‘Rolling Stone’ interview haunts El Chapo

NEW YORK: Drug lord El Chapo (61) had another bad day in his trial yesterday when his Sean Penn interview continued to haunt him.

Chapo’s demeanour darkened when FBI agent Stephen Marston took the witness stand and all but thanked the Mexican drug lord for the 2015 video interview he recorded for actor Sean Penn and Mexican-American actress Kate Del Castillo as part of a profile published by Rolling Stone magazine.

Marston said the interview was exactly the type of lengthy recording investigators needed to use voice recognition technology and identify Chapo on hundreds of wiretapped calls.

The agent said the calls were collected after the Sinaloa Cartel’s tech guru changed sides as part of a covert operation.

Marston said the sting operation started when investigators lured the IT specialist, Cristian Rodriguez, to a Manhattan hotel room under the guise of a meeting with a fellow gangster in need of his own encrypted network.

He said it quickly became clear the technology was so sophisticated, the United States needed an inside guy.

A decision was made months later to approach Rodriguez again and convince him to switch sides. The FBI set up a meeting in Rodriguez’s home country of Colombia, and he agreed to become a proactive cooperator.

Between April 2011 and January 2012, Rodriguez had the cartel’s servers moved from Canada to the Netherlands while he was working as a US government informant.

Marston said Dutch authorities were in on the move and began passing data to US investigators, including 800 calls that featured Chapo on as many as 200.

The agent said the vocal recognition software learned Chapo’s voice from the Rolling Stone video, as well as recorded calls Chapo made from jail in New York.