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.

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.

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 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.

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 — worked together and, with notable exceptions, “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 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.

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. 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.

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, Emma Coronel Aispuro, 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 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.

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 American 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 Power Point 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 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.

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

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

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.

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 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.

El Chapo Drugged and Raped 13-Year-Old Girls, Witness Claims

But now that the kingpin, known as El Chapo, is standing trial in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn, his lawyers have been forced to mount an actual defense. On Tuesday, as many had suspected, it emerged they did not offer one.

Guzmán’s case to the jury began at 9:38 a.m. when one of his lawyers, Jeffrey Lichtman, called to the stand an FBI agent who explained his own small role in obtaining a piece of evidence that did not relate to the defendant. Lichtman also read aloud a stipulation, noting that for several years, his client was in debt.

Lichtman finished his presentation at 10:08 a.m. “And with that, judge,” he said, “the defense rests.”

It was clear from the beginning of the trial that little could be done for Guzmán who, after all, had been under investigation by U.S. authorities for more than a decade. Complicating matters, he had also effectively confessed to being a drug lord in an interview with Rolling Stone two years ago.

But Guzmán’s 30-minute jury presentation seemed particularly small compared to the monumental case prosecutors brought to a close Monday. For more than 10 weeks, the government buried the defendant in a Matterhorn of evidence from 56 witnesses, including recorded phone calls of the kingpin doing business and intercepted messages of him, his wife and mistresses.

Guzmán’s courtroom troubles began in November from the moment Lichtman delivered his opening statement. In a bold move, he claimed his client had been framed for years by his partner in the Sinaloa drug cartel, Ismael Zambada Garcia, who Lichtman alleged had conspired with “crooked” U.S. drug agents and a hopelessly corrupt Mexican government.

Two main problems emerged with this argument. One was that Judge Brian M. Cogan cut it short at the government’s request, stopping Lichtman in the middle of his speech by telling him that anything he had said was unlikely to be supported by evidence. The other was that the argument, even if true, did not exclude the possibility that Guzmán was a narco lord guilty of the charges he was facing.

During the trial, Lichtman and the two other members of Guzmán’s legal team — William Purpura and A. Eduardo Balarezo — largely spent their time attacking the credibility of the government’s 14 cooperating witnesses. Their efforts sometimes worked and sometimes did not. Most of the witnesses had also been previously charged with federal crimes and usually confessed to their misdeeds before the defense could bring them out.

Before the trial, the kingpin’s lawyers had mostly focused their attention on pointing out the harsh conditions of his confinement in the high-security wing of the Manhattan federal jail. Given Guzmán’s history of jailbreaks, he was kept for several months in isolation, forbidden to occupy the same room as his lawyers. Pretrial meetings were conducted — awkwardly at best — through a perforated plexiglass window.

In several motions, Guzmán’s lawyers sought to persuade Cogan that such severe conditions had eroded their client’s right to adequate legal counsel under the Sixth Amendment. While the judge improved the circumstances slightly, he was mostly unconvinced that Guzmán’s constitutional rights had been violated.

Last week, intense speculation arose over whether Guzman might take the stand and become his own star witness. But after days of conversations with his lawyers, he told Cogan on Monday that he did not plan to testify.

Little is known about those conversations because of the protections of the attorney-client privilege. But after Guzman addressed the court, Purpura told Cogan that he and his partners had explained to their client the legal perils of undergoing cross-examination. Guzman then decided not to testify “knowingly and voluntarily,” Purpura said.

The kingpin’s lawyers will have one more shot at persuading the jury Thursday when they deliver their summation. But even that will be severely restricted if the government has its way.

On Monday night, prosecutors filed a motion to Cogan, asking him to preclude the defense from arguing, as they did in opening statements, that Zambada, known as Mayo, had quietly conspired with Mexican and U.S. officials to target Guzman.

The prosecutors not only said the claim was “preposterous,” but also quoted back Cogan’s words from the second day of the trial.

“You can have two drug dealers, one of whom is paying off the government and one of whom is not,” he had said. “That does not mean the one who is not didn’t do the crimes.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/29/nyregion/el-chapo-trial.html" id="d2264a26-7cef-367b-a985-553beb953b67">The New York Times</a>.

