https://news.yahoo.com/mexicos-top-c...231700812.html
NEW YORK — Mexico’s one-time top cop played the part of a drug-fighting hero, adding more than 30,000 cops to the country’s federal police force, but it was all a front, federal prosecutors say — Genaro Garcia Luna was really taking money from Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman's feared Sinaloa cartel to keep drugs flowing to the United States.
”He also had a second job, a dirtier job, a more profitable job,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Philip Pilmar said in his opening argument Monday at Garcia Luna’s trial in Brooklyn Federal Court.
Garcia Luna, 54, Mexico’s former secretary of public security, is accused of taking briefcases full of cash from the Sinaloa cartel while it was run by the notorious drug lord Guzman.
From 2006 to 2012, under then-President Felipe Calderón, he ran Mexico’s equivalent of the FBI, consolidating his power by swelling the ranks of the federal police, Pilmar said.
The cartel kept its billion-dollar drug operation humming by paying “to buy off the federal police, to put them on the payroll, to make them them part of the organization,” Pilmar said. “The defendant took their cash and betrayed his oath to his country.”
Guzman was convicted and sentenced to life plus 30 years in 2019.
At Guzman's trial, cartel turncoat Jesus Zambada Garcia testified to personally delivering briefcases with millions in cash to Garcia Luna in a Mexican restaurant.
In exchange, Pilmar said, Garcia Luna leaked sensitive law enforcement information on pending arrests, let cocaine pass through checkpoints
and turned his federal police officers into bodyguards, drug couriers and “armed mercenaries” for the cartel.
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