Mexican Drug Lord ‘El Chapo’ Found Guilty

Jurors in the trial of Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman found the
notorious Mexican drug lord guilty on all 10 counts in his
international narcotics smuggling trial in a capstone triumph for
the U.S. Justice Department.

The jury’s decision Tuesday comes after an 11-week-long
prosecution that featured unprecedented details about the inner
workings of the multibillion-dollar Sinaloa cartel, chilling
stories of drugland warfare and sweeping accusations of Mexican
corruption, from street-level police to the presidency. Jurors
deliberated for six days.

The 61-year-old Guzman who had escaped from two Mexican prisons,
now will almost certainly spend the rest of his life behind bars in
the U.S.

Guzman reacted calmly and watched jurors as the verdict was
being read and relayed to him by an interpreter. He then shook the
hands of all of his lawyers and smiled at his wife before being led
out of the courtroom.

He was charged with 10 criminal counts, covering accusations
that he sold hundreds of tons of cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin
and marijuana; conspired to murder a slew of rivals; and helped run
one of the world’s largest international drug networks.

Prosecutors had spent months presenting an “avalanche of
evidence” that included more than 50 witnesses, 200 hours of
testimony, ledgers of drug deals, a grenade launcher, and videos of
Guzman’s escape tunnels and his underwear drawer.

The defense, on the other hand, took about half an hour to
present its case — one witness and one document — before resting
late last month. Guzman’s lawyers argued that the case against
their client was a vast, multi-state conspiracy.

After he read the verdicts, U.S. District Judge Brian Cogan told
jurors that their attention to detail was “quite remarkable. Quite
frankly, it made me proud to be an American.”

Before jurors began deliberations Feb. 4, they’d spent weeks
listening to gripping testimony about drug world mayhem, the
ingenious ways Guzman had smuggled hundreds of tons of cocaine into
the U.S. for decades, and the kingpin’s lavish spending on yachts,
beach homes and even a private zoo with lions, panthers and a
tiger.

They sat through bombshell testimony alleging Guzman paid a
$100-million bribe to a Mexican president to allow him to keep
smuggling hundreds of tons of drugs with impunity.

They learned that before Guzman was known by the nickname that
means “Shorty,” he was dubbed “El Rapido,” or “Speedy,” because he
masterminded the quick transport of tons of cocaine through
cross-border tunnels in the early 1990s.

And in case there was any doubt about how violent Guzman could
be, a final prosecution witness testified about Guzman beating two
rival gang members with a stick for hours, before shooting each in
the head, and throwing them into a raging bonfire.

American authorities have been working for nearly a decade on a
case against Guzman, a man whose legend grew after he escaped two
maximum-security prisons in Mexico (once allegedly in a laundry
cart, once through a tunnel under his cell shower).

After his capture in Mexico in 2016, he was extradited to the
U.S. — and since the start of his trial in November, has been
brought to court in Brooklyn by heavily armed guards.

Jurors — who remain anonymous — have also been carted back and
forth to court, under the protection of the U.S. Marshals
Service.

In a Brooklyn courthouse under unprecedented security, the U.S.
government took every opportunity to show what all the years of
information-gathering on Guzman had produced.

And what a show it has been. Prosecutors, aided by testimony
from a who’s who of former cartel higher-ups, painted an epic
picture of Guzman: a poor boy from the mountains of northwest
Mexico who used his brutal cunning to rise to power, taking the
helm of one of the world’s largest drug networks, with a
diamond-encrusted pistol on his hip.

Jurors heard remarkable detail about the cartel’s internal
dealings and how hundreds of tons of cocaine were smuggled on boats
disguised as fishing vessels, between frozen pallets of meat, in
submarines and small airplanes, through cross-border tunnels — and
even in pickled jalapeño cans.

They listened to scores of intercepted phone messages, with
Guzman’s blaring voice arranging drug deals and bribing police
commanders; they watched videos of the drug lord interrogating a
man whose hands were tied to a pole; they were read dozens of text
messages between Guzman and his inner circle; they saw footage of
the networks of escape tunnels underneath his homes — each starting
under a bathtub lifted by hydraulics to reveal a secret entrance
and ladder.

Jurors heard from law enforcement officials involved in hunting
Guzman or in massive drug busts in his decades of cartel rule. But
the heart of the prosecution was the litany of cooperating
witnesses, members of Guzman’s inner sanctum and now mostly
convicted felons testifying against their former boss in hopes of a
reduced prison sentence.

Guzman’s defense team tried at every turn to tear down the
cooperating witnesses, portraying them as turncoats and liars. The
lawyers argued that the case against Guzman was a multi-state
conspiracy and that their client was a victim — less a
sophisticated boss than a scapegoat built into a myth by a corrupt
system. The U.S. Justice Department, they charged, would do
whatever it could to take down Guzman, including letting a dozen
drug bosses go free in exchange for prized testimony.

