Former Mexican drug kingpin Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada was sentenced in a U.S. court Monday to life in prison, seven years after his Sinaloa cartel co-founder Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán was handed the same sentence.

Zambada’s sentencing in Brooklyn federal court was the culmination of the U.S. government’s yearslong fight to bring the long-elusive cartel leader to justice. He was arrested in 2024 after he said he was kidnapped in Mexico and flown to Texas.

Zambada ordered torture and plotted murders as he and co-founder Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán grew the Sinaloa cartel into the world’s largest drug trafficking organization, federal prosecutors said. In indictments against Zambada in both New York and Texas, prosecutors alleged that Zambada and other Sinaloa cartel leaders were responsible for massive quantities of heroin, cocaine and fentanyl and other illegal drugs being distributed into the U.S.

A Justice Department statement said U.S. District Judge Brian Cogan sentenced him to life in prison in the federal court in Brooklyn without the possibility of parole for his role as a principal leader of a “continuing criminal enterprise” and for racketeering violations.

“Ismael Zambada Garcia spent nearly four decades poisoning American communities to make billions of dollars in profit and ordering the murders of anyone who stood in his way. Today, that chapter closes for good,” U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York Joseph Nocella, Jr. said in a statement.

Zambada was seen as the cartel’s strategist and dealmaker and was more involved in its day-to-day operations than the flamboyant Guzmán, who was convicted in 2019 and is serving a life sentence at the federal Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado.

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