Just 24 hours after the attack, it was found on Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra Street in Monterrey. The latest model Mini Cooper, white with black stripes and a matching roof, had been abandoned with its windows and doors locked. It was left a few blocks from ground zero and in front of a Todo Fácil store, containing four cartridges, a yellow envelope addressed to “Attn. Mr. [or Ms.],” bank receipts, and empty cardboard boxes.
There was no doubt: it was the same Mini Cooper that had appeared on all the national news channels, the one parked at the entrance of the Casino Royale, from which several hitmen from the Los Zetas cartel had emerged to set it on fire with 150 people inside, on August 25, 2011.
A day later, investigators discovered that the car had been reported stolen. However, the most significant finding was that one of the police officers managed to spot fingerprints on the steering wheel and doors.
They belonged to Julio Tadeo Berrones Ramírez, who was 28 years old at the time and had been arrested and released a few months earlier for armed robbery. The address he had reported was 613 Encino Street in the Hacienda Los Morales neighborhood of San Nicolás de los Garza.
On August 28, a surveillance operation was launched: it was suspected that Julio Tadeo would return home at some point. And so it happened: at 11 p.m., he arrived in a yellow Ibiza-type car with another man. He was intercepted by the police, who reported that he was carrying a Prietro Beretta handgun.
That night he confessed that his role was to act as a lookout, alerting Los Zetas to the presence of military personnel, federal agents, or suspicious vehicles. On August 25, they were summoned very close to the casino on orders from Baltazar Saucedo Estrada, known as El Mataperros, the head of the cartel in Monterrey. They were told bluntly that they were going to burn down a casino: “We’re going to blow up the San Jerónimo casino because they’ve refused to pay the protection money.”
Los Zetas were referring to the fact that the casino owners, including Raúl Rocha Cantú, had not paid an extortion fee. Rocha Cantú, now the owner of the Miss Universe pageant, is embroiled in a cascade of accusations related to arms trafficking, fuel smuggling – known as “huachicol” – and drug trafficking from Guatemala. After the tragedy, he left the country amid suspicions of irregularities in the operation of the Casino Royale. More than twenty years later, and without the events of that day having been fully clarified, Rocha Cantú remains involved in corrupt practices.
This is a collaboration between ARCHIVERO and DOMINGA, based on statements from the preliminary investigation opened by the then Attorney General’s Office, which reveals that in Mexico, the official truth is always a work in progress. The Zetas arrived at the casino asking for Rocha Cantú.
For security reasons, and given the level of risk involved in revealing identities in a context linked to the Zetas, the names of the individuals mentioned will be omitted, as well as any other information that could allow their identification.
He had been working at the Casino Royale for two and a half months, on a shift from 3 p.m. to 11 p.m., and usually had Wednesdays off. That’s why that Thursday he had come in and taken his place behind the counter, working as a cashier at the Montagu restaurant, which was inside the casino, where he handled requests from waiters or impatient customers who wanted to pay their bills.
He had only been on his shift for half an hour when he started hearing people screaming. He soon saw a surge of people trying to get out of the casino. “I ran to the kitchen, and there’s a door there that leads to another restaurant called Astoria, and we threw ourselves to the ground, and we could hear voices and screams in the distance, and then there was an explosion,” he would later testify.
After a few minutes, one of his colleagues saw the casino filling with smoke. Despite their fear, they ran through the restaurant, into the poker area, and finally reached the parking lot. “Who’s missing from our group!” he shouted.
He says he then turned around and saw a bald, heavyset man carrying a long gun. He saw him clearly as he got into a vehicle and drove away. That day, during the interrogations, they would ask him who the owner of the casino was: “I only know that the owner of the casino’s last name is Rocha,” he would say.
Another worker who survived the terrorist attack testified that he had been working at the Casino Royale for a year. His shift was from one in the afternoon to nine at night, and his day off varied. He remembers that on August 25th, he was assigned to the slot machine area when he suddenly heard the head of security shouting at the casino manager: “Some armed men are coming!”
