Flashback: Anatomy of a Drug Cartel

Armadillo: Below is a piece about the Gulf Cartel by Texas Monthly from 1998. It is lengthy but interesting, enjoy!

Drug Lord Juan Garcia Abrego

You won’t find drug trafficker Juan García Abrego at the Piedras Negras Restaurant in Matamoros anymore, but he used to hang around there all the time. These days you will find only his uncle Juan N. Guerra, who holds court in the back of the restaurant most mornings, beginning around ten. When I went there last June, the old man had not yet arrived, but people were already waiting to ask favors of him, as they have done for years. They looked like honest men, farmers with dirt under their fingernails, and they sat in respectful silence at the blue leather booths. They looked humble too, but in this place they were cloaked in an air of bloody machismo, thanks to the paintings of racehorses and cockfights that hung on the walls. Norteño music drifted through the room, periodically interrupted by crashes from the kitchen and the warbles of small green birds in a wire cage.

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Insidious Rise of the Gulf Cartel

Interviews, files and court records trace a syndicate's growth from small-time pot smuggling to a mega-empire with a hub in Houston

Houston Chronicle

Juan Garcia Abrego, shown being escorted from the federal courthouse in 1996, was sentenced to 11 life terms, largely on the strength of testimony from a Mexican police commander who had been paid $1 million.

The Gulf of Mexico - Ronald Reagan was in the White House. Eye of the Tiger was on the radio. Cocaine cowboys roamed Miami.

And the seeds for what would become perhaps the largest and most powerful crime syndicate in the hemisphere were quietly being sowed in Houston.

It was 1982, and William Hoffman, an American drug runner later tucked into the witness-protection program, was busy using rental cars to ferry 25-pound loads of Mexican marijuana from Brownsville to Houston.

Hoffman, according to records, would drive to a house on Houston's Wallisville Road, where guys he knew only as “Guero” and “Gringo” would unload the pot.

But small-time was about to become big-time.

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