Leo Sharp was a veteran, a horticulturist, and—at age 77—one of the Sinaloa Cartel’s most prolific traffickers in the United States. He moved over a ton of cocaine between the southern border and Detroit before the DEA caught him on a Michigan highway in 2011.
He died in 2016 at the age of 92, before completing his prison sentence. Clint Eastwood immortalized his story in *The Mule*, a film released in 2018—just as the trial of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán in Brooklyn was revealing the most unexpected names associated with the organization.
No one suspected the elderly man driving his Lincoln pickup truck across Arizona. That was, according to Sharp himself, his entire strategy: “The police aren’t going to bother stopping an old man driving across Arizona,” he said in an interview with the U.S. network ABC.
Sharp was born on May 7, 1924, in Michigan City, Indiana. He fought the Nazis during World War II and received a Bronze Star for his service. Upon returning, he settled on a farm in his hometown, where he lived and worked for decades, dedicating himself to cultivating daylilies—a specialty in which he achieved international renown.
