Alan Feuer

Once billed as the charitable arm of the president’s financial empire, the Trump Foundation closed its doors in December, six months after the New York attorney general’s office sued it for acting “as little more than a checkbook to serve Mr. Trump’s business and political interests.” The suit said the foundation engaged in “a shocking pattern of illegality” that included improperly coordinating with Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.

In the ruling Wednesday, Justice Saliann Scarpulla found that Trump had “breached his fiduciary duty” by using the foundation to further his political career.

The attorney general’s office had asked Scarpulla to ban Trump from ever running a charity again. Though she did not impose the ban, she did place numerous restrictions on Trump should he seek to open another charitable organization.

This article originally appeared in

Trump Ordered to Pay $2 Million to Charities

A state judge ordered President Donald Trump to pay $2 million in damages to a collection of nonprofit groups Wednesday as part of a settlement of a lawsuit that accused his charity, the Donald J. Trump Foundation, of financial mismanagement.

<h1>NEW YORK — When Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the Mexican drug lord known as El Chapo, walks into court Wednesday and is sentenced, by law, to life in prison, it will likely close the book on a criminal career unparalleled in its scope and celebrity since Al Capone’s.</h1>

But as with everything in the Guzmán case, getting to the end was not an easy matter. And an epilogue or two (or three or four) may still need to be written.

Guzmán, 62, was convicted this winter after a three-month trial in U.S.District Court in Brooklyn that often veered, in head-snapping fashion, between solemnity and absurdity.

Prosecutors leveled some of the most serious charges possible against him, presenting evidence that he sent hundreds of tons of drugs to the United States from Mexico and caused the brutal deaths of dozens of people to protect himself and his smuggling routes.

The case revealed in exacting detail the inner workings of the Sinaloa drug cartel — such as how it employed IT consultants and how it packaged its cocaine in waterproof rubber “condoms.”

But given the defendant’s fame and notoriety, the trial was also a boisterous legal circus, complete with a horde of international reporters, a steady trickle of curious “narco-tourists” and a cameo appearance by an actor who plays the drug lord on a Netflix show.

At one point, there was even a bizarre marital stunt in which Guzmán and his third wife, Emma Coronel Aispuro, showed up in the courtroom wearing matching velvet smoking jackets.

Even after the guilty verdict was issued Feb. 12, the case did not let up. Two days later, federal prosecutors in Washington unsealed an indictment against two of Guzmán’s sons, Joaquín and Ovidio Guzmán López. A few days after that, one of the anonymous jurors in El Chapo’s case told a reporter for Vice Media that several of the panelists had disobeyed repeated orders by the judge not to follow media coverage of the trial.

The Vice article prompted Guzmán’s lawyers to submit a motion requesting a new trial. And for a period of weeks, it suddenly seemed possible that the jurors might be hauled back into court and the protracted case forced to continue with a hearing to determine if they had in fact committed misconduct.

But in early July, Judge Brian Cogan foreclosed that possibility, denying the new trial motion and moving things forward toward the sentencing.

Some of the witnesses who testified against Guzmán have themselves recently been sentenced. At the end of June, a federal judge in Texas gave a nine-year prison term to Edgar Galvan, a divorced man from El Paso who wound up running guns for one of Guzmán’s most feared assassins after meeting him one evening at a nightclub across the border in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. And in late May, Vicente Zambada Niebla — the son of Guzmán’s partner and the cartel’s heir apparent — was sentenced in Chicago to 14 years in prison.

Around the same time, the assassin who befriended Galvan, Antonio Marrufo (or “the Jaguar,” as he called himself) was extradited from Mexico to Texas to face federal charges, including his alleged involvement in a brazen plot to kidnap a groom on his wedding day and kill him — and his best man — in Ciudad Juárez.

But it remains unclear for now where Marrufo’s prosecution might be headed given that more than a dozen sealed documents have been posted on his docket in the two months following his extradition.

A similar level of secrecy was applied to Guzmán’s case, although prosecutors in Brooklyn have started to unseal some of the filings. According to a document released two weeks ago, the kingpin, during one of his many wars against his rivals, hired a doctor to revive a man he had been torturing. After the victim regained consciousness, Guzmán and his crew kept working on the man, the document said, applying electrodes to his ear and yanking some of his teeth out.

Another document from early July revealed that the government had come up with a “conservative” estimate of Guzmán’s total career earnings: $12,666,181,704. They said they wanted him to pay it back.

Across the country, other cases related to Guzmán are slowly moving forward. Jesus Beltran Leon, a close associate of the kingpin’s sons, pleaded guilty to drug charges in April and will soon be sentenced in Chicago.

One of Guzmán’s top security chiefs, José Rodrigo Aréchiga, known as “Chino Ántrax,” and one of the kingpin’s Colombian suppliers, Javier Calle Serna, are scheduled to be sentenced in California and Brooklyn later this year.

In June, Mykhaylo Koretskyy, a Ukrainian man known as “Russian Mike,” was extradited to Manhattan from Curaçao and may eventually stand trial in a case that will explore the drug lord’s business interests in Canada.

In another case in Manhattan, Fredy Renán Nájera Montoya, a former Honduran congressman, is being prosecuted on charges that he worked with the Sinaloa cartel to ship cocaine to Mexico from Honduras and murdered an army general and paid off the country’s former president.

Guzmán’s sentencing Wednesday will not be marked by much suspense: Because of the severity of his crimes, he faces a mandatory penalty of life in prison. It is probable that Guzmán will be sent to the U.S. Penitentiary Administrative Maximum Facility in Florence, Colorado, more commonly known as the ADX.

But there may be a fair share of drama Wednesday.

According the government, at least one of his many victims plans to address the court. (The identity of the victim has not yet been revealed.) Guzmán himself may also speak at the hearing in what could amount to the most expansive courtroom comments he has ever made.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/16/nyregion/el-chapo-sentencing.html" link="null" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>.

