Clint Eastwood Has Made a Movie About The TRUE Story of El Chapo's 90yr Old Drug Mule > Called " The Mule"
The Mule (2018)
The FULL True Story Behind ‘The Mule’: (Leo Sharp). The Sinaloa Cartel’s 90-Year-Old Drug Mule
Originally Posted By Sam Dolnick in The New York Times Magazine on 11 June, 2014
Leo Sharp, Ex US Vet & El Chapo's 90yr Old Drug Mule.
Sharp during his service in the Army, about 1945.
The Lincoln pickup truck with Iowa plates was hurtling down Interstate 94, headed for Detroit. A dozen D.E.A. officers in unmarked cars were scattered along a 70-mile stretch, from Kalamazoo to Jackson, Mich. From on-ramps and overpasses, they watched traffic flash by as they tried to spot the truck. They believed it was carrying a major shipment of cocaine.
Special Agent Jeff Moore and his team in the Detroit field division had spent months investigating a local branch of the Sinaloa cartel, the world’s most notorious and powerful drug-trafficking ring, led by Joaquín Guzmán, known as El Chapo. With a sprawling network of distributors, couriers, wholesalers and street dealers, the organization had pumped thousands of kilos of cocaine from the Mexican border through Arizona safe houses and into Detroit. It was by every measure the biggest cocaine operation Detroit authorities had ever seen. In previous years, a significant bust might be a dozen kilos; now the cartel was bringing in 200 kilos a month.
Moore’s colleagues had wiretapped 11 phones and had spent so many hours listening to the drug traffickers’ coded Spanish conversations that they knew all the leadership’s tics: The wholesaler called Juanito had a goofy, childlike giggle; the courier called Tata was sometimes the butt of their jokes. The cartel exclusively used nicknames; in most cases, its members didn’t even know one another’s real names — they were simply Gordito, Primo, Cuatro, Viejo.
The organization worked with Detroit’s biggest drug dealers, people like Antonio (Pancho) Simmons, a fearsome, one-legged man with a long criminal record. But in some ways, it was the couriers driving across the country’s highways, their cars’ hidden compartments packed with kilos of drugs, who played the most crucial role. And no courier had been more prolific than Tata, the one driving the Lincoln pickup on Oct. 21, 2011. Tata had become a one-man cocaine fountain, working on a scale the Detroit D.E.A.'s office had never encountered. According to the cartel’s handwritten drug ledgers that the government obtained, he delivered 246 kilos in February 2010; 250 kilos in March; another 250 kilos the next month; 200 kilos the next; and another 200 the next. “Before you know it,” Moore said, “he’s an urban legend.”
He always drove alone and had managed to avoid detection for nearly a decade. The D.E.A. agents listened to key cartel figures talk about Tata many times, and they had even caught a glimpse of him once. Now, for the first time in months, Tata was coming back to Detroit.
The D.E.A. officer David Powell was the first to spot the pickup that October day — at 3:13 p.m., not far from Kalamazoo. Powell “maintained the eye,” following the truck from about a half-mile behind. As they barreled toward Detroit, Powell called out the mile markers on the radio so that the other D.E.A. agents along the highway could join the ever-growing procession as the courier passed their waiting spots.
Tata wasn’t driving fast, but he was swerving erratically. At one point, “he cut so close to a semi, I thought he was going to rip the front of his truck off,” Moore said.
Had Tata learned of the sting? Was he trying to lose them? At 3:56 p.m., the truck suddenly cut across traffic and sped toward Exit 97, sending the D.E.A. agents scrambling. Several D.E.A. cars roared past the exit. They spotted the pickup in a hotel parking lot near a Steak ‘n Shake. The agents were nervous. “Was this guy so good that he spotted surveillance?” Moore wondered.
After a few minutes, the truck pulled out from the hotel and slowly headed back toward the Steak ‘n Shake. The agents watched as the driver found the drive-through, pulled in and ordered French fries and an Orange Freeze milkshake. With his shake in hand, Tata headed back to the highway, and the pursuit continued.
