Lord of the Skies: The Man Who United Mexico's Cartels
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July 1997, Mexico City.

Amado Carrillo Fuentes, also known as the Lord of the Skies because of all the airplanes he used to traffic massive amounts of cocaine, is at the height of his power. Or he was, just a few months ago. The man who got his start in the drug game when he was barely a teenager and spent the ensuing decades apprenticing and learning different aspects of the game from a host of cartel bosses and drug lords has really put his knowledge to use. They say he's one of the most powerful drug lords ever,

and he's made an estimated $25 billion. He now sits as the boss of the Juarez cartel. He's known for being cool, collected, not flashy. He'd rather negotiate than get violent, though he's not afraid to drop a few dozen bodies if the situation calls for it. But mostly, he's a smooth operator.

He knows how to bring powerful people together, knows how to work with them, knows who to threaten and who to pay. He was, in the 90s, almost untouchable. Except for a close call assassination attempt some speculate was done by the Cali cartel for messing up a $20 million shipment, though others point to the Gulf cartel. But yeah, he's got everyone on the payroll.

He works with the Colombians and other top narcos. He pays off politicians, police, military, judges. He's good with everyone. But something has gone wrong recently, and the pressure is on. The governor of Morelos State, who lived a few blocks from Amado and was close with him, was recently forced to resign. And a little bit later, at his sister's wedding, Amado's sister, the whole thing was raided by the Mexican army, and he only barely escapes. He's starting to feel like the walls are closing in.

He's been to Cuba. He's been to Chile recently. He's bought some property. They say he's thinking of relocating. But first, he wants to make sure he's in the clear, that nobody can find him if he doesn't want to be found. So what he's going to do is, he's going to get some plastic surgery, change his whole face, and basically be incognito. So he sneaks into a clinic in Mexico City. But during the course of his operation, something goes wrong, really wrong. And he dies on the operating room table.

Almost immediately, the rumors start that he's still alive. It gets so bad that the government actually has a press conference with this messed up, like, decrepit body and face, open casket, all that. A couple of months later, though, two of the doctors are found dead. They've been tortured. But the rumors don't stop. And everyone is asking themselves...

Welcome back to another episode of the Underworld Podcast. I'm your host,

I am your host, Danny Gold. Usually with me is Sean Williams, but he's in Belize or the woods somewhere. I don't know what's going on with him. Usually we are two journalists who have worked all over the world and we bring you stories every week of organized crime. But Sean is not here. Here today to talk is Noah Horwitz making his return. He wrote the untold story of El Chapo, and I believe he might be our only two time guest. I think I think that honor first went to Toby Muse, but I'll take it.

I'm in good company. Thanks for having me on, Danny. Yeah, really good company. Toby has also done, I think, a Patreon interview for us. So that's three-time guest. But patreon.com slash underworldpodcast where we do interviews and short episodes as well. All sorts of stuff there. Sean's published some stuff from Belize with like, I don't know, I think some Belizean crips talking all sorts of crazy stuff. So it's a good listen. We are here today to talk about Amado Carrillo-Fuentes.

One of the most powerful, most infamous drug lords of all time. They called him the Lord of the Skies. And he was born in 1956 in where else? Sinaloa. The second of 10 children. And unlike someone like, say, El Chapo or a lot of the other drug lords, his father was actually not poor, right? He was a wealthy, not wealthy, but like a moderately well-off landowner. Did okay for himself.

And at about 12 or 13 years old, I should also actually say at this point too that not that much is known about Amado. He kept a lot secret, but we have some details here and there. So around 12 or 13, he goes off to Chihuahua, which is the highlands where the marijuana and the opium poppies are grown in Mexico. And he goes there to spend some time under the tutelage of

of his infamous uncle, Ernesto Don Neto Fonseca. Yeah, so like you said, Amado was born and raised in this tiny ranchito on the outskirts of the city of Navalato, which is like this dusty little agricultural town about an hour west of Culiacan, which is the capital of

Now, Sinaloa is this long, thin state in northwestern Mexico, and it's kind of divided into two major parts, right? To the west is the agricultural lowlands and coastal marshes along the Gulf of California. And that's where Armado grew up.