NEW YORK — The most common methods the drug lord Joaquín Guzmán Loera used to avoid imprisonment in Mexico was to either escape jail (which he did twice) or to not get caught in the first place.

El Chapo's Defense? It Lasted Just 30 Minutes

Guzmán — naked — ran into the bathroom, beckoning the rest of his household to come with him. Popping the top on his escape hatch, he lifted the lid of the bathtub to reveal a set of wooden stairs leading to a tunnel. As a tactical team of Mexican marines used a battering ram on his front door, the kingpin known as El Chapo disappeared into the tunnel’s humid darkness — and into the annals of criminal myth.

Like other legends that surround Guzmán, the basic facts of his flight from the marines five years ago have been told so often they have started to develop the haziness of a fable. But on Thursday, the tale was told again, not only with astonishing new details, but by a stunning firsthand source: Lucero Guadalupe Sánchez López, the mistress who escaped into the tunnel at his side.

In an afternoon of testimony at Guzmán’s drug trial in New York, Sánchez took the jury through an almost unbelievable drug world love story, starting with the moment she met the crime lord at age 21 and ending with a terrifying trudge through Culiacán’s sewers.

In three years of tortured romance, she recounted, Sánchez served as Guzmán’s “house wife” and his unpaid partner in crime, buying kilograms of pot for him, setting up his front companies and often making sure he had fresh underwear. Even though she testified to all of this as a prosecution witness, Sánchez still appeared to be in love with the drug lord — at one point erupting into tears on the stand.

“Until today, I’m still confused,” she told the jury, “because I thought, in our relationship, we were romantically involved, as partners.”

Now 29, Sánchez, a former lawmaker from the state of Sinaloa, was arrested in 2017 while trying to enter the United States at the San Diego border. Though she did not know it at the time, Sánchez had been a target of a sprawling wiretap investigation by U.S. federal agents. As part of a separate inquiry, her private texts with Guzmán had also been intercepted after the kingpin’s IT expert installed commercial spyware on her BlackBerry, then gave the password to the FBI.

Several of the messages shown to the jury Thursday painted a portrait of the cartel couple as something like a Mexican Bonnie and Clyde. In one of the messages, Sánchez told her lover that she had just stamped dozens of kilos of his marijuana with a brand that included a heart and the No. 4 — a reference to the crime lord’s birthday, April 4.

“The heart means I love you,” Sánchez wrote. “And the 4 means I bless the day you came into this world.”

Guzmán’s wife, Emma Coronel Aispuro, was sitting in the courtroom when this narco pillow talk was projected on a screen. The dynamic was — to say the least — a little awkward. When Sánchez took the stand at 2 p.m., her habitual facial twitch was exacerbated, apparently by anxiety. Coronel played with her hair and largely stared forward. Guzmán refused to meet either woman’s gaze.

The bizarre telenovela, unfolding live in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn, only became more dramatic when Sánchez, after breaking into tears, calmed herself and narrated her escape with Guzmán into the tunnel in Culiacán.

She said the kingpin ran ahead at first, leaving her with his maid and secretary — a man known only as Condor — in “a humid place filled with water and mud.” The fugitives were down there for at least an hour, wandering in the wet and dark for long enough “to traumatize me,” she recalled. They finally emerged, Sánchez said, near a river. The rest of her story was cut short by the regular end of the trial day.

Before Sánchez took the stand, jurors heard what happened after the escape from Victor Vazquez, an agent with the Drug Enforcement Administration who was embedded with the Mexican marines during the capture operation. Vazquez described a high-stakes game of cat and mouse as the marines pursued Guzmán on a nightlong chase through several of the drug lord’s safe houses, which were connected by a series of secret tunnels.

The marines never found Guzmán that night, but they found some of his belongings: a rocket-propelled grenade launcher; his monogrammed, diamond-encrusted pistol; and crates of plastic bananas filled with cocaine.

After tracking Guzmán with almost real-time information from the U.S. wiretap on the cartel’s phones, the marines eventually discovered he had fled to Mazatlán and was holed up in a room at the Hotel Miramar, a block from the beach, Vazquez said.

