. And his heroin is super pure at the time, like 93%. It's mostly coming across the border by land.

some of it in small plans. One big smuggling method he perfects is hiding drugs in the propane tanks of trucks which is apparently something because of the gas crisis with the Arab embargo in the 70s some cars had fitted their engines

to take propane with like tanks in the pickup bed which is crazy in my mind. So they find a way to stash drugs in them which for back then was like revolutionary. Yeah, big Zeppelin vibes. Butterfly flaps its wings in Algiers and we're ending up in like Latin America

it's crazy. Yeah. Yeah. Pablo's also dealing in stolen American cars, mostly trucks, and trading drugs for guns that come across the border from the U.S. And he has a major park growing operation contracting out to indigenous farmers to grow crops alongside the Contros River in Chihuahua. By 1986, it's estimated he has 500 associates working for him just in the U.S. It's very fluid, though. Most people only know their direct higher-up, and most of the people he surrounds himself with are either family or long-time blood-relius. or I guess long-time blood-related his family, but I think they mean long-time people he did business with.

He's got full networks in Texas and New Mexico. People from as far away as Michigan and North Carolina, they come down for his weed. Americans always come down to Ohanaga during harvest season. They, you know, the buyers line up in these hotels to deal with Pablo and he likes to scare them by showing up with half a dozen gunmen sort of acting like badasses with cowboy hats

and like, you know, the shotgun shells, bandoliers across their chest, which is a funny thing to do. I think that's great. Good for you, Pablo. Play the role, you know. With all those people in the U.S., though, Pablo occasionally has some issues.

And there's a number of murders of state-side involving heroin dealers who hadn't paid up. Marco is the one thought to have been the guy behind them. In fact, by the mid-80s, Marco actually has to disappear for a while, allegedly because he was killing too many people. And it said that he actually went down to Mexico City

to work as a federal police officer. Wait, what? That's... Yeah. It's amazing how many guys not just got started as police officers, but then would, like, go work as a police officer in the midst of, like, working for the cartels during this time. It's pretty crazy stuff.

Insane. A couple of other big things happen in the mid-80s, too. The first is Pablo starts doing a lot of Coke and then smoking crack, which is generally a bad idea. He's especially fond of the crack-laced cigarette, like, you guessed it, a young Sean Wilhelm's gallivanting around the plazas of Berlin. I'm just kidding. I don't think Sean regularly smoked crackly cigarettes.

No, no, and it was Bryce Slava when that happened anyway. But yeah, do go on. At first, I didn't think it was real. I woke up to this blinding light, and I was transported to another place. Pluto TV. Then I heard a voice. Come with me if you want to live. There were thousands of movies and shows, and they were all free.

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With over 2,500 episodes and a brand new story each in a new story, each in a year. every single day, morning cup of murder becomes part of your routine fast. If you like your coffee hot but your bones chilled, then sit back and start your day with a morning cup of murder. Go listen to Morning Cup of Murder wherever you get your podcasts. And remember, stay safe. But yeah, Pablo is smoking crack, staying up all night, dealing with all the crazy logistics, getting stuff to the border, getting stuff across the border, planes, cars, trucks, getting the money, dealing with the political playoffs, the authorities, all that.

It is a lot. Like, being a drug lord, I know it looks fun. It is not fun. So many. Managing the most stressful business ever. So it really is so many spreadsheets, dude. It's not like the glory, the glory is very short-lived, and it's a lot of business.

Even with all the crackly cigarettes and mariachi bands playing at your beck and call. And Pablo is starting to show signs of wear and tear. And 1985, that's going to be time for another big headache because that's when the cocaine starts coming in big time. And it's more money, more problems. Hundreds and hundreds of pounds. The crackdown on the South Florida route is in high gear with a myriad of federal agencies taking game at Miami and the Caribbean.

You know, we got the South Florida Task Force that's created in 1982. And within a few years, they're really seeing results. Now, Coke had been coming across the Mexican border since the 70s, but it was really small scale. But with all the feds concentrating on shutting down Miami and South Florida, the Colombians start eyeing Mexico. We're not exactly sure how Pablo connected with the Colombians, but it was likely through none other than Amato Carrillo-Fuentes, the Lord of the Skies, who shows up around that time to sort of like apprentice or intern with Pablo. It's a wonder actually it wasn't happening before and that they chose the Caribbean in the first place, considering how wide open the border was then and how much commercial traffic moved across it. But I mean, my guess for why would be the Mexicans already had their network there.

