WASHINGTON – Congress on Wednesday changed a quarter-century-old law that has subjected tens of thousands of blacks to long prison terms for crack cocaine convictions while giving far more lenient treatment to those, mainly whites, caught with the powder form of the drug.

The House, by voice vote, approved a bill reducing the disparities between mandatory crack and powder cocaine sentences, sending the measure to President Barack Obama for his signature. During his presidential campaign, Obama said that the wide gap in sentencing “cannot be justified and should be eliminated.” The Senate passed the bill in March.

The measure alters a 1986 law, enacted at a time when crack cocaine use was rampant and considered a particularly violent drug, under which a person convicted of crack cocaine possession gets the same mandatory prison term as someone with 100 times the same amount of powder cocaine.

The legislation reduces that ratio to about 18-1.

The bill also eliminates the five-year mandatory minimum for first-time possession of crack, the first time since the Nixon administration that Congress has repealed a mandatory minimum sentence.

“For Congress to take a step toward saying ‘we have made a mistake’ and this sentence is too severe … is really remarkable,” said Virginia Sloan, president of the Constitution Project, which in studies of sentencing practices has referred to crack cocaine mandates as a “‘poster child’ for the injustices of mandatory sentencing.”

Under current law, possession of five grams of crack triggers a mandatory minimum five-year prison sentence. The same mandatory sentence applies to a person convicted of trafficking 500 grams of powder cocaine.

The proposed legislation would apply the five-year term to someone with 28 grams, or an ounce, of crack.

Julie Stewart, president of Families Against Mandatory Minimums, said 28 grams is about what the average crack dealer might carry around.

She said politicians and the U.S. Sentencing Commission have for years acknowledged the unfairness of the system, “but no one wanted to look soft on crime.” The legislative change, she said, is “much more about being smart on crime.”

She cited Sentencing Commission estimates that almost 3,000 people a year subjected to the mandatory sentence would be affected by the change. The average sentence in these cases would be reduced from 106 months to 79 months.

Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., the main sponsor of the bill in the Senate, said last year close to 1,500 people were convicted for possession of somewhere between five and 25 grams of crack cocaine, subjecting them to mandatory minimum sentences.

Some 80 percent of those convicted of crack cocaine offenses are black.

In the 2008 campaign, Obama said the sentencing disparity “has disproportionately filled our prisons with young black and Latino drug users.” He cited figures that blacks serve almost as much time for drug offenses — 58.7 months — as whites do for violent offenses — 61.7 months.

The Congressional Budget Office said the bill would save the government $42 million over five years because of the reduction in prison populations.

Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas, the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee, was the only lawmaker to speak against the bill, saying the 1986 law was enacted at a time when the crack cocaine epidemic was bringing a sharp spike in violence to minority communities and it would be a mistake to change it.

“Why do we want to risk another surge of addiction and violence by reducing penalties?” he asked. “Why are we coddling some of the most dangerous drug traffickers in America?”

Rep. Bobby Scott, D-Va., noted that the bill also requires the sentencing commission to significantly increase penalties for drug violations involving violence. “This way the defendant is sentenced for what he or she actually did, not the form of cocaine involved,” Scott said.

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PHILADELPHIA (AP) ― A former Philadelphia police officer is going to prison for 15 years for plotting to steal $1.5 million in cocaine from a supposed drug dealer.

Prosecutors say 34-year-old Alhinde Weems planned to use his badge to enter a home and rob an undercover agent posing as a drug dealer. They say Weems had his service weapon and planned to use it if necessary.

Authorities say Weems also sold cocaine.

Weems told a federal judge Friday he had been depressed and acting irrationally after suffering a head injury in a 2007 bike accident on the job.

Friends said Weems was under pressure to support his wife, five children and other relatives.

Weems is one of at least five Philadelphia police officers charged in recent years with trying to rob drug dealers.

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NEW YORK – Jamaican gang leader Christopher “Dudus” Coke pleaded not guilty Friday to U.S. charges that he ran a massive drug ring in the Eastern U.S. from his Caribbean stronghold.

The 42-year-old boss of the Shower Posse gang was sent to New York on Thursday under tight security after waiving extradition. His case had sparked street violence in Kingston that left more than 70 dead.

He entered the plea at an appearance in Manhattan federal court and faces a maximum sentence of life in prison in the United States if convicted.

