Hunting El Chapo Read online

  In time, I brought Brady up to speed on the success Diego and I had had back in Phoenix, how far we had come in our Team America investigation, and the failed operation in Cabo. I sent him a photo of Chapo, flanked by three women and appearing to be in good health.

  Diego had sent me the photo after it was found on an abandoned BlackBerry taken from the Cabo mansion. It was the most up-to-date photograph that the US and Mexican governments had of the top drug fugitive in the world, and it had never been seen by the public.

  From inside the embassy, I began to GPS-ping Ofis-5.

  Boom.

  Within seconds I had pinpointed the device in Durango, east of Sinaloa. I couldn’t believe that Guzmán would be hanging out in the middle of a busy city again—but who knew? With Chapo, anything was possible.

  I explained to Brady the way Chapo had restructured his communications network after returning safely to Sinaloa from Baja.

  “That Ofis-5 device is most likely a mirror,” I said. “Short for oficina.”

  “Oficinas,” Brady said. “Makes sense. They’re functioning like offices.”

  “Exactly—Chapo’s often referred to his mirror locations as offices.”

  They were grand-sounding, but Brady and I later learned that they were really just cinder-block apartments—shitholes—with the “office” worker thumb-typing thousands of messages, never seeing daylight, surviving on a pot of refried beans and an occasional Burger King Whopper. For sixteen hours a day, the mirror would relay all communications and send them to the intended recipients: they acted like a central switchboard for the cartel and also served to limit Chapo’s direct communication with anyone.

  “So you think he’s still insulating himself?” Brady asked.

  “Yes, he’s insulating himself well. Now it’s just a matter of how many layers are between him and us. For now, these offices are our key.”

  It reminded me of the old-school American Mafia walk-and-talk—always insulate the boss from direct communication.

  And then I went back to my work, opening a fresh Google Map of Mexico on my MacBook and placing my first red-pin marker on the coordinates of Ofis-5 in Durango.

  ON THE EVENING OF April 4, Brady and I learned through a DEA agent in New York—working a confidential source—that Chapo would be celebrating his fifty-sixth birthday, surrounded by friends and family, at a ranch in his birthplace of La Tuna, the hacienda perched high in the Sierra Madre in the state of Sinaloa. Feliz cumple! Birthday messages streamed in for El Señor. It was the first time we knew where Chapo was located since he’d fled Cabo.

  But we couldn’t act on the intel.

  “It’s too early—and far too risky at this point—to organize a capture operation, and I don’t even know who we could trust in the Mexican counterparts,” I said.

  The same scenario had been tried, and had failed, numerous times. For years, DEA agents working with their Mexican law enforcement counterparts would act on viable intelligence derived from confidential sources reporting where Chapo would be. Sometimes it was a large fiesta in the mountains, other times a small meeting behind closed doors on some trusted lieutenant’s ranch.

  I had studied the history: the capture ops were always rushed and reactive. The DEA agents would typically have one or two days’ advance notice, grab the first Mexican counterpart willing to risk his unit, and mount a fast capture op. Invariably Chapo would catch wind of the plan a day or hours beforehand and vanish.

  No one knew where the leaks and tip-offs came from, but Chapo always had plenty of advance notice. Each time the Mexicans came up empty-handed, the DEA would blame systemic corruption, tuck their tails between their legs, and return home. There were never any persistent and sustained operations to follow, because no one had put in the time and done the work to see the big picture—to know where Chapo had come from, let alone where he was headed next.

  Up to this point, it had all been a crapshoot—haphazard and improvised—with each miss bolstering Chapo’s reputation as untouchable.

  “So other than you,” Brady said, “who’s targeting him?”

  I knew the answer to the question, but I let the silence on the line linger for effect.

  “No one.”

  “You’ve got to be shitting me?”

  “Not kidding,” I laughed. “Just me.”

  “Unbelievable,” Brady said.

  “There’s a lot of DEA offices targeting the upper echelon of the Sinaloa Cartel. They’re all trying to work an angle to penetrate Chapo’s inner circle. I’m working with all of them. Sure, they each have a piece of the puzzle, but they’re not close enough yet. You and me, we’re it, man. If anyone has a chance to catch Chapo, it’s us.”

