How Louisville Paper Investigated Mexican Drug Cartel

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 a documentary to tell the story of his fast-growing and violent cartel? For The Courier Journal, it’s a local story. Karl and Brenda Cooley are a Louisville couple whose 27-year-old son, Adam, had wrestled with drug addiction for six years. In 2017, the family planned to travel to Campbellsville, Ky., where Adam was to voluntarily enter a residential rehab facility. “Adam had one last fling” with drugs the night before their departure, Karl said, and he died 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 percent of that total, propelling Kentucky to a number five national ranking for overdose deaths that year. Investigative reporter Beth Warren said this year that 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. A Courier-Journal editor was “stunned by [the cartel’s] sophisticated distribution system, its violent war with rival cartels and Mexico’s government and the unbelievable speed in which it had moved into America.” 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.