‘El Chapo’ pleads not guilty in U.S. after extradition
NEW YORK — It’s a scene U.S. authorities have dreamed of for decades: One of history’s most infamous drug lords, Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, facing justice in an American court.
As it finally unfolded Friday, authorities faced another challenge — actually holding onto a notorious escape artist who has pulled off two brazen prison breakouts in his native Mexico.
A hush descended over a Brooklyn courtroom moments before a dazed-looking Guzmán entered Friday, a day after his extradition from Mexico. Security at the courthouse was stepped up to levels used for terrorism suspects, with officers armed with assault rifles and bomb-sniffing dogs.
Holding his unshackled hands behind his back, Guzmán appeared calm and collected as he gave yes and no answers, through an interpreter, to a judge’s questions.
He entered a not-guilty plea through his court-appointed lawyer to drug trafficking and other charges and will be held without bail in a jail that has handled terror suspects and mobsters.
“It is difficult to imagine another person with a greater risk of fleeing prosecution,” prosecutors wrote in court papers.
Prosecutors described Guzmán as the murderous architect of a 3-decade-long web of smuggling, brutality and corruption that made his Sinaloa cartel a fortune while fueling an epidemic of drug abuse and related violence in the U.S. in the 1980s and ‘90s.
“He’s a man known for a life of crime, violence, death and destruction, and now he’ll have to answer for that,” said Robert Capers, the U.S. attorney in Brooklyn.
The U.S. has been trying to get custody of Guzmán since he was first indicted in California in the early 1990s. American authorities finally got their wish on the eve of the inauguration of President Trump, who has lashed out at Mexico for sending the U.S. “criminals and rapists” and has vowed to build a wall at the Mexican border.
While Guzmán faces federal charges in several U.S. states, federal prosecutors in Brooklyn won the jockeying to get the case. The U.S. attorney’s office there has substantial experience prosecuting international drug cartel cases and was once led by outgoing U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch.
Now in his late 50s, Guzmán faces the possibility of life in a U.S. prison; prosecutors also are seeking a $14 billion forfeiture. They agreed to not seek the death penalty as a condition of the extradition.