This Was The Restaurant In Mexico City Where The Arellano Felix Brothers Almost Killed The Lord Of The Skies.

Mica for cartelinsider.com

The bill was paid in dollars and the specialty of the house – at least the one that the “Lord of the Skies” liked the most – were the seafood platters: giant shrimp, stuffed crab, oysters in their shell and scallops, all seasoned with bottles of white wine; that’s how Amado Carrillo Fuentes liked to spend his afternoons in Mexico City (CDMX), at least until hitmen from the Arellano Felix brothers tried to kill him.

It was December 1993 when Ramón and Benjamín Arellano Félix ordered three of their hitmen to assassinate “El Señor de los Cielos” (The Lord of the Skies), who was having dinner with his wife and friends at the Ochoa Bali Hai restaurant located on Avenida de los Insurgentes and marked with the number 1524.

Locating Amado Carrillo Fuentes in Mexico City was not a difficult task. In his book “The Bosses,” journalist Ricardo Ravelo writes that the former leader of the Juarez Cartel would visit him once a month or every two months. That is why the Arellano Felix brothers – with whom he was disputing control of the Tijuana area – knew that it was most likely he would be there. The other two options were the Sanborns on Las Palmas Avenue or in Zona Rosa.

Ochoa Bali Hai, had been operating for almost three decades as a chain of hotels, bars, nightclubs, and restaurants, until they decided to include seafood and products from the sea that are so beloved by the people of Sinaloa, such as Amado Carrillo, on their menus. Today, at number 1524 stands a multi-purpose building that proudly displays the BanBajio signs on its ground floor.

The attack against the most powerful drug lord after Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo did not yield the expected results, thanks to the intervention of Alcides Ramón Magaña, alias “El Metro”, the bodyguard of “El Señor de los Cielos” who confronted the hitmen of the Tijuana Cartel.

Like the rumors that have circulated with other drug lords like Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, it is said that Amado Carrillo Fuentes would arrive at the Ochoa Bali Hai and park his cars normally, like any other client; but upon entering he would order three seafood platters and have the other diners order whatever they wanted on his tab: “The bill, boss, quickly, in dollars”; recounts Ravelo.

But that December afternoon, not everything was a victory for “The Lord of the Skies”; the attack by the Arellano Felix – who had already tried to kill El Chapo Guzmán and ended up assassinating Cardinal Juan Jesús Posadas Ocampo in May of that same year – put him in the spotlight of the American and Mexican authorities.

Just a few months after the attack, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) located Carrillo Fuentes as the person responsible for trafficking 60 percent of all the cocaine that entered the United States each year; the DEA put a price on his capture, 5 million dollars; while the Attorney General’s Office (PGR) did the same and offered up to 30 million pesos for information that would help apprehend him.

Several years had passed since the attack on “El Señor de los Cielos” when General Jesús Gutiérrez Rebollo was appointed head of the National Institute for the Combat of Drugs (INCD); the new position of the military with ties to the Juárez Cartel made Ramón Arellano Félix nervous, who proposed an alliance to Carrillo Fuentes to unite the two strongest territories at the moment.

The intention of Ramon -writes Jesus Blancornelas in his book “The Cartel”- was not to be the prey of the INCD and the Juarez Cartel, but “The Lord of the Skies” had a request for the brothers who took over Tijuana: he wanted the three hitmen who tried to kill him in Mexico City.

It is said that the narcojuniors – hitmen and childhood friends in the service of the Arellano Felix – were the ones who failed that December afternoon in 1993; that’s why Ramón rejected the deal; however, they knew that the Tijuana Cartel would not last long if they didn’t make a deal with the powerful drug lord who moved more Colombian cocaine than all the other cartels combined.

Ramón and Benjamín accepted; the exact date is not known, but the alliance between Tijuana and Juárez would take place after a visit from “The Lord of the Skies” to Mexico City to undergo a face-changing operation.

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Mica

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