‘PENN SHOULD BE IN JAIL’
meds anymore, they would turn to his heroin. He sent smack flooding north, including on Chicago’s streets.
In 2013, the city named Chapo Public Enemy No. 1. Riley’s office got valuable leads by wiretapping local criminals’ phones.
“What really stands out is how stupid all these guys were,” Riley says. “On one call, [a dealer] is talking to Chapo’s guys in Mexico, and he says he thinks the ‘three letters’ [DEA] are onto us. So the guy says, ‘Don’t call me at this number anymore.’ Then he gives out his new number. We laughed our ass off in the office.”
American intelligence began zeroing in on El Chapo by monitoring the phones of those around him. Chapo ordered his henchmen to dispose of their burner phones regularly, but many got lazy and didn’t.
The US also used drones to surveil suspected hideouts, hoping to snap an image of Chapo.
The method led to several close calls (in one raid, Chapo escaped through a tunnel hidden beneath his bathtub) and ultimately his capture in 2014.
A few months after his arrest, however, Chapo was gone, escaped through a mile-long tunnel his crew had dug beneath the Mexican prison. Riley, by then second in command at DEA, had flown down a few days earlier to notify Mexican officials that Chapo was planning to escape. The warning went unheeded.
Money for bribes, Riley says, was built into Chapo’s business model.
In late 2015, officials suspected he was heading to Los Mochis, a coastal town in Sinaloa. Surveillance images showed construction crews fortifying the front door on one house, and locals were overheard murmuring, “Papi is coming.”
IN the end, “burritos and porn are what did him in,” Riley writes. On January 2016, Mexican officials saw a van leaving from a safe house with three men, including Chapo, inside. The group went for Mexican food and to pick up dirty movies, before returning.
The marines moved in. Chapo escaped through the sewer and emerged, carjacking a ride before being apprehended. He was extradited to the US in 2017.
Riley, who is now retired, is gleeful that his nemesis is behind bars and on trial, facing 10 counts.
“It’s fabulous,” he says. “After the scare in New Mexico that night, he got to me. I started looking over my shoulder, started second-guessing what I was doing. I lost focus for a while.
“I love that he’s sitting in jail and he’s now feeling the same way.”