Narquitectura: Inside the Fortified Palaces of Mexico's Drug Lords

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A gangster lives a fast, dangerous life ' especially Mexico's brutal narco-chieftains. Just look at their houses. With the prospect of death never far away and plenty of money to burn, it makes sense to spend lavishly on a mansion ' especially a fortified one. The locals have a term for the style: narquitectura.

Some are built like castles, intended to express authority and feature lavish interiors and pens of exotic pets. Others are tucked into tony, upper-income neighborhoods, making their gaudiness less conspicuous. But a gangster's house, no matter where it is, is going to be ostentatious and idiosyncratic. Some house are simply way too big, with furnishings seemingly chosen at random and in an apparent hurry. Damien Cave, a reporter for The New York Times, wrote that the mansions look they were built and decorated "as if on a shopping spree with a deadline imposed by a dangerous profession."

But the defining aspect of narquitectura is paranoia. Walls or gates are a must. Many gangster cribs have few windows and resemble command centers as much as homes, including business-like meeting rooms and advanced security systems. Drug cartels have even carried over some of the tacky luxury into death with elaborate bulletproof tombs. Narquitectura estates often turn out to be lifelong investments ' no matter how short those lives are.

Above:

Arabian Nights

Few drug lords matched the excess of Amado Carrillo Fuentes. Arguably the most powerful Mexican drug boss of the 1990s, Carrillo assassinated his way to the top of the Juarez Cartel and was infamous in the U.S. for transporting billions of dollars worth of cocaine on a fleet of private jets.

His vanity was reflected in this oversized mansion, named "The Palace of a Thousand and One Nights" after the Middle Eastern folk tales. Estimated to be worth $5 million, the mansion now sits abandoned and covered in graffiti in the posh Colonia Pitic neighborhood in the northwestern Mexican city of Hermosillo. Authorities have since taken steps to demolish it. Carrillo died in 1997 during a botched plastic surgery operation.

Photo: Artotem/Flickr