Hunting El Chapo Read online

  DIEGO HAD ALREADY FLOWN to Mexico City to coordinate the operation with DEA agents there, as well as trusted members of the Mexican Federal Police (PF). Alone, I took the FedEx boxes to a Learjet—used by the DEA solely for undercover ops—through a private hangar at Sky Harbor International Airport. As we rose through the clouds, I felt like nodding off, but I didn’t dare take my eyes off the cash-stuffed pair of boxes. My eyes stayed glued to them the entire flight as if they were my newborn twins.

  The pilots flew me down to Toluca, outside Distrito Federal, where I was picked up by Mexico City–based DEA agent Kenny McKenzie, driving a white armored Ford Expedition. I tucked the FedEx boxes in the backseat, glancing warily around me.

  Shouldn’t we be covered by another armed agent?

  I felt twitchy, but kept my thoughts to myself as we pulled away from the airport. It was an hour-long drive over the small mountain range into Mexico City, a route on which there was an ever-present risk of a carjacking.

  We drove directly to an underground parking garage in a middle-class area called Satélite, on the north side of the city. I was relieved to see Diego, a second Mexico City DEA agent, and two plainclothes Mexican Federal Police when we arrived.

  The PF had provided the “drop vehicle,” a white Chevy Tornado pickup that looked to me a bit like a mini El Camino. It was a seized drug smuggler’s truck, complete with a hidden stash compartment—a simple hollow cavity underneath the bed—nowhere near as sophisticated as the type Bugsy and his crew of narco juniors used in Phoenix. The deep trap—clearly designed for moving bulkier contraband like compressed bales of weed or bricks of cocaine—was accessed from behind the rear bumper, and the open space underneath ran the full length of the truck bed. Diego and I tied the FedEx boxes together, then used the remaining rope to secure them to the outside of the trapdoor so that they didn’t slide the full length of the trap and become invisible to our targets.

  Our Mexican counterparts also slapped a tiny GPS tracker on the truck so we could follow it to wherever the targets would unload the money, in hopes of pinpointing yet another location, another piece of the puzzle, more targets to ID, and another chance to follow the money. I kept repeating the mantra, Exploit, exploit, exploit, which had been drummed into my head back at the DEA Academy.

  Mexican PF was doing us a huge favor by allowing us to drop $1.2 million and let it walk, but they felt they should remain on the perimeter and keep their hands off the actual money. As a result, none of the Federal Police wanted to touch the Chevy pickup, let alone drive it.

  Now that the truck was loaded, Diego was in phone contact with the targets, and they agreed to pick up the vehicle on the upper-level parking lot of another mall called Plaza Satélite. Diego and the other Mexico City agent drove the armored Ford Expedition ahead while Kenny and I hopped into the shitty Tornado, with its manual transmission. Kenny drove, following the Expedition out of the parking garage and out onto the busy street, heading north. My mind was still racing:

  Our security setup is worthless: more than a million in cash, and we’ve got a grand total of four US agents? Only two of us have Glocks—useless if we get jacked by some assholes with AKs . . .

  If the operation went south, there was no way this truck would get us out of harm’s way. The tiny Chevy took a day and a half to get up to 40 miles per hour. We lurched and jolted along in traffic as Kenny grinded the stick shift into gear.

  It was blazing hot in the cab, and the A/C was busted. Cars, motorcycles, and trucks were buzzing, honking, zigzagging. This was the wild, chaotic traffic for which Mexico City is famous—and which I would come to know well in the years ahead. Kenny seemed to be hitting every possible pothole and red light on the route, too.

  By far the biggest security risk was the local cops. Too many Federal Police knew about the operation for my liking. And if just one of these PF guys was dirty, he could easily call up one of his friends and ambush us, and they’d split the proceeds fifty-fifty.

  The Chevy kept jumping forward while I continued talking to Diego in the Expedition on my Nextel. All of a sudden, the Expedition pulled over to the side of the road and the driver opened up the door and began projectile-vomiting onto the street. He had eaten at some roadside carnitas stand an hour earlier.

  By the time we reached Plaza Satélite, one of the largest shopping malls in the city, I began to think there must be something wrong—how could a popular shopping center be so desolate?

