Alan Feuer and Emily Palmer

<h1>NEW YORK — On Tuesday, Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the Mexican drug kingpin known as El Chapo, was convicted on drug conspiracy charges in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn. This followed an exhaustive three-month trial in which the prosecution dissected almost every detail of Guzmán’s Sinaloa cartel.</h1>

After more than a week of deliberations, jurors found Guzmán guilty on all 10 charges. Here’s what you need to know about the conviction and what lies ahead for El Chapo.

Why does this matter?

Guzmán is arguably the most important drug-related figure ever brought to trial in the United States. Prosecutors estimated that in his 30 years as a trafficker, Guzmán accumulated nearly $14 billion in earnings.

Prosecutors described his conviction as a watershed moment in America’s war on drugs.

“This trial has pulled back the curtain on international drug dealing in a way that no other trial has,” said Richard P. Donoghue, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York. “It revealed that Guzmán and his co-conspirators were responsible for smuggling hundreds of tons of cocaine, heroine, methamphetamine and marijuana into the United States. It also revealed that they were only able to operate on that scale because of endemic corruption. This is unacceptable and it will end. This is a day of reckoning. But there are more days of reckoning to come.”

What exactly did El Chapo get convicted of?

Guzmán was convicted on 10 counts:

1. Engaging in a continuing criminal enterprise.

2. International cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine and marijuana manufacture and distribution conspiracy.

3, 4. Cocaine importation conspiracy.

5, 6, 7, 8. International distribution of cocaine.

10. Conspiracy to launder narcotics proceeds.

For each count, jurors had to answer a series of questions with “guilty or not guilty,” “proven or not proven,” or simply “yes or no.” Jurors checked “guilty,” “proven” or “yes” in 51 of the 53 boxes.

The only counts the jury found Guzman not guilty of were two of the 27 violations contained in the top charge that accused him of running a continuing criminal enterprise for nearly 30 years. Those two violations alleged that he was involved in shipping 19 tons of cocaine on a tanker ship out of Panama that was seized by the U.S. Coast Guard in March 2007 and that he had also conspired to smuggle more than 400 kilos of marijuana on panga boats captured off the California coast in January 2012.

What will happen to El Chapo?

Guzmán will likely spend the rest of his life in prison. We will not know exactly where until he is sentenced June 25.

During that time, Guzmán is likely to be held at Metropolitan Correctional Center, a jail that has been called tougher than Guantánamo Bay.

Where will El Chapo most likely go to jail?

We will not know until sentencing, but 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.

From a New York Times Magazine story from 2015 about the ADX: The ADX can house up to 500 prisoners in its eight units. Inmates spend their days in 12-by-7-foot cells with thick concrete walls and double sets of sliding metal doors (with solid exteriors, so prisoners can’t see one another). A single window, about 3-feet high but only 4-inches wide, offers a notched glimpse of sky and little else. Each cell has a sink-toilet combo and an automated shower, and prisoners sleep on concrete slabs topped with thin mattresses. Most cells also have televisions (with built-in radios), and inmates have access to books and periodicals, as well as certain arts-and-craft materials.

Why did it take so long?

Six days of deliberations is not a long time. But as a result of the extensive amount of evidence, many people thought a conviction would happen sooner. But it was a complicated case. Almost 11 weeks of testimony by 56 witnesses for the prosecution produced an exhaustive amount of evidence for jurors to process.

Also, the charges were complicated. For the first count, engaging in a continuing criminal enterprise, jurors had to determine 27 different violations within that count. For example: “Violation One (International Distribution of Cocaine — 3,200 kilograms — January 2005).”

As mentioned earlier, jurors had to work through an eight-page verdict sheet with 53 boxes.

Requests by jurors to see complete transcripts for several witnesses — including major figures like Jorge and Alex Cifuentes-Villa, Vicente Zambada, Jesus Zambada García and Dámaso López Núñez — indicated they were being thorough in filling out that sheet.

What will happen to some of the prosecution’s cooperating witnesses from the case?

Lucero Guadalupe Sánchez López, one of El Chapo’s former mistresses who testified about how she once eluded authorities with the kingpin — naked — through a tunnel dug beneath a bathtub in his safe house, is awaiting sentencing stemming from her arrest while attempting to enter the United States at a border crossing in San Diego.

Prosecutors will eventually file papers with sentencing recommendations for other witnesses, including the cartel prince, Vicente Zambada Niebla; Vicente’s uncle, Jesus Zambada García; and El Chapo’s top aide, Dámaso López Núñez. But so far, their dockets do not indicate any (visible) schedules.

One major witness, the Colombian trafficker Alex Cifuentes, may end up testifying in a new cartel trial against Mykhaylo Koretskyy, a Ukranian-born alleged drug trafficker who was arrested in 2018 and then was indicted in federal court in New York on drug smuggling conspiracy charges.

