Juan Guerrero Chapa was craving his favorite frozen yogurt. It was early in the evening on May 22, 2013, and he and his wife, Julia, left their Southlake home and drove a few minutes away to the sprawling, upscale shopping district known as Town Square. Around 6 p.m., they parked their burgundy Range Rover in front of Victoria’s Secret and strolled down the block to Yumilicious. Guerrero, a 43-year-old with a ruddy face and slick black hair, was wearing crisp blue jeans and a black polo. Julia, her auburn hair pulled back into a ponytail, had on sandals, black pants, and a red blouse. They paid for their frozen yogurt, ate it on a bench in front of the store, and then headed down the block to Nine West, where Julia browsed for shoes. Nothing about the couple stood out among the denizens of Southlake. A thirty-minute drive northwest of Dallas, the town of Southlake is one of the richest places in America. Many of its roughly 30,000 residents live in opulent walled-off subdivisions with names like Coventry Manor, Monticello, and the Enclave. Famous athletes are a common sight. PGA golfer Rory Sabbatini and former Dallas Cowboy DeMarcus Ware live here. The public schools are consistently ranked among the best in the country, and Southlake Carroll High School has one of the most storied football programs in the state. In the mid-aughts, when they won a string of state championships, their games were often broadcast nationally. If the town itself represents the apotheosis of wealthy American suburbia, Town Square is its postcard-perfect centerpiece. Opened in the late nineties, the complex’s quaint brick architecture and old-fashioned street lamps are meant to evoke idyllic turn-of-the-century downtowns. In some ways, the image is fitting: crime in Southlake is a rarity. The police department averages one or two arrests a day, and most of them involve property theft, minor drug offenses, or the occasional public intoxication or DUI. Guerrero and Julia had moved to Southlake two years earlier, into a roughly $1 million mansion. Though they didn’t have many friends in the area, they liked to spend evenings at Town Square, walking amid the stately oak trees and glimmering fountains. It was still sunny at 6:45 p.m., when the couple left Nine West and headed back to their Range Rover. As Julia loaded her bag into the driver’s side back seat, Guerrero climbed into the front passenger seat. That’s when a white Toyota Sequoia pulled up behind them and a man got out with a 9mm pistol. Witnesses would later tell police he was wearing a hoodie and that something—perhaps a bandanna—covered his face. The man approached the passenger side of the Range Rover, raised the pistol, and started firing. The first two shots came from behind Guerrero; one of them hit the frame of the rear window. The next seven went through the front passenger-side window, sprinkling the scene with tiny slivers of glass. As Guerrero turned and tried to scramble into the back seat, multiple shots entered his side and back. Then the shooter returned to the Toyota, and the driver sped away. Guerrero slumped motionless between the Range Rover’s front seats, blood dripping from his mouth onto the tan leather. Julia, who was unharmed, raced over to her husband, stared silently for a brief moment, and then began screaming in both English and Spanish. Within seconds there were sirens, and a crowd gathered on the manicured lawn in front of a nearby gazebo. Police officers pushed away bystanders as EMTs pulled Guerrero from the car and tried to resuscitate him on the sidewalk across from Banana Republic. He was rushed to a hospital a few miles away, where he was pronounced dead. Surveillance cameras around Town Square didn’t capture the murder or the face of the shooter, but they did record the suspects’ SUV coming and going. The entire encounter, from the time the Toyota pulled up behind the Range Rover until the moment it drove away, took less than ten seconds.