NEW YORK – Jamaican gang leader Christopher “Dudus” Coke — known for his fiercely loyal following in his own country — also had his admirers in America, U.S. prosecutors say.

In court papers, the federal prosecutors in Manhattan say drug dealers in the U.S. regularly sent “cash and goods, including clothing and electronics, to Coke as ‘tribute’ payments, in recognition of his leadership and assistance.” The tribute payments also included firearms, the papers add.

Under heavy security, Coke was sent to New York on Thursday to face charges the tribute payments were part of a vast and lucrative conspiracy to flood the East Coast with cocaine and marijuana.

He was to appear on Friday in federal court in Manhattan to face drug and gun trafficking charges. The name of his attorney was not immediately available.

Coke, 42, was captured in Jamaica on Tuesday, but not without a fight: After Jamaica’s prime minister announced he would agree to a U.S. request the leader of the notorious Shower Posse gang be extradited, his armed supporters and government security forces clashed in the streets of the Tivoli Garden slums for four days, leaving 76 people dead.

On Wednesday, Coke agreed to waive extradition. He said he was saddened by the deaths and hoped his departure would help his country heal.

“I take this decision for I now believe it to be in the best interest of my family, the community of western Kingston and in particular the people of Tivoli Gardens and above all Jamaica,” Coke said in a statement released to the news media, his first public comments since the extradition request in August.

The U.S. indictment alleges that, since 1994, members of Coke’s gang in Jamaica and their U.S. counterparts “have sold narcotics, including marijuana and crack cocaine, at Coke’s direction.” It says that cooperators have recorded phone conversations with Coke about shipments of drugs and handguns.

At his extradition hearing at a military outpost in Kingston, the Caribbean nation’s capital, Coke expressed confidence that he will be found innocent and allowed to return to his family in Jamaica.

Coke faces a maximum sentence of life in prison in the United States if convicted.

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From BlackVoices.com:
Instead of trying to live out her days being a pillar of her community, Ola Mae Agee, 87, opted to ‘enrich’ her environment by selling crack-cocaine. The octogenarian was busted last Thursday on video for trying to sell the illegal drugs to an undercover officer.

The senior was arrested after she sold a $20 piece of crack to the officer back on April 30th. Escambia County, Fla., investigators caught the entire drug sale on a surveillance tape. The video reveals how the officer knocked on Agee’s back door. The retired janitor is then seen letting the undercover cop into her home and walking him through various rooms until she gets to a sofa. The woman is then seen rummaging through the piece of furniture until she finds the crack-cocaine. The deputy is seen doling out $20 and some additional change to the elderly woman, she then in turn, hands over the crack.

Click here to read more.

Click here to view photos:

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MEXICO CITY — After 40 years, the United States’ war on drugs has cost $1 trillion and hundreds of thousands of lives, and for what? Drug use is rampant and violence even more brutal and widespread.

Even U.S. drug czar Gil Kerlikowske concedes the strategy hasn’t worked.

“In the grand scheme, it has not been successful,” Kerlikowske told The Associated Press. “Forty years later, the concern about drugs and drug problems is, if anything, magnified, intensified.”

This week President Obama promised to “reduce drug use and the great damage it causes” with a new national policy that he said treats drug use more as a public health issue and focuses on prevention and treatment.

Nevertheless, his administration has increased spending on interdiction and law enforcement to record levels both in dollars and in percentage terms; this year, they account for $10 billion of his $15.5 billion drug-control budget.

Kerlikowske, who coordinates all federal anti-drug policies, says it will take time for the spending to match the rhetoric.

“Nothing happens overnight,” he said. “We’ve never worked the drug problem holistically. We’ll arrest the drug dealer, but we leave the addiction.”

His predecessor, John P. Walters, takes issue with that.

Walters insists society would be far worse today if there had been no War on Drugs. Drug abuse peaked nationally in 1979 and, despite fluctuations, remains below those levels, he says. Judging the drug war is complicated: Records indicate marijuana and prescription drug abuse are climbing, while cocaine use is way down. Seizures are up, but so is availability.

“To say that all the things that have been done in the war on drugs haven’t made any difference is ridiculous,” Walters said. “It destroys everything we’ve done. It’s saying all the people involved in law enforcment, treatment and prevention have been wasting their time. It’s saying all these people’s work is misguided.”

