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Read: How a Mobster’s Son Got Everyone to Repeat His Line About the Mafia Declaring War on ISIS
Last week, El Chapo, the leader of the Sinaloa Cartel who escaped from prison in a tunnel this summer, allegedly declared war on the Islamic State. The threat was reported in a since-deleted post on cartelblog.com, which claimed that El Chapo had sent an email to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al Baghdadi calling ISIS soldiers “lowly pussies” and threatening to “destroy” them, after the Islamic State reportedly intercepted and destroyed some of the cartel’s shipments to the Middle East.
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The problem is, there’s no evidence ISIS actually intercepted any of the Cartel’s drug shipments, and the email had apparently been leaked by an unnamed Mexican blogger, which made it hard to figure out if any of it was true. And on Friday, it became clear that the whole thing was a hoax. According to a report in the New York Daily News, the story originated as a satirical post on a website called Thug Life Videos almost two weeks ago, and went viral when Cartelblog.com picked it up. Unsurprisingly, it didn’t take long for a slew of reports to surface with accounts of the email.
In an interview with the Daily News, Steve Charnock—the writer behind the original Thug Life Videos post—said the whole thing was intended to be a joke. The original post had been tagged “satire,” but Charnock said it snowballed because it coincided with events in the news.
“We just thought it would be funny,” Charnock told the paper, “but I guess we made some of the quotes just a little too real.”
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