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El Chapo trial: An IT guy's testimony leads to a week of cyber spy intrigue

El Chapo trial: An IT guy's testimony leads to a week of cyber spy intrigue
El Chapo trial: An IT guy's testimony leads to a week of cyber spy intrigue

NEW YORK — Though narco-trafficking has long relied on old technologies like boats, trucks and tunnels, both dealers and U.S. authorities have started adapting to the digital age. That became clear last week when prosecutors at the drug trial of Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the Mexican crime lord known as El Chapo, suddenly unveiled the cyber-spy tale of a 20-something IT expert who helped take down the kingpin’s empire.

The techie-turned-informant, a young Colombian named Christian Rodriguez, told his story of working for — and eventually betraying — Guzmán in two days of jaw-dropping testimony in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn.

At first, Rodriguez said, he helped Guzmán develop an encrypted cellphone network that was accessible by Wi-Fi even in the crime lord’s hide-outs deep in the Sierra Madre mountains. He also fed his boss’s obsession with snooping by quietly installing spyware on the phones he gave his wife, two mistresses and other cartel operatives.

But then came the 21st-century twist: After a covert sting operation, the FBI recruited Rodriguez to infiltrate the same communications systems he had built. With his help, U.S. authorities were able to obtain a trove of Guzmán’s private calls and text messages.

— El Chapo’s Singsong Voice

An FBI agent, who had studied the audio of Guzmán’s calls, as well as the audio in several videos, described El Chapo’s voice as high-pitched with a nasally undertone. “It has a kind of sing-songy variation to it,” he told jurors.

On Tuesday the jury watched the 2015 Rolling Stone video (again). As he does often, El Chapo pulled back in his chair, eyes cast down at the screen, and watched the videotaped interview from the farthest position possible.

Comparing the intercepted phone calls to the Rolling Stone video, the FBI agent said, “the speech patterns are slower, more deliberate” because of the nature of an interview. But, he said, the singsong nature of El Chapo’s voice was still evident.

To further identity El Chapo, federal authorities also examined audio from phone calls the kingpin made in May during his detention at the Metropolitan Correctional Center.

— A Chapo Home Tour

El Chapo had a home in a gated community in Los Cabos, Mexico. Using cellphone footage from an FBI operation, the prosecution took the jury on a grand tour of the estate, where they had seized phones, ledgers and other paperwork. Three people were arrested during the takedown: Agustina Cabanillas Acosta, Maria Macias and Omar Hinojosa.

Judge Brian M. Cogan characterized the lengthy tour — complete with a closet survey — as “a real estate broker’s” presentation, warning the prosecution: “Don’t beat a dead horse.”

Via cellphone footage, the jury “walked through” the bedroom and bathroom (replete with women’s makeup and grooming products), as well as the closet housing size 9 Nike sneakers, a medium-size Banana Republic shirt and a vast collection of jeans.

“Did you ever find the defendant?” the prosecutor asked one of the FBI agents from the raid, who testified this week.

“No we did not,” the agent responded.

— Cartel Workers on the Government’s Payroll

The FBI got both Rodriguez and a woman named Andrea Velez to cooperate in exchange for no jail time, plus payments of $460,000 and $290,000, respectively. So essentially, Rodriguez got paid for his cooperation after having worked for years with the Cifuentes family and El Chapo, and after trying to work with a Russian crime organization that turned out to be a group of FBI agents on a high-stakes sting operation.

The U.S. government paid the pair for services and expenses they incurred while cooperating; according to Rodriguez, his payments came mostly in cash-stuffed envelopes.

Rodriguez didn’t even have to pay taxes on those payments until recently. But he said, “I never lied,” adding, “They never asked me about it.”

By the time the IRS caught up to Rodriguez, he owed $35,000. So far he’s paid $10,000 of that, paying a comfortable $250 per month.

— Grammar Quiz

As the defense has repeatedly pointed out, Guzmán’s formal education did not extend past the second grade, “and in fact he has a fair amount of difficulty writing,” one of his attorneys, Eduardo Balarezo, told the jury last week.

Still, Guzmán is often scrawling notes on a yellow legal pad and providing them to his attorneys. His handwriting is atrocious, according to one member of the defense team.

Rodriguez also had a hard time believing it. “He used to read the reports directly in the past, so I don’t think he had any problems reading,” Rodriguez said of the spyware reports frequently produced for Guzmán.

Rodriguez added that Guzmán spent “a fair amount of time reading those reports.” (Then again, Rodriguez testified that during their first face-to-face encounter, Guzmán told him that “he didn’t like to write on the computer. He preferred to talk.”)

— The Million-Dollar Gift

Anyone who has ever recalled a story among family knows the phenomenon: Someone across the table immediately corrects you and tells it completely differently. The jury was treated to just such a comparison last week. Two brothers have testified in the trial: elder sibling Jorge Cifuentes Villa testified in December, and Alex Cifuentes Villa began testifying Thursday. (He will continue Monday.) They told some of the same stories — albeit a little differently.

Jorge Cifuentes’ version: Around 2003, he flew to the mountains of Mexico for his first-ever meeting with El Chapo — to celebrate the second anniversary of the drug kingpin’s escape from jail (the first time). The final flight, aboard a rickety airplane (Guzmán was known for using outdated Cessnas), took about 30 to 45 minutes. The flight made Cifuentes feel “awful,” he said. “I actually had to pray three Our Fathers,” he said. Then they landed on an ascending airstrip.

As a result of such a rough experience, Jorge Cifuentes decided to gift El Chapo a $1 million blue helicopter “so that he would fly in a more civilized way.”

When he told El Chapo about the gift, the kingpin “got really excited, and his little eyes were actually shining,” Cifuentes recalled, adding: “And he said, ‘Thank you.'”

Later, pilots crashed the helicopter at an ostrich ranch. Thinking fast, Cifuentes simply rolled the damaged helicopter off a cliff to collect the insurance so El Chapo could buy another helicopter.

But, in his own retelling, Alex Cifuentes instead thrust himself as the protagonist of the story of how El Chapo got a helicopter. He told the jury Thursday that he once asked Guzmán if he could fly a plane. (Cifuentes’ brothers could, but Chapo could not.) Flying ensured security in case of an attempted arrest or other problem, Alex Cifuentes told him. If he could fly, “He could get in the helicopter, turn it on and fly from one mountain to the other.”

Then, Alex Cifuentes told his brother, Jorge, to send their own helicopter to increase Chapo’s security. The helicopter later burned at an aircraft hangar in Culiacán, Mexico.

— The Week Ahead

The government announced Thursday that it would likely rest its case next week. But before that, expect a few surprises.

On Monday, Alex Cifuentes, will return to the stand.

For years, Alex Cifuentes told jurors he was so close to Guzmán that the kingpin called him both his “right-hand man” and “left-hand man.” By his own account, he oversaw nearly every aspect of the crime lord’s business. He arranged cocaine deals in Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia and Panama. He bought farms for Guzmán in Costa Rica. He sold cocaine and heroin for him in New York and often purchased weapons on his behalf. Cifuentes even said he interpreted for Guzmán at trafficking meetings conducted in English.

There were hints last week that one of Guzmán’s mistresses, Lucero Guadalupe Sanchez Lopez, would also testify. Sanchez, a former legislator from Guzmán’s home state of Sinaloa, was arrested on drug charges in California in 2017. If called to the stand, she may walk the jury through text messages she exchanged with the defendant.

Guzmán’s lawyers offered their own hints last week about how they plan to defend him. As court adjourned Thursday, they told Cogan they intend to remove an unnamed criminal from prison to testify on their client’s behalf.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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