Adan Casarrubias Salgado. The Mexican government blacked out his eyes in the photo.
Mexico attorney general’s office
A onetime leader of a drug cartel tied to the disappearance of 43 students in Mexico nearly a decade ago admitted Friday that he smuggled heroin to Chicago by hiding it inside passenger buses and then had hundreds of thousands of dollars shipped back to him in Mexico.
Adan Casarrubias Salgado, once the head of the Guerreros Unidos drug cartel who went by the nickname “El Tomate,” admitted his crimes in front of U.S. District Judge Matthew Kennelly at the Dirksen Federal Courthouse in Chicago’s Loop. Salgado has been in custody here since 2022.
Salgado, 55, pleaded guilty to a drug conspiracy and money laundering, admitting he shipped 52 kilograms of heroin to Chicago for sale in 2014 and had $600,000 smuggled back to him on a passenger bus.
The conspiracy charge carries a maximum life sentence, but Salgado struck a deal with prosecutors designed to put a lower cap on his potential punishment.
The feds agreed with Salgado’s defense lawyers that Salgado should be sentenced to between 10 and 20 years in prison on the conspiracy charge. It’s a deal that Kennelly may either accept or reject at Salgado’s sentencing hearing, which is set for May 28.
No such agreement was reached on the money laundering charge, which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. Kennelly could theoretically order Salgado to serve two back-to-back 20-year terms — and basically impose a 40-year sentence.
But the feds do not intend to seek back-to-back terms, Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew Erskine told the judge. That means Salgado’s sentence likely won’t exceed 20 years if Kennelly accepts the deal.
Salgado and his brothers — Sidronio, Angel and Mario — were leaders of the Guerreros Unidos cartel. The late Mario Casarrubias Salgado, nicknamed The Handsome Toad, founded it around 2011, sources have said.
Adan and Mario Casarrubias were born in Mexico but lived for years in Chicago. They worked at Mama Luna’s pizzeria on Fullerton Avenue in Belmont Cragin on the Northwest Side.
Marco Vega Cuevas, who grew up in Aurora and drowned in a lake in Mexico in 2014, also led the cartel. His brother, Pablo Vega Cuevas, became a Chicago-area cell leader. He has been cooperating with federal authorities and was ordered released from jail and into house arrest last November. He pleaded guilty to drug conspiracy charges in 2021.
Guerreros Unidos has been blamed for the presumed massacre in Mexico of 43 college students in Iguala in the Mexican state of Guerrero. About 100 students from a teacher’s college there commandeered several buses on Sept. 26, 2014, planning to use them to ride to a protest.
That night, though, police officers and other gunmen in Iguala began firing at the students. Several were wounded. Dozens were taken away in police vehicles. By dawn, six people were dead and 43 students had vanished.
What exactly happened is still unclear, though. Text messages intercepted by the DEA and published in a report by international investigators suggest Guerreros Unidos might have believed an opposing group entered Iguala along with the students.
Contributing: Frank Main