The case, based in Manhattan, will touch on the Sinaloa cartel’s Canadian operations. Cifuentes was instrumental in those.

As a side note, one of El Chapo’s lawyers, Jeffrey Lichtman, is representing Koretskyy, who is still waiting to be extradited from Curacao.

What will happen to Emma Coronel Aispuro, El Chapo’s wife?

Coronel became a favorite of New York tabloids during the trial. But she will most likely go back to Mexico to take care of her 7-year-old twin daughters.

After the final closing arguments Jan. 31, Coronel wrote in Spanish on Instagram: “I have many feelings I find difficult to express.” She added: “They won’t sell me another version of Joaquin and although much time has passed that we can’t have contact, my husband knows how much I love him and always counted, counts and will be able to count on me.”

Lichtman after the verdict said of Guzmán: “I don’t think he’ll ever see his wife again other than across the courtroom at the sentencing.”

So does this mean the drug war is over?

Well, no. Actually, El Chapo’s Sinaloa cartel is still active in Mexico and is one of the leading traffickers of the synthetic opiate fentanyl into the United States.

Also, other cartels, such as the Jalisco New Generation, have risen up to fill any gaps that were left by Guzmán’s arrest.

In fact, Mexican heroin production increased by 37 percent and seizures of fentanyl in places like Nogales more than doubled in 2016 and 2017, the years when the crime lord was most recently arrested and sent to New York for prosecution.

But drug enforcement officials said they believe El Chapo’s conviction is a major win in the drug war.

“It is our hope that this verdict will show the entire world no matter who you are or where you are located or how powerful you become, the Drug Enforcement Administration will never stop and you will answer for your crimes,” said Uttam Dhillon, acting administrator for the DEA. “The DEA will continue to pursue justice worldwide and protect all Americans from this scourge of illegal drugs.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="1a0f6222-2ae4-40dc-bb14-b2d1ed852422" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/13/nyregion/el-chapo-conviction.html">The New York Times</a>.

El Chapo was convicted, here's what happens next

After more than a week of deliberations, jurors found Guzmán guilty on all 10 charges. Here’s what you need to know about the conviction and what lies ahead for El Chapo.

<h1>NEW YORK — There seemed little doubt, even from the start, that Mexican drug lord Joaquín Guzmán Loera would be convicted at his epic drug trial in New York. But when the verdict finally arrived, at 12:31 p.m. Tuesday, sadness, pride and, for many, sheer relief that the marathon was over swept through the Brooklyn courtroom, ending not only a grueling three-month trial, but an excruciating week of jury deliberations.</h1>

The first sign that a verdict had been reached came just after noon when Melonie Clarke, Judge Brian M. Cogan’s deputy, entered the eighth-floor courtroom to tell the defense and prosecution that jurors had just sent out a note saying they had come to a decision. For the next 25 minutes, a crowd of lawyers, reporters and government officials waited anxiously for the answer to a question most assumed they had known for weeks: Was the kingpin, known to the world as El Chapo, guilty?

At one point, Richard P. Donoghue, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, appeared in court to wish his prosecution team good luck, shaking each of their hands. Jeffrey Lichtman, one of Guzmán’s lawyers, did the same in an apparent show of sportsmanship.

Then, at 12:25 p.m., Guzmán was brought into the courtroom by several federal marshals and, as he had done throughout the trial, looked immediately at his wife, Emma Coronel Aispuro, who was sitting on a bench in the second row. As more marshals — called in to provide security — filled the well of the court, Cogan announced from the bench: “We have reached a verdict.”

A minute later, the 18 jurors slowly filed in — and none even glanced at Guzmán. The foreperson, known only as Juror 11, gave the verdict sheet to Clarke, who passed it to Cogan. As he read the verdict aloud — guilty on all 10 counts of the indictment — Guzmán listened through an interpreter, his mouth agape and looking vaguely stunned.

After the verdict was read, Guzmán looked back at Coronel, who flashed him a thumbs up with tears in her eyes.

Cogan, in his own emotional moment, told jurors that in his 13 years of trial work, he had never seen a panel that had paid more attention to a case or had scrutinized the evidence as closely as it had.

“Quite frankly,” he added, “it made me proud to be an American.”

The jury had certainly kept both sides on tenterhooks, deliberating over 35 hours spread across six days. During their deliberations, jurors not only asked the usual legal questions, but also took the unusual step of requesting the entire testimonies — amounting to thousands of pages — for five of the government’s 14 cooperating witnesses.

During the six-day wait for the jury’s decision, a man who claimed to be a family friend of Guzmán visited the courthouse Thursday and was promptly arrested on multiple open warrants for harassment charges. By the end of the day, the man, Rene Javier Rivera Martinez, was in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement on an immigration detainer.

