NEW YORK — In a scene U.S. authorities had dreamed of for decades, Mexican drug lord and escape artist Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman was hauled into an American courtroom Friday and then taken away to an ultra-secure jail that has held some of the world’s most dangerous terrorists and mobsters.
Holding his unshackled hands behind his back, a dazed-looking Guzman quietly entered a not-guilty plea to drug trafficking and other charges at a Brooklyn courthouse ringed by squad cars, officers with assault rifles, and bomb-sniffing dogs.
“He’s a man known for a life of crime, violence, death and destruction, and now he’ll have to answer for that,” Robert Capers, the U.S. attorney in Brooklyn, said at a news conference.
The court appearance came hours after Guzman’s Thursday night extradition from Mexico, where he had become something of a folk hero for two brazen prison escapes.
Guzman, who is in his 50s, was ordered held without bail in a special Manhattan jail unit where other high-risk inmates — including Mafia boss John Gotti and several close associates of Osama bin Laden — spent their time awaiting trial.
“It is difficult to imagine another person with a greater risk of fleeing prosecution,” prosecutors wrote in court papers.
Prosecutors described Guzman as the murderous overseer of a three-decade campaign of smuggling, brutality and corruption that made his Sinaloa cartel a fortune while fueling an epidemic of cocaine abuse and related violence in the U.S. in the 1980s and ‘90s.
Guzman faces the possibility of life in prison. To get Mexico to hand him over, prosecutors agreed not to seek the death penalty. They are also demanding he forfeit $14 billion in assets.
Outside court, Guzman defense attorney Michael Schneider said: “I haven’t seen any evidence that indicates to me that Mr. Guzman’s done anything wrong.” He also said he would look into whether his client was extradited properly to New York.
When Guzman got off a plane in New York, “as you looked into his eyes, you could see the surprise, you could see the shock, and to a certain extent, you could see the fear, as the realization kicked in that he’s about to face American justice,” said Angel Melendez, a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent.
New York City also boasts one of the most secure lockups in the U.S., the Metropolitan Correctional Center in lower Manhattan. The drab-looking building is protected by steel barricades that can stop up to 7 1/2 tons of speeding truck, and the area is watched by cameras capable of reading a newspaper a block away.
In the special high-security wing for the riskiest inmates, around a dozen prisoners spend 23 hours a day in roughly 20-by-12-foot cells, prohibited from communicating with one another. Meals are eaten in cells, and exercise is in a recreation area specifically for these inmates.
Guzman, whose nickname means “Shorty,” presided over a syndicate that funneled tons of cocaine from South America into the U.S. via tunnels, tanker trucks, container ships, speedboats and even submarines, prosecutors said.
Initially arrested in 1993, he broke out of a maximum-security Mexican prison in 2001, apparently in a laundry cart, and became a folk legend among some Mexicans, immortalized in song.