But then to the east, the Sierra Madre Mountains sweep up from the coastal plains into this rugged, sparsely populated land of steep slopes and deep valleys. And the residents there tend to eke out a living, mostly as ranchers and small-time farmers. For most of the 20th century until the present day, the economy has revolved around two main cash crops, which are, of course, opium and marijuana, like you said.

And along with the corners of two other neighboring states, Chihuahua and Durango, this area is known as the Golden Triangle. And it's home to nearly all of the most infamous drug lords, like you said, of the past 50 years. You know, El Chapo, Juan Jose Esparagosa Moreno, El Azul, the Beltran Leyva brothers. You know, all of these guys come from Sinaloa, most of them from the mountains.

So it's kind of a cliche by now, but it's true that Sinaloa is like the cradle of the Mexican drug trade. The Mexican state is a remote presence there, and power has for more than a century lain in the hands of a rotating cast of local strongmen, guys rich enough to buy local weed and opium and traffic it north.

while maintaining stability in the area through brute force and with this uneasy, fickle, constantly renegotiated backing of local and federal authorities.

I've spent a lot of time in Sinaloa, you know, when I was reporting on that book about El Chapo back in 2019. And I made repeated trips to Culiacan and into the mountains. And I got to tell you, I can see why the place like spawns such a tough crowd, you know. Those mountains are the most remote place I've ever been in.

in some areas are still controlled by these guys zooming around on ATVs with pistols in their waistbands, manning checkpoints with AKs and walkie-talkies. I mean, you know that crowd, right? You've been in places like that, Danny. Yeah, I think, you know, I've never been to Sinaloa, but it always has that reputation, right? Of just being like a tough place inhabited by tough people, sort of like, you know, outlaw, banditry vibe. That's what I've always taken from the legend of Sinaloa.

I mean, let me tell you, it's pretty accurate. And I feel like a lot of the portrayals of it tend to sort of turn that almost into a parody. And it's a lot more complex than that, but there's truth to it. And there are certain places where it really is run by these guys.

So anyways, Amado, like El Chapo and the rest of them, he got his start there. But like you said, he had the good fortune to be the nephew of this guy, Don Neto Fonseca. Now, Don Neto Fonseca,

Don Neto was this big bruiser of a man. He was a longtime opium farmer and heroin trafficker who, by the 1970s and the early 80s, he had moved to Guadalajara and he had teamed up with two other big shots, this guy Rafa Caro Quintero and Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo. With Rafa's weed-growing prowess and Felix Gallardo's political contacts in Guadalajara and Mexico City, they were pioneers of the modern Mexican drug trade. Divide

dividing up territory, collecting taxes from independent traffickers, and sticking their buddies in the federal police on anyone who went rogue.

And when cocaine came into the mix, everything got magnified a hundredfold. You know the story. Coke was barely a sideline for most of the 60s and 70s, but by the 1980s, demand in the U.S. had skyrocketed, and Felix Gallardo saw an opportunity. Why spend all this time, money, and manpower growing weed and opium when you can make 10 times the profit moving neat, tidy little bricks of cocaine, you know?

So for a while, the Colombians were shipping it to Mexico themselves. But after a big bust up on the Texas border outside of Juarez, they saw the wisdom in letting the Mexicans handle their own loads.

Before long, Amado was probably moving more than anyone. I'm talking fleets of planes landing every day, each holding hundreds of kilos of cocaine. I was talking to a retired DEA agent recently who was telling me that he would land seven, eight planes at a time, all of them loaded with hundreds of kilos. So that kind of money, that changed everything, and it made a lot of people extremely rich. And it wasn't just...

The guy, you know, the Amado Carrillo Fuentes, the Don Neto's, the guys moving it, you know, that money made its way to cops, to generals, to politicians, to businessmen, you know, the political elite of Mexico who all made sure that their guys kept the coke moving and the money coming.

