I had done a lot of cases in my career. I knew the right way to go about it. And we said to them, well, what do you have in mind? So just a little bit, and I believe his comment was 500 million to start. The major victory, the arrest of a Mexican drug lord. Chapo, as he's called Royal's most notorious drug lord, was extradited to the United States, revealing that he had worked with the feds to bring down the accused drug lord. Welcome to heroes behind headlines.
Today's guest is my good friend and co author Michael R. McGowan. Mike is a legend in the FBI. Nobody in the FBI has worked more undercover cases than him. Nobody. Only about 2% of FBI agents ever work more than one undercover case. Mike has worked 50 50. Today we're going to talk about one of his most significant cases, which is when he infiltrated and took down the Cinema cartel and its leader, the infamous El Chapo.
Make no mistake about it, mike is one of the most decorated and experienced special agents in FBI history, and he's today's hero behind the Headlines. First, Mike, I would just like to ask you a little bit about your background. How did you get into this line of work? I didn't have a choice. I came from a police family. My dad and my grandfather were police officers. I didn't know you could go into another profession. But from a very young age, I grew up around cops. They were in my house.
They would give me rides to sporting events. It was all I knew. So inevitably, I took a path into law enforcement. I was first a police officer of the street cop for a little less than five years. And during that time, I had been approached by an FBI agent who was interested in seeing if I was interested in the FBI, which I really hadn't given a lot of thought to, but I filled out the application. I loved being a street cop, so I really wasn't overly concerned with the application process.
I just kept showing up when and where they told me to. And then one day a letter came in the mail, and I was off to Quantico. But it was something that I knew I was going to enter law enforcement literally from the age of five or six years old. It was just kind of the family business. And you grew up in Boston, the Boston area? I grew up outside of Boston. I come from, believe it or not, a large Irish Catholic family.
And where I come from, you pretty much grow up to be a cop, a fireman, or a criminal. I chose cop. Okay, good choice. So can you tell us how long have you been in the FBI and just a little bit about how you got into undercover work. Okay, so before we get to the Sinala cartel case, I'll just explain that at that point, I had 2022 years in the FBI. I was an undercover coordinator in the Boston division, which means you manage and coordinate all undercover activity. I was not a supervisor.
I was not a manager. I was a street agent. But because of the unique nature of the undercover technique, the undercover coordinator is usually assigned to an experienced undercover agent. I had been doing undercover work at that point for 15 years or so. And in 2009, when this case first started, not only was I the Boston undercover coordinator, but I was also assigned to a national undercover team that the FBI was running.
I was the operations team leader, which meant that I literally set up the scenarios, assign the undercovers. So again, at that point, 2009, undercover work was full time. Very few people in the FBI work undercover full time. I was fortunate enough to be one of them. What was your training in undercover work in the FBI? My training was unlike today's FBI. There was no training when I started in the FBI. Now, there's a very intense process.
If you're interested in undercover work, there's a fallacy out there that every FBI agent works undercover. That's not true. Less than 10% of the agent population works undercover. So one out of ten agents is what's called certified, which means you have to go through a vetting process, a testing process, a psychological process, and then you have to successfully complete a two week undercover school run by the FBI. That all started in the mid 19, around 1990, 419 95.
I was in the FBI before that, working undercover. So I was grandfathered into the process if you were already working undercover prior to the initiation of the formalized training. So when I learned, I learned through mistakes, I learned through trial and error. I went out there and did it. I had no idea what I was doing when I first started. I was horrible at it, but I really enjoyed it.
Yeah, you told a funny story about the first time you were sent out to I think it was a Mafia like hangout, right? Yeah, that was the story where I was told to go in my assignment. Well, first of all, I was selected because I had been a cop in those days. The theory was that if you had been a cop before, you're an agent, that you would have natural for and undercover work, which is ridiculous, because it's the exact opposite. A police department is a very structured, organized chain of command.
But that was just the way the FBI did it in those days. So an agent approached me, and I said, well, what's my assignment? And he said, well, go find out. Go find out things. That was the extent of my instruction. I was given an assignment to go into a certain location, which I did. And the first time, as you know, the first time I walked in the entire place stopped talking, literally like an EF. Hutton commercial.
So that got off to a bad start, and I spent about three weeks going back and forth. I didn't look like them. I didn't dress like them. I didn't act like them. And then finally and kindly, a very elderly Italian gentleman grabbed me around the shoulder one night and basically said, kid, you're really nice, but what are you doing here? Get lost. So that was my entree into undercover work. I mean, I laugh about it now, but it was so ridiculous at the time. And now we don't put our dangerous.
It just kind of, so to speak. Right. And I also think I mentioned to you another time, one of my first undercover drug buys, when I went to buy the drugs, the seller just stopped and said, sorry, officer, we're out of dope tonight. So I was over two starting out. And again, I chuckle about it, but I really caught the bug, because it really is a fascinating technique. It's very interesting.
It's basically, as you get to understand it and as you get to apply it and practice it, it's basically a psychological chess match with bad guys. Now, I train undercover agents now, and what I tell them is, you have to convince a bad guy that you're as bad, if not worse, than him or her, and you're an FBI agent, so it's not easy. Right.
