Adolfo Constanzo was a drug dealer and occultist. He and his gang sacrificed humans in bizarre rituals. I had read about him online before, but he never really pops up in any of the books I read about occult murders. There’s a book by Edward Humes called Buried Secrets that came out in 1991 that seems to be a considered the definitive book on the topic, but I had a copy of Gary Provost’s Across the Border, so I went with that.

This is a really horrible story. Constanzo and his gang became known as the “Narcosatanists”, but they weren’t really Satanists. They were practicing a nasty form of Palo Mayombe, an African form of spirituality that came to the USA through Cuba, that involved sacrificing human beings and putting their remains into magical cauldrons. Apparently they had been doing this to rival drug dealers for a while, but things got messy after they kidnapped an American student. (They wanted a victim with a big brain.) They killed at least 20 people. It’s unclear how many of these victims were murdered for the sake of ritual and how many were drug hits. Apparently members of Constanzo’s crew used to drive around without any fear of being caught because they believed their boss had put an invisibility spell on them.

Provost’s book came out just months after Constanzo died, and it seems likely that more details about the crimes have come out since then. I expected this book to present a sensationalized version of the story, but I don’t think that it does. I noticed that Provost never even mentioned the fact that some of Constanzo’s victims were raped before they were murdered. This may not be an exhaustive account, but its not bullshitty either. There’s a section on other Satanic crimes that’s probably unnecessary given the fact that Constanzo and his crew were not actually Satanists, but Across the Border is relatively short, and the crimes and characters described within are fascinating. It certainly wasn’t a boring book. If I ever get my hands on a copy of Hume’s Buried Secrets, I’ll probably give that a go too.