Drug king’s tunnel of love
How the Viagra-guzzling most dangerous crook in the world burrowed out of jail to be reunited with his beauty queen bride
Just before 9pm on saturday night, surveillance cameras in Mexico’s most secure prison, Altiplano, picked up its most notorious inmate heading into the shower area of his cell. When he never came out, the guards supposedly providing 24-hour monitoring of drug lord Joaquin Guzman, rushed into his cell and discovered precisely why.
A 20in square hole had been made in the floor, through which the top of a ladder could be seen. It had been hidden by an ingeniously designed hatch, and the ladder descended 32ft to a newly excavated tunnel that stretched away into the distance.
Guzman, head of the sinaloa cartel — the world’s most powerful and ruthless drug trafficking organisation — is nicknamed El Chapo or ‘shorty’ because he’s 5ft 6in tall.
But El Topo, the Mole, would be just as fitting: Guzman loves a good tunnel. His army of traffickers has built 90 under the u.s.Mexico border to smuggle industrial quantities of cocaine, heroin, marijuana and methamphetamine into America and beyond.
He has even commissioned his favourite architect to build them under his safe houses, including one that opened up under his bathtub in true James Bond villain-style.
Now he has staged a prison escape so humiliating to the authorities that it may yet bring the Mexican government to its knees.
For Guzman was the prisoner Mexico had vowed would never get away. He had already managed to get out of another of the country’s maximum security prisons in 2001, and it took them 13 years to recapture him.
under his cunning and brutal leadership, the sinaloa established itself as the first cartel to have a truly global reach, boasting distribution networks that u.s. officials say extend to the UK, France and the Netherlands. El Chapo is the world’s most dangerous criminal and his disappearance possibly history’s most damaging prison escape.
the u.s. had always doubted that Mexico would be able to keep him behind bars and had applied to extradite him. But Mexico’s president Enrique Pena Nieto, who has had great success arresting a string of drug kingpins, considered it a matter of national honour to keep him in the country’s best prison.
While it holds Mexico’s most dangerous criminals, no one had ever escaped from Altiplano. It has its own no-fly zone to thwart a helicopter rescue and its airwaves are electronically restricted to stop prisoners communicating by mobile phone.
But none of this mattered. Mexico’s ‘most secure’ prison managed to keep hold of its worst criminal for just a year and a half. Moustachioed and thick set, Guzman is an intensely secretive man, and he eschews the antics of younger drug barons who show off their Lamborghinis and gold- plated machines guns on Facebook. He built an empire that won him a place in Forbes magazine’s list of the world’s ‘most powerful people’ by working quietly and methodically.
And that is how he got out of prison. His escape route — a tunnel a mile long — was painstakingly built over what was must have been months. Mexican officials have described it as an industrial feat, although it was clearly not built by Guzman himself.
More than 2ft wide and 5ft tall, it had lighting, emergency oxygen tanks and PVC piping for ventilation. It appears Guzman may not even have had to walk. An adapted motorcycle had been fitted to a track to cart rock and earth out. Investigators believe it also whisked Guzman to freedom.
the tunnel led under corn fields and pastures in a region west of Mexico City to a small cinder-block house decorated with Christmas lights. Residents said the unfinished house had been built since 58-yearold Guzman’s imprisonment. And apart from a few personal belongings left by men who had stayed in the house, there was no sign of anyone.
As police helicopters and vehicles fanned out from the jail, the local airport was closed and commandos stopped cars. But with experts predicting that if he wasn’t recaptured in 48 hours, he might never be found again, nobody is hopeful he will soon be back behind bars.
It now appears that the breakout may have been made easier by a large construction project just outside the prison’s perimeter fence which involved builders digging a deep trench and installing rows of giant tubing. It may have provided the perfect cover for El Chapo’s tunnel-building team.
‘It’s unbelievable, but in Mexico, anything can happen,’ said a farmer who lived nearby.
He could just as easily have said that El Chapo can make anything happen. this illiterate but fiercely bright master criminal has crafted a public image of himself as a cross between Robin Hood and the masked bandit Zorro, a man who can never be taken by surprise.
A twitter account yesterday had Guzman boasting yesterday that no prison could hold him. Assuming it was genuine, he said: ‘there’s no jail for such a big midget.’
But while his escape was dramatic, the more prosaic reality is that there is little in Mexico nowadays that cannot be bought — particularly by a multi-billionaire drug lord.
In a clear indication that investigators suspect mass bribery could have been involved, at least 18 prison staff are being questioned.
the oldest child of a subsistence farmer and occasional opium poppy grower in Mexico’s remote sierra Madre mountains, Guzman left school at eight, unable to read or write. He was soon working his way through the ranks of his Guadalajara drug cartel, establishing a reputation for ruthless efficiency.
If, for example, a drug shipment was late, he would shoot the smuggler in the head.
THE late Eighties and Nineties were years when the Mexican cartels plumbed new depths of barbarity in their battle for drug markets. Rivals’ wives were beheaded and their heads sent home in boxes. their young children were hurled off bridges.
By the time Guzman was arrested in 1993 after fleeing into Guatemala, his sinaloa cartel — named after the northern region where it is based – was Mexico’s richest and strongest drug gang.
Extradited to Mexico where he was jailed for 20 years for murder and kidnap, he bought off the prison staff and ran his empire almost as normal from his cell by mobile phone. satiating his prodigious sexual appetite — he is said to eat Viagra ‘like candy’ — he would summon up prostitutes by the busload. He entertained favoured inmates with dinners of fine wine, lobster bisque and filet mignon.
then, one day in 2001, a prison official pulled back a curtain that Guzman had put up across his cell and discovered he had gone. An inquiry concluded he had hidden among dirty washing in a laundry cart pushed by an accomplice.
Cynics said he could as easily have walked out considering all the people he had paid off — 71 prison staff, including the warden, were charged over his escape.
As he heads back into a life on the run, it would be a mistake to assume it will be a desperate, hand-to- mouth existence. During his last period of freedom, safe in his cartel’s mountainous heartland, he and his young beauty-queen bride, Emma Coronel, reportedly moved around a dozen or so ranches guarded by 300 heavily armed men.
He would occasionally break cover in a local smart restaurant. Each time, gunmen would arrive and politely request every other diner’s mobile phones.
Chapo and his entourage would then turn up, gorge themselves on steak and shrimp, apologise for the inconvenience and leave. the phones would be returned and Guzman would pay everyone’s bill.
FUGITIVES usually give themselves away when they try to communicate but here, too, Guzman has proved himself fiendishly cunning. In the past, he gave out orders by tapping out messages on a BlackBerry smart phone — they were less easy to hack into than other models. Missives were sent first to the BlackBerry of a trusted minion who would use a public wi-fi system to relay it to another cartel member.
this gangster would send it on to its intended recipient. tracing such a route, sometimes called a ‘mirror’ system, is incredibly hard.
Guzman has other tricks. Early last year, Mexican marines raided a safe house where he was staying. Delayed by a steel door, they discovered he had fled via an ingenious tunnel that led to the sewers. A switch next to his bathroom vanity mirror caused his bathtub to rise hydraulically and reveal steps leading down to the tunnel.
When, a few days later, his pursuers nabbed him in a beachside apartment block he had entered by pretending to be a frail old man in a wheelchair, he was in his underpants as he snoozed in bed next to his young wife, their two young twin daughters next door.
If his latest purported twitter missives yesterday promising death to those who had crossed him, are anything to go by, the slippery shorty Guzman is not planning to be recaptured any time soon.