This Mexican druglord had a zoo, jets filled with money and gave diamond watches to the workers

His $ 10 million beach house was set up along the coast at Acapulco. The Chapito – the yacht that he named after himself, was moored off the coast.

One of his ranches, in rural Guadalajara, Mexico, had tennis courts and swimming pools around the residence. There was even a zoo where guests could board a train to ride among crocodiles and panthers.

In the early 1990s, Joaquín Guzmán Loera, Mexican crime lord known as El Chapo, began to succeed as an entrepreneur in the world of drugs. started earning money, said one of his first employees on Tuesday. There was so much money that Guzmán used an expensive method to repatriate his profits: he sent the money back from the United States to Mexico in a fleet of private jets.

Testifying for the second day of the epic plot on Guzmán's drugs, former employee Miguel Angel Martínez spoke in detail about Narco's lavish lifestyle. Martínez was placed at the helm by prosecutors who sought to paint Guzmán as an indelible pillar

According to him, Guzmán would go to Macau to play or go to Switzerland in search of a facelift. He not only offered watches set with diamonds to his workers, but he also once paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for ordering a folk song on one of his murdered friends.

"When I met Mr. Guzmán, he had no jet," Martínez told a jury fascinated by the US District Court in Brooklyn. "But in the 90s he already had four jet planes. He had houses on every beach. He owned a ranch in each state. "

All these remains and much more, said Martínez, were bought and paid for by the countless sources of illicit income that Guzmán had derived from the illegal shipment of cocaine and marijuana to Los Angeles. innovative methods: tanker trains, secret compartment trucks, cross-border tunnels and jalapeños containers. Prosecutors say that he has earned $ 14 billion in total in his drug dealing career.

Some of the millions he made were hidden in caches, one of which was laid under a bed that could be lifted off the ground with the help of a hydraulically operated lift. . . Martínez testified that, once a month, he personally transported a Samsonite suitcase, stuffed with at least $ 10 million, into a bank in Mexico City to deposit Guzmán's account.

Such a standard of living slowly harmed Martínez, who declared that he had begun. sniff no less than 4 grams of cocaine a day – often, he admitted, in a golden spoon soaked in a small gold box. He financed his habit with the million dollars Guzmán gave him each year. His addiction was destructive enough that the drugs ended up burning his septum.

In contrast, Guzmán appeared in court Tuesday as being much less hedonistic. He loved his whiskey, his beer and his brandy, said Martínez, and seemed to have a particular fondness for women. But while Guzmán was guarding four or five mistresses in the 1990s, Martínez suggested that he was not as much in love as jealous – often spying on his friends with a wiretap.

Guzmán was not the only one to marvel at the extravagance. Martínez, for example, told how he and his boss went to visit Juan José Esparragoza, a former trafficker serving a prison sentence. When the two men arrived, they discovered their colleague at a prison party, surrounded by waiters, cooks and a mariachi group. Dinner was served and guests had the choice between a menu: lobster, steak or pheasant

But as was often the case in Guzman's orbit, luxury was never far from bloodshed. Guzmán had visited the respected old trafficker to ask him permission to murder a rival, Martínez said.

At that time, Guzmán and his team were waging a war against the drug cartel Tijuana in a gothic and macabre conflict. The wife of one of Guzmán's allies had already had her throat slit. The two young children of the ally are also victims of the fighting: they were thrown from a bridge by an badbadin.

Guzmán uses profits from his empire to obtain retaliation, said Martínez, equipping an army of armed men and unleashing two rounds of one-year attacks. One of them took place in 1992 in a disco in Puerto Vallarta. The following year, Juan Jesús Posadas Ocampo, a beloved Catholic cardinal, had died after an attack in retaliation for the shooting at the disco.

In his testimony on Tuesday, Martínez gave an astonishing account of the cardinal's death, claiming that his killers had been killed. him accidentally shooting for Guzmán. The coup took place in the middle of the Guadalajara airport, he recalled. Guzmán escaped the rain of bullets past a baggage carousel and in the street, while carrying a suitcase filled with $ 600,000 in cash.

Despite these scary stories, Martínez baderted in court that he was not a violent man. In fact, he said, Guzmán told him to get rid of it the only time he owned a firearm. The division chief feared that Martinez would hurt himself.

But once, he said, he asked his leader why he was so enamored with hostility.

"I told him:" Why kill people? " Martinez told the jury. . And he said, "Either your mother will cry, or their mother will cry. ""