  Diego and I had no idea whether the targets were waiting at the location. We were twenty-five minutes early, but the crooks could be early, too. Kenny drove to the upper parking lot on the north side and pulled the truck in alongside a few stray cars. I sat waiting for the clear signal from surveillance to get out. We’d leave the truck right there with the keys in the ignition for the prearranged drop.

  I was about to bail from the passenger side when I looked up and saw a Mexican guy, early thirties, five foot nine, muscular build, walking slowly in front of the truck. I felt my gut clench—were the crooks here already?

  The guy was wearing a black-collared button-down shirt with a dark gray jacket and dark blue jeans. His eyes were a piercing brown. There was a blade wound running straight down from his left eye, a good two inches long, like he’d been disfigured by an acid teardrop.

  It wasn’t just the scar that was unnerving. As a street cop, you develop a sense for these things. I studied the walk: he looked to be packing on the right side of his waistband. The guy had the unmistakable gait and look of an enforcer. He walked past the pickup, looking back one more time with menace.

  I turned to Kenny. “Who’s that?”

  “No idea, bro.”

  “Kenny, we need to get the fuck outta here before we get shot.”

  We both swung open the doors of the Tornado at the same time.

  I couldn’t spend another second sitting on the million-dollar bull’s-eye.

  THE TORNADO DROP was unprecedented—no federal law enforcement agency had ever delivered this kind of cash and let it walk, certainly not on the streets of Mexico City.

  Diego and I were now seen by Chapo’s people as fast-moving international players: we could deliver more than a million bucks, quickly—a mere forty-eight hours after picking up the bundles of bills nearly three thousand miles and two international borders away.

  There was no way Ricardo would suspect that he was dealing directly with cops—let alone the DEA. Ricardo told Diego that the money was headed south to purchase a major consignment of cocaine bound for the States. It was all happening so fast that Diego and I struggled to keep pace with the logistics. We were spending more time in the air and at hotels than in the Phoenix Task Force office. We’d be on a jet to the Caribbean one week, then back at our desks in Phoenix the next, and back out on a plane the following week for yet another tropical meet.

  Finding neutral countries in which to meet bad guys was becoming increasingly challenging, so I ordered a five-foot-long world map and pinned it up on the office wall. For fun, Diego and I closed our eyes and pointed a blind finger at possible locations for the next undercover meet. His finger landed on Iceland, mine somewhere in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

  Diego narrowed his focus to the isthmus of Central America, north of Panama.

  “San José,” he said. “Let’s set the next meet in Costa Rica.”

  “Costa Rica sounds right,” I said.

  Costa Rica, like Panama, was considered neutral ground for narcos. Más tranquilo, and far less risky than having a sit-down in Mexico or Colombia.

  BY THE NEXT DAY, Diego was sitting across the table from two of Chapo’s operators and Ricardo at an outdoor restaurant in the heart of Costa Rica’s capital.

  This time, unlike in Panama, I had eyes on him, parked across the street inside a rented black Toyota Land Cruiser. If Diego had felt cornered during his meet with Mercedes in Panama, this time he took the upper hand, leaning in forcefully, doing almost all the talking, pressing them with quest
ions—the bulk cash delivery had given him the power of street credibility.

  Diego asked—no, demanded—to know who all the coke and cash belonged to, who really was the jefe, before he’d set any wheels in motion.

  It took him about fifteen minutes, but finally one of Ricardo’s men reluctantly coughed up the name of the man they’d previously been calling El Señor.

  “Carlos Torres-Ramos.”

  The name didn’t ring any bells for Diego or me.

  Jetting back to the Phoenix Task Force, I quickly began working up Carlos within the DEA’s databases and found his record: Carlos Torres-Ramos had so far flown under DEA’s radar, but he did have a notable criminal history. Confidential informants reported that Carlos was known for moving massive loads of cocaine by the ton from Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru. I studied the black-and-white photo. He stood six feet tall, with receding black hair, a neatly trimmed black goatee, and dark eyes that made him look almost like a professor. But there was another detail that immediately leapt out at me.

