Hunting El Chapo

by Andrew Hogan

  We were looking at a gateway into the labyrinthine sewer system just below the city streets. Everything was pitch-black in both directions, except for a tiny pinhole of light a good twenty or thirty blocks away.

  I tried to catch my breath. I looked in one direction and Brady looked in the other, hoping for any sign of life—a whispered voice, a cry, footsteps splashing through the fetid water . . .

  Nothing.

  “Gone,” Brady said.

  Chapo had escaped again.

  The Drop

  CHAPO’S WORLD WAS UPSIDE-DOWN.

  Now so was mine.

  There was nothing to do but continue the hunt.

  I scaled the tunnel ladder and slowly crawled out, ducking down to avoid hitting my head on the bottom of the bathtub.

  Still no sign of Nico or Leroy.

  I pulled out my iPhone and texted Nico.

  “Where you at?”

  “The Four,” Nico replied. “Heading to the Three next. Meet us there.”

  I could see Nico’s orange icon blinking about ten blocks to the east on the Find My Friends app.

  “I bet Chapo could walk the sewer right down to the Four,” Brady said.

  “Yeah, he never has to see the light of day.”

  We walked into what had so recently been Chapo’s bedroom and began rifling through everything—all the piles of clothes, towels, ledgers, miscellaneous notes, boxes of Cialis, Celebrex, and other prescription pills littering the room.

  I only cared about one thing.

  “Get me all the BlackBerry boxes and SIM cards you can find,” I said. We needed anything that would offer clues about where Chapo had run and who he’d turned to for help in the final minutes.

  “Jesus, they’re everywhere,” Brady said. There were more than twenty BlackBerry boxes in the bedroom alone. Brady and I quickly collected them into a pile on the bed.

  I began snapping pictures of each distinct PIN number printed on the side of each box. As soon as I sent the PINs to Don, back in Virginia at DEA’s Special Operations Division, they’d be able to get me the corresponding phone numbers almost immediately. Then I could get to work pinging the devices.

  “There’s a good chance Chapo’s carrying at least one of these BlackBerrys,” I said.

  AS WE CONTINUED COMBING through the empty house, I ran into Admiral Garra.

  “Ven conmigo,” the admiral said abruptly, gesturing for Brady and me to follow him outside.

  We jumped into another rápida and sped off in a small convoy, following all the other SEMAR trucks. Garra’s face was determined, but his brow was starkly creased—it was clear he was still angry that Chapo had slithered away into the sewers.

  It was only 4:30 a.m.—still too dark to see clearly when the rápida came to a stop—but as soon as my boots hit the gravel street, I knew precisely where I was standing. It was the exact block I’d been studying on my Google Map and high-res imagery for months.

  The rápidas filled the street, marines piling out and swarming up the driveway. I stood back, taking in Colonia Libertad. I watched as a couple of marines led a man in a red-and-black polo shirt toward the house—even in the dim light I immediately recognized him as the courier Naris.

  Naris was silent, head bowed, hands cuffed in front, leading the marines to a long brown steel gate, solidly built and electrified. I knew this was the same gate that Naris had been waiting outside for minutes on end, after running out to buy shrimp or sushi or plastic spoons for Chapo, standing there shouting, “Abra la puerta!” and pleading for Condor to let him inside.

  This time it was Naris using a set of keys to open the gate for the marines. He was fully cooperating now. I stepped through the gate with the marines and turned around to look back at the street. I was more dialed in than I had realized: it wasn’t a one-block radius—my pin marker was a mere twenty paces away, across the street from Chapo’s driveway, close enough to hit the garage with the toss of a football.

  The entry team smashed the reinforced steel lock of the side door, and dozens of marines flooded inside. I followed on their heels, stepping fully into Chapo’s world now. This was his primary safe house, the one in which he had spent ninety percent of his time.

  I stepped into the first bedroom on the right, scoping everything in the room, taking more photos of BlackBerry boxes and SIM cards. The marines were already beginning to turn the place upside down.

  I heard Brady shouting:

  “Why aren’t they in the sewers? Get in the fuckin’ tunnels!”

