NEW YORK—In a scene U.S. authorities had dreamed of for decades, Mexican drug lord and escape artist Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman was hauled into an American courtroom Friday and then taken away to an ultra-secure jail that has held some of world’s most dangerous terrorists and mobsters.
Holding his unshackled hands behind his back, a dazed-looking Guzman quietly entered a not-guilty plea to drug trafficking and other charges at a Brooklyn courthouse ringed by squad cars, officers with assault rifles, and bomb-sniffing dogs.
“He’s a man known for a life of crime, violence, death and destruction, and now he'll have to answer for that,” said Robert Capers, the U.S. attorney in Brooklyn.
The court appearance came hours after Guzman’s Thursday night extradition from Mexico, where he had become something of a folk hero for two brazen prison escapes.
Guzman, who is in his 50s, was ordered held without bail in a special Manhattan jail unit where other high-risk inmates—including Mafia boss John Gotti and several close associates of Osama bin Laden—spent their time awaiting trial.
“It is difficult to imagine another person with a greater risk of fleeing prosecution,” prosecutors wrote in court papers.