___

In 1970, hippies were smoking pot and dropping acid. Soldiers were coming home from Vietnam hooked on heroin. Embattled President Richard M. Nixon seized on a new war he thought he could win.

“This nation faces a major crisis in terms of the increasing use of drugs, particularly among our young people,” Nixon said as he signed the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act. The following year, he said: “Public enemy No. 1 in the United States is drug abuse. In order to fight and defeat this enemy, it is necessary to wage a new, all-out offensive.”

His first drug-fighting budget was $100 million. Now it’s $15.1 billion, 31 times Nixon’s amount even when adjusted for inflation.

Using Freedom of Information Act requests, archival records, federal budgets and dozens of interviews with leaders and analysts, the AP tracked where that money went, and found that the United States repeatedly increased budgets for programs that did little to stop the flow of drugs. In 40 years, taxpayers spent more than:

- $20 billion to fight the drug gangs in their home countries. In Colombia, for example, the United States spent more than $6 billion, while coca cultivation increased and trafficking moved to Mexico – and the violence along with it.

- $33 billion in marketing “Just Say No”-style messages to America’s youth and other prevention programs. High school students report the same rates of illegal drug use as they did in 1970, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says drug overdoses have “risen steadily” since the early 1970s to more than 20,000 last year.

- $49 billion for law enforcement along America’s borders to cut off the flow of illegal drugs. This year, 25 million Americans will snort, swallow, inject and smoke illicit drugs, about 10 million more than in 1970, with the bulk of those drugs imported from Mexico.

- $121 billion to arrest more than 37 million nonviolent drug offenders, about 10 million of them for possession of marijuana. Studies show that jail time tends to increase drug abuse.

- $450 billion to lock those people up in federal prisons alone. Last year, half of all federal prisoners in the U.S. were serving sentences for drug offenses.

At the same time, drug abuse is costing the nation in other ways. The Justice Department estimates the consequences of drug abuse – “an overburdened justice system, a strained health care system, lost productivity, and environmental destruction” – cost the United States $215 billion a year.

Harvard University economist Jeffrey Miron says the only sure thing taxpayers get for more spending on police and soldiers is more homicides.

“Current policy is not having an effect of reducing drug use,” Miron said, “but it’s costing the public a fortune.”

___

From the beginning, lawmakers debated fiercely whether law enforcement – no matter how well funded and well trained – could ever defeat the drug problem.

Then-Alaska Sen. Mike Gravel, who had his doubts, has since watched his worst fears come to pass.

“Look what happened. It’s an ongoing tragedy that has cost us a trillion dollars. It has loaded our jails and it has destabilized countries like Mexico and Colombia,” he said.

In 1970, proponents said beefed-up law enforcement could effectively seal the southern U.S. border and stop drugs from coming in. Since then, the U.S. used patrols, checkpoints, sniffer dogs, cameras, motion detectors, heat sensors, drone aircraft – and even put up more than 1,000 miles of steel beam, concrete walls and heavy mesh stretching from California to Texas.

None of that has stopped the drugs. The Office of National Drug Control Policy says about 330 tons of cocaine, 20 tons of heroin and 110 tons of methamphetamine are sold in the United States every year – almost all of it brought in across the borders. Even more marijuana is sold, but it’s hard to know how much of that is grown domestically, including vast fields run by Mexican drug cartels in U.S. national parks.

The dealers who are caught have overwhelmed justice systems in the United States and elsewhere. U.S. prosecutors declined to file charges in 7,482 drug cases last year, most because they simply didn’t have the time. That’s about one out of every four drug cases.

The United States has in recent years rounded up thousands of suspected associates of Mexican drug gangs, then turned some of the cases over to local prosecutors who can’t make the charges stick for lack of evidence. The suspects are then sometimes released, deported or acquitted. The U.S. Justice Department doesn’t even keep track of what happens to all of them.

In Mexico, traffickers exploit a broken justice system. Investigators often fail to collect convincing evidence – and are sometimes assassinated when they do. Confessions are beaten out of suspects by frustrated, underpaid police. Judges who no longer turn a blind eye to such abuse release the suspects in exasperation.

