Drug Lords (2018) s02e01 Episode Script
El Chapo
[Jack Riley.]
One of the traffickers was summoned to Sinaloa in the mountain.
As he was being driven up the mountain to meet Chapo, it was 100 degrees out.
And there were people chained to trees all the way up.
Some may have been dead.
Some certainly were gonna die.
But that was all about intimidation.
It was all about, "Hey, you're gonna come work for me.
I'm gonna pay you.
And if not, then I'll kill you.
" [sirens wailing.]
[indistinct chatter on radio.]
[narrator.]
Chicago, 2013.
Crime in the city is reaching fever pitch.
Hands on top of your head.
Go round to the back.
[narrator.]
And it's down to a drug cartel 1,600 miles away in Mexico, and its head, El Chapo.
[Anabel Hernández.]
Chapo Guzmán, he's the most powerful drug lord in the world.
He has operations in Asia, in Africa, in Europe.
I mean, he's everywhere.
[Riley.]
He basically controlled the country.
He was a billionaire, and he was a business genius.
It's kinda the perfect storm.
[narrator.]
El Chapo and his Sinaloa cartel are flooding the States with millions of dollars of narcotics, from Mexico and beyond, every day.
The Sinaloa cartel represented, arguably, three quarters of the US-Mexican border.
[narrator.]
And US authorities marked their man "Public Enemy Number One.
" He's clearly more dangerous than Al Capone was at his height.
[gunfire.]
[people screaming.]
[narrator.]
The drug kingpin will stop at nothing to stay on top, waging a brutal turf war against his rival cartels and a 25-year game of cat and mouse with the feds.
[gunfire.]
[Riley.]
His organization is the largest, most well-financed, vicious criminal entity this world's ever seen.
[camera shutter clicking.]
When I saw what his organization did to my hometown of Chicago, that was it.
"We gotta get this guy.
We gotta destroy him any way we can.
" [narrator.]
Mountainous northwest Mexico.
The 1960s.
[indistinct chatter.]
A young boy named Joaquín Guzmán is busy trying to scratch out a living.
[in Spanish.]
His dad and mum were very poor.
He sold bread and oranges, so he could survive with his mother.
Then, after a while, he started doing things to make money.
[narrator.]
He's known by his nickname, "El Chapo," meaning "Shorty," for his stocky 5'6" frame.
And like many poor teenagers in Sinaloa, El Chapo grows up idolizing the reigning drug lords who flaunt the spoils of their violent business.
[Hernández.]
The dreams of these boys were, "I want to have a nice truck.
I want to have, beside me, a beautiful woman.
" That was the dream of these boys.
So, when he was 15, he decided to be a criminal and create his own business.
[narrator.]
Still just a teenager, El Chapo starts to process and sell marijuana and opium, Sinaloa's main cash crops.
[Juan.]
He started buying heroin.
He bought it from some men here in Culiacán.
Little by little, he established his own business.
[narrator.]
But it's not long before he finds there are bigger profits across the Colombian border in cocaine.
[Juan.]
We would go on a speedboat, carrying, like, two and a half tons of cocaine.
Behind us came a speedboat with around 5,000 liters of gasoline, because you burn a lot of petrol.
[narrator.]
Working with the infamous Guadalajara cartel, El Chapo is soon trafficking cocaine to the US, selling it for 12 times what it cost to produce.
He catches the eye of the cartel's notorious kingpin, Miguel Ãngel Félix Gallardo.
[Riley.]
Gallardo was a very, very astute businessman.
He was extremely low-key.
He was also a very brutal guy when he had to be, but I think he really was the first one that Chapo recognized was a business person.
[narrator.]
Gallardo spots El Chapo's natural talent for smuggling and promotes him right to the top.
He really became part of the most important cartel in Mexico in that moment, and that changed the story forever.
[narrator.]
By the late 1980s, the boy raised in poverty is supervising multi-million dollar cartel shipments into the US.
We began hearing about a logistics "genius" operating along the border.
[narrator.]
El Chapo.
[Larry Villalobos.]
Chapo Guzmán, at the time, was rising as somebody that a lot of people were talking about.
He was in charge of moving the contraband, staging it at the US-Mexico border, and then bringing it into the United States, and making sure that it got to the different markets in the US.
[narrator.]
Jack Riley's hometown of Chicago is hit hard.
- [officer.]
Put your hands on the ground.
- I am.
The drug problem in this country was really exploding.
[officer.]
Put your hands up! Right over here [Riley.]
Communities were being ruined, young people's lives were being ruined.
[narrator.]
Mexico is the key corridor funneling Colombian cocaine and other drugs into the US.
So the DEA builds a force that can fight back against the Mexican invasion.
[Villalobos.]
We had a hybrid intelligence unit, populated by several agencies of the US government.
And what we were doing was trying to identify all the Mexican cartel organizations.
We poured ourselves into understanding everything in there.
DEA was very good at allowing us to go wherever.
There was no borders to us.
[narrator.]
Desperate to get ahead of El Chapo, the feds make a dangerous move.
[Villalobos.]
There was an opportunity for us to get a bit more intelligence and understand what was going on.
[narrator.]
The DEA risks sending one of their top agents to infiltrate the Guadalajara cartel.
Acting on his intel, Mexican soldiers move in [gunfire.]
destroying the cartel's largest marijuana plantation.
Over two billion dollars of produce goes up in flames.
But it's a triumph that's short-lived.
On February 7th, 1985, the cartel hits back.
[Ronald Reagan.]
Enrique Camarena Salazar, special agent to the Drug Enforcement Administration, was conducting an undercover investigation in Guadalajara, Mexico, to smash a ring of drug traffickers.
He was kidnapped, tortured brutally, and killed.
[narrator.]
To catch the kingpin responsible for the murder of one of their own, the DEA launches a massive homicide investigation, tapping the phones of key cartel associates and rooting out corrupt officials.
[indistinct chatter.]
Eventually, on April 8th, 1989, they get their man capturing El Chapo's boss, Gallardo, in Guadalajara.
[Villalobos.]
As soon as these people begin to fall from what was the Guadalajara cartel, things begin to fracture.
Then you really see Chapo's stature rise.
[narrator.]
With his boss behind bars, El Chapo now steps up to fill the void.
