TOP-TIER HAD BECOME MY LIFE.
Pinging that BlackBerry device, the one nearest to Chapo, was all-consuming. As long as I could ping Top-Tier—from six in the morning often until after midnight—nothing else really mattered. Even when lying in bed with my wife in La Condesa, my mind was never far from hunting that Top-Tier.
By now I knew how Chapo ran the day-to-day of his multi-million-dollar drug empire; all I needed was the boss’s location. This wasn’t as simple as it sounded, given Chapo’s penchant for bouncing constantly, moving from safe house to safe house, from countryside to city, sometimes on an hourly basis. With every ping, I meticulously labeled the spot with a yellow thumbtack on my Google Map, marking the coordinates along with the date and time indicating where Condor’s device had pinged in Culiacán.
Top-Tier.
If Condor was standing with the man, every new ping helped me begin to establish Chapo’s pattern of life.*
Brady, Neil, and Joe were working around the clock now, too, intercepting as many mirror devices as they could identify—Offices 1 through 10, and Second-Tier—as well as a new critical mirror who went by the username “Usacell.” We quickly determined that Usacell—similar to the name of another major Mexican telecom service provider Iusacell—was a duplicate: another Second-Tier device run by the user Telcel, in Durango.
“It’s pretty obvious it’s the same guy,” Brady said. “He’s just labeled each of his two BlackBerrys with the corresponding service provider to tell them apart.”
The Usacell device may have been another mirror, but it exposed still more important messages that Chapo thought were hidden. If the office devices were sending two hundred messages a day to Telcel at Second-Tier, they were sending an equal amount to Usacell. Brady and I estimated that we were intercepting close to seventy-five percent of all the DTO communications coming to and from the boss.
The window into Chapo’s world was now becoming brighter.
“For now, we should sit at Second-Tier,” Brady said.
At the Second-Tier level, we could intercept every order coming down from Chapo and every communication coming up from the office devices.
“Yeah, that’s definitely the honey hole,” I said.
If Condor and the offices dropped their BlackBerrys, Brady and I could identify their new PINs easily, so long as we were still intercepting the two Second-Tier devices, Telcel and Usacell.
Office-4 was now starting to produce valuable intel, too, but I noticed something different about this mirror: not only did Office-4 appear to be sending messages up the chain to Chapo through Second-Tier, but it was also responsible for relaying command-and-control messages—mostly related to Chapo’s Canada operations—to another top player who went by the username “Panchito.”
“Did you see the deconfliction hit on Panchito?” I asked Brady. “It’s hitting all over FBI New York.”
“Yeah,” Brady said. “I saw it.”
“Our Panchito has got to be Alex Cifuentes,” I said.
The FBI New York office claimed to still have an interest in Chapo after it began targeting him through longtime Colombian drug lord Hildebrando Alexánder Cifuentes Villa, who’d moved to Sinaloa around 2008—acting as human collateral for all of Chapo’s cocaine shipments generated by the Cifuentes-Villa family in Medellín.
After the failure of the Cabo op, the FBI’s fresh intelligence slowly dried up. Alex—as everyone called Cifuentes—was one of Chapo’s right-hand men.
In fact, months prior to my Mexico City coordination meeting, while I was in New York, I’d sat down with the FBI and told them about the great working relationship I was building with HSI and Brady’s team.
“We’re moving quickly,” I said. “This train isn’t stopping. If you guys want to get on board and share your intel, now’s the time.”
This wasn’t my first attempt to coordinate a joint investigation with the FBI. I’d found their special agents to be polite and professional, but I also knew they were highly resistant to sharing. It was typical of the FBI to hold their cards close to their chest: that’s how they were trained at Quantico. The FBI believed they were the world’s premier law enforcement agency, but when it came to working a drug investigation—especially when faced with the complex structure of the Mexican cartels—their expertise couldn’t match that of the DEA.
As much as I tried to get everyone to cooperate, I knew it was going to be difficult.
The FBI’s file was composed mostly of historical intelligence on Cifuentes, who was now wanted by DEA and FBI after being federally indicted on multiple drug-trafficking conspiracy charges. But instead of sharing with the DEA, the FBI began giving their intelligence to the CIA, in hopes they could produce something that would give them the upper hand.
I knew that whenever intelligence was passed to CIA by a federal law enforcement agency, the source would instantly lose control of how that intelligence was classified, disseminated, and used. This was well known by the agents who worked in the embassy, and it was precisely why Brady and I had decided that the CIA had no place in our investigation.