The Colombians didn't have all the power. And working with the Mexican traffickers already controlling the area would involve giving up that power and profits that they just didn't want to at the time. Amato, for those who have never listened, his uncle ran the Guadalajara cartel, and he was sent to learn under Pablo and likely open up new cocaine routes because his uncle was connected to the Colombians already. Yeah, and listen to our recent show about Cuba and the Castro. too, because that has a lot of stuff about the roots for cocaine heading through the Caribbean back around, well, pretty much bang on this time. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's, the way it all moves, there's so many stories from the 80s, both in South Florida, all this is crazy stuff. By late 84, early 85, planes directly from Colombia are landing and dropping off loads in Ohanaga, and the product is being stored at ranches all over. It's not all for Pablo.

He's storing it for other big-time traffickers who are sometimes paying him $1,000 a key just to hold it. But he is, of course, also trafficking some himself and getting those plaza taxes. That's the other thing about cocaine, right? We will go bad. Cocaine you can store for a lot longer.

Soon enough, Pablo himself is meeting with the Medellin cartel, higher up Carlos letter, and there's five, maybe six tons of coke passing through Ohanaga every month. Ohanaga is about to become arguably the biggest co-stoucels Cain Depot in all of Mexico at the time. And the authorities, they catch on to that sooner rather

than later. In July of 85, a 19-year-old kid driving a truck pulls into a desolate US border checkpoint north Bel Paso, you know, the white sands, tumbleweed, the kind of place the roadrunner is always running around. It's the roadrunner again, clip-eye propellers. Yeah. Dude, those cartoon, I kind of want to start watching the roadowner again, man. A lot, a lot going on there. You're so, you're so, so young. I mean, Wiley Caii, Cornholio, all these reference, man. Yeah. Are we Gen Z.

Golden Era. That stop, it's not really set up for drug traffickers, right? There's more, they're more trying to get people on driving violations, expired licenses, drunk driver, like that whole thing. The cop working at though, he notices the propane tank in the back is a little funky. The valve is shut tight, and it usually works better if it's open. He had just put one on his own truck, and he asked the kid what he's running, and the kid says he's running propane, but the cop notices.

that the truck's dashboard indicates it's on gasoline. The kid is polite, but he doesn't have a driver's license or registration, and the cops kind of keep expecting that weird propane tank, and they're suspicious. One of the police there with them had heard a story about weed being hidden in propane tanks. So they take the kid in the car to a nearby auto mechanic. When they finally get it open, there is cocaine. This is, I mean, this is like, this is like word for word

as seen out of a Cornwall Mac McCarthy novel. It's amazing. Yeah. There is a lot of it for back then. 246 pounds. The book says it's worth $50 million, but if you actually look at cocaine rates, it's probably closer to $5 million,

unless Coke places were, like, insanely inflated back then. They keep digging into the suspect. They discover another shipment of 263 pounds of cocaine hidden outside his El Paso apartment in a truck that's parked outside there. And at the time, these are record-setting seizures, and no one fully grasped the scale of the smuggling problem along the Mexico border.

Then a call comes in from Los Angeles, authorities there have just made a record-breaking seizure of 556 pounds in May, and there are striking similarities between the two cases, including that it's a truck with a Texas license plate. Yeah, this is crazy, man. I guess the mid-80s always seen as this high type of Coke in the U.S., but is it just because it was relatively new? Because, like, I guess these buss are big, right?

I mean, they're not small, but by today's standards, it just shows how huge the busts are now. Yeah, I think in Miami it was quite big, but it's definitely not the biggest ever, correct? I think Toby Mews has even talked about how Columbia is growing more than ever at this time. So yeah, I think record breaking for back then

and the violence was also, everything was new then, including the violence of Miami, which actually was probably worse than it's ever been in Miami. Yeah, so I think it was massive, but it doesn't come close to what it is right now, you know? By then, cocaine is already moving through Sinaloa through Baja into California,

but the truck confiscated in Los Angeles, like I said, as Texas plates. The El Paso team digs deeper and begins finding connections, along with several local businesses that were on the take, including a mechanic who modified the propane tanks used for hiding the drugs. What emerges is a sophisticated smuggling network rooted in the El Paso area, and all the threads ultimately lead back to one man, Pablo Acosta.

