El Chapo

January 8, 2016, Los Mochis, Sinaloa. Joaquín Archivaldo Guzmán Loera, fifty-eight, the leader of the Sinaloa Cartel and the most-wanted drug trafficker in the world, is captured by Mexican Marines after a six-hour gun battle. He has escaped from Mexican federal prison twice — first in 2001, smuggled out in a laundry basket; second in July 2015, through a 1.5-kilometre tunnel constructed from the shower of his maximum-security cell. He is extradited to the United States on January 19, 2017 — the day before the Donald Trump inauguration. He is convicted on February 12, 2019, on all ten federal counts in the Eastern District of New York and sentenced on July 17, 2019 to life without parole plus thirty years. He is currently incarcerated at the U.S. Penitentiary in Florence, Colorado.

Elliot Cranmer's biography opens earlier — in La Tuna, Sinaloa, where Guzmán was born around 1957, the eldest of seven children of a cattle rancher who also grew opium poppies — and follows the arc through the youthful apprenticeship to Pedro Avilés Pérez, the long Guadalajara cartel years under Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, the post-1989 split of the Mexican drug-trafficking organisations, the long Sinaloa Cartel rise of the 1990s and 2000s, the 1993 Guadalajara Cardinal Posadas Ocampo killing, the 2001 first prison escape, the long ten-year fugitive decade, the 2014 first capture and the 2015 second escape, the 2016 second capture and the long extradition, the Brooklyn federal trial of 2018-19, and the Florence ADX years.

What emerges is a portrait of the Sinaloan opium-poppy grower's son whose forty-year drug-trafficking organisation ran the largest narcotics operation in the Western Hemisphere — and the two-decade U.S.-Mexico federal effort that has finally put him in a windowless cell.