Today, Explained - Chapo Big House

Episode Date: January 14, 2019

Brooklyn really does have everything: a basketball team, a laundromat-pinball bar, and now the drug lord trial of the century. Keegan Hamilton, host of the “Chapo” podcast from Vice News, explains what it’s like to stare deep into the eyes of former Sinaloa cartel leader Joaquín Archivaldo Guzmán Loera, aka “El Chapo”. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Support for this Monday, January 14th, 2019 episode of Today Explained comes from HelloFresh. Right now you can get $80 off your first month by going to HelloFresh.com slash Explained80 and you enter the promo code Explained80. That's HelloFresh.com slash Explained80 and enter the promo code Explained80 for $80 off your first month. My real regret of all of this is that there is no camera in the federal courts. If this case were televised, it would be on every network. You know, the first couple times that I was in court and El Chapo comes out and is escorted by U.S. Marshals,

it was sort of almost an awe-inspiring moment where there's a hush comes over the courtroom and everybody's looking really intently. All eyes are on this guy. But I got to say that, you know, as the weeks have worn on, that allure has worn off sort of, and every day he seems just more and more like a normal human being. But it's probably safe to call him a mass murderer.

You ever catch those mass murderer eyes? I have indeed. He has sort of a full-bore stare. And El Chapo's wife, Emma Cornell, sits right behind us. And I sort of had my back turned to the courtroom and was making small talk, just chit-chatting with his wife. And I could see her sort of looking over my shoulder. And I turn around, and he had been trying to get her attention, but I was talking to her, and I could see her sort of looking over my shoulder and I turn around and he had been

trying to get her attention but I was talking to her and I just got the full stare and there's a moment where it's almost panic like a knot in your stomach like oh my god am I am I in trouble do I need to go into some government protection and then you're like wait a minute this guy's surrounded by U.S. Marshals he's in solitary confinement in a maximum security federal jail. But it's easy to see how somebody who was on the receiving end of that stair when he wasn't in U.S. custody would be deeply scared and in deep trouble. Keegan Hamilton has been reporting from the Chapo trial in Brooklyn for Vice News. He's also the host of their Chapo podcast.

It sounds like this. This man makes a living mockery of America's war on drugs. He is Joaquin El Chapo Guzman. Also known as El Chapo, the short one. Chapo Guzman is like the Osama Bin Laden of drug trafficking. Hits the ultra-violent, ultra-lucrative Sinaloa drug cartel. So Richie made the Forbes magazine billionaire's list using boats, submarines, airplanes, marijuana, cocaine, heroin, meth, about to be responsible for a quarter of the drugs here in the U.S.

He escaped from a maximum security prison for the second time. El Chapo Guzman is like a god. Tens of thousands have died in the U.S. and Mexico because of him. And tonight at 10, we are tracking a big development. Mexican drug kingpin has been extradited to the U.S. to face charges for his role as the head of the cartel. I'm Keegan Hamilton, and this is Chapo. For the uninitiated, who is El Chapo?

So El Chapo is Joaquin El Chapo Guzman Loera. He is a leader of the Sinaloa cartel, which is one of, if not the most powerful drug trafficking organization in Mexico. He's been active in the drug trade basically since the late 70s and was one of the most powerful drug lords in Mexico through the 90s and 2000s up until his final capture in 2016. And he was captured by Mexican authorities, United States authorities? He was captured by Mexican authorities with a lot of help from the United States, particularly the FBI and the DEA. Why is he being tried in Brooklyn? That was one of several jurisdictions in the United States that had an indictment for him.

Some of the others included Texas, California, Florida. But New York offers one of the highest security federal jails in the country, in Manhattan, the MCC. And because the U.S. government knows this is a high-profile trial and wants a lot of eyes to be on it, so to maximize the press coverage. Good morning to you. This courthouse is operating like a fortress right now. Joaquin El Chapo Guzman is facing 17 counts, including drug trafficking, kidnapping, and murder. Two jurors already dismissed, highlighting the heavy burden on a jury in a trial expected to last four months. What was it like to select a jury to sit in this trial? I mean, that feels like maybe the most dangerous public service you could imagine. You saw a lot of people. I was one of the five reporters in the courtroom as they were picking these jurors.

