The Vice article prompted Mr. Guzmán’s lawyers to submit a motion requesting a new trial. And for a period of weeks, it suddenly seemed possible that the jurors might be hauled back into court and the protracted case forced to continue with a hearing to determine if they had in fact committed misconduct.
But in early July, Judge Brian M. Cogan foreclosed that possibility, denying the new trial motion and moving things forward toward the sentencing.
Some of the witnesses who testified against Mr. Guzmán have themselves recently been sentenced. At the end of June, a federal judge in Texas gave a nine-year prison term to Edgar Galvan, a divorced man from El Paso who wound up running guns for one of Mr. Guzmán’s most feared assassins after meeting him one evening at a nightclub across the border in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. And in late May, Vicente Zambada Niebla — the son of Mr. Guzmán’s partner and the cartel’s heir apparent — was sentenced in Chicago to 14 years in prison.
Around the same time, the assassin who befriended Mr. Galvan, Antonio Marrufo (or “the Jaguar,” as he called himself) was extradited from Mexico to Texas to face federal charges, including his alleged involvement in a brazen plot to kidnap a groom on his wedding day and kill him — and his best man — in Ciudad Juárez.
But it remains unclear for now where Mr. Marrufo’s prosecution might be headed given that more than a dozen sealed documents have been posted on his docket in the two months following his extradition.
A similar level of secrecy was applied to Mr. Guzmán’s case though prosecutors in Brooklyn have started to unseal some of the filings. According to a document released two weeks ago, the kingpin, during one of his many wars against his rivals, hired a doctor to revive a man he had been torturing. After the victim regained consciousness, Mr. Guzmán and his crew kept working on the man, the document said, applying electrodes to his ear and yanking some of his teeth out.
Another document from early July revealed that the government had come up with a “conservative” estimate of Mr. Guzmán’s total career earnings: $12,666,181,704. They said they wanted him to pay it back.
