Hunting El Chapo Read online

  Hustling through the terminal, I thought back to the last time I was on a beach. Just six months earlier, I’d been watching my kids make sandcastles along the Florida coast, my toes sunk into the surf, when my BlackBerry, sitting on a striped towel, started vibrating—even in that peaceful family moment, Chapo couldn’t help but intrude. I had decoded the messages right there on the beach, piecing together a murder plot from intel gleaned by DEA and HSI.

  Chapo was getting ready to kill his own cousin, a forty-three-year-old named Luis, whom everyone called Lucho. Guzmán was slick; it wasn’t going to be a public execution—no sicarios on motorcycles, toting AKs and wearing balaclavas. In fact, no one would ever be able to connect it back to Chapo.

  Instead, Guzmán planned to simply send Lucho across the border into Honduras on a negotiating errand. Corrupt Honduran cops on Chapo’s payroll would do a routine car stop—just as I had done so many times as a deputy sheriff in Kansas—but then they’d plant a hot gun and cocaine in Lucho’s Toyota pickup, arrest him, and take him to a Honduran prison, where Chapo had arranged to have the guy shanked to death, making it look as though Lucho had been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  I had gotten up from my towel, walked down the beach, and, out of earshot of my wife and kids, called the DEA in Honduras. Sure enough, Lucho had just been arrested hours earlier. We got the guy put into an administrative segregation unit and managed to stop the murder plot. When I signed up to be a cop, I never thought I’d be saving the lives of high-ranking Sinaloa Cartel members.

  Racing through the tourists in the Cabo airport, I was picked up by Nico in an armored Suburban tailed by a small convoy of rápidas—SEMAR’s customized pickup trucks with machine guns mounted in the bed—and we headed up to the BAM-9 base in La Paz. I threw my bag on an open bunk, then scouted around for a few minutes, setting up a mobile communications center in a closet-size side room of the barracks, a room I dubbed Nerd Central: MacBooks, various iPhones and BlackBerrys, cables, and chargers snaked everywhere.

  Brady landed in Cabo from El Paso a few hours later; we picked him up and drove to La Paz. We immediately sat down and briefed the field commander of the SEMAR brigade, two-star Admiral Antonio Reyna Marquez, a.k.a. “Garra.”

  Garra reported directly back to Admiral Furia, who had remained in Mexico City. I wasn’t sure how this admiral had picked up the nickname Garra—Spanish for “Talon”—but it fit him perfectly. He had a tight cut of bristly jet-black hair, a sun-creased forehead, a hawklike nose, and high cheekbones that hinted at ancient Aztec bloodlines. He was no-nonsense, calm, and direct. Garra immediately demanded to know if we could still count on Chapo heading south, at some point soon, from Culiacán to Duck Dynasty.

  “I wish I could give you a definitive answer, sir,” I said. “Our biggest problem continues to be the intel leaks. Any luck finding the source?”

  “No,” said Admiral Garra. “We’re still looking into it.”

  WITHIN A DAY, Brady and I had fully bonded with the brigade. We were the only white guys in civilian clothes on the base—and glaringly stood out—but then Captain Julio Diaz came around the corner with boxes of marine-issued BDUs and sand-colored combat boots.

  “You guys need to get out of those clothes and blend in,” Captain Diaz said. “Too many eyes around here.”

  I remembered Diaz from the meeting—every one called him El Toro. I’d liked him from the moment we met back in Mexico City.

  “El me cae bien,” I told Brady. “He falls on me well.” It was an expression I had picked up in Mexico that meant you got a good vibe from somebody. “Just look at him. El Toro’s always so amped up, ready to rock—he can’t even sit still.”

  The bunks were tight, but I was thankful SEMAR had stuck us in the officer barracks with air-conditioning and decent showers. Brady and I joined up with Leroy and Nico for dinner—everyone, including the eighty marines from DF, ate in the same crammed mess hall.

  “We gotta get over there,” said Leroy, taking a few slurps of a funky fish stew. “Fuck this waiting around. He ain’t coming out.”

  “Shit,” Nico said, laughing. “What’s the rush? I get a couple runs in around the base every day. Take a helo ride and buzz some beaches with these guys. Life’s good.”

