MEXICO CITY - A ritual is performed when drug lords are arrested here. They are paraded before the news cameras, often with black eyes and fresh bruises, and then stand shackled and grimacing between a pair of masked police.
The tough guys look tough, and they don't talk so much as mumble.
But the alleged gringo gangster called "La Barbie" smirked. And bragged.
In videotaped confessions that have riveted this country, a sweaty, cocky, beefy Barbie that boasts he was pals with the most famous crime bosses in Mexico, that he was rich, had "offices" in Colombia and Panama, and that he paid "some movie guys" $200,000 to film the story of his life - but didn't much like the script.
What happened to the filmmakers?
He says he doesn't know.
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Edgar Valdez Villarreal was arrested after a 14-month manhunt involving 1,200 Mexican federal police and an unknown number of U.S. agents. He faces multiple indictments in the United States for importing tons of cocaine. Mexican authorities say he is a kidnapper, torturer and murderer - as well as a major trafficker of marijuana and cocaine.
Valdez, 37, was born and raised in south Texas. He reportedly was a good student and a high school football star in the border town of Laredo, where he lived in a nice house in a nice neighborhood and went to a private high school. According to law enforcement agents, he began his climb up the criminal ladder after he started drinking and driving in Texas - and killed a man in an auto accident.
He got his nickname, Barbie, from a coach who thought the lean, dark-haired, square-jawed teen was as handsome as a Ken doll.
Had he been arrested in the United States, an alleged criminal mastermind of Valdez's stature would probably have zipped his lips. But in Mexico, where organized crime and celebrity often go together, Valdez has been more than willing to puff up the legend. Shown boasting to police interrogators about his "investments" in Colombia in one recent video clip released to the press, Valdez was asked: drugs?
"Sure, drugs," he said, proceeding to explain how he transported cocaine to Mexico from Panama and smuggled large amounts of cash out of the United States in boxes stashed in tractor trailers.
Video footage of Valdez's police confessions were rolling out in serialized form on news broadcasts and the Web sites of Mexico's newspapers all week. Though he has hired a Houston lawyer, he has shown little concern about self-incrimination, freely dishing to Mexican police about the inner workings of the country's drug cartels and naming names, including North America's No. 1 wanted man, Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman.
"Chapo is the one who began killing people," Valdez said, claiming that the Sinaloa cartel leader broke a non-aggression pact that Mexico's biggest capos worked out at a conference in 2007, where they sought to develop a truce to minimize violence and divvied up the billion-dollar smuggling routes to the United States.
But El Chapo "didn't respect the pact," Valdez said, describing how the man Forbes magazine named one of the richest in Mexico launched a war against the Juarez cartel for control of that city, now one of the most violent places in the world.
Valdez's confessions this week also show him disparaging Los Zetas, a rival cartel blamed for the recent massacre of 72 migrants in northern Mexico.
"They are dirty," he said. "As far as I'm concerned, not even their mothers could love them."
According to Mexico's El Universal newspaper, at least five filmmakers are interested in making a movie about Valdez, so he might get his wish, but maybe not the final cut.
