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2 Sinaloa Cartel leaders arrested, arrive in US after major sting operation
Former DEA Chief of Operations Ray Donovan joins ‘America’s Newsroom’ to discuss the ‘tremendous victory’ for the United States after ‘El Mayo’ arrived in El Paso, Texas, alongside the son of ‘El Chapo.’
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The Sinaloa Cartel raked in hundreds of thousands of dollars stealing Nike shoes from a moving BNSF train in their latest railroad heist between California and Arizona, a pattern that has been on the rise, according to law enforcement.
Eleven members of the Mexican transnational criminal organization are in federal custody after stealing the merchandise from a train car traveling north of Phoenix with cut air brakes on Jan. 17, Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) said in documents filed Wednesday in the U.S. District Court in Arizona.
BNSF employees notified police after spotting a severed air hose on a cargo train near Perrin, Arizona. Railroad police noticed a box truck parked a few miles away and, later, several crates positioned near the tracks.
Police said they stopped a Toyota Camry leaving the area of a Ford Econoline box truck and identified its occupants as Jaime Cota Peraza and Sadiel Martinez Soto. While the suspects were distracted, other authorities placed tracking devices into the waiting crates.
AMERICAN HIKER SHOT BY SUSPECTED MEXICAN CARTEL WHILE ON US SOIL
Sinaloa Cartel members allegedly used this box truck to offload $202,500 worth of Nike shoes from a BSNF train on Jan. 17, 2025. (Homeland Security Investigations)
After authorities reportedly watched several people load the crates into the box truck, Arizona Department of Public Safety troopers tracked them to Kingman, Arizona, where they chased two men who they said were Erik Portillo Valdez and Noe Cecena Castro over some trees and a barbed wire fence.
The tracking devices led them to a Chevy Tahoe pulling the crates. Inside, authorities found 150 cases of Nike merchandise worth $202,500.
Peraza, Soto, Valdez, Castro and seven other individuals were charged with felony possession or receipt of goods stolen from an interstate shipment. Nine of those suspects were in the United States illegally and six said they are Sinaloa natives.
Over the past two years, similar thefts have been on the rise, HSI said.
2 SONS OF MEXICAN DRUG LORD ‘EL CHAPO’ ARE NEGOTIATING PLEA DEAL WITH US PROSECUTORS, ATTORNEYS SAY
A Mexican soldier stands guard next to graffiti of drug trafficker Mayo Zambada and the criminal group “Cartel de Sinaloa” in Palmas Altas on March 14, 2022. (PEDRO PARDO/AFP via Getty Images)
“Once the organization targets a train of interest, they find a location for several burglars to get on the train,” the agency wrote in court documents. “The burglars open container doors while the train is moving and target merchandise such as electronics, tools and footwear.”
Cartel members look for cars with security locks and use metal-cutting saws, bolt cutters and other tools to steal the contents. In other instances, associates sabotage the trains’ signal systems by cutting locks on signal boxes and tampering with their wiring.
Once the train has stopped, they use their phones to share their location with other cartel members who are driving box trucks or small trailers on nearby roads to pick up the stolen goods.
“The suspects often cut the train braking system air hose, which causes the train to go into emergency stop,” HSI said in the court documents. “This act is very dangerous and can cause a train to derail, which could cause serious injury or death to railroad company employees or citizens.”
“This also is a dangerous act that creates ‘dark areas’ on the rail network. Trains travel at speeds of up to 70 miles per hour on multiple tracks east and west. Dispatchers and train crews rely on the signals for safe transportation,” the agency continued.
SINALOA CARTEL CO-FOUNDER ‘EL MAYO’ TAKEN INTO US CUSTODY
Sinaloa Cartel members raided a BNSF train on Jan. 17, 2025, according to Homeland Security Investigations. (ROBYN BECK/AFP via Getty Images)
Typically, the agency said, the cartel sells its spoils on Amazon, eBay or other digital platforms or to amenable California retailers.
Chris Swecker, the former assistant director of the FBI, told Fox News Digital that cartels have been robbing trains for at least a decade.
“When I was an assistant director, we were dealing with this at that time. If you look back, there was an epidemic for a while, then law enforcement got a handle on it,” Swecker said. “What’s even more interesting is that when they do it, it’s almost like a retail theft where there’s no intervention during the time when it happens. Nobody comes in guns blazing trying to stop the theft.”
Michael Ricks, the metro Atlanta region director for the Georgia Gang Investigators Association, said train thefts are “a very lucrative activity for organized crime groups and cartels.”
“They can get hundreds of thousands if not over $1 million worth of merchandise to sell and launder through … one, two container hits,” he said. “So this is actually relatively common activity for transnational criminal organizations and cartels.”
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President Donald Trump’s executive order to designate cartels as Foreign Terrorist Organizations could help curb train thefts along with other cartel operations, Swecker said.
“You can punish anyone who provides a stash house, a car, cash, money laundering activities for providing material support to a designated terrorist organization,” Swecker said. “It just adds another set of tools to the toolbox.”
“Giving them that designation certainly would help in building something like a racketeering case [when handling train thefts],” Ricks told Fox News Digital. “It’s not a coincidence that they happened to hit the Nike car that has $202,000 of merchandise, and that’s some type of inside information was provided to them at some level.”
Christina Coulter is a U.S. and World reporter for Fox News Digital. Email story tips to [email protected].