Twenty years after writing Drug Lord, Terrence Poppa decided the information in his book was more important than ever. In an important interview with the Texas Tribune, Poppa explains that ''the Mexico that I wrote about in the book describes the old order of things: Mexico under the PRI. In that sense, the book was out of date, because how drug trafficking operated under the PRI is completely different than how it works today in a new Mexico, under the democratically transformed Mexico...There has been a decoupling of the highest levels of power from drug trafficking now. It's important for people to understand that, so I had to bring the book up to date.''
"I was a walking bankroll, wearing $150,000 worth of jewelry and carrying as much as $40,000 cash in my pockets. Yet my friends asked: "how are you doing?" I'd sometimes reply, "miserable. I hate every second of my life, and I do not know why." Jorge ValdesAll his dreams for wealth and power came true. Then the nightmare began.As a young man in his twenties with an insatiable thirst for money and power, Jorge Valdes worked his way up inside Colombia's powerful Medellin drug cartel. His key position as head of U.S. Operations brought him into direct contact with presidents, generals, Hollywood celebrities, hired killers and kidnappers. This Cuban immigrant, raised in poverty, was living the high life in more ways than one. His deeds took him from the lap of luxury to the depths of prison and back again.Then an incredible thing happened: Jorge Valdes encountered a person much more powerful than the strongest drug lord, someone who offered something more satisfying than women, drugs, money, prestige and power.Reading more like a fast paced novel of intrigue than a traditional biography, coming clean: the true story of a cocaine drug lord and his unexpected encounter offers an insider's view of the drug industry and the greed that drives it. Told that he would never be anything but a twice convicted drug dealer; today, dr. Jorge l. Valdes, who holds a master degree from Wheaton college and a PhD. In new testament studies from Loyola University in Chicago, is a renowned national speaker who brings a message of hope, forgiveness and the power to change. He has been featured in numerous magazine covers and appeared in many national and international television and radio programs.
This is the story of the most successful cocaine dealers in the world: Pablo Escobar Gaviria, Jorge Luis Ochoa Vasquez, Carlos Lehder Rivas and Jose Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha. In the 1980s they controlled more than fifty percent of the cocaine flowing into the United States. The cocaine trade is capitalism on overdrive -- supply meeting demand on exponential levels. Here you'll find the story of how the modern cocaine business started and how it turned a rag tag group of hippies and sociopaths into regal kings as they stumbled from small-time suitcase smuggling to levels of unimaginable sophistication and daring. The $2 billion dollar system eventually became so complex that it required the manipulation of world leaders, corruption of revolutionary movements and the worst kind of violence to protect.
A stunning investigation of the life and legend of Mexican kingpin Joaquín Archivaldo “El Chapo” Guzmán Loera, building on Noah Hurowitz’s revelatory coverage for Rolling Stone of El Chapo’s federal drug-trafficking trial. This is the true story of how El Chapo built the world’s wealthiest and most powerful drug-trafficking operation, based on months’ worth of trial testimony and dozens of interviews with cartel gunmen, Mexican journalists and political figures, Chapo’s family members, and the DEA agents who brought him down. Over the course of three decades, El Chapo was responsible for smuggling hundreds of tons of cocaine, marijuana, heroin, meth, and fentanyl around the world, becoming in the process the most celebrated and reviled drug lord since Pablo Escobar. El Chapo waged ruthless wars against his rivals and former allies, plunging vast areas of Mexico into unprecedented levels of violence, even as many in his home state of Sinaloa continued to view him as a hero. This unputdownable book, written by a great new talent, brings El Chapo’s exploits into a focus that previous profiles have failed to capture. Hurowitz digs in deep beyond the legends and delves into El Chapo’s life and legacy—not just the hunt for him, revealing some of the most dramatic and often horrifying moments of his notorious career, including the infamous prison escapes, brutal murders, multi-million-dollar government payoffs, and the paranoia and narcissism that led to his downfall. From the evolution of organized crime in Mexico to the militarization of the drug war to the devastation wrought on both sides of the border by the introduction of synthetic opioids like fentanyl, this book is a gripping and comprehensive work of investigative, on-the-ground reporting.
