Danny Gold (36:50)
Yes. That's gonna make us way more money to reach his level of influence, Mensho has innovated in three main ways. Firstly, why rivals like the Sinaloans focus on the US border. Menshow looks to the seas, cementing Chinese partnerships across the Pacific as the flow of fentanyl is breaking into a flood. These synthetics drugs require little space to transport, no harvest, no reliance on shifting climates, and infinitely fewer day labourers, so they're way easier to traffic. And you can listen to our episode on the Pacific Drug highway from last year for more on that. Menshow has also forged alliances with narcos in Southeast Asia, South Asia, Australia, and he's expanded into Europe with the help of Italian Mafiosos, Dutch smugglers and other key players. Writes Millennial. The newspaper, not the cartel. Quote, he even took advantage of highly developed countries like New Zealand. Shout out to New Zealand there, with its young and wealthy population, selling the methamphetamines for up to $100 a pill. He accomplished all of this without speaking Mandarin or English or even having completed primary school. Not something I could say about myself. Second, Mencho carries on the Zetas baton, ditching the old motto of Plata o plomo for Plata e plomo. Money and lead. Corrupting cops and state officials at the top level, but also terrorizing officers, jurists and civilians on the street. It's about power, control, and the CJNG for years had turned it into a brutal, bloodthirsty art form. No episode personifies this more than the 2015 helicopter attack we mentioned in the cold open and a bit afterwards when CJNG members downed an army chopper with RPGs, killing 13. I mean, never before had cartels stood toe to toe with the military using battlefield hardware like that. Thirdly, and on a similar note, is how the CJNG had used military equipment like drones for espionage, security, and even to drop bombs on rivals. Landmines to fortify safe houses, and the hiring of Colombian ex FARC mercenaries to train plaza bosses. In particular, the use of mines has been an effective way of scaring civilians and kind of like redrawing the map in Mencho's image. I mean, imagine that. It's crazy using landmines to actually keep, like, civilians in and out of certain territories. It's. Yeah, and the CJNG are insane. The thing is, while Mensho has a huge global property portfolio, Tequila brands, hotels, restaurants, crypto, mountains of gold bars and Bengal tigers just like us, he actually lives pretty rustically in the Jalisco hills, more like a pauper than a prince. And the biggest reason for all of this is that since 2020 he's been suffering from alleged kidney failure and in need of daily bed rest and dialysis. Which brings us crashing right up to the present. Or perhaps pulsing or whatever a kidney does. Because it's precisely this treatment that means Mensho doesn't move from place to place on the daily anymore, like his fellow kingpins, which makes him vulnerable, especially when he's staying at his cabana in Tapalpa, which, unlike other CJNG strongholds, isn't ringed by landmines. Landmines isn't ringing. Maybe he's got a landline, I don't know. Isn't ringed by landmines. And layers of personnel. So when a U.S. officials pinpoint Mencho's position and U.S. drones hover overhead, harfootch and the Mexican government realize this is the best chance we've ever had to clear this guy out, writes Argentine newspaper Clarine. A month before the federal operation in Tapalpa that would end his life, Nemesio Osiguera Cervantes, the most important criminal in the world, lived on the run, sick and nervous, certain that every move was monitored by the United States security agencies in constant communication with the Mexican government. The DEA had tapped the phones of his main operatives and knew of El Mencho's nervousness. This anxious state aggravated his kidney and liver problems. At 59, his health was in shambles, partly due to surgeries performed in makeshift hospitals. He ate poorly and slept even worse. His sleep was fragmented by trips made in the early hours of the morning from one hideout to another. Anyone who saw him in January would never have imagined they were standing before a man with a fortune estimated at over a billion dollars. No, you're not going to come up with a joke about me. Berlin. Nothing like that. Okay, cool. We'll move on. The rest, of course, is history. I mean, not for me, but for Mencho, who is dead. But that is only part of the story. When news of Mencho's death goes public, the cjng, as we mentioned a while back, they go berserk in Tamaulipas. They hijack buses and set them on fire across highways. Vehicles block roads in Michoacan, and cops who try to clear them are fired upon in Guanajato, CJNG's hot operatives torch 74 cars, trucks and storefronts. Some 20 states are affected by this so called Menchaso, as Owen Grillo calls it. But the worst of the violence is reserved for Jalisco and particularly Guadalajara, where Running street battles have led to the deaths of several dozen state forces. This is a war, right? It's a full blown war. Most of you would have seen footage of fighting in Puerto Vallarta, a major tourist hub. Shutting down the airport, which is pretty new, deliberately target tourist infrastructure when such places, like we said, are usually considered off limits, not just because it attract too much state attention, but because visiting tourists are a big pot of gold for the cartels. And schools, even schools are shuttered in the wake of all this. Here's Owen again.
