He escaped from one high-security prison by disappearing through the floor of his cell, and from another by hiding in a laundry trolley.
However, it’s unlikely that infamous Mexican drug baron
El Chapo will ever slip away from his next destination.
Colorado’s bleak Supermax prison is where the United States incarcerates the ‘worst of the worst’ and, when he’s sentenced in June, it’s almost inevitable that he will spend the rest of his days there.
‘It is a sentence from which there is no escape and no return,’ said U.S. Attorney Richard Donoghue after the verdict.
Scroll down for video
El Chapo was finally captured for the last time in Mexico in 2016 after being on the run for more than a year. He has broken out of prison twice over the last 20 years to the mortification of the Mexican authorities he and his cronies have long-claimed are corrupt
Once arguably the most powerful criminal in the world, Joaquin ‘El Chapo’ Guzman, who held sway for decades over the all-powerful international Sinaloa drug-smuggling cartel, will be swapping a life of beauty queen mistresses and private jets stuffed with cash for the so-called ‘Alcatraz of the Rockies’.
Here, prisoners are confined for 23 hours a day in tiny concrete cells, deprived of almost all human contact. El Chapo certainly won’t be mixing with other inmates who include former London hate cleric Abu Hamza, British ‘shoe bomber’ Richard Reid, and Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.
No wonder that newly released video of the cold-blooded cartel boss shows him in tears after he was brought to New York by U.S. authorities two years ago. Once considered ‘untouchable’, he knew it was all over for him the moment he left the jurisdiction of Mexico, where endemic corruption had long allowed him to operate with virtual impunity.
After a three-month trial in Brooklyn that provided a jaw-dropping picture of a multi- billion-dollar criminal syndicate at work, a jury found him guilty of all 10 charges on Tuesday.
Convicted of masterminding a huge operation that used murder, kidnap and torture, he faces a life sentence with no chance of parole and an infinitesimal chance of ever finding an empty laundry trolley — let alone an accomplice to push it. Guzman, the stocky and barely-educated son of a peasant farmer, was extradited to the U.S. in January 2017 because Mexico simply couldn’t hold him.
America’s only Supermax prison — its official name is ADX (which stands for Administrative Maximum Facility) Florence — doesn’t have that problem. Since it opened in 1994, no one has ever escaped.
Guzman will probably be sent away to the one-and-only lockup designed to incarcerate the highest-risk prisoners in the federal penal system - the Administrative Maximum Facility (ADX) in Florence, Colorado, located 90 miles south of Denver
Widely known as Supermax, or 'Alcatraz of the Rockies,' the facility opened in 1994 and holds 402 inmates inside specially designed 'control units' that function as prisons within prisons
It is ideal for housing thugs like El Chapo whose syndicates are still operating.
Former ADX warden Robert Hood has described the Supermax as ‘life after death . . . in my opinion, it’s far worse than death’. Others have dubbed it ‘the prison of prisons’, ‘inhumane’, and ‘worse than Guantanamo’.
Its 410 inmates are delivered in buses, armoured cars and even Black Hawk helicopters, to the sprawling 37-acre facility around 115 miles south of Denver. A dozen tall gun towers and razor wire fences surround the network of squat, hardened brick buildings which are patrolled 24/7 by heavily armed guards with attack dogs.
Specially designed ‘control units’ function as prisons within prisons, and inmates are confined in their single-person, 7ft-by-12ft reinforced concrete cells for at least 22 hours a day. The walls are thick and sound-proofed ensuring prisoners cannot communicate with each other.
The bed is a poured concrete slab covered with a thin mattress and blankets, and there is a combined lavatory, sink and drinking fountain.
The only furniture is an immovable concrete desk and stool, and for some prisoners a small black-and-white TV showing carefully chosen educational and religious programmes.
Each cell has a slit-like 42in-tall, four-inch-wide window which is angled so there is no view of the sky nor of other cells.
This is intended to prevent inmates from even working out where they are in the prison complex. A former prisoner described Supermax as a ‘high-tech version of hell, designed to shut down all sensory perception’.
Inside look at ADX Florence: One of the cells in supermax prison is pictured above. Special restrictions are designed not only to prevent escape and keep corrections staff safe but to ensure that the most incorrigible inmates have no means of exerting influence or threats beyond prison walls
If an inmate needs a doctor, they must talk to them remotely through teleconferencing. Even contact with guards is highly restricted. Meals — eaten alone in the cell — are slid through small holes in the doors.
When taken outside their cells, inmates wear leg irons, handcuffs and stomach chains — and even then they are escorted by guards. Hundreds of cameras monitor their movements as metal doors slide open and shut along their route.
