El Chapo’s nightmare
Another druglord gets life in jail
ONE RUTHLESS Mexican drug kingpin down — and one to go.
A federal judge in Washington D.C., sentenced Alfredo Beltran Leyva to life in prison earlier this month for funneling tons of cocaine and methamphetamine into the U.S. Beltran Leyva — aka “El Mochomo (The Desert Ant)” — was also ordered to forfeit $529 million as part of his sentence on April 5.
Prosecutors buried the 46-year-old cartel leader in a mountain of evidence showing his Beltran Leyva Organization transported drugs via air, land and sea. And the organization sustained its operation for more than a decade through intimidation, kidnappings, torture and murders. Sound familiar? Legal experts say they expect prosecutors in Brooklyn to use similar tactics to earn a conviction in the federal case against Joaquin (El Chapo) Guzman, a man they call “the most notorious drug trafficker in the world.”
They’re not going to lock down the Sinaloa Cartel leader with name calling alone.
“This will not be a learning experience for the government. They are well-prepared,” said attorney Frank Rubino, the defense lawyer for Manuel Noriega when the former Panamanian dictator was convicted in 1992 of drug smuggling and racketeering.
Rubino said prosecutors will “make sure they are perfect.”
The defense, meanwhile, will have to play the hand they’ve been dealt by prosecutors, said Rubino, who’s also represented defendants brought to justice in America for the Mexican narco-wars.
Beltran Leyva pleaded guilty in February 2016, with a trial closing in fast. That was after the feds previewed their case, boasting a parade of cooperators and reams of documents.
Beltran Leyva later said he wanted to withdraw his plea and go to trial. Among his reasons, Beltran Leyva said he was forced to cop to the charges when he heard from a lawyer for a third party who warned that his family would be in danger if he went to trial.
Judge Richard Leon wouldn’t let Beltran Leyva rescind his plea. Beltran Leyva is appealing his life sentence.
There will likely be overlap between Beltran Leyva and Guzman, with a lot of the same witnesses.
“I believe one of the reasons the government really went after my client was in the hope he would cooperate against Chapo. My client chose not to do that,” Beltran Leyva’s lawyer, A. Eduardo Balarezo, told the Daily News.
To hear prosecutors tell it, there are many similarities between Beltran Leyva and 60-year-old Guzman. They both allegedly moved massive amounts of narcotics and had public officials in their pockets. They both could run their organizations from behind bars and had no mercy for rivals.
By the early 1990s, the Sinaloa Cartel and the organization Beltran Leyva built with his brothers were part of the “Federation,” an organized crime syndicate made of Mexican drug kingpins, prosecutors said. When Beltran Leyva was arrested in 2008, court papers said his cartel blamed Guzman and another man for the set up. Beltran Leyva was extradited in November 2014. Guzman was extradited in January after two prison breaks in Mexico. Guzman pops up again and again in Beltran Leyva’s court papers.
The government told Beltran Leyva they had a cooperator who’d talk about the murder of one trafficker. The witness was expected to say Beltran Leyva’s brother ordered him to bring the man to a meeting that included Guzman. Beltran Leyva allegedly watched as someone bashed the life out of the trafficker with a bat.
Other witnesses were prepared to talk about El Chapo chipping in on a $3 million bribe to a Mexican military general and the weekly tete-a-tetes Beltran Leyva and Guzman had about heroin and marijuana trafficking.
There’s even overlap in the prosecutor roster for Beltran Leyva and Guzman. One of the people on double duty is Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrea Goldbarg, a fluent Spanish speaker who’s senior litigation counsel in the Brooklyn U.S. Attorney's office.
A onetime colleague, Daniel Silver, called Goldbarg an “aggressive and capable prosecutor who’s really good at building complex cases and putting them together for trial.”
Brooklyn Law Professor Bennett Capers, a former federal prosecutor, said he couldn’t think of a trafficking case without cooperators. Capers said they were “incredibly effective” because they had the inside dirt on crimes and scored credibility with jurors for owning up to the fact they weren’t angels.
Balarezo said the government case against Beltran Leyva was “entirely based on cooperator testimony — cooperators who have done worse things than Mr. Beltran was accused of and were now seeking reduced sentences from the government.”