Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada Garcia, a co-founder of the notorious Sinaloa Cartel, has been handed a life sentence in a U.S. prison and ordered to pay a staggering $15 billion in drug trafficking profits. U.S. District Judge Brian Cogan deemed the life sentence appropriate, citing the “almost unimaginable amount of drugs attributable to him and the number of murders that we can document.” This sentencing marks a significant blow to organized crime, placing Zambada Garcia, 76, alongside fellow cartel leader Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman in receiving a life sentence from a U.S. judge. Zambada Garcia had previously agreed to plead guilty to racketeering conspiracy and continuing criminal enterprise charges, avoiding the death penalty. He was apprehended in July 2024, and during his sentencing, he took responsibility for the harm caused, urging the next generation to “choose a different path.” Prosecutors emphasized that Zambada Garcia spent nearly four decades “poisoning American communities to make billions of dollars in profit and ordering the murders of anyone who stood in his way,” and that this sentence, made possible by bilateral law enforcement cooperation, closes that chapter “for good,” bringing “some measure of justice to the countless victims of the Sinaloa Cartel’s narcotics trafficking and violence.”
Adapted from: Latest World News on Fox News
