Arrellano Felix

The alleged leader of a violent Tijuana crime family accused of smuggling hundreds of tons of cocaine and marijuana into the United States was captured by the U.S. Coast Guard while deep-sea fishing off the southern tip of Baja California, officials said Wednesday. Francisco Javier Arellano Felix, 36, nicknamed "the Wildcat," was taken into custody aboard a U.S.-registered boat, the Dock Holiday, in international waters about 15 miles off the Baja peninsula, U.S. authorities said.

The alleged leader of a violent Tijuana crime family accused of smuggling hundreds of tons of cocaine and marijuana into the United States was captured by the U.S. Coast Guard while deep-sea fishing off the southern tip of Baja California, officials said Wednesday. Francisco Javier Arellano Felix, 36, nicknamed "the Wildcat," was taken into custody aboard a U.S.-registered boat, the Dock Holiday, in international waters about 15 miles off the Baja peninsula, U.S. authorities said.

Police have arrested one of Mexico's most-wanted drug trafficking suspects, a Mexican news agency reported Saturday. Jesus Labra, an alleged leader of the Arrellano Felix drug gang, was captured at noon Saturday on a street in downtown Tijuana in an operation that involved the Mexican army and federal police, the Notimex news agency reported. The Tijuana-based gang is considered by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency to be one of the largest and most violent operating in Mexico.

Launching a process intended to take some of the profit out of the narcotic trade, the Clinton administration on Friday named 12 international drug kingpins--half of them Mexicans--to a new list of criminals considered so evil that Americans can draw jail time just for doing business with their associates.

Mexican officials said Saturday that they have arrested a veteran boss of a drug cartel that smuggles Colombian cocaine up Mexico's Pacific Coast into the United States, and thus crippled a major branch of the Juarez cartel. Mariano Herran Salvatti, Mexico's top drug prosecutor, told reporters that agents arrested Juan Jose Quintero Payan, a longtime trafficker, when he arrived at a house in Guadalajara on Friday night for a tryst with his lover.