Cartel leaders expected the courier at 6:30 p.m. “Mi tata was delayed by a train, another half-hour,” one of them said on a wiretapped phone call that day. But he would never arrive. At 5:45 p.m., State Trooper Craig Ziecina, who was working with the D.E.A., threw on his siren. In order to avoid compromising the investigation, the plan was to handle the stop like a routine traffic violation. Ziecina pulled the truck over for tailgating while Moore and the other agents watched from nearby.
Instead of waiting for the trooper to get out of his patrol car, the driver of the pickup opened his door and gingerly climbed out. If the D.E.A. was correct, this was Tata, the most formidable courier of them all.
The driver was wearing a plaid shirt with khaki pants, white socks and brown shoes. His hair was unkempt, his gait uncertain. He was unshaven and had thick white mutton chops. He carried his glasses with both hands and cupped his ear at the trooper’s instructions. He looked old enough to be Ziecina’s grandfather.
“What’s going on, officer?” the man asked. “At age 87, I want to know why I’m being stopped.”
The truck was a mess — the back seat was covered by a mound of food wrappers, cheese-puff bags, half-eaten sandwiches, crumpled newspapers, a milk bottle and an old bag of golf clubs.
The trooper asked for the driver’s license and registration. “He began to ramble about his age and took a very long time to produce any of the requested information,” Ziecina wrote in his report about the incident. The man seemed confused about what day it was.
The trooper patted him down while the driver found his wallet, and inside it, his license. His name was Leo Sharp, born in 1924. He was a World War II veteran and a great-grandfather. He had no criminal record.
The trooper asked if he was carrying any weapons. “Weapons? At age 87? For what? Officer, please!”
Sharp kept talking — he told the trooper he owned an airline in the 1970s and had lived in Florida, Hawaii, Indiana and Iowa. He said he was in the business of hybridizing plants. “I create new plant hybrids to make the world a better place,” he told the trooper.
Sharp said he was on his way to visit an old war buddy, Vanvelder. But he couldn’t remember Vanvelder’s first name. (“I’ve always called him Van.”) Or his address. Or his phone number.
Ziecina asked Sharp if he was carrying any drugs. “No, sir,” Sharp replied. He said he would prefer that the trooper not search his car so he could kindly be on his way. “I need to get where I’m going before dark, officer,” he said. “I don’t drive very well after it gets dark.”
Ziecina told him he could leave as soon as a colleague’s drug dog cleared the truck. Sharp was so nervous that an artery on his neck was visibly throbbing, Ziecina noted in his report.
The drug dog, Apollo, arrived and expressed great interest in the covered truck bed. Sharp said he didn’t have the keys — he said his sister in Iowa had them — and it had been days since he last opened it.
The troopers told him that Apollo’s response gave them probable cause to search the truck. “Why don’t you just kill me and let me, just, leave the planet,” Sharp said.
As they pried open the locked cover, Sharp was caught on the trooper’s recorder saying, quietly, “Oh, my God.”
What the troopers found amid piles of old clothes and food wrappers were five duffel bags. And inside the duffel bags were 104 kilos of cocaine.
Leo Sharp, the most prolific drug mule that regional law enforcement had ever tracked, was placed under arrest. The Sinaloa cartel’s nickname for him was well chosen. They called him Tata. Grandfather.
Day-lily people like to say that they see themselves in their flowers. Orchids are too fragile, too precious — all that care, all that expense. Roses are too cliché. But day lilies, in their endless varieties of color, shape and size, are hearty antidotes to “fussy little plants,” writes Sydney Eddison, a lily connoisseur, in her book, “A Passion for Daylilies: The Flowers and the People.” They are “upfront, beautiful and sexy.”
Day lilies typically have a few dozen buds, each of which blooms for just one day. Part of their appeal is how easy they are to hybridize. Simply pluck out the male part, brush the pollen on another flower’s female part, and voilà: a unique, new flower will bloom with traits you have selected — green ruffles, yellow dots, tiny petals, blue stripes. There are 75,378 different day lilies officially registered with the American Hemerocallis Society.
Day-lily admirers are as intense as boxing fans, arguing passionately about the beauty and staying power of this or that varietal. And Leo Sharp is their Don King — a widely admired hybridizer with nearly 180 officially registered day lilies to his name.
