Ioan Grillo - Blood Gun Money: How America Arms Gangs and Cartels

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

El Narco: Inside Mexicos Criminal Insurgency

Gangster Warlords: Drug Dollars, Killing Fields, and the New Politics of Latin America

CONTENTS

Everybody is a book of blood; wherever were opened, were red.

CLIVE BARKER, BOOKS OF BLOOD

Leave the gun out of it. I can always hear the sound of money.

RAYMOND CHANDLER, THE BIG SLEEP

Freedom is beautiful.

JOAQUN EL CHAPO GUZMN, SHORTLY BEFORE HIS THIRD CAPTURE, IN 2016

Finally seeing El Chapo in the flesh, a few feet away from me, conjured mixed emotions.

Like many in the Brooklyn courtroom, I felt a rush being so close to such a notorious villain as Joaqun Guzmn, who is up there with Pablo Escobar and Al Capone as the most infamous gangsters of the last century. Not only journalists but fans and tourists had been queuing up to get a sight of the sixty-one-year-old from Mexicos Sierra Madre mountains and see his beauty-queen wife in the gallery. Only the first few dozen would make it into the courtroom, fifty more into an overflow room to watch it on screens, with the rest turned away, so people were arriving earlier and earlier to get in line. On that January 2019 morning, while the polar vortex sprinkled snow on New York, I arrived at four-forty A.M. and still only just made it onto a courtroom bench.

Guzmn was reaching the end of his three-month trial for trafficking cocaine, heroin, marijuana, and crystal meth, which federal prosecutors claimed had made him fourteen billion dollars. As he was so notorious, the prosecutors called an overkill of fifty-six witnesses, including fourteen of his former cohorts, employees, and lovers. The scariest was a Colombian drug lord known as Chupeta, whod had plastic surgery so many times that his face looked like a rubber mask as he confessed to ordering a hundred and fifty murders. Other gripping testimony came from a computer buff whod built Guzmn an encrypted cell phone network and then tapped the calls for the Drug Enforcement Administration, and a lover who described Guzmn jumping out of bed naked and running into a secret tunnel to evade capture.

Such tales made great television, and American networks were giving it broad coverage. A cable news reporter at the court told me that his editors liked the story because it provided a light touch from the divisive issues dominating media in the Trump era. Gun violence in the United States, from mass shootings to police killings, cut to the heart of the tribal politics gripping the nation. So did the migrant caravans of thousands of Central Americans arriving on the southern border. El Chapo, meanwhile, could be entertainment.

But seeing the short, stocky figure of Guzmn, in his finely pressed suit with his lively, wide-open eyes, also filled me with anger and sadness. I had been reporting on the drug violence in Mexico since 2001, after I moved there from Britain, and what I first saw as a thrilling tale of supervillains had morphed into a humanitarian catastrophe.

I found myself covering things I couldnt have imagined. I hit crime scenes across the country where gunmen would spray five hundred rounds at their prey, slaying bystanders and leaving pulverized bodies that began to color my dreams. Then I saw victims mutilated and decapitated, the rival cartels escalating the numbers of corpses they dumped in public as if they were playing high-stakes poker. In 2012, I found myself in a morgue in Monterrey, my nostrils filled with the stench of forty-nine bodies that had been left on a road, all with their heads, hands, and feet cut off.

Finally, I lost good friends to the bloodshed. Javier

The surreal stories of lovers and tunnels distracted from this colossal human cost. It may have been an exotic foreign villain in the dock, a man with such bizarre stories that there were already two Netflix dramas portraying him. But he was only one step away from those same wedge issues dividing America.

Many in the caravan at the southern border were fleeing mob violence. The same methods used to supply guns to gangs in American cities were used to arm cartels south of the Rio Grande. And the tragedy of innocent people being gunned down in senseless mass shootings across the United States was echoed in the tragedy of innocent people being murdered in equally senseless massacres in Latin America.

Guzmn was not only a drug trafficker. He had helped escalate the turf wars in Mexico into a brutal conflict that destabilized his country, part of the armed violence ripping havoc on Latin America and driving refugees to the U.S. border. He would be seen as a war criminal if it were to be understood as a war. And finally, after escaping from two top security Mexican prisons, he was facing justice that could put him away for life in an American supermax cell in the desert.

On my second day in court, Andrea Goldbarg, the assistant U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, unleashed a grueling seven-hour closing argument to convict Guzmn. She showed a PowerPoint presentation explaining Guzmns trafficking empire, replayed wiretaps of him plotting with gangsters and guerrillas, and went over some of the juiciest anecdotes his cohorts had said on the stand. Though it was grisly stuff, the long explanation became tiresome. Not only the jury of New Yorkers seemed to be struggling to keep attention; even the eyes of El Chapo himself were wandering.

Until she brought out the guns.

Prosecutors carried in a trio of AK-47s that had been seized from the Sinaloa Cartel in Texas and laid them in the center of the courtroom. As she came to the finale of her arguments, she pointed to the guns and then to El Chapo.

I had been seeing a lot of guns that week. I had flown to the trial from Las Vegas, where Id been at the SHOT Show, the biggest firearms trade show in the world. Its just three miles from the Las Vegas Village concert venue, the site of the biggest mass shooting in recent U.S. history. The same models of Kalashnikovs that were in the courtroom were also on display at the SHOT Show, alongside bigger weapons like .50-caliber rifles, grenade launchers, and machine guns mounted on helicopters.

Goldbarg, who was born in Argentina and grew up in the United States, had built a career as a prosecutor going after Latin American gangsters. But El Chapos trial was by far the biggest of her career, and the stakes were enormous. It was the culmination of a decades-long campaign by law enforcement to nail the top dogs in the narco world, and he had been billed as the ultimate kingpin. It might have looked an easy win, convicting a drug lord as infamous as Guzmn. But open goals are high-pressure shots.

The AKs were a physical way to illustrate that the short-suited Guzmn, who was calm and smiling in the courtroom, really was a bloodthirsty warlord. It wasnt the first time that prosecutors had shown off weapons. Just before Christmas, they wheeled out an entire haul of forty Kalashnikov-style rifles seized in El Paso, Texas, and linked by a witness to El Chapo and his Sinaloa Cartel. Some were made in Romania, others in Serbia, but all had been sold retail in the United States, where they were acquired by the narcos.