Two weeks after the MadCowMorningNews exclusively reported suspicious connections between the owners of the two American-registered planes busted with multi-ton loads of cocaine during the past 18 months on Mexico's Yucatan peninsula, the Mexican Attorney General confirmed that both planes were used by the same smuggling operation.
In coordinated raids Thursday on Casa de Cambio Puebla SA, a country-wide network of currency exchanges, many located at airports, squads of heavily-armed Mexican Federal Police took more than 70 people into custody, targeting a ring they said used laundered money to buy airplanes to smuggle drugs, Mexico's Attorney General's Office said in a news release.
Nabbed in the raid was Pedro Alfonso Alatorre Damy, identified by authorities as the major money launderer for Mexico's Pacific Cartel, sometimes called the Sinaloa Cartel, as well as the New Federation, run by fugitive Mexican kingpin Juan "Shorty" Guzman.
Both the DC9 airliner (N900SA) busted with 5.5 tons of cocaine 18 months ago and the Gulfstream II (N987SA) business jet which crash-landed with 4 tons of cocaine had been purchased by Alatorre with laundered drug money from his "Cambio de Pueblo" currency exchanges, said a statement Friday from Mexico's Attorney General Office.
Left unanswered by the raids in Mexico is whether anyone will suffer consequences on the American side of the border. or whether the DEA's operative assumption is that the Sinaloa Cartel was buying jets on Ebay, and distributing its own cocaine to retail, perhaps using vendors who sell oranges at freeway onramps.