This article was co-published with El Paso News.
For Salvador Martinez his story begins like many other stories of aspiring law enforcement agents seeking adventure from a television show he watched as youngster. For him, it was the Miami Vice television series that ran from 1984 through 1989. But on the day that the FBI arrested him, Martinez was not the suave Miami Vice character he admired but was instead now “shocked and insulted” that he was now the one in handcuffs.
The story for Miguel Angel Flores was very different from his counterpart in the murder-for-hire plot. Not only was Flores the target but at 13-years-old, the “street urchin” would be accused of murdering the brother of a drug agent soon to be the leader of the fusion center targeting Mexican drug cartels. Flores would cross into El Paso to help his mother by offering to wash car windshields or perform juggling acts for whatever would be handed to him. Little did he know that on that fateful day, he would be accused and convicted of murder under the orders of the largest drug lord at the time – Vicente Carrillo Fuentes.
He was a cold-blooded murderer turned into a “street urchin,” by the local newspaper after the paper was grudgingly forced to accept the teenager wasn’t the murderer powerful people wanted everyone to believe. At the center of this story are two Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) agents intent on solving the murder – one weaving a tale of a drug lord behind his brother’s murder, the other targeting the “street urchin” for murder, and a kid from Juárez washing car windows to help his family.
The drama behind the saga pitted El Pasoans – bureaucracy and people – against the poor kid from Juárez. But a made-for-the-movies saga isn’t complete without a government conspiracy surfacing, a former presidential candidate providing air to the conspiracy and a mysterious piece of evidence surfacing just at the right moment to save the plot from imploding upon itself. This is the type of story that ends up on Netflix, full of villains and government agents tripping all over themselves.
That September Meeting The Exposed Everything
On September 24, 1999, then DEA Agent Martinez met with one of his informants at a gas station in McAllen, Texas. He promised his informant a Colt pistol and $10,000 – both from the coffers of the DEA – for the revenge killing of the alleged killer from Juárez.
But instead of going to Juárez to kill Miguel Angel Flores, the drug informant found another opportunity in the FBI to better his standing as the reliable criminal informant he used for protection. The informant rushed to the FBI and told them everything about the plot to kill the Juarense. The informant recorded several conversations with Martinez from October through December 1999, that “substantiated” the murder-fire-murder-plot that the DEA agent had orchestrated.
On December 15, 1999, with the recordings on hand, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents arrested Salvador Michael Martinez in Brownsville, Texas. He was charged with trying to contract a killer to kill Miguel Angel Martinez who had been freed by an appeal court a few months before. For Martinez, freeing the murderer was personal, an afront to the carjacking murder of his cousin, and the criminal system he had devoted his life to.
When Martinez was arrested, he was an eight-year veteran of the DEA stationed at the U.S. Consulate in Monterrey, México. Searching his consulate office five days later, the FBI found what they needed, a photograph of Miguel Angel Flores, a pistol and a timeline of the murder of Bruno Jordan.
The murder-for-hire plot began after a 13-year-old from Cd. Juárez was freed from prison after his El Paso June 1, 1995 murder conviction was overturned on appeal. Straight out of a made-for-the-movie scene, a deadlocked jury looking to acquit the child of murder mysteriously found a marihuana cigarette in the jacket lining of the child’s jacket that was submitted into evidence. The cigarette, that somehow had escaped months of police scrutiny, was the turning point for the jury – they found the child guilty, technically delinquent.
Never mind that the only evidence was five witnesses, two who say they saw Flores pull the trigger and three that said it wasn’t him. There was no gun and gun residue tests were “inconclusive” on a child that had been apprehended only 15 minutes after the murder. Driving the orchestra behind the saga was a powerful duo of DEA agents looking for revenge.
Lionel Bruno Jordan
Lionel Bruno Jordan was a standout high school basketball player for Jefferson in the mid-1980’s. On January 21, 1995, Bruno Jordan was killed by a gunman, who El Paso police said stole the truck Jordan was delivering to a friend. About 15 minutes after the carjacking, police arrested Miguel Angel Flores walking down Montwood, about a mile from the murder scene. The murder weapon nor the stolen truck were ever recovered. Jordan’s murder was the third murder that day.
By the time of Martinez’ arrest four years later, a car jacking had morphed into a complicated conspiracy of a Mexican drug lord sending a message to the brother of the victim and a Juárez child facing 20-years in prison for something he says he did not do, with evidence supporting that he had nothing to do with the murder. Adding to the drama of the drug lord was a pistol morphing into an Uzi machine gun when it became apparent that the intricately weaved saga was falling apart in court.
