From Chicago twins to cartel kingpins: The rise and fall of the Flores brothers
To build their billion-dollar drug empire, the Flores brothers worked together as a perfect machine.
Identical twins born in Chicago to Mexican immigrant parents, they could communicate without speaking - just a raised eyebrow or grunt would do.
Pedro, who went by Pete, had the smarts and discipline to manage a sprawling bi-national business. Margarito, known as Jay, brought the charm and deal-making savvy.
By their early 20s, they were doing business with the world's most powerful drug lords, including Sinaloa cartel chief Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán.
The twins were born into the drug trade and had grown up on gangster flicks like "Scarface," but several brushes with death convinced them they didn't want to end up like the film's protagonist, Tony Montana, a cocaine smuggler killed in a hail of gunfire.
So they made a dramatic choice that put a target on their backs forever:
They snitched.
Their spying helped bring down El Chapo and marked the starting point of a trend of high-profile drug lords cooperating with federal authorities that continues to this day. But it came with a price - the twins were convicted of drug trafficking and sentenced to prison.
Today they are free men living thousands of miles apart, each pursuing a very different path toward what they hope is redemption.
One has adopted an assumed identity, reinventing himself as a suburban dad with a job that has nothing to do with the drug trade. The other lives a very public life as a media cartel expert and a consultant to law enforcement, cashing in on his unusual expertise. Their separation is for the best, Pete says: "We make too much noise when we're together."
But he worries about Jay, whose appearances on Fox News, meetings with members of Congress and training sessions with cops, he fears put the whole family at risk.
They all remember the judge's warning at their sentencing hearing in 2015.
"You and your family will always have to look over your shoulder," he told the brothers, who sat side by side in the courtroom in matching prison uniforms, anxiously tapping their feet. "Any time you start your car, you're going to be wondering: Is that car going to start, or is it going to explode?"
It was not an exaggeration.
Their father, after all, had already paid the ultimate price.
Margarito Flores Sr. was a model immigrant. He drove a forklift at a candy factory and parked a station wagon in front of his tidy home in Little Village, a Mexican American enclave on the South Side of Chicago. But he had a secret.
Margarito Sr., who hailed from Zacatecas state, was smuggling people and drugs. In 1981, he sold 11 pounds of heroin to an undercover federal agent and was arrested in front of his children and his wife, who was pregnant with the twins. He was in prison when Pete and Jay were born three months later.
Some of their earliest memories are of road trips to Mexico, where their father put them to work picking and packaging marijuana.
For the precocious, bright-eyed twins, childhood ended the day their father came home from prison when they were 7 years old. He didn't smoke, didn't drink and told them only weak people used drugs. He assigned them grueling chores and taught them that respect between men was everything. "Every other word was a swear word, even when he was happy," Jay said.
It wasn't long before Margarito Sr. went back to the family business and introduced his sons to the rhythms of life as a cartel mule.
