WHAT IS TAKING THE EL CHAPO JURY SO LONG?
DELIBERATIONS REACH FIVE DAYS WITHOUT A DECISION
Can some of the most hardened narcos on earth be taken at their word? That’s the conundrum facing Brooklyn jurors trying to decide the fate of Mexican drug kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, who have deliberated for five days and have yet to reach a verdict.
As they examine 10 separate counts against the man charged with trafficking on a monumental scale, ordering the deaths of dozens of people and obtaining $14 billion in ill-gained assets, there’s no shortage of material to sift through.
In particular, they are looking back over testimony of Guzman’s former associates, each of whom has confessed to their own murderous plots. These include three Colombian witnesses central to the government’s case: Juan Carlos Ramírez Abadía, alias “Chupeta” or Lollipop, and the Cifuentes-Villa brothers, Jorge Milton and Hildebrando Alexander, or “Alex.”
CHUPETA
Chupeta was a leader of Colombia’s Norte del Valle Cartel, a successor group to the Cali Cartel, which was broken up in the 1990s. He famously disfigured his own face with surgery to conceal his identity, and his testimony was fittingly ghoulish.
“It’s impossible to be the leader of a cartel in Colombia without violence,” the man captured in 2007 after a period on the run in Brazil said on the stand, according to Rolling Stone.
Chupeta has admitted ordering 150 murders, including one of his own cartel members (an apparent snitch) and 12 of his protection unit.
Chupeta was a crucial early presence in El Chapo’s orbit, he said, outlining how his gang moved cocaine from Colombia to Mexico. First, it came by plane — sometimes a dozen a night — and later via fishing trawlers. From Mexico El Chapo, working then as a middleman taking 40 per cent, put Chupeta’s drugs across the U.S. border.
Drug ledgers were presented in court as evidence; northbound boats with code names like Juanita 8, 9 and 10 were marked within. Chupeta lost two huge consignments, he said, after interceptions by U.S. authorities in 2004 — “a tragedy,” he said.
Chupeta even regaled the jury with talk of a sea captain who, because of a cocaine psychosis episode, perished in the Pacific along with his cargo.
“He started to see ghosts everywhere, American Coast Guard everywhere, and he sank the ship with my 20,000 kilos of cocaine,” he said, according to the New York Post.
JORGE MILTON CIFUENTES-VILLA
“Everything I’ve breathed and eaten in my life has been drug trafficking,” he said on the stand, according to the New York Daily News, detailing his role within Colombia’s Cifuentes-Villa criminal clan, one of El Chapo’s main partner groups.
Jorge Milton started in the trade in 1988 as an underling with the Norte del Valle Cartel, the same group as Chupeta. His family navigated the underworld for decades; a brother Francisco, murdered in 2007, piloted for Pablo Escobar.
Jorge Milton sourced cocaine from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia of FARC, the left-wing rebels. Yet he was also cozy with right-wing narco-terrorists the United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia, or AUC, for whom he sourced weapons.
Eventually things went sour with the AUC, he said. After living for a period in Texas in the mid-1990s, and then doing a stint in Colombia, he reached Mexico and linked up with Guzman in 2002.
But Guzman wasn’t easy to deal with.
Guzman was being given advice that authorities knew about certain seafaring cocaine loads, Jorge Milton said, but insisted on pressing ahead. This pigheadedness resulted in huge consignments being caught by the U.S. navy and Ecuadorean authorities.
Jorge Milton admitted in court, under cross-examination by lawyer Jeffrey Lichtman, to a role in three murders, the New York Daily News reported. For one, he sent bribed Mexican federal police after a one-time friend, “El Flaco,” who was then bumped off.
“And you felt bad about that because you promised Flaco’s father on his deathbed that you would take care of Flaco?” said Lichtman, trying to point to a sly, deceptive witness.
“Yes, sir,” the narco said.
‘ALEX’ CIFUENTES-VILLA
Jorge Milton’s brother, Alex, gave the first insights into El Chapo’s Canadian operations.
He had gone to live with El Chapo in the mountains in Sinaloa in 2007, he said, as a “guarantee” for drug money that El Chapo was sending to Colombia. The Mexican drug lord at that point sourced his cocaine from the Cifuentes-Villa clan and the wider Norte del Valle cartel.
He said he “had a friend who was Colombian-Canadian and he had clients there,” and so first started running the Canadian angle for El Chapo from 2008.
Alex would coordinate deliveries to Canadian and U.S. wholesalers, he said, and make sure the cash came back south. He said the group used various methods to get cocaine north: 6,000-kilogram loads from Ecuador to Canada via the Pacific; overland routes from Mexico into the U.S.; cocaine sent from Phoenix and L.A. north by commercial truck to Vancouver; and even loads sent by helicopter over the U.S.-Canada border.
Alex also outlined his role in a chilling plot to kill Stephen Tello — a Canadian real estate agent El Chapo suspected of stealing from the Sinaloa Cartel.
Transcripts obtained by the National Post show Alex detailing another Canadian relationship, an agreement for drug deals with a “Tony Suzuki,” believed to be Antonio Pietrantonio of the Montreal mafia.
Alex backed up Jorge Milton’s instincts that Guzman did not have the tact needed to run a clandestine operation, referencing a confiscated 6,000-kilogram cocaine load from Ecuador.
“Well, my brother (Jorge Milton) didn’t really agree for the boaters to go out and load up the ship around those days because there was a lot of surveillance by the Coast Guard,” he said. And “Joaquin, through his nephew, Frank, was reporting to him that that was a lie, that there was no surveillance.”
Alex was then asked how Guzman reacted when the shipment was in fact taken.
“He was very quiet,” he said.
Alex also provided insight into Guzman’s lavish lifestyle, even from hiding. El Chapo used a golden Chevy Suburban and had a camouflage-colour Hummer emblazoned with “JGL.” He wore camouflage all the time, Alex said, and kept a camouflaged R-15 as well as a similarly initialled handgun.
“It was a medium size and it had a grenade launcher with 40-millimetre grenades. He carried a belt with his black, .38 super gun, with his initials in the handle. And with diamonds,” he said.