Jury finds Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman guilty in New York

Mexico’s most notorious drug lord, Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, has been convicted of running an industrial-scale smuggling operation after a three-month trial packed with Hollywood-style tales of grisly killings, political payoffs, cocaine hidden in jalapeno cans, jewel-encrusted guns and a naked escape with his mistress through a tunnel. Guzman was found guilty on all 10 counts meaning that he will spend the rest of his life in prison no matter what the judge decides his sentence should be.
Dressed in a grey suit, Guzman then looked for his ex-beauty queen wife, Emma Coronel Aispuro, in the gallery — who flashed him a supportive thumbs up as her eyes welled with tears.
US District Judge Brian Cogan lauded the jury’s meticulous attention to detail. Mr Cogan said it made him “very proud to be an American.”
Guzman faced a drumbeat of drug-trafficking and conspiracy convictions that could put the 61-year-old escape artist behind bars for decades in a maximum-security US prison selected to thwart another one of the breakouts that embarrassed his native country.
New York jurors whose identities were kept secret reached a verdict after deliberating six days in the expansive case, sorting through what authorities called an “avalanche” of evidence gathered since the late 1980s that Guzman and his murderous Sinaloa drug cartel made billions in profits by smuggling tons of cocaine, heroin, meth and marijuana into the US. Evidence showed drugs poured into the US through secret tunnels or hidden in tanker trucks, concealed in the undercarriage of passenger cars and packed in rail cars passing through legitimate points of entry - suggesting that a border wall wouldn’t be much of a worry. The prosecution’s case against Guzman, a roughly 5 foot figure whose nickname translates to “Shorty,” included the testimony of several turncoats and other witnesses.
Among them were Guzman’s former Sinaloa lieutenants, a computer encryption expert and a Colombian cocaine supplier who underwent extreme plastic surgery to disguise his appearance.
One Sinaloa insider described Mexican workers getting contact highs while packing cocaine into thousands of jalapeno cans - shipments that totaled 25 to 30 tonnes of cocaine worth $US500 million each year.