EVERY WEEK, WE bring you a round-up of the best longreads of the past seven days in Sitdown Sunday.

And now, every weeknight, we bring you an evening longread to enjoy which will help you to escape the news cycle. 

We’ll be keeping an eye on new longreads and digging back into the archives for some classics.

From jock to drug lord

Edgar ‘La Barbie’ Valdez Villarreal grew up in Texas – but went on to become a rich and successful drug lord.

(Rolling Stone, approx mins reading time)

But his fashion sensibility wasn’t the only thing that distinguished Barbie from other Mexican drug lords: He was also a gringo, a middle-class suburban jock who was born and raised in Texas. He is the only U.S. citizen known to have risen to the top of a Mexican cartel, and the only American on the State Department’s list of targeted drug lords. (The U.S. government offered $2 million for information that would lead to his arrest.) For years, as drugs flowed into Acapulco from Colombia, Barbie controlled the main distribution routes out of the city, moving as much as two tons of coke – that’s 2 million grams – into the U.S. every month. Most of the drugs went to Memphis and Atlanta, where Barbie is believed to have been the main supplier for several violent networks

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