Although El Paso Police were confident that Jordan’s murder was a carjacking, Dallas billionaire Ross Perot implied in his testimony before the Senate Banking Committee on January 31, 1995 that the murder was linked to the Juárez cartel. It is important to understand the backstory behind Perot to understand what may have motivated him to talk about the conspiracy starting to be weaved.
The year before, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), now known as the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) came into effect, opening free trade between Canada, México and the United States. In 1992, running for president as an independent, Perot assailed both Bill Clinton and George H. W. Bush for not seeing the “giant sucking sound” of American manufacturing hightailing it out of America on their way to México.
In 1978, then Texas governor Bill Clements appointed Perot to lead Texas’ newly declared war on drugs. As Perot’s “crusade,” his role saw him wanting to expand Texas police powers to target drug users and pushers, and “cordoning off black and Latino neighborhoods while subjecting the residents to mandatory searches for drugs and guns.” Perot wanted “drug dealers [to] go to POW camp.” In Perot’s mind, the Mexican drug lords were destroying America. It is against this backdrop that it becomes apparent why Perot would help to build a carjacking into an international conspiracy sending a message to a DEA agent to backoff.
El Paso Police Sgt. Bill Pfeifel told the El Paso Times that the murder was not “anything other than it appears to be, a carjacker.” Perot insinuated that the murder was in retaliation for Jordan’s brother’s work for the DEA. Phil Jordan, the brother of Bruno Jordan, then-head of the Dallas DEA office told the El Paso Times that the police had briefed him on February 2, 1995. Phil Jordan said that the police told him that “there was nothing to suggest that the murder was in retaliation” to Phil Jordan’s work for the DEA.
Nonetheless, the insinuation that the Juárez cartel was involved would come to dominate the life of Phil Jordan, be written in books as if factual and lead a DEA agent directly to jail for attempting to hire a contract killer to murder a kid from Juárez.
In his book, “Down By The River, Drugs, Money, Murder, and Family,” Charles Bowden weaves an intricate tale of a conspiracy on both sides of the U.S.-México border where high-level officials covered up the murder of Bruno Jordan, who Bowden alleges was ordered by the leader of the Juárez cartel, Amado Carrillo Fuentes. Bowden’s book makes several allegations that at best are unproven and at worst are fiction wrapped as exposing a high-level conspiracy others refused to accept. Although the drowning of an alleged killer’s brother in the river separating El Paso and Cd. Juárez is part of a cross-border conspiracy, the official cause of death remains nothing more than a drowning of someone trying to make their way across the border. But it adds to the made for movies conspiracy and apparently gives Bowden’s book some credibility.
Miguel Angel Flores
The trial against Miguel Angel Flores, the Juarense accused of murdering Bruno Jordan for his truck began on May 30, 1995. Representing him was Sam Medrano. Before his trial began, Medrano said that the 13-year-old maintained that he was innocent. Because Flores was a juvenile at the time of the murder, he was tried in juvenile court.
When the trial began, Flores told the judge that the charges against him, were not true, saying in Spanish that “no es verdad.” Unlike an adult trial, instead of pleading guilty or not guilty, in juvenile court the plea is either “true,” or “not true” to the charges.
The first two witnesses for the prosecution were friends of Bruno Jordan – Renan Barrosa and Israel Reyes. Barrosa told the jury that he saw Flores pointing a gun at Bruno Jordan. Reyes testified that he saw Flores “carrying something across his chest.”
El Paso police officer Noel Baeza told the jury that he arrested Flores 15-minutes after the murder, because he appeared “nervous.” Baeza said that Flores told him that “he saw a man lying on the ground” and left when he saw the Fire Department arrive because he was “scared.” Flores was in El Paso as an undocumented migrant.
David Walker Spence, a forensic expert, testified that tests for gun residue performed on Flores “were inconsistent.” The tests are used to show whether someone has fired a gun recently. The truck was not recovered and the gun was not presented to the jury, even though Flores had been arrested only 15 minutes after the murder. Sam Medrano, Flores’ attorney offered the jury three witnesses who testified that Flores was not the killer. The three witnesses testified that they saw the suspected shooter. They told the jury that the person they saw shoot was not Flores.
