Hunting El Chapo

by Andrew Hogan

  “You know what you’re getting yourself into,” Diego said. “At the end of the day, you gotta do what’s right for you and your family.”

  The next morning, I sat down with my wife and laid it all out for her. There was nothing to hide; all the risks were evident. I had been prepping her for months, but the danger of life in Mexico still weighed heavily on my mind.

  “What’s your gut telling you?” she asked. “I’ll support you, whatever you decide.”

  I sat silent at the kitchen counter for a long time.

  “Go,” I said finally. “My gut’s telling me go. Take the assignment in Mexico.”

  Looking back to my sheltered life in Kansas, I would never have fathomed those words. But every time I’d been faced with a life-changing decision, it felt uncomfortable, and I knew this was just another one of those moments. I paused and took a deep breath; my worries about any danger ahead began to lift: yes, it was natural career progression, after all—just furthering the investigations that Diego and I had started all those years ago.

  Then it was off to six months of Spanish immersion at the DEA’s language school in Southern California and, later, several more weeks of intensive training back at Quantico.

  Federal agents assigned to work in high-risk foreign posts were drilled in “personnel recovery” techniques: evasive driving maneuvers, including how to take over a moving car when your partner gets killed at the wheel and how to saw through plastic handcuffs using a piece of nylon string. This was followed by specialized training in handling heavy armored vehicles, which had become mandatory after the murder of Special Agent Zapata.

  IN FEBRUARY 2012, while I was away at language school, Diego had flipped a member of Chapo’s inner circle traveling to the United States.

  Diego called me—he was walking fast somewhere down the street, out in the wind—and he sounded breathless.

  “Yo, I got his BlackBerry PIN.” “Got whose PIN?”

  “C.”

  As always, we avoided saying the name Chapo whenever possible.

  “C’s BlackBerry?”

  “Yup. I have his personal PIN.”

  “Holy fuck. Where’s it pinging?”

  “Cabo,” Diego said.

  “He’s in Cabo San Lucas?”

  “Yep—but here’s the thing,” Diego said, frustrated. “No one fuckin’ believes me. They keep telling me it can’t possibly be his number. But I’m telling you: it’s him, brother.”

  Diego had passed the PIN to DEA Mexico City, which began its standard deconfliction. Several hours later, Diego heard back from a special agent in Mexico who told him the FBI in New York had thousands of wire intercepts with that same PIN. But they were oblivious and had no idea it was actually Chapo using it.

  “Shocking,” I said. “The Feebs have been secretly targeting Chapo and don’t even know which goddamn phone he’s using.”

  The DEA agent in Mexico City told Diego they were already preparing an operation with the Mexican Federal Police and had brusquely pushed Diego to the side.

  “They’re not going to let me in on the op,” Diego said. “Shit, I should be in Cabo running this thing.” I could tell Diego was feeling the strain of not having me by his side to iron out my own DEA agents in Mexico. I felt equally helpless sitting there in my Spanish immersion class, but I knew there was no stopping this runaway train—not with the Mexico City office having already involved the Mexican Federal Police.

  CABO SAN LUCAS, at the tip of the Baja Peninsula, was long considered one of the safest locations in Mexico and a favorite vacation spot among Hollywood stars and thousands of American tourists. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was in town at the same time as Chapo—at the Barceló Los Cabos Palace Deluxe, attending a G20 foreign ministers meeting, during which she signed the United States–Mexico Transboundary Agreement.

  Chapo clearly felt safe, even untouchable. DEA Mexico City put together a rapid operation that included three hundred Mexican Federal Police and moved them all up to Cabo overnight.

  But the mission turned into a debacle. The takedown team launched on an upscale neighborhood of beachfront mansions, raided twelve houses . . . and came away with nothing. All they managed to do was roust a bunch of wealthy American retirees, vacationers, and well-heeled Mexican families, pissing off the entire neighborhood.