A daily recreation hour is allowed for inmates to exercise in an outdoor cage slightly larger than the cells and built into a concrete pit resembling an empty swimming pool.
However, it is likely El Chapo may end up in the Special H-Security Unit, also called the H-Hut, reserved for terrorists and others whose communications with the outside world demand the strictest controls.
Some prisoners here don’t even have contact with guards when they exercise; their cells have automated chutes that open on to private yards.
H-Hut prisoners can be visited by only their lawyers and immediate family, speaking over telephones through reinforced glass windows. All conversations are monitored except official legal ones.
It’s hardly surprising, then, that El Chapo, now 61, sitting listening to a translator, appeared stunned as the verdict was read out, glancing at his wife, Emma Coronel, who unconvincingly gave him the thumbs up even as she had tears in her eyes.
Prosecutors said 5ft 6in-tall El Chapo — whose nickname means Shorty — amassed a $14 billion fortune, and was responsible for 33 murders and trafficking more than 220 tons of cocaine as well as vast quantities of other drugs to America, Europe and beyond.
El Chapo gave his wife Emma Coronel Aispuro a thumbs up after he was found guilty and escorted out of the courtroom on Tuesday in Brooklyn federal court
The trial heard 200 hours of testimony from 56 prosecution witnesses. They included 14 ‘co-operating witnesses’ — mostly his ex-criminal confederates — who the defence dismissed as ‘lifelong liars’ willing to perjure themselves in exchange for reduced sentences.
After persuading El Chapo’s technology chief to co-operate, too, the prosecution also provided surveillance photos, intercepted phone calls and text messages.
Trial proceedings veered between soap opera and horror film. El Chapo’s love of bling — his diamond-studded pistol was engraved with his initials and he had a gold-plated AK-47 assault rifle — was matched only by his playboy private life.
He kept a string of ‘narco- mistresses’ and fathered at least 15 children with different women.
When one of his girlfriends tearfully proclaimed her undying love for him even as she gave evidence against him, his 29-year-old wife — a voluptuous former beauty queen — laughed mockingly from the second row of the court’s public seats.
The following day, husband and wife wore identical red velvet smoking jackets in an apparent co-ordinated show of solidarity.
The court heard how El Chapo kept a private zoo — including tigers, lions and panthers — which travelled around on a miniature railway.
Witnesses told how he and his men would take target practice with a bazooka and once plotted to murder a victim with a cyanide-laced pie.
One testified how El Chapo tried to have him killed by having a mariachi band play a threatening song all night outside his jail cell — before a hand grenade was hurled into it.
El Chapo enjoyed his notoriety and the celebrity it conferred on him. He once agreed to give an interview to Hollywood star Sean Penn while on the run, and had been working on a documentary film about his life before his final arrest.
When, near the end of the trial, he heard that Alejandro Edda, an actor who plays him in the Netflix series Narcos: Mexico, was in the court to watch him, he smiled delightedly.
An outdoor area of the notorious prison pictured above
'The prisoners really have no contact with other prisoners, all their movements are controlled,' Horn told Reuters. 'They get limited privileges, limited contacts. ... It's a tough place to do time'
However, prosecutors also revealed the stomach-churning brutality of a drug lord who first achieved notoriety in 1993 when he was blamed for the killing of a Roman Catholic cardinal at Guadalajara airport.
Witnesses said El Chapo personally tortured, then murdered, three members of a rival cartel, including one he buried alive. Other bodies were tossed on bonfires.
He would shoot his own men in the head if a drug shipment was late. Prosecutors also produced evidence that El Chapo and his henchmen often drugged and raped underage girls as as young as 13.
Alex Cifuentes, once El Chapo’s right-hand man, sensationally claimed during the trial that Guzman paid a $100 million bribe to former Mexican president Enrique Pena Nieto in 2012 in return for allowing him to come out of hiding. A spokesman for Mr Pena Nieto has called the bribery claim ‘false and defamatory’.
Top-level officials in other Mexican administrations were also accused of taking huge bribes, including a head of public security who was given $3 million stuffed into two suitcases.
Police and officials frequently protected the cartel’s smuggling operation and warned El Chapo of any threats, the trial heard. Both his prison escapes almost certainly involved corruption.
El Chapo’s cartel used fishing boats, lorries, trains, radar-evading planes, passenger cars, submarines, oil tankers, and tunnels to get drugs across the border. Cocaine was even smuggled inside shoe boxes and cans of jalapeño peppers.
