NEW YORK — In the heart of bustling lower Manhattan sits one of the country’s most secure federal lockups – and the new home of Mexican drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman.

Guzman, who pleaded not guilty on Friday to charges he ran one of the world’s biggest drug-trafficking operations, can expect to be kept in a special unit inside the drab 12-story Metropolitan Correctional Center, where such other high-profile, high-risk inmates as Gambino crime family boss John Gotti and several former close associates of Osama bin Laden awaited trial.

“It’s got extra security above and beyond what you would have in a restricted housing area,” second only to the super-maximum security prison in Florence, Colorado, said Catherine Linaweaver, who served as the lockup’s warden for 15 months before retiring in 2014. “There is no other unit in the Bureau of Prisons like the high-security unit in New York.”

To authorities, it’s a setting befitting a man who twice escaped from maximum-security Mexican prisons.

The jail is sandwiched between federal prosecutors’ offices and two federal courthouses and is protected by steel barricades that can stop a heavy truck. Special cameras are trained on the area.

Inmates can be transported to court through corridors linked to both courthouses, though Guzman will be ferried to and from court in Brooklyn, a potentially risky job for the U.S. Marshals Service.

In the 10th-floor Special Housing Unit, known by the acronym SHU, around a dozen prisoners spend 23 hours a day in 20-by-12-foot cells, prohibited from communicating with one another.


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