His long apprenticeship is over.
[tires screeching.]
This is now Mexico's most dangerous drug lord.
That's when the picture of Chapo Guzmán really became clear to me.
And it started a 25-year fight to get this guy locked up and put in jail, because I knew, from a very early time, what he was capable of then and, if not stopped, what he was going to become.
[narrator.]
Ever ambitious, the new cartel boss is determined to destroy the competition.
And he has one big advantage.
They called him "El Rapido," the quick one, the rapid one, because he guaranteed that he could deliver the product that he was receiving into the United States within 48 hours of receiving it in Mexico.
And at the time, nobody knew how he was doing it.
[indistinct chatter on radio.]
[Juan.]
It was inside a normal little house and there was a mirror on the wall.
And hidden behind it, if you lifted it up, was a little button you could push, and a door would open.
And you'd go down ten meters on a ladder.
And then you'd go out into another house on the other side.
The shipments that passed through here were huge.
[narrator.]
Instead of taking drugs over the border, El Chapo and his team moved them under it, through a network of secret tunnels.
[Villalobos.]
When you dig a tunnel under two countries and you're able to bring drugs or money or arms or people, you're really touching on threats to the national security of the United States.
So he was important.
How dare he? [narrator.]
Tunnels will become EL Chapo's calling card, a device that will secure his success and confound the authorities.
[Villalobos.]
How is it that this uneducated logistician from the Sinaloa mountains was able to do this across an international border and get away with it? [narrator.]
By the 1990s, El Chapo's raking in millions of dollars a week and feels untouchable.
[in Spanish.]
What have you been up to, sweetie? [narrator.]
Living a family life out in the open.
Have you been jumping up and down? [Hernández.]
He was rich in that moment.
He had a lot of money.
He has properties.
He had airplanes.
He had the money to pay bribes to members of the government to work with him.
He had enough power to do that.
[narrator.]
But El Chapo's hunger is insatiable, and he wants to expand.
He has his eye on the border town of Tijuana, highly prized for its strategic location next to California, one of the largest cocaine markets in the world.
But this town is controlled by the infamous Arellano Félix brothers of the Tijuana cartel, so El Chapo goes on the offensive.
[upbeat music playing.]
[indistinct chatter.]
[narrator.]
In November, 1992, he seizes his opportunity when the brothers leave their home turf for the seaside resort of Puerto Vallarta.
[Hernández.]
He decides to organize one attack against the Arellano Félix brothers when they were inside one of the most famous discos in Puerto Vallarta.
[narrator.]
El Chapo's men opened fire.
[people screaming.]
[narrator.]
The Arellano Félix brothers miraculously survive, but El Chapo sends them a clear message.
[Hernández.]
El Chapo was a man who was very impulsive and very violent.
I mean, no one can control him.
[narrator.]
The brothers know the only way to hold on to Tijuana is to get even.
A few months later, they get their chance, at Guadalajara Airport.
El Chapo's driver drops him off at departure.
At the same time, the Archbishop of Guadalajara, Cardinal Posadas, is also passing through the airport.
[Villalobos.]
Arellano Félix has a group of killers in Guadalajara at the airport, and their orders are to kill Chapo.
[gunfire.]
These guys open fire.
There's a shoot-out outside the airport.
El Chapo escapes with his life, and they kill the cardinal.
His vehicle was identical to Chapo's wife's car.
It was a late model, white Lincoln Continental.
[church bell tolling.]
[narrator.]
The brutal murder of the much-loved cardinal causes public outrage.
Tens of thousands of mourners attend his funeral.
[Hernández.]
The Mexican government has to arrest someone, because this is a scandal.
[indistinct chatter on radio.]
[narrator.]
They issue an arrest warrant for both the Arellano Félix brothers and El Chapo, who was now a suspect in his own attempted murder.
[reporter.]
Joaquín Guzmán Loera alias El Chapo Guzmán.
Héctor Luis Palma Salazar.
[narrator.]
Mexican police put out wanted posters, offering a five million dollar bounty for each man.
With the country in uproar, El Chapo hits the road, traveling 1,000 miles south.
The DEA and Mexican authorities decide to pool their resources to catch El Chapo.
[Riley.]
It was a time when you almost had to roll your sleeves up and say, "We didn't trust you in the past.
You didn't trust us.
But this guy's bigger than all of us.
He's getting over on us.
He's winning every day.
People are dying.
" [narrator.]
It's not long before an informant leaks the drug lord's location.
On June 9th, 1993, authorities track El Chapo down to Guatemala.
[interviewer in Spanish.]
Why were you running away? - I wasn't running away.
- You weren't running away.
[narrator.]
El Chapo gets 20 years for drug trafficking, criminal association and bribery.
And Agent Jack Riley can finally stand down, satisfied his mission is accomplished.
[Riley.]
I was contemplating retiring, and that's when I really just said, "It's time for me to step down and go play golf.
" [narrator.]
But El Chapo doesn't plan to let prison cramp his style.
El Chapo Guzmán really broke all the rules and started to be the king of the jail.
He was able to do whatever he wants to.
[narrator.]
For a master drug smuggler, getting contraband into a prison cell is a breeze.
And business continues as usual.
He had girls coming in and out.
He had his own suite.
He never slowed down in terms of running his organization.
He just was confined to, you know, the prison.
[narrator.]
But in 2001, after eight years behind bars, El Chapo's worst fear comes true.
A new court ruling clears the path for criminals in Mexico to be extradited to the US.
[indistinct yelling.]
[Riley.]
I think he realized that if he stayed in the can, there was enough investigations here, domestically, that we probably could ask for his extradition.
[narrator.]
Within days of the ruling, confederates on El Chapo's payroll smuggle him past the guards in a laundry cart.
Back in the US, Jack Riley puts his retirement on hold.
[Riley.]
I felt like I just can't walk out of here until we do everything we can to get this guy back.
[narrator.]
El Chapo is back in town.
In that moment, for me, really is the moment when El Chapo Guzmán became this big, big, big drug lord.
[narrator.]
But the now-liberated drug lord has an ingenious plan to recover his power.
He unites Mexico's most successful drug lords to create a super cartel the Federation, and makes himself its unofficial boss.
[Villalobos.]
Nobody was gonna beat them.
