Flores had been unnerved during his trip when the small plane he was on landed at a sharply inclined makeshift airstrip. He became terrified when a group of gunmen picked him up and drove him past a chilling sight: a naked man chained to a tree.
Yet despite the harrowing journey, Flores and Guzmán soon reached an agreement: They would cut out their middleman and work directly with one another.
Appearing this week as a witness for the government at Guzmán’s trial, Flores spoke at length about that deal, telling jurors that for the next three years, he sold nearly 40 tons of the kingpin’s product in the United States, remitting to his boss in Mexico a staggering $800 million in cash.
But as with so much else in the cartel world, what started with success ended in disaster. In 2008, exhausted by a life of crime and fearing for his safety, Flores began to spy on Guzmán and his partners, secretly recording them for U.S. officials.
Betrayal has been a central theme at the trial, which is in its second month in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn. But even though several of Guzmán’s former allies have testified against him and exposed the inner workings of his business, Flores not only spoke about the drug lord’s various crimes, but also offered proof of them in two recorded phone calls.
Those calls — captured on a Radio Shack recorder that Flores purchased — were played for jurors Wednesday. In them, Guzmán can be heard negotiating the sale of $1 million worth of Mexican heroin. He also instructs Flores to give the money to a courier in Chicago.
For more than a month, the testimony at the trial has largely concerned the logistical complexities of moving drugs from Colombia to Mexico and then across the U.S. border. But in two days as a witness, Flores has shifted the trial to U.S. soil, describing drug deals in a Denny’s parking lot in Illinois and distribution routes in Milwaukee, Minneapolis and Louisville, Kentucky.
He has talked about spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on a trip for 60 people to a prize fight in Las Vegas and smuggling cocaine to Chicago in a truck filled with sheep.
He has also testified about his own criminal history, which started during his childhood in Chicago’s Little Village, a mostly Hispanic neighborhood. At 7, he recalled, he and his twin brother, Margarito, acted as English to Spanish translators for their father during drug deals, and were also tasked with loading and unloading carloads of cocaine.
By age 20, the brothers were among the city’s biggest wholesale drug dealers — a position, Flores said, that attracted the attention of one of Guzmán’s representatives in the Sinaloa drug cartel. With its network of rail yards, airports, waterways and interstates, Chicago has long been a focal point of the cartel’s operations. It is centrally located or, as Flores put it Tuesday, “halfway to everywhere.”
The man from Sinaloa, Lupe Ledesma, hired the brothers as his distributors and by the early 2000s, Flores said, they had already moved up to 20 tons of the cartel’s product through several U.S. cities. When the federal officials indicted the twins in 2004 on drug trafficking charges in Wisconsin, they fled together as fugitives to Mexico.
There, Flores told the jurors, they continued selling drugs and were ultimately spotted by someone else: Ismael Zambada García, Guzmán’s partner. Summoning the brothers to a meeting, Zambada praised them for the profits they were earning. He wished they could earn more, Flores added, quoting him as saying: “Imagine if you guys were triplets.”
Shortly after that encounter, Flores said, he met Guzmán in his mountaintop hide-out. While the men eventually worked well together, there was at first a cultural divide. Flores recalled how he showed up for the meeting wearing jean shorts and a T-shirt. The kingpin disapproved, telling him, “With all that money, you couldn’t afford the rest of the pants?”
The next three years went by in a flurry of drug deals and profits. Flores and his brother expanded to Detroit, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. They set up warehouses in cities across the country — always, he explained, in “the best neighborhoods” where the police weren’t likely to look.
But in 2008 everything changed, he said. First, Guzmán went to war with one of his former partners, Arturo Beltrán Leyva, and the cartel chieftains demanded the brothers’ loyalty. Then, Flores’ wife got pregnant and he began to think about their future — or lack of one, he said.
Within a few months, he had his lawyer reach out to U.S. law enforcement officers who met with him in a hotel in Monterrey, Mexico. He went to Radio Shack, bought the small recorder and started to document his conversations with several cartel figures.
He needed a way out, he said, and the U.S. officials provided it.
“I couldn’t promise my family a tomorrow,” he explained.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.