Drug mob killer’s chilling memoir
MARTIN CORONA is sorry for all those people brutally killed during his run as a drug syndicate executioner.
His apology comes in the form of a new book revealing his crimes in gruesome detail. And “Confessions of a Cartel Hit Man” has best seller written on every page.
Corona was sprung from federal lockup in 2014, a mere 12 years after snitching on his confederates in a viciously murderous Mexican drug operation, the Arellano Felix Organization, or AFO.
Corona’s information led to multiple arrests that decimated the AFO hierarchy.
He admitted to personally executing eight people — several from the same family — and participating in other carnage. The AFO, which inspired the movie “Traffic,” was known for its sadistic atrocities.
Cutting-edge butchery like the Mexican stew — stuffing victims alive into 55-gallon barrels of hot lye — was later adopted as a business practice by competing cartels.
Corona was recruited in 1993 by David (Popeye) Barron, an infamous hit man for the Arellano brothers, Benjamin, Ramon and Javier. He had saved Ramon’s life the year before.
Armed only with an AK-47, Corona single-handedly held off 40 assassins sent by Joaquin (El Chapo) Guzman to annihilate everyone in a Puerto Vallarta nightclub.
He used his free hand to push Ramon to safety through a bathroom window.
Shortly afterward, he opened fire on El Chapo at a Guadalajara airport — and missed, instead taking out Cardinal Juan Jesus Posadas Ocampo. El Chapo escaped. The public outrage drove the AFO underground, though Barron’s death squad stayed active. He personally instructed Corona exactly where to plunge a knife into “a bound man who was screaming for his life.”
Though an early assassination attempt on rival Sinaloa Cartel head Amado Carrillo Fuentes failed, the AFO kept after him. According to Corona, the cartel had a hit team inside the Mexico City hospital where Fuentes died while undergoing plastic surgery in 1997.
Barron’s death squad trained with the Mexican federal police, and often wore Federale uniforms on the job. Corona dressed casually, though, for his first execution on U.S. soil.
The target, a Sinaloa associate, owned beauty parlors in Tijuana. When Corona knocked on her door in Imperial daughters. Beach, Calif., the woman’s At the main house, Corona daughter judged the killer — held an infant and several other wearing jeans and “nerdy children at bay while Barron murdered glasses” — a safe bet. the homeowner upstairs. She let him inside. Corona, in a brief show of Corona and two other killers compassion, allowed the wife to fired five rounds into the mother’s breast-feed her baby. head, but let the daughter She was then stabbed to death. live. They fled the house, only to Around the same time, Ramon learn from a newspaper account Arellano ordered Barron to execute that they left behind $500,000 a man named Ronnie Svoboda hidden inside a closet. in a dispute over a woman. Corona
On Corona’s next big job, the either wasn’t in on the Tijuana squad scaled the walls of a Tijuana kill — or doesn’t admit to it. compound, tying up the first But he caught the next job family they found — a man, after Svoboda’s sisters Ivonne his wife and their 5-year-old twin and Luz went to the police about the hit. Ivonne had only just returned from a year in Paris modeling for Mademoiselle magazine.
Corona cornered the two in a San Diego alley after the siblings climbed into their car. Disguised with an Afro wig and sunglasses, he crept up on the sisters.
He fired three shots into Ivonne’s head. Luz took a bullet in the chest. In the same moment when the killer realized Luz was pregnant, a little girl screamed from the backseat.
Both sisters survived the murder attempt, although Ivonne suffered major brain damage. Corona writes that shooting a pregnant woman and terrifying a child left him tormented.
Yet one month later, he was holding the same little girl, Luz’s 9-year-old daughter, at gunpoint while Barron murdered her father.
According to Corona, a sevenman crew dressed in Federale uniforms stormed into a house in Tijuana. The target this time was Luz’s husband.
Corona was told to take the man’s child and her grandmother into the other bathroom. He doesn’t mention recognizing the girl, though the connection was obvious.
“You aren’t going to kill me, are you?” the terrified child asked.
“No, mija,” the assassin replied soothingly. “I’m not going to kill you. And nobody else will.”
Instead of following orders to tie her up, Corona allowed the child to just hold onto the rope.
“When we leave, you can let go of the rope and call for help,” he advised her.
Corona claims that he was prepared to murder any of the men — including Barron — if a move was made to harm the girl or her grandmother.
At one point, he wandered