In early 2011, two years into Operation Dark Water, we started to work with the Spanish National Police (SNP) to set up the European side of deal. The SNP controlled an airstrip outside of Madrid. In March, our team traveled to Madrid and I took Manuel Gutierrez-Guzman out to inspect the strip. On a cold, gusty morning, the two of us were greeted by SNP officials in dress uniforms standing at attention. I’d never seen so many shiny brass buttons and fancy police hats in my life. The scene created the impression that the SNP was in El Viejo’s pocket.
I, as El Viejo, told Gutierrez-Guzman that if El Chapo ever got to a point where he had to flee Mexico, he could land at the private airstrip in Spain and my Sicilian organization would protect him. We called this “the Escape Hatch plan,” and later learned that it was something El Chapo seriously considered.
The visit to the airport with Gutierrez-Guzman was a perfect prelude to subsequent meetings in Spain with more representatives from the Sinaloa Cartel. The previous five cartel associates were now joined by Jose Benjamin Locheo del Rio and Samuel Zazueta Valenzuela. Locheo del Rio identified himself as the cartel official responsible for daily operational decisions and the initial shipment of a thousand kilograms of cocaine from South America to Europe. Zazueta Valenzuela was in Spain to set up a front company for the cartel.
Like in almost all previous drug cases I had worked, we weren’t going to be provided with millions of U.S. tax-payer dollars to buy drugs. So we got the Sinaloa Cartel to agree that we would handle the sale and distribution of the drugs once it arrived in Europe. In return, we would receive 20 percent of the load. Negotiations dragged on longer than usual because Gutierrez-Guzman was having trouble making telephone contact with El Chapo in Mexico.
As the meetings wrapped up a week later, I handed Gutierrez-Guzman a 100-euro bill with a personal greeting on it from me to Chapo. I explained that this was part of an old Italian crime tradition. Upon receiving it, El Chapo was supposed to tear the bill in half, retain the half with my note and send back the other half with a personal message from him to me. My message said:
Señor, we finally meet this way. Sorry the call did not happen … no problem … Manuel will serve as the telephone between us. I look forward to a long and prosperous business relationship. You are welcome to be my guest in Europe if ever needed.
A month later, April 21, 2011, during a follow-up session in New Hampshire, Gutierrez-Guzman returned half of the 100-euro note with Chapo’s handwritten message on it. It read:
My friend, thank you for the support you are offering me, to receive me, and I am not discounting the invitation. Through my cousin I send you a message. So when he makes a decision, he will go with you. My friend, a big embrace.
* * *
As I read it, Gutierrez-Guzman stood and wrapped me in a bear hug. The gesture was captured on videotape and confirmed the partnership between us two heavyweight drug honchos.
Gutierrez-Guzman then informed us that the cartel intended to ship a thousand kilograms of coke in a container from Ecuador to Spain as an initial load. After that, we would start receiving a thousand kilograms of dope a month. As members of the FBI, we only needed one major drug seizure to complete our large-scale UCO.
We patiently waited throughout the summer of 2011 for the first shipment to arrive. The unexpected delay had to do with large seizures of Chapo’s drugs that took place in South America. Although the cartel never suspected that we were involved, they went dark.
Finally, in early August 2011, Gutierrez-Guzman and Celaya Valenzuela arrived in Boston to tell us that a ship with a container holding a thousand kilograms of cocaine had departed from Ecuador on August 1 and was scheduled to arrive in Spain on or around August 19. Our collective mood went from bummed to ecstatic. A day later, after a flurry of phone calls back and forth to Mexico, the two cartel members said the container didn’t contain cocaine, but was designed as a test load to determine if it would arrive safely through Spanish Customs without being interdicted. Though disappointed, I recognized that they were being cautious, professional drug traffickers, and we needed to be patient so as not to tip our hand.
