Records have shown that ex-Mexican drug lord Osiel Cardenas Guillen's lawyers arranged for him to serve time in a medium-security rather than high-security U. S. prison.

The records have indicated that Cardenas, 43, the symbolic leader of Mexico's Gulf Cartel, known for its violent methods of intimidation and for working closely with corrupt law officials and business people in Mexico and the United States, avoided Colorado's highest-security supermax U. S. Penitentiary Administrative Maximum Facility for "the worse of the worst" criminals and instead checked in to the U. S. Penitentiary, Atlanta, where he is to spend
25 years without the possibility of parole.

The Houston Chronicle reported on Thursday that unlike the harshness of Florence, Colorado's ADX Florence prison, where inmates are locked in tomblike cells and rarely see the light of day, USP Atlanta lets inmates walk the razor-wire-surrounded facility to go to meals, to the library or for recreation.

The newspaper said that until now, Cardenas was kept in secret locations for security reasons.

It has also been reported that in 1999 Cardenas allegedly threatened to kill two U. S. federal agents, one from the FBI and the other from the Drug Enforcement Administration, who were transporting a Gulf Cartel informant through Matamoros, Mexico, across the Rio Grande from Brownsville, Texas.

Reports have indicated that Cardenas and more than a dozen of his men allegedly surrounded the agents' car. After a tense standoff, the agents were able to walk away from the situation. (With Inputs from Agencies)