Sam Aaron is an LAPD undercover officer. He was supposed to help intercept Los Tiburones cartel shipments, create an opening for the Feds to shut down the cartel operations in California, and go home to his potted plants. The task force (codenamed "Raze") has intercepted the cartel shipments as though they had a shipping schedule for them, but someone is flooding the streets with coke like never before. Sam is tasked with finding the new drug dealer on the block, so his three-month operation has turned into an indefinite hell. Meanwhile, Manuel "El Tiburón" Santos has streamlined and revolutionized cocaine production in Colombia, but he's not making money like he should be. His "lieutenants" and "soldiers" keep getting arrested and/or whacked when they go to California, and it pisses him off. But at what point would the head of a cartel handle business personally? That's my problem. I need to draw Santos into Sam's crosshairs, and I don't know what would compel Santos to show up in California. Santos did take a different approach to business than his predecessors and rivals, but showing up in the place where your shipments are being routinely seized seems idiotic. What would make him that desperate?
Yeah, that's a tough one... he'd have to be sniffing a lot of his product to come anywhere near US jurisdiction. Could you have the confrontation occur out at sea? The logistics would be tricky, but it might be a fun scene to write. Even then he'd have to be pretty reckless to show up anywhere outside the legal sanctuary of Colombia.
He could be fleeing to California in order to avoid being killed by other cartels. If he's been running his own drug cartel he's probably got the money and the cojones to think he could get away with it and years of slipping shipments past the American borders would probably give him a false sense of how effective American Law Enforcement actually is.
Thank you both. I see possibilities for getting Manuel out to sea. He is a man who prefers the personal touch, where he can give it, and if he needs to dispose of a body, he prefers to feed it to sharks. As for fleeing from cartels, that could work, but it seems foolish for him to run to California, of all places. I'd need something to pressure him to go there. Would it seem believable for him to have avoided photographs, so no one in law enforcement knows what he looks like?
If no one in law enforcement knows what El Tiburón looks like, couldn't he fly to Los Angeles as a businessman and proceed to assess his problems there? He'd send a small shipment of something like baby laxative through his usual channels and see how it's captured. He'd be able to find out how his representatives are being compromised. What he doesn't count on is Sam Aaron, who starts to notice the same guy popping up in seemingly innocuous ways. The baby laxative shipment seems like an odd joke for El Tiburón to play, but it gets Sam thinking. He has the cocaine they've seized tested. Sure enough, it's been cut, to where it's barely cocaine at all. Because of his inside men, El Tiburón gets copies of the test results, and has the same goal as Sam: find who is stealing the coke. They chase the same goal, getting closer to each other, until the final confrontation, where Sam and El Tiburón have a showdown with the thieves.
Just a heads up, drugs that get imported to a country are unlikely to be cut. There may be impurities and it may not be great stuff, but when smuggling, shipping space is limited, so why fill it with things that don't need to be smuggled. It's only after it's reached it's supply chain in the destination country that it starts getting cut. The further down the chain, the worse it gets.
I understand that. El Tiburón ships pure cocaine. The fact the stuff in lockup is cut tips Sam and El Tiburón off to the fact someone is stealing the pure cocaine in lockup, replacing it with something. Does that make sense?
To clarify: In Santos' world, there are two types of cartel leaders. One owns farms, production, the whole gamut. It's expensive running an operation like that, and attracts attention. The military doesn't have to play ball with you if they can just drop herbicide on your crops, burn your factories, and arrest or kill your people. The other kind of cartel leader is less brazen. He'll feed the local economy with his trillions of pesos. Pay the farmers to grow smaller crops less noticeable to the military. Pay them well to not make their own cocaine. Why would they need to, if you're paying them to just grow and pick the leaves? Pay the military, too, for equipment and supplies. Feed them information on your competitors, or on a farmer who thinks he can make his own coke. You've got a factory where shit just keeps breaking, the employees keep stealing? Give it to the military, and let them make a big deal out of it for CNN, so long as they're not screaming your name. In exchange, you get consistent farming, and can afford production. You don't have to hire all that extra crap to smuggle your cocaine out of your country. Hell, you're paying the military enough, they'll probably load it on your boats for you. Then you've just got to worry about getting it to your target market. Sure, that's a cost, but what you pay in bribes isn't as much as you used to pay in trying to do everything in secret. You don't sell to the locals, and you convince the other cartels to throw in with you. Together, you even police your local communities, so the military doesn't have to. As long as they get their money and you can keep your people in line, you're in Disneyland. If you come across a military commander or farmer or criminal who doesn't want to play ball, you've got a chum factory, and there are a hell of a lot of sharks between Colombia and California. That's how Santos operates. He also won't deal with the Mexican cartels except to move his product through their territory. For that, he'll pay, or he'll give the cartels a tour of his chum factory. The Mexicans and Central Americans didn't want to work with him at first, so he took out the top three cartels and their families in a scorched earth campaign to prove a point. The other cartels are much nicer to him now. He's a devoted family man, and a man worthy of his nickname: "The Shark." He'll grind you into blood paste personally without ever raising his voice once, without enjoying or hating it, then he'll shower and take his children to school, make love to his wife, and deliver food to the local church to be distributed to the community free of charge.
Pablo Escobar at Disneyland. This was in 1981, before he was well-known to law enforcement, but he was already at the point where he traveled with bodyguards. His kid wanted to go, they went. Kim Jong Nam (the murdered elder half brother of the current North Korean leader Kim Jong Un) was arrested in 2001 for trying to sneak into Japan to visit Tokyo Disney: It probably cost him his chance at inheriting his father's position, and thence his life.
Plot twist: the kids with the guns are the bodyguards, and the "bodyguards" are off riding the Tilt-A-Whirl.
