Excerpt from Blood Gun Money by Ioan Grillo, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

The surreal stories of lovers and tunnels distracted from this colossal human cost. It may have been an exotic foreign villain in the dock, a man with such bizarre stories that there were already two Netflix dramas portraying him. But he was only one step away from those same wedge issues dividing America.

Many in the caravan at the southern border were fleeing mob violence. The same methods used to supply guns to gangs in American cities were used to arm cartels south of the Rio Grande. And the tragedy of innocent people being gunned down in senseless mass shootings across the United States was echoed in the tragedy of innocent people being murdered in equally senseless massacres in Latin America.

Guzmán was not only a drug trafficker. He had helped escalate the turf wars in Mexico into a brutal conflict that destabilized his country, part of the armed violence ripping havoc on Latin America and driving refugees to the U.S. border. He would be seen as a war criminal if it were to be understood as a war. And finally, after escaping from two "top security" Mexican prisons, he was facing justice that could put him away for life in an American supermax cell in the desert.


On my second day in court, Andrea Goldbarg, the assistant U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, unleashed a grueling seven-hour closing argument to convict Guzmán. She showed a PowerPoint presentation explaining Guzmán's trafficking empire, replayed wiretaps of him plotting with gangsters and guerrillas, and went over some of the juiciest anecdotes his cohorts had said on the stand. Though it was grisly stuff, the long explanation became tiresome. Not only the jury of New Yorkers seemed to be struggling to keep attention; even the eyes of El Chapo himself were wandering.

Until she brought out the guns.

Prosecutors carried in a trio of AK-47s that had been seized from the Sinaloa Cartel in Texas and laid them in the center of the courtroom. As she came to the finale of her arguments, she pointed to the guns and then to El Chapo.

I had been seeing a lot of guns that week. I had flown to the trial from Las Vegas, where I'd been at the SHOT Show, the biggest firearms trade show in the world. It's just three miles from the Las Vegas Village concert venue, the site of the biggest mass shooting in recent U.S. history. The same models of Kalashnikovs that were in the courtroom were also on display at the SHOT Show, alongside bigger weapons like .50-caliber rifles, grenade launchers, and machine guns mounted on helicopters.

Goldbarg, who was born in Argentina and grew up in the United States, had built a career as a prosecutor going after Latin American gangsters. But El Chapo's trial was by far the biggest of her career, and the stakes were enormous. It was the culmination of a decades-long campaign by law enforcement to nail the top dogs in the narco world, and he had been billed as the ultimate kingpin. It might have looked an easy win, convicting a drug lord as infamous as Guzmán. But open goals are high-pressure shots.

The AKs were a physical way to illustrate that the short-suited Guzmán, who was calm and smiling in the courtroom, really was a bloodthirsty warlord. It wasn't the first time that prosecutors had shown off weapons. Just before Christmas, they wheeled out an entire haul of forty Kalashnikov-style rifles seized in El Paso, Texas, and linked by a witness to El Chapo and his Sinaloa Cartel. Some were made in Romania, others in Serbia, but all had been sold retail in the United States, where they were acquired by the narcos.

There to talk about the rifles was Curtis Williams, an officer from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, known widely as the ATF, the U.S. federal agency that polices the gun industry and leads the fight against gun crime. Williams walked around the courtroom with one of the Kalashnikovs, snapping open the folding stock, which made a member of the jury flinch.

Excerpted from Blood Gun Money by Ioan Grillo. Copyright © 2021 by Ioan Grillo. Excerpted by permission of Bloomsbury USA. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.