Hunting El Chapo Read online

  In August 2013, I brought all the agents together in Mexico City; there were too many to fit in the Kiki Room, so we all assembled in the embassy auditorium. Each office presented its case on PowerPoint; as they did so, I would periodically interject, highlighting the connections I’d made to other cases, giving everyone in the room a greater sense of the scale of the investigation.

  “If we’re not targeting Chapo,” I said, wrapping up the meeting, “then who the hell is? We’re it—the elite USG team. Right here in this room. The only thing lacking is self-belief. Chapo is no super-criminal. He’s a man standing in the dirt somewhere in this very country. He’s breathing the same air as us. Like any other drug kingpin, Chapo’s vulnerable. He can be caught. But we all need to do our homework.”

  After the meeting, I was eager to sit down and meet a couple members of Brady’s core team who’d accompanied him to Mexico and had been working rigorously behind the scenes.

  Special Agent Joe Dawson was a heavyset, mid-thirties guy with straight brown hair long enough to tie in a ponytail, and he was wearing a gray button-down shirt and loose purple tie that made him look like a young tech exec from Silicon Valley. Joe, working closely with Brady, had taken the brunt of writing federal affidavits for all the office devices and the cartel operators we considered worthy of intercepting. Whenever I’d call El Paso, Joe would be working into the small hours of the night, sitting alone at his cubicle under one small desk lamp, jamming to Metallica, and typing and deciphering line sheets with me over the phone. Joe had a near-photographic memory and could instantly recall Chapo’s activities after reading them just once.

  At our meeting he said, “You see this guy called Vago in the line sheets on Office-5?”

  “Vago? I saw that.”

  “Looks like he’s getting ready to go on a rampage. Know who he is?”

  “It’s another alias for Cholo Iván.”

  I had already run “Cholo Iván” through our DEA databases: his real name was Orso Iván Gastélum Cruz. Chapo’s top sicario and plaza boss in the northern Sinaloan city of Los Mochis, Cholo Iván was a scary trafficker even by the standards of Mexican drug cartels.

  “And you saw him talking about a guy called Picudo?” I asked.

  Joe nodded.

  After Carlos Adrián Guardado Salcido, a.k.a. “El 50,” died in a shoot-out with a local unit of the Mexican Army in August 2013, Picudo had stepped up to become Chapo’s chief enforcer and plaza boss of Culiacán.

  “You have Picudo’s real name?” Joe asked.

  I shook my head. “Picudo—it’s Spanish for ‘sharp’ or ‘thorny.’ In Mexico it’s a nickname for a badass, for a guy who’s always looking for a fight. Picudo also goes by ‘El 70.’ Still working on getting his real name.”

  Picudo and Cholo Iván: these were two of the killers who gave Chapo his hold over the people of Sinaloa and through these sicarios, Guzmán could reign with violence.

  In the days before my meetings with my DEA colleagues, Cholo Iván had been talking about killing “Los Cochinos”—a group from a rival cartel—in retaliation for the murder of Picudo’s brother-in-law. Cholo Iván said they needed to attack Los Cochinos immediately, because elements in the Mexican government were aligning themselves with the rival cartel. Through the Office-5 mirror, Cholo Iván asked Miapa—slang for “my dad,” a code name for Chapo—to send some more heavy artillery to him in Los Mochis.

  We feared that bloodshed was coming.

  OUR KEYHOLE INTO CHAPO’S world was rapidly expanding, but every few weeks—usually on a thirty-day schedule—los pobrecitos (the “poor ones”), as Brady and I called them, who ran all the office mirrors in Durango, would receive a bagful of new BlackBerrys, dropping all the old devices and instantly creating a logistical headache for us and our entire team.

  Before we could intercept again, we had to try to identify the new office devices; then Joe would begin writing his affidavits. It was an arduous process that would take weeks to finish by the time an assistant US attorney reviewed the affidavit and Joe or Brady could get down to the federal courthouse in El Paso to have them signed by a US magistrate. Add another couple of days before HSI’s tech group would “flip the switch.” And all this had to be done for fifteen or twenty unique devices.

