Benjamin Smith

This was not one shakedown among many. This was the only game in town; it dwarfed the illegal alcohol and prostitution industries. This was not simply charging a handful of wholesalers and a couple of opium dens. Officials taxed every level of the drug business from the growers, to the buyers, to the chemists and the traffickers. They taxed in cash and they taxed in drugs. And they created an entire state-level police force in order to do so. A lot of the money went into private accounts, but at least some was spent on public works.

Protecting the trade was another matter. State governors wanted exclusive rights to tax the trade. To secure them, they needed to take out their rivals for the protection racket. And it was the conflicts over the control of the rackets—rather than the trade itself—that caused the violence. Loaiza would find this out the hard way. His decision would cause Sinaloa’s first spate of drug-related deaths, including his own.

The killing of the Wild Cat has gone down in local folklore as a stark lesson in what happened if you messed with Badiraguato’s mountain gunmen. It also neatly demonstrated the way shifts in political control—not trafficker rivalries—were the principal cause of early drug trade violence.