Guzmán, 62, was convicted this winter after a three-month trial in U.S.District Court in Brooklyn that often veered, in head-snapping fashion, between solemnity and absurdity.

The final chapter of El Chapo

But now the federal prosecutors who convicted Guzmán at his trial this winter in New York have put an actual price tag on his earnings, calculating the amount down to the dollar. And they want him to pay it back.

Late last week, the prosecutors filed a forfeiture request against the kingpin, laying out in remarkable detail how he had transformed staggering quantities of drugs into equally staggering profits over the years.

From the early 1990s until his arrest in 2016, the prosecutors said, Guzmán handled nearly 600,000 kilograms of cocaine (worth more than $11 billion), 200 kilograms of heroin (worth more than $11 million) and at least 420,000 kilograms of marijuana (worth about $846 million.)

As astonishing as these figures seem to be, the prosecutors noted that they were only a “conservative” estimate of the still unknown — and perhaps unknowable — total amount of drugs that Guzmán may have smuggled during his lucrative life of crime.

In their 12-page forfeiture document, prosecutors said they had arrived at the numbers by adding up all the narcotics provided to Guzmán by only a few of his many suppliers: Juan Carlos Ramírez Abadía, Jorge Cifuentes-Villa and Luis Caicedo, known as “Don Lucho.”

Both Ramírez and Cifuentes testified against Guzmán at his trial to devastating effect. But although Caicedo secretly pleaded guilty to drug charges in Brooklyn — and thus was theoretically available to testify — he never appeared on the witness stand.

At this point, it remains unclear how much, if anything, of the $12.7 billion that the government is seeking from Guzmán will ultimately be recouped.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/07/nyregion/el-chapo-trial-money.html" id="a95de4b3-9930-35d3-a941-00763fd6bd2b">The New York Times</a>.

El Chapo earned $12,666,181,704, prosecutors say, they want him to pay it back

NEW YORK — In his 30-year career as one of Mexico’s wiliest and most successful drug lords, Joaquín Guzmán Loera — better known as El Chapo — made so much money selling drugs that he once owned a pair of yachts, a fleet of Learjets and a private zoo with tigers, crocodiles and panthers. His fortune was vast enough that he was named to Forbes magazine’s annual list of billionaires four times.

The two weeks after Guzmán’s three-month trial — which ended with a guilty verdict Feb. 12 — have been exceptionally busy. Allegations of jury misconduct have already emerged. The kingpin’s lawyers have signaled their intention to move to retry the case. And in a third strange twist, two of Guzmán’s sons were charged with drug crimes in a federal indictment.

The post-trial drama began Wednesday when one of the anonymous jurors emailed Keegan Hamilton, a Vice News reporter, and later told him — during an interview by video chat — that at least five members of the panel had disobeyed instructions from Judge Brian M. Cogan to ignore media coverage of the trial.

Throughout the trial, Cogan regularly cautioned jurors to avoid reading or viewing anything about the case outside the courtroom. On two occasions, he directly asked the jury whether they had followed his admonishments.

But according to the juror’s interview with Vice, the panel not only routinely read about the case on Twitter, but also lied to Cogan when he asked jurors if they had consulted any sources other than the witnesses at the trial. Some of the material the jurors were said to have encountered was devastating to Guzmán and had been withheld from them at trial, including allegations that the kingpin had drugged and raped young girls.

“You know how we were told we can’t look at the media during the trial?” the juror told Vice News. “Well, we did.”

The juror also told Vice that the deliberations took six days — somewhat longer than many had expected — mostly because of a single “stubborn holdout.” While all the panelists eventually agreed that Guzmán was guilty, some were concerned that, after his conviction, he would be sent to the country’s most secure federal prison, where he would likely spend his life in isolation.

“A lot of people were having difficulty thinking about him being in solitary confinement, because, well, you know, we’re all human beings,” the juror said.

Because the judge ordered the identities of the jurors to remain secret, it was impossible to independently verify the comments made to Vice.

Still, hours after the interview was published, one of Guzmán’s lawyers, A. Eduardo Balarezo, issued a statement calling the juror’s remarks “deeply concerning and distressing.” In the statement, Balarezo added that if, in fact, the remarks were true, “Joaquín did not get a fair trial.”

On Friday, Balarezo sent a letter to Cogan, announcing that Guzmán planned to file a motion for a new trial “based on the disclosures in the article” and to request a hearing “to determine the extent of the misconduct.” The letter asked for an extension of a month to file the motion.

A spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn declined to comment on the allegation that jurors did outside research. But even when jurors commit improprieties, it is not easy to overturn their verdict, legal experts said.

“The standard in federal court is a steep one for the defense,” said Josh Dubin, a lawyer who specializes in juror issues. “They have to demonstrate the jury was actually prejudiced by the outside information that they were exposed to. A showing of juror misconduct is not enough.”

Dubin added that judges have broad discretion about how to handle inquiries of jurors, and ultimately Cogan will decide how to proceed in the Guzmán case.

Jessica Roth, a former federal prosecutor who is now a professor at the Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University, said that to protect “the sanctity of jury deliberations” federal rules of evidence limit the circumstances in which a judge can hear live testimony from a juror.

If the defense does make a motion to set aside the verdict, Cogan could question the juror in the Vice article only on the “limited issue of what the jurors were exposed to in the form of tweets and other press accounts,” Roth said.

She added: “The juror would not be permitted to testify about how those materials impacted the jury’s deliberations.”

Even as these questions about the jurors’ behavior emerged, the Justice Department announced it had charged two of Guzmán’s sons with distributing cocaine, methamphetamine and marijuana in the United States. It was the first time that U.S. prosecutors had accused the brothers, Joaquín Guzmán López and Ovidio Guzmán López, of drug-related crimes. They have yet to be arrested, and authorities believe they are in Mexico.

