Bingo. If you follow earlier reporting they had tagged in government leaders 'El Chapo' trial: Witness says he bribed top Mexican officials
The El Chapo Trial is nuts; $100m Bribe to NIETO?! UPDATE: FOUND GUILTY ON ALL COUNTS
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that's why the Judge ain't trying to hear that shyt.......cause then you gonna have to Subpeona former Attorny General Eric Holder's byatch azz and the one responsible for this prosecution taking place Loretta Lynch she ain't trying to hear that shyt either
kinda fukked up tho Chapo and his lawyers are gonna roll over on Zambada aka "the old man of the mountain"...
but that's the game and that's how it played ....every man for himself
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El Chapo Speaks: Jury Hears Secretly Recorded Phone Call Detailing Drug Deal
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On Thursday, jurors heard a recorded conversation between Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the Mexican drug lord known as El Chapo, and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.CreditStephanie Keith for The New York Times
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On Thursday, jurors heard a recorded conversation between Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the Mexican drug lord known as El Chapo, and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.CreditCreditStephanie Keith for The New York Times
For more than a month, Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the Mexican drug lord known as El Chapo, has sat in a Brooklyn courtroom, mostly stone-faced, sometimes smiling, but never saying a word.
On Thursday, however, the jurors at his drug conspiracy trial finally heard him engaging in the business that led to his indictment. Prosecutors played an intercepted phone call of the kingpin striking a deal with Colombian guerrillas to move six tons of cocaine from Ecuador to Mexico.
While it was not the first time Mr. Guzmán’s voice had been heard at the trial — this week the government played clips of his infamous video interview with Rolling Stone — it was the first time jurors heard him practicing his trade.
In the secretly recorded conversation, Mr. Guzmán was negotiating with a member of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, about the cocaine shipment — most of which he asked to buy on credit. In the recording, Mr. Guzmán haggled over pricing and insisted on dispatching a “technician” to inspect the product’s quality before sending the guerrillas their initial payment of $50,000.
Though it remains unclear who recorded the call and how, it appears to have emerged from a long investigation by American officials into Jorge Cifuentes Villa, the leader of a Colombian trafficking clan, who said he started working with Mr. Guzmán a few years before his former Colombian connection was arrested.
Appearing at the trial as a witness for the government, Mr. Cifuentes in three days of testimony has described not only the various cocaine deals he hatched with the defendant in Ecuador, but also his own remarkable life of crime, which began when he was 4 and started helping his father move illegal cigarettes and whiskey through the port in Medellín.
On Tuesday, his first day on the stand, Mr. Cifuentes recalled how he met Mr. Guzmán in 2003 at a mescal-soaked party at the kingpin’s hide-out in the Sierra Madre mountains; it was a celebration of the second anniversary of his first escape from prison. Getting to the party required a harrowing landing on a steeply inclined covert airstrip. Once he was safely on the ground — and after he had said a few prayers — Mr. Cifuentes resolved, he told jurors, to buy Mr. Guzmán a helicopter so he could “fly in a more civilized way.”
That same year, he started sending Mr. Guzmán shipments of cocaine in carbon-fiber airplanes that were specially designed to frustrate radar. In 2007, after his brother — a former pilot for the Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar — was killed, Mr. Cifuentes fled to Ecuador, where he began arranging drug deals with the FARC for Mr. Guzmán and protecting their investment by bribing a local military officer.
The officer was not the only person Mr. Cifuentes has acknowledged paying off. He testified that he routinely bribed the Ecuadorean Navy (for information about American naval ships) and the Colombian police (“whenever it was needed”). Early in his career, he told the jurors, he once paid off Colombian officials to expunge his prison record.
By his own admission, Mr. Cifuentes was also a prodigious liar and cheater. As a teenager, he said, he lied about his age on his first driver’s license, and later, in Key Biscayne, Fla., he lied about his name while buying a $4 million mansion. He once bought a fake diploma, he confessed, “to impress my colleagues at work,” adding that he meant his “drug trafficking work.” When the helicopter he gave to Mr. Guzmán crashed, he said he pushed it off a cliff in an insurance scam.
But Mr. Cifuentes’s grandest fraud involved creating a foundation to preserve some seven million hectares of jungle in the Amazon on behalf of what he called the region’s “indigenous people.” Under questioning by prosecutors, he grudgingly acknowledged that he did not have “completely noble motives” in the venture. In reality, he said, the foundation was mostly a way to funnel up to $1.5 billion in environmental contracts to companies he owned.
The Cifuentes family has, for decades, been famous in Colombia for working in the cocaine trade. Aside from the oldest brother — the pilot who was killed before he could be arrested — Mr. Cifuentes’s younger brother, Alexander, and two of his sisters, Dolly and Lucia, were convicted of drug trafficking charges.
Even his mother, Carlina, was involved. Before prosecutors played Mr. Guzmán’s call with the guerrillas, they let the jurors hear recorded conversations in which Mr. Cifuentes and his mother could be heard discussing drug deals.
And yet on cross-examination Thursday afternoon, Mr. Cifuentes claimed he and his relatives were normal people who had “conflicts like any other family.”
Jeffrey Lichtman, one of Mr. Guzmán’s lawyers, was skeptical.
“Conflicts like any other family?” he repeated. “Like the time your brother Alex ordered the murder of your nephew?”
Mr. Cifuentes will be back in court on Monday to finish cross-examination.
A version of this article appears in print on Dec. 14, 2018, on Page A29 of the New York edition with the headline: El Chapo Breaks Courtroom Silence (via Audiotape). Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
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this is INSANITY!!!!!!!