“Did you even know they give these deals for such bad people? Is
that the country you thought you were living in?” Guzman’s defense
attorney Jeffrey Lichtman asked jurors during closing arguments,
his voice booming. “What do you think would happen if you broke the
rules? You better hope you have a Chapo to turn on.”

But the defense’s efforts — hectoring witnesses, throwing
sarcastic jabs at these “scum,” only seemed to heighten the
cinematic feel. Their tales of intrigue were Shakespearean, their
stories of bloody internecine drug wars reminiscent of “Game of
Thrones.” And all the while, Guzman, a billionaire drug lord who
went from lavish Mexican villas to a tiny prison cell, sat in
apparent repose in his well-fitted suits.

He exchanged waves and smiles with his glamorous 29-year-old
wife, Emma Coronel, a former Mexican beauty queen. She offered
little emotion during the hours of testimony, aside from smirking
when Guzman’s distraught former mistress took the stand. The next
day, while the mistress continued her testimony, Coronel wore a
burgundy velvet suit blazer that matched her husband’s jacket
exactly.

And when Coronel herself became the center of riveting testimony
— a former cartel lieutenant testified that she helped coordinate
Guzman’s 2015 prison escape — she sat stone-faced, running her
hands through her shiny black hair.

The laying bare of Guzman’s fantastical and brutal life may seem
like a triumph for prosecutors, the trial he deserved. But this is
a man who, even in hiding, sought out movie producers to write his
own biopic. It is probably the trial he thinks he deserved too.

And so, in a case that has often seemed less about innocence or
guilt than the nature of power and the price of justice, the
state’s criminal witnesses lined up to betray the emperor. Like
Shakespeare’s Roman senators, they became the drama’s stars.

There was the tragic Miguel Angel “El Gordo” Martinez, a former
pilot and longtime cartel lieutenant, who, even after a decade of
informing on his former boss, still referred to him as “Mr.
Guzman.”

He told of the times before he turned on Guzman, when he said
the drug lord sent assassins after him four times. The killers came
after him in prison, the first three times wielding knives, the
last time with grenades. Martinez told the jury he feared he’d
traded his life for his freedom by continuing to testify.

The judge ordered courtroom artists not to sketch his face.

“I never failed him, never stole from him, never betrayed him; I
watched over his family,” he testified in November. “The only thing
I received from him was four attempted attacks against me, without
saying anything.”

Next on the stand was a silicone wraith in a black parka and
gloves, whose face alone was so frightening that one juror turned
his chair away. The longtime head of Colombia’s brutal North Valley
cartel, known as “The Man of a Thousand Faces,” had undergone
numerous surgeries to disguise his identity while he was on the
run.

Juan Carlos “Chupeta” Ramirez Abadia, whose nickname means
lollipop, hired a close friend to keep ledgers tracking the more
than 150 murders he ordered and sales of tons of cocaine. That
friend was later poisoned in prison, a fact that seemed to pain the
witness less than the drugs he lost to the U.S. Coast Guard.
“That’s a tragedy for me as a drug trafficker,” he said.

December brought the truculent Colombian narco family scion
Jorge Cifuentes and the hopeless romantic Chicago drug boss Pedro
Flores, who each introduced tapes in which Guzman could be heard
personally negotiating drug deals — among the clearest evidence
presented at trial.

If the first month of the trial set the stage for Guzman’s
downfall, the final weeks of testimony were the real showstoppers.
The keys to the prosecution case were on full display: traitors,
technology — and Guzman’s own paranoia.

There was the surreal tale of Christian Rodriguez, the cartel’s
20-something tech guru, who created a communications system for
Guzman so sophisticated that not even the FBI could crack it.
Instead, the government found Rodriguez and made him an
informant.

The government learned that Guzman had set up his own vast
spying system, monitoring the phones and computers of his cartel
leaders, his wife and his mistresses. Rodriguez gave them the key
to the treasure trove of information.

Jurors heard text messages between the married couple, including
Guzman saying of their 6-month-old daughter, one of their twins:
“Our Kiki is fearless. I’m going to give her an AK-47 so she can
hang with me.”

The texts also laid out details of the drug leader’s cartel life
as a wanted man, from the banal to the bizarre. In one he asked
Coronel to buy him pants (size 32/30), shoes (Mexican size 7) and
black mustache dye. In another he told her about barely escaping a
police raid on his Los Cabos, Mexico, home in 2012.

“I saw them pounding on the door next door, but I was able to
jump out,” he wrote to his wife, who married Guzman when she was
18.

“Oh, love. That’s horrible,” she responded. “I’ll be watching
the news to see what they say, love.”

