On March 13, 1989, men working for Adolfo de Jesús Constanzo abducted Mark Kilroy, a pre-med student from the United States on spring break, from outside a bar in Matamoros, across the border from Brownsville, Texas, and took him to Rancho Santa Elena, a house in the desert where the group kept large shipments of cocaine and marijuana. About twelve hours later, officials said, when Kilroy tried to escape, Constanzo killed him with a machete blow to the back of the neck. Constanzo believed his spells needed a superior brain, and he had decided that the brain of an American student would supply it.
Under pressure from Texas politicians, Mexican police picked up four of his followers, among them two of the Hernández brothers who ran the drug business Constanzo had attached himself to. The police quickly uncovered the group and his part in Kilroy's death, and raided the ranch. They found his nganga, the cauldron at the center of his rituals, holding among other things a dead black cat and a human brain. Fifteen mutilated bodies were dug up at the ranch. One of them was Kilroy's. The press called the group the Narcosatanists; its members called Constanzo El Padrino, the Godfather.
He was born in Miami on November 1, 1962, to Delia Aurora González, a Cuban immigrant who was fifteen when she had him and who had three children by different fathers. After her first husband died she moved to San Juan, Puerto Rico, and remarried. Constanzo was baptized a Catholic and served as an altar boy, and he also went with his mother on trips to Haiti to learn about Vodou. The family returned to Miami in 1972. His stepfather died soon after, leaving them some money, and as a teenager he was apprenticed to a local sorcerer and took up Palo Mayombe, a religion that uses animal sacrifice. His mother married again, to a man involved both in the religion and in dealing drugs. Mother and son were arrested repeatedly for theft, vandalism and shoplifting. He graduated from high school but was expelled from prep school.
In Mexico City he met the men who became his first followers, Martín Quintana, Jorge Montes and Omar Orea, and together they built a profitable business casting spells for luck, with costly sacrifices of chickens, goats, snakes, zebras and even lion cubs. Many of the clients were wealthy traffickers and hitmen, and several were senior police officers on the take who introduced him to the city's powerful drug organizations; his group was said to be tied to the Gulf Cartel. He began robbing graves for human bones for the nganga, and then the group decided that live sacrifices would make the spirits stronger. The killings around Mexico City came to more than twenty, the bodies mutilated. When he demanded a full partnership with the Calzada family, one of the most powerful he knew, and was refused, seven members of the family vanished; their bodies were found with fingers, toes, ears and brains missing, and in one case the spine.
He then allied himself with the Hernández brothers and took up with a young woman named Sara Aldrete, whom he made his second in command and the group's high priestess, La Madrina, to run his followers while he moved marijuana into the United States. In 1988 he moved to Rancho Santa Elena, and there the ritual killings continued, of strangers and of rival dealers.
After the raid he fled to Mexico City with four followers. They were found only because police were called to their apartment building over an unrelated dispute. Believing the officers had come for him, Constanzo opened fire with a machine gun, and reinforcements arrived. Determined not to go to prison, he handed the gun to a follower, Álvaro de León, known as El Duby, and ordered him to shoot him and Martín Quintana. By the time police got in on May 6, 1989, both were dead. He was twenty-six. De León and Aldrete were arrested on the spot. Fourteen members of the group were charged with crimes ranging from murder and drug trafficking to obstruction of justice. Aldrete, Elio Hernández and Serafín Hernández were convicted of multiple murders and sentenced to more than sixty years each, and de León to thirty. American authorities have said they intend to prosecute Aldrete for Kilroy's murder if she is ever released.