Sinaloa cartel co-founder "El Mayo" Zambada faces life sentence and record $15bn forfeiture
A Mexican cartel leader who helped shape the modern illegal drug trade and has agreed to one of the largest criminal forfeitures in US legal history is set to be sentenced to life in prison on Monday.
As reported by FT, Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, who co-founded the Sinaloa Cartel in the late 1980s with Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzmán, agreed to surrender up to $15bn based on the cartel’s revenues over more than three decades.
An almost mythical figure in Mexico who rarely sought the limelight, 76-year-old Zambada was regarded as the strategist who oversaw bribery for the group, paying off politicians and military figures to allow it to move cocaine, heroin and other drugs to the US.
He pleaded guilty to operating a criminal enterprise and to a racketeering conspiracy charge in a plea agreement with US authorities last year.
For decades he was “one of the most — if not the most — prolific and powerful narcotraffickers in the world”, Brooklyn federal prosecutors said in a court filing ahead of his sentencing. Under Zambada’s leadership, they said, the cartel distributed at least 1.5mn kg of cocaine and expanded into delivering heroin and fentanyl.
“It would be difficult to overstate the magnitude of the defendant’s crimes and scale of the corruption, violence, and other harm he spread throughout Mexico, the United States, and the world.”
They said Zambada’s armed personnel carried out “gruesome assassinations and kidnappings” and his cartel pioneered “novel distribution techniques”, such as using trains and tunnels between Mexico and the US to move drugs.
His 2024 kidnapping and removal to the US by Joaquín Guzmán López, the son of Zambada’s former partner, began an intra-cartel war in Sinaloa that has killed thousands.
The US is unlikely to recover the full $15bn judgment, which is the most prosecutors could seek by laying claim to Zambada’s assets. The cartel leader’s lawyer Frank Perez told the FT the forfeiture sum was “the largest I have ever heard of”.
“In a case like this, of course there’s a massive number, but until they find the assets it is only a number,” Stefan Cassella, a former federal government asset forfeiture specialist, told the FT. Recovered money can be paid to victims and used to fund some law enforcement services.
The figure is among the largest in US criminal history but is dwarfed by the $171bn forfeiture order handed to financier Bernard Madoff.
Mexican drug trafficking groups generate more than $12bn a year just from heroin, methamphetamines and cocaine, according to estimates from the UN Office on Drugs and Crime.
Raised in poor farming communities in the hills of Sinaloa, Zambada belongs to a shrinking group of old-time drug cartel bosses. He joined the trade as a young man in the late 1960s, growing marijuana before working his way up to a local and international leader. He has been indicted 16 times in courts across the US since 2009.
Ray Donovan, former head of operations at the US Drug Enforcement Administration who also led the US effort to catch Guzmán, said Zambada was the more strategic of the Sinaloa cartel leaders.
“Chapo [was] more muscle, while Mayo was more brains,” he said.
The drug trade has changed dramatically since Zambada’s origins, with modern groups focused on synthetic drugs and managing precursor chemicals coming from China and India. Synthetic opioid fentanyl has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans and become a leading cause of death for young people.
President Donald Trump has designated several of Mexico’s cartels as terrorist organisations, expanding US powers to dismantle the groups and target the politicians that work for them. Mexican analysts have raised the possibility that Guzmán’s sons, known as the “Chapitos”, and Zambada could hand over damaging information about sitting officials.
Zambada’s lawyers said he “did not provide substantial assistance” but “has sought to be co-operative and accommodating throughout this process to the utmost of his ability.”
His lawyers have painted him as more reasonable than his former partner Guzmán, because he has pleaded guilty, filed no pre-trial motions and avoided “one of the most complex federal trials in history”.
In a court filing ahead of the hearing they said he “accepts” that his guilty plea will lead to a mandatory sentence of life imprisonment. They said he “contends with a complex of age-related health issues” and asked for him to be sent to a prison with appropriate medical facilities.
They requested he not be sent to “the same draconian Supermax prison” as Guzmán, because unlike his Sinaloa co-founder he had conducted himself in “the way our system wants to encourage defendants to behave” since arriving in the US in 2024.
In that time there have been more than 3,552 violent deaths and 4,153 people have gone missing in the state of Sinaloa, according to local newspaper Noroeste.
The US government had said it did not “induce or condone” Zambada’s kidnapping by Guzmán, but Mexico’s government is investigating whether Washington lied about its role.
Mexican authorities admitted this month that the pilot who flew Zambada across the border was inadvertently handed over to US authorities as part of a prison transfer designed to show co-operation with Trump.
World Affairs Correspondent
Read more similar news:
Comments:
comments powered by Disqus