In court, when I've testified as an undercover, the defense lawyers will always start their first question, well, you spent your whole case lying to my client, and your answer is, yes, sir, I lied to him every day. It doesn't usually work well if you tell them you're an FBI agent and the jury understands that. You present yourself and you testify as a professional witness, but when you're in that role, you're one of them. Can you tell us how the El Chapo
case started and how you got involved? Yes. So in 2009, as I mentioned, I was the undercover coordinator in Boston. I was also part of that national undercover team. So I was flat out. I was working probably a dozen undercover operations, if not more. And there was a young agent in the Boston division that came to see me, and he was literally a baby. I think he had two or three years in the FBI total. And he kind of hung his head outside my office, peeking in. And finally I said, Can I help you?
And he said, Listen, I'm working with an informant, and I think I have something. And I was told to come see you because you could come up with something devious. So that's how the conversation started. And I said, what do you got? And I kind of was half listening to him. I really wasn't devoting a full attention. I had a lot of stuff on my plate.
And he started to tell me that he had developed an informant who had been in prison prior, who is now out of prison, but had been in prison with members of the Sinaloa cartel. And as soon as he mentioned the Sinaloa cartel at that time, in 2009, the Cinaloa cartel was the most powerful drug organization in the world. The Sinaloa cartel had been founded in the late 60s in the Mexican state of Sinaloa, and according to the US.
Justice Department, had been responsible for importing more than 200 tons of cocaine and heroin into the United States. It also supplied the United States and other markets with massive amounts of methamphetamine, marijuana, and MDMA. Nobody knows exactly what the revenue of the Sinaloa cartel is, but it's estimated that in 2009, it was around $40 billion a year. To put that into perspective, that's equal to the worldwide sales of the Coca Cola company.
Since the mid nineties, the cartel had been run by pint sized drug lord joaquin Achievaldo Guzman Lorca, commonly known as El Chapo, or Shorty. Born. The son of a poor cattle rancher, he was now worth billions and ranked by Forbes magazine as the 41st most powerful person in the world, ahead of Steve Jobs. And he was the world's most wanted fugitive at that time, too. He had escaped from a prison in Mexico, and he fled into the Mexican mountains.
And for whatever reason, the Mexican government wasn't about to go get him. So I remember this like it was yesterday. I literally felt a rush that if we had a chance to make a case against the Cinnamon cartel, because being in Boston, boston is not a distribution center or a core. It's just a little city in America.
But as I explained to the young man and he's a good friend of mine, and he's also now an undercover agent, but at the time, I explained to him these prison relationships are critical. When people go to prison who they meet, relationships develop inside. They're like gold. It's like getting your PhD in crime when they go to these prisons. So I wanted to interview his informant and see if the guy was the real deal or not.
And so the first thing we did was to go into view the informant, and he was the real deal. He had been in federal prison for 17 years. He had been intimately involved with the Pablo Escobar group out of Medea in Columbia back in the day. And like most good informants, he had a massive ego. He was always the smartest guy in the room, which is kind of surprising if you spent 17 years in federal prison. But the point is, they're a breed apart.
So not only when the young agent came to me, but then I meant the informant. I thought we had a chance if we set it up right. Can you tell us a little bit about the way you met the informant and the way you kind of handled him? I thought was very interesting what happened at the time. And you've got to remember, and I want to make it clear to your audience this stuff you learn by trial and error. And I probably have made more mistakes as an undercover agent than anyone else in the FBI history.
But you learn each time you make a mistake. So I had been dealing with informants for many, many years. That's how I was introduced in one of my first undercover cases. I learned how to be an undercover, not by an FBI agent, I learned by a criminal. So getting to this informant, the very first time I met him, the other agents were there. They were all in their blue jeans and their casual clothing.
I came in with a very expensive suit, dressed up, and I sat intentionally, I sat to the side of him so he couldn't make direct eye contact with me. And for 2 hours, I just listened, never said a word, never asked a question. I wanted to hear him, and I wanted to unnerve him, which it did, because as soon as I left the room, he made a comment that I can't repeat on the air. But he basically asked the case agent who this guy was. And we ended up becoming very close. He did a phenomenal job for us.
And people think all the time they hear the word informant, that somebody can inform on others. Everyone has a choice in life. The FBI wouldn't exist without informants. So you need to have a relate. You can never trust them a hundred percent, nor did I ever trust him 100%. But they can get you into places that FBI agents can't get into. So for the next three years with the case agent, we spent thousands and thousands of hours planning this case. And what was the informance nationality?
I believe he was from Cuba, originally of Spanish descent, but he was very educated, not in academic settings, although I do think I think he was a college graduate. But he could put together like, financial deals in 10 seconds. He was very savvy wow. Because he had been dealing with the Escobars and the Sinilo cartel. And again, people so he'd been doing this for a long time. People think these guys, they're not well educated.
They may not be well educated academically, but streetwise and dope wise, they're brilliant. Informants are key in making undercover cases. They're usually the way in to the criminal organization. The informant in this case, Vargas, had a long criminal resume, which included working with Pablo Escobar's Medellin cartel. He was also in possession of a massive ego.
Despite the fact that he had been arrested twice and had served a total of 17 years in federal prison, he considered himself a major player in the drug world. Although the case depended on Vargas, the informant, mike knew he had to watch him like a hawk for any sign of betrayal. He knew that at any point during the case, vargas thought he could make a better deal for himself on the other side of the fence. He wouldn't hesitate to jump, and all the undercovers, including Mike, could be killed.
And again, believe me, we had our differences and we had our blowouts, but you're literally trusting these people with your lives. He knew that we were agents. He was going to introduce us to the Sinaloa cartel. So we need to form a trust relationship that allows all of us to wake up and go to work the next day. And I've said this before, when a senator cartel case was over, I personally got a lot of credit and attemboys for that case.
