Hunting El Chapo Page 13

Raul—an operator in Panama—notifies Chapo that he’s found a place on a hill five kilometers from the border with a ranch and room for a clandestine airstrip, but he will need heavy machinery to clear it.

  Raton is requesting “20 rolls”—$200,000—for logistics in moving 20 tons of marijuana in a tractor trailer towards the U.S. border. Chapo tells him that Picudo will deliver it.

  Chapo reminds Raton that they shouldn’t plan on having their BBQ outside Culiacán because there’s been a lot of military and police activity outside the city. Chapo suggests having it at his son Güero’s house instead and they can order Chinese food.

  Chapo instructs Ciento, one of his gofers in Culiacán, to go get the press from Pinguino’s ranch so they can make the squares—kilos—and to be careful because military and law enforcement units have been spotted in the area of the ranches.

  Chapo asks his accountant Oscar how much cash he has on hand. Oscar says $1,233,940 not including what Güero recently gave him. Chapo instructs Oscar to make the following transactions. To give $200,000 to Ciento and have Oscar send him a confirmation after the transaction at the bank. Then he asks Oscar to give Pinto, still another Culiacan worker, 4,190 pesos to repair a car.

  Chapo tells his son Tocallo that he’ll meet with him tomorrow.

  Chapo asks Araña how many loads were taken from La Cienéga, an airstrip outside Culiacán. Araña runs down through a list and reports that there were ten trips taken in the last week at $2,000 each.

  Chapo tells Kava to hurry up with the deeds for the nine properties they’d been given. Kava tells him he’s headed to Tijuana to conduct an evaluation of a site, most likely the start of a new super-tunnel. Then he discusses with Chapo the purchase of a casa de cambio—money-exchange—that’s going out of business. Chapo’s interested. Kava’s also going to look at some other properties in Mexicali and San Luis.

  Chapo speaks with an advisor named Flaco who’s updating him on a hearing in the port city of Lázaro Cárdenas regarding one of the cartel’s boats that’s been seized.

  Chapo sends flowers and a local five-piece band called Los Alegres del Barranco over to a 28-year-old girl in his neighborhood to serenade her on her birthday.

  AND, LIKE CLOCKWORK, every morning Chapo would receive an intelligence report from one of his most trusted advisers; Brady and I knew him only as “Sergio.”

  Lic-F may have been Chapo’s eyes and ears in many aspects of the DTO, but we recognized that Sergio was a critical player regarding Chapo’s personal safety. For months, Brady and I would watch as Sergio reported the detailed movements of Mexican government operations—military and law enforcement—both inside and outside Sinaloa.

  “Today the reconnaissance flights are scheduled to begin at 10:00 hours and run through 14:00 hours. One helicopter to the Cruz de Elota zone, another to Jesús María, and the final to the Navolato area.”

  “Four sapos”—toads, a coded reference to the green uniforms of SEDENA troops—“will be conducting patrols in the Cañadas, Las Quintas, Loma Linda, and Villa Ordaz neighborhoods today.”

  “Federal Police will be leaving the airport this morning and there will be movement from Mazatlán to Los Mochis—they’re looking for meth labs.”

  “Two soldiers will escort a panel van carrying monitoring equipment through Culiacán.”

  The level of detail was so precise that it seemed to me as though Sergio was copying and pasting directly from the Mexican military’s daily operational plans.

  “Sergio’s got people greased everywhere,” I told Brady.

  “Yep,” Brady said. “Chapo’s got advance notice on every single movement in Sinaloa.”

  Brady and I had almost become numb to the military leaks, after reading them every day for months. We hoped that Chapo had become numb as well.

  “There’s no way in hell he has time to stay on top of all of this intel,” Brady said. “As busy as he is every day running the DTO.”

  “Regardless, he’s got his safety net in place,” I said. “He’ll know immediately if there’s even a whiff of an operation against him.”

  Brady interrupted our conversation with a freshly translated line sheet.

  “Condor just told Naris that Chapo wants some sushi. He’s to deliver it to Los Hoyos,” Brady said.

  “Pinging him now,” I said.

  “Condor won’t quit,” Brady said. “He’s now sending the poor fucker back out for plastic spoons and a couple bags of ice.”

