Top 10 Craziest Things El Chapo Has Done
#10: Trying to Take Someone Out in Prison
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El Gordo, real name Miguel Angel Martinez, worked as Chapo’s right hand man throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s. However, that all ended once Martinez was thrown in prison. Fearing that his old business partner was talking to the authorities, El Chapo had an assassin and a brass band sent to the Mexico City prison. After the band finished performing a song about death, a grenade flew into Martinez’s holding cell, and he was forced to quickly take cover behind the toilet. Lucky for Martinez, the toilet shielded him from much of the shrapnel, and he survived the attack on his life. He would later recount the story in court while testifying against his former boss.
#9: Building a Zoo
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As it turns out, ultra-rich and dangerous drug kingpins really love zoos. Pablo Escobar owned a zoo and amusement park called Hacienda Nápoles, which was discovered outside Medellín, Colombia. El Chapo owned a similar park in Guadalajara. According to Martinez, the man who was subjected to the attempted grenade assassination, “It was a very nice ranch with a house, pool, tennis courts and he built a zoo.” Said zoo supposedly contained a train that El Chapo rode to get around, and it housed exotic animals like lions and tigers and panthers. Oh my!
#8: Spying on His Wife & Mistress
Even cartels need IT guys, and the IT guy for the Sinaloa Cartel was a man named Christian Rodriguez. Rodriguez eventually flipped on the Cartel and used his knowledge of technology against them, providing the FBI with a wealth of information. During his time in the drug business, Rodriguez used a spyware app on the phones of El Chapo’s wife and mistress, giving the paranoid El Chapo an intimate glimpse into their lives. With the app installed, he was able to track their movements, read their text message, listen to their phone conversations, and even remotely activate the phone’s camera to spy on them in real time. El Chapo was always watching...
#7: Gifting an AK-47
El Chapo was reportedly a weapons enthusiast. He owned RPGs, a diamond-encrusted pistol, and a trove of assault rifles he supposedly fired with his family while on vacation. He was also adamant about eventually giving his offspring an AK-47. With the help of the aforementioned IT guy Christian Rodriguez, the court was able to access El Chapo’s personal text messages. In one conversation he was holding with his wife, Emma Coronel Aispuro, El Chapo wrote, “I'm going to give her an AK-47 so she can hang with me”, referring to their daughter. It’s unclear at what age exactly he wanted her holding a weapon, but it’s clear that he aimed to inspire a similar passion within her.
#6: Helicopter Insurance Fraud
Speaking of gifts, the drug supplier and pilot named Jorge Cifuentes gave El Chapo a modified personal helicopter worth an estimated $1 million. Cifuentes’s brother told El Chapo that he should learn how to fly it in the event that he needed to make a quick getaway. However, another cartel pilot soon crashed the helicopter inside a hangar, completely totalling the aircraft and prematurely ending any hope of El Chapo learning to fly. Not one to take a loss, El Chapo and Cifuentes pushed the helicopter off a cliff to collect on the insurance money.
#5: Escaping from Max Security
El Chapo’s life story has always been very dramatic, and that includes a prison escape using an underground motorcycle on rails. A mile-long tunnel was dug from outside the walls of his prison to El Chapo’s cell, and once the cartel leader entered the tunnel from his personal shower, he was whisked away on an underground motorcycle. An ATV then met him outside the prison, took him to a nearby warehouse that had been exclusively purchased for the occasion, and El Chapo flew away to San Juan del Rio. The dramatic prison escape was a wild success, and he remained free for the next six months.
#4: Running Through Sewage
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Police have found over 60 underground tunnels between the United States and Mexico attributed to El Chapo, offering an expansive glimpse into the magnitude of his empire. The crime syndicate head personally utilized an underground tunnel during a particularly nasty escape from the DEA. They made a surprise visit to one of El Chapo’s safehouses, prompting him to flee to the bathroom, where hydraulic pistons raised the bathtub and revealed a secret tunnel. Completely naked, both he and his lover fled into the dark, muddy tunnel and waded through the sewer system of Culiacán for over an hour. Very dirty and supremely stinky, they emerged at a drainage canal and made a successful escape.
#3: Getting His Hands Dirty
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Many drug barons have underlings to do the dirty work, but El Chapo wasn’t afraid to get his own hands dirty… both literally and metaphorically. In one instance, El Chapo tied up a member of a rival cartel and tormented him with the smell of his own burning flesh. Once that was done, he shot the man and had him buried alive. In another, El Chapo beat two rival members with a tree branch. These gravely injured men were then strapped onto the backs of ATVs and taken to a large bonfire where they were shot, killed, and thrown onto the fire.
#2: Allegedly Bribing the Highest Levels of Government
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Alex Cifuentes, the brother of the man who gave El Chapo a helicopter, became the kingpin’s personal assistant in the late 2000s. And he dropped a bombshell when taking the stand against his old boss. He claims that Enrique Peña Nieto, the ex-President of Mexico, accepted a bribe of $100 million from El Chapo. Nieto has continuously denied allegations of bribery, calling them “completely false and defamatory.” And Cifuentes offered no hard proof to back up his assertions. Whether this claim was true or entirely fabricated, reported governmental corruption remains a huge issue in Mexico.
#1: Having a ‘Special Room’
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Located near the Mexico-Texas border in the city of Ciudad Juárez is a slaughterhouse that was used to dispose of El Chapo’s enemies. Owned by a hitman named Antonio Marrufo, the house reportedly had a white, tiled room with a drainage outlet. It was also reported to be completely soundproof. As witness Edgar Galvan told the court, “That’s where he killed people… In that house, no one comes out.” Both the kill room’s exact location and the number of victims who met their ends within it remain unknown. And El Chapo is currently serving life inside a federal supermax prison in Colorado.
