[imagesource: Jerilee Bennett/ The Gazette]

Marco Antonio Paredes-Machado is suing the US government for being locked up alongside his boss, the infamous Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán.

As the former leader of the Sinaloa Cartel, Mexico’s most powerful drug trafficking organisation, El Chapo is spending life in America’s highest-security federal prison, ADX Florence in Colorado.

Nicknamed the “Alcatraz of the Rockies”, the place is packed with notorious and dangerous criminals, including Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, and 1991 World Trade Center bombing mastermind Ramzi Ahmed Yousef.

Paredes-Machado, who insists he was not a major player in the Sinaloa Cartel and rather a mere “plaza boss,” which is someone in a middle management role, is arguing that he was sent to this dangerous supermax prison as a “torturous” move to get him to talk about El Chapo, reported VICE.

In court documents from the civil lawsuit filed July 7, Paredes-Machado alleges that he was sent to ADX as an intimidation tactic and based on false evidence presented against him by prison officials.

This is where it gets a bit strange.

One of the justifications used to get him to move to ADX is a claim that he has a back tattoo from terrorist group ISIS.

That allegation is especially bizarre, his lawyer says, considering Paredes-Machado doesn’t have any tattoos at all:

An excerpt from the transfer paperwork refers at one point to “inmate Spain” rather than Paredes-Machado, suggesting prison officials may have mixed him up with someone else. The likely suspect is Casey Charles Spain, a 29-year-old from Richmond, Virginia, who the Department of Justice says “obtained a tattoo of the ISIS flag on his back” and was sentenced to prison in 2018 on gun charges after plotting attacks on military bases. The BOP’s inmate locator shows Spain at a high-security prison adjacent to ADX in Florence, Colorado.

Prison officials eventually admitted that Paredes-Machado was in fact “not the ISIS member described in the ADX transfer report”, but transferred him anyway.

In 2005, the US charged Paredes-Machado with conspiracy to distribute more than 1 000 kilograms of marijuana and more than five kilograms of cocaine:

Image: Court Document Image / VICE

Paredes-Machado was extradited to the US to face the charges and sentenced in 2020 to 22 years in a low-security prison.

The Denver Post explains the rest:

After entering the plea, Craig Wininger, an assistant U.S. attorney, emailed Paredes-Machado inquiring whether he would talk to the government about cartel “violence occurring on or near the border.”

Paredes-Machado agreed to meet Wininger and Seth Gilmore, with the Justice Department’s narcotics and dangerous drugs section, on the condition that they’d meet in Detroit, where he was being held, according to the complaint. Paredes-Machado was scheduled to be transferred to a Bureau of Prisons facility near Tucson, and he feared that if the meeting was in Arizona, cartel members would find out “and would violently retaliate against him and his family.”

Through an attorney, Paredes-Machado agreed to speak only about another cartel, La Linea, and not the Sinaloa Cartel to which he belonged.

But that meeting never took place, and instead Wininger and Gilmore (named as defendants in the lawsuit) “created, coordinated and executed a plan” to have Paredes-Machado transferred to ADX.

At ADX, nearly everyone is held in solitary confinement for 22 or 23 hours per day, with the worst of the criminals given additional restrictions.

[sources:vice&denverpost]