Felipe Cabrera Sarabia in custody at the federal organized crime investigations headquarters in Mexico City, on Dec. 26, 2011.
In asking for leniency, Cabrera’s attorneys noted that in the years before his arrest, Cabrera had become a “pillar of support” for his rural community in Mexico’s Durango region, overseeing the buying and selling of cattle, helping bring fresh water service to his village and enlisting engineers to build a roadway system linking area towns.In handing down the sentence of 230 months, however, U.S.
The charges alleged the Sinaloa cartel used jumbo jets, submarines and tunnels to smuggle massive amounts of drugs into the U.S., much of which was later distributed in wholesale quantities in Chicago. The cartel members then laundered billions of dollars in proceeds back to Mexico, according to the charges.who rose from the obscurity of the Little Village neighborhood