The US cop who hunted El Chapo
It was one of the most dangerous manhunts in history – the five-year search for the world’s richest, most ruthless drug trafficker, Joaquín Guzmán, also known as El Chapo. Andrew Hogan, the special agent who caught him in 2014, tells the story for the fir
AT SOME point in 2009 – he’s not sure of the exact moment – a 28-year-old cop named Andrew Hogan came up with an idea. He decided he was going to be the one to arrest Joaquín Guzmán, the Mexican drug trafficker everybody called El Chapo.
It’s possible that Hogan, who was working for the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) in Phoenix in Arizona, USA, got the idea when he was in a Mexican bar, observing a group of young drug dealers – narco juniors, Hogan calls them. They were singing along to a song glorifying the drug trade.
The song was El Niño de La Tuna (The Kid from La Tuna) by Roberto Tapia. It’s about a kid being born in La Tuna, a small town in Sinaloa on the Pacific coast of Mexico. The kid is Joaquín Guzmán. He was small so he got the nickname El Chapo (Shorty).
Born in 1957, El Chapo would become the most successful drug trafficker in the world. For 25 years he was responsible for about half the cocaine consumption in America. So if you were working for the DEA at the time, chasing drug dealers, and if you followed the coke money, the billions and billions of dollars, back to its final destination in Mexico, there’s a good chance you’d find yourself standing next to the boss of the Sinaloa cartel, the biggest drug trafficking organisation in the world.
That man would be 1,67m tall. He’d have dark hair, possibly dyed, and a dark moustache, also possibly dyed. He’d have a waxy, pale complexion. He’d be wearing a T-shirt and a black baseball cap. He’d be 52 years old. He’d be El Chapo. In the bar Hogan watched the narco juniors, and sang along with them to the Roberto Tapia song. “Yo soy El Chapo
Guzmán,” he yelled. I am El Chapo. The guy who, in the eyes of millions of people, was living the Mexican dream.
Maybe that was the moment Hogan decided he wanted to arrest El Chapo. Or maybe it was when he began to study the El Chapo file. Of course, everybody wanted to arrest this guy. He was one of the world’s most wanted men. It wasn’t just police in dozens of countries that wanted to get El Chapo. It was his rivals in the drug business, too. Over the years, he’d been a constant target of sicarios – assassins hired by other drug bosses. They’d shot, tortured and beheaded hundreds of people. But El Chapo always got away.
He’d even escaped from Altiplano, a maximum security prison just outside Mexico City, in 2001; it was estimated he’d spent $2,5 million (then about R18,87 million) bribing the guards.
Being in prison hadn’t stopped him from running the Sinaloa cartel, just as it hadn’t stopped him having sex with dozens of prostitutes, girlfriends and his wife.
BY 2009 El Chapo was at the height of his powers. He was focused and obsessive. Barely literate but with the mind of a top CEO. Able to keep hundreds of details in his mind at any one time, his brain a flow chart of money, drugs, times, distances and precisely quantified amounts of trust and fear. Business magazine Forbes ranked him as the 41st most powerful person in the world, and the 701st richest. He was a billionaire. Perhaps he was untouchable – perhaps he could shoot, threaten or buy his way out of anything.
But Hogan wasn’t intimidated by any of this.
“I never became emotionally attached to the guy – to his myth, his legend. Never fell into believing the hype, like most people,” he says, speaking on the phone from New York.
I’ll talk to Hogan twice. If I had to describe him I’d say he’s not like most people – he’s focused and obsessive. He’s also guarded. He says he doesn’t live in New York, even though he’s currently staying there with his wife and children. He doesn’t want to reveal personal details about his family, or where he really lives and what he actually does these days. He works “in the private security business”. He lives “somewhere in the Midwest”. He’s recently collaborated on a book, Hunting El Chapo, with writer Douglas Century.
One thing about Hogan is that he actually is a hunter. He’s from rural Kansas. The first time he went duck hunting, with his father and older brother, he was eight years old. Sitting silently, waiting for your prey to break cover as the sun comes up – “there’s nothing sweeter”, he says. He’s all about the silence and the patience and the concentration. And then that sudden decisive moment when your quarry becomes your prey.
Talking about El Chapo, he says, “I had people in my office who told me, ‘Why are you wasting your time? We should just give up.’ For me, that was nonsense. Nonsense. For me, it was all about the hunt. All about the challenge. Chapo could have been the Tooth Fairy or Santa Claus. For me, it didn’t matter. This man needed to be captured. And I needed to figure out how to do it.”
