Pamela K. Browne and Cyd Upson
and Foxnews.com offers a piece on a pair of Cartel wives whose drug trafficking
husbands have become informants and will soon testify against their former boss,
Joaguin “El Chapo” Guzman.
They once enjoyed a life of
ill-gotten luxury, married to identical twins who climbed to the top of the
world’s most profitable – and deadly – drug cartel. But these days, Mia and
Olivia Flores live in the shadows, wearing disguises and shuttling their children
from home to home, always wary someone is coming for them.
Daughters of Chicago police
officers, Mia and Olivia married Pedro and Margarito Flores Jr. as the brothers
rose from street-level dealers to running Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzmán's
Sinaloa drug cartel in the United States.
"They made a lot of
money," Mia said in an exclusive, on-camera interview with Fox News Chief
Intelligence Correspondent Catherine Herridge. "My husband and
brother-in-law were a big asset to him. They knew the U.S. inside and out, they
knew the roads, they knew how to maneuver in the U.S. And that's something
Chapo and his team didn't know how to do."
The lavish lifestyle came
crashing down in 2012, when the twins were each sentenced to 14 years in prison
for smuggling 71 tons of cocaine and heroin and $2 billion in cash into the
United States. The Flores brothers were the highest level American drug
traffickers to be flipped by the Drug Enforcement Agency--DEA, and key to
bringing El Chapo to U.S. justice. Key to the prosecution's case, they are
expected to testify at his 2018 trial in New York City.
"I would say that
they're probably the strongest witnesses in this case," Olivia said in the
interview, at which she, like her sister-in-law, wore dark glasses and a wig.
"They were the first to ever get El Chapo Guzmán on a recorded
conversation. They're U.S. citizens. They speak English. They've trafficked
drugs across the U.S."
In the meantime, Olivia and
Mia are telling their own story in “CARTEL WIVES: A True Story of Deadly
Decisions, Steadfast Love and Bringing Down El Chapo.” The book, which hits
stores this week, is Mia and Olivia’s effort to detail the role their husbands
played in bringing El Chapo to justice and to tell their own story of survival
in the aftermath.
"We do not share our
real names,” Olivia told Fox News. “We have to constantly hide. We have to
constantly remember our lies. We don't mingle with neighbors. We try to just
fly under the radar and try not to get noticed. We're soccer moms. We're on the
PTA. We're in car line. We're dressed in sneakers every day. And we're just
trying to give our children a normal life."
Although El Chapo, who was
captured in his Mexican mountain hideout in January of 2016, after repeated
escapes from prison, is now held at the maximum-security wing of the
Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York, Olivia and Mia fear they are
"being hunted" by his loyalists.
Their fear is real, according
to recently retired Drug Enforcement Administration Deputy Administrator Jack
Riley (seen in the above photo in front of a wanted poster of Guzman), who spent more than a decade hunting El Chapo. He said El Chapo is
directly responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of people.
"Look, I hate the guy,”
Riley said. “When I was on the border some 10 years ago, sluggin' it out with
what was going on in Juarez, he put a bounty on my head. I was a little upset
about it, because it was only $100,000, but he put a bounty to have someone cut
my head off.
You can read the rest of the
piece via the below link:
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