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 told if anyone can catch Chapo, it’s you . . .”
It was more a question than a statement, and I felt my face flush. I knew where this had come from: my first group supervisor, back in Phoenix, had worked with McAllister at DEA headquarters and knew exactly how relentless and methodical I was when pursuing the targets of my investigations.
“We’ll see, sir,” I said, smiling. “I’ll give it my best shot.”
One thing I had vowed: I was not going to fall into the trap of believing all the legends and hype. Even some of my DEA colleagues had lost hope, so I disengaged emotionally from the Chapo mythology, instead focusing on it from the most basic policing perspective. No criminal was impossible to capture, after all, the failed Cabo operation proved that Chapo was more vulnerable now than ever.
NO SOONER HAD I settled into my seat in the Enforcement Group than I was assigned to be the DEA liaison on a case dominating all the Mexican headlines: a drug-related murder in broad daylight inside the terminal at the Mexico City International Airport. The airport was known to be among the most corrupt in the world; inbound flights from the Andes, especially Peru, almost always had cocaine hidden in the cargo. What made the incident all the more shocking was that the murders involved uniformed Mexican cops shooting fellow Mexican cops.
Two Federal Police officers assigned to the airport were just getting off their shift, walking through Terminal 2. They were attempting to smuggle several kilos of cocaine hidden underneath the navy blue jacket of one of the officers—marked POLICÍA FEDERAL in white on the back—when they were approached by three PF officers coming on shift, who had become suspicious of them.
A quick argument ensued between the two groups as they stood near the public food court. The dirty cops drew their service pistols and began gunning down the honest cops. One was executed with a point-blank shot to the head; two others were hit and died. To outsiders, the carnage looked like a terrorist attack; horrified travelers were screaming and scrambling for cover. Meanwhile, the corrupt officers took off running through the terminal, jumped in a truck, and sped away.
“Can you believe this shit?” I turned toward a senior agent in the group. “Blue-on-blue in broad daylight in the middle of an international airport? Who are these guys?”
The agent wasn’t fazed; he didn’t even look up from his computer screen.
“Bienvenidos,” he said. Welcome to Mexico.
Though I tried to assist the Federal Police and the PGR—the Mexican Attorney General’s Office—tracking down the murderers, I soon came face-to-face with a harsh reality: there were too many layers of corruption. The investigation into the blue-on-blue killings faltered and eventually went cold. It was a stark introduction for me—I saw firsthand, within weeks of my new assignment, why fewer than five percent of homicides in Mexico are ever solved.
OF ALL THE STUNNING cases of corruption and violence in Latin America, few lingered like the case of DEA agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena, who vanished on a busy street in Guadalajara in 1985 while walking to meet his wife for lunch. Camarena’s body wasn’t found for nearly a month. When it was, it was discovered that his skull, jaw, nose, cheekbones, and windpipe had all been crushed; his ribs had been broken and he’d been viciously tortured; he was even sodomized with a broom handle. Perhaps worst of all, his head had been drilled with a screwdriver, and he’d been buried in a shallow grave while still breathing.
Kiki Camarena’s disappearance became a major international incident and heavily strained relations between the United States and Mexico—the US government offered a $5 million reward for the arrest of the murderers.
When I arrived at DEA’s Mexico City Country Office more than twenty-five years later, the circumstances surrounding Camarena’s death had not been forgotten. His memory was kept vividly alive. Along the main embassy hallway, a conference room dedicated to the slain agent—we referred to it simply as the Kiki Room—featured a small bust of Camarena and a plaque. Convicted of Kiki’s torture-murder was none other than Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, “El Padrino,” a former Federal Police officer turned godfather of the Guadalajara Cartel—and Joaquín Guzmán’s mentor in the narcotics business.*
LOOKING BEYOND THE DEEP-ROOTED history of violence in Mexico, I tried to give my wife and young sons the best life possible in the capital under the enormously high-stress circumstances. The DEA assigned us a spacious three-bedroom apartment in La Condesa, the city center’s hippest neighborhood—I suppose you could compare it to Paris’s Latin Quarter or Manhattan’s SoHo—home to young businesspeople, artists, and students. It was also close to the US embassy, on Paseo de la Reforma, so just a fifteen-minute drive to work.
We loved the neighborhood, full of tree-lined streets shading the 1920s architecture: restaurants, cafés, boutiques, galleries, and lively open-air markets on Sundays.
But it was difficult for me to enjoy the vibrant life of the city: my head was constantly on a swivel. Street-cop mode. It was second nature to be watching my back—I’d done so since I was twenty-one and on patrol with the Sheriff’s office—but in Mexico, there never seemed to be a moment’s rest. I was always checking for tails and surveillance by members of the cartel, street thugs, or even the Mexican government. When I left our apartment at 7 a.m., walking out to my Chevy Tahoe, I’d study all the other vehicles on the street. Which cars were new to the block? Which ones seemed out of place? Which cars had someone sitting inside them? I’d even memorize makes, models, and plate numbers.
Whenever we went to a new neighborhood, my wife knew that there was no point talking to me. I was too busy scanning the streets, looking hard at the faces of pedestrians, taxi drivers, deliverymen—anyone, in fact, within shooting distance.
