By his own admission, Mr. Cifuentes was also a prodigious liar and cheater. As a teenager, he said, he lied about his age on his first driver's license, and later, in Key Biscayne, Fla., he lied about his name while buying a $4 million mansion. He once bought a fake diploma, he confessed, "to impress my colleagues at work," adding that he meant his "drug trafficking work." When the helicopter he gave to Mr. Guzmán crashed, he said he pushed it off a cliff in an insurance scam.
But Mr. Cifuentes's grandest fraud involved creating a foundation to preserve some seven million hectares of jungle in the Amazon on behalf of what he called the region's "indigenous people." Under questioning by prosecutors, he grudgingly acknowledged that he did not have "completely noble motives" in the venture. In reality, he said, the foundation was mostly a way to funnel up to $1.5 billion in environmental contracts to companies he owned.
The Cifuentes family has, for decades, been famous in Colombia for working in the cocaine trade. Aside from the oldest brother — the pilot who was killed before he could be arrested — Mr. Cifuentes's younger brother, Alexander, and two of his sisters, Dolly and Lucia, were convicted of drug trafficking charges.
Even his mother, Carlina, was involved. Before prosecutors played Mr. Guzmán's call with the guerrillas, they let the jurors hear recorded conversations in which Mr. Cifuentes and his mother could be heard discussing drug deals.
And yet on cross-examination Thursday afternoon, Mr. Cifuentes claimed he and his relatives were normal people who had "conflicts like any other family."
Jeffrey Lichtman, one of Mr. Guzmán's lawyers, was skeptical.
"Conflicts like any other family?" he repeated. "Like the time your brother Alex ordered the murder of your nephew?"
Mr. Cifuentes will be back in court on Monday to finish cross-examination.
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