Hunting El Chapo Read online

  I stepped back slowly, away from the Tahoe, my eyes darting from one car to the next, looking for anyone who might be surveilling me.

  My eyes landed on someone sitting inside a black Lincoln Navigator across the street. Images of the scar-faced man I’d seen during the money drop flashed through my mind.

  Could it be the same guy?

  I wasn’t about to stick around and find out. I quickly jumped into the Chevy, where at least I was protected by the armor. I called my wife and told her to stay inside for the day as I took off slowly, waiting for the Navigator to follow.

  I hit the gas, took a sharp right, then another right, and quickly lost sight of the Lincoln in my rearview mirror.

  AS I WALKED PAST the Kiki Room at the embassy, my phone rang.

  “Hey, Tocallo has just asked Inge if he can have a guy killed in prison,” Brady said. “He knows the guy’s exact location—the cell he’s housed in and everything.”

  We knew that Inge was short for ingeniero—“engineer”—yet another nickname the DTO lieutenants and workers called Chapo over the BlackBerry messages.

  “What’s Chapo saying?

  “It’s weird,” Brady said. “He’s telling Tocallo to gather more information. He wants to know more.”

  That actually sounded liked Chapo. Despite his media-inflated reputation as a homicidal drug lord, I knew by now that Chapo seemed to be very deliberative, even circumspect, when authorizing the use of violence. In Sinaloa, most traffickers didn’t think twice about killing someone, especially in the mountainous terrain of the Sierra Madre, where Chapo was raised—blood feuds and shooting wars were a simple fact of life there.

  But Chapo must have become wiser over the years. Many times, when his lieutenants would report a serious problem—a killing offense—Chapo would conduct his own version of a police investigation, asking a series of questions to obtain more facts.

  My mind flashed back to my days in the Phoenix Task Force when Diego and I would sit for hours with our assistant US attorney, drafting indictments, continually getting beaten over the head with questions, as if we were already under cross-examination on the witness stand:

  “So how do you know this, Drew? Were you there? Who told you that?”

  Chapo was exhaustive with his interrogations. He’d typically contemplate the best course of action for a day or two before making the calls to resolve the problem—even if the final outcome was a death sentence.

  Brady and I confirmed this when we watched a video of Chapo taken several years ago, wearing his trademark plain dark baseball cap, casually walking back and forth underneath a palapa high in the Sierra Madre while an unidentified man sits on the ground with his hands tied to a post. Chapo’s demeanor is calm and detached as he paces and interrogates the prisoner.

  NOW THAT BRADY AND I were piecing together a good percentage of Chapo’s life through the interception of Second-Tier, we needed to once again advance up the ladder of mirrors. Chapo’s personal device couldn’t be too far away at this point.

  “Second-Tier is relaying everything up to a username labeled MD#8,” Brady told me one day.

  “Does MD#8 have a name?”

  “Yes,” Brady said. “Second-Tier’s been calling him Condor.”

  I repeated the name over and over in my head, trying to remember whether I’d heard it before. Nothing registered. But unlike the usernames of Chapo’s other mirror devices, “Condor” sounded like an actual person. Or at least like a narco nickname. Condors spend their time in mountainous country, soaring—was the name a clue that he was higher up in the cartel hierarchy? I couldn’t waste my time speculating; I needed to know exactly where Condor was pinging.

  I may have had Condor’s PIN, but I still needed the corresponding Mexican telephone number to ping.

  And for that I needed Don Dominguez. Don was a staff coordinator at DEA’s Special Operations Division (SOD), in Chantilly, Virginia. The primary function of staff coordinators at SOD was to assist agents working high-profile cases in the field by coordinating deconfliction efforts, providing funding for wire intercepts, and acting as liaisons with the intelligence community.

  Though equivalent in rank to my own group supervisor, at heart Dominguez was a street agent.

  “He’s not like the other desk jockeys in DC,” I told Brady. “Don’s one of us. He gets it. He believes we actually have a chance at capturing this fucker.”

