‘El Chapo’ heading to Colorado prison

NEW YORK CITY (Reuters) — Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, the Mexican found guilty in a US court on Tuesday of running a criminal enterprise that smuggled drugs into the United States, is likely headed to a “supermax” prison where repeating his past escapes would be nearly impossible.

No one has broken out of Administrative Maximum Facility (ADX) in Florence, Colorado since it opened in 1994 to house the most dangerous inmates in the US prison system.

“ADX is the kind of prison that was designed for a high-profile inmate like El Chapo,” Larry Levine, a former federal inmate who is the director and founder of Wall Street Prison Consultants, said in a phone interview.

Guzman, 61, the leader of the Sinaloa Cartel who escaped twice from maximum-security Mexican prisons before his most recent capture in 2016, faces a possible life prison sentence at a hearing scheduled for June 25 in New York.

US authorities have been tightlipped about where Guzman will be imprisoned. But it has been widely anticipated that, if convicted, he would be sent to ADX Florence, ever since his extradition to the United States in January 2017.