  After the first failure, the Federal Police, fed up with taking grief from the community, sent most of its personnel home. DEA coordinated a second capture op, but now they didn’t have enough manpower—only thirty PF officers. Nevertheless, they narrowed the pinging of Chapo’s phone down to one of three beautiful beachfront mansions in a cul-de-sac right outside Cabo. As they hit the first two houses, Chapo was waiting in the third and watching it all unfold. He had no heavy security detail—the only people with him were his most trusted bodyguard, who went by “Picudo,” a Cessna pilot, his cook, a gardener, and a girlfriend.

  As the DEA and the PF descended on the cul-de-sac, Guzmán and Picudo slid out the back door and ran up the coast, narrowly escaping the dragnet. The two men somehow made it all the way up to La Paz and then were picked up on a clandestine airstrip—likely by Chapo’s favorite pilot, Araña—and flown by Cessna back to the mountains.

  After the debacle, the Associated Press reported,

  Mexican authorities nearly captured the man the U.S. calls the world’s most powerful drug lord, who like Osama bin Laden, has apparently been hiding in plain sight. Federal police nearly nabbed Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán in a coastal mansion in Los Cabos three weeks ago, barely a day after U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton met with dozens of other foreign ministers in the same southern Baja peninsula resort town.*

  Among the people of Mexico, the raid immediately became a running joke: The Federal Police could muster a small army to capture Chapo in his mansion, but they forgot to cover the back door.

  No one on the ground from DEA Mexico had a clue how big this Cabo opportunity had been. There were technological failures in the first raid, and a poorly coordinated effort in the second. The Mexicans may not have had enough people to cover the back door, true, but where the hell were the Americans? There weren’t any DEA agents covering the back door, either.

  A narcocorrido instantly hit the streets, recorded by Calibre 50. “Se Quedaron a Tres Pasos” (“They Stayed Three Steps Behind”) turned the escape into another Dillinger-like legend, claiming that Chapo had gone on vacation in Los Cabos and then “outsmarted more than one hundred agents of the DEA.”

  They stayed three steps behind Guzmán

  They looked for him in Los Cabos

  But he was already in Culiacán!

  The corrido got one thing right: Chapo was back on his home turf in the mountains. In the following months, the FBI continued to obtain Chapo’s new numbers, then DEA Mexico would ping them to rural areas of Sinaloa, and later the nearby state of Nayarit. DEA Mexico then passed the intelligence to the Federal Police, which conducted additional raids, only to find that the target phone was not in the hands of Chapo at all. Instead the phone was being used by some low-level cartel employee who was only forwarding messages to Chapo’s actual device.

  And now no one had that number.

  That was because Guzmán was employing the technique of a “mirror.” It was the first time Diego and I had heard of Chapo using one. Mirroring wasn’t a complex way of dodging law enforcement surveillance, but it was highly effective, if done correctly.

  “Always one step ahead,” I told Diego. “Chapo’s smart—restructuring his communications as soon as he returned safely to Sinaloa.”

  After continued failed attempts in which they hit only the mirror (the low-level employee holding the target phone), the FBI’s numbers began to dry up, and DEA Mexico, along with the Federal Police, decided to throw in the towel. DEA Mexico even closed the case file, and it didn’t appear as if anyone was reopening a Chapo Guzmán investigation anytime soon.

  BEFORE I EVEN PUT IN for the position
, I knew I’d be ending a once-in-a-lifetime partnership. As much as Diego would’ve loved to investigate cartels south of the border, he wasn’t a fed; he was a Task Force officer—a local Mesa, Arizona, detective—and couldn’t reside in another country. The invitation to my going-away party had a picture of Diego and me together in our tactical vests just after we’d finished a big raid, smiles on our faces, the tangerine shades of the setting Arizona sun behind us.

  Over the years, if our casework took us to Southern California, Diego and I would often zip down to Tijuana to take in even more of the Mexican culture I’d come to love. We’d listen to mariachi, banda, and norteño, then swing over to the strip clubs at 3 a.m., before grabbing a handful of street tacos and heading back across the border. For me, it was all part of learning the culture, deepening my understanding of a world I’d submersed myself in since that first night at Mariscos Navolato when I heard “El Niño de La Tuna” and began educating myself on the Mexican cartels.

  I would never have gone to Tijuana without Diego. We weren’t tourists, after all—a DEA agent and a detective from an elite counter-narcotics task force—and if anyone knew who we really were, especially with the heavyweight cartel drug and money-laundering cases we were working, we’d have made extremely vulnerable targets.

