El Chapo’s murderous Sinaloa drug cartel was based in Mexico, but for years its American nerve center was Chicago. His henchmen from the Little Village neighborhood, twin brothers Pedro and Margarito Flores, turned the city into a conduit for as much as 1,500 kilos of cocaine and heroin each month that would be distributed throughout the U.S. and Canada.
Often, drugs sent to American cities were stashed behind fake walls or in crates of frozen fish or avocados shipped in boxcars and tractor-trailers.
The twins from Chicago were business partners with the notorious drug kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, but they also were his undoing. They flipped on him, secretly recording him and other cartel members.
In 2013, the Chicago Crime Commission branded Guzman “Public Enemy No. 1,” a designation the commission had used just once before—for Al Capone. His fate sealed, Guzman now can don a different number, the inmate kind, that comes with an orange jumpsuit.