Almost every piece of intelligence we gained on Chapo was derived judicially from court-authorized wire intercepts, so that the evidence collected could be used to charge Chapo and others in his DTO in a US federal court. It was exactly how DEA disrupted and ultimately dismantled DTOs. The CIA, on the other hand, dealt extensively with classified and top-secret material that was difficult—if not impossible—to present in court.
I didn’t need the CIA, but I also knew that they were anxious to get involved now that Brady and I were gaining momentum toward Chapo’s exact location.
“The Feebies and the spooks want to call a meeting,” I told Brady.
“Where?”
“Langley.”
“Fuck that,” Brady said. “We don’t need them.”
“We need to at least be on the same page when it comes to Cifuentes. We need to send someone if you or I don’t go. I’m going to talk to Don.”
Don Dominguez had been following these developments from Virginia and agreed to attend the meeting at CIA headquarters on our behalf. The result of the meeting was an agreement among all agencies to arrest Cifuentes and remove him from Chapo’s DTO, but only at the right time. It was crucial that the efforts be coordinated among all agencies. I confirmed with the FBI that Panchito’s PIN was in fact Alex Cifuentes and shared several of the ping coordinates I had obtained from the Cifuentes BlackBerry, hitting as it did in a rural area just southwest of Culiacán.
IN LATE NOVEMBER 2013, I received an urgent text from Brady in El Paso.
“This just in,” Brady wrote, quoting the line sheets after the Spanish translation. It was Second-Tier transmitting to all the office devices:
“Panchito was caught in a battle with soldiers and Picudo went to rescue him. Turn off your phones because they will get your PIN.”
I called Brady immediately.
“Goddammit—the Feebs fucked us!” he shouted.
“Hold on,” I said. “Let me look into it and get the facts.”
I reached out to DEA Mazatlán, who in turn contacted their local military contacts to see if they’d heard about a recent arrest just outside Culiacán.
Initially, the Mexicans didn’t even know who they’d arrested. SEDENA* had locked up some middle-aged guy at a small ranch, but they didn’t think he was Colombian, and his name wasn’t Cifuentes.
“They’re saying they’ve got a guy called Enrique García Rodríguez,” I told Brady. “They’re getting me a photo of him right now, along with the passport.”
Brady stayed on the line while I waited for Mazatlán to shoot me the email.
When the photo arrived, it showed a man in his mid-forties, with a receding hairline, salt-and-pepper beard, and light complexion.
“It’s Cifuentes, man,” I said. “It’s a fake name on this Mexican passport. Panchito is done.”
“Fuck them!” Brady was livid.
He knew it was just a matter of time before everything we’d built in the war room in El Paso came crashing down.
Sure enough, within minutes, Chapo’s offices were already talking about dropping their BlackBerrys; Second-Tier wouldn’t be far behind.
And then Top-Tier: Condor.
Brady and I would soon be standing, once again, in the dark.
“I just confirmed the photo with FBI,” I said. “They’re claiming they had nothing to do with this.”
“Bullshit,” said Brady.
“I don’t know for sure. But I can promise you—the CIA are the ones who gave the information to SEDENA,” I said. “Guaranteed.”
After I got off the phone with Brady, I reached out to the CIA’s counter-narcotics group in Mexico City about the Cifuentes arrest. At first they denied any knowledge, but a few days later, a CIA manager told me the truth: all the rural ping locations I had shared with the FBI had been passed on to SEDENA by the spooks. (The CIA claimed to have told SEDENA only that there was a “subject of interest” at that location.) The CIA then turned around and washed their hands of the whole ordeal after passing the lead—there was no oversight of the operation, and no close coordination with their Mexican counterparts. In fact, the CIA didn’t even know if SEDENA had captured the right man, otherwise they would have claimed credit immediately. Once I confirmed that it was Alex Cifuentes, though, the CIA were happy to step up and take credit.
I was sickened by the CIA, but I also knew this was simply the way they operated: collecting intelligence from their own government and then haphazardly sharing it with their Mexican counter-parts.
“That’s the fuckin’ spooks, man,” I told Brady. “They tell the Mexicans—then just stand back and watch the shit show. The CIA doesn’t give a fuck about dismantling international DTOs. It’s just another stat to them. If they can stat the pass-on of key intelligence or an arrest, then they can justify their existence.”