Guerrero’s Range Rover at Southlake’s Town Square on the day of the murder, May 22, 2013. Officers on the scene on the day of the murder. CBSDFW Left: Guerrero’s Range Rover at Southlake’s Town Square on the day of the murder, May 22, 2013. Right: Officers on the scene on the day of the murder. CBSDFW

The brazenness of the crime shocked and titillated the residents of Southlake. There hadn’t been a murder in town in more than a decade—and nothing this dramatic had happened since Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow killed two state troopers nearby, in the thirties. “This sort of thing just doesn’t happen in a place like Southlake,” a Department of Justice official said. Guerrero’s death was among the lead stories on every local news affiliate for three nights in a row. Fox 4 interviewed one woman who, marveling at the scope of the crime scene, explained that she had to leave her car in a parking lot as investigators examined the area. Another woman, standing by the town’s red brick courthouse, concluded, “It’s a very unsafe situation. Very unstable, and I hope they’re caught very soon.” The afternoon after the shooting, Southlake police chief Steve Mylett told reporters what many had already concluded on their own: “Obviously, this is a well-orchestrated and deliberate act involving a specific target.” He said the crime appeared to be the work of “an organization that is trained to do this kind of activity.” Mylett immediately called in help from the FBI and DEA, offering the agencies office space in the local police station, less than half a mile from where Guerrero had been shot. Days later the team was expanded to include representatives from the Texas Rangers, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. All told, there were dozens of officers and agents and analysts assisting the case. But it was largely headed by two men. The lead investigator, Michael Elsey, is a 25-plus-year veteran FBI agent. He has a deep voice, an affinity for fine cigars, and a remarkable ability to evade media attention. One colleague described him as “the most focused person I’ve ever seen.” Another said, “I would never want to be on Mike’s bad side.” The lead prosecutor, who worked closely with investigators from the start, was an assistant U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Texas named Josh Burgess. Burgess is tall and lean, with a boyish face, and he has a far different reputation from Elsey. He’s funnier, more garrulous, more likely to grab a beer with his co-workers at the end of the week. At the time, he taught a weekly Sunday school class for young married couples at his church in Fort Worth. A former JAG officer in the Air Force who once deployed for six months to serve as the only attorney on a base in Kyrgyzstan, Burgess had spent most of his career at the U.S. attorney’s office prosecuting cases involving organized crime, including several that employed wiretaps and undercover agents. One case involved a yearlong undercover investigation of the Bandidos Motorcycle Club; another was a two-year case that led to more than sixty indictments. Around 9 p.m. the night of the murder, Burgess was at home, reading a book in a recliner, when he was interrupted by a phone call. His counterpart at the U.S. attorney’s office in South Texas informed him that the man murdered in Southlake, whose face was already splashed across every local news channel, had been a high-level cooperator for the U.S. government. Burgess remembers thinking it wouldn’t take long for the press to break the news he’d just heard, bringing even more attention to the shooting. (Of the six DOJ officials dedicated to the case full-time, Burgess is the only one able to speak on the record about it.) Little is publicly known about Guerrero’s upbringing and life in Mexico, but investigators quickly uncovered his deep ties to one of the most violent criminal organizations in the world. Guerrero, it turns out, was the longtime personal attorney for Osiel Cárdenas Guillén, the former leader of the Gulf Cartel and one of the founders of its paramilitary enforcement arm, Los Zetas. Cárdenas, whose nickname was El Mata Amigos (“the Friend Killer”), was arrested after a shoot-out with the Mexican military in 2003. He was then extradited to the U.S. in 2007 for drug trafficking, money laundering, and the attempted murder of U.S. agents. The cartel infighting that followed his arrest triggered a famously bloody power struggle that gripped Northern Mexico for a decade. Thousands of people, many of them innocent bystanders, died in the ensuing mayhem. Two years after Cárdenas’s extradition, he pleaded guilty in federal court. In exchange for a 25-year sentence—and a chance to one day walk out of prison—Cárdenas agreed to turn over $50 million in cash, real estate, and aircraft to the U.S. government. Guerrero was tasked with helping the American agencies collect the assets, an ordeal that included moving several carloads of cash north across the border. Guerrero’s