Witness: We manipulated coke supply

They manipulated New York’s cocaine supply to keep prices high along with their customers.

Colombian druglord Juan Carlos Ramírez Abadia returned to the witness stand at El Chapo’s drug trafficking trial in Brooklyn on Monday and described how he and his traffickers stockpiled blow in stashhouses around Queens and Long Island to prop up prices during their heyday.

They often kept the drugs out of the pipeline for long periods of time to create pentup demand, he said.

“There would be less cocaine in the streets, then I would put my cocaine out and have bigger profits,” Ramirez told jurors during the fourth week of testimony in the high-profile case.

The witness best known for his freakish face caused by multiple plastic surgeries said his premium coke sold for between $20,000 and $34,000 per kilo, helping him amass a former fortune topping $1 billion.

Ramirez said that between the time he started doing business with El Chapo in the early 1990s and his first arrest in 1996, he sent Chapo’s Sinaloa Cartel approximately 200 tons of cocaine to smuggle into the U.S.

He said Chapo, whose real name is Joaquin Guzman Loera, transported 80,000 to 90,000 kilos of that — raking in at least $640 million.

He said that on average, Guzman took less than a week to traffic cocaine from Mexico to the U.S. An estimated 90% of the drug ended up in New York City, he testified.

Ramirez, nicknamed “Chupeta,” or lollipop, told the jury Thursday that he was a leader of Colombia’s largest drug gang, the North Valley Cartel, before his 2007 arrest in Brazil and extradition to the U.S. a year later.

He previously told prosecutors he sent 10 cocaine shipments to the Sinaloa Cartel from approximately 2002 through 2005, according to court paperwork.

After some of the cocaine was seized by the U.S. Coast Guard in 2004, Ramirez claims he sent his first submarine of cocaine to El Chapo and his partners.