It was a classic example of the breakdown in communication, if not outright antagonism, between the US intelligence community and federal law enforcement. I knew the ropes by now: most CIA activity in Mexico was never coordinated or deconflicted with the DEA. It was true of their approach in Mexico, but it was also how the CIA operated around the rest of the world. They often caused major disruptions to highly sensitive, judicially authorized investigations like ours.
Whatever the case, Alex Cifuentes had been prematurely arrested by SEDENA, and we were left to pick up the pieces. Virtually every BlackBerry we’d been intercepting dropped the day after the Cifuentes arrest. I was pissed, but I held back my emotions when speaking with Brady—no sense adding more fuel to the fire. It didn’t stop him, however.
“I’m fuckin’ done with the FBI,” Brady said. “We’re not sharing a single piece of intel with them ever again.”
“I understand,” I said. “But we need to keep an even keel here. The thing is—I don’t know what else CIA may have from the FBI that could torpedo this thing even further. We’ve got to keep them close.”
“All right, dude,” Brady said. “You keep playing Switzerland—it’s what you do best. Listen, if I was there in Mexico right now, I’d be choking some motherfuckers out.”
“ARGO,” I SAID. “You see that movie? Ben Affleck?”
“About the Hollywood sting with the Iranians?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Sure. ‘Argo fuck yourself.’”
I laughed. “Think we could pull it off?”
“With Chapo? I don’t know . . .”
For years, Alex Cifuentes had been searching for producers, screenwriters, and authors—all at the specific request of Chapo.
Strange as it sounded—given the precautions he took to guard his location and the secrecy of his communications—Chapo had become fixated on telling his rags-to-riches life story. He was desperate to see his rise from that impoverished little kid selling oranges in La Tuna to the world’s wealthiest drug lord on the big screen. In the line sheets, we would sometimes read about how Chapo was batting around the idea of a film, telenovela, or book. Chapo would entertain just about anyone who was interested in hearing his story.
Accordingly, Alex Cifuentes would get recommendations through his contacts for various filmmakers and writers and then vet them for Chapo. If they passed muster, Cifuentes would schedule a face-to-face meeting with Guzmán at a secure location, somewhere in Culiacán or at a ranch in the mountains.
Brady and I had learned of at least one aspiring filmmaker—we knew him only as Carlino—who’d flown in from Cabo. Carlino had Hollywood connections and claimed to have worked with the producers of the hit Fox TV show Cops.
Chapo knew the show Cops and was very interested in following up.
“We need to reach out to them,” said Brady.
“I bet they’d be on board,” I said. “I’ve already spoken to my guys in Los Angeles. They have a few DEA agents with connections to producers. They’d be willing to work with us.”
“Set up our own version of Argo?”
“Exactly.”
“How would we play it?” Brady asked.
“You could be UC as the director,” I said. “Just get one cameraman working with us as an undercover. You’d be perfect, dude. Keep your usual poker face. Never smile. Throw on some horn-rim glasses and just grumble and curse at everyone.”
“I could handle that,” Brady said.
“Let’s get up to LA to see what our options are,” I said. “With Cifuentes locked up, finding the right undercover agent to pose as a producer or screenwriter may be our only way to get this cabrón out of Culiacán.”
“We could call the film Saludos a Generente!” Brady said.
“Hell, no. I’ve seen that line one too many times already.”
I was staring at a map of Mexico, looking at all the possible coastal resort towns for a meet.
“The beauty of it is,” I said, “Chapo wouldn’t even have to leave the country. He’d go back to Cabo if it was to start rolling footage for a movie based on his life. Vallarta? Even Cancún would probably work. Anywhere on the Mayan Riviera. He has a history of traveling over there already. He’d feel safe.”
NOT ONLY WAS CHAPO conducting meetings with producers and writers, but I’d learned about a thumb drive on which he had the first half of a movie script about his rise to power. He’d let his wife Griselda López Pérez and daughter Grisel Guzmán López review it, only to have them complain that the screenplay didn’t mention them enough.
Griselda, Chapo’s second wife, was accorded a special level of respect—even deference—by the drug lord. Brady and I had intercepted Griselda’s complaints: she often demanded more money for her kids, and Chapo would comply, handing over $10,000 every few weeks.
Despite being exes, they clearly were still close. Guzmán and Griselda had three surviving children—Joaquin, Grisel, and Ovidio—and they were some of Chapo’s favorites.
