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

to Freddie. “Gotta get outta here before my old man beats my ass.”

      I RETESTED WITH the Highway Patrol but started looking into federal law enforcement careers, too—one of my best cop buddies had told me good things about the Drug Enforcement Administration. Until then, I had never considered a career as a special agent, but I decided to take the long drive over to Chicago and attend their orientation. The process was surprisingly quick, and I was immediately categorized as “best qualified,” with my past police experience and university degree. Months went by without a word, but I knew it could take more than a year before I completed the testing process. One fall morning, I was back on my Harley with a bunch of cops and firefighters for the annual US Marine Corps Toys for Tots fund-raising ride. After a long day cruising the back roads, doing a little barhopping, I let slip to Freddie’s cousin, Tom, that I had applied with the DEA.

      “No kidding? You know Snake?” Tom said, then called across the bar: “Snake! Get over here—this kid’s applying with the DEA.” Snake swaggered over in his scuffed-up leather jacket. Headful of greasy blond shoulder-length hair, wearing a half- shaven beard and a scowl, he looked more like a full-patch outlaw biker than a DEA agent.

      I hit it off with Snake right away—we downed a couple of bottles of Bud and talked about the snail-paced application process.

      “Look, kid, it’s a pain in the ass, I know—here’s my card,” Snake said, giving me his number. “Call me Monday.”

      Before I knew it, thanks to Snake, I found myself on a fast track through the testing process and received an invitation to the DEA Training Academy. One last blowout night at the Firehouse Pub, then I headed east, breaking free of my meticulously laidout life in Kansas. I drove through the heavily forested grounds at Quantico—chock-full of whitetail deer so tame you could practically pet them—and entered the gates of the DEA Academy as a member of a brand-new class of basic agent trainees.

      I had barely settled into life at Quantico when I got a call telling me I’d been selected as a candidate for the next Kansas Highway Patrol class. I scarcely believed what I heard myself telling the master sergeant on the phone.

      “Thanks for the invite,” I said, “but I’m not leaving DEA.” By that point, I was throwing myself headlong into the DEA training.

      We spent hours on the range, burning through thousands of rounds of ammunition, firing our Glock 22 .40-caliber pistols or busting our asses doing PT out near the lake’s edge—sets of burpees in the icy, muddy water, followed by knuckle push- ups on the adjacent gravel road.

      The heart of academy training was the practical scenarios. We called them “practicals.” One afternoon during a practical, I had the “eye” on a target—an academy staff member playing the role of a drug dealer—planning an exchange with another bad guy in a remote parking lot. I parked just out of sight, grabbed my binoculars and radio, and crawled up underneath a group of pine trees.

      “Trunk is open,” I radioed my teammates. “Target One just placed a large black duffel bag into the back of Target Two’s vehicle. They’re getting ready to depart. Stand by.”

      Alone in my Ford Focus, I followed the second target vehicle to another set.

      Time for the vehicle-extraction takedown. I still had eyes on Target Two, but none of my teammates had arrived in the parking lot. Minutes passed; I was staring at my watch, calling my team on the radio; I knew we needed to arrest the suspect now or we’d all flunk the practical.

      I hit the gas and came to a skidding stop near the rear of the target vehicle, and, with my gun drawn, I rushed the driver’s door.

      “Police! Show me your hands! Show me your hands!”

      The role player was so startled he didn’t even react. I reached in through the door and grabbed him by the head—hauling him from the vehicle and throwing him face-first onto the asphalt before cuffing him.

      My team passed the practical, but I caught pure hell from our instructor during the debrief. “Think you’re some kind of goddamn cowboy, Hogan? Why didn’t you wait for your teammates before initiating the arrest?”

       Wait?

      I held my tongue. It wasn’t that easy to unwire the aggression, the street-cop instinct, honed during those years working alone as a deputy sheriff with no backup.

      That tag—Cowboy—stuck with me for the final weeks of the academy.

      I graduated in the top of my class and, with my whole family present, walked across the stage in a freshly pressed dark blue suit and tie to receive my gold badge from DEA Administrator Karen Tandy, then turned and shook the hand of Deputy Administrator Michele Leonhart.

      “Congratulations,” Michele said. “Remember, go out there and make big cases.”

      THE PRISON WAS his playground.

      Down in Jalisco—the home of Mexico’s billion-dollar tequila industry—Chapo was living like a little prince. On June 9, 1993, after successfully slipping into Guatemala, he was apprehended by the Guatemalan army at a hotel just across the border. The political heat was too intense: he couldn’t bribe his way out of this jam. It was the first time his hands had felt the cold steel of handcuffs, and his first police mug shot was taken in a puffy tan prison coat. Before long, Guzmán was aboard a military plane, taken to the Federal Social Readaptation Center No. 1, known simply as Altiplano, the maximum-security prison sixty miles outside Mexico’s capital.

      By now the public knew more about Chapo. The young campesino had dropped out of school and sold oranges on the streets to help support his family. Later he’d been a chauffeur—and allegedly a prodigious hit man—for Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, a.k.a. “El Padrino,” the godfather of modern Mexican drug trafficking.

      Born on the outskirts of Culiacán, Gallardo had been a motorcycleriding Mexican Federal Judicial Police agent and a bodyguard for the governor of Sinaloa, whose political connections Gallardo used to help build his drug-trafficking organization (DTO). A business major in university, Gallardo had seen a criminal vision of the future: he united all the bickering traffickers—mostly from Sinaloa—into the first sophisticated Mexican DTO, called the Guadalajara Cartel, which would become the blueprint for all future Mexican drugtrafficking organizations.

      Like Lucky Luciano at the birth of modern American organized crime, in the late 1920s, Gallardo recognized that disputed territory led to bloodshed, so he divided the nation into smuggling “plazas” and entrusted his protégé, Chapo Guzmán, with control of the lucrative Sinaloa drug trade.

      While he was behind bars after his Guatemalan capture, Guzmán’s drug empire continued to thrive. Chapo’s brother, Arturo, was the acting boss, but Chapo himself was still clearly calling all the shots—he was now ranked as the most powerful international drug trafficker by authorities in both Mexico and the United States.

      Chapo was moving staggering amounts of cocaine—regularly and reliably—from South America up through Central America and Mexico and into the United States. These weren’t small-time muling jobs, either: Chapo’s people were moving multi-ton shipments of Colombian product via boat, small planes, even jerry-rigged “narco subs”—semi-submersible submarines capable of carrying six tons of pure cocaine at a time. Chapo’s methods of transport were creative—not to mention constantly evolving— and he thereby earned a reputation for getting his loads delivered intact and on time. Chapo expanded his grip to ports on Mexico’s Atlantic and Pacific coasts and strong-armed control of key crossing points—not just on the US-Mexico border but also along Mexico’s southern border with Guatemala.

      Chapo embedded lieutenants of the Sinaloa Cartel in Colombia, Ecuador, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Venezuela, giving him more flexibility to negotiate directly with traffickers within the supply chain. His criminal tentacles, versatility, and ingenuity surpassed even his more infamous predecessors, like Pablo Escobar. Headline-making seizures of Chapo’s cocaine—13,000 kilograms on a fishing boat, 1,000 on a semi-submersible, 19,000 from another maritime vessel en