Drug Trafficker Pleads Guilty to Murder of Mexican Gang Member

Christopher Perez, a/k/a "Cross," pleaded guilty on Thursday in Manhattan federal court to the murder of a Mexico-based narcotics associate Miguel Chaidez-Esparza, a/k/a "Noe Alfredo Castro-Loera."

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Perez and the murder victim were associates of a Mexico-based cocaine trafficking organization that supplied bulk quantities of cocaine to distributors in New York, Chicago, Detroit and California. On August 23, 2004, in Detroit, Perez and his co-conspirators met with Chaidez-Esparza and kidnapped him to question him regarding a drug debt. During his guilty plea, Perez admitted to kidnapping the victim so that he could be murdered. As a summary of the evidence provided at Thursday's proceeding by the government revealed, on August 23, 2004, Perez and co-conspirators kidnapped the murder victim to question him regarding 70 kilograms of cocaine that Perez believed had been stolen from him. As a result of the "interrogation" that followed, Perez came to believe that Chaidez-Esparza and his superiors in Mexico were plotting to have Perez murdered. Perez then suffocated Chaidez-Esparza with duct tape, and later burned his body in an effort to destroy evidence and avoid identification of the body. Perez later described his murder of the victim in a covertly videotaped meeting with an informant acting on behalf of law enforcement. Perez pleaded guilty to one count of murder in furtherance of a narcotics trafficking conspiracy. He is scheduled to be sentenced by Judge Naomi Buchwald on July 22, 2009. Perez, 40, faces a mandatory minimum sentence of 20 years in prison and a maximum sentence of life in prison.

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