Cartel Wives

To their neighbours, Olivia and Mia Flores are typical single mums, their days filled with packing their children’s lunches, driving them to soccer and attending PTA meetings. But Olivia and Mia are anything but ordinary. They live in fear, hiding behind assumed identities to escape a past life. 


Raised in Chicago in loving, law-abiding families, both women had fathers who were police officers. Yet they fell in love with identical twin brothers, Pedro and Margarito Flores, men who were to become two of America's biggest drug traffickers, and an integral part of El Chapo's Sinaloa Cartel. They lived wildly luxurious lives even as they tried to forget their guilt and survive the ever-present threats of betrayal, kidnapping, death or imprisonment that form a constant backdrop to cartel life. As the stakes of their business grew ever higher and bloodier, and the consequences of their actions became more unendurable, the two families finally made a desperate choice: to turn their backs on their criminal life and become the most important drug informants in US history. 


Now, from behind the cloak of witness protection, Olivia and Mia have come forward for the first time to tell the full story of their family's decision to risk everything—and seek redemption. 


Cartel Wives is a love story, an insiders' look into the terrifying but high-flying modern-day drug empire and, finally, the story of a major federal government operation to bring down one of the most feared men in the world.