Photo Credit: AFP

In February, a judge found Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman guilty of 10 federal crimes. Those crimes include murder conspiracy, drug trafficking, money laundering, and continuing a criminal enterprise.

Guzman is 62 years old and a native of Mexico; he was extradited from Mexico to the US in January 2017. This extradition was in exchange for US prosecutors to not seek the death penalty.

NPR quotes Assistant Attorney General Brian Benczkowski as saying, “Mr. Guzmán thought for more than 25 years that he was untouchable, that there was no problem affecting the Sinaloa cartel that he couldn’t bribe, intimidate, torture or kill his way out of.”

But not everybody thinks El Chapo had a fair trial – at least those were the words from one of his defense attorneys, Jeffrey Lichtman.

Lichtman said, “All he wanted, and he said to me from day one, ‘I just want a fair trial. You tell me that I can get justice here, I just want a fair trial.’ And at the end of the day, we like to pretend that it was justice—it was not justice. You can’t have a situation where jurors are running around lying, lying to a judge, lying to a judge about what they were doing and learning about allegations that were purposely kept out by the government.”

But it doesn’t end there. US federal prosecutors want to recover $12.6 billion in drug money they say El Chapo generated. According to NBC New York, the laundered proceeds covered payrolls and expensive vehicles like submarines and planes.