  I knew there was no stopping it now, no way to tell this SEMAR machine what to do.

  There was a bag of meth on the kitchen table. This was odd—snorting ice didn’t seem like Chapo’s thing. In the master bedroom, down the hall, I ran my hand across Chapo’s long line of dress shirts and kicked at the more than fifty boxes of shoes stacked high in the closet. There were a couple of expensive watches—one was a rose-gold Jaeger-LeCoultre chronograph with sapphire crystal, brand-new in its box from Le Sentier, Switzerland.

  Aside from the designer shoes and a few elegant Swiss time-pieces, though, everything seemed to have been purchased in bulk at Walmart.

  “Same cheap vinyl sofas,” I said. “Same white plastic table. Same folding chairs.”

  I was surprised to see that Chapo afforded himself so few luxuries. This house was no better than Location Five. These were cookie-cutter homes, completely utilitarian and almost certainly designed and crafted by Kava and his crew.

  I followed El Toro, the fiery SEMAR captain, along with a few other marines into the bathroom adjacent to Chapo’s bedroom. El Toro was pushing Naris forward, clearly on a mission.

  I rounded the corner and came face-to-face with Naris.

  His prominent nose was now bright red.

  Chapo’s courier, hands still cuffed, moved over to the sink and stuck a small shiny object—it might have been a paper clip—into a hole near the electrical outlet next to the mirror. There was a crackling sound—for a moment I thought Naris had given himself an electric shock, but he’d somehow activated an internal switch, triggering the hydraulics.

  The caulk liner around the bathtub began to crack away. Naris walked over and grabbed the top rim of the tub with his cuffed hands, giving an awkward lift until the power of the hydraulics took over. The stench of mold and sewage once again filled the bathroom as the entire tub was raised up to the same forty-five-degree angle I’d seen back at Location Five.

  A SEMAR lieutenant—everyone called him “Zorro”—kept barking at his troops. “Mira! Strip your gear, get into the tunnel, and find the motherfucker!” No time to souvenir-hunt, Zorro said. This was their chance to catch the world’s biggest drug lord.

  Zorro was the first down the open bathtub, descending into the nasty sludge-filled sewers. He quickly disappeared with his team. But I knew that Chapo was in the wind. The guy was as slippery as a sewer rat. He’d likely emerged from some drainage hole more than an hour earlier.

  I WALKED OUTSIDE and saw a large blue tarp above my head, a makeshift canopy that spanned across the driveway, from the guesthouse to the roof of the main house. Chapo clearly knew that there were always eyes in the sky watching him.

  The guesthouse—equipped with a bathroom and a queen bed—had been built near the far back corner of the small lot, no more than thirty feet from the side door of the main house. By the time I poked my head in, SEMAR had ripped the place to shreds. I figured that this might have been the residence of Chapo’s full-time cook or maid—everyone in Mexico who could afford it seemed to have a live-in housekeeper—but it could also have been where Condor stayed during his fifteen- to thirty-day shifts as secretario.

  After an exhaustive search of the entire property, the swarm of marines shifted gears without warning, filling the streets and jumping back into their rápidas. I grabbed Brady by the shoulder as we were leaving and pointed to the white Chevrolet Captiva sitting in the driveway—we had almost overlooked it. It was the same Captiva that Ch
apo had ordered Naris to get into a few hours earlier, with instructions to bring him his pistol.

  NOW WE WERE SPEEDING over to Location Two—it was only a few blocks away, so close we could have walked there. When we arrived, I opened the truck door to exit and paused. I was about to stand on another piece of asphalt I’d been studying for so long in my satellite imagery.

  Until that moment, everything had been unfolding at lightning pace, but the initial shock and adrenaline rush were now wearing off. I began to realize how vulnerable we were. At any instant, we could all be ambushed, taken on in a hail of gunfire right there in the street. I pictured streams of Chapo’s enforcers and their gunmen, other traffickers, dirty local cops—anyone with weapons—rounding the corner and opening fire. There would be nowhere to run.

