May 2005, the mountains of Sinaloa, Mexico. A man stepped out of a vehicle and walked toward a building hidden in the trees. Before he reached the door, he saw something outside the building. Something he didn’t ask about, didn’t look at twice. He walked past, went inside, and sat down to talk business. The man across the table was Guzman Loera El Chapo.
One of the most powerful and elusive men in the world, already running the Sinaloa cartel from a mountain hideout, already four years into a fugitive existence that would last another decade. He was sitting in a wooden chair and the man across from him was 23 years old from a basement apartment on the west side of Chicago.
The young man had brought gifts. Two goldplated Desert Eagle pistols, among other things. El Chapo held the pistols, assessed their weight, and handed them back. Too heavy for mountain terrain. The man returned a gift because of ergonomics. The young man noted this, adjusted, kept his face where it needed to be. They talked business for an hour.
He flew home to Chicago. To understand how someone gets into that room at 23 from a basement in Little Village sitting across from El Chapo, you have to go back further. Not to the first deal or the first shipment to the late 1980s, a car at a Mexican border crossing. Two boys in the back seat, seven years old, their father at the wheel.
He had shown them how to pack the marijuana. There were techniques for the border methods the father knew. and he had taught them how to sit, what to look at when the officer walked up to the window, what to do with their hands. When the officer waved the car through, their father did not explain what they had just learned. He just drove.
Their names were Pedro and Margarito Flores. And everything that follows stops in that car. Little Village is divided. The Latin Kings hold the east side. The two six hold the west. The twins grew up in the middle, or more precisely, in the basement of their older brother, Armando’s apartment, while Armando ran drugs in the unit above.
Both of them knew what was happening. Neither of them had anywhere else to be. Their father was gone again. He had gone to prison when they were born drugs, the same as before, and came out when they were around seven and took them to Mexico and taught them the lesson. Then he went back to Mexico for longer stretches. Then he just wasn’t around.
The apartment was Arandos. The economy was Arandos. The lesson was still running. Just filtered now through a different man. This is not a story about poverty as tragedy. Little Village in the 1990s was not a setting. It was an address. It had a specific hallway smell, a specific arithmetic to the month when the rent came due. The bank didn’t show up.
The job didn’t show up. The school showed up tired and the police showed up either too late or too hard. And neither version was useful. What showed up consistently was the operation upstairs. What showed up was a brother who had things figured out or seemed to. What showed up was an economy that worked even if it was the only one available.
Armando went to prison in 1998 on a drug charge. The twins were 16, maybe 17. He left just like that. Two teenagers in a basement in Little Village on their own with the lesson and without a teacher. One thing the story does not always make explicit, there were two of them. Not one boy watching his father at the checkpoint.
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Two boys side by side absorbing the same thing at the same moment from the same source. The father did not teach Pedro. He did not teach Margarito. He taught them together as a single unit of attention. Whatever the lesson built in one, it built in the other. For the next 30 years, that would be their greatest operational advantage.
Two people who thought in the same system, read the same room, made the same calculation without needing to explain it to each other. And at the end, it would be the thing that made their divergence so strange. Same back seat, same lesson, completely different answers. They got jobs at a McDonald’s on 26th and KZY.
Nah, sit with the McDonald’s for a second. People want to read that as ironic. Look at these kids. Drug money to the counter and back again. That’s not what was happening. They looked at that operation the same way their father taught them to look at anything. What moves? What doesn’t? What can be replicated? Shift structure, restocking cycles, how a system runs when everybody knows their role and nobody deviates.
They weren’t clocking it as a joke. They were taking notes. They made their first drug deal at the same McDonald’s. By the time they were 17 years old, they were moving large quantities of cocaine and sitting on a million dollars in profit. They had watched long enough. Now they would build something. They did not build a gang operation.
They built a distribution company. No colors, no corners, no noise, just product moving in one direction and money moving in the other through warehouses and stash houses and neighborhoods where nobody looked twice at a van in the driveway. The people who moved their product across six time zones did not know each other’s names. That was intentional.
That was the system working as designed. They were in their early 20s. They were already thinking three cities ahead. At peak operation, the floor’s network was moving between 1,500 and 2,000 kg of cocaine per month. Every 30 days, 1,500 kg per month. The distribution side covers Chicago and half the surrounding Midwest plus Columbus, Cincinnati, Detroit, Milwaukee, New York, Philadelphia, Washington, and Vancouver.
Not all of it simultaneously, but across the life of the operation, all of those cities. The supply side came from the Sinaloa cartel and from the Beltran labor organization simultaneously for years. Neither organization appeared to know the full extent of the twins dealings with the other.