In prison, in the U.S. or Mexico, traffickers continue to operate, ordering assassinations and arranging distribution of their product even from solitary confinement in Texas and California. In Mexico, prisoners can sometimes even buy their way out.

The violence spans Mexico. In Ciudad Juarez, the epicenter of drug violence in Mexico, 2,600 people were killed last year in cartel-related violence, making the city of 1 million across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas, one of the world’s deadliest. Not a single person was prosecuted for homicide related to organized crime.

And then there’s the money.

The $320 billion annual global drug industry now accounts for 1 percent of all commerce on the planet.

A full 10 percent of Mexico’s economy is built on drug proceeds – $25 billion smuggled in from the United States every year, of which 25 cents of each $100 smuggled is seized at the border. Thus there’s no incentive for the kind of financial reform that could tame the cartels.

“For every drug dealer you put in jail or kill, there’s a line up to replace him because the money is just so good,” says Walter McCay, who heads the nonprofit Center for Professional Police Certification in Mexico City.

McCay is one of the 13,000 members of Medford, Mass.-based Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, a group of cops, judges, prosecutors, prison wardens and others who want to legalize and regulate all drugs.

A decade ago, no politician who wanted to keep his job would breathe a word about legalization, but a consensus is growing across the country that at least marijuana will someday be regulated and sold like tobacco and alcohol.

California voters decide in November whether to legalize marijuana, and South Dakota will vote this fall on whether to allow medical uses of marijuana, already permitted in California and 13 other states. The Obama administration says it won’t target marijuana dispensaries if they comply with state laws.

___

Mexican President Felipe Calderon says if America wants to fix the drug problem, it needs to do something about Americans’ unquenching thirst for illegal drugs.

Kerlikowske agrees, and Obama has committed to doing just that.

And yet both countries continue to spend the bulk of their drug budgets on law enforcement rather than treatment and prevention.

“President Obama’s newly released drug war budget is essentially the same as Bush’s, with roughly twice as much money going to the criminal justice system as to treatment and prevention,” said Bill Piper, director of national affairs for the nonprofit Drug Policy Alliance. “This despite Obama’s statements on the campaign trail that drug use should be treated as a health issue, not a criminal justice issue.”

Obama is requesting a record $15.5 billion for the drug war for 2011, about two thirds of it for law enforcement at the front lines of the battle: police, military and border patrol agents struggling to seize drugs and arrest traffickers and users.

About $5.6 billion would be spent on prevention and treatment.

“For the first time ever, the nation has before it an administration that views the drug issue first and foremost through the lens of the public health mandate,” said economist and drug policy expert John Carnevale, who served three administrations and four drug czars. “Yet … it appears that this historic policy stride has some problems with its supporting budget.”

Carnevale said the administration continues to substantially over-allocate funds to areas that research shows are least effective – interdiction and source-country programs – while under-allocating funds for treatment and prevention.

Kerlikowske, who wishes people would stop calling it a “war” on drugs, frequently talks about one of the most valuable tools they’ve found, in which doctors screen for drug abuse during routine medical examinations. That program would get a mere $7.2 million under Obama’s budget.

“People will say that’s not enough. They’ll say the drug budget hasn’t shifted as much as it should have, and granted I don’t disagree with that,” Kerlikowske said. “We would like to do more in that direction.”

Fifteen years ago, when the government began telling doctors to ask their patients about their drug use during routine medical exams, it described the program as one of the most proven ways to intervene early with would-be addicts.

“Nothing happens overnight,” Kerlikowske said.

___

Until 100 years ago, drugs were simply a commodity. Then Western cultural shifts made them immoral and deviant, according to London School of Economics professor Fernanda Mena.

Religious movements led the crusades against drugs: In 1904, an Episcopal bishop returning from a mission in the Far East argued for banning opium after observing “the natives’ moral degeneration.” In 1914, The New York Times reported that cocaine caused blacks to commit “violent crimes,” and that it made them resistant to police bullets. In the decades that followed, Mena said, drugs became synonymous with evil.

Nixon drew on those emotions when he pressed for his War on Drugs.

“Narcotics addiction is a problem which afflicts both the body and the soul of America,” he said in a special 1971 message to Congress. “It comes quietly into homes and destroys children, it moves into neighborhoods and breaks the fiber of community which makes neighbors. We must try to better understand the confusion and disillusion and despair that bring people, particularly young people, to the use of narcotics and dangerous drugs.”