Although the gun wasn’t provided to the jury, the truck wasn’t recovered and three witnesses testified they saw the shooter, and it wasn’t Flores, the jury, at first leaning towards acquittal found that he committed the murder, after mysterious evidence surfaced in the jury room. A marihuana cigarette found by one of the jurors in the jacket Flores was wearing when he was arrested, turned the jury against the Juárez child. Although Medrano made a motion for a mistrial because of the cigarette, Judge Phil Martinez denied the motion. The cigarette had somehow gone unnoticed as the jacket was handled by police, investigators and prosecutors never to surface until the moment it was needed – to sway the jury at the last minute. The cigarette was never introduced into evidence.
On June 1, 1995, the jury convicted Flores of the murder, although the jury had sent a note to the judge the day before that they were deadlocked on the case with seven of the 12 jurors not convinced that Flores was the killer. To counter the jury’s deadlock, the judge allowed the prosecutors to present another witness, Phil Jordan, the director of the El Paso Intelligence Center (EPIC) and Bruno Jordan’s brother.
Phil Jordan told the jury that the murder “killed all of us a little.” After Flores’ conviction, Phil Jordan alleged that the conviction “was just the beginning,” because he and unnamed investigators knew that Flores was “a pawn in a border auto-theft ring.” Phil Jordan added that it was “only a matter of time” before the unnamed suspects “were brought to justice.”
Legally, because of his youth, Flores was found to have “engaged in delinquent conduct” in the murder of Bruno Jordan. He was sentenced to 20 years in state prison, five in a youth facility and the rest in a state prison. But the case remained far from over.
Court Orders New Trial For Flores
Although Flores was serving a 20-year sentence for the murder of Bruno Jordan, questions remained over who killed him. For Phil Jordan, the murderer was Flores, but he had help from others that Phil Jordan said he knew but would not name publicly. Phil Jordan believed his brother had been murdered by a “car-theft-by-order” ring. Meanwhile Flores continued to insist he did not murder Bruno Jordan. According to Phil Jordan, the best thing that happened to “Flores was getting arrested” because the leaders of the criminal ring “wanted him dead.”
In May 1996, with $5,000 in help the Mexican Consulate provided to Flores, the 8th Court of Appeals heard from Flores’ new attorney Charles Roberts, arguing why the Juárez youth should get a new trial. Jordan called the money “blood money” from the Mexican government. The $5,000 would become part of the saga as newspapers would trumpet the idea that it was uncommon for the Mexican government to get involved in the case of a Mexican “street urchin” jailed for a murder he says he did not commit. For its part, the Mexican government insisted that the help was help it provided because the evidence left in doubt about whether Mexican citizen was serving prison time for a crime that the evidence did not support.
Roberts offered that the prosecutors provided two witnesses that did not directly identify Flores as the murderer, only that it was “a short male Hispanic wearing a jacket.” The people who believed Flores did not commit the murder wondered why the marihuana cigarette was not discovered by officials who handled the jacket in evidence before it landed on the jurors’ table. The jury was leaning towards acquitting Flores of the murder, until the marihuana was discovered in the jury room.
The 8th Court of Appeals agreed with the jury and found that Flores was guilty of the murder. Roberts then appealed to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. This time, Roberts accepted a dollar, plus expenses, from the Mexican government to take the appeal to the next level.
In February 1998, the Texas Supreme Court ordered a new trial for Flores “because jurors in the case received additional information” after they began deliberating. The additional evidence was the marihuana cigarette a juror found in Flores’ jacket in the jury room. Phil Jordan blamed the Mexican Consulate for what he called its “blatant obstruction of justice” when it paid Flores’s attorney to file the appeal.
The made-for-the-movies saga was now a full-blown conspiracy involving drug lord Amado Carrillo Fuentes, being helped by the Mexican government to protect a car theft ring that no one believed existed, except for the news media seeking headlines, a heartbroken family, and Bowden peddling his drug lord book as fact.
Phil Jordan’s Crusade
By February 1995, Phil Jordan left Dallas as the DEA’s field supervisor there and returned to El Paso where he became the director of the El Paso Intelligence Center (EPIC). On January 3, 1996, Phil Jordan retired as director of EPIC. EPIC is an intelligence fusion center based at Ft. Bliss that originally gathered and processed information about the drug trade. It now provides “tactical intelligence” to help “identify threats” to the nation with an emphasis on the southern border.
