It’s the largest commercial border in the world, carrying almost $5 billion in trade a year.

Given the sheer volume of traffic, U.S. Customs can’t come close to searching every truck. Even a serious effort to do so would cripple U.S.-Mexican trade. Not for nothing was NAFTA often referred to as the “North American Free Drug Trade Agreement.”

Once the truck with drugs in it crosses that border, it’s literally on the freeway.

“The Fives”—Interstates 5, 25, and 35—are the arterial veins of the Mexican drug trade.

When Adán ruled the trade, it didn’t matter—he controlled the border crossings into El Paso, Laredo, and San Diego. But with him out of power, the Sinaloans have to pay a piso—a tax—to bring their product across.

Five points don’t sound like a lot, but Adán has an accountant’s perspective. You pay what you need to on a flat-fee basis—salaries and bribes, for instance, are just the cost of doing business. But percentages are to be avoided like debt—they suck the life out of a business.

And not only are the Sinaloans paying 5 percent of their own business—which amounts to millions of dollars—but they aren’t collecting the 5 percent of other people’s businesses, the piso that was theirs when he controlled all the plazas.

Now you’re talking serious money.

Cocaine alone is a $30 billion market in the United States annually. Of the cocaine that goes into the United States, 70 percent of it goes through Juárez and the Gulf.

That’s $21 billion.

The piso on that alone is a billion dollars.

A year.

You can be a multimillionaire, even a billionaire, moving your own product and paying the piso. A lot of men do, it’s not a bad life. You can get even richer controlling a plaza, charging other traffickers to use it and never touching or even going near the actual drugs. What most people don’t understand is that the top narcos can go years or even their entire business lives without ever touching the drugs.

Their business is to control turf.

Adán used to control it all.

He was the Lord of the Skies.

—

Adán’s days in Puente Grande are full.

A thousand details require supervision.

Supply routes into Mexico from Colombia have to be constantly refreshed, then there’s transportation to the border, smuggling into the United States.

Then there’s money management—tens of millions of dollars flooding back from the United States, in cash, that need to be laundered, accounted for, invested in overseas accounts and businesses. Salaries, bribes, and commissions that need to be paid. Equipment to be purchased. Adán’s operation employs scores of accountants to count the money and keep an eye on each other, dozens of lawyers. Hundreds of operatives, traffickers, security lookouts, police, army, politicians.

Adán hired a convicted embezzler to digitize all his records so he can track accounts on computer, laptops that are swapped out once a month and freshly encoded. He uses scores of cell phones, changed every other day or so, the replacements smuggled in by guards or other of Diego’s employees.

Los Bateadores are in charge of managing Block 2. The rest of Puente Grande is a bedlam of gangs, robberies, assaults, and rapes, but Block 2 is quiet and orderly. Everyone knows that the Sinaloa cartel runs that part of the prison on behalf of Adán Barrera, and it is a sanctuary of calm and quiet.

Adán rises early, has a quick breakfast, and then goes to his desk. He works until 1:00 p.m., when he has a leisurely lunch, then goes back to his desk until 5:00. Most evenings are quiet. His chef comes in every day to cook his dinner and select the appropriate wine. It seems to matter a great deal to the chef—it matters less to Adán.

He’s not a wine snob.

Some evenings Los Bateadores convert the dining hall into a cinema, complete with a popcorn machine, and Adán invites friends in to watch a movie, munch popcorn or eat ice cream. The guests call these sessions “Family Nights” because Adán prefers PG films—lots of Disney—because he doesn’t like the sex and violence that come with most Hollywood films these days.

Other nights are less wholesome.

A prison guard cruises the Guadalajara bars and comes back with women, and then the dining hall is converted into a brothel, replete with liquor, drugs, and Viagra. Adán pays all the “fees” but doesn’t take part in these evenings, retreating to his cell instead.

He’s not interested in women.

Until he sees Magda.

—

Sinaloans like to brag that their mountain state produces two beautiful things in abundance—poppies and women.

Magda Beltrán is certainly one of the latter.

Twenty-nine years old, with a tall frame, long legs, blue eyes—Magda is a mixture of the native Mexican people and the Swiss, German, and French who migrated to Sinaloa in the nineteenth century.

Seven Sinaloanas have been crowned Miss Mexico.

Magda wasn’t one of them, but she was Miss Culiacán.

She competed in beauty pageants since she was six years old and won most of them. In doing so, she attracted the attention of agents, film producers, and, of course, narcos.

Magda was no stranger to that world.

Her uncle was a trafficker in the old Federación, and two cousins had been sicarios for Miguel Ángel Barrera. Growing up in Culiacán, she simply knew traffickers; most people did.

She was nineteen when she started dating them.

Narcos flock around local beauty queens like circling vultures. Some of them even sponsor their own pageants, narcoconcursos de misses, to bring out the talent. When some other pageant officials expressed concern about the girls associating with drug traffickers, one local wag asked, “Why would you not want these women representing the state’s biggest product?”

It’s a natural combination—the girls have looks, and the narcos have money to treat them to gourmet dinners, clothes, jewelry, expensive vacations, spas, beauty treatments…

Magda took them all.

Why not?

She was young and beautiful and wanted to have a good time, and if you wanted good times in Culiacán, if you wanted to hang with the cachorros—the jet-set kids of the drug barons—you had to go where the money was.

Besides, the narcos were fun.

They liked parties, music, dances, concerts, and clubs.

If you were on the arm of a narco, you didn’t stand in line behind the rope; they opened the rope for you and showed you into the VIP room with the Cristal and the Dom, and the owners—if the narco himself didn’t own the club—would come over to greet you personally.

Some of the girls found themselves enmeshed with the older narcos who became obsessed with them, but Magda avoided that trap. She watched what happened to girls a few years ahead of her. A fifty-year-old chaca, a boss, would become enamored, make the girl his mistress, and make sure no other man—especially a young, handsome one—came near her. Sometimes he would “marry” her in a faux ceremony, fake because he was already married (at least once). The poor girl would waste her youth imprisoned in a luxury condo somewhere until the narco went to prison, was killed, or simply grew tired of her.

Then she would have money, yes, but also regrets.

Magda had none.

She was nineteen when Emilio, an up-and-coming twenty-three-year-old cocaine trafficker, came to one of her pageants, swept her off her feet and into his bed. He was handsome, funny, generous, and a good lover. She could see herself with him, marrying him and having his babies when she was done with the pageant world.

Magda was heartbroken when Emilio went to prison, but by that time she was competing for Miss Culiacán and gained the attentions of Héctor Salazar, a younger associate of her uncle’s. Héctor sent a dozen roses with a diamond in each one to her dressing room, stood politely in the shadows as she was crowned, and then took her to Cabo.