Joaquin Archivaldo Guzmán Loera, or El Chapo as he is generally known, is headed to federal court.

The undisputed king of the ruthless Sinaloa Cartel, which has helped send thousands of tons of coke, heroin, methamphetamine and marijuana into America, will face the music on November 12, as things stand.

The jury is being selected this week for the trial, which will take place inside a highly secure federal courthouse in Brooklyn, New York.

No surprises that finding jurors willing to report for duty is proving difficult, with many excusing themselves because they fear for their lives. Fair enough, given that El Chapo is famous for ruling with an iron fist, and keen on an eye for an eye.

Here are the basics of the charges he faces via Rolling Stone:

The trial is expected to last anywhere from two to four months. He faces a 17-count indictment for his role as the head of the cartel, including money laundering, and firearms and murder-conspiracy charges.

And according to court documents outlining the government’s case against him — and conversations with some of the people who helped put him away — El Chapo may have finally drawn the short straw.

The trial has been repeatedly delayed, as Chapo’s defense attorneys requested the trial date be pushed back in light of the mountains of evidence being brought by the prosecution. The latest hold-up came as lawyers for the defense complained to judge Brian Cogan that a last-minute dump of some 14,000 pages of new evidence from previously unnamed cooperating witnesses…

I would also want to be unnamed if I was a cooperating witness.

If you ask Jack Riley, who was working as the DEA’s top cop in Chicago at the time of El Chapo’s 2014 capture, it was teamwork that brought the drug kingpin down:

“What Chapo counted on was law-enforcement and cops not talking to one another,” Riley says. “So when we began looking at him, it was clear we had to build relationships with our Mexican counterparts, and gather intel in Mexico as well as to understand how he operated in the U.S. And that meant a lot of cops sharing intel and information, which they had previously been hesitant to do. Everybody from small police departments to large police departments to the DEA and the FBI and ICE.”

That cooperation was especially crucial given the diverse nature of Sinaloa’s revenue streams, Riley says.

See, even drug cartels are taking that ‘diversify your portfolio’ advice to heart.

Federal prosecutors are preparing a mountain of evidence to take Guzmán down, and some of it is pretty gruesome:

In one particularly gory paragraph, prosecutors claim a Sinaloa sicario specially outfitted a murder house with plastic sheeting for the walls and a drain specifically designed to catch blood from murder victims…

Even with a team of battle-tested lawyers, It’s hard to see how Guzmán could wriggle his way out of this one. Thousands of miles from his base of support in the Sierra Madre mountains, held 23 hours a day in solitary in a heavily fortified federal lockup in Manhattan, the chances of another daring escape are slim.

His attorneys are tasked with defending a man whose decades-long run as a top drug lord is not only common knowledge, but also detailed in hundreds of thousands of pages of evidence from prosecutors and backed up by key cooperating witnesses.

Guzman’s legal team has hinted that they intend to dispute the government’s characterization of their client as the ultimate drug lord.

That’s going to prove difficult, but Andrew Hogan, the DEA agent who stared Guzman in the face in a Mazatlán parking garage on the morning Mexican Marines pulled him out of bed in 2014, is taking nothing for granted:

“He’s where he belongs, but you can guarantee he’s thinking about the next step,” Hogan says. “What that is, I don’t know. But his mind’s always running.”

You don’t run one of the world’s largest and most successful criminal enterprises without thinking on your feet.

Again, spare a thought for the jurors who will have to make a call on El Chapo’s freedom, knowing what he is capable of.

[source:rollingstone]