Newsweek Magazine, 1/30/12
There are usually just three ways for a trafficker to leave a Mexican drug cartel: go to prison, get killed, or become a government informant.
Two weeks ago, I had dinner at an expensive restaurant near the Mexican border with a man who got out by the third route. He was, until recently, an important figure in the Sinaloa cartel’s drug-running operations, working indirectly for the boss, Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán.
Casually dressed, he used a small fork to scrape the marrow from the shank bone on his platter of osso buco. He joked that he wished he had a soft tortilla on which to spread the marrow, the old Mexican way, the way his family did it with a butchered animal.
