November 2008.
Pedro Flores picks up the phone and calls the most wanted man on Earth.
El Chapo answers him.
Amigo, he says.
Pedro is wearing a wire.
Two months later, his father will be dead in the Sinaloa desert.
Margarito Flores and his twin brother Fedro were once considered to be the biggest drug traffickers in Chicago.
Both had strong ties to the Seninoa cartel until they decided to become informants for the government and that helped bring down the most wanted and feared Mexican drug lord El Chapo Guzman.
>> This is the story of how two identical twins from Little Village Chicago became the biggest drug informants in American history.
How they brought down El Chapo Mayo Zambada and over 50 cartel figures.
and how the price they paid for that cooperation cost them the one person they loved most.
These are the twins who snitched on El Chapo and got their dad killed.
Margarito Flores and his twin brother Fra were once considered to be the biggest drug traffickers in Chicago.
Both had strong ties to the Cinoaoa cartel until they decided to become informants for the government and that helped bring down the most wanted and feared Mexican drug lord El Chapo Guzman.
>> March 1981, South Homeman Avenue, Little Village, Chicago.
A man named Margarito Flores Senior is selling 11 lbs of blacktar heroin to a federal undercover agent.
Right in front of his own house, his pregnant wife is inside.
When the agents close in to arrest him, he doesn’t run.
He doesn’t fight.
He just asks them, “Please don’t put the cuffs on me in front of her.
She might lose the baby.
” 3 months later, that baby was born.
Actually, two of them identical twin boys.
Pedro and Margarito Flores Jr.
And while their mother was bringing them home from the hospital, their father was already in federal prison serving a 10-year sentence.
That is the family they were born into.
That is the legacy waiting for them.
By the time they were 7 years old, their father was out of prison and putting them to work.
He’d take them across the border into Mexico, sit them on top of bales of marijuana in the back of a flatbed truck, and use them as cover.
Nobody pulls over a man with two little kids in the cab.
The boys translated for him at gas stations in Texas and Arkansas.
They learned the routes.
They learned the lies.
Their father had rules.
Don’t be a thief.
Be polite to the gas station attendants.
And here’s the dark one.
Only weak people use the drugs we sell.
He didn’t drink.
He didn’t smoke.
But every other word out of his mouth was a curse.
They idolized him.
Around this time, their older brother, Hector, died of a heroin overdose.
The family did the rosary.
Then they got back to business.
That was the lesson.
Death didn’t stop the operation.
nothing did.
Their father eventually had to flee back to Mexico to dodge more federal trouble.
So, the twins, just barely teenagers, went to live with their oldest brother, Armando Flores.
Armando wasn’t subtle.
He was a shot caller for the Latin Kings, one of the most violent gangs in Chicago, and he was running his own cocaine operation out of a car dealership in Cicero.
Armando sold drugs upstairs.
The twins slept in the basement.
But Armando did one thing right.
He made the twins get jobs at a McDonald’s down the street.
He told them to study how it worked, the training, the system, the way every worker had a role, and every product was identical no matter who served it.
Pay attention, he said.
This is how a real business runs.
That McDonald’s playbook would have become the blueprint for everything they did later.
1998, Armando got arrested.
Cocaine charges.
He was going away for a long time.
And just like that, the 17-year-old twins inherited his customer base, his suppliers, and the keys to the operation.
Their first deal on their own was 30 kilos of cocaine.
They were still in high school.
By age 20, they were moving over a,000 kilos a month.
They had hundreds of thousands of dollars cash stashed under their beds.
They had cars with hydraulic trap doors.
They had stash houses across Chicago, Bedford Park, Hinsdale, Planefield.
They had front businesses, including barber shops in Berwin and a Mexican restaurant in West Rogers Park.
And they ran the whole thing like a corporation.
Pedro was the operator, always two phones, always shouting.
His twin brother, Margarito, who everyone called Junior or Jay, was the negotiator, the face, the closer.
The wives later said it best.
They were living every drug dealer’s dream, making LeBron James money.
And nobody, not even their own neighbors, knew who they really were.
But the bigger you get in this game, the bigger the targets on your backs become.
