Mariel Colón had simply completed regulation college and was ready for the outcomes of the bar examination when she replied to a Craigslist advert trying for a Spanish-speaking paralegal to assist with translation on a main case.
Only later did she study that she’d be engaged on considered one of the largest trials of the decade, serving to defend the infamous Sinaloa drug cartel chief Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán.
The inmate Colón encountered deep in the bowels of a Manhattan jail appeared hungry for human connection after years of isolation in jail. So as Colón defined to Guzmán what the attorneys on his drug trafficking and murder conspiracy case had been planning, she regarded for methods to bond.
“I told him I love singing,” she stated. “And he told me he loves music.”
Colón discovered his favourite songs — banda and ranchera classics — and serenaded him there in the jailhouse. He applauded.
She credit Guzmán, 68, with rekindling her love of performing and sparking her curiosity in the wealthy custom of Mexican nation music. And so, as her authorized profession blossomed and he or she carved out an experience representing drug traffickers like El Chapo, she additionally pursued an unlikely aspect hustle: as a swaggering singer of corridos underneath the stage title La Abogada — the Lawyer.
On a current sweltering weekend, at a California pageant billed as the Coachella of ranchera music, younger {couples} in denims and boots spun round in the grime as all-male bands from each side of the border swigged tequila from the bottle and performed boisterous songs about epic events, grievous infidelities and the daring lives of drug traffickers.
Backstage, on a tour bus whose home windows regarded out at acres of California almond groves, Colón waited nervously to carry out. She wore a merlot-colored cowboy hat contemporary out of the field and matching boots whose heels lifted her simply above 5 ft.
In the testosterone-heavy world of regional Mexican music, the 33-year-old Puerto Rican singer knew she was a bit misplaced. “I’m female,” she stated. “And I’m not Mexican.”
Abraham Siguenza holds an AK-47-shaped decanter holding tequila after pouring a shot into musician Chavela Vasquez’s mouth at the Ranchela Music Festival in Tracy.
(Tomas Ovalle / For The Times)
Festival attendees dance at the Ranchela Music Festival in Tracy.
(Tomas Ovalle / For The Times)
But she had one huge factor going for her that none of the different bands may declare: a shut bond with the man lionized in a lot of the narcocorridos the musicians had been belting onstage.
Colón, who as we speak is Guzmán’s major lawyer, is considered one of the few individuals permitted to go to him in the Colorado supermax jail the place he is serving a life sentence. And whereas the particulars of their twice month-to-month conferences by no means make it into her songs (“attorney-client privilege,” she explains), her proximity to Mexico’s most infamous cartel boss is an plain promoting level in a culture obsessed with all things narco.
She has leaned closely into the lawyer persona. In her first music video, filmed in a courtroom, she wore a sizzling pink pantsuit and crooned: “Good morning, judge, please give me the floor. I have come to defend a broken heart.”
It was a bit gimmicky, certain, and as a girl in the famously machista business of Mexican regional music, Colón felt the odds had been stacked in opposition to her. But she was banking on the plain drive of her singing voice, the public’s eternal obsession with Guzmán — and her personal tenacity.
“If I made it on the Chapo case, I’m going to make it here,” she stated. Then she stepped from her tour bus and strode together with her band onto the stage.
Before Colón was a lawyer, she was a musician.
She grew up round round salsa, merengue and pop in Puerto Rico, the place her father was a percussionist and band chief. She begged her mother and father for voice classes and took any alternative to carry out, dancing alongside her dad’s bands onstage and dressing up as a clown for her mother and father’ children occasion enterprise.
Colón dreamed of fame as a singer, however her household, conscious of the challenges of the music business, pushed her to take a extra typical path. She studied music enterprise at Loyola University in New Orleans and regulation at Hofstra University in New York. She deliberate at first to be an leisure lawyer, however discovered herself drawn to the courtroom drama of legal circumstances.
“Criminal law is exactly like performing,” she stated. “Your audience is the judge and jury. You have a story line and you have to convince them of it.”
She met Guzmán in 2018. Known as El Chapo, or Shorty, due to his peak, he had been extradited to the U.S. to face trial after twice escaping jail in Mexico. Back house, Guzmán was typically seen as people hero: a rags-to-riches nation child from the Sinaloa sierra recognized for his generosity with locals and his eager capacity to evade authorities. But prosecutors accused him of fueling an dependancy disaster in the U.S. and ruthlessly torturing and killing opponents. During his trial, they shared proof that Guzmán had burned the our bodies of rivals — and as soon as ordered a man to be killed after he refused to shake the cartel boss’ hand.
Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzmán, the head of Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel, is proven 10 years in the past as he’s escorted to a helicopter in Mexico City after his seize in Mazatlán.
(Eduardo Verdugo / Associated Press)
Colón knew little about Guzmán when she first met him inside the cement fortress that’s Manhattan’s Metropolitan Correctional Center.
In between translations of plans for opening statements and cross-examinations, they talked about their shared love of music. Guzmán was a devotee of Mexican regional music — an umbrella time period that refers to the subgenres of nation common in numerous components of Mexico. Colón, who knew little about the fashion, researched his favourite bands and singers, together with Jenni Rivera and Los Tucanes de Tijuana. And she went about educating him tunes from up to date musicians, like Peso Pluma, a more contemporary singer who sings frequently about El Chapo, and who was not too long ago threatened by a rival cartel for his perceived sympathies to Sinaloa.
She beloved the manner the regional songs had been composed and the depth of the lyrics.
“I’m very dramatic and very passionate,” she stated. “I mean, it was just perfect for me.”
