The Real Story Behind Diego Luna's Narcos: Mexico Role Is the Stuff of Nightmares

Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo — commonly referred to as El Padrino (The Godfather) — was born in 1946 in Culiacán, Mexico. Though he would later become a Mexican drug lord who formed the Guadalajara Cartel and controlled almost all of the drug trafficking in Mexico, Gallardo was first employed as a federal judicial police agent after college.

While working as a bodyguard for the children of Leopoldo Sanchez Celis, the governor of Sinaloa, Gallardo developed political connections (including one with feared drug lord Pedro Avilés) that he used to help build his drug trafficking organisation. Together with Rafael Caro Quintero and Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo, Gallardo gradually took control of the trafficking routes that he inherited from Avilés after his death.

After President Reagan established the South Florida Task Force in an attempt to curb drug trafficking through Florida, Gallardo was contacted by Colombian cartels, and he established a relationship with the infamous Medellín Cartel's cocaine trafficker Pablo Escobar. Though Gallardo formerly controlled most of the marijuana and heroin smuggled into the US, he began to help the Colombian cartels smuggle cocaine as well.

The Drug Enforcement Administration became increasingly suspicious of Gallardo, and DEA agent Enrique "Kiki" Camarena was sent to Mexico to infiltrate Gallardo's gang. Thanks to Camarena's intel, a 2,500-acre marijuana plantation called Rancho Búfalo was destroyed by the Mexican military. Gallardo figured out the source of the leak, and in 1985, Camarena was kidnapped, tortured, and killed.

The discovery of Camarena's kidnapping and murder lead to Operation Legend, one of the largest DEA homicide investigations in history, and Gallardo and his cohorts Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo and Rafael Caro Quintero were declared the main suspects. Fonseca and Quintero were both quick apprehended, but Gallardo managed to evade the DEA for four years, until he was arrested in Mexico on April 8, 1989.

He managed to still run his empire from prison before he was relocated to a maximum security facility in Mexico. Now 72, Gallardo still remains in federal penitentiary in Morelos, serving out the remainder of his 37-year sentence.