NEW YORK — Ismael Zambada Garcia, the longtime Sinaloa cartel leader widely known as “El Mayo,” was sentenced Monday to life in prison after pleading guilty to drug trafficking charges that federal prosecutors in New York described as among the most sweeping narcotics cases in the world.
Zambada Garcia co-founded the Sinaloa cartel with Joaquín Guzmán Loera, better known as “El Chapo,” and helped run an organization that moved millions of kilograms of deadly drugs, including cocaine, fentanyl and methamphetamine, prosecutors said. Authorities also said he relied on armed sicarios who carried out assaults, torture and killings, while paying millions of dollars in bribes across multiple levels of the Mexican government.
In federal court in Brooklyn, U.S. District Judge Brian Cogan imposed a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole.
“Ismael Zambada Garcia spent nearly four decades poisoning American communities to make billions of dollars in profit and ordering the murders of anyone who stood in his way. Today, that chapter closes for good,” U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York Joseph Nocella Jr. said in a statement.
The outcome had been expected. El Mayo pleaded guilty last August to engaging in a continuing criminal enterprise, a broad charge that encompassed 85 legal violations. As part of the plea, he accepted mandatory life imprisonment and agreed to forfeit $15 billion.
“It would be difficult to overstate the magnitude of the defendant’s crimes and scale of the corruption, violence, and other harm he spread throughout Mexico, the United States, and the world,” Brooklyn federal prosecutors wrote in a sentencing memo urging a life sentence.
Under the terms of his plea, the 76-year-old Zambada Garcia admitted responsibility for at least 1.5 million kilograms of cocaine, along with enormous quantities of heroin and fentanyl.
Federal prosecutors said El Mayo continues to present “serious security concerns,” a factor they said should be weighed as the judge recommends where he will serve his life sentence.
“The defendant is the co-founder of one of the world’s most violent criminal organizations, and for decades directed its operations, including its violence. Moreover, many members of the Cartel remain loyal to the defendant, including one of the defendant’s sons, who remains a key leader of the defendant’s faction of the Cartel in the defendant’s absence,” federal prosecutors said.
The defense noted that El Mayo spared the judicial system a trial and “helped protect the safety of potential witnesses who will not need to be disclosed or called to testify.”
In a statement ahead of his sentencing, El Mayo said he recognized the “grave harm that illegal drugs have done to the people of the United States, of Mexico and elsewhere.” He also said he recognized the “human toll of the violence and lawlessness that my criminal organization engaged in.”
El Mayo said he took responsibility for his role in all of it and apologized to “everyone who has suffered or been affected by my actions.”
