Mariana van Zeller
👤 PersonAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
from LAPD, confiscated guns that he had acquired from LAPD.
So in that case, it went back to my contacts in Sinaloa.
And I think it's three reasons why people talk to us.
I think the first one is ego.
People want to boast.
And if you're part of the Sinaloa cartel, or even if you're a boss in the Sinaloa cartel, and there's an ongoing war between you, a turf war between you and another gang like the CNG,
which is a cartel, Jalisco, they're fighting for power, right?
So here's an opportunity to show how powerful you are.
And a lot of these people that talk to me, I don't, you know, very often or more often than not, it's not the bosses or the kingpins that I'm talking to, right?
It's the sicarios, it's the middle and low level people.
It's the traffickers, it's the chemists, the smugglers.
It's not the kingpins.
they spend their whole lives doing something that sometimes their own families don't know they do.
Like I remember an episode we did about counterfeit money, people who make fake U.S.
dollars and euros in Peru, in Lima.
And this guy, like a shiny eye, so excited, showing me how he finishes these bills to make it look and feel and smell exactly like a $100 bill.
And when I asked him, and he's a taxi driver by day and he does this by night,
And I was asking him, so why did you accept talking to us?