2018’s blockbuster crime case has now rolled over into 2019, and the El Chapo trial continues to deliver headlines.

We did a one-month recap just before we went on holiday in December (it was glorious, thanks for asking), but plenty has happened since then.

As we have mentioned before, an ever-present in the courtroom is wife Emma Coronel, and yesterday’s proceedings would have been more than a little awkward for her to sit through.

The Daily Beast reports:

FBI agent Stephen Marston took the stand and told the federal jury how authorities accessed the Sinaloa cartel leader’s text messages with his beauty-queen wife and mistresses—and what they said…

The cartel had a Colombian IT expert doing work for it, and El Chapo asked him to install Flexi-spy snoopware onto his wife Emma Coronel’s phone, the New York Daily News reported.

The drug lord didn’t know it, but the FBI had flipped the techie, Cristian Rodriguez. Agents subpoenaed Flexi-spy and obtained the messages between the fugitive and his wife and girlfriends…

Some of the messages showed El Chapo and Coronel [above right] behaving like any other husband and wife, “cooing over how cute their twin daughters are and talking about Emma’s enchiladas,” New York Times reporter Alan Feuer tweeted.

Guzman, 61, regularly called his glamorous 29-year-old wife, whom he married in 2007 while on the run, “my love” and “mommy.” She used terms of endearment like “Don Joaquin,” “Papi,” and “Mr. Joaquín.”

In one text message, Coronel, a teenage beauty pageant winner, teased him: “Recently, I’ve been told [our daughter] looks more like you—but she has a sweet disposition.”

Cute – they’re just like us.

Oh, except for the smuggling and killing and stuff:

…the domestic chit-chat was interspersed with the grim talk of the narcotics trafficking business, with the couple talking about their girls in one breath and in the next “talking about whether Chapo’s soldiers were slaughtered in a gunfight.”

“Our [daughter] is fearless, I’m going to give her an AK-47 so she can hang with me,” Chapo reportedly told his wife on his twin girls’ six-month birthday.

The mistress texts were pretty awkward, too:

Chapo also used Flexi-spy on two of his mistresses’ phones, Feuer reported, so the FBI was able to access their messages.

As the back-and-forths were read aloud in court—including one that revealed Guzman had paid for Agustina Cabanillas Acosta’s [reportedly below] liposuction—Coronel reportedly sat stone-faced.

“How are the sales going?” Chapo purportedly texted Acosta one day. “Oh, like busy bees,” she reportedly wrote back. “Non-stop, my love.”

In another message, Chapo reputedly told her, “You are the most important person to me, I love you.”

Though once Acosta realized she was being spied on, she reportedly texted a friend: “Fuck that.”

She added: “I’m way smarter than him.”

Sadly, no cameras are allowed inside the courtroom, so we’ll never get to see Coronel’s face when all of this was revealed.

Here’s a humorous aside from earlier this week to finish, as reported by the New York Post:

Lights in the Brooklyn federal courtroom hosting Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman’s trial briefly went dark Tuesday morning — leading some jokester to shout, “He’s gone!”

Fortunately, the kingpin was still there when the lights came back on, and the room erupted in laughter.

Quality.

[sources:dailybeast&nypost]