Bandit Stars Stayed at Drug Trafficker's Ranch

Call it method acting of a kind or a form of research. While shooting the movie Bandidas in northern Mexico four years ago, Penélope Cruz and Salma Hayek played outlaws by day before the cameras, and then allegedly slept at a ranch owned, appropriately enough, by a drug trafficker.

There is no suggestion the actors knew who the ranch owner was when they stayed for several nights, at the house beside a reservoir in the state of Durango. But it turns out the property belonged to Sergio Bernal, a man wanted on suspicion of drug trafficking and known locally as El Grande, or the Big One. Mexican paparazzi who covered the actors' stay in Durango during the eight-week shoot say their security was unusually tight.

The revelation came from protected witnesses questioned by police hunting Bernal, according to the Mexican newspaper El Universal. Officials have not confirmed or denied the report.

Bernal was dismissed from the federal police in 1996 but worked his way into the inner circle of a trafficking gang run by the four Beltran Leyva brothers. They were blamed for the assassination in May of Mexico's federal police chief who had captured one of them a few months before. The family's recent split from Mexico's biggest cartel run by Joaquín "El chapo" Guzmán has also opened a vicious front in the wider drug turf wars already raging around the country.

Set about 100 years ago, Bandidas finds Hayek and Cruz slipping into a life of crime after joining together to hit back at the killers who murdered their families.

This is not the first time celebrities have become mixed up in Mexico's underworld. Several Mexican singers, including the superstar Juan Gabriel, felt obliged to plead naivety last year when it was revealed they sang at private narco-fiestas.

Bands playing music popular in areas of the country where drug traffickers are powerful have been killed when their songs are taken up by a rival gang.