Drug lord
A drug lord, drug baron, kingpin, or lord of drugs is a type of crime boss in charge of a drug trafficking network, organization, or enterprise. When a group of independent drug lords collude with each other, in order to improve their profits and dominate the illegal drug trade, they form an organization called a drug cartel.
Organizational role
Since the 1970s, research on organized crime leadership has evolved. Where once studies emphasised the importance of the leader's human capital, it has now developed to focus upon the leader's social capital.List of well-known drug lords
Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo
Pablo Escobar
Pablo Emilio Escobar Gaviria was a Colombian drug overlord. Often referred to as the "World's Greatest Outlaw", Escobar was perhaps the most elusive cocaine trafficker to have ever existed. He is considered the 'King of Cocaine' and is known as the lord of all drug lords. In 1989, Forbes magazine declared Escobar as the seventh-richest man in the world, with an estimated personal fortune of US$30 billion. In 1986, he attempted to enter Colombian politics. It is said that Pablo Escobar once burnt two million dollars in cash to keep his daughter warm while on the run. Escobar was the boss of the famous Medellín Cartel, the most powerful drug empire to exist and is said to have had over twice the power and money of their rivals, the Cali Cartel. Pablo was known as Paisa Robin Hood, for his contributions to the poor, but was also known for murdering anyone who got in his way. His carrot-and-stick strategy of bribing public officials in the Colombian government, and sending hitmen to murder the ones who rejected his bribes, came to be known as "silver or lead" or "money or bullets". When the Colombian government launched a manhunt for Escobar, it needed assistance from the DEA, the CIA, the Cali Cartel, and Los Pepes. On December 2, Search Bloc killed Escobar on a rooftop.Amado Carrillo Fuentes
As a top drug lord in Mexico, Amado Carrillo was transporting four times more cocaine to the U.S. than any other trafficker, building a fortune of over $25 billion.He was called El Señor de Los Cielos for his use of over 22 private 727 jet airliners to transport Colombian cocaine to municipal airports and dirt airstrips around Mexico, including Juárez. He was a member of the Guadalajara Cartel and worked for Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo. After Félix was arrested, Amado formed the Juarez Cartel. In the months before his death, the DEA described Carrillo as the most-powerful drug trafficker of his era, and many analysts claimed profits neared $25 billion.
Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán
Guzman is the most notorious drug lord of all time, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. In the 1980s, he was a member of the Guadalajara Cartel and used to work for Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo. After Félix's arrest in 1989, Guzmán formed the Sinaloa Cartel along with Ismael Zambada García and Héctor Luis Palma Salazar. He is well known for his use of sophisticated tunnels—similar to the one located in Douglas, Arizona—to smuggle cocaine from Mexico into the United States in the early 1990s. In 1993, a 7.3-ton shipment of his cocaine, concealed in cans of chili peppers and destined for the United States, was seized in Tecate, Baja California. That same year he barely escaped an ambush by the Tijuana Cartel led by Ramon Arellano Felix and his gunmen. After being captured in Guatemala, he was jailed in 1993 and in 1995 he was moved to the maximum-security prison called Puente Grande, but paid his way out of prison and hid in a laundry van as it drove through the gates. On 22 February 2014, Guzmán was arrested again.He is considered a folk hero in the narcotics world, celebrated by musicians who write and perform narcocorridos extolling his exploits. For example, Los Traviezos recorded a ballad extolling his life on the run. In July 2015, Guzman escaped a second time from a maximum-security prison through a hole in a shower floor that led to a mile-long tunnel, ending at a nearby house. A large-scale manhunt ensued. On 8 January 2016, Guzmán was captured by the Mexican Marines.
