Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma

From a Denny's restaurant in Omaha comes a tale of cross-border drug smuggling, cross-media journalistic cooperation - and the long-awaited arrest of the alleged killer of a Mexican journalist.

The 2004 murder of Gregory Rodriguez, a photojournalist for the Sinaloa newspaper, El Debate, was an early harbinger of the wave of assassinations that have made Mexico the most dangerous country on earth for reporters outside of Iraq.  But now an alleged Mexican drug smuggler arrested in that Omaha Denny's has been implicated in Rodriguez's murder, report Dart Center Ochberg Fellows Karyn Spencer (2008) and Michel Marizco (2007).

 Over the weekend, they broke the story simultaneously in their respective publications, the Omaha World-Herald and Border Reporter: "Reeling in a Dealer of Meth and Death."

Antonio Frausto was arrested after agreeing over a meal at Denny's in Omaha to sell four pounds of the purest meth seen in Nebraska for $100,000 to an undercover DEA agent. But Spencer and Marizco's reporting reveal that he is also an alleged hit man for a Mexican drug cartel. Among the murders for which he has been accused, but never charged, was Gregorio Rodriguez, a photojournalist for the Sinaloa newspaper, El Debate.

Both stories place the significance of Frausto's arrest in the gloomier context of the situation of journalists in Mexico and they both end with the ominous words of Rodriguez's widow.

"We'll just have to see if he was involved in my husband's murder," Maria Teresa Gonzalez said last week. "I really don't want to say much more than that. You know how it is here."

Read the stories in the Omaha World-Herald and Border Reporter.