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. 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.
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.
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.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.