  Brady and I knew that the potential breakthroughs would be buried in those line sheets, in those messages.

  “We just gotta keep digging,” I said.

  “Easy enough to target one trafficker,” Brady said. “But that sounds like it’s not gonna work with Chaps.”

  “No,” I said. “Never has. We need to exploit his entire inner circle. The lieutenants, enforcers, couriers, pilots, lawyers, and accountants. His sons, nephews, cousins, wives, girlfriends. Even his cook and maids.”

  The key investigative strategy would be to simultaneously exploit multiple avenues leading to El Señor. If one line failed, we’d have several backup options, allowing us to pivot without losing any momentum.

  “Chapo’s been one step ahead ever since he broke out of Puente Grande,” I said. “He understands who’s hunting him. He understands how we operate. This guy’s no fool. He’s always watching his back.”

  For years Chapo had outsmarted some of the best agents on both sides of the border, but in Brady Fallon I felt I had a fellow federal agent who shared my conviction and determination. Together I hoped that we might have the right stuff to outsmart Chapo at his own game.

  IN LESS THAN a month, Brady’s HSI team in El Paso was intercepting two more oficina BlackBerry devices that we’d identified.

  Brady and I determined that each office was in communication with anywhere from five to ten members of Chapo’s inner circle, and each office was responsible for sending Chapo’s orders to its designated contacts.

  On a whiteboard in the embassy, I drew a line from each office tasked with communicating orders from above to the actual lead cartel operators—Chapo’s core workforce, and the men representing his authority in Mexico and Central and South American countries:

  Office-1—Tocallo

  Office-3—Lic-F, Lic Oro

  Office-5—Chuy, Pepe, Fresa, Turbo

  For the first time ever, Brady and I were peering through a keyhole into Chapo’s inner world, witnessing the volume of activity flowing somehow—through all the mirrors—from the office devices back up to Chapo.

  Brady and his team had already done a ton of legwork over the course of several months and were well versed on several of the key players:

  Chuy was an operator based in Guatemala who coordinated large cocaine loads coming up from Colombia and Venezuela. He would work with Chapo’s pilots, like Sixto, to get the loads across the southern border into Mexico.

  Pepe worked right at the source of the coke pipeline—deep in the jungles of Colombia—trying to secure thousands of kilos of cocaine base, which he would then send north in go-fast boats staged on the coast near the Colombia–Ecuador border. In the line sheets, it was evident that Pepe was a hard worker and reliable; he always provided updates on his progress to El Señor, mirrored through Office-5.

  Fresa was the chief operator based in Ecuador who had the responsibility of finding clandestine airstrips in rural areas so he could receive loads of cocaine base, to be flown out of the country in private planes. Brady and I could see that Fresa was nowhere near as reliable as Pepe.

  “This guy Fresa down in Ecuador is constantly bitching about not getting paid,” said Brady.

  “Yeah, I see that. And el generente isn’t real impressed with his work. Fresa bet
ter get on point.”

  Pissing off the manager of the world’s largest drug cartel usually didn’t end with just a verbal reprimand.

  TOCALLO? LATE INTO THE NIGHTS, I kept drilling down into the line sheets on Office-1. But that word kept leaping out at me from the blur of the daily back-and-forth among all the office devices.

  I’d first heard the word tocayo—“namesake”—years ago from Diego during our Task Force years in Phoenix. In many Mexican families, Diego had told me, Tocayo—often misspelled Tocallo—was an affectionate way of referring to someone who has the same name as you.

  “Tocallo on Office-1,” I told Brady. “I’d bet anything this Tocallo is gonna turn out to be Iván.”

  “Iván?” Brady said.

  “Yeah, Iván Archivaldo Guzmán Salazar.”

  “His son . . . I remember.”

  “You can tell just by the way that they’re speaking. There’s a level of respect they have for each other. And it’s the first numbered office device—why wouldn’t Chapo designate the first office to his number-one son?”