  I sent Condor’s PIN to Don so he could flip it. Don had access to a small team of techies at DEA, each of whom had built excellent relationships with the largest telecommunication service providers—even Canadian ones, like BlackBerry.

  A standard request to a comms company could take almost three weeks to yield results, and by that time Condor—and all the other users—would be on to a brand-new BlackBerry and we would have to begin the process all over again. But once Brady and his team drafted an administrative subpoena to BlackBerry requesting Condor’s corresponding telephone number, I was confident that Don would work around the clock to get the subscriber results back quickly.

  SURE ENOUGH, IN LESS than twenty-four hours, Don Dominguez delivered.

  “Just got Condor’s number back from Don,” I told Brady, anxious to hit the ping button on my laptop.

  “Where’s it at?” asked Brady.

  Within minutes my eyes lit up as I received the results and sent the coordinates back to Brady:

  24.776,-107.415

  “It’s hitting in Colonia Libertad.”

  “Colonia Libertad?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Looks like a small, run-down neighborhood on Culiacán’s southwest side.”

  Now we had a BlackBerry in the heart of Sinaloa’s capital. The net was narrowing: it was the first ping we’d ever had outside of Durango.

  “CONDOR” WAS IN CULIACÁN. An average-size city of 675,000 nestled in the center of Sinaloa, just west of the Sierra Madre, Culiacán is the birthplace of all Mexican drug trafficking and had displaced Medellín, Colombia, as the world’s narco capital. From the days of Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo through to Chapo’s current reign, all the top cartel leaders had come from the city or the small towns nearby.

  Culiacán was also famous for its Jardines del Humaya cemetery—the “drug lord’s burial ground”—with its $600,000 air-conditioned mausoleums, including a lavish marble one for Chapo’s murdered son, Edgar, and a large shrine to Jesús Malverde, the mustached patron saint of drug trafficking. Legend had it that Malverde was a bandit from the hills of Sinaloa who stole from the rich and gave to the poor until his death by hanging in 1909.

  I REMEMBERED DIEGO telling me about visiting Jardines del Humaya when he was once on vacation in Culiacán. Diego said he was astonished by how much money traffickers had poured into the shrine to keep it thriving. Now Culiacán was known as a city of outlaws, and off-limits to authorities from outside of Sinaloa, which was a problem, because most of the local cops and military had been corrupted by Chapo’s organization.

  In fact, no outside law enforcement or military personnel had ever dared to enter Culiacán to conduct an operation, for fear of immediate retaliation.

  Still, as distant and untouchable as Culiacán seemed to me, this was our first indication that Chapo could be in Mexico’s narco capital.

  I QUICKLY GRABBED the next flight from DF to El Paso and met with Brady, Joe, and Neil Miller, the other member of Brady’s core team at HSI.

  “Neil’s our bulldozer,” Brady said, laughing. “He doesn’t think twice about pissing someone off, as long as the job gets done. Welcome to his domain.”

  Brady shoved open a door to reveal their newly created war room, a converted conference area discreetly tucked away from everyone else at the HSI El Paso Field Office. They’d recently taken over the room and filled it with more than a dozen computers and at least that many translators, to run all the wires on the office devices, on Chapo’s key lieutenants, and now on Second-Tier.

  But despite the resources, Brady was still
on edge. “How do we know that there aren’t a hundred more layers to the pyramid-like Second-Tier and the offices? I think we’re fucked. The mirrors could go on forever.”

  I paused for a second before giving my partner the breakthrough.

  “No, there aren’t hundreds,” I said. “I’ve been analyzing Condor’s tolls, looking at his most frequent contact. I just found it: two. There’s only two layers.”

  Condor wasn’t in contact with any other PINs—just Second-Tier.

  “It stops right there,” I said. “Condor isn’t forwarding any messages. He’s the end of the line.”

  Brady couldn’t believe it.

  “Condor is either fat-fingering thousands of messages a day into a new BlackBerry and forwarding them on—a nearly inconceivable job—or he is standing in the same room as Chapo, receiving personally dictated orders directly from the boss,” I said.

