A prison that ‘El Chapo’ is not likely to escape
Drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman twice escaped from prison in Mexico. With his conviction on drug trafficking and murder charges in U.S. federal court this week, he is likely headed to a far more secure facility: the so-called Alcatraz of the Rockies.
The federal prison, known as “Supermax,” is an administrative maximum U.S. penitentiary in Florence, Colo., about an hour south of Colorado Springs, and is considered to be among the most secure sites in the United States.
Built in 1995 for $60 million, it is currently home to 402 inmates — a veritable Who’s Who of violent criminals who live in the most restrictive conditions in the country. Here are a few of the facility’s most notorious residents whom 61-year-old Guzman would be joining.
Theodore Kaczynski
Known as the Unabomber, Kaczynski, 73, terrorized the country beginning in 1978. Over the next 17 years, he mailed or hand-delivered bombs that killed three people and injured two dozen. When his cabin in Montana was raided in 1996, federal agents found bomb-related items and 40,000 handwritten journal pages.
He pleaded guilty in 1998 and was given four life sentences.
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev
The Boston Marathon bomber was sentenced to death for killing three people and injuring more than 260 others in his explosives attack on April 15, 2013, near the race’s finish line. The death penalty conviction was for two of the people killed in the bombing.
His brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, apparently killed the third victim days later in a shootout with police that also resulted in Tamerlan’s death.
Dzhokhar, 25, has been at Supermax awaiting execution since 2015.
Richard Reid
Three months after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Reid boarded a plane in Paris that was headed to Miami. En route, he tried to detonate a bomb hidden in his shoe. Fellow passengers restrained him, and the flight landed in Boston, where Reid was arrested. Reid, who became known as the “shoe bomber,” was convicted in 2003 after pleading guilty to felony counts that included attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction and attempted murder of passengers on an aircraft.
In his statement at his conviction, he said: “I am at war with your country. I’m at war with them not for personal reasons but because they have murdered so many children and they have oppressed my religion and they have oppressed people for no reason except that they say we believe in Allah.”
U.S. District Judge William Young responded: “You are not an enemy combatant. You are a terrorist. You are not a soldier in any war. You are a terrorist. To give you that reference, to call you a soldier, gives you far too much stature. And we do not negotiate with terrorists. We do not sign documents with terrorists. We hunt them down one by one and bring them to justice. So war talk is way out of line in this court.” Reid is 45.
Terry Nichols
He helped Timothy McVeigh commit what at the time was the deadliest terrorist attack on U.S. soil: the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995.
McVeigh was executed in 2001 for his part in the attack, which killed 168 people — including 19 children. Nichols was convicted of criminal conspiracy and involuntary manslaughter in the deaths of eight federal law enforcement agents.
Nichols, 63, has been at Supermax since his conviction and hasn’t had a quiet time there. He sued the prison in 2009 for not providing him with whole-grain foods and fresh raw vegetables and fruit in accordance with religious and dietary needs. The case was dismissed by a federal judge a year later. In 2015, he filed a petition asking the government to turn over seized weapons to his ex-wife. That effort failed, and the weapons were ordered destroyed.
Zacarias Moussaoui
He pleaded guilty in 2006 as a conspirator in the Sept. 11 attacks and was sentenced to life at Supermax. During his trial, it was revealed that he had bragged about his ties to Al Qaeda, but testimony and evidence also showed that FBI officials in Washington were skeptical that he was a threat to the country. He was in jail the day of the attacks — arrested three weeks prior for overstaying a visa.
When he left court after sentencing, he yelled; “America, you lost!” But U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema, at his sentencing, had a different view.
“You came here to be a martyr, and to die in a great big bang of glory,” she said. “But to paraphrase the poet T.S. Eliot, instead you will die with a whimper. The rest of your life you will spend in prison.” Moussaoui is 50.
Ramzi Yousef
Convicted in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, Yousef has a terrorist track record that also includes the bombing of a Philippine Airlines flight in 1994 and a plot to bomb a U.S. airliner the following year.
He was convicted in 1997 for his role in the World Trade Center bombing, which left six dead. His sentence was life plus 240 years. He is 50.