El Chapo: The inside story of how the drugs baron was first captured DEA agent Andrew Hogan on how the elusive fugitive was finally caught

Aiming his handgun into the darkness, Andrew Hogan was worried. For nearly two years the US agent had been leading the operation to capture the world’s most wanted fugitive, Joaquin Guzman, the drugs baron known the world over as El Chapo. Now it looked like Hogan and his team might finally get their man, but Guzman was the master of last-minute escapes.

The Mexican billionaire bandit – accused of torturing and murdering countless enemies, and responsibility for half of all the narcotics smuggled into the US – was infamous for his Sinaloa cartel’s tunnels, dug either to transport drugs under the border into America or to evade capture. His nickname is Spanish for Shorty, and El Chapo’s 5ft 6in stature came in handy when slipping underground.

Guzman had done just that to get away from Hogan and his team only days earlier, scarpering down a hole that led to a sewer. Instead of coming away from that raid with his target in handcuffs, all Hogan left with was El Chapo’s black baseball cap.

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How the raid unfolded

It was now 5:30 in the morning, 22 February 2014. Wearing that same black cap as a trophy, as well as camouflage gear and a ski mask, Hogan – an agent with the US Drug Enforcement Administration – had arrived outside the Miramar hotel in the Pacific coastal resort of Mazatlan together with a squad of elite Mexican marines, led there by mobile phone surveillance.

“As soon as we pinged the phone and had it at Miramar, we were essentially 100 per cent certain that he was there,” Hogan tells i, recalling the pre-dawn operation. “I was concerned about our perimeter, about him escaping again. He was in that particular hotel for a reason – he could have had a tunnel or an escape route.

“The marines flooded the hotel while I was standing outside, looking up at the windows, waiting to see the lights come on. It felt like an eternity had gone by, and I said: “If he’s escaping, he’s doing it right now, at this very moment.” I was going to run around the block to make sure we were covered, when I heard the excited radio chatter that said they’ve got the target, they need a vehicle down underneath in the parking garage.

“I drove down there. It was dark but I could see a shirtless man they were just standing up, and I got out of my vehicle and ran right up to him and jumped into his face and said: ‘What’s up, Chapo?!’

A relentless hunt

Since revealing his identity to tell the inside account of the mission in his new book, Hunting El Chapo, Hogan has told this story a few times, but he still smiles at that frat boy-ish victory phrase. It seems hard to imagine him saying it now. With chiselled features and the cool demeanour of an action hero ready to spring into attack or defence mode at any moment, the 37-year-old is dressed in a smart blazer for our interview over tea in a London hotel.

But Hogan says he is not embarrassed by his celebration of completing a potentially deadly operation (Guzman had an AK-47 assault rifle next to his bed that night when he was awoken by the marines, which he didn’t fire).

“That was essentially the build-up of my entire career,” he says. “I hadn’t thought about what I was going to say to him, I didn’t even know I was going to come face to face with him. That’s just the first thing that came out, I really don’t know why.”

Hogan had been working “relentlessly” to catch El Chapo since 2009, at one point even going undercover with his partner to deliver $1.2m to Guzman’s men via a private jet. Despite insisting he never became “infatuated” or “emotionally attached” to his target, the way he sums up El Chapo underlines a personal obsession in his hunt.

“He was the criminal that no prison could hold. He had evaded capture for over a decade, evading Mexican and US law enforcement, always escaping out the back door, getting advance notice of every operation, every raid against him. He climbed to this kind of legendary figure, almost mythical figure, where people sing songs about him, and people think he’s untouchable.”

Risky business

Guzman is due to go on trial on 13 Novcmber. A 90-page memo filed to the courts in April outlines some of the evidence against him – including claims that he used sicarios, or hit men, to kidnap competitors to be interrogated “bound and helpless” by El Chapo himself.

According to CNN, the document details one case involving two suspected gangsters from the Zetas cartel. “After having lunch, the defendant interrogated them, had them beaten and then shot them both in the head with a long gun,” it alleges. “In at least one instance, the defendant himself shot the rivals at point-blank range.”

Chasing Guzman was as dangerous as it gets, and not just because of the warring gangs. Hogan describes in his book how, not long into his posting in Mexico City, two CIA agents had their armoured diplomatic car sprayed with more than 100 machine gun bullets – by corrupt police.

