Hunting El Chapo

by Andrew Hogan

  Brady and I jumped in the backseat of Chapo’s white armored Chevy Captiva; Toro had seized it back at Location Three and added it to SEMAR’s fleet. My knees were jammed into the back of the driver’s seat, but I was thankful now to be shielded by the armor on Chapo’s former rig. Brady and I still didn’t have any guns. Toro jumped in the front passenger seat and the Captiva sped off, following a dark gray Jeep Cherokee, another of Chapo’s armored vehicles that the marines had commandeered. That vehicle had Naris inside—the Nose was leading us to the next takedown location.

  I spun in my seat, looking back through the rear window at the long trail of rápidas racing through the streets behind us. I could hardly believe the pace at which the marines were smashing and grabbing, destroying Chapo’s infrastructure.

  We came to a quick stop on the rocky dirt road in front of a two-story concrete residence. The place looked like it was still unfinished. Stray dogs ran loose down the street while a young mother in skintight stonewashed blue jeans and black high heels walked outside with her young son.

  “This is Condor’s place?” Brady said. “What a shithole.”

  The marines were already inside, and while clearing the house they had found an old rifle and a photograph of a clean-shaven, light-skinned Mexican male with black hair tapering into a spiked flattop.

  Brady studied the picture closely.

  “Yeah, looks like a condor to me,” he said.

  Then we jumped back into Chapo’s Captiva, once again winding through the city with the convoy of rápidas, and finally up a steep hill to a house in a much nicer residential neighborhood.

  The moment I walked in the front door, I immediately noticed that the decor didn’t match the bare-bones style of Chapo’s other Culiacán homes. The furniture was far more expensive; the marble tile was shiny and clean; large framed artwork hung on the walls.

  A mural just inside the front door was painted in deep shades of yellow, orange, and red. It was a memorial: I recognized the face of Edgar, Chapo and Griselda’s slain son, ascending to heaven. I could almost hear Diego’s voice, singing the lyrics of that narcocorrido years ago in Phoenix:

  Mis hijos son mi alegría también mi tristeza

  Edgar, te voy a extrañar

  A white Chevrolet Suburban and Hummer H2 were parked in the garage, but it was suddenly clear that Naris had merely coughed up an old house belonging to Griselda, Chapo’s second wife. There were no signs of recent activity—no fresh food in the kitchen, no dirty clothes in the bedrooms. In fact, it didn’t look like she’d lived in the place for months.

  “Regroup at Location Five,” Toro called out.

  The marines had dug up piles of photo albums in one of the bedroom closets, and before leaving Griselda’s, I grabbed a stack of albums and tucked them under one arm.

  When we arrived at Location Five, I walked upstairs and sat down on Chapo’s brown faux leather couch. I peeled away the black balaclava from my face for the first time since putting it on, and only now did I begin to feel the first wave of exhaustion. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d slept or eaten or drunk anything besides the few swigs of Johnnie Walker back at the base in Topolobampo.

  Brady walked up the stairs with a couple of mugs of hot instant coffee he had found downstairs in the kitchen and handed one to me.

  “Leroy’s down there making eggs on the stove.”

  Brady and I began thumbing through Griselda’s photo albums, trying to find any useful pictures of Chapo. But every family photograph of Griselda and her kids—Joaquín, Grisel, and Ovidio—was missing their father. Weddings, baptisms, quinceañeras, fiestas . . . but never a single shot with Chapo.

  Once we were done with the photos, Brady and I scoped out the rest of the house. Next to a forty-inch TV on the living room wall, there was a second small white screen, the size of a large computer monitor, and downstairs by the small swimming pool we found the same setup: a forty-inch flat-screen TV on the wall and still another small white surveillance monitor mounted underneath it, showing pictures of all of Chapo’s safe houses in the city.

  “Anywhere he watches TV,” I said, “he can keep tabs on what’s happening at all his houses.” This was clearly one of the safe houses—La Piscina—where Chapo felt most at ease.

  I walked back into Chapo’s bedroom to take another look around and opened the closet, where I pulled down a black hat from the top shelf.

