Here's your Forbes Daily Briefing for Monday, March 2nd.

Today on Forbes, why Drug Kingpin El Mentiono's billion-dollar fortune will likely remain untouched

by authorities.

On the evening of Saturday, February 21st, Nemesio El Mentiono Osegera was enjoying himself in a luxury cabin nestled in the pine-covered

hills of a resort community in Topalpa, a popular tourism destination in the western state of

Halisco. Early Sunday morning, a squadron of Mexican security forces gunned down the 59-year-old

drug lord in a five-hour firefight.

The feds had found Mexico's most wanted man by tracking the movements of the lover whom

he had traveled to meet for the weekend.

Elmensch leaves behind the Halisco New Generation cartel, known as C.J.N.G., one of Mexico's

two largest drug trafficking organizations, along with the

Sinaloa cartel. That cartel was formerly led by Joaquin El Chappo, Guzman, who was 68 years old

and is serving a life sentence in a U.S. prison. El Mancho, a former Halisco state policeman who lived

and was incarcerated in the U.S. as a young man,

founded C.J.N.G. in 2009 as an offshoot of the millennial cartel,

following the arrests and deaths of Millennio's leaders and a vicious power struggle.

With his combination of organizational efficiency and psychotic ruthlessness, like dumping dozens

of tortured bodies in the streets of Veracruz one evening in 2011, El Mentiono grew his

outfit into a diversified criminal enterprise beyond just drug smuggling, with interests

in human trafficking, large-scale extortion, fuel theft, and financial scams.

In all likelihood, El Mentiono was Mexico's richest kingpin at the time of his death.

Mexican officials estimated in 2017 that C.J.N.G. Enterprises held roughly $50 billion

...