If Mexican druglord Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman is convicted in a US court, he is expected to end his life in a super-secure Colorado prison housing America's most dangerous inmates.
Serial jailbreaker Guzman, 59, pleaded not guilty in a US District Court in Brooklyn on Friday to charges that he ran perhaps the world's largest drug-smuggling operation.
He was extradited from Mexico, where he has escaped from prison twice, on condition the court would not seek the death penalty.
He faces 17 criminal charges. If convicted, he would receive a mandatory life prison term, according to US Attorney Robert Capers. There is no parole in federal prison.
If found guilty, Guzman would probably be sent to the Administrative Maximum Facility (ADX) in Florence, Colorado, which is for the most-dangerous prisoners in the US.
It is widely known as Supermax, or the "Alcatraz of the Rockies" and opened in 1994. It holds 400-plus inmates inside specially designed "control units" that function as prisons within prisons.
Inmates are confined to single-person cells for up to 23 hours a day, depriving them of virtually all contact with the outside world.
Among its residents are Ramzi Yousef, mastermind of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Centre in New York; Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev; airline "shoe bomber" Richard Reid; and Unabomber Ted Kaczynski.
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