  “What’ve you got on him?”

  “Iván’s known to be moving ton quantities of weed from Sinaloa up through Sonora and then into Tijuana and Nogales. Chapo and Iván share the same middle name, Archivaldo. That’s a namesake. Tocallo. Can’t be a coincidence,” I said. “It’s gotta be Iván.”

  Iván was one of Chapo’s sons by his first wife, María Alejandrina Salazar Hernández. Born in 1983, and often referred to as “Chapito” after Edgar was murdered, Iván eventually took over as Chapo’s heir. Now he was the most trusted son. Iván and his younger brother, Jesús Alfredo Guzmán Salazar, spent most of their earlier years bouncing between Culiacán and Guadalajara, living the life of the ultimate narco juniors: throwing lavish parties and driving rare European sports cars. Now Iván and Alfredo were running their own semiautonomous DTO and helping their father out with whatever he needed. Alfredo and Chapo were federally indicted together in Chicago in 2009 on drug-trafficking and money-laundering conspiracy charges.

  While their father was trying to keep a low profile, Iván and Alfredo couldn’t get enough of the narco life, buying the world’s most exclusive cars—Lamborghinis, Ferraris, Shelby Mustangs, even a rare silver Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren, with batwing doors, which was imported from England and could go from zero to sixty in 3.4 seconds—all ordered in the United States and Europe through straw purchasers. They also bought private aircraft, though they never paid full price—just like their father, the sons always haggled to get the best deal. They wore oversize Swiss watches, carried bejeweled pistols, and even had wild A1 Savannah cats, imported from Africa, living as their pets in Culiacán.

  THE MESSAGES KEPT POURING into HSI’s El Paso office.

  “These guys are non-fucking-stop,” Brady said. “My translators can hardly keep up with the line sheets.”

  Every day in Mexico, I would receive a fresh batch of the latest lines and spend my entire day reading and rereading them, trying to decipher just a sliver of Chapo’s global drug communications. With all of the fast-paced activity of cocaine loads bouncing north from country to country, it was easy to get distracted, but now that I had access to the “tolls” (call detail records) from multiple office devices, I could do what I’d learned to do best.

  We’ve got to move up the ladder, I would tell myself. Exploit . . .

  If the office devices were all mirrors, then who was above them?

  I ran a quick frequency report on the offices, which provided the most common PIN in contact with each of them, and quickly noticed a common thread. I knew from all of my years analyzing numbers that the PIN in most frequent contact with the target would likely lead to the boss. With normal phone users it would typically be a spouse, significant other, or parent, but in the drug trade the most frequent contact PIN was invariably the shot caller, the boss. One hundred, two hundred, or even three hundred messages were sent daily to that most frequent PIN.

  26B8473D

  I took that most frequently contacted PIN and pinged it.

  If this was indeed Chapo’s personal PIN, I’d have a pretty good idea based on location. The results came back within seconds.

  Right in the heart of Ciudad de Durango, the capital of Durango State, again.

  “Shit,” I told Brady. “Looks like just another mirror.”

  The username of the PIN was “Telcel.” Brady and I dubbed this next layer “Second-Tier.”

  “You guys are writing for Second-Tier, right?” I asked Brady.

  “Yeah, one step ahead of you,” Brady said. “I’ve already got my guys on it. Have you read what’s been coming in on Office-3 lately?”

  “Just diving in this morning,” I said.

  In the line sheets I saw that Office-3 was in regular contact with all the “Lics” in the organization. Lic was shorthand for licenciado.

  I knew from my casework in Phoenix with Diego that licenciado—literally “licensed title”—could refer to anyone who’d earned an advanced degree: engineers, psychologists, architects. But in common Mexican usage, a licenciado was generally a lawyer or someone with any higher education. No one could be sure, but one of the principal advisers in the line sheets went by the name Lic Oro.

  Filtering the message through Office-3 and then down to Lic Oro, El Señor would ask for the status of various court cases involving significant Sinaloa Cartel heavyweights who’d recently been arrested.

