Hunting El Chapo Read online

  My family back in Mexico City . . . I hadn’t called since that delirious conversation when I was lying flat on my back in Chapo’s driveway.

  My first text was to my wife.

  “Got him, baby.”

  “No way!”

  “Yeah, it’s done.”

  “Coming home?”

  “Yes.”

  “When?”

  “Not sure. Very soon.”

  The darkness was quickly breaking as the sun started to peek over the Sierra Madre to the east. I heard the welcome sound of SEMAR’s MI-17 helicopter, far off to the north, a rumble like the thunder of horses’ hooves growing ever closer.

  Qué Sigue?

  BRADY AND I WALKED down the long sidewalk on SEMAR’s Mazatlán base toward the interview room. Chino stood there, chest puffed out; he wore a blank expression, and now, for some reason, he was blocking us.

  “By order of the secretary of the navy, I can’t let anyone in here,” Chino said dryly.

  “Come on, brother,” I said. “After all we’ve been through?”

  “Orders come directly from the secretary of the navy.” Chino kept up the dead-eyed stare, then, turning on his boot heel, shut the door.

  Brady and I paced outside until the door cracked open.

  It was Tigre, gesturing for us to sneak inside.

  I saw Chapo seated on a sofa in a clean short-sleeved navy-blue polo shirt. His entire face above the nostrils was wrapped up, mummy-like, in white gauze.

  Chapo was talking in a normal tone of voice, no trace of fear or anger, but it was clear that his spirit was deflated. I recognized the voice immediately from my verified recordings; it was a voice I had listened to so many times I’d often dreamed about it.

  Now the voice had a strange high pitch to it. Not stress—not exhaustion. Relief, perhaps? The realization that the thirteen-year hunt was, at long last, over?

  The interrogation was being conducted with candor and respect. Chino was asking the questions in Spanish.

  Chapo began by calmly stating his full name.

  “Joaquín Archivaldo Guzmán Loera.”

  “Date of birth?”

  “Fourth of April, 1957.”

  “Where were you born?”

  “La Tuna. El Municipio de Badiraguato, Sinaloa.”

  I stood back in wonder: I’d written out that full name, date of birth, and town so many times—in my DEA sixes, case updates, PowerPoint presentations—that it had somehow become an extension of myself. I knew it as well as my own Social Security number. Now to hear it all confirmed—in the twangy mountain accent of the squat little man himself—seemed surreal.

  Guzmán was no ghost, no myth, no invincible kingpin. He was a captured criminal, like any other, a flesh-and-blood crook, his eyes wrapped in white gauze. He was sitting right there on a sofa, not more than six feet away from me, stating that he had severe tooth pain and recently had had one of his molars fixed.

  Chino asked who Guzmán’s key operational lieutenant was in the United States.

  Chapo paused. “I don’t have one,” he said finally.

  I nodded at Brady; this was backed up by our own intel.

  Chino asked him how much weight he was moving from the south. I remember Guzmán saying that his cocaine shipments were between four hundred and eight hundred kilograms at a time. I nodded again. We knew Chapo was being straightforward—gone were the days of the massive multi-ton shipments of blow from South America.

  Chino asked how long Chapo had been living in Culiacán.

  “Not long. A couple of weeks.”

  Brady and I looked at each other. That was a bald-faced lie.

  Chino said something about the “business” not being what it used to be.

  “Claro que sí,” Chapo said. “There’s no respect anymore. I do my own thing. This business now, it’s tough. Really tough.”

  BRADY AND I LEFT the interrogation room, walking out onto the tarmac toward the waiting MI-17 and Black Hawk; we huddled up with Tigre and a group of marines who’d been part of the takedown team, and for the first time I heard the details of what had happened hours earlier that morning on the fourth floor of Hotel Miramar:

  When the marines busted through the door of Room 401, Chapo’s first line of defense had been Condor. SEMAR quickly apprehended him, then stormed through the two-bedroom suite. In one bedroom they found two women: Chapo’s cook, Lucia, and the nanny, Vero, fast asleep with Guzmán’s two-year-old twin daughters. The marines raced to the larger bedroom in the back, where they discovered Emma Coronel, Chapo’s young wife, who had just awoken.