And I tell everybody who listens, if not for the informant and not for the other three undercover agents who I worked with, the case never would have been made. So I tell people, I was like Mariana Rivera. I just came in the night then, and to clean it up, the informant and the three other undercovers really made the case. So now you've met the informant. How do you proceed? I'm sure you did like, an evaluation at that point to decide, okay, this guy is somebody I can work with.
And then what was the plan from that? Again, at that point, I had a lot of experience, so I knew that if we were actually going to take a run at the Sinila cartel, we had one shot at it. It had to be perfect. So you need the right personnel, you need the right manpower, you need the right plan. And I also knew I had worked out all my life. I broke into the FBI working escobar in the medalline cartel. I was in Philadelphia. I wasn't in Medellin, but our squad was named the Colombian Dope Squad.
You couldn't use that anymore. But we were targeting Colombians and Escobar. So I also knew that the Cinema Cartel would never have anything to do with us if we were connected to the United States. All right. The only thing that the cartels in Mexico worry about is the FBI or DEA grabbing them, because they know we lock up dope dealers. So in this case, I came up with a plan that we had to be a criminal organization that had no nexus to the United States.
So we eventually decided, because of the personnel we had, we were going to be a Sicilian based crime organization that was looking to import cocaine and heroin from Mexico into Europe. And that's the way we instructed the informant to go back to them and explain, hey, I'm working with this group in Europe. Here's what they're about. But they have nothing to do with the United States. And that was a critical decision early on that I believe, resulted in why the case was successful at the end.
So he goes to Mexico, he makes contact with his contacts within the santa La Car? Yes. We as agents, we cannot travel into Mexico legally. That's not permissible for obvious reasons, but we can send informants into Mexico. So he was sent into Mexico, I believe, four or five times, but after the second meeting, he had done so well that he was instructed to come back to meet directly with Chapo, and that's what he did. So once we had that, again, any day, this case could blow up.
But we just kept pushing ahead. And again, the informant was critical by basically putting the two groups together. So he went into Mexico at high risk. He was on his own. We couldn't follow him. We couldn't protect him. So he'd go into Mexico for four, five, six days at a time, and hopefully he came out every time, and he did, and eventually he put the two groups together. He convinced Chapo that this European group was interested in setting up an arrangement.
Was there a name for the European group or he was just saying a European crime? The Italians. We were supposed to be Sicilian, so he just referred to us as the Italians. Okay. Another question. When he was in Mexico, did you have any contact with him? Do you have any way to monitor what he was saying? And that's why I give him a lot of credit. He went in there, no FBI assistance, no US government assistance. He went up into the mountains to meet with Chapo.
He was escorted by Mexican military personnel. Very dangerous game. Not a game. I shouldn't even call it a game. Very dangerous assignment. Right. Had he met chapel before? No, in those two meetings, when he met with the underlings in Mexico, he was convincing enough, and this is where the credibility from the 17 years in federal prison, he can throw around the right names. Okay, so he was the real deal is the best way to describe it. He was a class A criminal, and luckily
he was working for us at the time. Wow. And what was the arrangement with him? What was he going to get out of this? Reduced. Again, it's a very odd story, but when he was arrested the last time, before he went to federal prison under the US government forfeiture laws, the government seized a bunch of his properties, which included some properties that belong or were used by family members, and all he wanted was to get those properties back.
So his incentive to cooperate was literally to, I guess, take care of his family with these properties. And these were properties in the United States? In the United States that the US. Government had seized. And eventually, because he performed well, those properties were eventually returned to him well. So he makes three or four trips into Mexico and he arranges for the Italian gang to meet with the Sinaloa cartel. Is that correct? Yes.
And you got to understand, when you have an informant as good as an informant he was. You have to instruct them so that they know ABC. You have to tell them this and this and you got to stick to the script. So smartly. When they said we'd like to connect with the Italians he says, hey, you got to talk to them directly. I don't represent them, I'm just trying to make a buck here, putting people together.
So he arranged that the only way the negotiations would occur would be directly with the Italians, which is what we wanted obviously because we had a team ready to go if and when we were able to meet them. And the reason we went with the Sicilian is we had an undercover agent on the East Coast that spoke Sicilian, had worked international undercover and would be perfect for the role. So we lined up as the leader of the gang. Yeah, we lined up.
It took us six to twelve months to get our ducks in a row because we knew they'd check us eventually. They have attorneys, they have private investigators. We were going to be vetted at some point so that takes a little time to set up. So we went to our friends in law enforcement overseas and basically created this group and if anybody were to check, we appeared to be legitimate.
So you had to talk to European law enforcement so that if the Sinaloa cartel checked they could back it up that this group exists. There's something in law enforcement undercover work called backstopping, which means you have to create a persona, either an individual or business persona that will withstand scrutiny. It's very complicated. I'm not going to reveal the trade craft involved but they're going to check on you.
You can't be a bad guy and tell somebody, hey, I'm so and so, or I want to do 20 tons of dope. They vet it just like a business person would. So we had to go around the world literally and set this up because as I said at the beginning we had one shot at these guys, one mistake and we were done. So you had to establish that this group had a history. Had a history. The names were known internationally. For instance, we did a lot of work with the Spanish national police.
