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Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada — co-founder of the Sinaloa Cartel — pleaded guilty Monday to leading a criminal enterprise and racketeering.
U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi announced the plea in Brooklyn, saying Zambada confessed to a lifetime of crime with the Sinaloa Cartel, labeled a foreign terrorist organization.
“Thanks to the relentless work of our prosecutors and our federal agents, El Mayo will spend the rest of his life behind bars. He will die in a U.S. federal prison where he belongs,” Bondi said. “His guilty plea brings us one step closer to achieving our goal of the elimination of the drug cartels and the transnational criminal organizations throughout this world that are flooding our country with drugs and human traffickers and homicides.”
Over the past three decades, Zambada and his accomplices made billions of dollars by importing poisonous drugs like fentanyl into the U.S., Bondi noted. Zambada founded the Sinaloa Cartel alongside Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán.
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While the cartel initially built their businesses through cocaine, it turned to heroin and fentanyl under Zambada’s leadership.
“They purchased fentanyl precursor chemicals from China. They made the drug in Mexico and flooded it into our communities, killing our kids,” Bondi said. “El Mayo also ensured that the Sinaloa Cartel operated and protected its drug trafficking business by relying on extreme violence.”
For instance, she explained the cartel used military-grade weapons and directed hitmen to kill their adversaries. The cartel also committed “gruesome” assassinations, kidnappings and horrible crimes to maintain discipline within the organization, she added.
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Zambada is also accused of paying bribes to government officials to control corrupt officials and officers, who in turn protected his workers and drug shipments as they traveled from Mexico to the U.S.
“El Mayo’s crimes have been so prolific that in the past two decades, he’s been indicted in no fewer than 16 federal courts across our country, 16 from Western District of Texas to Chicago to here in the Eastern District of New York. He escaped justice for decades,” Bondi said. “But under President Trump’s leadership, he has finally been brought to justice.”
The Department of Justice (DOJ) said Zambada had previously been charged by indictments filed in the Eastern District of New York, the Western District of Texas, the District of Columbia, the Northern District of Illinois, the Southern District of California and the Central District of California.
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Under the plea agreement, Zambada agreed to the transfer of the Western District of Texas indictment to the Eastern District of New York for plea and sentencing. With that agreement, he is also being held accountable in the Eastern District of New York for the crimes in both indictments. All other indictments will be dismissed when Zambada is sentenced on Jan. 13, 2026.
He faces a mandatory minimum term of life in prison for leading a continuing criminal enterprise and a maximum sentence of life in prison for racketeering.
He also agreed to a $15 billion forfeiture at sentencing.
Sought by American law enforcement for more than two decades, Zambada has been in U.S. custody since July 25, when he landed in a private plane at an airport outside El Paso in the company of another fugitive cartel leader, Joaquín Guzmán López, according to federal authorities.
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Zambada later said in a letter that he was forcibly kidnapped in Mexico and brought to the U.S. by Guzmán López, one of El Chapo’s sons.
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