For months, Brady and I had been intercepting Joaquin and Ovidio. The brothers were going by the code names “Güero” and “Ratón.”
Being light-skinned, Joaquin’s use of the name Güero was an obvious choice.
I remembered the first time Diego had taught me the word güero, years back when we were listening to narcocorridos during our Phoenix Task Force days. “You come down to DF with me,” Diego had said. “Pick up some slang, eat the street food—they won’t take you for a gringo, dude. Everyone’ll call you güero . . .”
“And why Ratón?” Brady asked.
I had studied the one photo I had of Ovidio. “He looks like a mouse,” I said, which cracked us both up. The kid did have big black eyes and protruding ears . . .
Güero and Ratón were speaking constantly with their father through the mirror of Office-1, just like their half brother Iván.
The two sets of brothers operated in pairs, but Güero and Ratón seemed to be more heavily involved in Chapo’s day-to-day business than Iván and Alfredo. According to the messages we were intercepting, all four sons were key players in Chapo’s drug dynasty, though, and closer to him than anyone else in his organization.
These guys weren’t wannabes: the hard-core narco life was in their blood—they had followed in their father’s footsteps from an early age. Just from watching their day-to-day communications, I knew the four boys meant everything to Chapo.
A FEW WEEKS AFTER the arrest of Alex Cifuentes, Brady, Joe, and Neil, with the help of their lead prosecutor, Camila Defusio, had finally righted the ship in El Paso; they had cranked out the affidavits and were back live again, sending fresh intercepts down to me by the hundreds.
HSI was moving at lightning speed—all due to the management in El Paso providing full support for Brady and his team.
Brady told me that this was the biggest drug investigation HSI had ever been involved in. I knew that Brady’s bosses were fully invested in their success and had been greasing all the logistics behind the scenes for months. I had never seen anything like it. Brady’s brass kept us moving forward without the slightest bureaucratic interruption. It was impressive.
Brady and his team had climbed back up and were now intercepting a handful of office phones and a new Second-Tier device. But these grunt workers in Durango—however valuable the intercepts—didn’t get us any closer to Chapo himself. Only pinging Top-Tier could do that.
I HAD BEEN WAITING to find the new Top-Tier device, and fortunately it didn’t take us long. This time the username was MI-26, and in the line sheets everyone was calling him “Chaneke.”
“Who’s this now?” Brady asked. “What happened to Condor?”
“I’m not sure, man.”
“Who the hell is Chaneke?”
“For now,” I said, “let’s assume he’s our new Condor.”
I pinged the phone on my laptop. “Perfect. Chaneke’s device is hitting in that same neighborhood. Right in Colonia Libertad. That’s where I had Condor.”
I quickly Googled the name Chaneke. Like so many of the words in the line sheets, it turned out to be a phonetic misspelling. Chaneques were, in fact, among the hundreds of gods and spirits sacred to the ancient Aztecs. Legendary creatures in Mexican folklore, they are the “little people who steal your soul.” The images of chaneques that I found—pre-Columbian sculptures and drawings—resembled tiny trolls with oversize eyes. By Aztec tradition, the chaneques were guardians of the forest, attacking intruders, frightening them so that their souls would abandon their bodies.
This Top-Tier Chaneke was also a kind of guardian: Chapo’s direct intermediary. In the intercepts, the workers kept referring to Chaneke as “Secre.”
“It’s got to mean he’s Chapo’s secretary,” I said. “And these usernames MD-8 and now MI-26—I think they’re makes of helicopters.”
“Maybe Chaneke’s a helicopter pilot?” Brady said.
The reason, for now at least, remained a mystery, but one thing was clear: Condor might run a tight ship, but Chaneke was intensely disliked by the workers in Chapo’s organization.
“Everyone hates Chaneke,” Brady said, “Second-Tier and the offices keep bitching about him. Sounds like he’s stiffing them. They’re constantly asking him when El Señor is going to pay them. One office worker has been complaining that he needs the money to buy groceries for his kid. And Second-Tier told him, ‘Don’t worry, Condor will take care of you when he returns.’”
“I see it now. Two secretarios—Condor and Chaneke. Same job, they’re just taking shifts,” I said.
We determined that each secretary was working fifteen to thirty days straight—no downtime at all. They probably ate whatever the boss ate, slept whenever he slept, and typed out every order and whim Chapo needed sent via that Top-Tier BlackBerry.