The implications, though, are clear. This is the new route. El Paso is the new Miami. I am always saying this. The few DEA agents on the case start to get overwhelmed as they uncover more and more about Acosta's organization, and they form a task force. They're uncovering hundreds of people working for or connected to Acosta all around them. By February of 1986, they've convened pretty much every federal agency there is in the region, DEA, FBI, Customs, INS, IRS, U.S., U.S. Attorney, El Paso Police Department,

and they run through how big the operation is, the 500 associates, the guns, the murders, the drugs, and end with, quote, current intelligence indicates that numerous public officials throughout West Texas, which include Sherry deputies, local police officers, state and local prosecutors, and other elected and appointed officials are associates of the Acosta organization. Meanwhile, Pablo is having issues

on his side of the border. In late January 86, as all this is happening, around midnight one night, Pablo and his nephew and another member of his organization are on a stoplight in Ohanaga. They're ambushed by a dozen or so gunmen who spring out of a group of cars and start just firing.

But he's saved. Ravid randomly by two civilians who accidentally drive through the street right when the Sikario start unloading their weapons. They're killed instantly, but Pablo's men get cover and they run into a convenience store market, which the men then spray with more automatic gunfire. Some of Pabot's guys, though, they show up, and there is a firefight. You know, you ever seen Boundaq Saints, William Defoe? Oh, man, I always miss that. And like, the people who are really into it, there were so many people were deeply in.

into it at uni that kept watching it all over and over again. I never saw it, no. It's terrible, but also incredible. William Defoe in his weirdest role that you've ever seen. Pablo's guys are outnumbered, but they're battle tested, right? And the Sikarios are young and experienced guys. There are gunfights all over town. There's running battles, chases. It lasts hours. Pabos guys, though, they come out on top. There's bodies everywhere. The next day, soldiers show up and surround Pablo's house. But they're not there to arrest him. They're there to protect him. Pablo blames the Aravalo family, immediately the one son who survived. He's paranoid. He's crazy at this point, like I said, smoking a lot of crack. He starts kidnapping civilians who were just there

at the shooting as random witnesses. He's showing up at their houses at 3 a.m. just trying to get a story of what happened. He's torturing them to get answers. You know, on the one hand, like I said, a lot of crack. Paranoia goes to the territory. But on the other hand, this is like the ninth time someone tries to kill him. So I kind of feel like some paranoia might be warranted. You know, maybe it's not just the crack speaking. Yeah, I mean, I kind of wish someone would kill him at this point. Now, as all this is going on,

there's actually a U.S. customs agent focused on narcotics that's been secretly meeting with Pablo in Mexico, hoping to turn him into an informant. His name is David Regella. He is a badass. He's a story past. He had been in an infamous gunfight with smugglers called the San Vicente shootout

and had already arrested Pablo's uncle and one of his younger brothers. Anyway, around that same time as the cocaine flights are starting to come in, he's connected to Paolo through a woman named Mimi Webb Miller, the niece of a U.S. Senator who has gigantic ranch next to Paolo and Mexico.

She's an artist who loves Mexican culture. She falls in love with, like, the border area, sets up shop there and marries, like, this outlaw type. Pablo's friendly with the guy, they had some business together, and he actually helps her set up a horseback tours for tourists. And Pablo and his boys,

they soon start using her ranch like a spa or like a B&B. Eventually her husband's heroin addiction gets to be too much. They break up and she starts dating this guy, David Regella, the agent. They, you know, ride horses, they raft in the river. It actually sounds quite idyllic. Pablo actually finds out about it and he knows this guy is the Fed who sent his family members away. He confronts Mimi, Mimi, and she somehow talks him down, tells him she hasn't been giving up any info that this guy's okay. Somehow Pablo is cool with this, which is, you know,

The whole thing is insane that he would be cool with this. She must have been extremely charming and attractive. A few months later, he actually asked her to set up a meet with the guy. Yeah. Is Mimi Miller actually the true hero of the story? This is the, I guess, the intelligent play? I don't know. I mean, why?

Oh, I mean, she's managed to somehow not get killed and inform and I don't know. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So we'll see what happens. But no. They eventually meet up and grow to like each other. they're exchanging, you know, their war stories, drinking brandy, all that.

