'WHAT'S UP, CHAPO?'

Fed taunted drug thug

A former Drug Enforcement Administration agent recalled the dramatic moment he came face to face with El Chapo when the Mexican drug kingpin was recaptured iin 20142014.

“I ran right up to him, jumped into his face and said the first thing that came into my head and it was — I screamed, ‘What’s up, Chapo?!’ ” Drew Hogan said Wednesday on the “Today” show.

Hogan was part of a team of American and Mexican authorities tracking the movements of the drug lord, whose real name is Joaquín Guzmán, after his first prison escape in 2001.

Hogan said they closed in on Guzmán “by looking at the details.”

“The phone numbers don’t lie,” he said. “We began intercepting members of Chapo’s inner circle, starting to dismantle layers within a sophisticated communication structure until we got to the top, where I had his personal secretary’s device, who was standing right next to him.”

By pinging the secretary’s phone, Hogan was able to pinpoint where Guzmán was.

The information led them to a hotel in Mazatlán. After Mexican marines pounded on the door of El Chapo’s room, he gave up without a fight.

“I heard excited radio chatter: ‘They got him! They got the target!’ ” Hogan said.

The leader of the Sinaloa drug cartel had been on the lam for most of the 13 years following his escape. He pulled another jail break in 2015 before being caught again and extradited to the United States in 2016.

Before confronting Guzmán, Hogan donned the fugitive’s own black baseball cap, which the G-man had just taken from the hotel room’s closet. He called it a “souvenir of the hunt.”

Guzmán, 61, faces US charges stemming from his time running the drug cartel, in addition to carrying out hundreds of murders.

The trial of Guzmán, who is being held at a federal facility in downtown Manhattan, has been postponed from April to September so his attorneys can examine more than 300,000 pages of documents.

Hogan had kept a low profile until Tuesday’s release of his book, “Hunting El Chapo.” Sony Pictures won the rights to make a movie from the book.

El Chapo always wanted Hollywood to produce a biopic that would “immortalize him in film.”