It’s been awhile since we’ve gotten a Kingpin. Almost a year. El Chapo. We’ve gotten this guy before. Like non-sequel movies, are we running out of Kingpins?
Tag: kingpins
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We Got Another Kingpin! (15)
It’s amazing there are any drug kingpins left since we’ve gotten so many of them.
It seems there was one last to get: “La Tuta.” Now he’s history. (I’m a bit disappointed in the monicker. “The teacher” is a pretty lame nickname by drug lord standards, I have to say. We may not be running out of kingpins, but they may be running out of good nicknames.)
“The most wanted drug lord in the country,” according to the NYT.
I guess Mexico is now safe. Surely this marks the end of the drug war. What a relief.
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We Got Another Kingpin! (14)
It’s been a few months, and actually “we” didn’t get him. But he was gotten all the same.
From the BBC: “Mexican police have found the body of Aquiles Gomez, who was thought to be one of the main leaders of the Knights Templar drug cartel.”
We win! (for the fourteenth time and counting…)
As I wrote back in 2011:
Ah, the illusive search for “Mr. Kingpin.” If only we could nab him, the whole criminal enterprise would tumble. Witness how we’re all safe from terrorism after the killing of Osama bin Laden. And notice how the drug war in Mexico has been won…
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We Got Another Kingpin! (13)
“El Chapo, Most-Wanted Drug Lord, Is Captured in Mexico.”
“This is an absolutely huge get.”
“Big strike.”
“A landmark achievement, and a victory for the citizens of both Mexico and the United States.”
So don’t believe the headline, “Drug kingpin’s bust may have no effect.” Or the nay-sayers: “It’s bad news for Mazatlán. “He was keeping the peace.”
We win! (for the thirteenth time and counting…)
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We Got Another Kingpin! (12)
That’s two in one month and it makes an even dozen.
“Eduardo Arellano Felix is to serve 15 years in jail, after pleading guilty to charges of money laundering,” says the BBC. Though I don’t know if this should really count since he’s been in jail since 2008, and his nickname, “The Doctor,” is kinda lame. But I’m still chalking him up because, well, he was a kingpin (or at least the accountant for one).
Check out the others.
Eduardo was the last of four brothers who ran the Mexican drug cartel known as the Arellano-Felix Organization. With all these kingpins gone, we can look back to the turning point in the drug war. Though today it’s hard to conceive of how violent Mexico once was, back before we won the war on drugs.
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We Got Another Kingpin! (11)
Why it was less than a year ago that we got Heriberto Lazcano, the founder and principal leader of the Zetas. And now the Times reports:
The leader of … the Zetas, was captured Monday in a city near the Texas border, an emphatic retort from the new government to questions over whether it would go after top organized crime leaders.
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Mr. Treviño is the highest-ranking and most-sought-after drug capo arrested by the government of President Enrique Peña Nieto of Mexico, whose aides had questioned the so-called kingpin strategy of his predecessor, which had emphasized high-profile arrests.
If you’re counting, and I am, this is the 11th Kingpinwe’ve captured in less than three years! Start the chant: War on drugs! War on Drugs! USA! Mexico!
The BBC mentions in passing: “The fear is that it will lead to a period of violent in-fighting between different Zeta factions as they try to assume control of the criminal organisation, our correspondent adds.” Ya think?
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Tic-Toc Like Clockwork
Jeanmarie Evelly of DNAInfo.com writes about a “massive drug sweep” in the Queensbridge* and Ravenswood Homes in Astoria/Long Island City. 28 people indicted; 23 others arrested for selling drugs to undercover cops on “hundreds of separate occasions over an eight month span from 2012-2013.”
Well, slap my back and declare victory.
Just like we I wrote about in 2009.
And happened before in 2005.
If drugs were so bad, one might logically wonder why police didn’t simply arrest those who sold them drugs back in 2012 before they could peddle their addictive wears to other innocent people. The answer, of course, is you need to shut down the whole operation. Get the kingpin. And, you know, make the projects drug free. Just like we did four and eight years ago. In the war on drugs, we’re always behind enemy lines. The depressing part is that the goal of the drug war isn’t even to win. It’s to keep fighting in perpetuity.
We can win a battle or two every four years. But I suspect today some other “entrepreneur” is already gleefully taking the place of those arrested. And he’ll get paid and live large till he’s arrested four years from now. And then we’ll all pay to lock him up for five or twenty years.
Ask yourself, do you think one addict can’t get drugs today because of this operation? If you think the answer is yes, you’re very very naive. People want to get high. The only question is how. There are certainly more and less harmful drugs as well as more and less harmful ways of distributing them (liquor stores seem to work pretty well). So you then might wonder, couldn’t there perhaps be a better way of reducing use and the harms of public drug markets than swooping down every four years and imprisoning “many vicious characters”*(at a cost of $30,000-$70,000 per man per year)?
Of course there is. We could reduce drug use (the US has the highest rate of illegal drug consumption in the world). We could drastically reduce the violence and effed-up culture that goes along with illegal selling. We could regulate the drug trade. But that won’t happen with a prohibitionist mindset.
Meanwhile, I’m marking my calendar for 2017. Because this will happen all over again.
*Here’s a nice video about the Queensbridge Homes. It’s the largest public housing project left standing in America. And it’s not as bad as you might think.
**New York Police Superintendent Pillsbury, in a 1859 quarterly report. Pillsbury wrote about “[Youthful immigrants,] many vicious characters, and a still larger number of needy and ignorant persons, who, under the influence of over ten thousand grog-shops become recruits to the army of law-breakers.” In 1859, 84% of arrests were drug related (alcohol). (And 80% of those arrested were foreign born.)
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We Got Another Kingpin! (10)
And this one is a big one. Heriberto Lazcano, the founder and the principal leader of the Zetas. Perhaps he’s even the big one. The real kingpin. I guess we won. Ten times is the charm.
Let’s savor our victory and bask in a new drug-free world.
Update: the body was stolen.
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We Got Another Kingpin! (9)
Since I’m still keeping track, I thought I’d share.A Colombian woman known as “the queen of cocaine” was murdered earlier this month. But she was murdered, not killed or captured by the good guys. (Plus technically, she would be a Queenpin, which sounds kind of funny.) So I’m not counting her. So it’s been awhile since the wheels of justice have crushed one of these evil-doer kingpins.
Luckily today I woke up today to see the amazing news that we’ve captured Ivan Velazquez Caballero. I mean this guy is known as El Taliban. It doesn’t get much badder than that! So by my count he’s the ninth “kingpin”we’ve put out of business in just the past two years. Of this guy, the BBC says: “He is believed to have controlled some of the most important drug routes
into the United States and ruled them with cold brutality.” Wowzahs! Mark those drug routes closed, shut, and done!So… how’s that drug war going?
In Mexico 50,000 have been killed. But perhaps more than 100,000. With so many bad guys being eliminated by friend and foe, soon the streets will be safe!