Raul Madrigal stares and extends a defiant middle finger, apparently at feds hunting him.“He is kind of taunting us,” said Brian Ritchie, who leads the violent crimes and gangs task force for the FBI's Houston division, which has been trying to capture him for months. Authorities contend Madrigal, 29, is a key member of the fast-growing Tango Blast — the largest gang in the city — and that from 2007 to 2009, he helped the Gulf Cartel pump millions of dollars worth of marijuana and cocaine into Houston and the surrounding area.Fleeing to Mexico follows a Texas border crime tradition, but also speaks to what Washington sees as a growing threat posed by partnerships between Mexican drug cartels and U.S. gangs.Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer testified before Congress last week that the Department of Justice plans to step up investigations of the ties as part of a strategy similar to what was previously used to take on the mafia and other international syndicates.
Madrigal apparently made so much money that authorities intend to seize $18 million in assets in the case against him and 13 other defendants charged with trafficking under Operation Broken Star.They've already seized nine of Madrigal's bling cars, including a Bentley sedan, two BMWs and two Maseratis. All look showroom clean and remain parked in a heavily secured storage facility until they are sold at auction.
A 6.5 carat diamond ring also was taken as drug proceeds, as was a customized three-wheel T-Rex motorcycle, complete with ostrich-skin seats and an LCD monitor.
Authorities won't say whether they expect to see Madrigal in handcuffs anytime soon but note he's likely in a dangerous country where he can't stand alone. “He has probably aligned himself with some people who offer the protection he deserves and has earned,” Ritchie said.In Houston, the conspiracy is alleged to have started months after U.S.-born Madrigal was released from his second stint in a Texas prison, where agents speculate he reinforced dubious connections. Authorities said Tango Blast is an appealing partner for traffickers because it has many members and is spread out across the state. Other more traditional Latino gangs, such as the Mexican Mafia and the Texas Syndicate, also work with the cartels, according to a recent law enforcement report. “People are so worried the cartels are going to come over here, but they have these people at their beck and call,” said Pat Villafranca, an FBI spokeswoman in Houston.The cartel has the drug supply while the U.S. gangs know the streets, have the contacts and can blend in.“They get these guys to do their dirty work,” said Rick Moreno, a Houston police homicide investigator who has mapped out local gang connections to cartel murders, kidnappings and other crimes.
Among others charged in the conspiracy is Saul Salinas, the brother of a trafficker gunned down here in 2006. The case was recently solved and the suspects await trial.
“Madrigal hooked up with all these people he met in prison and out of prison,” the FBI's Ritchie said. His biggest connection was Mario Gonzalez, an accused cartel member and fugitive. Madrigal is charged in a conspiracy to move at least a ton of weed, but he is believed to have used a network of stash houses to sell about 5,000 pounds a month, enough to roll more than 3 million joints every 30 days.Even if Madrigal, who has a list of prior criminal offenses, again sees a courtroom, there is no guarantee of conviction. Four times he's had charges against him dismissed, and he wasn't charged in the death of a rival killed in a shootout. He was convicted twice and went to prison, once for theft and again for drug dealing.In the meantime, Madrigal's taunts give authorities motivation, said a veteran state law enforcement officer. “Old-school gangsters ... would never draw attention like that,” he said.

Juan Pablo Gutierrez was one of 23 people who purchased 339 weapons in a 15-month period. At least 40 of these weapons have been recovered in Mexico and three have been found in Guatemala, according to court documents

."He was arming an infantry squad," prosecutor Mark White told U.S. District Judge Gray Miller. "He wasn't just arming local street thugs. This defendant was doing something a lot more serious."

The 24-year-old pleaded guilty in January to eight counts of making false statements to a federal firearms licensee, claiming he was buying the weapons for himself.White said Gutierrez refused to identify his customers.But prosecutors suspect Gutierrez was purchasing the guns for a cousin, and White said Gutierrez has a cousin whose father-in-law is Osiel Cardenas-Guillen. The drug kingpin was extradited in 2007 from Mexico to Texas and is set to be tried in Houston in September.After the court hearing, White declined to say if he knew whether the guns were purchased for Cardenas-Guillen's son-in-law."He's scared of the people that got him into this. That's why he didn't cooperate. He's worried for his family's safety," defense lawyer David Adler said.Gutierrez, who was also fined $7,500, apologized to his family and friends before being sentenced, saying he didn't know where the firearms he bought would end up."I've hurt people who I've never met," he said.
Gutierrez bought 20 weapons from Carter's Country, a chain of four gun stores based in the Houston suburb of Spring, from October 2006 to December 2006. Five of these weapons have been recovered at crime scenes in Mexico.