  BACK AT THE BARRACKS, we found out we weren’t alone.

  Two young DEA agents had arrived and were unpacking their bags. These were the two case agents leading the investigations of Mayo Zambada and Rafael Caro Quintero (or “RCQ”). A judge had recently granted Caro Quintero early release from a Mexican prison after he had served twenty-eight years of a forty-year sentence for his involvement in the murder of Special Agent Kiki Camarena. He was now wanted again, and believed to be hiding north of Culiacán, high in the Sierra Madre.

  Ever since I began coordinating with SEMAR for the Chapo op, there was talk in the embassy about sharing resources with other viable DEA investigations. It was official protocol—no way around it. Brady had been incensed when I’d prepped him a few weeks earlier about the possibility of sharing SEMAR with another investigation. “You gotta be joking,” he said. “Share SEMAR? For what?”

  “Other case agents are claiming to have actionable intel on their targets, too,” I said. “Now that we’ve lined everything up with SEMAR, they’re saying they’ll be just as ready as we are to launch.”

  “Bullshit,” Brady said, fuming.

  “I know,” I said. “But there’s nothing I can do about it. The decision was made above me.” I had struck a gentleman’s agreement with the other case agents: whoever had the ripest intel at the time SEMAR was ready in La Paz, that agent had authorization to green-light a launch. Fortunately, I knew that the intelligence these arriving agents had on Mayo and RCQ wasn’t remotely close to what Brady and I had put together over the past nine months on Chapo.

  “We can only hope SEMAR doesn’t get distracted with all these different targets on deck. We’ve got to keep them focused,” I said.

  I knew that Mayo frequented the mountainous area just east of Duck Dynasty; an attempt to capture him first would immediately kill any chance we had of Chapo leaving Culiacán. He’d never risk it, knowing that the marines were conducting raids just south of the city.

  As they unpacked in the barracks, I approached the two agents.

  “You both realize if we launch on Mayo or RCQ first, our Duck Dynasty op is done,” I said. “Completely burnt.”

  They nodded, but it was clear it didn’t matter to them. I could tell they were just thrilled to be in the middle of all the action on the base.

  AFTER A COUPLE OF DAYS at La Paz, I knew there was no way Brady or I would be leaving anytime soon. Nerd Central was our new command center, and we had SEMAR at our fingertips in the event we needed to launch.

  Nico drove Brady and me to the local Walmart, where we stocked up on groceries and a couple of extra pairs of underwear. A return date to DF was the furthest thing from my mind.

  I called my wife from the Walmart parking lot.

  “Baby, I can’t leave,” I said. “I don’t know how long it will be—maybe a couple more days—I’ll explain later.”

  “Okay, please be careful,” she said.

  “Love you.”

  My wife had been rock steady throughout my DEA career. If she was worried, she never told me. We were the perfect match that way: always accepting and embracing life’s precious moments—even the scarier ones—as a team.

  For the next few days, Brady and I were glued to the hardwood chairs inside Nerd Central, reading fresh stacks of line sheets and pinging Top-Tier into the late hours, after all the marines had gone to sleep. Most nights, we’d be the only ones left in the room, all lights off, working by the glow of our computer screens.

  Lic-F continued to keep Chapo updated on SEMAR movements, only this time there was no delay—nearly zero lag time. Brady and I watched as four SEMAR helos—two Black Hawks and two Russian MI-17s—took off from BAM 9 to conduct another training mission.
r />   “Here it is,” Brady said, reading from his BlackBerry within seconds.

  “Lic-F just told Chapo four helicopters left the base at La Paz, and it appears they’ll be conducting a training mission near Cabo.”

  “Spot-on,” I said. Talk about unnerving. I didn’t feel safe on-base. It still felt like we were all under constant surveillance.

  There had to be someone on the base who was dirty. But who?

  IN THE MIDDLE OF our fifth night’s dinner, I received a call from my group supervisor in Mexico City, requesting an update, though it quickly became evident what her agenda was. She was letting me know—not so subtly—that she was receiving pressure from officials within “G.O.M.” (government of Mexico).

  “Drew, G.O.M. is leaning on me,” she said. “Where do you guys stand? We don’t have unlimited time with this operation.”

