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

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 BUGSY HAD a major problem: his cajeta supply from Sinaloa had temporarily dried up in Phoenix. One Saturday morning, Task Force Officer Nick Jones, Diego, and I were set up on surveillance outside the “pool house.” We’d just “flipped the switch” and started listening to the wiretap we had on several of Bugsy’s cell phones. It had taken us months of writing and rewriting federal wire affidavits each time Bugsy would drop a phone, which he did almost every week. With nothing coming across the wire, we followed Bugsy and his crew to gain any intelligence we could.

      “Looks like they’re packing up,” Nick said over the radio. “Get ready to roll, guys.” Bugsy and his crew took off in the GL550 at high speed, westbound on Interstate 8 heading out of Phoenix.

      We were hardly prepared for a long road trip, but I was thankful that Nick was with us for surveillance—the whole Task Force called him “Sticky Nicky,” because he’d never lose the bad guy. Bugsy kept driving west, and every hour or so he’d dart off an exit at the last minute in an attempt to clean his tail, but we’d been following him for too long to fall for such basic countersurveillance moves. We stayed on him for close to five hours, following just far enough behind that Bugsy wouldn’t notice, until finally we ended up in San Diego.

      During several days of surveillance, still wearing the same clothes, we watched as Bugsy and his crew visited one stash house after another in the suburban neighborhoods of San Diego. I had the San Diego Police Department stop a Chevy Avalanche leaving one of the stash locations—the local cops seized three hundred pounds of cajeta in the rear bed of a truck driven by one of Bugsy’s boys.

      “He was planning on taking this load right back to Phoenix,” I told Diego. “We need to take advantage of his drought.”

      “Yeah,” Diego nodded. “Think I’ve got the perfect guy.”

      AFTER RETURNING TO PHOENIX, Diego and I drafted a plan: we had Diego’s confidential source introduce Bugsy to a DEA undercover agent, a thirty-two-year-old Mexican American working out of the San Diego Field Division office. Like Diego, “Alex” could play the part of a narco junior perfectly.

      Knowing that Bugsy was too street-smart to fall for the typical DEA “trunk flash,” we lured him down to Mission Bay, where we would flash him more than a thousand pounds of marijuana stuffed inside a DEA undercover yacht equipped with cameras, recording devices, and several bronzed girls in bikinis (who were actually female undercover San Diego cops). Mixed within the thousand pounds were the same “pillows” of cajeta we had just seized from Bugsy’s crew.

      On the day of the setup, from inside our G-ride across the bay, Diego and I kept our eyes locked on the screen of the surveillance camera we’d set up in the yacht. On the boat, Bugsy was cutting into and sniffing the same pillow he’d seen at the stash pad just a week earlier.

      The mirage was so convincing that Bugsy fell headlong into the trap, telling undercover agents that he needed five hundred more pounds to complete a tractor-trailer load bound for Chicago. Alex told him that the weed he’d just seen was already spoken for, en route to another buyer in LA, so Bugsy would just have to wait a week.

      IN THE MEANTIME, Diego and I worked to secure indictments on the DTO and decided to rip Bugsy’s money as he came to purchase the five hundred pounds.

      In a TGI Fridays parking lot, Bugsy, along with his righthand man, Tweety, met Alex, the undercover agent, and quickly flashed a quarter million in cash—rubber-banded bundles inside a chocolate-brown Gucci bag—with the expectation that he’d soon pick up his cajeta order at another location down the street. But before Bugsy and Tweety could get away with the cash, Diego and I pounced.

      A marked San Diego police unit swooped in to a make a traffic stop on the black Ford F150. Bugsy and Tweety sped off and started tossing $10,000 chunks of cash out the truck’s windows, littering miles of San Diego freeways.

      We were following the chase, pulling over to recover as much cash as we could for evidence—while countless other drivers also pulled over, quickly stuffing their pockets with bunches of Bugsy’s bills, then jumping back into their cars before Diego and I could stop them.

      The high-speed chase continued up Interstate 5 until Bugsy and Tweety finally ran out of cash and stopped in the middle of the freeway to surrender to police, leaving behind a trail of “cash confetti,” as CNN reported—$50 and $100 bills still fluttering across the highway,