This gives jalapenos poppers a whole new meaning.
The Sinaloa drug cartel smuggled some $500 million of Colombian cocaine each year into the United States — by stuffing the potent powder into cans of pickled jalapenos, a witness testified on Tuesday.
The process would leave workers high as a kite as they packed up to 700 six-pound cans with cocaine at a facility in Mexico City, cartel turncoat Miguel Angel Martinez told the court.“They got intoxicated because whenever you would press the kilos, it would release cocaine into the air,” Martinez told jurors in his second day of testimony in Mexican drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman’s trial in Brooklyn federal court.
Martinez, who was one of Guzman’s closest pals and a self-described “manager” in the powerful cartel, said the La Comadre pepper cans would be filled with a half-kilo of coke and the rest with sand, so they reached the proper weight.
Trucks would then carry 2,000 to 3,200 cans at a time — including some stuffed with cocaine and hidden among cans of real jalapenos — from Mexico to Baja, Calif., Martinez said.
All told, 25 to 30 tons of cocaine worth $400 to $500 million reached Los Angeles each year, he said.
Fifty-five percent of the cut went to the Colombians, while Guzman and his crew received 45 percent for the distribution.
Guzman began employing the unconventional method in the early 1990s, after police unearthed the secret underground tunnel his cartel used to get drugs across the border.
That tunnel connected a building in Douglas, Ariz. to a house in Agua Prieta, Mexico — where the entrance to it was accessible under a pool table that lifted using hydraulics.
But someone “left the pool table raised and some police officer went by and saw it through the window” of the home, Martinez said.
Guzman was tipped off about the discovery by crooked Mexico City police chief Guillermo Gonzalez Calderoni, who Martinez testified on Monday had been paid tens of millions of dollars in bribes from the Sinaloa cartel.
The kingpin stopped using the tunnel to move narcotics — and it cost him his lesser-known nickname among Colombians, “El Rapido.”
“He wasn’t El Rapido anymore. He was El Lento, the slow one, the S.O.B.,” Martinez testified.