YOU NEVER FORGET your first murderer, they say — though few cops recall the killers they caught as charitably as Vargas does. At the wheel of his seven-seat Escalade — a car that drives like an opium dream and is fancied equally by narco bosses and the retired federal agents who chased them — Vargas speaks of the Camacho-Higuera brothers like promising kids who made a rash mistake. That isn’t, strictly speaking, the official view. The brothers were the nephews of Ismael (El Mayel) Higuera-Guerrero, the chief of operations for the Arellano-Félix Organization. For most of the 1990s till the mid-to-late aughts, the AFO ran Tijuana, Mexico , like a Chicago slaughterhouse. It killed and beheaded street cops, cooked the flesh of its rivals on flaming tires, and delivered bodies by the hundreds to a man it called El Pete. Pete then dissolved the corpses into chunks of stew and poured the liquid remains down a drain. The AFO didn’t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
YOU NEVER FORGET your first murderer, they say — though few cops recall the killers they caught as charitably as Vargas does. At the wheel of his seven-seat Escalade —<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-477240","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","category-public-safety"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/omni48.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/477240","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/omni48.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/omni48.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/omni48.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=477240"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/omni48.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/477240\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/omni48.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=477240"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/omni48.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=477240"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/omni48.com\/api\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=477240"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}