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

I had all three of them eating out of the palm of my hand.”

      “Outstanding! Did she say whose money it is?”

      “Yeah, it’s his,” Diego said.

      “His?”

      “She said it’s his,” Diego repeated.

      Diego went quiet, smiling.

      “His?” I asked again.

      “Chapo.”

      “Chapo.”

      “Yes. She said, ‘It’s all Chapo’s money.’ ”

       TEAM AMERICA

      PHOENIX, ARIZONA

       July 1, 2010

      I FELT LIKE a millionaire. And I was one—for a few hours, at least. I’d been entrusted with $1.2 million in laundered drug proceeds, freshly withdrawn from our undercover account at a local bank in Phoenix. Along with three other Task Force officers, I painstakingly counted and recounted that million in cash and stuffed the bundles into two white FedEx boxes.

      The money seemed fake. It was a sensation I’d become accustomed to in the past year: anytime I handled US currency used in our undercover operations, I felt like I was thumbing through Monopoly money. A good cop is able to dissociate from the awe of the green. Those fat stacks of cash on our big conference table were just another tool of the undercover trade.

      Counting the bills, I thought back to four months earlier, when Diego and I had made our first pickup. After nearly a year of nothing but big talk—her “hundred-million-dollar contracts all over globe”—Mercedes finally came through: she had a much smaller cash drop of $109,000, delivered, fittingly, in a laundry detergent bucket to Diego and my undercover teammate in a Home Depot parking lot just south of Los Angeles. That very afternoon—and following the instructions laid out precisely by Mercedes—Diego and I had run the stack to the bank, then wired the money to an account at Deutsche Bank in New York. From there, the money was transferred to an account at a corresponding bank in Mexico. Back at the office, Diego sent a photo of the wire confirmation to Mercedes over his BlackBerry and put his feet up on his desk.

      “We’re big-time now, dude,” I said with a sarcastic laugh. It was a modest start, considering some of the huge figures Mercedes had been throwing around, but soon Diego and I were inundated with money-pickup requests. Mercedes set up back-to-back drops in New York City, black duffel bags stuffed with dirty money: $199,254 one day, $543,972 the next, and then $560,048. Always with the same wiring instructions—to a Deutsche Bank in New York.

      A lot of the money couriers hardly looked the part. One time we flew to New York and followed a couple in their seventies who had parked their RV, with California plates, on a side street off Times Square, then marched two suitcases full of cash to our undercover in the shadows of the billboards.

      Then it was up to Vancouver, Canada, for a pickup up of more than $800,000. The Canadian dollars had to be quickly converted to US currency before we could send the wire to Mercedes. In less than a month, we’d laundered more than $2.2 million of Chapo’s money for Mercedes.

      The money-laundering aspect of the investigation was authorized under an official Attorney General Exempt Operation (AGEO). An AGEO allowed federal agents to follow the money and further exploit their investigations, ultimately leading to the dismantlement of an entire drug-trafficking organization, as opposed to arresting a couple of low-level money couriers. It took me months of writing justifications to become authorized to create fictitious shell companies and open undercover bank accounts.

      We’d flipped so many members of Bugsy’s crew, getting them to cooperate, that our assistant United States attorney, before every proffer, would say to the defendants, “Now that you’ve seen the evidence we have against you, how would you like to come on over and join Team America?”

      We’d dubbed our new case “Operation Team America.” By June 2010, it was obvious that Mercedes had her hands full, and in the midst of all the cross-country cash pickups, she introduced Diego to Ricardo Robles, a thirty-four-year-old Mexican with a youthful face and thick black hair. Ricardo was a powerhouse money broker who’d grown up in the lucrative world of Mexican casas de cambio—money exchanges—even owning a few himself.

      Diego and I quickly learned that all of the pickup contracts had come from Ricardo. Mercedes was just another protective layer, another buffer, shielding the true bosses while still taking her cut.

      Over the weeks, Diego and Ricardo formed a tight bond. Finally, Ricardo asked for a face-to-face meet at Diego’s Phoenix office. There was just one minor issue: we didn’t have one.

      Ricardo was flying in that afternoon. We arranged to have him picked up curbside at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport in a silver Mercedes CL 63 AMG. Our undercover teammate, driving the Mercedes, looked the part of a young narco. Following in a black Cadillac Escalade with twenty-two-inch black custom wheels, we used more undercover agents from the Task Force, posing as Diego’s own personal security group.

      As Ricardo drove in from the airport, we were still making the final arrangements in a luxurious high-rise office suite we’d rented. It was a gorgeous 1,200-square-foot space overlooking downtown Phoenix.

      “Shit, we’ve got a major problem,” I said to Diego as we were walking around the suite admiring the view.

      “The place doesn’t look lived in,” Diego agreed. “Looks like we moved in five minutes ago.”

      I ran to the elevator, rode down to the street, jumped into my G-ride, and drove to my house. There, I grabbed some framed art off my living room walls, a few houseplants, sculptures, and trinkets I had collected from my travels. Meanwhile, Diego at the last moment set a framed photo of his kids on top of the desk. With my stuff plus his, the illusion was complete: Diego, wearing a silver Armani suit, sat back in his tall leather swivel chair, looking every bit the sleazy corporate executive.

      Our teammates radioed to me that Ricardo had arrived and was coming up in the elevator. Diego quickly tightened his tie while I gave him a heavy pat on the back and rushed out the door.

      We were charging at least seven percent on every money pickup, a standard commission. We would then take the commission and set it aside as Trafficker Directed Funds (TDF), to be used to rent the office space, buy the latest MacBooks and sophisticated recording devices—hidden inside expensive-looking wristwatches—along with the iridescent Armani suit for Diego.

      The trust had already been established through laundering a couple million in drug money, and now it was time for Ricardo and Diego to talk about the other end of the equation: a two-ton cocaine transportation contract, moving product from Ecuador to Los Angeles.

      “He wants to introduce me to Chapo’s people,” Diego told me as we debriefed the meeting over cups of coffee.

      It had become obvious that, just like Doña Guadalupe and Mercedes, Ricardo was yet another buffer—another broker in the middle. And we knew there would likely be several more layers to sift through before we got to the top.

      But before the introductions to Chapo’s people could be made, there was a final test. Ricardo had several money pickups in Vancouver, Canada. But this time he wanted that cash—the $1.2 million—delivered directly to Mexico in bulk.

      DIEGO HAD ALREADY FLOWN to Mexico City to coordinate the operation with DEA agents there, as well as trusted members of the Mexican Federal Police (PF). Alone, I took the FedEx boxes to a Learjet—used by the DEA solely for undercover ops—through a private hangar at Sky Harbor International Airport. As we rose through the clouds, I felt like nodding off, but I didn’t dare take my eyes off the cash-stuffed pair of boxes. My eyes stayed glued to them the entire flight as if they were my newborn twins.

      The pilots flew me down to Toluca, outside Distrito Federal, where I was picked up by Mexico City–based