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police, army, politicians.
    Adán hired a convicted embezzler to digitize all his records so he can track accounts on computer, laptops that are swapped out once a month and freshly encoded. He uses scores of cell phones, changed every other day or so, the replacements smuggled in by guards or other of Diego’s employees.
    Los Bateadores are in charge of managing Block 2. The rest of Puente Grande is a bedlam of gangs, robberies, assaults, and rapes, but Block 2 is quiet and orderly. Everyone knows that the Sinaloa cartel runs that part of the prison on behalf of Adán Barrera, and it is a sanctuary of calm and quiet.
    Adán rises early, has a quick breakfast, and then goes to his desk. He works until 1:00 p.m., when he has a leisurely lunch, then goes back to his desk until 5:00. Most evenings are quiet. His chef comes in every day to cook his dinner and select the appropriate wine. It seems to matter a great deal to the chef—it matters less to Adán.
    He’s not a wine snob.
    Some evenings Los Bateadores convert the dining hall into a cinema, complete with a popcorn machine, and Adán invites friends in to watch a movie, munch popcorn or eat ice cream. The guests call these sessions “Family Nights” because Adán prefers PG films—lots of Disney—because he doesn’t like the sex and violence that come with most Hollywood films these days.
    Other nights are less wholesome.
    A prison guard cruises the Guadalajara bars and comes back with women, and then the dining hall is converted into a brothel, replete with liquor, drugs, and Viagra. Adán pays all the “fees” but doesn’t take part in these evenings, retreating to his cell instead.

    He’s not interested in women.
    Until he sees Magda.
    —
    Sinaloans like to brag that their mountain state produces two beautiful things in abundance—poppies and women.
    Magda Beltrán is certainly one of the latter.
    Twenty-nine years old, with a tall frame, long legs, blue eyes—Magda is a mixture of the native Mexican people and the Swiss, German, and French who migrated to Sinaloa in the nineteenth century.
    Seven Sinaloanas have been crowned Miss Mexico.
    Magda wasn’t one of them, but she was Miss Culiacán.
    She competed in beauty pageants since she was six years old and won most of them. In doing so, she attracted the attention of agents, film producers, and, of course, narcos.
    Magda was no stranger to that world.
    Her uncle was a trafficker in the old Federación, and two cousins had been sicarios for Miguel Ángel Barrera. Growing up in Culiacán, she simply knew traffickers; most people did.
    She was nineteen when she started dating them.
    Narcos flock around local beauty queens like circling vultures. Some of them even sponsor their own pageants, narcoconcursos de misses, to bring out the talent. When some other pageant officials expressed concern about the girls associating with drug traffickers, one local wag asked, “Why would you not want these women representing the state’s biggest product?”
    It’s a natural combination—the girls have looks, and the narcos have money to treat them to gourmet dinners, clothes, jewelry, expensive vacations, spas, beauty treatments…
    Magda took them all.
    Why not?
    She was young and beautiful and wanted to have a good time, and if you wanted good times in Culiacán, if you wanted to hang with the cachorros— the jet-set kids of the drug barons—you had to go where the money was.
    Besides, the narcos were fun.
    They liked parties, music, dances, concerts, and clubs.
    If you were on the arm of a narco, you didn’t stand in line behind the rope; they opened the rope for you and showed you into the VIP room with the Cristal and the Dom, and the owners—if the narco himself didn’t own the club—would come over to greet you personally.
    Some of the girls found themselves enmeshed with the older narcos who became obsessed with them, but Magda avoided that trap. She watched what happened to girls a few years ahead of