In Phoenix, Hogan received a tip-off from an informant, Diego. A woman connected to a Mexican drug cartel needed somebody to launder several million dollars – drug traffickers are always in need of money-laundering services. Diego met the woman, who quizzed him and passed him on to another woman, who quizzed him even more and introduced him to some guys at a higher tier of the cartel. Diego wondered whose money he’d be laundering.
“It’s his,” he told Hogan after meeting the cartel men. “It’s Chapo’s.”
So Hogan and Diego became El Chapo’s money launderers. They applied for an AGEO – attorney general exempt operation – which meant they didn’t have to make any immediate arrests. Instead, they watched the flow of money, which came in several bundles – $109 000, $199 000, $544 000 and £ 560 000, as well as 800 000 Canadian dollars. They wired the money to a
‘El Chapo needed to be captured. And I needed to figure out how to do it'
branch of Deutsche Bank in New York, and from there to an account in Mexico.
One day El Chapo made another request: could Diego and Hogan deliver $1,2 million, in cash, to a car park in Mexico City the next day?
This is the guy, remember, who knows everything – who’s stayed one step ahead of everybody else, the cops and the assassins, for a quarter of a century. And now he’s asking you to cross the line into his world. Would you?
Hogan did. He took the money on a private jet. Then he drove to the car park to make the handover. El Chapo’s man had a scar under one eye. He took the money. He didn’t kidnap or kill Hogan. Soon after this, Hogan made another decision. He requested a transfer to Mexico City.
I ask him how he felt about this, bearing in mind the case of another DEA agent, Enrique Camarena Salazar, who infiltrated a Mexican drug cartel in the ’80s. When his cover was blown he was tortured for more than 24 hours. His nose and cheekbones were shattered, his ribs were broken, his windpipe was crushed and his skull was penetrated with a drill. Meanwhile, he was injected with amphetamines so he wouldn’t black out.
Hogan was married. He had young children. “The dangers of working as a DEA agent in a foreign country – they’re real,” he says. “It’s a life of constant risk assessment. You know that going in.”
He adds, “You never know who could be watching. Members of the cartel. Even the Mexican government. That’s why you have to be in what I call ‘street-cop mode’.”
He pauses. “It’s chilling at times. There’s some fear there. But it’s what you do with that fear. It’s how you step into the fear. And breathe through it. And move on to accomplish the next task. It’s the way I’ve always lived my life. Take that next step. Even though it’s uncomfortable.”
Hogan sat down with his wife to talk about relocation to Mexico City. She said, “What’s your gut telling you? I’ll support you, whatever you decide.”
He took the step. And it was uncomfortable. In Mexico City, Hogan was perpetually in street-cop mode. Sometimes he thought he was being followed. He kept scanning cars and people. Looked out for the guy with a scar on his face. But he made progress.
In 2012, just as Hogan was relocating, the DEA managed to infiltrate the BlackBerry Messenger system of El Chapo’s trafficking operation. Using a GPS, they could see that he was in one of several luxury mansions in a cul de sac in the resort town of Cabo San Lucas.
Mexican federal police surrounded the cul de sac. They searched the houses. They found El Chapo’s stuff, including a “go bag” containing a bulletproof vest, an automatic weapon, and even some grenades.
He’d run without his go bag. The Mexican cops had come close. But El Chapo had got away. Again.
IN MEXICO CITY, Hogan painstakingly combed through the cartel’s BlackBerry messages. Communications were mirrored – bounced back and forth many, many times between lowerlevel cartel members before eventually reaching El Chapo’s most trusted lieutenants. Hogan realised he’d have to unravel the workings of El Chapo’s entire organisation.
He called tech experts at the department of homeland security and the DEA. He arranged subpoenas with the phone company. He ran a statistical analysis. Frequency of numbers texted. GPS location. He read the messages. He tried to decipher the codes, the system of nicknames. He put a whiteboard on the wall and made a chart.
“I’m very detail-orientated,” Hogan tells me. “You have to pay attention to the small things, do the small things right, but still have that big-picture focus.”
He had what he describes as “a single-minded, laser-precision focus”. He’d sit at his desk for six hours straight.
There was always mayhem around him. At the airport there was a shootout between dirty cops and clean cops. Then a DEA colleague met an informant known as El Potrillo. Minutes later a guy rode up on a scooter and shot El Potrillo in the back of the head. If Hogan was infiltrating El Chapo’s organisation, it seemed El Chapo had already infiltrated the other side.
Hogan moved forward. He saw that messages radiated out from certain BlackBerrys in specific patterns. He followed the nicknames. Tocallo, Lic F, Lic Oro, Chuy, Sixto, Pepe, Fresna, Turbo.