Pablo tells him he has nothing to do with cocaine, which is a lie, and asked what happened with his younger brother and uncle. Regella, he finally asked Pablo, like, why don't work together? You have rivals, dealers, you probably want out of the picture. Feed me info. You know, this is a classic thing that U.S. authorities have done with, and Mexican authorities, too, with cartel guys, but I guess this was early on in that era. Pablo says he'll think about it, and with that, they sort of break off.

They keep meeting, like, every month or so for the next year or two. Pablo never really gives up anything worthwhile at first, but Regella thinks maybe he just wants to lead the door up in to eventually turn himself in and cooperate, like so many future drug lords have. Then in early 86, where we have that shootout and ambush, Pablo, he asked Regela to go after the Aravallos for trafficking heroin because he, of course, suspects they're the ones who try to kill him.

He starts informing, but his tips are just kind of bad or late. At one point, they decided to work with one of Regela's informants. Pablo's going to help him sort of figure out how to start buying their heroin, and sort of get him in the scene and eventually convince the son who was still alive whose name is Lupe to come to the U.S. for a big deal so Regela can bag him. Meanwhile, Pablo is super strung out, right?

He's just inhaling blow at this point, not sleeping, staying up for days at a time and smoking crack or snorting blow to keep him running his business on that little sleep. It's kind of just like the early days of the owner-world podcast. Yeah. Oh, the good old days.

Actually, take back what I said about Mimi Miller. We're actually the real heroes here. I can't believe we get all these 45-minute podcast done week after week, just for you guys. It gets the point where friends are sometimes injecting him with tranquilizer, so he stays asleep. Finally, he hits the Cancun for a few months to detox, to relax, to get away from the blow at the border. I mean, I guess Cancun wasn't Cancun yet in the mid-80s, and Tulum, like, forget about it. I get not even like a single sound healer at setup shop. Pabo stays for two months.

He sometimes pretends to be a bellhop to practice English with Witturus, which is hilarious. By April of that year, he's hitting the papers, though, as being a huge trafficker. It's the first time his name has been seen in newspaper since the 1960s, and that is a bad sign. He's cleaned for a bit after getting back from Cancun, but soon enough, he's using again more paranoid than ever, desperate to kill off the Aarevello's. He's always on the move, never sleeping in the same place twice, switching cars, only. surrounded by blood relatives. Yeah, you're right. This is, this actually is like the early days of the pod.

Yeah. In summer of 86, Pablo starts to tell Regela that he wants the Colombians out of Ohanaga. Pablo finally admits he was helping with warehousing and smuggling Yeh, that he helped the Colombian set up shop in Ohanaga and was making a ton of cash, but feared they were taking over and bringing too much heat from the US. He wants them out. The Colombians, for their part, they're making life tougher for all the dime store traffickers Pablo works with. The guys who emuels small amounts of weed and heroin across the river and the border

because all the heat the Colombians had brought with them, now there's a lot more American patrols, and those small-time traffickers, they're getting pissed at Pablo because he brought all these Colombians in and kind of ruined their livelihood. Pablo wants to go back to the old ways, but you can't, Pablo, you just can't. Like time is an unstoppable force. There's nothing we can do. It just keeps moving oblivious to the wills and desires of man, and we must accept this, or it will drive us mad. Where was I? All right.

Pobble then, as if his life isn't complicated enough, he starts a relationship with Mimi Weber after her and Regella had broken up, which this is a wild-ass love triangle, though it's supposedly amicable. Honestly, this must have been like some woman, like a young Dolly Pardon. Or maybe, maybe even Jolene, dude. Maybe this is who Jolene was. Riegela is worried about Mimi, though. He warns her that Pablo is quite a few people that want him dead, which obviously, but she's like, you know, doing the wounded bird thing.

She wants to save him, think she can turn him around like a 33-year-old woman in Brooklyn dating a skateboarder with a neck tattoo, which ladies, it's just like, it's not going to work. You can't. You can't. She also doesn't know too much of his dark side, according to the author of the book, but, I mean, come on. Like, she definitely dated. She's in the border town. She has to know these guys are killing people left in mind. Now, her brilliant idea is to get Pablo some positive press,

so she introduces him to a few journals and gets a few small articles printed. But in October of 86, a journalist from the El Paso paper reaches out to Mimi to meet Pablo. He's warned by friends not to do the interview. Pablo's warned not through the interview. But Mimi thinks he can tell his side and come out looking good. She thinks everyone's going to fall for him like she did, which is a bad move. Pablo has a reporter come meet him. he's got like guns everywhere, like, you know, the pistilero that he is.