The cafeteria of the Supermax Prison in Florence, Colorado pictured above
El Chapo's new home? A look inside the sterile cells of ADX florence pictured above with stone furniture
Having twice been jailed and twice escaped — once in the laundry basket in 2001 and again in 2015 via a specially constructed mile-long tunnel with a motorcycle on rails and electric lighting — El Chapo inevitably became obsessed with his own security.
He had more elaborate tunnel systems built under his various homes and safe houses, one hidden under a bath tub and another under a pool table.
El Chapo’s prison years in Mexico were hardly harsh. Corrupt guards and officials enabled him to live like a lord, entertaining favoured inmates with dinners of fine wine, lobster bisque and filet mignon.
He continued to handle business by phone and would satisfy an insatiable sexual appetite — he was said to have consumed Viagra ‘like candy’ — by summoning in prostitutes by the busload.
So ADX Florence is going to be quite a shock to El Chapo. A 2014 Amnesty International report concluded that the harsh regime of solitary confinement and sensory deprivation had a devastating effect on prisoners’ mental and physical health.
Two years earlier, a class action lawsuit on behalf of mentally ill prisoners claimed many of them ‘interminably wail, scream and bang on the walls of their cells’ or mutilate their bodies with whatever objects they can find.
Authorities counter that even inmates in the H-Hut can post letters, exercise in their cell, talk on the phone for up to 30 minutes a month and write books.
For the publicity obsessed El Chapo — who worked hard to convince the ordinary people of Mexico that he was actually a dashing, latter-day Robin Hood — the chance to work on an autobiography might be the only consolation of his grim new life.
He will certainly have few distractions in Supermax.
Inside the same room inmates have a toilet, sink, and miniature mirror
GRAPHIC: Cartel Dumps Tortured Bodies Along Mexican Border City Highway
Breitbart Border / Cartel Chronicles
1:59
REYNOSA, Tamaulipas – Gulf Cartel gunmen dumped the bodies of three victims along one of the highways in this border city. A large deployment of police forces responded to secure the crime scene. The violence comes at a time when rival factions of the Gulf Cartel continue their fight for control of the border region.
Early morning motorists moving the Libramiento highway called authorities upon spotting the three bodies. Tamaulipas state authorities rushed to the scene and set up a perimeter while forensic investigators documented the crime scene and collected the bodies.
Breitbart TV
CLOSE | X
The cartel gunmen wrapped one of the victims in a blanket, a second one plastic, and a third was dumped tied and semi-nude. All three victims showed signs of torture, law enforcement sources revealed to Breitbart News.
Editor’s Note: Breitbart Texas traveled to the Mexican States of Tamaulipas, Coahuila, and Nuevo León to recruit citizen journalists willing to risk their lives and expose the cartels silencing their communities. The writers would face certain death at the hands of the various cartels that operate in those areas including the Gulf Cartel and Los Zetas if a pseudonym were not used. Breitbart Texas’ Cartel Chronicles are published in both English and in their original Spanish. This article was written by “A.C. Del Angel” from Tamaulipas.
Eight-Time Deportee Accused of Trafficking $850,000 in Meth, Cocaine
2:17
Police arrested an illegal alien in Utah, who had been deported from the U.S. eight different times, for allegedly trafficking $850,000 in meth and cocaine.
Jose Olegario Lopez, a 44-year-old Mexican national from the state of Sinaloa, was traveling with his 16-year-old son on Saturday when Utah County officers pulled him over for suspected traffic violations.
But Lopez reportedly did not stop the car, causing authorities to surround him until he was forced to stop.
Breitbart TV
CLOSE | X
Officers who initially searched Lopez found he had traces of cocaine on his body, authorities said.
When officers and a K9 conducted an in-depth search of Lopez’s vehicle, they discovered multiple individually wrapped packages. Detectives say they recovered 2.35 pounds of cocaine, worth $106,000, and 16.7 pounds of methamphetamine, with an estimated street value of more than $750,000.
Authorities charged Lopez with two first-degree felony counts of possessing a controlled substance with intent to distribute, one count of failing to respond to obey an officer, and one class A misdemeanor charge of drug paraphernalia possession, according to a press release from the Utah County Sheriff’s Office.
Lopez is currently in custody and a judge ordered that he be held without bond.
Officials say the son was not involved in the trafficking and they released him into the custody of his mother.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials confirmed that Lopez is in the U.S. illegally and has been busted for illegally re-entering the country eight times.
ICE officials placed a detainer on Lopez, meaning that if he is released from prison, ICE can take custody of him and deport him out of the U.S.
Lopez is not the only eight-time deportee to make headlines. One judge threw the book at a Honduran national who had been deported from the U.S. eight times, sentencing the illegal alien to five years in federal prison.
