Going Undercover

By 2019, I had been writing cartel stories for a dozen years yet I still wasn’t ready for what I heard.

Marcos Reyes, a half-Dominican gun merchant out of Chicago, told me about it. He appeared at gun shows all over America as Marcos, but almost every narco in Mexico calls him El Fríto. What almost nobody knows is that he is actually Marcus Reed, a 38-year-old ATF agent who was living undercover for forty-five months.

He was targeting Los Chapitos Chiqueados (sometimes just called “Los Chiqueados”), a hyper-violent splinter that broke away from the main Chapitos group after Ivan Guzman got busted in 2023. The Chiquedos were led by a mid-level psycho named Jesus Arreola, a former Chapitos enforcer who looks like your friendly neighborhood janitor, a pair of pliers in his back pocket where most people keep house keys, until you noticed his gold Rolex.

Los Chiqueados controlled the rural corridors west of Culiacán (think Pericos, Costa Rica, El Tamazula) and operate on pure terror. They dumped 47 bodies on the Culiacan-Mazataan highway alone, most of them wrapped in barbed wire with their fingers in their mouths. They were small, maybe 100 gunmen, but they punched way above their weight because Chaparro had a direct pipeline to contacts in Cambodia who move precursor chemicals and, more importantly, he had a couple of ex-Federales who taught new sicarios how to shoot at mannequins out in the desert and not miss.

That was the crew Marcus Reed had been feeding M60s and 7.62 to for two years.

The night I’m telling you about, he rolled up to one of their safehouses in his beat-to-shit black Suburban with two duffels full of AR-7s in the back. The desert smelled like burnt meat. In the compound, Christmas lights blinked between two palms (because in Sinaloa you don’t take the decorations down, ever).

A baby faced 20-year-old lookout told him to leave the bags outside. Marcus told him to go fuck himself, politely. Inside the courtyard, a veteran sicario with a scarred face tried to steer him away from the main house. Marcus walked straight in anyway.

That’s when he saw the kid.

Fourteen, maybe fifteen. Shirtless, zip-tied to a metal chair, cigarette burns mapping his chest like a constellation. Blood running from his nose in perfect twin lines. A severed fingertip on the tile floor.

Chaparro stood behind him, sleeves rolled up, holding the pliers like a conductor’s baton.

“Marcos, mi amigo,” he said, calm as a priest. “You’re early. I like that.”

The kid’s eyes found Marcus and begged, help me.

Chaparro explained, almost apologetically: the boy’s father is a comandante in the Policía Estatal. Someone has been talking to the Policía Estatal. He’s going to give names. “Kids heal fast,” Chaparro smiled. “They can lose a lot and still walk.”

Marcus told me the room spun, that the federal agent and the gun runner inside himself looked at each other, and said they could no longer exist in the same body.

But he didn’t scream.

Instead, he lit a Marlboro with a Zippo engraved with the Virgin of Guadalupe (gift from a Tijuana sicario who’s currently dissolving in a 55-gallon drum somewhere near Popotla). He told Chaparro that the Policía look at trucks, and he doesn’t like people looking at his trucks.

Then, because the mask was slipping and the only way to glue it back on was to be crazier than the crazy in front of him, Marcus picked up the severed fingertip, examined it like a jeweler, and flicked it in the kid’s face.

“Suelta prenda!” he said, spill the beans, in Sinaloa dialect.

Chaparro stared for two full heartbeats, then threw his head back and laughed so hard the Christmas lights shook.

“I like you, Marcos,” he wheezed. “Crazy!”

The kid got dragged off to “the cooler”, a walk-in fridge where no one could hear the victims scream, Marcus drank a shot of tequila, collected his cash, took a new order for RPG-7s, and walked out alive.

But he felt his eyes on his back as he left. Chaparro smelled hesitation like a shark smells blood in the water.

Marcus Reed punched out the next day. Tthe extraction team is still waiting for a signal that might never come. Nobody had taught him how to swallow this, kids being tortured because of who their dad was.

But no one saved that kid. “Marcos” let out word he had taken a bullet in San Antonia, rivaly with a local gang, and had gone into hiding.

The ATF knew the math: every crate of rifles he delivered kept the wire humming with intel that has already taken forty-three tons of precursor chemicals off the street, shut down two super-labs cooking 800 kilos a week, and put names and faces on the ledger that will one day, when the raid finally drops, save hundreds, maybe thousands of American kids from the fentanyl those labs would have produced.

The kid in the cooler was collateral damage in a war that’s already killed 400,000 people north of the border. Marcus Reed wasn’t a saint. He’s just the guy willing to be a monster for a while so the bigger monsters lose.

Jesus Arreola vanished years ago. The Chiqueados, a victim of their own succeess, were erased overnight, every member, every trace of their existence. No one speaks of it, not even the local police.

As I visit the room of the abandoned safehouse, I wonder where Marcus is and how he sleeps at night.

I write this story, close my laptop, and move on. He can’t. He will carry what he witnessed for the rest of his life. The life of an undercover agent is a heavy burden, a cross very few people are built to shoulder.