He's telling him he's kill people, but it's always in self-defense. He tells the guy that the border is full of insane rumors and not to believe them. He confesses to being a drug trafficker, but he says it's only weed. The reporter asks him about the 26 murders he's accused of, and he goes through the list and actually claims responsibility for a bunch. But he says, of course, they're all self-defense. He talks about the war with the Aravallos. He downplays how big his organization is.

He says the DA is recklessly exaggerating, which, you know, they do some time. So fair play on that one. He also shows the reporter how he makes crack and then laces a cigarette and smokes it after claiming the only cocaine he ever had is for personal use. Do you reckon the journalist did the crack in the cigarette?

Because I reckon he did. I reckon he did and just didn't say anything because, like, come on. I mean, we've all been there. But it actually reminds me of, there's that New York article from way back with Gil Scott Heron. right, where he's like smoke and crack in front of the author.

And it's super depressing. Oh, no, I haven't read that one. No, no, no, no. I don't know. Yeah. Oh, it's, it's a wild one. Bonjour, compadre. It's the Priceline negotiator.

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there's a money side to every story. And when you see the money side, you understand what others miss. Get the money side of the story. Subscribe now at Bloomberg.com. So yeah, Pablo's doing the whole Robin Hood thing. He's talking about how he gives away 90% of, 95% of his money. He helps the sick and the poor. He even takes the reporter to see a girl.

who's like surgery he paid for on her eyes in a hospital. Oh, any admits to paying off the federal police, but pretend it's not organized or like a deal, just money here and there. So one of those details that you're like, probably shouldn't have said that to a reporter afterwards. The reporter spends 24 hours with him, and he gets some good material.

Pablo is just like straight up losing it, though, right? He's forgetting things. He's being abandoned by friends and allies. Most people start to think the crack in the Coke is going to finish him off before the bullets do. He's starting to ask Regella about surrendering to the U.S., cutting a deal, also offering him $500,000 to kill off Lupa, the Aravalo son. He even asked for a federal prosecutor to come to Mexico to discuss a deal,

and as part of the deal, Pabo wants to go to prison in the U.S., not Mexico, which is incredibly ironic considering how things change over the next couple decades. When the stories start coming out, the newspaper stories, with Pabo on the front page and the title, the Mexican godfather, things do not go well for him, especially the parts about him paying off the Mexican Federalis and having the army protect his weed fields. There is upheaval in Mexico, to put it lightly.

People are fired, officials are replaced, warrants are on earth, forces are assembled. I think maybe this doesn't happen if he doesn't give up the whole paying off the authorities angle, but who knows. And Narco Season 2, Mexico, I think does a really good job of dramatizing all of this stuff. Pablo flees Ohanaga,

so do all his close people, including Amato. There's a massive Mexican manhine under way from late 1986 into 1987. At one point, his nephew gets pinched after he had returned to Ohanaga to score some heroin. He was an addict and is interrogated and beaten to death by the Mexican police. Pabo, though, figuring he would give up his location slips away. He's now the most wanted man in Mexico at the time, and he's depressed about his nephew's death. He blames himself for what happened. Yeah, I mean, because it probably was his fault, right? Yes, yeah, 100%.

He starts talking about trying to kill as many Mexican federalities as possible, even if it meant he's going to die in a shootout, when before that he had been thinking he could just bribe his way out. But now he's just, like, overcome with rage. He goes to hide out in this rural village in a canyon that's, like, super hard to access unless you're coming in from the American side, from Big Bend, across the river. Or I think if you're going to come in from the Mexican side, it's something like, you'll be spotted away before you get close,

you'll have no element of surprise. So Pablo gets there. He spreads his money around. All the campasinos are peasants are loyal. He recruits all the young men to service his protection. He gives them guns and everything. Soon enough, though, U.S. park rangers across the river in Big Bend National Park,

they have a good idea of Pabo is there. They can see all the action happening. The Federalities soon learn to from phone taps. But they're wary to go in. There's just, you know, because it's so hard to get into, there's no element of surprise, and they think Pabo would have too much time to flee and fight back.

they know they're going to need that element. They managed to strike a deal, though, with the Americans who are going to let the Mexican commandos helicopter in from their side of the border. On April 24th, Pobos guys are throwing a small fiesta in the village. They're roasting a calf on the open fire. There's maybe 300 villagers in total living in the entire enclave. And just then, two helicopters come through, warring loudly, and 20 or so commandos were palled down onto rooftops in a nearby field.

