An infamous Chicago drug trafficker has returned to testify at the trial of Joaquin ‘El Chapo’ Guzman, revealing how he double crossed the drug lord and secretly recorded their phone conversations.
Pedro Flores, 37, returned to the witness stand for a second day on Wednesday in Brooklyn, explaining how with his identical twin brother Margarito Flores he moved tons of cocaine in the U.S. for the Sinaloa Cartel.
During his testimony, prosecutors played part of a call to Guzman that Pedro Flores made on November 15, 2008 to negotiate prices on a shipment of cocaine.
‘Amigo!’ a cheerful voice identified as Guzman’s says at the start of the call. ‘Here at your service,’ Guzman continues, ‘You know that.’
Pedro Flores, 37, (above) testified on Tuesday at Guzman’s (right) trial, saying that with his identical twin brother he distributed some 60 tons of cocaine in the U.S. for the Sinaloa Cartel
Pedro Flores (left) and his identical twin brother Margarito Flores (right) worked their way up from street dealing in Chicago’s Little Village neighborhood to become major traffickers
Flores then asked whether Guzman could cut the per-kilo price they had originally agreed on to $50,000, a discount of $5,000. Guzman sounds happy to help out, as long as Flores was willing to.
‘I’ll pick up the money tomorrow,’ Guzman says with little hesitation. ‘That price is fine.’
Flores asks Guzman in a brief follow-up call on the same day if he could deliver another large shipment of heroin to replenish the Chicago-based distribution network that the twins still controlled from Mexico.
Guzman questions why, since it was his understanding that the Flores twins had already received a shipment from another cartel supplier.
‘Yes, but what they sent was not good,’ he responds. ‘It doesn’t compare to what you had.’
In the end, Flores told the jury, the kingpin feared far and wide ‘agreed to my terms.’
Though the Flores twins ran much of the Sinaloa cartel’s U.S. distribution for years, they were not above more menial tasks, the Chicago Tribune reported.
Flores said that he was in charge of securing a ‘burner’ cell phone for himself and other cartel members, and tested them by calling a number familiar to all Chicagoans: 312-588-2300.
‘That’s the number for Empire carpeting,’ Flores explained, referring to the Chicago company that for decades has run TV commercials advertising the number in a sing-song jingle.
Flores did not perform the jingle in court, and the Brooklyn court seemed perplexed at the number’s significance.
Accused Mexican drug lord Joaquin ‘El Chapo’ Guzman sits during his trial in this courtroom sketch as he appears in Brooklyn federal court in New York on Tuesday
During cross-examination, Guzman’s attorney tried to cast doubt on Flores by tying him to the 2003 murder of Latin Kings boss Rudy ‘Kato’ Rangel Jr in a Little Village barber shop – a death memorialized in a song by the rapper DMX.
The murder was long said to be a jewelry robbery gone wrong, but Guzman’s defense attorney brought up the rumor that Rangel had ripped off the Flores twins for hundreds of kilos of cocaine before his death, and the fact that Margarito Flores soon went on to marry Rangle’s widow.
On the stand, Pedro Flores denied that he had ordered the hit on Rangel. ‘Not for the woman or 200 kilograms?’ the attorney asked.
‘No,’ Flores responded.
Flores’ first day of testimony on Tuesday was the first time that either brother had been seen in public since 2015, when they were both sentenced to 14 years in prison in a sweetheart deal for turning federal informants on the notorious cartel.
In his first day of testimony, Flores said that he had worked his way up from street dealing in Chicago’s Little Village neighborhood, eventually running afoul of a supplier in Mexico, who kidnapped him when he was on the run from a federal indictment.
Accused Mexican drug lord Joaquin ‘El Chapo’ Guzman watches testimony in this courtroom sketch as he appears in Brooklyn federal court earlier this month
Flores testified that the kidnappers handcuffed and blindfolded him, and took him to a remote house where they held him for several days until his brother secured his freedom, the Chicago Tribune reported.
His brother’s first words to him, he said, were that he smelled bad and: ‘I met Chapo.’
In exchange for dealing with the kidnapper, Guzman wanted the twins to use their experience distributing cocaine in the U.S. for the Sinaloa cartel, Flores said.
Flores described his first meeting with Guzman in 2005, saying he was taken by private plane to a rough landing strip on the incline of a mountain.
Driving from the airstrip to the compound, Flores said he saw grisly signs of the cartel’s violence, including a naked man chained to a tree, who crouched and stared at the truck as it passed.
Guzman appeared from the thatched-roof concrete villa wearing a hat, with a shiny handgun in his waistband and an AK-47 propped nearby, and his first words were to tease Flores for wearing shorts, the court heard.
‘He said with all that money, I couldn’t afford the rest of the pants?’ Flores said.
Another Sinaloa cartel leader, Ismael ‘El Mayo’ Zambada, was there for the negotiations, Flores said.
‘You guys have my respect,’ he quoted Zambada as saying. ‘Imagine if you guys were triplets.’
Flores said that the brothers used their know-how to turn Chicago into a national distribution hub for the Sinaloa cartel, taking advantage of the city’s central location.
As he grew more comfortable with Guzman, whom he called ‘The Man’, Flores began to give him regular gifts – gold plated guns, which he admits were too heavy and inspired by watching too many movies, as well as a gag gift of a pair of jean shorts like the ones he wore to their first meeting, given in a box shaped like a Viagra pill.
The drugs flowed north in trucks filled with fruit and vegetables – sometimes so much of them that it affected market prices in Chicago when the brothers dumped their cover goods, Flores said.
Authorities escort Joaquin ‘El Chapo’ Guzman, center, from a plane to a waiting caravan of SUVs at Long Island MacArthur Airport, in Ronkonkoma, N.Y. in January 2017
One time, the brothers received a shipment of cocaine in a truck full of live sheep. Flores said they were baffled about what to do with the sheep, and eventually paid a friend $10,000 to get rid of them.
‘I’m looking at a bunch of live sheep,’ Flores said. ‘What are we gonna do with them?’
‘I was concerned the cover loads were getting kinda weak,’ he recalled.
Around 2008, Flores said he began to fear for his life when the cartel split into two factions, with both sides insisting that the twins deal exclusively with them.
The bloody civil war within the cartel meant ‘we were in a lose-lose situation,’ he said, ‘because we had to choose a side.’
Flores contacted the DEA and began working as an informant, even making recordings of Guzman with a digital recorder that he bought at a Mexican Radio Shack.
The jury is expected to hear the recordings in the coming days, as Flores continues his testimony.
Guzman has denied that he was the leader of the Sinaloa cartel, saying he is being set up by shady government cooperators. If convicted, he faces life in prison without parole.