  Brady rushed into the wire room and returned several minutes later with Neil.

  “We’ve got him, brother,” said Brady.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m looking at it right here.”

  Brady showed me a line sheet that had come in that morning from Second-Tier to Condor, asking if el generente—the manager—was awake yet.

  Condor clearly was in the same house—or even the same room—as the boss.

  Condor had replied:

  “No, he’s still sleeping . . .”

  Abra La Puerta

  TOP-TIER HAD BECOME MY LIFE.

  Pinging that BlackBerry device, the one nearest to Chapo, was all-consuming. As long as I could ping Top-Tier—from six in the morning often until after midnight—nothing else really mattered. Even when lying in bed with my wife in La Condesa, my mind was never far from hunting that Top-Tier.

  By now I knew how Chapo ran the day-to-day of his multi-million-dollar drug empire; all I needed was the boss’s location. This wasn’t as simple as it sounded, given Chapo’s penchant for bouncing constantly, moving from safe house to safe house, from countryside to city, sometimes on an hourly basis. With every ping, I meticulously labeled the spot with a yellow thumbtack on my Google Map, marking the coordinates along with the date and time indicating where Condor’s device had pinged in Culiacán.

  Top-Tier.

  If Condor was standing with the man, every new ping helped me begin to establish Chapo’s pattern of life.*

  Brady, Neil, and Joe were working around the clock now, too, intercepting as many mirror devices as they could identify—Offices 1 through 10, and Second-Tier—as well as a new critical mirror who went by the username “Usacell.” We quickly determined that Usacell—similar to the name of another major Mexican telecom service provider Iusacell—was a duplicate: another Second-Tier device run by the user Telcel, in Durango.

  “It’s pretty obvious it’s the same guy,” Brady said. “He’s just labeled each of his two BlackBerrys with the corresponding service provider to tell them apart.”

  The Usacell device may have been another mirror, but it exposed still more important messages that Chapo thought were hidden. If the office devices were sending two hundred messages a day to Telcel at Second-Tier, they were sending an equal amount to Usacell. Brady and I estimated that we were intercepting close to seventy-five percent of all the DTO communications coming to and from the boss.

  The window into Chapo’s world was now becoming brighter.

  “For now, we should sit at Second-Tier,” Brady said.

  At the Second-Tier level, we could intercept every order coming down from Chapo and every communication coming up from the office devices.

  “Yeah, that’s definitely the honey hole,” I said.

  If Condor and the offices dropped their BlackBerrys, Brady and I could identify their new PINs easily, so long as we were still intercepting the two Second-Tier devices, Telcel and Usacell.

  Office-4 was now starting to produce valuable intel, too, but I noticed something different about this mirror: not only did Office-4 appear to be sending messages up the chain to Chapo through Second-Tier, but it was also responsible for relaying command-and-control messages—mostly related to Chapo’s Canada operations—to another top player who went by the username “Panchito.”

  “Did you see the deconfliction hit on Panchito?” I asked Brady. “It’s hitting all over FBI New York.”

  “Yeah,” Brady said. “I saw it.”

  “Our Panchito has got to be Alex Cifuentes,” I said.

  The FBI New York office claimed to still have an interest in Chapo after it began targeting him through longtime Colombian drug lord Hildebrando Alexánder Cifuentes Villa, who’d moved to Sinaloa around 2008—acting as human collateral for all of Chapo’s cocaine shipments generated by the Cifuentes-Villa family in Medellín.

  After the failure of the Cabo op, the FBI’s fresh intelligence slowly dried up. Alex—as everyone called Cifuentes—was one of Chapo’s right-hand men.

  In fact, months prior to my Mexico City coordination meeting, while I was in New York, I’d sat down with the FBI and told them about the great working relationship I was building with HSI and Brady’s team.

  “We’re moving quickly,” I said. “This train isn’t stopping. If you guys want to get on board and share your intel, now’s the time.”