  I realized it would take a small miracle for us to stay up long enough to break through all the layers of BlackBerry mirrors in Chapo’s communications structure, let alone have enough time to be able to unravel Chapo’s day-to-day operations.

  But Brady and his handpicked team were not about to give up. We both knew that this entire investigation rested solely on his shoulders in El Paso and mine in Mexico City.

  Fortunately, besides the staunch assistant US attorney they had working with them in El Paso, Brady had lined up another attorney with juice: a deputy chief for the US Attorney’s Office in Washington, DC, Camila Defusio. A veteran prosecutor in her mid-forties, Defusio wasn’t afraid of taking massive cartel cases, as long as they kept producing fruitful results. The Chapo case was right in her wheelhouse. She knew what needed to be done and would streamline HSI’s affidavits even if it meant writing some herself. Like us, Camila saw the big picture, and Brady kept her well informed of our progress.

  The intercepts on the Second-Tier device proved to be our vital portal.

  Second-Tier may have been yet another mirror, but as soon as the BlackBerry went live, it was like a row of streetlamps turned on to illuminate a previously dark street. The crucial information in the line sheets grew exponentially. Not only were Offices 1, 3, and 5 routing their communications up to Second-Tier, but another three offices—numbers 2, 4, and 6—were doing the exact same thing.

  THE INCOMING MESSAGES in the line sheets became an endless and intoxicating river. Brady was forwarding them to me by the pile—there were thousands of them. I could go six hours without moving or even getting up to take a leak. Each sentence from the offices exposed clues leading deeper into Chapo’s secretive lair. I found I could be most productive when the other agents had left the embassy, from 6 p.m. until midnight, when I didn’t have to stomp out fires and do the diplomatic dancing that fills up the days of most foreign agents. So finally, alone in the office, I would submerse myself in the line sheets, looking for that one piece of intel, that one critical clue in a torrent of misspelled and often barely literate Spanish text. My retinas burned as I sank deeper into Chapo’s world.

  EVERY DAY AT AROUND 11 A.M., Brady and his team in El Paso would see the key lieutenants, the offices, and the Second-Tier phones coming to life. This was the same modus operandi I’d seen among the traffickers I targeted in the United States. Diego and I would joke about “doper time”—drug dealers, whatever their level in the organization, are creatures of the night, waking up and conducting business whenever they’re good and ready.

  Brady and I were now witnessing firsthand the extent of Chapo’s exploitation of new markets. Guzmán was eager to find refrigerated warehouses and place his operators in England, the Netherlands, the Philippines, and even Australia.

  We knew, too, about Chapo’s vast distribution network throughout the United States, but we were caught off guard by his deep infiltration of Canada. In terms of profit, Chapo was doing more cocaine business in Canada than in the United States. It was a straightforward price-point issue: retail cocaine on the streets of Los Angeles or Chicago sold for $25,000 per kilo, while in major Canadian cities it sold for upwards of $35,000 per kilo.

  His key cartel lieutenants could exploit weaknesses in the Canadian system: the top-heavy structure of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police hampered law enforcement efforts for even the most routine drug arrest and prosecution.*

  It was a perfect match for Chapo: hindered law enforcement and an insatiable Canadian appetite for high-grade coke. Over the years, the Sinaloa Cartel had built a formidable distribution structure, smuggling loads of cocaine across the Arizona border and hauling them to stash pads and warehouses in Tucson or Phoenix, before the
y were driven by car to the Washington border, where the loads would be thrown into private helicopters. The birds would jump the border and drop the coke out among the tall lodgepole pines of British Columbia.

  Chapo’s men had connections with sophisticated Iranian organized-crime gangs in Canada who were facilitating plane purchases, attempting to smuggle ton-quantity loads using GPS-guided parachutes, while sending boxes of PGP-encrypted smartphones south to Mexico at Chapo’s request. A network of outlaw bikers—primarily Hells Angels—were also moving his cocaine overland and selling it to retail dealers throughout the country.

