Hunting El Chapo Read online

  In Guadalajara, Mexican cops raided the house of one of Guzmán’s associates, confiscating automatic weapons, drugs, phones, computers, and thousands of dollars in cash. Within days of the escape, though, it was clear that Guzmán was no longer in Jalisco. The manhunt spread, with hundreds of police officers and soldiers searching the major cities and sleepiest rural communities.

  Guzmán called a meeting of all the Sinaloa Cartel lieutenants, eager to prove that he was still the top dog. A new narcocorrido swept the nation, “El Regreso del Chapo.”

  No hay Chapo que no sea bravo

  Así lo dice el refrán*

  Chapo was not just bravo: he was now seen as untouchable—the narco boss that no prison could hold. Sightings were reported the length of the nation, but whenever the authorities were getting close to a capture, he could quickly vanish back into his secure redoubt in the Sierra Madre—often spending nights at the ranch where he’d been born—or back into the dense forests and marijuana fields. He was free, flaunting his power, and still running the Sinaloa Cartel with impunity.

  It would be nearly thirteen years before he again came face-to-face with any honest agent of the law.

  The New Generation

  PHOENIX, ARIZONA

  October 5, 2008

  “LAS TRES LETRAS.”

  I repeated the words, looking to Diego for assistance, but I got none. We were sitting in the Black Bomber on a surveillance, listening to a narcocorrido by Explosion Norteña.

  Diego chewed on the end of his straw and rattled the ice cubes in his Coke cup, his brow creased like a stern teacher’s.

  “The Three Letters?”

  The Black Bomber was the ideal vehicle for listening to narcocorridos—booming bass in the Bose speakers, clarity as good as at any Phoenix nightclub. When Diego first came to DEA Phoenix, he was driving that jet-black Chevrolet Suburban Z71 with heavy tint on all the windows and a tan leather interior.

  The Mesa PD had seized the Suburban from a coke dealer a couple of years earlier. The owner’s luxury options had made the Bomber the perfect ride for us on long surveillance operations, which included a flip-up customized video screen in the dash. We’d often kill the hours watching Super Troopers, parked in the shadows on a side street before a dope deal was supposed to go down.

  But the Black Bomber wasn’t just a rolling entertainment center on 24-inch rims; it was also ideal for raids—unlike standard cop cars, the Suburban could fit four of us in all our tactical gear. We thought of the Bomber as another team member. It was a sad day when some number-crunching bureaucrat made Diego turn her in because she had 200,000 miles on the odometer.

  Diego would get pulled over in the Black Bomber by Phoenix cops all the time, simply because it had Mexican plates. He’d kept the originals from the state of Sonora, white and red with small black letters and numbers. Local cops were always looking for cars—especially tricked-out SUVs—with Mexican plates, but it allowed us to blend into any Mexican hood in Phoenix. No one would think twice about a parked Suburban with Sonora plates: behind those dark-tinted windows, Diego and I could sit on a block all night and never get burned by the bad guys.

  And the narcocorridos Diego was always playing in the Black Bomber had become central to my education. Every big-time trafficker south of the Rio Grande had at least one norteño song celebrating his exploits.

  You were no one in the narco world, Diego explained, until you had your own corrido. But I was still trying to decipher Las Tres Letras . . .

  “Come on, brother,” Diego said, laughing. “You got this. Shit, at this point you’re more Mexican than most of the Mexicans I know . . . ”

  I leaned forward in the Bomber and hit the repeat button on the CD player, taking one more shot at decoding those lyrics.

  “Las Tres Letras?”

  Finally, Diego jabbed his index finger hard into my shoulder. “Bro, you’re Las Tres Letras! DEA.”

  Las Tres Letras . . . what every drug trafficker fears the most.

  DAYS AFTER DIEGO FIRST told me about El Niño de La Tuna, I’d started after-hours research in my cubicle back at the DEA office in central Phoenix.

  I searched for “Joaquín GUZMÁN Loera” in our database, the Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs Information System (NADDIS). Chapo’s file was endless; you could scroll down for almost an hour without reaching the end. DEA Phoenix had an open case against Guzmán, but so did dozens of other jurisdictions all across the country. I couldn’t begin to fathom what I’d need to do, how many major cases I’d have to initiate, in order to be the agent entrusted with heading an investigation targeting Guzmán.

