The Relatives

Maria Marcu was in her kitchen when she learned of her son’s death. “I fell to the floor. I died. I came back to life. ... You can’t imagine what it was like,” she said. Her son, Constantin Sorinel Marcu, joined the Riviera Maya gang in Mexico in 2014, but fell out with its leader, Florian Tudor, and was shot dead in June 2018. Gang members visited Constantin Sorinel’s father at his home in Romania before the shooting, warning that his son would be killed. Tudor’s enforcers also secretly surveilled the family of a technician who had fled Mexico back to Romania, taking a photo of one of his children walking with a school bag.