  But Canada wasn’t always smooth sailing for Chapo. At some point he’d entrusted a twenty-two-year-old from Culiacán who spoke decent English—Jesus Herrera Esperanza, a.k.a. “Hondo”—and sent him to Vancouver to run his drug distribution and money collection throughout Canada. Hondo’s front—and it was a sweet life for a young Sinaloan—was to enroll in a business program at Columbia College, in downtown Vancouver, near his luxury thirtieth-floor condo loft. Hondo only attended a few classes, instead spending most of his time hanging out at clubs or taking girls sailing on the British Columbia coast.

  But Hondo was sloppy and openly flaunted his connection to Guzmán. Brady and I hacked into Hondo’s Facebook account one night and saw a status update reading:

  Puro #701!

  “What the hell is this kid posting?” Brady asked.

  “Pure seven-oh-one?” Then suddenly it made sense. “It’s not code, dude—it’s Forbes.” I laughed. “That’s Chapo’s Forbes number.” Guzmán had recently been ranked by the magazine as the 701st-richest man on the planet.

  Hondo was clearly a weak link among all the operators. He was so amped up about living the narco-junior life that he disregarded his daily functions for Chapo’s DTO. At one point, millions of dollars were sitting uncollected in Vancouver, Calgary, Winnipeg, Toronto, and Montreal—all from the sale of Chapo’s cocaine and heroin.

  Finally, in frustration, Chapo—mirrored through Office-5—gave Hondo a direct order:

  “I want a report every night at seven sharp. How much you’ve sold and how much money you’re sitting on. Break it down by city.” When Hondo got around to sending in the numbers, we would read the nightly reports. Vancouver: $560,000 and 95 kilos of coke. Winnipeg: $275,000 and 48 kilos. Toronto: $2 million and 150 kilos . . .

  I ALSO BEGAN to see how stuck in the details Guzmán could be.

  In July 2013, a jerry-rigged go-fast panga, equipped with four Yamaha 350-horsepower outboard motors and 130 plastic containers full of fuel, had set sail from Ecuador with two young Mexicans at the helm. They had stashed their cargo in a fishing net: heavy garbage bags carrying 622 kilograms of cocaine. The men left the coast of Ecuador, charting a zigzag course, avoiding fishing vessels and coast guard patrols, sleeping in the open air, and eating only canned scallops and saltine crackers for a week at sea as they throttled northbound toward Mazatlán, in Sinaloa, Mexico.

  They never made it. Tipped off that a Mexican navy vessel was headed out to intercept them, the two young men decided to ditch the load. A similar thing had happened to some of Chapo’s other smugglers several months earlier; they, too, had nearly been intercepted, and had dumped their kilos of coke into the ocean, then had lit the remaining canisters of gas, turning their go-fast boat into a fireball as they jumped into the Pacific and nearly drowned. This time, the tip-off came early enough that the men had heaved the fishnet of waterproofed cocaine bricks overboard, attaching an orange buoy to it so that it could be spotted by air and retrieved.

  Chapo was livid: losing one load was bad; losing two was unacceptable. His Mazatlán-based maritime smuggling lieutenant, Turbo, sent boat after boat out to the area of the drop, sixty miles off the coast, in a desperate attempt to find the lost load.

  But we could tell Chapo was nearing the boiling point when he sent his best pilot, Araña, out in an old rattletrap Cessna to look for that bobbing buoy, making several flights a day, circling above the Pacific.

  “That shit is probably in China by now,” Araña complained to another pilot. “I can’t take another day flying over the ocean. I’m fucking scared. The boss can ask me to do anything and I’ll do it—but not this. I’m not flying out there again.”

  Brady and I couldn’t believe how much manpower Chapo was putting into trying to retrieve a 622-kilogram load. It made no rational sense for the world’s wealthiest drug kingpin to search so hard for 622 keys.

  I HAD BEGUN to discern a psychological pattern in my prey: Chapo was fixated on the minutiae, like the price of jet fuel or the precise number of pesos being paid to his people. And he was cheap. For example, Guzmán would authorize monthly payments of only 2,000 Mexican pesos—roughly $165—to military lookouts scattered along the Colombia-Ecuador border. Why would he nickel-and-dime such key cogs in his machine of institutional bribery?

  Chapo Guzmán was apparently the CEO of a sprawling, multibillion-dollar drug-trafficking organization, but he also spent hours each day acting as a personnel complaint department. Brady and I couldn’t help but laugh some days when we’d read the exchanges from Chapo’s lieutenants bitching about being unappreciated—or, worse, not receiving their monthly payments on time.

