CHICAGO — Chicago twins Pedro and Margarito Flores were just 16 when their older brother Armando was arrested in the late 1990s for selling narcotics out of a Cicero auto dealership.
Armando was later sentenced to five years in federal prison, and his absence created a vacuum for his younger brothers to fill. Within a few years, the twins had risen to the highest levels of Chicago’s drug-trafficking underworld, where their position as major distributors for Mexico’s notorious Sinaloa cartel made them fantastically rich and ultimately provided a direct pipeline to the boss himself, Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman.
The twins’ decision to cooperate with federal authorities in 2008 led to arguably the biggest drug case ever brought in Chicago, with charges against El Chapo himself as well as many of his top underbosses, culminating with Pedro Flores testifying against Guzman at his trial in New York in 2018.