Yeah, I mean, let's go back a bit, though, to sort of like, you know, how Amato sort of comes about his sort of entire adolescence and how he kind of rises up a ladder, right? There's this great Texas Monthly article from 1995. No, actually, you sent this to me. And it shows his rise, right? He starts at the bottom, loading and driving marijuana, learning from his uncle. And then he sort of goes through these stages where it's like he almost apprentices with an all-star cast of different drug lords, all with different skills, right?

He links up first with the Herrera family, who had a serious history of heroin smuggling and were from Durango. There's a quote from the article. The Herreras were the last of a breed in Mexico, an exclusively family-run operation that controlled every single aspect of their trade, from planting marijuana and poppy seeds in the foothills of Las Herreras to distributing the product in Chicago. And he apparently befriends the godfather's nephew, this guy Jaime Jr., who...

quote, epitomize the new style of trafficker, the Concorde flying, thousand dollar boot wearing, golden diamond ornamented internationalist. You know, so this new breed that wasn't just like a Sinaloan cowboy, these guys who were slick and wore slick suits and had all the jewelry and all that sort of stuff. But after that, Amato somehow ends up working under Pablo Acosta Villarreal.

Via Real, sorry, who controlled a major smuggling corridor in northern Mexico along the border with Texas. And it's described back then as the most flamboyant trafficker in modern times. Amato's kind of like, you know, Arya Stark, right, in Game of Thrones, where like every step of the way, she's just training with a different badass guy who's like a, you know, killer of all sorts. And she just ends up picking up all their skills. And by the end, she's the most skilled of all.

And Amado is like that with these guys, right? He ends up being this extremely powerful and ruthless drug lord, but he's learning from all these guys at a young age and he's taking notes. And Noah will talk later about, you know, he had a relationship with El Mayo and El Chapo as well, the Arellano Felix family, the Beltran Levas, like everyone, everyone in the Mexican drug game with a known name from those years and the years before and the years after he was involved with. And then also don't forget, you know, he was known for having relationships with the Colombians, right?

all sorts of high-level politicians, top of the police force, top of the military. He was just a real renaissance man.

So at this point, what's happening is he's basically moving up that ladder and he's learning the trade from various people. But he also kind of runs into some trouble. Yeah, so let's talk about Pablo Acosta because I think that's where Amado's career really gets a jumpstart. By the mid-1980s, Amado is working very closely with Acosta who runs this personal fiefdom of sorts in and around the city of Ojinaga, Chihuahua, which sits right on the border across from Presidio, Texas.

Now, if you want to know about Acosta, I highly recommend this book by the journalist Terrence Papa. It's called Drug Lord, and then there's some under title, whatever. Put it on the list, Danny. It's a really good book, and it's one of the most important works, in English at least, that really describes not only the life of this guy, Acosta, but also the structure, the mechanics of the drug trade, the division of territory, the collusion with cops, etc.

all the neat little details, like how, you know, they'd, they'd weld empty pockets into the side of oil containers and, and paint over the welding so that customs officials in the U S wouldn't spot, uh, where they're hidden, you know, where they've hidden the drugs. Um, yeah, I really, you know, can't recommend that book enough anyway. Um, so Amado ends up in, in Okinaga, you know, he's probably sent there by, uh, his uncle Don Neto. And, uh,

he's working with Acosta and he's really learning the ins and outs of smuggling drugs over the border. You know, Amado is known as the Lord of the Skies for his skill at piloting huge cargo planes from Colombia into Mexico. But he would also later become known for setting up one of the most sophisticated cross-border smuggling operations in history, you know. And who better to learn that from than a guy like Acosta who, you know, his smuggling career,

dated back to when people were smuggling all kinds of things over the border. If something was illegal on one side of the border, he'd smuggle it. So he really knew what he was doing. And he sort of taught this to Amado.

Now, Amado was also likely there for another reason, and that was to keep an eye on Pablo Acosta, because Pablo Acosta was not a quiet man. He was known to get into wild shootouts in broad daylight, and he had this bloody, long-running feud with another local family. And so by 1987, bodies were dropping left and right in Ojinaga. Acosta was also smoking marijuana.

way too much crack, you know, and he was just kind of losing it. What's the right level of crack to smoke?