And I'd say at least a quarter, maybe a third of those folks said, there's no way I'm going to be on this jury because I'm afraid for my life. Ultimately, all of the 12 jurors and the six alternates who they picked are anonymous. They do get to go home to their families every night. They're not sequestered in a hotel room, but they are escorted to and from the courthouse by U.S. Marshals. And Chapo gets to look them in the eye every single day. I mean, this is a guy who's been accused of gruesome murders, who's being accused of being responsible for maybe hundreds, thousands more. He's escaped from prison multiple times. Is there a sense that, you know, trying him in a Brooklyn court is dangerous? It's pretty far-fetched to think that there's a way

that the cartel could try to bust him out. And the security of the courthouse itself is very intense. They have bomb-sniffing dogs, they have radiation detectors in case somebody tries to bring a dirty bomb in. But a funny thing happened in early January when the trial resumed after the winter break. Right before the trial was getting underway for the day, when the courtroom was packed,

Choppa was at the defense table with his lawyers. I think there was even a witness on the stand about to testify. The lights went out, and it was just pitch black. You couldn't see your hand in front of your face. And one of the reporters in the row just yells out, he's gone. There's a moment of panic where everybody looks and no, he's just sitting right there at the table and everybody laughed. Did he laugh? He doesn't speak English. I don't know that he understood what was just said.

But the U.S. Marshals are the ones who are in charge of guarding him in the courtroom and making sure he doesn't escape. I'm sure we're not amused by that joke. Because we are talking about, like, one of the most surely sophisticated drug operations ever, what have been sort of the more remarkable moments in the trial, the more remarkable revelations? So far in the trial, we've had nine major cooperating witnesses, and they've run the gamut from some of his major Colombian cocaine suppliers who are in U.S. custody to his Mexican cartel associates, some of his right-hand men, his top lieutenants, and then some more obscure

figures. Just recently, we heard from a guy who is best described as the Sinaloa cartel's IT guy. He set up an encrypted communication system for the cartel and then became an informant and let the FBI into that network so that they could obtain recordings of Chapo

discussing cartel business on the phone. The phone calls that the FBI was able to get from these servers really were just a window into the day-to-day operations of the cartel. And you see that Chapo is essentially a micromanager. He is in constant communication with his underlings, directing every aspect of his business. He's getting on the phone with corrupt police commanders to ask for favors. He's talking to his chief enforcer about how to battle a rival cartel group. On top of that, perhaps the most salacious thing that we heard from the IT guy was that Chapo was obsessed with spying on people who worked for him and not just his employees, but also the women in his life, his wife, Emma Cornell, and his mistresses.

He had the IT guy install commercial spyware on their cell phones so that he could remotely turn on the microphones on their phones so he could hear what they were saying after he'd finished talking to them. Just your friendly neighborhood, totally insecure drug lord. I also hear there were like a set of twins

who testified against him. Do twins go at the same time or do they still have to go one by one? Actually, they just put the same twin up there twice and say it's a different guy. The Flores twins, Pedro and Margarito Flores, were wholesalers for Chicago. They were born and raised in Chicago and then fled the U.S. when they were under indictment, went to Sinaloa, and became basically some of Chapo's top drug distributors in the United States. And we heard from one of those twins so far, we might hear from another before it's all said and done, who described the complete supply chain, how drugs get from Colombia to Mexico,

smuggled across the border, and then make their way to Chicago and distribute it across basically the entire United States. And how exactly does that work? Bribes is a big part of it, paying the Mexican and Colombian authorities to make sure that the shipments get from South America to Mexico and to the border without being intercepted by the authorities there. And then at the border, there's just an enormous array of smuggling techniques, none of which a giant wall at the border would stop. In most cases, they were being smuggled across the border through semi-trucks, commercial trucks with hidden compartments. They also used trains.

