9781422271018

Today, prison escapes lack the excitement and fervor of a boat in a moat or multiple tunnels filling with water and narrow escapes. Or do they? The noted drug kingpin “El Chapo,” whose real name is Joaquín Archivaldo Guzmán Loera, escaped custody in 2001 and in 2015, after his re-capture in 2014, using a laundry cart and a helicopter in the first escape, and one of the massive tunnels for which he became known in the second escape. Guzmán is now housed in a U.S. prison, but he grew up in farming country in Mexico, in a family with ten children. You could say he was born to the drug trade, though, since his father cultivated opium. Guzmán took it further, starting out in marijuana and building his business to also include cocaine and other illegal drugs. He once wielded the greatest power in the drug trade as the leader of the Sinaloa cartel, which he founded. His second recapture and a life sentence in a U.S. supermax prison ended his regime. Read on to learn how a man who referred to himself as a farmer and son of a cattle rancher and farmer rose to control a billion-dollar business although an illegal one. Joaquín Guzmán Loera is in the custody of the Federal Bureau of Prisons at the United States Penitentiary Administrative Maximum, located in Florence, Colorado.

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