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

backseat, glancing warily around me.

       Shouldn’t we be covered by another armed agent?

      I felt twitchy, but kept my thoughts to myself as we pulled away from the airport. It was an hour-long drive over the small mountain range into Mexico City, a route on which there was an ever-present risk of a carjacking.

      We drove directly to an underground parking garage in a middle-class area called Satélite, on the north side of the city. I was relieved to see Diego, a second Mexico City DEA agent, and two plainclothes Mexican Federal Police when we arrived.

      The PF had provided the “drop vehicle,” a white Chevy Tornado pickup that looked to me a bit like a mini El Camino. It was a seized drug smuggler’s truck, complete with a hidden stash compartment—a simple hollow cavity underneath the bed—nowhere near as sophisticated as the type Bugsy and his crew of narco juniors used in Phoenix. The deep trap—clearly designed for moving bulkier contraband like compressed bales of weed or bricks of cocaine—was accessed from behind the rear bumper, and the open space underneath ran the full length of the truck bed. Diego and I tied the FedEx boxes together, then used the remaining rope to secure them to the outside of the trapdoor so that they didn’t slide the full length of the trap and become invisible to our targets.

      Our Mexican counterparts also slapped a tiny GPS tracker on the truck so we could follow it to wherever the targets would unload the money, in hopes of pinpointing yet another location, another piece of the puzzle, more targets to ID, and another chance to follow the money. I kept repeating the mantra, Exploit, exploit, exploit, which had been drummed into my head back at the DEA Academy.

      Mexican PF was doing us a huge favor by allowing us to drop $1.2 million and let it walk, but they felt they should remain on the perimeter and keep their hands off the actual money. As a result, none of the Federal Police wanted to touch the Chevy pickup, let alone drive it.

      Now that the truck was loaded, Diego was in phone contact with the targets, and they agreed to pick up the vehicle on the upper-level parking lot of another mall called Plaza Satélite. Diego and the other Mexico City agent drove the armored Ford Expedition ahead while Kenny and I hopped into the shitty Tornado, with its manual transmission. Kenny drove, following the Expedition out of the parking garage and out onto the busy street, heading north. My mind was still racing:

       Our security setup is worthless: more than a million in cash, and we’ve got a grand total of four US agents? Only two of us have Glocks—useless if we get jacked by some assholes with AKs...

      If the operation went south, there was no way this truck would get us out of harm’s way. The tiny Chevy took a day and a half to get up to 40 miles per hour. We lurched and jolted along in traffic as Kenny grinded the stick shift into gear.

      It was blazing hot in the cab, and the A/C was busted. Cars, motorcycles, and trucks were buzzing, honking, zigzagging. This was the wild, chaotic traffic for which Mexico City is famous—and which I would come to know well in the years ahead. Kenny seemed to be hitting every possible pothole and red light on the route, too.

      By far the biggest security risk was the local cops. Too many Federal Police knew about the operation for my liking. And if just one of these PF guys was dirty, he could easily call up one of his friends and ambush us, and they’d split the proceeds fifty-fifty.

      The Chevy kept jumping forward while I continued talking to Diego in the Expedition on my Nextel. All of a sudden, the Expedition pulled over to the side of the road and the driver opened up the door and began projectile-vomiting onto the street. He had eaten at some roadside carnitas stand an hour earlier.

      By the time we reached Plaza Satélite, one of the largest shopping malls in the city, I began to think there must be something wrong—how could a popular shopping center be so desolate?

      Diego and I had no idea whether the targets were waiting at the location. We were twenty-five minutes early, but the crooks could be early, too. Kenny drove to the upper parking lot on the north side and pulled the truck in alongside a few stray cars. I sat waiting for the clear signal from surveillance to get out. We’d leave the truck right there with the keys in the ignition for the prearranged drop.

      I was about to bail from the passenger side when I looked up and saw a Mexican guy, early thirties, five foot nine, muscular build, walking slowly in front of the truck. I felt my gut clench—were the crooks here already?

      The guy was wearing a black-collared button-down shirt with a dark gray jacket and dark blue jeans. His eyes were a piercing brown. There was a blade wound running straight down from his left eye, a good two inches long, like he’d been disfigured by an acid teardrop.

      It wasn’t just the scar that was unnerving. As a street cop, you develop a sense for these things. I studied the walk: he looked to be packing on the right side of his waistband. The guy had the unmistakable gait and look of an enforcer. He walked past the pickup, looking back one more time with menace.

      I turned to Kenny. “Who’s that?”

      “No idea, bro.”

      “Kenny, we need to get the fuck outta here before we get shot.”

      We both swung open the doors of the Tornado at the same time.

      I couldn’t spend another second sitting on the million-dollar bull’s-eye.

      THE TORNADO DROP was unprecedented—no federal law enforcement agency had ever delivered this kind of cash and let it walk, certainly not on the streets of Mexico City.

      Diego and I were now seen by Chapo’s people as fast-moving international players: we could deliver more than a million bucks, quickly—a mere forty-eight hours after picking up the bundles of bills nearly three thousand miles and two international borders away.

      There was no way Ricardo would suspect that he was dealing directly with cops—let alone the DEA. Ricardo told Diego that the money was headed south to purchase a major consignment of cocaine bound for the States. It was all happening so fast that Diego and I struggled to keep pace with the logistics. We were spending more time in the air and at hotels than in the Phoenix Task Force office. We’d be on a jet to the Caribbean one week, then back at our desks in Phoenix the next, and back out on a plane the following week for yet another tropical meet.

      Finding neutral countries in which to meet bad guys was becoming increasingly challenging, so I ordered a five-foot-long world map and pinned it up on the office wall. For fun, Diego and I closed our eyes and pointed a blind finger at possible locations for the next undercover meet. His finger landed on Iceland, mine somewhere in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

      Diego narrowed his focus to the isthmus of Central America, north of Panama.

      “San José,” he said. “Let’s set the next meet in Costa Rica.”

      “Costa Rica sounds right,” I said.

      Costa Rica, like Panama, was considered neutral ground for narcos. Más tranquilo, and far less risky than having a sit-down in Mexico or Colombia.

      BY THE NEXT DAY, Diego was sitting across the table from two of Chapo’s operators and Ricardo at an outdoor restaurant in the heart of Costa Rica’s capital.

      This time, unlike in Panama, I had eyes on him, parked across the street inside a rented black Toyota Land Cruiser. If Diego had felt cornered during his meet with Mercedes in Panama, this time he took the upper hand, leaning in forcefully, doing almost all the talking, pressing them with questions—the bulk cash delivery had given him the power of street credibility.

      Diego asked—no, demanded—to know who all the coke and cash belonged to, who really was the jefe, before he’d set any wheels in motion.

      It took him about fifteen minutes, but finally one of Ricardo’s men reluctantly coughed up the name of the man they’d previously been calling El Señor.

      “Carlos Torres-Ramos.”

      The name didn’t ring any bells for Diego or me.