A LIFE-LONG PRISON SENTENCE...
One man asked to be excused from serving because he was a Michael Jackson impersonator – and feared being identified – while another had a panic attack.
The trial featured testimony from more than 50 witnesses and offered the public a unqiue look at the inner workings of his cartel.
His smuggling exploits, violence and sheer size of his business made him the world’s most ruthless drug baron since Colombia’s Pablo Escobar.
More than a dozen former associates struck deals to rat on their former boss.
Jurors heard how the Sinaloa cartel gained power amid the shifting allegiances of the Mexican drug trade in the Nineties.
Eventually, it controlled almost the entire Pacific coast of Mexico.
Jurors heard how El Chapo made a name for himself in the Eighties as “El Rapido” – the speedy one – by building cross-border tunnels.
It allowed him to move cocaine from Mexico into the US faster than anyone else and would go on to help with his escape decades later.
Witnesses included top lieutenants, a communications engineer and even a one-time mistress, who said she once fled down a tunnel with the naked gangster.
El Chapo was said to have built the Sinaloa cartel into a sophisticated organisation that was reminiscent of a multinational corporation.
He had fleets of planes and boats on standby, and also kept his own private zoo.
Despite Forbes marking him at number 701 on its 2009 rich list with his £775million fortune, in 2017 the US Justice Department sought penalties of more than £11billion in drug proceeds and illicit profits from El Chapo.
His trial also heard of the horrific violence he meted out to rivals.
One former bodyguard THE END: El Chapo during his arrest and victims of his deadly cartel testified that he watched El Chapo, who owned a handgun with his diamond-encrusted initials on the handle, kill three rival cartel members.
He is also alleged to have shot one victim and ordered him to be buried alive.
Witness Jesus Zambada said the defendant once bragged that the greatest pleasure he ever experienced was having a long-time enemy slaughtered.
He was reported to have made the remark after the murder of rival gang leader Ramon Arellano Felix in 2002.
The trial also featured extensive testimony about corruption in Mexico, with claims that former president Enrique Pena Nieto took a £75million bribe.
A spokesman for Mr Nieto has denied the claim.
The same day El Chapo told the judge he would not testify in his own defence, he grinned towards the gallery at Alejandro Edda, the Mexican actor who plays him in the Netflix drama Narcos.
El Chapo’s lawyers claimed he was set up as a fall guy by the real culprit, Ismael El Mayo Zambada, a powerful drug lord from Sinaloa who remains at large.
But after six days of deliberation, jurors found him guilty on all of the ten counts he was facing.
He will almost certainly be sent to ADX Florence, the oneand-only lock-up designed to cage the highest-risk prisoners in the federal penal system, located in Florence, Colorado.
Widely known as Supermax, or Alcatraz of the Rockies, it was opened in 1994 and holds 400-plus inmates inside specially designed control units that function as prisons within prisons.
Among its most infamous residents are Ramzi Yousef, mastermind of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York, convicted Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, airline shoe bomber Richard Reid and Unabomber Ted Kaczynski.