Tag: SINALOA CARTEL

  • American Show Trial

    American Show Trial

    It was a show trial. Except it wasn’t in Moscow.  It was in Brooklyn.   The guilt of the defendant was never in question.  It was an honest-to-God American show trial. It was a display of an “enemy of the people” at the moment he is smitten by the righteous might of American justice. It was…

  • Governments, Gangsters, & the Trial of El Chapo Guzman

    Governments, Gangsters, & the Trial of El Chapo Guzman

    The trial of El Chapo Guzman is as disappointing to criminologists trying to understand the deep structure of the drug trade as a rained-out series between The Yankees and Red Sox is to baseball fans waiting to place bets on who’s going to win the American League. This week in El Chapo’s trial was like…

  • The Lie at the Heart of the Trial of El Chapo Guzman

    The Lie at the Heart of the Trial of El Chapo Guzman

    The lie at the heart of the trial of El Chapo Guzman is one familiar to every American who understands what happened to this country during Prohibition: Men and women are human. They can be bought, bribed, threatened or cajoled. It is the basis of organized crime.     Getting the ‘go-ahead’ from Marta Fernando…

  • THE SECRET TRIAL OF ‘EL CHAPO’ GUZMAN

    THE SECRET TRIAL OF ‘EL CHAPO’ GUZMAN

    The government’s star witness in the trial of El Chapo Guzman  was trying to buy information from a man who was instrumental in the purchase of the DC-9 — dubbed “Cocaine One” for its resemblance to official U.S. government planes — busted in Mexico in April of 2006 carrying 5.5 tons of cocaine. Fernando Blengio Cesena, alias…

  • A True Story about Barry Seal & the CIA

    A True Story about Barry Seal & the CIA

      Speaking of the new movie “American Made” about Barry Seal and the CIA and drug trafficking… and we WERE, weren’t we? I mean, with all the MONEY rolling in– day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, decade after decade– why would anyone ever talk about anything ELSE?

  • Free press in U.S. vs Mexico: Que es mas macho?

    Free press in U.S. vs Mexico: Que es mas macho?

      Three Mexican journalists—each a woman who has spent years living with the real possibility that the death threats she regularly receives will one day result in a slow, gruesome death—heroically continue to report the truth about the drug war in their country that no mainstream American journalist has the balls to report about the drug war in ours:…

  • True Detective: Chicago, El Chapo, & Vince Vaughn’s Mom

    True Detective: Chicago, El Chapo, & Vince Vaughn’s Mom

    Actor Vince Vaughn, in the news for his starring role in HBO’s True Detective and recent controversial statements advocating more guns in schools, now has a new source of notoriety guaranteed to keep him in face time: his family. Vaughn’s mother, Sharon Vaughn, a sparkling and vivacious Chicagoland socialite, and his step-father, Stephen Ferrone, a…

  • The NSA, Drug Trafficking, & the Crash of Cocaine2

    The NSA, Drug Trafficking, & the Crash of Cocaine2

    This will someday be remembered as the year when shocking new discoveries about the National Security Agency became an almost daily occurrence. But amid the steady drumbeat of revelations, the one I’ve been waiting for hasn’t yet surfaced: The NSA’s involvement in the global drug trade.

  • DC-9 ‘Cocaine One’ kingpin’s secret conviction

    It was the biggest drug seizure on an airplane in Mexican history. It led directly to the forced sale of Wachovia, then America's 4th largest bank. And it threatened to become America’s most notorious drug scandal since Iran Contra. Yet when a leader of the drug smuggling organization responsible for the flight of the DC-9…