  I looked around in the truck for an extra rifle, pistol, or even a knife—nothing. A wave of fear rolled through me. I jumped out of the rápida and hustled and worked my way in among the mob of marines headed for the door—I figured that it was safest to be tucked in among the troops.

  “The Two,” as Chapo referred to it, was constructed like Safe House 3—with heavy concrete walls rising high to deter observation from the street and black wrought-iron fence completing the gaps—yet was similar enough to the rest of the neighborhood homes not to stand out. “The Two” was painted white, with a couple of large palms stuck in the walkway just inside the door, along with an attached single-car garage. I was familiar with this location, too. I’d studied the detailed overhead photographs of this very place back in La Paz when I was zeroing in on the pings of Picudo.

  Once inside, we found the house almost bare. The three bedrooms each had a bed, but there was little or no other furniture.

  “This place looks like a straight stash-or flophouse,” I told Brady.

  SEMAR had found yet another identical tub on hydraulics in the bathroom off the main bedroom, only this one was nearly impossible to enter. It was stuffed with more than one thousand individual football-size packages wrapped in brown tape and marked with a four-digit number that appeared to be the weight. Methamphetamine. In the end, we would calculate that more than three tons of meth were jammed into the tunnel.

  It made no sense to me. Tens of millions of dollars’ worth of meth just sitting there getting moldy in the bowels of Culiacán?

  “Maybe Chapo’s cash-out stash?” I asked Brady.

  “Could be,” Brady said. “Given the street value of that stuff, he could live on the run for years . . .”

  The sun was coming up fast, the Culiacán horizon growing brighter by the moment, the streets starting to come alive. I stood for a while out in the street, with a few marines holding outer security. I noticed a grade school directly across the way; soon it would be bustling with children.

  Something else, too: there was blaring music wafting down the hill. Who would play banda so loud at this hour? Was it a signal of some sort from Chapo’s loyalists? A call to arms?

  BEFORE I KNEW IT, Brady and I were back in the convoy, riding with Nico and Zorro in the armored Suburban, speeding north to yet another location.

  It was the first chance I’d had to talk to Nico face-to-face since the frenzy of the first predawn raid.

  “How close were you guys to grabbing him before he hit the tunnel?”

  “When we pulled up, they were still inside,” Nico said. “I could see people upstairs in the window. Someone peeked through the blinds. By the time we got through that fuckin’ door, he was gone.”

  I glanced at Brady, shaking my head in disbelief. “We knew he had a tunnel under a bathtub,” I said. “We just didn’t know he had one in every single safe house.”

  Lieutenant Zorro looked especially pissed at this remark. “No one has ever outrun me before,” he said.

  “We could hear them running—splashing in the distance—but had no idea where,” Zorro said. “We found these lying in the sewer,” he said, pointing back to two armored tactical vests, one black, the other a pale green.

  Tucked in the vests were four black hand grenades with gold pins. One grenade had an American $20 bill wrapped around it. Chapo was presumably planning on tossing them behind himself to blow up the tunnel but hadn’t had time. “He had the same setup in Cabo,” I remembered.

  Zorro handed me a red thumb drive that Chapo had dropped in the tunnel in his haste. There was not much on it other than surveillance video of the inside of some chick’s house. Must have been another Guzmán obsession . . .

  After a few minutes, we arrived outside Location One. There, an open brown garage door led into an enclosed driveway hidden by huge army-green canvas tarps hung from above.

  In the garage, there was a small desk with several monitors displaying video footage from surveillance cameras in all of Chapo’s safe houses. Someone obviously had the mind-numbing assignment of sitting in another cheap plastic chair in that empty garage, watching the small checkerboard of cameras on the screens.

  This place was even older than Location Two—there were mid-sixties pink and green tiles throughout the bathroom, several bedrooms, and an old, filthy couch in the living room. The walls were bare. I had the feeling that this may have been Chapo’s original safe house in Culiacán, considering its age.

  Once again, a still-handcuffed Naris jimmied the hydraulic bathtub, revealing yet another entrance to a tunnel.

  “Every safe house is connected,” I said. They were close enough together that they could all be accessed through the same citywide sewer grid directly below the streets.

  I walked back out to the street with Brady to get my bearings. It was now full daylight. I recognized the area.