They had the infrastructure.
They had the networks, the transportation schemes, the corruption schemes.
They controlled so much that to take them out was gonna be extremely difficult.
We have limited resources.
We gotta play by the rules.
He has unlimited resources.
He makes up the rules.
[crowd cheering.]
[in Spanish.]
I promise to defend and uphold the Constitution of the United States of Mexico and its laws.
[narrator.]
As the cartels tighten their grip on the country and drug violence escalates, Mexico's new president, Felipe Calderón, decides to fight fire with fire.
[gunfire.]
In 2006, he launches an all-out war on drugs, mobilizing six and a half thousand troops.
The border city of Juárez, a huge smuggling corridor, becomes a battle ground.
[gunfire.]
At that time Juárez was more dangerous than Baghdad, where we were embroiled in, actually, a war.
[sirens wailing.]
[gunfire.]
[narrator.]
With no escape for civilians, it becomes Mexico's bloodiest conflict in 100 years.
Thousands of people were killed, just in the year and a half I was there.
That was the first time I saw Chapo use a car bomb.
Which got our attention, because what he was doing is copying what was going on in Afghanistan and Iraq.
[narrator.]
There's evidence of the drugs war everywhere, with beheadings, mass executions and bodies left on the street.
President Calderón, I think, did a great thing by trying to calm it by bringing the military in, but there was no municipal law enforcement, no state police in Juárez.
It was literally a battle zone.
[narrator.]
Eight thousand people are killed in three years, as President Calderón loses the battle to end drug violence.
[Hernández.]
Cost many lives, but at the end, Ciudad Juárez is under control of the Sinaloa cartel.
[narrator.]
By 2010, El Chapo is triumphant, eluding capture and running an empire that stretches across most of the globe and dominates the US drug market.
The Sinaloa cartel represented, arguably, three quarters of the US-Mexican border.
If you took from the Texas Big Bend area all the way west, that was probably his corridor.
I mean, Chapo represented probably the most powerful cartel threat to the United States.
[narrator.]
Despite tearing Juárez apart with terrible violence, in his home state of Sinaloa, El Chapo is now honored as a legend.
[Pepe in Spanish.]
We don't see the man as a criminal.
In truth, for us, he's more than a boss.
He helps people here a lot, all of his workers, as well as many people from the ranches and towns around here.
They appreciate him a lot.
You're talking about people who have almost no income.
It was not uncommon for Chapo to to stop and talk to his chauffeur, let's say.
"What's going on in your life?" "My daughter's getting married next year.
" "Really? Here in Sinaloa?" "Yeah.
" "I'll take care of it.
Where do you wanna have it?" Get a big place, provide the band, provide the booze and the food, and the whole town knows.
And the father of the bride said, "Chapo made this possible.
" I mean, he was about that.
They bought churches.
They bought gyms.
You know, everything that the government wasn't to these people, Chapo was.
[Juan.]
He helped people with everything.
He brought electricity to the farms.
The roads were really bad.
He paved them to make it easier for the people to use.
[narrator.]
At the shrine of Malverde, the saint of the drug lords, El Chapo's name is revered.
[Juan.]
He is very loved, and we all took care of him, everyone in the mountains.
[narrator.]
Chapo's image as a man of the people helps him evade capture in Sinaloa.
[in Spanish.]
It's hard to think that, in the 13 years he evaded justice, he didn't have accomplices helping him.
He who eludes justice, who kills, who traffics drugs, who commits abuse, who bribes, who does these types of things at that time, was being considered a hero.
The image of Joaquín Guzmán had to be discredited.
[indistinct chatter.]
[narrator.]
While Mexicans sing of their hero, Chicago takes an even bigger beating.
[Riley.]
Homicides were up.
Shootings were up.
Gang activity was the worst seen in 40, 50 years.
And it was, all in my mind, because of Chapo Guzmán sitting on the mountain in Sinaloa, calling the shots in Chicago.
[narrator.]
Then, El Chapo makes it personal.
[Riley.]
Two high-level traffickers based in Mexico had acknowledged that Chapo had put a bounty on my head.
I think it was $100,000.
And that, specifically, he wanted my head cut off.
At first, I mean, some of these threats happen all the time.
It's part of the job, and you kind of blow 'em off.
But that was a time when you had to pay attention.
[narrator.]
In June 2012, Riley ramps up his manhunt.
I gotta tell you.
Chicago's become a hub for a number of the major cartels.
It's our job to identify and attack those organizations.
We're attacking at the highest possible level, even if that takes us to Mexico, and we're making a difference to interrupt the violence on the street.
We put together a strike force, and it's still in effect today.
It's called the Chicago Strike Force.
And it essentially was there to destroy Sinaloa and to nail Chapo.
[narrator.]
And the DEA strike force employs a new tactic: to destroy El Chapo's Robin Hood image by publicizing his brutality in all its gory detail.
They name him "Public Enemy Number One" and put pressure on Mexican authorities to step up their game.
A team of Special Forces was created specifically to take on the Joaquín Guzmán's case.
This Special Forces group had the job of locating him and capturing him.
[narrator.]
El Chapo was a wanted man, and the number of associates willing to rat on him skyrockets.
Then, on February 22nd, 2014, in Sinaloa, El Chapo lets his biggest weakness, women, get the best of him.
The Marines move in.
[in Spanish.]
On arrival at the apartment we entered in a stealthy way.
Because it was early in the morning, we assumed that everyone was asleep and it would be a surprise when the Marines entered the residence.
[woman screaming.]
[gasping.]
[narrator.]
The authorities capture El Chapo after 13 years on the run.
[breathing heavily.]
[indistinct chatter.]
[Sánchez.]
I remember it very well.
It was a Saturday, in the morning, when I heard about it.
He's transported to Mexico City by air.
He arrives at the attorney general's hangar, where several of president of the republic staff were gathered.
And that's where we carried out all kinds of tests to confirm his identity.
[narrator.]
Once again, El Chapo is behind bars.
Determined not to let him escape a second time, the US immediately begins proceedings to extradite El Chapo, and prison officials install 24-hour surveillance on his cell.
Then on July 11th, 2015, after the prison guards make their evening rounds, El Chapo puts on his shoes and walks into the shower.
He never reappears.
[Riley.]