And in 2003, those targets were located.
Summer of that year, Pedro was hog tied and abducted off a Chicago street in broad daylight.
The man who took him was named Saul Rodriguez, a kidnapping crew leader who, get this, was working with a corrupt Chicago narcotics officer named Glenn Luellan.
Luwellyn was drawing a $40,000 a year police salary.
Rodriguez had pulled in over $800,000 from the Chicago police as their highest paid informant while running kidnapping rings on the side.
Pedro was held for ransom.
Margarito tried to short the kidnappers, send them weak product, save some money.
But then Pedro got on the phone terrified and told his brother, “Just pay them.
Pay them everything.
” Margarito paid the full ransom in cocaine.
Court testimony later put the load at over $2.
4 million.
And here’s the wildest part.
A few months after Pedro got home, the twins flew to Vegas to see a De La Hoya fight.
They sat ringside on tickets booked by, you guessed it, Saul Rodriguez, the man they were 90% sure had kidnapped Pedro.
They partied with him in the club afterward.
They smiled.
They didn’t say a word.
Their solution, just sell more cocaine to make up for the loss.
That was the kind of mindset they were operating with.
My relationship with him was not just a business relationship.
It was more of a a friend relationship.
Um, but more as a, you know, I I kind of seen him as like maybe my uncle.
>> By 2004, the heat was getting too thick in Chicago.
A warehouse worker had flipped to the feds in Wisconsin.
The twins fled to Mexico, settling in their father’s hometown of Jalpa Zakatekus, and started running the Chicago operation by phone.
That’s when things got cosmic.
A Sinaloa cartel middleman named Lupe Leisma had been their main supplier, but Leedisma got greedy.
He demanded the twins hand over their entire warehouse network.
They refused.
A few weeks later, Pedro was lured to a meeting.
25 masked men with rifles burst through the door, beat him with the butts of their guns, stripped him to his underwear, and stuffed him into the back of a truck.
They held him in a cell for 15 days, almost starved him to death.
Margarito, watching this from the outside, made a decision that should have gotten him killed.
He requested a sitdown with Leiddesma’s boss.
He wanted to plead his case directly to the man at the top of the pyramid.
The man at the top was Walkin Guzman, El Chapo.
May 2005, Margarito flew on a tiny private plane to a runway carved into the side of a Sinaloa mountain.
Driving up to the meeting site, he passed a naked man chained to a tree.
He didn’t ask questions.
The truck kept moving.
El Chapo was waiting under a thatched roof, two walkie-talkies on his belt, jeans, plain t-shirt.
His opening line, according to the wives’ book, was this.
You know people that come up here, don’t go back.
I could you and your brother right now and go about my day.
Margarito didn’t flinch.
He pulled out a stack of payment ledgers.
Neat, organized, every transaction logged.
“Yes, Senor,” he said.
“I am very aware.
But I am here because I only have my word and these books.
” El Chapo flipped through the ledgers.
He looked impressed.
He ordered Pedro released that day.
A few weeks later, Lupe Leiddesma was suffocated to death with a plastic bag by one of El Chapo’s men.
The twins were told, “Don’t worry about him.
He’s seeing ghosts now.
” The pitch from El Chapo was simple.
We can do business.
We can make a lot of money together.
And just like that, two kids from Little Village were sitting at the very top of the cartel.
You exported $3 billion of US currency.
>> Yes, sir.
In total.
Um, >> and how did you export that? >> Was it in 18 wheelers? >> 18 wheelers, tractor trailers, commercial vehicles.
Um, um, and there is no seizures in the 10 years.
Um, >> what followed was, according to former DEA agents, the largest cocaine distribution operation Chicago has ever seen.
From 2005 to 2008, the twins moved an average of 1,500 to 2,000 kilos of cocaine every single month.
That’s two tons a month.
Through their hub in Chicago, they branched out to Cincinnati, Philadelphia, New York, Detroit, Milwaukee, Washington DC, Los Angeles, even Vancouver, Canada.
The wives book says El Chapo and Mayo Zambata were sending them 400 kilos every 5 days.
400 kilos every 5 days.
