A onetime top lieutenant in the drug cartel led by Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman Loera offered $25,000 for the severe beating of Guzman’s godson ahead of the lieutenant’s sentencing hearing Monday, according to testimony in federal court in Chicago.
The godson, Damaso Lopez Serrano, who said his father was at one point “the closest person to Chapo,” took the stand Monday to testify against Jesus Raul Beltran Leon. Federal prosecutors say Beltran Leon once worked with Guzman’s sons, Alfredo and Ivan Guzman, to smuggle massive shipments of drugs into the United States.
Beltran Leon is also related to “El Chapo” by marriage. And he once allegedly bragged that he was “one of the first people” to see Guzman after Guzman escaped from a Mexican prison in 2001. He faces sentencing Monday before U.S. District Judge Ruben Castillo.
Serrano, who acknowledged ordering 13 to 15 murders, said he learned in April that Beltran Leon had offered $25,000 for his beating by “gang members” behind bars. The feds say Beltran Leon offered that money to have someone “split his head.”
As a result of the threat, Serrano said he spent weeks in solitary confinement and was eventually moved to a different prison for his protection.
The beating was to be carried out by a member of Chicago’s Four Corner Hustlers street gang, according to attorney comments and court filings. Several members of that gang face trial later this year before U.S. District Judge Thomas Durkin. Beltran Leon’s lawyers have suggested he was the victim of an extortion plot by a member of the gang.
During his appearance in a Chicago courtroom, Serrano explained how Beltran Leon once bragged about being with Ivan Guzman when “El Chapo” called with instructions to pick him up after Guzman’s escape from prison in 2001.
“ ‘Chapo’ told Ivan not to worry, that he was going to get lost for a while but that everything would be alright,” Serrano said. “And after that, they just dropped him off somewhere.”
For years, Beltran Leon has maintained that U.S. agents were complicit in torture he endured at the hands of Mexican marines in 2014. A memo filed by his lawyers last month said he was brutally beaten and sexually assaulted. He also said the Marines covered his face with plastic bags, punched him in the stomach and threatened to rape his wife and kill his mother and even asked whether he thought his infant daughter could “withstand a plastic bag.”
Castillo previously said Beltran Leon “presents a disturbing picture of law enforcement in Mexico,” adding that he was “deeply disturbed by the accusation that American law enforcement agents may be condoning or turning a blind eye to these tactics.”
But the judge declined to dismiss the case against Beltran Leon. So in April, Beltran Leon admitted his role in the sale of 46 kilograms of cocaine in Los Angeles between June 8 and June 10 in 2013.
Had Beltran Leon gone to trial, prosecutors planned to call high-ranking members of the Sinaloa cartel and others to testify about the movement of millions of dollars in drug proceeds, about an attempt to smuggle drugs into the United States through a tunnel, about close calls with law enforcement and about the greeting party that followed Guzman’s 2001 prison break.
One Sinaloa member had been expected to testify that he’d invested in a two-ton marijuana load in Mexico headed for the United States. The plan had been to smuggle it across the border through a tunnel, but law enforcement found the tunnel first.
Three years later, Beltran Leon suddenly darted into that cartel member’s car. He explained that he had just been at a restaurant with Alfredo Guzman, Ivan Guzman and others. A waiter then warned, “the government was coming,” prosecutors said.
Beltran Leon said they swapped clothes with some waiters and made a break for it.
Yet another potential witness worked as a money courier for Beltran Leon in 2012 and 2013. That courier was expected to testify about deliveries of drug proceeds that occurred at least 10 times a month, for an estimated total of up to $6 million per month.
Beltran Leon let the courier keep one half of 1 percent of the money, prosecutors said. But if the courier brought the drug money down to Mexico, the courier received 1 percent.
As for Guzman, a federal judge sentenced him last month to life in prison. The drug kingpin is now being held at the “Supermax” facility in Florence, Colorado, records show.