Just a few years later, a young Barack Obama was one of those young users, a teenager smoking pot and trying “a little blow when you could afford it,” as he wrote in “Dreams From My Father.” When asked during his campaign if he had inhaled the pot, he replied: “That was the point.”

So why persist with costly programs that don’t work?

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, sitting down with the AP at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City, paused for a moment at the question.

“Look,” she says, starting slowly. “This is something that is worth fighting for because drug addiction is about fighting for somebody’s life, a young child’s life, a teenager’s life, their ability to be a successful and productive adult.

“If you think about it in those terms, that they are fighting for lives – and in Mexico they are literally fighting for lives as well from the violence standpoint – you realize the stakes are too high to let go.”

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Almost a decade after he was indicted, a Mexican politician was hauled to New York this week to face charges he laundered drug money through Lehman Brothers.

Mario Ernest Villanueva Madrid collected up to $500,000 for each cocaine shipment the Juarez cartel smuggled through Quintana Roo state, which includes Cancun, the feds say.

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All over Jamaica people are talking about the President and the Prime Minister. One of them was elected by the people of Jamaica, the other is the De Facto leader of one of Kingston’s most notorious neighborhoods.

Christopher “Dudus” Coke is not an elected official, yet he is known as the President. He presides over Tivoli Gardens, an enclave in Jamaica known as a garrison. To some he is a community leader, to others he is gangster. Unfortunately for Dudus, the US government believes he is a gangster and has extradited him to the US on guns and drug trafficking charges.

Despite the close relationship between the US and Jamaica, Jamaican Prime Minister, Bruce Golding has refused to extradite Coke to the US. Golding claims that the US illegally wire tapped Coke.

Still it is doubtful that that is the reason that Golding is refusing to extradite Coke. Golding represents the Jamaican Labour Party, which Coke and his Garrison of Tivoli Gardens strongly support.

The connection between politics and gangsters in Jamaica is hardly a new one. Dudus’s father, Lester Coke, also known as Jim Brown was not only JLP leader and Prime Minister, Edward Seaga’s bodyguard and representative in Tivoli Gardens, but also the leader of the notorious Jamaican Shower Posse.

The opposition, People’s National Party, has also been connected too several notorious gangsters and have their own Garrison communities in which they receive extensive support.

In Jamaica “Dons,” named after mafia leaders, control garrison communities. They previously served as liaisons between the political parties and the communities they lived in. Originally the Dons would give out jobs and housing to political supporters in their district. As the 80s came, Dons realized they could make more money facilitating cocaine to the US from Colombia and the Shower and Spangler posses became international drug trafficking organizations, complete with all the violence and money that cocaine brings.

A great deal of Golding’s support comes from the Tivoli Gardens neighborhood, where Dudus is both worshipped and feared. Dudus regularly puts on parties and sporting events for his community. Dudus also receives construction contracts for the government, which brings jobs into the community. Dudus in not unlike John Gotti, a hero in his own community and people but a threat to the police and other communities.

Dudus also receives a good deal of government contracts through his company Incomparable Enterprise Limited.

Jamaica is hardly the only country where politics and criminality meet. Panamanian President, Manuel Noriega, was heavily involved in the cocaine trade and the brother of Afghan President, Karzai is a heroin dealer and warlord.

While in Jamaica, I heard rumors that several top level officials, including Prime Minister, Bruce Golding were going to be indicted. Also there were reports several members of the JLP had paid a lot of money to a lobbyist in order to handle the Dudus matter in the US.

The Dudus matter has put a longstanding Jamaican secret out in the open. The connections between Dons and politicians and the power that the Dons have in Jamaica is well known in Jamaica but rarely spoken about in the international media.

Criminals and corrupt politicians have gone hand in hand since the beginning of civilization. Often times, the USA has taken advantage of this situation. During the 80’s the CIA used drug dealers to help fund the Contras who were waging a civil war in Nicaragua. Cecil Connor, a member of the Shower Posse along with Dudus’s father Lester “Jim Brown” Coke, claimed that he was trained by the CIA to fight for the JLP against their political rivals the PNP. In Gary Webb’s book, “The Dark Alliance,” he claims that the CIA was also shipping guns to JLP thugs, predecessors to Dudus’s Presidential Clique.

