The former supreme leader of Mexico’s Gulf Cartel will spend the rest of his life in a U.S. prison. The drug lord is responsible tons of cocaine and marijuana smuggled into the U.S. and mass killings to preserve or expand turf.
On Thursday morning, 51-year-old Jorge Eduardo “El Coss” Costilla went before U.S. District Judge Fernando Rodriguez to receive a life sentence for drug conspiracy charges. Mexican authorities arrested El Coss in 2012. After years of court battles, U.S. authorities were able to have El Coss extradited in 2015 so he could face drug conspiracy and money laundering charges. Authorities also charged El Coss with threatening a federal officer over an incident in northern Mexico.
According to prosecutors, in November 1999, Costilla and his then boss Osiel Cardenas spotted two federal agents and an informant in the border city of Matamoros, Tamaulipas. Gulf Cartel gunmen mobilized a team to intercept the agents. The agents were held up until the standoff ended and the agents were able to cross back into Texas. The drug lord pleaded guilty to the charges on September 26, 2017.
Costilla, a former police officer in Matamoros who joined the gulf cartel in the early 1990s, inherited the leadership of the Gulf Cartel in 2003 after authorities arrested Osiel Cardenas Guillen, who is currently serving a 25-year sentence in the U.S. Costilla was the last leader of the entire Gulf Cartel before the organization’s factional splits.
Under Costilla’s leadership from 2003 to 2012, the Gulf Cartel is credited for smuggling more than 10,000 kilograms of cocaine and 140,000 kilograms of marijuana into Hidalgo, Starr, and Cameron Counties in Texas.
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