After a fugitive employee of Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman Loera tried in vain to bribe a top Mexican military official millions of dollars to let the drug lord on the lam live “in peace,” he saw red and ordered her killed, his former right-hand man testified Tuesday.
Alex Cifuentes, Guzman’s former secretary, told jurors on his third day on the stand about his ex-boss’s growing impatience and razor-thin tolerance while hiding out in the city of Culiacan in January 2013.
The turncoat said an anxious Guzman was growing tired of a life spent in hiding and ordered Cifuentes’ assistant, Andrea Velez Fernandez — who ran a modeling agency in Mexico City — to bribe an unidentified government official in the hopes authorities would ease up on the intensifying manhunt.
“(Velez) would introduce female friends to the general … for private parties,” Cifuentes said in court, adding that Guzman offered to pay her $1 million to bribe the general at one of the gatherings.
“She was not successful. The general hated Joaquin very much,” Cifuentes said Tuesday. “(Guzman) was angry and he said that she was a liar.
“He ordered her killed.”
Cifuentes said Velez Fernandez ultimately managed to evade execution.
Guzman, 61, is on trial in federal court in Brooklyn where he has pleaded not guilty to a 17-count indictment that charges money laundering, conspiracy, firearms and international distribution of cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin and marijuana.
On Tuesday morning jurors also heard taped phone calls of the witness lamenting to his mother on the phone after Guzman narrowly avoided capture in Los Cabos in 2012.
“They were going to search the entire city, house to house, looking for him,” the witness is heard saying.
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