  “You’re not going to believe this,” I said, still staring at the computer screen. “Diego, get over here.”

  I showed Diego the link: Carlos’s daughter Jasmine Elena Torres-Leon was married to Jesús Alfredo Guzmán Salazar, one of Chapo’s most trusted sons.

  “Holy shit,” Diego said softly. “Carlos and Chapo are consuegros.”

  The word had no precise English equivalent—“co-fathers-in-law”—and was an important connection between two Mexican families, especially in the world of Sinaloan narcos.

  We had thought Carlos was a big-time player, but we never imagined he was this big.

  Diego began speaking to Carlos about transportation arrangements directly over the phone, then via BlackBerry Messenger—Carlos considered BlackBerry the most secure mode of communicating. Though they’d still never met—Diego in Phoenix, Carlos in Sinaloa—the two were establishing trust.

  “Cero-cincuenta,” Diego said, smiling, finishing up a text session with Carlos. “Think I got this dude.”

  “Cero-cincuenta?”

  “He just assigned me a number—like he considers me part of his organization. He calls me cero cincuenta.”

  Diego was now “050” and part of Carlos’s secret code list. All of Carlos’s most trusted men were designated by a number. Locations were digitized, too: 039 represented Canada; 023 was Mexico City; 040 was Ecuador.

  Carlos even sent Diego the equation his organization used to decode phone numbers when they’d send them via text. Sophisticated traffickers never give out phone numbers openly, so Diego would have to multiply every digit via the equation to figure out Carlos’s new cell phone number.

  THE MONEY PICKUPS kept flowing in from Canada, now by the millions, all going toward Carlos’s purchase of the two-ton load of cocaine down in Ecuador. Of course, Diego and I weren’t working for free; Diego knew the rules of the narco game and convinced Carlos to give him a deposit to cover the initial costs of transportation. Carlos agreed, and the next day he had a total of $3 million delivered to various pickup locations in Montreal and New York.

  Three million in cash: as good as a seizure—and it had the added value of not burning our undercover investigation. With the money deposited in our TDF bank account, Diego and I jumped on the next plane to Ecuador to begin preparing to take delivery of the two tons of cocaine.

  Once we’d arrived, Diego had a quick undercover meeting with several of Carlos’s men at one of Guayaquil’s upscale steakhouses. I sat at a table across the restaurant, in the shadows. This time I had a small backup army: a team of plainclothes Ecuador National Police. This was the DEA’s most trusted Sensitive Investigation Unit in-country; every officer had been personally trained at Quantico in counter-narcotics operations. The plainclothesmen were spread all over the restaurant—inside and out—watching every move of Carlos’s men.

  ONCE DIEGO FINISHED the meeting, the cops in unmarked cars followed the men to the outskirts of the city—the crooks made a brief stop at a shop to buy brown packing tape—then to a nondescript finca (small farm). Covertly surveilling the finca, the cops were able to obtain the license plate of a white delivery truck parked outside.

  Classic Quantico scenario. I remembered from my days of practicals at the academy. The events taking place were standard drug-trafficking methods.

  The Ecuadorian cops sat on the truck the entire night and watched it pull away from the finca the next morning, the rear end loaded with bright yellow salt bags. Diego and I instructed the cops to set up a seemingly routine roadside checkpoint, and the truck drove right into it. As soon as the driver saw the marked police cars with flashing lights, he screeched to a stop, bailed out, and sprinted across a field. The police quickly chased him down and put him in cuffs. The cops searched the back of the truck and found 2,513-kilogram bricks of cocaine, stamped with the numbers 777—wrapped in that brown packing tape—tossed into seventy yellow salt bags.

  Diego quickly passed the news to Carlos, via BlackBerry, that the load had been seized by the local police, but the boss didn’t flinch. He’d lost two thousand keys to a random roadblock, but it was just the cost of doing business. He wasted no time in asking if Diego was ready to take delivery of more cocaine.

  “You believe this guy?” I asked Diego. “Ice in his veins. Just lost a load with a street value of nearly sixty-three million and he wants to trust us with more.”

  Diego responded to Carlos’s text immediately:

  “Estamos listos. A sus ordenes.”

