Hunting El Chapo

by Andrew Hogan

  The door was finally battered open, and I could see the stream of marines entering Picudo’s house. I paused, expecting to hear a volley of gunshots.

  Nothing.

  Emerging from my position, I entered the house and saw three men on their knees in the living room, lined up against the wall.

  I made my way through the kitchen and toward the back bedrooms.

  SEMAR had Picudo at gunpoint on his bed. No one, I thought, not even a feared cartel killer, looks scary when you roust them from a deep sleep, bare-chested, hair messed up, at 2:00 a.m. Picudo didn’t look like he could hurt anyone—he was pale, sweaty, and scrawny.

  In Spanish, he claimed to be very sick. Brady didn’t believe it; he grabbed Picudo by the left arm and spun him roughly onto his stomach. Picudo screamed now—a high-pitched wail. He claimed to be dying, but neither Brady nor I could decipher from what, precisely.

  Brady pinned Picudo down on the bed. Now the SEMAR doctor came into the bedroom and told Brady to ease off; he wanted to examine Picudo.

  “You gotta be shitting me,” Brady grumbled to me. “They’re gonna believe this pathetic actor crying like a little bitch?”

  I listened closely as the doctor began asking Picudo the routine questions: How long had he been suffering from this rare disease of the blood?

  Picudo exhaled with relief, righted himself in the bed.

  Suddenly, Brady leapt forward—he had seen the butt of a gun secreted under Picudo’s naked thigh.

  Brady grabbed Picudo more roughly, pinning him on his face, holding him tight by the neck and the left arm.

  “No lo toques!” the doctor shouted, “What are you doing? You can’t touch him—he’s very sick. He might die!” All the marines in the room were also yelling, shoving forward, agitated.

  “Fuck that,” Brady said. “Tiene arma! Look, the motherfucker’s got a gun!”

  Brady kept him pinned while one of the marines reached under Picudo’s body and retrieved the Colt .45, fully loaded and with one in the chamber. If they’d believed this guy’s bullshit, let their guard down long enough, Picudo could have pulled out his pistol and shot every one of us in the room.

  I COULD STILL HEAR Picudo wailing as he went into the kitchen. There was a cache of automatic weapons on the table, including an AK-47, an AR-15, a TEC-9, and several other rifles. Picudo’s men had been ready for a last stand—just like Macho Prieto’s crew in Puerto Peñasco—but they had been caught by surprise.

  By now, all the gunmen had been safely detained: cuffed, blindfolded, and lined up against the wall. The marines kept bringing more phones to the kitchen for me to analyze. The table was piled high with BlackBerrys and SIM cards, tossed in haphazardly with all the guns. There was even a book in Spanish that I was surprised to see: La D.E.A. en México.

  Picudo—like Chapo—had been studying up on my agency and our operational history in Mexico. I had seen a copy already; this dog-eared paperback was well known in the DEA office back in Mexico City. It was a quickie knocked out by some writers for the Proceso magazine, using only a couple of retired DEA dinosaurs as sources, guys who’d been stationed in-country back in the 1990s. The biggest “revelation” was that DEA special agents operating within Mexico on counter-narcotics missions had been, illegally, strapped with guns.

  I didn’t care about the book or the weapons now, however: I hovered over the kitchen table, examining all the phones. I recognized some numbers that the Phoenix Field Division and Brady’s people in El Paso had been intercepting.

  Chino, the marine, led Picudo—now identified as Edgar Manuel López Osorio—out of the house, and he was strutting like he owned the city, which, as Chapo’s plaza boss for Culiacán, he essentially did. There was no blindfold on him yet, and I was able to get a good look into those cold, steely eyes.

  All I saw was an abyss.

  Chino put Picudo in the back of a Jeep Cherokee, where he was joined by a fierce-looking marine—six foot four, powerfully built—whom everyone called “Chiqui” (slang for “the smallest”). Chiqui’s face was pure Aztec—eyes dark and close-set—and his brow was pocked with scars. I’d never heard Chiqui speak, but it was clear to me that he was the muscle in this brigade.

  “Vamos,” Chino said.

  The convoy left in total darkness; I had no clue where we were heading. We ran down an unlit highway until, fifteen minutes outside Culiacán, we reached a pecan ranch—SEMAR owned it and had used it in the past for their training.

