record: Carlos Torres-Ramos had so far flown under DEA’s radar, but he did have a notable criminal history. Confidential informants reported that Carlos was known for moving massive loads of cocaine by the ton from Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru. I studied the black-and-white photo. He stood six feet tall, with receding black hair, a neatly trimmed black goatee, and dark eyes that made him look almost like a professor. But there was another detail that immediately leapt out at me.
“You’re not going to believe this,” I said, still staring at the computer screen. “Diego, get over here.”
I showed Diego the link: Carlos’s daughter Jasmine Elena Torres-Leon was married to Jesús Alfredo Guzmán Salazar, one of Chapo’s most trusted sons.
“Holy shit,” Diego said softly. “Carlos and Chapo are consuegros.”
The word had no precise English equivalent—“co-fathers-inlaw”—and was an important connection between two Mexican families, especially in the world of Sinaloan narcos.
We had thought Carlos was a big-time player, but we never imagined he was this big.
Diego began speaking to Carlos about transportation arrangements directly over the phone, then via BlackBerry Messenger—Carlos considered BlackBerry the most secure mode of communicating. Though they’d still never met—Diego in Phoenix, Carlos in Sinaloa—the two were establishing trust.
“Cero-cincuenta,” Diego said, smiling, finishing up a text session with Carlos. “Think I got this dude.”
“Cero-cincuenta?”
“He just assigned me a number—like he considers me part of his organization. He calls me cero cincuenta.”
Diego was now “050” and part of Carlos’s secret code list. All of Carlos’s most trusted men were designated by a number. Locations were digitized, too: 039 represented Canada; 023 was Mexico City; 040 was Ecuador.
Carlos even sent Diego the equation his organization used to decode phone numbers when they’d send them via text. Sophisticated traffickers never give out phone numbers openly, so Diego would have to multiply every digit via the equation to figure out Carlos’s new cell phone number.
THE MONEY PICKUPS kept flowing in from Canada, now by the millions, all going toward Carlos’s purchase of the two-ton load of cocaine down in Ecuador. Of course, Diego and I weren’t working for free; Diego knew the rules of the narco game and convinced Carlos to give him a deposit to cover the initial costs of transportation. Carlos agreed, and the next day he had a total of $3 million delivered to various pickup locations in Montreal and New York.
Three million in cash: as good as a seizure—and it had the added value of not burning our undercover investigation. With the money deposited in our TDF bank account, Diego and I jumped on the next plane to Ecuador to begin preparing to take delivery of the two tons of cocaine.
Once we’d arrived, Diego had a quick undercover meeting with several of Carlos’s men at one of Guayaquil’s upscale steakhouses. I sat at a table across the restaurant, in the shadows. This time I had a small backup army: a team of plainclothes Ecuador National Police. This was the DEA’s most trusted Sensitive Investigation Unit in-country; every officer had been personally trained at Quantico in counter-narcotics operations. The plainclothesmen were spread all over the restaurant—inside and out—watching every move of Carlos’s men.
ONCE DIEGO FINISHED the meeting, the cops in unmarked cars followed the men to the outskirts of the city—the crooks made a brief stop at a shop to buy brown packing tape—then to a nondescript finca (small farm). Covertly surveilling the finca, the cops were able to obtain the license plate of a white delivery truck parked outside.
Classic Quantico scenario. I remembered from my days of practicals at the academy. The events taking place were standard drugtrafficking methods.
The Ecuadorian cops sat on the truck the entire night and watched it pull away from the finca the next morning, the rear end loaded with bright yellow salt bags. Diego and I instructed the cops to set up a seemingly routine roadside checkpoint, and the truck drove right into it. As soon as the driver saw the marked police cars with flashing lights, he screeched to a stop, bailed out, and sprinted across a field. The police quickly chased him down and put him in cuffs. The cops searched the back of the truck and found 2,513-kilogram bricks of cocaine, stamped with the numbers 777—wrapped in that brown packing tape—tossed into seventy yellow salt bags.
Diego quickly passed the news to Carlos, via BlackBerry, that the load had been seized by the local police, but the boss didn’t flinch. He’d lost two thousand keys to a random roadblock, but it was just the cost of doing business. He wasted no time in asking if Diego was ready to take delivery of more cocaine.
“You believe this guy?” I asked Diego. “Ice in his veins. Just lost a load with a street value of nearly sixty-three million and he wants to trust us with more.”
Diego responded to Carlos’s text immediately:
“Estamos listos. A sus ordenes.”
We’re ready. Awaiting your orders.
OVER THE NEXT SEVERAL WEEKS, Carlos’s crew in Ecuador delivered more than eight hundred kilos of cocaine to undercover Ecuadorian cops posing as Diego’s workers, triggering a global takedown of the Carlos Torres-Ramos drug-trafficking organization.
The whole house of cards came tumbling down in just a matter of hours—Carlos, Ricardo, Mercedes, Doña Guadalupe, and fiftyone other defendants spanning from Canada to Colombia. We also directly seized more than $6.3 million and 6.8 tons of cocaine.
It took Diego and me months to recover from the follow-up work generated by our massive takedown.
AS SOON AS THINGS settled down at the Task Force office, we were eager to get back on the hunt. But this time, we were left with only one place to go. We laid out the chart of the Sinaloa Cartel hierarchy and saw only one target name higher than Carlos. It was that pudgy-faced man with the black mustache in the photo wearing a black tactical vest and plain baseball hat, lightly gripping an automatic rifle slung across his chest.
Joaquín Archivaldo Guzmán Loera—El Chapo himself.
IN JANUARY 2011, I put in for an open position at the DEA Mexico City Country Office, long considered one of the most elite foreign postings for US federal drug enforcement agents targeting Mexican cartels. If I hoped to successfully target Chapo Guzmán, I knew I’d need to work—and live—permanently south of the border. Violence was soaring in Mexico: more than 13,000 people were dead as a result of Chapo’s gunmen and other cartels—notably the ex–Mexican Special Forces known as Los Zetas—battling for key smuggling turf along the US border.
Several months after we took down the Carlos Torres-Ramos organization, Diego and I began conducting our own deconfliction on Guzmán. Surely there had to be someone—some federal team or task force—targeting the world’s most wanted narcotics kingpin. Diego and I ran through the various scenarios as we walked out of the US Attorney’s Office in downtown Phoenix. There had to be agents in every federal law enforcement agency who had a bead on Chapo. We needed to find those agents, put our intel together, and begin coordinating.
I was expecting to discover a hidden world of US-agency-led Chapo task forces, secret war rooms all lining up to get their shots in—but after days of conducting deconfliction checks, Diego and I kept drawing blanks.
Who was targeting Chapo?
The shocking answer was: no one. There was no dedicated team. No elite task force. Not a single federal agent with a substantial