Felix Gallardo, as portrayed in the Netflix Narcos series, is a modern Caesar. A strategist, a tactician and man whose dream, sordid as it is, is bigger than his soldiers can bear.

On the surface of it, Felix is a man who goes from being a low level dirty cop to a horrifically powerful drug baron all by selling a dream. He begs, cajoles and negotiates his way into first a republic that he slowly chips away into and empire. The show even alludes to this somewhat when a cop compares him to Julius Caesar.

Gallardo doesn’t run a plaza, he doesn’t have a large contingent of his own men (especially when he starts the conglomerate), but he has the trust and the fear of the plaza bosses. At any time his lieutenants can turn on him but they don’t. He leads them through the force of his will, and cunning. In the beginning he shows them that his vision and his leadership leads to profit. He leverages his relationship with the government, sure, but he starts by adding value over anything else. When they see the money come in once his plan of a united cartel materializes (and they see his skills as a negotiator), they all tacitly accept his leadership.

Once his marijuana field is destroyed, he is the only one with the cocaine supply, but nothing stops the others from developing their own contacts — and indeed, when they sense his weakness, they do. After the field is destroyed, he starts to assert his dominance. We see him aggressively put down one of the plaza bosses, he has the wife and children of another murdered, and he stops referring to the members as bosses but rather as employees. “I have no partners” becomes a theme. He has turned his republic into the empire that forever changes cocaine smuggling in Mexico.

Gallardo is portrayed as a small and nervous man. Diego Luna does a great job showing him as a sort of squirrelly Machiavellian prince. He’s not physically imposing and he rarely ever shows his teeth but when he does…He spends a lot of time explaining his vision in a gravelly intonation that belies his surprise that other people don’t see the future the way he does.

Things start to unravel when his government protector wants have Kiki Camarena abducted. Who knows what the real story is, but in the Netflix series, Gallardo gets outmaneuvered. He makes one massive mistake and spends the rest of his life living out the consequences. The brutal torture of Camarena, exposes Gallardo’s weakness both to himself and his lieutenants. It is the only time Gallardo is powerless. His ambition blinded him to the risks of his partnership.

His power grows and so does his ruthlessness. He stops thinking about the group and starts prioritizing himself. He betrays the woman he loved, he betrays a friend who risked her life to help him, he diminishes the bosses and he kills the leader of the federal police. But his biggest mistake is yet to come: his ambition outstrips his means.

He wants to take control of the sale of cocaine. He is Alexander in India: his soldiers will go no further. He’s abused them, bullied them, got them in a right mess and has them poised to make more money then they could ever imagine. But he has lost them and as a result has lost everything.