Woman Finally Caught After Double Hit on Two Israelis in a High-End Mexico City Restaurant
In July 2019, two Israeli underworld figures sat down with Vanessa Ballar Fallas at a Mexico City restaurant. At one point during their meeting, Ballar Fallas took a phone call and, moments later, two assailants approached the table and shot both men dead from close range. Ballar Fallas then calmly got up, walked out of the restaurant, and disappeared—until now.
According to reports from Mexico, Ballar Fallas was arrested
on Thursday for allegedly masterminding the killing of the two men. The pair,
Alon Azulay and Benjamin Yeshurun Sutchi, were reportedly in Mexico City to
collect a $14.5 million money laundering debt that she had with them. But the
shady deal was entangled with Mexico City’s brutal cartels, and the men were
aware they were in danger ahead of the meeting.
Messages on cellphones recovered at the scene—a restaurant
at the luxury Plaza Arts Mall—reportedly revealed that the victims only agreed
to meet in person if it all happened in a busy public place. Ballar Fallas
reserved the table where Azulay and Sutchi were shot and was there to meet them
before all hell broke loose in the building. Cellphone video of the incident
showed panicked diners hiding under tables from the gunfire.
Ballar Fallas, known by the moniker “La Güera,” is believed
by investigators to have lured Sutchi and Azulay to the restaurant with the
promise of giving them millions of dollars of laundered money. In a Friday
statement, the Mexico City Attorney General’s Office reportedly described her
as a “trusted partner” of the leadership of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, which
has been blamed for organizing the assassinations.
The newspaper El Universal reported that the Jalisco New
Generation Cartel had attempted to use the two Israelis to launder the millions
but came to believe that the two weren’t going to give them their share, so
allegedly arranged the hit job using Ballar Fallas and hired guns.
At the time of the murders, the shooters were named as
Esperanza Gutierrez, a 33-year-old woman, and 23-year-old male Mauricio Hiram.
They are both believed to have belonged to the Tláhuac Cartel, which is
reportedly allied with the larger Jalisco New Generation Cartel. Gutierrez was
arrested moments after the July 2019 hit, whereas Hiram wasn’t tracked down and
arrested until September of that year.
Israel’s embassy in Mexico said the two dead men had
previous criminal records in both Israel and Mexico, and Mexican police have
noted that the evidence suggested that the shooting was linked to a financial
dispute between criminal groups with connections to the Israeli mafia.
“The event yesterday leads us to relate the facts with a
settling of scores among criminal groups and/or organized crime,” Ulíses Lara
López, a spokesman for the city prosecutor’s office, said in 2019. “It could be
a settling of scores in the Israeli mafia, which is why a complete
identification [of the victims] was possible, along with their criminal
records.”
In August 2019, Mexico asked Interpol for help in finding
Ballar Fallas. On Thursday, a year and eight months after she allegedly masterminded
the deadly hit job, she was finally tracked down in Mexico City.
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