Three of those included two Bushmaster assault rifles that were among an arsenal of weapons seized in April 2007 from a group of 20 suspected kidnappers and drug traffickers in Campeche, Mexico, in the Yucatan Peninsula, and another Bushmaster rifle seized in December 2007 when 11 suspected Zetas — the Gulf cartel's infamous hit men — were arrested in Campeche after assaulting police.

Prosecutors said Gutierrez also bought several FN 5.7 caliber pistols, semiautomatic handguns which can fire armor-piercing bullets and are popular with drug cartels. In all, Gutierrez bought weapons worth more than $17,800. The organization he worked for bought weapons worth more than $366,000.The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives began investigating in January 2007 after a routine inspection of Carter's Country's records. A worker at Carter's Country declined to make anyone available to comment on the case. The chain was named Houston's "best place to buy guns" by a newspaper in 2006.Adler said guns dealers share culpability for guns going into Mexico."The problem won't be solved until the government focuses on the conduct of gun dealers," he said.
Authorities say that Gutierrez also used a so-called "straw buyer" to buy eight Beretta 9mm handguns. That person later cooperated with authorities.Gutierrez could have been sentenced up to 10 years for each count he faced and fined up to $250,000.John Phillip Hernandez, another member of this organization, pleaded guilty last year to similar charges in the case and is set to be sentenced next month.Authorities say one of the guns Hernandez bought was recovered from a bloody February 2007 daylight shooting in the resort city of Acapulco, where more than a dozen armed assailants staged simultaneous attacks against two police stations, killing five police investigators and two secretaries.On Thursday, a South Texas man who organized a dozen others to buy guns from licensed dealers so that he could smuggle them to Mexico was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

Mexico published a list of more than 30 men the government says are leading the country's five main cartels, including Guzman's powerful Pacific-coast Sinaloa gang and the Gulf cartel in northeastern Mexico, whose feared Zeta hitmen are known for beheading rivals.Mexico on Monday offered multiple rewards of up to $2 million for information leading to the capture of the country's drug kingpins, including Mexico's most-wanted man, Joaquin "Shorty" Guzman.Attorney General Eduardo Medina Mora said Mexico's security forces would accept tips from rival drug gangs. "We don't rule out that those giving us information are part of (organized crime) groups. The important thing is to capture the wanted person," Medina Mora told a news conference.Mexico's President Felipe Calderon has made controlling rampant drug violence his administration's top priority and has sent 45,000 troops across the country to break up the gangs.Last week, soldiers captured two capos, but despite a string of arrests and historic drug busts, violence surged to a record 6,300 drug-related killings last year. Washington fears the drug war is spilling over into the United States.The conflict is also scaring off tourists and investment along Mexico's border just as the global economic crisis drags the country into recession.

Mexican criminal organization most commonly known as "Los Zetas" has been busy. Members of this group have been linked to a death threat delivered to the president of Guatemala, a grenade thrown into a bar in Pharr, Texas, the death of a high-ranking military general in Cancun, and a fair share of the organized crime-related deaths registered this year in Mexico.Many journalists and analysts who write about Los Zetas still refer to this group as the enforcement branch of the Gulf Cartel. This was a true description when the original 31 Special Forces soldiers abandoned the Mexican military to protect a young, upcoming leader of the Gulf Cartel, Osiel Cardenas Guillen. But today, the Zetas have evolved into a separate entity with its own agenda. And it doesn't take orders from the Gulf Cartel.