Pavel's guys are caught completely off guard. The commandos are able to round up a ton of men in the village with like no shots fired. After 10 minutes, the village is almost completely secured. Pablo's guys are caught off guard. The commandos are able to round up a ton of men in the village. After 10 minutes, the whole outside is completely secure. Then they start going door-to-door, searching houses, rounding up all the men. Pablo ends up in one house surrounded with two of his guys and gets into a shootout with the Federalis.

And it takes hours. They try all sorts of stuff like throwing in tear gas and setting the roof on fire. they capture one of the gunmen Pablo's with, the other eventually surrenders, eventually they storm in only to find Pablo already dead on the bed holding a machine gun. His funeral is held a few days later, and some sick narco caridos are ridden and played for it. And one goes, quote, gone is Pabloito, friend of the poor, killed by the government in a world that shows no mercy for people like that. And the gringos laughing on their side of the river prayed for Pabloito to die.

Yet he had done nothing more than give them what they were. they wanted. I bet that sounds incredible in Spanish over like accordion music, dude. Yeah, and why haven't you done that? I don't know. Another, quote, the Tsar of traffickers is dead. Truly the mafia king. He always won respect in the villages and towns around. Everywhere else he went, even the bravest shook with fear. So the fox of Ohanagua is dead, a true outlaw bandit. He had the scarred face, the cowboy gear, the gold-line teeth. You know, he had the bandoliers. across his chest and he represented a transition, a time in the Mexican cartel landscape where things

were changing rapidly. I always thought he kind of represented a more peaceful, less brutal area, but it turns out, well, yeah, but also the bar is super low because he did a whole lot of murdering. Of course, we all know what happens after. Amato Carrillo-Fueltes disappears for a while, then shows it back in O'Hanagua, and while I'm not in charge at first, eventually grows more powerful than almost anyone in Mexico, becomes lower to the skies. The cartel system really emerges in the 90s. Everything is carved up, and we get the Juarez cartel in this area. Later, there's rumors that Amato actually paid the police commander to kill Pablo, but the evidence

isn't really there. And Mimi Weber, who was still with Pablo at the time, I think in relationship-wise, not in the village, is informed there's a price on her head because she knows too much. She flees to California. Texas Magazine reports, though, that in the early 2010s, she's back in the area giving horseback tours. So good for her for getting back on that horse. Hi-yo!

Waited over an hour for that. I think everyone listening to the show will agree it was worth every second. Yeah, that, I mean, come on. What a setup. That was fantastic. If I don't say so myself, it might have been like a Sean joke, but it was also terrific. And given that people were going to be listening to this a week after the game, what are your predictions for the game two of the wild card?

Let's just have them so we can laugh back at it. Yankees, if the Yankees lose, I mean, they need to fire Boone. Like, it's Steinbreder would have followed him in the middle of the game yesterday, dude. It's insane. Like, come on, dude. Why do you take freed out? Why don't you start? I know why you don't start jazz, but put jazz in her.

I'm so angry. Patreon.com, which I'm still in a world podcast because I'm going to lose money, betting on the Yankees to win the World Series. I'm like an idiot. Underworldpod.com. Sign up on Spotify. Support our advertisers. We love you.

Sean, you're a great man, and I'm just happy to be here with you. And, uh, you know, it's Yom Kippur in like, like five hours. So I ask your forgiveness, Sean, for, um, for wronging you in the podcast. I'll get back to you. And I ask, you know, let's just keep going on. I ask, I ask our listeners forgiveness for wearing sunglasses. I know it makes a lot of you incredibly angry when I do that in the studio. So I ask your forgiveness.

And, uh, happy New Year. Love you all. Support the podcast. Good night. Beautiful. Thank you.