That was the worst day of my life.
I remember getting the phone call at 2:00 in the morning.
"He what? He what? How How in God's name could this happen?" They actually dug a tunnel a mile away from the prison.
Dug completely under the prison walls and came right up in his toilet.
And, if you see the video, you see him pacing, and then finally he disappears right down the hatch.
And in the tunnel, it was extremely sophisticated.
Again, this is a trademark of Chapo.
The tunnel itself was ventilated with electricity, had a track with a motorcycle on it that he actually used to go that mile and then come up in a house that they had purchased after he had got to prison, about a year earlier.
So they had thought this through very, very well.
Unfortunately, for the Mexicans and for us and for me, it came off like clockwork.
Obviously, the reason we're here today is to voice our extreme displeasure at the Mexican authorities that allowed for the escape of one of the most dangerous criminals in the world.
[indistinct chatter.]
[SEGOB official in Spanish.]
It is a very regrettable incident that is undignified and unworthy to Mexican society.
[Riley.]
I was embarrassed for them.
But I gotta tell ya, I was more pissed off than anything.
It just So, we huddled the next day, and we got the team back together again, and we said, "We did it once.
We're gonna do it again.
We'll do whatever we can to help the Mexicans get this guy again.
" [narrator.]
Now, hunted more than ever, El Chapo heads up into the mountains of his home state of Sinaloa and hires dozens of security guards.
[Pepe.]
When I heard about the escape, I thought that things would be very difficult, very dangerous, because they'll go hard on him.
That's what I thought.
Fortunately, he's an intelligent person who knew how to get things done.
Most of the time, he moved around here in Sinaloa because it's where his people are.
It's easier to give him support with whatever he needs at any given time.
[Riley.]
There's not a large law enforcement presence ever there.
He was paying people off all over to sound the bell.
It's the old saying, "If you see something, say something.
" [bell tolling.]
He basically was in a no-man's-land, and he controlled everything around him.
[narrator.]
But El Chapo starts taking risks.
In October 2016, he meets with Hollywood actor Sean Penn to discuss his life story, but the DEA is watching Sean Penn, too.
He thought Sean Penn was this tough guy who would put a movie together and portray him, remember, as Robin Hood, good versus evil [narrator.]
The authorities used the intel from that meeting with the star to hone in on his location.
Within days, they track him down in Durango, a neighboring state to Sinaloa.
Our brave counterparts in the Marines in the military in Mexico, along with us assisting with intel information They decided to launch an assault on a compound on a mountain, that we really had good information.
We thought he was there.
[narrator.]
They have the target in their sights and are about to take the shot.
But El Chapo has cover.
At that time, Joaquín Guzmán was with a little girl who could have been hurt if one of the tactical group had opened fire.
In these circumstances, the order my Marines received was not to shoot, and, unfortunately Joaquín Guzmán escaped once again.
[Riley.]
This guy's got nine lives.
We took it as a slap.
I can even remember having a meeting at the Department of Justice, and a couple of the attorneys that were handling the case looked at me and said, "He's We'll never get him again.
" And I looked at him like, "Oh Just hang tight.
Not too fast, my friend.
Hang tight.
" [narrator.]
On January 8th, 2016, El Chapo leaves his mountain refuge and comes down to the coastal town of Los Mochis, Sinaloa.
He liked the tacos.
And, evidently, he liked the porno movies.
And he liked coming down into the real world.
And, I think, the older he got, the more that ate him.
I really do.
He just didn't think things through.
He was in a gated community with some very nice homes, and we felt so confident that he would show up there that the Marines hung out on surveillance for almost 60 days.
[narrator.]
Just after midnight, El Chapo's henchmen pick up a large order of tacos with the surveillance team on their tail.
And, lo and behold, we think we have him.
[narrator.]
Just before dawn, the Marines move in on the house where they believe El Chapo's hiding.
[Riley.]
Those Marines I mean, holy moly.
[indistinct chatter.]
What they walked into And they stood tall and did what they were trained to do.
[in Spanish.]
The team made entry and began gaining ground.
[gunfire.]
The house had two floors.
We took control of the first floor, and then the second floor.
[indistinct yelling.]
There were four bodyguards that were killed in that.
The good guys had one guy shot in the arm.
A guy was actually in a red shirt because he was on surveillance and didn't have a chance to change.
That guy's a hero.
[Marine "B".]
The team carried out a systematic search of the place and found a tunnel inside one of the closets of the main room on the first floor.
[narrator.]
But El Chapo and his security chief have already gone underground.
What he wasn't counting on Two or three days before, it rained pretty hard there, so this wasn't a dry sewer.
So they had to wade their way through.
[narrator.]
Day is breaking as the wanted men emerge on a street corner several blocks away.
[Riley.]
Then he pops his head up, and he's looking around.
Then they climb out, and what do they do? As good criminals, they go carjack a car.
But the morons picked the wrong car.
It broke down.
[chuckles.]
[engine stalling.]
[handcuffs clicking.]
And that's where I get the phone call, and they e-mailed me the picture.
It's that famous picture of him in the dirty shirt, sitting in the hotel, and that's when I walked in the boss' office and I said, "It's done.
We got him.
" We felt an enormous satisfaction, an enormous joy, and what can I say? We feel very proud to be part of the Mexican State.
[narrator.]
But the capture of Sinaloa's Robin Hood is not good news for his loyal fans.
[Pepe.]
The first time we heard it, we couldn't believe he's been captured again.
It was something hard to absorb.
Well, everyone was unsettled.
Let's put it that way.
Everything was very, very unstable.
[narrator.]
Once again, El Chapo was sent back to Altiplano prison.
From then on, they regularly move him between cells to prevent escape.
One year later, El Chapo runs out of luck.
I'm pleased to announce the extradition of Chapo Guzmán to the United States from Mexico.
Mr.
Guzmán will be arraigned later today in the United States District Court right here in Brooklyn, on a 17-count sweeping indictment.
[narrator.]
On January 19th, 2017, El Chapo leaves Mexico to face justice in the country he exploited for so long.
[Riley.]
After it was over, it was kind of a letdown, 'cause I knew, for me, my career had reached the end, and it was time to hang it up.
But in the end, we kicked his ass.
And, I think, if we ever took a badge to do something right, this was our effort.