  When we hopped out of the Captiva, I saw Picudo, blindfolded, grimacing as he sat on the Jeep’s rear bumper, face lit up starkly by headlights.

  There were now more than twenty people—various marines, Brady, Leroy, Nico, and me—surrounding the back of the Jeep. The darkness felt thicker now, the air electric: it was clear that Picudo was ready to talk.

  His voice was a strong baritone, notable for its heavy Sinaloan accent. And the tone had changed from whiny back to that of a stone-cold killer. This was the real Picudo, the enforcer we suspected to be personally responsible for the murders of countless victims.

  “Mira, esto fue lo que pasó,” he said calmly.

  “Ándale,” said Chino.

  “Voy a estar honesto . . .”

  The circle of marines undulated like some great jellyfish, growing tighter around Picudo.

  “I’M GOING TO BE honest with you now,” I remember Picudo saying. “When you hit the house, Chapo escaped through the tunnel—ran through the sewer. He was with a girl, Condor, and the cook. Chapo and the girl were naked—nearly naked. Just in their underwear. Chapo has a cut on his head from hitting something—running through the sewer. They called me to come pick them up. They escaped out of a drainage hole. When I entered the city, I saw all of your trucks.”

  Picudo had scooped up Chapo and his entourage in his truck and driven the boss at high speed down the Pacific coast. They drove for nearly two hours, and Chapo did not say a word the entire time, besides ordering Picudo to contact Bravo, Chapo’s chief enforcer and plaza boss in the southern part of the state, and let Bravo know to meet them at the drop site.

  “I dropped them off near the resorts,” Picudo said finally. “I don’t know where they went from there.”

  “What resorts?” Chino asked, glancing from Picudo over to me.

  “Dónde? That’s not good enough. Where on the coast?” Toro demanded.

  Picudo’s bared teeth flashed a cold hatred, his brow tensing behind the blindfold, before he finally gave it up.

  “Mazatlán,” he said, exhaling through pursed lips. “I dropped them at the playa exit.”

  “La salida de playa?” Chino repeated for confirmation.

  “Sí,” Picudo said. “Just before the new strip of resorts in Mazatlán.”

  Turning our backs on Picudo, Toro, Brady, and I walked away to strategize.

  “This confirms the drop,” I said, “but we still need Top-Tier to know Chapo’s exact location. Like I said, we need to exhaust all our intelligence while we’re here in Culiacán.”

  Toro nodded his head in agreement.

  “We still have all the sons and Lic-F to go after,” Brady said. “They could give up where he’s at, too.”

  “Vamos a continuar,” Toro said as we all climbed back into our rigs.

  The convoy rolled out onto the dusty path. Then Chino pulled the Captiva over to the side. He was waiting for a couple of rápidas to join the end of the line. Toro turned in his seat to look back at me.

  “Que quieres hacer?”

  I felt like I was in a trance: I could see Toro’s lips moving but couldn’t make out what he was saying. The entire rig began to spin. I could feel the blood rushing out of my head. I was on the verge of passing out from pure exhaustion.

  “Qué sigue?” Toro asked.

  “Dale!” I replied, half-delirious. “Dale! Dale!” and I felt my fist smashing into my own palm.

  “Dale!” Toro said, grinning.

  Dale! Dale! Dale!

  I ke
pt repeating the word, so exhausted that my mouth was barely moving. Everyone in the car went quiet. I squinted over at Brady, whose head was tilted against the window. He was out cold. Chino was snoring in the front seat, and Toro’s head was bobbing forward as he slept.

  My eyes drifted shut.

  A loud squelch came across the radio.

  “Toro de Zorro! Toro de Zorro!”

  We all snapped back awake, startled by the radio traffic. None of us realized we’d passed out and that the rest of the SEMAR brigade was waiting for us to lead the convoy back to the city.

  I knew that we all needed some serious rest soon—we’d been running on fumes for days. The sun was just beginning to rise over the mountains in the east, and Toro made the command decision to head back to base—Location Three—so everyone could at least sleep for a few hours.

  THAT AFTERNOON, Brady and I left Location Three and walked the dirt street down to Location Two, where SEMAR was processing all the evidence. We stopped along the way at a small puesto—a makeshift convenience store some guy was running out of his dark cinder-block garage. I bought a paleta—a Mexican popsicle—and a bag of Doritos for Brady with the few pesos I had in my pocket.