  I COULD ALSO GET stuck in my own obsessions, to the point of being oblivious to what was going on around me in the office.

  One morning, I was so consumed with the line sheets that words began blurring together on the screen in front of me—wiggling back and forth. Was I having a panic attack? I looked over at the coatrack and realized that one of the hangers was rocking hard from side to side.

  Terremoto.

  Mexico City had frequent small tremors, but this was the first substantial earthquake I’d felt. After the massive earthquake in 1985—known to have killed more than ten thousand people—many new buildings were built to roll with the earth. The US embassy was built out of marble and placed on anti-seismic rollers for this purpose.

  I DROVE HOME THAT EVENING thinking about a brand-new nickname I’d read about in Chapo’s world. “Naris”—“the Nose”—was a courier who was constantly being sent by Second-Tier (once again through Office-6) to change cars frequently, pick people up, and deliver them to specific locations. Could he possibly be Chapo’s personal gofer?

  Narrowing in on Naris’s location was now my new priority.

  I parked my Tahoe on the street a block over from my apartment—something I did every so often to switch up my routine—and, walking home, I realized it was Día de los Muertos—the Day of the Dead, when Mexicans celebrate the deceased by dressing up in elaborate costumes and painting their faces as fanciful skulls with flowers and bright colors. The streets were full of people parading to celebrate in cemeteries, and my wife was throwing a party at home for all the women of the neighborhood, decorating sugar skulls she had made from scratch. She had quickly made friends with the extensive embassy and expat network; there were playdates with the kids and parties on all the major Mexican holidays like this one.

  I smiled at the sight of my wife, taking full advantage of our time in-country, as I walked to the back bedroom to take off my suit and tie.

  Unfortunately, there was no time for me to join in the festivities.

  I sat down on the corner of the bed and quickly began reading a string of messages from Brady.

  “How many times has Chapo been married?”

  “No idea,” I answered. “He’s married at least four or five women that I know of. But no one knows for sure. He never divorces; he just marries again. Not to mention the women he doesn’t marry. The guy is obsessed with women.”

  “I can see that,” Brady wrote back. “Check this out. It just came over Second-Tier. Someone sent a photo spread of young girls in lingerie. Looks like they’re coming from a madam they call Lizzy.

  “He’s sent a menu and gets to pick which one he wants for the night,” Brady wrote. “What a fuckin’ lowlife.”

  “Degenerate,” I replied
. “Sickening . . .”

  Second-Tier then ordered Naris to the “Galerías” to pick up Lizzy’s girl after Chapo had made his selection from the photo array.

  I later determined that “Galerías” was code for the Centro Comercial Plaza Galerías San Miguel, a mall in the heart of Culiacán to which Chapo would send his visitors to rendezvous with Naris or other couriers to be brought to his secret hideouts.

  NOT ONLY DID CHAPO have a fixation with underage virgins, but he had also become obsessed with the popular Mexican actress Kate del Castillo after becoming infatuated with the hit telenovela La Reina del Sur, on which she played a Sinaloa-born cartel boss running her empire from Spain. I had read in one line sheet that Chapo had instructed Lic Oro to get Kate’s personal PIN so they could contact each other.

  “This guy’s got no other motive in life besides moving dope and banging as many women as he can,” I wrote to Brady. “None. He’s either obsessing over the day-to-day of the DTO or he’s getting laid.”

  Sex was the only break in Chapo’s workaholic drug-trafficking routine. He maintained a revolving door of women; in between, he’d invite his wife over to share the same bed; the sex was almost constant.

  My street-cop instinct kicked in: the stronger the obsession, the more likely it could result in an exploitable weakness, a possible Achilles’ heel. I had even heard from a confidential source that Chapo and Mayo often joked that women would be their ultimate demise.

  THE MORNING AFTER the Día de los Muertos party, I walked out to my armored Tahoe to find that the spare tire had been stolen. There was a small hole in my windshield—a circular shatter mark, spider-webbing the bulletproof glass near the driver’s side. It looked like a close-range shot from a pistol.