I would probably say none, but he was really, really hitting the pipe. In this book by Terrence Papa, he talks about how he would just hole up in a room with a brick of coke and he would cut little bits off and he would cook it into crack just in a spoon over the sink. He was really, really losing the plot. So,

But, you know, all of that crack, all of the fucking shootouts, that was not really his biggest sin. You know, his biggest sin was in 87, he talked to the press. He actually gave an interview to Terrence Papa where he held forth on all sorts of things regarding his profession, which I don't have to tell you, you're not really supposed to do that if you're a high-profile drug trafficker. So...

The way the modern drug trade was set up in Mexico, one guy like Acosta would be in charge of a swath of smuggling territory, which was known as a plaza, such as Ojinaga. And anyone smuggling drugs through there was either working for him or paying tribute to him. And he, in turn, kicked up a huge cut to the cops and politicians who allowed him to operate.

Part of the deal was you can't raise a ruckus. You can't make those cops and politicians look bad. And Acosta with his shootouts and his freebasing and his interview with Terrence Papa, he made everybody look bad. So finally, in April of 1987, uh, a squad of federal police under the command of this infamously corrupt commander, uh, they tracked him down in this tiny village called Santa Elena, which was right on the border, uh,

right on the banks of the Rio Grande River, and they cornered Acosta and they gunned him down, which worked out fine for Amado. There's been rumors over the years, and I recently heard this from a retired DEA agent who insisted that Amado had paid a million dollars to that police commander to take out Acosta. It can't be proven, but it seems feasible to me, honestly.

By the time that went down, though, Amado had relocated. He wasn't in Ojinaga anymore. Unlike Acosta, he was a careful guy. He was really careful. Hardly anyone even knew what he looked like, but I'll get to that later. Around this time, 1987, 88, 89, the drug trade in Mexico was changing. The old network based in Guadalajara, the operation run by Félix Gallardo, Don Neto, Rafa Caro Quintero,

had scattered under the intense pressure from Mexican and U.S. law enforcement, and all the underlings were carving out their own territory. In Tijuana...

the Arellano Felix family was in control. And El Chapo, meanwhile, took over the route from Sinaloa up to the border between Sonora and Arizona, mostly in this little town called Agua Prieta, which, as you may know, that's where he dug his famous tunnel later on. And Amado ended up in Juarez, working for this former federal police commander named Rafael Aguilar Guajardo. Yeah, and this is not the end that we're going to hear of him working with police commanders. And this is also when stuff just like...

Shit really starts to happen, right? And the fighting and the violence are just increasing at a really high level. Yeah, so basically things were really going to shit in northwestern Mexico at this point. A war was breaking out between El Chapo's outfit and the Arellano Felix family. But even as...

violence was increasing and bodies were dropping, Amado was able to remain neutral for a very long time. People on both sides of this war were getting killed left and right in Tijuana and Sinaloa in 89, 90, 91, 92. But for most of that time, Amado was able to stay out of it. He just... He wasn't a guy that you messed with, I think. And he also...

He wasn't quick to get involved. He wasn't hot-headed. So even at times he tried to mediate between the warring parties because when he talked, people listened. So there was this one really intense episode

that I describe in great detail in my book. So it's November 1992, and this war is going on between El Chapo and the Arellano Felix family. And this is maybe a few weeks after this infamous shootout in Puerto Vallarta at this discotheque where El Chapo tried to kill the Arellano Felix family. They got away. And it was a sort of low point in the war. And Amado decides, all right, I got to...

try to fix this. So Amado flies to Tijuana and he's going to try to broker a truce between the two factions. And he brought with him this kid, Vicente Zambada, who was the teenage son of Ismael El Mayo Zambada. You may be familiar with him from more recent occurrences, but at the time, El Mayo was

He was a Sinaloan trafficker and he was closely allied with El Chapo and also very close with Amado. But he wasn't yet, like Amado, he wasn't yet involved in the war. So it turned out to be a bad decision to bring Vicente to this meeting because he was, you know, El Mayo was just as good as on El Chapo's side. He was seen as that close to El Chapo. So they...

