Edgar Valdez Villarreal, who got his nickname from his fair complexion, is wanted in the U.S. for allegedly smuggling tons of cocaine.
In Mexico, he's blamed for a turf war that's included bodies hung from bridges, decapitations and shootouts as he and a rival fought for control of the divided Beltran Leyva cartel.
Villarreal, as he was displayed to reporters, still wore the green polo shirt in which he was captured the day before. He grinned often as police described a high-flying and violent life.
Security forces had been closing in on Villarreal for over a year, the biggest breakthrough being the death of his boss, Arturo Beltran Leyva, in a December shootout with marines.
Villarreal was charged earlier this year, in federal court in Atlanta, with distributing thousands of pounds of cocaine from Mexico to the eastern U.S. from 2004 to 2006.
Prosecutors say they used a federal wiretap of a related case in Atlanta in January 2008 to identify Villarreal as the source of the cocaine.
Witnesses said that some truckloads traveling from Laredo to Atlanta carried more than 650 pounds of cocaine. The workers shipped truckloads of money, often containing several million dollars in cash, back to Mexico in the tractor-trailer trucks, according to the court records.
The case was investigated by Special Agents of the Drug Enforcement Administration, as well as officers of the Gwinnett County Drug Task Force and the Gwinnett County District Attorney's Office, Clayton County Police Department, Georgia State Police, Fulton County Police Department, DeKalb County Sheriff's Office, Forsyth County Sheriff's Office, and the Bureau of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement.
(AccessNorthGa.com's Ken Stanford contributed to this story.)
Villarreal was charged earlier this year, in federal court in Atlanta, with distributing thousands of pounds of cocaine from Mexico to the eastern U.S. from 2004 to 2006.
http://accesswdun.com/article/2010/8/231870