The original 31 "Zetas" saw to it that at least another 10 men were trained. Members of Los Zetas, along with Cardenas, bribed, threatened and cajoled local and state police to assist with that protection detail. In most areas where the Gulf Cartel operated, local and state police formed the outer rings of a four or five ring-deep security detail for Cardenas and other top leaders of the Gulf Cartel. The Zetas remained at the inner rings, providing close protection support, and acting on the wishes of Cardenas and their leader, Arturo Guzman Decenas, known as Z1, and the man for whom Los Zetas was named.

But that was in 2003, when the Mexican Defense Department separated out Los Zetas as the most formidable death squad to have worked for organized crime in Mexican history. At that time there were perhaps some 300 members of Los Zetas: 30 or so original military deserters and the men they trained. Across the landscape of Mexican organized crime, no one could compete. These men were intelligence specialists and experts with a number of different types of weapons and operational tactics. In many ways, these men innovated paramilitary tactics in use by organized crime today. Many agree that these men raised the bar in the Mexican criminal underworld, forcing Cardenas' rivals to find former military soldiers of their own, just so they could compete.Until Cardenas' extradition to the US, where he has awaited trial in Houston, Texas since January, 2007, members of Los Zetas guarded the Gulf Cartel's most important sections of turf, especially Nuevo Laredo, where in 2005, many observed the initial escalation of violence that has so many worried today.
But the dominance of Los Zetas couldn't last. Over time, many of the original 31 have been killed, and a number of younger, ambitious men have filled the vacuum, forming something that resembles what Los Zetas used to be, but still very far from the professionalism and efficient style of the original Zetas. The term Los Zetas, some argue, has been turned into a brand name - a calling card used to control businessmen and politicians deemed useful to further the advances of either the Gulf Cartel, the new Zetas Organization, or even smaller groups who have capitalized on the name brand but have very little connection to the Gulf Cartel or the Zetas Organization.

"Most of the original Zetas are gone, but the legacy of the Zetas still lives on," Jose Wall, Senior Special Agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives told ISN Security Watch. He added that the current version of the Zetas carries a "more brutal mindset" and apart from military and police deserters relies on a force of regular guys who have very little training with no future and no job to speak of.

