THE story of notorious Mexican drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán has it all: dozens of murders, billions of dollars of drugs smuggled around the world, and two prison escapes that made Guzmán into something of a folklore hero.

His nickname may mean “shorty” in Spanish, but his reach was long. He headed the Sinaloa Cartel, the world’s biggest drug cartel, and is accused of spending 25 years smuggling over 155 tons of cocaine into the United States, more than anyone else.

Guzmán has been referred to as the “biggest drug lord of all time,” and the U.S. Government considered him “the godfather of the drug world” and strongly estimates he surpassed the influence and reach of Pablo Escobar.

Guzmán also stunned the world with his extraordinary escape from Altiplano maximum-security prison through an impeccably engineered mile-long tunnel in 2015. That was his second prison escape, the first being 13 years earlier, from Puente Grande prison, where he was smuggled out under sheets in a laundry cart.

He is said to have a net worth of roughly US$1 billion and was named the 10th richest man in Mexico in 2011.

The trial of the cartel boss, who was captured in early 2016, has begun in Brooklyn, New York after he was handed over by Mexican authorities. The trial is expected to last more than four months.

Experts say the U.S. Government has a very strong case against Guzmán and hopes to send him to a maximum-security prison for life.

His 29-year-old beauty queen wife, Emma Coronel Aispuro, has been banned from visiting him in prison and has instead attended many of his pre-trial hearings, waving and blowing him kisses.

Guzmán reveled in extravagance, one of his first employees testified Tuesday. His US$10 million beach house sat along the coast in Acapulco, Mexico. Moored offshore was the Chapito — the yacht he named after himself.

One of his ranches, in Mexico’s rural Guadalajara, had tennis courts and pools around the residence. There was even a zoo where guests could board a train to ride among crocodiles and panthers.

In the early 1990s, as Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the Mexican crime lord began succeeding as a drug-world entrepreneur, and he started making money — tons of it. There was so much cash that Guzmán used an expensive method to repatriate his profits: he flew the money back from the United States to Mexico in a fleet of private jets.

Testifying for the second day at Guzmán’s epic drug conspiracy trial, the former employee, Miguel Angel Martínez, turned from telling stories of his boss’s scrappy early years to describing the details of a lavish narco lifestyle. Martínez was placed on the stand by prosecutors seeking to paint Guzmán as a kingpin for the ages.

By his account, Guzmán would on a whim go to Macao to gamble or fly to Switzerland for a rejuvenation cure. He not only gave diamond-studded watches to his workers, but also once paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to commission a folk song about one of his slain friends.

“When I met Guzmán, he didn’t have a jet,” Martínez told a spellbound jury in Federal District Court in Brooklyn, New York. “But in the 1990s, he already had four jets. He had houses at every single beach. He had a ranch in every single state.”

All these spoils and more, Martínez said, were bought and paid for by the endless streams of illicit cash Guzmán was earning by shipping tons of cocaine and marijuana to Los Angeles through a wide variety of innovative methods: oil-tanker trains, trucks with secret compartments, cross-border tunnels and cans of jalapenos. Prosecutors say he earned a total of US$14 billion in his drug dealing career.

Some of the millions he made were hidden in stashes, one of which sat underneath a bed that could be raised off the floor on a hydraulic-powered lift.

Martínez testified that once a month, he personally wheeled a Samsonite suitcase, stuffed with at least US$10 million, into a Mexico City bank to place in Guzmán’s account.

Such high living slowly took its toll on Martínez, who said that he began to snort as much as four grams of cocaine a day — often, he admitted, from a gold spoon dipped into a little gold canister. He financed his habit with the US$1 million that Guzmán gave him every year. His addiction was destructive enough that eventually the drugs burned through his septum.

Guzmán, in contrast, emerged in court Tuesday as much less of a sybarite. He enjoyed his whiskey, beer and cognac, Martínez said, and seemed to have a particular fondness for women. But while Guzmán kept four or five mistresses throughout the 1990s, Martínez suggested he was not so much in love as he was jealous — often spying on his girlfriends with a wiretap.

