The first man, Juan Carlos Ramirez Abadia, Guzmán’s main Colombian connection, told the jury in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn that he had taken part in at least 150 murders in the years he ran the North Valley drug cartel, both at home in Colombia and elsewhere in South America.
Ramirez, who wore a winter parka and a pair of gloves inside the court, testified about how the blood bath started in the early 1990s, when he ordered the deaths of several workers connected to his New York City drug distribution operation. It continued unabated until 2007, when Ramirez was arrested at a luxury condo in Brazil.
The victims were legion — prosecutors, thieves, former allies, Colombian military officers and a loose-lipped lawyer who once got drunk and talked about his business — but the full scope and details of the killing spree were never aired in court. Judge Brian M. Cogan told the defense that it did not need to thoroughly describe each of the murders Ramirez took part in to point out he was a violent man.
As for the money, Ramirez told jurors last week that he had once paid a hit squad $338,776 — a detail he recorded in one of many accounting ledgers in which he scrupulously tracked expenditures. Then there was the series of payments — $10 million altogether — he said he made to members of Colombia’s Congress as an enticement to vote against a law that ultimately led to his extradition to the United States.
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On Wednesday, Ramirez’s frontman, a Colombian lawyer named German Rosero, told jurors what may be one of the saddest drug-world origin stories. Rosero recalled how decades earlier, while working as a public defender in Colombia, he turned to Ramirez for protection when someone threatened his life. He spent the rest of his career paying off that debt.
Rosero served as an ambassador at large of sorts for Ramirez, working out of Mexico and selling his boss’ cocaine to Guzman and other members of the Sinaloa drug cartel.
In two days of testimony, he described a typical deal: He would get in contact with one of Guzman’s men who would arrange for him to be picked up at a nearby hotel and ferried to an airport. From there, he said, he would board a small plane and fly into the Sierra Madre mountains outside the city of Culiacan in Sinaloa state.
Guzman, who at that time had recently escaped from prison, usually waited for him at a remote mountain hideout. One hideout, Rosero said, was a farm with a big wooden gate, a normal-looking house and a pool with a palapa.
Rosero would make his pitch to Guzman — 3,000 kilos, say, delivered on the open seas by speedboat — while sitting in the shade underneath the palapa. Guzman, he recalled, often sat listening in a baseball cap.
Though he could be hotheaded when it came to personal slights, Guzman seemed relaxed when facing business problems. Once, Rosero said, the U.S. Coast Guard seized a mammoth load of more than 12 tons of cocaine that was headed to the Sinaloan traffickers. Hat in hand, Rosero flew into the mountains to see the kingpin and break the bad news.
“He told me we had to keep moving,” Rosero said. “We had to keep working.”
A New Face
In the early 2000s, Ramirez went to Brazil, learned Portuguese and underwent a series of face-altering surgeries in an effort to avoid the authorities. Doctors adjusted his jawbone and cheeks. He got a hair transplant, lip implants, and his eyes were widened, among other changes.
During cross-examination, one of the defense attorneys, William Purpura, who is bald, asked about the hair transplant.
“How did that work out for you?”
Ramirez, who still has a head of hair, laughed and said that it had worked out well.
Later, Purpura said, “You were a handsome man.”
The prosecution objected.
Purpura pivoted: “You weren’t a handsome man.”
Another objection came.
Sleepy Jury
On Wednesday, Cogan admonished the jury for not paying attention. “I know there is a lot of testimony to listen to,” he said. “Without singling anyone out, sometimes I look over and wonder if you’re as focused as you should be.”
The next day, grueling testimony about tanker cars and secreted cocaine put two jurors to sleep — one still holding his notebook in the air — and a third woman doubled over in her chair. This time, the judge said nothing.
Jurors will get two weeks off for the holiday season starting Dec. 20.
Chapo Glossary
Bajadores — A word used often during the trial comes from the Spanish verb bajar, meaning “to go down.” (The -dor suffix changes the verb to a noun.) Thus, bajadores has been used during the trial to describe people who bring drug money down from where the drugs are sold.
Seizures — Despite having created innovative techniques to hide drugs, including truck traps and false walls, several government agents testified this week about how the Drug Enforcement Administration and the U.S. Coast Guard seized large shipments of El Chapo’s cocaine and marijuana. The revelations included details about a 1999 raid of 3,500 pounds of marijuana and more than 1,000 kilograms of cocaine, some of it bundled into Robert Wayne Footwear shoe boxes. Later, in 2002, some 1,900 kilos of cocaine was seized from a warehouse in Brooklyn and a similar amount of cocaine was seized the following year in Queens.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.