Two more test loads followed. One contained plantains and another held pineapples. The logistics involved in having our Agents track them from South America to Spain was a nightmare. All of us were frustrated. We had collected enough evidence to charge five cartel members (including Chapo) with conspiracy, but without having seized actual illegal drugs it would be known in legal terms as a dry conspiracy. And we didn’t want to go up in court against an organization as powerful as the Sinaloa Cartel without real drugs.
At the close of 2011, the FBI had invested an enormous amount of time and money in Dark Water, and FBIHQ was growing increasingly impatient. While our ASAC Frank Johnson in Boston remained confident we would succeed and continued running interference with the pencil pushers in DC, I knew the clock was ticking not only in DC, but with our cartel partners in Mexico.
So in the early days 2012, after long and careful consideration, I called Case Agent Tanner into my office and told him gently that we had to inform Chapo’s people that the Italians were walking away.
“What?” he asked in shock.
“El Viejo and his boys are moving off in another direction due to the delays and test loads,” I said.
He looked so upset, I thought he was about to pass out. “Why?” he asked.
“I’ve been doing UCOs my whole career,” I explained. “After awhile you start to think like the bad guys. I can tell you bad guys like the Italians would never tolerate delays and false promises like this. The only people who would hang around waiting for something to happen are cops.”
Tanner was devastated. He’d worked his butt off for three years, and now I was telling him we had to walk away without ever getting any dope. I explained to him that this was a move we had to make, and to my mind, a calculated gamble that had an 80 percent chance of succeeding.
“That high?” he asked.
“I think so. We have to let ’em know that we’re not screwing around.”
Sometime in late April 2012, our informant Gus Vargas conveyed the message to Gutierrez-Guzman: The Italians are looking for other sources of supply, and they’re pissed off that they’ve expended more than $70,000 paying off corrupt Customs officials and law enforcement personnel in Spain for letting the test loads in, and never receiving dope or any kind of compensation from the cartel.
After that we (the Italians) cut off communications. Vargas remained the only bridge between the two sides. Some members of our team feared we’d never hear from Sinaloa again. I disagreed, and hoped to hell I was right.
A long month later, Gutierrez-Guzman called Vargas to request a meeting with us in Phoenix, Arizona. Gus Vargas and another UCA went, but we decided that El Viejo and the other Italians should decline the offer. Vargas extended my (El Viejo’s) good wishes to the Mexicans in their future endeavors, and told Gutierrez-Guzman that I had moved on.
Tanner remained upset. I told him to sit back and wait like a good fisherman to see if the bait worked. He looked at me like I had lost my mind.
Less than a month later, Gutierrez-Guzman informed us that if we could travel to Detroit in twenty-four hours, a cartel associate would front us some heroin and methamphetamine to cover some of the expenses we had incurred in Spain. It appeared as though our gamble had worked. No one was more relieved than me.
As El Viejo was believed to be in Europe, two new UCAs from New York answered the call. At my request, they dropped what they were doing and grabbed flights to Detroit. Boston team members Mike Sullivan, Stork, Tanner, and I joined them in Detroit after taking an overnight flight.
On June 7, sleep deprived but charged with adrenaline, the two NY UCAs drove to a ramshackle restaurant in southwest Detroit that looked like it had been plucked out of the dusty Mexican countryside. As they entered, all eyes in the joint shifted to them. They were both big, heavily muscled, and had “don’t fuck with me” written all over them. A short Hispanic man, half their size, bounded out of the kitchen, walked up to within inches of them, and snapped their picture with his cell phone.
Then without saying a word he motioned them to the rear of the restaurant. The two burly New York UCAs followed the little man through the kitchen and out the back. Parked in an alley behind the restaurant was an old red Honda. The Mexican simply pointed through the open passenger window to something on the floorboard.
One of the UCAs reached in and retrieved a white plastic bag that looked like a take-out order, while the other UCA stood guard. The exchange had taken no more than sixty seconds and not one single word had been exchanged.