The twins had positioned themselves so perfectly between two of the most dangerous organizations in the world that each one thought they had an exclusive relationship. That is not luck. That is architecture. The money moved the other direction at the same pace. $1.8 8 billion in drug proceeds transferred back to Mexico across the life of the operation. 1.8 billion.
That is not a cartel figure. The cartel kept more than that. That is just what passed through two men from Little Village on his way back to Sinaloa. They ran it with roughly 30 employees at peak. Full-time money counters, stash houses in affluent zip codes. There was one in Brooklyn with a view of the Brooklyn Bridge from the window because that is where the money and product could sit without attracting attention.
They restocked on the 1st and 15th of every month, the same rhythm as the neighborhood. They grew up in the same calendar as the McDonald’s job. The machine ran on a cycle that anyone who had ever worked a shift in an economy that ran paycheck to paycheck would recognize immediately. The machine required a relationship with the man at the top.
There is a cost to running something that size that does not show up in any ledger. You cannot manage a thousand kilogram operation across six cities on feeling. You cannot maintain supply relationships with two cartels who would kill you if they knew about each other on instinct. The father had taught them to hold their face at a checkpoint.
What the machine required was holding their face permanently. Not just at the border, but in every room at every moment with every person who worked for them or supplied them or came asking. The lesson that was supposed to get them through a single border crossing had become the only mode of operation they knew. They were not cold people.
They had learned very young and very completely to put the part of themselves that felt things somewhere the machine could not reach. The trouble with that, and neither of them understood this yet, is that you cannot put something somewhere and go back for it later, not intact. Pedro Flores had been to these mountains before.
He knew what might be outside when he arrived and how to carry himself past it. He had learned over several visits what El Chapo did not want. Jewelry, expensive clothes, the kind of gifts you bring to a man you’re trying to impress. He was trying to survive without a pharmacy, without being seen in public, without access to anything ordinary.
Pedro had adjusted. He brought what the man actually needed. Viagra jean shorts, practical things for a life lived in hiding. And on this visit, two goldplated Desert Eagle pistols. Because there was still things he had not yet learned about that room, El Chapo handed the pistols back.
Too heavy for mountain terrain, which was his own data point about what this man still was under everything else. Pedro noted it. Not as comedy, as information. Read the man holding power before he reads you. Bring what he actually needs, not what you assume he wants. Do not let what is outside change the expression on your face inside.
Pedro had been learning that lesson since he was 7 years old at the checkpoint in Armando’s building in the McDonald’s parking lot. This was the same lesson. The stakes were just different. El Chapo gave an order on that trip, one word, execute. Pedro heard it and filed it correctly, not into any register that would have shown on his face.
just data information about the kind of authority he was dealing with and the precision it expected. His father had been teaching him since he was seven that the world is a system and systems have owners and if you want to move through a system you need to understand its owner completely. What he needs, what he expects, what he does to people who fail him.
Pedro now understood. He did not ask for elaboration. He flew back to Chicago and kept the operation running. He was 23. I keep having to remind myself of that. 3 years later in 2008, the relationship between the Sinaloa cartel and the Beltran Lever organization collapsed into open war. Both factions contacted the twins.
Both wanted to know whose side they were on. They had been supplying both simultaneously for years. Neither faction appeared to know the full extent of what the twins had been doing. Now both factions were demanding an answer. The machine that had run without friction for a decade had just run out of track. The summer of 2003, 5 years before the war that would end everything, Pedro Flores was kidnapped.
not by a cartel or a rival operation, by a man named Saul Rodriguez, who ran a kidnapping crew in Chicago and who had been operating for years without meaningful consequence under the protection of a corrupt Chicago Police Department narcotics officer. Rodriguez identified targets. The CPD officer made sure the heat stayed off.
They had been working that arrangement long enough to feel comfortable. They took Pedro and held him. The public record does not say for how long. Days most likely, maybe longer. What happened in that room, what was said, what was threatened, what Pedro saw, and what he decided not to show on his face, none of that is in any document that has ever been made public.
Margarito paid the ransom in cocaine, at least $1.5 million worth at wholesale. When Pedro walked out, the ledger had been balanced. The debt was paid. And then Margarito made a decision. He did not retaliate. No calls, no one dispatched. And this needs to be understood correctly because there is a version of this story that wants to make that sound like restraint, like self-control, like the better angels prevailing. That is not what it was.
What it was was the father’s lesson applied to a situation the father probably never imagined it being applied to. Margarito had the connections. He had the access. He had the relationships with organizations that did this kind of work regularly and efficiently and without leaving much behind. He had every argument that the street accepts as legitimate.
