He masterminded two of the most daring prison escapes in modern history. 

But Joaquin 'El Chapo' Guzmán is now claiming that the one place he can't break out of, is slowly destroying him. 

The Mexican drug lord is suing federal officials over his extreme isolation and other conditions that he argues amount to cruel and unusual punishment, according to a new legal complaint. 

And the Daily Mail can reveal, he is so starved for human contact that he is enjoying the visits of an 'attractive' Spanish-language interpreter behind bars. 

'He really does like our interpreter,' David Lane, one of his Denver-based team of lawyers told the Daily Mail in an exclusive interview.

Drug kingpins at ADX have been known to hire gorgeous paralegals and interpreters with whom they're allowed visits.

The women offer company and conversation, the ultimate luxury at ADX.

Separated by the thick glass walls of a highly secured visiting booth, clients tell them about their lives and families, and ogle at them while federal monitors look on. 

There are strictly enforced dress rules prohibiting them from showing cleavage or wearing skirts that fall above the knee.

Guzmán, 68, has been serving his life sentence at the United States Penitentiary, Administrative Maximum Facility, also called ADX, in Florence, Colorado since 2019.

Known as the 'Alcatraz of the Rockies,' it is the US government's highest-security supermax, housing inmates deemed too dangerous for other prisons — or too likely to escape.

Assigned to ADX's most restrictive wing, known as 'the Suites,' he typically spends at least 23 hours a day alone in a cell the size of two queen-sized mattresses, with limited access to an outdoor recreation cage and extremely little human contact.

His civil rights complaint lists a litany of grievances about his living conditions, including five years of sleep deprivation and 'near-constant severe sinus, ear, nose, and throat pain for years, without adequate medical care.'

'He is suffering greatly as a result of all this,' Lane said.

'Even in a prison known for its deprivation and isolation, he is virtually more deprived of human contact than any other inmate.'

Lane says Guzmán's special set of restrictions, known as Special Administration Measures (SAMS), limit his ability to discuss who his client comes into contact with. 

'If I divulge things that the government perceives are SAMS restrictions, things go very badly for me and for him,' he said.

His filing also claims that special restrictions designed to prevent him from running his cartel from behind bars 'keep him from contact with his family' and give him 'little to no access to Spanish-speaking mental health professionals, and no meaningful access to educational programs and materials that could help him learn English and therefore pave the way to more substantial human contact.'

In a statement to the Daily Mail, a spokesperson said: 'The Bureau of Prisons does not comment on pending litigation or matters that are the subject of legal proceedings.'

Guzmán spent decades running the Sinaloa Cartel, one of the largest, most powerful and violent drug trafficking rings in the world. 

He became notorious for smuggling massive amounts of cocaine, heroin, marijuana and methamphetamine into multiple continents. Much of it came into the US through a sophisticated network of tunnels.

Guzmán, once named by Forbes as among the world's richest people, is also infamous for having bribed law enforcement and politicians and assassinated his rivals through death squads. 

Indictments against him in the US detail dozens of specific murders linked to him or his orders, but some sources suggest that thousands of people may have died as a result of the cartel's activities under his leadership.

The rags-to-riches cartel boss became somewhat of a folk hero in Mexico after escaping from a prison there in 2001, allegedly smuggled out in a laundry cart. 

He spent 13 years on the run before being caught and sent to a maximum-security prison.

His legend grew in 2015 when he escaped again, this time through a tunnel his crews bored between a warehouse nearly a mile from his prison to a shaft under the shower of his cell. 

The underground escape route was large enough so that the 5'6" 'El Chapo' – Spanish for 'shorty' – could stand upright. 

The tunnel was equipped with a motorbike to make his get-away faster.

'He becomes the GOAT of prison escapes,' Carl Pike, a retired US Drug Enforcement Administration special agent who worked on Guzmán's case, says in a documentary about the cartel boss's wife, Emma Coronel.

The show, 'Married to El Chapo: Emma Coronel speaks,' is set to premier on Oxygen on Friday. 

It is part of her effort to reinvent – or, at least, explain – herself in light of her family's notoriety.

Coronel was a regional beauty queen in Mexico when she married Guzmán, 32 years her senior, at age 18 in 2007. The couple has twin girls.

He was recaptured six months after his second prison escape and extradited to the US. 

Coronel regularly attended her husband's trial in New York, during which she learned of his long string of infidelity.

'He didn't do drugs. He didn't really drink. But he ate Viagra like candy. He was addicted to women,' Pike says in the documentary.

'I can tell you it hurts that I wasn't the only partner in his life, that there were some before, after and while we were together,' Coronel adds about her husband's cheating.

It also came out at trial that Coronel helped plan Guzmán's second escape from prison by smuggling to him a GPS watch that helped cartel members digging the tunnel pinpoint the exact location of his cell.

She was arrested and charged for involvement with the cartel, ultimately pleading guilty in 2021 to three federal charges. 