I guess it’s sort of like how New York started hip hop and now the south damn near runs it.
shyt is crazy
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El Chapo Trial: How Many Gory Details Can One Jury Take?
6-8 minutes
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The trial of Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the Mexican drug lord known as El Chapo, has offered details about many murders — perhaps too many according to Judge Brian M. Cogan.CreditStephanie Keith for The New York Times
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The trial of Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the Mexican drug lord known as El Chapo, has offered details about many murders — perhaps too many according to Judge Brian M. Cogan.CreditCreditStephanie Keith for The New York Times
[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
In terms of bloodshed described in court, even the most violent Mafia cases have nothing on the trial of Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the Mexican drug lord known as El Chapo.
In the first four weeks of testimony, witnesses have recounted bone-chilling stories about people being stabbed in the face, getting gunned down on their doorsteps and nearly having their heads blown off. But while at least two dozen murders have already been discussed, many more dark tales — and much more grisly evidence — have gone unheard by jurors.
Judge Brian M. Cogan, who is presiding over the trial in Federal District Court in Brooklyn, has kept a tight leash on the gore, attempting to balance what is necessary to convey the stark realities of Latin American drug cartels and what is — literally — overkill. Judge Cogan seems to have taken the Goldilocks approach, looking for the spot between too much and not enough.
This week, however, his efforts were criticized by Mr. Guzmán’s lawyers as they began to cross-examine their client’s main cocaine supplier, Juan Carlos Ramírez Abadía, an exceptionally violent man who, by his own admission, took part in at least 150 murders. When the lawyers asked Mr. Ramírez to describe some of these crimes, Judge Cogan halted the line of inquiry.
“I am not understanding the relevance,” the judge confessed, noting he was concerned that the defense was “spending a lot of time” on Mr. Ramírez’s slew of executions. While he did not stop the questions altogether, he did encourage the lawyers to discriminate a bit.
“See if you cannot do 150 murders,” he suggested.
Judge Cogan has been hesitant before about permitting graphic evidence. Before the trial, prosecutors said they were planning to accuse Mr. Guzmán of personally killing or ordering the deaths of more than 30 people — among them, rivals, law enforcement officers and turncoats from within his organization. But at a pretrial hearing in October, Judge Cogan said that number was “way too much” and “out of control.” He advised the government to sharply cut back.
“This is a drug conspiracy case that involves murders,” he explained. “I’m not going to let you try a murder conspiracy case that happens to involve drugs.”
Judges often limit prejudicial evidence. For their part, prosecutors are not supposed to inundate jurors with inflammatory testimony that could sway their feelings toward defendants. In a similar way, defense lawyers are expected to keep their questions on cross-examination focused on those that impeach a witness’s credibility.
Judge Cogan has been similarly cautious in restricting testimony on high-level narco-corruption in Mexico. But Mr. Guzmán’s lawyers seemed especially displeased by his decisions this week regarding violence.
Juan Carlos Ramírez Abadía, a former Colombian kingpin known as Chupete, has admitted in court to taking part in at least 150 murders.CreditUnited States Attorney’s Office, Southern District of New York
Image
Juan Carlos Ramírez Abadía, a former Colombian kingpin known as Chupete, has admitted in court to taking part in at least 150 murders.CreditUnited States Attorney’s Office, Southern District of New York
They complained that the rulings and suggestions have not only stopped them from thoroughly exploring the sadistic nature of the government’s witnesses, but have also sanitized the brutal violence for which drug cartels are known.
“Murder is an infamous act and infamous acts go right to the heart of someone’s credibility,” one of the lawyers, William Purpura, said in court of Mr. Ramírez. “We have a right to go over all of these bad acts to show what type of character this is.”
The government, however, has seemed happy to comply with the judge. On direct examination, prosecutors never asked Mr. Ramírez about any of the executions, leaving the defense to lead him through his lengthy list of victims.
Among them was an unnamed lawyer who was gunned down in a bookstore in Colombia after drunkenly discussing Mr. Ramírez’s business. There was also a certain Señor Canoso who was shot in the head after stealing $2 million of the cocaine supplier’s money.
Mr. Ramírez admitted to the defense that he even recorded the various expenses for his killings in scrupulous accounting ledgers. Some of the entries were exactingly precise. One listed a payment to a hit squad for $338,776.
It remains unclear how many more assassinations will be mentioned at the trial — and just how explicit the details will be. The government has not yet offered the evidence it has about the murder of Francisco Aceves Urías, a Guzmán gunman known as Barbarino, who was slain three years ago in a restaurant parking lot in Mexico. Nor has the jury heard about the two rival traffickers whom Mr. Guzmán is accused of doing away with after relaxing over lunch. Prosecutors claim that once the men were dead, he had their bodies tossed into a pit and set on fire.
But if Mr. Ramírez’s testimony is a guide, the government may fight to keep out any further graphic evidence.
On Tuesday, for example, Mr. Purpura showed the jury a photo he had found by plugging the words “150 people” into a Google image search. It was a visual aid, he claimed, designed to indicate just how large Mr. Ramírez’s group of victims really was.
The prosecutors objected to the photo, saying it was “overly prejudicial.” But Judge Cogan let it in — given one condition.
He asked Mr. Purpura to be sure to tell the jury that the people in the picture had not in fact been killed.
A version of this article appears in print on Dec. 7, 2018, on Page A22 of the New York edition with the headline: Now Testing Its Tolerance for Gore: The El Chapo Jury. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
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Dealers meeting at Burger King?
Let me find out that @The Burger King was the Gustavo Fring of this drug empire. That must've been what Los Pollos Hermanos was based on.
