Hunting El Chapo Read online

  “Yeah,” I said. “Seems to me he’s Chapo’s most trusted set of eyes and ears. He’s cautious and smart. But I don’t think he’s a lawyer. Some of these line sheets make me suspect he’s actually got a law enforcement background.”

  The thought of Lic-F took me back to that escape from Puente Grande prison—Chapo’s corruption of the guards, and even the failures of the prison management. Lic-F? El Licenciado? Dámaso? The former police officer in the Sinaloa Attorney General’s Office who’d become a close friend of Chapo’s during his stint in Puente Grande?

  “I think Lic-F’s going to turn out to be Dámaso López Núñez,” I said. “But I can’t tell yet. The only thing I’m sure of is that this guy is slick. And he’s got some serious hooks within the government.”

  “Look at this,” Brady said. “He’s giving Chapo the status on a tunnel.”

  I pulled up the line sheet from Lic-F to Top-Tier. Lic-F was providing Chapo with a precise description of a tunnel that had been under construction for more than a year. “It’s going to measure approximately eleven hundred meters, and they have finished more than six hundred meters,” I read in the translated message. And Lic-F said he’d need less than a “roll”—$10,000—to finish construction and keep paying the salary of the tunnel workers.

  “Damn,” I told Brady. “That tunnel is gonna be more than a quarter-mile long.”

  “They’re digging into San Diego or Nogales—one of the two,” Brady said.

  Working in the HSI office in El Paso, Brady had become an expert on tunnels along the US–Mexico border.

  It was Chapo who had pioneered the narco tunnel along his key smuggling corridors. The tunneling had started nearly a quarter-century earlier, in 1990, when the first cross-border one was found in Douglas, Arizona. The Douglas tunnel, estimated to have cost the traffickers $1.5 million, originated inside a house in the town of Agua Prieta, Sonora, and ended some three hundred feet away at a warehouse in Douglas. Used for smuggling loads of weed for the Sinaloa Cartel, the media had dubbed it the “James Bond Tunnel,” because the only way to access the underground passage was to turn on an outdoor water spigot at the Agua Prieta house, which triggered a hydraulic system that raised a pool table in a game room, which in turn exposed a ladder down.

  No one knew exactly how many tunnels Chapo had constructed in the ensuing years. Since that first Douglas discovery, US authorities had found more than 150, almost always with the same signature construction features: ventilation, lighting, sometimes rails, and often sophisticated hydraulics were included.

  I HAD DISCOVERED a key player in the tunnel construction, too: “Kava.”

  “Kava may be an architect,” I told Brady. “Possibly an engineer. He’s constantly reporting to Chapo, giving him status updates on his workers and the various projects they having going on. One job is up in Tijuana—probably the tunnel that Lic-F is talking about.”

  “Could be,” Brady said. “Everything I’m seeing that’s tunnel-related I’m passing to my guys in San Diego and Nogales.”

  On October 31, 2013, the San Diego Tunnel Task Force, comprising DEA, HSI, and US Customs and Border Protection, discovered a major tunnel between a warehouse in Tijuana and another in San Diego. I followed the news coverage live on CNN in the embassy.

  This “super tunnel,” as authorities dubbed it, went down to a depth of thirty-five feet and zigzagged about a third of a mile until the exit in an industrial park west of the Otay Mesa port of entry. Muling drugs down there must have been claustrophobic work; the tunnel wasn’t big enough for a man to stand up in—only four-feet tall and three feet wide—but it did have ventilation, lighting, hydraulic doors, and an electric rail system.

  US Immigration and Customs Enforcement locked up three suspects and made a sizable seizure during the discovery of the super tunnel—more than eight tons of marijuana and 325 pounds of cocaine.

  Brady and I suspected that the super tunnel was Chapo’s handiwork—not because of chatter in the line sheets but because, after its discovery, the DTO’s BlackBerrys immediately went completely silent about it.

  “Amazing,” Brady said. “Everyone’s quiet. They’re disciplined. They lose a tunnel of that size and no one’s saying a goddamn word?”

