Former Honduras president Juan Orlando Hernández worked “hand in hand” with El Chapo’s Sinaloa Cartel and the notorious MS-13 gang to smuggle “massive amounts of cocaine” into the US for nearly a decade, the feds charged as his trial kicked off in New York court Wednesday.

Drug cartels fueled Hernández’s stint leading the Central American nation from 2014 through 2022 —showering him with millions in bribes, bankrolling his political campaigns and tampering with local elections to keep him in power, Manhattan federal prosecutor David Robles told jurors.

“This is a case about power. About corruption, about massive amounts of cocaine, and about the one man who stood at the center of all of it,” Robles said — before pointing at Hernández, who wore a suit and tie in his seat at the defense table in the packed courtroom.

“For years, he worked hand in hand with some of the most violent drug traffickers in Honduras to send ton after ton of cocaine to the US,” Robles charged during a 15-minute opening statement.

“He abused the power of his country, the military, the police, the justice system, to protect and support those traffickers.”

The former Honduras leader even brazenly bragged during his tenure that he would “shove the drugs right up the noses of the gringos,” the prosecutor said. His supposed drug-fighting efforts even earned him the praise of then-President Donald Trump.

Hernández, 55, has been held at a Brooklyn federal lockup since his 2022 arrest and faces a mandatory minimum sentence of 40 years in prison if convicted on drug and weapons smuggling charges.

His lawyer, Renato Stabile, ripped the government for basing its case on the testimony of “depraved people” and “psychopaths” who together are responsible for dozens of murders.

“You will hear from government witnesses who have killed so many people,” Stabile said in his opening statement.

“The number of people they have killed is so high, that the number of people they have killed is probably more than everyone here in this courtroom right now,” Stabile added. “When they get up on the witness stand, please think of that.”

Stabile also tried to get ahead of photos expected to be introduced during the two- to three-week trial showing Hernández posing with notorious drug smugglers.

A crowd of people — sometimes including drug dealers — often followed Hernández around during his time as president and asked for face time with him, the attorney said.

“The evidence will show that everywhere he goes, people want photos of him, even drug dealers,” Stabile said.

The lawyer also argued that the amount of cocaine shipped through Honduras to the US actually decreased during Hernández’s time in power and that the ex-president had pushed through key changes — including making a new extradition deal with US authorities — that upset the cartels.

“Mr. Hernández does not sit down with drug dealers, he stands up to drug dealers,” Stabile said, adding that the jury will hear later on in the trial about “assassination plots” made against Hernandez by cartels.

US authorities at times touted a close relationship with Hernández in the fight against drug smuggling during his tenure as president.

“President Hernandez is working with the United States very closely,” Trump said of Hernández in a 2019 speech.

“You know what’s going on our southern border,” Trump added at the time. “And we’re winning after years and years of losing. We’re stopping drugs at a level that has never happened.”

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The teen granddaughter of jailed drug kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman is partying her way through Scotland — and even joined a hunt for the elusive Loch Ness Monster, according to reports.

Frida Sofia Guzman Munoz, 18, has been making the rounds during her Scottish jaunt, posting pics at a Johnny Walker whiskey tasting, checking out the view from Edinburgh Castle — and hitting the Highlands for a boat trip on Loch Ness to look for its legendary resident, The Herald reported Monday.

The teenager is the daughter of Edgar Guzman Lopez, the drug lord’s son who was gunned down by rival narcos in a Mexican parking lot in 2008, the outlet said.

Guzman, who was extradited to the US, is now serving a life sentence at the ADX Florence Supermax prison in Colorado — periodically griping about conditions there through his lawyers.

Once head of the Sinaloa Drug Cartel in Mexico, Guzman once boasted to killing as many as 3,000 people during his reign of terror atop the country’s illicit drug trade.

First jailed in 2015, he managed to tunnel out to freedom — only to be recaptured the next year and extradited to the US in 2017.

While on the run, authorities said he left behind a trail of empty whiskey bottles at various hideouts and had a particular affinity for Buchanan’s Scotch Whiskey, an 18-year-old blended spirit.

Munoz, who seems to prefer Johnny Walker, wasn’t the first Chapo relative caught living it up while he sits behind bars.

Last year his wife, Emma Coronel Aispuro, was snapped partying it up in the VIP section of a Los Angeles nightclub after getting an early release from federal prison where she had been doing time on a drug-trafficking conviction.

Munoz also made the news before her recent high-profile trip to Scotland, including by launching a modeling and singing career in 2022 at the tender age of 16.

Her current vacation has also taken her to the Louvre Museum and Versailles in Paris and, and Buckingham Palace and the Tower of London in England, according to her Instagram page.

It was unclear if she stumbled on Nessie.

