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The murderer's bullet passed near Jesus Zambada García's ear and threw him to the ground. He was not dead, he was just injured. The shot cut a deep red furrow in his head.
Lured into an ambush by his attackers in a Mexico City store, Mr. Zambada stumbled and fell. With a panicked rifle shot, he hit one. The other has escaped.
"I'm alive," he told a jury on Thursday, "because the bullet did not get into my skull."
On the second day, Mr. Zambada was charged with attempted attempted strike against his former Sinaloa drug cartel leader, Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the Mexican crime lord known as El Chapo.
After testifying Tuesday about the cartel's methods of financing and smuggling, Zambada on Thursday referred to the two most notorious aspects of the anti-trafficking organization: his taste for violence and his talent for combating human trafficking. Corruption.
For nearly five hours, he told the jury the stories of the brutal drug war in Mexico, one of which had been brushed by death in 1994, while he was being chased by gunmen in Mexico. Arellano-Felíx gang, one of the fiercest of his cartel. .
His story was delivered in a slender style that could be described as narco-Gothic. He presented the jury with an overview of the crimes known in Mexico, including the murder of a Roman Catholic cardinal, a bloodbath in a disco in Puerto Vallarta and the murder of a trafficker competitor, killed from a bullet in the nape of the neck.
"They always end up dead," Zambada said of the fighting he had gone through. "There are a lot of deaths."
This was the first time in Guzmán's highly contentious drug-trafficking trial at the Federal District Court in Brooklyn that the testimonies were panicked. But the violent nature of tales has been undermined by the jaded storyteller. Even as he spoke of his favorite pistol type (.38 caliber) and the murder of one of his brothers, Mr. Zambada seemed relaxed, caressing his chin and casually flipping into his chair.
His story began in the early 1990s when Mr. Guzmán and his Sinaloan partners – including Mr. Zambada and his brother, Ismael Zambada García – went to war with another couple of brothers, Benjamín and Ramón Arellano Felíx, who were running a cartel in Tijuana. Hostilities erupted after Ismael Zambada separated from the Arellano Felíx brothers to join one of Guzmán's allies.
After the split, Mr. Zambada told the jury that the Arellano Felíx brothers had closed the Tijuana border to the traffickers of Sinalo, an order ignored by Mr. Guzmán's stubbornness. The Arellano Felíxes were scandalized. And in 1992, Mr. Zambada stated that Mr. Guzmán was trying to take revenge.
Prosecutors say that early in the morning of November 8, 1992, A group of Guzmán gunmen broke into Christine's nightclub in Puerto Vallarta, firing their coats and turning off the lights.
Mr. Zambada said that Mr. Guzmán had planned to assassinate Ramón Arellano-Felíx that night. The intended target survived the attack, but some of his gunmen and several passersby did not do it.
The following year, Mr. Arellano Felíx sought revenge. Cardinal Juan Jesús Posadas Ocampo was killed in 1993 at an airport in Guadalajara, one of the most legendary murders in Mexican history. And in court on Thursday, Zambada said Arellano Felíx was to blame. He stated that the trafficker had personally killed the cardinal accidentally while attempting to assassinate Mr. Guzmán.
It took another decade for the bloody circle to finally be closed. In February 2002, Mr. Arellano Felíx was arrested by the authorities of Mazatlán, a seaside resort on the Pacific coast. A shooting ensues and the drug lord of Tijuana fled to a hotel. But before his arrival, someone put a bullet in the back of his neck.
Mexican officials later blamed the police, but Zambada, in another court clash, said on Thursday that the police who killed Mr. Arellano-Felíx were working with the Sinaloa cartel.
Guzmán was delighted with the death of his antagonist, he said.
"If anything had really pleased him," Zambada told the jury, "it was for killing Ramón Arellano."
Before presenting this litany of blood, Mr. Zambada confessed to committing another crime. Every month, he said, he personally paid $ 300,000 in bribes to Mexican officials for more than a decade.
Mr. Zambada, acting as a cartel, announced that he had corrupted army officers, municipal and federal police, airport and seaport authorities, officials of the Attorney General's office, and even representatives of Interpol. .
These illicit documents are particularly useful, he said, when Mr. Guzmán escaped from prison – for the first time – in 2001, hiding in a laundry basket. Working with his brother, Mr. Zambada said that he had helped the capital pillar to flee his pursuers by planning a helicopter to transport him to a safe place.
Once Mr. Guzmán was finally cleared, Zambada said, he and his brother drove the leader to the center of Mexico City, on the territory that Mr. Zambada claimed for the cartel. He had arranged in advance for the police to escort them. But Mr Guzmán suddenly became nervous when a team car and a motorcycle arrived unexpectedly.
Mr. Zambada has put his friend at ease.
"I said:" Do not worry, "he told the jury. "These are our people. They are here to protect us.
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