  This was one of Chapo’s famous plain, logo-free ball caps, which he could be seen wearing in the few verified photographs that existed of the kingpin since his escape from Puente Grande. Chapo always wore the black hat perched high on his head as if it were an essential part of his everyday uniform. I shoved the black hat underneath my bulletproof vest.

  It was my only souvenir of the hunt.

  Su Casa Es Mi Casa

  “ÁNDALE! APÚRATE! APÚRATE!” Captain Toro yelled.

  We were still at La Piscina, but everyone was now scrambling to grab their gear and guns. Naris was giving up more locations. Brady and I jumped in the rear of the Captiva, Toro taking the front passenger seat again.

  “Zorro de Toro,” Toro kept yelling over the radio, giving directions in Spanish as the Captiva sped off, leading the convoy.

  We raced into yet another residential neighborhood. SEMAR was battering its way through a door, and I walked in after the first wave of marines. The place was bare except for green bananas and pepinos (small cucumbers) that littered the floor, some white powder on the kitchen counter (cocaine cutting agents), and several black trash bags full of cultivated weed. I picked up a green banana from the bunch on the floor—it was a fake, used for international shipments of a far more lucrative crop, but they were all empty.

  “How’d you like to be the poor fucker who had to fill each of these bananas with coke?” Brady said.

  A single fake banana could hold no more than half a kilo of cocaine at a time—it would have been the most tedious, labor-intensive job. Immediately I remembered how Hondo, up in British Columbia, was constantly looking for a warehouse large enough to store “fruit deliveries” for the boss. These fake bananas were most likely going directly to Vancouver to be unloaded, then shipped out to cities all across Canada.

  A message from the El Paso wire room suddenly hit our group chat.

  It was Lic-F reporting through Office-3, to Condor and Chapo.

  Buenos dias, como amanecieron. En la ciudad siguen con alboroto esos del agua, no han dormido.

  “Good morning, how did you guys wake? In the city, the rampage continues—those from the water, they haven’t slept.”

  Lic-F continued:

  Compadre andan bien bravos y todo el movimiento es contra la empresa.

  “Compadre [Chapo], they are running really strong and the whole movement is against the business.”

  The convoy was indeed running on full steam again, smashing house after house.

  We were now in another Picudo stash pad. In the dirt backyard, we found five fighting cocks, spurs attached to their legs, strutting around. They circled one another like prizefighters eager to spar. I watched as one dark red rooster with ocean-blue wing feathers attacked another. They were cocks trained to fight to the death. I picked up a handmade leather dice cup hanging on the wall, with markings burned into the side of it, a tribute to El 50. By the looks of things, Picudo’s crew had cleared out each stash pad just before we hit.

  WE ROLLED BACK TO Location Three. The whole street was now blockaded by SEMAR rápidas. There was still the ever-present risk of a gunfight, but I was feeling a little more comfortable knowing we now had plenty of manpower out front.

  Brady and I walked into Chapo’s kitchen, looking for something to drink. I opened the fridge and grabbed the only three bottles of La Cerveza del Pacifico left.

  “Split ’em?” I asked Brady and a few marines.

  I smiled as I took one cold swig of Pacifico—remembering that night in Phoenix with Diego when I’d heard “El Niño de La Tuna,” peeled ba
ck the canary-yellow label, and gulped down my first taste of the beer. I passed the bottle on to a young marine, then Brady took a gulp and passed it back. With the sleep deprivation, that little sip of cerveza was just enough. I let out a laugh—I felt like we were college kids passing around a bottle of whiskey.

  I walked over to Toro with a newfound spring in my step.

  “Vamos a tener otra oportunidad,” I said—realizing I sounded a bit like my old high school football coach when it was halftime and we were down by two touchdowns. “We’re gonna get another chance,” I said, still holding the bottle of Pacifico. “This isn’t over. I’m confident, Captain.”

  All we needed now was to obtain the new Top-Tier number. I explained to Toro that Chapo was smart enough to drop all of his phones, but Brady’s team back in the United States was still intercepting several office devices, scrambling to intercept the new Second-Tier so that we could identify the new Top-Tier device Condor was no doubt holding.

  “My guys are on it,” Brady said. “Just a matter of time.”