After just a few weeks in DF, my wife had also learned the techniques of constant risk assessment: look everyone on the sidewalk in the eyes quickly to judge them, and decide: threat or not? She and our young sons were always on the street, at the park, shopping, or meeting friends. There was crime all over DF, but of a random nature: we’d hear reports of an embassy employee being held up at gunpoint for his gold watch in a local restaurant in our neighborhood, or a lady out pushing her kid in a stroller having her handbag snatched.
But there were plenty of great things about living in Mexico, too. We especially loved the city’s street food: tacos de canasta, tlacoyos, elote (sweet corn in a cup with melting butter topped with a dab of mayonnaise and chili powder). But best of all were the camotes—sweet potatoes—from a vendor who’d come around every week at sundown, pushing his old squeaky metal cart.
The guy looked as if he’d been working in the sun all day, face golden brown, covered in beads of perspiration from pushing his wood-burning stove up and down the streets. The pressure of the smoke and heat from the fire would sound a steam whistle, like an old locomotive in a Western movie. You could hear the sound coming from blocks away, even if you were indoors. One of my sons would shout:
“Daddy, the camote man!”
We’d throw on our shoes and run outside. Sometimes the camote man would be gone, vanishing in the shadows down side streets before he’d sound his whistle again, directing us where to run. Once we hunted him down, he’d pull out a drawer full of large sweet potatoes roasted over the wood fire and let my sons pick out the best-looking ones, then he’d slice them lengthwise and drizzle condensed milk over the top and add a heavy sprinkle of cinnamon and sugar—a bargain at just twenty-five pesos.
Even in those sweet moments, as much as I tried to mask it from my sons, I was on edge. Children were always the most vulnerable for kidnapping—we even had one neighbor, a “self-made millionaire,” who’d fly his daughter to school in a private helicopter every weekday.
It wasn’t strange to see the latest Ferraris and Porsches ripping through our neighborhood streets—though anything lavish and excessive in the capital reeked of a narco connection. There was an estimated $40 billion a year in drug money flowing through the country’s economy, and it had to trickle down somewhere.
I was constantly reminded of a remark that I’d heard from a local journalist in DF: “Everything is fine in Mexico until suddenly it’s not.” The expression captured it all in chilling simplicity. “You’re living your life happily and then one day you’re dead.”
CHAPO HAD FINALLY BECOME a household name in the United States, designated Public Enemy Number One by the Chicago Crime Commission—the first outlaw to earn that title since Al Capone. And while I was glad this label drew more attention to Guzmán’s name and his criminal activity, it did little, from an investigative standpoint, to assist with a capture.
At my embassy desk, I spent day after day sorting intel on Guzmán, dissecting every old file I could get my hands on. The freshest leads were the ones that came from the notebook pages, ledgers, business cards, and even the pocket trash left behind at the mansion after the raid in Cabo San Lucas. It was grueling analysis—the sort of work despised by most DEA agents—but I’d find even the slightest variation of a nickname or the subscriber to a phone invaluable, and when I found something, it hit me like a shot of adrenaline.
Exploit. Exploit. Exploit.
My life soon became an endless blur of digits. I had become obsessed with numbers. I was constantly memorizing any phone number, any BlackBerry or PIN number I could find. I couldn’t remember my grandma’s birthday, but I had Chapo’s pilot’s phone number on the tip of my tongue. The other agents in the group would ask why I was always consumed with analyzing phone numbers and PINs.
Numbers, unlike people, never lie.
NOT ONLY DID CHAPO and Picudo leave crumbs behind in Cabo San Lucas, but they took off so quickly that Chapo never had time to grab his tactical go-bag containing his forest-green armored vest, black AR-15 rifle equipped with a grenade launcher, and six hand grenades.
Diego and I confirmed that Guzmán had even cut himself on a fence, drawing blood, but was now resting comfortably back across the Sea of Cortez in Sinaloa. For Chapo, this was as close as he had ever been to capture since his breakout from the Puente Grande penitentiary. I knew he was becoming complacent if he felt he could spend time in such a popular resort city, especially one swarming with foreign tourists. And clearly he wasn’t escorted by hundreds of bodyguards driving fleets of black armored SUVs with tinted windows, as people had claimed. It was intel that was still widely believed, including by the US intelligence community in Mexico.
Once in a while I’d share my findings with the Mexican Federal Police team that had worked the leads after the February raid in Cabo, and PF would give me any bits and pieces of intelligence they had collected. I’d end up divulging far more information than I’d receive, but I reasoned that some Mexican intel was better than none.
Then it was back to digging through the active phone numbers of Chapo’s pilots, family, girlfriends—often never raising my head above my computer screen until another agent would make a sarcastic comment.
“Why you wasting your time, Hogan? What’s the endgame? The Mexicans will never catch Chapo.”
Even my bosses were skeptical as they eyed the massive charts I’d pinned on the wall, linking multi-ton cocaine seizures in Ecuador directly to Chapo’s lieutenants.
“Cuando? Cuando?” my boss would often yell as he walked by my desk, demanding to know when—if ever—I was going to show something for all the effort.
