In drug trafficking as in burger flipping, franchisees, who are not truly part of the company, are never going to be quite as loyal to the brand as regular staff. Entrepreneur magazine has pointed out that franchises tend to have a weaker “core community” of employees than do top-down organizations. The same is true of criminal gangs. No one knows this better than the Zetas, who started out as the armed bodyguards of the Gulf cartel. Within a few years the Zetas had become too ambitious for their limited role, at which point they turned against their Gulf employers, all but destroying them.