For years, Sharp attended day-lily conventions across the country dressed in either an all-white leisure suit or an all-black one. He traveled with an entourage of Mexican farmhands to help with the hundreds of flowers he would give away, making his admirers swoon.
“The people who do lilies are way cooler than other plant people,” said Nikki Schmith, a gardener in Worden, Ill., who writes a day-lily blog. “He was just a stud. He just had the air. He had 70-year-old swagger.” Schmith has more than a dozen of Sharp’s day lilies in her own garden. She has won Best in Show in a regional contest with his flowers two years in a row.
Day-lily enthusiasts used to make pilgrimages to Sharp’s flower farm near Michigan City, Ind., a quiet vacation town on the shore of Lake Michigan where he has lived for decades, and to his southern farm in Apopka, Fla., which calls itself “the indoor foliage capital of the world.”
Leo Sharp in May 2014 at his day-lily farm in Indiana.
Sharp’s neighbors in Michigan City remember buses filled with customers idling outside his front gate waiting to buy his signature flowers, almost all named after his business, Brookwood Gardens. There was Brookwood Black Kitten, Brookwood Sweetie Face, Brookwood Barely Pink, Brookwood Pink Sometimes, Brookwood Pink Pinup, Brookwood Right Now, Brookwood Ambivalent and Brookwood Wow.
The world of day lilies belonged to him, one gushing profile in a day-lily newsletter declared in 2009. Little did they know that this “accomplished hybridizer and most generous man” was in all likelihood already working as one of the cartel’s primary couriers. “By mid-2010, he had already brought 1,100 kilos here to Detroit,” said Chris Graveline, the assistant U.S. attorney assigned to Sharp’s case.
Sharp traveled across the country for day-lily speaking engagements and conventions, but federal authorities say they believe he made time to visit Mexico for his other line of work. “Bosses in Mexico know of the Grandfather,” Moore said.
Sharp’s lawyer, Darryl A. Goldberg, said that it was unclear precisely when Sharp began working with the cartel, but he believed it started at the day-lily farm. “He has Mexican fellas working on the farms,” Goldberg said. “They happen to know people who introduced him to other people who asked him if he wanted to get involved in something.” His first assignments were to ferry cash, he said. “And then it morphed into something bigger.”
Law-enforcement authorities said the cartel deliberately recruited couriers who played against type. Walter Ogden, a 57-year-old man from Oklahoma, was another trusted driver. Ogden has been on disability since 2010 and has had four heart attacks, according to his lawyer. He was a former heavy-equipment operator for an excavation company in Oklahoma City and, like Sharp, had no criminal record.
“Leo is the perfect courier for the cartel,” said Special Agent Jeremy Fitch, one of the D.E.A. agents who worked the case. “He has a legitimate ID, he’s an older guy, he wouldn’t be pegged as a drug runner and he has no criminal history.”
It’s easy to see how the work might have been tempting: Couriers were generally paid $1,000 per kilo, so Sharp would have made $104,000 on the trip where he was arrested and a total of more than $1 million in 2010.
Sharp’s gardening friends still search for clues as to what happened. Gisela Meckstroth, the former head of the Great Lakes region of the A.H.S., points to a Hispanic farmhand who traveled with Sharp to a flower symposium in Cleveland around 2005. “In retrospect you look back and you say, ‘What was he doing there with his manager?’ ” she said. “What was that all about? No one else traveled like that with a manager.”
Prosecutors are less interested in what caused Sharp to go into business with the cartel. “The defendant clearly chose his role in this conspiracy for two reasons,” they wrote. “(1) he saw nothing wrong with the trafficking of cocaine and (2) greed.”
The Detroit D.E.A. office is in a nondescript building a block from the federal courthouse. A triple-beam scale rests on a desk next to overstuffed files, and a particularly great “Scarface” poster, complete with a cutout for a fake machine gun, looms over their computers. “Every house we hit has a ‘Scarface’ poster,” Moore said.
Moore has short, spiky dark hair and a thin goatee. At 43, he is fairly certain that the Sinaloa investigation will be the biggest of his career. “I’ll never see another case like this,” he said, sounding a bit wistful, as we drove around Detroit on a recent afternoon, visiting the cartel’s old haunts. (One of them, an excellent taqueria in Mexicantown, had served as a meeting point both for D.E.A. agents and drug couriers.)
