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

streets, recorded by Calibre 50. “Se Quedaron a Tres Pasos” (“They Stayed Three Steps Behind”) turned the escape into another Dillinger-like legend, claiming that Chapo had gone on vacation in Los Cabos and then “outsmarted more than one hundred agents of the DEA.”

       They stayed three steps behind Guzmán They looked for him in Los Cabos But he was already in Culiacán!

      The corrido got one thing right: Chapo was back on his home turf in the mountains. In the following months, the FBI continued to obtain Chapo’s new numbers, then DEA Mexico would ping them to rural areas of Sinaloa, and later the nearby state of Nayarit. DEA Mexico then passed the intelligence to the Federal Police, which conducted additional raids, only to find that the target phone was not in the hands of Chapo at all. Instead the phone was being used by some low-level cartel employee who was only forwarding messages to Chapo’s actual device.

      And now no one had that number.

      That was because Guzmán was employing the technique of a “mirror.” It was the first time Diego and I had heard of Chapo using one. Mirroring wasn’t a complex way of dodging law enforcement surveillance, but it was highly effective, if done correctly.

      “Always one step ahead,” I told Diego. “Chapo’s smart—restructuring his communications as soon as he returned safely to Sinaloa.”

      After continued failed attempts in which they hit only the mirror (the low-level employee holding the target phone), the FBI’s numbers began to dry up, and DEA Mexico, along with the Federal Police, decided to throw in the towel. DEA Mexico even closed the case file, and it didn’t appear as if anyone was reopening a Chapo Guzmán investigation anytime soon.

      BEFORE I EVEN PUT IN for the position, I knew I’d be ending a once-in-a-lifetime partnership. As much as Diego would’ve loved to investigate cartels south of the border, he wasn’t a fed; he was a Task Force officer—a local Mesa, Arizona, detective—and couldn’t reside in another country. The invitation to my going-away party had a picture of Diego and me together in our tactical vests just after we’d finished a big raid, smiles on our faces, the tangerine shades of the setting Arizona sun behind us.

      Over the years, if our casework took us to Southern California, Diego and I would often zip down to Tijuana to take in even more of the Mexican culture I’d come to love. We’d listen to mariachi, banda, and norteño, then swing over to the strip clubs at 3 a.m., before grabbing a handful of street tacos and heading back across the border. For me, it was all part of learning the culture, deepening my understanding of a world I’d submersed myself in since that first night at Mariscos Navolato when I heard “El Niño de La Tuna” and began educating myself on the Mexican cartels.

      I would never have gone to Tijuana without Diego. We weren’t tourists, after all—a DEA agent and a detective from an elite counter-narcotics task force—and if anyone knew who we really were, especially with the heavyweight cartel drug and moneylaundering cases we were working, we’d have made extremely vulnerable targets.

      For the going-away party, several of my buddies from back home flew in: even my old sergeant from the sheriff ’s office. The celebration kicked off at one of San Diego’s craft-beer bistros—a night of war stories, a running slide show of my time with Team 3, and the requisite plaques and framed photos—but the party didn’t end when the bosses went home. Instead, at 2 a.m., I grabbed my closest friends and suggested we pop down to Mexico. But just as we were about to leave, Diego stared at his buzzing iPhone. “Fuck—family emergency,” he said abruptly, hugging me. “Sorry, dude—gotta bounce.”

      My friends and I jammed into a cab and raced to the border. A taxi full of gringos, and no Diego as our guide. I had heard the cold click of the border pedestrian gates close behind me many times before, but now it was all on me: I would have to do all the talking and navigating.

      Fresh out of language school, my Spanish was good enough—my teacher was from Guadalajara, so my accent was consistent with the locals’. But my vocabulary was still so limited that I often found myself getting knee-deep in conversations I just couldn’t get out of until I’d end the interaction abruptly with a nod and a “gracias.”

      Somehow I managed to lead my Kansas buddies through the night, tossing back shots of Don Julio, rolling over to a streetside taco stand, mowing down al pastor on the spit, and walking back across the border into California just as the sun was cresting the mountains to the east. Diego should’ve been here to see this, I thought, but then I realized it was almost a rite of passage that I was able now to handle Tijuana on my own.

      THE FOLLOWING DAY I was at the San Diego International Airport with my family, lugging the cart loaded up with our suitcases and carry-on bags through the terminal to check in. I was just another dad, hands full of passports, boarding passes—and my sons tugging at my elbow.

      Whatever risks lay ahead, I was more certain than ever I’d made the right decision.

      The plane ascended through the clouds—my sons fell fast asleep on my shoulders—and, for the next couple of hours, at least, hunting down Chapo Guzmán was the furthest thing from my mind.

       DF

      MY FAMILY AND I touched down in Mexico the last week of May 2012. The sprawling metropolis—with twenty-six million people, the largest city in the Western Hemisphere—was rarely referred to by locals as “Ciudad de México.” To the natives it was El Distrito Federal (“DF”) or, owing to the ever-present layer of smog, El Humo (“The Smoke”).

      At the embassy, I’d initially been assigned to the Money Laundering Group. The Sinaloa Cartel desk was run by a special agent who was burned out, especially after the Cabo fiasco. After a few months, I convinced management to transfer me over from Money Laundering to the Enforcement Group. The following morning, I sat down for breakfast with my new colleagues and group supervisor at Agave, a café known for its machaca con huevo and freshly baked pan dulce.

      Before my arrival, the system had been inefficient. Most DEA special agents were working leads on multiple cartels: Sinaloa, the Zetas, the Gulf Cartel, the Beltrán-Leyvas, the Knights Templar . . . My group supervisor knew that this lack of focus was highly counterproductive. The Mexico City Country Office was such a hive of activity that no special agent could become a subject-matter expert on one particular cartel, because they were constantly working all of them.

      So, in one of my first meetings with my new team, we began a reorganization. We went around the table to focus our assignments, and when it came to the Sinaloa Cartel, the assigned agent spoke up immediately, nodding at me.

      “You can have this desmadre of a case,” he said. “I’m done. The Mexicans couldn’t catch Chapo if he was standing at the fuckin’ Starbucks across the street from the embassy.”

      “Sure, I’ll take it,” I said, trying to contain my excitement.

      “Adelante y suerte, amigo.” Go ahead, and good luck.

      At that moment, my mind drifted far from the meeting: I tried to picture Chapo eating breakfast, too, in a mountain hideaway or on some ranch in the heart of Sinaloa . . . Somewhere in Mexico. At least we were now on the same soil.

      The task in front of me was daunting. After all the failed capture operations, all the years of near misses, I knew that Chapo must have learned from his mistakes. He had the resources, the money, and the street smarts to secrete himself so deeply into his underworld that it would now be extremely difficult—perhaps even impossible—to take him unaware.

      He has eleven years of hard study on me, I thought as the meeting wrapped up. I’ve got a hell of a lot of catching up to do.

      AS I SETTLED INTO my work at the embassy, I ran into Thomas McAllister, the DEA regional director for North and Central Americas Region (NCAR). He gave me a piercing look.

      “Hogan, I’m