Adolfo de Jesus Constanzo was born in Miami on November 1, 1962, to a Cuban immigrant mother, and was raised between Miami, Puerto Rico and Mexico City in a household steeped in Palo Mayombe, a Congo-derived religion. He worked as a model and a fortune teller in Mexico City, built a wealthy clientele among police officers, drug traffickers and entertainers, and told them that his rituals would make them invulnerable and invisible to the authorities.
By the late 1980s he had a following and was working with the Hernandez family, who ran cannabis across the border at Matamoros. At a ranch called Santa Elena he conducted ritual killings, using a cauldron, of at least fifteen people: rivals, informers, and men taken off the street. He was called the Godfather of Matamoros.
In March 1989 the group abducted Mark Kilroy, a twenty-one-year-old University of Texas student on spring break in Matamoros, and killed him. The disappearance of an American student produced enormous pressure. A member of the group drove through a police roadblock in April, leading officers to the ranch, where the bodies were found.
Constanzo fled to a flat in Mexico City. On May 6, 1989, when police surrounded it, he handed a machine gun to a follower, Alvaro de Leon Valdez, and ordered him to shoot him and his lover Martin Quintana Rodriguez, which he did. Constanzo was twenty-six. Sara Aldrete and several others were convicted of the killings. The case produced a wave of American press coverage about satanic cults which the evidence did not much support; what the group actually was, was a trafficking operation with a religious apparatus attached to it.