Inside a small house in a southern Dallas neighborhood, people gathered around altars, slaughtered animals and doused themselves in the blood.
The participants were drug traffickers, the feds say, who took part in occult rituals to protect themselves and their illicit operations from law enforcement. They even paid for a “hex” to be placed on a local DEA agent investigating them, court records show. The agent’s name was found on an altar.
Their alleged cult leader, a Mexican-American known as “Padrino” or godfather, could not, however, foresee the fate that awaited them. Agents arrested more than 40 men and one woman across North Texas since 2021 on federal drug trafficking charges.
The defendants hotly disputed the government’s claims about a cult and argued the bloody rites were a valid religious exercise. Most pleaded not guilty, and many remain locked up awaiting trial.
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Agents found multiple blood-soaked altars at the house near Paul Quinn College in southeast Oak Cliff as well as a “blessing book” in the home of the “godfather,” Daniel Vallejo, the accused cult leader and one of the charged defendants.
They also found cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine in his house and others, court records show. A DEA agent in the case, Marcus West, said at a detention hearing last year that the cult’s purpose was “to bless the success of the ongoing drug-trafficking enterprise.”
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