Secret date with Penn led cops to El Chapo
Actor interviewed drug lord in Mexican jungle in October, which helped put officials on his trail
A Mexican law enforcement official said Saturday that a secret interview conducted by actor Sean Penn helped authorities locate and capture drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman.
Guzman was arrested early Friday after a shootout in his home state of Sinaloa that killed five and injured one.
Mexico Attorney General Arely Gomez had said Friday that Guzman’s contact with actors and producers for a biopic helped gave law enforcement a new lead on tracking and capturing the world’s most notorious drug kingpin.
The official, who spoke Saturday on condition of anonymity, said it was the Penn interview, for Rolling Stone magazine, that led authorities to Guzman in a rural part of Durango state in October. They aborted their raid at the time because he was with two women and child.
In the interview with Penn, conducted in a jungle clearing, Guzman described starting out in business not long after turning 6, selling oranges and soft drinks.
By15, Guzman said, he had begun to grow marijuana and poppies because there was no other way for his impoverished family to survive.
Now, unapologetically, he said: “I supply more heroin, methamphetamine, cocaine and marijuana than anybody else in the world. I have a fleet of submarines, airplanes, trucks and boats.”
Although his fortune, estimated at $1 billion (U.S.), has come with a trail of blood, he does not consider himself a violent man. “Look, all I do is defend myself, nothing more,” he told Penn. “But do I start trouble? Never.” The seven hours Guzman spent with Penn, and the follow-up interviews by phone and video, which began in October while he was on the run from Mexican and U.S. authorities, marked another surreal turn in his long-running battle to evade capture.
Guzman, one of the world’s most wanted fugitives, who had twice escaped jail, was captured in his home state of Sinaloa in northwest Mexico on Friday after a gun battle with the authorities.
The story also marks a stark admission he has operated a drug empire. Interviewed by a group of reporters in 1993 after a previous arrest, Guzman denied that he had engaged in drug dealing. “I’m a farmer,” he said, listing his produce as corn and beans. He denied that he had used weapons or had significant funds.
The interview with Rolling Stone, believed to be the first Guzman has given in decades, was published online Saturday night.
The interviews were held in a jungle clearing atop a mountain at an undisclosed location in Mexico. Surrounded by more than 100 cartel troops and wearing a silk shirt and pressed black jeans, Guzman sat down to dinner with Penn and Kate del Castillo, an actress who played a drug kingpin in a soap opera.
Mexican authorities told ABC News on Saturday that Penn and del Castillo are under investigation.
Even though Mexican troops attacked his hideout in the days after the meeting, necessitating a narrow escape, Guzman continued the interview by BlackBerry Messenger and in a video delivered by courier to the pair later.
The story provides new details on his dramatic escape from prison last summer, when he disappeared through a hole in his shower into a mile-long tunnel that some engineers estimated took more than a year and at least $1 million to build. The engineers, Penn wrote, had been flown to Germany for specialized training. A motorcycle on rails inside the tunnel had been modified to run in the low-oxygen environment, deep underground.
Penn’s account will probably deepen the concern among the Mexican authorities already embarrassed by Guzman’s multiple escapes, the months required to find him again and his status for some as something of a folk hero. Penn describes being waved through a military checkpoint on his way to meet Guzman, which Penn suggested was because the soldiers recognized Guzman’s son.
Penn said he was also told, during a leg of the journey taken in a small plane equipped with a scrambling device for ground radar only, that the cartel was informed by an insider when the military deployed a highaltitude surveillance plane that might have spotted them.
In the end, the Mexican authorities said Friday night that Guzman had been caught partly because he had been planning a movie about his life and had contacted actors and producers, which had helped the authorities to track him down. Penn’s story says that Guzman, inundated with Hollywood offers while in prison, had indeed elected to make his own movie. Del Castillo, whom he contacted through his lawyer after she posted supportive messages on Twitter, was the only person he trusted to shepherd the project, according to the story. Penn heard about the connection with del Castillo through a mutual acquaintance and asked if he might do an interview.
It is not clear whether the contacts described in the story were the ones that led to Guzman’s arrest. Penn wrote that he had gone to great lengths to maintain security while arranging to meet Guzman. He described labelling cheap “burner” phones, “one per contact, one per day, destroy, burn, buy, balancing levels of encryption, mirroring through Blackphones, anonymous email addresses, unsent messages accessed in draft form.”
Nevertheless, he wrote, “there is no question in my mind but that DEA and the Mexican government are tracking our movements,” referring to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.
Guzman asked Penn whether peo- ple in the United States were interested in him and laughed when Penn told him that the Fusion channel was repeating a documentary on him, Chasing El Chapo.
Guzman, Penn wrote, was also interested in the movie business and how it works. “He’s unimpressed with its financial yield,” wrote Penn, a two-time Academy Award winner for best actor. The “high side doesn’t add up to the downside risk for him. He suggests to us that we consider switching our career paths to the oil business.”
In a wider-ranging interview, for which Penn submitted questions that were put to Guzman on video by one of his associates, he detailed his childhood and said he had tried drugs during his life but had never been an addict and had not touched them for 20 years. He said that he was happy to be free and that the pressure of evading the authorities was normal for him.
Pushed on the morality of his business, he said it was a reality “that drugs destroy.”