involvement wasn’t made public, but he was nonetheless a potential target; leaders of Los Zetas and the Gulf Cartel were incensed about the Cárdenas plea deal. And so, with the knowledge of the U.S. government, Guerrero and his family moved from Monterrey to North Texas. There, he continued cooperating with the Department of Homeland Security. The arrangement was kept so quiet that even high-ranking officials in the local U.S. attorney’s office didn’t know about it until after the murder. In Texas, Guerrero lived a quiet but complicated life. His autopsy revealed that he had cocaine in his system at the time of his death. He kept a low profile online. His LinkedIn account claimed that he owned a working cattle ranch in the Mexican state of Guanajuato with “a wide range of livestock and farm animals,” including “some of Mexico’s strongest bulls.” It also described, in the third person, his affinity for “the regional flavors of the restaurants in his hometown” and his allegiance to Club León, a second-tier Mexican professional soccer team. A WordPress blog under his name featured three short posts in June 2011 about the Mexican cattle industry. His name was also listed in the paperwork of a few businesses in South Texas, including a gaming corporation and a salvage and recycling company. The only public photo of him prior to the murder was a mug shot taken in Miami in 2011, in which his dark eyes are glazed and bloodshot, his cheeks bloated and pockmarked. According to a local news report, at around 3 a.m. local officers were dispatched to the posh Fontainebleau hotel, where Guerrero was accused of slapping the 29-year-old woman with whom he was having an affair. In the spring of 2011, Guerrero was living with Julia and their three kids in Grapevine, just to the east of Southlake, when he got an urgent call from his handler at the Department of Homeland Security. Julia recalled her husband seeming “afraid” and “surprised” after the conversation. “They knew where he lived,” she said. “And they wanted to kill him.” The family never again returned to the house in Grapevine. They traveled to South Florida, where his brother lived, for spring break, and when they got back to Grapevine, Guerrero told his wife to rent an apartment in her sister’s name and to stop using her cellphone to call Mexico. Soon after, they moved into the house in Southlake. It was purchased in cash, and Guerrero’s name didn’t appear anywhere in the county records. Julia remembered her husband receiving another distressing call in February 2013, and he fled once again—this time moving from hotel to hotel, traveling to Las Vegas with his brother—but he resumed living with the family again in May. He continued to be cautious, though, she said. He didn’t leave the house often, except to get frozen yogurt. Innocent victims are easy to pitch to a jury. But unfortunately for agents and prosecutors, they don’t get to pick the victims for whom they seek justice. If they did, Burgess certainly wouldn’t have chosen a cartel attorney. Then he got to know Julia, Guerrero’s wife of more than twenty years, and he was moved by her grief. “This was a strong, dignified woman,” Burgess says. “Whatever you think of him, Julia truly loved her husband. He was the father of her three teenage children. And she watched him get killed.” Burgess and Elsey also recognized early on that this might turn out to be the biggest case of their careers, and the deeper they got into the investigation, the more fascinating it became. At first, though, there weren’t many leads. A palm print was taken from the side of Guerrero’s Range Rover, but investigators didn’t turn up any matches. They later found the white Toyota Sequoia used in the murder, which was left in a rental car parking lot, but that didn’t lead to much, either. A few weeks after the shooting, the case seemed to have stalled. That’s when FBI agents, for the first time, looked under Guerrero’s Range Rover. There, they discovered a black plastic box the size of a deck of cards: a GPS tracker. When agents contacted the tracker’s manufacturer, Blackline, they were told that there were five other devices associated with the same account, including one still attached to Guerrero’s other car, a white Mercedes. The subscriber name on the Blackline account and the name used on the associated Gmail address turned out to be fake. But agents kept probing. They subpoenaed Google and located a secondary Gmail address, which eventually led them to an unlikely source: a bald, bespectacled, retired Verizon technician living near McAllen named José Cepeda Cortés. Most of his American friends called him Joe. Joe, who was in his late fifties, was born in Mexico but had spent much of his adult life in the Rio Grande Valley (he held a green card). To those who knew him, he seemed straitlaced, prone to awkward goofiness and bad jokes. After retiring from telecommunications, he operated a sign business in the suburbs of McAllen. And in the fall of 2012, he and his two brothers