Roll up to the mansion, you know, this big house on the outskirts of Tijuana that was owned by the Arellano Felix family. And there's gunmen all around. And they get this icy cold reaction from, I believe, from Benjamin Arellano Felix, who is the brother widely seen as the leader of that family. You know,

So Benjamín, Vicente told this story later in court. Benjamín is snarling at the pair. He's like, why did you bring him? Why did you bring the son of El Chapo's compadre? Why is he here? And the meeting only went downhill from there.

By the end, Benjamín was raving, spitting out threats to murder not just El Chapo, but Amayo too. He was saying, you should have killed me at the discotheque. I'm coming for you now. Really dramatic, Shay. And so Amalo managed to whisk young Vicente out of the mansion and onto a plane out of town. And by the time they landed, he decided he wasn't neutral anymore. He sided with El Chapo against the Arellano Felix family.

Actually, just a brief aside there, Vicente later said he went to see his father and his dad was like, what are you doing? You're supposed to be in high school, man. Yeah, I mean, we all skipped school back in the days, but few of us got involved in the most

bloody narco wars of all time when we were doing it. But yeah, from my understanding too, like Amado was always pretty under the radar. Yeah. He wasn't flashy. He preferred negotiation over violence though. He wasn't scared of using violence when he had to. He was just a slick operator that was careful, meticulous, and he had everyone on the payroll. Everyone. A New York times article in 1997 says quote Korea style. The investigators say has kept him a free man in addition to making him rich.

He never carries guns or drugs. He has not spoken publicly about any of the allegations against him, and he has never served more than eight months in jail. He has never been convicted of a crime. Yeah, and you know, that really tracks with everything that I have heard about him from people who were either associates of his or were chasing after him. Even to this day, when I talk about a mother or two

organized crime experts or journalists or retired DEA agents who dedicated their lives to taking him down. Everyone speaks with this sort of like grudging respect, you know, he was the real deal. He kept his head down, built an empire, kept the killing to a minimum, like you said, or, you know, at least he kept it quiet, right? Like any good drug trafficker, he did have enemies. So in

In 93, he barely escaped an attempted hit with his life.

Remember how I said that no one really knew what he looked like? That's probably what saved him. He was eating dinner in a restaurant in a suburb south of Mexico City, him, his wife, and a couple of bodyguards, right? And these two gunmen stormed into the place and they opened fire with automatic weapons. And they killed two of the bodyguards as Amado and his wife ducked behind a table. And then they turned their guns on this random poor schmuck who was running away.

They dropped him, and apparently, thinking they'd gotten their man, they fled the scene. But Amato survived. And then by 1993, the boss of the Juarez Cartel, he gets gunned down, like everyone sort of, you know, above Amato always tends to, and he takes over and becomes the head of it. Yeah, so that boss...

Rafael Aguilar Guajardo, he was another guy that it was good to learn from. He was a former commander in the Federal Security Directorate, which was this secret police of the ruling party in Mexico that got its start in the, well, in the 70s, it murdered dissidents. It would disappear leftist guerrillas. It had a death squad that killed students. But

Starting in the late 70s, early 80s, it got really involved in the drug trade because that's where the money was at. And these guys were just fucking criminals. So Aguilar Guajardo, the DFS was disbanded in 85. He went into drug traffic in full time and he ends up, as you say, running Juarez.

And he was, you know, he was, like I said, he was a great person to learn from if you want a certain skill set. With his contacts in federal law enforcement, he knew the ins and outs of the Mexican power structure that sits quietly atop the hierarchy of the drug trade. But eventually he got in Amado's way as well. And in April of 93, Aguilar Guajardo was gunned down in the streets of Cancun. And Amado was finally in control of Juarez, or shortly after he consolidated control of Juarez. So,

I think I said a minute ago, Juarez is, you know, we have to understand it's, it's,

It's this massive port of entry into the U.S. You know, there's a staggering number of cars, trucks, trains crossing back and forth every day, moving just billions of dollars in cargo. And in 1994, the amount of capital crossing the border exploded thanks to the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, which loosened tariffs and freed up the movement of goods across the borders of Mexico, the U.S.,

And with more goods and fewer shipments being inspected on the border, of course, there's a lot more opportunity to move drugs. So by the time that happened, Amado had total control of the crossing there. You know, anyone moving drugs had to pay him. And he was kicking up so much money to the cops and military that he was untouchable.

