‘Cartel Wife’ married to Chicago twin who helped nab ‘El Chapo’ gets 3 1/2 years in prison for hiding drug proceeds

It’s been nearly 15 years since Vivianna Lopez and her family packed up their cars in Mexico and made the harrowing trip across the border, back to her hometown of Chicago.

Carrying her 11-day-old daughter, Lopez was headed into a dangerous unknown. Her husband, Pedro Flores, and his twin brother, Margarito, two of the biggest drug traffickers Chicago had ever produced, were about to be outed as cooperators against notorious Sinaloa cartel boss Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman.

In addition to becoming certain targets of the cartel, the family had left behind most of the riches drug trafficking had brought them — the villa in Mexico with a private zoo, the Bentleys, the Jet Skis and jewelry. But more than the loss of material things, during the trip, Lopez realized for the first time she was going to have to do things on her own.

“When you have 1,400 miles ahead of you and what feels like a lifetime in your rearview mirror, you have a lot of time to think,” Lopez said in the 2017 tell-all book “Cartel Wives,” which she co-wrote with her sister-in-law, Valerie Gaytan. “I’d never had to step up to the plate and take care of myself. Now I had to do that and protect my daughter.”

But the decisions Lopez made after returning to the U.S. didn’t lend her a new life. Instead, they landed her in federal court, charged with conspiring to launder hundreds of thousands of dollars in her husband’s narcotics proceeds and spending it on private tuition, lavish trips and luxury cars.

On Monday, Lopez, 43, was sentenced to 3 ½ years in prison, less than half of what federal prosecutors had sought but still a harsh reality for the daughter of a Chicago police officer with no prior criminal record.

Dressed in a black suit, Lopez sobbed into a microphone as she begged U.S. District Judge Matthew Kennelly for leniency, saying that while her husband was “tucked away” in witness protection, she was out there with “the full responsibility” of taking care of their family.

“Please don’t take me away from my children. We had just begun to rebuild our lives and put back the broken pieces,” she said through tears. “Not only do they need me, I need them. They have kept me alive.”

Lopez also said she accepts they will always have to look over their shoulder.

“We accept that, because of my husband’s cooperation, and who he cooperated against,” she said.

In handing down the sentence, Kennelly said it was clear that Lopez was intelligent and business savvy, and that she likely had rationalized her actions in her own mind as a sort of “misguided effort to protect herself, protect her family, and protect her lifestyle.”

“They could have made a clean break and said, ‘OK, here’s all the money. We’re done,” Kennelly said. “That is not what happened.”

The judge said that Lopez has now “put her family in harm’s way in a different way,” both by forcing her kids to be without their mother and by roping other relatives in on the money-laundering scheme.

“That’s something that ought to eat at you. And I suspect it does,” Kennelly said as Lopez sat quietly at the defense table.

Kennelly ordered Lopez to surrender to the U.S. Bureau of Prisons by Oct. 19.

After the hourlong hearing, Lopez hugged her attorney, MiAngel Cody, before leaving the courtroom with her father, a retired Chicago police officer, who was lugging a purple suitcase.

Lopez and her sister-in-law, Gaytan, who is married to Margarito Flores Jr., each pleaded guilty in April to one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering.

Gaytan is scheduled to be sentenced in September.

According to prosecutors, after the Flores brothers began cooperating, millions in the twins’ drug proceeds, much of it still in small denominations, was hauled across the border in rental trucks. It had been secretly recouped from the twins’ associates in the U.S., hidden in trap compartments in vehicles and stash houses, and buried under their older brother’s home near Austin, Texas.

With the twins’ cooperation heating up in late 2010, Gaytan and Lopez were told they had to come clean. So one day they flew to Chicago and removed more than $4 million from under the floorboards of a basement theater room in Gaytan’s suburban home, packed the bundles into large plastic storage bins and drove to see Margarito’s lawyer at his office in Lincoln Park, according to U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration reports.

The money sat in escrow until the twins’ sentencing nearly five years later, when most of it was turned over to the government in forfeiture, court records show.

But that wasn’t the end of the story. In 2021, Lopez and Gaytan were indicted on charges alleging they had stashed away millions more, and employed a network of relatives to launder the money through currency exchanges, credit cards, money orders, gift cards and the U.S. mail.

They allegedly used the money to fund at least a sliver of the lifestyle they’d grown accustomed to when their husbands were on the top of the cartel heap, spending more than $165,000 on private school tuition for their children, $100,000 on international and domestic travel, $80,000 for Lopez’s rent and $11,000 in child support, according to court records.

Lopez also allegedly sent $5,000 of the laundered money to her husband in prison and spent another $31,000 on a laundry business she opened in Arizona after the family went into hiding, court records show.

Their scheme began to unravel just as Pedro Flores was preparing to testify against El Chapo at trial in federal court in New York, which ended with Guzman being convicted and sentenced to life in prison.

