Narco Wars

REPORTER (over TV): Shake this square world and blast off for Kicksville.

NIXON (over TV): Public enemy number one is drug abuse.

NANCY (over TV): Just say, "No."

REAGAN (over TV): Halting the drug problem in America

is like carrying water in a sieve.

BUSH (over TV): Take my word for it,

this scourge will stop!

There's now an understanding that the War on Drugs

was an abject failure.

You have to stop and ask yourself,

how did we get here?

TRUMP (over TV): We will build a wall.

MAN (over loudspeaker): It's good to see y'all.

Happy St. Patrick's Day.

Chicago's annual St. Patrick's Day Parade.

Growing up in Chicago, we had a great life.

We came from great families.

MAN (over loudspeaker): Chicago's finest.

Nice welcome to Chicago's finest.

Our fathers were police officers.

Our whole family is in law enforcement.

We grew up in a blue collar neighborhood where

city workers lived.

They were all striving to do the same things.

They would send their kids to private schools.

You don't really run into drug dealers or gangs.

And Peter and Junior moved down the block from me.

The Flores twins were born as Pedro Flores and

Margarito Flores Junior.

Almost nobody called them that,

they were referred to as Pete or Peter, was Pedro,

and Margarito went by Junior or Jay.

Well they are identical twins,

so they just stood out,

out of everybody in the whole neighborhood.

My father did tell me to stay away from 'em,

but when we turned 18, 19 years old we became closer.

Peter and Junior would go to extreme measures to just

put a smile on our face.

And even though I come from a family of law enforcement,

I was always attracted to these bad boys.

So I ended up falling in love.

The Flores twins, Margarito and Pedro,

if you saw 'em on the street you wouldn't think twice about 'em,

because they're very slender, small.

They looked like kids, punks.

I mean they were.

Not what you would picture as a major kingpin.

Without a doubt the Flores twins became the

biggest drug dealers in the history of Chicago.

Chicago sits at, at the crossroads of many interstate highways,

many rail lines.

For decades, big corporations, FedEx, Amazon,

companies like that used Chicago as a transit hub.

Cartels use it for the exact same reason.

So the drugs that made it from Mexico to Chicago could then

very easily be transported to other US cities.

The Flores brothers were more or less born into

the drug trade.

Their father was a marijuana trafficker,

so from the earliest age they were put in car seats on top

on loads of marijuana that their father was moving back

and forth across the Mexican border.

And they had an older brother in a gang in Chicago.

So through those role models they learned drug trafficking.

At a young age Peter and Junior worked at McDonald's.

The process of McDonald's, the fry guy does the fries,

the burger flipper does the burgers,

they took this experience into the drug world.

All their workers only did one job.

So the money counter counted the money.

The courier delivered the drugs.

Nobody ever would cross paths, so there wouldn't be a problem

if one got caught.

They always bounced ideas off each other and they'd always

try to come up with something better.

They graduated from hiding drugs in cars to hiding

drugs in trucks.

They graduated from hiding drugs in trucks

to hiding drugs in massive semis that could carry in

excess of 200 kilos of cocaine or heroin every time.

They were moving a 1,000 kilos a month of pure cocaine.

A kilo was goin' for about $60,000.

You can do the math.

I went into a stash house.

I seen money stacked up to the ceiling.

That's when I really knew how big they were.

We were very young.

We were very flashy.

When we would go out we would go to clubs

and it was like we were popping bottles of Crystal

and we were just living that life.

I was known as the Million Dollar (bleep),

just because like, you know, I was the first girl to get my

boobs done and always wore designer clothes and

I was very flashy.

You know, this was a whole other level.

It was obvious to see what they were doing

and how much money that they were making.

I mean they were two twins,

driving around the neighborhood

in a Bentley and they were only 22-years-old.

They built themselves up from sort of neighborhood

dealers to a criminal enterprise that existed on a,

on a truly national scale.

Everyone in Chicago knew where the drugs

were coming from.

The drugs they were getting were coming

from the Sinaloa Cartel.

From Chapo.

Even though they didn't owe him directly,

indirectly they had to pay him.

WOMAN (over TV): Mexican drug lord, Joaquin Guzman.

MAN (over TV): The man known as El Chapo, aka, Shorty.

MAN (over TV): The top drug dealer in the world.

MAN (over TV): Who runs the world's largest drug cartel.

He's the tunnel king.

He's responsible for more sophisticated tunnels

than I think any other criminal in history.

Chapo, Chapo!

He's supposedly this Robin Hood, you know,

takes from the rich, gives to the poor.

Building soccer fields, churches.

That's all (bleep).

I never saw any of that.

He's nothin' but a stone cold killer.

MAN (over TV): Tens of thousands may have died in the US and Mexico

because of him.

My name's Jack Riley and for 32 years I was with DEA

and my man Chapo Guzmán became my obsession.

In my opinion Chapo's hand-in-hand

with Osama Bin Laden.

The only thing is I think Chapo's killed tens of

thousands of more people.

He's a mass murderer, make no mistake about it,

but he's also one hell of a corporate CEO.

MAN (over TV): El Chapo's cartel is believed responsible

for an estimated 25% of the drugs entering the US.

MAN (over TV): Yeah, this guy's been on the loose since

escaping from a maximum security prison back in 2001,

reportedly by hiding in a laundry cart.

I hate the guy.

I hate everything he stands for.

He put a bounty on my head and wanted my head cut off.

So that kinda changed it, that made it personal for me.

So I said, okay, let's see who wins this.

I always want the City of Chicago to be remembered as

the best city in this United States.

Anyone from Chicago knows it's the place you really

don't leave unless you really have to.

I can never go back to Chicago.

In 2004, the twins were very much a known quantity

in drug trafficking.

They were indicted, they learned of that indictment

and that's ultimately what caused them to, to flee to Mexico.

We were basically on the run,

hiding from the US Government.

We moved to Guadalajara and we were just thrown

into this narco world.

But Peter and Junior continued to run their infrastructure

as if they were in Chicago.

Once the Flores brothers were in Mexico

and were operating on this truly international scale,

where, where they were moving hundreds of millions of

dollars of cocaine and, and heroin into the United States each year,

they began to interact directly with more and more

senior members of the Sinaloa Cartel.

I think they felt invincible.

When you are taking drugs from the cartel,

you're taking drugs on consignment,

you owe millions and millions of dollars.

Making the smallest mistake can cost them their lives.

In 2005 Guadalupe Ledesma,

one of the twins sources of supply,

declared that the twins owed to him a, a massive drug debt

of several million dollars.

Guadalupe ultimately received his drugs from Chapo.

I remember the day when Junior's phone rang.

Peter had been kidnapped.

I seen the devastation in my brother-in-law's eyes.

He was hurt beyond belief.

He knew exactly what he had to do to get my husband home.

Junior says that he's gonna go to Sinaloa

to try to get to Chapo.

I was so frightened.

I didn't think that Peter was gonna come back alive.

In 2005, Chapo is already one of the most wanted

people on the planet.

It's hard to overstate how dangerous it is for Chapo to

meet with a stranger that could be bringing

the Mexican Marines with them.

He was allowed to go up to the mountain top

and see Chapo.

A lot of people that go to the mountain top,

they don't return.

He had to get on a Cessna.

To go meet with Chapo,

you effectively surrender yourself to, to Chapo's sicarios.

They landed on a manmade strip.

Junior is greeted by Chapo's army.