Osiel Cárdenas Guillén
is a former Mexican drug lord who was the leader of the Gulf Cartel and Los Zetas. Originally a mechanic in Matamoros, Tamaulipas, Guillén eventually became involved in the illegal drug trade the Gulf Cartel before becoming its leader in 1997 by assassinating drug lord Salvador Gómez Herrera. Guillén recruited over 30 deserters from the Mexican Army's special forces unit, the Cuerpo de Fuerzas Especiales, to form the cartel's armed wing; this group would go on to be among the founding members of Los Zetas, another Mexican drug cartel. In 1999, Guillén and a group of Gulf Cartel gunmen threatened two U.S. federal agents at gunpoint, which triggered a massive combined effort from American and Mexican law enforcement agencies to crack down on the leadership structure of the Gulf Cartel and led to Guillén becoming one of the most wanted criminals in the world. Guillén was arrested in Mexico in 2003 and deported to the U.S. in 2007, where he remains incarcerated to this day.Jorge Alberto Rodriguez
Jorge Alberto Rodriguez, also known as Don Cholito, is a notorious Argentine-born, Puerto Rican and Colombian mixed drug lord from New York, who headed the 400 criminal organization, a dismantled secret cell of the Cali Cartel. Pulled into the drug trade at age 12, he left home at age 14 to begin working for his Father, Gilberto Rodríguez Orejuela, who headed the Cali Cartel. Within six years he had amassed a fortune exceeding over US$300 million by shipping drugs from Colombia to nearly every state in the U.S. He was one of the most ruthless international drug lords unknown to law enforcement or governments. During that time, the murder rate and cocaine-related hospital emergencies in the United States doubled. He was arrested on July 6, 1990, in Tallahassee, Florida and sentenced to a 25-year prison term for a number of federal violations. Following his conviction, Rodriguez continued to operate his illicit business from behind bars, importing as much as 12,500 kilograms of cocaine into the U.S. each month and ordering numerous murders of informants, witnesses, in the U.S. and Colombia. He reigned and flourished while incarcerated until he was placed in court-ordered high-security isolation in 1994. According to the Bureau of Prisons, Rodriguez was released in 2012.Marcola
Born on April 13, 1968, in Osasco, Marcos Willians Herbas Camacho, known as "Marcola" is one of the founders and the current leader of Primeiro Comando da Capital, the largest and the most powerful Brazilian criminal organization. A Brazilian with Bolivian origins, Marcola is the current leader of PCC and commands this powerful crime syndicate from inside the Taubaté Prison, one of the most infamous prisons in Brazil. Under the command of Marcola, the PCC expanded its influence outside Brazil, to having a presence in Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela, Paraguay and Peru. The PCC is notorious for its use of violence, for its numerous confrontations with police officers and because of their violent conflicts over territory control and the control of drug trafficking against another powerful Brazilian criminal organization, the Comando Vermelho, a powerful crime syndicate based in the city of Rio de Janeiro.Griselda Blanco
Griselda Blanco, known as the "Godmother of Cocaine", was a drug lord who operated between Miami and Colombia during the 1970s and 1980s. During the height of her operation, she smuggled nearly of cocaine into the U.S. every month through a network in south Florida. She was noted for her ruthlessness and use of extreme violence, employing tactics such as publicly assassinating people in broad daylight, bayoneting a rival trafficker inside Miami International Airport, and inventing the drive-by motorcycle shooting execution method. It was estimated that she was responsible for the homicides of 200 people in Colombia, Florida, New York, and California. Arrested in 1985 for drug-trafficking charges, she was subsequently convicted and spent almost 20 years in a U.S. prison. She was killed by motorcycle hitmen in Colombia on 3 September 2012 as she was coming out of a butcher's shop.Roberto Suárez Gómez
Pablo Escobar started to buy cocaine from Roberto Suárez in the 1970s when he had just created the Medellín cartel. Suárez started building cocaine laboratories in the middle of the Bolivian Amazon jungle and in the zone of "Los Yungas" in the end of the 1960s and created the first cocaine cartel in Bolivia called "La Corporación". At first, the Medellin cartel bought cocaine at $8,000 per kilogram. La Corporación then sold cocaine-based paste to Colombian cartels, and they finished and distributed it in the east of the United States. The finished cocaine was sold directly to Mexican cartels for distribution in the west of the United States. Suárez received untold amounts of money, but as detectives and journalists discovered the corruption between Bolivia and the U.S., the empire Suárez built began to fall. Suárez was arrested by the DEA in 1988, and Escobar took over of the production and distribution of 80% of the world's cocaine.Rick Ross
Rick Ross, "Freeway" Ricky Ross, is a convicted drug-trafficker best known for the drug empire he presided over in Los Angeles in the early 1980s. The nickname "Freeway" came from Ross growing up next to the 110 Harbor Freeway. During the height of his drug dealing, Ross was said to have made "$2 million in one day." According to the Oakland Tribune, "In the course of his rise, prosecutors estimate that Ross transported several tons of cocaine to New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere, and made more than $600 million in the process."In 1998, Ross was sentenced to life imprisonment after being convicted of purchasing more than 100 kilograms of cocaine from a federal agent during a sting operation. Ross became the subject of controversy later that year when a series of articles by journalist Gary Webb in the San Jose Mercury News revealed a connection between Ross's main cocaine source, Danilo Blandon, and the CIA as part of the Iran–Contra affair. Ross's case went before the federal court of appeals and his sentence was reduced to 20 years. He was later moved to a halfway house in March 2009 and released from custody on September 29, 2009.
In June 2014, Ross released his book The, Freeway Rick Ross: The Untold Autobiography, co-written by crime-writer Cathy Scott.