This was the Super Bowl for me.
One of the traffickers was summoned to Sinaloa in the mountain.
As he was being driven up the mountain to meet Chapo, it was 100 degrees out.
And there were people chained to trees all the way up.
Some may have been dead.
Some certainly were gonna die.
But that was all about intimidation.
It was all about, "Hey, you're gonna come work for me.
I'm gonna pay you.
And if not, then I'll kill you.
" [sirens wailing.]
[indistinct chatter on radio.]
[narrator.]
Chicago, 2013.
Crime in the city is reaching fever pitch.
Hands on top of your head.
Go round to the back.
[narrator.]
And it's down to a drug cartel 1,600 miles away in Mexico, and its head, El Chapo.
[Anabel Hernández.]
Chapo Guzmán, he's the most powerful drug lord in the world.
He has operations in Asia, in Africa, in Europe.
I mean, he's everywhere.
[Riley.]
He basically controlled the country.
He was a billionaire, and he was a business genius.
It's kinda the perfect storm.
[narrator.]
El Chapo and his Sinaloa cartel are flooding the States with millions of dollars of narcotics, from Mexico and beyond, every day.
The Sinaloa cartel represented, arguably, three quarters of the US-Mexican border.
[narrator.]
And US authorities marked their man "Public Enemy Number One.
" He's clearly more dangerous than Al Capone was at his height.
[gunfire.]
[people screaming.]
[narrator.]
The drug kingpin will stop at nothing to stay on top, waging a brutal turf war against his rival cartels and a 25-year game of cat and mouse with the feds.
[gunfire.]
[Riley.]
His organization is the largest, most well-financed, vicious criminal entity this world's ever seen.
[camera shutter clicking.]
When I saw what his organization did to my hometown of Chicago, that was it.
"We gotta get this guy.
We gotta destroy him any way we can.
" [narrator.]
Mountainous northwest Mexico.
The 1960s.
[indistinct chatter.]
A young boy named Joaquín Guzmán is busy trying to scratch out a living.
[in Spanish.]
His dad and mum were very poor.
He sold bread and oranges, so he could survive with his mother.
Then, after a while, he started doing things to make money.
[narrator.]
He's known by his nickname, "El Chapo," meaning "Shorty," for his stocky 5'6" frame.
And like many poor teenagers in Sinaloa, El Chapo grows up idolizing the reigning drug lords who flaunt the spoils of their violent business.
[Hernández.]
The dreams of these boys were, "I want to have a nice truck.
I want to have, beside me, a beautiful woman.
" That was the dream of these boys.
So, when he was 15, he decided to be a criminal and create his own business.
[narrator.]
Still just a teenager, El Chapo starts to process and sell marijuana and opium, Sinaloa's main cash crops.
[Juan.]
He started buying heroin.
He bought it from some men here in Culiacán.
Little by little, he established his own business.
[narrator.]
But it's not long before he finds there are bigger profits across the Colombian border in cocaine.
[Juan.]
We would go on a speedboat, carrying, like, two and a half tons of cocaine.
Behind us came a speedboat with around 5,000 liters of gasoline, because you burn a lot of petrol.
[narrator.]
Working with the infamous Guadalajara cartel, El Chapo is soon trafficking cocaine to the US, selling it for 12 times what it cost to produce.
He catches the eye of the cartel's notorious kingpin, Miguel Ãngel Félix Gallardo.
[Riley.]
Gallardo was a very, very astute businessman.
He was extremely low-key.
He was also a very brutal guy when he had to be, but I think he really was the first one that Chapo recognized was a business person.
[narrator.]
Gallardo spots El Chapo's natural talent for smuggling and promotes him right to the top.
He really became part of the most important cartel in Mexico in that moment, and that changed the story forever.
[narrator.]
By the late 1980s, the boy raised in poverty is supervising multi-million dollar cartel shipments into the US.
We began hearing about a logistics "genius" operating along the border.
[narrator.]
El Chapo.
[Larry Villalobos.]
Chapo Guzmán, at the time, was rising as somebody that a lot of people were talking about.
He was in charge of moving the contraband, staging it at the US-Mexico border, and then bringing it into the United States, and making sure that it got to the different markets in the US.
[narrator.]
Jack Riley's hometown of Chicago is hit hard.
- [officer.]
Put your hands on the ground.
- I am.
The drug problem in this country was really exploding.
[officer.]
Put your hands up! Right over here [Riley.]
Communities were being ruined, young people's lives were being ruined.
[narrator.]
Mexico is the key corridor funneling Colombian cocaine and other drugs into the US.
So the DEA builds a force that can fight back against the Mexican invasion.
[Villalobos.]
We had a hybrid intelligence unit, populated by several agencies of the US government.
And what we were doing was trying to identify all the Mexican cartel organizations.
We poured ourselves into understanding everything in there.
DEA was very good at allowing us to go wherever.
There was no borders to us.
[narrator.]
Desperate to get ahead of El Chapo, the feds make a dangerous move.
[Villalobos.]
There was an opportunity for us to get a bit more intelligence and understand what was going on.
[narrator.]
The DEA risks sending one of their top agents to infiltrate the Guadalajara cartel.
Acting on his intel, Mexican soldiers move in [gunfire.]
destroying the cartel's largest marijuana plantation.
Over two billion dollars of produce goes up in flames.
But it's a triumph that's short-lived.
On February 7th, 1985, the cartel hits back.
[Ronald Reagan.]
Enrique Camarena Salazar, special agent to the Drug Enforcement Administration, was conducting an undercover investigation in Guadalajara, Mexico, to smash a ring of drug traffickers.
He was kidnapped, tortured brutally, and killed.
[narrator.]
To catch the kingpin responsible for the murder of one of their own, the DEA launches a massive homicide investigation, tapping the phones of key cartel associates and rooting out corrupt officials.
[indistinct chatter.]
Eventually, on April 8th, 1989, they get their man capturing El Chapo's boss, Gallardo, in Guadalajara.
[Villalobos.]
As soon as these people begin to fall from what was the Guadalajara cartel, things begin to fracture.
Then you really see Chapo's stature rise.
[narrator.]
With his boss behind bars, El Chapo now steps up to fill the void.
His long apprenticeship is over.
[tires screeching.]