  She said that SEMAR was immediately needed to go fight Los Caballeros Templarios—the Knights Templar Cartel—down in Michoacán. The Knights Templar were a violent threat—founded by Nazario Moreno, a narco commonly referred to as El Más Loco (“the Craziest One”)—but the notion that they were a higher-priority target for the DEA or SEMAR than Chapo Guzmán was ludicrous.

  “Knights Templar?” I said. “Sorry, but the G.O.M. is full of shit. We’re talking about Chapo. I have safe houses within Culiacán; definitive locations. There’s never been a higher-priority drug target in the history of Mexico. Since I’ve been on the ground here with SEMAR—with their admiral—no one has said a word about Michoac—”

  “It’s gotten—well, political,” she said. “I can only push back so hard, Drew. SEMAR is talking about pulling all of their people out of La Paz.”

  I hung up and stared at Brady. “My GS,” I said. “There’s talk about shutting us down. Pulling SEMAR from La Paz.”

  “Get the fuck outta here,” Brady said, polishing off his last spoonful of lentejas, a watery bean soup.

  “I’m not joking. ‘Getting political,’ she says.”

  I took a deep breath. Typical—bosses say one thing and the ground troops report another. None of these rank-and-file marines had any intention of leaving La Paz to go after the Knights Templar.

  Still, I felt like the entire operational plan was in danger of unraveling. The double-talk was bad enough; more potentially damaging was the number of politicians, bosses, and bureaucrats in both governments who knew of the pending operation. I pushed my bowl of soup away, did a head count, and quickly lost track: the administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration, the director of Homeland Security Investigations, and down the ranks through their various underlings and supervisory agents in Washington, Arizona, California, Texas, and Illinois. And los primos knew, of course, most likely right up to the director of the Central Intelligence Agency himself.

  Too many mouths, I thought. And too many egos.

  I didn’t know the precise source of the leaks, but the effect on our target was crystal clear. Hell, Chapo knew more of the precise up-to-the-moment details of what was happening on the ground—more of the exact marine operational movements—than anyone in the US government other than Brady and me.

  “THE PLANE SPOTTED Mayo’s courier,” Leroy Johnson said excitedly. “They’re following him. Southeast of Culiacán. I think we’re going to launch.”

  El Roy knew that our intel on Chapo should have taken top priority. But Leroy simply couldn’t take sitting around the barracks any longer. He’d watch movies in the bunk room until 4 a.m., and his mind always seemed to be racing. He was pumped up and ready to get out into the field with the marines and chase down some bad guys, regardless of who they were.

  I turned to Brady. “They’re saying it’s a fifty-fifty shot that this courier could be delivering some food to Mayo in the hills. They’re launching.”

  “Goddammit.”

  Brady and I both watched as Nico, Leroy, and his team donned the tactical gear hanging from their bunks and joined teams of marines boarding the four helos out on the tarmac. I followed them outside, feeling powerless just standing there, the ocean and the grit from the rotor chop smacking me in the face. There was no stopping this operation now.

  I watched helicopters lift off and eventually disappear over the horizon of the Sea of Cortez.

  LATE THE FOLLOWING DAY, the helos returned to base, and I watched as lines of exhausted marines filled the mess hall.

  I’d already been briefed on the results.

  They hadn’t captured Mayo, but they did arrest a few of his men and seized a cache of AK-47s, M-16s, and shotguns found buried in fifty-five-gallon drums on a ranch near the initial target location.

  “Not good,” Brady told me. “Several office devices in Durango dropped already, and the lines are quiet.”

  Brady and I knew this was coming—the same thing had happened after the premature arrest of Alex Cifuentes. If all the mirrors dropped, we were on the verge of standing in the dark once again.

  I saw the Mayo case agent packing up his bags in the barracks, nodding on his way out.

  “Well, he looks perfectly happy,” I said to Brady.

  “All of that for a fifty-fifty chance? Good riddance. At least he’s outta here, so SEMAR can focus on Chapo.”

  As we were walking back to the command center from our barracks, Brady stopped, staring at his phone. A brand-new message from Top-Tier—intercepted and translated in the HSI war room in El Paso—had arrived.

  “Shit, we’re still alive.”

  “What you got?”

