SECRET FILE: Markitos Toys and the Castro clan. Luxuries, bullets, and drug ties to "Los Chapitos." The fall of Sinaloa's influencers?

Behind the millions of views, luxury cars, and dream life that the Castro clan, led by popular YouTuber Markitos Toys, boasted about on social media, lies a much darker and more dangerous plot. This secret file reveals the alleged ties between these Culiacán digital idols and the Sinaloa Cartel, a spiral of threats, kidnappings, and murders that has put their viral empire in jeopardy.

The Castro family—Markitos Toys (Marco Eduardo Castro), his brother Kevin "KC" Castro (born in 1995 and partner of fellow influencer Ana Gastelum), and the now-deceased Gail Castro—catapulted to fame by exhibiting overwhelming charisma and an ostentatious lifestyle, replete with exotic trips and high-end vehicles. Markitos, who started as a parts salesman, became a digital phenomenon. But the facade of success soon began to crack.

Alarm bells rang on January 9, 2025, when Kevin Castro's name appeared on a list linking him, along with other influencers and YouTubers, to the "Los Chapitos" faction of the Sinaloa Cartel.

Shortly after, anonymous flyers flooded Culiacán, threatening to kill members of an alleged financial arm of Los Chapitos known as "Los Sapitos." Prominent among the list were the Castro brothers and Markitos Toys himself, accused of being front men and money launderers, as well as being described as arrogant and violent.

These threats are believed to have come from "La Mayiza," the rival faction led by Ismael "El Mayo" Zambada, engaged in a bloody territorial dispute with Los Chapitos.

The violence soon materialized in the most brutal way. In December 2024, strong rumors spread about Kevin Castro's imprisonment, a fact that led his partner, Ana Gastelum, to temporarily deactivate her social media accounts amid a tense family silence. The tragedy was confirmed and escalated.

Gail Castro was shot and killed on March 28, 2025, at the Villa Marina restaurant in Ensenada, Baja California, a plaza controlled by the Sinaloa Cartel but fiercely contested by the Jalisco New Generation Cartel. Later in 2025, before April, it was reported that Kevin Castro had also been killed in another violent incident.

The list of influencers threatened and subsequently executed didn't end there; several more suffered the same fate. This spiral of extreme violence suggests that accusations of their ties to drug trafficking were taken very seriously by rival factions, and that their high public visibility—ironically the source of their fame and fortune—made them easy targets or bloody examples in a relentless war. Was their digital fame their death sentence? Did they underestimate the danger of flaunting a life allegedly financed by drug traffickers?

In the face of the storm, the reactions of those involved have been erratic. Ana Gastelum, following the murder of her brother-in-law Gail, asked on social media to "stop blaming others for their mistakes," a statement that did little to quell the rumors. Markitos Toys, for its part, has tried to maintain the image of closeness with its fans that brought it to stardom, but the shadow of drug violence now looms over its entire clan.

Meanwhile, information about significant progress in police investigations into these high-profile crimes and their connections to organized crime is remarkably scarce as of May 2025. This apparent lack of progress could reflect the complexity and danger inherent in investigating these cases in cartel-dominated regions, or, in a more sinister scenario, it could point to possible infiltration or paralysis by authorities.