Reputed Sinaloa cartel leader ‘El Mayo’ Zambada pleads not guilty

Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada Garcia, accused of being one of the world’s most brutal crime bosses, pleaded not guilty Friday to charges that he fueled the deadly fentanyl crisis in the United States through his alleged leadership of Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel.

Zambada, 76, was being held pending trial on a brief arraignment in a Brooklyn federal court on 17 counts of drug trafficking, firearms offenses and money laundering. It was the fifth superseding indictment for a man authorities believe was the mastermind behind the cartel, which it built into a voracious global drug trafficking and criminal syndicate with his partner and co-defendant, Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, before El Chapo was arrested in 2016.

Zambada appeared weak and gave short answers to U.S. District Judge James Cho in the Eastern District of New York.

When asked through an interpreter if he was indeed Ismael Zambada, the alleged leader replied, “Sí, señor.”

More: Fueled by fentanyl, drug overdose deaths have quadrupled in the past 20 years

When the judge asked him how he felt, Zambada replied, “Fine, fine,” an insider said.

Zambada’s attorney, Frank Perez, entered the plea on his behalf. Perez did not respond to requests for comment, but said outside the courtroom that his client expected to go to trial rather than enter into a plea agreement with the government.

“It’s a complex case,” Perez said, according to the Associated Press.

The ‘Founder and Leader of the Sinaloa Cartel’

Justice Department officials described Zambada’s indictment as a major step forward in the U.S. war against Mexican drug cartels that have flooded the U.S. with the synthetic opioid in recent years. Fentanyl, which is up to 50 times more potent than heroin, and other opioids have killed more than 160,000 people in the past two years alone, the CDC says.

“El Mayo, the co-founder and leader of the Sinaloa Cartel, has been charged with overseeing a multibillion-dollar conspiracy to flood American communities with narcotics, including deadly fentanyl,” said Attorney General Merrick Garland. “We allege that El Mayo built and for decades led the Sinaloa Cartel’s network of manufacturers, killers, traffickers and money launderers responsible for kidnapping and murdering people in both the United States and Mexico, and importing lethal amounts of fentanyl, heroin, meth and cocaine into the United States.”

More: Exclusive: Sinaloa Cartel Leader Ismael Zambada Kidnapped and Flown to US, Lawyer Says

Zambada was arrested by the United States in Texas on July 25.

In a letter last month, he said he had been kidnapped in Mexico by a son of El Chapo, also wanted by U.S. authorities for his role in the fentanyl trade, flown across the border into Texas against his will and turned over to U.S. authorities. He was transferred Thursday from the Western District of Texas to the Eastern District of New York, where Brooklyn is located, where he was first charged in 2009.

El Chapo was sentenced to life plus 30 years in prison in 2019 by a federal court in Brooklyn.

“Zambada Garcia’s day of judgment in a U.S. court has arrived and justice will follow,” U.S. Attorney Breon Peace said Friday. “If convicted, he will never again supply fentanyl, cocaine and other deadly drugs and the violence that comes with them to our country or make millions while hundreds of thousands of innocent lives are lost.”

Though it was a family business that also included their sons, El Mayo and El Chapo ran the Sinaloa Cartel from 1989 to 2024 as a “complex, multi-layered” and sophisticated organization that controlled every step of the drug trade, “from the source of supply to distribution on the streets of the United States,” the Justice Department said Friday.

Zambada also deployed groups of “sicarios,” or hitmen, on both sides of the border to kill “anyone who threatened this valuable narcotics pipeline” and to exact revenge on rivals and suspected government informers, the Justice Department said. “The billions of dollars generated from drug sales were then transported back to Mexico and laundered.”

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Under Zambada’s leadership, the Sinaloa cartel began expanding its drug trafficking business in 2012 to include the production and distribution of fentanyl. The cartel earned millions of dollars a year in corruption payments and regularly engaged in campaigns of brutal violence to ensure its success, according to the new indictment and other court documents.

If found guilty, Zambada faces a mandatory minimum sentence of life imprisonment.

Joaquín Guzmán López, who Zambada alleges was the perpetrator, has pleaded not guilty in federal court in Chicago to drug trafficking and other charges.