  “With as many tunneling projects as Kava’s working on, Chapo’s gotta be used to these things getting popped by now,” I said. “Hell, they’ve probably got at least another five super tunnels in the works.”

  AS BRADY AND I were in the heat of strategizing our high-risk operation to capture Chapo, the Mexico City embassy was rocked by shocking news. In mid-December 2013, a joint capture-op involving units of the DEA and Mexican Federal Police in the beachside resort of Puerto Peñasco, just south of the Arizona border, turned wildly violent.

  I had just finished breakfast and was fixing the Windsor knot in my tie when the phone rang. “Get in here now,” my group supervisor said. “Marco and the guys are pinned down up in Sonora in a shoot-out. They’re calling for help.”

  I quickly snatched my laptop bag and headed toward my G-ride. On most days, DEA Special Agent Marco Perez sat next to me, but on this particular morning, Perez, several other DEA agents, and the Mexican Federal Police were staging a covert operation in Puerto Peñasco to arrest Gonzalo Inzunza Inzunza, a.k.a. “Macho Prieto,” a high-ranking leader in the Sinaloa Cartel. Macho Prieto ran his own drug-trafficking organization under the cartel’s umbrella. A protégé of Ismael “Mayo” Zambada García, Macho Prieto was considered extremely violent.

  I burst into the embassy hoping to hear Marco and his team were out of harm’s way, and quickly got briefed on what had gone wrong. The Federal Police had approached the door of Macho’s condo in the predawn darkness, and Macho’s response had been instant. The cops began taking fire through the front door from Macho and his bodyguards, and within seconds there was a firefight under way in the middle of an upscale residential neighborhood filled with American tourists, just steps from the white sand. Macho’s men—armed with AK-47s and automatic belt-fed machine guns—fired until they ran out of ammo.

  Macho called in reinforcements, and gunmen raced in from other condos, firing at the cops from balconies and vehicles. Macho’s “war wagon”—an armored white Ford F-150 with a 50-caliber machine gun mounted in the back bed underneath a camper shell—came screaming in through the front gates of the complex, smashing PF’s barricade of cars, while snipers fired round after round into the front windshield, wounding the driver. The war wagon sped out of control, leaking gasoline and oil onto the pavement. Gunmen jumped from the front and back of the truck and ran to join the fight.

  “They’re in the back of the complex, hunkered down,” my supervisor said, her ear to a phone receiver. “I can hear the gunshots over the phone in the background—it’s nonstop.” Perez and the other two DEA agents were around in back of the complex, taking cover behind a small concrete wall. The American agents were pinned down in the darkness and couldn’t leave their positions because PF had two Black Hawk helicopters in the air, firing grenades at the bad guys, turning vehicles into fireballs.

  Even local police cars began responding, but not to join the good guys—the local cops, all on Macho’s payroll, were picking up the injured cartel gunmen and taking them away like a makeshift ambulance service. The PF team was small, outgunned, and now running the risk of being surrounded by Macho’s men.

  In the chaos, Macho’s bodyguards were able to drag him out the back door and into a car to make an escape, but Macho was bleeding profusely. When PF finally made entry into the condo, they saw puddles of blood and scarlet handprints everywhere. Macho had sunken into a hot tub in an attempt to control his bleeding, turning the bubbling water thick and dark red. The smears continued on the floors and out the back door. Macho Prieto had escaped the gunfight but would soon die from his wounds.

  Two Mexican Federal Police were also badly wounded; the DEA team raced them in a convoy across the US border to Tucson. They couldn’t risk staying i
n Mexico a moment longer, for fear of being attacked—nowhere in Sonora was safe once word was out that PF had killed Macho.

  The wounded PF members all recovered in an Arizona hospital; no DEA agents had been injured; Macho was dead—so the operation was judged a major success against the Sinaloa Cartel, but it was also one of deadliest international operations DEA had ever conducted.

  CULIACÁN HAD ALWAYS weighed heavy on my mind. Even more so after the bloody operation to capture Macho Prieto.