The two UCAs then drove five minutes to a nearby hotel where Tanner, the other guys from the Boston office, and I were waiting. We gave Tanner the honor of opening the bag. Hands trembling with excitement, he carefully pulled apart the plastic opening and removed nine individually wrapped packages of crystal meth (1.76 kilograms) and heroin (3.56 kilograms). All of us collectively sighed with relief.
We’d done it! We no longer had a dry conspiracy. The expression of joy on Tanner’s face was priceless.
The strange exchange outside the Mexican restaurant remains the largest seizure of methamphetamine and one of the largest seizures of heroin in Detroit law enforcement history. More importantly, we now had illegal drugs in our possession supplied by the Sinaloa Cartel, which strengthened our legal case by leaps and bounds.
The dramatic shift in momentum buoyed the spirits of everyone on our team. With the Italian criminal organization back on board, we pressed the cartel hard to finally deliver on their promise of cocaine. On July 2 they informed us that a shipment of cocaine sent through a Brazilian front company named Cristerlia Celta would be arriving at the port of Algeciras, Spain, on the 27.
On the night of July 27, FBI and SNP officials carefully opened the container from Cristerlia Celta in a police compound in Algerciras, Spain. Inside we found 346 kilograms (762 pounds) of cocaine in the form of bricks wrapped in bright blue, yellow, and pink plastic. It was the big score all of us had been waiting for more than three years.
In a little more than a month, we had seized $15 million worth of drugs from the Sinaloa Cartel without fronting a penny. Now, with the evidence we needed, we decided to summon the Mexicans to Spain and arrest them there. We did this for two reasons: One, if any of them ended up cooperating with the FBI, we wanted them in Europe so we could use them to go further up the chain of command, and, two, we wanted them as far away from Mexico and any other UC activity we might launch in the future.
In early August, Gonzo, Vargas, the other UCAs, case personnel on the Boston team, and I traveled to Madrid, Spain, and arrived before the Mexicans to coordinate with the SNP. The Sinaloans thought they were there to meet El Viejo and discuss a South American–European cocaine pipeline we were going to run for many years into the future.
We had other plans. First thing we did was to rent a massive eight-room suite in one of the city’s finest luxury hotels. I took photos of myself standing in the elegant marble bathroom with gold fixtures to show my kids how far I’d traveled from the boy who grew up with one pair of dungarees and two T-shirts.
I had developed superstitions that went all the back to my days of playing high school baseball, including secretly wearing a St. Michael’s medal—representing the patron saint of policemen—around my neck. Throughout my FBI career, I made it a habit to wear some subtle piece of law enforcement paraphernalia on my body the day of an arrest. The morning of August 7, 2012, I dressed in my best suit and tie, a crisp white shirt, and a pair of FBI cufflinks.
When Jesus Manuel Gutierrez-Guzman entered the hotel suite, I rose and embraced him. Reviewing the videotape later, the FBI cufflinks were clearly visible. I directed Gutierrez-Guzman to the suite’s luxurious library, and with Gonzo at my side translating, we began what would be our last meeting.
With the video and audiotape running, I carefully reviewed every aspect of the case step-by-step. And I made sure that Gutierrez-Guzman confirmed that El Chapo had been the final decision maker in every overt act, including the planning and the shipping of the cocaine. After three hours of getting Gutierrez-Guzman to recount every act in the criminal conspiracy, I received a text message from members of the Boston team monitoring the meeting from another area of the hotel that read: “No mas” (No more.)
Next, I beckoned Zazueta Valenzuela, Celaya Valenzuela, and Jesus Gonzalo Palazuelas Soto—who had been sent by the cartel to Brazil to supervise the initial shipment of cocaine—up to my suite and went through their individual roles and responsibilities in the drug-trafficking conspiracy.
More than four hours after the FBI recorders had been activated, I thanked all the cartel members individually and asked them to wait for me in the lobby before I took them out to celebrate. Instead, when the four men reached the lobby they were discreetly arrested by members of the SNP and taken off in handcuffs.
Three years after the start of the case nobody thought we could make, we had four high-level Sinaloa Cartel members in custody, and enough evidence to arrest other members of the cartel, including Chapo Guzmán himself.