Guzmán was born to a poor family in the rural community of La Tuna, Badiraguato, Sinaloa, Mexico. Sources disagree on the date of his birth, with some stating he was born in 1954 while others report he was born in 1957.

Few details are known of Guzmán’s upbringing. As a child, Guzmán sold oranges and dropped out of school in third grade to work with his father. Guzmán was regularly beaten by his father and he sometimes fled to his maternal grandmother’s house to escape such treatment. However, when he was home, Guzmán stood up to his father to protect his younger siblings from being beaten. His mother, however, was the “foundation of [his] emotional support.”

With few opportunities for employment in his hometown, he started growing poppies for opium, a common practice among local residents. At the age of 15, he cultivated his own marijuana plantation with four distant cousins, and with that, Guzmán supported his family financially.

It was during his adolescence that Guzmán earned the nickname El Chapo for his 1.68-meter stature and stocky physical appearance.

With help from his uncle Pedro Aviles Perez, one of the pioneers of Mexican drug trafficking, he left Badiraguato in his 20s and joined organized crime.

Since he joined the drug trade as a teenager, Chapo swiftly rose through the ranks, building an almost mythic reputation: first, as a cold pragmatist known to deliver a single shot to the head for any mistakes made in a shipment, and later, as he began to establish the Sinaloa cartel, as a Robin Hood-like figure who provided much-needed services in the Sinaloa mountains, funding everything from food and roads to medical relief.

By the time of his second escape from federal prison, he had become a figure entrenched in Mexican folklore.

In the 1970s, Guzmán first worked for the drug lord Hector Palma transporting drugs and overseeing their shipments from the Sierra Madre region to urban areas near the U.S.-Mexico border by aircraft.

In the early 1980s, he was introduced to Felix Gallardo, one of the major drug lords in Mexico at that time. He soon earned enough standing and began working for Gallardo directly.

Guzmán’s Sinaloa Cartel, at the time of his arrest, was the wealthiest and most powerful of Mexico’s drug cartels. It smuggles multi-ton cocaine shipments from Colombia through Mexico to the United States by air, sea and road, and has distribution cells throughout the United States. The cartel built a shipping and transport empire.

The organization has also been involved in the production, smuggling and distribution of Mexican methamphetamines, marijuana and heroin from Southeast Asia.

After Guzmán’s prison escape in 2001, nearly a decade after his initial arrest, he and close associate Ismael Zambada Garcia became Mexico’s undisputed top drug kingpins after the 2003 arrest of their rival Osiel Cardenas of the Gulf Cartel.

In 2007 Guzmán met Coronel, then 17, as she competed in a beauty contest. They married just days after she turned 18 years old. She is Guzmán’s third or fourth wife and gave birth to twin girls in 2011 in Los Angeles, California.

Coronel’s father and uncle have both been identified as high-ranking members of Guzmán’s gang, claims the family have denied.

In his testimony Tuesday, Martínez also offered a startling account of the death of Juan Jesús Posadas Ocampo, a beloved Roman Catholic cardinal, saying that his killers had slain him accidentally while gunning for Guzmán.

The hit took place in the middle of the Guadalajara airport, he recalled. Guzmán escaped the hail of bullets by fleeing past a baggage carousel and out onto the street — all while toting a suitcase filled with US$600,000 in cash.

Despite these grisly stories, Martínez claimed in court that Guzmán was not a violent man. In fact, he said, the only time he ever owned a gun, Guzmán told him to get rid of it. The kingpin was worried he might hurt himself.

But once, he said, he asked his boss why he was so enamored of hostility.

“I said to him, ‘Why kill people?’” Martínez told the jury. “And he answered me: ‘Either your mom’s going to cry or their mom’s going to cry.’”(SD-Agencies)