While the US has indicted Dudus for gun trafficking, the Jamaican Prime minister has blamed the USA for the many guns that enter Jamaica and are used in gang warfare.

The US has every right to extradite Dudus. While some may say he is good, righteous person who takes care of his community, he is widely known as a criminal and the US has sufficient evidence to extradite him. Still Dudus can be extradited to the US for gun trafficking, shouldn’t Jamaica be able to extradite CIA agents who brought guns into Jamaica in the 70s and 80s?

Still if Dudus is extradited and convicted, another Don will take his place, most likely after a violent conflict. If The US was really serious about stopping gun and drug trafficking in Jamaica, it should consider changing its gun laws and its policies on drugs.

In Jamaica and other poor countries, drugs are often one of the biggest sources of income. This often makes criminals more powerful than politicians, which leads to gangsters like Dudus holding enormous power in their own countries. In order to stop Dons and gangsters from getting into power the world community must find ways to make sure that Third World economies are not dependent on drugs and that US made guns are not illegally shipped into the hands of criminals.

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Detroit Police said a major drug bust Monday netted 14 kilos of cocaine and $200,000 in cash.

The department said this morning it will release more details about the seizure at a 1 p.m. news conference with Chief Warren Evans today at Detroit Police headquarters at 1300 Beaubien.

Police are calling the cocaine confiscation one of the city’s largest drug busts in decades. Over the weekend, a related bust netted another 5 kilos.

Two Detroit police officers approached a man early Saturday morning only to ask him if he had heard two gunshots.

But they wound up arresting him after finding about $2 million in cocaine in an open duffel bag on the front seat of his car that reeked of burnt marijuana, said police spokesman John Roach.

Here is what police said happened:

The officers, who were part of the 8th Precinct’s Special Operation Unit, were patrolling in the area of Grandview and West 8 Mile at 1 a.m. when they heard two gunshots coming from near the Splash Bar & Grill at 24587 W. Eight Mile.

The officers pulled into the bar’s parking lot and shined a spotlight around as they investigated. They then saw a man get out of a silver 2004 Infiniti.

As the officers got out of their car to approach him, he began to walk toward them. The officers smelled marijuana. They walked to the car and on the front seat was a duffel bag filled with cocaine, with an estimated street value of $2 million.

“Having this quantity of cocaine off the streets is significant not just for the seizure, but for the shootings and other drug-related issues that likely will be prevented as a result,” Detroit Police Chief Warren Evans said.

The man, described as a 42-year-old Ypsilanti resident, is expected to be arraigned today or Monday. It was the second major drug bust in recent days. Earlier this week, Detroit police seized $662,000 in suspected drug money from a hotel in southwest Detroit.

(CNN) — A reputed Mexican drug lord with a $5 million reward on his head has been named to Forbes magazine’s list of the most powerful people in the world.

Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, who authorities say heads the powerful Sinaloa Cartel, is believed to have shipped $6 billion to $19 billion in cocaine to the United States over the past eight years, Forbes says in the listing.

The magazine ranks him No. 41, ahead of Russian President Dmitry Medvedev (No. 43), Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (46), French President Nicolas Sarkozy (56) and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez (67). Guzman also bested U.S. Chief Justice John Roberts (49) and entertainer Oprah Winfrey (45) on the list, released Wednesday.

The designation marks the second time Forbes has named Guzman to one of its lists. Forbes classified him in March as one of the wealthiest people in the world, ranking him No. 701 with a net worth of $1 billion.

Guzman was not the first narcotrafficker named to the Forbes most-wealthy list. The magazine placed Colombian cocaine king Pablo Escobar on the list in 1989.

Guzman, known as “El Chapo” or “Shorty,” is under indictment in Illinois on cocaine trafficking charges. U.S. officials have offered a $5 million reward for information leading to his capture.

He was arrested in 1993 on homicide and drug charges but escaped in 2001, reportedly by bribing prison guards to smuggle him out in a laundry truck. A Mexican federal investigation led to the arrest of more than 70 prison officials.

Forbes notes that Guzman’s fortune was self-made. His age is given as 52 or 54.

The Sinaloa Cartel, named after the Mexican Pacific Coast state where the gang was formed, is one of the most powerful drug-trafficking groups in the nation.