Chuy was in charge of getting raw coke from Colombia and Venezuela. Pepe was even further down the line, in the jungle. Sixto was a pilot.
Tocallo could be connected to tocayo, which means “namesake”. Maybe, Hogan thought, this could be one of El Chapo’s sons, notorious for driving Lamborghinis
‘It’s a life of constant risk assessment. You never know who could be watching’
and Ferraris, for wearing enormous Swiss watches and carrying bejewelled pistols. And was El Suegro the father of Chapo’s 20-year-old fifth wife, Emma Coronel Aispuro, whom Chapo married when she was a teenager? Chapo never actually got divorced, it seemed; he just kept on marrying people.
Along with his homeland security colleague, whom he calls Brady Fallon, Hogan was beginning to piece El Chapo’s life together. He followed the messages up the ladder, to a man with the nickname of Condor. People messaged Condor and told him to pass on their greetings to “El Gerente” and “El Señor”. Hogan figured Condor was El Chapo’s personal assistant. Now he could read texts to and from El Chapo himself.
A picture emerged. Chapo was obsessed with every detail of the drug business. He knew the price of every link in the supply chain. Worryingly, he’d set up an intelligence system, and received regular reports from the police and the army. That’s why he always knew the cops were coming. He was fixated on los hoyos – his engineers had dug dozens of tunnels, mostly underneath the USMexico border. He had a laser focus on detail. He was a workaholic. For relief, he was often sent a menu of prostitutes; he’d make his choice and have a chauffeur pick up the woman – often the girl – and deliver her to his house. Then it was back to work.
When Hogan looked at the GPS coordinates, they formed what he called a “bull’s eye” in the Sinaloan city of Culiacán – the “narco capital” of Mexico. The bull’s eye on Hogan’s map wasn’t just one house. It was several. Then one day Hogan picked up a message that El Chapo wanted to see one of his underlings in person. He sent one of his chauffeurs, Nariz – the Nose – to pick him up. Coke had gone missing. The guy was responsible. Hogan tracked the Nose’s phone on GPS. Would the Nose lead him to Chapo’s exact location?
The Nose switched his phone off as he drove. He was being careful. But then he switched it on again. He sent a text. “Abra la puerta.” Open the door. El Chapo’s automatic gate was stuck. Bingo. Hogan had his man.
Now he had to organise a capture operation with the Mexican marines. He had a meeting with the head of the marines, who arranged the operation – helicopters, trucks, dozens of men.
Hogan was watching El Chapo. And now, via informants, El Chapo was watching Hogan. Time was running out. Hogan told the marines to disseminate false information. That this was a training exercise. He watched the wires. El Chapo’s people bought it. For now.
The marines flew into Culiacán. Hogan came along. They surrounded El Chapo’s safe houses. They broke into the houses. There were five. Mostly, they were not luxurious. Cheap furnishings. Faux leather sofas. The doors were made of reinforced steel. There were go bags, bundles of drugs, a pack of the erectile dysfunction drug Cialis. In one go bag El Chapo had packed two pairs of white Calvin Klein briefs. There were baseball caps. Hogan took one of El Chapo’s caps and wore it.
There was something weird about the bathtub in one house. It was raised up on a hydraulic pulley. Under the bath was a tunnel. The marines searched the tunnel. It led into the sewers of Culiacán. El Chapo was gone.
After a gruelling three-day chase they found him. He’d run through the sewer in his underwear. One of his men had driven him down the coast to Mazatlán, where he was holed up in a hotel with his wife and twin toddler daughters. Hogan was there when they found him on 22 February 2014. He’d followed the coke. He’d followed the money. He’d read the endless texts. Now the two men met, face to face. The drug boss who’d infiltrated the cops. The cop who’d infiltrated the cartel. Neither man had slept properly for a while. They were both shattered. Hogan was wearing El Chapo’s hat.
“What’s up, Chapo?” he said.
WE ALL know what happened next. El Chapo was jailed. Then he escaped again on 11 July 2015. He’d got his men to dig a tunnel into his cell. He went on the run. He hid in the mountains. He had a weird meeting with actress Kate del Castillo and actor Sean Penn. He didn’t recognise Penn. He was, it turned out, desperate to find somebody to tell his story. He wanted his exploits turned into a book or a film by someone. Of course, he’d already met that person. That person had been wearing his hat.
On 8 January 2016 he was arrested again and extradited to the United States. He awaits trial in “Little Gitmo”, the Metropolitan Correctional Centre in lower Manhattan. The film, which he’ll get to watch in perhaps the fourth or fifth year of his incarceration, will be called Hunting El Chapo – the story of the kid from La Tuna who was almost untouchable.