© Associated PressFederal authorities escort Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, center, from a plane back on Jan. 19, 2017.
Notorious Mexican cartel kingpin Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman was convicted Tuesday of running a massive, violent drug trafficking empire that for decades pumped billions of dollars worth of narcotics into the US.
The diminutive drug lord looked stunned as the Brooklyn federal jury handed down the verdict on its sixth day of deliberations - convicting him on all counts, including operating a continuing criminal enterprise, use of firearms and charges of conspiracy to import and distribute cocaine, heroin and marijuana.
Guzman, 61, then cast around to catch the eye of his beauty queen wife - who flashed him a supportive thumbs-up as her eyes welled with tears.
"Today I'm not going to cry. Why? No one has died here," 29-year-old Emma Coronel Aispuro - a fixture in the courtroom throughout her hubby's trial - told a reporter in Spanish after being offered a tissue.
The jurors reached their decision after almost 35 hours of deliberations, and Judge Brian Cogan told the panelists their diligence made him "very proud to be an American."
Guzman, who twice escaped prison in Mexico, now faces life in a maximum-security federal prison.
"It is a sentence from which there is no escape and no return," US Attorney Richard Donohue said outside the courthouse - as heavily armed, camouflage-clad US marshals surrounded the building.
"This conviction is a victory for the American people, who have suffered so long and so much while Guzman made billions pouring poison over our southern border," Donohue said. "There are those who say the war on drugs is not worth fighting. Those people are wrong."
Defense attorney Jeffery Lichtman said his team "fought like complete savages" for their client, but acknowledged the evidence against Guzman "was overwhelming."
© ReutersAttorney Jeffrey Lichtman outside court
Lichtman vowed to appeal, noting that Guzman will likely never see his wife again after his sentencing, which is scheduled for June 25. His only allowed visitors have been their two young daughters.
The high-profile trial often unfolded more like a telenovela than a prosecution - chronicling the 61-year-old drug lord's rise and fall as leader of the infamous Sinaloa Cartel over the course of three decades.
More than 50 prosecution witnesses - including 14 former associates of Guzman's who took the stand against him - shared wild tales of diamond-encrusted pistols and presidential payoffs in the heyday of his empire, followed by his life on the run from authorities following two Hollywood-worthy jailbreaks.
Meanwhile, Guzman's lawyers attempted to paint such stories as tall tales cooked up by a vast government conspiracy and foolishly embraced by their fame-hungry client - whom, they noted, was caught after sitting down for an interview with actor Sean Penn in the hopes of scoring a movie deal.
Guzman, whose nickname "El Chapo" - or "Shorty" - refers to his 5-foot-6-inch stature, first made a name for himself as "El Rapido."
After clawing his way to the top of the cartel in the early 1990s, Guzman earned the lesser-known moniker among Colombian cocaine smugglers for the unprecedented speed with which he could secret drugs into the US, witnesses testified.
One former Colombian cocaine capo recalled how the minuscule Mexican first impressed him in the early '90s by making good on a promise to move coke across the border faster than any of his competitors.
"It was super quick, that I recall, it was less than a week" said North Valley Cartel leader Juan Carlos Ramirez Abadia. "Typically it took a month or more."
One secret to Chapo's speed was all the crooked officials he had on the payroll, witnesses said - throughout the trial, he was variously accused of paying off everyone from local cops to former Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto.
Another was a clandestine tunnel that went directly from Mexico to the US and allowed his cartel to ferry a ton of cocaine between the two countries on a small cart, according to other witnesses.
That passage connected a building in Douglas, Ariz., to a house in Agua Prieta, Mexico - and was accessed under a pool table that was lifted using a sophisticated hydraulic system, a former US Customs agent told jurors.
Chapo Verdict Sheet by on Scribd
The scheme was blown when a passing cop caught a glimpse of the raised pool table through the window - and it cost him the "El Rapido" nickname, added Miguel Angel Martinez, one of Guzman's close pals in the cartel.
He then began moving cocaine into the States by stuffing the powder into cans of La Comadre pickled jalapenos - and sending trucks packed with 700 tainted tins hidden amongst regular pepper cans from Mexico to Baja, Calif., said Martinez.
Some 25 to 30 tons of cocaine - worth $400 to $500 million - reached Los Angeles each year, passing through legal border crossings, he said.
With business booming, Guzman was living large. The runty cartel boss owned four planes, a yacht and luxury houses across Mexico - including a ranch in Guadalajara with a pool, tennis courts and its own private zoo.
Chapo and his cronies flew all over the world to dine at top restaurants - and to Switzerland so he could maintain a youthful complexion with cell-rejuvenation therapy, Martinez revealed. He also maintained a harem of at least four lovers and carried around numerous diamond-encrusted firearms.
But it was also a life of extreme violence, as Chapo waged wars with rival cartels.
Several witnesses recalled an infamous 1992 shootout at the ritzy Christine's nightclub in Puerto Vallarta - where Guzman brought some 20 armed men to open fire in an attempt to kill the leaders of the Tijuana Cartel, but wound up slaying several clubgoers instead.
The war cost Chapo his freedom in 1993, when the cardinal and archbishop of Guadalajara got caught in the crossfire of a shootout at an airport. The Tijuana Cartel had sent gunmen to knock off Chapo, greeting him with a hail of bullets as he pulled up. Guzman grabbed a suitcase stuffed with $600,000 and fled through the airport - running along a luggage belt and onto the airport's landing to get away, according to Martinez.