Thirty-second briefing: El Chapo Joaquin Guzman was named Public Enemy Number One by the Chicago Crime Commission in 2013, the first outlaw to be given that title since Al Capone. The drugs kingpin has hired a legendary lawyer for his trial: Jeffrey Lichtman, famous for his successful defence of the mafia boss John Gotti Jr through four trials in five years. US prosecutors claim El Chapo has $14bn assets which they intend to seize, though so far they have struggled to find any.

Family concerns

Hogan and his family could have become targets themselves. He admits he had to discuss the situation “many times” with his wife, as she had to care for their young sons while he was out chasing merciless gangsters, but he says: “She was a rock. She was standing next to me, making those uncomfortable life-changing decisions, every step of the way.”

Hogan writes how she too had to learn how to assess risks: “Look everyone on the sidewalk in the eyes quickly to judge them, and decide: threat or not?”

As for his most fearful experience, the former agent says: “Probably the scariest was being in Culiacan, in Chapo’s stronghold, without a gun – stuck in the middle of the lion’s den, not knowing what’s around every corner, and knowing that we could be in a gunfight around every corner. It was all about survival.”

Coming out of the shadows

Revealing his identity is risky even now, but Hogan – who will only say of his life now that he lives in the American Midwest, working as a private security consultant – is proud to finally be telling his story.

“I’d always been in the shadows and really downplayed the story when people asked me about it. It was time to step up and be proud.” He says he has no regrets, but admits the hunt changed his life forever. “It’s hard for me to get excited about things any more, after accomplishing something like that.”

Hogan has been in negotiations for his book to be made into a film by Sony Pictures, though he struggles to watch dramas about the war on drugs – he only managed to sit through two episodes of Narcos.

A master of escapes

While awaiting trial, El Chapo has been held in a maximum security unit at New York’s Metropolitan Correctional Centre, a prison in downtown Manhattan known as “Little Gitmo”. The US authorities are taking no risks after his incredible escape from Altiplano Federal Penitentiary in Mexico 2015.

Hogan, who had retired from the DEA after his successful mission, remembers hearing the news. “I was in Europe at the time, heading to an airport in the back of a taxicab when my wife texted me and said C had escaped, he was out. ‘C’ was our codename for him. My initial reaction was: ‘Let’s mount back-up, bring the band back together and go get him.” But we obviously couldn’t do that, we’d moved on.”

“It felt almost like the world was conspiring against me,” he adds, saying he wasn’t surprised by the news because of the level of corruption in Mexico.

Guzman added to his notoriety by inviting the Mexican TV star Kate del Castillo to his lair while still on the run – and granting a controversial interview to the Hollywood actor Sean Penn. The article was published in Rolling Stone magazine three months later, the day after El Chapo was recaptured.

Asked if he saw Penn’s actions as a betrayal, Hogan shakes his head, but says the actors placed themselves in mortal danger. “They should have known that they were going to be under surveillance, they’re lucky that they [the authorities] didn’t launch an operation while they were there because they very well could have.”

The violence goes on

Even without Guzman on the streets, Mexico remains a battleground. Around 200,000 people in the country have died as a result of drugs-related violence in the past decade, including 29,168 last year alone – the worst on record. In Cancun, a popular tourist destination, 14 people were murdered in the space of 36 hours in April.

A Reuters investigation the same month found that at least 82 politicians and candidates had been killed after election campaigning began in September last year. The president-elect, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, a left-wing populist who claimed victory in July and will assume office in December, has proposed an amnesty for people in the drugs business, saying: “You can’t confront violence with violence. You can’t put out fire with fire.”

Nevertheless, Hogan maintains that capturing Guzman did help – and says the “war on drugs” must continue.

“The argument is: OK, you take out Chapo and even his cartel, but then a new one moves in. Well, of course a new one moves in every time, but you have to apply the same pressure and strategy and resources to become successful in targeting other cartels.

“Look at Medellin in Colombia, for example. Under the reign of Pablo Escobar in the 1990s, could you walk into Medellin on vacation? No. Can you now? Absolutely. Colombia has become a tourist destination. Why is that? Because the Colombian government has embraced the co-operation of the US and built up its drug enforcement programme, where they have successes day in and day out, and they have improved the quality of life for their citizens. I think the same thing can be applied to Mexico.”

He adds: “You’re never going to stop the flow of drugs, just like you’re never going to stop the murders and the killings in the world – there will always be criminals, there will always be those in pursuit of criminals, but nobody’s immune to justice; their day will always come.”

‘Hunting El Chapo: Taking down the world’s most wanted drug lord’ by Andrew Hogan and Douglas Century (£14.99, HarperCollins) is out now. This article was originally published in May 2018.