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On March 26, 1958,  Lana Turner returned to the Hotel Bel Air from the 30th Academy Awards. Nominated for “Peyton Place,” she lost the Best Actress Oscar to Joanne Woodward for her performance in “The Three Faces of Eve.” 

But as Casey Sherman writes in “A Murder in Hollywood: The Untold Story of Tinseltown’s Most Shocking Crime” (Sourcebooks), the drama was just beginning. 

After putting her daughter Cheryl to bed, Turner walked into her own room. “The room was dark, but she could see the figure of a man sitting on a chair by her bed. Lana’s heart sank,” writes Sherman. “She flicked on the light switch, and there he was, Johnny Stompanato,” Turner’s temperamental boyfriend. 

A fight ensued. Stompanato slapped Turner, punched her in the face and then produced a knife. “No one will ever want to look at that pretty face again!” he raged.

All the while, young Cheryl cowered in her room.

Sherman chronicles a crime that shocked show business and laid bare the abusive relationship between one of Hollywood’s brightest stars and a liar, a crook and a conman.

Born in Woodstock,Ill., in 1925, Stompanato was a former Marine turned gangster and worked for Mickey Cohen, head of the notorious Los Angeles-based Cohen crime family. 

In 1957, the pair hatched a plan to blackmail Turner, who was known for her taste in the wrong kind of men. “The two gangsters reverse engineered the classic honey trap scheme, using Stompanato as bait to lure Lana into bed,” Sherman writes. 

“But that was not enough. They would need to stage a threesome of some kind while Cohen’s men surreptitiously filmed the sex act. They would then use that fear, hanging it over the actress’s head while siphoning off loads of cash from her bank account.”

Using the alias “John Steele,” Stompanato bombarded Turner with calls, flowers and gifts. Later he charmed Cheryl by letting her ride his horse and new Thunderbird convertible. “Call me John,” he told her.

What Cohen hadn’t counted on was his right-hand man falling in love with Turner. “The game had changed. He was no longer interested in blackmail or sex movies.”

But over the course of a torrid year, Stompanato made Turner’s life a misery.

He abused her psychologically and routinely assaulted her. He also drugged her and took nude photographs of her while she slept.

It was only when her friend, actor Mickey Rooney, showed her an old copy of Confidential magazine, revealing “John Steele” was actually the gangster Johnny Stompanato that Turner tried to end the relationship.

But Stompanato wouldn’t accept it.

In 1957, for example, he became convinced Turner was having an affair with up-and-coming Scottish actor Sean Connery, whom she was working with in England on “Another Time, Another Place.” 

Although Turner tried to dissuade him, Stompanato used a fake passport to fly across the Atlantic to confront her and in a row, tried to strangle her. 

Two weeks later, Stompanato turned up on the movie set and threatened Connery with a gun. “Stompanato pulled the revolver out of his pocket and aimed it at the actor’s chest. Lana let out a bloodcurdling scream,” writes Sherman.

Connery didn’t cower. 

Instead, he grabbed Stompanato’s wrist, twisting it behind his back. As he dropped the firearm, Connery punched him hard in the face, knocking him over, his nose gushing with blood. 

Although banned from the studio, Stompanato showed up again days later, threatening to kill Turner. But thanks to a tip-off about Stompanato’s fake passport, police officers were there to escort him to the airport and on to a plane back to Los Angeles.

Still she couldn’t avoid him.

When filming ended Turner traveled to Copenhagen to make a connecting flight to Acapulco, Mexico where she intended to recuperate alone.

But waiting at the foot of the aircraft’s stairs, carrying a single yellow rose, was Stompanato. “Lana,” he said. “You know in your blood I’m never gonna let you go.”

Later, in Mexico, she awoke one night to find Stompanato at the foot of her bed, pointing a gun at her. “If you aren’t going to be with me, you’re not gonna be with anyone else,” he whispered. 

For her own safety, Turner resorted to playing the part of doting girlfriend. “She put her body on autopilot while her brain worked out some way to get rid of him forever,” writes Sherman.

The affair ended on April 4, 1958, a few weeks after Oscar night.

That evening, Stompanato turned up at Turner’s Beverly Hills home and threatened to kill her. 

When Turner tried to hide in her bedroom, Stompanato barged in. 

It was then that Cheryl Turner intervened, plunging an 8-inch butcher’s knife into the gangster’s stomach. “With one thrust, the blade penetrated his abdomen, slicing into one of his kidneys, striking a vertebra, and puncturing his aorta,” writes Sherman.

“Seconds later, Johnny Stompanato, gangster, conman, and abuser, was dead.”

When the case went to trial, Cheryl Turner was acquitted of murder, the jury ruling it was a “justifiable homicide” committed purely to save her mother’s life.

Stompanato was buried at LA’s Oakland Cemetery. Soon after, it was revealed his entire estate was worth just $274, which included $50 in cash.

As one newspaper headline eulogized: “He Lived Big and Died Little.” 

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