  THE PRESIDENT of the United States identified Guzmán and the Sinaloa Cartel as significant foreign narcotics traffickers, pursuant to the Kingpin Act,* in 2001 and again in 2009. The US government had offered a $5 million reward for information leading to his capture, and the Mexican government had offered a reward of 60 million pesos—roughly $3.8 million.

  Wildly divergent rumors swirled about Chapo. Some stemmed from law enforcement intel, others from street gossip—the loose chatter of informants—and some were just urban legends, embedded in the lyrics of all those underground corridos.

  By one account, Chapo was considering having plastic surgery so he could never again be recognized; in another, he’d vowed to commit suicide rather than be captured alive. In May 2003, he’d been reported as living in a remote cave—a Mexican version of Osama bin Laden—but then, in June of that year, he was said to be traveling free as a bird within Mexico City. Another intel report had him hiding in Guatemala and returning to Mexico only on occasion, and in September 2004 he narrowly escaped just before a two-ton marijuana-and-weapons seizure in the Sierra Madre.

  How could anyone possibly separate the facts from the fiction? Was Chapo surrounded by hundreds of heavily armed bodyguards, wearing a bulletproof vest at all times? Or was he living more simply—traveling with just two trusted associates—because he was receiving tacit protection from the Sinaloa State Police on the cartel payroll?

  I DIDN’T HAVE much time to ruminate on the life and crimes of Chapo Guzmán—for more than a year, Diego and I had our hands full with thirty-one-year-old Pedro Navarro, a.k.a. “Bugsy.” Bugsy’s crew may have been young—in their early and mid-twenties—but they weren’t small-time. Within weeks of developing my first intel on Bugsy, I received authorization to initiate an Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force investigation that Diego and I titled “La Nueva Generación” (the New Generation), a Priority Target Investigation for DEA Phoenix.

  Since I first saw them that smoky night in Mariscos Navolato with Diego, I’d developed a grudging respect for these narco juniors. They were savvy kids who had drug trafficking in their bloodlines—they were often the sons of heavy-hitting cartel men in Mexico—but most had gone to high school and college in the United States and Europe. That level of education, their flawless English, and their familiarity with American culture allowed them to start up their own sophisticated drug organizations. Narco juniors like Bugsy were scattered all over the Southwest, from Phoenix to San Diego.

  These young men had the confidence and swagger of a new generation—and, in fact, Diego and I started referring to ourselves as La Nueva Generación as well. A mirror image of the narco juniors, we were a fresh young crop of cops with the stamina and street savvy to keep pace with young Mexican traffickers.

  We’d established that Bugsy’s crew was responsible for shipping ton quantities of high-grade marijuana to New York City, Baltimore, Boston, and St. Louis by tractor-trailer, FedEx, and UPS. Navarro had leased a seven-thousand-square-foot warehouse in Mesa for packaging and shipping the marijuana, which was then concealed in crate pallets disguised as scrap-metal shelving used in big-box stores. He also had several young business owners laundering his dirty millions through local Phoenix businesses. For money couriers, he used local strippers: the girls’ nonstop travel allowed them to make cash pickups all around the United States. Bugsy even had a
former NFL player working as a wholesale marijuana broker for the DTO.

  Bugsy would often travel armed, keeping guns inside custom-made secret storage compartments, or “traps,” in his Mercedes GL550 SUV. His traps were more sophisticated than the typical drug dealer’s: you had to have the ignition key turned on, the left turn signal engaged, and a small plastic lever in the cupholder turned just so—three steps executed in the correct sequence—before the trap would spring open. Sometimes, wary of us on his tail, Bugsy wouldn’t carry weapons in his Benz; he’d have a crew in a follow car who were armed with pistols in their own traps.

  Diego and I were intercepting Bugsy’s cell phones, and I enjoyed the challenge of deciphering the narco-junior code. The phrase gangsta-up meant they’d be traveling armed; pool house referred to Bugsy’s four-bedroom house in Glendale; picture of my son was a sample of weed. Of all the lines I heard over the wire, my favorite was when we caught Bugsy openly bragging that he and his boys were living “like Entourage meets The Sopranos.”

