Court Sees El Chapo's Texts to Wife, Mistress

He joked about giving baby daughter an AK-47
By Rob Quinn,  Newser Staff
Posted Jan 10, 2019 1:56 AM CST
Court Sees El Chapo's Texts to Wife, Mistress
Emma Coronel Aispuro, wife of Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, arrives to federal court in New York, Thursday, Dec. 6, 2018.   (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)

Drug lord Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman was so paranoid that he installed spyware on the phones of his wife and mistress, along with those of dozens of associates. He wasn't paranoid enough, however, to realize that the FBI had flipped his IT guy. The New York Times reports that jurors in Guzman's federal trial in Brooklyn saw many pages of Guzman's messages Wednesday, in which he discussed business and more personal matters with the women in his life. "Our Kiki is fearless,” he wrote to wife Emma Coronel of one of their twin baby daughters. "I'm going to give her an AK-47 so she can hang with me."

In messages from when Guzman was on the run in 2012, he described his escape from authorities to his wife and told her he needed items including dye for his mustache. Coronel was present in court Wednesday but did not react when the messages were displayed, reports the AP. In messages to mistress Agustina Cabanillas Acosta, Guzman asked how drug sales were going, Fox reports. She later told a friend: "He wants a security system at the construction site ... He wants to spy on me. Guess what, I’m smarter than him." Christian Rodriguez, Guzman's IT expert, testified that the cartel kingpin had spyware installed on more than 50 phones and was fond of calling associates, then using the software afterward to find out what they said about him to others. (A key member of Guzman's Sinaloa cartel testified against him last week.)

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