from behind bars, Chapo had the insight to diversify the Sinaloa Cartel’s operations: where it had previously dealt strictly in cocaine, marijuana, and heroin, the cartel now expanded to the manufacture and smuggling of high-grade methamphetamine, importing the precursor chemicals from Africa, China, and India.
On November 22, 1995—and after being convicted of possession of firearms and drug trafficking and receiving a sentence of twenty years—Chapo arranged to have himself transferred from Altiplano to the maximum-security Federal Social Readaptation Center No. 2, known as Puente Grande, just outside Guadalajara.
Inside Puente Grande, Guzmán quickly built a trusted relationship with “El Licenciado”—or simply “El Lic”—a fellow Sinaloan, from the town of El Dorado. El Lic had been a police officer at the Sinaloa Attorney General’s Office before being appointed to a management position in Puente Grande prison.
Under El Lic’s watch, Chapo reportedly led a life of luxury—liquor and parties, and watching his beloved fútbol matches. He was able to order special meals from a handpicked menu, and when that grew boring, there was plenty of sex. Chapo was granted regular conjugal visits with his wife, various girlfriends, and a stream of prostitutes. He even arranged to have a young woman who was serving time for armed robbery transferred to Puente Grande to further tend to his sexual needs. The woman later revealed Chapo’s supposed romantic streak: “After the first time, Chapo sent to my cell a bouquet of flowers and a bottle of whiskey. I was his queen.” But the reality was more tawdry: on the nights he got bored with her, it was said he passed her off among other incarcerated cartel lieutenants.
It was clear that Chapo was the true boss of the lockup. With growing fears of being extradited to the United States, he planned a brazen escape from Puente Grande.
And sure enough, just after 10 a.m. on January 19, 2001, Guzmán’s electronically secured cell door opened. Lore has it that he was smuggled out in a burlap sack hidden in a laundry cart, then driven through the front gates in a van by one of the corrupt prison guards in a mode reminiscent of John Dillinger’s famous jailbreaks of the 1930s.
The escape required complicity, cooperation, and bribes to various high-ranking prison officials, police, and government authorities, costing the drug lord an estimated $2.5 million. At 11:35 p.m., the prison warden was notified that Chapo’s cell was empty, and chaos ensued. When news of his breakout hit the press, the Mexican government launched an unprecedented dragnet, the most extensive military manhunt the country had mounted since the era of Pancho Villa.
In Guadalajara, Mexican cops raided the house of one of Guzmán’s associates, confiscating automatic weapons, drugs, phones, computers, and thousands of dollars in cash. Within days of the escape, though, it was clear that Guzmán was no longer in Jalisco. The manhunt spread, with hundreds of police officers and soldiers searching the major cities and sleepiest rural communities.
Guzmán called a meeting of all the Sinaloa Cartel lieutenants, eager to prove that he was still the top dog. A new narcocorrido swept the nation, “El Regreso del Chapo.”
No hay Chapo que no sea bravo Así lo dice el refrán2
Chapo was not just bravo: he was now seen as untouchable—the narco boss that no prison could hold. Sightings were reported the length of the nation, but whenever the authorities were getting close to a capture, he could quickly vanish back into his secure redoubt in the Sierra Madre—often spending nights at the ranch where he’d been born—or back into the dense forests and marijuana fields. He was free, flaunting his power, and still running the Sinaloa Cartel with impunity.
It would be nearly thirteen years before he again came face-to-face with any honest agent of the law.
PHOENIX, ARIZONA
October 5, 2008
“LAS TRES LETRAS.”
I repeated the words, looking to Diego for assistance, but I got none. We were sitting in the Black Bomber on a surveillance, listening to a narcocorrido by Explosion Norteña.
Diego chewed on the end of his straw and rattled the ice cubes in his Coke cup, his brow creased like a stern teacher’s.
“The Three Letters?”
The Black Bomber was the ideal vehicle for listening to narcocorridos—booming bass in the Bose speakers, clarity as good as at any Phoenix nightclub. When Diego first came to DEA Phoenix, he was driving that jet-black Chevrolet Suburban Z71 with heavy tint on all the windows and a tan leather interior.
The Mesa PD had seized the Suburban from a coke dealer a couple of years earlier. The owner’s luxury options had made the Bomber the perfect ride for us on long surveillance operations, which included a flip-up customized video screen in the dash. We’d often kill the hours watching Super Troopers, parked in the shadows on a side street before a dope deal was supposed to go down.
But the Black Bomber wasn’t just a rolling entertainment center on 24-inch rims; it was also ideal for raids—unlike standard cop cars, the Suburban could fit four of us in all our tactical gear. We thought of the Bomber as another team member. It was a sad day when some number-crunching bureaucrat made Diego turn her in because she had 200,000 miles on the odometer.
Diego would get pulled over in the Black Bomber by Phoenix cops all the time, simply because it had Mexican plates. He’d kept the originals from the state of Sonora, white and red with small black letters and numbers. Local cops were always looking for cars—especially tricked-out SUVs—with Mexican plates, but it allowed us to blend into any Mexican hood in Phoenix. No one would think twice about a parked Suburban with Sonora plates: behind those dark-tinted windows, Diego and I could sit on a block all night and never get burned by the bad guys.
And the narcocorridos Diego was always playing in the Black Bomber had become central to my education. Every big-time trafficker south of the Rio Grande had at least one norteño song celebrating his exploits.
You were no one in the narco world, Diego explained, until you had your own corrido. But I was still trying to decipher Las Tres Letras...
“Come on, brother,” Diego said, laughing. “You got this. Shit, at this point you’re more Mexican than most of the Mexicans I know...”
I leaned forward in the Bomber and hit the repeat button on the CD player, taking one more shot at decoding those lyrics. “Las Tres Letras?”
Finally, Diego jabbed his index finger hard into my shoulder. “Bro, you’re Las Tres Letras! DEA.”
Las Tres Letras . . . what every drug trafficker fears the most.
DAYS AFTER DIEGO FIRST told me about El Niño de La Tuna, I’d started after-hours research in my cubicle back at the DEA office in central Phoenix.
I searched for “Joaquín GUZMÁN Loera” in our database, the Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs Information System (NADDIS). Chapo’s file was endless; you could scroll down for almost an hour without reaching the end. DEA Phoenix had an open case against Guzmán, but so did dozens of other jurisdictions all across the country. I couldn’t begin to fathom what I’d need to do, how many major cases I’d have to initiate, in order to be the agent entrusted with heading an investigation targeting Guzmán.
THE PRESIDENT of the United States identified Guzmán and the Sinaloa Cartel as significant foreign narcotics traffickers, pursuant to the Kingpin Act,3 in 2001 and again in 2009. The US government had offered a $5 million reward for information leading to his capture, and the Mexican government had offered a reward of 60 million pesos—roughly $3.8 million.
Wildly divergent rumors swirled about Chapo. Some stemmed from law enforcement intel, others from street gossip—the loose chatter of informants—and some were just urban legends, embedded in the lyrics of all those underground corridos.