El Chapo’s wife, Emma Coronel Aispuro, sentenced to three years for helping run cartel
The beauty queen wife of infamous drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman was sentenced Tuesday to three years in prison for helping her husband run the murderous Sinaloa Cartel.
Emma Coronel Aispuro, 32, pleaded guilty in June to helping El Chapo run his operation. She was arrested in February at Dulles Airport near Washington, DC.
Coronel, a US-born former beauty queen, admitted to conspiracy to distribute thousands of kilos of heroin, coke, meth and marijuana while working for her husband in Mexico. She also pleaded guilty to money laundering.
Prosecutors wrote in their sentencing memo that she “attempted to aid and abet the goals” of her husband, whom she married on her 18th birthday in 2007, and cited her role in his notorious 2015 escape from a Mexican prison.
They claimed she bribed Mexican prison officials to take good care of El Chapo while he was behind bars and acted as a go-between for her husband and his henchmen, sneaking a GPS watch into the prison for him. Guzman is serving life behind bars in federal prison in Colorado, where he is locked in his cell for 23 hours a day.
Prosecutors had recommended Coronel serve only four years and pay a fine of almost $1.5 million, saying in the memo she had no criminal history and “swiftly accepted responsibility for her actions.”
“We’re pleased with the result and we’re pleased with the court recognizing her very minimal role,” Coronel’s lawyer, Jeffrey Lichtman, told The Post on Tuesday, adding that she agreed to the $1.5 million forfeiture.
Coronel made headlines in 2019 when she laughed in Brooklyn federal court as her husband’s mistress sobbed on the stand at his trial, and garnered attention for showing up to court in designer outfits.
