Yesterday, Guzman was convicted of running industrial-scale smuggling operation that brought drugs from his native Mexico into the United States.
The method he used to smuggle most of the drugs, through tunnelling, was also how he became a master of escaping jail.
So now with his jailing in the United States, where will the larger-than-life kingpin with a Houdini-like tendency be imprisoned.
"El Chapo fits the bill perfectly," said Cameron Lindsay, a retired warden who ran three federal lockups, including the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn.
I'd be absolutely shocked if he's not sent to the ADX.
Located outside an old mining town about two hours south of Denver, Supermax's hardened buildings house the nation's most violent offenders, with many of its 400 inmates held alone for 23 hours a day in 2.1 x 3.7 metre cells with fixed furnishings made of reinforced concrete.
Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 11 September conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui and Oklahoma City bombing accomplice Terry Nichols are among those who are housed there..
That includes a sensational 2015 escape from the maximum-security Altiplano prison in central Mexico, where he communicated with accomplices for weeks via mobile phone, slipped into an escape hatch beneath his shower, hopped on the back of a waiting motorcycle and sped through a mile-long, hand-dug tunnel to freedom.
Prisoners at Supermax spend years in solitary confinement and often go days "with only a few words spoken to them," an Amnesty International report found.
While federal authorities have not said for certain where El Chapo will be housed, he's staring at "a sentence from which there is no escape and no return," US Attorney Richard Donoghue said after yesterday's verdict.
Guzman's confinement leading up to his three-month trial included remarkable security measures reflecting his immense flight risk.
He has been housed in solitary confinement in a high-security wing of the Metropolitan Correctional Center, a Manhattan lockup known as "Little Gitmo" that has held notorious terrorists and mobsters.
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