Guzman’s cell fortified against escape

Saturday – one day after Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman was recaptured by authorities – seemed as good a time as any to unveil one of the year’s biggest journalistic scoops: a sprawling account of how the actor and director known for starring in such films as “Dead Man Walking” and “Milk” scored a rare interview with the notorious Mexican drug lord.

Undated file picture taken of Mexican drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzman, after been captured in 2014, and presented by the authorities, in Mexico City.

Penn said Mexican actress Kate del Castillo planned the interview.

Mexican drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán recorded answers to questions sent to him by American actor Sean Penn.

Guzman s lawyer, Juan Pablo Badillo, has vowed to launch a “tough” legal battle that could reach the Supreme Court.

Carlos Barragan y Salvatierra, a professor of law at Mexico’s National University, said there would be little ground to prosecute Penn or Del Castillo, unless money or gifts changed hands.

“There was no discernible impact when he was in prison” on the flow of drugs or the amount of cash moving from the U.S.to Mexico, Duecker said Monday. And the circumstances surrounding how Mexican authorities said they found him were just as intriguing. While on the run, Guzman met secretly with Penn at a jungle hideout – a move the government says was “essential” to his capture.

Before the interview came to light, two US law enforcement officials had said tracking of cell phones and electronic exchanges of people close to the drug kingpin led to his recapture. “With this action, 98 of the 122 most risky criminals no longer present a threat to society and we are going for all of them”.

Federal prosecutors in six states have filed indictments against Guzman, but the Eastern District of NY and the Southern District of Florida have overlapping cases that could be combined, and the headquarter sites of Brooklyn and Miami have emerged as the leading contenders for the sensational trial.

“If there was not consumption, there would be no sales”, Guzman says about his drug trafficking. A combination of celebrity cachet and immersive reporting brought Penn face-to-face with the kingpin himself.

An official claimed dozens of texts were authentic and claimed Guzman often asked to meet up with Del Castillo. A Mexican security official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media, said the drug lord is being held in a different cell and that the tunnel he built and the cell he escaped from had been destroyed.

Guzman, 57, was arrested in the northern city of Los Mochis on Friday (Jan 8), six months after a dramatic second jailbreak through a tunnel in his cell. Intelligence indicated that Guzman’s wife, Emma Coronel, had arrived with their twin daughters to celebrate the Feast of the Three Kings, a major Christmas-season holiday for Mexican children.

Keeping Guzman behind bars is unlikely to slow drug trafficking by the Sinaloa cartel, said Jonathan Duecker, a DEA agent from 1998 to 2003, who recently studied transnational criminal organizations as a staff member for the House Homeland Security Committee.