Director: Dan Johnstone, Castor Fernandez
How does a horse-racing circuit in Oklahoma end up laundering millions of dollars for one of Mexico's most violent cartels? Cowboy Cartel, a 2024 documentary series directed by Dan Johnstone and Castor Fernandez, follows a rookie FBI agent's investigation into exactly that scheme.
What is Cowboy Cartel about?
The series traces the case from its unglamorous starting point — a junior agent pulling on a thread inside the American Quarter Horse racing world — through to a scheme tied to the Los Zetas cartel's money-laundering operation. Rather than staying purely procedural, it uses interviews and reconstructed timelines to show how legitimate-looking races, breeders, and auctions became a channel for drug profits, and how federal investigators slowly built a case strong enough to reach the top of the operation.
Cast & crew
Cowboy Cartel is a documentary series rather than a scripted drama, so its subjects are the real investigators, prosecutors, and industry figures involved in the case rather than a credited cast. Directors Dan Johnstone and Castor Fernandez rely on interviews with people close to the investigation alongside archival footage and case documents to reconstruct how the scheme unfolded and how it was uncovered.
Context & significance
The series sits at the intersection of true-crime documentary and a specific, lesser-known corner of American sports — Quarter Horse racing — that became an unlikely front for cartel money. Los Zetas built a reputation as one of the most violent Mexican cartels of the past two decades, and the racing-industry laundering scheme covered here was one of the more unusual ways that reputation and its cash reserves intersected with legitimate US institutions. Each episode runs around forty minutes, closer to a case-file format than a single feature-length documentary.
Where & how to watch
Cowboy Cartel is available on K-Time with a Persian dub and Persian subtitles, so viewers can pick whichever suits them after signing into a free account. The series streams episode by episode, and the platform's browsing experience is built in Farsi for the Iranian diaspora audience.