Their wholesale price from El Chapo was $15,000 a kilo.
Court records confirmed they personally moved over 60 tons of cocaine for the cartel during this stretch, worth around $800 million on the street, plus another 200 kilos of heroin worth 10 million.
They invested in one of the cartels narco submarines.
They invested in one of the 747s used to fly cocaine north out of Colombia.
With all the seats stripped out, they lived on a Mexican mountaintop estate with horses, monkeys, and at one point a tiger cub.
Mayo Zambada treated them like sons.
He used to joke about how much more they could move if there were three of them instead of two.
El Chapo’s son, Vicente, called Alfredo, was on a firstname basis.
Aruro Beltran Leva, the head of his own cartel offshoot, called them brothers.
They had become by every measure untouchable.
But the higher you climb, the harder gravity pulls and the cartel was about to split in half.
January 2008, Mexican authorities captured Alfredo Beltran Leva, one of the most powerful brothers in the federation.
Within days, the Beltran Leva organization accused El Chapo of selling them out.
They went to war.
The twins were buying from both sides.
Both sides demanded total loyalty.
There was no neutral ground.
Things spiraled fast.
Late January 2008, the twins were at a strip club in Punta Mita with two Chinese chemical suppliers.
A corrupt Mexican federal cop showed up with a caravan, grabbed the twins and their wives, and started driving them to a back room to extort them or worse.
Margarito got one phone call out before they took his phone.
20 minutes later around a 100 armed men with AK-47s rolled into Puerto Valarta.
They surrounded the federal cops car.
Their leader was a man you may have heard of, Nemesisio Oga Cervantes.
Elmento years before he founded his own cartel.
He was working for Sinaloa and he came to rescue the twins personally.
Vamos, he said, let’s go.
The twins slid out of the back.
Two of Mencho’s men slid in.
That’s the kind of life it was.
Saved one week, hunted the next.
Around the same time, Pedro’s wife got pregnant and something shifted in him.
He’d recently watched a documentary about John Gotti being betrayed by Sammy the Bull Graano.
And one night, looking at his pregnant wife, he had a thought.
As he later put it on the witness stand, he began to think about their future or their lack of a future.
He said he couldn’t promise his family tomorrow.
That thought was about to change everything.
Not just for the twins, for the entire Sinaloa cartel.
But in 2008, something changed.
The twin brothers made the decision to turn themselves in and become informants for the DEA.
Recording conversations with El Chapo.
>> October 2008.
Through their lawyer, Pedro and Margarito reached out to the DEA in Chicago.
They wanted to talk about everything.
When DEA agents first sat down with the twins, they couldn’t believe what they were hearing.
Two of the biggest drug traffickers in the country, sitting at the top of the most powerful cartel on Earth, were asking to flip while still actively dealing.
Federal prosecutors later said they had never seen anything like it in 20 years.
Here’s what made it unprecedented.
The twins didn’t just want to surrender.
They wanted to keep working from inside the cartel wearing wires.
For the next 2 months, that’s exactly what they did.
Court records show 54 recorded conversations with cartel leadership.
They bought a digital voice recorder at a Radio Shack in Mexico because the DEA hadn’t even given them equipment yet.
October 2008, Margarito put a wire on his body and walked into a remote Sinaloa mountaintop compound.
Sitting across from him were three of the most wanted men in the world.
El Chapo Guzman, Mayo Zambada, and Mayo’s son, Vicente Zambada Nebla.
What they said in that meeting and what got captured on tape would eventually be played in courtrooms.
Vicente leaned forward in that meeting and asked Margarito for something specific.
Rocket launchers, grenades, 50 caliber machine guns, American militaryra weapons.
He told Margarito, “Find someone.
Find guys who came back from the war.
” And then he said something the prosecutors quoted at the Brooklyn trial.
“Forget the money.
Forget the drugs.
I want to blow stuff up.
” The plan was to attack a Mexican government building or a media outlet to send a message that would stop extraditions to the United States.
It was all on tape.
Then came November.
Pedro got El Chapo himself on the phone twice.
In the first call, Pedro pretended a heroin shipment had come in low quality.
In the drug game, you don’t do this.
