Featured image credit: PA Images
The world's biggest cocaine dealer and drug kingpin was sentenced to 35 years in a U.S. prison yesterday after engaging in a multi-million-dollar scheme to produce hundreds of tons of cocaine and traffic it throughout the world.
Columbian Daniel Barrera Barrera, more famously known as 'El Loco' or 'The Madman', was sentenced in Manhattan after pleading guilty to a number of narcotic-related charges and to having conspired to engage in money laundering, the Daily Mail reported.
The Judge Gregory Woods rejected the claim of the 44-year-old kingpin's defence that the sentenced should be mitigated after taking into consideration that he had supported the investigation. 'Loco' had called on other drug dealers to surrender and released those who had been kidnapped.
The drug lord was also ordered to pay a fine of $10million and ordered him to forfeit the same amount. Meaning he will pay $20million in total.
Image credit: PA Images
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According to prosecutors, Barrera transferred around 720 tons of cocaine from Colombia to the US, with the kingpin confessing to have distributed 400 tons of cocaine annually from 1998 to 2011.
The judge called Barrera a 'smart, talented, maybe even gifted man' who had gone from working as a farm hand to being at the helm of an international drug trafficking cartel.
"Simply put, the scope of the offense here is staggering," Judge Woods said.
The cocaine dealer had managed to evade trial in Colombia by burning off his own fingerprints and getting plastic surgery.
Prior to sentencing, Barrera told the court he hoped to see his grandchildren.
"I ask for my family's forgiveness for all the suffering I have caused them," he said.
In March 2010, Barrera was put on the US's list of most-wanted Colombian narcotics traffickers. With Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos calling Barrera 'the last of the great capos'.
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Words by James Dawson