U.S. drug case shows European ambitions of Mexico's Sinaloa cartel

A U.S. prison sentence handed down to a Mexican attorney is the final chapter in a long investigation by federal authorities that shed light on the Sinaloa cartel's attempts to expand into the lucrative European market for cocaine.

A U.S. district judge in New Hampshire sentenced Rafael Celaya on Monday to 17 years in prison for his role along with eight co-defendants in a drug trafficking case involving Joaquín 'El Chapo' Guzmán, the Sinaloa cartel boss and world's most wanted drug lord.

Federal Bureau of Investigation agents told Reuters in an interview that informants and undercover operatives in the case were able to get unprecedented access to Guzmán by making contact with his first cousin and holding out an opportunity to ferry drugs to Europe.

While the Mexican cartels control much of the U.S. drug market, Colombian cartels have long been dominant in Europe, according to Europol, the law enforcement agency of the European Union.

"We said we had people in the U.S. and in Europe and that we had influence in a port in Spain and from there it really just took off," said an FBI agent who declined to be named because he is now undercover in a separate probe.

Since the arrests, Europol has not detected any increased presence of the Sinaloa cartel, agency spokeswoman Veronica Sánchez said, even as other Mexican cartels have made connections with Europe-based organized crime groups.

The FBI dubbed the investigation "Operation Dark Water" for the name of the town in Mexico - Agua Prieta - where the probe originated. It began in 2009 and ended in 2012 with Celaya and other defendant's arrested in Spain, where the cartel had arranged a multimillion-dollar shipment of more than 760 pounds (345 kg) of cocaine.

Celaya is the last defendant arrested in the case to be sentenced. Guzmán's cousin, Manuel Gutiérrez Guzmán, received a 16 year prison sentence in August. Joaquín Guzmán escaped in July from a maximum security prison in Mexico and is still at large. It was his second jail break in the past 15 years.

Celaya, now in jail, plans to appeal the sentence. His attorneys have argued that the government failed to show the cartel actually wanted him to be involved.

The undercover agents met more than a dozen times with cartel members abroad and in the United States, including meetings in New Hampshire. At one secretly recorded meeting in 2010, Celaya presented himself as a financial planner working for Guzmán and the cartel, who was adept at setting up shell companies and laundering illicit proceeds, prosecutors said.

SECRET HIDEOUT VISIT

Celaya was politically involved with Mexico's ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and sought a seat in federal Congress in 2012 in the state of Sonora but the party rejected his candidacy, according to documents from Mexico's Electoral Tribunal and confirmed by the president's office late on Monday. A spokesman for the PRI declined to comment.

The FBI investigation started with a confidential informant who offered to connect the Sinaloa cartel with an Italian organized crime group that claimed it had influence at U.S. and Spanish ports. But the representatives of the criminal group were actually FBI agents.

Joaquín Guzmán was so interested in the offer that he invited the FBI informant to meet with him personally at his hideout in the mountains of Sinaloa in 2010, the FBI agents said. After being moved between various hotels for several days, the informant was summoned to a small aircraft shuttling in supplies to Guzmán that landed on a clandestine airstrip carved into a field.

"He said it was scary," said the FBI agent who cultivated the source but asked to remain anonymous. "He said had very good manners and fed him and met with him for hours."

The European cocaine market was valued at US$33 billion, nearly on par with the US$37 billion U.S. market, according to a United Nations report in 2011. That was the most recent year for which such estimates are available. But a U.N. report this year said European demand for cocaine had remained stable while North American demand was shrinking.

The Council on Hemispheric Affairs, a U.S. nonprofit, has said connections are expanding between Italy's most powerful mafia the 'Ndrangheta families and Mexican cartels but those links are mainly to Sinaloa's rivals - the Zetas and the Gulf Cartel.

The arrests were all made before Guzmán's 2014 capture and escape this year and the agents and prosecutors involved did not detect much change in how the organization operated while its leader was briefly behind bars.

"This is a multinational business there is a management hierarchy," said New Hampshire U.S. Attorney Donald Feith who prosecuted the case. "I think like in most organizations, obviously when the CEO of a group is no longer there, there are some adjustments. But I don't think they've missed a beat."