“They’ve got a person and they want to sell him. The family wants to buy him. It’s all about money. It’s not personal. They’re just trying to move merchandise,” explains Jacobo, the wily “go-to guy” in Mexico who, before he retired, negotiated 88 kidnaps and returned the victim alive in every case – if occasionally minus a couple of fingers.

Jacobo is the human face of an unorthodox service industry that has grown up alongside the lucrative business of kidnapping in Mexico City, whose unforgiving underworld is more readily comprehended by those like him who have a hawker’s economic shrewdness.