GUILTY AS EL
Drug kingpin Chapo faces life in prison
Hasta la vista, Shorty. Mexican cartel kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman was convicted Tuesday of running a massive, violent drug-trafficking empire that for decades pumped billions of dollars worth of narcotics into the United States.
The diminutive drug lord looked stunned as the Brooklyn federal jury handed down the verdict on its sixth day of deliberations — convicting him on all counts, including operating a continuing criminal enterprise, use of firearms and charges of conspiracy to import and distribute cocaine, heroin and marijuana.
Guzman, 61, then cast around to catch the eye of his beautyqueen wife — who flashed him a supportive thumbs-up as her eyes welled with tears.
“Today I’m not going to cry. Why? No one has died here,” 29year-old Emma Coronel Aispuro — a fixture in the courtroom throughout her husband’s trial — told a reporter in Spanish after being offered a tissue.
The jurors reached their decision after almost 35 hours of deliberations, and Judge Brian Cogan told the panelists their diligence made him “very proud to be an American.”
Guzman, who twice escaped prison in Mexico, now faces life in a maximum-security federal prison.
“It is a sentence from which there is no escape and no return,” US Attorney Richard Donoghue said outside the courthouse — as heavily armed, camouflage-clad US marshals surrounded the building.
“This conviction is a victory for the American people, who have suffered so long and so much while Guzman made billions pouring poison over our southern border,” Donoghue said. “There are those who say the war on drugs is not worth fighting. Those people are wrong.”
Defense attorney Jeffrey Licht- man said his team “fought like complete savages” for their client, but acknowledged the evidence against Guzman “was overwhelming.”
“He knew the odds. This was a case that was literally — literally — an avalanche of evidence. So much, we could barely wade through it.”
Lichtman vowed to appeal, noting that Guzman will likely never see his wife again after his sentencing, which is scheduled for June 25. His only allowed visitors have been their two young daughters.
The high-profile trial often unfolded more like a telenovela than a prosecution — chronicling the drug lord’s rise and fall as leader of the infamous Sinaloa Cartel over three decades.
More than 50 prosecution witnesses — including 14 former associates who took the stand against Guzman — shared wild tales of diamond-encrusted pistols and presidential payoffs in the heyday of his empire, fol- lowed by his life on the run from authorities after pulling off two Hollywood-worthy jailbreaks.
Guzman, whose nickname “El Chapo” — or “Shorty” — refers to his 5-foot-6-inch stature, first made a name for himself as “El Rapido.”
After clawing his way to the top of the cartel in the early 1990s, Guzman earned the lesser-known moniker among Colombian cocaine smugglers for the unprecedented speed with which he could secret drugs into the US, witnesses testified.
One former Colombian cocaine capo recalled how the minuscule Mexican first impressed him in the early ’90s by making good on a promise to move coke across the border faster than any competitor.
“It was super quick, that I recall, it was less than a week,” said onetime North Valley Cartel leader Juan Carlos Ramirez Abadia. “Typically it took a month or more.”
One secret to Chapo’s speed was all the crooked officials he had on the payroll, witnesses said. Throughout the trial, he was variously accused of paying off everyone from local cops to former Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto.
Another was a clandestine tunnel that went directly from Mexico to the US and allowed his cartel to ferry a ton of cocaine on a small cart, according to other witnesses.
That passage connected a building in Douglas, Ariz., to a house in Agua Prieta, Mexico — and was accessed under a pool table that was lifted using a sophisticated hydraulic system, a former US Customs agent told jurors.
The scheme was blown when a passing cop caught a glimpse of the raised pool table through the window — and it cost Guzman the “El Rapido” nickname, according to Miguel Angel Martinez, one of his cartel pals.
El Chapo then began moving cocaine into the States by stuffing the powder into cans of La Comadre pickled jalapenos — and sending trucks packed with 700 tainted tins hidden among regular pepper cans, said Martinez.
Some 25 to 30 tons of cocaine — worth $400 to $500 million — reached Los Angeles each year, passing through legal border crossings, he said.
With business booming, Guzman was living large. The runty cartel boss owned four planes, a yacht and luxury houses across Mexico — including a ranch in Guadalajara with a pool, tennis courts and its own private zoo.
Guzman also maintained a harem of at least four lovers and carried around numerous diamond-encrusted firearms.
But it was also a life of extreme violence, as Chapo waged wars with rival cartels.
Several witnesses recalled an infamous 1992 shootout at the ritzy Christine’s nightclub in Puerto Vallarta — where Guzman brought some 20 armed men to open fire in an attempt to kill the leaders of the Tijuana Cartel, but wound up slaying several clubgoers instead.
The war cost Chapo his freedom in 1993 — when the cardinal of Guadalajara was killed after getting caught in the crossfire of a shootout at an airport.
Prison didn’t put a damper on Guzman’s career, however.
Damaso Lopez Nuñez, a former security official at Puente Grande prison, testified that he accepted huge bribes from the kingpin to smuggle in cellphones, fresh clothes and lovers.
Guzman finally used his clout to bust out of Puente Grande in 2001 — famously paying off a worker to smuggle him out of the lockup in a laundry cart.
He then got into a helicopter and was whisked away to a “semi-deserted location,” added Jesus Zambada, a former accountant for the Sinaloa Cartel.
This was the beginning of Chapo’s life on the lam — and he spent the next 13 years evading authorities in mountain hideaways.
But being a fugitive didn’t cramp Guzman’s busy love life.
The horndog entertained a parade of female visitors in his compounds — including his current wife, Coronel, whom he married in 2007 when she was just 18.
Coronel gave birth to Guzman’s twin girls in 2011, but the randy trafficker continued sleeping around, the courtroom heard.
One mistress, a 29-year-old disgraced politician named Lucero Guadalupe Sanchez Lopez, appeared in person to testify about their affair, which began that same year.
Meanwhile, Guzman kept a close eye on his associates and lovers, hiring an IT guy to bug the cellphones of just about everyone in his orbit.
But his paranoia backfired when the FBI turned the geek into an informant in 2010 — and scored damning recordings of Guzman.
Chapo was hiding out in Culiacan in 2014 when he escaped another raid by the skin of his teeth — and his bare behind. Sanchez recounted how she was with Guzman that night, when US feds and Mexican marines broke down their door — and Chapo fled naked through a secret tunnel beneath his bathtub.
Guzman made it to the resort town of Mazatlan — but that’s where his luck ran out.
A US DEA agent who had been trailing Chapo’s bare butt through the tunnel and a small group of marines disguised in beachwear quietly slipped into town, where they tracked Guzman to a hotel and pounced.
He was thrown back behind bars — but was there for barely a year before he busted out again in his most audacious escape.
Lopez Nuñez told jurors how Coronel arranged for Chapo’s sons to buy land near the lockup so they could begin tunneling inside — and to sneak a GPS watch inside to pinpoint the exact location of his cell.
They built a mile-long, 33-footdeep passage leading up to his shower, and on July 11, 2015, Guzman slipped into the hole and rode a motorbike through the shaft to freedom, Lopez Nuñez said.
In the end, Guzman’s own fame caught up with him.
Chapo — who witnesses said had long been obsessed with scoring a book and movie deal to capitalize on his own notoriety — met with actor Sean Penn and Mexican soap actress Kate del Castillo just a month later even as authorities were tracking his whereabouts.
He was finally recaptured on Jan. 8, 2016, and extradited to the US the following year.