Hunting El Chapo Read online

  LOOKING BEYOND THE DEEP-ROOTED history of violence in Mexico, I tried to give my wife and young sons the best life possible in the capital under the enormously high-stress circumstances. The DEA assigned us a spacious three-bedroom apartment in La Condesa, the city center’s hippest neighborhood—I suppose you could compare it to Paris’s Latin Quarter or Manhattan’s SoHo—home to young businesspeople, artists, and students. It was also close to the US embassy, on Paseo de la Reforma, so just a fifteen-minute drive to work.

  We loved the neighborhood, full of tree-lined streets shading the 1920s architecture: restaurants, cafés, boutiques, galleries, and lively open-air markets on Sundays.

  But it was difficult for me to enjoy the vibrant life of the city: my head was constantly on a swivel. Street-cop mode. It was second nature to be watching my back—I’d done so since I was twenty-one and on patrol with the Sheriff’s office—but in Mexico, there never seemed to be a moment’s rest. I was always checking for tails and surveillance by members of the cartel, street thugs, or even the Mexican government. When I left our apartment at 7 a.m., walking out to my Chevy Tahoe, I’d study all the other vehicles on the street. Which cars were new to the block? Which ones seemed out of place? Which cars had someone sitting inside them? I’d even memorize makes, models, and plate numbers.

  Whenever we went to a new neighborhood, my wife knew that there was no point talking to me. I was too busy scanning the streets, looking hard at the faces of pedestrians, taxi drivers, deliverymen—anyone, in fact, within shooting distance.

  After just a few weeks in DF, my wife had also learned the techniques of constant risk assessment: look everyone on the sidewalk in the eyes quickly to judge them, and decide: threat or not? She and our young sons were always on the street, at the park, shopping, or meeting friends. There was crime all over DF, but of a random nature: we’d hear reports of an embassy employee being held up at gunpoint for his gold watch in a local restaurant in our neighborhood, or a lady out pushing her kid in a stroller having her handbag snatched.

  But there were plenty of great things about living in Mexico, too. We especially loved the city’s street food: tacos de canasta, tlacoyos, elote (sweet corn in a cup with melting butter topped with a dab of mayonnaise and chili powder). But best of all were the camotes—sweet potatoes—from a vendor who’d come around every week at sundown, pushing his old squeaky metal cart.

  The guy looked as if he’d been working in the sun all day, face golden brown, covered in beads of perspiration from pushing his wood-burning stove up and down the streets. The pressure of the smoke and heat from the fire would sound a steam whistle, like an old locomotive in a Western movie. You could hear the sound coming from blocks away, even if you were indoors. One of my sons would shout:

  “Daddy, the camote man!”

  We’d throw on our shoes and run outside. Sometimes the camote man would be gone, vanishing in the shadows down side streets before he’d sound his whistle again, directing us where to run. Once we hunted him down, he’d pull out a drawer full of large sweet potatoes roasted over the wood fire and let my sons pick out the best-looking ones, then he’d slice them lengthwise and drizzle condensed milk over the top and add a heavy sprinkle of cinnamon and sugar—a bargain at just twenty-five pesos.

  Even in those sweet moments, as much as I tried to mask it from my sons, I was on edge. Children were always the most vulnerable for kidnapping—we even had one neighbor, a “self-made millionaire,” who’d fly his daughter to school in a private helicopter every weekday.

  It wasn’t strange to see the latest Ferraris and Porsches ripping through our neighborhood streets—though anything lavish and excessive in the capital reeked of a narco connection. There was an estimated $40 billion a year in drug money flowing through the country’s economy, and it had to trickle down somewhere.

  I was constantly reminded of a remark that I’d heard from a local journalist in DF: “Everything is fine in Mexico until suddenly it’s not.” The expression captured it all in chilling simplicity. “You’re living your life happily and then one day you’re dead.”

  CHAPO HAD FINALLY BECOME a household name in the United States, designated Public Enemy Number One by the Chicago Crime Commission—the first outlaw to earn that title since Al Capone. And while I was glad this label drew more attention to Guzmán’s name and his criminal activity, it did little, from an investigative standpoint, to assist with a capture.

