Margarito “Jay” Flores Jr. and his twin brother Pedro (a.k.a. “Pete”) were helping their father smuggle marijuana and other contraband across the Mexican border by the age of 7. Around the time they turned 17, Jay and Pete started their own drug-trafficking enterprise. By 18, they were millionaires.
Their work trafficking marijuana, cocaine, and heroin made billions that they sent back to Mexico, much of it going directly to the Sinaloa cartel, including Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán himself.
But they also did business with the Beltrán-Leyva cartel, and when the two cartels, on the verge of war, told the Flores twins they had to choose between the two, they took a different course: They became federal informants.
“We cooperated with the government against the biggest drug lords in the world,” Jay Flores told The Free Press, and the twins’ cooperation helped put El Chapo away. After serving “12 solid years” of his sentence, Flores was released in 2020 and now runs a business called Kingpin to Educator, educating members of law enforcement, tech companies, and government agencies on the inner workings of cartels.