The Surprising Truth Behind Mexico’s Cartel War, Child Hitmen & CJNG | Johnny Mitchell • 314
Julian Dorey · 29 Jun 2025 · 3h 12m
Guest: Johnny Mitchell · Host: Joey Def, Julian Dorey
Comedian and content creator Johnny Mitchell, host of a true-crime show called The Connect, walks through his own path from teenage weed dealer in Portland to federal and state prison to eight and a half years of stand-up before pivoting to cartel-focused journalism. He describes how he moved from small local deals to shipping large weed shipments cross-country from Oregon and California growers linked to Mexican traffickers, his eventual arrest over laundered cash rather than product, his attempted bribe of local police, and his time in county jail and a maximum-security facility, including performing insult comedy for other inmates. The conversation then shifts into his reporting trips into cartel territory, describing training camps for teenage recruits, drug-testing protocols within the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, the group's origins fighting the Zetas, its parallel-government structure, and its infiltration of the legal cannabis and stolen-fuel markets. He and the host discuss the CIA's historical and rumored ongoing entanglement with cartel figures like El Mayo and El Chapo, sensationalism in true-crime media, the pressures and ethics of interviewing traumatized sources, and a lengthy, opinionated detour into the Israel-Gaza war, media incentives, and cancel culture. It closes with speculation about Mexico's coming trade infrastructure, Chinese investment, and predictions about cartel power over the next twenty years. Throughout, the tone is loose, profane, and heavily bantering, mixing firsthand reporting claims with speculation the host himself flags as unverified.
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What comes up
Timestamps link into the episode on YouTube.
- Cartel training camps in Jalisco
- Arrest, prison time, and attempted bribery
- Guest's podcasting career and burnout
- Growing up and early drug dealing in Portland
- Scaling up weed shipping operations
- Movies, rap influence, and getting caught up in the lifestyle
- Legal cannabis market and cartel exploitation
- Cartel stolen fuel and smuggling rackets
- CJNG structure, Mencho, and recruit training
- Israel-Gaza war debate
- CIA-cartel collaboration theories (El Mayo, El Chapo)
- Mexico's planned trade corridor and China's role
Said on this episode
Quoted from the auto-generated transcript, which mishears names and technical terms. podcite.com reports what a show said; it does not endorse or fact-check it.
“You need to think of them as a level of government, maybe right under the the the Mexican military.”
“Not only is he like, oh, there's it's almost a we can say with with beyond a reasonable doubt that not only was Hamas being funded by the Israelis via US, they uh they actually knew October 7th was going to happen.”