Over the weekend, there was more news related to Guzmán’s case. Mexican newspaper RíoDoce, which closely covers the drug-trafficking world, reported that the brother of Dámaso López Núñez, one of the kingpin’s former aides who testified against Guzmán at the trial, was killed by unknown gunmen in Mexico City.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/25/nyregion/el-chapo-trial-jurors-sons.html" id="595ee4ec-6338-3624-af85-9cf9c5a420a7">The New York Times</a>.

Claim Arises After El Chapo Trial That Jurors Violated Judge's Instructions

NEW YORK — In a typical case, after a defendant’s conviction, the criminal process slows down as both sides prepare for sentencing or the defense prepares an appeal. But the prosecution of Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the Mexican drug capo known as El Chapo, has never been a typical case.

<h1>The conviction this week of Mexican crime lord Joaquín Guzmán Loera was one of the most visible victories for U.S. law enforcement since the war on drugs began in the 1970s, a triumph over a cartel leader who survived — and thrived — for decades on his business skills, brutal violence and bottomless bribes to Mexican officials.</h1>

And yet Jan. 31, the same day that the trial of Guzmán — known to the world as El Chapo — ended in a Brooklyn federal courtroom, border officials in Arizona made an announcement: They had just seized the largest load of fentanyl ever found in the United States, a haul that was hidden in a truck carrying cucumbers on its way through the Nogales port of entry, a crossing that Guzmán’s organization, the Sinaloa drug cartel, has traditionally run for years.

The fentanyl seizure — enough for 100 million lethal doses — was a clear signal that even after the hard-fought task of convicting Guzmán on drug conspiracy charges, U.S. federal agents have far to go in their attempts to dismantle Mexico’s infamous cartels. The verdict against the kingpin Tuesday may, in the end, have little lasting effect on either Guzmán’s group or the wider effort to stem the flow of drugs into the United States.

Even without its former leader, the Sinaloa cartel is a major threat and maintains among its competitors “the most expansive footprint in the United States,” according to the Drug Enforcement Administration’s most recent assessment of the drug trade. While Guzmán’s guilty verdict disrupted the relationships and smuggling agreements the kingpin forged in his career, federal agents say his empire remains intact and is now being run by his sons and his wily longtime partner, Ismael Zambada García.

Drugs, of course, have never stopped coming across the border. In 2016 and 2017, the years when the crime lord was most recently arrested and sent for prosecution in New York, Mexican heroin production increased by 37 percent and seizures of fentanyl in places like Nogales more than doubled, the DEA has said.

According to the State Department, 90 percent of all cocaine smuggled into the United States still enters the country from Mexico. And global production of cocaine reached a record 1,140 tons in 2016, up 25 percent from the previous year, according to a 2018 report by the United Nations’ Office on Drugs and Crime.

President Donald Trump has suggested that this vast tide of narcotics could be stanched by building a wall along the southwest border, but extensive testimony at Guzmán’s trial — from traffickers themselves — indicated that a wall would have little effect: Most illegal drug loads cross the border legally at official checkpoints, not in remote stretches where a barrier would stop them.

By any definition, Guzmán’s three-month trial was a monumental endeavor, the culmination of more than a decade of investigative work by U.S. federal prosecutors and law enforcement agents who acted in concert with several foreign governments in Latin America. Like Joseph Valachi’s congressional testimony in 1963, which revealed to the public the inner workings of the Mafia, Guzmán’s prosecution detailed his cartel’s operations and demystified an outlaw who for decades enjoyed a kind of folk-hero status around the world.

“The trial put a big spotlight on the power of the Sinaloa cartel, giving the public insight into how it really operates and functions,” said Raymond P. Donovan, special agent in charge of the DEA’s New York office who played a leading role in Guzmán’s final capture. “Prior to the trial, people had heard the legend of El Chapo, but now they have the reality: the violence, the manipulations, the drug trafficking — what we, in law enforcement, have known for years.”

But several security experts said that convicting and imprisoning the kingpin for the most part sends a symbolic message.

“Catching Chapo is important because it is a signal but nothing else,” said Christian Ehrlich, who works for Riskop, a risk analysis firm in Monterrey, Mexico. “In terms of logistics, there may be a superficial change, but these organizations know how to adapt very quickly.”

Even before Guzmán’s arrest in 2014 at a hotel in Mazatlán, Mexico, and his eventual recapture in 2016 after a prison break, the approach of hunting for and prosecuting top drug criminals — the kingpin strategy — did not halt violence or drug trafficking in the country. In recent years, collaboration between the United States and Mexico succeeded in killing or jailing many of Mexico’s best-known narco lords, including Guzmán’s cousin, Alfredo Beltrán-Leyva, and the heir apparent to his empire, Vicente Zambada Niebla, along with dozens of their lieutenants — all with little measurable effect.

Instead, fragmented groups have battled over smuggling routes and moved into new businesses, leading to a record 33,341 killings in Mexico last year. "In the same territory there are small and large organizations,” said Eduardo Guerrero, a security expert for Lantia Consultores, a Mexico City-based consulting firm. “The large try to absorb the small, and the small try to remain independent. This is very unstable.”

U.S. authorities say the Sinaloa cartel’s most notable current rival is the Jalisco New Generation cartel, which Guzmán once used as his front-line soldiers in a war against another rival group, Los Zetas. After breaking from Guzmán several years ago, Jalisco New Generation started branching out into activities such as extortion, kidnapping, migrant smuggling and gasoline theft — a crime that has cost Mexico as much as $3 billion a year, government officials say.