  “Until then,” I told Toro, “we need to exhaust all our intelligence here, Señor.”

  “Bueno, vamos a Picudo entonces,” Toro said.

  The next target for us to capture became Picudo, Chapo’s chief enforcer and the plaza boss of Culiacán.

  SEMAR HAD BY NOW taken over every one of Chapo’s five Culiacán safe houses, converting them into temporary bases. Brady and I climbed down the ladder underneath the bathtub in Safe House 3 to get a closer look at the tunnel.

  It was the fourth one we’d seen that morning, and no different from the others except that it boasted a specially designed rack along the underground wall that had been used to store hundreds of kilograms of cocaine. The marines had found 280 kilos on the racks, along with boxes full of fake bananas.

  I called Brady over.

  “Check this out, man. Chapo’s go bag.”

  Again, it was typical Chapo, purely functional: a plastic supermarket sack with a couple of pairs of white underwear inside. These were Chapo’s favorites, those Calvin Klein briefs that Marky Mark had made famous. No toothbrush, no shoes, just those Calvin Kleins.

  Brady laughed. “Shit, how many times do you escape down a fuckin’ bathtub tunnel naked that you need to have a go bag full of tighty-whities?”

  BY LATE AFTERNOON, still more SEMAR teams were out raiding Chapo’s stash pads throughout the city.

  One team drove back to Location Three in a white panel delivery truck with secret compartments built inside the walls and the bed. I watched as the marines pried open the traps and extracted fifty more kilos of meth. This time the drugs were packaged in plastic Tupperware-style containers with various-colored lids.

  A little later, a crew of marine cooks arrived, bringing large steel pots and utensils, and took over Chapo’s kitchen. I stood back and watched how SEMAR was settling into field life here in Culiacán: everyone would soon start receiving three meals a day, and the marines had even brought in a staff doctor. I still wasn’t hungry, but I knew I needed to refuel.

  Brady and I pulled a couple of plastic folding chairs up to Chapo’s white plastic kitchen table and squeezed in next to Lieutenant Zorro. Zorro’s warm smile and upbeat attitude masked his exhaustion. I watched, impressed, as Zorro skillfully cut into a tin can of scallops with his bowie knife.

  “Cómo les gusta el campo?” Zorro asked. How did we like life in the field?

  “Para mí,” I said, “me encanta.” I looked at Brady, still not quite believing we were sitting in Chapo’s kitchen.

  Spearing scallops straight from the can with the blade of his knife, Zorro reminded me of one of my uncles back in Kansas. He had the same genuine smile, the same rough-and-ready attitude of a born outdoorsman—he reminded me of someone you’d want to share a case of beer with, sitting around a fire, listening to his war stories.

  In fact, I’d heard a few stories about Zorro already, from Leroy. El Roy had previously worked with Zorro on operations targeting the Zetas Cartel. One day Zorro had been caught in a fierce urban firefight; Zetas gunmen were raining hell on Zorro and his team from the rooftops, but Zorro walked calmly out into the open street, bullets whizzing around him, and methodically placed his troops into strategic shooting positions. El Roy said that in all his fugitive operations he’d never seen anyone so cool under fire.

  My BlackBerry buzzed again: it was another message from the El Paso wire room. I read it and handed it across the table to Toro, who was sitting next to Zorro.

  Condor, filtered down through Office-1 and out to Chapo’s son Ovidio (Ratón):

  La nana todo bien ai descansando oiga pero todo bien

  “Everything is fine with Grandmother. She’s here resting. Listen, everything is fine.”

  We knew that Nana was a code name Ovidio and Chapo’s other sons often used for their father. It was a good sign that Condor was sending out reassurances that Chapo was settled someplace safe and that there was nothing for them to worry about.

  LEROY AND HIS MARSHALS TEAM, Nico, Zorro, and a handful of marines had already left to track down Picudo. I sent them out near the Culiacán International Airport, knowing that, based on previous pings, Picudo most likely lived in a middle-class neighborhood near there.

  The remainder of the marines and Brady and I all stayed back at Chapo’s safe houses. We were resting for a few minutes while Leroy located the phone Picudo was holding. Once Leroy got a definitive address, he’d give the green light for us to mount up the convoy, rolling in fast and heavy; until then, we were able to briefly take a breather.