The troops, he added, took extreme precautions approaching Mazatlán, shedding their uniforms and buying flip-flops and board shorts from a local Walmart. After staking out the hotel, Vazquez said, they prepared to raid it — on Feb. 22, in the hours before dawn.

When the operation started, Vazquez said, a group of Mexican marines went into the hotel as he stood waiting in the lobby. Within minutes, he reported, a coded message came over his radio: “7-7-7, confirmado.”

At that point, Vazquez said, “I knew they had got him.”

Running down to the hotel’s basement parking lot, Vazquez said he saw the kingpin on his knees, in a dirty T-shirt, surrounded by his captors.

“It’s you,” he recalled telling Guzmán, who would within a year escape from prison (again).

But it was not only him. The marines had also found Coronel and the couple’s twin toddler daughters.

After fleeing with his mistress, Guzmán had returned to — and had been arrested with — his wife.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/17/nyregion/el-chapo-trial.html" id="83cbdc23-080b-3581-a125-1e9a4c9355d8">The New York Times</a>.

NEW YORK — In the early morning of Feb. 17, 2014, Mexican drug lord Joaquín Guzmán Loera was in bed with his mistress — one of many — when his personal secretary burst into the room with an urgent message: Troops were at the door. Time to leave.

As the Wife Looks On, an El Chapo Mistress Tells Tales From the Bedroom

The stunning testimony was delivered Tuesday in a New York courtroom by Alex Cifuentes Villa, a Colombian drug lord who worked closely with Guzmán from 2007 to 2013, when the kingpin was hiding from the law at a series of remote ranches in the Sierra Madre.

“Mr. Guzmán paid a bribe of $100 million to President Peña Nieto?” Jeffrey Lichtman, one of Guzmán’s lawyers, asked Cifuentes during cross-examination.

Guzmán may offer more details soon. Shortly after the jury was excused around 4:30 p.m. Tuesday, Lichtman submitted his client’s name to the prosecution as a potential witness for the defense, an indication that the drug trafficker might testify in his own trial.

According to Cifuentes, Peña Nieto first reached out to Guzmán about the time he was elected president in late 2012, asking the drug lord for $250 million in exchange for calling off a nationwide manhunt for him.

But Guzmán made a counteroffer, Cifuentes added, saying he would give Peña Nieto only $100 million.

“The message was that Mr. Guzmán didn’t have to stay in hiding?” Lichtman asked.

“Yes,” Cifuentes said, “that very thing is what Joaquin said to me.”

Lichtman, quoting Cifuentes’ notes from an interview he gave to U.S. authorities in 2016, asked whether Felipe Calderón, who preceded Peña Nieto as Mexico’s president, took a bribe in 2008 from one of Guzmán’s rivals, the Beltrán-Leyva brothers.

“I don’t recall this incident very well,” Cifuentes answered. He added moments later, “Right now, I do not remember that.”

Peña Nieto and Calderón could not yet be reached for comment.

While other witnesses at Guzmán’s trial in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn have testified about huge payoffs from traffickers to the Mexican police and public officials, the testimony about Peña Nieto was the most egregious allegation yet. If true, it suggests corruption by drug cartels had reached into the highest level of Mexico’s political establishment.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/15/nyregion/el-chapo-trial.html" id="978ae2db-f700-3bde-a1fd-1654fb6f6593">The New York Times</a>.

NEW YORK — Former Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto took a $100 million bribe from Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the infamous crime lord known as El Chapo, according to a witness at Guzman’s trial.

El Chapo Trial: Former Mexican President Peña Nieto Took $100 Million Bribe, Witness Says

But as he began frequenting the city’s raucous nightclubs, Galvan — then only 26 — made poor choices about who he spent his time with. He became “party friends,” he said, with Antonio Marrufo, a bloodthirsty killer known as Jaguar, who would soon be tasked by the Sinaloa drug cartel with “cleansing” Juárez of its rivals. Within four years of meeting Jaguar, Galvan began working for him, receiving shipments of Mexican cocaine and marijuana at safe houses in El Paso and moving guns in the opposite direction.

