Why is The Courier Journal reporting on a deadly Mexican drug cartel? Because it’s here

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Why would a Kentucky newsroom — 2,000 miles from the headquarters of a ruthless Mexican drug lord named "El Mencho" — spend nine months; commit 21 staffers; travel to Mexico, 15 American cities and five states; and produce nine stories, 10 videos and one long-form documentary to tell the story of his fast-growing and violent cartel?

Because for The Courier Journal, it's a local story.

Just before Christmas 2018, investigative reporter Beth Warren introduced me to Karl and Brenda Cooley. They're a Louisville couple whose 27-year-old son, Adam, had wrestled with drug addiction for six years.

In March 2017, the family planned to travel to Campbellsville, Kentucky, where Adam was to voluntarily enter a residential rehab facility.

"We were hopeful that maybe this time rehab would work," Brenda said. "That he could break the cycle that had such a powerful hold on him. He was 21 when he had his first injection, and after that, he was hooked."

Instead, "Adam had one last fling" with drugs the night before their departure, Karl said.

"We found him the next morning, and everything changed for us."

Adam Wade Cooley died March 10, 2017 — just hours before he was to enter the facility.

Investigators believe he sought heroin from a dealer the evening before, but instead, he snorted more than 20 times the lethal dose of fentanyl.

Adam was one of Kentucky's 1,566 overdose deaths in 2017. Fentanyl is blamed for 52% of that total, propelling our commonwealth to a No. 5 national ranking for overdose deaths that year.

For a decade, The Courier Journal has documented Kentucky's battle with opioid addiction, which rose from over-prescribed pharmaceutical painkillers. A pain-pill crackdown led to surging heroin abuse, followed by the more potent and deadly fentanyl.

BBC Radio also came to Louisville a year ago to profile how The Courier Journal was covering the opioid crisis. Its three-part "Everyday Americans" series followed our reporters as we told the heartbreaking tales of addiction and inspiring stories of recovery in our commonwealth.

Warren wrote about Adam's addiction, his death and the decision by his parents to tell their family's story; to serve as a witness to others who experienced remarkable grief and the loss of loved ones at the height of Kentucky's addiction crisis.

A few months after Adam's death, the Cooleys met Warren for lunch. They had one question for her: "Who is sending all of this poison into our city?"

"I had no answer," Warren told me.

"They wanted to know where the drugs were coming from. I didn't know, so I started asking about the suppliers who are selling to local dealers. It all grew from there."

A year ago, I challenged Warren to dig deeper: How are these drugs flooding into Kentucky? Who is to blame? What can we tell the Cooleys and other readers?

In early 2019, she and her editors, Kristina Goetz and Veda Morgan, returned to me with a name I had never heard before: "We think a Mexican cartel leader by the name of El Mencho is behind this."

El Mencho is the alias for Rubén Oseguera Cervantes, the leader of something called the Cártel Jalisco Nueva Generación, better known as CJNG.

After a March 2019 meeting with Drug Enforcement Administration officials in Louisville, we had a better understanding of CJNG's ambitions to be the world's biggest supplier of meth, heroin, cocaine and fentanyl. I was stunned by its sophisticated distribution system, its violent war with rival cartels and Mexico's government and the unbelievable speed in which it had moved into America.

More independent reporting — wading through reams of public court documents and traveling to several cities around the U.S. and Mexico — led to more discoveries.

Yes, CJNG, which formed just eight years ago, is one of several cartels thriving in Mexico. But this one, at El Mencho's command, had successfully set up shop at breakneck speed in dozens and dozens of small towns and second-tier cities across America.

It was targeting unsuspecting communities coast to coast, places off the beaten path from the major drug hubs and border cities that most of us know about.

CJNG's objective is clear: Quickly expand its operations and reach to meet the surging demands of drug users.

Our investigation revealed that in some cases CJNG associates would buy homes or rent apartments and create "cells," living in the neighborhoods — sometimes not far from schools, stores and churches — where they trafficked tons of illegal drugs.

Warren's reporting showed that El Mencho and CJNG were operating in farm towns tucked in the Midwest, in beach communities in Mississippi and South Carolina, in a 6,500-person community deep in Virginia and scores of other places.

Through public records and interviews, Warren confirmed that CJNG is or has been operating in 35 states — including Kentucky.

In Lexington, a horse groomer at historic Calumet Farm surreptitiously directed the flow of at least $30 million worth of illegal drugs transported from CJNG members in Mexico to Kentucky's two largest cities, Louisville and Lexington.

Right in front of us, El Mencho was building an American drug empire.