  When Chapo wasn’t locked in his bedroom with his latest girl, he was all business, 24/7, running the day-to-day of his organization without even a break on Sunday.

  “Naris is getting fed up,” Brady said. “Check this out: ‘I’m spending the day with my family,’ Naris says. ‘You can tell El Señor I’m not doing his bitch work today.’”

  “‘I’m not doing his bitch work,’” I repeated, laughing so hard that I forgot to send the coordinates to Brady.

  When I did send them, Naris’s ping came back with a successful hit.

  “Same neighborhood, brother. Colonia Libertad. Right within that same block.”

  “What’s Los Hoyos?” Brady asked. “‘The Holes’—a street name? A stash house?”

  Los Hoyos.

  We both thought it over. Silence on the line. Both of us racking our brains . . . Then, once again, the word puzzle slotted into place. Brady and I said it in perfect unison:

  “Tunnels.”

  This would certainly fit the profile of a man known as the tunnel king.

  “Remember what I heard from one of my sources? Inside one of his safe houses, Chapo has a tunnel—entrance is underneath a bathtub.”

  “Yeah, of course, I remember—the tunnel underneath the tub.”

  “Bet anything that’s why they’re calling the place Los Hoyos.”

  Whatever Chapo meant by Los Hoyos, I kept pinging Top-Tier and Naris, zeroing in tighter on that dusty block in Colonia Libertad.

  “My pings are close, man. His pattern of life is clear. Now all we need to do is find a door.”

  I KNEW JUST THE GUY I’d need to call once we were ready to go operational.

  United States Marshal Leroy Johnson, from Mississippi, had been with the Marshals Service for years and had a reputation as the foremost expert in tracking the phones of fugitives. He worked primarily out of Tennessee, but he had traveled all over the United States and on international missions, too. Leroy had conducted enough counter-narcotics capture operations in Mexico that he’d picked up the Spanish nickname “El Roy.” His southern accent was as thick as his build—he stood six feet and a solid two hundred pounds—and he shared my passion for a manhunt.

  “This guy is crazy,” I told Brady. “And fearless. He’ll walk through the worst neighborhoods in Juárez to put cuffs on a bad guy.”

  I knew that if we were to conduct any capture operation, we’d need Leroy and his team of marshals on the ground.

  By this point, the pressure was beginning to build, from Washington, DC, to Mexico City. Word had slowly trickled out among DEA and HSI that Brady and I had Chapo pinned down to less than a one-block radius. Upper brass from both sides were insisting on a final coordination meeting. I could feel the bureaucratic tilt—like at the embassy when it had shifted its weight during the earthquake.

  I was now spending more time trying to appease my bosses and coordinate a complex interagency meeting than focusing on the plan to act on our intelligence. On top of that, the CIA’s counter-narcotics team began showing up on the floor of my office, providing snippets of stale intelligence while asking probing questions, all in an attempt to collect anything they could about my plans.

  ON JANUARY 16, 2014, at 6:53 p.m., I received a text from Brady.

  “Chapo’s headed back down to Duck Dynasty. Looks like he’s already en route.”

  “Goddammit,” I texted back. “We should have SEMAR on board by now. We’re not going to get many more chances like this.”

  I knew that Chapo was at his mo
st vulnerable leaving Los Hoyos behind in Culiacán, traveling light with Condor and maybe Picudo or some other bodyguard. I had been studying recent satellite images of Duck Dynasty, too. The photos revealed multiple palapas, a newly constructed pool—complete with a swim-up bar—and several other small outbuildings. A construction worker or two could still be seen on the property. This corroborated the line sheets: palapas, a new pool, the need for an airboat—all things Chapo had discussed randomly over the months were now making sense.

  DUCK DYNASTY WAS in the middle of nowhere; the terrain was flat and easily accessed from all directions, so it was the perfect place to launch a capture operation.

  But the clock was ticking. The possibility of a leak getting back to Chapo was too great. The only thing predictable about Chapo Guzmán was his unpredictability. He could switch up his pattern at any time and simply vanish up into the Sierra Madre for months.

  I knew we couldn’t wait any longer—we had the whole investigation wrapped up in a package with a big red bow on top.

  “Think we can chance it?” Brady asked.

