Reputed Sinaloa cartel co-founder Ismael Zambada Garcia, also known as El Mayo, was arraigned on a superseding indictment Friday in New York City, charged with an trafficking fentanyl as well as a host of related counts. Photo provided by U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency
Sept. 13 (UPI) — Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada Garcia, the reputed co-founder of the feared Mexican Sinaloa cartel, has been arraigned on 17 drug trafficking, firearms and related charges in New York, federal authorities said Friday.
El Mayo, 76, was arrested in New Mexico on July 25 on a broad range of drug-related charges that were replaced by a new, superseding indictment unveiled Friday as he made an initial appearance in federal court in New York City, according to the Department of Justice.
The new indictment, the fifth aimed at the once-powerful cartel kingpin, relates to his “decades-long leadership of the Sinaloa Cartel, one of the most violent and powerful drug trafficking organizations in the world,” as well as conspiracy to manufacture and distribute fentanyl, prosecutors said.
He made his court appearance in Brooklyn a day after being transferred from the Western District of Texas and was ordered detained pending trial.
U.S. authorities allege that El Mayo and co-defendant Joaquin Guzman Loera, also known as El Chapo, together ran the cartel from their headquarters in Mexico from 1989 until El Chapo’s arrest in 2016. The latter was convicted in New York in 2019 and sentenced to life plus 30 years in prison.
“El Mayo, the co-founder and leader of the Sinaloa Cartel, has been charged with overseeing a multi-billion-dollar conspiracy to flood American communities with narcotics, including deadly fentanyl,” said Attorney General Merrick Garland.
“We allege that El Mayo built, and for decades led, the Sinaloa Cartel’s network of manufacturers, assassins, traffickers, and money launderers responsible for kidnapping and murdering people in both the United States and Mexico, and importing lethal quantities of fentanyl, heroin, meth, and cocaine into the United States.
“Now, El Mayo joins the many other Sinaloa Cartel leaders who have faced charges in an American courtroom for the immeasurable harm they have inflicted on families and communities across our country,” Garland said.
Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas said El Mayo’s latest indictment reflected the “dedicated work of brave Homeland Security Investigations agents and their federal partners” who are succeeding in “disrupting and dismantling drug trafficking operations across the world.”
Prosecutors said El Mayo used a complex and layered organization that employed thousands of people in South and Central America, Mexico and the United States to distribute the cartel’s drugs, generating billions of dollars in revenues that were laundered and sent back to Mexico.
He used groups of “sicarios” or hit-men, who at his orders carried out kidnappings and murders in Mexico, the United States and elsewhere to protect his narcotics pipeline and to retaliate against rivals and those suspected of cooperating with the U.S. government, officials said.
By 2012, El Mayo had expanded the cartel’s interests into fentanyl manufacturing and distribution and “is responsible for the distribution of many thousands of kilograms of fentanyl into the United States,” prosecutors said.
He also allegedly expanded the power and influence of the Sinaloa Cartel by making millions of dollars each year in pay-offs to judges and politicians and by carrying out “regular campaigns of brutal violence, including retaliatory murders that were allegedly committed on his orders as recently as just weeks prior to his arrest.”