One of their favorite tactics was to use oil tankers, like rail cars with oil tankers on them. And those had secret compartments at either end, and they would fill the tankers up with, I think they said vegetable oil or some type of cooking oil, so that anybody who popped the top on this container would look in and see oil and say, I don't want to mess with getting in there or trying to drain that. And it proved to be remarkably effective. Crazy. Every day brings something new. For me, one of the big takeaways is that for an outsider or somebody who just follows this sort of casually, you hear the name Chapo and you assume that he's the one guy at the top calling all of the shots. But it's way more complicated than that.

And the prosecutors, as they've laid out their case, have made it clear that Chappa was not the only major drug trafficker the sinaloa cartel was a federation is another word that they've used to describe it of top traffickers who each sort of had their own factions or or networks and they would cooperate when it suits them and they would work individually when it benefited them so there's choppa and then there's a half dozen other guys who were coordinating their own drug shipments. The way that I've explained it to people is, think of it like a major corporation, something like GM, where it's a brand name that everybody knows,

but under that, there's all these other brands. There's Chevy, there's GM, there's Buick, and they're all under the umbrella of GM, but they're their own sort of businesses as well. And you can't get to the top of a corporation like GM without at least some people admiring you, right? Like El Chapo, though intensely feared, is also loved by some people in Mexico. Yeah, it depends where you are in Mexico. In his home state of Sinaloa, you would hear from people who say, yeah, Chapo, he fills the void that the government doesn't.

He pays for roads, he pays for planes to transport sick people to the hospital from the mountains. And this is why there are, like, thousands of folk songs written about him, right? Yeah, the narco-corritos are a facet of the Mexican cartel world. They will, in some cases, commission artists to make songs that sing their praises. And Chapo has many, many narco-corritos written about him. So he's got that sort of narco-Robin Hood reputation in his home state. But we also

spoke to folks in Mexico City who called him a parasite, who said, this guy is a criminal and he gives our country a bad name. Coming up, prison escapes, Sean Penn, and an unusually large taco order. This is Today Explained. If they provoke us, we'll be angry. Repent if you want to stay alive. Southwest chicken and peppers with yellow rice and black beans. This dish packs all your favorite Southwest flavors into one delicious bowl. Seriously, it's like a Tex-Mex treasure hunt for tasty toppings. In it, you'll find chili and cumin spiced chicken, creamy black beans, a tangle of tender peppers, and a dollop of tangy sour cream. The base is a bed of golden-hued rice, which gets its beautiful color from turmeric,

a spice that's been around for centuries. It comes from the root of a plant from the ginger family, and it's known for its earthy flavor and signature deep yellow color. If you like recipes and food, but don't like going outside, try HelloFresh. You get $80 off your first month by going to HelloFresh.com slash Explained80 when you enter the promo code Explained80. That's HelloFresh.com slash Explained80 and the promo code Explained80. They'll bring the food and the recipes to your door. So who exactly is El Chapo? Like, where did he come from in Mexico? What was his childhood like? Did he want to grow up to be a drug lord?

El Chapo was born in a tiny, tiny village in the mountains of Sinaloa, which is in the Sierra Madre Mountains in an area called the Golden Triangle. This area is incredibly poor, and it's a solid four-hour drive from the nearest major city, Cuyacan, over some incredibly rough roads. The famous story is that his family had nothing, and so he would sell oranges by the side of the road to bring in a little extra money for his family. Eventually, he, as many people do in that area of Mexico, realized the only way to provide for your family was to start growing marijuana and opium poppies,

which get processed into heroin. And he parlayed his drug crops into the multi-million dollar empire that it eventually became. And what is it about his rise that led to empire? What made him more savvy than your average drug dealer or your average entrepreneur. I think everybody agrees that Chapo is just a smart guy, a good businessman. The big innovation that Chapo is credited with is building tunnels underneath the border, smuggling tunnels. And that supposedly earned him the name El Rapido from Colombian cocaine suppliers because they would ship their product to Mexico and Chapa would get it across the border in record time. Even today with the DEA and

