After 25 years on the run - hiding from the army and the police, imprisoned and staging astonishingly audacious escapes – Mexico’s most in...
After 25 years on the run - hiding from the army and the police, imprisoned and staging astonishingly audacious escapes – Mexico’s most infamous drug lord finally had his day in court.
Thirty minutes later, it was all over.
Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, the $14 billion man, a short and stocky 61-year-old cartel leader sent to the US on the last day of Barack Obama’s presidency, had only one witness called to his defence.
And even that witness, an FBI agent who gave fleeting evidence about a cocaine supplier that testified for the prosecution, was reluctant.
“He didn’t set out to help me,” Guzman’s lawyer, Jeffrey Lichtman, told the court, somewhat ruefully.
On Monday the jury will retire to consider their verdict on 10 trafficking, money laundering and firearms counts, at the end of a trial which, the prosecution said, presented “an avalanche” of evidence against the man who famously escaped high security Mexican prisons not once but twice.
The trial always promised much drama. Even before it commenced in November, a wannabe Guzman lawyer held press conferences outside court, and a woman claiming to be his long-lost sister showed up. Questions swirled as to what lawyers would take on such a case. Rumours abounded about the mythical cartel leaders who could testify. A member of the jury pool had a panic attack in the waiting room, and had to be sent to the hospital in an ambulance.
Once it eventually began, it more than delivered - indeed, so great was the interest that queues formed outside the Brooklyn courthouse at 2:30am this week, in minus 14 Celsius temperatures.
It lifted the lid on the world’s most expansive drug trafficking network, the Sinaloa Cartel, in jaw-dropping detail – indeed, it is by far the biggest drug trial ever staged in the US. And every day provided bombshell after bombshell – it was, as one US network put it, a trial of “murder, mistresses and matching velvet”.
That was because when one of Guzman’s mistresses took the stand to give tearful testimony about the man she still thought was her honey, his wife, US-born beauty queen Emma Coronel, showed up in court in a maroon velvet suit matching that worn by her husband that day.
Guzman, seen in court videos in baggy jeans, polo shirts and a baseball cap, was dressed every day in smart suits.
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