According to the journalist Chuck Bowden, it was considered suicide to even say his name in public. You know, that's how many spies he had and how committed he was to keeping his name out of the public. There's this terrifying anecdote in that Texas Monthly piece that you mentioned, Danny, where these two strangers show up on the doorstep of a newspaper publisher in Juarez. And they're like, you know,

Hey, we have come here on behalf of a friend. We would like to pay you a substantial sum of money every month. In exchange, you will let him review every article you intend to publish about Amado Cario Fuentes. And the guy, of course, he says no. He's honest. He can't do that.

And so one stranger responds, well then, since you can't do that, let's try another arrangement. Either you will let a friend pay you a substantial sum of money every month in exchange for which you will not publish anything about Amado Cario Fuentes, or you will be killed.

And then they said goodbye and they left. That was it. And the publisher decided maybe it was time to sell the newspaper. So he did. Now, the author of that 1995 Texas Monthly piece, a reporter named Robert Draper, he spoke to some reporters in Juarez about that story and they basically confirmed it. Here's a quote from one of the reporters in that piece. He said,

television, radio, newspapers, it's the same editorial policy. So you see how he was able to

keep everyone so quiet. You know, he didn't have to shoot his fucking guns in the air like, you know, what's his name? Yosemite Sam. I was going to say Elmer Fodder, but that's Yosemite Sam. Yosemite Sam. So, you know, he doesn't have to do that fucking cowboy shit. He commands this fear just by sending polite envoys. And by the way, I don't want to sound like I...

impressed with this you know the the situation for Mexican journalists has only gotten so much worse in the years since this was happening and it's just it's just not something defies anything I can say here it's just it's just awful so I I don't want to sound like I'm impressed with the guy he's he's a real he's a

He's a scumbag. There's no words to describe him. He's not good. He's not good. But I think there's a difference between something that's somewhat impressive and condoning it, right? No one's condoning it. But the way he operated compared to the other guys. Yeah, we get it. They get it. Yeah, I heard a note of admiration in my voice that I didn't like. So...

You know, who he was a dream come true, though, for was that corrupt elite, the local power brokers, the folks in Mexico City alike, because he was really stuck. You know, he was he stuck to this cardinal rule of not creating a scene, not bringing attention to himself. And so he was so good at what he did. He smuggled so many tons of coke that there was there was really no way he could escape notice for long. You know, so before long,

He was in the sights of U.S. law enforcement. But basically during these years, the early to mid-90s, he's turning the Juarez cartel into the number one cartel in the world. He's organizing with the Colombians. He's getting way more favorable deals and independence for the Mexican cartels. He's essentially creating this federation of cartels, of Mexican cartels. And we should also mention with the planes, I think we've talked about a few times, the reason they called him the Lord of the Skies is because as he moved up the chain from Mexico

you know, drug runner to drug Lord, he went from flying these little Cessnas to having a number of big seven 47s and some French plane. I think some French plane type that I can't pronounce, but he would just fill them with cocaine and land them just shy of the Texas border. We were then figure out all these ingenious ways of bringing them into the U S I think I read an article from that time that talks about how, you know, they found cocaine hidden in 60,000 pounds of Mexican carrots, which now, uh,

Sounds almost quaint to us because they've just moved up to submarines and all sorts of different things. But back then, it was kind of a big deal. And this guy was just a master smuggler. And in 1996, he's at the height of his power. Yeah, he was really good at what he did. So by this time, like 1996, there were...

maybe half a dozen major drug trafficking networks operating throughout Mexico at this time. But ask anyone, and it was Amado who ran the show. He was far and away the biggest operation, and he had Juarez on lock.

He teamed up with this gang of current and former cops. They were known as La Lina or The Line. And La Lina did his dirty work for him. They would kill anyone who disobeyed. They would kill anyone who failed to pay the tax. And they did it quietly, no fuss. They were sort of, I think, pioneers in disappearing people rather than shooting them in the street. And that...

trend only increased in Mexico over the years. He'd teamed up with this gang of current and former cops who were known as La Linea or The Line. And La Linea did his dirty work for him very enthusiastically. They would kill anyone who disobeyed. They would kill anyone who failed to pay the tax. And they did it quietly, no fuss. Oftentimes they would just make the body disappear.