We were well aware that the cartel had a system in place whereby if one of their officials didn’t report back in thirty-six hours, a red flag would go up. So we knew we had to work fast. One of the cartel members we had arrested agreed to cooperate and immediately started feeding us information. Some of what he told us pointed to corruption at the very highest levels of the Mexican government. He not only provided evidence that top Mexican government officials were in the pocket of the cartel, he claimed that some of those officials and potential coconspirators had played a role in the shipment of our cocaine to Spain.
When we quickly relayed this very important news to FBIHQ in Washington, we were told to “stand down” because what we were pursuing—namely the links between the Sinaloa Cartel and the Mexican government—were in HQ’s words “outside the scope of your original objective.” All of us were incredulous. What the hell did that mean? Additionally, we were ordered to conclude the UC portion of the case and return to the States immediately.
The whole thing stunk to high heaven. For one thing, the FBIHQ supervisor who ordered us to “stand down” was not the NDURE supervisor, and had never played any role in the case.
I argued strenuously with FBIHQ that we had a golden opportunity to identify and collect timely evidence against other coconspirators in this massive and now airtight drug conspiracy. If they happened to be powerful Mexican government officials, so be it. We’d simply done what we were trained by the FBI to do—follow the trail of evidence. Where it led had never been a problem in the past.
FBIHQ argued back that we had inadvertently stepped into another evidentiary realm—namely, international Public Corruption. They were out-of-their-minds wrong. We hadn’t stepped into anything new. The case was what it had been all along, an international drug-trafficking conspiracy.
Those of us who had spent the last three years working on Dark Water were shocked and pissed off. Did the FBI not want to know about the collusion between high Mexican government officials and the Sinaloa Cartel? Had someone higher up in our government told the FBI to suspend that part of the investigation?
We never found out. What we did learn is that soon after we were told to conclude our investigation, the Justice Department announced that it had issued criminal indictments against Chapo Guzmán and eight other members of his organization. The story appeared on the front page of The New York Times and was the lead story on NBC Nightly News.
Meanwhile, Gonzo, other UCAs, case personnel, and I returned to Boston fuming that we hadn’t been allowed to pursue the new leads we’d developed. We now began the very onerous extradition process with Spain. After that it took us two years to prepare evidence against all four defendants.
Three of them, including Gutierrez-Guzman, pled guilty and received sentences from ten to more than twenty years in federal prison.
The lawyer, Rafael Humberto Celaya Valenzuela, who had always thought of himself as the smartest in the group, was the only one who decided to go to trial despite the fact that the evidence against him was overwhelming. My cross-examination lasted a mere fifteen minutes. After a five-day trial, the jury deliberated only five hours before finding him guilty on all counts. On October 14, 2014, more than five years after Tanner first poked his head in my office Celaya was convicted and later sentenced to seventeen years in the can.
All of the Dark Water defendants had been arrested and convicted except one. January 7, 2016, I was roused from my sleep one morning by the sound of my pinging phone. I leaned out of bed and read the text message: “We got him!” I knew immediately who the message was referring to: El Chapo. He’d been arrested in Mexico. A year later he was extradited to the United States, and is now in U.S. custody awaiting trial in a U.S. federal court. I stand ready to do my part.
Shortly after Celaya Valenzuela’s trial ended in October 2014, FBI Director James Comey traveled up to Boston to present awards to the team that had worked on Dark Water. At first, I didn’t want to attend, because I’m not a fan of awards or ceremonies. But when I thought about how proud I was of Tanner, the other UCAs, and the rest of the team, and how hard they had worked, I changed my mind.
In front of five hundred FBI Agents and employees, Director Comey spoke about the case and our remarkable accomplishment. When it was my turn to go up to the podium, I remember looking at the Director and thinking, What the fuck does “outside the scope of your original objective” mean?
That’s how my demented mind works. On that occasion, I rubbed some dirt on it, kept my mouth shut, and shook his hand.