  BUT BUGSY HAD a major problem: his cajeta supply from Sinaloa had temporarily dried up in Phoenix. One Saturday morning, Task Force Officer Nick Jones, Diego, and I were set up on surveillance outside the “pool house.” We’d just “flipped the switch” and started listening to the wiretap we had on several of Bugsy’s cell phones. It had taken us months of writing and rewriting federal wire affidavits each time Bugsy would drop a phone, which he did almost every week. With nothing coming across the wire, we followed Bugsy and his crew to gain any intelligence we could.

  “Looks like they’re packing up,” Nick said over the radio. “Get ready to roll, guys.” Bugsy and his crew took off in the GL550 at high speed, westbound on Interstate 8 heading out of Phoenix.

  We were hardly prepared for a long road trip, but I was thankful that Nick was with us for surveillance—the whole Task Force called him “Sticky Nicky,” because he’d never lose the bad guy. Bugsy kept driving west, and every hour or so he’d dart off an exit at the last minute in an attempt to clean his tail, but we’d been following him for too long to fall for such basic countersurveillance moves. We stayed on him for close to five hours, following just far enough behind that Bugsy wouldn’t notice, until finally we ended up in San Diego.

  During several days of surveillance, still wearing the same clothes, we watched as Bugsy and his crew visited one stash house after another in the suburban neighborhoods of San Diego. I had the San Diego Police Department stop a Chevy Avalanche leaving one of the stash locations—the local cops seized three hundred pounds of cajeta in the rear bed of a truck driven by one of Bugsy’s boys.

  “He was planning on taking this load right back to Phoenix,” I told Diego. “We need to take advantage of his drought.”

  “Yeah,” Diego nodded. “Think I’ve got the perfect guy.”

  AFTER RETURNING TO PHOENIX, Diego and I drafted a plan: we had Diego’s confidential source introduce Bugsy to a DEA undercover agent, a thirty-two-year-old Mexican American working out of the San Diego Field Division office. Like Diego, “Alex” could play the part of a narco junior perfectly.

  Knowing that Bugsy was too street-smart to fall for the typical DEA “trunk flash,” we lured him down to Mission Bay, where we would flash him more than a thousand pounds of marijuana stuffed inside a DEA undercover yacht equipped with cameras, recording devices, and several bronzed girls in bikinis (who were actually female undercover San Diego cops). Mixed within the thousand pounds were the same “pillows” of cajeta we had just seized from Bugsy’s crew.

  On the day of the setup, from inside our G-ride across the bay, Diego and I kept our eyes locked on the screen of the surveillance camera we’d set up in the yacht. On the boat, Bugsy was cutting into and sniffing the same pillow he’d seen at the stash pad just a week earlier.

  The mirage was so convincing that Bugsy fell headlong into the trap, telling undercover agents that he needed five hundred more pounds to complete a tractor-trailer load bound for Chicago. Alex told him that the weed he’d just seen was already spoken for, en route to another buyer in LA, so Bugsy would just have to wait a week.

  IN THE MEANTIME, Diego and I worked to secure indictments on the DTO and decided to rip Bugsy’s money as he came to purchase the five hundred pounds.

  In a TGI Fridays parking lot, Bugsy, along with his right-hand man, Tweety, met Alex, the undercover agent, and quickly flashed a quarter million in cash—rubber-banded bundles inside a chocolate-brown Gucci bag—with the expectation that he’d soon pick up his cajeta order at another location down the street. But before Bugsy and Tweety could get away with the cash, Diego and I pounced.

  A marked San Diego police unit swooped in to a make a traffic stop on the black Ford F150. Bugsy and Tweety sped off and started tossing $10,000 chunks of cash out the truck’s windows, littering miles of San Diego freeways.

  We were following the chase, pulling over to recover as much cash as we could for evidence—while countless other drivers also pulled over, quickly stuffing their pockets with bunches of Bugsy’s bills, then jumping back into their cars before Diego and I could stop them.