  “This is exactly where SEDENA killed El 50 back in August,” I told Brady. “Right out on this street.”

  BRADY AND I HAD just jumped back in the old armored Suburban when I got an email from my group of intelligence analysts in Mexico City. Before we left La Paz, I had instructed them to ping other high-value cartel members every hour—anyone close to Chapo—so we could put them on the target deck in the event they needed to be located and arrested.

  This latest email said that Picudo’s pings appeared to have traveled at high speed, beginning in Culiacán and ending along Highway 15D just north of Mazatlán. I looked at the times.

  Last ping before leaving Culiacán: 3:48 a.m.

  Closest ping near Mazatlán: 6:00 a.m.

  I reached over and nudged Brady.

  “This is our drop!”

  I knew that if Chapo trusted anyone, it would be Picudo. Guzmán might not want anyone else in the organization to know he was fleeing—in fact, the HSI team in El Paso reported that most of the DTO’s lines were still up and running despite the chaos in Culiacán—but Picudo, his chief enforcer, could scoop him up and run him out of town discreetly.

  “Yeah, looks promising,” Brady nodded, studying Picudo’s ping locations and times.

  “This is our drop,” I said again. “I’m telling you. Chapo’s in Mazatlán.”

  “Vámanos, güey!” Brady said.

  But we both knew that we couldn’t go marching into Mazatlán with three hundred marines. Since the escape at Location Five, Brady and I already had Joe and Neil back in Texas scrambling for the next Top-Tier PIN to show up. Condor was bound to get a new device soon so he could get back in contact with Second-Tier and the office devices, making it appear that business was operating as normal. It was only a matter of time before El Paso cracked that new Top-Tier number.

  “WHERE’S TORO?” I asked Nico. “We need to let him know that Picudo’s on his way back now.”

  My intelligence analyst had told me that Picudo appeared to be on the highway toward Culiacán. I braced for the worst.

  “He may roll in here with an army of guys,” I said. “Ready for a fight.”

  “There’s no place I’d rather be than right here,” Brady said, looking around.

  We now felt fully embedded with this SEMAR brigade, in the middle of the Sinaloa capital, and I c
ould feel a subtle shift in the dynamic between us and the marines. Brady and I were no longer gringo federal agents with our mounds of intel and satellite imagery. It didn’t matter how many narcos they’d hunted down; nothing had approached the intensity of this capture op. Zorro, for one, was impressed with the accurate intel I had been pitching for more than two weeks now. My precise pattern of life, coupled with all of the real-time intelligence generated by Brady and his El Paso team, had led us straight into Guzmán’s lair.

  Back at Location Five, I found Toro walking out of the kitchen, wearing a green-and-black shemagh. With his face wrapped in that camo scarf, he looked more like a US Spec Ops officer than a Mexican marine. To me, his Spanish nickname had a double meaning: he was bull-like, yes, but Toro also seemed to be short for tormenta—“storm.” He’d been like a hurricane as soon as he touched down in Culiacán, tearing with ferocity through Chapo’s secret underworld.

  “Motor! Motor!” Toro yelled suddenly, calling for one of his young lieutenants so he could translate what I was about to tell him. Motor was only in his early twenties, but he was already a well-respected SEMAR officer, and he’d studied college-level English in the United States. He’d been part of the initial briefings Brady and I had with Admiral Furia and his brass back in Mexico City. I could normally get my point across to Toro in conversational Spanish, but for operational updates, Toro made sure Motor was there to translate, ensuring that no critical detail got lost or misunderstood.

  “We need to hit Picudo,” I told Toro, filling him in on the suspected drop. “Picudo will confirm that Gárgola’s in Mazatlán.”

  “Dale,” Toro responded without hesitation. It meant “Let’s hit him.” “Dale.”

  “Okay, by our pings, it looks like he’s just coming into the city now,” I said. “I’ll get with Leroy and the marshals and put him next up on the target deck.”

  IN THE MEANTIME, Toro and his men were still squeezing Naris for more information.

  “Vamos a la casa de Condor!” Toro said, moving toward the street.