Hunting El Chapo Read online

  Maps

  Dedication

  To my wife and sons.

  —A.H.

  Epigraph

  Certainly there is no hunting like the hunting of man and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never really care for anything else thereafter.

  —Ernest Hemingway, “On the Blue Water,” 1936

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Maps

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue: El Niño De La Tuna

  Part I

  Breakout

  The New Generation

  El Canal

  Team America

  Part II

  La Frontera

  DF

  Badgeless

  Top-Tier

  Abra La Puerta

  Duck Dynasty

  Los Hoyos

  Part III

  La Paz

  Follow the Nose

  Lion’s Den

  The Drop

  Su Casa Es Mi Casa

  El 19

  Miramar

  The Man in the Black Hat

  Qué Sigue?

  Epilogue: Shadows

  Authors’ Note

  Acknowledgments

  Glossary

  A Note on Sources

  Index

  Photos Section

  About the Authors

  Also by Andrew Hogan and Douglas Century

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue: El Niño De La Tuna

  PHOENIX, ARIZONA

  May 30, 2009

  I FIRST HEARD THE legend of Chapo Guzmán just after midnight inside Mariscos Navolato, a dimly lit Mexican joint on North 67th Avenue in the Maryvale section of West Phoenix. My partner in the DEA Narcotic Task Force, Diego Contreras, was shouting a translation of a song into my ear:

  Cuando nació preguntó la partera

  Le dijo como le van a poner?

  Por apellido él será Guzmán Loera

  Y se llamará Joaquín

  “When he was born, the midwife asked, ‘What are they gonna name the kid?’” Diego yelled, his breath hot and sharp with the shot of Don Julio he’d just downed. “The last name’s Guzmán Loera, and they’re gonna call him Joaquín . . .”

  Diego and I had been working as partners in the Phoenix Task Force since early 2007, and two years later we were like brothers. I was the only white guy inside Mariscos Navolato that May night, and I could feel every set of eyes looking me up and down, but sitting shoulder to shoulder with Diego, I felt at ease.

  Diego had introduced me to Mexican culture in Phoenix as soon as we met. We’d eat birria out of plastic bowls in the cozy kitchen of some señora’s home that doubled as a makeshift restaurant and order mango raspados from a vendor pushing a cart across the street, all while listening to every narcocorrido* Diego had in his CD collection. Though I clearly wasn’t from Mexico, Diego nevertheless told me I was slowly morphing into a güero—a light-skinned, blond-haired, blue-eyed Mexican—and soon no one would take me for a gringo.

  The norteño was blaring—Los Jaguares de Culiacán, a four-piece band on tour in the Southwest, straight from the violent capital of the state of Sinaloa. The polka-like oompa-loompa of the tuba and accordion held a strange and contagious allure. I had a passing knowledge of Spanish, but Diego was teaching me a whole new language: the slang of the barrios, of the narcos, of “war zones” like Ciudad Juárez, Tijuana, and Culiacán. What made these narcocorridos so badass, Diego explained, wasn’t the rollicking tuba, accordion, and guitar—it was the passionate storytelling and ruthless gunman attitude embodied in the lyrics.

  A dark-haired waitress in skintight white jeans and heels brought us a bucket filled with cold bottles of La Cerveza del Pacifico. I grabbed one out of the ice and peeled back the damp corner of the canary-yellow label. Pacifico: the pride of Mazatlán. I laughed to myself: we were in the heart of West Phoenix, but it felt as if we’d somehow slipped over the border and eight hundred miles south to Sinaloa. The bar was swarming with traffickers—Diego and I estimated that three-quarters of the crowd was mixed up somehow in the cocaine-weed-and-meth trade.

  The middle-aged traffickers were easy to spot in their cowboy hats and alligator boots—some also worked as legit cattle ranchers. Then there were narco juniors—the new generation—who looked like typical Arizona college kids in Lacoste shirts and designer jeans, though most were flashing watches no typical twenty-year-old could afford.

  Around the fringes of the dance floor, I spotted a few men who looked as if they’d taken a life, cartel enforcers with steel in their eyes. And scattered throughout the bar were dozens of honest, hardworking citizens—house painters, secretaries, landscapers, chefs, nurses—who simply loved the sound of these live drug balladeers from Sinaloa.