This is now Mexico's most dangerous drug lord.
That's when the picture of Chapo Guzmán really became clear to me.
And it started a 25-year fight to get this guy locked up and put in jail, because I knew, from a very early time, what he was capable of then and, if not stopped, what he was going to become.
[narrator.]
Ever ambitious, the new cartel boss is determined to destroy the competition.
And he has one big advantage.
They called him "El Rapido," the quick one, the rapid one, because he guaranteed that he could deliver the product that he was receiving into the United States within 48 hours of receiving it in Mexico.
And at the time, nobody knew how he was doing it.
[indistinct chatter on radio.]
[Juan.]
It was inside a normal little house and there was a mirror on the wall.
And hidden behind it, if you lifted it up, was a little button you could push, and a door would open.
And you'd go down ten meters on a ladder.
And then you'd go out into another house on the other side.
The shipments that passed through here were huge.
[narrator.]
Instead of taking drugs over the border, El Chapo and his team moved them under it, through a network of secret tunnels.
[Villalobos.]
When you dig a tunnel under two countries and you're able to bring drugs or money or arms or people, you're really touching on threats to the national security of the United States.
So he was important.
How dare he? [narrator.]
Tunnels will become EL Chapo's calling card, a device that will secure his success and confound the authorities.
[Villalobos.]
How is it that this uneducated logistician from the Sinaloa mountains was able to do this across an international border and get away with it? [narrator.]
By the 1990s, El Chapo's raking in millions of dollars a week and feels untouchable.
[in Spanish.]
What have you been up to, sweetie? [narrator.]
Living a family life out in the open.
Have you been jumping up and down? [Hernández.]
He was rich in that moment.
He had a lot of money.
He has properties.
He had airplanes.
He had the money to pay bribes to members of the government to work with him.
He had enough power to do that.
[narrator.]
But El Chapo's hunger is insatiable, and he wants to expand.
He has his eye on the border town of Tijuana, highly prized for its strategic location next to California, one of the largest cocaine markets in the world.
But this town is controlled by the infamous Arellano Félix brothers of the Tijuana cartel, so El Chapo goes on the offensive.
[upbeat music playing.]
[indistinct chatter.]
[narrator.]
In November, 1992, he seizes his opportunity when the brothers leave their home turf for the seaside resort of Puerto Vallarta.
[Hernández.]
He decides to organize one attack against the Arellano Félix brothers when they were inside one of the most famous discos in Puerto Vallarta.
[narrator.]
El Chapo's men opened fire.
[people screaming.]
[narrator.]
The Arellano Félix brothers miraculously survive, but El Chapo sends them a clear message.
[Hernández.]
El Chapo was a man who was very impulsive and very violent.
I mean, no one can control him.
[narrator.]
The brothers know the only way to hold on to Tijuana is to get even.
A few months later, they get their chance, at Guadalajara Airport.
El Chapo's driver drops him off at departure.
At the same time, the Archbishop of Guadalajara, Cardinal Posadas, is also passing through the airport.
[Villalobos.]
Arellano Félix has a group of killers in Guadalajara at the airport, and their orders are to kill Chapo.
[gunfire.]
These guys open fire.
There's a shoot-out outside the airport.
El Chapo escapes with his life, and they kill the cardinal.
His vehicle was identical to Chapo's wife's car.
It was a late model, white Lincoln Continental.
[church bell tolling.]
[narrator.]
The brutal murder of the much-loved cardinal causes public outrage.
Tens of thousands of mourners attend his funeral.
[Hernández.]
The Mexican government has to arrest someone, because this is a scandal.
[indistinct chatter on radio.]
[narrator.]
They issue an arrest warrant for both the Arellano Félix brothers and El Chapo, who was now a suspect in his own attempted murder.
[reporter.]
Joaquín Guzmán Loera alias El Chapo Guzmán.
Héctor Luis Palma Salazar.
[narrator.]
Mexican police put out wanted posters, offering a five million dollar bounty for each man.
With the country in uproar, El Chapo hits the road, traveling 1,000 miles south.
The DEA and Mexican authorities decide to pool their resources to catch El Chapo.
[Riley.]
It was a time when you almost had to roll your sleeves up and say, "We didn't trust you in the past.
You didn't trust us.
But this guy's bigger than all of us.
He's getting over on us.
He's winning every day.
People are dying.
" [narrator.]
It's not long before an informant leaks the drug lord's location.
On June 9th, 1993, authorities track El Chapo down to Guatemala.
[interviewer in Spanish.]
Why were you running away? - I wasn't running away.
- You weren't running away.
[narrator.]
El Chapo gets 20 years for drug trafficking, criminal association and bribery.
And Agent Jack Riley can finally stand down, satisfied his mission is accomplished.
[Riley.]
I was contemplating retiring, and that's when I really just said, "It's time for me to step down and go play golf.
" [narrator.]
But El Chapo doesn't plan to let prison cramp his style.
El Chapo Guzmán really broke all the rules and started to be the king of the jail.
He was able to do whatever he wants to.
[narrator.]
For a master drug smuggler, getting contraband into a prison cell is a breeze.
And business continues as usual.
He had girls coming in and out.
He had his own suite.
He never slowed down in terms of running his organization.
He just was confined to, you know, the prison.
[narrator.]
But in 2001, after eight years behind bars, El Chapo's worst fear comes true.
A new court ruling clears the path for criminals in Mexico to be extradited to the US.
[indistinct yelling.]
[Riley.]
I think he realized that if he stayed in the can, there was enough investigations here, domestically, that we probably could ask for his extradition.
[narrator.]
Within days of the ruling, confederates on El Chapo's payroll smuggle him past the guards in a laundry cart.
Back in the US, Jack Riley puts his retirement on hold.
[Riley.]
I felt like I just can't walk out of here until we do everything we can to get this guy back.
[narrator.]
El Chapo is back in town.
In that moment, for me, really is the moment when El Chapo Guzmán became this big, big, big drug lord.
[narrator.]
But the now-liberated drug lord has an ingenious plan to recover his power.
He unites Mexico's most successful drug lords to create a super cartel the Federation, and makes himself its unofficial boss.
[Villalobos.]
Nobody was gonna beat them.
They had the infrastructure.
