In this courtroom drawing, Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, second from left, stares at the jury as the judge reads the verdict in his drug trafficking trail on Tuesday in Brooklyn. With him are an interpreter, left, and defense attorneys Eduardo Balarezo, right, and William Purpura. (Elizabeth Williams / Associated Press)
Joaquin Guzman, the Mexican drug lord known as “El Chapo,” was found guilty Tuesday in an international narcotics smuggling trial that marked a triumph for the U.S. Justice Department and a steep fall for a brutal narco legend who ruled with a diamond-encrusted pistol on his hip.
The seven-woman, five-man jury took six days to find Guzman guilty of all 10 criminal counts. The 61-year-old, who has escaped from two Mexican prisons, now will almost certainly spend the rest of his life behind bars in the United States. Prosecutors will ask that Guzman be given life with no possibility of parole when he is sentenced June 25.
“It is a sentence from which there is no escape and no return,” said U.S. Atty. Richard Donoghue outside federal court in Brooklyn, as snow fell.
Guzman was convicted of selling hundreds of tons of cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin and marijuana; conspiring to murder a slew of rivals; and running one of the world’s largest drug networks.
He calmly watched the jury as the guilty verdict for each count was relayed to him by an interpreter. He shook the hands of his lawyers and smiled at his wife, giving her a thumbs-up before being led out of the courtroom.
The case detailed the inner workings of the multibillion-dollar Sinaloa cartel and brought to light stories of drug-land warfare and sweeping accusations of Mexican corruption, from street-level police to the presidency.
Prosecutors spent 11 weeks 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.
A jury finds Mexican drug lord and escape artist Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman guilty on all 10 counts in his federal trial on charges of international narcotics smuggling.
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.
"Of course we're going to appeal," Guzman's lawyer Jeffrey Lichtman told reporters outside court. He said an appeal may cite restrictive cross-examination questioning or issues with Guzman’s extradition from Mexico.
Lichtman said Guzman was a "trophy" for the government and that his conviction would make no difference in the larger war on drugs.
"The cocaine doesn't stop flowing with the takedown of El Chapo."
Before the jurors, whose identities remain anonymous, began deliberations Feb. 4, they’d spent weeks being ferried by U.S. Marshals to and from court. They heard testimony about drug world mayhem, the ingenious ways Guzman had smuggled cocaine into the U.S., and the kingpin's lavish spending on yachts, beach homes and even a private zoo with lions, panthers and a tiger.
They sat through testimony alleging Guzman paid a $100-million bribe to a Mexican president-elect and 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 cocaine through cross-border tunnels in the 1990s.
And in case there was any doubt about how violent the drug lord 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.
After U.S. District Judge Brian Cogan read the verdicts on Tuesday, he told jurors that their attention to detail was the best he's seen in his nearly 30 years on the bench.
“The way you went about it was quite remarkable," he told them. "Quite frankly, it made me proud to be an American.”
U.S. authorities had worked nearly a decade on the 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.
Authorities escort Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman from a plane to a waiting caravan of SUVs at Long Island MacArthur Airport in Islip, N.Y., on Jan. 19, 2017. (Associated Press)
In a courthouse under unprecedented security, the U.S. government took every opportunity to show what all the years of information-gathering on Guzman had produced.
Aided by testimony from a who’s who of former cartel higher-ups, prosecutors 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.
An evidence photo shows a diamond-encrusted pistol decorated with the intials of Joaquin Guzman Loera. (U.S. attorney's office)
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.”
Emma Coronel arrives at court in Brooklyn on Jan. 30 for her husband's trial. (Justin Lane / EPA/Shutterstock)
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.
Former Colombian drug lord Juan Carlos Ramirez Abadia is shown before and after the plastic surgeries he underwent to try to hide his identity. (U.S. attorney's affice)
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."
Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, left, poses in an undated photo with Alex Cifuentes and an unidentified woman. (U.S. attorney's office)
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."
Trùm ma túy khét tiếng ‘El Chapo’ bị kết tội ở Mỹ - Báo Mai
Trùm băng đảng ma tuy khét tiếng nhất thế giới, Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, người đã vươn lên từ đói nghèo ở vùng nông thôn Mexico để trở thành đại gia thu thập hàng tỉ đôla, đã bị kết tội tại tòa án ở Mỹ hôm thứ Ba về tội buôn lậu ma túy vào Mỹ trong một sự nghiệp đầy bạo lực kéo dài hàng chục năm.
Các bồi thẩm viên tại tòa án liên bang ở quận Brooklyn của thành phố New York khép Guzman, 61 tuổi, người cầm đầu Băng Sinaloa, vào tất cả 10 tội danh do các công tố viên liên bang đưa ra.
Richard Donoghue, Công tố viên Hoa Kỳ của Khu vực Đông New York, nói với báo giới rằng ông hi vọng Guzman sẽ nhận án tù chung thân không được tha bổng khi bị kết án vào ngày 25 tháng 6.
Guzman, một trong những nhân vật chính trong các cuộc chiến ma túy hoành hành ở Mexico từ năm 2006, gần như trở thành huyền thoại khi hai lần trốn thoát khỏi nhà tù an ninh cao ở Mexico và tránh được các cuộc truy nã rầm rộ. Ông ta đã tạo dựng hình tượng của mình như một Robin Hood với người nghèo ở bang Sinaloa.
El Chapo bị nhà chức trách Mỹ áp tải tại Sân bay MacArthur Long Island, bang New York, ngày 26 tháng 11, 2018.
Guzman, người mà biệt danh “El Chapo” có nghĩa là “Gã lùn,” bị dẫn độ về Mỹ để xét xử vào năm 2017 sau khi ông ta bị bắt ở Mexico một năm trước đó.
Mặc dù các nhân vật cao cấp khác trong băng đảng đã bị dẫn độ trước đó, Guzman là người đầu tiên ra tòa thay vì tuyên bố có tội.
Phiên tòa kéo dài 11 tuần, với lời khai từ hơn 50 nhân chứng, hé lộ những điều chưa từng biết về cách thức hoạt động nội bộ của Băng Sinaloa, được đặt theo tên bang ở phía tây bắc Mexico, nơi Guzman sinh ra trong một ngôi làng nghèo khó miền núi.
Chính phủ Mỹ nói Guzman đã buôn lậu hàng tấn cocaine, heroin, cần sa và methamphetamine vào Mỹ trong hơn hai thập niên, củng cố quyền lực của ông ta ở Mexico thông qua các vụ giết người và chiến tranh với các băng đảng đối thủ.
Với tầm vóc nhỏ bé, những chiến tích buôn lậu của Guzman, những hành động bạo lực mà ông ta sử dụng và quy mô hoạt động kinh doanh bất hợp pháp của ông ta khiến Guzman trở thành trùm ma túy khét tiếng nhất thế giới kể từ Pablo Escobar của Colombia, người bị cảnh sát bắn chết vào năm 1993.