Moore started out as a street cop in Kansas City, Mo., working domestic disputes and traffic violations. Eventually he made his way to narcotics, where he worked undercover. He grew his hair long, stopped shaving and visited every crack house in town, usually with a prostitute in tow. Kansas City crack houses all had the same basic protocol, Moore said: As soon as you entered, you were greeted with a smoldering crack pipe and a demand that you smoke it to prove you were not a cop.
The art of the undercover assignment lies in delivering an excuse that doesn’t get you shot: My kid is waiting in the car; I have a drug test in the morning; I’m on my way to work. Moore’s identity was never revealed. “Most fun I ever had,” he said.
When Moore joined the D.E.A. in Detroit in 2004, he was eager to put his undercover expertise to the test. On his first undercover assignment, he tried to buy a few thousand dollars’ worth of heroin in a McDonald’s parking lot. It did not go well. The dealer stuck a gun to his head and led the police on a high-speed car chase. Moore never worked undercover again.
The Sinaloa case began in the summer of 2011 with a routine bust involving two kilograms of cocaine. That bust led to a dealer named Tusa, whom Moore tried to turn into an informant. During their first and only conversation, Tusa mentioned the name of a local heavyweight: Ramon Ramos. Moore had never heard the name before. A few days later, he tried to follow up with Tusa, but it was too late — his informant had already disconnected his phone and moved back to Mexico.
Moore began investigating Ramos, trailing him across Detroit. After six months, Moore got a search warrant for Ramos’s house and found more than $350,000 in cash. It could have ended there, but Ramos said he was the bookkeeper for a trafficking ring that was part of the Sinaloa cartel. And he was willing to cooperate in the hope that agents would help him get immunity and enter the witness-protection program.
Informants are often low-level functionaries with few contacts beyond their immediate handlers, but Ramos knew everyone in the Detroit cell. As he opened up his ledgers, recorded in codes and symbols, he offered a paper trail that allowed the D.E.A. to diagram a far-flung network that, until now, they didn’t even know existed.
“It’s kind of like you got Al Capone’s accountant,” Chris Graveline, the U.S. attorney, said.
To show that he was serious, Ramos told them about a coming meeting. In a few days, he said, a courier driving an R.V. would pick up nearly $2 million in drug proceeds at 9:30 a.m. from a warehouse in Wyandotte, Mich. Moore was skeptical — they almost never saw such a major transaction.
This wasn’t a major transaction, Ramos said. It was routine.
At the appointed time, from inside a surveillance van parked a block away, Moore locked his binoculars on the warehouse. It was utterly anonymous, a plain one-story building opposite a quiet park in a blue-collar suburb. “We would never know about this place,” Moore said as he showed me the building. “There’s nothing suspicious about it.”
Waiting at the warehouse was Teddy Czach, who ran McCaffery’s, a well-known Irish bar in Lincoln Park with a ye-olde-pub design and $2 Long Island iced teas. According to Moore, Czach was once an important person for the cartel, but Ramos had replaced him as the main bookkeeper. (Czach’s lawyer did not respond to a request for comment.)
Moore watched an R.V. turn onto the quiet street and nose into the warehouse’s garage door. The driver, Walter Ogden, the retiree from Oklahoma, got out, and Czach helped him load some duffel bags. A “routine” traffic stop after the R.V. drove away confirmed it: Ogden had picked up $1.96 million, just as Ramos said he would. Law-enforcement officials arrested Ogden — “that’s a tremendous amount of money to let walk,” Moore said — without revealing to the cartel that they now had an inside source.
Over the next six months, Moore and Ramos met twice a week in parking lots outside Walmart, Home Depot or Lowe’s. The organization generally worked like this, Ramos told him: Senior cartel leaders in Mexico would send the drugs to a house in Tucson, where a contact known as Viejo, the head of Detroit distribution, would hire a courier to drive the drugs to Ramos and other cartel members in Michigan. They would then sell it to Detroit’s biggest drug dealers, people like Pancho, the one-legged distributor. Pancho could have been the target of his own major D.E.A. investigation; but this case was so big that Pancho sat somewhere on the third tier of suspects. (His lawyer disputed that he was one of the largest drug dealers in Detroit.)