The man regarded as the Jalisco leader, Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, known as El Mencho, is still at large in Mexico, but faces an indictment filed in 2014 in Washington that closely resembles the one used to try Guzmán. Indeed, the two prosecutors named on El Mencho’s case file served on Guzmán’s trial team.

In a remarkable — if coincidental — bit of timing, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, president of Mexico, two weeks ago reiterated his administration’s reluctance to embrace the kingpin strategy, even as a prosecutor was delivering the government’s summation at Guzmán’s trial in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn.

“We haven’t arrested capos, because that isn’t our main function,” López Obrador said at a news conference, referring to cartel bosses. “The main function of the government is to guarantee public security. The strategy of operations to arrest capos is over.”

Historically, prosecutions of kingpins like El Chapo and El Mencho have done little to affect the viability of their former organizations. In 1997, a federal judge in Houston sentenced Juan García Ábrego, a boss of the Gulf cartel, to 11 life terms in prison. At the time, the lead prosecutor on the case said of the cartel: “If it’s not the end, it’s near the end. They’re mortally wounded.”

But more than 20 years later, the Gulf cartel remains alive in Matamoros, Mexico, directly across the border from Brownsville, Texas. At least one former prosecutor who worked on the investigation that led to García’s indictment said he had no regrets for going after kingpins.

“There was a time when they felt invulnerable, impervious, that they were above any kind of sense of justice,” the former prosecutor, Kenneth Magidson, said. “That sense of imperviousness has been removed from the equation. Not only are they touchable, but we’ve touched every one of them.”

Donovan, who runs the DEA’s New York office, said the capture and prosecution of Guzmán was “the first of its kind” because so many law enforcement agencies — the FBI, the DEA, Homeland Security Investigations — mostly worked together and “put their egos aside.”

“It’s the model for how to go after people moving forward,” he said.

But some former law enforcement agents wondered why the federal government never sought to leverage the overwhelming evidence it had against Guzmán to persuade him to cooperate and provide information on the cartel’s relationships with politicians, bankers and lawyers — or about his former partner, Ismael Zambada, who has never been arrested. (Guzmán’s lawyers have said he was never offered a plea deal and might have refused one even if it was offered.)

“Twenty years ago, the unwritten rule was you don’t get anyone at the highest levels to cooperate because it’s dirty,” said Derek Maltz, a former director of the DEA’s special operations division.

Maltz said that extraditing kingpins to the United States was “the one thing that works.” But he also noted that with the cartel’s advancements in communications, its increasingly sophisticated financial systems and the role it has played in the opioid crisis, “Maybe we should start thinking about creative cooperation deals. The same old ways just aren’t working that well.”

Banks that have laundered cartel money have largely escaped prosecution. In 2012, the U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn — the same agency that prosecuted Guzmán — reached an agreement with British bank HSBC that allowed it to avoid criminal charges even though it was found to have funneled more than $880 million in drug profits — much of it from the Sinaloa cartel. Under the agreement, HSBC forfeited more than $1.2 billion, paid $665 million in fines and put in place “structural changes” to its global operations.

María McFarland Sánchez-Moreno, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, which works to reduce the harms of both drug misuse and drug prohibition, said that while the war on drugs had led to prison terms for kingpins like Guzman, it had also yielded waste, violence, crime and corruption throughout Latin America.

“Latin American leaders have said they want to explore forms of regulation for certain drugs,” Sánchez-Moreno said. “That’s a conversation they have earned a right to have, and the U.S. should encourage and participate in that conversation.”

Guzmán had his own somewhat fatalistic ideas on the subject in the famous interview he gave to Rolling Stone before his final arrest in 2016.

He was asked if he felt responsible “for the fact that there are so many drugs in the world.”

“No, that’s false,” he said. “Because the day I don’t exist, it’s not going to decrease in any way at all.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="26360e63-1868-40cb-bc96-763f50581322" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/13/nyregion/joaquin-guzman-drug-war.html">The New York Times</a>.

A Cartel King Was Convicted, Yet Drugs Still Flow From Mexico

The fentanyl seizure was a clear signal that even after the hard-fought task of convicting Guzmán on drug conspiracy charges, U.S. federal agents have far to go in their attempts to dismantle Mexico’s infamous cartels.

A cartel king was convicted, yet drugs still flow from Mexico

The fentanyl seizure — enough for 100 million lethal doses — was a clear signal that even after the hard-fought task of convicting Guzmán on drug conspiracy charges, U.S. federal agents still have far to go in their attempts to dismantle Mexico’s infamous cartels. The verdict against the kingpin Tuesday, may, in the end, have little lasting effect on either Guzmán’s group or the wider effort to stem the flow of drugs into the United States.

Donovan, who runs the DEA’s New York office, said the capture and prosecution of Guzmán was “the first of its kind” because so many law enforcement agencies — the FBI, the DEA, Homeland Security Investigations — worked together and, with notable exceptions, “put their egos aside.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/13/nyregion/joaquin-guzman-drug-war.html" id="af0e3734-be37-3346-ad05-354d3fe0c999">The New York Times</a>.

El Chapo Is Behind Bars, but Drugs Still Flow From Mexico

The conviction this week of Mexican crime lord Joaquín Guzmán Loera was one of the most visible victories for U.S. law enforcement since the war on drugs began in the 1970s, a triumph over a cartel leader who survived — and thrived — for decades on his business skills, brutal violence and bottomless bribes to Mexican officials.

<h1>NEW YORK — The Mexican crime lord known as El Chapo was convicted Tuesday after a three-month drug trial in New York City that exposed the inner workings of his sprawling cartel, which over decades shipped tons of drugs into the United States and plagued Mexico with relentless bloodshed and corruption.</h1>

The guilty verdict against the kingpin, whose real name is Joaquín Guzmán Loera, ended the career of a legendary outlaw who also served as a dark folk hero in Mexico, notorious for his innovative smuggling tactics, his violence against competitors, his storied prison breaks and his nearly unstoppable ability to evade the Mexican authorities.

