Ismael "El Mayo" Zambada, the co-founder of Mexico's Sinaloa Cartel, has told a U.S. federal court he won't fight the life sentence he is about to receive, but he would rather not spend his final years in the same "supermax" prison that holds his old partner, Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán.
In a sentencing memorandum filed Monday with U.S. District Judge Brian Cogan in Brooklyn, defense attorney Frank A. Perez wrote that Zambada accepts a mandatory life term and is not asking for anything outside the law. What the defense wants instead is placement.
It is asking Cogan to recommend that the aging kingpin serve his time at a federal prison medical center rather than the Administrative Maximum facility in Florence, Colorado, the isolation-heavy lockup often called the "Alcatraz of the Rockies." The Bureau of Prisons runs several dedicated medical centers, including ones in Butner, North Carolina, and Springfield, Missouri, that are equipped for inmates with serious health needs.
Perez argued that Zambada, who is in his 70s and dealing with age-related illness, took a fundamentally different path than Guzmán and should not end up in identical conditions. Where El Chapo forced an 11-week trial in 2019, roughly 30 cooperating witnesses, heavy security costs and snarled traffic around the Brooklyn courthouse, Zambada waived his right to a trial and pleaded guilty, sparing witnesses and the government that ordeal. Sending him to the same draconian supermax as Guzmán, the filing contends, would ignore that he chose to resolve the case. The defense also said it has gathered dozens of character-reference letters from people who grew up in Zambada's region of Mexico.
Prosecutors in the Eastern District of New York have until July 13 to respond in writing. The sentencing hearing itself is set for July 20 in a Brooklyn courtroom, before the same judge who sentenced both Guzmán and former Mexican security chief Genaro García Luna. It has already slipped several times, first from January, then April, as both sides assembled their filings.
Zambada, one of the last founders of the Sinaloa Cartel to evade capture for decades, was taken into U.S. custody in July 2024 after landing at an airfield near El Paso, Texas, aboard a private plane alongside Joaquín Guzmán López, one of El Chapo's sons. Zambada has long said he was ambushed, drugged and flown across the border against his will. Guzmán López has not denied that account, in his own guilty plea, he broadly acknowledged orchestrating the operation that delivered Zambada into American hands.
After first pleading not guilty, Zambada reversed course in August 2025 and admitted to running one of the world's largest trafficking organizations. Speaking through an interpreter, he traced his criminal life back to 1969 and took responsibility for decades of cocaine, heroin and fentanyl flowing north, apologizing to those harmed by the cartel's drugs and violence.
As part of the deal, the Justice Department agreed not to pursue the death penalty, and Zambada agreed to a $15 billion forfeiture, leaving a life sentence as the only realistic outcome. Attorney General Pam Bondi said at the time that he would "die in a U.S. federal prison where he belongs."
His capture set off a bloody power struggle inside the cartel between his loyalists, known as La Mayiza or "Los Mayos," and "Los Chapitos," the faction run by El Chapo's sons. The fighting has convulsed the state of Sinaloa, especially Culiacán, for months. In his filing, Perez repeated Zambada's appeal for his home state to stay calm and avoid more bloodshed.
Barring a surprise, Cogan will hand down a life sentence on July 20. After that, the only open question is the one Zambada's lawyers are still fighting over: not how long he will be locked up, but where.
