Organized Crime Mexico

A witness has identified another of the burned, tortured bodies found stuffed in concrete-filled oil drums as the second doctor who performed an operation that cost the life of drug lord Amado Carrillo Fuentes, police said Thursday. Prosecutors also revealed Thursday that they issued an arrest warrant on Oct. 30 for the two doctors on homicide charges, alleging that they intentionally caused Carrillo's death.

One of the doctors believed to have operated on top Mexican drug lord Amado Carrillo Fuentes just hours before his death has been found stuffed into a cement-filled barrel, authorities said Wednesday. The remains of Jaime Godoy were discovered with two other bodies Monday inside oil drums along the Mexico City-Acapulco highway. In a sign of a mob hit, their fingernails had been yanked; their blindfolded bodies bore burn marks. Two were strangled and one shot.

Mexican officials said Wednesday that they had identified one of three bodies found entombed in concrete as a plastic surgeon who operated on Amado Carrillo Fuentes just before the alleged drug lord died in his hospital bed. Mexican police said they had identified one of the mangled corpses as that of Jaime Godoy, an ear, nose and throat specialist. The identification helps explain a long-standing mystery--the whereabouts of doctors who participated in an operation that cost Carrillo his life.

In an effort to increase pressure on the brutal Tijuana drug cartel, U.S. law enforcement officials have prepared an indictment against one of its alleged kingpins and are considering offering a hefty reward for his arrest, U.S. law enforcement officers said Monday. A senior U.S.

Sgt. Ron Caudillo of the Mendocino County Sheriff's Department saw the change coming five years ago as he looked down an old logging road covered with 7,000 marijuana plants. His experience in the state's most fertile pot-growing area told him the garden was not the work of any local doper. The scale was too big, the rows of sinsemilla too straight. Whoever it was didn't even spread out the crop to avoid discovery.

An alleged gunman for the Tijuana drug cartel threatened to arrange the killing of a U.S. prosecutor who is seeking his extradition to Mexico, according to recently filed court documents. Court documents say the threat against assistant U.S. Atty. Gonzalo Curiel was made by Emilio Valdez Mainero in a bugged conversation with a convicted cocaine trafficker and government informant who befriended Valdez at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in San Diego.

The bodies of four strangled doctors, piled atop one another by the side of the road. A bleeding lawyer, hit five times in a shootout on city streets and now in critical condition in a local hospital. Six bullet-riddled bodies in a steakhouse, sprayed with more than 100 rounds by assailants toting AK-47s. At least 17 people have been slain here, gangland-style, since the July 4 death of Amado Carrillo Fuentes, who ruled Mexico's premier narcotics-smuggling organization.

Pudgy and haunted, he fled his pursuers in a haze of cocaine, liquor and well-founded paranoia. But the "Lord of the Skies" was still thinking big. Amado Carrillo Fuentes, known as the boss of Mexico's Ciudad Juarez cartel, had moved dope by the jetload, corrupted generals and shouldered aside his former Colombian partners to become the cowboy emperor of cocaine.

Gunmen walked into a border restaurant and fired more than 100 rounds at a single table, in an incident that left six people dead and three others wounded in what may have been part of a war for control of the Juarez drug cartel. One of the dead was a prison official who was gunned down outside, apparently after he walked from a nearby bar to investigate the shooting.

They called him the "Lord of the Skies," and his cocaine-smuggling empire ranged from the drug laboratories of Colombia to the streets and stash houses of Los Angeles, Chicago and New York, authorities say. Amado Carrillo Fuentes, whose Juarez drug cartel is considered the most powerful in Mexico, died July 4 after extensive plastic surgery.