WRITING A BOOK set in the murderous milieu of contemporary narcotrafficking can be daunting. As with any criminal underworld, what passes for official history is often mere speculation or mythology. It’s nearly impossible to separate fact from fable: urban legends, prison lore, and old war stories get repeated generation after generation—reprinted in newspapers, magazines, blogs, and books—to the point that they’re often indistinguishable from verifiable fact.
It’s no less true for the early days of Joaquín Guzmán than it was for American gangsters such as John Dillinger or Pretty Boy Floyd, Al Capone, or Bugsy Siegel.
The United States and Latin America are rife with narco-porn today—salacious films, paperbacks, websites, and magazines that often traffic in exaggeration, rumormongering, and glamorization of the exploits of grotesquely wealthy drug lords.
To be sure, there are hundreds of clear-eyed writers doing excellent and brave frontline reporting on narcotrafficking and government corruption, maintaining the balance of dispassion while cultivating direct access to primary sources. Gabriel García Márquez’s Noticia de un Secuestro, a brilliant account of Pablo Escobar’s early-1990s reign of terror in Colombia, was an inspiration: for me it remains the exemplar of how a nonfiction author of the first order—through in-depth interviews, meticulous research, and novelistic technique—can capture the visceral terror wrought by criminals such as the Medellín Cartel.
I was fortunate in this book to have worked with a former federal agent who lived it, witnessed it, experienced it all firsthand. It’s rare that someone of Drew’s caliber leaves a federal law enforcement career at such a young age, while the story of his investigative journey is still so fresh and newsworthy. Together we’ve strived to write this book with an exacting eye, separating out all the hearsay, rumor, and dubious reporting that surrounded “the world’s most wanted narcotrafficker” from the verifiable facts.
All too often stories of men like Drew remain untold. This historic capture operation, with all its remarkable twists and turns, deserves an accurate rendering for posterity. And the key participants—not just Drew, but the other DEA and HSI agents, US marshals, SEMAR troops and commanders—deserve to shine for the years of selfless sacrifice that would otherwise have remained cloaked in shadows.
My deepest gratitude goes to Drew, and to everyone who put in so much hard work—at 3Arts Entertainment, HarperCollins, and ICM Partners—for helping us bring his singular story to fruition.
—D.C.