The day before Rivera Martinez’s arrest, two other men were removed from the main courtroom after it was discovered that they had continued a multiday ruse pretending to be paralegals for the defense.

It all seemed to keep with the trial’s circuslike atmosphere.

After the jurors left the courtroom Tuesday and Guzmán, waving goodbye to his wife, was taken back to his holding cell, the courthouse erupted into further frantic activity as reporters rushed outside into the snow for dueling news conferences by the defense and prosecution. Even though security had been tight throughout the trial, it was extra tight on verdict day: Marshals carrying assault rifles and wearing camouflage combat gear patrolled the lobby, and a bomb-sniffing dog lay by the door.

The verdict came on the heels of a quiet morning. Less than an hour before the jury informed the judge of a verdict, A. Eduardo Balarezo, one of Guzmán’s lawyers, wandered two floors down to the media room to chat with reporters. He said he did not expect a verdict, though some of the other defense lawyers did. (William Purpura, he noted, was donning a made-for-TV suit.)

Balarezo said that Guzmán was prepared for the impending decision, adding that the kingpin was ready for any outcome.

“My client’s feet are firmly planted on the ground,” he said.

This article originally appeared in <a id="00875ca9-e044-4507-93db-bde037a06547" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/12/nyregion/el-chapo-guzman-trial.html">The New York Times</a>.

Inside the Courtroom: El Chapo Appeared Stunned After Verdict

At one point, Richard P. Donoghue, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, appeared in court to wish his prosecution team good luck, shaking each of their hands.

Inside the courtroom: El Chapo appeared stunned after verdict

<h1>NEW YORK — Though narco-trafficking has long relied on old technologies like boats, trucks and tunnels, both dealers and U.S. authorities have started adapting to the digital age. That became clear last week when prosecutors at the drug trial of Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the Mexican crime lord known as El Chapo, suddenly unveiled the cyber-spy tale of a 20-something IT expert who helped take down the kingpin’s empire.</h1>

The techie-turned-informant, a young Colombian named Christian Rodriguez, told his story of working for — and eventually betraying — Guzmán in two days of jaw-dropping testimony in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn.

At first, Rodriguez said, he helped Guzmán develop an encrypted cellphone network that was accessible by Wi-Fi even in the crime lord’s hide-outs deep in the Sierra Madre mountains. He also fed his boss’s obsession with snooping by quietly installing spyware on the phones he gave his wife, two mistresses and other cartel operatives.

But then came the 21st-century twist: After a covert sting operation, the FBI recruited Rodriguez to infiltrate the same communications systems he had built. With his help, U.S. authorities were able to obtain a trove of Guzmán’s private calls and text messages.

— El Chapo’s Singsong Voice

An FBI agent, who had studied the audio of Guzmán’s calls, as well as the audio in several videos, described El Chapo’s voice as high-pitched with a nasally undertone. “It has a kind of sing-songy variation to it,” he told jurors.

On Tuesday the jury watched the 2015 Rolling Stone video (again). As he does often, El Chapo pulled back in his chair, eyes cast down at the screen, and watched the videotaped interview from the farthest position possible.

Comparing the intercepted phone calls to the Rolling Stone video, the FBI agent said, “the speech patterns are slower, more deliberate” because of the nature of an interview. But, he said, the singsong nature of El Chapo’s voice was still evident.

To further identity El Chapo, federal authorities also examined audio from phone calls the kingpin made in May during his detention at the Metropolitan Correctional Center.

— A Chapo Home Tour

El Chapo had a home in a gated community in Los Cabos, Mexico. Using cellphone footage from an FBI operation, the prosecution took the jury on a grand tour of the estate, where they had seized phones, ledgers and other paperwork. Three people were arrested during the takedown: Agustina Cabanillas Acosta, Maria Macias and Omar Hinojosa.

Judge Brian M. Cogan characterized the lengthy tour — complete with a closet survey — as “a real estate broker’s” presentation, warning the prosecution: “Don’t beat a dead horse.”

Via cellphone footage, the jury “walked through” the bedroom and bathroom (replete with women’s makeup and grooming products), as well as the closet housing size 9 Nike sneakers, a medium-size Banana Republic shirt and a vast collection of jeans.

“Did you ever find the defendant?” the prosecutor asked one of the FBI agents from the raid, who testified this week.

“No we did not,” the agent responded.

— Cartel Workers on the Government’s Payroll

The FBI got both Rodriguez and a woman named Andrea Velez to cooperate in exchange for no jail time, plus payments of $460,000 and $290,000, respectively. So essentially, Rodriguez got paid for his cooperation after having worked for years with the Cifuentes family and El Chapo, and after trying to work with a Russian crime organization that turned out to be a group of FBI agents on a high-stakes sting operation.

The U.S. government paid the pair for services and expenses they incurred while cooperating; according to Rodriguez, his payments came mostly in cash-stuffed envelopes.