  For the going-away party, several of my buddies from back home flew in: even my old sergeant from the Sheriff’s office. The celebration kicked off at one of San Diego’s craft-beer bistros—a night of war stories, a running slide show of my time with Team 3, and the requisite plaques and framed photos—but the party didn’t end when the bosses went home. Instead, at 2 a.m., I grabbed my closest friends and suggested we pop down to Mexico. But just as we were about to leave, Diego stared at his buzzing iPhone. “Fuck—family emergency,” he said abruptly, hugging me. “Sorry, dude—gotta bounce.”

  My friends and I jammed into a cab and raced to the border. A taxi full of gringos, and no Diego as our guide. I had heard the cold click of the border pedestrian gates close behind me many times before, but now it was all on me: I would have to do all the talking and navigating.

  Fresh out of language school, my Spanish was good enough—my teacher was from Guadalajara, so my accent was consistent with the locals’. But my vocabulary was still so limited that I often found myself getting knee-deep in conversations I just couldn’t get out of until I’d end the interaction abruptly with a nod and a “gracias.”

  Somehow I managed to lead my Kansas buddies through the night, tossing back shots of Don Julio, rolling over to a streetside taco stand, mowing down al pastor on the spit, and walking back across the border into California just as the sun was cresting the mountains to the east. Diego should’ve been here to see this, I thought, but then I realized it was almost a rite of passage that I was able now to handle Tijuana on my own.

  THE FOLLOWING DAY I was at the San Diego International Airport with my family, lugging the cart loaded up with our suitcases and carry-on bags through the terminal to check in. I was just another dad, hands full of passports, boarding passes—and my sons tugging at my elbow.

  Whatever risks lay ahead, I was more certain than ever I’d made the right decision.

  The plane ascended through the clouds—my sons fell fast asleep on my shoulders—and, for the next couple of hours, at least, hunting down Chapo Guzmán was the furthest thing from my mind.

  DF

  MY FAMILY AND I touched down in Mexico the last week of May 2012. The sprawling metropolis—with twenty-six million people, the largest city in the Western Hemisphere—was rarely referred to by locals as “Ciudad de México.” To the natives it was El Distrito Federal (“DF”) or, owing to the ever-present layer of smog, El Humo (“The Smoke”).

  At the embassy, I’d initially been assigned to the Money Laundering Group. The Sinaloa Cartel desk was run by a special agent who was burned out, especially after the Cabo fiasco. After a few months, I convinced management to transfer me over from Money Laundering to the Enforcement Group. The following morning, I sat down for breakfast with my new colleagues and group supervisor at Agave, a café known for its machaca con huevo and freshly baked pan dulce.

  Before my arrival, the system had been inefficient. Most DEA special agents were working leads on multiple cartels: Sinaloa, the Zetas, the Gulf Cartel, the Beltrán-Leyvas, the Knights Templar . . . My group supervisor knew that this lack of focus was highly counterproductive. The Mexico City Country Office was such a hive of activity that no special agent could become a subject-matter expert on one particular cartel, because they were constantly working all of them.

  So, in one of my first meetings with my new team, we began a reorganization. We went around the table to focus our assignments, and when it came to the Sinaloa Cartel, the assigned agent spoke up immediately, nodding at me.

  “You can have this desmadre of a case,” he said. “I’m done. The Mexicans couldn’t catch Chapo if he was standing at the fuckin’ Starbucks across the street from the embassy.”

  “Sure, I’ll take it,” I said, trying to contain my excitement.

  “Adelante y suerte, amigo.” Go ahead, and good luck.

  At that moment, my mind drifted far from the meeting: I tried to picture Chapo eating breakfast, too, in a mountain hideaway or on some ranch in the heart of Sinaloa . . . Somewhere in Mexico. At least we were now on the same soil.

  The task in front of me was daunting. After all the failed capture operations, all the years of near misses, I knew that Chapo must have learned from his mistakes. He had the resources, the money, and the street smarts to secrete himself so deeply into his underworld that it would now be extremely difficult—perhaps even impossible—to take him unaware.