He says he suddenly saw two men enter the casino with long guns. The waiter managed to hide in a gap behind the buffet counter, along with a female colleague. Terrified, they stayed there for three minutes until they heard what sounded like an explosion and then felt the heat of a flash fire. He thought that what had exploded was the gas tank of a hot dog cart that was usually parked at the entrance. They ran out, fearing the flames would reach them, and ran through the Astoria restaurant and then the poker table area.
They managed to escape through the side door when they saw a group of armed men getting into a vehicle: the Mini Cooper. “Several of my colleagues were trapped inside,” he said. Questioned just a few hours after the attack, he also told authorities that the person in charge of the place was named Raúl Rocha Cantú.
“There was fire and black smoke…”
A third waiter testified that on the day of the attack, he also started his shift at three in the afternoon. He arrived, put on his uniform, and went up to the second floor of the casino where there was an area with slot machines. At around 3:30, he saw through a window overlooking the first floor that three armed men were entering through the main door.
He only remembers the shorts of one of them, he’ll never forget them, they were checkered. He says his first instinct was to yell at people to run to the terrace where the employees usually ate. He tried to help someone up some small stairs next to a drinks bar when he heard an explosion and then felt the entire floor shake. “There was fire and black smoke… but I helped a woman get up, since she couldn’t climb the stairs, and I went up with her.”
However, it would be the security supervisor of the Casino Royale who would see what happened outside. He was working about two meters from the main entrance when he saw a taxi dropping off a customer on San Jerónimo Avenue and, behind it, someone in a Mini Cooper with a black roof was honking desperately. Then a man got out of the passenger side, carrying a long gun, and started shouting, “Get the hell inside, everyone!”
He then decided to run towards the restaurant area when he heard one of the armed men shout, “Go to hell, everyone!” They ran towards the Astoria. He had his radio with him and broadcast the message “40,” meaning everyone to the floor. He says that through another colleague’s radio frequency he heard the “everyone get out, go to hell” that the hitmen were shouting.
He also recounted: “I looked down at the ground and there were two legs of a person, and I grabbed them and pulled, and I couldn’t move her, and I pulled until I got her out of that area, noticing that she showed signs of life… We saw something moving and it was another person, and we managed to get her out. And then we asked the firefighter if he had water or anything so we could go in, and he said no, that [the fire] was already too dangerous.”
The statement of lookouts and hitmen in the preliminary investigation
In the file, he is identified as a lookout for Los Zetas. He recounted that on August 25, at around two in the afternoon, he received a direct order: he was instructed to go to a plaza in the Unidad Modelo neighborhood to meet with other Zetas. There, he said, he was informed that “they were going to carry out a mission.” According to his version, they were already waiting for him in a gray Chevrolet Equinox; he got in, noticing that two other men were also inside, whom he only identified as people “from the southern area.”
At approximately three in the afternoon, they headed towards the Casino Royale on San Jerónimo Avenue. He said that he entered the building along with other individuals whose names he did not know, as he had only been working for Los Zetas for a short time. He went up to the second floor, where they even robbed the customers of their belongings. Then they set it on fire, and when the casino was already engulfed in flames, they left the scene.
Finally, he said that the following day they had met again in the plaza in the Unidad Modelo neighborhood to discuss what had happened at the Casino Royale.
Another Zeta hitman would later testify in the case file that on August 25, 2011, at around 2:30 in the afternoon, he received a call on his Nextel radio from a person he identified as the person in charge of “the Monterrey territory.”
According to his account, he was ordered to go to a restaurant on Gonzalitos Avenue, where he was told they were going to “blow up” the casino because the owner had refused to pay the protection money. At that meeting, he coordinated with other members of the organization. He helped leave the gasoline containers at the entrance of the casino.