His twin brother had been taken a line had been crossed. Someone was owed an answer. He decided the response was bad for business. Retaliation draws heat. Retaliation creates variables. Retaliation takes the conversation in a direction that is bad for the operation. And the operation was running running well. Running at a scale that had not existed before with supply lines functioning exactly as designed.
None of that could survive the chaos that comes after you start a war with a Chicago kidnapping crew that has a corrupt cop keeping the lights on. So, he made the calculation. He absorbed the loss. He moved forward. That’s the part I keep coming back to for real. Nothing admirable in it. I’m not saying that.
But there’s something to understand in how completely the lesson had gotten into him by this point. By 2003, the lesson was not something they applied. It was something they were. A seven-year-old learns to control his hands at a border crossing. A teenager learns to replicate a logistics system from a fast food job.
A man in his mid20s whose twin brother has just been returned from captivity learns to calculate the cost of war and decide the math does not work. Each time the same lesson, each time going deeper, not into strategy, into character, into the specific shape of a person who no longer distinguishes between what he feels and what he decides to show because that gap has been trained out of him since he was in the backseat of a car at the Mexican border.
Pedro walked out. They kept moving. The machine kept running. That was not discipline. That was the lesson finished. Saul Rodriguez was eventually arrested and convicted. At his sentencing, he sobbed. He told the judge he didn’t want to do bad anymore. He said he had found God while incarcerated.
That is not where the Rodriguez story ends. We will come back to him. In October of 2008, Margarito Flores drove to a Radio Shack in Mexico and bought a voice recorder. The DEA had not given him one. They were not ready. He was. Federal authorities had approached the twins in Mterrey, Mexico, days before.
The Sinaloa Beltron lever war was escalating. Both sides were leaning on the twins for supply for information for loyalty that neither could afford to give. The machine was now inside a conflict it had not been designed for. And Pedro had been watching his pregnant wife and thinking about a question that he could not stop asking himself.
He said it plainly at trial years later. I began to think about our future or that lack of a future. I thought they deserve better. Not justice, a future, a specific ordinary future with children in it who would not grow up in a basement while the uncle ran drugs upstairs. The wife, the child not yet born, the version of a life where you do not have to teach a seven-year-old how to act at a checkpoint.
The federal authorities asked. Pedro said yes. But the DEA didn’t have equipment ready. And I need to say this straight up. That is exactly the type of thing that stops most people cold. The decision already been made. The operation still running. And now the government’s telling you, “We ain’t ready yet. Sit tight.
Most people sit tight. They wait it out. The delay gets in their head. They lose their nerve. Pedro and Margarito went to Radio Shack. Think about what that is. The border lesson was just read. What you need, figure out how to get it, go get it, and keep moving. Their father had taught them that inside a car at the border when he needed to move product.
They took that skill and applied it faithfully precisely to buying a recording device to dismantle the network the same skill had built. That is not irony. That is inheritance running in the only direction it knows. Margarito flew to the mountains of Sinoa that same month. He had just agreed to cooperate. Nobody knew.
He went in the same way he always went in with purpose and without visible anxiety. Carrying himself the same way he always had at a threshold bringing what was needed. And from a phone with a cheap plastic case, the kind you buy for $20 at a convenience store. El Chapo answered. Amigo, they talked for a while. El Chapo was interested in heroin.
He offered a price. Margarito said they could handle 40 kilograms a month. El Chapo said I bueno. Margarito flew home with everything on tape. There’s a photograph that does not exist but should of whatever expression was on Margarito’s face on that flight back. The man who called him amigo on a recording that was now in a DA evidence folder.
Margarito had just turned quietly and completely against all of it. This was the last time. Think about what he was actually carrying. Not the tape, though the tape was there. What he was carrying was the knowledge that a version of himself had just ended. For years, the operation had its own internal coherence. The machine had its logic.
The father’s lesson had its logic. You read the room. You make the calculation. You move forward. You do not ask about what is outside the door. That coherence was now broken. He had walked into El Chapo’s room in one identity and walked out in another. El Chapo had said amigo Margarito had smiled, said the right things, kept his face exactly where it needed to be, and recorded all of it.
Not because anyone forced him, because of a pregnant wife and a question he could not stop asking himself. The father’s lesson had just been used to dismantle the father’s lesson. He was roughly 30 years old. He had been learning this since he was seven. He would spend the next decade learning what it had cost.
The problem was the father. The twins had told Margarito Flores, Senior explicitly, “Do not go to Mexico.” Federal authorities had warned him, too. The message was as clear as the government knew how to make it. The Suns had cooperated. The cartel would eventually know Mexico was not safe. In 2009, Margarito Flores senior went to Mexico anyway.