As Judge Brian M. Cogan read the jury’s charge sheet in open court — 10 straight guilty verdicts on all 10 counts of the indictment — Guzmán sat listening to a translator, looking stunned. When the reading of the verdict was complete, Guzmán leaned back to glance at his wife, Emma Coronel Aispuro, who flashed him a thumbs up with tears in her eyes.

The jury’s decision came more than a week after the panel started deliberations at the trial in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn where prosecutors presented a mountain of evidence against the cartel leader, including testimony from 56 witnesses, 14 of whom once worked with Guzmán. Guzmán now faces life in prison at his sentencing hearing, scheduled for June 25.

Speaking to reporters outside the courthouse, Richard P. Donoghue, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, called the guilty verdict a victory for law enforcement; for Mexico, where 100,000 people had died because of drug violence; and for families who had lost someone to the “black hole of addiction.”

“There are those who say the war on drugs is not worth fighting,” Donoghue added. “Those people are wrong.”

In their own news conference, Guzmán’s lawyers promised an appeal, saying they would focus on the extradition process that brought the kingpin to New York City for trial and on the prosecution’s efforts to restrict their cross-examinations of witnesses. They said that Guzmán had expected the guilty verdict and was prepared for it.

“I’ve never faced a case with so many cooperating witnesses and so much evidence,” Jeffrey Lichtman, one of Guzmán’s attorneys, said. “We did all we could as defense lawyers.”

A. Eduardo Balarezo, another one of Guzmán’s attorneys, added about his client: “When he came here he was already presumed guilty by everyone, unfortunately. We weren’t just fighting evidence, we were fighting perception.”

Not long after the jury got the case Feb. 4, Matthew Whitaker, the acting U.S. attorney general, stepped into the courtroom and shook hands with each of the trial prosecutors, wishing them good luck. During the next several days, the jurors, appearing to scrutinize the government’s evidence, asked to be given thousands of pages of testimony, including — in an unusual move — the full testimonies of six different prosecution witnesses.

Guzmán’s trial, which took place under intense media scrutiny and tight security from bomb-sniffing dogs, police snipers and federal marshals with radiation sensors, was the first time a U.S. jury heard details about the financing, logistics and bloody history of one of the drug cartels that have long pumped huge amounts of heroin, cocaine, marijuana and synthetic drugs like fentanyl into the United States, earning traffickers billions of dollars.

But despite extensive testimony about private jets filled with cash, bodies burned in bonfires and shocking evidence that Guzmán and his men often drugged and raped young girls, the case also revealed the operatic, even absurd, nature of cartel culture. It featured accounts of traffickers taking target practice with a bazooka, a mariachi playing all night outside a jail cell and a murder plot involving a cyanide-laced arepa.

At times, the trial was so bizarre it felt like a drug-world telenovela unfolding live in the courtroom. Last month, one of Guzmán’s mistresses tearfully proclaimed her love for him even as she testified against him. The following day, in what seemed like a coordinated show of solidarity, the kingpin and his wife appeared in court in matching red velvet smoking jackets.

Toward the end of the proceeding, Alejandro Edda, an actor who plays El Chapo on the Netflix series “Narcos: Mexico,” showed up at the trial to study Guzmán. The crime lord flashed an ecstatic smile when told Edda had come to see him.

Although Tuesday’s conviction dealt a blow to the Sinaloa drug cartel, which Guzmán, 61, helped to run for decades, the group continues to operate, led in part by the kingpin’s sons. In 2016 and 2017, the years when Guzmán was arrested for a final time and sent for prosecution to New York, Mexican heroin production increased by 37 percent and fentanyl seizures at the southwest border more than doubled, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration.

The DEA, in its most recent assessment of the drug trade, noted that Guzmán’s organization and a rising power, the Jalisco New Generation cartel, “remain the greatest criminal drug threat” to the United States.

Mexican authorities began pursuing the stocky crime lord — whose nickname translates roughly to “Shorty” — in 1993 when he was blamed for a killing that epitomized for many Mexicans the extreme violence of the country’s drug wars: the assassination of the Roman Catholic cardinal, Juan Jesús Posadas Ocampo, at the Guadalajara airport.

Though Guzmán was convicted that same year on charges of murdering the cardinal, he escaped from prison in 2001 — in a laundry cart pushed by a jailhouse janitor — and spent the next decade either on the lam in one of his mountain hideouts or slipping through various police and military dragnets.

In 2012, he evaded capture by the FBI and Mexican federal police by ducking out the back door of his oceanview mansion in Los Cabos into a patch of thorn bushes. Two years later, after he was recaptured in a hotel in Mazatlán by the DEA and Mexican marines, he escaped from prison again — this time, through a lighted, ventilated, mile-long tunnel dug into the shower of his cell.

But following his last arrest — after a gunfight in Los Mochis, Mexico in 2016 — Guzmán was extradited to New York City, where federal prosecutors had initially indicted him in 2009. He also faced indictment in six other U.S. judicial districts.

The top charge of the New York City indictment named Guzmán as a principal leader of a “continuing criminal enterprise” to purchase drugs from suppliers in Colombia, Ecuador, Panama and Mexico’s Golden Triangle — an area including the states of Sinaloa, Durango and Chihuahua where most of the country’s heroin and marijuana are produced.

It also accused him of earning a jaw-dropping $14 billion during his career by smuggling up to 200 tons of drugs across the U.S. border in an array of yachts, speedboats, long-range fishing boats, airplanes, cargo trains, semi-submersible submarines, tractor-trailers filled with frozen meat and cans of jalapeños and yet another tunnel (hidden under a pool table in Agua Prieta, Mexico.)