  Chapo had jumped out of bed in his underwear and run into a small bathroom, armed with an assault rifle. As Emma screamed, “Don’t kill him! Don’t kill him!” Guzmán dropped the gun, offering his empty hands through the bathroom doorway. They took Chapo down without a single shot being fired and brought him down the service elevator to the parking garage.

  Now I watched as Brady helped some of the marines carry Chapo’s daughters—still dressed in their yellow-and-pink pajamas—from the Chevy Captiva toward the building in which Chapo was being held.

  I walked a little further down the road and saw Condor—we’d identified him as Carlos Manuel Hoo Ramírez—lying in the bed of a pickup truck, handcuffed, his eyes wrapped with gauze like Chapo.

  I recognized him as the same man in the photograph we’d found in his house in Culiacán. I pulled out my iPhone and took a shot of the tattoo on his calf: a condor’s head. Then I walked down and saw Emma, the cook, and the nanny sitting handcuffed inside another vehicle, their eyes blindfolded, too.

  Brady and I continued to hug and congratulate every marine we came across on the base. At some point I realized I was still carrying Tigre’s pistol tucked into the front of my BDU pants.

  “Gracias, carnal,” I said, handing back the black FN Five-Seven to Tigre. I couldn’t believe that no one had to fire a shot during the entire operation. Tigre took the pistol and slid it back in his thigh holster.

  “Tu lo hiciste,” Tigre replied with a grin. “You did it.”

  Even Admiral Garra managed to crack a small smile when I congratulated him later.

  Eventually, Nico, Chino, Chiqui, and several other marines led Chapo, handcuffed, his eyes still wrapped in gauze, out of the interrogation room and placed him inside the Black Hawk. The rotors whipped up clouds of dust and grit; I shielded my eyes with one hand as the helo lifted off the pavement en route to the Mazatlán International Airport, where Chapo was to be flown immediately by Learjet, accompanied by Admiral Furia, to Mexico City, where he would be paraded in front of the world’s press.

  MOMENTS AFTER CHAPO’S DEPARTURE, Brady and I boarded an MI-17 and took off for a low-altitude flight down the Pacific coastline. Both sets of helo pilots and their crews were SEMAR’s best and had been with the brigade since we began in La Paz—Brady and I respected them as core members of our team.

  “No such thing as ‘crew rest’ with these guys,” I said to Brady. They were ready to fly their birds anywhere, under any condition, and on a moment’s notice.

  The pilots swung the MI-17 down low, cruising just above the surface of the ocean, so close that I could see the crests of the waves clearly and felt like I could almost reach my hand out the open window and touch the water. Tourists swimming near the beach were ducking and diving as if the MI were about to strafe them.

  After the joyride, we touched down at the Mazatlán airport, from which Chapo had flown out only minutes earlier on the jet.

  I knew this was likely the last time I’d see any of these marines. I felt like I was leaving a group of my own brothers—these Mexican warriors had done everything to keep all of us American personnel safe.

  It was all I’d known for weeks: eating, sleeping, making predawn raids together. Returning to DEA now felt as foreign as the entry to Culiacán had.

  I hugged Brady one last time.

  And it hit me suddenly—I guess it was a mixture of gratitude an
d sadness—that I was losing a partner. I could never have accomplished any of this—I would never have come close to taking Chapo into custody—without Brady and his entire team of HSI agents, supervisors, and translators back at the war room in El Paso.

  “You tell Joe and Neil they just made history,” I said.

  “Yes, they did,” said Brady.

  “Safe travels, brother.”

  “Whatever happens, we’ll always have each other’s back—deal?”

  “Deal.”

  The props began to spin on the DEA’s King Air. One of the pilots called out to me that we were ready to roll. I waved one last good-bye to the group of marines standing on the runway and ducked my head as I boarded the plane.

  I was alone now in the dark cabin as the King Air ascended into the sky. I watched out the window as the marines down below grew smaller, and then the coast of Mazatlán disappeared finally into the distance.

