firefighters and drug lords
and look !! His daddy own(s)(ed) a bar, JUST LIKE YOU, COLIN.
Poire, the security spokesman, said Valdez maintained ties to drug gangs operating in the United States and Central and South America, and a series of arrests during the day in Colombia appeared to bear out that claim.
Valdez grew up in a middle-class subdivision of Laredo popular with Border Patrol agents, police officers and firefighters. His father was a nightclub and bar owner.
The former Laredo United High School linebacker became a small-time street dealer as a teen. His first arrest came at 19 in Texas, where he was charged with criminally negligent homicide for allegedly running over a middle school counselor in his truck while speeding down a Laredo street. He was never indicted.
Valdez later moved to Mexico City, where in 1998 he met Arturo Beltran Leyva, a drug lord working for the Sinaloa cartel, according to the federal police's counternarcotics chief, Ramon Pequeno.
As the Texan worked his way up the criminal chain, first in Nuevo Laredo along the border, then starting in 2004 in the Pacific Coast resort of Acapulco, he nurtured a reputation for extreme violence, including frequent beheadings of the Beltran Leyva group's enemies, Pequeno said.
By 2007, Valdez ranked