Then came a star for the prosecution — and a key punching bag
for the defense — Vicente Zambada, the most senior cartel member to
testify at trial. Tall and with a square jaw, the 43-year-old, even
in his navy blue prison jumpsuit, still resembled the billionaire
cartel prince he once was.

When he took the stand, Zambada nodded at Guzman, his son’s
godfather. The defendant returned the gesture with a grin. Zambada,
in jail for drug trafficking since his 2009 arrest, is the son of
Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, the man defense lawyers say was the real
leader of the cartel.

For prosecutors, Vicente Zambada performed dutifully, coolly
detailing the intimate workings of the Sinaloa cartel, explaining
how he helped Guzman and his father traffic thousands of kilos of
drugs and guns, order the torture and killings of rivals and pay
off scores of Mexican officials with a monthly bribe budget of
about $1 million. The corruption was so ingrained in their
day-to-day business, he said, that the cartel was planning on
meeting with representatives of Mexico’s state oil company to
discuss a plan to transport 100 tons of cocaine in an oil tanker to
the U.S.

With Guzman intently listening, Zambada’s testimony seemed more
like a trip down memory lane for the men than a rebuke of his
former boss or his former lifestyle.

He also gave the narrative that linked his father and Guzman as
business partners, telling jurors that the men met high in the
mountains of Mexico’s Sinaloa state soon after Guzman made his
first prison escape, in 2001. Guzman was struggling financially
then, Zambada said, but his network was still strong. His father
told Guzman, “I’m 100% with you,” solidifying their partnership
with a pact to share their kilos of cocaine equally, he
testified.

For the defense, the testimony was ammunition for one of its
central arguments: Zambada’s father, not Guzman, was the true power
behind the Sinaloa cartel, and Guzman was set up to take the fall
for him.

“Was your Papa Mayo a social worker?” defense attorney Eduardo
Balarezo asked sarcastically.

“I know that in the past he was a worker,” Zambada replied
flatly through his interpreter, drawing laughs from the
courtroom.

“What I meant was, your father wasn’t in the business of helping
struggling drug traffickers,” Balarezo said.

Prosecutors went after Guzman because he was famous, while the
elder Zambada remained “in the shadows” and helped them pin Guzman,
Balarezo said.

“If he hasn’t been arrested, it’s not my fault,” Vicente Zambada
said.

Perhaps the most headline-grabbing testimony came from Alex
Cifuentes, Guzman’s self-professed “left-hand man” and “right-hand
man.”

Jurors learned during defense questioning that Cifuentes had
told authorities about an especially egregious bribe: Guzman, he
said, paid $100 million to Mexico’s president-elect in 2012,
Enrique Peña Nieto. Cifuentes even said Peña Nieto had asked for
$200 million, but Guzman bargained him down. (The former president
has denied the claims.) Cifuentes also told authorities, however,
that Guzman was $20 million in debt between 2007 and 2013.

Lichtman, Guzman’s lawyer, offered up another take on the bribe
allegation during his closing argument: It was Ismael Zambada who
paid out those millions. Cifuentes, like all the other cooperating
witnesses, was a violent liar, an “utter animal” who’d say whatever
it took to get out of jail, Lichtman said.

It made more sense, he argued, that Zambada, the real Sinaloa
cartel leader, would pay that bribe.

Why would Guzman, who was in hiding and in debt, he asked, pay
money he didn’t have to a president who would end up having him
arrested and sent to the U.S. to face trial? He didn’t, Lichtman
said. That bribe, he insisted, is why Zambada remains free.

Cifuentes’ testimony also offered fodder for another defense
argument: Guzman wasn’t a murderous cartel mastermind; he was a
showman, a braggart in love with fame. Cifuentes testified that for
six years, he worked with his boss on a script and book about his
life. Guzman even flew in a producer from Colombia to his mountain
hideouts to discuss the film project — which he planned to
direct.

Cifuentes said Guzman told the producer a story about the army
hanging him up by his feet from a helicopter to scare him, but he
“never gave up the drugs.” Those tales, Lichtman insisted, were
clearly fantastical.

And to hype the cartel even more? One of Guzman’s lieutenants,
Cifuentes testified, made hats and T-shirts imprinted with “Cartel
Sinaloa.”

Guzman, Lichtman told jurors in his closing, is “a human being”
and he “has feelings too.” His voice breaking, the attorney asked
them not to “give into the myth of El Chapo.”

And there was something else to remember, Lichtman said: Zambada
is still out there. Drug networks still flourish. “Get Chapo,” he
said. But the “cocaine keeps flowing. Nothing changes.”

But in the prosecution’s closing, Assistant U.S. Atty. Andrea
Goldbarg reminded jurors of Guzman’s many flights from justice:
“He’s sitting right there. Do not let him escape responsibility.
Hold him accountable for his crimes. Find him guilty on all
counts.”

Plagianos and Sharp are special correspondents.