Phil Jordan said that the murder of his brother was the worst thing that had happened to him during his years in law enforcement. He said his brother’s murder “was masterminded by adults, including an attorney,” adding that he and others “know who they are.” He did not provide the names of the people he suspected of his brother’s murder. For Phil Jordan, México was “corrupt to the core.”
Although focused on the so-called car theft ring, for Phil Jordan it was an antagonist he had been pursuing since he joined the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, which later morphed into the DEA. Phil Jordan’s antagonist was the Mexican drug lords who tortured and killed Enrique “Kiki” Camarena in 1985.
DEA Agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena was tortured and killed by Mexican drug lords in 1985. That much is proven. But the murder of Camarena, itself has led to movies about the drug trade, many times led by corrupt Mexican officials and powerful drug lords, at least in the movies. Much of the story lines in the movies come from books written by authors like Charles Bowden. For Bowden, the murder of Camarena was not simply about drug lords and their antagonists, the DEA. For books to sell, the stories need vast conspiracies, like the CIA having a hand in the torture and murder of a DEA agent. It’s also helpful to have corrupt Mexican Federales involved in the plot.
Three Mexican drug lords were convicted in the murder of Camarena, and a Mexican doctor was kidnapped by Mexican bounty hunters paid by the DEA and delivered to El Paso. But a made-for-the-movies conspiracy is not complete without a plot twist. By the time the Mexican doctor’s kidnapping saga ended, the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled that, essentially, the U.S. government had the right to kidnap foreigners to bring them to trial. But in the end, the jury found the Mexican doctor not guilty.
What bothered Phil Jordan the most was the Mexican government’s failure to arrest Amado Carrillo Fuentes, the leader of the Juárez cartel. Trying to prove that his brother’s murder was more than a simple carjacking by a 13-year-old, Phil Jordan along with two friendly Mexican Judicial Police visited Flores’ mother in Juárez. Jordan offered the mother witness protection and that he would drop all charges if Flores told him who the mastermind was.
Things would only get weirder in the case from there. While Flores and his mother and his siblings argued that Miguel Flores was innocent, Phil Jordan continued to believe him to be part of a greater conspiracy. As this played out, Miguel Flores’ older brother, Juan Alfredo Flores, was found drowned in the Rio Grande only weeks after his brother had been convicted and sentenced for the murder.
After the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ordered a new trial for Flores, Phil Jordan was no longer telling people that it was a car-theft-ring that ordered his brothers murder, but, instead, it was the Juárez cartel who ordered the murder.
The Second And Third Trials
On October 27, 1998, the second trial against Miguel Angel Flores began. Except for the newest revelation that it was an Uzi submachine gun that was used to kill Bruno Jordan, the witness testimony remained the same as in the first trial. Also, this time around there was no marihuana cigarette for the jury to find during deliberations. On October 30, 1998, the jury deadlocked, forcing judge Phil Martinez to order a mistrial. At the core of the deadlocked jury were two sets of witnesses testifying, two saying it was Flores who committed the murders and three saying it wasn’t him. The truck nor the murder weapon were found, even though Flores was arrested within minutes of the murder.
On May 3, 1999, the third trial against Miguel Angel Flores began. The jury deadlocked only three days after the third trial had begun, forcing a second mistrial. County Attorney José Rodríguez, who was the prosecutor in the two latest court hearings, said he wasn’t sure they would try Flores a fourth time.
Rodríguez, who retired after 17 years as the county attorney, went on to be elected state senator replacing outgoing Eliot Shapleigh. Rodríguez retired in 2019. Days after the second trial, he announced there would not be a fourth trial for Flores, essentially exonerating him of the murder.
In the last two trials, the jurors had deliberated for ten and eleven hours before announcing they were helplessly deadlocked. Without the mysterious marihuana cigarette, the El Paso jurors could not convict Flores.
For his part, Phil Jordan told the El Paso Times that he and his family knew “who all the players are in the killing” of his brother, but “it’s just unfortunate that the only ones who have paid for my brother’s death are my parents and Miguel Angel.” Jordan announced that he would file a wrongful death lawsuit against the people he alleged were the masterminds behind the murder.
Miguel Angel Flores, now 17-years-old, was freed in 1999 and deported to Juárez.
Meanwhile, in July 1999, the Jordan family sued Kmart alleging that they should have provided a security guard in the parking lot. On July 22, 1999 an El Paso jury awarded the Jordan family $250,000 because Kmart had failed to provide security at its parking lot.
