Author Topic: Protagonists in the Organized Crime -Part 1  (Read 190 times)

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raul

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Protagonists in the Organized Crime -Part 1
« on: February 21, 2022, 07:03:17 pm »
Daniel Arizmendi, the Mochaorejas or the ear chopper

Arizmendi created the world of kidnapping. With him a way of working was born: cruelty and mutilation with his kidnapped victims.

He moved to the Mexico City area, where he made deals and agreements with the Judicial Police and even with government parliamentarians to protect him. He made them his partners in the empire of terror he created.

Arizmendi began working at a very young age with his father, in a miserable workshop in the
city of Neza. Daniel learned little, although the most relevant thing, and something he continued to tell until the end of his days, was when he saw his uncle with his hand dripping blood after cutting himself with a glass. That taught him the most important thing about the trade he would eventually take up, and which he still did not know. His uncle set a rag on fire in the yard of the house and took it to his hand. Immediately the blood stopped gushing.

When he cut the ear of a kidnapped person with scissors, he immediately applied the burning rag to stop the bleeding. That is how he got his nickname, the Mochaorejas, the ear chopper

It was 1958 when Daniel Arizmendi was born in Morelos. When Daniel was very young they traveled to Mexico City. Daniel was never a good student, although according to his teachers he was the smartest or liveliest in the class. His father was a violent alcoholic who beat everyone who lived there. His mother and four siblings were the easy victims of his bad temper and violence, which his children undoubtedly inherited.

The mother was not far behind in beating her children, a broken home like many others in Mexico in those days. The mother left the abusive Catalino, her husband, but also abandoned her four children, who had no choice but to stay with the father.

El Mochaorejas never finished his studies and when he was very young he started working with his father, as there was never enough money in the house due to his drinking problems. So hard was his life that at the age of nineteen he married Lourdes Arias -pregnant with his first child-, the only woman he would respect, at first, during his criminal life.

But this did not prevent Daniel and Lourdes' life from being an ordeal. He was an alcoholic like his father and most of his family. He respected his wife, but all day long he was out on the streets looking for a living and drinking.

Respect soon ended and Daniel was a photocopy of his father: he began to mistreat his wife. She had studied and was no longer of the same social level as Arizmendi, something that Daniel could not stand either, being less than his wife. False jealousy or drunkenness was always an excuse to mistreat her.

He did not work or talk to his children, it was like living with a caged animal, an animal that would soon come to light. He worked for the Secretary of the Navy and even swept the streets.

But his life changed when he got a job as a chauffeur. He spent at least four years there. He liked driving and spent a lot of time alone waiting for his boss. It had always been a problem for him to relate to others. He thought that was his world and bought a van to make transports, but that didn't work out either. Daniel was very lazy and not very responsible, so he began to realize that what he was looking for was to earn a lot of money without having to work.

His first step was to join the Morelos police force, when he was twenty-six years old. In the police he met criminals who taught him how to live outside the law without having to work, instead of arresting the criminals he befriended them. From these criminals he learned how to rob, extort or steal cars. With this new knowledge he left the police and dedicated himself to stealing cars, as he had been taught by his former detainees.

He stole about two hundred cars, which he dismantled and sold in pieces, with the help of his brother Aurelio, a judicial police officer in Morelos.

They were commissioned to steal vehicles, all under the cover of the Morelos Judicial Police, where their brother Aurelio worked and where the thefts would never be investigated.
They worked stealing in the parking lots of Mexico City's shopping malls, in the most luxurious ones and where the best cars were.

They were putting new license plates and new documentation, they were putting cars on sale as if they were new, and they were in charge of a gang of almost a hundred people.

Finally in December 1990 they were arrested for the first time. Aurelio and Daniel were imprisoned for five months awaiting trial. The whole gang got out, paying the best lawyer in Mexico.

Except Aurelio who pleaded guilty the rest of the gang got out for lack of evidence. Aurelio was locked up for less than two years, and for us to see how they began to move with Mexican judicial corruption, they gave a huge amount of money, millions of dollars, to the State as a bribe and the place where they worked, with that they bought Aurelio's freedom.

The psychologists said that Daniel had never loved any person, he could love cars or any object he liked, but from the beginning he had despised human beings.
When Daniel was released from prison for lack of evidence, he waited for Aurelio to follow him.

