For three decades, Joaquín Guzmán mercilessly reigned over the drug trade – but the narco couldn’t stay on top forever
Rush hour starts early on Heroin Highway, generally by 6 a.m. Hockey dads in sport-utes; high school teens in car pools; commodities brokers and pensioners making their early-morning runs into Chicago on I-290. The Eisenhower Expressway – the Ike, as locals call it – is a straight shot in from the western suburbs to the mob-deep blocks of West Chicago.
And so, in 2013, Riley summoned his stagecraft and pronounced Chapo public-enemy number one. At a press conference carried by hundreds of outlets, Riley and members of the ChicagoCommission proclaimed Chapo the greatest threat since Al Capone, a mass poisoner of the city and its suburbs. The fallout from Riley’s broadside surprised everyone, Riley included. “At most, I hoped they’d find some corrupt colonel to go after him down there,” says Riley.
That was Chapo’s boyhood, and the boyhood, by degrees, of most of Mexico’s drug lords of the past half-century. He grew up with, or close to, kids who became his partners and, eventually, his mortal foes: the Beltrán Leyva brothers, five cutthroat charmers who would one day be his enforcers and political fixers; the Arellano-Félix brothers, seven legendary sadists who roasted their victims alive in vacant fields.
No farm was going to hold a kid like that, and at 15 or 16 he won an introduction to the don of Badiraguato, Pedro Avilés Pérez. Avilés, the first of the air smugglers in Mexico, hired him to do odd jobs for his lieutenants. Chapo rode along on their runs to the U.S. border, soaking up knowledge of roads and checkpoints and befriending dispatchers and truckers. Though he couldn’t read or write, he had a head for numbers and a steel-trap memory for detail.
in a fissile rage. Then there’s the second type: the behind-the-scenes mechanic who patiently builds a case for weeks or months, and goes home to his wife and kids at a decent hour. Chapo was convicted in a closed-door trial and given 20 years, hard time, for narco-trafficking. He treated this as a senseless inconvenience. At Puente Grande, a supermax facility 50 miles west of Guadalajara, he bought off everyone from wardens to washerwomen and settled down to do his business. He received his lieutenants in a sumptuous parlor and sent them away with detailed orders on where to ship his tonnage.
Rule number two: Be a nimble supplier. He fitted tractor-trailers with elaborate traps – fake walls and subfloors that hid hundreds of kilos of product . He bought jumbo jets and filled them with “humanitarian” goods for drops in Latin America, then flew the planes back, bearing tons of cocaine, to bribed baggage handlers in Guadalajara. There were fishing vessels and go-fast boats and small submarines that could lurk underwater till the Coast Guard passed above.
History bears this out: Chapo has never killed a fed or declared war on the U.S. government. But it’s clear now that he entertained the option. According to multiple witnesses who’ll testify at trial, Chapo went looking for heavy ordnance in 2008 to attack the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City. He was furious at extraditions of cartel leaders, who were getting long sentences in U.S. courts and dispatched to spend their days in federal pens.
In 2005, while launching his quest to monopolize Mexico’s drug trade, Chapo was told about a pair of Chicago natives with the best broker network in the country. For years, the Flores brothers had been buying in bulk from one of Chapo’s lieutenants near the border. They were smart and street-avoidant, faithfully paid on time and looked like they worked at a Wendy’s in La Villita, the barrio on Chicago’s West Side. Chapo was intrigued. Set a meeting, he told his guy.
In June 2008, DEA agents flew to Mexico to sit with the Flores twins. “We needed a lot of convincing; we’d been promised Chapo before,” says Lorino, who was at the meeting. “But the twins, man, they had the bona fides.” There were stacks and stacks of logbooks listing every drug shipment, four dozen cellphones with texts and voicemails saved from Chapo’s lieutenants, and flowcharts of brokers back in the States who were buying hundreds of kilos apiece.
For weeks, he and his henchmen went zero-dark silent: No calls or BlackBerry messages hit the wire. Then someone saw Ivan, Chapo’s son and security chief, scouting neighborhoods in salty Los Mochis. A sweatbox of a city on the Sinaloan coast, it had everything Chapo lacked while he hid out in the hills: fieryunderage hookers and an easy in-and-out by land and sea. SEMAR sent spies in civilian clothes to check out the report.
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