GRAPHIC – 7 Human Heads Dumped in Mexican Border State
Breitbart Texas / Cartel Chronicles
Police discovered seven heads abandoned in an ice cooler Friday morning in the rural community of Bácum, Sonora–sparking fears of an escalation in an ongoing territorial cartel war.
Security elements of the State Public Security Police (PESP) and investigators assigned to the State Attorney General’s Office responded to a report of heads in a cooler at approximately 4 am, according to local media. Authorities determined that all victims were males between the ages of 25 and 40 and were believed kidnapped several hours earlier in the town of Francisco Javier Mina.
According to authorities and Breitbart Texas law enforcement contacts, the Friday morning executions and the general escalation in violence in the region can be attributed to a territorial dispute between “Los Salazar,” aligned with the Sinaloa Cartel, and Cártel de Jalisco Nueva Generación (CJNG). This dispute began in 2017 as CJNG moved into southern Sonora to challenge the Sinaloa Cartel’s dominance over routes to the U.S. drug markets.
According to local media reports, the small community of Bácum has registered 150 homicides.
Sonora Homicides per Year
2016 – 580
2017 – 693
2018 Year to July 31 – 653
Source: Mexican Secretariat of National Public Security
In early August, Breitbart Texas reported that the United States Consulate General in Hermosillo issued a security alert prohibiting federal employees from traveling to the popular tourist locations of San Carlos, Guaymas, and Empalme, Sonora, due to recent violent activity. Breitbart Texas also reported that more than 200 federal and state police personnel supported by elements of the Mexican Army were deployed to Guaymas amid increasing violence.
Robert Arce is a retired Phoenix Police detective with extensive experience working Mexican organized crime and street gangs. Arce has worked in the Balkans, Iraq, Haiti, and recently completed a three-year assignment in Monterrey, Mexico, working out of the Consulate for the United States Department of State, International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Program, where he was the Regional Program Manager for Northeast Mexico (Coahuila, Tamaulipas, Nuevo Leon, Durango, San Luis Potosi, Zacatecas.) You can follow him on Twitter. He can be reached at robertrarce@gmail.com
GRAPHIC: Cartel Gunmen Carry Out Early Morning Hits in Mexican Border State
Breitbart Texas / Cartel Chronicles
CIUDAD VICTORIA, Tamaulipas — Cartel gunmen escalated the number of executions in capital city of this Mexican border state. Hitmen began a new tactic where they are now raiding homes early in the morning. The raids are designed to surprise their sleeping victims and kill them at point-blank range.
This week, Ciudad Victoria, the capital of Tamaulipas, witnessed a series of executions where a group of assassins arrived at the houses of their victims at dawn and used assault rifles to kill them. The first execution took place in the Horacio Terán neighborhood in the southern part of the city where 52-year-old Hortencia “N” and an unidentified man died after being shot three times in the head.
According to information provided to Breitbart Texas by state authorities, neighbors reported hearing several gunshots at 6 a.m. so they called the authorities. By the time authorities and emergency personnel arrived, the victims were already dead and the gunmen escaped from the scene.
The double murder occurred at about the same time that another group of hit men killed an ex-convict named Ricardo “El Riki” Gonzalez Villanueva. According to information provided to Breitbart Texas by authorities, the gunmen also caught the victim by surprise at his home when two cartel hitmen entered and shot him multiple times in the head.
Also this week, a group of hitmen executed two men outside a house in the Luis Echeverria neighborhood. The gunmen shot their victims with machine guns at close range before fleeing. According to police sources, the executions are related to the territorial disputes between rival factions of Los Zetas cartel called Northeastern Cartel or Cartel Del Noreste and Old School Zetas or Zetas Vieja Escuela.
Editor’s Note: Breitbart Texas traveled to the Mexican States of Tamaulipas, Coahuila, and Nuevo León to recruit citizen journalists willing to risk their lives and expose the cartels silencing their communities. The writers would face certain death at the hands of the various cartels that operate in those areas including the Gulf Cartel and Los Zetas if a pseudonym were not used. Breitbart Texas’ Cartel Chronicles are published in both English and in their original Spanish. This article was written by “Francisco Morales” from Tamaulipas.
DO YOU EVER WONDER WHY DEMOCRAT POLS NEVER OPEN THEIR OTHEWISE MASSIVE MOUTHS ABOUT THE MEX CRIME TIDAL WAVE THAT IS NOW BORDER TO OPEN BORDER???
40% of all Federal Border Crimes are by invading Mexicans!