We did a lot of work with the Italian national police. We were all over the world and the FBI supported us because we literally were going after the top drug organization in the world. Okay, so your informant arranges this meeting, I believe it was supposed to take place in the first meeting took place in February of 2010. Is that 2010? Correct. Because it took us about a year to set it up. Okay. And do you want to describe your team that was going to meet with the Sinaloa cartel?
Right, so for, like I said, for about a year we were setting this up and my job was to basically be the puppet master behind the scenes, pulling the undercover strings. And I knew exactly who I wanted to be working and what their roles would be. So I took three undercovers, two from the national team that I worked with, and one from Boston and another one from the East Coast city.
So I had four undercovered lined up, and the Sicilian speaker was going to be the boss, El Hefe, and he was perfect for the role. We're meeting them in, as you said, February of 2010. Right around Christmas of 2009, my good friend the Sicilian was offered a private sector job in retirement and retired from the FBI. Apologize profusely, but I wished him well, but he got pulled out of us at the last minute. So we had to overcome and adapt and adjust, and we did.
And ironically, I ended up selecting myself to replace him. And even though I don't speak Sicilian or Italian or Spanish and sometimes struggle with English, I knew that I could do the role. You basically had 2025 years of undercover experience. To the FBI. This was like our Super Bowl. At this point in his career, Mike was a veteran of undercover work. He had infiltrated the Russian mob, three Italian mafia families, and a major Pakistani heroin importer.
Undercover choose roles that they're familiar with. For this job, Mike used the cover of an irascible Italian mob boss named Del Viejo, the Old Man. He was familiar with this role because of his dealings over the years infiltrating Italian crime families, so he knew the character well. So with the other three undercovers and myself and the informant and the case team, the young agent who was helped by other senior agents, we probably had 1015 guys assigned to the case.
And it literally was an allstar team. It was a very, very competent, experienced, successful team, which was the only way we could have attacked this group. So you arranged to meet where? And again, we set up our organization. We mirrored the cinema cartel. We knew how they were structured, who was in charge, how they did things. We basically did the same thing.
So the first meeting now, they knew that we were from Europe, and we invited them to Europe, initially hoping that they wouldn't accept. And then we said, you know what? The cops watch us over here all the time, so let's meet somewhere in neutral and just have a vacation. Let's meet in the States. So that's how we snuck back in, because we had to establish what's called venue. In order to prosecute crimes in the United States, crimes have to be committed within the United States. Got it?
So they were very appreciative that we told them, don't come to our homes because the cops are going to identify you. Right. They're watching us all the time. So we'll go to Miami. No one knows you in Miami. We'll go to Miami. So we set up this meeting in Miami for the initial meeting, which is again, that February 2010. You got to understand there was a tremendous amount of pressure. I can laugh and joke, I'm retired now and all that, but at the time, the FBI was like, high strung.
This was like a big deal. All right, so there was a lot of pressure on us to perform and to succeed. We set up this meeting, the four of us, the four undercovers go. I brought in a female undercover to help us. We set up this operation in a high rise condo right on the Atlantic Ocean, beautiful view, et cetera. And when we were preparing and right as the Cinema representative was coming to meet us, I noticed that the atmosphere was very tense and stressful.
And I had worked with these other three guys all my career, and they're very funny guys, they're very accomplished guys, but everybody was kind of uptight. And I just thought as the team leader, it was my job to kind of break the ice. So I was originally dressed in a very expensive suit, jewelry and blah, blah, blah. But I had noticed that in the bathroom there was a purple velour bathrobe.
So with the cameras running, I took off the nice suit and I put on the bathrobe and came out and it completely busted the whole thing open. Everybody started to relax. And again, we later found out that the representative went back to Chapel and said, hey, the Boston even dressed up. And the prosecutors later, when we went to court, the prosecutors always referred to that meeting, not the first meeting. They always refer to it as the bathrobe meeting.
So again, it's humorous, but it broke the ice and it just showed the Sinaloa cartel that these guys, they're the real deal. They don't even get dressed up for these things, right? They don't really. Yeah. That first day, we spent 4 hours negotiating with them. When I say them, they had sent somebody named Manuel Gutierrez Guzman, who was the first cousin of Chapo. He was their spokesman.
And we hit it off from that first day, and we were talking crazy amounts of dope within the first hour, basically. So you come out in a bathrobe. I remember you told me your hair was slick. You know, the batch, you were kind of like going around like, you want a piece of me? Like this kind of stuff. Yeah, I had a little fun with it. It's on video, but no one's ever going to see that. But what happened was now I was supposed to be the equivalent of Chapo.
I'm the head of this Sicilian organization now, so I'm going to act like Chapel would act, which is you don't get it to the nuts and bolts of the meeting. I took the pretty undercover and we went out and sat on the deck and got a tan and had a couple of drinks. And whenever. Something important would happen. One of the undercover would come out, whisper in my ear. I'd whisper back. I paid Manuel no attention. And again, people probably think I'm sound crazy. This stuff works.
I've done it forever. And you just don't walk up to a dope dealer from the lower cartel in five minutes and tell them you're deep in darker circus. I wouldn't even speak to them. So you're out taking a tan with your girlfriend balcony on the 30th floor, right? That's funny. I got a nice ten. This meeting was incredibly important. The FBI had to convince members of the Sinilo Cartel, who were highly suspicious that the people they were dealing with were really Italian criminals.
Mike was their leader, so Mike led the way as El Viejo. Now, Mike is not a trained actor, but like a great actor, he inhabited this bold and flamboyant character strutting around the room in a colorful silk robe and shouting orders to his minions, and he pulled it off. And when I told Washington we had a chance to meet the Sinner Cartel, they were like, Meet them next week. No, I'm dead serious. And I was like, yeah, I say we can't meet them for maybe a year.
