‘ EL CHAPO’ EXTRADITED, LANDS IN NEW YORK TO FACE CHARGES
NEW YORK — Infamous Mexican drug kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, who twice escaped from maximum- security prisons in his country, was extradited at the request of the United States to face drug trafficking and other charges and arrived in New York late Thursday.
A plane carrying Guzman landed at a suburban airport, where a caravan of SUVs waited to take him away. Guzman, the convicted leader of the Sinaloa drug cartel, one of the world’s largest drug trafficking organizations, was expected to spend the night in a New York jail before his first appearance in a federal courthouse in Brooklyn on Friday, officials said.
Mexico’s Department of Foreign Relations announced Guzman was handed over to U. S. authorities for transportation to the U. S. earlier Thursday, the last full day of President Barack Obama’s administration and a day before Donald Trump’s scheduled inauguration.
Guzman was taken into custody by the U. S. Drug Enforcement Administration in Ciudad Juarez, a border town across from El Paso, Texas
Guzman faces the possibility of life in a U. S. prison under multiple indictments in six jurisdictions around the United States, including New York, San Diego, Chicago and Miami.
Authorities in Chicago spent years putting together a sweeping case against Guzman and the Sinaloa Cartel — but after the drug kingpin was captured in 2014, many federal insiders thought he would wind up in federal court in New York.
Outgoing U. S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch twice served as the U. S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, in 1999- 2001 and again in 2003- 2005. Many thought she would steer the high- profile Sinaloa Cartel case back to federal prosecutors in New York.
Both the U. S. attorney’s offices in Manhattan and Brooklyn have brought charges against Guzman.
Some legal observers thought Chicago would have a strong claim on Guzman because Vicente Zambada-Niebla, the son of one of Guzman’s associates, is in custody in the Chicago case.
Zambada, a high- ranking cartel member, pleaded guilty in 2013 and is cooperating against Guzman, making the Chicago case among the strongest in the United States.
Zambada- Niebla allegedly oversaw the export of tons of narcotics into Chicago and other cities, using trains, ships, Boeing 747 cargo jets and even submarines.
Meanwhile, Margarito and Pedro Flores — twin brothers who grew up in Chicago — agreed to become government informants in the 2009 indictment brought in Chicago against Guzman and his cartel leaders.
The twins had partnered with Guzman to smuggle tons of drugs from Mexico to Chicago. In their heyday, they were importing 1,500 kilograms of cocaine and heroin into the United States every month.
They even went to Guzman’s mountain compound in Mexico and secretly recorded top cartel lieutenants including “El Chapo” in two phone conversations, in which the kingpin was implicated in a heroin deal on the West Side, prosecutors said.
The brothers eventually helped federal agents seize 15 kilograms of heroin in Chicago in October 2008 and 12 kilograms in Cicero in November 2008, court records show. In 2015, they were sentenced to 14 years in prison and have been in federal protection since then.