  “Fuck it,” I said. “Yes, let’s bring in SEMAR right now. I’m canceling the meeting with the brass.”

  We had no other option: it was time to deliver.

  MY FIRST CALL WAS to US Marshal Leroy Johnson, up in Tennessee.

  “It’s a go,” I said.

  “A capture op?”

  “Get down here.”

  “On my way,” Leroy said.

  That next evening, I sat down with Leroy over a couple of bottles of Negra Modelo in a quiet bar across the street from the embassy, flipped open my MacBook, and showed him the heavy concentration of pin markers on my Google Map.

  By now there were so many that you could hardly make out the city of Culiacán: it was completely covered with colored pins. I zoomed in, describing the meaning of each color and icon.

  “Yellow pins are my Top-Tier pings,” I explained. “Red pins are for the sons—also all of Chapo’s other operators. Blue are points of interest—any important locations mentioned in the line sheets. Tower icons are cell phone towers.”

  “Good,” Leroy said.

  “An ‘M’ is for meeting places, or pickup locations frequented by his couriers. The red circles are where we believe he has other safe houses. The little planes mark clandestine airstrips—there are hundreds of them.”

  “And the yellow stars?” Leroy asked.

  “Those are my closest pings—the ones with the tightest radius.” I zoomed in tighter on the Colonia Libertad neighborhood. “Chapo is right here on this block.”

  “Unbelievable,” Leroy said. “You’ve got his whole world mapped out, Drew. Safe houses, pickup locations, cell towers. Hell, I’ve never seen a pattern of life so dialed in. You’ve got him cornered.”

  “Not just yet,” I said. “We’ve got plenty to work with, but we still don’t have a door.”

  “Oh, we’ll find it,” Leroy said confidently. “Let’s go get this son of a bitch.”

  EVERYTHING BRADY AND I had worked so hard to keep secret—even some of our own DEA and HSI people were in the dark about many of the details—was about to be exposed to the Mexican counterparts.

  Admiral Raul Reyes Aragones, the top-ranking SEMAR commander in DF, commonly known by the nickname “La Furia” (the Fury, for the way he and his elite brigade would rip through and destroy Mexican drug-trafficking organizations), arrived at the US embassy in an armored Mercedes sedan, followed by his captain and several lieutenants.

  Furia cut an impressive figure: early sixties, but extremely fit—he looked like he could still knock out fifty push-ups at the drop of a dime. Aragones’s bald head was tanned and so shiny that it seemed to have been polished. He wore a crisp white-collared naval dress shirt, starched and without a single crease. His hands were soft and well manicured; when he smiled, his teeth gleamed white—too white, I thought, as if they’d been overbleached by his dentist. It was a salesman’s smile.

  “Quieres Chapo?” I asked immediately as the admiral leaned back in his leather swivel chair in the Kiki Room.

  “Pues, claro que sí,” the admiral said. “Of course we want Chapo! Tell me when and where.”

  I explained that Chapo and his entire organization feared SEMAR, whom they called las rápidas, “the fast ones.” As I spoke, my chest felt suddenly tight, as if I’d just finished a six-mile run in that thin mountain air of the capital: I had so much to say, but I was almost too nervous to put my thoughts into words . . .

  I’d spent years building up to this moment—how could I suddenly let go? How could I begin to spill all the secrets and techniques it had taken me so long to perfect? No one had been told the complete picture—no one on earth knew everything that I knew—and now I was supposed to dump it all out in the lap of some spit-and-polish admiral I’d just met?

  Realizing that if Chapo was going to be captured, we would need military help, I took a deep breath and stared the admiral in the eyes—this guy with the gleaming smile and immaculate uniform was the key to putting the operation into action.

  “Chapo sometimes leaves the security of his stronghold in Culiacán for a lagoon getaway with a pool and swim-up bar.”

  “Why this location?” Admiral Furia asked.

  “The proximity to Culiacán,” I said, shrugging. “It’s a short drive down—and it’s remote from any prying eyes. Chapo likes to meet his sons—do business face-to-face. Some issues they just can’t get done over the phone. It’s an abandoned duck-hunting club called Pichiguila—Chapo refers to it simply as ‘Pichis.’ He’s taken old palapas, had them renovated, and turned it into a pretty nice place. I call it Duck Dynasty.”