And they're like, what are you talking about? But the boots on the ground that do this thing regularly, we understand these, but sometimes the people in position of authority and supervision haven't done it before, so they think this stuff just happens magically. Right. It doesn't, right? No. You have to look like who you're pretending to be at every moment, right. So you can't be dressed when you do this stuff. I've taught people this all the time.
From the second I walk out of my house where I really live. From that second on, I'm that other person. I'm that undercover persona, and I have to expect I'm being followed, I'm being watched. If you don't have that mindset, something bad is going to happen. All right? I think, Ralph, you and I talked about it. There's a bridge outside of Boston that when I hit this bridge, I become that other person. I have to. All right. Now that I'm retired, it's so much nicer
not to have to be two people. Yeah. But when you're doing the Cinema cartel, it really is a psychological challenge. Right. Okay. Now, if they thought if we act think, dress, talk like cops yeah. You're going to never see them away, right? Of course. So you got this clown out with a bathrobe on his hair, having a cocktail in the middle of the day. Well, I don't know who these guys are, but they're not FBI agents, I can tell you that. And she was in a bikini. She was, yeah.
So you wouldn't expect to see an FBI agent in a bikini either. No. Yeah, that's funny. Wow. And this all came out later in court, and I was testifying to some of this, and the jury was literally laughing. It was a very serious process, but they were like, wow, I didn't know. I thought, like, Ephraim Zimbalis Jr. Did this stuff. I didn't know these guys wore bathrobes and strutted around. So we set it up the right way, and I had told them that I was bringing my guys to relax and vacation.
So we took him out to dinner. We went out dancing, just doing the necessary things. So the meeting kind of was serious business. And then you entertain them afterwards. Right. When you're an undercover agent, people think you're talking what we call dirty are you talking criminal nonstop. You're not. You have to spend hours and hours. It's just like gaining friendship or dating. You have to establish a relationship with the other people. So you do natural things. You go out to dinner.
You go out for drinks. You want them to like you, okay. And get a sense of who you are, which is actually a false sense. Right. And I tell people when I do my training, I tell people. And it was pretty much the same with the Sin Aloe, but I did a lot of organized crime undercover work the wise guys, the Mafia, blah, blah, blah. And with those guys, they want to talk about criminal activity the least amount of time as possible.
So you could be with somebody for two, 4 hours, and you might get three minutes of dirty talk. Well, you have to fill the time with something else. You can't be a doofus, or you got to talk about something. You like sports, hobbies, whatever. But you got to be engaged with these guys, because at the end of the day, they want to do business with you. Yeah. Okay. So you have that initial meeting in February of 2010, and with Chapel's first cousin. And then what happens?
Well, again, when we had to get used to this in the case, we would have these meetings, and then they would obviously go back to Mexico, or he would go back to Mexico, and we had to wait weeks or months before we could find out the next step. It wasn't like we were meeting with these guys around the corner every day. So we would meet with Manuel. He would go back to Mexico. They were very disciplined about phone conversations.
They wouldn't talk on the phone, hardly at all, other than to have arranged logistics. So when we left a meeting, we never knew if we would have another meeting until we got a response from Mexico. Right. So that February meeting back into the mountains, sit down with Chapel. Yeah. Everything's face to face. Right. And the informant it's too dangerous to send the informant in there, like, over and over again. So we establish communications with them.
We establish a system where basically they would call us at a certain date and time if things were going well. And there were times we didn't hear from them, and we were like, we're done. We didn't know. And then the phone would ring and we were back on. Most FBI undercover operations take place within the continental United States, and there's regular contact daily or weekly contact here. That's why you had to kind of hit a home run each meeting in order to get them to come back.
So how long does it take before you hear anything from them? Again, I may not remember the exact specifics, but we knew within a brief period of time, I would say weeks, that Manuel was impressed with us, that he told them these guys are the real deal. And he did. We found out later that he told them the boss was in his bathrobe. He didn't even get dressed up for this meeting. And everybody laughs about that, but that's something I stress in training. You're hearing that from the horse's mouth.
You got chopped gooseman. Being convinced that the FBI is really a Sicilian crime organization, a big deal. And when we got word back that he was impressed with us, we knew that we were going to move forward. We had to strategically plan and prepare for each meeting. We couldn't waste any meetings. Right. So Manuel would come back, and then he would slowly start bringing other people. At one point, they invited us. I think the next meeting was
in the Virgin Islands, correct? Yes. So there's like, three months in between the physical meetings. Now we're talking to them cryptically on the phone, but it's never dirty talk for being intercepted. So, you know, it's like a boxing match. They're filling us out, we're filling them out. We were prepared to continue on, and the next meetings were the Virgin Island meetings. And again, we're trying to mirror their organization. So I'm taking my guys on vacation.
Like, when they believe we're in Europe, we're hustling. So when it's time to relax, we want to go away from where the cops are and relax and enjoy the time. So we were happy to meet them in the Virgin Islands. And I believe they brought at least one other, if not two guys. Yeah, his personal mendoza, I think it was. Yeah Mendoza, his personal representative. Yeah. So they come this time and again. Our job is to tell them that we are the real deal.
