Witness stands out in a cast of characters at El Chapo trial
Drug kingpin aide’s $100M bribery claim part of colorful account
NEW YORK — Alex Cifuentes Villa was born with the drug trade in his blood.
As the youngest member of a storied narco dynasty, Cifuentes already was helping his father dry and pack cocaine at age 10. A few years later, he befriended a top aide to the drug lord Pablo Escobar, who had moved into his building in Medellín, Colombia. He started going bowling with the aide’s bodyguards.
But about a decade ago, Cifuentes, then in his 40s, was in dire straits, recovering from pancreatic surgery and saddled with a large debt from his recently murdered older brother.
Needing money quickly, he testified this week, he was hired as a personal assistant to an old business associate: Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the Mexican kingpin known as El Chapo.
Cifuentes worked with Guzmán for the next six years — arranging his schedule, managing his drug deals, buying his weapons, disposing of his enemies and even taking part in his vanity movie project. But he has spent the past four days betraying the defendant as a witness for the prosecution at his drug trial in New York.
While his detailed testimony about Guzmán’s Sinaloa cartel was damaging for his former boss’ defense, it was his revelation Tuesday under cross-examination that arguably will be most remembered: Cifuentes testified that just before Mexico’s 2012 presidential election, Guzmán gave Enrique Peña Nieto, who ultimately won the contest, a $100 million bribe.
The kingpin’s trial, in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn, has seen its share of flamboyant figures in the past nine weeks — from Guzmán’s chief cocaine supplier, who altered his entire face with plastic surgery, to the 20something IT expert who built El Chapo an encrypted cellphone system and then worked with the FBI to hack it.
But even in this parade of vivid characters, Cifuentes has stood out.
Who else could describe for jurors, as he did Wednesday, how he once planned to “fuse” cocaine into “plastic cubes” and ship it to Canada with the help of twin brothers in the Mafia? Cifuentes also said he lied about his true occupation on an application for Mexican citizenship, saying he sold “submersible plants.”
Federal prosecutors have said in court filings that Cifuentes has an “unorthodox” interest in the occult (which, they noted, he picked up from watching the Discovery Channel) and on several occasions has gone to see a witch doctor.
He said he once took a trip to Ecuador to buy cocaine for Guzmán, filling a cooler with $1 million and traveling the high seas in a six-person boat.
Cifuentes first grew close to Guzmán in late 2007 when he went to live with the drug lord (and his entourage of secretaries, maids and bodyguards) in a series of secret hideouts in the Sierra Madre.
Before he arrived, Cifuentes said, Guzmán was living in a rustic hut with plastic folding chairs and makeshift wooden furniture. It only was after he showed up, he claimed, that Guzmán acquired modern amenities like a plasma-screen television.
In the next six years, Cifuentes was involved in nearly every aspect of Guzmán’s business.
His own personal assistant, Andrea Velez Fernandez, once tried to help the kingpin bribe an army general whom she was supplying with “female friends” from a modeling firm she ran. When Guzmán later wanted Velez dead, Cifuentes said he took the contract, sending his wife to Canada to hire a local group of Hell’s Angels for the hit.
His ties to Guzmán ended shortly after Cifuentes was arrested by Mexican authorities in late 2013.
Within a year, he testified, his brother Jorge, who already was in custody in the United States, persuaded him to cooperate with the prosecutors on Guzmán’s case.
The Cifuentes family had not always gotten along so well. On Wednesday, Cifuentes told jurors that he had once asked his nephew to kill his niece’s boyfriend after he suspected the man of being an informant.
Some years later, after the nephew kidnapped his grandmother — Cifuentes’ mother — he tried to have the nephew murdered, too.
When Cifuentes first appeared on the witness stand Thursday, he nodded at Guzmán in a solemn way that seemed to say, “This is how it ends, old friend.” Guzmán nodded back.