El Chapo organized lavish parties attended by employees and inmates of the Federal Center for Social Readjustment of Puente Grande, in Jalisco, and managed his own payroll of prison staff, says British journalist Malcolm Beith in his book “The Last Narco”.
Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán Loera became Mexico’s most famous cartel, and its eccentricities have been widely documented for years. Some writers and journalists point out that his fame goes back to the time when he started to commit a crime.
British journalist Malcolm Beith points out in his book “The Last Narco” that while in prison at Puente Grande’s Federal Center for Social Readaptation, in Jalisco, Mexico, where he first escaped in 2001, El Chapo organized parties for female employees and detainees present. He managed his own prison staff payroll, Beith adds.
The Infobae newspaper also refers to a luxury party held in the same prison at Christmas and sponsored by El Chapo, which brings 500 liters of wine and lobster.
In an interview with lawyer José Antonio Ortega Sánchez, the lawyer overhears Loera asking why he had kept him waiting so long, the Sinaloa cartel leader replied that he had his conjugal visit that day and then took a Turkish bath, to take a nap “to greet you as you deserve”.
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El Chapo made his fortune trading cocaine to the United States in the 1990s. In 2018, during the trial of him, one of the events that drew a lot of international attention, a US government witness told the life level of his former boss.
Jets, luxurious homes on every beach in Mexico with swimming pools and golf courses, farms in every state and a private zoo with tigers, lions, panthers and deer, and a train to travel over them, as well as a yacht, “El Chapito”, in its property in Cancun and “4 or 5 women” were part of the luxury Loera maintained with his fortune.
Miguel Ángel Martínez Martínez, aka ‘el Gordo’ or ‘el Tololoche’, testified at a court hearing in New York, where he explained that his then boss had given him a Rolex watch with diamonds and that he paid a million dollars in the 1990s. salary.
He added that in one month he ordered him to buy more than 50 cars, Buick, Thunderbird and Cougar, to give to his workers, who could choose the model.
Martínez added that the nineties drug trade was “very good” and that Guzmán Loera took advantage of the “coca tree” and that he used some of the money to pay bribes and continue his business.
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He also confirmed that the capo received one or two trucks a month coming from the United States with the money from the sale of the drug, and that he later sent his planes to collect that money in Tijuana, which was sent to Mexico City. brought and deposited into accounts, banks, after bribing employees, some of which he invested in real estate.
The journalist Anabel Hernández says in her book “Los señorres del narco” in her writing that El Chapo rented an entire apartment to stay in the old Sheraton Bugambilias hotel in Puerto Vallarta, Jalisco.
His desire to become known also led him to seek the actor and producer Sean Penn to make a film of his life that began humbly in Badiraguato, Sinaloa, his impressive jailbreaks and his economic might. .
“El Chapo”, the world’s most wanted drug trafficker, was captured in Sinaloa more than three months after Penn and Kate Del Castillo met him on October 2, 2016, and six months after a spectacular escape from a maximum-security prison in central Mexico .
In July 2019, he was sentenced to life in prison for continuing to maintain a criminal organization and 30 years for using weapons in a violent manner.
Diagram of the cells in the Supermax prison where Joaquín “el Chapo” Guzmán is serving a life sentence. Photo / courtesy
This file photo taken on February 13, 2019 shows a representation of the United States Maximum Administrative Prison, also known as ADX or “Supermax,” in Florence, Colorado. Photo / AFP