If bets were placed on what led to the ultimate downfall of the most wanted and dangerous drug trafficker in the world, you’d expect his demise to be the culmination of a decades-long and elaborate intelligence gathering operation.

Instead, the seizure and killing of Mexican drug lord Nemesio Rubén Oseguera Cervantes on February 22, commonly referred to by his alias ‘El Mencho’, was the result of a terrible blunder on behalf of the late kingpin.

During his lifetime, the drug lord was notorious for heading the fearsome Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG), infamous in Mexico for its flagrant displays of ultraviolence and its enormous, military-style arsenal.

The renowned trafficker, who presided over 400 gunmen, bomb-delivering drones and land mines, always took extraordinary precautions to keep himself safe – including rarely allowing a phone near him because he feared a GPS signal might reveal his location.

But last week, the fabled criminal met his death not because of a dramatic betrayal on behalf of one of his loyal gunmen, or even due to a cocaine trafficking operation being intercepted by watchful authorities.

In fact, El Mencho was finally brought down by the easily-trackable movements of one of his girlfriends, who US and Mexican intelligence forces covertly followed using Predator drone surveillance to a secluded forest cabin, which the couple mistakenly believed was private.

Early last Sunday, after a stealthy rendezvous with his lover, the 59-year-old cartel chief remained holed up in the romantic hideout, discreetly located in the picturesque western town of Tapalpa.

He had a rude awakening when a squad of elite Mexican army and National Guard special-operation soldiers descended on his retreat in the verdant pine woods – turning an otherwise relaxing morning into his violent death.

But El Mencho is far from the only cartel boss whose intimate date transformed into the scene of an unanticipated assassination within a matter of seconds.

Throughout time, scores of women – from secret mistresses to illustrious actresses – have won the hearts of otherwise lethal gangsters, spelling the end of their criminal enterprises.

Mexican drug lord Nemesio Rubén Oseguera Cervantes was killed in a military raid last week

Maria Julissa, 25, has been accused of revealing the cartel leader’s location and causing his eventual death at the hands of the Mexican army

The model at the centre of Mexico’s cartel chaos has furiously denied leading authorities to El Mencho, but that hasn’t stopped online speculation that a certain Mexican influencer was responsible for his ultimate demise.

Maria Julissa, 25, has been accused of revealing the cartel leader’s location and causing his eventual death at the hands of the Mexican army.

A banner hung from a bridge in Zapopan, Jalisco, called Julissa a ‘b***h’ and claimed that she ‘sent the marine’ after the criminal, who rose to the top of one of the most dreaded and dangerous cartels in modern Mexico.

It also accused her of ‘biting the hand that fed [her]’, alluding to a rumored but heavily denied relationship with the drug lord who hailed from humble rural roots in the western state of Michoacán.

The death of one of world’s most wanted drug traffickers triggered a wave of explosive disorder across 20 Mexican states, with masked gunmen setting fire to stores and vehicles and setting up disruptive roadblocks – causing the government to deploy 9,500 troops to restore order.

In a statement posted to her almost four million followers on Instagram, Julissa denounced the rumours as ‘fake news’, writing: ‘I want to make it absolutely clear: I have nothing to do with that situation. The information circulating is false and unfounded.’

While Julissa may have been falsely framed by the masses, hoping to make some sense out of El Mencho’s downfall, there is a precedent for kingpins being fatally undone by their muses.

Joaquín Archivaldo Guzmán Loera, commonly known as ‘El Chapo’ is the jailed former leader of the Sinaloa Cartel, which the US Justice Department describes as ‘one of the world’s most prolific, violent and powerful drug cartels’ – trafficking billions upon billions of dollars in marijuana, cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine.

Believed to be responsible for the death of over 34,000 people, in 2019 he was sentenced to life in jail and is currently languishing in the high-security ADX Florence, Colorado, after having escaped from prison multiple times.

He was first captured in 1993 in Guatemala before he was extradited and sentenced to 20 years in prison in Mexico for murder and drug trafficking, but he bribed multiple prison guards and escaped from a federal maximum-security prison in 2001.

El Chapo’s status as a fugitive resulted in an $8.8million combined reward from Mexico and the US authorities for information leading to his seizure, and he was eventually arrested again in 2014 and held in the feared El Altiplano facility.

Nevertheless, the formidable kingpin, known for using intricate tunnel systems for both evading authorities and moving massive quantities of drugs, managed to escape formal sentencing a year later, through an underground underpass dug by one of his associates.

When El Chapo, 68, was finally apprehended, it was because of his fatal weakness for female attention, and a desire to be in the spotlight.

The farm boy who hailed from an impoverished background from the rural community of La Tuna in Sinaloa – who amounted assets worth more than $12.6billion through his illicit activities – had escaped the grip of authorities countless times, but a growing correspondence with Mexican actress Kate del Castillo made him blind to danger.