They had the networks, the transportation schemes, the corruption schemes.
They controlled so much that to take them out was gonna be extremely difficult.
We have limited resources.
We gotta play by the rules.
He has unlimited resources.
He makes up the rules.
[crowd cheering.]
[in Spanish.]
I promise to defend and uphold the Constitution of the United States of Mexico and its laws.
[narrator.]
As the cartels tighten their grip on the country and drug violence escalates, Mexico's new president, Felipe Calderón, decides to fight fire with fire.
[gunfire.]
In 2006, he launches an all-out war on drugs, mobilizing six and a half thousand troops.
The border city of Juárez, a huge smuggling corridor, becomes a battle ground.
[gunfire.]
At that time Juárez was more dangerous than Baghdad, where we were embroiled in, actually, a war.
[sirens wailing.]
[gunfire.]
[narrator.]
With no escape for civilians, it becomes Mexico's bloodiest conflict in 100 years.
Thousands of people were killed, just in the year and a half I was there.
That was the first time I saw Chapo use a car bomb.
Which got our attention, because what he was doing is copying what was going on in Afghanistan and Iraq.
[narrator.]
There's evidence of the drugs war everywhere, with beheadings, mass executions and bodies left on the street.
President Calderón, I think, did a great thing by trying to calm it by bringing the military in, but there was no municipal law enforcement, no state police in Juárez.
It was literally a battle zone.
[narrator.]
Eight thousand people are killed in three years, as President Calderón loses the battle to end drug violence.
[Hernández.]
Cost many lives, but at the end, Ciudad Juárez is under control of the Sinaloa cartel.
[narrator.]
By 2010, El Chapo is triumphant, eluding capture and running an empire that stretches across most of the globe and dominates the US drug market.
The Sinaloa cartel represented, arguably, three quarters of the US-Mexican border.
If you took from the Texas Big Bend area all the way west, that was probably his corridor.
I mean, Chapo represented probably the most powerful cartel threat to the United States.
[narrator.]
Despite tearing Juárez apart with terrible violence, in his home state of Sinaloa, El Chapo is now honored as a legend.
[Pepe in Spanish.]
We don't see the man as a criminal.
In truth, for us, he's more than a boss.
He helps people here a lot, all of his workers, as well as many people from the ranches and towns around here.
They appreciate him a lot.
You're talking about people who have almost no income.
It was not uncommon for Chapo to to stop and talk to his chauffeur, let's say.
"What's going on in your life?" "My daughter's getting married next year.
" "Really? Here in Sinaloa?" "Yeah.
" "I'll take care of it.
Where do you wanna have it?" Get a big place, provide the band, provide the booze and the food, and the whole town knows.
And the father of the bride said, "Chapo made this possible.
" I mean, he was about that.
They bought churches.
They bought gyms.
You know, everything that the government wasn't to these people, Chapo was.
[Juan.]
He helped people with everything.
He brought electricity to the farms.
The roads were really bad.
He paved them to make it easier for the people to use.
[narrator.]
At the shrine of Malverde, the saint of the drug lords, El Chapo's name is revered.
[Juan.]
He is very loved, and we all took care of him, everyone in the mountains.
[narrator.]
Chapo's image as a man of the people helps him evade capture in Sinaloa.
[in Spanish.]
It's hard to think that, in the 13 years he evaded justice, he didn't have accomplices helping him.
He who eludes justice, who kills, who traffics drugs, who commits abuse, who bribes, who does these types of things at that time, was being considered a hero.
The image of Joaquín Guzmán had to be discredited.
[indistinct chatter.]
[narrator.]
While Mexicans sing of their hero, Chicago takes an even bigger beating.
[Riley.]
Homicides were up.
Shootings were up.
Gang activity was the worst seen in 40, 50 years.
And it was, all in my mind, because of Chapo Guzmán sitting on the mountain in Sinaloa, calling the shots in Chicago.
[narrator.]
Then, El Chapo makes it personal.
[Riley.]
Two high-level traffickers based in Mexico had acknowledged that Chapo had put a bounty on my head.
I think it was $100,000.
And that, specifically, he wanted my head cut off.
At first, I mean, some of these threats happen all the time.
It's part of the job, and you kind of blow 'em off.
But that was a time when you had to pay attention.
[narrator.]
In June 2012, Riley ramps up his manhunt.
I gotta tell you.
Chicago's become a hub for a number of the major cartels.
It's our job to identify and attack those organizations.
We're attacking at the highest possible level, even if that takes us to Mexico, and we're making a difference to interrupt the violence on the street.
We put together a strike force, and it's still in effect today.
It's called the Chicago Strike Force.
And it essentially was there to destroy Sinaloa and to nail Chapo.
[narrator.]
And the DEA strike force employs a new tactic: to destroy El Chapo's Robin Hood image by publicizing his brutality in all its gory detail.
They name him "Public Enemy Number One" and put pressure on Mexican authorities to step up their game.
A team of Special Forces was created specifically to take on the Joaquín Guzmán's case.
This Special Forces group had the job of locating him and capturing him.
[narrator.]
El Chapo was a wanted man, and the number of associates willing to rat on him skyrockets.
Then, on February 22nd, 2014, in Sinaloa, El Chapo lets his biggest weakness, women, get the best of him.
The Marines move in.
[in Spanish.]
On arrival at the apartment we entered in a stealthy way.
Because it was early in the morning, we assumed that everyone was asleep and it would be a surprise when the Marines entered the residence.
[woman screaming.]
[gasping.]
[narrator.]
The authorities capture El Chapo after 13 years on the run.
[breathing heavily.]
[indistinct chatter.]
[Sánchez.]
I remember it very well.
It was a Saturday, in the morning, when I heard about it.
He's transported to Mexico City by air.
He arrives at the attorney general's hangar, where several of president of the republic staff were gathered.
And that's where we carried out all kinds of tests to confirm his identity.
[narrator.]
Once again, El Chapo is behind bars.
Determined not to let him escape a second time, the US immediately begins proceedings to extradite El Chapo, and prison officials install 24-hour surveillance on his cell.
Then on July 11th, 2015, after the prison guards make their evening rounds, El Chapo puts on his shoes and walks into the shower.
He never reappears.
[Riley.]
That was the worst day of my life.