His vehicle was found abandoned. The government later described what was left behind in its own sentencing documents as making the message explicit retaliation for his son’s cooperation with federal authorities. His body has never been recovered. I don’t know what the sons said to each other after that. I don’t think anyone does.
Between 2009 and 2018, Pedro and Margarito Flores were in federal custody. That is not a blank in this story. Two men trained from the age of seven to read every room, move through every system, make the calculation, and keep moving. Now, inside a system with no exits, no system left to run, just time and the lesson, and nothing to run it through.
What the father had built was a capacity for control. What prison does eventually is remove the things you were controlling it for. The machine was gone. The operation was dismantled. The cartel knew what they had done. And for the first time in their lives, the twins could not calculate their way forward.
They could only wait. Nearly four years after sentencing in December of 2018, Pedro Flores walked into a courthouse in Brooklyn and sat down in a witness chair facing Waqin Guzman Loera El Chapo. The man whose voice Margarito had recorded in these same mountains. amigo and handed to the DEA who had held the gold-plated pistols found them too heavy and handed them back 10 ft away in a federal courtroom.
Pedro had been in federal custody since 2008, roughly a decade. El Chapo had not yet been sentenced. Stay in that room for a moment. two men who had met on a mountainside in Sinaloa, who had negotiated drug prices across a cheap plastic phone, who had shared a mutual understanding that whatever was outside that building was simply part of the business, now sitting in a room where one of them was bound to the other by whatever Pedro chose to say under oath.
And Pedro chose to say everything. When the defense played a clip of the Shaun Penn interview to challenge his voice identification, Pedro initially said, “Not really. No, they sound similar, but no.” And then after a beat, he corrected himself. 100% certain it was him. I was working for the DEA trying to set him up. The defense had tried to rattle him.
It had not worked. He had been trained from childhood to hold his expression and not betray what he was thinking. Even in the witness box facing his former employer that held the skill was built for exactly this. A room with someone powerful in it. Information that could destroy you if it escaped a face that could not show any of it.
The border crossing. El Chapo’s mountain. The room where Pedro was held. The courtroom in Brooklyn. Each time the same discipline, but this time the information was moving in reverse. Pedro was not protecting cargo. He was releasing it everything he knew deliberately under oath into the federal record. The checkpoint lesson used one final time.
He had simply decided to let everything through. El Chapo was convicted. He was sentenced to life in federal prison in Colorado where he currently resides and where he will die. The twins had been sentenced nearly four years earlier in January of 2015, 14 years each. Judge Ruben Castillo told them, “But for this cooperation, I would have imposed a life sentence.
Then every time you start a car, you’re going to be wondering, is that car going to start or is that car going to explode every single time for the rest of your life?” He was not being dramatic. He was being accurate. They had handed the dea, the recordings, the architecture, the supply lines, the names.
The cartel knew exactly what they had done. The cartel does not forget. They were released in late 2019 or early 2020 after credit for time served and good behavior. into what exactly was a question the judge couldn’t answer and neither could they. Jay Flores Margarito, the one who paid the ransom, the one who drove to a radio shack in Mexico and bought a recorder the DEA hadn’t prepared, is not in witness protection.
He travels the country under his real name. He stands in rooms with DEA agents and federal task forces and describes in precise operational detail how to build what he built and how to take it apart from the inside. The father’s lesson understand a system completely enough to move through it without being seen.
Jay understood it so completely that he can now explain it to the people who were supposed to stop him. Peter somewhere else. Pedro. New identity, extremely low profile since his release, presumably with his children. Not talking, not training anyone, just somewhere. In July of 2025, Jay wrote a letter to the federal judge handling Saul Rodriguez’s petition for early release.
Rodriguez had kidnapped Pedro in 2003, had ransomed a human being for a load of cocaine. Jay wrote, “Forgiveness wasn’t something that happened overnight. It was a process rooted in accountability, healing, and growth.” He offered to put Rodriguez in his law enforcement training programs. He wrote that true freedom had come through faith.
In 2003, Margarito had decided not to retaliate against Rodriguez. Cold calculation, bad for business father’s logic. Exactly. What he did in 2025 was different. The father’s lesson had no name for it. No operating system he had built could have produced it. I don’t know what to do with that. Honestly, the judge had not yet ruled. Pete has said nothing.
Same lesson, same father, same block in Little Village. Jay is in a conference room somewhere drawing the supply chain on a whiteboard. Pete is not. His body has never been recovered. He started something in the back of a car at a border crossing with two small boys watching everything he did. They are still carrying it.