The diminutive Joaquín Guzmán Loera, known universally by his nickname of 'El Chapo' ('Shorty' in Spanish), is the highest-profile narco-terrorist since the demise of Pablo Escobar in the 1990s. Loera began work at the age of nine as a gomero - a farmhand harvesting opium - and as he grew up he shot and murdered his way to the top. In 2009, he made the Forbes annual billionaires list and, before his capture by Mexican marines in 2016, the Sinaloa cartel which he commanded was turning over more than $11 billion in annual sales to North America, supplying more than 10 per cent of all illegal narcotics used on that continent. This made him Public Enemy Number One in the USA. El Chapo was among the most powerful individuals in the world. In Sinaloa, he was a folk hero and the subject of popular songs known as 'narcocorridos'. Meanwhile, America's Drug Enforcement Agency (the DEA) had sworn to hunt him down. Featuring the remarkable tale of El Chapo's arrest in Guatemala in 1993, how he continued to run his cartel from his cell in a Mexican jail and his subsequent escape in a prison laundry cart, along with his recapture in 2014, and ultimate extradition to the US for the Trial of the Century, this book gives you the inside track on the dog-eat-dog world of international drugs trafficking.
A unique and unbelievable first-hand account of how one man fought his way to the top of the criminal underworld... and what he needed to do to stay there. As you read this, someone somewhere is buying drugs. Across the globe, millions of people are involved in the brutal, cold-blooded world of drug dealing, but only a small number make life-changing money. Only a few get to the top, make the calls, know how it all works and truly become drugs lords. And even fewer survive. I know because I am one of those drug lords. After thirty years, I've decided to retire and tell the story of how I got to the top of this tainted profession, what's involved in being a serious criminal, the tricks of the trade, the art of the deal and what it really takes to stay alive for so long. This will be my last confession. And I hope you learn something.
The story of infamous leader of the Medellin Cartel and one of the world's most successful drug dealers, Pablo Escobar. See how a common street thug, became one of the wealthiest people in the world, that promoted his interests with murder, torture and terrorism. Here's some of what you'll find in this book... The Violence that Formed Escobar into a ruthless leader and drug trafficker, the heroic men that died pursuing Escobar. Interesting insights into the life of Escobar from his family and close associates The Money, Sex and Cocaine, See the death and destruction one man can create, on the altar of greed. Meet the man that changed the face of drug enforcement forever, See how a single organization managed to control an entire county with bribes, torture and death.
The riveting and suspenseful account of two young FBI agents in a pursuit of a drug cartel's most fearsome leader, Miguel Treviño Drugs, money, cartels: this is what FBI rookie Scott Lawson expected when he was sent to the border town of Laredo, but instead he’s deskbound writing intelligence reports about the drug war. Then, one day, Lawson is asked to check out an anonymous tip: a horse was sold at an Oklahoma auction house for a record-topping price, and the buyer was Miguel Treviño, one of the leaders of the Zetas, Mexico's most brutal drug cartel. The source suggested that Treviño was laundering money through American quarter horse racing. If this was true, it offered a rookie like Lawson the perfect opportunity to infiltrate the cartel. Lawson teams up with a more experienced agent, Alma Perez, and, taking on impossible odds, sets out to take down one of the world’s most fearsome drug lords. In Bloodlines, Emmy and National Magazine Award-winning journalist Melissa del Bosque follows Lawson and Perez's harrowing attempt to dismantle a cartel leader’s American racing dynasty built on extortion and blood money. With extensive access to investigative evidence and in-depth interviews with key players, del Bosque turns more than three years of research and her decades of reporting on Mexico and the border into a gripping narrative about greed and corruption. Bloodlines offers us an unprecedented look at the inner workings of the Zetas and US federal agencies, and opens a new vista onto the changing nature of the drug war and its global expansion.
The DEA agent who caught El Chapo recounts the high-stakes, seven-year manhunt in this “cinematic . . . captivating first-person account” (USA Today). Once a smalltown Kansas deputy sheriff, Andrew Hogan landed a job with the Drug Enforcement Administration, never imagining that he would eventually be put on the trail of Joaquín Archivaldo Guzmán Loera a.k.a. El Chapo: the leader of Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel and Public Enemy Number One in the United States. Six years later, Hogan links up with agents from Homeland Security Investigations to infiltrate Chapo’s intricate and sophisticated underworld network . . . But who can they trust with their intel? Will the details of their top secret operation leak back to Chapo before the hunt even begins? Hunting El Chapo follows Special Agent Hogan from the investigation’s beginnings to leading a white-knuckle manhunt through the cartel’s stronghold of Sinaloa. Andrew Hogan and Douglas Century’s cinematic crime story follows every beat of the relentless search, taking the reader behind the scenes on one of the most dangerous counter-narcotics operations in the history of the United States and Mexico.
