Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada Garcia, a co-founder and longtime leader of Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel, was sentenced Monday to life in federal prison and ordered to forfeit $15 billion in proceeds from drug trafficking.
Zambada Garcia, 76, pleaded guilty to leading a continuing criminal enterprise and participating in a racketeering conspiracy. His plea agreement consolidated charges filed in the Eastern District of New York and Western District of Texas for sentencing in federal court in New York.
Federal prosecutors said Zambada Garcia helped lead the Sinaloa Cartel for nearly four decades, overseeing the trafficking of cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine and fentanyl into the United States. His leadership began during the cartel’s early years in the late 1980s and continued until his arrest in July 2024.
“Today, narco-trafficker El Mayo was sentenced to life in prison, marking the end of his reign over the Sinaloa Cartel,” Assistant Attorney General A. Tysen Duva said in a Justice Department announcement.
According to prosecutors, Zambada Garcia helped expand a transportation and distribution network that moved multi-ton shipments of cocaine from South America through Central America and Mexico before entering the United States.
The cartel later expanded into fentanyl production, purchasing precursor chemicals from Chinese companies and operating laboratories in both rural and urban areas of Mexico, the Justice Department said. Prosecutors alleged that the organization produced thousands of kilograms of fentanyl for distribution in the United States.
The cartel also operated extensive money-laundering networks to return billions of dollars in drug proceeds from the United States to Mexico, according to federal authorities.
Prosecutors said Zambada Garcia maintained the organization’s power through murder, intimidation and corruption. They alleged that he paid Mexican officials and law-enforcement officers to protect cartel members and drug shipments, provide advance notice of military operations and obstruct efforts to capture cartel leaders.
Zambada Garcia became more powerful after the 2016 capture of his longtime partner, Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán. Guzmán was convicted in federal court in 2019 and is serving a life sentence in the United States.
The charges against Zambada Garcia covered conduct dating from January 1989 through January 2024. Separate indictments had been filed against him in New York, Texas, Washington, D.C., Illinois and California.
“This sentence was made possible by the tireless bilateral cooperation between U.S. and Mexican law enforcement,” U.S. Attorney Joseph Nocella Jr. for the Eastern District of New York said.
The Drug Enforcement Administration, Homeland Security Investigations and FBI investigated the case. Prosecutors from the Justice Department’s Criminal Division and U.S. attorney’s offices in New York, Florida and Texas handled the prosecution.
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