I am of an age where I know lots of dead people.
Some, of course, have been dead for a while.
Hollywood. Asshole Bob. Jimmy the Dead Guy. That was his nickname when he was still alive.
Chu and Eric and Jimmy.
Some have passed more recently. Mario. Tom.
Friends of mine die and I don’t even hear about it. Their obituaries don’t appear in the paper. They just disappear, though, to be fair, many of them had already disappeared from my life.
Maybe Facebook is where you find out that your friends are dead. I quit Facebook. Facebook wasn’t making me happy.
(At first I quit Facebook because I thought people were too judgemental. The I realized that I was too judgemental.)
Gilberto Ontiveros Lucero, El Greñas, died at a private hospital in Ciudad Juarez on April 28, 2025.
The internet tells us that Greñas was one of the founders of the Juarez cartel, and the Juarez cartel grew to be the biggest dog on the block. Greñas preceded Amado Carrillo Fuentes, the Lord of the Skies, in control of the local plaza, and probably Los Dos Rafas, but I’m not really sure of the history of ascension.
You can read about Greñas’ exploits here on InforBae.com, but it’s in Spanish. A few highlights:
As a youth he worked as a shoeshine boy, carpenter, and selling popsicles.
Mr. Ontiveros Lucero lost a million dollars on a horse race in Buenaventura that attracted thousands of spectators.
He kidnapped a photojournalist that came to his hotel to take pictures for the New York Times.
He owned a mansion in Cuernavaca that had previously belonged to the Shah of Iran.
In the 1980s, Mr. Ontiveros Lucero was known as El Zar del Narcotráfico
And yet El Greñas lived to be 73, in an industry not known for the longevity of its participants.