Thread by @alanfeuer

Day 4 of jury deliberations at the Chapo trial has ended. Still no verdict.
The jury has decided not to sit on Friday so deliberations will resume on Monday.
Chapo seemed pretty happy at the end of the day. He gave one of his lawyers, Jeff Lichtman, a giant backslapping hug.

Before leaving, the jury requested more testimony, asking for everything that Chapo's chief Colombian cocaine supplier, Juan Carlos "Lollipop" Ramirez, said about a series of 10 big coke shipments from 2003-2005 he nicknamed the Juanitas.

The Juanita shipments were major operations, the largest including 12 tons of coke. Altogether the Juanitas moved a staggering 55 tons of coke by boat from Colombia to the Sinaloan coast of Mexico and then north across the US border. More than 22 tons of Juanita coke was seized.

The Juanitas are reflected in the jury's verdict sheet as the first 10 violations of the first--and biggest--count: the continuing criminal enterprise charge. The fact that the jury wants all of Chupeta's testimony about the loads suggests they're considering those violations.

This is yet another sign the jury is doing the hard work of matching evidence from the trial to the counts in the indictment. Since Monday they have asked for complete testimonies from 5 of the govt's 14 cooperating witnesses. The Chupeta request was smaller but still sizeable.

Altogether the jury has now asked questions or for testimony that in theory relate to most of the 27 violations in Count 1; Count 2; Counts 3-8 (all drug conspiracy charges); and Count 9 (gun charge.) They haven't asked for anything related to the money laundering count yet.

In other words, they appear to have sought evidentiary confirmation for virtually all the counts and sub-counts in the indictment. That's a pretty scrupulous effort.

Chupeta was a remarkable witness not least b/c he looked like F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu after getting plastic surgery on his cheekbones, chin, eyes, nose, ears. He was an intensely proud supplier, always referring to the cocaine he mentioned as "My cocaine."
nytimes.com/2018/12/03/nyr…

Chupeta testified that he first met Chapo in 1990 and was impressed by the young smuggler's confidence that he could move coke faster than anyone across the US border. Chapo and Chupeta worked together almost until Chupeta was arrested in Sao Paulo, Brazil in 2007

When Brazilian authorities captured Chupeta they found more than $1 million he'd stashed in a nearby garden & seized 2 paintings by the Colombian artist Fernando Botero from his house, each worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.
They also found dozens of fake IDs w/his aliases.

Chupeta--the Spanish slang nickname could be read as "Sucker" not just "Lollipop"--is also in other violations on the verdict sheet. He sometimes moved coke to Mexico in planes that landed at secret airstrips. One violation includes the famous jalapeno shipments he did for Chapo.

By his own account, Chupeta worked with many other Sinaloa cartel bigwigs too: Mayo Zambada, Nacho Coronel, Amado Carrillo Fuentes. He said he was particularly close to Amado.

Chupeta was an especially creepy trial witness, not only because of his disfigured face (a chin like a fist, shovel blades for cheekbones, eyes stretched waaaay back) but also because he testified in a pair of gloves and zipped up winter parka.
It was weird.