appeared on the Spanish-language TV show Tengo Talento, Mucho Talento (“I Have Talent, a Lot of Talent”). They called themselves Los Pachucos, a nod to the Latino zoot suit subculture, and, accordingly, dressed like forties gangsters, in brimmed hats and baggy colorful suits and suspenders. (Their performance received lukewarm reactions from the studio audience.) When agents searched Joe’s emails, they didn’t discover any obvious links to drug cartels. But they did find records, dated in the months leading up to the murder, for car and property rentals in both North Texas and South Florida. They also came across several noteworthy exchanges with his cousin Jesús “Chuy” Ledezma Cepeda. Chuy, agents soon learned, was a private investigator in a suburb of Monterrey, not far from where Guerrero lived before fleeing to America. Like Joe, he was in his late fifties, but the similarities stopped there. Chuy was shorter, stockier, and considerably more streetwise. For years, he had served as a police officer in Mexico. Then he worked with a clandestine security-intelligence force founded by the wealthy mayor of San Pedro Garza García, one of the most moneyed areas in all of Latin America. Chuy was also good friends with leaders of the Beltrán Leyva Organization, a cartel with mixed alliances that operates in the Mexican border state of Nuevo León, which meets McAllen at its eastern point and Laredo to the west. Joe and Chuy had grown up on opposite sides of the border but stayed in touch through the years. In the email correspondence that caught the attention of agents, though, they weren’t simply catching up. It included links to Mexican blog posts that detailed Guerrero’s involvement with the Gulf Cartel. One post, which was later translated into English and entered into evidence by the U.S. government, alleged that Guerrero had once run over Mexican federal agents in order to avoid a subpoena. Another blog reported that Mexican soldiers, as part of an operation to stifle cartel operations, arrested Guerrero after “provoking the crash” of his vehicle. The story noted that he was later released. Sifting through GPS data immediately preceding the murder, investigators realized they could connect Joe and Chuy to the crime scene in Southlake. In the days leading up to the shooting, a tracker from their Blackline account had often moved in tandem with one of Guerrero’s vehicles. At other times, the device was immobile, but it was stationed a few miles away at an apartment complex in Grapevine. When agents inspected the apartment’s records, they discovered that the lease was under Joe’s name. Chuy was also listed on the rental agreement, and there was a third name that investigators didn’t recognize: Jesús Ledezma Campano, also known as Gerardo. He turned out to be Chuy’s son. Gerardo was around thirty, and, as agents learned, he had been assisting his father in his private investigation business—including the extrajudicial security work—since he was a teenager. Gerardo also owned a few businesses himself, including a nightclub and a smoke shop in San Pedro Garza García. Investigators now had their third suspect. By this time, several months had passed since the murder. Chuy and Gerardo had long ago crossed back into Mexico, while Joe continued living in McAllen. And as much as they knew about the three men, agents still wanted to expand their investigation to determine who else might be involved. And so they hunkered down in the Southlake office. He snapped a photo just as a middle-aged man in a polo shirt and dark slacks was climbing back into the Mercedes. In the picture, it’s clear that Guerrero is utterly unaware he’s being watched. For months, they combed through the massive trove of emails and GPS data, and along the way they hopped on flights to Florida and Mexico to track down sources. They covered the office walls with a dizzying array of charts and maps. In scrutinizing the movements of the suspects, agents realized they could retrace the intricate workings of their operation. Gradually, painstakingly, they were able to reconstruct most of the elaborate sequence that had led to Guerrero’s murder. The hunt for Guerrero began in June 2011, when Chuy received an email with orders to track down the attorney (investigators could not determine the source of the email). Soon thereafter, he began by scouring business records in Mexico. Over the course of several months, he also assembled a list of the attorney’s family members, on both sides of the border. He managed to find phone records for several relatives. At one point, using a trick taught to him by Joe, whose telecommunications expertise proved invaluable, Chuy apparently listened in on some of the relatives’ calls. He and Gerardo also submitted applications for U.S. travel visas. Chuy further enlisted Joe’s help the following year. In November 2012, while rehearsing for Tengo Talento, Mucho Talento, Joe began nosing around the website publicdata.com using a newly created email address. There, he