1,500 murders ordered by leader of Mexican Murder, Inc.

by: jim kouri | published: 08 02, 2011

Law enforcement officials in Mexico claim that a vicious and ruthless cartel leader they arrested boasted of ordering the murder of more than1,500 people in northern Chihuahua state, a U.S. drug enforcement source tells Law Enforcement Examiner.

The 33-year old gang leader, Jose Antonio Acosta Hernandez, is also suspected of masterminding the 2010 attack on a U.S. diplomat and her spouse in the war-torn city of Ciudad Juarez, not far from the U.S.-Mexican border.

Mexico does not execute even the most prolific killers.

According to U.S. drug enforcement officials, Acosta Hernandez is a key figure in the Juarez drug cartel based in Ciudad Juarez, a city that boasts Mexico's highest murder rate. In 2010 alone, more than 3,000 people were murdered by drug cartel members in that city..

Acosta Hernandez, a/k/a El Diego, is accused of being the leader Mexico's own version of Murder, Inc., the La Linea gang, whose members function as assassins and enforcers for the Juarez cartel. Part of El Diego's gang is allegedly comprised of police officers.

Murder, Inc. was the name given by reporters to organized crime groups in the 1920s through the 1940s that resulted in hundreds of murders on behalf of the American Mafia and Jewish Mafia groups who together formed the early organized crime groups in New York and elsewhere. The name was a journalistic invention. Murder, Inc. was established after the formation of the commission of the National Crime Syndicate, to which it ultimately answered. Largely headed by former mob enforcers Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel and Meyer Lansky,

The Juarez cartel controls the main drug smuggling routes from Ciudad Juarez into the United States.

Mexican authorities accused El Diego of being behind a car bomb attack which killed four people in the border city, the first such attack in Mexico's so-called war on drugs.

El Diego is considered so dangerous, that the Mexican government posted a 15 million Mexican pesos ($1,275,000) reward for information leading to his capture.

U.S. federal prosecutors had wanted to try him in the case of the 2010 killing of U.S. diplomat Lesley Enriquez, her husband Arthur Redelfs, and the husband of another consulate staff member, Jorge Alberto Salcedo.

They were shot dead in their car execution-style as they left a social function in Ciudad Juarez. Ms Enriquez, 35, was four months pregnant when she was murdered. The American couple's seven-month-old daughter survived the violent attack. She was discovered by responding police officers in the backseat of the car crying uncontrollably.

Jorge Salcedo was killed in drive-by shooting as he drove away in a separate vehicle from the same event only minutes after the Enriquez killing.

Mexican President Felipe Calderon said that Acosta's capture was "the biggest blow" to organized crime in Ciudad Juarez since he sent 5,000 federal police to the city in April 2010 to attempt to curtail the violence in one of the world's most dangerous cities.

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