  The high-speed chase continued up Interstate 5 until Bugsy and Tweety finally ran out of cash and stopped in the middle of the freeway to surrender to police, leaving behind a trail of “cash confetti,” as CNN reported—$50 and $100 bills still fluttering across the highway, creating chaos during rush-hour traffic and making national headlines.

  El Canal

  PANAMA CITY, PANAMA

  June 14, 2009

  THE ROOFTOP HOT TUB was kidney-shaped, and the Panamanian beer was Balboa—named after the conquistador. The palms and mirrored skyline view seemed to have been laid on in thick streaks of tropical paint. Panama City gleamed like a Caribbean Dubai.

  “Salud!” Diego said, hoisting a silhouette glass of Balboa. “A la Nueva Generación!”

  “Salud!” I said, raising my own glass.

  The New Generation had finally stepped onto the international stage.

  We’d taken down Bugsy’s crew that night in San Diego and Phoenix—collapsing his entire organization, seizing another thousand pounds of marijuana and more than $450,000 in assets, including Bugsy’s personal yacht, a string of Mercedes-Benzes, jewelry, and bulk cash.

  But with a takedown of that scope, there were bound to be key evidentiary remnants—wide-ranging paper trails and criminal tentacles still left unexploited.

  One of those loose ends happened to be in the form of Tweety’s father, Gerardo, who over the past year had been selling pounds of Mexican methamphetamine to our confidential source.

  Gerardo was well connected in Nogales, Mexico, and casually mentioned that he had a friend who needed some money moved. She was middle-aged, with porcelain skin, and her black curly hair was always pulled back tight in a ponytail. Aside from smuggling loads of meth and cocaine across the border from Nogales in her Toyota RAV4, Doña Guadalupe, as everyone called her, put out the word, through Gerardo, that she was actively seeking someone who could transport money. Not just a couple hundred thousand dollars, but tens of millions.

  As an undercover, Diego had played dozens of roles over the years and could slip effortlessly into many personas, but he’d never posed as a money launderer before.

  “This is our chance to follow some serious cash,” I told him over lunch at our favorite Chinese joint in Mesa.

  “Think we can pull it off?” I asked him.

  I could see the wheels turning in Diego’s head, contemplating ways we could win the contract from Doña Guadalupe and begin moving the numbers to which she claimed to have access.

  Within the week, Diego had finagled an introduction to Doña Guadalupe, and he immediately sold her on the services of his “company.” Diego seemed to be exactly the man she was looking for, but it turned out Doña Guadalupe was just a glorified go-between, a buffering layer—the first of many, as we’d soon come to find out.

  And that’s how we found ourselves soaking in a
hot tub on the roof of a Panamanian hotel, our first time traveling abroad—so that Diego could be introduced to Doña Guadalupe’s people face-to-face.

  JUST A FEW HOURS before our first undercover meeting, Diego was acting as if he didn’t have a care in the world. Like any good actor, he was supremely confident in his ability to negotiate his way through any business deal. But his confidence also came from meticulous preparation. We’d spent months creating our undercover legend: Diego would be playing the role of a senior executive, the director of operations for a US-based company—supposedly a covert criminal network—operating a ton-quantity drug-and-money transportation organization. Doña Guadalupe had already sold Diego to her people, including the head of a sophisticated money-brokerage-and-laundering cell led by Mercedes Chávez Villalobos and several of her associates, based in Mexico City, Guadalajara, and Bogotá, Colombia.

  When Diego spoke with Mercedes, she had been aggressive, fast-talking, and extremely demanding. Diego told me she was a tough chilanga from Mexico City.

  After doing a quick international work-up on her, I discovered that there was a warrant out for Mercedes in Amsterdam, for laundering money back in 2008. And she had connections all around the world, country-hopping almost weekly. She was always looking for a better deal, for someone trustworthy who could move hundreds of millions of dollars quickly—and strictly on a handshake.

  “Do you really believe she’s sitting on all this money?” The night before the sit-down, I was staring at streams of data on my MacBook, and the dollar amounts were staggering. “She’s supposedly got a hundred million in Spain. Fifty mil in Canada. Ten mil in Australia. And some two hundred million in Mexico City?”