BROOKLYN — For more than four decades, Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada ruled from the shadows. While other top Mexican drug traffickers were killed or extradited to the United States to face justice, Zambada remained comfortably ensconced atop his empire, exporting tons of cocaine, meth, heroin and fentanyl around the globe from his stronghold in the Pacific state of Sinaloa.
Long after the downfall of his Sinaloa cartel partner, Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, Zambada continued to operate with impunity, always a step ahead of the law — until eventually it caught up to him, too.
Now the question is whether he’ll take others down with him.
Zambada, 75, will mark a final chapter Monday afternoon in his legendary criminal career when he is set to appear before a federal judge in Brooklyn and plead guilty to an array of charges for leading a “continuing criminal enterprise” from the late 1980s until his arrest last year. He admitted to money laundering, kidnapping, murder and drug conspiracies.
Zamabada’s stunning downfall began last July when he arrived on a private jet at a small airport near El Paso, Texas. In the immedate aftermath, rumors swirled that Zambada may have orchestrated his surrender in order to undergo medical treatment or reunite with his brother and several sons who are believed to be living under witness protection after pleading guilty and cooperating with U.S. authorities to resolve their own criminal cases.
Zambada, however, has vehemently denied that his arrival in the U.S. was prearranged. A few weeks after he was taken into custody, he alleged he was set up and kidnapped by one of El Chapo’s sons, Joaquín Guzmán López, a leader of the cartel faction known as Los Chapitos, or the Little Chapos.
Zambada claimed in a letter released by his lawyer that he was lured to what he thought would be a meeting between Sinaloa’s governor and another prominent politician, only to be ambushed, zip-tied, forced onto the plane by Guzmán López and delivered to U.S. authorities.
Guzmán López, 39, is facing his own federal case in Chicago, where he has pleaded not guilty to drug and conspiracy charges. His younger brother, Ovidio Guzmán, recently pleaded guilty to similar charges, with court filings revealing that he has agreed to cooperate with U.S. investigators.
There is no indication that Zambada has a cooperation agreement. But his family’s history, combined with the fact that he has agreed to plead guilty rather than take his case to trial, is fueling speculation that he could be prepared to spill secrets about high-level corruption.
Paul Craine, the top official in Mexico for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration from 2012 to 2017, said of Zambada: “He knows more than anybody.”
Craine, who retired from the DEA now runs a private security firm, said it’s unlikely that federal prosecutors would ever agree to a deal that gives the kingpin anything less than life in prison.
Zambada was already spared the death penalty, but the government could dangle other benefits, he said, such as relocating family members to the United States for their safety or allowing him to serve his time somewhere cushier than the Colorado “supermax” prison where El Chapo and others deemed extreme security risks are held in near total isolation.
Zambada, Craine said, has knowledge about “40 years of the top leadership of the military and the government [in Mexico] that he was directly paying and had co-opted.”
“He’s the godfather,” Craine said. “He’s the consistency across everything.”
Zambada’s case is playing out during a delicate moment in U.S.-Mexico relations, with President Trump using tariffs as a cudgel to force action against the Sinaloa cartel and others responsible for shipping fentanyl and other drugs north across the Rio Grande. Trump designated Zambada’s group and others as terrorist organizations earlier this year, and has floated the possibility of the U.S. military taking action on the Mexican side of the border.
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has sought to appease Trump by handing over dozens of reputed high-ranking cartel figures for prosecution by U.S. authorities, but Craine said those offerings may not be enough.
“There’s more value now in being able to target a high-level corrupt criminal political figure than there is in the biggest drug trafficker in Mexico,” he said.
Other former federal law enforcement officials echoed that assessment. Adam Braverman, a former U.S. attorney in San Diego who oversaw the indictments of Zambada and several of his sons, called Monday’s guilty plea “a monumental day for the Department of Justice.”
Braverman, who now works in private practice, said if Zambada were to cooperate, merely giving up other cartel figures would not be enough to make it worth the bargain.
“When you’re at the top of the chain, there’s nobody else to cooperate against,” he said. “You’re talking about generals, governors — potentially presidents of Mexico.”
Zambada claimed in his letter last year that he was invited to a meeting near Sinaloa’s capital Culiacán, where he expected to help mediate a dispute between the city’s former mayor, Héctor Melesio Cuén, and his political rival, Sinaloa’s current governor, Rubén Rocha Moya.
Melesio Cuén turned up shot to death on the day of Zambada’s arrest. Rocha Moya, a Morena party member, has denied any knowledge of the kidnapping plot, pointing to flight records that show he took a family trip to Los Angeles as the events were playing out.
Mexican federal authorities have cited several suspicious irregularities in the investigation into Melesio Cuén’s killing by Sinaloan state authorities, including the abrupt cremation of his body.
With tensions already running high, Guillermo Valdes Castellanos, a former head of the national intelligence agency that is Mexico’s equivalent of the CIA, said Zambada’s plea means some of Mexico’s political elites must now be sweating bullets.
“[The Americans] are going to concentrate on receiving information about all of the politicians who protected [El Mayo], who helped him from the army, the police, etc.,” he said. “The fact that he may have more solid information to accuse the Mexican politicians and authorities involved is what’s making people very nervous here.”
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