After pleading not guilty, 'El Chapo' hauled off to U.S. jail that held terrorists
He definitely looks better with a mustache. Wonder if he'll escape again?In a scene U.S. authorities had dreamed of for decades, Mexican drug lord and escape artist Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman was hauled into an American courtroom Friday and then taken away to an ultra-secure jail that has held some of the world's most dangerous terrorists and mobsters.
Holding his unshackled hands behind his back, a dazed-looking Guzman quietly entered a not-guilty plea to drug trafficking and other charges at a Brooklyn courthouse ringed by squad cars, officers with assault rifles, and bomb-sniffing dogs.
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"It is difficult to imagine another person with a greater risk of fleeing prosecution," prosecutors wrote in court papers.
Prosecutors described Guzman as the murderous overseer of a three-decade campaign of smuggling, brutality and corruption that made his Sinaloa cartel a fortune while fueling an epidemic of cocaine abuse and related violence in the U.S. in the 1980s and '90s.
Guzman faces the possibility of life in prison. To get Mexico to hand him over, prosecutors agreed not to seek the death penalty. They are also demanding he forfeit $14 billion in assets.
