Luis Lopez says he’s proud to be a Two-Six member. Since grade school, he says, he never wanted to do anything but join members of his extended family in the gang. From the sidelines of a softball game in July, Lopez, 18, describes the links between Little Village and Mexican smuggling. “Since we’re Latino, we know more people who are tied to the cartel,” he says. “The black guys, they need us for drugs and guns because we have the right connection.”
The two Mexican couriers were hauling a tractor-trailer full of cash: $3 million collected for drugs sold on the streets of Chicago. Juan Gonzalez and David Zuniga were driving their rig through Indiana in October 2011, transporting the money to Mexico. As they stopped to fix a flat tire, three members of the Gangster Disciples, Chicago’s biggest street gang, held them up at gunpoint.
The gang had bought the drugs — and now these members wanted the money back. They pistol-whipped and handcuffed Zuniga. As the gangsters were hooking their own purple Kenworth cab to the money-laden trailer, Gonzalez fled through a cornfield and called the police.
After a 15-mile chase north along Interstate 65, lawmen intercepted the rogue truck, arrested the gang members and recovered the loot, Bloomberg Markets magazine will report in its October issue.
Gonzalez, who worked for Mexican drug lord Joaquin Guzman, made a surprising request that fall day: He wanted proof for cartel leaders that police had confiscated the $3 million.
“He knew, without a receipt, they’d kill him or his family in Mexico,” says Jack Riley, head of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration for a five-state region that includes Illinois and Indiana.
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