Mexico’s Ex-Security Chief Sentenced to 38 Years for Cartel Bribery

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.”