In the spring and summer, we expanded our reporting efforts to peel back more layers and better understand the cartel's presence nationwide:

• Warren and Omar Ornelas, a photographer from The Desert Sun, our sister newspaper in Palm Springs, California, went to Mexico City and Guadalajara to learn and observe more about CJNG's presence there, how its operatives were evading U.S. drug-fighting authorities, and what was being done to find El Mencho.
• Reporters Jonathan Bullington, Kala Kachmar and Chris Kenning traveled around the U.S. to talk with families, police officers, prosecutors and others caught up in the vortex of CJNG's violence and El Mencho's quest to dominate the nation's drug trade.
• Multimedia staffers Michael Clevenger, Matt Stone, Dustin Strupp and Sam Upshaw accompanied the reporters, shooting video and photos to visually capture the depth of CJNG's presence.
• We hired a freelance writer in Mexico City, Karol Suarez, and photographer Cristopher Rogel Blanquet, to tell the story of CJNG's violence in Mexico. They explained how the fast-growing cartel had disrupted lives south of the border, often through violence, as it propelled its drug operations into America.

• Reporter Kirby Adams, who had a 13-year career as a WHAS-TV anchor before joining our newsroom in 2014, worked with Strupp and visuals editors Jeff Faughender, Mary Ann Gerth and Scott Utterback to produce and narrate a related 15-minute documentary.

It was Warren, however, who spearheaded the investigation. She spent months tugging at the threads of this story until El Mencho's secrets unraveled.

In a dimly lit office in our newsroom, she invested countless hours wading through thousands and thousands of court documents to decipher CJNG's criminal footprint across 35 states and the territory of Puerto Rico. She tracked down local police chiefs, prosecutors, lawyers, DEA officials, even CJNG members in prison to understand U.S. cases that involved the Mexican cartel.

She called in favors from old sources, found dozens of new ones and leveraged a patchwork of international experts who helped her connect the dots that spelled CJNG.

As the story took shape, senior editors and reporters talked often about fairly portraying Mexican Americans and the broader Latino community — here in Kentucky and around the country.

We wanted to anticipate fears, even potential partisan rants or social media outbursts, that "all Mexicans are part of a cartel," as preposterous as that may be. Conversations were robust, with occasional disagreements. We spent weeks ensuring not only accuracy but fairness in how we reported this complex investigation.

I shared our investigation with other top editors in the USA TODAY Network and our senior director for standards and ethics. It also had an extensive legal review, as three lawyers analyzed all our stories and videos.

The process made this comprehensive package even better. We were precise about the words we chose and the sources we quoted.

We made clear that this story is about a violent drug cartel, sprinting to meet the demands of drug users in this country.

No editor has been more proud of his team's dedication to telling such an important story than I am.

Its publication comes at an important time for us. It's no secret that traditional media sites such as The Courier Journal have faced stiff economic headwinds over the past decade.

New devices, new social media giants and new habits by digital-loving readers have forced us to change. Sometimes, those changes have been painful for our 151-year-old operation.

As we prepare to enter a new decade, challenges continue, of course. But, so too does our unflinching commitment to invest significant resources when needed to tell stories that are important to our readers and the communities we serve — in Kentucky or around the country.

I came to Louisville 18 months ago convinced we should be one of the best media sites of our size in the country. We're pursuing that goal and telling ambitious stories like this one because of loyal subscribers.

Their commitment allows us to deliver high-caliber journalism that Metro Louisville and Kentucky deserve. If you're not a subscriber, my staff and I would be grateful if you considered supporting us.

The Cooleys returned to The Courier Journal's newsroom on Broadway in mid-November, about 11 months after I had first met them.

Warren walked them through our team's findings and introduced the couple to El Mencho's evils.

She also ushered them to our building's basement. There, one of this project's lead designers, Kyle Slagle, built a 12-by-8-foot display that elaborately showcases the newsroom's reporting. It's dominated by a large map of the U.S. and Mexico with color-coded yarn markers connecting CJNG's Mexican operations to cities and states across America.

A large "WANTED" poster of El Mencho, and the $10 million reward that's on his head, is front and center.

We cannot say with 100% certainty that this criminal drug lord hiding somewhere in the wilds of Mexico provided the fentanyl to a supplier who then sold it to Adam Cooley the night of March 9, 2017.

But our ambitious and in-depth reporting shows El Mencho's CJNG cartel was, by far, the dominant provider of that wretched poison at that time in Kentucky.

If there is an enemy among us, in Kentucky and at least 34 other states, all signs are pointing to El Mencho.

"It just proves," Brenda told me as she left the newsroom, "how ruthless these (cartel members) are."

Rick Green is our editor and can be reached at rgreen@courierjournal.com or (502) 582-4642. Follow him on Twitter: @KentuckyRAG.