NEW YORK _ Prosecutors injected some of their hardest evidence yet into the trafficking trial of Mexican drug lord Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman on Wednesday, playing a secretly recorded phone call in which Guzman purportedly confirms a large heroin shipment to one of his partners.
The partner, Pedro Flores, 37, and his identical twin brother Margarito became top drug runners for the Sinaloa cartel in the early 2000s and eventually cut out their middleman to work directly with Guzman after meeting him at one of his mountain hideouts in 2005, he said.
At the start of his testimony Tuesday, Flores said that between 2005 and 2008, he and his brother received more than 60 tons of cocaine from Mexico, including at least 38 tons from Guzman and his partners worth an estimated $800 million.
When a violent cartel turf war exploded in 2008 and the twins were asked to pick sides, they feared for their lives and proactively reached out to U.S. law enforcement to offer their help with a sting operation, Flores said.
The Nov. 15, 2008, call played for jurors Wednesday was one of the recordings Flores made as he prepared to turn himself in to the Drug Enforcement Administration, he said. It features Flores casually haggling with Guzman for a few minutes in an admitted effort to keep him on the phone as long as possible.
"Do you think that we can work something out?" Flores asks in the recording. "Where you can deduct 5 pesos from those for me?"
He testified that "5 pesos" was code for knocking $5,000 of each kilo in the 20-kilo heroin deal.
During the call, Flores successfully talks Guzman down to $50,000 per kilo from $55,000, saying the price cut means he can pay the cartel immediately for the $1 million shipment.
Jurors then heard a second call from the same date in which Guzman asks Flores how many kilos of heroin he can get rid of in a month. Flores tells him 40.
"Amigo!" Guzman greets him during the second call.
"I was going to ask you, uh, I only have three left," Flores says. "When do you think we can get some more?"
Guzman stutters and uses an obscenity. "Didn't you say that you could only get rid of a little bit?" he asks.
"The truth is that, uh, these turned out f---ing good _ I can't lie," Flores replies, saying that other drugs he sold were "nothing compared" to Guzman's.
"I'll send you some from this week to the next week," Guzman says. "Hope you are well."
Flores said two weeks later, he turned himself in to the DEA.
On cross examination, Flores was grilled by defense lawyer William Purpura over prior statements he made claiming Ismael "El Mayo" Zambada was the head of the enterprise, not Guzman.
"Mayo Zambada's not on trial, is he?" Purpura asked.
"No," Flores responded, admitting that he has also cooperated in cases against Zambada and more than 40 other people.
Purpura then questioned Flores about his alleged relationship with Latin Kings member Rudy Rangel, who grew up in the same Chicago neighborhood as the twins, Little Village, and at one point bought cocaine from them.
"You know that Rudy Rangel had a tattoo on his chest? 'Destined forever my queen Valerie,'" Purpura said.
Flores confirmed his brother ended up marrying the tattoo's subject after partying it up in Las Vegas with Valerie while she was pregnant with Rangel's baby.
Flores said he rented out 60 rooms at the Mandalay Bay Resort and paid for lobster and steak feasts for everyone during the wildly lavish trip.
Purpura asked if the bill hit $200,000.
"Might have been more," Flores said.
The jury also heard that Rangel was suspected of stealing cocaine from the twins and eventually turned up murdered in a Chicago barber shop.
"You and your brother didn't end up killing Rudy Rangel over that woman or 200 kilos?" the lawyer asked.
"No," Flores said.
Purpura then suggested Flores' recordings were doctored and didn't feature Guzman at all.
The lawyer played for the jury a clip from the interview Guzman recorded for Sean Penn's Rolling Stone profile, in which the drug kingpin speaks more slowly and deliberately.
"You can manipulate recordings if you are devious, right?" Purpura asked.
"Yes," Flores said.
"But you're not devious, right?"
"Uh, no," he replied.
The lawyer then asked whether Flores himself thought the two recordings sounded like the same voice.
"Not really, no," Flores testified.
The witness said he didn't have the technical prowess to edit the recordings and added they were good enough for the government to certify their validity.
Flores and his brother were sentenced in 2015 to 14 years in prison and are "not allowed" to communicate, he testified.
Guzman, 61, has pleaded not guilty to more than a dozen felony charges involving money laundering, conspiracy, firearms and international distribution of cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin and marijuana.
Prosecutors claim he was a billionaire drug boss who commanded a vast narcotics empire before his most recent arrest at a Mexican hideout in January 2016.
His lawyers claim he's being framed by cooperating witnesses who became government informants to lessen their own sentences and hopefully obtain visas for themselves and their families to stay in America.
Guzman's beauty queen wife Emma Coronel, 29, had been a fixture at the Brooklyn trial until her high-profile absence this week.
She took the break to handle personal matters related to the couple's 7-year-old twin daughters, a defense lawyer said Tuesday.
"Emma is coming back tomorrow and may be in the courtroom. The girls are visiting their dad on Friday," a source told the New York Daily News on Wednesday.
