A powerful Mexican drug cartel leader who has been held in Texas since his arrest in the U.S. over the summer does not oppose being transferred to New York to face charges there, according to a court filing Thursday.

Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, 76, co-founder of Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel, was arrested along with Joaquín Guzmán López, a son of notorious drug kingpin Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán,” after landing at an airport near El Paso on July 25. They are charged in the U.S. with various drug crimes and remain jailed.

Federal prosecutors in Texas asked the court last month to move Zambada to the New York jurisdiction that includes Brooklyn, where the elder Guzmán was convicted in 2019 of drug and conspiracy charges and sentenced to life in prison.

U.S. District Judge Kathleen Cardone in El Paso had issued an order Wednesday denying the request for a move to New York. But prosecutors filed a motion Thursday saying that Zambada and his attorneys agreed to the move, and a subsequent court filing confirmed that.

The transfer is pending approval from Cardone, who late Thursday afternoon canceled a status conference hearing scheduled Monday in El Paso.

Zambada faces charges in multiple locales. So far he’s appeared in U.S. federal court in El Paso, where he pleaded not guilty to various drug trafficking charges.

If prosecutors get their wish, the case against Zambada in Texas would proceed after the one in New York.

In New York, Zambada is charged with running a continuing criminal enterprise, murder conspiracy, drug offenses and other crimes.

Strange twist in cartel leaders’ saga

In an unexpected twist, last month Mexican prosecutors said they were bringing charges against Guzmán for apparently kidnapping Zambada. The younger Guzmán apparently intended to turn himself in to U.S. authorities, but may have brought Zambada along as a prize to sweeten any plea deal.

Federal prosecutors issued a statement saying “an arrest warrant has been prepared” against the Guzmán for kidnapping.

But it also cited another charge under an article of Mexico’s criminal code that defines what he did as treason. That section of the law says treason is committed “by those who illegally abduct a person in Mexico in order to hand them over to authorities of another country.”

That clause was apparently motivated by the abduction of a Mexican doctor wanted for allegedly participating in the 1985 torture and killing of Drug Enforcement Administration agent Kiki Camarena.

Nowhere in the statement does it mention that the younger Guzmán was a member of the Chapitos — “little Chapos” — faction of the Sinaloa cartel, made up of Chapo’s sons, that smuggles millions of doses of the deadly opioid fentanyl into the United States, causing about 70,000 overdose deaths each year. According to a 2023 indictment by the U.S. Justice Department, the Chapitos and their cartel associates used corkscrews, electrocution and hot chiles to torture their rivals while some of their victims were “fed dead or alive to tigers.”

Authorities said last month the murders of at least 10 people in Sinaloa appear to be linked to infighting in the dominant drug smuggling cartel there, confirming fears of repercussions from the detention of Zambada and Guzmán.

El Chapo, the Sinaloa cartel’s founder, is serving a life sentence in a maximum security prison in Colorado after being convicted in 2019 on charges including drug trafficking, money laundering and weapons-related offenses.

Last year, El Chapo sent an “SOS” message to Mexico’s president, alleging that he has been subjected to “psychological torment” in prison.

U.S. Open winners will take home hefty paychecks this year, distributed from a record purse of $75 million for the final Grand Slam tennis tournament of the season. The total pot is 15% bigger than it was in 2023. 

The checks awarded to the men’s and women’s singles draw champions could go to American players. 

Though it’s unclear who the winners will be, two American women — Emma Navarro and Jessica Pegula — reached the semifinals, and Pegula won her match, earning a place in the finals. Navarro and Pegula happen to have fathers who are billionaires. On the men’s side, another American could also take home the trophy — and first-place check — for the first time since Andy Roddick won the tournament in 2003. Americans Taylor Fritz and Frances Tiafoe will face off in one of two semifinal matches on Friday. 

The winners of the women’s and men’s singles draws will each earn equivalent $3.6 million checks — a 20% bump from the $3 million winners earned in 2023. The finalists in each event, or runners-up, will get $1.8 million this year, according to official figures from the Queens, New York, tournament. All four semifinalists in both singles draws will get $1 million a piece. Notably, this year marks the 50th anniversary of male and female players earning equal prize money at the tournament. 