  When we walked into the Two, I saw that SEMAR had extracted all the meth from the tunnel. Brown packages were stacked on top of one another and covered the entire living room floor. In the kitchen, a young marine was counting plastic bananas and placing them in a large container.

  I stepped outside, passing the stash of rocket-propelled grenade launchers, AK-47s, and other military-grade weapons, laid out in meticulous order on the white pavement.

  Something shiny caught my eye—it was the gun Chapo had ordered Naris to fetch for him. The Colt Super .38-caliber Automatic had Chapo’s initials monogrammed into the grip, in diamonds: J.G.L.

  Despite my still-exhausted state, I now knew I wasn’t in some waking dream: holding that cold steel in my hand made everything tangible.

  The detailing on the Colt Super was impressive. Chapo hadn’t had time to grab the pistol before he fled through the tunnel and sewer, and it was clear that this was his favorite weapon, his personal Excalibur.

  Who knew the full history behind Guzmán’s pistol? But if the Colt gave Chapo some mystical power, I could almost sense it now, too. Just holding the .38 Super in my hand, I felt that same visceral energy transferring through my grip.

  Stacks of BlackBerrys were piled high in the backyard. Brady and I sat down and began looking through Picudo’s phones one by one. I found a picture of Duck Dynasty and messages in the most recent chat logs with Lic-F.

  Just then, another message hit our group chat from El Paso. It was a fresh intercept—Lic-F reaching Condor and Chapo:

  A poco tuvo problemas el picudo

  “Oh really, Picudo had problems?”

  Condor and Chapo immediately responded:

  Si. Tenemos ke estar trankilo. Por ke. No keda de otra. Claro. Por ke picudo. Pobre. El si sabe de todo.

  “Yes, we have to be calm because there’s no other option. Yes, of course. Because of Picudo. Poor Picudo. He knows everything.”

  I called in Nico and Leroy.

  “We need to find Lic-F next,” I said. “Now that Picudo’s gone, Chapo’s going to be relying on him for everything.”

  “Agreed,” Leroy said. “We’ll focus on him and the sons.”

  Then my BlackBerry buzzed with another message from El Paso. It was Condor to Chapo’s son Ratón:

  oiga dise inge si tiene una super. Ke le mande. Con 4 cargadores estra. Es para el oiga. Y si me ase el paro ai oiga con 1 bereta o lo ke tenga oiga

  “Listen, Inge is asking if you have a Super [Colt .38] that you can send. With four magazines. It’s for him, and do me a favor: bring me the Beretta or whatever you have.”

  Then, moments later:

  oiga dise inge para kele mande 10 rollos al negro.

  “Listen, Inge says to send ten rolls to Negro.”

  I grinned. I knew that “Negro” was another code name for Manuel Alejandro Aponte Gómez, a.k.a. “El Bravo.” Chapo needed ten rolls—$100,000 in cash—delivered to him immediately. This was confirmation of Chapo’s vulnerable position: he was free, but he had nothing with him in Mazatlán—no guns and no cash.

  We went back to analyzing the BlackBerrys, and, as ever, minutes turned to hours.

  I vaguely remembered the marines handing out sandwiches for dinner, but when I glanced at my watch, I saw that it was now one o’clock in the morning. I lay down on the top of Chapo’s bed, the mattress now covered only by the dirty brown fitted sheet. Brady was sitting in the corner on a chair. I stared at the ceiling, imagining where Chapo might be resting in Mazatlán.

  “Weird, isn’t it?” I said. “Chaps is somewhere right now in Maz trying to figure out his next move, and we’re here in his bedroom strategizing ours.”

  “Good to know he’s got no money with him,” Brady said.

  “We need that Top-Tier.”

  “We’ll get it.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Soon enough.”

  We were both confident that Joe and Neil, in El Paso, were dialed in and cranking out the roving intercepts as fast as they possibly could.

  “Luz verde! Luz verde!” one of the marines yelled down the hall. El Roy had locked down on the phone of Iván Archivaldo Guzmán Salazar, in a house on the north side of the city.

