How drug gangsters copy al-Qaida

By Clarence Page

Friday, Feb. 28, 2014 | 2:01 a.m.

Barely two days after Joaquin “El Chapo” (Spanish for “Shorty”) Guzman’s arrest, Entertainment Weekly polled its readers as to who should play the Mexican drug lord in a movie about his life.

The Spanish-language channel Univision already has ordered a 60-episode miniseries based on Guzman’s life, EW reports. Its title: “The Drug Baron” or “El Varon de la Droga.” Catchy.

And why not? Just as the murders and mayhem of illegal drug traffickers inspire the Mexican musical art form of “narcocorridos,” Guzman’s arrest by Mexican marines last Saturday in his beachside condo in the resort town of Mazatlan, Sinaloa, with no shots fired sounds tailor-made for the big screen.

Like “The Godfather,” “Goodfellas” and “Scarface,” he started young, growing and selling marijuana as a 15-year-old, the eldest of seven children in a poor, rural Mexico family.

Taking advantage of deaths, disappearances and other misfortunes among his superiors, he worked his way up his high-risk industry to become CEO of the ultra-violent Sinaloa drug cartel and top Forbes magazine’s latest power list as “the world’s most powerful drug trafficker.”

His operations bring in $3 billion a year, Forbes estimates, by distributing 25 percent of all illegal drugs that enter the U.S. through Mexico.

And Hollywood, take note: Most of his narcotics reportedly flow through a city and region long associated, fairly or not, with gangsters — Chicago.

Yes, a city once associated with white gangsters like Al Capone and later black gangsters like Jeff Fort and the El Rukns is now prominently associated with Hispanic drug lords Shorty Guzman. Ethnic succession is alive and well even among gangsters in the Midwest’s biggest city — which Guzman, by all accounts, ironically has never visited.

The Chicago Crime Commission, a nonprofit civic group that’s been investigating organized crime since 1919, dusted off its old “Public Enemy No. 1” label for the first time since Al Capone in 1930 to apply it to El Chapo.

Guzman “makes Capone look like a piker,” Art Bilek, a retired detective and the commission’s executive vice president, told me in a telephone interview. “He’s the major provider of narcotics to the five-county Chicago area, not to mention some 37 other countries.”

With all due disrespect to Capone, I find another comparison to be more appropriate: Osama bin Laden.

Like the late al-Qaida leader, Guzman is resourceful at hiding in plain sight since his escape from a Mexican maximum-security prison in 2001 (either in a laundry cart or dressed as a cop, depending on which official report you believe).

More significant, Guzman has built his networks in the way al-Qaida plants itself in failed or teetering states like Afghanistan, Somalia and Yemen: He fills leadership vacuums in places where central authority has broken down.

That’s one explanation for why Guzman declared in a 2006 conversation monitored by Mexican police, according to a Bloomberg Markets magazine investigation last year, that he wanted to make Chicago his “home port.”

For Guzman, Chicago offered what always has attracted enterprising businesspeople: a natural distribution hub of warehouses and highways across the region.

Circumstances in Chicago’s neediest neighborhoods were unusually inviting for Guzman by the early 2000s. Federal prosecutors, armed with new racketeering laws, largely decapitated the leadership of super-gangs that at least imposed some semblance of order on street drug traffic since the 1970s.

With federal help, the city also was leveling some of the nation’s largest low-income high-rise public housing developments, which had a tragic and unexpected consequence.

It scattered hundreds of leaderless gang “cliques” into neighborhoods where former high-rise residents resettled. Drug crime inequality follows income inequality.

Enter El Chapo. Guzman’s people took over freelance operations and “centralized everything,” Bilek said, shipping drugs in, warehousing it and shipping money back to Mexico.

Yet even if Guzman is taken out of action, I would not expect much noticeable change in his Midwestern drug markets. As history repeatedly has shown, drug kingpins who fall are soon replaced, often with more bloodshed.

With billions of dollars at stake, the illegal drug business never stops. It only changes managers, claims more lives, finds new customers, makes more money and eventually inspires more movies.

Clarence Page is a columnist for the Chicago Tribune.