Post by New York Magazine

In her previous life, Chelsie Marie Anderson had earned money waitressing at a seafood restaurant in Clinton, South Carolina. She went to church; she attended PTA meetings. With her husband, Jeremiah, whom she married in 2015 in a dry ceremony on the campus of a Christian college, she had owned a home in a development where the kids rode bikes in the street. “They were just so perfect,” her friend Morgan Gibbs remembers thinking of the couple. Now, Anderson gets dizzy thinking about how quickly her life had flipped. Anderson’s relationship fell apart in 2018, and she began taking drugs with fellow waitresses to blow off steam. But when her husband officially moved out, “a bump here and there quickly turned into an eight ball a day.” She lost custody of her kids. It was a breaking point. “I was like, Fuck it,” she says. “I’m about to be exactly what they want me to be.” She started selling cocaine to cover the costs of her expensive habit. At first, Anderson says of dealing, “I was just trying to make a quick come-up.” But that was only the beginning. Today, she is a fugitive on the run in Mexico, entangled in the largest narcotics-conspiracy investigation in state history. She has ascended the ladder from small-time meth deals to helping cartels and meeting with suppliers at cockfights in the Mexican mountains. Julia Lindau travels to Mexico to meet Anderson face-to-face — and reports on how she went from suburban mom to international drug dealer: https://lnkd.in/eNmA_fbN