‘Trafficker’s £15m bribe to top cop’

Mexico.” In truth, he controlled nothing. Mayo Zambada did. Mayo Zambada kept paying the Mexican government, president after president, two in a row – and somehow he remains free. And who is the one that’s constantly being hunted down? It’s Guzman.

“[Government officials] were paid off to leave Zambada alone.”

Former Mexican president Felipe Calderon, who preceded Neito, has always denied taking cartel money. El Mayo started working with a cartel based in Juarez, on the Mexico-us border, in the 1980s and 1990s.

When Juarez’s leader, Amado Carrillo Fuentes, died in 1997 after botched plastic surgery to change his face, the cartel eventually split into two factions. One gang was based in Tijuana, on the US border, and the other, set up largely by El Mayo and El Chapo, was in Sinaloa, further south.

When the Tijuana cartel began to decline, and the pair took advantage. They set out to expand their trafficking routes to the US and Europe, as they controlled much of the heroin production and shipment in Mexico.

The Sinaloa cartel went on to build a £9billion-a-year international cocaine, heroin and human-trafficking empire. El Mayo’s strength was his ability to quickly adapt to customers’ demands.

And, as the cash poured in, his army of highly educated money men laundered their ill-gotten gains through some of the world’s biggest banks and offshore accounts, while also investing in legitimate companies.

Mike Vigil, former head of international operations at the DEA, explained: “He has a very diversified portfolio. Even though he’s only had maybe an elementary school education, he’s received a Harvard-level education from some of the most prolific, knowledgeable and astute drug lords that Mexico has ever had.”

Now, despite his advancing years, growing frailty, and battle with diabetes, EL Mayo is as sharp as ever. Since El Chapo’s arrest in January 2016, he has successfully diversified the cartel’s business, from cannabis and coke to deadly fentanyl, an opioid-based synthetic drug.

The average revenue from one kilo of fentanyl purchased in China can yield as much as 24 times the income of one kilo of heroin bought in Colombia, according to the DEA. And now, with America in the grip of an op cartel slowin

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EL Chapo bribed MexicoCity’s former chief of police with at least £15million to allow his cartel to operate freely, a US court has heard.Miguel Angel Martinez, who was formerly El Chapo’s pilot, said he was instructed to deliver money to Guillermo Gonzalez Calderoni in the late 1980s and early 1990s.Speaking at El Chapo’s trial at Brooklyn’s Federal Court in New York, Martinez spoke of El Chapo’s relationship with the ex-chief of police, who was assassinated in 2003.He said of Calderoni : “That was his friend. He was sent, on about two or three occasions, about $10million COURT El Chapo, left, and his lawyer, Jeffrey Lichtman [£7.8million] each time.” The money was delivered on El Chapo’s jets. Once he was paid, Calderoni would offer intelligence and let the cartel run with impunity, he said.After being accused of corruption and torture, Calderoni fled to Texas, where he died in a suspected hit.Martinez said El Chapo first hired him to move 1,470 kilos of cocaine from Colombia to Mexico around 1987.El Chapo was extradited to the US in January 2017 on drug-trafficking charges.His lawyers say he is being framed by co-operators like Martinez, in return for favourable treatment. If convicted, he faces life in jail. El Chapo lands in New York, 2017 MUGS after a