  At my embassy desk, I spent day after day sorting intel on Guzmán, dissecting every old file I could get my hands on. The freshest leads were the ones that came from the notebook pages, ledgers, business cards, and even the pocket trash left behind at the mansion after the raid in Cabo San Lucas. It was grueling analysis—the sort of work despised by most DEA agents—but I’d find even the slightest variation of a nickname or the subscriber to a phone invaluable, and when I found something, it hit me like a shot of adrenaline.

  Exploit. Exploit. Exploit.

  My life soon became an endless blur of digits. I had become obsessed with numbers. I was constantly memorizing any phone number, any BlackBerry or PIN number I could find. I couldn’t remember my grandma’s birthday, but I had Chapo’s pilot’s phone number on the tip of my tongue. The other agents in the group would ask why I was always consumed with analyzing phone numbers and PINs.

  Numbers, unlike people, never lie.

  NOT ONLY DID CHAPO and Picudo leave crumbs behind in Cabo San Lucas, but they took off so quickly that Chapo never had time to grab his tactical go-bag containing his forest-green armored vest, black AR-15 rifle equipped with a grenade launcher, and six hand grenades.

  Diego and I confirmed that Guzmán had even cut himself on a fence, drawing blood, but was now resting comfortably back across the Sea of Cortez in Sinaloa. For Chapo, this was as close as he had ever been to capture since his breakout from the Puente Grande penitentiary. I knew he was becoming complacent if he felt he could spend time in such a popular resort city, especially one swarming with foreign tourists. And clearly he wasn’t escorted by hundreds of bodyguards driving fleets of black armored SUVs with tinted windows, as people had claimed. It was intel that was still widely believed, including by the US intelligence community in Mexico.

  Once in a while I’d share my findings with the Mexican Federal Police team that had worked the leads after the February raid in Cabo, and PF would give me any bits and pieces of intelligence they had collected. I’d end up divulging far more information than I’d receive, but I reasoned that some Mexican intel was better than none.

  Then it was back to digging through the active phone numbers of Chapo’s pilots, family, girlfriends—often never raising my head above my computer screen until another agent would make a sarcastic comment.

  “Why you wasting your time, Hogan? What’s the endgame? The Mexicans will never catch Chapo.”

  Even my bosses were skeptical as they eyed the massive charts I’d pinned on the wall, linking multi-ton cocaine seizures in Ecuador directly to Chapo’s lieutenants.

  “Cuando? Cuando?” my boss would often yell as he walked by my desk, demanding to know when—if ever—I was going to show something for all the effort.

  “Paciencia, jefe, paciencia,” I would say. “Have some patience, boss.”

  EVERY NIGHT I LEFT the embassy, my head was back on a swivel. DF was a constant swarm of cars and pedestrians, and I knew that at any hour of the day or night someone could be watching me.

  Or, worse, trying to follow me.

  I was headed home one evening at dusk, driving away from the embassy on side streets in my Tahoe. As I took my first right, I made a mental note of the vehicles behind me that did the same.

  Blue Chevy Malibu. White Nissan Sentra.

  I took a left at the next light; the white Sentra did the same. In my rearview mirror I could make out the sharp cheekbones, dark eyes, and thick brow of the driver.

  Was it the same guy with the blade scar on his cheek on that hot afternoon money
drop in Plaza Satélite? It sure looked like him . . .

  I couldn’t be sure, but I hit the gas hard—another left and then a quick right, making sure I cleaned my tail of the Nissan.

  But I felt relatively safe in my Chevy Tahoe, with its two-inch-thick bulletproof glass. It was so heavy from all that level 3 armor that just a gentle tap on the gas pedal made it sound like it was going eighty-five miles an hour. A seasoned DEA agent at the embassy would say, in his heavy West Texan accent, “Them babies run like scalded apes.” Surveillance by Chapo’s people would be nearly impossible, the way I drove the thing—after just a month in-country I knew all of the shortcuts home, and regularly changed my route to and from work.

  IT WAS A BLAZING afternoon in August 2012, and Tom Greene, an agent in my group—working the Beltrán-Leyva DTO—was agitated, constantly checking his BlackBerry.

