The Dark Art by Edward Follis

Author:Edward Follis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group, USA
Published: 2014-09-21T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 6

THE LORD OF THE SKIES

They called him the Lord of the Skies: Amado Carrillo Fuentes, godfather of the Juárez Cartel. A man so feared, so wily, and so wealthy that even today—long after his gruesome demise—he’s still ranked number one on many unofficial lists of the “richest gangsters of all time.”

He earned the name “Lord of the Skies” due to his private fleet of planes, including nearly two dozen private Boeing 727 jet aircraft, which he used to import cocaine from Colombia to Mexico, where it was later smuggled into the United States. As the de facto CEO of a sprawling cocaine empire, Carrillo Fuentes had an estimated net worth of $25 billion. In the mid-1990s, we in the Drug Enforcement Agency ranked him as the most powerful cocaine trafficker in the world.

Still in his thirties then, Amado was known as a criminal mastermind, one of those audacious—and utterly brilliant—businessmen who come around once in a generation.

Through the 1970s and ’80s, of course, it was Colombian kingpins like Pablo Escobar and the Ochoa brothers who dominated the cocaine trade. They used Mexico only as a transshipment point: perfectly situated, with its broad and pervious border to the US markets.

Amado had been there as a young narco-trafficker at the founding of the Federation, a cooperative conglomerate of previously competing local Mexican bosses, put together by Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, known as El Padrino, the original Guadalajara-based godfather of the Mexican cartels.

But Amado Carrillo Fuentes, bright and enormously ambitious, wasn’t satisfied with the status quo. He determined that, for all the tens of millions coming into their coffers, the Mexicans were little more than glorified mules; they were being used by the Colombians to advance the trade but not receiving what Amado deemed due compensation.

Amado developed a new vision under the tutelage of Félix Gallardo, reshaping the transshipment of cocaine to American locations, mostly along the West Coast of the United States.

Previously, the Mexicans had been paid in cash per kilogram of pure cocaine. But with one stroke of genius, Amado Carrillo Fuentes changed the entire game. He said to the Colombians:

“Forget the cash—just pay me in product.”

He offered to fly his own 727 jets into Colombia, pick up the cocaine, and guarantee safe delivery to the vast wholesale and retail markets in the United States.

To the Colombian cartel bosses, it made little difference: After all, it was just processed coca. Rather than compensating their middlemen in cash—pesos or US dollars—they’d simply pay them in product.

Around this same time, the most powerful drug traffickers in Colombia were starting to come under indictment by US federal prosecutors. After decades of seeming impotence, the Colombian government had finally stepped up and begun to extradite cocaine traffickers to US jurisdictions. Many of the Colombian cartels’ coca loads were being seized and destroyed, and they were losing fortunes.

It was much safer for them to simply move the coca from Bolivia, process it into raw product in Colombia, then let the Mexicans take over the rest of the operation.

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