Another hitman corroborated these accounts, saying he received a call on his Nextel. He was told they were going to set fire to “the slot machines” because the owner “didn’t want to cooperate.” He confirmed that they went to the casino, parked, and remained outside carrying a long gun. At that moment, people began unloading gasoline containers from a pickup truck and taking them into the casino. Just two minutes later, people came running out, he saw the smoke, and as he was leaving, he could still hear the sound of the business’s windows shattering.
A third hitman, whose identity the authorities are keeping anonymous, recounted that on the day of the events, before going to burn down the casino, they bought some sandwiches. It was there that he saw José Alberto Loera Rodríguez, known as El Voltaje, apparently giving final instructions to the passengers of the Mini Cooper.
According to the testimony recorded in the file, the group first arrived at the Casino Royale parking lot in a gray Town & Country minivan without license plates and waited. After a few minutes, Voltaje Negro, as the media would later call him, spoke on his Nextel and announced: “DAD, the map is clear,” and then immediately said: “Watch what’s going to happen now,” while laughing.
Then the other vehicles began to arrive in succession: first a white and black Mini Cooper, then a gray van with tinted windows; followed by a blue pickup truck and finally a gray Aveo subcompact car. The man said that at least one of the people who got out was armed with a long gun and another with an AR-15, and that gasoline containers were unloaded from the gray vehicle. According to investigations, the order allegedly came from Los Zetas commanders in Monterrey and was carried out as retaliation because the business refused to pay the extortion fee to “avoid being bothered.” The mastermind was Baltasar Sauceda Estrada, alias “El Mataperros,” whom authorities identified as the operational leader in the area and who ordered the attack; years later, the Attorney General’s Office reported that he received a 135-year prison sentence in a federal trial.
Other individuals sentenced were Julio Tadeo Berrones Ramírez (who received the longest sentence due to recidivism), as well as Juan Ángel Leal Flores, Luis Carlos Carrasco Espinoza, Jonathan Jair Reyna Gutiérrez, Jonathan Emmanuel Estrada Pérez, José Alfredo Grimaldo Rodríguez, Tomás Barbosa Sánchez, Javier Alonso Martínez Morales, Clemente Perales Contreras, Alan Pérez Gámez, Héctor Piñones Mendoza, and Jesús Alejandro García González.
Irregularities in the operation of the Casino Royale
A writ of amparo under review in the judicial system (filed by administrators and owners of the Casino Royale to challenge an arrest warrant issued on December 23, 2011, against Raúl Rocha Cantú and other businessmen) reveals that the authorities attempted to prove that there were irregularities in the casino’s operation.
The main “irregularity” attributed to them is that the Casino Royale was operating gambling games without authorization from the Ministry of the Interior. The case file itself describes that on August 25, 2011, and before, the establishment offered card games, dice games, and roulette, in addition to slot machines, “without authorization from the Ministry of the Interior.”
However, a judge ruled in their favor, stating that the expert report on the gambling machines was “flawed” and “dogmatic” because it didn’t explain the methodology, operations, or experiments conducted; furthermore, the machines were damaged by the high temperatures of the explosion, making it “materially impossible” to definitively assess their functionality.
After the attack, Raúl Rocha Cantú fled to the United States, where he declared that for months Los Zetas had been demanding a payment of $50,000 in cash and had warned him that if he didn’t pay, he would “face the consequences” for his failure to comply. According to his account, because he didn’t hand over the money, a week later he received another anonymous message informing him that the extortion amount had increased to $140,000.
Years later, far from the smoke of the Casino Royale, Raúl Rocha Cantú reappeared surrounded by glamour and beautiful models: he bought the Miss Universe beauty pageant. And yet, even in that world of perfect smiles, his name couldn’t escape controversy. The 2025 edition was plagued by accusations of “rigging” and allegations of favoritism; even a former judge publicly stated that Rocha Cantú tried to influence the voting in favor of the Mexican contestant, Fatima Bosch.
Thus, even in a contest designed to crown beauty, the darkness of a character who has moved from casinos to the world of fashion runways, always with impunity, once again prevailed.
Sources: Milenio, Cartel Insider Archives
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