Ramos proved to be the ideal informant. While he was taking a tremendous risk in working with the D.E.A., he was perhaps less vulnerable than most. Authorities will not say where he is from, but he is not Mexican and, Graveline said, he may have felt somewhat less fearful because “his family is not down in Sinaloa country.”
With Moore listening in, Ramos would call cartel leaders in Mexico to discuss coming shipments. He agreed to wear video-recording devices into his meetings at Untouchables, an auto-body shop, and to the various parking lots where he met dealers in parked cars. It was Ramos who first told Moore about the elderly courier the cartel liked to work with. He only knew him as Tata.
On Sept. 17, 2011, Ramos met with Tata at Czach’s warehouse. It was Moore’s first sighting of Sharp. “I was kind of surprised that he seemed like he was in pretty good health,” Moore said. “When you hear 87 years old, you think of someone in a wheelchair. He was in good shape.”
While several men loaded up his truck with three duffel bags filled with cash, Tata cracked jokes about the drive and told the group that his doctor told him he would live to be 100. After the car was packed and Sharp was preparing to drive off, he asked Ramos to take some Georgia onions.
Onions? Moore had spent countless hours decoding the secret language of the cartel — cocaine was called food, heroin was called fea. Onions was a new one. Was it opium? Weapons?
“Onions,” Moore said. “We thought it was kind of weird at first.” But onions were not a code for anything. The Grandfather was talking about a bag of vegetables.
At Detroit’s federal courthouse, it was hard to square the prosecutor’s descriptions of Sharp’s crimes — “the amount of wrecked lives is staggering” — with the kindly old man with crepe-paper skin slouching at the defense table, so hard of hearing that his lawyer had to stage-whisper his sotto voce counsel: “I’m going to have you stand for a minute!” In a previous court appearance, Sharp apologized to a frustrated magistrate judge that he had lost “a terrific amount” of his hearing. “My doctor said I was too near a cannon during the war,” he said.
Sharp wore a baggy black suit, and his hair was a shock of dandelion fluff. He had watery eyes and a nervous habit of chuckling to himself every few minutes. He fidgeted at the defense table, waiting for the judge to enter. He pulled out an overstuffed leather wallet to show photos of his daughter in Hawaii to courtroom officers. “They live in a good place,” he said in a froggy voice. “It’s paradise.” The court officers nodded politely. During another break, he leaned back at the defense table and belched. Twice.
One fundamental question looming over the case is whether Leo Sharp was savvy or senile. His lawyer, Darryl Goldberg, argues that merciless criminals took advantage of a sick old man slipping further into dementia every day. A prison sentence would amount to a death sentence, he said. “This is a man who has lived an exemplary life, and then at old age he started suffering from dementia,” Goldberg said. “The hallmark of dementia is poor judgment and poor decision-making.”
Goldberg submitted to the court a neuropsychological assessment conducted by Dr. Mary F. Zemansky, an Indiana psychologist, that found Sharp’s profile to be “consistent with dementia, demonstrated by a significant loss of information over short time periods.”
Goldberg argued that Sharp was coerced into working as a courier — a claim Sharp first made in an early court appearance. “You’re dealing here with a man who was forced to do what I did by gunpoint,” Sharp told a magistrate judge not long after he was arrested.
Was a gun really pulled? Goldberg acknowledges that if it was, it was late in the relationship with the cartel, not at the beginning. But he said that Sharp wanted out of the drug-running business and that the cartel wouldn’t let him leave. He points to a conversation caught on wiretap a few days before Sharp was arrested about whether the Grandfather would make another run.
“I mean, he doesn’t want to really, the old man,” Viejo said. “He . . . isn’t afraid, right?”
An associate said that the Grandfather might in fact be frightened.
“Brainwash him some there,” Viejo said. “So once he gets there, he’ll go on and grab the kit.”
“I hope the old man will,” he added. “Sometimes he gets testy.”
Goldberg says the recordings speak for themselves: A sick old man was being exploited. “I’m not saying dementia is his excuse, but it certainly explains a little bit about how he got involved with these folks,” he said.
