Sinaloa Cartel

Sixty reputed members of an Iraqi drug-trafficking organization in El Cajon have been arrested and authorities seized more than $630,000 in cash, 3,500 pounds of marijuana, dozens of high-powered firearms and several explosive devices, law enforcement officials said Thursday. The organization was run out of a social club and has suspected links to the ruthless Sinaloa Cartel in Mexico and an Iraqi organized crime syndicate in Detroit, according to law enforcement officials. The social club, located on East Main Street, has been a "hub of criminal activity conducted by Iraqi organized crime," El Cajon police Chief Pat Sprecco said.

Last of four parts Reporting from Calexico, Calif., and Badiraguato, Mexico T he towering iron gates opened onto a palm-lined driveway that led past the family church, a twisting water slide and two man-made lakes, one stocked with fish, the other with jet skis. With its soaring twin bell towers, each topped by a cross, the estate in the emerald hills outside Culiacan, Mexico, had an almost surreal grandeur. It reminded Carlos "Charlie" Cuevas of Disneyland, without the smiles.

John Charles Ward would take flight in the half-light before dawn, when he could race down the runway without headlights and ascend into the cloaking embrace of an overcast sky. This feature requires that JavaScript be enabled and the Flash plug-in be installed. Third of four parts J ohn Charles Ward would take flight in the half-light before dawn, when he could race down the runway without headlights and ascend into the cloaking embrace of an overcast sky. Soaring above the crowded California freeways in the single-engine aircraft, he'd relax, pour himself a whiskey and Seven and plan his hopscotch route to Pennsylvania.

Second of four parts G abriel Dieblas Roman took orders from cartel bosses in Mexico, hard men who ruled by fear, but he wouldn't approve a shipment without talking to a plucky, middle-aged woman from Compton. Guadalupe "Lupita" Villalobos ran a storefront botanica where Virgin of Guadalupe statuettes sat beside grinning Saint Death skeletons. She would threaten to turn neighbors into toads, and her clients believed she could divine the future by studying snail shells scattered on a tabletop.

Mexican soldiers have arrested the man who authorities say replaced slain drug lord Ignacio Coronel as a ranking leader of the powerful Sinaloa cartel, the military said Friday. Soldiers captured Martin Beltran Coronel in Zapopan, an upscale suburb of the western city of Guadalajara. Authorities described him as a nephew of Coronel, one of Mexico's most powerful drug kingpins, who was killed by troops in July during a raid in the same suburb. Gen. Edgar Luis Villegas said Joaquin Guzman, Mexico's most wanted drug fugitive and head of the alliance of Sinaloa traffickers, chose Beltran to assume command over Coronel's faction.

The house on Knightner Road is small, blue and white, with a stone front porch and a string of Christmas lights still hanging. Here, crack cocaine was sold to drive-up customers a few miles from the state Capitol in Columbia. The one on Pound Road in rural Gaston, just south of Columbia, is a brown-and-white trailer, with a gravel driveway and woods out back. Here, federal law enforcement officers surprised Frediberto Pineda, who had 10 kilos of cocaine worth $350,000 in his possession.

The bodies of at least 25 people, 15 of them with their heads cut off, were discovered Saturday in the resort city of Acapulco, authorities said. Drug cartel violence has increasingly plagued Acapulco as rival gangs fight for control of the local market, occasionally spilling into the tourist areas of the city. Even though most of Saturday's killings appeared to have steered clear of those sections, the violence damages the reputation of a once-glamorous city struggling to make a comeback amid President Felipe Calderon's drug war. The grimmest discovery came as police were investigating a burning car in a shopping center parking lot early in the morning: the decapitated bodies of 15 people.

The kidnapped brother of a former state attorney general who was forced to make a video accusing the official of cartel crimes has been found slain, authorities announced Friday. Eight suspects were arrested in the kidnap-homicide of Mario Gonzalez, brother of Patricia Gonzalez, who until last month was the top prosecutor in Chihuahua, Mexico's most violence-ridden state. The suspects said the killing was ordered by a local police officer working for the Sinaloa cartel. Several of the suspects were paraded before television cameras Friday morning wearing what appeared to be the same camouflage clothes they had worn in a video in which they were seen forcing Mario Gonzalez at gunpoint to "confess.

As Californians get ready to vote on Proposition 19, which would legalize the individual possession of small amounts of marijuana for recreational use, one area of debate is what effect passage would have on the illegal drug business here and in violence-torn Mexico. I can't predict the future, but I can say a little about narco-trafficking, having covered it off and on over four continents since the early 1990s. Traditionally, the bulk of the United States' marijuana has come from Mexico; even today, despite a recent increase in the amount of pot grown in California, researchers at Rand Corp.