As a chain gang of former business associates shuffled through the Brooklyn, New York courthouse, telling their astonishing tales (in trade for reductions on their own jail sentences, most in navy-blue prison scrubs), Chapo showed little emotion, occasionally stroking the naked folds in his face that a bandito mustache formerly rendered fearsome. During the many breaks in proceedings—impromptu conferences at the bench keyed to lowering the volume of high-pitched violence, sex, and corruption in this many decades’ saga (because otherwise, we’d all be sitting there forever)—Chapo’s eyes searched for Emma Coronel Aispuro, 29, the woman he calls his wife. Herself an American border-baby, she was generally alone in the stalls, playing with her silky jet Mary Magdelene hair as a crash course was taught on just what her man did for a living, from dreary disquisitions on dope-price differentials between L.A. and New York to the stuffing of plastic bananas with cocaine, to the pistoleros who allegedly blew people’s heads off on Chapo’s say-so—and all the other women he was living with, making love to, and rewarding with the gift of curve-carving liposuction. At trial, it became clear that in the macho, mustache-man world of drug-trafficking, Chapo had as much use for women, seducing them with saccharine forevers, then putting them to work in his stable—as buyers, as Blackberry-tapping go-betweens to preserve his anonymity on deals. Involving their family members because there’s no glue stronger than blood.