But Catholic Cardinal Juan Jesus Posadas Ocampo had been parked right next to Guzman and was killed in the initial gunfire - sparking public outrage that forced authorities to finally arrest Chapo a month later.
Prison didn't put a damper on Guzman's career, however.
Damaso Lopez Nuñez - a former security official at Puente Grande prison who later became Chapo's right-hand man in the cartel - testified that he accepted huge bribes from the kingpin to smuggle him in cellphones, fresh clothes and lovers.
Guzman finally used his clout to bust out of Puente Grande in 2001 - famously paying off a worker to smuggle him out of the lockup in a laundry cart.
Lopez said a staffer named "Chito" wheeled the kingpin out in soiled sheets then put him in the trunk of a car.
He then got into a helicopter and was whisked away to a "semi-deserted location," added Jesus Zambada, a former accountant for the Sinaloa Cartel. This was the beginning of El Chapo's life on the lam - and he spent the next 13 years evading authorities in a series of mountain hideaways.
Guzman and his associates shuffled between a collection of "humble pine huts" that were decked out with washer-dryers, satellite radios and tinted windows - and protected by a small army of heavily armed guards, his former live-in secretary Alex Cifuentes testified.
But being a fugitive didn't cramp Guzman's busy love life.
The horndog entertained a parade of female visitors in his compounds - including his current wife, Coronel, whom he married in 2007 when she was just 18.
"Joaquin liked for her to make Swiss enchiladas," Cifuentes said of the brunette bombshell's visits to the mountains.
Coronel - a regular presence in Brooklyn federal court through the trial - bore Guzman twin girls in 2011, but the randy trafficker continued sleeping around, the courtroom heard. One mistress, a 29-year-old disgraced politician named Lucero Guadalupe Sanchez Lopez, appeared in person to testify about their affair, which began that same year.
Chapo's years on the run were also business as usual for the cartel, with witnesses testifying about massive drug shipments making their way to the US during this period. One turncoat explained how the cartel netted $500 million to $800 million in cocaine sales in the US between 2000 and 2003 by running tanker trains full of cocaine disguised as loads of cooking oil.
Other law enforcement officials described huge seizures of Chapo-linked drugs that were intercepted on boats - including more than 13,000 pounds found stuffed inside a submarine - and showed jurors massive bricks of coke and heroin they'd seized.
Meanwhile, the vertically challenged drug boss kept a close eye on his associates and lovers, hiring an IT guy to bug the cellphonesof just about everyone in his orbit.
But his paranoia backfired when the FBI turned the geek into an informant in 2010 - and scored damning recordings of Guzman organizing his vast empire and romantic entanglements. Among the calls and messages shown to the jury were missives warning Coronel about a 2012 raid on one of his properties in the resort town of Cabo San Lucas, where they found incriminating weapons, ledgers and phones.
Prosecutors had previously shown footage of agents rifling through a closet in the million-dollar mansion - zeroing in on a pair of size-9 black Nike sneakers.
Chapo's lawyers questioned whether the shoes even fit their client, but the messages showed Guzman telling Coronel about his escape and asking her to send him some replacement black shoes in a Mexican size 7 - a US size 8.5.
Chapo was hiding out in Culiacan in 2014 when he narrowly escaped another raid by the skin of his teeth - and his bare behind. Sanchez recounted how she was with Guzman that night, when US feds and Mexican Marines suddenly broke down their door - and Chapo fled butt naked through a secret tunnel hidden underneath his bathtub.
Guzman made it to the resort town of Mazatlan - but that's where his luck ran out.
A DEA agent who'd been trailing Chapo's bare butt through the tunnel and a small group of around 25 Marines disguised themselves in "beach wear" and quietly slipped into the town, where they tracked Guzman to a hotel and pounced.
He was thrown back behind bars - but was barely there for a year before he busted out again in his most audacious escape yet.
Damaso Lopez Nuñez told jurors how Coronel arranged for Chapo's sons to buy land near the lockup so they could begin tunneling inside - and to sneak a GPS watch inside to pinpoint the exact location of his cell.
They then brazenly built a mile-long, 33-foot-deep passage leading up to his shower - the work was so loud that other prisoners complained, according to Lopez - and on July 11, 2015, Guzman slipped into the hole and rode a motorbike through the shaft to freedom, he said.
In the end, Guzman's own fame caught up with him.
Chapo - whom witnesses said had long been obsessed with scoring a book and movie deal to capitalize on his own notoriety - met with actor Sean Penn and Mexican soap actress Kate del Castillo just a month later even as authorities were tracking his whereabouts.
He was finally recaptured on Jan. 8, 2016, and extradited to the US the following year.
The cartel kingpin's defense lawyers argued that Chapo's willingness to meet with the Fast Times at Ridgemont High star was evidence he was never the powerful drug lord the prosecution made out to be - just a wannabe who didn't want to admit he was flat broke.
Instead, they contended that he was the victim of a "frame-up" by the government to protect "Mayo" Zambada, whom they said was the true leader of the cartel but had paid off the Mexican government. The government's cooperating witnesses, they said, were a bunch of liars who'd say anything to get their own sentences reduced.
"These witnesses [were] not only ... lying every day of their lives, of their miserable, selfish lives, but they lied in this courtroom," Lichtman said during his closing statement.
In the end, Guzman's high-powered defense lawyers spent less than 30 minutes presenting their own case - calling just one witness to the stand.
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