  Brady and I were finally armed now, too—Nico had thankfully tracked down a couple of AR-15s from some marines and handed them over to us before he’d left.

  “Damn, my net worth just quadrupled,” Brady said, laughing, as he cradled the rifle. Since leaving Topolobampo, his only possession had been his BlackBerry. He’d even forgotten to grab his wallet before jumping on the helo with me, and joked that he didn’t even have enough pesos to buy a toothbrush.

  I WENT OUTSIDE to grab a breath of fresh air, spreading out on my back in the middle of Chapo’s driveway and gazing up at the night sky.

  The exhaustion hit me so hard, I felt like I couldn’t move. It seemed as if the cold pavement was about to swallow me up. I called my wife at our La Condesa apartment, which wasn’t the best idea, as I immediately started laughing and rambling.

  “The night clouds, baby,” I said. “The clouds of Culiacán. These are the clouds of Culiacán. The same clouds C would look up at if he was here and could look up.”

  “Where are you?” my wife said after a long pause.

  “In C’s driveway.”

  “What?”

  “I’m just on my back, on the ground, looking up at the clouds. Remember how we’d look at the clouds when we were first dating? There’s one that looks like a gun! Where was that park we’d go to before the kids were born and just stare at clouds together for hours?”

  I let out another burst of hysterical laughter.

  “You’re scaring me, Drew,” my wife said. “You realize you’re making absolutely no sense.”

  I had a serious case of the giggles. Brady came out to join me, and even he was starting to laugh.

  “I’m serious, Drew—you really sound messed up . . .”

  I realized, finally, that my nonsense rambling was alarming. I snapped to my senses.

  “I’m fine, baby,” I said. “I’m surrounded by some of the toughest warriors in the world. These marines are the best guys I’ve ever seen. I’m just—just kind of delirious. All I need is a good couple hours’ sleep.”

  AND THEN I AWOKE with a sudden start. Somehow, I was in Chapo’s bed.

  “Luz verde!” a young marine yelled. “Luz verde! Vamos a Picudo.”

  Green light: we were going to snatch up Picudo.

  It was still dark outside in the Culiacán streets. I rubbed my eyes. My head was aching, and I realized I must have nodded off for only for
ty-five minutes. As I sat up, Chapo’s plastic garment bag peeled away from my sweaty back like a snake’s dead layer of skin. The last thing I remembered was laying the plastic down beneath me on the bed so I wouldn’t catch some STD.

  I stood up, knees wobbly, stretched my arms high overhead and into a backbend. I’d been lost in a dream-memory of making that first big drug bust back in Kansas—three ounces of crack cocaine in that Deadhead’s car. Was this whole thing a dream? Was I now actually sitting on a three-ton seizure of methamphetamine belonging to the world’s biggest drug lord?

  Brady and I scrambled to throw on our vests and slung the carbines across our chests. Once we were ready, we jumped into the Captiva with Toro and another young SEMAR lieutenant, nick-named Chino—apparently for his Chinese-looking eyes.

  We raced in another convoy out to a middle-class neighborhood near the Culiacán airport. Leroy had located the phone inside a small ranch-style house surrounded by a wrought-iron fence.

  I looked at my watch: 1:32 a.m.

  There wasn’t another vehicle on the streets. The entire city was either scared or gearing up for war. I grabbed the pistol grip of my AR-15, pulling it tighter to my chest, as we turned the corner onto Picudo’s dimly lit block. If there was going to be a Macho Prieto– style firefight, it was going to happen right here at Picudo’s house.

  El 19

  CROUCHING DOWN, I TOOK a position behind the front quarter panel of the Captiva, pointing my AR toward the dark shadows in the narrow walkway next to Picudo’s house.

  I could see in my peripheral vision a mob of black silhouettes quietly making their way to the front door. Then the stillness was shattered by the noise from the battering ram. Dogs began to bark.

  The ramming continued for minutes. I was becoming more anxious by the second. Surely with Picudo’s house under SEMAR assault, it would only be a matter of time before his reinforcements arrived on the scene.