On July 18, 2018, Gaytan and Lopez were returning from a trip to the exotic Caribbean islands of Turks and Caicos when customs agents stopped them at JFK International Airport in New York, according to federal court records

Gaytan was carrying five cellphones, including two with Chicago area codes even though she was supposedly living in hiding out of state. But what really caught the attention of investigators was a sheet of notebook paper found in Lopez’s belongings that had scrawled notes about packages.

Federal prosecutors alleged it was a “straightforward drug-money ledger” laying out a schedule for the disbursement of funds.

After their indictment, the wives contended that they had been assured by prosecutors that their husbands’ unprecedented cooperation against Guzman meant they would not face charges themselves for their own actions.

An evidentiary hearing held by Kennelly last year provided an unusual behind-the-scenes look at the trafficking operations of the Flores twins, who were eventually sentenced to 14 years in prison and have since been released.

In a highly unusual move, Pedro Flores testified via video link that he and his brother were promised early on by investigators that his wife and other family members would not be prosecuted for any drug-related activities.

“I thought my family was good,” Flores told the judge.

Prosecutors, though, repeatedly asserted at the hearings that there was never any immunity deal for the wives, which could only be finalized in a written document approved by the highest levels at the U.S. attorney’s office. And even if such protection was offered, it would not have excused the wives from future crimes, prosecutors argued.

Kennelly ruled there was no convincing evidence there was ever an immunity agreement in writing for Lopez or Gaytan and certainly not for future conduct involving the alleged laundering of the funds at issue in the indictment.

The judge said that while the women argued that certain promises were made, there was no indication that there was any “meeting of the minds” about a formal agreement, and certainly nothing was obtained in writing.

Also charged as part of the conspiracy was Lopez’s aunt, Laura Lopez, who pleaded guilty and was sentenced Monday to a year in prison, and sister, Bianca Finnigan, who pleaded guilty and is awaiting sentencing.

The twins’ older brother Armando Flores, who helped them break into the drug business three decades ago, has also pleaded guilty and is scheduled to be sentenced Sept. 26.

Vivianna Lopez was born in Chicago’s Little Village neighborhood and her family later moved to nearby West Lawn. She was raised in a tightknit, extended-family household, a high school cheerleader who’d largely steered clear of gangs despite her gritty surroundings.

Writing under the pseudonym “Mia,” Lopez wrote in “Cartel Wives” that she had dated a young man she referred to in the book as “Mark Jones,” who became a Chicago cop himself and was later convicted of corruption.

The Tribune confirmed that Jones was actually Keith Herrera, a former officer with the elite Special Operations Section who pleaded guilty to robbing drug dealers at the direction of his friend and mentor, Officer Jerome Finnigan.

Finnigan was sentenced in 2011 to 12 years in federal prison. His brother is married to Vivianna Lopez’s sister and co-defendant, Bianca.

Lopez also described in the book meeting the Flores twins through her childhood friend, recalling them as handsome and well-dressed. When the Flores family moved into Vivianna’s neighborhood, her friend wanted to introduce them.

“Finally I was going to meet the legendary Flores twins,” she wrote in the book. “Peter’s” handshake greeting and respectful demeanor struck her immediately, a big departure from the boys who would openly comment on her looks, she wrote.

They saw each other socially and she even invited him to a party at her home, where she describes her police officer father cornering him and warning him to stay away from his daughter.

Ultimately, it was Peter’s near-death experience that brought them together for good. In the summer of 2003, Peter was kidnapped by a violent drug crew and held for ransom, which was paid by Flores’ brother.

Upon release, Peter made a brief trip to Mexico to clear his head. When he returned, he sought out Lopez and told her how much he cared for her, she wrote.

Lopez said she knew then that she had to either cut off contact or accept her feelings.

“Life without him felt hollow,” she wrote. “I wanted to be with the drug dealer with the heart of gold. I loved Peter for all the goodness and kindness I saw inside him … and I’d choose to let the rest slide.”

In asking for a sentence of probation, Lopez’s attorney said Monday that a “fog of fear” has pervaded Lopez’s life since her husband started cooperating — a fear that hasn’t lifted to this day. Cody said federal investigators have communicated to her several death threats against her client in the past two years.

“She’s moved her family 11 times to four different states,” Cody said. “No one does that kind of move that many times if they don’t legitimately believe that they have reason to fear for their lives.”

Cody also said that Lopez used much of the money at the center of the indictment on legitimate things, including starting her own successful laundry business.

But prosecutors said that can cut both ways. Lopez had many opportunities in her life that other defendants don’t have, and could have “come clean” about the money at any point, Assistant U.S. Attorney Erika Csicsila said.

And while Csicsila agreed that Lopez had reason to be fearful for her safety, she has repeatedly chosen to take her story public, including writing the book, granting interviews and pursuing a movie deal.

“She has repeatedly put herself out there and kept her and her family in the dialogue,” Csicsila said.

jmeisner@chicagotribune.com