Hunting El Chapo: Taking down the world’s most-wanted drug-lord. Douglas Century

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ morning, Task Force Officer Nick Jones, Diego, and I were set up on surveillance outside the “pool house.” We’d just “flipped the switch” and started listening to the wiretap we had on several of Bugsy’s cell phones. It had taken us months of writing and rewriting federal wire affidavits each time Bugsy would drop a phone, which he did almost every week. With nothing coming across the wire, we followed Bugsy and his crew to gain any intelligence we could.

      “Looks like they’re packing up,” Nick said over the radio. “Get ready to roll, guys.” Bugsy and his crew took off in the GL550 at high speed, westbound on Interstate 8 heading out of Phoenix.

      We were hardly prepared for a long road trip, but I was thankful that Nick was with us for surveillance—the whole Task Force called him “Sticky Nicky,” because he’d never lose the bad guy. Bugsy kept driving west, and every hour or so he’d dart off an exit at the last minute in an attempt to clean his tail, but we’d been following him for too long to fall for such basic countersurveillance moves. We stayed on him for close to five hours, following just far enough behind that Bugsy wouldn’t notice, until finally we ended up in San Diego.

      During several days of surveillance, still wearing the same clothes, we watched as Bugsy and his crew visited one stash house after another in the suburban neighborhoods of San Diego. I had the San Diego Police Department stop a Chevy Avalanche leaving one of the stash locations—the local cops seized three hundred pounds of cajeta in the rear bed of a truck driven by one of Bugsy’s boys.

      “He was planning on taking this load right back to Phoenix,” I told Diego. “We need to take advantage of his drought.”

      “Yeah,” Diego nodded. “Think I’ve got the perfect guy.”

      AFTER RETURNING TO PHOENIX, Diego and I drafted a plan: we had Diego’s confidential source introduce Bugsy to a DEA undercover agent, a thirty-two-year-old Mexican American working out of the San Diego Field Division office. Like Diego, “Alex” could play the part of a narco junior perfectly.

      Knowing that Bugsy was too street-smart to fall for the typical DEA “trunk flash,” we lured him down to Mission Bay, where we would flash him more than a thousand pounds of marijuana stuffed inside a DEA undercover yacht equipped with cameras, recording devices, and several bronzed girls in bikinis (who were actually female undercover San Diego cops). Mixed within the thousand pounds were the same “pillows” of cajeta we had just seized from Bugsy’s crew.

      On the day of the setup, from inside our G-ride across the bay, Diego and I kept our eyes locked on the screen of the surveillance camera we’d set up in the yacht. On the boat, Bugsy was cutting into and sniffing the same pillow he’d seen at the stash pad just a week earlier.

      The mirage was so convincing that Bugsy fell headlong into the trap, telling undercover agents that he needed five hundred more pounds to complete a tractor-trailer load bound for Chicago. Alex told him that the weed he’d just seen was already spoken for, en route to another buyer in LA, so Bugsy would just have to wait a week.

      IN THE MEANTIME, Diego and I worked to secure indictments on the DTO and decided to rip Bugsy’s money as he came to purchase the five hundred pounds.

      In a TGI Fridays parking lot, Bugsy, along with his righthand man, Tweety, met Alex, the undercover agent, and quickly flashed a quarter million in cash—rubber-banded bundles inside a chocolate-brown Gucci bag—with the expectation that he’d soon pick up his cajeta order at another location down the street. But before Bugsy and Tweety could get away with the cash, Diego and I pounced.

      A marked San Diego police unit swooped in to a make a traffic stop on the black Ford F150. Bugsy and Tweety sped off and started tossing $10,000 chunks of cash out the truck’s windows, littering miles of San Diego freeways.

      We were following the chase, pulling over to recover as much cash as we could for evidence—while countless other drivers also pulled over, quickly stuffing their pockets with bunches of Bugsy’s bills, then jumping back into their cars before Diego and I could stop them.

      The high-speed chase continued up Interstate 5 until Bugsy and Tweety finally ran out of cash and stopped in the middle of the freeway to surrender to police, leaving behind a trail of “cash confetti,” as CNN reported—$50 and $100 bills still fluttering across the highway, creating chaos during rush-hour traffic and making national headlines.

       EL CANAL

      PANAMA CITY, PANAMA

       June 14, 2009

      THE ROOFTOP HOT TUB was kidney-shaped, and the Panamanian beer was Balboa—named after the conquistador. The palms and mirrored skyline view seemed to have been laid on in thick streaks of tropical paint. Panama City gleamed like a Caribbean Dubai.

      “Salud!” Diego said, hoisting a silhouette glass of Balboa. “A la Nueva Generación!”

      “Salud!” I said, raising my own glass.

      The New Generation had finally stepped onto the international stage.

      We’d taken down Bugsy’s crew that night in San Diego and Phoenix—collapsing his entire organization, seizing another thousand pounds of marijuana and more than $450,000 in assets, including Bugsy’s personal yacht, a string of Mercedes-Benzes, jewelry, and bulk cash.

      But with a takedown of that scope, there were bound to be key evidentiary remnants—wide-ranging paper trails and criminal tentacles still left unexploited.

      One of those loose ends happened to be in the form of Tweety’s father, Gerardo, who over the past year had been selling pounds of Mexican methamphetamine to our confidential source.

      Gerardo was well connected in Nogales, Mexico, and casually mentioned that he had a friend who needed some money moved. She was middle-aged, with porcelain skin, and her black curly hair was always pulled back tight in a ponytail. Aside from smuggling loads of meth and cocaine across the border from Nogales in her Toyota RAV4, Doña Guadalupe, as everyone called her, put out the word, through Gerardo, that she was actively seeking someone who could transport money. Not just a couple hundred thousand dollars, but tens of millions.

      As an undercover, Diego had played dozens of roles over the years and could slip effortlessly into many personas, but he’d never posed as a money launderer before.

      “This is our chance to follow some serious cash,” I told him over lunch at our favorite Chinese joint in Mesa.

      “Think we can pull it off?” I asked him.

      I could see the wheels turning in Diego’s head, contemplating ways we could win the contract from Doña Guadalupe and begin moving the numbers to which she claimed to have access.

      Within the week, Diego had finagled an introduction to Doña Guadalupe, and he immediately sold her on the services of his “company.” Diego seemed to be exactly the man she was looking for, but it turned out Doña Guadalupe was just a glorified gobetween, a buffering layer—the first of many, as we’d soon come to find out.

      And that’s how we found ourselves soaking in a hot tub on the roof of a Panamanian hotel, our first time traveling abroad—so that Diego could be introduced to Doña Guadalupe’s people face-to-face.

      JUST A FEW HOURS before our first undercover СКАЧАТЬ