And this is what I emphasize, and I hope they're listening. The other three undercovers have to carry the ball. I just come in periodically as the boss, so they have to go out to dinner, they have to go to the beach. They have to go out drinking with these guys. But again, with each meeting, if we hear back from them and they want to meet again, means we're making progress. Right. The business end of it is you're talking amounts of cocaine and heroin that Chapo would import into Europe.
Is that correct? Yes. Because we knew from anybody in law enforcement knows at that time they had a stronghold on the United States. They flooded our country with all kinds of dope, but they didn't have a presence, a strong presence in Europe. That's what we tried to take advantage of. And when we floated, we called it the pipeline. We wanted to establish a pipeline between Mexico and Europe. It just melded into what their business model was at the time. Right, so you were going to
basically be their distributor in Europe. Exactly. So, again, planning planning or preparation by having that seem to come out of nowhere, it took us six months to decide that. Right. And what kind of quantities were they were crazy quantities. In that Miami February meeting, they opened up what they could give us 20 tons.
Now, to understand the scale of this request, 20 tons of cocaine laid out in kilo bricks would almost cover a football field end zone to end zone, and be worth over $1 billion. And if we had said yes, they would have said, thanks, officer. I'll see you around. Yeah. Right. So this is that tap dance, the psychological chess match. We looked at them like they were crazy. Nobody does 20 tons. Right off the bat. Right off the bat, yeah.
So we had to negotiate, and we wanted only 10 00, 15 00 kilos, which is a hell of a lot of dope, but it's a very small quantity in the big picture. But we have to act unlike cops. Right. So you have to act like a criminal organization. Right. Give us a smaller amount, and we'll test it. Let's see how each side handles it. Okay? Right. We bent over backwards. We were very respectful, but we weren't overwhelmed that we were dealing with Chapel. All right.
I even told Manuel at one point, your guy stuck with a warrant over his head. I can move anywhere in the world. Your guy is stuck in the mountains. All right? Which is true. He was limited in what he could do because he couldn't leave Mexico. So that's why Manuel had to come to Europe and the United States to meet with us. But Manuel was we ended up calling Manuel the telephone. That's how the messages were exchanged. And during this time, you're also having to deal with the FBI brass. Right.
So what is their take? Are they pleased with your progress? Are they pushing you to move faster? You have to understand, because the case was out of Boston, which was unusual, we were supervised by people in Boston, and all of whom were excellent bosses. Now, FBI headquarters in Washington obviously has overall authority and overall oversight, but we used our bosses in Boston to kind of keep them off our backs so we could work. Right.
And I'm not disparaging anybody, but when you're doing something like this and you're involved in the day to day planning, preparation meetings, you can't spend your whole day on the phone with Washington explaining yourself, having second guess. So because of who the targets were, because of our initial successes, we were able to kind of move forward without too much crap, for lack of a better term. Every FBI investigation is monitored. Everybody has to deal with Washington.
It's just the way it is. But we had great bosses in Boston who allowed us based and I remember distinctly my direct boss saying, give me all the paperwork. I'll take care of that. You go do what you got to do. That's great. So we were protected, if that's the right word, by our manager. We're running interference for you. Later in the case, headquarters started to tighten the noose. But after these first initial meetings, we were supported very well.
So after the Virgin Islands meeting, they went back. We had to wait to see if we were still in the game. Whatever we did was impressive enough that they came back to us. The next series of meetings took place in Florida and they brought financial people and legal people. So we knew that we were dealing with their I used to refer to their executive level board or their management board. They brought legal people, serious financial people.
Because think about it, if you take away the illegal aspect of it, cocaine and heroin, if you have two conglomerates trying to do a deal in Europe and one's in Mexico, you're going to send your top people to work a deal out. And these were very capable people, very educated, very well spoken, very well dressed, very impressive people. If they ever devoted the same level of interest to legitimate work, they'd probably be very successful. They're not stupid people, believe me. Right.
So we had these financial and it was mainly financial. And that's when, because I was running that national team, I had access to all the undercovers around the country. So I brought in guys who were very skilled in financial and money laundering. So just as we were meeting new people, I was introducing new people to them so they didn't see the same four faces every time.
And there were many meetings where they would see me maybe through a window or sitting out in a car, and I didn't even come into the meeting. That's what I have people working for me to do just as chapo. I basically was chapo for us. So I would send my attorney, I would send my legal guy. And again, we had exceptional undercover agents work in this case. There were no rookies or sloppy undercover working as they were the best the FBI had to offer.
So in that meeting in Florida in August, the money laundering came up, right? Do you remember? Yeah. We had a function, again, a social function. It's not always business, but business inevitably comes up. And I believe that it was the attorney who approached. One of our guys, I believe was Patricio and began to discuss money laundering, and he asked them how much they were talking about, because money laundering inevitably goes hand in hand with drug trafficking.
I had done a lot of money laundering cases in my career. I knew the right way to go about it. And we said to them, well, what do you think? What do you have in mind? He said, Just a little bit. And I believe his comment was 500 million to start. All right, just a little bit. And one of the problems with the Mexican cartels is exactly that. They make so much cash money, it's very difficult to clean up. I mean, they literally have we've seen them.
They literally have underground tunnels that is stuff full of US. Cash that they literally can't get rid of. They put them in wheelbarrows or small trains to transport. There's just that much cash hanging around. So what that told me, when they approached us about that, we eventually told them, yes, we'll end your money later. We want to do the dope first. But what that told me was we were in solid.
If they're asking us to launder their funds, they're going to give you X amount of dollars and trust you to return a percentage of that. You don't do that unless you're in tight. Right. So these are all positive signs. So your credibility with them was very high. Yes. And again, we told them no. What, cops are going to turn down laundering money.