  Just as Macho maintained ironfisted control of his turf in Sonora, the city of Culiacán was in the grip of Chapo. Brady and I knew it would be nearly impossible to hit Chapo anywhere in Culiacán: we could end up in a firefight with an entire city. If Macho could summon that many fighters in the little resort town of Puerto Peñasco, how many would Chapo have streaming to his aid if we were to hit him in Culiacán? It was precisely why Brady and I were working so hard to find a location outside the city where we could nab him quickly, quietly, and hopefully without a gun battle.

  “How many kids does Chapo have?”

  It was our fifth phone call of the day, and it wasn’t even noon.

  “All the women he’s run through—no one really knows,” I said. “Hundreds? You might be living next door to one.” Brady let out a loud laugh.

  “But really,” I continued, “there’s only the four key sons we need to pay attention to.”

  With Christmas season approaching, I saw that Ratón and Güero were taking regular trips out of Culiacán; Chapo would tell them where to meet—some place he called “Pichis.”

  “This new ‘Pichis’—over and over. Just today again: ‘Meet me at Pichis,’” Brady read from a freshly translated line sheet.

  I had been dissecting those sheets as well.

  “Yes, I’ve seen that. No idea what Pichis means. But he’s building a pool there along with some palapas—Kava’s been sending him regular updates on the construction.”

  Being hypervigilant for references to meetings among all the players was a top priority for me, especially if the get-togethers were planned outside the city. I started pinging Güero’s and Ratón’s phones simultaneously as they headed south from Culiacán; then more pinging, until I had six red pushpins tacked to my Google Map, tracing a crooked line down Sinaloa State Highway 5.

  But then, nothing. After about fifty minutes, the sons’ phones would stop pinging. Maybe they were so far in the sticks that they were out of reach of a cell tower? Or had they shut their phones off, or taken out the batteries, right before a meeting?

  Brady and I couldn’t track the boys any further, but we could drill down on Chapo’s language. What the hell did that name “Pichis” mean?

  DECEMBER 24, 2013—10:34 P.M. I had just poured a cup of homemade eggnog, helping my wife finish wrapping up the last Christmas gifts for the boys, when my phone hummed with a text from Brady in El Paso.

  “Got another Pichis run.”

  This time it wasn’t just Güero and Ratón, but Tocallo as well. Chapo had instructed the three boys to meet his driver at the gas station in “Celis,” and he’d take them the rest of the way in. My wife rolled her eyes as I turned toward the computer and began pinging.

  “Celis” was the small town of Sanchez Celis.

  “I can see a gas station at the south end, but all the pings dry up right around there,” I told Brady.

  It was one o’clock on Christmas morning, and Brady and I had been swooping around on Google Earth, searching that desolate area of Sinaloan farmland that faded into swamp further toward the Pacific, looking for any sign of Chapo’s top-secret location.

  Then it all began to fall into place. “He was ordering those airboats a couple months ago, right?” Brady said.

  “Yeah, then he talked about building a pool near some palapas at Pichis.” I replied. “So it’s going to be someplace on the water—near the Ensenada de Pabellones.”

  “Found it!” Brady interrupted. “Pichis. An abbreviation. Short for Pichiguila duck-hunting club.” Brady had already pulled up the club’s website. I did the same, and came upon a home page advertising “the best duck-hunting in North America.” The website even noted that President Dwight D. Eisenhower had hunted in the area, though before the club was established.

  I was struck by the eerie throwback to my Kansas past. Chapo was a duck hunter? Guzmán hardly fit the profile of an outdoorsman, even though he’d been raised in the remote mountains of the Sierra Madre.

  “Can you see him standing out in the middle of a swamp in knee-high waders, waiting for a flock of pintails to fly by?”

  “Chapo’s got no time for that shit. Ducks? Hell, no. He’d rather be hunting young girls,” said Brady.

  The club was located on the north end of the Ensenada de Pabelones. But my pings near Sanchez Celis were too far away from the club; Chapo couldn’t be hanging out at the lodge. Brady and I continued our virtual flyovers, zooming in, zooming out, searching for any kind of man-made structure. Just after 3:30 a.m., I found myself hovering tight over two brown grainy circles resembling old palapas.

  Jackpot!