Homeland Security is still finding cross-border tunnels in San Diego, Arizona, that part of the border. Marijuana before legalization in the United, was a big cash crop for the cartel. Heroin, which the cartel can control the production of because they can grow the poppies in Mexico, was another big one. But the moneymaker, what really changed the game, was cocaine. back in the late 70s and 80s in Pablo Escobar's heyday, Colombians would ship the cocaine pretty much directly from Colombia to the United States. It would go through the Caribbean. They called it the Caribbean route. But when the U.S. started cracking down on that,

the Colombians needed a new way to get their product to market, and the obvious solution was the giant land border with Mexico. So they started working with Chapo and other major Mexican traffickers to ship cocaine across the land border. And that is what really changed the game in Mexico and brought a huge influx of cash and power to the Mexican cartels. So as he's making this sort of meteoric rise to being the king of this empire, what's the sort of byproduct of it? Tell me about the ugliness of this rise. Violence is an unavoidable part of the drug business. You know, this is basically a corporation, is what the Sinaloa cartel is.

In a legal corporation, you know, if there's a business dispute of some kind, you can go to civil court and have your lawyer settle it. In the drug trade, they don't have that luxury, and inevitably violence is the way to solve those problems. So there's killings over drug debts, and then there's killings over just rivalries. As you get powerful cartel figures, many of whom came from the same rural area of Encino Loa as Chapo,

there's these sort of lifelong grudges. And when one act of violence is met with retaliation, which starts a whole spiral that can become a war. What we saw a few years ago in Ciudad Juarez along the border with El Paso, Texas, can be basically traced back to a personal dispute between El Chapo and the leader of the Juarez cartel that got out of hand and made Juarez the murder capital of the Western Hem smuggling routes into the United States, the people of Juarez say the killings only stop when the Mexican national team is playing on TV or when it's raining outside. As these killings and death tolls tick up,

at what point exactly does law enforcement start trying to track him down? I mean, law enforcement had been trying to track Chapo down basically since the early 90s. He was successfully captured in 1993 and spent the next eight years in prison. He was in prison in Mexico from 1993 to 2001. And then he escaped and was on the run again from 2001 until 2014. And then he was in prison briefly, escaped again in 2015. You know, who knows how hard the Mexican authorities really were trying to capture him. We've heard a lot about corruption in this trial, and it's clear that he was allowed to operate and in many cases allowed to escape because he had paid off the right people.

The first time he escapes from prison, how exactly does he do it? Purportedly, El Chapo's first escape from prison in 2001 occurred when he hid in a laundry cart underneath clothes that a prison employee wheeled out the front gate of the prison. We heard an alternative theory to that, that he paid off the prison officials and was actually dressed as a federal police officer and walked out the front gate. Wow. And the second time he gets out of prison, how does he do at that time? Chapo's second prison escape is undoubtedly his most incredible and daring moment. That involved him being in a maximum security prison

and having his people dig a tunnel that was a mile long from a house just outside the prison that went right up into the shower of his cell. And he just ducks down and disappears. And inside that tunnel, to have a little icing on the cake here, was a rail that had a motorcycle mounted on it. So Chapo gets on this motorcycle and rides to freedom. But the U.S. authorities were were trying very very hard to capture him especially

toward the end from say 2008 to 2016 when he was caught finally a dramatic capture the world's most wanted most dangerous drug lord joaquin el chapo guzman back in mexican custody tonight mexico's president announcing mission accomplished after a nearly six-month manhunt for the Sinaloa cartel chief. And how was he finally caught? It's ridiculous, but I have to say it. He was given away by a very large taco order. What?

Where? He was hiding out in a city called Los Mochis, which is on the coast of Sinaloa. And they knew that he was there somewhere, but they didn't know exactly where. And they followed one of his men who had gone out to get food for all these gunmen who were hiding out with Chapo at the safe house, tailed him back, and figured out where he was.

