Genaro García Luna, who once served as Mexico’s top law enforcement official, was sentenced on Wednesday to just over 38 years in prison following his conviction in New York last year on charges of taking bribes from the very drug cartels he was meant to be pursuing.
The stiff penalty of 460 months, handed down at a hearing in Federal District Court in Brooklyn, was the next and potentially final step in Mr. García Luna’s stunning downfall — one that saw him plummet from the heights of power as the architect of his country’s war on criminal mafias to a criminal himself who will now likely spend the rest of his life in an American federal prison.
During the hourlong hearing, Judge Brian M. Cogan, who oversaw Mr. García Luna’s monthlong corruption trial, scolded Mr. García Luna, 56, from the bench, saying that he had led a double life and that his career as Mexico’s top lawman was “a smoke screen” that allowed him to do harm to countless numbers of his countrymen.
Judge Cogan also compared Mr. García Luna, who served directly under two different Mexican presidents, to Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the notorious drug lord known as El Chapo, who was tried and convicted in the same courthouse five years ago and is now serving a life sentence.
“Aside from your pleasant demeanor and your articulateness, you have the same thuggishness as El Chapo,” Judge Cogan said. “It just manifests in a different way.”
Speaking in his own defense, Mr. García Luna maintained his innocence, telling the judge that he had “not committed any of these crimes.”
Those remarks echoed a letter he filed to Judge Cogan on Tuesday night in which he claimed that the government of Mexico and the witnesses who testified at his trial had offered “false information” against him because of the “frontal combat” he had engaged in against drug trafficking “where powerful political interests confront each other.”
Before Mr. García Luna was sentenced, President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico seemed to take issue with his claims that he has been attacked by government officials.
“Now, it turns out that he is a victim,” Ms. Sheinbaum told reporters on Wednesday morning when asked about Mr. García Luna’s letter. “It’s a lot of cynicism.”
For more than a decade — from 2001 to 2012 — Mr. García Luna reigned supreme in his country’s security establishment, so powerful that he was often referred to as the J. Edgar Hoover of Mexico. He served first as the leader of Mexico’s version of the F.B.I. and then became the country’s public security secretary, working with local authorities and top U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agents to take down drug lords.
But after hearing from a half-dozen turncoat narco-traffickers, the New York jurors who presided over his trial determined that he had led a double life and was shielding the Sinaloa cartel as it smuggled tons of drugs into the United States, nearly the entire time he was in office.
“The defendant enabled the cartel,” Saritha Komatireddy, one of the prosecutors, said. “He protected the cartel. He was the cartel.”
Mr. García Luna has vowed to appeal his conviction.
At his trial, the government’s witnesses included Sergio Villarreal Barragán, a former Mexican police officer who switched sides in the drug war and was known as El Grande. Mr. Villarreal Barragán testified that in the early 2000s Mr. García Luna showed up at a warehouse in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas to claim his cut of a drug deal: more than $14 million in cash.
Another prosecution witness was Jesús Zambada García, the brother of the recently captured Sinaloa cartel kingpin, Ismael Zambada García. Jesús Zambada testified that he had personally packed millions of dollars into two sports bags that were given to Mr. García Luna in the Champs Élysées restaurant in Mexico City shortly after he became the country’s public security secretary.
Ismael Zambada was taken into custody by U.S. officials this summer after U.S. officials say he was betrayed and abducted by a son of El Chapo, his longtime business partner. On Friday, Mr. Zambada is expected to appear in the same federal courthouse where Mr. García Luna was sentenced for a status conference concerning the separate criminal charges he is facing.
Mexicans have long suspected that government officials at the highest levels of power have been in league with the same gangsters who for decades have inflicted pain and suffering on their country. And Mr. García Luna’s prosecution in New York was a kind of cathartic spectacle for many in Mexico.
Judge Cogan nodded at the problem of corruption in Mexico, adding that he wanted to make an example of Mr. García Luna. “The offense here is so overwhelming,” he said, “it does suggest a real need to send a message to other public officials.”
The news of his sentence rekindled questions about what knowledge former President Felipe Calderón had of his top security official’s illicit activities — even from members of his own conservative party.
“Felipe Calderón must give an explanation to the people of Mexico,” Marko Cortés, president of the party, said in a news conference on Wednesday before the sentence was announced. “We don’t want more García Lunas in our country.”
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