I remember getting the phone call at 2:00 in the morning.
"He what? He what? How How in God's name could this happen?" They actually dug a tunnel a mile away from the prison.
Dug completely under the prison walls and came right up in his toilet.
And, if you see the video, you see him pacing, and then finally he disappears right down the hatch.
And in the tunnel, it was extremely sophisticated.
Again, this is a trademark of Chapo.
The tunnel itself was ventilated with electricity, had a track with a motorcycle on it that he actually used to go that mile and then come up in a house that they had purchased after he had got to prison, about a year earlier.
So they had thought this through very, very well.
Unfortunately, for the Mexicans and for us and for me, it came off like clockwork.
Obviously, the reason we're here today is to voice our extreme displeasure at the Mexican authorities that allowed for the escape of one of the most dangerous criminals in the world.
[indistinct chatter.]
[SEGOB official in Spanish.]
It is a very regrettable incident that is undignified and unworthy to Mexican society.
[Riley.]
I was embarrassed for them.
But I gotta tell ya, I was more pissed off than anything.
It just So, we huddled the next day, and we got the team back together again, and we said, "We did it once.
We're gonna do it again.
We'll do whatever we can to help the Mexicans get this guy again.
" [narrator.]
Now, hunted more than ever, El Chapo heads up into the mountains of his home state of Sinaloa and hires dozens of security guards.
[Pepe.]
When I heard about the escape, I thought that things would be very difficult, very dangerous, because they'll go hard on him.
That's what I thought.
Fortunately, he's an intelligent person who knew how to get things done.
Most of the time, he moved around here in Sinaloa because it's where his people are.
It's easier to give him support with whatever he needs at any given time.
[Riley.]
There's not a large law enforcement presence ever there.
He was paying people off all over to sound the bell.
It's the old saying, "If you see something, say something.
" [bell tolling.]
He basically was in a no-man's-land, and he controlled everything around him.
[narrator.]
But El Chapo starts taking risks.
In October 2016, he meets with Hollywood actor Sean Penn to discuss his life story, but the DEA is watching Sean Penn, too.
He thought Sean Penn was this tough guy who would put a movie together and portray him, remember, as Robin Hood, good versus evil [narrator.]
The authorities used the intel from that meeting with the star to hone in on his location.
Within days, they track him down in Durango, a neighboring state to Sinaloa.
Our brave counterparts in the Marines in the military in Mexico, along with us assisting with intel information They decided to launch an assault on a compound on a mountain, that we really had good information.
We thought he was there.
[narrator.]
They have the target in their sights and are about to take the shot.
But El Chapo has cover.
At that time, Joaquín Guzmán was with a little girl who could have been hurt if one of the tactical group had opened fire.
In these circumstances, the order my Marines received was not to shoot, and, unfortunately Joaquín Guzmán escaped once again.
[Riley.]
This guy's got nine lives.
We took it as a slap.
I can even remember having a meeting at the Department of Justice, and a couple of the attorneys that were handling the case looked at me and said, "He's We'll never get him again.
" And I looked at him like, "Oh Just hang tight.
Not too fast, my friend.
Hang tight.
" [narrator.]
On January 8th, 2016, El Chapo leaves his mountain refuge and comes down to the coastal town of Los Mochis, Sinaloa.
He liked the tacos.
And, evidently, he liked the porno movies.
And he liked coming down into the real world.
And, I think, the older he got, the more that ate him.
I really do.
He just didn't think things through.
He was in a gated community with some very nice homes, and we felt so confident that he would show up there that the Marines hung out on surveillance for almost 60 days.
[narrator.]
Just after midnight, El Chapo's henchmen pick up a large order of tacos with the surveillance team on their tail.
And, lo and behold, we think we have him.
[narrator.]
Just before dawn, the Marines move in on the house where they believe El Chapo's hiding.
[Riley.]
Those Marines I mean, holy moly.
[indistinct chatter.]
What they walked into And they stood tall and did what they were trained to do.
[in Spanish.]
The team made entry and began gaining ground.
[gunfire.]
The house had two floors.
We took control of the first floor, and then the second floor.
[indistinct yelling.]
There were four bodyguards that were killed in that.
The good guys had one guy shot in the arm.
A guy was actually in a red shirt because he was on surveillance and didn't have a chance to change.
That guy's a hero.
[Marine "B".]
The team carried out a systematic search of the place and found a tunnel inside one of the closets of the main room on the first floor.
[narrator.]
But El Chapo and his security chief have already gone underground.
What he wasn't counting on Two or three days before, it rained pretty hard there, so this wasn't a dry sewer.
So they had to wade their way through.
[narrator.]
Day is breaking as the wanted men emerge on a street corner several blocks away.
[Riley.]
Then he pops his head up, and he's looking around.
Then they climb out, and what do they do? As good criminals, they go carjack a car.
But the morons picked the wrong car.
It broke down.
[chuckles.]
[engine stalling.]
[handcuffs clicking.]
And that's where I get the phone call, and they e-mailed me the picture.
It's that famous picture of him in the dirty shirt, sitting in the hotel, and that's when I walked in the boss' office and I said, "It's done.
We got him.
" We felt an enormous satisfaction, an enormous joy, and what can I say? We feel very proud to be part of the Mexican State.
[narrator.]
But the capture of Sinaloa's Robin Hood is not good news for his loyal fans.
[Pepe.]
The first time we heard it, we couldn't believe he's been captured again.
It was something hard to absorb.
Well, everyone was unsettled.
Let's put it that way.
Everything was very, very unstable.
[narrator.]
Once again, El Chapo was sent back to Altiplano prison.
From then on, they regularly move him between cells to prevent escape.
One year later, El Chapo runs out of luck.
I'm pleased to announce the extradition of Chapo Guzmán to the United States from Mexico.
Mr.
Guzmán will be arraigned later today in the United States District Court right here in Brooklyn, on a 17-count sweeping indictment.
[narrator.]
On January 19th, 2017, El Chapo leaves Mexico to face justice in the country he exploited for so long.
[Riley.]
After it was over, it was kind of a letdown, 'cause I knew, for me, my career had reached the end, and it was time to hang it up.
But in the end, we kicked his ass.
And, I think, if we ever took a badge to do something right, this was our effort.
This was the Super Bowl for me.