The prosecution was years in the making and Guzmán’s trial drew upon investigative work by the FBI, the DEA, the U.S. Coast Guard, Homeland Security Investigations and federal prosecutors in Chicago, Miami, San Diego, Washington, New York and El Paso, Texas. The trial team also relied on scores of local American police officers and authorities in Ecuador, Colombia and the Dominican Republic.

The evidence presented at the trial included dozens of surveillance photos, three sets of detailed drug ledgers, several of the defendant’s handwritten letters and hundreds of his most intimate — and incriminating — phone calls and text messages intercepted through four separate wiretap operations.

Prosecutors used all of this to trace Guzmán’s 30-year rise from a young, ambitious trafficker with a knack for speedy smuggling to a billionaire narco lord with an entourage of maids and secretaries, a portfolio of vacation homes — even a ranch with a personal zoo.

Andrea Goldbarg, an assistant U.S. attorney, called the prosecution’s case “an avalanche” during the government’s summations. Even with the help of a PowerPoint presentation, complete with a slideshow of photos of the kingpin, Goldbarg took almost an entire day to lead the jury through it.

But the centerpiece of the government’s offering was testimony from a Shakespearean cast of cooperating witnesses who took the stand to spill the deepest secrets of Guzmán’s personal and professional lives.

Among the witnesses were the kingpin’s first employee; one of his personal secretaries; his chief Colombian cocaine supplier; the son of his closest partner and heir apparent to his empire; his IT expert; his top American distributor; a killer in his army of assassins; even the young mistress with whom he escaped from the Mexican marines, naked, through a tunnel that was hidden under a bathtub in his safe house.

Confronting this onslaught, Guzmán’s lawyers offered little in the way of an affirmative defense, opting instead to use cross-examination to attack the credibility of the witnesses, most of whom were seasoned criminals with their own long histories of lying, cheating, drug dealing and killing.

Late last month, there was frenzied speculation that Guzmán might testify in his own defense. But after he decided against doing so, the entire defense case lasted only 30 minutes — compared with 10 weeks for the prosecution — and consisted of a single witness and a stipulation read into the record.

In his closing argument, Lichtman, one of the defense lawyers, reprised a theme he first introduced during his opening statement in November, telling jurors that the real mastermind of the cartel was Guzmán’s closest partner, Ismael Zambada García.

Despite being sought by the police in Mexico for nearly 50 years, Zambada, known as El Mayo, has never been arrested. Lichtman said the reason was that Zambada had bribed virtually the entire Mexican government. Guzmán was merely “the rabbit” that authorities chased for decades, deflecting attention from his partner, Lichtman said.

Witness after witness took the stand at the trial and talked about paying off nearly every level of the Mexican police, military and political establishment — including the shocking allegation that Guzmán gave a $100 million bribe to the country’s former president, Enrique Peña Nieto, in the runup to Mexico’s 2012 elections. There was also testimony that bribes were paid to Genaro García Luna, one of Mexico’s top former law enforcement officers, a host of Mexican generals and police officials, and almost the entire congress of Colombia.

“One of the important things about this conviction is that it sends a resounding message,” Ángel Meléndez, special agent in charge for Homeland Security Investigations, said of other drug traffickers. “You’re not unreachable, you’re not untouchable and your day will come.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="de588e84-2355-4138-97d2-4850725f4c64" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/12/nyregion/el-chapo-verdict.html">The New York Times</a>.

El Chapo Found Guilty on All Counts; Faces Life in Prison

The guilty verdict against the kingpin, whose real name is Joaquín Guzmán Loera, ended the career of a legendary outlaw who also served as a dark folk hero in Mexico.

El Chapo found guilty on all counts; faces life in prison

Speaking to reporters outside the courthouse, Richard P. Donoghue, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, called the guilty verdict a victory for law enforcement, for Mexico — where 100,000 people had died because of drug violence — and for families who had lost someone to the “black hole of addiction.”

Not long after the jury got the case Feb. 4, Matthew Whitaker, the acting U.S. attorney general, stepped into the courtroom and shook hands with each of the trial prosecutors, wishing them good luck. Over the next several days, the jurors, appearing to scrutinize the government’s evidence, asked to be given thousands of pages of testimony, including — in an unusual move — the full testimonies of six different prosecution witnesses.

Guzmán’s trial, which took place under intense media scrutiny and tight security from bomb-sniffing dogs, police snipers and federal marshals with radiation sensors, was the first time an American jury heard details about the financing, logistics and bloody history of one of the drug cartels that have long pumped huge amounts of heroin, cocaine, marijuana and synthetic drugs like fentanyl into the United States, earning traffickers billions of dollars.

At times, the trial was so bizarre it felt like a drug-world telenovela unfolding live in the courtroom. Last month, one of Guzmán’s mistresses tearfully proclaimed her love for him even as she testified against him. The following day, in what seemed like a coordinated show of solidarity, the kingpin and his wife, Emma Coronel Aispuro, appeared in court in matching red velvet smoking jackets.

Although Monday’s conviction dealt a blow to the Sinaloa drug cartel, which Guzmán, 61, helped to run for decades, the group continues to operate, led in part by the kingpin’s sons. In 2016 and 2017, the years when Guzmán was arrested for a final time and sent for prosecution to New York, Mexican heroin production increased by 37 percent and fentanyl seizures at the southwest border more than doubled, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration.

But following his last arrest — after a gunfight in Los Mochis, Mexico in 2016 — Guzmán was extradited to New York City, where federal prosecutors had initially indicted him in 2009. He also faced indictment in six other American judicial districts.

Andrea Goldbarg, an assistant U.S. attorney, called the prosecution’s case “an avalanche” during the government’s summations. Even with the help of a Power Point presentation, complete with a slideshow of photos of the kingpin, Goldbarg took almost an entire day to lead the jury through it.