“Talk about a ‘pattern of life’—can you imagine Condor’s?” I asked Brady. “Guy’s got no personal time at all. Twenty-four seven he’s Chapo’s slave.”
Brady let out a short laugh. “And the poor bastard gets to sleep in the room next to Chapo—listening to him bang his whores all night long.”
We had figured out that Chapo, still spooked by the near capture in Cabo, no longer used a phone. He was strictly dictating orders now—his two assigned secretaries would relay all of his communications so that he didn’t even have to touch the Black-Berrys.
BRADY AND I HAD our own reasons for disliking Chaneke. Whenever he took over from Condor, shift-change protocol was followed with almost military precision, meaning that Chaneke, the Second-Tier, and office devices in Durango would all drop their phones almost immediately, either tossing them in the trash or giving them to a family member to use. Either way, it created an instant logistical nightmare for us. Whatever phones we were intercepting—usually hundreds—all went dead. In an instant, no more messages, and no more line sheets to decipher. Our keyhole into Chapo’s secret inner world would vanish, just like the ghostly drug lord himself.
This emotional roller coaster of being up, listening, one day, then down the next was beginning to grind on everyone’s nerves.
“I don’t know how much more my team can take,” Brady told me after Chaneke had once again burned all the phones instantly.
“We’re right there,” I said. “Hold tight, brother. This last ping was in the same area in Culiacán.”
I WAS CERTAIN THAT zeroing in on either Condor’s or Chaneke’s device would lead us straight to Chapo, so for fourteen hours straight I kept pinging. By now I had a concentration of yellow pin markers on my Google Map—adding to weeks of pings already and forming a swirling bull’s-eye in the heart of urban Culiacán. I was staring at a clear pattern of life. Although there was some slight variation in the pings, it appeared that Condor and Chaneke never moved from that Colonia Libertad section of Culiacán.
“Have you seen the overhead images on these?” I asked Brady.
“Looks like a goddamn shantytown down there,” Brady said. “Dirt streets. Derelict cars. Tarps draped over back lots.”
“Yeah, the shitty neighborhood doesn’t make much sense. Why would Chapo be holed up there? We know his secretaries need to be face-to-face. Right there with him. Maybe he’s laying low.”
“Hold on—these are just coming in,” Brady said. He had a batch of brand-new translated line sheets. “Chaneke instructed Naris to go pick up Turbo at the Walmart 68. Naris is driving a black Jetta.”
“Turbo’s in some serous shit,” I said.
“Those six hundred kilos are long gone, and Turbo’s personally responsible,” Brady said.
“Yeah, could get ugly. Turbo will be lucky if he makes it out alive.”
Several hours prior, Chaneke—passing orders down through Second-Tier, then to Office-5, and finally out to Chapo’s Mazatlán-based maritime coordinator—instructed Turbo to head to “El 19.” His tío (“uncle,” yet another coded nickname for Chapo) was ready to see him. Turbo was then told to go to the “Walmart 68 on Obregon,” where he’d wait to get picked up by a black Jetta.
Brady and I had established that El 19 was clearly the DTO’s code for Culiacán.
“And I know that Walmart,” I said. “It’s just to the east of all my Top-Tier pings, off Avenida Álvaro Obregón. It’s close—the perfect pickup spot.” I watched the movements of Naris as I continued to ping him.
“You dialed in?” Brady asked.
“Yep, he’s there at the Walmart. Now he’s headed further west.”
I kept tracking Naris with regular pings, getting closer to the elusive boss.
Abra la puerta. Abra la puerta!
Naris was sending messages out to Office-6, but there was a glitch in the system. His requests to “open the door” weren’t getting delivered to Second-Tier, which meant they weren’t getting relayed to Chaneke.
“He’s stuck there at some front gate,” Brady said. “Frustrated as hell.”
It was a bizarre turn of events. I knew Naris was usually highly cautious about all communications—he’d almost always power down his BlackBerry before getting close to Chapo’s location. But now Naris was stuck outside the house, and with no one opening the gate for him, he’d decided to risk it, turning his BlackBerry back on to push his messages out quickly.
Carnal, abra la puerta!
“That’s it!” I said.
Naris was now pinging directly on top of Chaneke.
“Yeah, Naris is at the gate,” I said. “We’ve got him, Brady. Not sure which house. But Chapo is definitely right there on that fucking block.”