“Paciencia, jefe, paciencia,” I would say. “Have some patience, boss.”
EVERY NIGHT I LEFT the embassy, my head was back on a swivel. DF was a constant swarm of cars and pedestrians, and I knew that at any hour of the day or night someone could be watching me.
Or, worse, trying to follow me.
I was headed home one evening at dusk, driving away from the embassy on side streets in my Tahoe. As I took my first right, I made a mental note of the vehicles behind me that did the same.
Blue Chevy Malibu. White Nissan Sentra.
I took a left at the next light; the white Sentra did the same. In my rearview mirror I could make out the sharp cheekbones, dark eyes, and thick brow of the driver.
Was it the same guy with the blade scar on his cheek on that hot afternoon money drop in Plaza Satélite? It sure looked like him . . .
I couldn’t be sure, but I hit the gas hard—another left and then a quick right, making sure I cleaned my tail of the Nissan.
But I felt relatively safe in my Chevy Tahoe, with its two-inch-thick bulletproof glass. It was so heavy from all that level 3 armor that just a gentle tap on the gas pedal made it sound like it was going eighty-five miles an hour. A seasoned DEA agent at the embassy would say, in his heavy West Texan accent, “Them babies run like scalded apes.” Surveillance by Chapo’s people would be nearly impossible, the way I drove the thing—after just a month in-country I knew all of the shortcuts home, and regularly changed my route to and from work.
IT WAS A BLAZING afternoon in August 2012, and Tom Greene, an agent in my group—working the Beltrán-Leyva DTO—was agitated, constantly checking his BlackBerry.
“Funny, he’s not responding,” Tom told me. Greene had just returned from meeting with his informant, El Potrillo (“The Colt”), a twenty-six-year-old with a heavyset frame and a long, thin face, from just outside Mexico City. Tom and Potrillo had met a few minutes earlier at a small café-bookstore called El Tiempo, just a block from the embassy in the Zona Rosa neighborhood.
“I’ve sent him a shitload of messages,” Greene said. “Kid always texts right back.”
It didn’t seem like a big deal, so Tom and I went to lunch in the embassy cafeteria. As we were standing in line with our trays, we overheard one of the cashiers speaking Spanish: “Did you hear? Horrible. There was just a shooting over in Zona Rosa . . .”
Just west of the historic center of Mexico City, Zona Rosa was a perfect place to meet a confidential informant, because it was one of the capital’s most bustling and vibrant neighborhoods—full of nightclubs, after-hours joints, and gay bars. After meeting with El Potrillo, Greene had seen a couple of suspicious guys on the street, one in a car and another walking slowly down the sidewalk, but he had thought little of it. His informant followed protocol, waiting to exit El Tiempo until Greene was long gone.
El Potrillo had only taken a few steps down the busy sidewalk when a motorcycle pulled up alongside him. There were two male riders in full-faced black helmets. The rear rider got off the back of the Yamaha, walked calmly up behind El Potrillo, and shot him in the back of the head six times. Five of the bullets had been superfluous; El Potrillo was most likely brain-dead by the time he hit the pavement. The assassin jumped on the back of the motorcycle and sped off. The killers had used a classic sicario technique, imported to the Mexican capital by Colombian hit squads.
I walked by the spot a couple of days later and could still see the bloodstains—now the color of dried wine—on the sidewalk.
The police investigation went nowhere; none of the witnesses would cooperate. The assassins’ Yamaha had had no license plates. In fact, not one piece of evidence was noted by the local cops besides the time and place of the shooting. It quickly became another stat: one of the tens of thousands of drug-related homicides that remained unscrutinized and unsolved.
AFTER GREENE DEALT WITH a few days of trauma in the DEA office, I found that life, strangely enough, went back to normal. The execution of El Potrillo was just another nightmare moment that Mexico City belched out daily, like the clouds of smog that hover over the metropolis—and yet another constant reminder that I could be shot point-blank in the back of the head at any moment, too, if I didn’t remain hypervigilant.
If anything leaked out to the wrong people (narcos, dirty cops, even some greedy civilian looking for a payday), if anyone were to learn who I was actually targeting or the work I’d been doing for more than six years, it wouldn’t be some informant bleeding out in the streets of Zona Rosa—I would be another Kiki Camarena.
Several weeks later, two CIA employees were driving to a military installation on the outskirts of the city in a Chevy Tahoe with diplomatic license plates—an armored vehicle identical to mine—when they were ambushed by two vehicles loaded with gunmen. The Tahoe was sprayed with more than a hundred machine gun rounds. The bad guys—it turned out they were rogue Mexican Federal Police—laid fire in such rapid succession that the bullets pierced the armor, striking the two CIA employees inside. But unlike Special Agent Zapata, they survived—they kept the Tahoe crawling on the metal rims until it could go no further.
I studied the photographs: that Tahoe looked like it had just driven out of a firefight in Fallujah.
I walked out of the office that very night and opened the door to my own Tahoe, my left eye twitching, and felt a bristling cold shiver, in spite of the midsummer heat, knowing that I—or any other DEA agent in the embassy—could be the next target of a murder.