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Adolfo Constanzo: Inside the Mind of the Drug Cult Leader Who Ruled Through Fear · Inside The Criminal Mind

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  Speaker 1: Well, it is Halloween week, so we decided to do
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  Speaker 1: one special podcast on narco-satanists. On March 14, 1989, a
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  Speaker 1: 21-year-old American college student named Mark Kilroy disappeared while celebrating
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  Speaker 1: spring break in Monomoto, Mexico. Kilroy was a pre-med student
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  Speaker 1: at the University of Texas at Austin. He crossed the
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  Speaker 1: border from South Padre Island with friends and was returning
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  Speaker 1: from an evening of partying when he vanished. What initially
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  Speaker 1: appeared to be a missing person investigation would expose something
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  Speaker 1: far more disturbing. a drug trafficking organization whose members believed
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  Speaker 1: human sacrifice could make them invincible. At the center was
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  Speaker 1: Adolfo de Jesus Constanza. He was a Cuban-American who had
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  Speaker 1: established himself in Mexico as a spiritual practitioner. Constanzo cultivated
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  Speaker 1: an extraordinary reputation. He claimed to possess supernatural abilities and
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  Speaker 1: offer spiritual protection to wealthy clients, criminals, and drug traffickers.
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  Speaker 1: But Constanzo's organization went beyond superstition. He operated within a
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  Speaker 1: criminal network involved in marijuana trafficking and used violence, intimidation,
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  Speaker 1: and ritual practices to maintain authority. Central to the group's
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  Speaker 1: activity was a ritual cauldron known as Naganga, containing objects
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  Speaker 1: and human remains. Constanzo claimed the rituals involving the cauldron
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  Speaker 1: could provide supernatural protection. According to investigators, some followers believe
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  Speaker 1: these practices can make them invisible to police and bullets.
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  Speaker 1: If members accepted that their leader controlled supernatural forces, questioning
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  Speaker 1: his authority became more than disobedience. It became a threat.
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  Speaker 1: It was an existential threat. In April 1989, investigators following
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  Speaker 1: leads connected to drug trafficking reached Rancho Santa Elena, a
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  Speaker 1: rural property near Matamoros. Authorities there discovered the human remains,
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  Speaker 1: including those of Mark Kilroy. The investigation ultimately identified multiple
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  Speaker 1: victims and revealed that the organization had used murder as
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  Speaker 1: part of its ritual practices. The discovery generated international headlines,
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  Speaker 1: and the media quickly labeled the group as narco-satanists, of course,
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  Speaker 1: for media hype. Constanzo's practices drew selectively from Afro-Caribbean religious traditions,
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  Speaker 1: including Paulo, while incorporating criminal violence in his own distorted beliefs.
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  Speaker 1: The murders were not representative of mainstream Paulo religious practice, however.
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  Speaker 1: The group's behavior also illustrates a psychological phenomenon known as
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  Speaker 1: magical thinking, which involves believing that unrelated actions where rituals
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  Speaker 1: can directly control external events. In everyday life, it can
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  Speaker 1: appear relatively harmless, such as athletes wearing lucky clothing. Within
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  Speaker 1: Constanzo's organization, however, those beliefs became intertwined with coercion and
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  Speaker 1: criminal power and lethality. So, failures, meanwhile, could be blamed
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  Speaker 1: on insufficient loyalty or inadequate ritual observance. On May 6, 1989,
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  Speaker 1: Mexican police located Constanzo in a Mexico City apartment. As
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  Speaker 1: officers closed in, Constanzo ordered a follower to kill him.
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  Speaker 1: Constanzo died at the scene. Some of the questions that
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  Speaker 1: remain is how could individuals engaged in organized drug trafficking
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  Speaker 1: come to believe that ritual murder offered protection from arrest?
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  Speaker 1: And how did one charismatic criminal persuade others to participate?
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  Speaker 1: Sometimes belief itself becomes a mechanism of criminal control.