Late last month, there was frenzied speculation that Guzmán might testify in his own defense. But after he decided against doing so, the entire defense case lasted only 30 minutes — compared to 10 weeks for the prosecution — and consisted of a single witness and a stipulation read into the record.

In his closing argument, Lichtman, the defense lawyer, reprised a theme he first introduced during his opening statement in November, telling jurors that the real mastermind of the cartel was Guzmán’s closest partner, Ismael Zambada García.

Despite being sought by the police in Mexico for nearly 50 years, Zambada, known as El Mayo, has never been arrested. Lichtman said the reason was because Zambada had bribed virtually the entire Mexican government. Guzmán was merely “the rabbit” that authorities chased for decades, deflecting attention from his partner, Lichtman said.

Witness after witness took the stand at the trial and talked about paying off nearly every level of the Mexican police, military and political establishment — including the shocking allegation that Guzmán gave a $100 million bribe to the country’s former president, Enrique Peña Nieto, in the run-up to Mexico’s 2012 elections. There was also testimony that bribes were paid to Genaro García Luna, one of Mexico’s top former law enforcement officers, a host of Mexican generals and police officials, and almost the entire congress of Colombia.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/12/nyregion/el-chapo-verdict.html" id="6eb0356e-2e85-3df7-a68c-2bb348500f88">The New York Times</a>.

NEW YORK — The Mexican crime lord known as El Chapo was convicted Tuesday after a three-month drug trial in New York City that exposed the inner workings of his sprawling cartel, which over decades shipped tons of drugs into the United States and plagued Mexico with relentless bloodshed and corruption.

The jury’s decision came more than a week after the panel started deliberations at the trial in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn where prosecutors presented a mountain of evidence against the cartel leader. Guzmán now faces life in prison at his sentencing hearing, scheduled for June 25.

Guzmán’s lawyers promised an appeal, saying they would focus on the extradition process and on the prosecution’s efforts to restrict their cross-examinations of witnesses.

Guzmán’s trial, which took place under intense media scrutiny and tight security, was the first time an American jury heard details about the financing, logistics and bloody history of one of the drug cartels that have long pumped huge amounts of heroin, cocaine, marijuana and synthetic drugs like fentanyl into the United States, earning traffickers billions of dollars.

Although Monday’s conviction dealt a blow to the Sinaloa drug cartel, which Guzmán, 61, helped to run for decades, the group continues to operate, led in part by the kingpin’s sons.

El Chapo Found Guilty on All Counts, Faces Life in Prison

At times, the trial was so bizarre it felt like a drug-world telenovela unfolding live in the courtroom. Last month, one of Guzmán’s mistresses tearfully proclaimed her love for him even as she testified against him from the stand. The following day, in what seemed like a coordinated show of solidarity, the kingpin and his wife, Emma Coronel Aispuro, appeared in court in matching red velvet smoking jackets.

The jury’s decision came more than a week after the panel started deliberations at the trial in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn where prosecutors presented a mountain of evidence against the cartel leader, including testimony from 56 witnesses, 14 of whom once worked with Guzmán. He faces life in prison at his sentencing after being convicted of all 10 counts.

The top charge named Guzmán as a principal leader of a “continuing criminal enterprise” to purchase drugs from suppliers in Colombia, Ecuador, Panama and Mexico.

It also accused him of earning a jaw-dropping $14 billion during his career by smuggling up to 200 tons of drugs across the U.S. border.

El Chapo Convicted in Trial That Revealed Drug Cartel's Brutality and Corruption

In his closing argument, Jeffrey Lichtman, one of the defense lawyers, reprised a theme he first introduced during his opening statement in November, telling jurors that the real mastermind of the cartel was Guzmán’s closest partner, Ismael Zambada García.

<h1>NEW YORK — Even though jurors in the trial of Mexican drug lord Joaquín Guzmán Loera have spent nearly three months in the courtroom, they seem to be in no rush to go home. In a day and a half of deliberations, they have already written four notes with substantive questions and requests for evidence, including one that asked for more than a week’s worth of testimony from three witnesses.</h1>

It is difficult to glean much information from a jury’s notes, but those that have been sent by the jurors in this case suggest that the panel is making a genuine effort to sort through more than 10 weeks of testimony and exhibits.

That is a daunting task, not only because of the volume of the evidence, but also because jurors must work through an eight-page verdict sheet with 53 boxes that must be checked “Guilty or Not Guilty,” “Proven or Not Proven,” or simply “Yes or No.”

The verdict sheet is based on the indictment charging Guzmán, who is known as El Chapo, with 10 separate counts, the most important of which accuses him of being a leader of a “continuing criminal enterprise” from 1990 to 2014.

The enterprise count is composed of 27 violations, most of which allege that Guzmán arranged specific drug deals, from 400 kilograms of marijuana to nearly 20 tons of cocaine. There is also a murder conspiracy violation that claims he either personally killed or ordered the deaths of dozens of people.

The other counts accuse Guzmán of making, importing and distributing drugs; using firearms to further his operation; and conspiring to launder the profits of his empire.

Complicating matters, four of the violations listed under the enterprise charge are also included as separate counts on the verdict sheet. Another twist: the jury cannot consider the firearms and money laundering counts, unless it first finds that Guzmán is guilty of at least one of the drug counts.

On Monday morning, it took Judge Brian M. Cogan, who is handling the case, almost three hours to instruct the jurors on how to proceed. By the end of the day, they had sent the judge two substantial notes, which illustrated the complexity of their task. One asked if “a drug war” could be thought of as a drug trafficking crime that would trigger their consideration of the firearms charge. The other note asked if ephedrine — an ingredient in methamphetamines — was the same as the drug itself.

