http://www.madcowprod.com/2019/01/13/th ... po-guzman/ Government, Gangsters, & the Trial of El Chapo Guzman BY DANIEL HOPSICKER · PUBLISHED JANUARY 13, 2019 · UPDATED JANUARY 13, 2019
The trial of El Chapo Guzman is as disappointing to criminologists trying to understand the deep structure of the drug trade as a rained-out series between The Yankees and Red Sox is to baseball fans waiting to place bets on who’s going to win the American League.
This week in El Chapo’s trial was like watching an alternative reality TV show, like the one about what if the Nazis had won World War II. Federal prosecutors pretended that we live in a world where neither the NSA nor the company once housed in the building below, which sits on a headquarters campus in Clearwater-St. Pete Florida, ever existed.
The deliberate omissions by prosecutors exposed what they attempted to conceal: a global drug cartel composed of governments and gangsters.
Nothing to see here. Move along.From a secrecy-obsessed proceeding filled with whispered sidebars between attorneys and a Judge determined that the less the public knows the better, the trial in recent days devolved even further. Instead of a courtroom in Brooklyn, observers might have felt they’d been transported to a science fiction and comic book convention like Comic-Con.
Prosecutors presented a story line straight out of a celebrity news and gossip talkfest like Entertainment Tonight or Page 6 TV.
A man on trial for allegedly being the market leader in a $500 billion dollar a year industry in the U.S. alone was forced to “suck it up,” in the New York Post’s felicitous phrase, while prosecutors revealed hundreds of text messages he sent—not to fellow titans of cocaine, or government and law enforcement officials— but to his wife and mistresses.
The horror. The horror.
New revelation [
… con’d]