  Diego and I had spent the entire day on a mind-numbing surveillance, and after ten hours without food, I quickly gulped down that first Pacifico, letting out a long exhale as I felt the beer hit the pit of my stomach.

  “Mis hijos son mi alegría también mi tristeza,” Diego shouted, nearly busting my eardrum. “My sons are my joy—also my sadness. “Edgar, te voy a extrañar,” Diego sang, in unison with the Jaguares’ bandleader. “Edgar, I’m gonna miss you.”

  I glanced at Diego, looking for an explanation.

  “Edgar, one of Chapo’s kids, was gunned down in a parking lot in Culiacán,” Diego said. “He was the favorite son, the heir apparent. When Edgar was murdered, Chapo went ballistic. That pinche cabrón fucked up a lot of people . . .”

  It was astonishing how Diego owned the room. Not with his size—he was no more than five foot five—but with his confidence and charm. I noticed one of the dancers flirting with him, even while she was whirling around with her cowboy-boot-wearing partner. Diego wasn’t a typical T-shirt-and-baggy-jeans narcotics cop—he’d often dress in a pressed collared shirt whether he was at home or working the streets.

  Diego commanded respect immediately whenever he spoke—especially in Spanish. He was born on the outskirts of Mexico City, came to Tucson with his family when he was a kid, and then moved to Phoenix and became a patrolman with the Mesa Police Department in 2001. Like me, he earned a reputation for being an aggressive street cop. Diego was so skilled at conducting drug investigations that he’d been promoted to detective in 2006. One year later, he was hand-selected by his chief for an elite assignment to the DEA Phoenix Narcotic Task Force Team 3. And that was when I met him.

  From the moment Diego and I partnered up, it was clear that our strengths complemented one another. Diego had an innate street sense. He was always working someone: a confidential informant, a crook—even his friends. He often juggled four cell phones at a time. The undercover role—front and center, doing all the talking—was where Diego thrived. While I loved working the street, I’d always find myself in the shadows, as I was that night, sitting at our table, taking mental note of every detail, studying and memorizing every face. I didn’t want the spotlight; my work behind the scenes would speak for itself.

  Diego and I had just started targeting a Phoenix-based crew of narco juniors suspected of distributing Sinaloa Cartel cocaine, meth, and large shipments of cajeta—high-grade Mexican marijuana—by the tractor-trailer-load throughout the Southwest.

  Though we weren’t planning to engage the targets that night, Diego was dressed just like a narco junior, in a black Calvin Klein button-down shirt, untucked over midnight-blue jeans, and a black-faced Movado watch and black leather Puma sneakers. I looked more like a college kid from California, in my black Hurley ball cap, plain gray T-shirt, and matching Diesel shoes.

  My sons are my joy and my sadness, I repeated to my
self silently. This most popular of the current narcocorridos—Roberto Tapia’s “El Niño de La Tuna”—packed a lot of emotional punch in its lyrics. I could see the passion in the eyes of the crowd, singing along word for word. It seemed to me that they viewed El Chapo as some mix of Robin Hood and Al Capone.

  I looked over and nodded at Diego as if I understood fully, but I really had no clue yet.

  I was a young special agent from Kansas who’d grown up on a red-meat diet of Metallica, Tim McGraw, and George Strait, and it was a lot to take in that first night with Diego in Mariscos Navolato.

  Up on the five flat-screen TVs, a big Mexican Primera División soccer match was on—Mérida was up 1–0 against Querétaro, apparently, though it meant little to me. The CD jukebox was filled with banda and ranchera, the walls covered in posters for Modelo, Tecate, Dos Equis, and Pacifico, homemade flan, upcoming norteño concerts, and handwritten signs about the mariscos specialties like almeja Reyna, a favorite clam dish from Sinaloa.

  “El Chapo”? Was “Shorty” supposed to be a menacing-sounding nickname? How could some semiliterate kid from the tiny town of La Tuna, in the mountains of the Sierra Madre—who’d supported his family by selling oranges on the street—now be celebrated as the most famous drug lord of all time? Was Chapo really—as the urban legends and corridos had it—even more powerful than the president of Mexico?

