Trial of Notorious Sinaloa Cartel Boss – Rolling Stone

Joaquin Archivaldo Guzmán Loera has always compensated for his size, although his nickname, "El Chapo", or Shorty, is a constant reminder of his stocky frame, five feet five inches.

The small drug lord, 61, has made himself known as the undisputed king of the ruthless cartel of Sinaloa. Over the years, his organization has helped shovel thousands of tons of coke, heroin, methamphetamine and marijuana into the arms of American consumers. He famously ruled with an iron fist and an eye for every detail.

For decades, he ran a company worth billions of dollars, first from his mountainous fortress in the state of Sinaloa in Mexico, and then, after his capture in 1993, from prison. After a leak in 2001, he kept the machine moving during his escape, hiding for 13 years in plain view. Even after his capture in 2014, he was not long stuck to the ground, shocking the world with a shameless underground escape.

Until it was resumed in early 2016 – and extradited to the United States in 2017 – it seemed largely untouchable. But now he is in a difficult situation.

This week, the lawsuit against El Chapo must finally open in Brooklyn federal court. The selection of the jury must start on Monday and the pleadings must be tentatively set for 12 November. The trial should last from two to four months. He faces a charge of 17 counts for his role at the helm of the cartel, notably in money laundering, indictment of possession of firearms and the possession of firearms. murder for conspiracy.

And according to court documents describing the government's arguments against him – and conversations with some of the people who helped to fire him – El Chapo could finally have pulled the short straw.

The trial was postponed several times as Chapo's defense lawyers requested that the trial date be postponed in light of the mountains of evidence presented by the prosecution. Defense lawyers have complained to Judge Brian Cogan about the publication at the last minute of some 14,000 pages of new evidence from previously unknown cooperating witnesses (who were actually transported to the courtroom). in 23 plastic filing cabinets, according to the New York Times) justified yet another delay, as they needed time to translate it into Spanish for their client and examine the evidence.

But finally, on Tuesday, Cogan was fed up on both sides, which he accused of bothering with "panicked" phone calls about the case, according to Reuters. In a tedious exchange, Cogan reprimanded prosecutors for bringing more people to the table than necessary to sentence him, including accusing him of direct involvement in at least 33 murders.

"This is a case of drug-related conspiracy that involves murder," said Judge Cogan. Time. "I will not let you judge by a murder conspiracy case involving drugs."

Few Americans know El Chapo Better than Andrew Hogan, the former DEA agent who helped him tear it down in 2014 in Mazatlan, a seaside town in the state of Sinaloa.

For Hogan, who detailed his hunt for pivot El Chapo HuntingChapo was always the target, although he was not always in the line of sight of the agent. Even when he and his partner practiced narcos-controlled money-laundering in Mexico and Ecuador, he is aware that a man, Joaquin Guzman, was sitting at the top of the pyramid.

Yet he has never seen El Chapo as a white whale. "I have never been attached to him or any of my targets. It could have been anyone, "says Hogan. "What motivated me, it's hunting, the challenge of capturing this guy." I did not necessarily care who Chapo was as a person. Of course, I was worried about the number of drugs he carried, but I did not get distracted by this man, nor by the legend that everyone built it.

According to Jack Riley, who worked as the DEA's top policeman in Chicago at the time of the capture of El Chapo in 2014, and then to the agency's second position in Washington, the case against Chapo was a model of interinstitutional cooperation.

"What Chapo counted on were police forces and cops who do not talk to each other," says Riley. "So when we started to look at it, it was clear that we needed to build relationships with our Mexican counterparts, gather information in Mexico and understand how it operated in the United States. This involved a large number of cops sharing information and information, which they had already hesitated to do. Everyone, from small police departments to large police departments, through DEA, FBI and ICE. "

This cooperation was particularly crucial given Sinaloa's diverse sources of revenue, said Riley.

Although he is placed in solitary confinement in a cell above Manhattan, Guzmán's legacy continues.

Guzmán has made a name for himself by devising new ways to bring coke and heroin into the fields of Colombia and Mexico and into the veins of eager customers from the north. Over the years, Chapo has shipped narcotics to the United States in planes, trains, trucks and submarines. He was a pioneer in tunneling under the border, a skill that will help him later to get out of his maximum security prison cell in 2015. He was a brutal man but above all else he innovated with agility that would be the pride of Silicon Valley.

Guzmán probably can not claim the exclusive credit of reducing fentanyl heroin – it has appeared sporadically over the years – but he certainly had the chance to popularize it very early, says Riley. In 2006, a warning about what was going to happen was first announced in Chicago, when dozens of drug addicts suddenly overdosed a particularly potent drug strain that was found to be cut off from fentanyl.

Overall, this "epidemic" of fentanyl in the mid-2000s killed more than 1,000 people in Illinois, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and other states, according to the Office of Alcoholism and Substance Abuse Services. The spread of the deadly charge closely followed the distribution network that Chapo had set up, with Chicago as a hub, and a raid by the Mexican authorities against a Sinaloa-related drug lab created to produce fentanyl to confirm Chapo's position in the case, Riley says.

"If you give credit like that, I think his research and development portfolio, his way of seeing things, he's ahead of all the others," says Riley. "He was trying to see the market and adapt to it."

