MJ would never

Adan Casarrubias Salgado (left), known as El Tomate, and his late brother Mario Casarrubias Salgado, nicknamed El Sapo Guapo, or the Handsome Toad — were Chicago pizza delivery guys who became among the reputed leaders of the Guerreros Unidos Mexican drug cartel. The Mexican government blacked out Adan Casarrubias Salgado’s eyes in the photo.
Adan Casarrubias Salgado (left), known as El Tomate, and his late brother Mario Casarrubias Salgado, nicknamed El Sapo Guapo, or the Handsome Toad. The Mexican government blacked out Adan Casarrubias Salgado’s eyes in the photo.Mexico attorney general’s office, Chicago Police Department
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THE WATCHDOGS NEWS CRIME
They were 2 Chicago pizza delivery guys. Then, they ran a Mexican drug cartel, feds say
The Guerreros Unidos cartel that authorities say brothers Adan and Mario Casarrubias Salgado led fueled Chicago’s appetite for heroin. It’s also blamed for the massacre of 43 students in Mexico.
By Oscar Lopez and Frank Main Aug 4, 2023, 6:30am EST
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Loaded with drugs, the buses left Iguala in southern Mexico every week bound for Chicago.

Secret compartments made detection at the border almost impossible.

At warehouses in Aurora and Batavia, the heroin was unloaded, then distributed around Chicago and across the country.

Over a year, starting in July 2013, the Guerreros Unidos Mexican drug cartel imported about 2,000 kilograms of heroin to Chicago, authorities say. Millions of dollars were sent back to Mexico in the same compartments.

“When we came to the realization as to the volume of heroin that they were trafficking, the significance really hit home to us,” former U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent Mark Giuffre says. “Practically every week, shipments were coming in on these buses.”

Students at Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College during a protest in Mexico City in July demanding justice for 43 students who attended the college before disappearing in 2014.
Students at Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College during a protest in Mexico City in July demanding justice for 43 students who attended the college before disappearing in 2014. Oscar Lopez / Sun-Times
Compared to more powerful organized crime groups like the Sinaloa cartel, at the time led by now-imprisoned Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman Loera, Guerreros Unidos was just a fledgling gang.

“They were up-and-comers,” says Jack Riley, who headed the agency’s Chicago office and became the No. 2 official with the DEA, helping make the case against El Chapo.

Though smaller than the Sinaloa cartel, Guerreros Unidos helped fuel Chicago’s growing appetite for heroin, bringing in quantities equal to tens of millions of doses on tour buses, authorities say.

“The GU’s heroin operations in the region were operating at a very high capacity at the very time heroin-related emergency room treatments and overdose deaths were rapidly increasing here,” Giuffre says.

What the cartel lacked in power and reputation, it compensated for in ingenuity. Its tactics included bribing Mexican police and military officials and installing hiding places on the buses so complex that, when U.S. authorities eventually seized one and took it apart, they couldn’t find any trace of the stash.

“Guerreros Unidos were under the radar of law enforcement because big money was focused on El Chapo,” Giuffre says. “We were blind to what was happening.”


GuerreroOaxacaMichoacánVeracruz
IgualaPueblaMexico
CityGuadalajara
Gulf of
MexicoPacific
Ocean200 miles
Jesse Howe/Sun-Times
The cartel’s anonymity didn’t last for long. In the fall of 2014, Guerreros Unidos became infamous around the world for perpetrating one of the most heinous crimes in modern Mexican history: the disappearance and presumed massacre of 43 college students in Iguala in the state of Guerrero. The remains of only three of the students have been found.

The cartel’s reputed leaders — including brothers and former Chicago pizza deliverymen Adan Casarrubias Salgado, known as El Tomate, and the late Mario Casarrubias Salgado, nicknamed El Sapo Guapo, or the Handsome Toad — became suspects in that atrocity, which continues to shake the foundations of Mexican society.

Forensic examiners search for human remains below a garbage-strewn hillside near Cocula, Mexico, on Oct. 28, 2014.
Forensic examiners search for human remains below a garbage-strewn hillside near Cocula, Mexico, on Oct. 28, 2014.Getty Images
Even now, nearly nine years later, the case remains shrouded in mystery. At the end of July, international investigators presented a final report that accused the Mexican army of stonewalling their investigation.

To get a better sense of what happened, and the role of Guerreros Unidos, the Chicago Sun-Times examined hundreds of pages of documents in the United States and Mexico, interviewed current and former law enforcement officers on both sides of the border and visited key places where the cartel operated in Chicago and Mexico.

A raid in Ravenswood
A key piece of the story is how the DEA took down the cartel’s lucrative Chicago operation. That begins on the Northwest Side.

During a money-laundering investigation in August 2013, Giuffre detained a cartel courier carrying $200,000. That courier, arrested in a parking lot, gave up details of the operation.

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The DEA raided his gray clapboard house on Winnemac Avenue in Ravenswood and seized another $231,000 plus 12 kilograms of heroin and 9 kilos of cocaine. Agents also arrested the courier’s boyfriend, an Army veteran who went on to become the DEA’s most important informant in the case.

“It became clear early on that this was not a money-laundering cell,” Giuffre says. “This was a heroin-trafficking cell that happened to launder some of its own money.”

The DEA launched a surveillance operation. It tapped cartel members’ phones, intercepting text messages, and followed them to cash drops and back-alley drug deals. Spanish translators helped decipher the codes used by the traffickers.

A hierarchy emerged.

The Casarrubias brothers were leaders of the cartel in Mexico, authorities say.

And running the show in Chicago was Pablo Vega Cuevas, whose nickname among traffickers was “Transformer.” Playing off the movies, the DEA’s investigation was dubbed Operation Megatron.

Though they were born in Mexico, Mario Casarrubias and Adan Casarrubias lived for years in Chicago. They worked at Mama Luna’s pizzeria on Fullerton Avenue in Belmont Cragin on the Northwest Side. Workers at the restaurant say they still remember them handling deliveries.

The siblings also got in trouble.

Adan Casarrubias was charged in 1999 with involvement in drug smuggling.

1994-1995

the In-Season Tournament for LeBron and the Lakers by posting an ad for Lakers In-Season CHAMPS merch when the game isn't even until tomorrow. They already made the shirts & hats.





2012 - lock out title
2013 - Ray Allen title
2016 - rigged title
2020 - Mickey title
2023 - Make believe plastic trophy

Starts fed questions @ 2:50

@2:42

how is this legal........all have been in college long enough to earn phds........
they are playing against kids under 21..........

It’s a toy

:-)