  This wasn’t my first attempt to coordinate a joint investigation with the FBI. I’d found their special agents to be polite and professional, but I also knew they were highly resistant to sharing. It was typical of the FBI to hold their cards close to their chest: that’s how they were trained at Quantico. The FBI believed they were the world’s premier law enforcement agency, but when it came to working a drug investigation—especially when faced with the complex structure of the Mexican cartels—their expertise couldn’t match that of the DEA.

  As much as I tried to get everyone to cooperate, I knew it was going to be difficult.

  The FBI’s file was composed mostly of historical intelligence on Cifuentes, who was now wanted by DEA and FBI after being federally indicted on multiple drug-trafficking conspiracy charges. But instead of sharing with the DEA, the FBI began giving their intelligence to the CIA, in hopes they could produce something that would give them the upper hand.

  I knew that whenever intelligence was passed to CIA by a federal law enforcement agency, the source would instantly lose control of how that intelligence was classified, disseminated, and used. This was well known by the agents who worked in the embassy, and it was precisely why Brady and I had decided that the CIA had no place in our investigation.

  Almost every piece of intelligence we gained on Chapo was derived judicially from court-authorized wire intercepts, so that the evidence collected could be used to charge Chapo and others in his DTO in a US federal court. It was exactly how DEA disrupted and ultimately dismantled DTOs. The CIA, on the other hand, dealt extensively with classified and top-secret material that was difficult—if not impossible—to present in court.

  I didn’t need the CIA, but I also knew that they were anxious to get involved now that Brady and I were gaining momentum toward Chapo’s exact location.

  “The Feebies and the spooks want to call a meeting,” I told Brady.

  “Where?”

  “Langley.”

  “Fuck that,” Brady said. “We don’t need them.”

  “We need to at least be on the same page when it comes to Cifuentes. We need to send someone if you or I don’t go. I’m going to talk to Don.”

  Don Dominguez had been following these developments from Virginia and agreed to attend the meeting at CIA headquarters on our behalf. The result of the meeting was an agreement among all agencies to arrest Cifuentes and remove him from Chapo’s DTO, but only at the right time. It was crucial that the efforts be coordinated among all agencies. I confirmed with the FBI that Panchito’s PIN was in fact Alex Cifuentes and shared several of the ping coordinates I had obtained from the Cifuentes BlackBerry, hitting as it did in a rural area just southwest of Culiacán.
r />   IN LATE NOVEMBER 2013, I received an urgent text from Brady in El Paso.

  “This just in,” Brady wrote, quoting the line sheets after the Spanish translation. It was Second-Tier transmitting to all the office devices:

  “Panchito was caught in a battle with soldiers and Picudo went to rescue him. Turn off your phones because they will get your PIN.”

  I called Brady immediately.

  “Goddammit—the Feebs fucked us!” he shouted.

  “Hold on,” I said. “Let me look into it and get the facts.”

  I reached out to DEA Mazatlán, who in turn contacted their local military contacts to see if they’d heard about a recent arrest just outside Culiacán.

  Initially, the Mexicans didn’t even know who they’d arrested. SEDENA* had locked up some middle-aged guy at a small ranch, but they didn’t think he was Colombian, and his name wasn’t Cifuentes.

  “They’re saying they’ve got a guy called Enrique García Rodríguez,” I told Brady. “They’re getting me a photo of him right now, along with the passport.”

  Brady stayed on the line while I waited for Mazatlán to shoot me the email.

  When the photo arrived, it showed a man in his mid-forties, with a receding hairline, salt-and-pepper beard, and light complexion.

  “It’s Cifuentes, man,” I said. “It’s a fake name on this Mexican passport. Panchito is done.”

  “Fuck them!” Brady was livid.

  He knew it was just a matter of time before everything we’d built in the war room in El Paso came crashing down.

  Sure enough, within minutes, Chapo’s offices were already talking about dropping their BlackBerrys; Second-Tier wouldn’t be far behind.

  And then Top-Tier: Condor.

  Brady and I would soon be standing, once again, in the dark.

  “I just confirmed the photo with FBI,” I said. “They’re claiming they had nothing to do with this.”