  Whatever the truth of El Chapo, I kept my eyes glued to the narco juniors sitting at a table near the far end of the bar. One had a fresh military-style haircut, two others fauxhawks, the fourth sporting an Arizona State University ball cap. Diego and I knew they were likely armed.

  If the narco juniors went out to their cars, we’d have to follow.

  Diego tossed two $20 bills on the table, winked at the waitress, and rose from his seat. Now the crew shifted in their seats, one getting to his feet, fixing the brim on his cap, pivoting on the sole of his Air Jordans like a point-guard.

  Diego downed the last gulp of his Pacifico and gestured for me to do the same. The band was blaring louder now; Diego laughed, along with the entire bar, hitting the crescendo of the song:

  I may be short, but I’m brave . . .

  And I began to grin, too, as I slid my chair back and stood up.

  The hypnotic rhythm took hold; I found myself singing with as much gusto as any of these cowboy-hat-clad traffickers:

  “Yo soy El Chapo Guzmán!”

  Part I

  Breakout

  GUADALAJARA, MEXICO

  May 24, 1993

  THE SUDDEN BURST OF AK-47 gunfire pierced the calm of a perfect spring afternoon, unleashing panic in the parking lot of the Guadalajara Airport. Seated in the passenger seat of his white Grand Marquis, Cardinal Juan Jesús Posadas Ocampo, the Archbishop of Guadalajara, was struck fourteen times as he arrived to meet the flight of the papal nuncio. The sixty-six-year-old cardinal slumped toward the center of the vehicle, blood running down his forehead. He had died instantly. The Grand Marquis was riddled with more than thirty bullets, and his driver was among six others dead.

  Who would possibly target the archbishop—one of Mexico’s most beloved Catholic leaders—for a brazen daylight hit? The truth appeared to be altogether more prosaic: it was reported that Cardinal Posadas had been caught up in a shooting war between the Sinaloa and Tijuana cartels, feuding for months over the lucrative “plaza”—drug smuggling route—into Southern California. Posadas had been mistaken for the leader of the Sinaloa Cartel, Joaquín Archivaldo Guzmán Loera, a.k.a. “El Chapo,” who was due to arrive at the airport parking lot in a similar white sedan at around the same time.

  News footage of the Wild West–style shoot-out flashed instantly around the world as authorities and journalists scrambled to make sense of the carnage. “Helicopters buzzed overhead as police confiscated about 20 bullet-riddled automobiles, including one that contained grenades and high-powered automatic weapons,” reported the Los Angeles Times on its front page. The daylight assassination of Cardinal Posadas rocked Mexican society to its core; President Carlos Salinas de Gortari arrived immediately to pay his condolences and calm the nation’s nerves.

  The airport shoot-out would prove to be a turning point in modern Latin American history: for the first time, the Mexican public truly took note of the savage nature of the nation’s drug cartels. Most Mexicans had never heard of the diminutive Sinaloa capo whose alias made him sound more comical than lethal.

  After Posada’s assassination, crude drawings of Chapo’s face were splashed on front pages of newspapers and magazines all across Latin America. His name appeared on TV nightly—wanted for murder and drug trafficking.

  Realizing he was no longer safe even in his native Sierra Madre backcountry, or in the neighboring state of Durango, Guzmán reportedly fled to Jalisco, where he owned a ranch, then to a hotel in Mexico City, where he met with several Sinaloa Cartel lieutenants, handing over tens of millions in US currency to provide for his family while he was on the lam.

  In disguise, using a passport with the name Jorge Ramos Pérez, Chapo traveled to the south of Mexico and crossed the border into Guatemala on June 4, 1993. His plan apparently was to move stealthily, with his girlfriend and several bodyguards, then settle in El Salvador until the heat died down. It was later reported that Chapo had paid handsomely for his escape, bribing one Guatemalan military officer with $1.2 million to guarantee his safe passage south of the Mexican border.