discovered Guerrero’s Miami arrest report. He then scouted out the home address of Guerrero’s brother, Armando, who lived in Wellington, a well-to-do suburb near West Palm Beach. Chuy and Gerardo soon used their recently acquired U.S. travel visas to fly with Joe to South Florida. When they arrived in early December, the three men approached a local realtor about leasing a property in Olympia, the gated community where Armando resided. Joe, who spoke the best English, did most of the talking, explaining that they were in town to install surveillance cameras at a nearby hospital. To show off the neighborhood’s amenities, the realtor met them at the lavish clubhouse, equipped with a spa and kiddie water park. But the men were uninterested. They just wanted to see properties, they said. When they arrived at the first house, they didn’t bother to look around much before agreeing to rent it. Their application, however, was denied because they hadn’t supplied enough financial information. Joe filled out two other applications that were also denied. Eventually they secured a house in the neighborhood bordering Olympia. Rent was $2,400, and they made the first payment in cash. The realtor stopped by sometime later, and she found it odd that, other than a couch and a chair, the three-thousand-square-foot house was still empty. The men spent most of December tailing Guerrero’s brother Armando, hoping he would lead them to Guerrero. Because the gate to Olympia was manned, they had to enter his subdivision using a pedestrian walkway. Chuy installed a GPS tracker under Armando’s car, but the device’s batteries lasted only a few days. It was less cumbersome, not to mention much faster, to swap out the entire device than to change the batteries, so over time they would put several trackers in play (to tell them apart, they put distinctive stickers on each device). Sometimes, they competed to see who could switch the trackers the fastest. Chuy had it down to a science. He’d go for a stroll along the neighborhood sidewalks, amble right up to Armando’s house, then stop and stoop over behind his vehicle, pretending to tie his shoes. He did this repeatedly for weeks and never got caught. But he didn’t catch the slightest glimpse of Guerrero. The men gave up on tracking Armando and returned home for the holidays. The hunt resumed in earnest in February 2013, at which point Joe and Chuy began exchanging frequent emails, sharing anything they turned up on Guerrero, including the blog posts about his cartel activities. After a few weeks, Joe sent a message containing the property tax records of Guerrero’s sister-in-law, Laura Martinez, who lived in Grapevine. His note featured an unusual subject line: “Litmus Test.” Later in court, Burgess would ask Elsey, the FBI agent, what he thought Joe meant by “Litmus Test.” “Well,” Elsey said, “I guess you can go to Google. ‘A decisively indicative test’ is what they would say. I would say it’s more of a make-it-or-break-it kind of moment.” In early March Chuy and Gerardo crossed the border into McAllen and then drove the more than five hundred miles from there to Grapevine. Joe arranged for them to stay in an apartment complex near Martinez’s house called Colonial Village. Gerardo would later say that, unlike the swanky Florida rental, it was relatively inexpensive, and “they don’t ask too much questions.” Using the same tactics they’d employed in Wellington, they affixed a GPS tracker onto Martinez’s car. On occasion, they would tail her in a rental car. Other times, they stayed at the apartment and used a tablet to follow the tracker’s movements on a map in real time. It was tedious work, and for the first few weeks their surveillance yielded little. But in the last week of March, Martinez did something unusual. She stopped at a house in Southlake, a few miles away from her home, two days in a row. Things moved quickly after that. On April 1 Chuy sent Joe a photo of Guerrero’s burgundy Range Rover. On April 2, he sent a photo of his white Mercedes, and, that same day, Joe caught a flight up from McAllen. They placed trackers on both of Guerrero’s vehicles, and they later installed a pair of game cameras—the type that hunters use to track deer—near the entrance to Guerrero’s neighborhood and on a utility pole at the edge of his front yard. Using the cameras, which are equipped with night vision and motion sensors, Chuy, Joe, and Gerardo took several photos of the house, often with the car of Guerrero’s teenage daughter parked out front. One day, Chuy was shadowing the white Mercedes as it traveled to the DFW Lakes Hilton, a four-star conference hotel in Grapevine. Chuy waited in the parking lot for the driver to return to the car. He snapped a photo just as a middle-aged man in a polo shirt and dark slacks was climbing back into the Mercedes. In the picture, it’s clear that Guerrero is utterly unaware he’s being watched.

Josh Burgess outside the federal courthouse in Fort Worth on August 29, 2018. Photograph by Jonathan Zizzo