A Mexican cartel leader who helped shape the modern illegal drug trade and agreed to one of the largest criminal forfeitures in US legal history was sentenced to life in prison on Monday.
Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, who co-founded the Sinaloa Cartel in the late 1980s with Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzmán, agreed to surrender up to $15bn based on the group’s revenues over more than three decades.
An almost mythical figure in Mexico who rarely sought the limelight, 76-year-old Zambada was regarded as the strategist who oversaw bribery for the group, paying off politicians and military figures to allow it to move cocaine, heroin and other drugs to the US.
He pleaded guilty to operating a criminal enterprise and to a racketeering conspiracy charge in a plea agreement with US authorities last year. On Monday he appeared solemn in a tan prison uniform, saying that he accepted his punishment, and warned others not to repeat his mistakes.
“To the next generation I say choose a different path, there’s no honour in violence,” he told the courtroom.
For decades Zambada was “one of the most — if not the most — prolific and powerful narcotraffickers in the world”, Brooklyn federal prosecutors said in a court filing. Under his leadership, they said, the cartel distributed at least 1.5mn kg of cocaine and expanded into delivering heroin and fentanyl.
“This defendant perpetrated unspeakable crimes and unquantifiable carnage,” Tysen Duva, assistant attorney-general of the DoJ’s criminal division, said after the sentencing. “He never held a legitimate job in his life, all he did was spread evil.”
“It would be difficult to overstate the magnitude of the defendant’s crimes and scale of the corruption, violence, and other harm he spread throughout Mexico, the United States, and the world,” the Brooklyn prosecutors said.
They added Zambada’s armed personnel carried out “gruesome assassinations and kidnappings” and his cartel pioneered “novel distribution techniques”, such as using trains and tunnels between Mexico and the US to move drugs.
His 2024 kidnapping and removal to the US by Joaquín Guzmán López, the son of Zambada’s former partner, began an intra-cartel war in Sinaloa that has killed thousands.
The US is unlikely to recover the full $15bn judgment, which is the most prosecutors could seek by laying claim to Zambada’s assets. Government lawyers said in court on Monday that no assets had yet been seized towards that forfeiture.
The cartel leader’s lawyer Frank Perez told the FT the forfeiture sum was “the largest I have ever heard of”.
“In a case like this, of course there’s a massive number, but until they find the assets it is only a number,” Stefan Cassella, a former federal government asset forfeiture specialist, told the FT. Recovered money can be paid to victims and used to fund some law enforcement services.
The figure is among the largest in US criminal history but is smaller than the $171bn forfeiture order handed to financier Bernard Madoff.
Mexican drug trafficking groups generate more than $12bn a year just from heroin, methamphetamines and cocaine, according to estimates from the UN Office on Drugs and Crime.
Raised in poor farming communities in the hills of Sinaloa, Zambada belongs to a shrinking group of old-time drug cartel bosses. He joined the trade as a young man in the late 1960s, growing marijuana before working his way up to a local and international leader. He has been indicted 16 times in courts across the US since 2009.
Ray Donovan, former head of operations at the US Drug Enforcement Administration who also led the US effort to catch Guzmán, said Zambada was the more strategic of the Sinaloa cartel leaders.
“Chapo [was] more muscle, while Mayo was more brains,” he said
The drug trade has changed dramatically since Zambada’s origins, with modern groups focused on synthetic drugs and managing precursor chemicals coming from China and India. Synthetic opioid fentanyl has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans and become a leading cause of death for young people.
President Donald Trump has designated several of Mexico’s cartels as terrorist organisations, expanding US powers to dismantle the groups and target the politicians that work for them. Mexican analysts have raised the possibility that Guzmán’s sons, known as the “Chapitos”, and Zambada could hand over damaging information about sitting officials.
Zambada’s lawyers said on Monday that he “did not co-operate with the government in the traditional sense”, meaning he did not provide information on cartel members or Mexican officials.
His lawyers have painted him as more reasonable than his former partner Guzmán, because he has pleaded guilty, filed no pre-trial motions and avoided “one of the most complex federal trials in history”. They asked for him to be sent to a prison with appropriate medical facilities.
They requested he not be sent to “the same draconian Supermax prison” as Guzmán, because unlike his Sinaloa co-founder he had conducted himself in “the way our system wants to encourage defendants to behave” since arriving in the US in 2024.
Judge Brian Cogan said he had no problem with sentencing him to life in prison and that medical reports indicated Zambada was drifting towards being cognitively impaired. Authorities are yet to specify where he will serve his sentence.
Since his arrest there have been more than 3,552 violent deaths and 4,153 people have gone missing in the state of Sinaloa, according to local newspaper Noroeste.
The US government had said it did not “induce or condone” Zambada’s kidnapping by Guzmán, but Mexico’s government is investigating whether Washington lied about its role.
Mexican authorities admitted this month that the pilot who flew Zambada across the border was inadvertently handed over to US authorities as part of a prison transfer designed to show co-operation with Trump.
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