The Cartel by Don Winslow Read Free Book Online Page A

out…he was hoping to pop the question.
    There was just one small thing.
    He needed a little help.
    There was some money, cash, in Mexico City. He’d go himself, but things were…difficult…there at the moment. But if she would go, perhaps visit her family, see friends, and then pick up the money and fly it back…
    Magda did it.
    She knew what she was doing. Knew that she was crossing the line from “association” to “participation,” from dating a drug trafficker to money laundering. She did it anyway. Part of her knew, deep down, that he was using her, but another part wanted to believe him, and there was yet another part that…

    …wanted in.
    Why not?
    Magda grew up around la pista secreta, learned about the trade from Emilio, learned much more about it, and on a much higher level, just being with Jorge. She had the experience, the brains—why did she always have to just be eye candy on the arm of some male narco?
    Why couldn’t she be a narca?
    A chingona, a powerful woman on her own?
    Other women—admittedly few—had done it.
    Why not her?
    So when Magda packed two suitcases with $5 million in American cash and headed for Mexico City International Airport, she couldn’t really say, then or later, if she was going to deliver the money to Jorge or steal it from him to start her own business. She had a ticket to Cartagena and a ticket to Culiacán, and she didn’t know which she was going to use. Go to Colombia and see if Jorge was really going to marry her, or go back to Sinaloa and fade into the protective cradle of the mountains, where Jorge would never dare come to demand his money back. (Really, what was he going to do? She would simply say that the police seized the money, and what was he going to do?)
    She never had the chance to decide.
    The federales arrested her as she was walking into the terminal.
    So she could truthfully tell Jorge that the police seized his money. They made a big show in front of the news cameras over the seizure of $1.5 million and the arrest of a “major money launderer for the Colombian cartels.”
    The media loved it.
    They plastered Magda’s mug shots all over the front pages and television with split-screen images of her under arrest and her standing on the stage in her tiara. News announcers shook their heads and tcch’d cautionary, let-this-be-a-lesson tales for other young women tempted by the narco-world of “glitz and glamour.”
    Even some American papers picked it up, with headlines reading BEAUTY AND THE BUST . Or, in the tabloid version, THE BUST AND THE BUST .
    Magda was less amused, although her police interrogations were ridiculous. The focus of the federales ’ questions was not so much on what she was doing taking $5 million in cash through Benito Juárez Airport, but what she was doing taking $5 million in cash through Benito Juárez Airport without paying them first.
    She admitted that it was a naïve mistake, that she should have known better, and if she had it to do over again—that is, if they gave her the chance to do it over again—she would certainly do so.

    That led directly to the next round of questions—did she, in fact, have any more money?
    She didn’t.
    Magda had a few thousand in the bank, some jewelry on her fingers and around her neck and a little more in a safe-deposit box in Culiacán, but that was about it. But hadn’t they made enough from her already, stealing three and a half million dollars?
    As it turned out—no.
    They did let her try to call Jorge to see if something could be arranged, but he didn’t answer his phone and appeared to have gone on an extended trip to Southeast Asia.
    That was bad luck, the federales commiserated.
    Bad luck for them, worse luck for her, and she ended up getting charged, and convicted, of multiple counts of money laundering, advising and abetting a drug kingpin, and narcotics trafficking.
    The magistrate sentenced her to fifteen years in maximum security.
    As an example to other young