  So much for rest—Brady and I jumped in a rápida with Admiral Garra and raced to the location. By the time we arrived, SEMAR had already made entry, but Iván was nowhere to be found. Instead, there were only a couple of his workers sitting on a stash pad full of weapons, two-way radios, a small amount of meth, and, of course, another pile of BlackBerrys. Iván had clearly been warned by Chapo to get out of the city and had set up a classic BlackBerry mirror operation with his workers before leaving.

  Nico handed me a black baseball cap he had found in one of the bedrooms. The front of the hat was emblazoned with #701 in shimmery gold stitching—again, that Forbes ranking of the world’s wealthiest men.

  As we continued to look around, I received a new email from my analysts back in Mexico City. A brand-new Nissan GT-R belonging to one of Chapo’s sons, Jesús Alfredo Guzmán Salazar, had just pulled into the Mercedes dealership off Boulevard Pedro Infante.

  “Vamos!” Toro said. “Do you know where the dealership is?”

  “Yes, of course,” I said.

  “All right, you lead, then.”

  Brady and I jumped into our old armored Suburban and took off out of the neighborhood, trailed by a stream of rápidas.

  WE TOOK THE MERCEDES dealership by storm. Guns drawn, the marines flooded the showroom floor and the service center and surrounded the parking lot. Brady and I rushed inside, looking for Alfredo, a skinny twenty-six-year-old narco with a baby face.

  Alfredo’s Nissan had arrived at the service department no more than five minutes before the convoy. I put my palm on the hood: the engine was still hot. The GT-R had a temporary California registration sticker on the windshield—further proof, I knew, that this was all part of Alfredo and Iván’s long-running money-laundering scheme. Chapo’s sons would send a worker in the States to pick up hundreds of thousands of dollars in drug proceeds and then “smurf ” the cash into various US bank accounts—making multiple deposits of just under the $10,000, the federal mandatory reporting requirement. Once the cash was in the US banking system, Iván and Alfredo could use aliases or straw purchasers to negotiate the best price for these exotic sports cars. Their workers in the United States would wire the money to the seller and arrange to have the car imported into Mexico and delivered straight to Culiacán.

  Brady and I bounded upstairs and cased the executive offices, but there was still no sign of Alfredo. By now the entire dealership, inside and out, was crawling with armed men in green-and-black camouflage. All the employees and customers were in shock—no one dared speak a word.

  We reviewed the surveillance video of the p
ast hour. Then I found Captain Toro. “Alfredo’s not here,” I said.

  “He’s not even on the surveillance tape,” Brady said. “He had a whole crew of narco juniors dropping these cars off.”

  Brady pointed to the string of brand-new Mercedes sedans and coupes lined up in the service area. Captain Toro took a few moments to review the video and returned to the shop floor.

  “We’re taking them all,” Toro said, and he began walking through the parking lot with a group of marines, checking every vehicle. “If it’s armored, we’re taking it.”

  Fourteen armored vehicles were seized, and six more luxury cars, even a Ducati motorcycle. As evidence, I began snapping photos of the makes, models, and license plates. Mercedes SLS AMG. Mercedes AMG G63. Mercedes C63. Mercedes CLA45. Even a cloned municipal police armored Dodge Charger.

  Chapo’s son Iván had the most expensive car on the lot: his 2010 silver Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren two-door coupe, complete with suicide doors, a customized sound system, and a 5.4-liter supercharged V8 engine. Chino popped one of the batwing doors and fired it up. The McLaren sounded louder than a Learjet.

  Brady and I got back in the Suburban and watched the marines hop into all the cars, driving millions of dollars of vehicles right off the lot, one after the other, as though they were just playing a wild round of Grand Theft Auto.

  AS WE STARTED BACK toward Location Three, in my rearview mirror I could see the Mercedes dealership employees standing outside gawking, still in shock.

  At that moment I realized that we had taken full control of the city—we’d wrested Culiacán away from Chapo. The SEMAR machine was untouchable; no one in El 19 had had the balls to confront us. The marines were moving too fast and hitting too hard. All of Chapo’s halcones had crawled back into their holes. Even Lic-F was reporting intel from his corrupt sources that was stale—two hours old.

  I thought back over the past few days. I couldn’t remember seeing a single police car—local or federal—patrolling the streets. All law enforcement officers were now obviously in hiding. Even the city’s dirtiest cops knew that it was best to stay out of SEMAR’s path.