Then this whole shootout ensued. He almost escaped through a tunnel again, and they ultimately found him. Do we have any idea how many tacos that guy ordered? I'd like to know what type of tacos they were. And then, of course, there's Sean Penn. We can't talk about El Chapo's capture without talking about Sean Penn.

Yeah, let's talk about Sean Penn. How the hell is Sean Penn landing an El Chapo's capture without talking about Sean Penn. Yeah, let's talk about Sean Penn. How the hell is Sean Penn landing an El Chapo interview at the peak of all of this? El Chapo, while he was on the run, after his second prison escape, had been interested in telling his life story. The content of this interview is exclusive to Ms. Kate del Castillo and Mr. Sean Penn. He had contacted an actress named Kate del Castillo, who is the star of a Mexican soap opera,

and said, I want you to produce a movie about my life. And she contacts Sean Penn through mutual friends and says, we can go meet El Chapo. And they go up to one of his mountain hideouts, and while they're there, Sean Penn says, oh, by the way, I want to write an article about this for Rolling Stone magazine. Because I think that there is, and there always has been, in the American culture, a romance of the outlaw. And it turns out that the Mexican authorities had been surveilling

both Kate Del Castillo and El Chapo. El Chapo was captured and then Sean Penn's story in Rolling Stone came out a few days later. I see him as one man with the imagination and perhaps the entrepreneurial drive that he had attached it to something that is experienced in its harvesting and selling in a very different way than it is experienced in its usage. Should, like, the U.S. Marshals have arrested Sean Penn when he got back into the United States for, like, coordinating with El Chapo? I think if he did anything, he'd be charged with crimes against journalism. El Chapo being on trial in Brooklyn, in New York, in a sense, makes good sense because

his work, his empire extended up, right? I mean, the hub of his United States operations was Chicago. Probably some of his drugs are making it all the way up to Canada, right? We heard testimony that he had business extensively in Vancouver supplying methamphetamine, heroin, cocaine. And he was definitely supplying significant kilos of cocaine that belonged to Chapo and the Sinaloa cartel. And Keegan, you live in New York. I imagine you've met a cocaine user or two in your time there. The vice office is in Williamsburg, so certainly I have encountered a cocaine user or two in my time in New York City. And, you know, like just to be real here for a second,

I have friends who buy like fair trade coffee, organic tomatoes. They won't buy a car because of the toll on the environment, but they don't ever ask questions about where their drugs come from, about where their white powder at the dance party comes from. And I just wonder like how do they fit into this story? At the end of the day, if there was no demand for drugs in the United States, there would be no cartels to supply those drugs. U.S. consumers of drugs are ultimately the ones who are responsible for the drug trade.

Chapo and every other Mexican trafficker is just supplying a product that they know will get them money from the United States. And sitting in that courtroom and seeing his trial, do you think it'll change a thing? The most compelling argument I've heard in favor of saying that this changes something is that Chap for many years, was sort of the face of impunity. Like, he can get away with it because he can buy off whoever he needs to buy off. He's so powerful that he can't be brought to justice. So in the sense that bringing El Chapo to the United States and convicting him shows that no one is above the law. I think there is something to be said for that. On the flip side, there is no change in terms of the supply of drugs in the United States.

So I think that there's a symbolic value in convicting him and him being sentenced to life in prison as seems inevitable. But in terms of practical impact, is this making any dent? No. Keegan Hamilton writes about drugs and crime for Vice News. If you want more El Chapo, you'll want to follow Keegan's work. He's sitting in the courtroom every day until this is over. And he's making a podcast about it.

It's called Chapo. I'm Sean Ramos for him. This one's called Today Explained. HelloFresh has a fresh offer for 2019. It's to get $80 off your first month of food delivery and recipe delivery to your house. You go to HelloFresh.com slash Explained80. And guess what the promo code is? Explained80. And guess what the promo code is? Explained80. Gets you $80 off at HelloFresh.com slash Explained80.