On Monday, Galvan, now 41, spoke about his brief stint in the smuggling trade at the drug trial of longtime cartel leader, Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the kingpin known as El Chapo. Most of the witnesses at the federal trial in Brooklyn have been Guzmán’s lieutenants, suppliers or distributors — people who emerged from his organization’s managerial class. A luckless figure with a quiet voice and an unassuming manner, Galvan was the first witness who could be described as a minor worker bee.

In an afternoon on the witness stand, Galvan told the jurors that he had never even met Guzmán and had only heard his voice one time — when he was in the room as Marrufo talked to the crime lord on the phone. At best, Galvan was a guy who knew a guy who knew the guy in charge.

In that way, Galvan, who is serving a 24-year prison term on drug and weapons charges, was emblematic of the hundreds of minions who prosecutors say helped Guzmán turn the cartel into a multibillion-dollar operation that shipped huge loads of heroin, cocaine and marijuana into the United States on trains, planes, trucks, fishing boats and submarines.

But in a trial where witnesses have routinely talked about illicit drug shipments that could weigh 200,000 kilograms or more, Galvan’s bulk weight shipped was paltry: In the three years before he was arrested, he claimed he moved only about 250 kilos of cocaine.

It appeared from his testimony that he was brought to court largely to corroborate earlier descriptions by law enforcement officers of a seizure of 40 AK-47 rifles that took place in El Paso in 2010. Galvan said Monday that the cartel needed the rifles to fight a bloody war at the time against a breakaway group called La Linea, which was founded by Guzmán’s ally-turned-rival, Vicente Carrillo Fuentes.

At first, Galvan said he was leery of working for Marrufo — a frighteningly violent man. He told the jurors how one day his employer took him to a house in Ciudad Juárez that had a room with a white-tiled floor that sloped toward a drain.

“That’s where he killed people,” Galvan said.

But Galvan took the job of smuggling guns from Texas to Mexico — just as he had smuggled drugs the other way — because it was not easy to defy Marrufo.

“Jaguar is not the kind of person who asks you questions,” he said. “He gives orders.”

Though Guzmán’s empire mostly concerned itself with narcotics, U.S. officials have long maintained that it also did a brisk trade in illegal guns, including military weapons like rocket-propelled grenade launchers and .50-caliber rifles. Last week, Vicente Zambada Niebla, the son of Guzmán’s partner and the cartel’s heir apparent, testified that 99 percent of the guns he purchased came from the United States.

Galvan said he successfully moved four or five shipments of U.S. weapons from El Paso to Juárez before misfortune struck on Jan. 13, 2010. On that day, El Paso police raided one of his stash houses after trailing a suspicious Volkswagen Jetta.

Before Christmas, prosecutors wheeled an evidence cart filled with the 40 seized rifles into the courtroom, delighting some jurors and terrifying others. But at the time of the raid, Galvan had his own problems: When Marrufo learned of the raid, he said, he was “really pissed.”

“That was the last time I ever spoke to Jaguar,” Galvan said.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/07/nyregion/el-chapo-trial.html" id="9b68f407-09a6-3d09-abad-169ca1e8cb90">The New York Times</a>.

NEW YORK — When Edgar Galvan got divorced in El Paso, Texas, in 2003, he did what many others in a similar position might have done: look for a good time. To do so, Galvan rented a house across the Mexican border in El Paso’s sister city, Ciudad Juárez.

Getting Over a Divorce, He Got Tangled With El Chapo

As strange as it was that a cartel prince wanted to quit the empire that he had been groomed to run, Zambada’s plan to escape the enterprise was even more unusual: His father’s partner, Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the crime lord known as El Chapo, offered to put him in touch with federal drug agents in the United States, he said.

While many of the details of Zambada’s departure from the drug trade are still shrouded in secrecy, he talked about some of them for first time Friday on the witness stand at Guzmán’s drug trial in New York.

At 32, Zambada told the jurors, he had grown weary of the narco life and asked his father, Ismael Zambada García, for permission to “retire.” It was then, he said, that Guzmán made an astonishing proposal: He offered to reach out to his “contacts” in the Drug Enforcement Administration and see if they would meet with the young man.

NEW YORK — In 2007, an unlikely figure vowed to leave the Sinaloa drug cartel: Vicente Zambada Niebla, a son of one of its leaders and the group’s heir apparent.

Alan Feuer

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