NEW YORK — At the start of the federal trial of Joaquín (El Chapo) Guzmán, defence lawyers said they would discredit prosecution witnesses as criminal liars who would say anything to convict the accused Mexican drug lord and win leniency for their own crimes.
A defence lawyer hammered Juan Carlos Ramírez Abadía in Brooklyn federal court Tuesday, getting the witness who testified he was Guzmán's Colombia cocaine supplier to admit he ordered roughly 150 killings — including the assassination of a man in the Queens borough of New York.
The former head of Colombia's Norte Valle cocaine cartel even kept financial records that listed the costs of some killings to the dollar.
Guzmán's lawyer William Purpura showed jurors an image of a business ledger and asked Ramírez if one entry referred to "the murders of three people."
"That's correct," said Ramírez, whose benign-seeming drug cartel nickname is Chupeta, or lollipop.
The witness said he did not remember the victims' names, but he readily confirmed the cost of the killings: US$45,000.
Testifying through a Spanish-language interpreter, Ramírez admitted he ordered the assassination of the brother of a cartel member he believed was co-operating with investigators. That hit cost US$338,776, he said.
Asked to explain the higher price, Ramírez said, "It was a big group of hit men who took part in that killing."
Purpura inquired about other murders.
Ramírez acknowledged that he lured a cartel member nicknamed Tocayo to a meeting because the man was suspected of co-operating with investigators.
Instead of a meeting, Purpura asked, were Tocayo, his attorney and 10 to 12 others "obliterated… with guns?"
"That is correct," Ramírez said. He acknowledged that members of a Tocayo backup group waiting at a nearby gas station were shot to death by cartel hit men known as "sicarios."
All the bodies were thrown into the back of a truck and disposed of, he said.
Ramírez admitted he personally killed one adversary, a man named Rodríguez, by shooting him in the face "from a distance of one metre."
He acknowledged ordering assassinations from afar, including the murder in 1993 in Queens of Vladimir Beigelman, a reputed Russian cocaine dealer.
"It's impossible to be the leader of a cartel in Colombia without violence," Ramírez explained at one point.
The defence team elicited the testimony in an effort to persuade jurors that Ramírez's testimony about Guzmán's alleged drug trafficking, conspiracy, money laundering and other crimes was not credible.
Purpura focused attention on Ramírez's face, a tightly stretched mask created by multiple plastic surgeries that the defendant said he ordered in a bid to avoid arrest, extradition to the U.S. and prison.
Despite the facial alterations, U.S. and Brazilian authorities traced Ramírez to a hideout in a neighbourhood outside Sao Paulo and arrested him in 2007. Investigators confirmed his identity with voice-recognition technology.
Federal investigators seized roughly US$1 billion, valuable paintings by Colombian artist Fernando Botero, a yacht and other assets Ramírez amassed during his drug trafficking career.
On the stand Tuesday, Ramírez acknowledged he lied habitually — including when he told Colombian authorities he would dismantle his cartel, stop selling cocaine and co-operate with them in exchange for a light prison sentence.
He admitted he kept the criminal enterprise running and continued to sell cocaine — and got lighter punishment still by bribing corrupt Colombian officials.
"Would you lie to avoid arrest, avoid extradition, avoid going to prison?" Purpura asked.
"At that time, of course, I lied," Ramírez answered.
"Would you lie now," the attorney asked, as a witness against Guzmán?
"I'm not lying," Ramírez said.
Ramírez, 55, may receive a maximum prison sentence of 30 years for a guilty plea he entered in 2010. The sentence could be reduced to 25 years if prosecutors tell a federal judge he told the truth and co-operated fully in cases against others.
Ramírez is the third confessed co-conspirator to identify Guzmán as a kingpin of Mexico's Sinaloa drug cartel.
Ramírez told jurors that he, Guzmán and others conspired to smuggle tons of cocaine from the jungles of Colombia into Mexico, across the southern U.S. border and on to Los Angeles, Chicago and New York.
The drug shipments started with airplanes during the early 1990s. The method proved successful, leading to so many early morning flights from Colombia to Mexico that U.S. investigators said it looked like Mexico was being invaded, Ramírez testified.
Responding to air surveillance, the Colombian and Mexican cartels reached a preliminary agreement to shift the cocaine shipments to Pacific Ocean shrimp boats.
This was an untried "virgin method," Ramírez said he told Guzmán and other conspirators.
Ramírez said Guzmán asked him to join him and other Sinaloa cartel members in seeking approval from Juan José Esparragoza Moreno, a respected member of the crime group whose nickname was El Azul.
Esparragoza was held in a Mexico City jail at the time, Ramírez said. Getting inside was no problem, he told jurors: he was driven to the jail in the car of a Mexican federal police commander "who worked for the Sinaloa cartel."
The traffickers met with El Azul and his lieutenants in an area of the jail where liquor, marijuana and "any food you wanted" was available, Ramírez testified.
El Azul gave his approval to shift from planes to boats, Ramírez said. The oceangoing cocaine trafficking method worked at first, Ramírez said, but it, too, broke down over time as U.S. and Mexican authorities tracked the boats.
The conspirators agreed to Ramírez's recommendation to carry the cocaine cargoes north in submarines, Ramírez testified. U.S. and Mexican investigators caught on to that method, too, and seized some shipments.
— USA Today
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