  We’re ready. Awaiting your orders.

  OVER THE NEXT SEVERAL WEEKS, Carlos’s crew in Ecuador delivered more than eight hundred kilos of cocaine to undercover Ecuadorian cops posing as Diego’s workers, triggering a global takedown of the Carlos Torres-Ramos drug-trafficking organization.

  The whole house of cards came tumbling down in just a matter of hours—Carlos, Ricardo, Mercedes, Doña Guadalupe, and fifty-one other defendants spanning from Canada to Colombia. We also directly seized more than $6.3 million and 6.8 tons of cocaine.

  It took Diego and me months to recover from the follow-up work generated by our massive takedown.

  AS SOON AS THINGS settled down at the Task Force office, we were eager to get back on the hunt. But this time, we were left with only one place to go. We laid out the chart of the Sinaloa Cartel hierarchy and saw only one target name higher than Carlos. It was that pudgy-faced man with the black mustache in the photo wearing a black tactical vest and plain baseball hat, lightly gripping an automatic rifle slung across his chest.

  Joaquín Archivaldo Guzmán Loera—El Chapo himself.

  Part II

  La Frontera

  IN JANUARY 2011, I put in for an open position at the DEA Mexico City Country Office, long considered one of the most elite foreign postings for US federal drug enforcement agents targeting Mexican cartels. If I hoped to successfully target Chapo Guzmán, I knew I’d need to work—and live—permanently south of the border. Violence was soaring in Mexico: more than 13,000 people were dead as a result of Chapo’s gunmen and other cartels—notably the ex–Mexican Special Forces known as Los Zetas—battling for key smuggling turf along the US border.

  Several months after we took down the Carlos Torres-Ramos organization, Diego and I began conducting our own deconfliction on Guzmán. Surely there had to be someone—some federal team or task force—targeting the world’s most wanted narcotics kingpin. Diego and I ran through the various scenarios as we walked out of the US Attorney’s Office in downtown Phoenix. There had to be agents in every federal law enforcement agency who had a bead on Chapo. We needed to find those agents, put our intel together, and begin coordinating.

  I was expecting to discover a hidden world of US-agency-led Chapo task forces, secret war rooms all lining up to get their shots in—but after days of conducting deconfliction checks, Diego and I kept drawing blanks.

  Who was targeting Chapo?

  The shocking answer was: no one. There was no dedic
ated team. No elite task force. Not a single federal agent with a substantial case on his whereabouts.

  Among the stacks of closed-case files, stale intelligence—not to mention the tens of millions spent each year on the “war on drugs”—Diego and I couldn’t find one lawman on either side of the border who was actively pursuing the man personally responsible for controlling more than half the global drug trade.

  THEN, ON FEBRUARY 15, 2011, Jaime Zapata and Víctor Ávila, two US Department of Homeland Security Investigations (“HSI”) special agents on assignment in Mexico City, were ambushed in the northern state of San Luis Potosí by masked members of the Zetas Cartel. One Zetas vehicle passed the agents’ armored Suburban, firing automatic rifles and ramming them off the road. The Zetas gunmen then pulled open the driver’s side door and tried to drag Zapata out, but he fought back, trying to reason with the Zetas as they surrounded the vehicle. “We’re Americans! We’re diplomats!” The response was a hail of automatic gunfire. Zapata was killed at the wheel and Ávila badly wounded.

  The murder of Special Agent Zapata threw my life into sudden turmoil. I’d already been selected for the position in Mexico City—but now I had my young family to think about, too. Was it safe to move my wife and our young sons south of the border? The majority of DEA agents wouldn’t even consider putting in for a job in Mexico, due to the fear of being kidnapped or killed.

  “Jesus, with Zapata getting murdered, I’m on the fence now,” I told Diego. “We’re happy and safe here in Phoenix, but, I dunno—this feels like the next step.” We were camped out at a table at Mariscos Navolato, ties loosened, drinking a couple of Pacificos after a long day of organizing evidence for the Team America prosecutions. I was practically hoarse from talking to Diego over the blaring banda playing on the stage in front of our table.