BALTIMORE, Feb. 3 (UPI) -- An alleged lieutenant for Mexico's violent Gulf Cartel drove a mobile home across the United States packed with $5.6 million in cocaine, the man testified.
Alex Mendoza-Cano, who later became a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration informant, stayed in fancy hotels and dined at fine restaurants to set up contacts, he said through an interpreter in U.S. District Court in Baltimore.
The cartel, known for its violent methods and intimidation, allegedly traffics cocaine, marijuana, methamphetamine and heroin across the U.S.-Mexico border to major U.S. cities from its base in Matamoros, Mexico, across the Rio Grande from Brownsville, Texas.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Peter Nothstein told jurors that during the trial they would hear things "you've only seen on TV and in movies," The Baltimore Sun reported.
Mendoza-Cano testified he considered himself a "businessman" who entered the country illegally in 2004 and acted as a cartel conduit for local U.S. drug suppliers.
Besides working for the cartel, Mendoza-Cano said he worked for the cartel's militant enforcement arm, Los Zetas, a mercenary gang made up of alleged Mexican army Special Forces deserters.
Los Zetas are best known for beheading rivals and are suspected in the disappearance of dozens of migrants who investigators allege may have been victims of extortion as they made their way to the United States from Central and South America.
Los Zetas later split from the cartel and allied with the rival Beltran-Leyva Cartel.
When Mendoza-Cano was arrested in Baltimore in 2009, he had been running a distribution route through Little Rock, Ark., Wisconsin, Chicago, Philadelphia, New Jersey, Delaware, and Atlanta.
The cartel offered to get him an attorney, he testified, but he declined.
"If I had an attorney furnished by the cartel, everything I did would be provided to the cartel," he said. "It's not because the cartel needs me. It's because I know too much. It was a way to shut me up."