On the second day of deliberations, in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn, the jury made two additional requests concerning Guzmán’s role in trafficking methamphetamines. They asked to rehear an intercepted phone call of the kingpin clearly discussing selling the drug. They also asked to be read testimony from a witness who said he once met with the man in charge of methamphetamine production for Guzmán’s organization, the Sinaloa drug cartel.

It was harder to discern the meaning of another request the jury made: They asked Cogan to provide them with the entire eight-day testimony of Jorge and Alex Cifuentes-Villa, two Colombian brothers who worked closely with Guzmán.

To avoid reading the testimony aloud in court — which could easily take days — Cogan suggested giving the jury a transcript. But that required redacting sidebars and the answers to questions the judge ruled should be struck from the record. The jury did not receive a copy of the transcript by the time court ended Tuesday afternoon.

The jury also requested the entire testimony of Juan Aguayo, a U.S. border agent who testified about seizing a load of marijuana from three panga boats that washed up on the shore of Santa Barbara, California, in 2012. Three men were arrested in the seizure after federal agents found them hiding, wet and sandy, behind a pile of rocks.

The jurors are expected to hear Aguayo’s testimony Wednesday.

This article originally appeared in <a id="6ea363ae-c438-4955-b74f-70cba6c05de6" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/05/nyregion/el-chapo-trial.html">The New York Times</a>.

It is difficult to glean much information from a jury’s notes, but those that have been sent by the jurors in this case suggest that the panel is making a genuine effort to sort through more than 10 weeks of testimony and exhibits.

Why the El Chapo Jury is taking Its time

<h1>Guzmán, known as El Chapo, trafficked tons of drugs, bribed nearly everyone of authority in Mexico and once ordered his henchmen to incinerate the bodies of two of his enemies in a bonfire, they said.</h1>

But on Friday night, two days before jurors were set to begin deliberations, the prosecutors unsealed secret documents revealing a series of even more shocking claims against Guzmán. The most disturbing were accusations that the crime lord once raped one of his mistresses and routinely raped girls as young as 13, sometimes drugging them by placing “a powdery substance” into their drinks.

Guzmán’s lawyer, A. Eduardo Balarezo, immediately discounted the accusations, issuing a statement Saturday that said: “Joaquin denies the allegations.”

In the statement, Balarezo noted that the claims “lack any corroboration and were deemed too prejudicial and unreliable to be admitted at trial.” He added: “It is unfortunate that the material was publicly released just prior to the jury beginning deliberations.”

The timing of the documents’ release was set on Jan. 23 when Judge Brian Cogan issued an order signing off on a schedule that was initially proposed in a joint submission by the defense and prosecution. Cogan’s order came in response to letters from The New York Times and Vice Media complaining about the pervasive secrecy in the case.

The unsealed documents said the claims that Guzmán raped underage girls came from one of his former personal secretaries, Alex Cifuentes Villa, who testified at the trial that he lived with the crime lord in rural camps in the mountains while hiding from Mexican authorities.

According to Cifuentes, a woman known only as “Comadre Maria” regularly sent Guzmán photographs of girls as young as 13 for him to choose from. For a $5,000 fee, Cifuentes said, the kingpin and members of his entourage — including Cifuentes — often had the girls brought into the mountains to rape them.

El chapo drugged and raped 13-year-old girls, witness claims

NEW YORK — Prosecutors at the trial of the drug lord Joaquín Guzmán Loera spent more than 10 weeks painting the kingpin as the most despicable sort of criminal.

The unsealed documents said the claims that Guzmán raped underage girls came from one of his former personal secretaries, Alex Cifuentes Villa, who testified at the trial that he lived with the crime lord in rural camps in the Sierra Madre mountains while hiding from Mexican authorities. According to Cifuentes, a woman known only as “Comadre Maria” regularly sent Guzmán photographs of girls as young as 13 for him to choose from. For a $5,000 fee, Cifuentes said, the kingpin and members of his entourage — including Cifuentes — often had the girls brought into the mountains to rape them.

Guzmán considered the youngest of the girls to be “his vitamins” because raping them gave him “life,” according to the documents.

Cifuentes had previously mentioned a Comadre Maria during his testimony at the trial. On Jan. 15, he told jurors that a woman named Comadre Maria had also served as the kingpin’s intermediary when he allegedly paid a $100 million bribe to former Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto.

The documents also contained a cryptic reference to Guzmán committing another rape. In the documents, prosecutors noted that Cogan had kept from the trial evidence that the crime lord had sexually assaulted a cooperating witness in the case before “beginning a romantic relationship with her and drawing her into his criminal enterprise.”

The documents did not identify the witness, but the only female cooperator who testified against Guzmán was his former lover, Lucero Guadalupe Sánchez López. In an emotional turn on the stand, Sánchez told jurors how in 2014 the crime lord escaped with her — naked — into a tunnel hidden under a bathtub when the Mexican marines were at the front door of his safe house.

The documents also contained information about Cifuentes.

They said, for instance, that he once had an argument with his wife because he had “sexually harassed” their baby sitter. They also said Cifuentes once obtained “snake oil” from a witch doctor and was interested in “the Illuminati, Freemasonry, other planets, other galaxies, UFOs and the idea that there was an impending apocalypse in 2012.”

How did Cifuentes come by such interests?

“From internet videos and the Discovery Channel,” the documents said.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/02/nyregion/el-chapo-trial.html" id="3ae8bfc2-75a9-35f4-aa9d-6053109ca8c1">The New York Times</a>.

NEW YORK — Prosecutors at the trial of the drug lord Joaquín Guzmán Loera spent more than 10 weeks painting the kingpin as the most despicable sort of criminal. Guzmán, known as El Chapo, trafficked tons of drugs, bribed nearly everyone of authority in Mexico and once ordered his henchmen to incinerate the bodies of two of his enemies in a bonfire, they said.

Alan Feuer

Articles written by the author

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