  I WAS MET IN Mexico City on the runway by Regional Director McAllister, my assistant regional director, and my group supervisor, who congratulated me on a job well done. It was because of the three of them that I had been allowed to run the investigation—as I knew how—from beginning to end. They’d given me the latitude and time, and it had resulted in a tremendous win for all of us at DEA.

  And Camila Defusio, the deputy US attorney in Washington, DC—along with her small team of assistant US attorneys—had ensured that the judicial process never hindered the operation. Don Dominguez, back at SOD, and his staff, including the group of intel analysts in Mexico City, had also been behind-the-scenes heroes of the capture.

  MY BOSSES DROVE STRAIGHT to my La Condesa apartment, where I walked in and hugged my wife and sons.

  I wiped a tear from my cheek, thankful to be home, then sat down at the kitchen table. The rustic SEMAR meals had been satisfying, but they were nothing like a home-cooked dinner prepared by my wife. We barely said a word at the table as we ate slowly. We were just grateful to be together again.

  The next morning, I went with my wife and sons on a bike ride through the city, just as we usually did on the weekend. Paseo de la Reforma was closed to cars on Sundays and was swarming with bicyclists, runners, walkers, and rollerbladers.

  On the newspaper stands, every paper—Reforma, Excélsior, El Universal, Milenio—had Chapo’s face plastered on the front and banner headlines.

  CAPTURAN A EL CHAPO!

  CAYÓ!

  AGARRAN A EL CHAPO!

  POR FIN!

  CAE EL CHAPO!

  To stand there on Paseo de la Reforma, buying those papers like a local, after all the weeks I’d spent embedded with SEMAR, was like living in another life. I bought all of them and stuffed them in the front basket of my Raleigh. I was struck by the eerie sense of being covert again, chameleon-like, blending in with the bustling crowd. No one snatching up copies of the newspapers could have suspected that the blond-bearded cyclist in a V-neck cotton shirt, shorts, and chanclas had been at the heart of the hunt, that only hours earlier I was the agent who led the capture of the most wanted criminal in the world.

  THE NEXT MORNING, I put on my suit, knotted my tie—like on any typical Monday—and drove to the embassy in my armored Tahoe.

  But as I walked the halls, I felt like a zombie: my body was present, but my mind was not. I walked back to my desk and heard another agent talking about pinging phones of targets in his own trafficking investigation. I felt unsteady, and the office seemed to rock. I felt a sudden blood-pressure drop, and a queasiness, as if I were going to throw up right there on my desk.

  I’d been expecting to feel euphoric after the Chapo capture, but I felt the opposite. Over the next few days, I tried to shake it off, but the void only deepened.

  SINCE HIS CAPTURE in February, Chapo had been interviewed at the Mexican Attorney General’s Office (PGR) before being locked up in the country’s most secure prison, Federal Social Readaptation Center No. 1 (Altiplano), in central Mexico, not far from Toluca.

  I later heard a story about a remarkable exchange between PGR lawyers and Guzmán. Interrogators apparently said they could now close out the estimated thirteen thousand homicides credited to Chapo.

  “Thirteen thousand?” I was told Chapo responded, seeming genuinely surprised. “No, not thirteen thousand. Maybe a couple thousand . . .”

  Whatever the body count, Guzmán was supposedly now no longer a threat: the authorities assured the public that he was under twenty-four-hour video surveillance at Altiplano. The maximum-security prison housed Mexico’s most violent and notorious narcotraffickers and was considered escape-proof.

  Guzmán was behind bars, but there was still more bloodshed back on his home turf. On April 10, 2014, I picked up one of the local papers and read that the body of Manuel Alejandro Aponte Gómez—Bravo—had been found dumped on a dirt road near La Cruz de Elota, Sinaloa. Bravo had reportedly been tortured before being shot several times, and had been killed along with two of his associates. No one knew for sure, but street rumor quickly spread that Bravo had died for the unpardonable mistake of not properly protecting his boss while he was on the run in Mazatlán.

  SEVERAL DAYS LATER, after the murder of Bravo, I flew with Tom McAllister and my group supervisor to Washington, DC. There I briefed DEA Administrator Michele Leonhart and her top brass at headquarters in Arlington, Virginia. The briefing room was standing room only as, slide by slide, I walked through the details of the operation. Leonhart concluded by congratulating me and our entire team on the capture of Chapo.

