'El Chapo' Appears In Brooklyn Court, Complains About Manhattan Jail Conditions

DOWNTOWN BROOKLYN, NY — Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, 59, former head of Mexico’s ruthless Sinaloa Cartel and for many years the most-wanted drug kingpin on Earth, made the trip Friday morning from Lower Manhattan to Downtown Brooklyn for the second time since he was extradited to NYC from Mexico.

Want the latest on El Chapo's trial and other news from your NYC neighborhood delivered straight to your inbox? Sign up here for Patch's daily newsletter and real-time news alerts.

The Brooklyn Bridge reportedly had to be shut down for 15 minutes during the 9 a.m. rush hour as El Chapo and his high-security motorcade crossed the East River.

Once in court, El Chapo's public defenders said their client found the Metropolitan Correctional Center, where he's being held on 23-hour-per-day lockdown, to be "too strict."

His wife, ex-teen pageant queen Emma Coronel, hasn't been allowed to visit, the attorneys reportedly said in court, and he can't even get a glass of water when he wants one.

Judge Brian Cogan refused to indulge the complaints and said it was up to jail officials to decide how El Chapo would be handled, according to ABC7. "They're taking extra security measures," Cogan said.

"I think we all know the reasons for that," the judge added — an apparent dig at the kingpin's storied history as a prison escape artist.

See also: El Chapo Takes New York: Everything You Need To Know

A Brooklyn federal judge previously instructed El Chapo's lawyers to video-chat their client into his Brooklyn hearings from inside his new high-security home in Lower Manhattan. However, his lawyers argued that El Chapo deserved an in-person trial because — among other reasons — his "presence in court is necessary to ensure his faith in the fundamental fairness of the American judicial process," following a shocking and sudden Jan. 19 extradition from Mexico that came as a surprise to even the highest-level officials in the U.S. judicial system.

At Friday morning's courtroom appearance, El Chapo reportedly nodded at his wife in the front row. She smiled back, said a journalist who was in the room.

His next court appearance will be May 5 at 9:30 a.m., according to a court spokeswoman.

On the afternoon of Friday, Jan. 20, in El Chapo's first appearance in Brooklyn court, he entered a plea of "not guilty" to 17 charges tied to three decades of alleged high-volume drug trafficking.

The Sinaloa Cartel's extensive network of dealers, runners, spies and hitmen — operating across more than a dozen countries — brought more than 200 metric tons of cocaine, much of it produced in Columbia by other notorious cartels like Pablo Escobar's, into the U.S. from the 1980s through the 2000s, prosecutors say.

The cartel also trafficked heroin, weed and meth, prosecutors say — but cocaine was their bread and butter.

"Nowhere was the devastating impact of the introduction of cocaine into the United States felt more acutely than in New York and Miami in the 1980s, which became central hubs of cocaine distribution and money laundering," the Brooklyn indictment says. "Along with the proliferation of drugs into our communities, came an onslaught of violent crime."

El Chapo is as notorious a jail breaker as he is a drug dealer.

The Sinaloa Cartel boss first escaped from Mexican prison in 2001 and spent 13 years on the run. He was finally recaptured and re-jailed in 2014 — but soon escaped again, this time through a mile-long underground tunnel stretching from the jail to a nearby construction site.

Mexican authorities finally got their hands on the nation's most-wanted man for good in January 2016, not long after his high-profile meeting and Rolling Stone interview with Sean Penn and Mexican actress Kate del Castillo, the kingpin's longtime crush.

Guzman was extradited from Mexico to the U.S. on Jan. 19 and flown into Long Island's MacArthur Airport. He was then transported to the high-security Metropolitan Correctional Center, where he's been living out his days in a dark blue jumpsuit.

The MCC has been called a "hellhole," a "Guantánamo in New York" and the worst prison in America. In fact, one prisoner in solitary confinement said he found Guantánamo to be “more pleasant” and “more relaxed” than the MCC.

Some former prisoners and their attorneys recently told The Intercept that the MCC's extreme isolation and omnipresent monitoring can make inmates go so insane, they'll admit to almost anything. “Anecdotally, we’ve seen increased deterioration over a period of time, especially in a pre-trial situation," attorney Peter Quijano said. "It seems like a punishment and it affects their ability to assist in their defense.”

El Chapo is one of around 800 people incarcerated at MCC — among them some of New York's most ruthless murderers, drug bosses and terrorists. (And, previously, Bernie Madoff.)

Lead photo via Day Donaldson/Flickr