  “Chapo just told Naris to go out and buy some red satin sheets and take them over to one of the safe houses,” Brady said.

  Chapo was going about his daily business—spooked or not. And any fears he had about SEMAR’s movements just south of Culiacán and in the skies hadn’t put a dent in his love life, certainly not on Valentine’s Day—known in Mexico as El Día del Amor y la Amistad, the “Day of Love and Friendship.”

  “He’s ordered Naris to get dozens of roses for all his women and write the same message on all the cards,” Brady said. “He even wants Naris to sign his initials for him: J.G.L.”

  “J.G.L.,” I said. “Doesn’t get any more personal than that.”

  There was no doubt in my mind now. Chapo was still inside that safe house, on that run-down block in Colonia Libertad.

  There wasn’t a moment’s peace to be found in La Paz. I was still on edge after the recent turn of events with SEMAR going after Mayo.

  Brady and I knew that we’d need to refocus SEMAR back onto the manhunt for Chapo, so we went directly to meet with Admiral Garra in his office. I could see that Garra was tired, his eyes dark and puffy; he was clearly disappointed by the results of the Mayo raid.

  Garra seemed annoyed by our very presence in his doorway. He didn’t say a word; he merely raised his eyebrows as an indication for us to get to the point.

  “Señor,” I said. “Top-Tier hasn’t dropped.”

  “You’ve still got him within that block?”

  “Yes, surprisingly, Top-Tier is still pinging in the same place,” I said. “Chapo seems comfortable in Culiacán. We might turn this to our advantage. He must think that all the military activity in La Paz was for the mission launched against Mayo. He’s still going about his business. He just had flowers sent to all his girls for El Día del Amor y la Amistad, but there’s no way he’s coming out. Not now.”

  “So you’re suggesting . . .?”

  “Going to ground,” I nodded.

  “In Culiacán?”

  The name of the cartel stronghold—often called the City of Crosses, for its makeshift shrines to hundreds of murdered narcos—hung between us for a long time in the command center barracks.

  A mug shot parade flashed across my mind: Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo, Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, Rafael Caro Quintero, Héctor Luis “El Güero” Palma, Amado Carrillo Fuentes, Mayo Zambada, Manuel Salcido Uzeta (a.k.a. “Cochiloco”), the Arellano Félix brothers, Chapo Guzmán . . . virtually all of
Mexico’s most infamous narcotraffickers had called Culiacán home. Going into the capital of Sinaloa was a daunting thought, like trying to wrest control of Chicago away from Al Capone’s grip back in the heyday of Prohibition.

  I stared at Garra, and he at me. We both seemed to acknowledge that it was the only option, but we also both knew the immense dangers ahead.

  Nothing like this had ever been considered, let alone attempted. For SEMAR, and for two American federal agents, leading the capture op in Culiacán would be like walking on the moon.

  GARRA PICKED UP his phone and made a quick call to Admiral Furia in Mexico City. He turned to look at Brady and me.

  “Pack your gear tonight,” Garra said. “We’ll leave at oh-eight-hundred hours tomorrow.”

  That evening, the marines threw together a quick going-away party in a remote sandy corner of the base, among the cardónes—giant cactuses—and blue fan palm trees. They lit a bonfire, and SEMAR had their own version of a food truck slinging plates full of carnitas, tacos de barbacoa, and the marines’ favorite, tacos de sangre—soft-shelled corn tortillas filled with blood sausage.

  Sitting around the fire, I thought back to when I was eighteen, those Thursday nights with our varsity football team in Pattonville, when we’d huddle around the campfire and share stories in preparation for the big game under the Friday night lights.

  I sensed a similar camaraderie taking shape there at La Paz—jokes cracked in Spanish, blood tacos devoured, cold cans of Tecate downed one after another. All the marines were in high spirits, knowing that in the morning they’d be leaving La Paz behind for good.

  I nodded at Brady. We were about to make the big leap.

  We would be crossing El Charco and heading into the heart of Sinaloa itself.

  THE NEXT MORNING, February 15, 2014, I woke before sunrise and lay on my bunk, staring at the ceiling. The more I thought about entering Sinaloa, the more I felt my gut tighten. I reached for my iPhone and texted my father: