El Mencho
74 | Rolling Stone | RollingStoneAus.com September, 2017
allowed CJNG to smuggle in vast quan-
tities of precursor chemicals from India
and China, and smuggle out the fi nished
product.
“These guys were huge early adopters of
methamphetamine,” Stewart says. “They
also understood the economics: Unlike
cocaine, which they had to buy from the
Colombians, with meth, they controlled
the lion’s share of the profi ts.”
But according to a DEA analyst, “The
problem with meth guys is that they’re
unhinged.” Compared to the
more established cartels, Men-
cho and CJNG were “hillbil-
ly, backwoods guys who made
their reputation crushing up
pseudoephedrine”, the ana-
lyst says. “They didn’t have to
wine and dine Bolivian suppli-
ers, or fl y to South America to
do international negotiations.
They’re not sophisticated.
They’re very rough.”
But as Mencho quickly built
his business, his operation grew
more complex. He invested
heavily in submarines, which
he used to bring in narcotics
from South America. (Accord-
ing to the former DEA agent, he
even hired Russian naval engi-
neers to help design the subs.)
He avoided American scrutiny
by focusing on overseas mar-
kets such as Australia, where
- as Mori explains – a kilo of
cocaine can fetch quadruple the
price it does in the States. (“You send fi ve
tons to Australia , it’s like doing 20 here,” he
says.) Mencho also employed more earthly
techniques, like using fashion models to
smuggle in drugs. According to the former
fi eld agent, CJNG traffi ckers would pose as
magazine photographers, complete with
fake credentials, and fl y into Mexico with
“talent” from Colombia and Venezuela.
Authorities would be so distracted by the
women that the drugs would slip right in.
Mencho leveraged his power using the
twin tools of corruption and intimidation.
Captured CJNG members have testifi ed
about how he hates disobedience and likes
to make his victims beg forgiveness before
killing them. “This is a guy who’ll execute
your whole family based on not much more
than a rumour,” a source says. “He just has
zero regard for human life.” According to
one source who met Mencho, he’s a shrewd
businessman who doesn’t drink, doesn’t
have lovers like other cartel leaders do and
trusts almost no one.
The former fi eld agent says he’s heard
multiple taped phone calls of Mencho
talking to cartel underlings. “These guys
are killers themselves, and they were
afraid,” the agent says. “He was ordering
them around. I don’t think I heard any
where he was calm. But he wasn’t a hot-
head. The yelling was very controlled. He
knew what he was doing.”
Mencho’s ferocity inspired similar devo-
tion from his troops. “One time there was
a big shootout at a fair,” the former agent
recalls. “Someone threw a grenade, and
some [CJNG] guys fell on it to avoid Men-
cho getting killed.” According to the agent,
Mencho’s ruthlessness also made it hard to
recruit informants against him. The agent
once had a source who got close – he hadThen there was the time (never pub-
licly reported) that Mencho sent a severed
pig’s head to the attorney general in Mexi-
co City as a warning. “They put it right on
his doorstep, in an ice chest,” the former
fi eld agent says. “I was surprised it was
only a pig.”
A recently surfaced telephone call shows
how casually Mencho wields the threat of
violence. On the recording, he can be heard
talking to a local police commander (call
sign “Delta One”) whose offi cers were ap-
parently being too zealous for
Mencho’s liking. An abridged
translation follows:mencho: Delta One?
commander: Ye s, who’s
speaking?
m: Listen up, you son of a
bitch. This is Mencho. Tell your
guys to back the fuck off , or I
will seriously fuck you up. I’ll
kill even your fucking dogs,
motherfucker.
c: Yes, sir. I’ll tell them to
stand down—
m: Don’t hang up on me, you
son of a bitch. I know where you
are – you were just in Chapala
[a wealthy suburb of Guada-
lajara].
c: No, sir. I’m not hanging
up. I’ll tell them to stand down.
m: I thought you said we
would get along, motherfuck-
er. You’d better get on board
or you’ll be the fi rst to go, un-
derstand?
c: No, sir. We don’t have to go there. We
do not have to go there.
m: If you want friendship, you have a
great friend here. But if not, then you can
go fuck yourself.
c: Sir, you know me. You know I’m your
friend. I’ll make some calls right now. I’ll
call you back at this number—
m: No, no, no. Don’t call this number. I’ll
call you. And don’t turn off this phone, or
else I’ll take that as a negative [sign].
c: Ye s , si r. You k now me , si r. You k now
there’s respect.
m: OK, then. Sorry for the bad language.While CJNG were ramping up oper-
ations, the DEA was preoccupied with
Chapo’s Sinaloa cartel, helping Mencho
fl y under the radar. “All the cables out of
headquarters, all the intelligence reports,
were focused on Chapo,” the former fi eld
agent says. “The bosses in D.C. were like,
‘We’ve never heard of [CJNG].’ They didn’t
think they were important.” Partly as a
result, Mori’s investigation had diffi culty
gaining traction. “We hit a dead end,” he
says. “We didn’t get close to Mencho, didn’t
get any sources, didn’t get any wiretaps.
We knew we had this big player, this up-an address for Mencho. But when the car-
tel realised he was sniffi ng around, they
kidnapped the man as well as his teenage
son. “They found the father’s body a month
later,” the agent says. “He’d been tortured.
They never found the kid.”
Mencho also bought off cops. Jalisco’s
governor, Aristóteles Sandoval, has said
that when he fi rst took offi ce, the state’s
“greatest vulnerability was the infi ltration
of organised crime” into its police forces.
According to a report by Reuters, at one
point CJNG had more than half of Jalisco’s
municipal police on the payroll – some at
more than fi ve times their salaries. “People
stopped trusting the police,” said Jalisco
Attorney General Eduardo Almaguer. And
the cops Mencho couldn’t buy, he terro-
rised. According to the former DEA fi eld
agent, CJNG inspired an extraordinary
degree of fear in Mexican police, above and
beyond that of most cartels. “They were
afraid of [Mencho],” he says. “They didn’t
want to piss him off .”Surveillance from La Leche, the Puerto
Vallarta restaurant where Mencho’s men
kidnapped two of El Chapo’s sons. “He
was sending a message,” a DEA source
says. “‘Don’t think you’re untouchable.’”