The Mafia in Mexico (Part II)

Mafia in Mexico: The first networks and the Diarte killing

Mob interest in the narcotics business started in New York. It was a matter of demand. The city was the capital of U.S. opiate addiction; the FBN estimated that up to half of the nation’s users lived there. The mafia started to get involved in the business after the end of prohibition. For them it was breaking new ground. Previously Italian American mobsters had focused on gambling, booze running and prostitution. They had been wary of involvement in the drug trade. So to learn, they allied with the existing East Coast importers. In the main these were Jewish-American syndicates. (In the late 1920s one Jewish community agency found that 85% of peddlers were of Jewish descent).

The alliance was a fruitful one. Mobsters like Charles “Lucky” Luciano would work together with old syndicates heads like Meyer Lansky for the next thirty years. Initially Luciano provided the market. In the mid 1930s he ran as many as 200 New York brothels, where he could now monopolize the sale of Meyer’s imported narcotics. His men also provided the dealers. And Italian Americans now replaced Jewish Americans as the city’s corner sellers. They massified  the trade, cutting the drugs, lowering the purity, and pushing addicts to buy greater quantities of poor quality product. 

Lucky Luciano, mafia head who pioneered move into heroin trade

 In 1936 the authorities imprisoned Luciano on a prostitution rap; at the end of World War II he was deported back to Italy. But the alliance held. Lansky in the United States and Luciano in Europe would team up with a generation of Corsican mobsters to preside over a vast transnational heroin trade. It would move Turkish opium to Beirut morphine labs and then to Marseilles heroin factories. They would then smuggle the finished drugs into the United State. Rather minimizing its global sophistication, the Americans called it “the French Connection”. As we shall see Mexico would play its own role in this enterprise. By the 1960s it had become a vital transshipment point when U.S. authorities tightened East Coast port controls.

But those days were still to come. And during the early 1940s America was still cut off from European supplies. And so successive mafia gangs attempted to set up a similar farm-to-arm opium industry in Mexico. Some rackets lasted for a few years; others for barely a few months. `Yet despite Mexico’s geographical proximity, extensive opium fields, and morally pliable local governments, in the end it was easier to establish a massive international drug industry in Europe rather than south of the border.

The first group to attempt to harness Mexico’s narcotics potential was a gang known as the 107th Street Mob. They were old partners of Luciano; they drank, chatted and made deals around the La Guardia Political club on 107th Street; and they cut, weighed, and distributed the drugs a few miles south at the back of the Garden Pharmacy on 50th and Broadway. In the first years of the war, they were reduced to fairly desperate measures. They frequently got hold of morphine supplies by staging heists of U.S. and Canadian pharmacies.

But they also turned south. Around 1942 New York gangsters like Charlie “Big Nose” La Guardia moved to California. New demands generated new alliances. And he teamed up with local criminals like William Levin. Levin was an experienced smuggler; he had worked for Antone “Black Tony” Palmagnani, who had run west coast narcotics trade until his arrest in 1929. Recently out of prison and newly independent (Black Tony had died in 1937), he now started to source opium for the New Yorkers from the Mexican border. His mules were generally addicts from the Los Angeles area.

On the Mexican side, there were also new alliances. The Americans’ supplier was a Tijuana-based dealer called Enrique Diarte Escobar. Diarte was a new breed of border trafficker, the product of the rapid changes to the Mexican trade. Since Governor Cantú had started to regulate the import and smuggling of opiates, Baja California’s traffickers had stayed fairly constant. One group were wealthy foreign merchants – often from Europe or the United States - who had set up import-export businesses in the coastal town of Ensenada. They used their connections to the producers of medical morphine to bring in small amounts for border addicts or – if they were more ambitious – the growing southwest market. The rest were Chinese merchants. They were mainly based in Mexicali. They had connections to the producers of smoking opium in Asia and increasingly in Mexico. Both groups were drug dilettantes. They mixed moving narcotics with smuggling booze and operating legal businesses.

Enrique Diarte Escobar, first big Baja California smuggler.

 Diarte was quite different. He was a much less public figure than the early smugglers. Drugs seem to have been his sole business. This made him difficult to place. And subsequent investigations misspelled his name, claimed that Diarte was a fake name, mixed him up with other traffickers, and asserted (wrongly) that he came from a wealthy Chihuahua family. In fact, Diarte was born in 1905 in a small ranch outside the Sinaloa market town of Mocorito. His family were poor – a mix of miners and day laborers. But Diarte had a few natural advantages. By the early 1940s, his birthplace was changing from a sleepy rural town into one of the principal collection centers for the Mexican opium trade. Moreover it lay just a few miles from the Pacific railway line. Trains now took produce up to the border and (with a line extension in 1938) on to Mexicali in less than a day.

Diarte was well placed to take advantage of this shift. A local cop who bumped into the trafficker on a couple of occasions, was impressed by his charisma. He seemed “educated, with an attractive personality, hearty, and a magnificent conversationalist”. After arriving in Tijuana sometime in the early 1930s he first worked in one of the city’s many prohibition era bars before becoming a policeman.

