.NoahHurowitz covered the El Chapo trial for Rolling Stone — then he set out to write a book about the notorious drug lord. The book's out July 20, but we got early access to the first excerpt, detailing a clandestine meeting between El Chapo and the DEA.
was in his office at the U.S. embassy in Mexico City when he received a call from one of the U.S. Marines standing guard outside. There was a guy, the Marine told him, who had a message for the DEA. Bond threw on a jacket and went downstairs to see what was up.
Bond had been stationed in Mexico City for less than a year, but he was at home here. The son of a father from the U.S. and a Mexican mother, he’d grown up there the pampered golden boy of a sprawling, patrician family with links to the ruling Party of Institutional Revolution, which had controlled virtually every facet of political and economic life in the country ever since the Revolution wound down and ossified in the late 1920s.
They would have to go to Puente Grande undercover. El Chapo had stipulated that no one — not the prison warden, not the guards — could know that he was reaching out to the DEA. If word got back to other traffickers that he was talking to the gringos, he worried that his life, and the lives of his family members, would be in grave danger. He may have had much of the prison staff on his payroll, but he was not the only one.
The two DEA agents and the Mexican prosecutor spilled out of their car and presented themselves to the officer in charge, who solemnly checked each man’s credentials. Arriving at the entrance of the prison’s administrative area, a guard ushered them into the office of the warden, who waved them in with a chilly welcome. Once again they presented their passes and their credentials, and gave him the spiel, claiming that they were there to conduct psychological profiles of prominent Mexican criminals. The man on their agenda that day was El Chapo.
As soon as the code name left Bond’s mouth, the imprisoned drug lord went pale, his beady eyes narrowing. He’d known the agents would come at some point, but not when; he was unprepared, caught unawares. “They’re everywhere,” El Chapo said. “They,” people belonging to the Arellano-Félix network, were in Mexico City, Guadalajara, and Aguascalientes, and he worried they were going to try to kill him, kill his family members, anyone they could get their hands on associated with him.
Before he could say more, El Chapo made clear what he wanted: to be placed in a prison where he could speak face-to-face with an associate he trusted to gather up-to-date information on his enemies that El Chapo could feed to the DEA; he asked for a guarantee of safety for his family; and he asked that his outstanding charges in the United States be “resolved,” in order to fend off the possibility of extradition.
When the agents asked him about political protection of the Arellano-Félix clan, however, El Chapo clammed up. He refused to talk about politicians. “They’re too dangerous,” he said.This came as a surprise, Bond recalled. As far as they knew at the time, El Güero and El Chapo were still friends and partners here in Puente Grande, as they had been on the outside for years.
The meeting lasted around two hours. As it was winding down, El Chapo gave the agents and Patiño a warning. The Arellano-Félix brothers, he claimed, were planning to assassinate the former attorney general and current ambassador to France, and planning to frame him for the killing. He wanted to go on record that he was not involved in any threat against the former prosecutors.