  IN MAY 1993, around the time of the Posada murder, I was fifteen hundred miles away, in my hometown of Pattonville, Kansas, diagramming an intricate pass play to my younger brother. We were Sweetness and the Punky QB—complete with regulation blue-and-orange Bears jerseys—huddling up in the front yard against a team made up of my cousins and neighbors. My sister and her friends were dressed up as cheerleaders, with homemade pompoms, shouting from the sidelines.

  My brother, Brandt, always played the Walter Payton role. I was Jim McMahon, and I was a fanatic—everyone teased me about it. Even for front-yard games, I’d have to have all the details just right, down to the white headband with the name ROZELLE, which I’d lettered with a black Magic Marker, just like the one McMahon had worn in the run-up to the 1985 Super Bowl.

  None of us weighed more than a hundred pounds, but we took those front-yard games seriously, as if we really were Payton, McMahon, Singletary, Dent, and the rest of the Monsters of the Midway. In Pattonville—a town of three thousand people, fifty-two miles outside Kansas City—there wasn’t much else to do besides play football and hunt. My father was a firefighter and lifelong waterfowl hunter. He’d taken me on my first duck hunt at age eight and bought me my first shotgun—a Remington 870 youth model—when I turned ten.

  Everyone expected I’d become a firefighter, too—my great-grandfather, my grandfather, and three uncles had all been firemen. I’d spend hours at the fire station following my dad around, trying on his soot-stained leather fire helmet and climbing in and out of the trucks in the bay. In fifth grade, I brought home a school paper and showed my mom:

  “Someday I’m going to be . . . a fireman, a policeman, or a spy detective.”

  But as long as I could remember, I’d really been dead set on becoming one thing: a cop. And not just any cop—a Kansas State Trooper.

  I loved the State Troopers’ crisp French-blue uniforms and navy felt campaign hats, and the powerful Chevrolets they got to drive. For years I had an obsession with drawing police cars. It wasn’t just a hobby, either—I’d sit alone in my bedroom, working in a feverish state. I had to have all the correct colored pens and markers lined up, drawing and shading the patrol cars in precise detail: correct light bar, insignia, markings, wheels—the whole works had to be spot-on, down to the exact radio antennas. I’d have to start over even if the slightest detail looked off. I drew Ford Crown Vics and Explorers, but my favorite was the Chevy Caprice with the Corvette LT1 engine and blacked-out wheels. I’d often dream while coloring, picturing myself behind the wheel of a roaring Cap
rice, barreling down US Route 36 in hot pursuit of a robbery suspect . . .

  Fall was my favorite time of year. Duck hunting with my dad and brother. And football. Those front-yard dreams now playing out under the bright stadium lights. Our varsity team would spend Thursday nights in a barn or some backwoods campsite, sitting around a fire and listening to that week’s motivational speaker, everyone’s orange helmets, with the black tiger paws on the sides, glowing in the flickering light.

  Life in Pattonville revolved around those Friday-night games. All along the town’s roads you’d see orange-and-black banners, and everyone would come and watch the Tigers play. I had my own pregame ritual, blasting a dose of Metallica in my headphones:

  Hush little baby, don’t say a word

  And never mind that noise you heard

  After high school, I was convinced that I’d live in the same town where my parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, and dozens of cousins lived. I had no desire to go anyplace else. I never could have imagined leaving Pattonville. I never could have imagined a life in a smog-cloaked city of more than 26 million, built on top of the ancient Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán . . .

  Mexico? If pressed—under the impatient glare of my third-period Spanish teacher—I probably could have found it on the map. But it might as well have been Madagascar.

  I WAS SOON THE black sheep: the only cop in a family of firefighters. After graduating from Kansas State University with a degree in criminal justice, I’d taken the written exam for the Kansas Highway Patrol, but a statewide hiring freeze forced me in another direction. A salty old captain from the local Sheriff’s office offered me a job as a patrol deputy with Lincoln County, opening my first door to law enforcement.

  It wasn’t my dream job, but it was my dream ride: I was assigned a 1995 Chevrolet Caprice, complete with that powerhouse Corvette engine—the same squad car I’d been drawing and coloring in detail in my bedroom since I was ten years old. Now I got to take it home and park it overnight in the family driveway.