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<CENTER><H2><CHAPO!</FONT>
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<p><b>Table of Contents</b></p>
<p><b>Directions</b>: Click any of the links below to go to a specific part of the story.</p></b>
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<li><a href="#part1">Part 1</a></li>
<li><a href="#part2">Part 2</a></li>
<li><a href="#part3">Part 3</a></li>
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<p><b>Part 1</b></p>
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<H2><P><I>Last year on Valentine's Day, the drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman was designated Chicago’s Public Enemy No.1. It was a telling day to bestow the measure of dishonor, a nod to the gangster Al Capone and The Valentine’s Day Massacre of 1929. Capone found himself Chicago’s Public Enemy No. 1 after seven mobsters were killed that day, and his role as a bogeyman blamed for increasing crime in the city was unmatched for decades—until El Chapo. El Chapo ran the biggest drug syndicate in the Americas until he was captured in Mexico last week, and his footprint was especially.</I>
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heavy in the place once dominated by that earlier public enemy. El Chapo’s Sinaloa Cartel, widely considered to supply up to 80 percent of the drugs in the city, has been blamed for helping spark the gang disputesthat have fueled so much of the gun violence in Chicago. That violence peaked in 2012, the city’s bloodiest year in almost a decade, when 506 people were killed by gun violence. As Art Bilek of the Chicago Crime Commission, which issues the public enemies list, put it, El Chapo “virtually has his fingerprints on the guns that are killing the children of this city.”
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<p><b>Part 2</b></p>
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<P><I>Indeed, El Chapo once referred to Chicago as his “home port.” But his arrest is unlikely to have much effect on violence there. Most law enforcement officials attribute the city’s uptick in shootings to the breakdown in the traditional gang hierarchy. Federal prosecutions of gang leaders like Larry Hoover, the head of the notorious Gangster Disciples, disorganized the ranks, and senseless violence increased as a kind of collateral damage.“The problem is now the gang structure here is so fractured, you have a lot of the cliques,” says Brian Sexton, chief of narcotics prosecutions for the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office. “You may have just like maybe 15 guys in one block or whatever, but there’s nobody calling the shots really, and they’re more younger and more violent than they ever were.”The drug trade can actually have a stabilizing effect, according to law enforcement. The supply of cocaine and heroin from Mexico, much of it coming from the Sinaloa Cartel, is the main source of income for these gangs and violence can be bad for business.</I>
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“In the 70s, when all the gangs started big, it was very traditional,” Sexton said. “Folks versus Peoples, and the colors, and you know they were all rivals with each other and very turf-protective. But now it’s all about making money.”Much of that money comes from selling drugs from El Chapo’s cartel, which get smuggled from Mexico to Chicago and then distributed throughout the Midwest and other parts of the nation. Numerous cartels ship drugs through the city, but Sinaloa dwarfs them all, according to court records.
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<p><b>Part 3</b></p>
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And the market is large. In a 2010 report, the Department of Justice named the Chicago metro area the No. 1 destination in the United States for heroin shipments, No. 2 for marijuana and cocaine, and No. 5 for methamphetamine. The reasons are a combination of ideal geography, a developed retail network and a large population of Mexican immigrants.Chicago is a national transportation hub, ideally located within a day’sdrive of 70 percent of the U.S. population. It has two major airports, and six of the seven major railroads. The region accounts for one quarter of the entire country’s rail traffic. If you’relooking to efficiently move products in and out, it’s a hard location to beat.“The geographic reality of the situation is that it’s just a very convenient point, the infrastructure’s there,” says Amarjeet Singh Bhachu, an Assistant U.S. Attorney who helped prosecute members of the La Familia Michoacana drug cartel. “The same reasons that made Chicago a big city in the history of the United States are the same reasons that make it a big city for any enterprise, including illegal enterprises.”
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