Federal prosecutors seem to be preparing a wealth of evidence against Guzmán, including dozens of witnesses and hundreds of thousands of pages of documents detailing his empire over drugs. In a preliminary memorandum tabled last year, the government had pledged to link Guzmán to a wide range of crimes, including the widespread corruption of Mexican security forces and money laundering in Mexico. Industrial scale.

In a particularly bloody paragraph, prosecutors say that a Sinaloa Sicario had specially equipped a house with killers of plastic sheeting for the walls and a pipeline specifically designed to collect the blood of murder victims.

The testimonies of Pedro and Margarito Flores, two Chicago-born and Chicago-born drug dealers who have been under government protection for nearly a decade since their decision to turn against El Chapo and flee their homes. weapons of the federal authorities during a dramatic escape leading to a desperate cross-border campaign by their families.

Pedro and Margarito Flores, identical twins raised by a drug-trafficking father, built a massive trafficking network that supplied wholesale supplies of narcotics to Chicago dealers, who were spreading across the country.

In their unsealed grand jury testimony, the brothers quietly detail their trafficking operation, in which thousands of kilograms of coke, heroin, and other drugs were smuggled into traps compartments. the interior of road tractors, and the creation of legitimate screen companies allowing them to ship drugs by freight train.

The twins moved their families to Mexico in 2003 and began working directly with Guzmán's associates in 2005, according to their testimony before the grand jury and the court documents filed by prosecutors.

But over the years, their wives and their wives – who published last year a book about their lives as "cartel wives" – began to fear the violence associated with Chapo, in especially after the war between Guzmán and his rivals.

In the spring of 2008, the two brothers promised to cooperate fully with the government. They recorded many conversations with the lieutenants of Sinaloa and set up a handful of drug shipments for seizure by the authorities.

Finally, in November 2008, they fled Mexico for the relative safety of witness protection, leaving behind millions of dollars in cash, cars and property, prosecutors said.

In an interview with Rolling stoneMia and Olivia Flores, the wives of Pedro and Margarito Jr., claim that the glamor of life in Mexico has lost its luster as the potential danger becomes more and more apparent.

"It's very easy to become addicted to this lifestyle, but it's not worth it," says Olivia Flores.

In addition to the millions they left in Mexico and the promise of a life of witness protection, the Flores twins have already paid a heavy price: their father, Margarito Flores Sr., their father, Margarito Flores Sr. Mexico a few days after entering the country in 2009. According to court documents, his car would have been found abandoned in Sinaloa, accompanied by a note stating that the father's disappearance was attributable to the actions of his sons.

But the Chapo network had already been damaged. According to a government sentencing memorandum explaining why the Flores twins should get lighter sentences than your usual high-level drug traffickers, this brother's testimony has led to the charge or the charge. arrest of dozens of traffickers, sicarios, traffickers and street bosses. from Chicago to the mountains of Sinaloa.

"I know that our husbands have harmed the drug trade and, although people are being replaced, no one will be Chapo Guzmán," says Olivia Flores. "No one will be taller than him."

Following his extradition to the United States, Guzmán was initially represented by federal tax lawyers funded by taxpayers, the version of the championship of public defenders. But starting in the autumn of 2017, he began to form a dream team composed of narco-lawyers, beginning with Angel Eduardo Balarezo, a US-Ecuadorian attorney who had previously represented the ally become rival of Chapo, Alfredo Beltran-Leyva. (Beltran-Leyva pleaded guilty in 2016 to charges of international drug trafficking and was sentenced in 2017 to life imprisonment). Jeffrey Lichtman, who represented John Gotti Jr., the leader of the "Teflon Don" crowd, will join Balarezo.

Even with a team of experienced lawyers in the field, it's hard to see how Guzmán could get out of this situation. Thousands of kilometers from its base of support in the Sierra Madre Mountains, held 23 hours a day alone in a fortified federal prison in Manhattan, the odds of a new bold escape are slim.

His lawyers have a mission to defend a man whose reputation as a drug chief for decades is not only well-known but also detailed in hundreds of thousands of pages of evidence presented by prosecutors and supported by key witnesses cooperating.

Guzman's legal team has hinted that she intends to challenge the government's qualification of her client as the greatest drug lord. After appearing with reporters after his first appearance in this case, Lichtman accused prosecutors of fleeing with a popular image of El Chapo that does not correspond to reality. "He is a mythical character who, according to them, is the only drug dealer in the world," Lichtman told the Brooklyn Federal Court in September, according to the newspaper. New York Post.

Regardless of the lawyers' strategy, they have work to do, according to Riley, who is not involved in pursuing the case.

"It is extremely difficult for a defense team to build a consistent record with so much evidence," he says. "They'll put up a typical Narco defense. You hire high-priced lawyers [who will] try to defeat the government of all it can, submit motions on everything it can, they oppose everything they can object to knowing that at the end of the trial it will go to jail. "

But Hogan, the DEA officer who watched Guzman opposite in a Mazatlan morning car park in the morning of the Mexican Marines, removed him from bed in 2014, warning against the underestimation of 39, El Chapo.

"It has its place, but you can be sure that it is thinking about the next step," says Hogan. "What is it, I do not know, but his mind is still on."