A few months later, DEA agent Salvador Micheal Martinez was in handcuffs accused of attempting to hire a hitman to kill Flores, who now lived in Juárez. Martinez is Phil Jordan’s cousin.
“Should Have Been Handled Internally,” Phil Jordan Argues
On May 5, 2000, Salvador Martinez stood before the judge, apologized for trying hire someone to kill his cousin’s murderer, and accepted the seven years in prison sentence that was part of his plea agreement three months before. Phil Jordan called Martinez’ sentence another “injustice” in the saga over his brother’s murder. His prison sentence only intensified the rift between the DEA and the FBI. Jordan told The Houston Chronicle that the FBI “should have handled this much like they have for their agents – keeping the matter internal.” Jordan expected the FBI to bury the hire-for-murder crime under a bureaucratic coverup to protect his cousin. Jordan said that “when the FBI first got wind” of the plot, they should have recognized that Martinez “was talking recklessly” and the FBI should have notified the DEA so that the agency could discipline Martinez internally and provide him with counseling.
The problem for Phil Jordan’s allegation of impropriety by the FBI in the arrest of the former DEA agent was that at sentencing, Judge George Kazen offered Martinez the opportunity to take back his guilty plea, if he felt that he was “entrapped.” Kazen told Martinez that if he did not take back his guilty plea, that he should “level with your friends and family.”
For his part, the former DEA agent issue a written statement about pleading guilty because “if I had given priority to my own self-interest, many people would have suffered through an agonizing painful and expensive jury trial.” He added that “the public image of federal agents on the Southwest border would have been tarnished.”
However, family members told The Los Angeles Times that Martinez had been “framed.” Never mind that surveillance video showed him trying to hire a killer to kill the Juarense wrongly accused of murder. As The Los Angeles Times reporter wrote on July 8, 2000, “it would be easy to dismiss if the story hadn’t happened on the border.”
For the story tellers, the ingredients for the carefully crafted narrative was there. A Mexican child crossing the border illegally, omnipotent Mexican drug lords, a conspiracy involving the CIA, a corrupt Mexican government, and, as the Los Angeles Times described them, “a prominent El Paso clan (the Jordan’s), famous for both its closeness and its two sons in law enforcement.”
The Story That Wouldn’t Die
With Martinez in jail for attempting to hire a hitman to kill Flores, one would assume the wind had been taken out of the story. But it didn’t. In July 2001, a Tamaulipas state police commander was gunned down along with his assistant. On July 9, 2001, police commander Jaime Yañez Cantu was killed along with his assistant, Gerardo Gazcon in Matamoros. Phil Jordan said that Yañez was a double agent that worked for both U.S. law enforcement and Mexican drug cartels. Yañez was also the informant who turned on Martinez, the former DEA agent, and helped to put him jail. Jordan also added another unnamed individual was complicit, “a news media person” in his brother’s murder.
Typical of Phil Jordan’s list of members in the conspiracy over the years, the latest news media person remained unnamed.
In the case of the murder of Yañez, only Phil Jordan and his family were saying he was working for both U.S. law enforcement and the drug cartels. Mexican and U.S. authorities quickly criticized the unfounded allegation against Yañez. Yañez worked alongside U.S. law enforcement in June 2001 helping to arrest 57 people connected to the Gulf cartel on both sides of the border.
But for Phil Jordan, the facts were just an inconvenience to the story he had been carefully weaving since the murder of his brother.
Phil Jordan’s Dream Witness Is Arrested
On October 9, 2014, Mexican military and federal police arrested Vicente “Viceroy” Carrillo Fuentes in Torreon. Phil Jordan wanted to interview him for the murder of his brother. Viceroy Carrillo was the brother of Amado Carillo Fuentes, the “Lord of the Skies.”
The Carrillo Fuentes drug organization went to war against the Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán drug clan starting around 2008 for control of the Juárez Plaza. For Phil Jordan, the opportunity to question Carrillo Fuentes, in his mind, would allow him to prove the theory of his brother’s murder that he had been peddling since then.
Rafael Caro Quintero, another Mexican drug lord accused of being part of the Kiki Camarena murder was extradited by the Mexican government along with Vicente “Viceroy” Carrillo Fuentes. Both were indicted on April 30, 2025 on federal drug charges in New York.
It is not known if Phil Jordan has had the opportunity to or will have the opportunity to question Carrillo Fuentes. Or will the trial, if any, give some credence to his long evolving theories of who killed his brother. But if history is any indication, new information that comes to light only further exposes his theory as fiction wrapped in a made-for-movie plot.