Prosecutors scoff at the notion that Sharp was forced into being a drug mule. The D.E.A. has photos of Sharp and Viejo, one of the senior leaders of the Detroit ring, vacationing together in Hawaii. The repeat trips, the chumminess, the sheer volume of cocaine — it all points to a man in control, prosecutors argue.
“Leo is a sharp guy,” Graveline said. “At no point was it, ‘Oh, we’ll take advantage of this guy.’ They had been working with him for a decade. They knew him.”
Sharp drove cross-country routes on his own that would have exhausted men half his age — on his last trip, he went from Florida to North Carolina to Arizona to Michigan, all in eight days. He was also more trusted than nearly every other courier. Typically, a drug courier parks his car with the keys inside and leaves it in a hotel parking lot. A different person drives it away. Several hours later, the courier returns to find the car packed with drugs. He never sees anyone’s face.
Sharp was different. His trips often began in Tucson, where there are several drug houses near one another, law-enforcement officials said. One is filled with product for Chicago; one for Boston; one for Detroit. Sharp would begin his cross-country journeys at Tucson’s Detroit house. That’s almost unheard-of in the world of couriers. “That’s a huge risk,” Moore said. “You can tell there’s a long history of trust.”
As effective and trusted as Sharp was as a courier, there were signs that he was becoming a liability for the cartel. During one leg of his final trip, Moore said, he dropped his truck off at a repair shop with the cocaine still inside it. And when he was making runs for the cartel, a contact had to meet him at the exit ramp and guide him through the streets around Detroit to the drop spot. No other courier required that service.
His hygiene had deteriorated, a common indicator of dementia. “Could he be losing his sharpness over the years?” Graveline asked. “Possibly.”
Sometimes the cartel called him El Viejito, the little old man. More often it was Mi Tata, my grandpa. He was particularly close with Viejo. But Viejo teased Sharp as well. In a wiretapped call, Viejo joked that Tata was happy because “he’s getting teeth put in in the next few days.” (These weren’t code words. The cartel leaders were discussing their courier’s dentures.) Just days before Sharp’s arrest, they poked fun at his forgetfulness. “What did the old man tell you?” Viejo asked. The other cartel member replied, laughing, “He wanted to verify what he had told me because he couldn’t remember.”
Despite trips to Indiana and Michigan, and months of requests for an interview with Sharp, Goldberg ultimately decided not to let me speak to his client — not on the record, off the record, with lawyers present or with ground rules. I never figured out whether he was worried Sharp was too senile for an interview or not senile enough.
But before Goldberg made that decision, I introduced myself while he and Sharp were sitting on a bench outside the courtroom. “This man is very interested in your life, Leo,” Goldberg said to his client, speaking slowly and emphatically.
“Ha ha ha!” Sharp chuckled inappropriately. He heartily shook my hand while flashing me a gummy grin. It was his 90th birthday.
Leo Sharp pleaded guilty to drug conspiracy charges on Oct. 8, 2013. But he did not cooperate with the authorities in any meaningful way. He did not explain his relationship with the cartel or how he managed to evade detection while driving drugs thousands of miles across the country. But he managed to help investigators anyway.
For months, the D.E.A. had been investigating Sharp’s handler, Viejo, who sat atop the Detroit trafficking ring. Despite the nickname, Viejo wasn’t old; Moore believes he was called Viejo out of respect. Investigators knew he was Hispanic, had a mole on his cheek and lived in Florida. But they didn’t know his real name or his address.
When agents searched Sharp’s truck after pulling him over on I-94, they found, amid the trash, a scrap of paper with a phone number, Miami area code, scrawled next to the name Della. They traced the phone number to the Miami home of a man named Pedro Delgado-Sanchez and his wife. The D.E.A. pulled Delgado-Sanchez’s driver’s-license photo and showed it to Ramos. That’s Viejo, Ramos said.
Four months after Sharp’s arrest, on Feb. 26, 2012, D.E.A. agents fanned out across the country for takedown day. All at once, they hit 10 locations connected with the cartel.
