Kidnappings, suitcases of cash and tons of cocaine: Inside the Brooklyn trial of Mexico's former top cop

BROOKLYN, N.Y. — The most compelling true crime drama of 2023 so far is arguably playing out on the eighth floor of a federal courthouse in downtown Brooklyn.

Over the past four weeks, a steady stream of characters, including convicted members of some of Mexico’s most notorious drug cartels, government officials, and current and former law enforcement agents from both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border, have regaled the court with firsthand accounts of one of the most violent periods in that country’s recent history.

Their testimonies included tales of kidnappings, murder, suitcases full of cash and millions of dollars’ worth of drugs flowing in and out of Mexico’s major air- and seaports. They’ve described encounters with drug traffickers wearing official police badges and uniforms and federal law enforcement agents in Mexico driving luxury sports cars and carrying gold-plated handguns — narratives that shed light on the tangled web of corruption that has long plagued efforts to dismantle the country’s vastly profitable drug trade.

At the center of these stories, or in some cases looming large in the background, is Genaro García Luna, Mexico’s former top security official, who is now on trial in the United States for allegedly helping the Sinaloa drug cartel funnel tons of cocaine and other drugs into the U.S. in exchange for millions of dollars in bribes.

Between 2001 and 2012, García Luna served as the public face of his country’s war on drugs, first as head of Mexico’s equivalent of the FBI and then as public security secretary, a Cabinet-level position in the government of then-President Felipe Calderón, who made cracking down on drug gangs a focus of his administration.

But, federal prosecutors in Brooklyn argue, while García Luna was making headlines for high-profile narco arrests and garnering praise from American law enforcement partners in Washington, he was secretly conspiring with the same criminals he claimed to be trying to take down.

Roots in El Chapo case

The trial against García Luna, which began last month, comes four years after a jury in the same Brooklyn courtroom convicted Joaquín Guzmán, the notorious cartel kingpin known as "El Chapo," on 10 charges, including narcotics trafficking and money laundering, for which he received a life sentence.

It was during that three-month blockbuster trial that a former Sinaloa cartel member testified about making multimillion-dollar payments to the then federal security chief, García Luna.

Months after Guzmán’s conviction, in December 2019, García Luna — who moved to Miami after retiring from government in 2012 — was arrested by federal agents in Dallas. He pleaded not guilty to five charges, including conspiracy to distribute cocaine and engaging in a continuing criminal enterprise. He faces potential sentences of between 10 years and life in prison if convicted.

García Luna is one of the highest-ranking Mexican officials to be accused of collaborating with drug cartels. His trial has drawn a cadre of primarily Spanish-speaking journalists — and a few curious members of the public — day after day to the Brooklyn courthouse.

To say the government’s case against García Luna reads like something out of a telenovela, or a bingeworthy true-crime series, is an understatement. In fact, the real-life drama of Mexico’s brutal drug cartels, particularly El Chapo and the Sinaloa cartel, has inspired multiple scripted dramas currently streaming on Netflix. One of those series, “El Chapo,” which premiered on Univision in 2017, even features a character apparently based on García Luna.

Based on the government’s long list of witnesses, the trial was initially expected to last two months, but this week prosecutors told the judge they plan to rest their case on Monday.

García Luna’s lawyers are expected to tell a drastically different story than the one presented thus far in court. In an opening statement, lead defense attorney César de Castro outlined his team’s argument: that the prosecution has no concrete evidence of García Luna’s alleged corruption and that his client is simply being targeted for revenge by the same criminals he helped imprison years ago.

As evidence of García Luna’s legitimacy, de Castro highlighted the former security chief’s close working relationship with top U.S. officials in Washington, showing photos of his client alongside the likes of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, former Attorney General Eric Holder and former President Barack Obama.

But while the trial has the potential to expose broader failures in the drug war, including from the U.S. side, witness testimony so far has focused primarily on corruption on the Mexican side of the border.

