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El Chapo Ran An $800 Million Cocaine Train From Mexico to New York City

Bloomberg's Best Photos 2014

NY POSTHe should have been called El Choo-po.

Mexican cartel kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman ran a cocaine train all the way from Mexico to New York City, a witness testified Monday.

“Chapo decided who could use the train route,” cartel member turned informant Tirso Martinez Sanchez told Brooklyn federal jurors in Guzman’s drug trafficking trial.

A train!  Unreal.  Everyone is so focused on high speed jetboats with stealth technology, unmanned drones, god damn teleportation.  Nobody thought to check 1846’s favorite mode of transportation.

Choo choo motherfucker, all aboard the coke train.

(Don’t forget Chapo loves trains.  He built himself a zoo and would ride “a little train” around it all day checking out the tigers and panthers. Little Chapo riding around on his little train oohing and aahing at the animals is the cutest shit ever.)

Anyway, here’s how they did it: cooking oil.

The tankers would transport cooking oil into Mexico under the guise of a legitimate business, where the oil would be siphoned out and secret compartments on either end would be stacked with kilos of cocaine, he explained.

Workers would then add an inch or two of oil to the bottom of the container to discourage customs from crawling in to look around on their way back north. They also covered their tracks by dabbing the kilos themselves with grease to throw off the scent for drug-sniffing dogs.

Just a whole bunch of Crisco on its way to the kitchens of Italian grandmothers in the Bronx, with a little added bonus for the kids in there – kilos of blow.

They’d ride the trains into warehouses in Jersey, switch them to box trucks, then bring them to a warehouse in the big city.  Then they’d meet up with the Gus Frings and Walter Whites of NYC in a McDonald’s or Burger King or Los Pollos Hermanos and do the trades.

Fascinating.

But you know what the craziest part of this story is, BY FAR?

The fact that Tirso Martinez is up on that witness stand right now describing all of this.  That he’s not in 17 tiny pieces scattered at the bottom of the East River.  Because Martinez pulled the same move on Chapo that you use on your Tinder match: he ghosted him.

Martinez said he stopped working with the Sinaloa Cartel after three of his warehouses were raided by cops, and he was under ‘too much pressure,” following the $100 million loss of cocaine.

“They wanted to kill me because I had lost the train route, that means of transport,” he told jurors. “I just didn’t want to keep going.”

He said he ghosted the kingpin and his associates, and miraculously survived long enough to be arrested in 2014 and extradited to Brooklyn, where he ultimately pleaded guilty to importation and distribution charges.

Absolutely wild that he’s still alive and not tied to some rails and run over by a cocaine train going 100 MPH.

PS,

Don’t think I didn’t see you, NY Post.  “El Choo-po.”  Nailed it.