They were already making a lot of money, so they were supported by the police, who, charging a percentage of their operations, turned a blind eye and never investigated their crimes.
Juan Fonseca was their contact in the Attorney General's Office (PGR), no less than the deputy director of the Judicial Police. Fonseca also served as a salesman for them; several deputies even drove around in stolen cars transformed by the Arizmendi brothers.

Through Fonseca they met another important bird, Arturo Moncada, a Sinaloa public prosecutor capable of selling his soul to the devil for money, and who, coming from his last assignment, evidently knew well the business of stealing.

With his gang well organized and earning more money than when they entered prison, they began to have power. The power to get people out of jail, everything was money in Mexico and they managed it. They had contacts in all levels of government, license plates, documentation, transportation cards, the Arizmendi gang could get it all.

One day they heard from one of Lourdes' nieces that someone had been kidnapped in Cuernavaca, the state of eternal spring. The family wanted to pay, but the police advised them to negotiate and they killed the kidnapped person.

The infrastructure was already in place. They began to work and at the beginning everything went well, they did not ask for large amounts of money and people paid.

However, Lourdes, Daniel's wife, became suspicious, money was always coming into the house, but lately it was excessive, even for them. But Daniel was a criminal genius and was able to convince his wife again that he was doing everything for her sake, a woman he had despised and beaten, but with whom he remained, despite always having her at home and being the king in the street with his countless infidelities. He convinced her that they should change business, but Daniel had covered his back very well beforehand.

Angel Vivanco entered Arizmendi's life. Vivanco was a former commander of the Judicial Police in the state of Mexico and would be the one to facilitate the criminal network for the brothers.

He would pay the Judicial Police all over the country so they would not see anything of what they were doing, they controlled lawyers and judges, the evil empire was being planted with a huge base.

The most important thing for the kidnappings were the vehicles. A brother-in-law of Fonseca provided them with credentials from the Congress of Deputies for the vehicles to be used in the kidnappings, so that no police would dare to stop them.

Lourdes, Daniel's wife, even dared to tell him that since they were already millionaires, why didn't they sell the properties they already had and set up a legal business. But Daniel at that point did not know how to do anything honest.

The first kidnapping of the Mochaorejas was that of Martín Gómez, in June 1995. They put him in a small, dirty bathroom, naked and blindfolded. In the first negotiation they asked for one million pesos and finally they charged, after bargaining 350,000.

They saw that it was easy and that they had total impunity, with the Judicial Police and the government on their side. Martin was lucky and was released in one piece.

He put his entire family to work in the new Dorado they had found. Even the mistresses and their relatives were in that job, they kept the cash hidden or put in their name the properties they bought with the profits.

Daniel and his gang kept accounting books like the big drug traffickers and also began to handle ccocaine trafficking.

Arizmendi bragged in all the bars in Morelos that he could not be arrested  and this caused him to be stopped by the police in March 1997. Cops that he did not have on his payroll and that only knew that he was handling a lot of money. The car they were in was stolen and the law enforcement officers beat them until Lourdes said they had money to give them.

Daniel was detained until Lourdes returned with the money and the two were released and the stolen car was returned to them.

Even judges like Roberto Caletti were accused of giving cover to the kidnappers and of releasing criminals in exchange for money. Caletti, who was one of the most corrupt, managed to get out also for lack of evidence, just as he released the crooks.

In December 1995, the Mochaorejas kidnapped a large wine businessman, Leobardo Pineda. This time he asked for five million pesos, he was paid one million two hundred thousand pesos. Leobardo's family was gathering the money, they had been preparing it for two months when Daniel got tired and armed with a pair of scissors he ordered two of his gang to hold him to the ground and then, with all the coldness in the world, he cut off his ear and sent it to the family in a plastic bag.

The family paid immediately, but the police mafia, who knew where they were going to deliver the money, stole it. Daniel had to keep his name, so, with the coolness that always characterized him, he ordered one of his men to shoot Leobardo in the head. They let him bleed to death so he wouldn't stain the car and wrapped in plastic they threw him in the middle of the road.

Arizmendi's men knew which roads to take and who was behind them thanks to the warnings from Vivanco, the partner. Daniel bought lots of houses and ranches, always in the name of front men, he even opened a disco in Neza, Skates, and put his brother Aurelio, the other big brain of the gang, in charge of it. Meanwhile, they were expanding the ccocaine trafficking business.

Daniel was not a typical mafioso. He liked to participate in everything, in the kidnappings, in the murders, in changing the number of vehicles, and what he liked most was to cut off the ears of the kidnapped and apply the burning rag, as he had seen his uncle do when he was young to cut the bleeding.

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