You don’t accept a load and then renegotiate.
Margarito later said it was the kind of move that gets you killed, but Pedro tried it anyway.
El Chapo greeted him on the line.
“Amigo,” he said.
Pedro pitched the price reduction.
“If you can drop it from 55 to 50,000 a kilo, I can pay you tomorrow.
” El Chapo paused, then he agreed.
Saved Pedro about $100,000 on the load.
Even threw in 40 more kilos a month going forward.
The twins had just gotten the most wanted man on Earth on a wire tap, talking specific quantities and prices for heroin.
Two phone calls.
The DEA later said those tapes were the single most consequential drug case wires in American history.
November 30th, 2008, US agents called the twins.
They had 2 hours.
Get out now.
The brothers grabbed their wives and kids, left everything behind, and crossed the border into the United States to surrender.
They had no idea what was coming next.
When we made the decision to betray them, because it was a betrayal, it was not just a betrayal of of Chapo and Mayo.
It was a betrayal of the whole organization.
We were always trying to please the people we try to idolize and please everyone else.
And we finally decided to make a decision that was going to be best for me.
our family.
>> Word spread fast in Mexico.
The Flores twins had flipped.
Everyone they had ever worked with was now in danger.
The US government brought their father, Margarito Flores, Senior, into the country for protection.
He was a key witness.
He was a target.
He didn’t listen.
Against direct orders from federal agents, against his own sons begging him not to do it, the old man went back to Mexico.
The wives later said he had personal business he wouldn’t explain.
His last conversation with his sons, according to his daughter-in-law, was him calling them cowards.
He said cooperators were the lowest form of life.
He told them, “You don’t know what they’re capable of.
They’re going to kill all of us.
” Then he got in his car and drove south into Sinaloa.
Within days, his car was found abandoned in the desert.
Tires intact, doors unlocked, engine off, nobody inside.
What was inside was a note taped to the windshield.
The federal prosecutor on the case later confirmed the message in English.
It said, “Tell those two to stop talking or we’ll send you his head.
” His body has never been found.
To this day, 16 years later, the Department of Justice sentencing memorandum on the case states it plainly.
Within days, the father was kidnapped and presumed killed.
A note left at the scene of the kidnap.
Ping made explicit that the father was taken as a direct consequence of the Flores brothers cooperation.
Prosecutors have since stated they believe the Sinaloa cartel itself carried out the killing, a direct retaliation order, possibly straight from the top.
Margarito Jr.
years later summed it up to a Chicago Tribune reporter.
He chose that life, he said.
And that’s the life that ruined our family.
That’s the price the twins paid for cooperating.
Their father, their first teacher, the man who put them on bales of marijuana when they were 7 years old.
He was the first ghost.
He would not be the last.
In 2015, Margarita Flores and his twin brother, Pedro, were sentenced to 14 years for running a major drug trafficking network in the US worth almost $2 billion.
>> January 27th, 2015, Dirkson Federal Courthouse downtown Chicago.
Bomb sniffing dogs swept courtroom 2541.
The twins attorneys were not named publicly for security reasons.
The hearing room was sealed.
Everyone in the building knew this was bigger than a normal sentencing.
Pedro went first.
He stood up in front of Chief Judge Ruben Castillo.
>> “I want to thank the United States government for giving me the chance to cooperate,” he said.
Then Margarito with tears in his eyes.
“I am ashamed.
I am embarrassed.
I am regretful.
There is no excuse for what we did.
” The federal prosecutor, Michael Ferrara, told the court something that has been quoted ever since.
Simply put, “These two defendants are the most valuable cooperators this district has ever seen in the context of a drug case.
Their cooperation had directly led to the indictment of 54 other defendants including El Chapo, including Mayo Zambada, including Vicente Zambada, including Chapo’s own son.
And then Judge Castillo spoke.
He said something the twins still can’t forget.
Every time you start a car for the rest of your life, you are 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.
Sentence 14 years each with credit for time already served.
They had been facing life.
They walked away with 14.
3 years later, the bill came due for El Chapo.
December 18th, 2018.
United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York, Brooklyn.
The trial of the century.
