Amado Carrillo Fuentes & Palacio de Mil y Una Noches

Notorious, and long gone, Mexican drug lord Amado Carrillo Fuentes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amado_Carrillo_Fuentes), who died after undergoing a botched facial plastic surgery to change the way he looked, had a mansion in Mexico that everyone called Palacio de Mil y Una Noches (The Palace of the 1001 Nights). You can see from this picture, from the article on Border Reporter, its Orientalistic architecture.

I don't have time to look into this any more than this at the moment, but it's a fascinating story, I've excerpted the article below, and I wonder if the place had ever been torn down? The article is from 2006. Feel free to add more links/info in the comments section (I'd be interested in learning more about this house).

From 1001 Nights

"Apr 4th, 2006 | By Michel Marizco | Category: General News, Organized Crime, Politics

HERMOSILLO, SONORA – Gov. Eduardo Bours Castelo wants to tear down one of the last vestiges of the most powerful drug lords Mexico ever knew.

Topped with Russian cupolas and covered in graffiti, the narco-castillo of Amado Carrillo Fuentes stands three stories in the air, looming over the swank homes in Hermosillo’s Colonia Pitic neighborhood.

Amado, the Lord of the Skies, dominated the cocaine trade between Colombia and the United States, buying 747 jets in the U.S. and ferrying tons of cocaine up to the border at Ciudad Juarez and El Paso.

In the 1990s, he purchased the unfinished castle from the proprietors who were left holding it when Tucson’s own drug lord was arrested in 1988. Jaime Figueroa Soto, the biggest drug lord ever arrested in Arizona, went down hiding in a closet in his million-dollar home in Scottsdale.

Narco-castillos dot the desert of northern Mexico. This one, dubbed the Palacio de Mil y Una Noches, is estimated to cost upwards of $5 million, sitting less than a quarter-mile from the governor’s mansion in this provincial Mexican capital.

In a frank discussion with reporters Monday, Gov. Bours said he’s asked the Mexican Federal Attorney General’s office to turn the seized property over to the state so it could be torn down and the property turned into a park.

Describing it as a haunted house in El Imparcial newspaper, Bours said he’s asked the feds to knock it down but that they say they can’t because the case is still in federal court. The feds seized the house in 1993.

History has a strange way of repeating itself and familiar names keep coming up in the narco-world.

Jaime, now 57, was released from a U.S. prison in Florence, Colo., March 20, 2006.

Amado Carrillo Fuentes died July 4, 1997 after a bad reaction to a plastic surgery operation. His death certificate listed him as a ganadero, a cattle rancher."