Before arriving in Vegas, Golden Knights Spanish voice had to deal with death threats in Mexico.
The voice is audible and full of emotion in the shaky, diagonally shot, and partially out of focus video clip.
On the congested Las Vegas Strip, Jorge Lopez yells, “That’s my dad,” while focusing his phone on a passing bus. “That right there is my dad.”
Play-by-play commentator for the Vegas Golden Knights in Spanish, Jesus Lopez, has spread a Mexican flag over the top of the bus and is swaying it while his son breaks records. Days have passed since the Golden Knights won their first Stanley Cup as a team, six years after they were founded, by defeating the Florida Panthers in five games during the best-of-seven Final.
“It seems like he lived twice,” Jorge remarked, astonished by his father’s character and accomplishments.
The stories of the Golden Knights and Lopez, who had no prior hockey experience when he immigrated to the US from Mexico, are as improbable as it gets—violence and threats that he believes originated from the Mexican cartel La Familia Michoacan changed his family’s life and his own.
Arriving in 2011, he was a man accustomed to managing restaurants and making pizzas; he had dabbled in sports broadcasting as a hobby but never as a career; and he thought he would be killed if he stayed in Mexico.
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Lopez received the first call while preparing pizza sauce.
Cursing, the voice on the other end told Lopez it was time to make amends because they knew his restaurants were doing well.
The voice on the call said, “You’re going to have to give us 5,000 pesos per month for each store if you want to keep your businesses safe,” back in 2010.
Lopez declared, “I’m not going to do that.”
On Sunday, a man who was almost lifeless was dumped at his door.
“This is how you’re going to end up [expletive],” they shouted at me, Lopez claimed. “I was attempting to assist the man in pulling himself together, but he refused to listen to me and left me alone. You
The calls persisted, getting increasingly detailed, menacing, and intimate. They would talk about how vulnerable and obliging his daughter Celina looked while working out at the gym. In a panic, not knowing what he would find, Jesus would grab a delivery motorcycle from the restaurant and ride there.
Mexico is beset by a problem that sends travel advisories flying and terrorizes the lives of Mexican citizens: cartels. They operate as criminal organizations that are frequently focused on drug trafficking, using violence, extortion, threats, and kidnapping. Initially emerging in 2006, La Familia Michoacana gained prominence by the early 2010s, when the Lopez family was the target of their first attack.
The Zetas, an armed wing of the Gulf Cartel, split from the group of traffickers at some point, according to Nathan Jones, an associate professor of security studies at Sam Houston State University’s College of Criminal Justice. Jones specializes in studying drug trafficking organizations in Mexico and organized crime violence. “And they made an extremely violent and brutal entrance, hurling severed heads onto a dance floor and declaring that they were there to defend the populace.
“Yet, despite their claims to be defending the populace, La Familia Michoacana also exploited the locals by engaging in acts of extortion.”
Local company owners who turned a profit, particularly one that was noticeable, would be the targets of
With the opening of their first restaurant in 1980 by his older brother, Lopez and his family had been in the pizza business for forty-five years. When the people he thought were from the cartel came looking for them, they had established 16 or 17 Santino’s Pizza locations across the state of Jalisco, paying homage to James Caan’s character from “The Godfather.” Their logo was recognizable and well-known. The chance for a big payoff was something that would have appealed to the cartels.
“During this time, they were fighting against the Zetas, a notoriously aggressive and violent organization,” stated Jones, the writer of “Mexico’s Illicit Drug Networks and the State Reaction.” Zetas and La Familia are both renowned for their violent and
When Lopez entered his office, he found his brother Armando on the floor with a gun aimed at his head, despite the fact that Armando owned a shop in their hometown that sold sheets of wood and was not in the pizza business.
Hopelessness and helplessness were the emotions experienced.
According to Jones, “extortion is one of the crimes that is notoriously underreported.” “People do not submit reports. They don’t think that process will result in anything positive. In the back of their minds, they also wonder, “What if the police are aware of this?”
The family didn’t think it was worth calling the police or looking for authorities they couldn’t or wouldn’t trust. According to state attorney general Eduardo Almaguer’s 2016 interview with Reuters, up to 20 percent of the municipal police force in Jalisco, where the Lopez family resided, are in collusion with cartels, and 70 percent would not act against them.
Lopez, who was residing in Ocotlán, a city close to the Jalisco–Michoacan border at the time, claimed that the cartels had people simply keeping an eye on people. Who was building a large home, who purchased a new car, and they just called them because they thought they had the money. After I completed it, my home was a