Rodriguez didn’t even have to pay taxes on those payments until recently. But he said, “I never lied,” adding, “They never asked me about it.”

By the time the IRS caught up to Rodriguez, he owed $35,000. So far he’s paid $10,000 of that, paying a comfortable $250 per month.

As the defense has repeatedly pointed out, Guzmán’s formal education did not extend past the second grade, “and in fact he has a fair amount of difficulty writing,” one of his attorneys, Eduardo Balarezo, told the jury last week.

Still, Guzmán is often scrawling notes on a yellow legal pad and providing them to his attorneys. His handwriting is atrocious, according to one member of the defense team.

Rodriguez also had a hard time believing it. “He used to read the reports directly in the past, so I don’t think he had any problems reading,” Rodriguez said of the spyware reports frequently produced for Guzmán.

Rodriguez added that Guzmán spent “a fair amount of time reading those reports.” (Then again, Rodriguez testified that during their first face-to-face encounter, Guzmán told him that “he didn’t like to write on the computer. He preferred to talk.”)

— The Million-Dollar Gift

Anyone who has ever recalled a story among family knows the phenomenon: Someone across the table immediately corrects you and tells it completely differently. The jury was treated to just such a comparison last week. Two brothers have testified in the trial: elder sibling Jorge Cifuentes Villa testified in December, and Alex Cifuentes Villa began testifying Thursday. (He will continue Monday.) They told some of the same stories — albeit a little differently.

Jorge Cifuentes’ version: Around 2003, he flew to the mountains of Mexico for his first-ever meeting with El Chapo — to celebrate the second anniversary of the drug kingpin’s escape from jail (the first time). The final flight, aboard a rickety airplane (Guzmán was known for using outdated Cessnas), took about 30 to 45 minutes. The flight made Cifuentes feel “awful,” he said. “I actually had to pray three Our Fathers,” he said. Then they landed on an ascending airstrip.

As a result of such a rough experience, Jorge Cifuentes decided to gift El Chapo a $1 million blue helicopter “so that he would fly in a more civilized way.”

When he told El Chapo about the gift, the kingpin “got really excited, and his little eyes were actually shining,” Cifuentes recalled, adding: “And he said, ‘Thank you.'”

Later, pilots crashed the helicopter at an ostrich ranch. Thinking fast, Cifuentes simply rolled the damaged helicopter off a cliff to collect the insurance so El Chapo could buy another helicopter.

But, in his own retelling, Alex Cifuentes instead thrust himself as the protagonist of the story of how El Chapo got a helicopter. He told the jury Thursday that he once asked Guzmán if he could fly a plane. (Cifuentes’ brothers could, but Chapo could not.) Flying ensured security in case of an attempted arrest or other problem, Alex Cifuentes told him. If he could fly, “He could get in the helicopter, turn it on and fly from one mountain to the other.”

Then, Alex Cifuentes told his brother, Jorge, to send their own helicopter to increase Chapo’s security. The helicopter later burned at an aircraft hangar in Culiacán, Mexico.

— The Week Ahead

The government announced Thursday that it would likely rest its case next week. But before that, expect a few surprises.

On Monday, Alex Cifuentes, will return to the stand.

For years, Alex Cifuentes told jurors he was so close to Guzmán that the kingpin called him both his “right-hand man” and “left-hand man.” By his own account, he oversaw nearly every aspect of the crime lord’s business. He arranged cocaine deals in Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia and Panama. He bought farms for Guzmán in Costa Rica. He sold cocaine and heroin for him in New York and often purchased weapons on his behalf. Cifuentes even said he interpreted for Guzmán at trafficking meetings conducted in English.

There were hints last week that one of Guzmán’s mistresses, Lucero Guadalupe Sanchez Lopez, would also testify. Sanchez, a former legislator from Guzmán’s home state of Sinaloa, was arrested on drug charges in California in 2017. If called to the stand, she may walk the jury through text messages she exchanged with the defendant.

Guzmán’s lawyers offered their own hints last week about how they plan to defend him. As court adjourned Thursday, they told Cogan they intend to remove an unnamed criminal from prison to testify on their client’s behalf.

This article originally appeared in <a id="26bfa6fc-c071-4db4-9309-8cf2d1d579bf" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/13/nyregion/el-chapo-trial.html">The New York Times</a>.

El Chapo trial: An IT guy's testimony leads to a week of cyber spy intrigue

The techie-turned-informant, a young Colombian named Christian Rodriguez, told his story of working for — and eventually betraying — Guzmán in two days of jaw-dropping testimony in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn.

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Alan Feuer and Emily Palmer

Articles written by the author

El Chapo was convicted, here's what happens next

Inside the courtroom: El Chapo appeared stunned after verdict

El Chapo trial: An IT guy's testimony leads to a week of cyber spy intrigue