Yahoo News sat in on the trial last week. Here are some key takeaways from the witnesses those days.

$3 million for a meeting at a car wash

Among the most damning testimonies against García Luna came from Oscar Nava Valencia, the former leader of the Milenio cartel, who claimed he personally paid the former security secretary millions of dollars in bribes.

Known as "El Lobo" (the wolf), Valencia, who was extradited to the U.S. in 2011 on conspiracy and drug trafficking charges to which he later pleaded guilty, took the witness stand last week in a canary-yellow prison jumpsuit.

With the help of a translator, Valencia said he was introduced to García Luna through Arturo Beltrán-Leyva, a longtime underboss of the Sinaloa cartel who later broke off and formed his own organization. Valencia said he contributed to a group payment organized by Beltrán-Leyva in 2006; Sinaloa leaders and allies allegedly gave García Luna millions in exchange for increased access to the country’s airports, intelligence on law enforcement operations and other help for their drug trafficking enterprises.

Valencia said he didn’t meet García Luna in person until the following year, after cargo ships carrying more than 20 tons of cocaine from Colombia were seized off the port of Manzanillo, on Mexico’s Pacific coast. Valencia said he’d paid $5 million to García Luna and other Mexican government officials to try to recover the drugs, but the allegedly corrupt authorities said they were unable to act because of the involvement of the Mexican Navy and U.S. government in the operation.

Instead, Valencia testified that García Luna provided the cartel bosses with a document showing that the seizure was prompted by U.S. intelligence about the shipment and its origins. The drug traffickers used this document to get out of reimbursing the Colombians $50 million for the intercepted goods, Valencia said.

Valencia described another meeting with García Luna that took place at a car wash in Guadalajara in 2008, at the start of a bloody war between two factions of the Sinaloa cartel. He said he wanted the then security chief’s protection from his former ally Beltrán-Leyva, after choosing to side with rival El Chapo.

Valencia said he paid $500,000 to set up the meeting with García Luna, followed by another $2.5 million that was handed over in a suitcase when he arrived at the car wash. He said García Luna came to the meeting with another senior federal law enforcement official, Luis Cárdenas Palomino, who has also been charged in the García Luna case but currently remains jailed in Mexico.

According to Valencia, García Luna and Cárdenas Palomino pledged at that meeting to “stand with us.”

Valencia’s testimony echoed that of Sergio Villarreal Barragán, a former police officer turned drug trafficker, nicknamed "El Grande" for his large physical stature. As the government’s first witness, Villarreal Barragán told jurors he was present on several occasions when García Luna accepted multimillion-dollar bribes from Beltrán-Leyva and the Sinaloa cartel. He cited an early-2000s drug deal at a warehouse where García Luna allegedly handed over a shipment of cocaine that had been intercepted from a rival cartel, in exchange for a payout of more than $14 million.

“He was of great help,” Villarreal Barragán said of García Luna. “He would give us information about operations against the cartel. He helped us put in and take out agents in every part of Mexico, and he shared information so we could hit our rivals.”

During cross-examination, the defense raised questions about the validity of Valencia’s testimony, noting that the former narco never mentioned García Luna’s name until 2020, after the former security secretary’s arrest, despite cooperating with the government for more than a decade. What’s more, Valencia admitted that he briefly recanted his claims about knowing García Luna in a meeting with prosecutors just two months before taking the witness stand.

“The reality is that I’m fearful,” Valencia told the jury, insisting he’d been hesitant to testify only because of threats he and his family received over his cooperation with U.S. authorities. “I’m afraid I’m in danger.”

Spreadsheets to keep track of bribes

For further insight into the alleged relationship between García Luna and the Sinaloa cartel, the government called Israel Ávila, a former real estate agent who became the gang’s accountant. He said he fell into the job after he unwittingly rented a house to cartel members who used it for a murder.

Ávila, currently serving a 15-year prison sentence, said he was both the victim and the perpetrator of torture during his time with the cartel, and that he’d been present for a number of kidnappings and killings.

