One of the most feared Mexican drug lords - a man who dissolved more than 300 people in acid and signed his name with headless corpses - was nabbed Tuesday.
It was a huge win for the often-overmatched Tijuana cops warring with the increasingly savage cartels. Teodoro (El Teo) Garcia Simental was arrested in La Paz, officials said.
Details were not immediately available. Garcia is blamed for much of the border bloodshed and had a $2.1 million price on his head.
Authorities say he runs a massive kidnapping ring, holding victims in cages, and is behind an explosion of violence that has littered Tijuana with an average of five bodies a day.
Last week, a kidnap victim was found with his face sliced off and stitched onto a football, with a note directed at police saying, "Happy New Year, because it will be your last."
Last January, Santiago Meza, known as Garcia's "stew maker," was arrested and told reporters he was paid $600 a week to dissolve corpses - at least 300 over 10 years.
The Los Angeles Times, which closely follows the border drug wars, reported that Garcia often left the disintegrated remains in barrels on busy streets with messages threatening to turn his rivals into pozole, a thick Mexican soup.
He is a mystery man. His birth date is unknown - he is in his 30s - and only one photo of him has ever been published. He started out as an enforcer in the Arellano Felix cartel and grew powerful by turning the kidnapping of doctors, politicians and businessmen into a multimillion-dollar industry, the LA Times reported.
He split dramatically with the cartel in 2008 - a shootout on a Tijuana expressway left 14 dead.
Since then, his reign of terror has included slicing off the face of one victim, hanging others from highway overpasses and Many of the bodies carry messages boasting they are Garcia's work.
The Mexican gangs are the major supplier of marijuana, methamphetamine, cocaine and heroine to the United States.
Mexican President Felipe Calderon launched his offensive against the cartels in December 2006, which escalated into the increasingly gruesome war.
More than 15,000 people have been killed and many of the victims were tortured or mutilated to send a message to police and rival gangs.
Police have been killed, and their families murdered.
In October 2008, the corpses of three decapitated police officers were arranged along with six other headless bodies to spell "3 L" - Garcia's nickname: "Tres Letras."
Garcia's arrest is the second major victory for the government in a month. Drug lord Arturo Beltran Leyva died in a military shootout in December.
NY Daily News
Follow Me @Twitter.com/ChasinMoPaperRead more…
LATIMES Reports
Los Angeles County coroner’s officials said today that they have looked into security breaches involving the investigation of Michael Jackson’s death, including hundreds of improper views of the pop star’s death certificate and the discovery of weaknesses in two other computer systems in which more sensitive records were stored.
At least a half-dozen coroner’s staff members were among those who inappropriately accessed Jackson’s death certificate, officials said today. Within two weeks of his death, the certificate had been viewed more than 300 times.
In some cases, staff members appear to have printed copies before it became a public record. Earlier this month, coroner’s officials warned employees to cease, cautioning that they had previously been admonished about the security hold on the Jackson case.
"There's only one person in the investigation of Mr. Jackson who needed to have a copy of the death certificate, and that was the investigator," said Craig Harvey, chief coroner investigator.
Harvey called any access of the Electronic Death Registration System for personal use “not appropriate.”
In a July 9 e-mail reviewed by The Times, a coroner’s captain told staff that future abuses of the system would result in disciplinary action. Staff members who had printed a copy of the death certificate were advised to destroy it.
Harvey said he learned that coroner’s employees were inappropriately accessing Jackson’s death certificate after he received a tip alleging that a funeral home employee created a fake death certificate for Jackson in the computer system.
Harvey did not uncover any fraudulent death certificate, but did discover the names of coroner's employees who had looked at the record even though they had no role in the Jackson investigation.
He said he had not contacted any law enforcement agency about the actions, saying he believed that internal rules had been broken, not any laws.
Death records in the EDRS system, which is state-supervised, can be accessed by anyone with a state-issued password, including employees at coroner’s offices, funeral homes, hospitals, and county and state registrar's offices. Users input information on death certificates that must be signed off on by doctors or coroners and made public by the state registrar.
Coroner's employees are supposed to look up cases "strictly in the performance of your official coroner duties,” according to the e-mail reviewed this month.
In addition to issues with the electronic access to Jackson’s death certificate, Harvey said that his office also had trouble securing two other computer systems in which they kept Jackson’s death investigation reports.
Investigation reports, which are not public records, typically are accessible only to investigators and other employees with office-issued passwords. Once employees log in, they can access others’ investigations — unless the reports are locked.
The investigator’s reports on Jackson's death were locked from the start, Harvey said, meaning access should have been available only to employees with the rank of captain or higher. Because of the high interest in Jackson, coroner’s officials took the added precaution of restricting access to only a few administrators. Harvey said the hard copy of the investigation was stored under lock and key.
Still, after the investigation started, they discovered vulnerabilities in the computer systems that might have allowed employees unauthorized access, Harvey said. He declined to say what those weaknesses were.
“We took extra steps to plug those holes,” he said.
Read more…
}