Right. And I literally had to go to Washington and explain our position where we didn't want to do it, because if we started to go down the money laundering path, we would have got away from the drug trafficking. If we were going to prosecute these people on drug trafficking charges, we needed to have actual drugs in our possession. Right. So the money was kind of exciting, and it didn't justify all the time and energy we had set up to do the case.
And then I think the next meeting was in Spain in 2011. That's right. We went to Madrid. I think that's the point where you had contact with Chapo, is that correct? We were trying to arrange earlier when we were in the Virgin Islands, mendoza called Chapo, and Chapo was on the phone with us in the Virgin Islands. And Patricio and Antonio, two of our undercovers, obviously were Spanish speakers. I wasn't going to get on the phone because I don't speak Spanish.
And they got on the phone with him and had a conversation, and he basically said, hey, tell Vajo I'm looking forward to this. He had bought it. He just tells us, Hope things are going to work out. Hope we have a long relationship. So they talked to him in the Virgin Islands. When we went to Spain, I was supposed to speak directly to him because he was now introducing us to his people, his traffickers, who were in Europe.
Okay, so all of this is leading to, we're going to do this exchange, but you need to meet our people. They need to meet. And we were being vetted every time we knew that they were watching us. Right. It was a cat and mouse game. Yeah. So you go to Spain, and I think that's where you started to discuss drugs and test loads. Correct? Right. At that point, we had now spent more than a year, I believe, pushing this.
And again, because you got to understand it if you're talking about a large quantity transaction, either by vessel or by air, the details involved in that are incredible. This isn't something you can work out in an hour. And especially given the back and forth, they had to go into the mountains, come back to us. It took a long time, but we were patient. And at this point, we now started to talk specifics. We were going to get X amount of dope.
We talked about using cargo planes, vessels, et cetera. How much, we had to know. You got to remember, if we get 1000 kilos of cocaine, we can't pay for it. The US taxpayer is not going to give the FBI millions and millions of dollars. So we had to be creative. And we told them, hey, rather than paying you for it, we'll offload it for you, we'll get rid of it for you, and we'll take 20% of the load as our payment.
That way we don't have to give them any cash and we find out where all the adopt is going. So these are the negotiations that go on for weeks, months. Now we're in two years. You're negotiating percentages, you're negotiating terms. And when I say we are, this is getting back to the three undercovers. That was their primary job, and I would just come in and clean it up.
An interesting thing I remember about Spain was when I went into the meetings, the other undercover in the informant had prepared these guys so well. They stood up when I walked in like I was the President of the United States. Okay? But again, this is what I teach in training. They were pavlov's dogs because of the way the scenario had been set up. So they knew that when I walked into room businesses. Yeah, exactly. There's a video from Spain that we played at trial where they all jump up.
It looked like the United Nations when I walked into a room. But that's just the way they had been prepared. And Spain was successful. The Spanish National Police were great. They allowed us access to a private airstrip. We were trying to lure Chapel out of Mexico. And we did a scenario where I took Manuel to this private airfield. I met with all the generals as if I controlled the airport. And we offered the opportunity for Chapter to flee to Europe.
And again, we find out a lot of things. You find out. After the investigation, we found out that he was seriously considering that we had hoped that he jumped on a plane, but that was the type of cooperation we got from the foreign law enforcement. So this was a worldwide effort. The FBI was leading the show, but we got great help from Italy, from Spain, from England. We got help from everywhere. So you decide to not use the airstrip. That was a decision that they made. That they made.
And what did they come back with in terms of an alternative? Well, no, kind of a secondary goal was to try to get him out of Mexico. So that's what the airfield was about, the dope deal. So you can arrest them? Yeah. If he felt so much pressure in Mexico, he had to flee. Well, he had to go somewhere. So we just gave them the opportunity to come to Europe if he ever chose to. He eventually did not, but it was a serious consideration.
We found out later we're still focused on our drug exchange, and it's during those meetings in Madrid that they commit to start sending us drugs that summer. And that would lead to to the test loads that you're familiar with. For people who aren't educated in drug trafficking, you can't send a container from point A to point B with no previous relationship, without customs, whatever country it is, the customs people are going to search that vessel. So we had to do some test loads.
We only wanted it to be one or two test loads. They ended up over that summer, they ended up doing, I think it was four or five. And we were getting a little bit aggravated because it takes time, money, etc, etc. They were being careful, we understood that. But at the same this is really when Washington started to get a little bit antsy. We had now been working these guys for a couple of years and we had great conversations. We had a great conspiracy, but we didn't have any actual drugs, right?
And without drugs, you don't have any real evidence. You can charge people with drug trafficking charges without drugs, but you really don't want to do that. And especially you don't want to do that with the sinner cocktail. It's called a dry conspiracy. But we were adamant that we had to seize drugs in order to move forward with the prosecution. So when you talk about test loads, you're talking about just seeing if you can get things through certain ports and through certain customers.
You have to have Company A, have a history with Company B, right? And every month they get a load of pineapples, they get a load of fruit, whatever it is. That's what they were establishing with us. But again, we never lose sight of the fact that we're law enforcement. We're telling them, hey, one or two is plenty. You're sending it to Spain? It's our responsibility to get it any risk is on our end, not yours, even though they'd lose the product.
