The wife of notorious Mexican cartel boss Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán was relocated to a California halfway house this week ahead of her release from custody.
Emma Coronel Aispuro, 33, was moved from a federal prison in Texas to a facility in Long Beach, KABC reported, citing an official with the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
Coronel, a former teenage beauty queen, was sentenced to three years behind bars in November 2021 after pleading guilty to drug trafficking and money laundering conspiracy charges related to her husband’s murderous Sinaloa cartel
She was also ordered to pay almost $1.5 million in fines.
Months before her own sentencing, the San Francisco-born narco queen was a regular fixture at Guzmán’s Brooklyn federal trial — even famously laughing when one of her much-older hubby’s mistresses broke down in tears.
Coronel is set to be released in mid-September.
In the meantime, she’ll be in community confinement at a facility overseen by Long Beach Residential Reentry Management in California, according to CBS News. She was transferred there May 30 from FMC Carswell in Texas.
It is normal for well-behaved inmates to be moved to a “residential reentry program,” or halfway house, up to six months before their release, a BOP official told KABC.
Guzmán, once the world’s most feared drug lord, was sentenced to life in prison in 2019.
He remains incarcerated at a supermax facility in Florence, Colorado.
The kingpin, now 66, married Coronel when she was a teenager.
The couple share pre-teen twin daughters, Emali Guadalupe and Maria Joaquina.
In January, Guzmán begged Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador to get him home, citing “cruel and unfair” conditions in the US prison.
Earlier that month, the Sinaloa leadership was dealt a serious blow when Guzmán’s son Ovidio Guzmán Lopez was arrested ahead of a visit to Mexico from President Biden.
The high-profile capture sparked a wave of violence in northwestern Mexico, including reports of gunfire at the Culiacán International Airport.
This article was originally posted here