  One of the most pressing legal cases involved a player Lic Oro referred to as “El Suegro.”

  I kept poring over those line sheets, seeing references to the case involving El Suegro (Spanish for “father-in-law”).

  Driving home from the embassy that night, I remembered one family barbecue in the suburbs of Phoenix where Diego had introduced me to his wife’s father—using that title, “mi suegro.” And during the Team America operation, learning that Carlos Torres-Ramos and Chapo were consuegros . . .

  And then I suddenly understood that this El Suegro could be only one man: Inés Coronel Barreras, the father of Emma Coronel Aispuro, Chapo’s young beauty-queen wife.

  Emma was actually an American citizen—she was born in California in 1989—and had grown up in a remote Durango village called La Angostura. She’d married Guzmán when she was just eighteen, when Chapo was over fifty. Brady and I knew her history well—she’d caught Chapo’s eye after winning some local pageant at La Gran Feria del Café y la Guayaba; her father was a cattle rancher and heavy hitter within the Sinaloa Cartel. In fact, on April 30, Inés Coronel Barreras had been arrested by the Mexican Federal Police along the US border—in Agua Prieta, Sonora—for running a marijuana-and-cocaine-trafficking distribution cell responsible for smuggling large loads into Arizona.

  Tocallo: namesake.

  Had to be Iván.

  El Suegro: father-in-law.

  Had to be Inés.

  As careful as the communications insulation system was, the nicknames and aliases were clear tells.

  The names left little doubt: Brady and I were almost certain who El Señor was, the man at the top of this BlackBerry chain. The boss putting out the orders through the mirror devices—however many layers of them there were, and we still weren’t sure—had to be Chapo Guzmán himself.

  Once I got to my apartment in Condesa that evening, I poured myself a double shot of bourbon on the rocks, slumped back in my living room armchair, and pulled my BlackBerry out of my pocket to write a message to Brady.

  Iván—Tocallo.

  Inés—El Suegro.

  The net was tightening: a string of Spanish names was drawing us closer to El Señor.

  I knew that standard texting wasn’t secure over Mexican cell towers, so I typed Brady a message on WhatsApp.

  “We’ve got momentum now,” I wrote. “Tocallo. El Suegro. We’re rolling. But we need to meet up. How soon can you come down here?”

  TELECONFERENCING AND TEXTING for three months could accomplish only so much.


  We had to meet face-to-face.

  Less than a week later, I met Brady at the Mexico City airport, right there in Terminal 2, not more than fifty feet from the food court where the blue-on-blue Federal Police murders had taken place.

  I recognized him immediately—he was five-ten, had a shaved head, and was wearing a dark gray jacket and Ray-Bans perched on his forehead. He was walking toward me with a pissed-off scowl, although, as it turned out, he wasn’t in the least bit angry. We held a long stare, looking at each other—not as special agents from rival US federal government agencies, but as men with a shared vision for our investigation.

  “Badgeless,” I said.

  Brady nodded.

  “Badgeless.”

  We sealed the deal with a handshake, pulling each other chest-to-chest in a powerful hug.

  Top-Tier

  BY THE SUMMER OF 2013 I was running point in Mexico for all DEA offices targeting the Sinaloa Cartel, coordinating with other DEA agents and federal prosecutors in San Diego, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, and Miami.

  I now had a much better grasp of the overall umbrella-like structure of the cartel. Chapo may have been el jefe de jefes—boss of bosses—but there were other DTOs nearly as large as Chapo’s personal organization that operated under the wing of the Sinaloa Cartel. Next to Chapo, Ismael Zambada García, a.k.a. “El Mayo,” Chapo’s longtime senior partner, was the most prominent.

  Any trafficker below Chapo and Mayo needed their direct blessing to work and share resources within their territory.

  I was regularly on the phone with DEA agents stationed in Canada, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia, and Ecuador, passing leads and sharing intel on the movements of Chapo’s countless drug shipments. With all the moving parts, I realized I needed to call a coordination meeting of all the far-flung agents who saw only a sliver of the intelligence and investigative leads.