They raided Antonio (Pancho) Simmons’s home in Willis, Mich., a McMansion with a deluxe kitchen, canopy bed and flat-screen TVs. They raided the Detroit home of Kenneth Jenkins, another major local distributor, and found metal walls 10-feet high surrounding a pack of pit bulls, along with tens of thousands of dollars stashed in the pockets of his pinstriped suits. They raided the home of David Jurado, another big-time dealer, in Woodhaven, Mich., where they found $700,000 stashed in the air ducts. Czach, the bar manager, was arrested outside another warehouse used by the cartel.
Within days, they had 19 indictments. All but two have since pleaded guilty. José Roberto Lucero-Bustamante, who ran the Detroit cartel branch from Mexico, is a fugitive. Armando Dias-Lucero, his deputy, is believed to be dead.
Chapo Guzman, the head of the entire Sinaloa cartel, was one of the most wanted fugitives in the world. He was arrested in February in an unrelated investigation, a surprising coup many in law enforcement thought would never happen. Still, experts believe that the Sinaloa cartel is almost certain to continue its operations.....
In Detroit, officials say that their busts have helped raise the street price of a kilogram of cocaine to roughly $43,000 from about $30,000. “When you spike the price by one-third, I think you’ve hit the right vein of where it’s coming from,” Graveline said.
The cartel’s two other major local couriers, both of whom carried less cocaine than Sharp, were sentenced to five and seven years in prison. Distributors have received as much as 16 years.
As for Ramos, the only thing law-enforcement spokesmen will say is that he is alive and well and living somewhere under an assumed identity. “There are a lot of people who are not happy with him,” Graveline told me with a sly smile.
Sharp faced a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison, although prosecutors recommended that he serve only five, in part because of his age. At the sentencing last month, Sharp’s lawyer described him as a World War II veteran deserving of mercy. “That’s not how we honor our heroes,” Goldberg said.
Then Graveline described Sharp as a remorseless criminal who preyed upon Detroit’s citizens. “How many addicts are out on the street simply because Mr. Sharp brought the cocaine here?” he asked.
Finally, it was Sharp’s turn to speak. He addressed the judge in a soft, croaky voice. “I’m really heartbroken I did what I did,” he said. “But it’s done.”
Then he made one, final, strange plea.
If he could stay out of jail, he proposed paying off the $500,000 penalty he owed the government by growing Hawaiian papayas. “It’s so sweet and delicious,” he said, his voice nearly breaking.
The judge didn’t bite. Leo Sharp was sentenced to three years in federal prison.
He managed to win one point when negotiating his plea deal, however. The government allowed him to keep his day-lily farm.
For all the time that Jeff Moore spent on the Leo Sharp case, he never went to see the day-lily farm. Sharp’s lawyer had never visited it, either.
I was determined to see it, but neither of them knew exactly where it was.
I called Nikki Schmith, the day-lily blogger who visited Sharp’s garden about five years ago. She didn’t remember the address but sent me her best recollection of how to find it. “Be on the lookout for a black railroad truss,” she wrote in an email. “If I remember right, the road kind of dips and curves to the left and the truss shows up out of nowhere. Immediately following the truss, turn right and head down about a half mile or so. The remains of Brookwood Gardens are just over the hill.”
The day after Sharp’s sentencing, I drove to Michigan City. After about an hour of aimlessly driving around town, I looked up and saw a train rumbling along an overpass. The truss! I turned up a winding gravel road and there on the left hung a tattered blue sign that read, “Brookwood Gardens.”
I walked through the gate and past a rusted white trailer. A rough dirt path cut the field in two. Along the edges of the field stood a forest of tall white sprinklers that had all gone dry. Tiny flower labels marking bare plots of dirt poked from the ground: Crown Prince, Chariot Wheel, Lemon Splash. One read, simply, Happiness.
It was too early for the day lilies. But all around, in ragged clumps and uneven lines, in brilliant bursts of yellow, orange, white and green, wildflowers were blooming.
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If he could stay out of jail, Sharp proposed paying off the $500,000 penalty he owed the government by growing Hawaiian papayas.
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El Chapo, (Joaquín Guzmán Loera) was found guilty of all counts in the US on 12 February 2019, and will be sentenced on 25 June 2019.
The Clint Eastwood Movie is Posted on This Site & Can Be Found HERE:
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