The leader of Mexico's most infamous drug cartel pleaded guilty in a US court yesterday to charges of running a criminal enterprise and money laundering.
Javier Arellano Felix (37) will be sentenced to life imprisonment without parole in November and has agreed to forfeit $50 million, prosecutors said. The plea bargain with US authorities will spare him the death penalty.
Prosecutors decided at the weekend not to seek the death penalty against him, and charges of murder, drug trafficking and racketeering were dismissed yesterday as part of the plea.
In San Diego federal court, Felix admitted his Tijuana-based organisation used violence to run a business that smuggled cocaine and marijuana into the United States.
One of his top lieutenants, Manuel Arturo Villareal-Heredia, pleaded guilty to racketeering and conspiring to invest illicit drug profits and will be sentenced to 30 years in prison, authorities said.
Felix is the youngest of five brothers, who prosecutors say have controlled the Arellano Felix Organization for 15 years.
He was arrested by the US Coast Guard on a fishing boat in international waters in August 2006 and has been in custody ever since in San Diego.
Two weeks ago, his brother, Benjamin Arellano Felix, was sentenced in Mexico to 22 years in prison for drug trafficking and organised crime.
Of the other three brothers, one was killed in a shoot-out with police in 2002, another was extradited to the United States last year after serving a jail term in Mexico, and a third is at large.