Drug Warrior by Jack Riley

Author:Jack Riley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: None
Publisher: Hachette Books

Chapter 11

Homeward Bound

I had shifted quickly from the front lines in El Paso to an anonymous office in Washington. But the bland surroundings disguised what would be an important job. I was fighting El Chapo and the Mexican cartels, just as the violence reached a fever pitch.

When I started in the summer of 2008, the situation in Mexico was out of control. More brutal slayings as Sinaloa continued to fight the Beltrán Leyva brothers and just about every other cartel.

Hundreds of narcotraficantes in Culiacán and other places were killed every month. Victims were found shot dead in parked cars, decapitated, burned, rolled up in bloody blankets and dumped on the roadside.

Matters got so bad that we heard a state official trekked up to a ranch in the state of Durango, deep in the eastern Sierra Madre, and tried to broker a truce between Guzmán and one of the cartels. It didn’t work.

President Calderón’s push against the cartels only made the violence worse. The major traffickers weren’t being killed—only police officers, soldiers, and innocent bystanders.

But all that violence did nothing to disrupt the flow of drugs across the border.

The Fusion Center was designed to go after bad guys like Chapo. I had a hundred agents from the DEA, FBI, ATF, ICE, and IRS, all of us working together to develop leads to stop the scourge of illegal drugs. And I made sure we got the information to agents in the field.

Every day at 8:30 a.m., I’d meet with my section chiefs to go over the Consolidated Priority Organization Targets, a list of the top 100 drug traffickers in the world. There were Afghans and Colombians on the list, but most of the gangsters were Mexican.

I’d ask my chiefs what they were doing to catch the drug lords, and what they were seeing in the field. But, inevitably, the conversation would turn to El Chapo. I explained that he was our biggest threat. Guzmán and his Sinaloa cartel controlled most of the drugs being smuggled into the United States.

“He’s as dangerous as Osama bin Laden,” I’d say. I pushed our agents and intelligence people to be aggressive in cracking down on his cartel’s operations.

I threw myself into tracking Chapo, talking to informants, reading reports, trying to anticipate his next move. I was working so many long hours that, a year into the job, Monica thought it would be a good idea if she and Kevin moved back to St. Louis. “That’s the only place he’s ever felt at home,” she said. I agreed. We bought a place there and got him into a good Catholic high school. On weekends, I flew home to be with my family.

After two years at the Fusion Center, I felt the urge to get back in the field. That’s where I was at my best. So when I heard that the SAC in Chicago was about to retire, I talked to my boss, Leonhart, about the position. To my surprise, I got the job. I was headed home.

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