In 2012, Del Castillo published an open letter on X, in which she stated she trusted El Chapo more than the Mexican government while asking the Sinaloa boss to start ‘trafficking with love’.

‘Today I believe more in Chapo Guzmán than in the governments that hide the truth, even if it’s painful,’ Del Castillo said, while starring in La Reina Del Sur as the girlfriend of a slain cartel chief, who eventually built her own criminal empire.

‘Let’s traffic with love. You know how to. Life is a business and the only thing that changes is the merchandise. Don’t you agree?

‘Mr Chapo, wouldn’t it be cool that you started trafficking with love?’

The open letter would spell the beginning of the end for the kingpin, as it kickstarted his ultimately destructive obsession with having a film made about his extraordinary life.

The drug lord sent flowers to the soap actress, and traded BBM messages with her while he was on the run, even allowing her and American actor Sean Penn into his hill country hideout for a meeting about a potential movie.

At that meeting, Penn even interviewed the fugitive for Rolling Stone magazine.

But investigators were able to monitor the movements of Penn and Del Castillo and took photographs of the actors when they landed in Mexico before their ill-fated get-together with El Chapo.

Following the rendezvous, troops raided El Chapo’s remote mountain stronghold in northwestern Mexico, in order to flush him out ‘toward a city’, according to government officials.

He fled and eventually made his way to the seaside city of Los Mochis in his native Sinaloa state, where he was recaptured in a deadly military operation.

One factor that led El Chapo to Los Mochis was that he was ‘really very interested in meeting the actress again’, a Mexican official said following the dramatic operation.

‘This was an almost obsessive interest that turned into another incentive to go down to the city, where he wanted to meet with her.’

Authorities said he used the codename ‘hermosa’ (beautiful) when referring to the star, and had DVDs of her famous TV series in the house that the marines ultimately raided.

El Chapo fled the residence through a tunnel during a gunfight between troops and his henchmen, but he was later caught after he had stolen a vehicle, ending a months-long manhunt involving 2,500 investigators and federal forces.

Authorities escort Joaquin ‘El Chapo’ Guzman from a plane, New York, 2017

The drug lord sent flowers to Mexican actress Kate del Castillo and their meeting helped authorities to hunt him down

Another kingpin brought down by a love interest was Servando Gómez Martínez, or ‘La Tuta’, the leader of the Knights Templar cartel and one of Mexico’s most-wanted fugitives.

As the chief of the Templars, a quasi-religious criminal group that once controlled all of Michoacán state, La Tuta controlled politics and commerce through tactics of extortion, intimidation and coercion.

On February 27, 2015, he was arrested by Mexican security forces in Morelia, Michoacán, and in 2019 he received a 55-year prison sentence for a kidnapping conviction.

He was ultimately captured because of his desire to celebrate his 49th birthday in style, however.

Alert security agents – tracking his movements – noticed an unusual amount of people coming and going from one of the homes they were keenly monitoring in Morelia.

Authorities knew that María Antonieta Luna Avalos was one of the kingpin’s girlfriends, so when a vehicle registered under her name arrived at one of his residences, they immediately understood they were in business.

Luna Avalos, who reportedly has had three children with Gómez, had entered the home presenting a chocolate birthday cake, but it was this special delivery that led to the drug lord’s arrest and the crumbling of his criminal enterprise.

He was seized by an elite squadron of the Mexican federal police in a stealthy operation where no shots were fired, ending his reign of terror.

Another kingpin brought down by a love interest was Servando Gómez Martínez, or ‘La Tuta’

In December 2024, a drug cartel ringleader paid the ultimate price for his glamorous wife’s Instagram addiction.

Luis Manuel Picado Grijalba, a Costa Rican drug lord, was grabbed by National Crime Agency officers near London Bridge just after Christmas, after his partner, Estefania McDonald Rodriguez, shared photographs of their luxury travels to her 21,000 followers on social media.

During the pair’s European holiday, she had posted snaps of herself posing by Rome’s Trevi Fountain, with the caption: ‘A trip is lived 3 times: When we dream it, When we live it, When we remember it.’

While Grijalba, nicknamed ‘Shock’, usually travelled separately from his wife, the couple were in the capital enjoying a £16,000 trip that took them from Costa Rica’s Juan Santamaría Airport to Paris and onwards to London.

But little did he know, US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents were tracking his every move, and asked National Crime Agency (NCA) officers in the UK to assist in the surprise operation.

With an arrest warrant already in place from the US, Shock was handcuffed at an airport, after being investigated for years by Costa Rican authorities.

Límon province, where Grijalba primarily operated his criminal network, has seen a huge surge in gang-related violence in recent years, with its capital city of the same name boasting a port thought to be a drug trafficking hotspot.

In 2023, 214 homicides were recorded in the metropole – more than in Costa Rica’s capital San José despite being a third of the size, according to investigative platform Insight Crime.

