NoTeaPartyPleez
Gold Member
- Dec 2, 2012
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True. Backed by Sinaloa and El Chapo. The Mexican drug cartel is deeply embedded in the U.S. and the cause for more murders and gun crimes than radical Islamists...by far. If the people dying were white kids from La Jolla or the Upper East Side, there would be an end to this:
How escaped drug lord Guzman has poisoned the streets of Chicago
By Ashley Fantz, CNN
Updated 11:06 AM ET, Thu July 16, 2015
(CNN)Mexican drug kingpin Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman may be far from the streets of Chicago, but he has run them for a long time.
As much as 80% of the illegal narcotics in America's third-largest city come from Guzman's Sinaloa cartel, said Art Bilek, a retired Chicago detective who spent 60 years in law enforcement.
"Guzman is the reason you've got kids fighting over just one corner, and shooting each other," he said.
Much of the gun violence in the city can be traced to drugs that come from Sinaloa, the region of Mexico where "El Chapo" was born to a poor rural family and rose to lead a global network of smugglers, dealers, assassins, corrupt politicians and paid-off police.
"Guzman has hurt everyone -- the users in the city and the suburbs, the innocent bystanders, the kids who get wrapped up in gangs," said Bilek, who ran the nonprofit Chicago Crime Commission, one of nation's oldest civic anti-crime organizations.
Sinaloa's Chicago-based loyalists, led by eccentric twin brothers who were Guzman's best traffickers, helped the cartel make billions of dollars by pumping multiple tons of their product -- heroin, methamphetamine, cocaine and marijuana -- into the city.
The kingpin's imprisonment over the years -- including his time in a Mexican prison from February 2014 until his escape Saturday -- did not abate the flow of drugs into the city, Bilek said.
"At this point [drug trafficking is] so well-established, it's part of the culture," said Bilek, who spent his career in the police department's organized crime unit, a division that increasingly, over the years, involved narcotics.
"The DEA and the FBI are working at their maximum and judges are giving strong sentences," he said. "It's very complex."
He doesn't have a solution. He's not sure there is one.
It isn't for lack of trying over the years. In 2009, Chicago's Department of Justice prosecutors indicted Guzman in absentia, charging him with conspiring to transport narcotics across international borders.
This week, Chicago Crime Commission members stressed that they wanted him extradited to the United States if he's caught.
He is public enemy No. 1 in Chicago, they said. The label has been given only once before, to Prohibition-era gangster Al Capone.
Jack Riley led Chicago's Drug Enforcement Administration office for years. Now the deputy administrator of the DEA in Washington, Riley told CNN that Guzman had an "ability to enter in partnerships, businesses, with nearly 150,000 street gang members who make their living putting heroin and cocaine and meth on the street."
Eighty-three percent of men arrested for crimes in Chicago in 2013 tested positive for drug use, according to the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy.
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How 'El Chapo' Guzman has poisoned Chicago's streets - CNN.com