  I remembered my father teaching me a key lesson back when I was ten: whenever you hunt ducks, you want to sit on the “X.” The X is the hot spot where the ducks are known to feed or relax. It was no different for Chapo.

  Guzmán needed to leave his claustrophobic Culiacán safe houses to eat some carne asada, relax, sit under the stars in the middle of nowhere, and breathe fresh air for a few hours. A secluded place where he could meet with his sons to discuss cartel business face-to-face.

  “Just found our X,” I said. “It’s the ultimate hit location.” Brady laughed when I told him the name I’d given Chapo’s secret lagoon hideaway.

  “Duck Dynasty.”

  Los Hoyos

  THE KIKI ROOM WAS filled with suits. I was sitting at the center of the table, across from the head of the DEA. Administrator Michele Leonhart had flown down to the embassy to be briefed specifically on all the high-profile cases Mexico City agents had been working.

  Leonhart was no stranger to stories of agents chasing down elusive kingpins. She had begun her DEA career as a street agent in Southern California and had worked her way up through the ranks before being appointed DEA administrator by President Obama in February 2010. The last time I had seen her was in 2006, when I walked across the stage at my graduation in Quantico. Before I began to brief her on the latest developments with Chapo, her words from my graduation ceremony once again rang in my head:

  Go out there and make big cases.

  I smiled, knowing that now, six years later, I was on the verge of fulfilling the promise I’d made with that handshake.

  I filled Leonhart in on the tremendous relationship I had built with HSI and how far we’d come, showing her my Google Map and the heavy concentration of Top-Tier pings in the Colonia Libertad neighborhood.

  “We have him down to a block radius, ma’am,” I said. “And every week—or every week and a half—he comes out of Culiacán.”

  “Do you know where he’s going?”

  “Yes, to the coast,” I said, “to a private hideaway he’s constructing not far from the city.”

  Leonhart nodded.

  “We’re finalizing all the details,” I told her. “I want to have enough intelligence to know where he’s going to run to—should he escape capture again. We’re almost there, ma’am. We plan to bring in SEMAR soon.”

  Following the meeting, I ran into the Regional Director Tom McAllister in the hallway.

  “You spoke pretty confidently in there,” Tom said. “Made some big promises.”

  “It’s the truth,” I said. “I just told it like it is.”

  I wasn’t being cocky. I simply had no time to second-guess myself.

  I had put in years of hard study back in Phoenix with Diego, and now I’d done all these grueling months in the trenches with Brady, Joe, and Neil, cracking the code of Chapo’s mirrored telecommunication system. I could hon
estly say—without arrogance or bravado—that no one in history had ever been in a better position to capture Chapo Guzmán.

  I now had the current location of the world’s most wanted criminal. I’d saturated myself in all the tiniest details of Guzmán’s life. I was sunk so deep into Chapo’s world that I knew virtually almost every movement he made, and close to every order he gave throughout the day.

  READING THE DAILY INTERCEPTS painstakingly, line by line, I could see a parallel obsession to mine: Chapo kept his eyes on everything, too, every single transaction and decision in his drug-trafficking sphere. In his own way, the kingpin was driven by a constant thirst for knowledge, just as I was. Chapo needed to understand every detail of his operation, even the most seemingly routine and boring things. This need for total knowledge bordered on a compulsion. Chapo was a boss who required complete control.

  I needed control, too. Many evenings—nights when I should have already been home with my family—I found myself scrolling down through the summary of translated line sheets on my MacBook, hoping to find something—anything—I’d missed:

  Chapo and Turbo, his Mazatlán-based maritime operator, discuss payments for a high-speed cigarette boat that needs to be sent to San Diego for several months to have new motors installed. Turbo asks Chapo to deposit the money into his wife’s account and says that he still had not received his $10,000 bi-weekly payment for his expenses. Turbo also tells Chapo that he’s looking at acquiring buoys equipped with GPS—clearly as a result of the recent 622-kg cocaine loss at sea.

  Maestro, a pilot based in Chiapas, asks Chapo to send a payment for some unnamed military commanders. Chapo replies that he’ll be sending a total of $130,000 in the plane: $40,000 to pay each commander for each event and $10,000 for the jet fuel.