The drug lord himself had reportedly survived two assassination attempts prior to his seizure.

Together with his brother Jordie Kevin Picado Grijalba , nicknamed ‘Noni’, Shock established himself as one of the most prolific cocaine traffickers in the country, mostly through his direct contact with cocaine suppliers in Colombia.

Shock and Noni were responsible for importing cocaine largely via maritime routes and storing the drug at warehouses throughout Costa Rica.

They expanded their business by forming alliances with other prominent traffickers, such as Celso Manuel Gamboa and Edwin Danney Lopez, as well as armed groups, including a gang of sicarios, or hitmen, controlled by Tonny Alexander Pena Russell.

On March 2, 2022, he survived an ambush in which seven other men were shot dead on a farm at Matama, on the outskirts of Limón, after he hid from gunmen behind a cherry tree and a cabin.

At least four of the victims had homicide and drug trafficking convictions.

Grijalba was ordered to give witness testimony at the subsequent trial of four men, but refused to attend court in Limón.

Despite this, one Costa Rican and three Venezuelan men were convicted of the murders in March 2024, and will serve the maximum penalty of 50 years in prison.

Shock is currently being held in the UK pending a final decision on extradition to the US, according to the Treasury Department.

Rodriguez had plastered glamorous photos of her various holidays across social media – leaving a trail for authorities to follow

Grijalba, nicknamed ‘Shock’, was wanted in the US on suspicion of trafficking cocaine internationally

Of course, in the underground world of cartel violence, women aren’t just taking a back seat.

‘The only man I was ever afraid of was a woman named Griselda Blanco.’ This is what notorious Colombian drug lord and narcoterrorist Pablo Escobar allegedly once said about the female who created one of the most profitable cartels in history.

Blanco was so influential that a whole six-part Netflix thriller dedicated to telling her life story called Griselda was released in 2024.

Dubbed the ‘cocaine godmother’ and responsible for the murder of her three husbands, the mother of four amassed a vast empire and was a central figure in the Miami drug wars in the 1970s.

Born in Colombia in 1943, Blanco had a net worth of billions before her arrest in February 1985 for manufacturing, importing and distributing cocaine to the US.

She was credited with inventing the motorcycle ride-by killing during her time controlling southern Florida’s nascent cocaine trade, and established a distribution network across America that generated tens of millions of dollars a month, making shipments of more than 1,500kg.

Following her death in 2012, she was remembered for concocting creative methods to get cocaine into the US, even setting up a lingerie shop in Colombia that produced underwear for export with secret compartments.

But during her lifetime, there is no mistaking the fact that Blanco was responsible for an enormous amount of pain and suffering, wreaking death and bloodshed wherever she went.

Born in Colombia in 1943, Griselda Blanco had a net worth of billions before her arrest in February 1985 for manufacturing, importing and distributing cocaine to the US

Griselda Blanco was so influential that a whole six-part Netflix thriller dedicated to telling her life story called Griselda was released in 2024

She was involved in criminal activity from the age of 11, when she allegedly shot dead a wealthy boy after she kidnapped him when his parents refused to pay a ransom.

In 1964, aged 21, she illegally immigrated to New York with her three children and husband and began selling marijuana, but by 1970 she had him assassinated, and moved to Miami.

There, she met her second husband, drug trafficker Alberto Bravo, and honed her audacious approach to smuggling by flying young women from Colombia to the US, with cocaine stashed in their bras and underwear.

Bravo also met a grisly end in a blazing gun battle with his wife in 1975, when he and his six bodyguards were shot dead in a Bogotá nightclub car park over millions of dollars missing from the profits of the cartel they built together.

In 1983, she had her third husband assassinated, after he left Miami with the couple’s child, Michael Corleone – named after the central figure in the Godfather trilogy of mafia movies.

Overall, she was suspected of responsibility in at least 40 murders, possibly as many as 200, but was ultimately convicted of only three – two drug dealers and a two-year-old boy, Johnny Castro.

He was the son of one of her former enforcers, Jesus, who Blanco ordered to be assassinated after he allegedly insulted one of her sons.

But in an operation-gone-wrong, the toddler, who was travelling in his father’s vehicle, got caught up in the crossfire and was shot twice in the head by her hitmen.

Blanco’s former lieutenant, Jorge Ayala, told police: ‘At first she was real mad because we missed the father, but when she heard we had gotten the son by accident, she said she was glad, that they were even.’

She escaped the death penalty when Ayala was discredited as a witness, after being caught having phone sex with secretaries in the prosecutors’ office, and she served 20 years in jail.

Three of her sons were killed during her prison sentence, and once released in 2004, she was deported to Colombia and led a quiet life.

Blanco met her own demise aged 69 on September 3, 2012, when she was shot dead by a man on a motorbike outside a butcher’s shop, in a drive-by shooting that was a copycat of the assassination style that she coined during her lifetime.

[H/T Daily Mail]