Hunting El Chapo: Taking down the world’s most-wanted drug-lord
This is the untold story of the American federal agent who captured the world’s most-wanted drug-lord.Every generation has its larger-than-life criminal legend living beyond the reach of the law: Billy the Kid, Al Capone, Ronnie Biggs, Pablo Escobar. But for every one of these criminals, there’s a Wyatt Earp, Pat Garrett or Slipper of the Yard. For Joaquín Archivaldo Guzmán-Loera a.k.a. ‘El Chapo’ – the 21st century’s most notorious criminal – that man is D.E.A. Special Agent Andrew Hogan.This is the incredible story of Hogan’s seven-year-long chase to capture El Chapo, a multibillionaire drug-lord and escape-artist posing as a Mexican Robin Hood, who in reality was a brutal sociopath responsible for the murders of thousands. His greedy campaign to take over his rivals’ territories resulted in an unprecedented war with a body count of over 100,000.We follow Hogan on his quest to achieve the seemingly impossible: to cross the border into Mexico and arrest El Chapo, the leader of the Sinaloa Cartel, a billionaire and Public Enemy No. 1, who had been evading capture for more than a decade and had earned a reputation for being utterly untouchable.This intimate thriller tells how Hogan single-mindedly and methodically climbed the ladder within the hierarchy of the Sinaloa Cartel – the world’s wealthiest and most powerful drug-trafficking organization – by creating one of the most sophisticated undercover operations in the history of the D.E.A. From infiltrating Chapo’s inner circle to leading a white-knuckle manhunt with an elite brigade of Mexican Marines, Hogan left no stone unturned in his hunt for the world’s most powerful drug kingpin.
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ALSO BY DOUGLAS CENTURY
BARNEY ROSS
TAKEDOWN
STREET KINGDOM
ICE
IF NOT NOW, WHEN?
BROTHERHOOD OF WARRIORS
HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
First published in the US by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018 This UK edition published 2018
FIRST EDITION
© QQQ, LLC 2018
Cover layout design Dominic Forbes © HarperCollinsPublishers Cover photograph © AFP/Getty Images
A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library
The authors assert the moral right to be identified as the authors of this work
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Source ISBN 9780008245849
Ebook Edition © April 2018 ISBN: 9780008245863 Version 2018-07-18
This is a work of nonfiction: all the events depicted are true and the characters are real. The names of US law enforcement and prosecutors—as well as members of the Mexican military—have been altered, unless already in the public domain. For security reasons, several locations, makes of vehicles, surnames, and aliases have also changed. All dialogue has been rendered to the best of Andrew Hogan’s recollection.
To my wife and sons. —A.H.
Certainly there is no hunting like the hunting of man and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never really care for anything else thereafter.
— Ernest Hemingway, “On the Blue Water,” 1936
Contents
PHOENIX, ARIZONA
May 30, 2009
I FIRST HEARD THE legend of Chapo Guzmán just after midnight inside Mariscos Navolato, a dimly lit Mexican joint on North 67th Avenue in the Maryvale section of West Phoenix. My partner in the DEA Narcotic Task Force, Diego Contreras, was shouting a translation of a song into my ear:
Cuando nació preguntó la partera Le dijo como le van a poner? Por apellido él será Guzmán Loera Y se llamará Joaquín
“When he was born, the midwife asked, ‘What are they gonna name the kid?’ ” Diego yelled, his breath hot and sharp with the shot of Don Julio he’d just downed. “The last name’s Guzmán Loera, and they’re gonna call him Joaquín . . .”
Diego and I had been working as partners in the Phoenix Task Force since early 2007, and two years later we were like brothers. I was the only white guy inside Mariscos Navolato that May night, and I could feel every set of eyes looking me up and down, but sitting shoulder to shoulder with Diego, I felt at ease.
Diego had introduced me to Mexican culture in Phoenix as soon as we met. We’d eat birria out of plastic bowls in the cozy kitchen of some señora’s home that doubled as a makeshift restaurant and order mango raspados from a vendor pushing a cart across the street, all while listening to every narcocorrido>1 Diego had in his CD collection. Though I clearly wasn’t from Mexico, Diego nevertheless told me I was slowly morphing into a güero—a light-skinned, blond-haired, blue-eyed Mexican—and soon no one would take me for a gringo.
The norteño was blaring—Los Jaguares de Culiacán, a fourpiece band on tour in the Southwest, straight from the violent capital of the state of Sinaloa. The polka-like oompa-loompa of the tuba and accordion held a strange and contagious allure. I had a passing knowledge of Spanish, but Diego was teaching me a whole new language: the slang of the barrios, of the narcos, of “war zones” like Ciudad Juárez, Tijuana, and Culiacán. What made these narcocorridos so badass, Diego explained, wasn’t the rollicking tuba, accordion, and guitar—it was the passionate storytelling and ruthless gunman attitude embodied in the lyrics.
A dark-haired waitress in skintight white jeans and heels brought us a bucket filled with cold bottles of La Cerveza del Pacifico. I grabbed one out of the ice and peeled back the damp corner of the canary-yellow label. Pacifico: the pride of Mazatlán. I laughed to myself: we were in the heart of West Phoenix, but it felt as if we’d somehow slipped over the border and eight hundred miles south to Sinaloa. The bar was swarming with traffickers—Diego and I estimated that three-quarters of the crowd was mixed up somehow in the cocaine-weed-and-meth trade.