Ralph Reyes, chief of Mexico and Central America division for Global Enforcement at the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), echoed Wall's sentiments. Reyes pointed out in a recent phone call that one of the factors that has always separated the Zetas from other armed criminal groups in Mexico is their willingness to engage in firefights.That is partially why most of the original 31 Zetas are either in custody or dead. What followed in their wake is called the Zetas Organization by an intelligence officer in the US who focuses on Mexican organized crime and spoke with ISN Security Watch, but asked not to be named. The Zetas Organization, he agrees, is very powerful in its own right and beholden to none, not even the current leaders of the Gulf Cartel. Unlike Los Zetas of old, the Zetas Organization operates more like a network comprised of isolated cells that all maintain control over a certain slice of turf between the US/Mexico border from El Paso east, moving south along Mexico's eastern coast, south through Veracruz, and east through Tabasco, and into the Yucatan peninsula. "Back in the PRI days, the rule of the game was different," Dr George Grayson, a Latin American politics professor at The College of William and Mary in Virginia, US and a senior associate at the Washington-based think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies, told ISN Security Watch. "Now the members of the Zetas are young and mean, and they don't take orders from anyone."The men and women who form part of this network likely number in the thousands. They operate a range of illicit businesses from the regular extortion of street vendors to charging other groups for passage through their territory, to gun and drug smuggling, human smuggling, kidnapping for ransom, money laundering and the operation of a vast network of illegal businesses.
Surrounding this organization is a larger than life myth, a sort of Zeta brand name that some criminals use just to scare their targets, explains Howard Campbell, professor of anthropology at the University of Texas at El Paso. "The Zetas have become something of a myth like Poncho Villa," Campbell said, adding, "their origins are obscure, and no one knows how many there are." Part of what made Cardenas so powerful as an organized crime boss was his ability to smooth talk people into working for him. Like everyone else in his line of work, he didn't hesitate to offer bribes, but unlike others, he was able to maintain a very well organized network of individuals who serviced him and his Zetas with a constant flow of information.For a while, the Zetas were considered the best-informed paramilitary force in Mexico. But once Cardenas left Mexico to face justice in Houston, he took with him the connections to a large number of individuals who spoke only to him, successfully ripping out a large section of the Gulf Cartel's tightly woven intelligence network.
"Osiel's extradition broke up networks, and the Zetas now intimidate rather than bribe," Bruce Bagley, chairman of the Department of International Studies at the University of Miami told ISN Security Watch.One of the original Zetas, Heriberto Lazcano, aka "El Lazca," and Cardenas' brother, Ezequiel Cardenas Guillen, aka "Tony Tormenta," took over control of the Gulf Cartel in January 2007, and have been able to keep the organization together until today, according to Ricardo Ravelo, a Mexican journalist who has closely followed Mexican organized crime for Mexican news weekly Proceso. Yet they have not been able to rein in the growing network and name that grew out of the time when Los Zetas were the most feared death squad in Mexico.
The Gulf Cartel still maintains a robust intelligence network across Mexico and deep into the US, especially in Houston and Dallas, and in cities located across the southeast and well into the mid-Atlantic and northeast, but it does not compete with the networks maintained by the old guard of drug traffickers, and Cardenas' rivals like "El Chapo" Guzman who has kept his decades' old networks in play.
"They operate a very well developed grass roots network," he added, echoing a 31 December article published by Mexican daily El Universal. Entitled, "Inside Los Zetas," the article explained how small-time shop owners, men who stand on highway overpasses, and a regularly updated list of local and state politicians and police officers all serve as look outs and informants for the Zetas Organization.
Grayson also explained that the Zetas are not as focused on high-level, federal politicians, preferring to keep close ties with local and state officials. "If they do go after a high-level politician, it's only to make sure they control him when he comes back to the state level to become governor or something similar," Grayson said.
Nevertheless, the Zetas Organization remains a formidable criminal faction, operating both in Mexico and, to an extent, inside the US. Rumors of training camps continue to circulate, and there is proof that this organization knows how to amass weaponry. In November 2008, Mexican military soldiers seized from a Gulf Cartel safe house in the Mexican border state of Tamaulipas the largest cache of weapons ever discovered in Mexican history: over 500 firearms, including .50 caliber Barrett sniper rifles, rocket and grenade launchers, assault rifles and over a half-million rounds of ammunition.At the time of the discovery, many analysts in the US considered the cache as a bold statement of what the Gulf Cartel intends to do. Some headlines even read that the Zetas "prepared for war."Speculation about highly trained members of Los Zetas crossing the US border to hunt down and kill civilian targets seemed to be confirmed when a group of men dressed like a Phoenix police SWAT team entered a house and killed a Jamaican drug trafficker in June 2008.
Police in Birmingham, Alabama, who responded to a multiple homicide in a suburban apartment complex in August 2008, suspected Zeta involvement in the death of a number of Mexican men, found with their throats cut. Money and drugs in the apartment were not disturbed. Police in Georgia suspected Zeta involvement when they discovered that a man had been bound and tortured in the basement of a house near Atlanta.Yet in none of these cases have authorities publically confirmed that members of the original Zetas carried out these hits, often referred to as "account adjustments" in Mexico. While it remains unlikely that Mexican members of the Zetas Organization cross the border to maim and kill rivals, there is strong evidence that connects Mexican organized crime with a robust and widespread prison gang population in both California and Texas.The Barrio Azteca and Texas Syndicate prison gangs are most likely the Zeta operatives inside the US. There may also be some links to the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13), as well as other, smaller groups. Yet these groups are contractors, hired for one job, maybe two, explained the intelligence officer. But there is little to no evidence to suggest that these groups operate on some sort of retainer, or use the Zeta name to spread fear inside the US.Back in Mexico, however, the Zeta Organization has become more and more of a headache, both for the Mexican government and for the organizations' rivals. During a conference call on 6 March with journalists, US Senator John Cornyn said that the Gulf and the Sinaloa drug trafficking organizations - including, presumably the Zetas Organization - could together muster an army of some 100,000 guns. Compared to the 130,000 troops within Mexico's regular army, it appears that Mexican organized crime is powerful enough to topple a nation, but Campbell, speaking to the cyclic nature of Mexican organized crime warned against making such assumptions."There's a system of cartel infiltration in the government for its own benefit, and this system has been going on for 50 years," Campbell said."This short term, sensationalistic treatment [of Mexican drug trafficking organizations] is not going to ruin the US or overthrow the Mexican government."