  He has eleven years of hard study on me, I thought as the meeting wrapped up. I’ve got a hell of a lot of catching up to do.

  AS I SETTLED INTO my work at the embassy, I ran into Thomas McAllister, the DEA regional director for North and Central Americas Region (NCAR). He gave me a piercing look.

  “Hogan, I’m told if anyone can catch Chapo, it’s you . . .”

  It was more a question than a statement, and I felt my face flush. I knew where this had come from: my first group supervisor, back in Phoenix, had worked with McAllister at DEA headquarters and knew exactly how relentless and methodical I was when pursuing the targets of my investigations.

  “We’ll see, sir,” I said, smiling. “I’ll give it my best shot.”

  One thing I had vowed: I was not going to fall into the trap of believing all the legends and hype. Even some of my DEA colleagues had lost hope, so I disengaged emotionally from the Chapo mythology, instead focusing on it from the most basic policing perspective. No criminal was impossible to capture, after all, the failed Cabo operation proved that Chapo was more vulnerable now than ever.

  NO SOONER HAD I settled into my seat in the Enforcement Group than I was assigned to be the DEA liaison on a case dominating all the Mexican headlines: a drug-related murder in broad daylight inside the terminal at the Mexico City International Airport. The airport was known to be among the most corrupt in the world; inbound flights from the Andes, especially Peru, almost always had cocaine hidden in the cargo. What made the incident all the more shocking was that the murders involved uniformed Mexican cops shooting fellow Mexican cops.

  Two Federal Police officers assigned to the airport were just getting off their shift, walking through Terminal 2. They were attempting to smuggle several kilos of cocaine hidden underneath the navy blue jacket of one of the officers—marked POLICÍA FEDERAL in white on the back—when they were approached by three PF officers coming on shift, who had become suspicious of them.

  A quick argument ensued between the two groups as they stood near the public food court. The dirty cops drew their service pistols and began gunning down the honest cops. One was executed with a point-blank shot to the head; two others were hit and died. To outsiders, the carnage looked like a terrorist attack; horrified travelers were screaming and scrambl
ing for cover. Meanwhile, the corrupt officers took off running through the terminal, jumped in a truck, and sped away.

  “Can you believe this shit?” I turned toward a senior agent in the group. “Blue-on-blue in broad daylight in the middle of an international airport? Who are these guys?”

  The agent wasn’t fazed; he didn’t even look up from his computer screen.

  “Bienvenidos,” he said. Welcome to Mexico.

  Though I tried to assist the Federal Police and the PGR—the Mexican Attorney General’s Office—tracking down the murderers, I soon came face-to-face with a harsh reality: there were too many layers of corruption. The investigation into the blue-on-blue killings faltered and eventually went cold. It was a stark introduction for me—I saw firsthand, within weeks of my new assignment, why fewer than five percent of homicides in Mexico are ever solved.

  OF ALL THE STUNNING cases of corruption and violence in Latin America, few lingered like the case of DEA agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena, who vanished on a busy street in Guadalajara in 1985 while walking to meet his wife for lunch. Camarena’s body wasn’t found for nearly a month. When it was, it was discovered that his skull, jaw, nose, cheekbones, and windpipe had all been crushed; his ribs had been broken and he’d been viciously tortured; he was even sodomized with a broom handle. Perhaps worst of all, his head had been drilled with a screwdriver, and he’d been buried in a shallow grave while still breathing.

  Kiki Camarena’s disappearance became a major international incident and heavily strained relations between the United States and Mexico—the US government offered a $5 million reward for the arrest of the murderers.

  When I arrived at DEA’s Mexico City Country Office more than twenty-five years later, the circumstances surrounding Camarena’s death had not been forgotten. His memory was kept vividly alive. Along the main embassy hallway, a conference room dedicated to the slain agent—we referred to it simply as the Kiki Room—featured a small bust of Camarena and a plaque. Convicted of Kiki’s torture-murder was none other than Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, “El Padrino,” a former Federal Police officer turned godfather of the Guadalajara Cartel—and Joaquín Guzmán’s mentor in the narcotics business.*