  There were a few snickers around the table.

  “Dinastía de Pato,” someone said.

  “We’ve followed his sons—well, we’ve followed the pings on his sons’ phones—and they take us right there near the palapas. So do the pings from the Top-Tier device.”

  “How do you know Guzmán is behind the phone you’re pinging?”

  “He’s using espejos—mirrors—a layering system, which we’ve broken and infiltrated,” I said. “Tiers, let’s call them. In his terms, they’re secretarios, and he’s the manager—el generente. But one of two secretaries—Condor or Chaneke; we simply call them Top-Tier—is always by Chapo’s side.”

  “Fine,” Admiral Furia said curtly. “He comes down to this Pichiguila hunting club on the lagoon. Doesn’t he travel with a lot of bodyguards? Our reports are that Guzmán’s always got many heavily armed support with him—could be as many as one hundred—”

  “That intel is historical,” I interrupted. “It’s out of date. At some point, yes, Chapo may have been traveling up in the mountains with that many armed bodyguards. Years ago, perhaps. Not now. He’s moving fast and lean. He has a core group of loyal bodyguards—he’s likely always armed, wearing a bulletproof vest, maybe in an armored vehicle. But no—those reports of hundreds of armed cartel men driving in a convoy of black Suburbans at all times? They are no longer valid. At this point, I can assure you that when Chapo comes down to those palapas he built near the Pichiguila Club, it’s just with a couple of his most trusted men.”

  I could see that the admiral was hooked—and sure enough, by the end of my presentation he was ready to put all his men and resources at our disposal. We drafted an ambitious ops plan: simultaneous ground and air attack on Chapo’s compound at the lagoon.

  The element of surprise would be key: we would need to get SEMAR in perimeter positions in the middle of the night in order to capture the drug lord in a predawn raid. They would put four of SEMAR’s top helicopters at a base in La Paz, near the southern end of the Baja Peninsula; they’d move in the elite brigades from Mexico City to bunk down at the SEMAR bases within Sinaloa, encircling Duck Dynasty.

  “Once the helicopters and my men are in position, we’ll wait until we receive the green light from you,” the admiral said. “We won’t move until you tell us that
the Top-Tier device is there.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “Once our pings indicate he’s at Duck Dynasty, we’ll let you know immediately.”

  “And your team of marshals will be joining us in La Paz, correct?”

  “Yes, sir. They’ll be with you in the event we need to chase the phone. If Chapo leaves unexpectedly, there’s nobody better than El Roy and his guys to track him down. I’ll also send Nico Gutierrez with you to be my DEA liaison from the ground.”

  SPECIAL AGENT NICOLÁS GUTIERREZ was a native Spanish speaker who sat next to me at the embassy and helped me ping phones and decipher some of the more unintelligible slang and misspellings in the line sheets. A former US Marine who was built like a defensive lineman, Nico was the perfect guy to be my eyes and ears in the field.

  Gutierrez lived for capture ops like this. He already had his tactical gear packed and was ready to jump in with SEMAR.

  Standing outside the Kiki Room, I ran into Regional Director McAllister again.

  “Well, Drew, this is where your world begins to spin,” Tom said with a smile.

  “Spin? Sir, it already feels like it’s about to unravel.”

  Tom was a seasoned DEA senior executive who’d led high-level cases throughout Latin America, Europe, and the Middle East. He understood better than anyone how hard I had worked to get even this far.

  “I’ve filed a gag order with the chief of station here,” Tom said. “CIA will not be allowed to talk about this operation with anyone.”

  I felt extremely grateful that Tom, and my other bosses, had allowed me to work without interruptions or any of the political drama that could often plague an investigation of this scope. They’d all been working diligently behind the scenes, ensuring that only those who needed to know were kept updated.

  With the volume of intelligence coming in daily, Brady would need to remain in the El Paso war room, while I would establish a command center at the embassy with a group of intelligence analysts, along with all of my top brass. Brady and I both wanted to be on the ground with SEMAR, but we also knew that in order to keep the train from running off the tracks, we needed to be in our positions doing what we’d been doing nearly around the clock for nine months.