slimvictor
Bluelight Crew
Laredo, Texas (CNN) -- On a dusty, remote ranch across the Rio Grande from this Texas border town, an intimidating drug lord stood over 13-year-old Rosalio Reta and handed him a gun.
Reta didn't know who the man was, but it was clear he instilled fear and commanded respect among everyone standing around watching the dramatic scene unfold.
The American teen had never before met anyone who carried a pistol adorned with such an unforgettable decoration: the number "40" encrusted in diamonds on the handle.
The cartel leader looked at Reta and ordered him to shoot and kill a man tied up on the ground. If he refused to murder the stranger, Reta recalls, the drug lord would have killed him.
Rosalio Reta's career as a teen drug cartel assassin had begun.
"I knew that my life had just changed forever," Reta told CNN this week, 11 years later. "That's a day that I'm never going to be able to forget. After that, I didn't have no life."
Reta's boyhood friend Gabriel Cardona says he started his life as a criminal by stealing cars and selling them across the border in Mexico. He graduated to smuggling drugs and weapons across the Rio Grande. Cardona says it wasn't long before he also became a drug cartel assassin. He was only 16.
Reta and Cardona agreed to give CNN rare interviews from the Texas prisons where both men are serving life sentences for murder. They offered a first-hand glimpse inside the sinister world of drug cartels, a world that plagues innocent people on both sides of the border.
The mysterious drug lord who ordered Reta to shoot the stranger at the ranch that day, Reta says, was Miguel Angel Trevino. For years, Trevino was the unrivaled leader of the ruthless Zetas drug cartel until police arrested him last month just outside Nuevo Laredo, Mexico.
cont at
http://edition.cnn.com/2013/08/06/justice/teen-cartel-killers/index.html?iid=article_sidebar
Reta didn't know who the man was, but it was clear he instilled fear and commanded respect among everyone standing around watching the dramatic scene unfold.
The American teen had never before met anyone who carried a pistol adorned with such an unforgettable decoration: the number "40" encrusted in diamonds on the handle.
The cartel leader looked at Reta and ordered him to shoot and kill a man tied up on the ground. If he refused to murder the stranger, Reta recalls, the drug lord would have killed him.
Rosalio Reta's career as a teen drug cartel assassin had begun.
"I knew that my life had just changed forever," Reta told CNN this week, 11 years later. "That's a day that I'm never going to be able to forget. After that, I didn't have no life."
Reta's boyhood friend Gabriel Cardona says he started his life as a criminal by stealing cars and selling them across the border in Mexico. He graduated to smuggling drugs and weapons across the Rio Grande. Cardona says it wasn't long before he also became a drug cartel assassin. He was only 16.
Reta and Cardona agreed to give CNN rare interviews from the Texas prisons where both men are serving life sentences for murder. They offered a first-hand glimpse inside the sinister world of drug cartels, a world that plagues innocent people on both sides of the border.
The mysterious drug lord who ordered Reta to shoot the stranger at the ranch that day, Reta says, was Miguel Angel Trevino. For years, Trevino was the unrivaled leader of the ruthless Zetas drug cartel until police arrested him last month just outside Nuevo Laredo, Mexico.
cont at
http://edition.cnn.com/2013/08/06/justice/teen-cartel-killers/index.html?iid=article_sidebar