And just like it wasn't a good idea to say Amado's name too loudly, La Línea existed as a whisper, a group so efficient, so untouchable, that it was better just to pretend that you had never heard of them. So with them at his side in Juarez, with all the cocaine he's bringing in, with all the deals he's negotiated, he's kind of doing almost whatever he wants for like half a decade or so, just moving tons and tons of product. And everyone is getting paid.

But then in late 1996, something switches. And the Mexican security forces who would let him do whatever he wanted, they actually start going after him. The army even raids his sister's wedding in Sinaloa, and he barely escapes from it. It's hard to know exactly what happened.

why they actually started going after him. But if I had to hazard a guess, I would say that by 96, the pressure from the US was really getting to the folks in Mexico City. There was this fusion center of different law enforcement agencies in El Paso who their main focus

target was Amado. You know, Amado was really the center of attention for the agents who were right across the border. I've spoken to several of them and they, you know, they were, by 96, they were really, really gunning for Amado. So,

It's not going well for him in the end of 96, the beginning of 97, but what really forced the hand of the Mexicans and really made it so that they just couldn't pretend for any longer that they didn't know Amado or that they didn't know how to find him

was this top military anti-drug officer, the top military anti-drug officer in Mexico, General Jesus Gutierrez Royo. He was arrested in February of 1997 for colluding with Amado for years. This was the top drug official in the country, a close partner of the U.S., and he was in Amado's pocket.

This was a huge embarrassment to Mexico City, and it was also a huge embarrassment to Washington. Just a few months prior to his arrest, the general had stood on a dais in D.C. as the American drug czar, Barry McCaffrey, told reporters what a deadly serious guy the general was, and a man of, quote, highest integrity. You know, we might think that people in Washington have no shame, I personally do, but the

in terms of international diplomacy, they don't like to be embarrassed, you know? So Gutierrez-Ribollo goes down and now both governments are

are really, really turning up the heat. And Amato's aware of this and he's not stupid. So in February of that year, he starts kind of looking for his escape plan. He's visiting Cuba. He's visiting Chile. He's kind of putting some money out. He buys some houses, buys some property, and he almost gets plastic surgery in Cuba to sort of change how he looks. Like he really wants to go incognito and kind of leave the game. But he decides to go back to Mexico City and he sneaks into a clinic to like sneakily get it done.

But of course, as the story goes that I told in the beginning, he dies on the operating table. And yeah, the best laid plans, right? Yeah, that was a big mistake. And it remains unclear if...

It was the doctors. Someone got to the doctors. Someone paid them to put him under and keep him under. The doctors were certainly unfortunate enough to be under suspicion because several of them ended up found in barrels encased in cement a little while later. But I want to talk about how we know that he died because there's been all these conspiracy theories in the wake of his death.

that, you know, Amado ran away to Cuba. He, he, he ended up in Chile, you know, at the, at the end of, um, at the end of Narcos Mexico, as, as I'm sure some of you will know, there's this sort of open-ended, like, you know, did he, did he make it? Um, and I am here to tell you that he did not. And the reason that I know that is I've, I've spoken to several, uh, high ranking, uh, former DEA agents who, uh,

took me through step by step of how they identified the body. So, you know, on the day that Amado goes into that clinic, it's, you know, it's July 3rd. And, you know,

He dies. And the next day, all of the diplomatic staff of the U.S. Embassy, all of the attachés, all of the DEA, FBI, everybody is at the ambassador's house in Mexico City having a Fourth of July celebration. And suddenly one of them, one of the DEA agents gets a phone call from this high-ranking source in the Mexican government. And he says,

listen, Amado's dead. Amado's dead. The plane is headed to Sinaloa with his body. I wanted to let you know. So just like that, you know, the party's over for the DEA. They head back to the embassy and start figuring out how they're going to prove that he's dead, right? So Amado,

