Federal officials announce crackdown on violent drug cartel
LOS ANGELES — Last November, the cook at a Mexican seafood restaurant in Santa Ana (Orange County) approached a diner with a question. Would it be possible, he asked the man, to get him 200 to 300 assault rifles?
So began an alleged deal for machine guns that Nicola Hanna, the U.S. attorney in Los Angeles, traced this week to the Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion, or Jalisco New Generation, a Mexican drug trafficking organization known to few people in the United States, but one Hanna called “one of the most significant transnational criminal threats we face today.”
Twenty-seven people were arrested Wednesday in Rancho Cucamonga (San Bernardino County) and the Los Angeles County neighborhoods of North Hollywood and Sun Valley.
Bill Bodner, the special agent in charge of the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Los Angeles office, described Jalisco New Generation as a pioneer in manufacturing synthetic drugs such as methamphetamine and fentanyl, which are cheap to produce and highly potent — often fatally so.
The gang controls between one-third and two-thirds of the U.S. drug market. It is so violent that members leave piles of bodies in streets and hanging from overpasses in Mexico, and they fill the city of Guadalajara with mass graves. They carry machine guns and hand grenades. They once used rocket launchers to shoot down a Mexican military helicopter.
More than 600 people have been arrested during the operation in recent months, more than 15,000 kilos of meth was seized and nearly $20 million taken as search and arrest warrants were executed. About 250 were arrested this week across the U.S.
The cartel has seized control of Tijuana’s smuggling routes, Bodner said, moving methamphetamine, fentanyl, heroin and cocaine through the border city and into Los Angeles, where drugs are warehoused before being...