A South Carolina Mexican restaurant stands accused of moving a lot more than mulitas inside its taco trucks.
The S.C. State Attorney General announced an investigation into Greenville's Los Primos Mexican Restaurant for its suspected participation in an alleged drug trafficking conspiracy, with unsealed indictments collectively containing 124 charges against 34 defendants.
Among the allegations, the owners of Los Primos are accused of having a central role in transporting pounds of meth and cocaine between Georgia and other states, using their restaurant as a regional hub for trafficking the narcotics in and out of South Carolina, and its taco trucks for selling product directly.
“It was a Mexican restaurant just like any other,” Creighton Waters, of the State Attorney General’s Office, tells Greenville's Post & Courier. “It’s just that there was more you could get in your Styrofoam clam shells than just burritos and tacos.”
Los Primos, which stood across from an elementary school, reportedly worked its way into the cross-hairs of local law enforcement due to surrounding property crimes and reports of violent incidents, with one neighbor alleging that he's called 911 numerous times due to gunshots in the area. It is also wholly possible that, this being the U.S. South, selling tacos may have brought such authoritarian scrutiny alone.
The years-long state investigation, called "Los Banditos" (pronounced like the alleged L.A. Sheriff's Department gang of the same name) has produced information leading to the charges against Los Primos' owners, as well as to the seizure of large amounts of drugs (including many, many pounds of smack, yayo, yesca, skante, and zannies), plus cash, and firearms in both South Carolina and Atlanta.
According to the AG announcement, the "very large scale" trafficking operation has ties to Mexican drug cartels working in the state, specifically named by one DHS agent as "La Familia Michoacana," with claims of it bringing nearly $90 million worth of drugs into the South Carolina since the beginning of its operation.
All of which is to say, take that, Los Pollos Hermanos.
See a report from South Carolina's WLTX, below, for more info. and photos of a serious load of seized coke.
