When Margarito “Jay” Flores Jr. agreed in 2008 to help the U.S. topple Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán Loera, he knew he could end up paying a deadly price for flipping on the Mexican Sinaloa drug cartel boss.
A federal judge even warned him at his 2015 sentencing: “Every time you start a car, you are going to be wondering, ‘Is that car going to start, or is that car going to explode?’ ”
Now that one of El Chapo’s sons, Ovidio Guzmán López, has agreed to do exactly what Flores did almost two decades ago and admit his guilt and cooperate with U.S. law enforcement officials, Flores says, “I do believe that we’ve seen the demise of the Sinaloa cartel as we once knew it.”
Flores, 43, who’s now out of prison and teaching cops the ins and outs of drug-trafficking, says Guzmán’s agreeing to cooperate with U.S. authorities shows the double standard in the way the cartel’s leaders view flipping.
“Ironically, it’s their own family that wrote the rules on flipping when it benefits them,” Flores says in
an interview with the Chicago Sun-Times. “These guys preach loyalty, but they only mean it when they’re on top. The moment it stops serving them, they move differently.”
He and his twin brother Pedro Flores grew up in Little Village and became what prosecutors say were the biggest drug-traffickers in Chicago’s history. They smuggled an average of more than a ton of cocaine a month from Mexico to the United States from 2005 to 2008. And El Chapo was their No. 1 supplier.
In 2008, after being caught by the feds, the brothers agreed to help the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration penetrate El Chapo’s drug empire. A secretly recorded phone negotiation between Pedro Flores and El Chapo about a 20-kilogram heroin deal was key evidence that helped convict the Sinaloa cartel boss in 2018 in New York and send him to prison for life.
Then, in 2023, Ovidio Guzmán and three other sons of El Chapo were charged in Chicago with drug-trafficking. Prosecutors say their operation was one of the biggest suppliers to the United States of fentanyl, a drug blamed in the deaths of thousands of people in Chicago in recent years.
On July 11, Ovidio Guzmán pleaded guilty, agreeing to cooperate with federal prosecutors in Chicago, California and New York.
Under the deal, he’s also required to cooperate with the Justice Department’s Narcotic and Dangerous Drug Section and to pay the government $80 million.
His brother Joaquín Guzmán López is awaiting trial in Chicago.
El Chapo’s sons Archivaldo Iván Guzmán Salazar and Jesús Alfredo Guzmán Salazar also face federal drug-trafficking charges in Chicago but haven’t been arrested. The U.S. government is offering $10 million rewards for their capture.
Margarito Flores says he never met Ovidio Guzmán.
“My dealings were more with his brothers Alfredo and Iván, but Ovidio’s cooperation doesn’t surprise me,” he says. “And I wouldn’t be surprised when Joaquín pleads guilty.”
He also says he thinks that “Iván and Alfredo will eventually reach out to make a deal or cooperate when they get arrested.”
Flores calls Ovidio Guzmán’s plea agreement a strategic play for “survival and leverage.”
Ovidio Guzmán’s lawyer didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Flores points out that Vicente Zambada Niebla, a son of Sinaloa cartel co-founder Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada García, also pleaded guilty to drug charges in Chicago, in 2013. Vicente Zambada gave explosive testimony against El Chapo.
Last year, El Mayo was arrested and extradited to New York, where he, too, faces drug charges.
El Chapo’s son Joaquín Guzmán is believed to have tricked El Mayo into getting on a plane, telling him they were going to look at real estate in Mexico when they really were headed to Texas, where they were arrested at an airport near El Paso. Joaquín Guzmán might have used the ruse as ammunition for a hoped-for deal with U.S. authorities for himself and to help his already-jailed brother Ovidio Guzmán, sources say.
Factions loyal to El Mayo and El Chapo’s four sons — known as the Chapitos — have been warring in Mexico since El Mayo’s capture.
Flores says he’s thankful for the deal he and his brother made with the feds in Chicago.
“When my brother and I turned ourselves in on Nov. 30, 2008, there weren’t many people at our level cooperating and definitely not voluntarily,” he says. “In some ways, I believe we helped set a precedent that it’s possible to walk away from that life and start over. Today, you’ve got people who once mocked that idea now living freely in the U.S. under new identities. That’s a powerful incentive.
“We walked away, we became fathers, and we’ve built something positive out of the wreckage. If Ovidio and his brothers are now cooperating and especially if they’ve turned on El Mayo, that’s a major win for the U.S. government and a huge one for the DEA’s Chicago office. It also exposes the reality: These organizations aren’t as solid as they appear.”
Deals between U.S. authorities and Sinaloa cartel leaders such as Ovidio Guzmán have rankled Mexico President Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo, who has pointed out that the Trump administration designated many cartels as terrorist organizations.
“They have repeatedly stated that they do not negotiate with these groups,” Sheinbaum has said. “So they need to explain why, in these cases, agreements are being made.”
Trump crackdown on fentanyl suppliers
El Chapo’s cartel, based in Mexico’s western coastal state of Sinaloa, is still the biggest supplier of fentanyl to the United States, according to U.S. authorities. President Donald Trump has threatened higher tariffs to force Mexico, China and Canada to stop the cartel and other criminal groups from transporting the deadly drug over the U.S. border.
Across the United States, DEA agents have reported seizing about 44 million fentanyl pills and 4,500 pounds of fentanyl powder this year and made more than 2,100 arrests related to the drug.
“We are not slowing down,” Robert Murphy, the federal agency’s acting administrator, said Tuesday at a news conference in Washington. “We are dismantling these networks piece by piece.”
The DEA’s Chicago office has seized more 1.6 million pills containing fentanyl so far this year, sharply up from the approximately 600,000 pills it reported seizing all of last year and the 65,000 it seized in 2022.
The regional office, which covers Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin, also has reported seizing more than 395 pounds of fentanyl powder so far this year, compared with 229 pounds all of last year.
The drug, a deadly scourge on Chicago’s streets since about 2005, is mixed into counterfeit pills that sellers purport to be OxyContin or other prescription drugs and also is blended with heroin and other drugs to be snorted or injected.
As the number of fentanyl seizures has risen, the number of opioid deaths in Cook County has fallen. In 2024, the Cook County medical examiner’s office reported that opioids were responsible for more than 1,000 deaths countywide, mostly from combinations of fentanyl and drugs such as heroin. There were about 1,800 such deaths in 2023, more than 2,000 in 2022 and about 1,900 in 2021.
The demise of the Sinaloa cartel?
Flores says he doesn’t think the Sinaloa cartel or others made a “strategic” decision to enter the fentanyl business.
“It was reactive,” he says. “The demand was there, especially in the middle of the opioid crisis, and cartels saw an opening. For them, it’s always been about profit. Fentanyl just made more money faster.”
But, Flores says, “It’s also been one of the worst long-term decisions they’ve made. Yes, it brought profits, but it also created a new generation of leaders who lacked the discipline, structure and respect of the older generation. Their obsession with violence and power is part of what’s brought so much heat and instability.”