U.S. Open winners earn more than Wimbledon champions, who each took home £2.7 million, or just over $3.4 million, a substantial bump of nearly 15% from 2023, according to official prize money figures released by the grass court tournament.

At the U.S. Open, men’s and women’s singles players who make it as far as the round of 128, also known as first-round main-draw losers, earn prize money too. The payout breakdown is as follows:

• Round of 16: $325,000
• Round of 32: $215,000
• Round of 64: $140,000
• Round of 128: $100,000

Doubles players earn significantly less. The champion women’s and men’s doubles teams each get $750,000, to be split between the two players. Second-place teams get $375,000 each. The winners of the mixed doubles event take home $200,000, while the second-place team gets a $100,000 check. 

The women’s finals take place on Saturday, Sept. 7, while the men’s championship match will be played on Sunday. 

The National Security Agency is revealing aspects it never disclosed before about its role in helping the U.S. government track down Osama bin Laden, the al Qaeda founder and terrorist who orchestrated numerous deadly strikes on U.S. and Western targets including, most notoriously, the attacks of September 11, 2001.

In a new podcast series called “No Such Podcast” that debuted this week, current and former senior NSA officials who were involved in the decade-long search for bin Laden after 9/11 describe how the highly secretive operation unfolded before culminating in the 2011 raid on a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, where Bin Laden had fled.

“I remember late night meetings in the fall of 2001, we’d sit around a table and say, ‘How do we find him?'” recounts Jon Darby, former NSA director of operations, according to a transcript of the first episode released by the agency.  “And one of the early theories was a courier, somebody that’s going to be taking care of him. But that was 2001.”

Darby described the operation as “ultra-compartmented,” with no more than 50 of the tens of thousands of NSA employees aware of the effort until after the day of the Abbottabad raid.

“So the government had decided to carry out this special forces raid. So what’s NSA’s role at that point? Our job is to make sure there are no threats to those choppers that are flying in and on the way out,” Darby said, in an apparent allusion to the risk that the two Black Hawk helicopters that had secretly entered Pakistan’s airspace could be intercepted. “So we had people poised, you know, ready to provide any indications and warning of threats to those helicopters,” he said.

NSA aided Ukraine after Russia’s invasion

Natalie Laing, the current director of operations at NSA who was also interviewed for the podcast, offered an overview of the fundamentals of signals intelligence, the NSA’s core focus, and described more recent examples of the agency’s role in informing U.S. policymakers, foreign partners, and the Ukrainian government about the imminence of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

Signals intelligence is information about targets obtained from electronic signals and communications from those targets such as phone calls, texts, radio waves and other things that create digital data.

“[W]e collected those signals and we were able to see that Russia had the plans and intentions to invade Ukraine before they invaded,” she said, adding that personnel from U.S. Cyber Command, which works hand-in-glove with the NSA, were dispatched overseas to help Kyiv strengthen its cyber defenses.

“Cyber Command was able to send before the invasion, again, a small team over to Ukraine to help them look through their networks and point to some activity that seemed to be Russian activity there, so they could shore up their networks from a cybersecurity perspective,” Laing said.

She also explained how signals intelligence collected by NSA helped the U.S. government determine the Chinese origins of a chemical used to synthesize fentanyl, whose illicit influx into the country American agencies have deemed a national security threat.

U.S. intel agencies pulling back the curtain more

Once so secretive its very existence was classified, the NSA has sought in recent years to pull back the curtain on some of its operations and to share more cybersecurity information with non-government entities and the public.

In launching its own podcast, the NSA joins other American intelligence agencies – including the CIA, which started a podcast, “The Langley Files,” in 2022, and the Defense Intelligence Agency, whose podcast “Connections” was released in 2020 in an effort to demystify some of their work, albeit through carefully choreographed, in-house productions.

Efforts to better shape the public narrative surrounding the NSA’s activities follows the 2013 disclosures by former contractor Edward Snowden of classified U.S. government mass surveillance programs, which ignited a firestorm of controversy that intelligence officials have acknowledged did lasting damage to the reputation of the American intelligence community.

“Because it’s sensitive, we can’t talk about some of our work, but it’s time to start telling more stories that we can talk about, sharing more of that expertise, and highlighting these incredible public servants,” Sara Siegle, NSA’s Chief of Strategic Communications, said in a statement.

The NSA aims to release six more episodes on major podcast platforms through next month.