Both jobs offered contacts. And by the early 1940s he had established Tijuana’s principal narcotics smuggling gang and the link between the mob and Mexican opium growers. The members reflected the new face of both the drug trade and the border towns. Some, like Diarte, were from the Golden Triangle. Contacts with the supply zones were now key. They included Jesus Vázquez Camacho from Ahome in Sinaloa and the mysterious Onesimo Rivera Carrera aka Manuel Salinas aka Manuel Macias from the mountain town of Tepehuanes, Durango. Others, like many Tijuana residents, were recent immigrants from the poor rural regions of southern Mexico like José Méndez García and Mariano Quintano Aguilar who came from the small Michoacán town of La Piedad. Others still were Mexican Americans with links to organized crime on the other side of the border. Francisco Orbe, for example, was originally from Tecpán, a small coast town around 100 km west of Acapulco. But he had come north to the United States during the Revolution in search of work. For two decades he had traipsed the cities of the Pacific coast, learning English, and working as a laborer and steamship steward before getting involved in booze and narcotics running in the 1930s.

The gang’s product varied. Unlike their predecessors, they didn’t specialize in any particular form of opium; they ran a smuggling clearinghouse. They weren’t fussy. Over the years they trafficked raw opium, smoking opium, heroin and morphine - whatever there was and whatever the Americans wanted. They even tried out a hybrid, flexible form of opium that met new market needs. Diarte’s teams boiled up the crude gum, removed sticks, stones, and leaves, and stored it in specially made cans. The substance could be used in multiple ways. It could be injected by desperate border addicts, transformed into smoking opium for the Chinese market, or further refined into morphine or heroin for the East Coast addicts. 

The gang was a school for future traffickers. And in subsequent years Mendez and Rivera would both become important traffickers in their own right. Mendez would marry into a Sinaloa family and use the links to firm up his supply route further south. He pioneered the use of female drug mules and used the U.S. postal service to send drugs north. Rivera – if that was his real name – would become a trafficking legend. He was the first Golden Triangle smuggler to open up a route through Monterrey and then the Mexican-Texas border. Secrecy, multiple pseudonyms and savvy investments in mining, transport and taxi firms shielded him from official prosecution. In fact, he was still involved in the narcotics business in the mid-1970s.

Diarte’s gang might have set trends, but it did not last long. In 1944 U.S. agents tracked down the California end of the 107th Street mob. Le Guardia was murdered (or at least rather seriously incapacitated - his brains were found on the dashboard of his car); Levin was captured; and so were his mules. They then tried to ensnare Diarte. The first time they managed to persuade him to cross the border with 11 lb of raw opium and 1 lb of heroin. The agents sprung the trap but Diarte managed to escape. The second time U.S. Customs officials went down to Tijuana. They teamed up with local Mexican policemen to tail the trafficker. And for two days an undercover agent used his rather underwhelming Spanish to try to meet with Diarte. But again, the attempt failed; Diarte vanished.  

When they found him again, it was too late. On 4 November - four days after he had disappeared - locals called Tijuana police to a ranch just east of town. A body lay rotting at the bottom of ditch just off the main road; the stench was already oppressive. It was Diarte. Whoever killed him wanted to make sure he was dead. He had been shot; his throat was cut; and his skull had been dented with a heavy object.

Police collect Diarte’s body

Diarte’s death was effectively the end for the 107th Street gang’s Mexican connection. But the subsequent inquiry was more revealing. It showed that other American mobsters were queuing up to take over the gang’s operation and that they were prepared to kill in order to do so. It also introduced the authorities to the man they had entrusted with this new, Mexican mission.   

The Tijuana police started the investigation by pulling in members of Diarte’s gang. Diarte had disappeared – they claimed - after he had gone to meet his Mexican-American contact – Francisco Orbe. Orbe had taken Diarte to a ramshackle opium-processing lab just outside town. Here Diarte had met another Mexican trafficker called Melesio Alvarado Sánchez and a mysterious American, rather transparently going under the pseudonym John Smith.

Initially the investigation focused on Orbe and Alvarado. The police found one of Orbe’s cars. It stunk of gasoline.  They surmised that Orbe had used the liquid to try to clean the blood from the seats and dashboard. Then they tracked down Orbe’s girlfriend and got her to cough up the location of Orbe’s other car. Here they found a rug in the back covered with incriminating bloodstains. Finally they brought in Orbe and Alvarardo. They took them to the morgue and confronted them with Diarte’s rotting corpse. It was not a pretty sight. Orbe went white; Alvarardo collapsed and started to confess. 

Both admitted that they were involved in processing heroin and getting rid of Diarte’s body. But the question of who actually murdered Diarte remained. In Orbe’s first statement he had pointed the finger at Alvarado. But in his second statement, he changed tack. Here he claimed that he had remained in a car outside the lab while Diarte had gone inside to speak to the mysterious American. A few minutes later Diarte stumbled out, his head streaming with blood. “I’m injured,” he said getting into the passenger seat. At this point the American also left the lab and got the back of the car. “Go,” he ordered. Orbe turned on the ignition and aimed for the nearest hospital. On the way Diarte continued to complain, blaming the American for his injury. Without warning the American took out a gun and shot him dead.

At first the police were stumped. Who was this mysterious American? Why was he in Tijuana? And what was his problem with Diarte? In an effort to identify the murderer they crossed the border to San Diego. Here they asked the local police for mug shots of known U.S. traffickers. Returning to Tijuana they showed the pictures to Orbe and Alvarado. They both concurred. The man who pulled the trigger was Max Cossman. (Though he went by an address book of other names. John Smith, Francisco Mora, Max Weber, and James Fuller in Mexico. Joe Miller, William Leech, Henry Daniels, and Philip Martini in the United States.) He was the mafia’s man in Mexico.

Next week, The Mafia in Mexico (Part 3): The Mysterious Max Cossman