  “I’ve been with DEA a long time,” said the special agent in charge of SOD, “and this has got to be the best case I’ve seen in my career.”

  Immediately afterwards, I jumped in a black armored Suburban with Administrator Leonhart and rode in her motorcade across the Potomac River to the United States Department of Justice building to brief US Attorney General Eric Holder.

  “This was Bobby Kennedy’s office when he was AG,” one of Holder’s aides told me as we entered. I glanced up at the painting of Kennedy, wearing a bomber jacket, hanging on the wall alongside other former attorneys general.

  I shook AG Holder’s hand and could immediately sense his sincerity and his genuine interest about the details of the operation. McAllister took him through my presentation while I highlighted the story with details from the weeks on the ground in Sinaloa—from our discovery of the Duck Dynasty hideaway through the days of smashing down doors in Culiacán, right up to the predawn face-to-face capture at the Hotel Miramar.

  The attorney general asked about Chapo’s first escape through the bathtub tunnels.

  “Well, we knew he had a tunnel, sir,” I said. “But not under every house.”

  “How many houses were there?”

  “He had five safe houses in Culiacán,” I said. “And they were all connected through the sewers.”

  Holder was impressed by the persistent hunt and inquired about how we’d been able to sustain our operations until the very end.

  “We used Chapo’s homes as bases,” I explained. “We essentially turned them into makeshift barracks, all of us living on top of each other. We cooked in his kitchen. Slept in his beds.”

  At the end of the thirty-minute briefing, Attorney General Holder expressed his official thanks on behalf of the Obama administration and the American people for bringing Guzmán to justice. He said this would go down as one of the greatest achievements of the administration.

  “So what do you do now?” Holder asked.

  I stared at him—not fully understanding—and then Holder added:

  “Seriously, what do you do next? Take some time off and drink mai tais on the beach?”

  Everyone in the room laughed.

  “That’s what I’m still trying to figure out, sir,” I said.

  WHAT COULD I DO NEXT? The AG’s question kept resonating in my mind as I returned to Mexico City. Back at the embassy, I still felt that aching hollowness—and it wasn’t subsiding.

  Qué sigue
?

  I’d achieved the greatest challenge possible as a drug enforcement agent, and I realized there was nothing left for me to do at DEA. I had nothing left to give. I couldn’t go back to tracking down some lesser trafficker—pinging phones, debriefing sources, gathering intel, crunching numbers—here in Mexico, or in any other country, for that matter.

  In my world—among all of DEA’s international targets—who was bigger than Chapo Guzmán?

  In fact, the past few years had never been about Chapo; they had only been about the hunt, and now the hunt was over.

  I ALSO HAD TO consider the risk to my wife and young sons, exposed as we all were in the heart of Mexico. No one had assigned us any added security or made plans for us to catch the next plane out of the country.

  That came with the gig: you take down a drug trafficker—even one as infamous as Chapo Guzmán—and it’s back to business as usual.

  But no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t stop hearing that phrase echoing constantly in my ears:

  “Everything is fine in Mexico until suddenly it’s not.”

  With the security concern and the strong desire to pursue another challenge—my next hunt—less than nine months after the capture, I resigned from the DEA, boarded a flight with my wife and sons, and disappeared as fast as Chapo had escaped from me in Culiacán.

  Epilogue: Shadows

  AT ALTIPLANO PRISON, on Saturday, July 11, 2015, at exactly 8:52 p.m., Chapo Guzmán could be seen on the overhead surveillance video taking a seat on his narrow bed, changing shoes, then quickly ducking into the shower stall in the corner of his cell. He disappeared behind the low wall separating the shower from his cell, the only spot in the five-by-six-foot prison cell hidden from cameras.

  Then he vanished from view and was gone, disappearing into a twenty-inch-square opening that had been cut into the floor. He squeezed into a narrow vertical shaft to the tunnel below, climbed down a ladder, and entered a sophisticated tunnel nearly a mile long. Electric lights had been hung from the ceiling, as had PVC pipe, which pumped fresh air the length of the passageway. Chapo Guzmán’s latest tunnel had A/C.