  “Funny, he’s not responding,” Tom told me. Greene had just returned from meeting with his informant, El Potrillo (“The Colt”), a twenty-six-year-old with a heavyset frame and a long, thin face, from just outside Mexico City. Tom and Potrillo had met a few minutes earlier at a small café-bookstore called El Tiempo, just a block from the embassy in the Zona Rosa neighborhood.

  “I’ve sent him a shitload of messages,” Greene said. “Kid always texts right back.”

  It didn’t seem like a big deal, so Tom and I went to lunch in the embassy cafeteria. As we were standing in line with our trays, we overheard one of the cashiers speaking Spanish: “Did you hear? Horrible. There was just a shooting over in Zona Rosa . . .”

  Just west of the historic center of Mexico City, Zona Rosa was a perfect place to meet a confidential informant, because it was one of the capital’s most bustling and vibrant neighborhoods—full of nightclubs, after-hours joints, and gay bars. After meeting with El Potrillo, Greene had seen a couple of suspicious guys on the street, one in a car and another walking slowly down the sidewalk, but he had thought little of it. His informant followed protocol, waiting to exit El Tiempo until Greene was long gone.

  El Potrillo had only taken a few steps down the busy sidewalk when a motorcycle pulled up alongside him. There were two male riders in full-faced black helmets. The rear rider got off the back of the Yamaha, walked calmly up behind El Potrillo, and shot him in the back of the head six times. Five of the bullets had been superfluous; El Potrillo was most likely brain-dead by the time he hit the pavement. The assassin jumped on the back of the motorcycle and sped off. The killers had used a classic sicario technique, imported to the Mexican capital by Colombian hit squads.

  I walked by the spot a couple of days later and could still see the bloodstains—now the color of dried wine—on the sidewalk.

  The police investigation went nowhere; none of the witnesses would cooperate. The assassins’ Yamaha had had no license plates. In fact, not one piece of evidence was noted by the local cops besides the time and place of the shooting. It quickly became another stat: one of the tens of thousands of drug-related homicides that remained unscrutinized and unsolved.

  AFTER GREENE DEALT WITH a few days of trauma in the DEA office, I found that life, strangely enough, went back to normal. The execution of El Potrillo was just another nightmare moment that Mexico City belched out daily, like the clouds of smog that hover over the metropolis—and yet another constant reminder that I could be shot point-blank in the back of the head at any moment, too, if I didn’t remain hypervigilant.

  If anything leaked out to the wrong people (narcos, dirty cops, even some greedy civilian looking for a payday), if anyone were to learn who I was actually targeting or the work I’d been doing for more than six years, it wouldn’t be some informant bleeding out in the streets of Zona Rosa—I would be another Kiki Camarena.

  Several weeks later, two CIA employees were driving to a military installation on the outskirts of the city in a Chevy Tahoe with diplomatic license plates—an armored vehicle identical to mine—when they were ambushed by two vehicles loaded with gunmen. The Tahoe was sprayed with more than a hundred machine gun rounds. The bad guys—it turned out they were rogue Mexican Federal Police—laid fire in such rapid succession that the bullets pierced the armor, striking the two CIA employees inside. But unlike Special Agent Zapata, they survived—they kept the Tahoe crawling on the metal rims until it could go no further.

  I studied the photographs: that Tahoe looked like it had just driven out of a firefight in Fallujah.

  I walked out of the office that very night and opened the door to my own Tahoe, my left eye twitching, and felt a bristling cold shiver, in spite of the midsummer heat, knowing that I—or any other DEA agent in the embassy—could be the next target of a murder.

  Badgeless

  HE WASN’T DIEGO. But then again, who was? Homeland Security Investigations Special Agent Brady Fallon brought his own unique skills to the table, and my partnership with him was almost as unlikely as the one I’d formed with Diego. Not ethnically—we were both Irish Americans; Brady had been born in Baltimore, studied finance in college abroad, and become a fed immediately after the September 11 terrorist attacks. What made our connection so unique was that agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration and HSI typically detested each other.

