Almost two decades of Chicago-based drug investigations were instrumental in the downfall of former Sinaloa cartel kingpin Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, who pleaded guilty Monday in New York to narcotics trafficking charges.
Zambada spoke for about eight minutes during a court hearing in which he admitted the violence his cartel wrought in Mexico, and concluded with an apology “to everyone who has suffered from my actions.” Along with Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, he founded the Sinaloa cartel decades ago, authorities say.
Zambada was taken into U.S. custody last year after arriving in Texas on a plane with one of Guzmán’s sons, Joaquín Guzmán López, who’s said to have kidnapped Zambada in order to curry favor with prosecutors in his own criminal case in Chicago.
Guzmán López has pleaded not guilty to federal drug-trafficking charges in Chicago, but his brother Ovidio Guzmán López, pleaded guilty here last month and agreed to cooperate with the government against the Sinaloa cartel.
They and two other El Chapo sons — fugitives in the same Chicago case — were targets of a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration investigation based here. El Chapo’s four sons, known as the Chapitos, are accused of running his empire after he was sent to a federal prison in Colorado for life in 2019. They’re accused of flooding Chicago and the rest of the country with fentanyl.
Like Ovidio Guzmán López, Zambada’s own son also agreed to help the U.S. government’s campaign against the Sinaloa cartel. In 2013, Vicente Zambada said he would cooperate with federal agents in Chicago and later testified against El Chapo at his trial in New York. In exchange, Vicente Zambada got a lenient sentence of 15 years in prison.
Prosecutors said his 77-year-old father led a militarized private security force and a team of “sicarios,” or hitmen, who carried out assassinations, kidnappings and torture. The elder Zambada appeared in court Monday in Brooklyn where he acknowledged the deadly fighting recently between his security operation and the Chapitos faction of the Sinaloa cartel.
“These confrontations led to many deaths — both of our enemies and of fighters on our side,” Zambada said. “Many innocent people were also killed.”
Thousands of people have died in gunfights in Mexico after Joaquín Guzmán López duped Zambada to join him on a Beechcraft King Air plane to look at real estate, officials have said. They landed at an airport outside El Paso, Texas, where they were both arrested.
Zambada told the court he started out in the drug trade when he was a 19-year-old marijuana grower in 1969. Although he sold heroin and other drugs, he later specialized in cocaine trafficking, transporting at least 1.5 million kilograms of the drug to the United States since 1980, he said.
“I recognize the great harm illegal drugs have done to the people in the United States and Mexico,” Zambada said through a Spanish-language interpreter. “I apologize for all of it and I take responsibility for my actions.”
El Chapo was considered the ruthless logistical boss of the cartel’s day-to-day trafficking operations while Zambada was viewed as the leader of the cartel’s finances and business strategy. But Zambada also used extreme violence to enforce his will, prosecutors have said.
Zambada entered his guilty plea two weeks after prosecutors said they wouldn’t seek the death penalty against him. He’s expected to be sentenced on Jan. 13 to life in prison for racketeering conspiracy and running a continuing criminal enterprise.
As with Zambada, Chicago also played a big role in El Chapo’s downfall. A Chicago-based DEA investigation produced much of the evidence brought against him, including a wiretapped phone call in which the Sinaloa boss discussed a drug deal with a Chicago-raised cocaine trafficker, Pedro Flores.
Flores and his brother Margarito agreed in 2008 to cooperate with the U.S. government against El Chapo and the cartel. Pedro Flores testified against El Chapo at his trial. The Flores twins, known as the biggest drug traffickers in Chicago history, are now free after serving 14-year prison terms. The twins have admitted smuggling tons of cocaine into Chicago and other cities.
loyalists against backers of Guzmán’s sons.