She has been living under federal supervision since her release from prison in 2023, and is cultivating her fame partly by doing modeling work — including a runway appearance during fashion week in Milan last year when she modeled a wedding dress.

Coronel cannot communicate with her husband, who is under special restrictions at ADX severely limiting his access to mail, phone calls and visits so he can't continue running the Sinaloa Cartel from behind bars. 

He has for seven years also been prohibited from contact with her, his sisters and adult children, some of whom have been involved — directly or indirectly — with the drug ring. 

One of them, Ovidio Guzmán López, who helped run the cartel after his father's extradition, pleaded guilty to federal drug charges last summer.

Lane told us that his client is allowed to speak by phone only with the 14-year-old twin daughters he shares with Coronel.

'They're the only family he can communicate with,' he said.

Guzmán filed his lawsuit specifically against ADX's warden, Mistelle Starr, and a counselor at the prison named John Holbrooks.

He alleges that, despite pain in his ears, nose and throat for more than three years, prison brass have refused to let him see a specialist 'or any other qualified medical professional who could help treat and alleviate his condition.'

'Plaintiff has resorted to stuffing small pieces of toilet paper in his ears at night to try to alleviate the pain, with no notable success,' his court filing reads.

It goes on to say that hot air is blown into Guzmán's cell for 15 minutes every two hours, waking him four to five times each night.

'Indeed, his mattress gets so hot that he opts to sleep on the concrete frame instead, in hopes of ameliorating his overheating enough to get even small amounts (of) sleep,' his filing claims.

The complaint says Guzmán has begun suffering high blood pressure, depression and memory problems due to prolonged sleep deprivation.

On a typical day, the drug lord – who does not speak English – has no contact with anyone who speaks his native Spanish, depriving him of 'meaningful contact with other human beings,' it reads.

'Plaintiff is endeavoring to learn English to expand his world and hopefully enhance his ability to connect with the people around him, as well as to learn about the American criminal and civil justice system and meaningfully participate in his own litigation. 

But he is being prevented from learning English by Defendants: he is given ESL worksheets that do not include Spanish instructions and are therefore entirely inscrutable to him.'

The complaint also alleges that the warden has denied Guzmán access to Spanish-speaking mental health professionals. 

Without such access, his lawyers argue: 'Plaintiff therefore has vanishingly little help from the mental health staff to deal with the trauma of prolonged solitary confinement and other events and conditions which adversely affect his mental health.'

Solitary confinement was first used in the US in the 1820s as a morally progressive social experiment by Quakers, who urged lawmakers to replace amputations, mutilations and the death penalty with efforts toward rehabilitation. 

They hoped that long periods of introspection would help criminals repent.

Charles Dickens, after touring an American prison that imposed prolonged isolation in the 1840s, described its effect as a 'slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain immeasurably worse than any torture of the body.'

Most prisons suspended solitary confinement in the mid- to late-1800s once it became clear that it wasn't rehabilitating inmates.

The Supreme Court weighed in on the topic in 1890, freeing a Colorado man who had been sentenced to death for killing his wife because of the psychological harm solitary confinement had caused him. 

It described how long-term isolation can make inmates crazy, writing that a considerable number 'fell, after even a short confinement, into a semi-fatuous condition, from which it was next to impossible to arouse them.'

Solitary confinement came back into use after 1983 when inmates killed two guards in two separate incidents on one day at the US Penitentiary in Marion, Illinois, then the highest security federal prison. 

That set in motion a scramble to build the federal supermax in Colorado to put the so-called 'worst of the worst' in prolonged solitary confinement — removing them not only from the rest of society, but also from each other and staff.

Meals at ADX are shoved through slots in the door. Guzmán is allowed out of his cell a few hours a week to exercise, alone, in an adjacent recreation cage below ground level with no direct sunlight.

'He's in the holeyest of holes,' says Lane, noting that his client spends time reading books in Spanish or watching the limited Spanish-language TV available to him.

'He has not seen the sun, he has not felt the sun in years,' she adds. 

Court records suggest Guzmán also may have struck up a relationship with another inmate housed on his extra-restrictive wing of ADX.

James 'Jimmy' Sabatino is a mobster and con artist with a history of running scams even from behind bars. 

In a highly unusual move, Sabatino – who once persuaded a FedEx office that he was the president of the Miami Dolphins and needed to retrieve some packages, thus netting himself $268,000-worth of Super Bowl tickets –asked to serve his 20-year sentence at ADX, arguing that the only way to stop himself from conning people is to be totally cut off.

But the extreme isolation was apparently too much, and Sabatino and Guzmán have been communicating by knocking or shouting through the walls of their nearby cells.

In a court filing earlier this year, Sabatino argued that long-term isolation has caused his mental health, and Guzmán's, to deteriorate. 

He asked that the pair be allowed in their adjacent recreation cages at the same time so they can walk and talk together.

'They are human beings,' Sabatino's lawyer told CBS News Miami. 'They may be flawed individuals, but they should be treated as human beings.'