  At the executive level, in Washington, DC, communication between the agencies was done through snail mail—agents wouldn’t even pick up the phone to talk to each other. There had been deep-seated enmity even before the Office of Homeland Security, established after 9/11, became the cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security on November 25, 2002. It was much like the dysfunction between the FBI and the CIA—competition and a desire for personal credit overrode cooperation and common sense.

  Special agents from DEA and HSI would typically get into territorial pissing matches. . . . Then a headline-hungry assistant US attorney might get added to the mix with a case like this—the potential to arrest and charge the world’s most wanted narcotrafficker—and the investigation would come crashing down in a matter of weeks. That was precisely why no one had gotten a bead on Chapo in the twelve years since he’d broken out of prison.

  My relationship with Brady began in April 2013, with what I thought would be a routine deconfliction hit, just another DEA office or US federal agency investigating the same BlackBerry PINs as I was. I called the agent whose name popped up on my screen: Brady Fallon, HSI—El Paso Field Office.

  “So tell me, does your guy ‘06’ also go by ‘Sixto’? And your ‘El 81’—has anyone ever called him ‘Araña’?” I asked.

  I could imagine what Brady was thinking: Great—another DEA cowboy who wants to come in and sweep up our entire case . . .

  I could hear a muffled voice as Brady yelled to a few of his Homeland Security guys in the background, then he came back on the phone and said, “Yes, we have them referred to by those names. Araña comes up—so does Sixto. Why?”

  “Listen,” I said, “I don’t know if you guys realize it, but you’re sitting on two of Chapo Guzmán’s most trusted pilots.”

  Not only were Brady and I both targeting the same PINs—for Sixto and Araña—but there was another PIN I’d found while piecing together go-fast boats smuggling tons of cocaine off the coast of Ecuador, bound for Mexico’s west coast. Brady had the user name of that PIN listed as “Ofis-5,” and said that whoever was on the other end of that device was placing some serious orders to traffickers in Guatemala, Colombia, and Ecuador. And the recipients would always acknowledge the message with the words “Saludos a generente.” Greetings to the manager.

  “Sometimes these guys will address their messages to ‘El Señor,’ too,” said Brady.

  “Yeah, El Señor,” I repeated.

  That level of respect almost surely meant it was a reference to Chapo.

  Working along the Texas border across from Ciudad Juárez—a narco war zone, and the city with the highest murder rate in the world—Brady had had his share of unpleasant dealings with DEA agents.

  At one point, he had invited a DEA agent
from the El Paso, Texas, office to help with their case; he was told that the only way DEA was going to help was if they could lead the investigation; Brady wasn’t going to let that happen and slammed the door. So he was still skeptical.

  “How do I know you’re not just going to run off with all of my intel?” Brady said.

  I understood his concern. “You don’t know me yet, but I pride myself on knowing everything there is to know about my targets and sharing it with guys who want to jump on board and work together.”

  I had closely studied the systemic failure of intel sharing between the FBI and the CIA—the catastrophic interagency dysfunction in the period before 9/11—and promised myself I’d never withhold information from another federal agency if it would further the investigation. I had learned early on—going back to Task Force days with Diego—that it was the tight relationships I fostered throughout my career that had helped me be successful in every case I’d led. No one could come along and tell me that they knew more than I did—because, frankly, they had never dug deep enough. This wasn’t arrogance; it was just my thorough method of investigating.

  After setting the tone with Brady, I immediately began to fill him in on everything I knew about the two pilots, Sixto and Araña, and how Ofis-5 was connected to seizures down south that were directly linked to Chapo.

  “This shit could be a gold mine,” Brady said.

  BRADY AND I WERE soon on the phone twice a week, comparing notes, phone numbers, and intercepts from the Ofis-5 wire.

  We laughed about the far-fetched stories that filled the various government agency intel files. Chapo never had plastic surgery to disguise himself; he wasn’t hiding in Buenos Aires; he wasn’t living a life of luxury in the Venezuelan jungle, drinking tea and talking politics with Hugo Chávez. No one in the US government’s alphabet soup—DEA, HSI, FBI, ATF, or CIA—had bothered to sift through all the stories to determine fact from fable. There was no coordination in targeting efforts, and everyone slowly began to believe all the myths, repeated and retyped often enough that they were regarded as gospel.