25 MINUTE VIDEO OF ACTUAL MEX INVASION. Illegals pour over Texas rancher’s property.
FOR EVERY ILLEGAL CAUGHT AT BORDER IT IS ESTIMATED THAT ABOUT 8 GET THROUGH AND ARE LOOTING US NOW!
You truly want wider open borders with NARCOMEX?
HIGHLY GRAPHIC!
IMAGES OF AMERICA UNDER LA RAZA MEX OCCUPATION… gruesome!
BEHEADINGS LONG U.S. OPEN BORDERS WITH NARCOMEX: The La Raza Heroin Cartels Take the Border and Leave Heads
THE LA RAZA MEXICAN DRUG CARTELS REMIND AMERICANS (Legals) THAT THERE IS NO (REAL) BORDER WITH NARCOMEX!
SHOCKING IMAGES OF CARTELS ON U.S. BORDERS:
“Heroin is not produced in the United States. Every gram of heroin present in the United States provides unequivocal evidence of a failure of border security because every gram of heroin was smuggled into the United States. Indeed, this is precisely a point that Attorney General Jeff Sessions made during his appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on October 18, 2017 when he again raised the need to secure the U.S./Mexican border to protect American lives.” Michael Cutler …..FrontPageMag.com
JUDICIAL WATCH
THE GRUESOME MS-13 GANGS FROM LOS ANGELES: THEIR MURDER, RAPE, AND CRIME TIDAL WAVE IN AMERICA’S OPEN BORDERS
The illegal stabbed her to death with a screwdriver and then ran her over with her car.
JUDICIAL WATCH:
“The greatest criminal threat to the daily lives of American citizens are the Mexican drug cartels.”
“Mexican drug cartels are the “other” terrorist threat to America. Militant Islamists have the goal of destroying the United States. Mexican drug cartels are now accomplishing that mission – from within, every day, in virtually every community across this country.” JUDICIALWATCH
“Mexican authorities have arrested the former mayor of a rural community in the border state of Coahuila in connection with the kidnapping, murder and incineration of hundreds of victims through a network of ovens at the hands of the Los Zetas cartel. The arrest comes after Breitbart Texas exposed not only the horrors of the mass extermination, but also the cover-up and complicity of the Mexican government.”
“Heroin is not produced in the United States. Every gram of heroin present in the United States provides unequivocal evidence of a failure of border security because every gram of heroin was smuggled into the United States. Indeed, this is precisely a point that Attorney General Jeff Sessions made during his appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on October 18, 2017 when he again raised the need to secure the U.S./Mexican border to protect American lives.” Michael Cutler …..FrontPageMag.com
THE MEXICAN DRUG CARTELS OPERATING IN AMERICA’S OPEN BORDERS
Overall, in the 2017 Fiscal Year, officials revealed that a record-breaking 455,000 pounds plus of drugs had already been seized. In 2016, that number amounted to 443,000 pounds. The 2017 haul is worth an estimated $6.1 billion – BREITBART – JEFF SESSION’S DRUG BUST ON SAN DIEGO
THE ILLEGALS’ AND THEIR CRIME TIDAL WAVE!
Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute has testified before a Congressional committee that in 2004, 95% of all outstanding warrants for murder in Los Angeles were for illegal aliens; in 2000, 23% of all Los Angeles County jail inmates were illegal aliens and that in 1995, 60% of Los Angeles’s largest street gang, the 18th Street gang, were illegal aliens.
A NATION DIES OF OPIOID ADDICTION
AMERICAN BIG PHARMA, RED CHINA and NARCOMEX PARTNER FOR THE BIG BUCKS
“The drug epidemic is the product of capitalism and the policies of the capitalist parties, both Democrats and Republicans. There is, first of all, the role of the pharmaceutical companies, which have amassed huge profits from the deceptive marketing of opioid pain killers, which they claimed were not addictive. Prescriptions for opioids such as Percocet, Oxycontin and Vicodin skyrocketed from 76 million in 1991 to nearly 259 million in 2012. What are the numbers and profits now?
OPIOID AMERICA: CHINA AND MEXICO PARTNER TO ADDICT AMERICA
PRINCETON REPORT:
American middle-class is addicted, poor, jobless and suicidal…. Thank the corrupt government for surrendering our borders to 40 million looting Mexicans and then handing the bills to middle America?
OPIOID MURDERS BY BIG PHARMA
“While drug distributors have paid a total of $400 million in fines over the past 10 years, their combined revenue during this same period was over $5 trillion.”
“Opioids have ravaged families and devastated communities across the country. Encouraging their open use undermines the rule of law and will do nothing to quell their continued abuse, let alone the problems underlying mass addiction.”
No comments:
Post a Comment