This guy, Larry Villalobos, he's a former FBI fingerprint technician who later went to work for the DEA in El Paso and then in Mexico City. And he remembers that back in 1985, Amado had actually been picked up by either local police or border patrol near Presidio, Texas, right over the border.

border from Ojinaga where he was working with Pablo Acosta. So they pick up Amado, they fingerprint him and they deport him back to Mexico. That meant they had the fingerprints. This guy, Larry Villalobos, he had seen the fingerprints. So he calls El Paso. He gets the fingerprints sent to him. Meanwhile, in Sinaloa,

agents of the Mexican government, either the Attorney General's office or the military, I can't remember which off the top of my head right now, they intercept the plane as it lands in Sinaloa. They take the body off the plane and they put it on another plane and they send it back to Mexico City. And basically they took the corpse's fingerprints

And they compared them with the fingerprints of Amado in, you know, in Presidio in 85. And they're a perfect match. And later, later I'm told that, you know, someone was able to do a DNA test to prove it, but the fingerprints proved it, you know, this guy was dead. And I think part of the reason that there have been these conspiracy theories is just that Amado,

you know, he, he didn't really have that many options for successor. The, the, his mother's number two was his, his younger brother, this guy, Vicente Cariofantes. And Vicente was just not the same as a mother. He didn't, you know, he was built different. And he, he did, you know, he did a lot of Coke. He partied, he was, he was louder than a mother and he didn't come in the same amount of respect.

And so I have a bit of a theory based on talking to people about this, that it was in the interest of Amado's family, of the organization, for people to think that Amado was still alive. Because you're not going to talk back to Vicente. Well, you probably aren't going to talk back to Vicente anyway, but you're not going to talk back to Vicente if you think that Amado might be in Chile

you know, ready to come back and get you. Right. But he never came back. You know, if he, if he really did retire, he would be having a very quiet retirement. He never came back. And Carter started to fall apart. You know, within a few months, there was, there was much more open violence. You know, there was a shooting in a restaurant. A few months later, there was this, there was a massacre. And it really, it really, you know, the, the,

the grim, violently enforced peace that Amado kept in Juarez started to break down. And it only continued to break down more and more as Vicente was unable to maintain the relationships that Amado was so skilled at maintaining. You know, Amado was so close with El Mayo Zambada, but within a few years,

El Chapo and El Mayo were at war with Vicente because Vicente wasn't able to control his younger brother. El Chapo killed Vicente's younger brother, Rodolfo. Vicente killed El Chapo's brother. And it just got worse and worse. And as we may know, then in 2007, President Felipe Calderon sort of sent in the Fed, sent in the military and the federal police to supposedly to

you know, enforce peace in Juarez and it just exploded. Juarez descended into just the most hellish violence imaginable for the next,

four or five years. Thousands of people killed a year and just 300,000 people left the city. Just a war zone, a war zone. And the violence died down for a bit in the mid-2010s, but it's been ticking up again for the last few years. And so I'm not saying that Amado...

should have been allowed to remain in power. I'm certainly not saying that because the peace enforced by corruption and violence is not a real peace. But it was clear that no one else could really step into his shoes in Juarez. And the result of his death was just a general sort of

decay and disorganization and devolving into this kind of violence that really never would have existed under his watch. There you go. Lord of the Skies. Thank you, Noah, so much for coming on. Please buy Noah's book so that I can be like, look, dude, you came on our show and people bought your book. It's great. And then he tells other people and they come on the show. They write scripts. I don't have to write scripts. Sean doesn't have to write scripts and things just go easier for all of us.

And hey, I would say too, please subscribe to the Patreon. I think I'm one of your earliest subscribers. That's true. Patreon.com slash Edwin Wapata. Yeah, I've been listening to all of the Patreon episodes. They really add...

a lot to the overall underworld experience. So buy my book and sign up for the Patreon. Patreon.com slash underworld? Yeah. No, patreon.com slash the underworld podcast. Slash the underworld podcast. Sorry. I know. But thanks anyway and thank you so much Noah for coming on. Danny, thanks so much for having me on. It'll be great when Sean comes back. He's got a much more soothing voice than I do.

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