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

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СКАЧАТЬ chewed on the end of his straw and rattled the ice cubes in his Coke cup, his brow creased like a stern teacher’s.

      “The Three Letters?”

      The Black Bomber was the ideal vehicle for listening to narcocorridos—booming bass in the Bose speakers, clarity as good as at any Phoenix nightclub. When Diego first came to DEA Phoenix, he was driving that jet-black Chevrolet Suburban Z71 with heavy tint on all the windows and a tan leather interior.

      The Mesa PD had seized the Suburban from a coke dealer a couple of years earlier. The owner’s luxury options had made the Bomber the perfect ride for us on long surveillance operations, which included a flip-up customized video screen in the dash. We’d often kill the hours watching Super Troopers, parked in the shadows on a side street before a dope deal was supposed to go down.

      But the Black Bomber wasn’t just a rolling entertainment center on 24-inch rims; it was also ideal for raids—unlike standard cop cars, the Suburban could fit four of us in all our tactical gear. We thought of the Bomber as another team member. It was a sad day when some number-crunching bureaucrat made Diego turn her in because she had 200,000 miles on the odometer.

      Diego would get pulled over in the Black Bomber by Phoenix cops all the time, simply because it had Mexican plates. He’d kept the originals from the state of Sonora, white and red with small black letters and numbers. Local cops were always looking for cars—especially tricked-out SUVs—with Mexican plates, but it allowed us to blend into any Mexican hood in Phoenix. No one would think twice about a parked Suburban with Sonora plates: behind those dark-tinted windows, Diego and I could sit on a block all night and never get burned by the bad guys.

      And the narcocorridos Diego was always playing in the Black Bomber had become central to my education. Every big-time trafficker south of the Rio Grande had at least one norteño song celebrating his exploits.

      You were no one in the narco world, Diego explained, until you had your own corrido. But I was still trying to decipher Las Tres Letras...

      “Come on, brother,” Diego said, laughing. “You got this. Shit, at this point you’re more Mexican than most of the Mexicans I know...”

      I leaned forward in the Bomber and hit the repeat button on the CD player, taking one more shot at decoding those lyrics. “Las Tres Letras?”

      Finally, Diego jabbed his index finger hard into my shoulder. “Bro, you’re Las Tres Letras! DEA.”

      Las Tres Letras . . . what every drug trafficker fears the most.

      DAYS AFTER DIEGO FIRST told me about El Niño de La Tuna, I’d started after-hours research in my cubicle back at the DEA office in central Phoenix.

      I searched for “Joaquín GUZMÁN Loera” in our database, the Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs Information System (NADDIS). Chapo’s file was endless; you could scroll down for almost an hour without reaching the end. DEA Phoenix had an open case against Guzmán, but so did dozens of other jurisdictions all across the country. I couldn’t begin to fathom what I’d need to do, how many major cases I’d have to initiate, in order to be the agent entrusted with heading an investigation targeting Guzmán.

      THE PRESIDENT of the United States identified Guzmán and the Sinaloa Cartel as significant foreign narcotics traffickers, pursuant to the Kingpin Act,³ in 2001 and again in 2009. The US government had offered a $5 million reward for information leading to his capture, and the Mexican government had offered a reward of 60 million pesos—roughly $3.8 million.

      Wildly divergent rumors swirled about Chapo. Some stemmed from law enforcement intel, others from street gossip—the loose chatter of informants—and some were just urban legends, embedded in the lyrics of all those underground corridos.

      By one account, Chapo was considering having plastic surgery so he could never again be recognized; in another, he’d vowed to commit suicide rather than be captured alive. In May 2003, he’d been reported as living in a remote cave—a Mexican version of Osama bin Laden—but then, in June of that year, he was said to be traveling free as a bird within Mexico City. Another intel report had him hiding in Guatemala and returning to Mexico only on occasion, and in September 2004 he narrowly escaped just before a two-ton marijuana-and-weapons seizure in the Sierra Madre.

      How could anyone possibly separate the facts from the fiction? Was Chapo surrounded by hundreds of heavily armed bodyguards, wearing a bulletproof vest at all times? Or was he living more simply—traveling with just two trusted associates—because he was receiving tacit protection from the Sinaloa State Police on the cartel payroll?

      I DIDN’T HAVE much time to ruminate on the life and crimes of Chapo Guzmán—for more than a year, Diego and I had our hands full with thirty-one-year-old Pedro Navarro, a.k.a. “Bugsy.” Bugsy’s crew may have been young—in their early and mid-twenties but they weren’t small-time. Within weeks of developing my first intel on Bugsy, I received authorization to initiate an Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force investigation that Diego and I titled “La Nueva Generación” (the New Generation), a Priority Target Investigation for DEA Phoenix.

      Since I first saw them that smoky night in Mariscos Navolato with Diego, I’d developed a grudging respect for these narco juniors. They were savvy kids who had drug trafficking in their bloodlines—they were often the sons of heavy-hitting cartel men in Mexico—but most had gone to high school and college in the United States and Europe. That level of education, their flawless English, and their familiarity with American culture allowed them to start up their own sophisticated drug organizations. Narco juniors like Bugsy were scattered all over the Southwest, from Phoenix to San Diego.

      These young men had the confidence and swagger of a new generation— and, in fact, Diego and I started referring to ourselves as La Nueva Generación as well. A mirror image of the narco juniors, we were a fresh young crop of cops with the stamina and street savvy to keep pace with young Mexican traffickers.

      We’d established that Bugsy’s crew was responsible for shipping ton quantities of high-grade marijuana to New York City, Baltimore, Boston, and St. Louis by tractor-trailer, FedEx, and UPS. Navarro had leased a seven-thousand-square-foot warehouse in Mesa for packaging and shipping the marijuana, which was then concealed in crate pallets disguised as scrap-metal shelving used in big-box stores. He also had several young business owners laundering his dirty millions through local Phoenix businesses. For money couriers, he used local strippers: the girls’ nonstop travel allowed them to make cash pickups all around the United States. Bugsy even had a former NFL player working as a wholesale marijuana broker for the DTO.

      Bugsy would often travel armed, keeping guns inside custommade secret storage compartments, or “traps,” in his Mercedes GL550 SUV. His traps were more sophisticated than the typical drug dealer’s: you had to have the ignition key turned on, the left turn signal engaged, and a small plastic lever in the cupholder turned just so—three steps executed in the correct sequence—before the trap would spring open. Sometimes, wary of us on his tail, Bugsy wouldn’t carry weapons in his Benz; he’d have a crew in a follow car who were armed with pistols in their own traps.

      Diego and I were intercepting Bugsy’s cell phones, and I enjoyed the challenge of deciphering the narco-junior code. The phrase gangsta-up meant they’d be traveling armed; pool house referred to Bugsy’s four-bedroom house in Glendale; picture of my son was a sample of weed. Of all the lines I heard over the wire, my favorite was when we caught Bugsy openly bragging that he and his boys were living “like Entourage meets The Sopranos.”

      BUT СКАЧАТЬ