Mexican officials Wednesday said they were still identifying the victims of a series of gunbattles Tuesday that left several dead and more injured amid a scene of shot-out cars, homes and businesses.Pedro Sosa López, a chief of Tamaulipas state police department, said six men were confirmed dead. One was identified as Jose Alejandro Rivera Torres, a civilian. On Tuesday, reports of injuries and deaths varied widely, with some reports of as many as 12 people killed.Sosa said no others had been identified and that he could not confirm reports that a high-ranking Gulf Cartel boss was among those killed or possibly captured.He said seven alleged assailants were being detained but did not have further details.
The gunfire volleys between federal police officers and suspected gang members occurred in six parts of the city and were attributed to the Gulf Cartel's struggles to maintain control of one of the key pathways for smuggling drugs into the United States.This city is said to be key territory for the cartel's drug-smuggling organization and its assassins, the Zetas. It is across the Rio Grande from McAllen and is one of Mexico's most important manufacturing centers.The violence involved automatic weapons and grenades and began when police stopped a vehicle at a checkpoint in an upscale neighborhood of Reynosa, witnesses said. That set off running gunbattles through the streets, with gangsters commandeering vehicles and using them to block intersections.
Witnesses said the battles raged on for more than an hour Tuesday morning. Civilians ran for cover and children crouched under desks.
“We were hearing the gunfire,” said Enrique Marquez, assistant director of a middle school near one of the gunbattles. “I was there with my microphone, telling everyone to be calm, to exit calmly.”All got out safely, he said, but that school and at least one other remained closed Wednesday for fear of more violence.
The gunfire was over when Martin Marquez arrived to open his florist shop Tuesday, but evidence of the violence lay everywhere.
The front window was a lattice of bullet holes, broken glass filled the show room, and a mirrored door in a back room was shattered.
“We came to see this,” he said. “Total disaster.”He marveled at the one thing that had survived unscathed — a shelf with small statues of the Virgin Mary and Jesus Christ.“Not even touched,” he said.

Francisco Velasco Delgado is being questioned by prosecutors in the AG office's organized-crime division.They said prosecutors planned to ask a federal judge to allow them to hold the police chief without bail.Retired Gen. Mauro Enrique Tello Quiñones, 63, was found dead last week inside a van on the Cancun-Merida highway together with army Lt. Gertulio Cesar Roman Zuñiga and a civilian, Juan Dominguez Sanchez

."The result of the autopsy shows that they were tortured before being riddled with bullets,"

the Quintana Roo state Attorney General's Office said.Velasco's arrest followed the arrival at police headquarters in the municipality of Benito Juarez, which includes Cancun, of some 25 soldiers who locked down the station for about an hour Monday morning.Before he was taken into custody, Velasco told reporters the soldiers were conducting a routine inventory and inspection of police weapons and that the military presence did not mean the army was taking charge of public safety in Cancun, as it did earlier in violence-wracked Tijuana, which lies near San Diego, California.Tello Quiñones, who served as military attache at the Mexican Embassy in Spain and as commander of the military zone of the western state of Michoacan, was laid to rest with full military honors after a ceremony attended by Mexican President Felipe Calderon.The mayor of Benito Juarez, Gregorio Sanchez, said that Velasco was "comparing information" with federal prosecutors, and named Gumercindo Jimenez Cuervo acting police chief.Since taking office in December 2006, Calderon has deployed more than 30,000 soldiers and federal police to nearly a dozen of Mexico's 31 states in a bid to stem the wave of mainly drug-related violence blamed for more than 8,000 deaths over the past two years.
The anti-drug operation, however, has failed to put a dent in the violence due, according to experts, to drug cartels' ability to buy off the police and even high-ranking prosecutors.

