Born in 1990, Ovidio Guzmán López was 18 when he joined his father’s Sinaloa Cartel. Now, he helps produce and traffic thousands of pounds of narcotics every year.
Since the late 1980s, the Sinaloa Cartel has been laundering money and trafficking drugs into the United States and bribing, torturing, or murdering anyone who crosses it. While its leader Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán was captured in 2016, his son, Ovidio Guzmán López, remains at large — but not for lack of trying.
Police agencies have long known that Mexican drug cartels help supply Europe’s nearly US$10 billion annual cocaine habit, but acknowledge they have little idea about the workings of these highly organized and well-financed operations.
But now, a recent Italian police investigation, code-named Operation Halcon, has provided the most in-depth look yet into how Mexico’s leading drug traffickers, the Sinaloa Cartel, do business in Europe. IrpiMedia, OCCRP’s Italian partner, obtained access to police files and surveillance reports that show the cartel’s methods in unprecedented detail.About This ReportThis article was produced in collaboration with “The Cartel Project,” an investigation coordinated by Paris-based Forbidden Stories. It involves 60 journalists from 25 organizations in 18 countries and involves various aspects of Mexican cartel violence, including the murders of journalists in Veracruz state. Forbidden Stories is a nonprofit group dedicated to continuing the work of journalists silenced by homicide.Read more
Operation Halcon started in early 2019, at a time when Europe was being flooded with cocaine from Latin America. The Sinaloa Cartel, a global leader in cocaine sales with operations in at least 50 countries, was looking for new routes into Italy as a way to
The Chicago drug dealers working for notorious Mexican gangster El Chapo had a big problem on their hands: What should they do with the millions of dollars in cash they earned from selling cocaine?
They bought gold. Tens of millions of dollars worth from pawnshops — rings, necklaces and watches.
Then they had to find a place to fence it all.
More than a thousand miles away, in an industrial warehouse in South Florida, they found the perfect partner: an obscure gold-trading company called Golden Opportunities. El Chapo’s crew shipped the metal in dozens of FedEx deliveries to the Hallandale Beach company, according to federal court records.
The owners of Golden Opportunities, Jed and Natalie Ladin, may not have known they were working with Joaquín Guzmán Loera, better known as El Chapo — but between 2011 and 2014 his brutal Sinaloa cartel laundered nearly $100 million of cocaine cash through Golden Opportunities, court records show.
A New York judge has delayed for almost a month the hearing of Mexican drug kingpin Joaquin ‘El Chapo’ Guzman, one of the world’s most notorious criminals.
Guzman’s attorney Eduardo Balarezo had wanted Judge Brian Cogan to push back the hearing to April. But Cogan of his own accord already delayed it from January 19 to February 15.
Balarezo said he needs more time to address the 290,000 pages of documents and thousands of other documents in the case.
The 60-year-old kingpin, accused of running one of the world’s biggest drug empires, has been held in solitary confinement since being extradited on in January 2017.
Guzman — who twice escaped from prison in Mexico — is accused of running the Sinaloa cartel, one of the world’s biggest drug empires.
