The stories of narco-violence piled up high on Monday as jurors at the trial of Joaquín Guzmán Loera heard gruesome testimony about six separate brutal drug war murders.
One of the victims nearly had his head cut off by a fusillade of gunfire. Another was killed on his doorstep after being lured from home when he was told, falsely, that his son had just been run down by a car.
A third made a small, but fatal, error: He refused one day to shake Mr. Guzmán’s hand.
Last week, the federal prosecutors trying Mr. Guzmán, the Mexican drug kingpin known as El Chapo, offered evidence about the gothic bloodshed his cartel routinely committed. But as the proceeding entered its second week, the government began to tie that violence directly to Mr. Guzmán.
From the start of the trial, which is being held in Federal District Court in Brooklyn, prosecutors have accused Mr. Guzmán not only of earning $14 billion by routinely shipping ton-size batches of drugs into the United States, but also of taking part in more than 30 murders. Mr. Zambada began on Monday to describe some of those killings, starting with the slaying of Rodolfo Carrillo Fuentes, a former member of the Sinaloa cartel.
In 2004, he said, Mr. Guzmán and Mr. Carrillo Fuentes were rivals as part of a larger war between the Sinaloa traffickers and a vicious gang, the Zetas, with whom Mr. Carrillo Fuentes had allied himself. At a meeting to restore the peace, Mr. Guzmán’s longtime partner, Ismael Zambada García, tried to broker a truce. But when Mr. Guzmán put his hand out Mr. Carrillo Fuentes did not take it.
Not long after, Mr. Zambada said, armed assassins lay in wait for Mr. Carrillo Fuentes and his unsuspecting wife, gunning both down as they exited a movie theater in Culiacán. “Chapo said he was going to kill him,” Mr. Zambada told the jury.
The next year, a similar fate befell Julio Beltran-Leyva, another one of Mr. Guzmán’s former allies. According to Mr. Zambada, Mr. Beltran-Leyva had disobeyed an order not to send a shipment of cocaine from Acapulco. At Mr. Guzmán’s behest, Mr. Zambada testified, a team of assassins attacked Mr. Beltran-Leyva, firing so many rifle rounds at him that his head was left dangling from his neck.
It was clear from Monday’s testimony that drug trafficking, especially in Mr. Guzmán’s orbit, was not an occupation that promoted health or longevity. People around him seemed to die with alarming frequency.
There was, for instance, his younger brother, Arturito Guzmán, who was murdered in prison on New Year’s Eve in 2004. There was also a police officer who usually stayed at home out of fear, but walked outside into a spray of bullets after one of Mr. Guzmán’s killers knocked on his door and shouted a lie: that his child had just been hit by a car.
Even those who endured the violence surrounding Mr. Guzmán required a level of machismo to survive. One gunman, caught in the crossfire of Mr. Beltran-Leyva’s murder, was knocked unconscious for five or 10 minutes with a head wound, Mr. Zambada said. When he finally awoke, the gunman dismissed the wound as “a scratch.”
William Purpura, one of Mr. Guzmán’s lawyers, asked Mr. Zambada a few questions on Monday afternoon, largely pointing out that in prior statements he had never mentioned Mr. Guzmán in connection with some of the murders the government accused him of committing. Mr. Purpura also suggested that Mr. Zambada was a liar who could say whatever he wanted since most of the people who could corroborate — or refute — his account were already dead.
Mr. Purpura noted that Juan José Esparragoza, Mr. Guzmán’s mentor, who knew him better than anyone, was dead — and so was Mr. Guzmán’s brother, Arturito. Mr. Guzman’s former ally, Amado Carrillo Fuentes — a brother of Rodolfo — was also deceased, Mr. Purpura said, having bled to death in 1997 while undergoing plastic surgery.
“All of them are dead,” Mr. Purpura told the witness. “So there’s really no one but you, correct?”
Mr. Zambada readily agreed.
“Fortunately,” he said, “I’m alive.”