JoaquĂn Guzmán Loera, also known as El Chapo, was escorted to a helicopter in Mexico City in 2016 after breaking out of a maximum security prison and being recaptured.
When Colón Miró was admitted to the bar in September 2018, Guzmán asked her if she would join his defense team as a trial attorney. Colón Miró had a job lined up at the Legal Aid Society, but she didn’t want to abandon a client with whom she’d become very close. She accepted El Chapo’s offer.
“Chapo, not being American and familiar with our justice system, didn’t trust everyone who worked on the case,” said Jeffrey Lichtman, one of Guzmán’s attorneys who is best known for winning an acquittal for John Gotti Jr. in 2005. “But he always trusted her.”
Last week, Fernich and Colón Miró visited him at the supermax prison ADX in Florence, Colorado, known as the “Alcatraz of the Rockies.” She said that El Chapo isn’t adjusting well to life in a supermax. Though he now gets outdoor exercise time, he gets even fewer visits.
A lawyer for Mexican drug lord JoaquĂn “El Chapo” Guzmán Loera asked a federal appeals court in Manhattan on Monday to grant him a new trial, saying a media report of alleged juror misconduct was reason to overturn his conviction for running a narcotics empire.
U.S. District Judge Brian Cogan defended his decision not to grant Guzman a new trial amid claims of juror misconduct in the case. Guzman was found guilty in February of leading a murderous drug conspiracy. He was ordered to pay $12.6 billion in ill-gotten drug proceeds.
Pedro Flores (left) and his brother Margarito Flores once were the biggest drug traffickers in Chicago — till they got caught and agreed to help federal authorities bring down Sinaloa cartel drug lord JoaquĂn “El Chapo” Guzmán Loera.
El Mayo is the leader of Mexico's Sinaloa cartel, taking over five years ago for the notorious drug lord known as El Chapo. El Mayo has been on the lam for decades. He is 73 and said to be in ill health, and may no longer be on the run. For decades, he was the right hand man to Joaquin El Chapo Guzman.
Judge Brian CoganThe decision by the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan rejected claims that Judge Brian Cogan made rulings allowing a jury to hear faulty evidence at Guzman's 2019 trial.
He is considered to have been one of the most powerful drug traffickers in the world....JoaquĂn "El Chapo" GuzmánCriminal penaltyLife in prison plus 30 years, must forfeit assets worth more than $12.6 billion.21 more rows
Chapo started to come up in the late 1990s. Pablo never met Chapo. Pablo's contacts in Mexico in the '80s —we had great evidence, we had fax intercepts —were people like Amado Carrillo Fuentes, [known as] El Señor de Los Cielos. But Pablo never met with Chapo.
The Flores brothers are Chicago's most notorious twins, raking in millions as El Chapo's emissaries here before they flipped on the boss and took him down. New court records reveal one joint account amounted to more than $5 million in cash deposited under the floorboards of a house.
The now infamous Flores twins have family trouble on the horizon. In 2020, Pedro and Margarito Flores were released from prison into witness protection. The brothers from Chicago's Little Village neighborhood were largely responsible for information that led to the federal takedown of cartel kingpin El Chapo.
He was a close lieutenant of the former cartel leader JoaquĂn "El Chapo" Guzmán....Manuel Alejandro Aponte GĂłmez.Manuel "Aponte"Alejandro Gomez DiazDied9 April 2015 (aged 40) La Cruz de Elota, Sinaloa, MexicoNationalityMexicanOther names"El Bravo"OccupationProfessional hitman3 more rows
According to Slash Film, American Sicario is based on the true story of how Erik Vasquez (also known as La Munequita or "little doll") rose to prominence as the most dangerous American gangster and drug lord. The movie follows Erik's rise and fall on the journey to claim the top spot in the Mexican underworld.
As of 2021, the Sinaloa Cartel remains Mexico's most dominant drug cartel. After the arrest of JoaquĂn "El Chapo" Guzmán, the cartel is now headed by Ismael Zambada GarcĂa (aka El Mayo) and Guzmán's sons, Alfredo Guzmán Salazar, Ovidio Guzmán LĂłpez and Ivan Archivaldo Guzmán Salazar.
Davis, who was tried as a juvenile, copped to one count of first-degree robbery in June and was sentenced to 18 months in detention. Weaver and Lewis — who face murder and robbery charges — are being tried as adults. Enlarge Image. Rashaun Weaver William Farrington.
“When El Chapo came into court, he wasn’t at the defense table wearing handcuffs,” he said. “The contrast hit me pretty hard.
The real boss was Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, who, while named in the government’s indictment, still, conveniently, remained at large south of the border. The entire Chapo trial was a part of vast cover-up, Lichtman said. ...
It was also Chapo’s fault that the government had been able to crack the encryption system Jorge Milton had set up to defeat wire taps.
Lichtman was not deterred. It was no easy task to undermine the moral credibility of a witness who has already admitted to trying to kill a fellow prison inmate with a cyanide-laced arepa, as well as supplying weapons to right-wing death squads, but little by little, the Jersey-born mouthpiece was closing the distance.
The entire Chapo trial was a part of vast cover-up, Lichtman said. “This is a case that will require you to throw out much of what you were taught to believe in about the way governments work and how they behave, governments in South and Central American and Mexico and even the United States.”.
Not that Lichtman had any reason to despair. The mouthpiece from Newark had done his job. He’d served the interests of his client. Indeed, El Chapo, who looked intermittently disconnected earlier, was clearly engaged, writing feverishly on a legal pad.
For years La Rossa was the personal attorney for Big Paul Castellano, ruler of the Gambino Family. When Big Paulie was shot dead in front of the Sparks steakhouse in 1985, the alleged orchestrator of the crime, John Gotti Sr. hired Shargel to keep him out of jail, which he did, for a while.
Certainly Chapo had captured headlines with his daring escapes from maximum-security prisons, running record shipments of tons of cocaine into the U.S., as well as allegedly causing wholesale death and social misery in various wars of machismo and avarice against rival cartels.
Captured, he had been sentenced to 20 years in a Mexican prison for drug trafficking. But he escaped, purportedly by bribing the guards and hiding in the laundry. Now, he had a cadre of armed bodyguards, prosecutors say, a network of mountain hideaways and a diamond-studded pistol on his hip.
Reporter Tim Prudente interviews attorney William Purpura, who speaks about his career, including that of defending Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman against a 17-count indictment, slated for trial in November, in the United States District Court in New York City. (Karl Merton Ferron / Baltimore Sun)
He put psychologists on the witness stand to explain the adolescent brain. He showed jurors a defendant’s childhood of poverty, abuse and neglect. The past shouldn’t excuse the crime, he believed, but should preclude a death sentence.