El Chapo Guzman, sitting at the defendant’s table in a gray suit and plaid tie, watched as a man in a dark blue prison jumpsuit, was led into the room.
Pedro Flores, the man Chapo once called Amigo on a phone call he didn’t know was being recorded, now standing 6 feet from him, about to bury him.
Pedro at first refused to even say El Chapo’s name.
He called him the man.
When the prosecutor pressed him, he said, “Mr.
Guzman.
” Pressed again, he finally said it.
Walken.
For 2 days, Pedro told the courtroom everything.
The naked man chained to the tree on the way to the mountaintop.
El Chapo joking about his cut off jean shorts at their first meeting.
The Lupe Leiddesma murder.
The wars.
The submarines.
The 74P7s.
Then the prosecutors played the tapes.
The amigo calls.
The heroin discount.
The whole jury heard El Chapo’s voice.
Negotiating, agreeing, laughing.
February 12th, 2019.
The jury found Haqin Guzman guilty on all 10 counts.
July 17th, 2019, he was sentenced to life in prison plus 30 years.
He was sent to ADX Florence, the highest security supermax facility in the United States in Colorado, the same prison that holds the Una Bomber, Ted Kazinski.
El Chapo gets 23 hours a day in a concrete cell.
No windows that anyone can really see out of, no natural light.
the most powerful drug trafficker who ever lived.
Brought down in significant part by two twins from Chicago who used to work at McDonald’s.
>> Are you afraid for your life? >> Um I I think I’ll always live in in in fear.
>> November 2020, Pedro and Margarito Flores walked out of federal prison.
They had served 12 years on a 14-year sentence.
Good behavior.
They went into witness protection.
New names, new cities, new lives.
Pedro disappeared completely.
He lives somewhere in suburban America today.
PTA dad, soccer dad.
His neighbors have no idea who he is.
None.
But Margarito Jr.
took a different path.
He started a company called Kingpin to educator.
He travels around the country giving paid seminars to law enforcement, FBI agencies, sheriff offices, teaching them how cartels actually operate.
He testified before a congressional task force on Mexican drug cartels.
He told an interviewer in 2024, “I have a need to do something with all my knowledge.
I want to make sure my legacy is something positive.
” But this story doesn’t end clean.
Because while the twins were locked up, their wives, Vivana Lopez and Valerie Gay Tan, who later wrote a book called Cartel Wives, were on the outside trying to keep what was left of the family fortune alive.
June 2021, federal indictments came down, the wives, Armando, the older brother, several other family members, money laundering conspiracy.
Federal agents had found about $5 million in cash buried under the porch of Armando’s house outside Austin, Texas.
More cash hidden in the floorboards of various properties.
Money used to fund Turks and Caos vacations.
Dubai trips.
A Jennifer Lopez concert in Vegas.
$165,000 private school tuition for the kids.
In 2023, both wives were sentenced to 42 months each.
Armando got time served for cooperating.
The Flora’s name, three generations now.
The father was killed by the cartel.
The twins doing federal time.
The wives are doing federal time.
The brother is doing federal time.
It was supposed to be over when they flipped.
But in that life of crime and narcotics, it never really ends.
July 2025, a federal judge in Chicago received a letter.
The letter was a request for compassionate release.
The man asking for mercy was Saul Rodriguez, the Chicago kidnapper, who in 2003 hogtied Pedro Flores and held him for a $2.
4 million cocaine ransom.
The man writing the letter on his behalf, Margarito Flores Jr.
, he told the court he forgave him.
He said it was time to let it go.
That’s where this story sits today.
The most expensive drug informants in American history.
The reason El Chapo will die in a concrete cell.
The reason Mayo Zambata eventually got pulled into a New Mexico hanger in handcuffs.
The reason 50 plus cartel figures sit in federal prisons.
And the reason a windshield in the Sinaloa desert had a note on it that destroyed three generations of one family in Little Village, Chicago.
Their father is still missing.
16 years and counting.
Some choices echo forever.
The twins made theirs in October of 2008.
And every time one of them starts their car somewhere out in suburban America, they’re still listening for what comes next.
Disclaimer : This content may be created by AI for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.