Mexican authorities have arrested a senior police official for allegedly working with drug cartels.The arrest Tuesday of Ricardo Gutierrez Vargas, Mexico's representative to the international police force, Interpol was part of a probe into leaks of information to drug gangs.Mexico has seen increasingly brutal drug-related violence, which has claimed thousands of lives.In Tijuana, federal agents and military forces are temporarily replacing hundreds of police officers responsible for patrolling the crime-ridden border town. Five-hundred police officers were sent to training and will undergo background checks.Earlier this month, the top officer of Mexico's federal police force, Gerardo Garay, stepped down following allegations senior officers had helped drug traffickers.President Felipe Calderon has deployed about 36,000 troops around the country to battle violent drug gangs.More than 4,000 people have been killed in drug-related violence in Mexico this year. Much of the violence takes place in northern Mexico, where traffickers smuggle drugs over the border into the United States.

Severed heads of four men have been delivered by a courier service to a police station in northern Mexico, according to the local authorities. The heads, all of men believed aged between 25-35, arrived last week in an icebox marked as containing vaccines. Police thought the package was meant for a local hospital - they only opened it on Monday, revealing the four heads. Police are investigating if the heads belong to any of the 10 local people who were kidnapped last week by gunmen.
The gruesome delivery was made in the town of Ascension, not far from Ciudad Juarez, close to the US border. Ciudad Juarez has a reputation as one of Mexico's most violent cities, with more than a quarter of the country's 3,800 drugs-related murders reported to have taken place there since the start of the year. The authorities have discounted reports that one of the heads may have been of a police commander who was kidnapped on 18 May this year.

Jesus Zambada Garcia is captured after a gun battle in Mexico City. He commanded one of four branches of the Sinaloa cartel, officials say.
Mexican authorities said Wednesday that they arrested a leading drug figure known as El Rey after a shootout in Mexico City early this week.
Jesus Zambada Garcia, the brother of a suspected drug kingpin in the western state of Sinaloa, was among 16 people captured Monday, Atty. Gen. Eduardo Medina Mora said.
The attorney general said Zambada, whose nickname means "the king," commanded one of four branches of the so-called Sinaloa cartel, leading its operations in central Mexico. Zambada is the brother of Ismael Zambada and an associate of Joaquin "Shorty" Guzman, the most-wanted trafficker in Mexico, officials said.
Jesus Zambada controlled smuggling of cocaine and chemical ingredients for the production of methamphetamine through Mexico City's airport, Medina Mora said. Authorities have focused attention in recent months on drug smugglers' use of the country's largest airport.Zambada has also been linked to gruesome drug killings in central and western Mexico, prosecutors said."The arrest of Jesus Zambada Garcia, the King, stands out, without a doubt, as one of the most significant by President [Felipe] Calderon's government to date," Medina Mora told reporters. "It is not the only one in recent months, nor will it be the last in the months to come." Investigators are looking into Zambada's possible role in the assassination of acting federal Police Chief Edgar Millan Gomez. The police commander was ambushed in May by a gunman in his Mexico City home, and authorities have long suspected that Sinaloa cartel traffickers were behind the slaying.Marisela Morales, who runs the organized-crime unit of the attorney general's office, called Zambada "one of the most important" smugglers of cocaine and methamphetamines into Mexico.
Zambada's arrest offered officials a much-needed chance to claim progress in their uphill battle against drug traffickers.Calderon declared a crackdown nearly two years ago, but drug-related violence has worsened despite some high-profile arrests and hefty drug seizures.The death toll this year has exceeded 3,500, according to unofficial tallies in the media, amid a wave of killings that has included decapitations, scorched bodies and a growing list of innocent victims.A grenade attack that killed eight civilians last month in the western state of Michoacan fed an increasing sense among Mexicans that their government is losing its war with well-armed drug gangs.In Monday's incident, police came under fire after being led to a house in northern Mexico City by a resident's tip. Police rounded up the 16 suspects but were not able to immediately confirm Zambada's identity, Morales said.
Prosecutors said Zambada's 21-year-old son, Jesus Zambada Reyes, and a nephew were among those arrested. On Wednesday, authorities lined up suspects and their seized weapons before news cameras, and police searched the house where the shootout took place.U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Wednesday began a two-day visit with Mexican officials in the resort city of Puerto Vallarta that was to include discussion of Mexico's battle against traffickers.Mexican officials are eager for the release of a $400-million package of U.S. training and equipment, known as the Merida Initiative.