As for the convicted former DEA agent, Sal Martinez, his story is like other stories of high-profile convicted felons who now peddle their criminal stories for money. Martinez is a bail bondsman and a legal defense specialist/prison consultant as well as a public speaker. He continues to peddle the story that he was “not totally guilty,” and that he “never got to tell his side of the story,” unless you want to pay him to speak at your event, or pay for his book. Martinez adds that the government he “nearly died for,” “turned its back” on him.
As for the person at the center of this cross-border made-for-movie saga, Miguel Angel Flores, the 13-year-old accused of murder, little is known about what happened to him after his release to Juárez in 1999. Other than becoming fluent in English while incarcerated for a murder he did not commit, his story essentially ends where it began – in obscurity. Were it not for El Paso police arresting him for looking “afraid,” a prosecutor who didn’t seem to care for the evidence and Phil Jordan/Charles Bowden’s carefully crafted fictional story of a carjacking, it is unlikely that Flores’ story would have been told.
The Made-For-Movies Narrative
By the time the legal system got around to correct the injustice of convicting a 13-yeear-old for a murder that the evidence simply could not prove and a member of the grieving family going to jail for trying to hire a killer to kill the child, the only thing left was the reality that a carjacking had been twisted into the plot of a drug-crime movie based on pure fiction.
Phil Jordan’s theory of who killed his brother kept evolving from the time the “street urchin” was arrested. He did it, to he was part of a car-to-order-theft-ring to drug lord Amado Carrillo Fuentes did to send him a message. Everyone agreed that Bruno Jordan was doing a favor delivering the truck for a friend when he was killed. In 2000, Phil Jordan added another twist to the story, the friend that asked Bruno Jordan to deliver the truck was “helping her ex-boyfriend steal the Silverado for delivery to traffickers.” He added that the traffickers ordered the murder “to intimidate” the incoming head of the DEA, Phil Jordan.
Phil Jordan, who “readily” admitted to The Los Angeles Times reporter that he had “no hard evidence,” added that his theory of his brother’s murder developed from talking to unnamed sources, including an unnamed source at the Mexican Consulate that told him the Juárez cartel paid for the appeals that freed Flores from prison.
The public record contradicts this. The Mexican government paid $5,001 plus expenses to the attorney to appeal case.
Hiding behind the smoke-and-mirrors of the twisted plot was that the El Paso police officers arrested a kid from Juárez because he looked good for the murder because he seemed “afraid.” Compounding the police errors – who if you believe the carefully crafted plot – somehow missed the “smoking gun” of a marihuana joint while handling the evidence of the coat worn by their suspect, is El Paso’s then county attorney, José Rodríguez, who prosecuted the Juárez teenager, not once, but twice, even though anyone who looked at the evidence knew it just wasn’t there.
But a made-for-movie plotline needs someone to take it to the big screens. First was the El Paso news media eager to lap up the story of a Mexican drug lord ordering a 13-year-old to kill. Not once did the El Paso media ask, why is it that there is no gun in evidence, no gun residue on the alleged killer and the truck that was stolen wasn’t ever found? Because that narrative did not sell newspapers. The narrative weaved by Ross Perot, the victim’s brother and the prosecution was more juice for selling newspapers to readers accustomed to believing that México “is corrupt to the core,” and that the DEA are honest agents looking to stop the drugs invading America.
And then there was Charles Bowden, who wrote a book about the murder. To understand if Bowden’s account of what transpired during the murder and the conspiracy behind it as theorized by Phil Jordan, the reader need only to see that Bowden believed that the death of the “Lord of the Skies,” Amado Carrillo Fuentes was a coverup. According to Bowden, the much sought after drug lord is “alive and being protected by U.S. drug agents as he lives out his days on a Caribbean sanctuary,” at least Bowden carefully hides his theory by adding, as “Mexicans think.”
In 2003, John MacCormack wrote a review of Bowden’s book in the Anchorage Daily News. He wrote that the book “is a harsh does of reality.” MacCormack got it wrong. The evidence of the sordid tale makes Bowden’s work a harsh reality of fiction.
In the end, the only person to go to jail was a DEA agent that tried to hire a killer to kill a Mexican simply because he was the easy scapegoat in the whole sordid saga. Never mind the facts because they don’t sell newspapers.
This article is based on public records, court testimony and documents, and personal interviews.
