The recent arrest of Sinaloa Cartel leader Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada Garcia briefly made bold headlines in the United States and newscasts worldwide, but the story has faded so quickly that I thought I’d call legendary retired Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agent Mike Vigil and ask him put the moment in proper perspective.

“Mayo Zambada makes a tremendous mafia figure like Carlo Gambino, as big as he was, look like a neophyte,” Vigil says. “They called Gambino ‘the boss of all bosses,’ and deservedly so. I would call Zambada the boss of bosses of all bosses.”

A bold statement? Sure, but Vigil knows of what he speaks. He broke in as an undercover agent for the then newly created Drug Enforcement Administration. He worked undercover in the U.S., Mexico, Colombia and Bolivia, eventually rising to the agency’s head of international operations. These days, the retired Vigil is an author and consultant who provides a powerful and authentic American voice throughout Latin America on a range of issues, including transnational organized crime, narcotics trafficking and political corruption.

It's not only a matter of scale that made Zambada different, but his management style and product diversity as well. Turn on a television and “you’ll always hear about Pablo Escobar as the greatest drug trafficker of all time — not hardly,” Vigil says. “Pablo Escobar basically only trafficked cocaine, and most of his market was in the United States. Look at the organization that Mayo Zambada built. It now spans six continents, and not only did he traffic cocaine, but marijuana, heroin, methamphetamine and fentanyl. He invested billions in legitimate enterprises (in Mexico and the U.S.), and has made billions of dollars in human trafficking.”

He started far from the top of the treacherous heap. About the time Vigil was working undercover in Sonora, Mexico, and the country’s “Golden Triangle” states of Sinaloa, Durango and Chihuahua, Zambada had traded life as a Sinaloa farm boy and teenage marijuana peddler for an integral role in what would become known as the Juarez Cartel. In partnership with Amado Carrillo Fuentes, Zambada secured a network of reliable smuggling routes by air, land and sea from Medellin to El Paso, with an emphasis on the business over gratuitous bloodshed. But if there was trouble to be had, he could bring it with dozens of sicarios under his command.

After the death of Carrillo Fuentes in 1997, Zambada partnered with Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzmán. Zambada remained free, in large part, by keeping his trusted inner circle small and by not drawing attention to himself. He moved often, spent millions a year on police and political corruption and, compared to others, lived humbly. For decades he was a ghost, a wisp of smoke and rumor in the mountains of Sinaloa and the coast at Nayarit. He let others, including his partner Guzmán, assume higher profiles and more dangerous reputations.

Zambada, Vigil says, recognized early on that a simpler life was also a safer one. Despite millions in bounties offered for his arrest — Vigil still recalls the billboards soliciting information strung from Arizona to Texas — he remained out of jail until his capture along with Chapo’s son Joaquín Guzmán López on July 25 at a private airfield in El Paso.

At the time of his arrest, Zambada had been a major player in Mexico’s narco underworld through sexenios of six Mexican presidencies.

The horizontal business structure and distribution enables the cartel to operate no matter who sits at the top. As long as there are willing buyers, especially in the U.S., ways will be found to move and sell the product.

Given that reality, Vigil winced back in May when DEA issued a threat assessment stating the obvious: that the Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation cartels were active in all 50 states. Per the report: “They control clandestine drug production sites and transportation routes inside Mexico and smuggling corridors into the United States and maintain large network ‘hubs’ in U.S. cities along the Southwest Border and other key locations across the United States.”

The drug crisis is very real, Vigil says, but the politicization of it by those who want to build walls and target most immigrants is the worst sort of grandstanding. The vast majority of the drugs that find their way into the U.S. come through legal ports of entry, he says.

Zambada should know. He helped pioneer and plan many of the routes — roads that led to misery for many and billions for a few.

That’s part of what makes the Zambada arrest the end of an era, Vigil says, and he would know.

“We’re definitely from the same era, just on opposite sides,” he says. “This individual had tremendous street smarts. And the fact of the matter is, like Chapo Guzmán he had very little education and came from poverty. Through sheer tenacity and intelligence, he was able to build an empire that most individuals in the corporate world would not have the capability of building. When you look at most CEOS of global conglomerates, they don’t build anything. These guys built from nothing a criminal corporation spanning six out of the seven continents.”

And now that El Mayo is off the board and behind bars?

“The fact of the matter is, it’s not going to put a dent in the Sinaloa Cartel,” he says. “As long as the infrastructure stays intact, the capture of a leader — even Mayo Zambada — isn’t going to make a noticeable impact.”

John L. Smith is an author and longtime columnist. He was born in Henderson and his family’s Nevada roots go back to 1881. His stories have appeared in New Lines, Time, Readers Digest, Rolling Stone, The Daily Beast, Reuters and Desert Companion, among others.