“I had to keep working for them because otherwise they were going to kill me,” he told the jury. “Not just me — my family.”

Ávila said he helped his cartel bosses create Excel spreadsheets to keep track of their expenses, including payments to public officials at the federal, state and municipal levels. He told jurors that the largest payment he recorded for García Luna was $5 million but that other payments ranged between $1 million and $3 million. He also said the cartel’s ledgers did not refer to García Luna by name, but by the nicknames “Tartamudo” or “Metralleta,” both of which translate to “stutterer.”

Ávila also referred to a dramatic incident in which García Luna himself was kidnapped by Beltrán-Leyva, who was concerned that his government ally was siding with rival El Chapo in the cartel’s civil war. Another witness, Harold Mauricio Poveda-Ortega, a Colombian trafficker and Beltrán-Leyva’s longtime cocaine supplier, later corroborated the account of García Luna’s kidnapping. Poveda-Ortega, known as “El Conejo” (the rabbit), was extradited to the United States in 2012 on charges related to his alleged cocaine business.

Strange orders and suitcases filled with cash

Not all the government’s witnesses worked for the cartels. Last week the jury heard from Raúl Arellano Aguilera, who served as a federal police officer in Mexico for nine years before resigning in 2011, citing disillusionment with the corruption he observed on the force.

Arellano Aguilera testified about his time working at the Mexico City airport, where he was stationed to conduct surveillance and security starting in 2007, the year after García Luna was elevated from the head of the federal police to the secretary of public security.

Arellano Aguilera said he realized that drugs were being trafficked through the airport after he and his colleagues started receiving “strange orders” using police codes indicating that their superiors were directing them to “stand by,” preventing them from conducting any searches or arrests for a couple of hours at a time. He said these orders were issued once or twice a week, and often coincided with flights arriving from South America and departing for the U.S. and Europe.

Arellano Aguilera said he noticed that some of his colleagues would disappear during these strange “stand by” orders and then return once the orders were lifted, discussing openly how happy they were that a suitcase or package had made it through on a certain flight with no problem.

He named several members of what he called the “special group” of officers, who regularly missed work or arrived late without repercussions. He said they drove luxury sports cars and wore flashy jewelry — one even carried a pistol with a gold-plated handle — items Arellano Aguilera said he could never afford on his biweekly salary of 8,000 pesos.

During this time, Arellano Aguilera said that Óscar Moreno Villatoro, then the head of airport security, moved his office to the Mexico City airport, where he would regularly receive visits from the directors of other airports. He recalled seeing these airport directors arrive for their meetings when he and his colleagues were lined up for their daily roll call outside Villatoro’s office. He noted that they often came carrying suitcases. Arellano Aguilera described one particular incident in which one of his colleagues bumped into the director of the Toluca airport, who was on his way into Villatoro’s office. The collision caused the airport chief’s suitcase to fall open, revealing that it was full of American dollars.

“I was very surprised,” Arellano Aguilera said, explaining that there was no reason for another airport director to be bringing Villatoro a briefcase full of cash as part of their regular work as police officers.

Arellano Aguilera said he was the only member of his team transferred in 2010 to Monterrey, which had become ground zero for an intensely violent turf war between two of the Sinaloa cartel’s biggest rivals: the Zetas and the Gulf cartel. Though he wasn’t happy about the transfer, Arellano Aguilera described feeling somewhat liberated in Monterrey. During the entire time he was stationed at the Mexico City airport, he made zero drug arrests or drug seizures. But for a brief time in Monterrey, he said, he was “able to act freely and perform [police] duties, [and] was able to make arrests.”

Eventually, though, the strange orders started up again. Feeling “tired” and “let down,” Arellano Aguilera decided the best thing for him to do was resign, which he did on Dec. 31, 2011.

“The principles I had been taught at the police training academy, I thought they had been trampled on,” he told the jury in Brooklyn last week.