When Colón was admitted to the bar in late 2018, Guzmán requested if she would be a part of his protection crew as a trial lawyer. His extra skilled legal professionals formed most of the technique. But as soon as the tribunal started, Colón typically discovered herself in the highlight, giving interviews to Spanish-language journalists and gaining tens of hundreds of followers on Instagram, the place she posted courtroom sketches of herself and content material praising Guzmán’s wife, a former beauty queen named Emma Coronel who had change into a shut pal.
Guzmán was eventually convicted of smuggling large quantities of narcotics into the U.S. throughout the a long time he led the brutal Sinaloa cartel.
Although the protection crew had misplaced the case, the telephone in Colón’s Brooklyn regulation workplace saved ringing.
It turned out many accused drug traffickers — even these from rival cartels — wished the likelihood to work with El Chapo’s lawyer. Colón additionally briefly labored on the case of intercourse offender and sex-trafficking defendant Jeffrey Epstein earlier than he dedicated suicide.
Mariel Colón leaves a courthouse in Washington, D.C., after the sentencing three years in the past of Emma Coronel, the spouse of Joaquin “Chapo” Guzmán. Colón turned shut with Coronel throughout Guzmán’s trial.
( Yasin Ozturk / Getty Images)
Colón beloved her work. A religious Christian, she had no qualms about representing individuals accused of heinous crimes; she stated her faith taught her not to decide others. She preferred advocating for purchasers akin to Guzmán, whose isolation in the Colorado jail she has repeatedly argued is inhumane.
But she nonetheless felt a calling to music — and particularly wished to discover the style Guzmán had turned her onto.
She requested her purchasers what they considered her launching a music profession. Colón stated all of them gave her their blessing.
“They know I’m always singing,” she stated. “And they’re the only ones who should have a say, because they’re the ones paying me.”
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1. Colón at the Tracy pageant. 2. Fellow lawyer Arturo Hernández backstage with Colón. (Tomas Ovalle / For The Times)
Colón says considered one of her largest supporters was Coronel, 34, who served two years in prison after pleading responsible to serving to run her husband’s drug empire.
Days after Coronel was freed last fall, she was noticed sipping cocktails in the VIP part of a Lynwood nightclub the place Colón was performing. The headlines that adopted introduced new consideration to Colón’s singing profession.
“I didn’t want it to be a PR stunt,” Colón stated of Coronel’s go to. “I just wanted my friend who had just gotten out of prison to see me perform because she’s always been very supportive of me.”
Every two weeks, Colón flies into Colorado Springs and drives 40 miles to considered one of the nation’s most intensely guarded prisons. There, she spends 4 or 5 hours with Guzmán, who spends 23 hours a day locked in a 7-by-12-foot cell. Guzmán has nearly no contact with the exterior world — not even his spouse is allowed to go to him.
Guzmán and Colón discuss authorized issues, sure, but in addition private issues, starting from tales about their childhoods to Colón’s love life.
“He knows a lot about me, and I know a lot about him,” she stated. She admits that a few of the anecdotes he has shared would make for nice lyrics. But Colón stated she attracts a clear boundary between her two careers.
“I have to be really careful about what I sing about,” she stated.
Colón performs at the pageant in Tracy. “If I made it on the Chapo case, I’m going to make it here,” she stated of her music profession.
(Tomas Ovalle / For The Times)
Just earlier than Colón took the stage at the pageant in Tracy, a video performed on a large display screen. It confirmed clips of her getting out of a automobile in a slick pantsuit, taking tequila photographs with a group of pals, and in a sizzling tub surrounded by candles. An image of a younger Guzmán flashed. “Many know her as the lawyer of El Chapo,” a male voice intoned.
Colón — who solely began releasing music final yr and continues to be at work on her first EP — was considered one of the lesser recognized names to play at the pageant. As she took the stage, the response from the crowd was lukewarm at first.
But as she began singing — first a tune by Rivera, later a cowl of a corrido about El Chapo (“The Earth turns and stops / If Joaquín orders it”) — the crowd warmed up. Women, particularly, appeared excited by her presence in the in any other case all-male lineup.
After she completed, throwing black-dyed roses into the crowd, she stepped off stage and bought a hug from Arturo Hernández, a gray-haired man in a Santa Clara Law sweatshirt.
Hernández, an lawyer who has represented many cartel members, met Colón throughout the Guzmán trial when she requested him for data on Sinaloa. He noticed in her parallels along with his personal profession and took her underneath his wing. In the Nineteen Eighties, he was a younger lawyer simply beginning out when he represented serial killer Richard Ramirez, generally known as the Night Stalker.
Colón hangs out together with her band after their efficiency at the Ranchela Music Festival.
(Tomas Ovalle / For The Times)
Hernández had suggested her on how to deal with the media. He supported her, too, when she instructed him she wished to be a singer. His recommendation, each instances, was the identical.
“Have fun,” he stated. “Enjoy the ride.”
She is having fun with it. Although the calls for of the music business, which requires artists to additionally be influencers, can be a lot.
Some individuals have requested what’s going to occur to her authorized profession if her music takes off. If that occurs, she is aware of she might need to scale back her caseload.
But she stated she’ll without end be loyal to El Chapo.
“I have a responsibility to make sure that he has the best quality of life, whether it be inside or outside and especially if it’s inside,” she stated. She feels the identical manner about Coronel, whom she is advising on a number of potential enterprise ventures.
“They gave me my first opportunity,” she stated. “I’d cancel concerts for them.”
As the solar sank over California farm nation, the younger crowd exterior saved dancing and ingesting, and Colón and her crew ready to head out. She had some recording in San Francisco to do. Some circumstances to work on. And a few days later, a journey to Colorado to make.
