The Mafia in Mexico (Part IV)

The Mafia in Mexico: The Guadalajara Connection

Over the next six years Cossman would become the – changing – face of the mob in Mexico. After his run-in with the Tijuana police he moved south to the city of Guadalajara. On the surface this was a strange place to choose. It lay over 500 miles south of the main opium growing region and 1000 miles south of the border. It was a big city but a relatively fusty place, more famous for its grand churches and pious believers than its swinging nightlife.

It did have certain advantages. It lay at the end of the Pacific railway line. So, though product and market were far, they were still relatively simple to reach. It also had a growing chemical industry, which made syphoning off the calcium oxide, ammonium chloride and acetic anhydride needed to process the raw opium easy and untraceable. Most importantly, however, the city had a local government, which was prepared to offer his enterprise security. Key among his protectors was the chief of police Andres Medina Navarro and his deputy – Raúl Mendiolea Ceniceros. It was the same Rául Mendiolea Ceniceros who had orchestrated the murder of Enrique Fernández’s gang a decade earlier.

From this new base, Cossman established the second center of Mexico’s opium processing business after Culiacán. Cossman himself played the role of wholesaler. According to one exposé he spent the pre-planting season traipsing through the Golden Triangle offering peasants poppy seeds and credit under the pseudonym Francisco Mora. Once the poppies were grown he had the gum delivered to his labs, where it were processed into morphine and then heroin. According to the FBN he then had the merchandise delivered to Los Angeles by plane.

Exactly whom he used for the refining process it is difficult to say. But he was not without options. Guadalajara was home to Mexico’s first two known narcotics chemists. One was a former police chemist, Luis Manuel Vazquez, who was caught trafficking morphine up to the Texas border in 1942 and again in 1948. The second and the more probable associates were a husband-and-wife team – the Spanish emigré José García Cantín and his partner María Alvarez García. García and Alvarez had a two-stage process for producing drugs for the American market. García used his Guadalajara lab to transform the gum into morphine before sending product to Alvarez’s Mexico City lab. Here she reduced it into good quality heroin. It seems Alvarez was the mastermind of the operation, described by the FBN as “a capable chemist with an extraordinary knowledge of processing of heroin”. Allegedly she forced García to partner her in the operation. Both labs were impressive establishments – more sophisticated that the backroom stills used by Lalo Fernández in Culiacán. They smacked of mafia financing. When the two were eventually arrested in December 1947, the papers claimed that the equipment in the Guadalajara was worth over 200,000 pesos. When police eventually raided it they found 26 kilos of opium and 3.5 kilos of heroin.

If Garcia and Alvarez were Cossman’s chemists (and it seems likely that they were), then they linked him to another important layer of political protection. The husband-and-wife team was also partners of important Guadalajara trafficker, Gastón Baca Corella.

Baca was a familiar figure – a cop turned narco. Born in Sonora in 1900, he joined the army, worked as a customs officer and then moved to Mexico City and joined the capital’s small band of counter-narcotics police. By 1940 he was head of the operation. In this year he visited the mountains of the Golden Triangle on one of the Mexican government’s first opium eradication programs. It was the first time he had seen the vast fields of poppies and milk churns full of opium gum. “The sales were made in such a barefaced fashion that they were put through before the open public, in the same way as sales were made of watermelons,” he later observed. The visit was inspirational. And it was here that “his flashy career in narcotics started.” He immediately resigned and set up as a narcotics wholesaler and trafficker. As early as 1943 he was using his old contacts in the U.S. embassy to get a border crossing card and moving small amounts of heroin into Texas.

If García and Alvarez provided the tech, Baca offered the mafia the political protection. Described by the Americans as ““foxy, clever, and smart,” they marveled that “ no American agent has ever been able to get near him”. Such talents soon came in handy. In late 1947 the U.S. government was putting pressure on Mexico to make drug arrests. The Mexican authorities were looking for evidence that it was foreigners not Mexicans who were controlling the trade. They raided the two labs and arrested both Cossman and Baca. Though they had witness statements linking both men to the labs and also to the manslaughter of one of the lab assistants, the charges didn’t stick. Cossman and Baca were released after less than a week. In contrast, the chemists got ten years. At the time it was the longest sentence the Mexican authorities had handed out for drug offences.

Baca, it seems, was suitably cowed. According to a Customs agent who did eventually manage to get near him, he was looking to retire from business. He didn’t need the money. He had invested his profits wisely. He had sugar cane and tomato fields in the lowlands of Sinaloa and on the other side of the country in Tamaulipas. He had a garage and an auto repair shop in Mexico City. And his son ran one of the capital’s first flight schools. The arrest pushed him into making a decision. He seemed to get out of the game for good.

Without Baca’s network of political protection, Cossman’s time was running out. But what was bad for the mafia was good for Mexico’s tabloid journalists. And Cossman – the mysterious man with a dozen pseudonyms – briefly became a media sensation. In 1949 the Mexican authorities arrested Cossman again. This time, they didn’t make the mistake of setting the trial in Guadalajara, where he clearly had friends in the judiciary. They moved him to Mexico City. Here justice was swift. He got a 5000 peso fine and six years in the imposing Lecumberri jail.

Max Cossman in 1949

But the jail didn’t hold him. In August 1950 Cossman’s Mexican wife was about to give birth. Somehow he managed to bribe the prison guards to allow him to visit the maternity ward. It was a mistake. When they left him to say goodbye he jumped out of the window and was gone. For a year the Mexican police searched for him. There were rumors he had fled to Chile, Argentina, Guatemala, and France. Newspapers reported that he had gone to Sonora where he now monopolized a reinvigorated opium industry. Others claimed that he was off to New York to track down the mafia bosses that had betrayed him. Another trafficker also accused him of paying his debts with fake bills.

If the stories were far fetched, so was the reality.  On 22 November 1951 the Mexican police received a tip-off from the aggrieved  trafficker that Cossman was still living in the Guadalajara suburbs under yet another pseudonym. They went to investigate. When they arrived at the house, they saw a short, thin man shut the door and leave. He was dressed in a mariachi outfit and shuffled down the street carrying a brown paper bag. He stopped and waited for the approaching bus.

Max Cossman in 1951 post plastic surgery

It was now or never. The agents stepped out in front of the mariachi and pointed their guns. It was lucky they did. The paper bag contained a small revolver; Cossman was determined not to return to prison. Back at the station fellow cops that had met the American before confirmed that the prisoner was the right man. He had lost a lot of weight, gone through substantial plastic surgery, grown a rather spivvy moustache, and dyed his hair. But there was no doubt this was the man the press called “the king of opium”.

Behind bars for the fourth time, Cossman still tried his luck. First he maintained that the police had got the wrong man. (He knew his nationalist audience and claimed that they really wanted a “Fernando Grossman”, whom he claimed was “protected by U.S. capitalists”.) After he finally confessed his identity, he refused to admit to new charges of forging dollars. (“Do you think I would try to make the American government my enemy by circulating false bills?”). He refused to give up the doctor that had changed his face. (“I am not accustomed to be a snitch”). Nevertheless he did indeed become a snitch and gave up the names and addresses of dozens of international traffickers.

He even engineered another escape attempt. A month after his recapture his wife was caught smuggling a gun into his cell. This time it was unsuccessful. Cossman would die in jail in 1960.

Next week: The Mafia in Mexico (Part V): The end