But they were very disciplined, and that's why they're the top. And they were sending actual fruit. Correct? Yeah. We fed half the country of Spain with pineapples and plantains and everything, but it was frustrating. And you got to remember, the case agent who started this whole case is very inexperienced. He thinks they're going to drop him out of planes, they're going to drop kilos out of parachutes. A very sophisticated process.
So you're getting shipments of pineapples and bananas or whatever it is, and it's your job to get it into the ports past the Customs initials. We had to show that we also had to the Cinelia cartel. Exactly. We had to show the cartel that we could get it off the ship through Customs and into Europe, which we did. We literally had to drive this junk out of the port. We didn't know if we were being watched. Right. Of course. You probably were. We have to go through the motions.
People get frustrated. But I knew going into this that if we were going to do it right, we had to do all of these steps. And it was going to be frustrating and it was going to be long term. But one mistake this is what people don't get. You make one mistake and three years of investigation are out the window. Okay, so you do two or three. I think it was I think it was either four or five. Yeah.
And that goes well. No glitch. No. We're establishing the relationship, but as lhey in Europe, I'm now bitching to my people, hey, let's get going. So we're now applying soft pressure to them. Hey, make this happen. There's a big difference between one and two test loads and four you're wasting basically another six to twelve months. And you're doing all this arranging, and it's complicated. I don't know if you've ever tried to do it. I learned a lot, I can tell you that. Right.
So now we're early 2012, and I think everybody at this point is getting ready, expecting the first load of drugs, and everybody's getting a little antsy. Right? Everybody. From the Cinema Cartel to the Sicilians to FBI headquarters to Boston, there was a tremendous amount of pressure. I felt comfortable that we were going to succeed. But you got to understand, at that point, I probably had, in the chain of command, I probably had 20 bosses above me, and each one of them needs an explanation.
Each one of them has to be convinced. So we had to make a critical decision at that point in that's late 2011, early 2012, I believe it took me about three months, four months that I finally went to the case agents and said, listen, you're not going to like this, but we have to tell the Silo that the Italians are walking away. We needed to now turn up the pressure to the point that they either had to provide something or walk away, because very simply, no bad guys would stick around that long.
So if we continue to just wait, they're going to say, Wait a minute, these guys, maybe these guys are really cops. So that was something that I decided. The case agent was very disappointed, but it was the right move, hopefully, at the time. So basically, we're going to communicate through our channels that Elviejo is. We told them straight out, they're gone, and we walked away. They tried to reach us and we stopped communicating. We didn't pick up the phone.
I think we did that in February, March 12. And believe me, there was a lot of sleepless nights about that decision. And again, I bark about the FBI when I don't think we're being supported. They supported that decision. They didn't like it, but they left that up to the investigators. I thought it was the right move. I knew it was a gamble. I told him I thought it had an 80% chance of working. In reality, I thought it had about a 20% chance of working, but I didn't tell them that.
But there comes a point in a case, every case, where you got to make something happen, and we have reached that point. So we did that. I believe it was March, and thankfully and luckily and hopefully, that kind of lit a fire under there in their jungle. And that leads up to July of 2012. We get a call out of the blue, go to Detroit in 24 hours, there's something there for you. We send a team to Detroit overnight. The next day, we go to a Mexican restaurant. We meet with the Mexican employees.
They take us to a back alley point to a car. We reach in the car, there's a takeout bag, and when we get back to the hotel, there's a huge amount of heroin and methamphetamine. And this was totally unexpected. It wasn't unexpected in the sense that they have to do. We had kind of called their bluff. All right, right, you guys are supposed to be the cynical or cartel. You're supposed to be this and that. You can't even give us a bag of dirt. So again, what cop is going to say to them?
We're walking away. All right. So we set that up, and once we got the heroin and the methamphetamine, I knew literally that moment that we were going to get the load that we had hoped for. And literally within I think it was only two or three weeks later at the end of July, finally, a ship arrives in Spain, and there's 346 kilos of cocaine. So the mother load finally came in. It took three years. Yeah, without fronting a dime. Didn't pay a penny for it. This was the moment of victory.
The FBI had helped facilitate the largest seizure of methamphetamine and heroin in Detroit. Law. Enforcement history, which was stuffed in takeout bags and dropped on the front seat of a car. They had also seized 346 kilos of cocaine in Spain. So after three years of investigation, the FBI now had illegal drugs supplied by the Sinhala cartel in their possession, which, after decades of trying, finally solidified the legal case against them.
So now you've got the drugs, you're talking to Chapo, you've established direct communications with him, and then what happens? You get the dope, you get the product, but the case has been finished until you get the bodies. So now we have to arrest. All right? So we know we're not going to we can't go into the mountains of Mexico and grab him, but we can grab all of his people. So we arrange for them to come to Spain again, and we want to have a celebratory party. We finally made our first deal.
Drugs are flowing freely through Europe. They're expecting to get paid. I believe they thought we were going to give them $13 million, so it's setting up the arrest. So we work with the Spanish national police, and we set up the final day. But again, from experience and from what older agents had taught me, we wanted to bleed them dry the last day because we're never going to see these guys again. So rather than just arrest them, we invite them. They think they're going to a huge party.
We bring them to the hotel, and then I sit with Manuel, one of the undercovers, and myself sat with man. Well, for I believe it was 4 hours, and we literally went through step by step of what had happened in the case that Chapo made every decision in the federal system, you have what's called co conspirator statements. So if Manuel says that Chapo approved all of these, that's evidence that you can use. So it's almost the same as the words coming out of Chapo's mouth.
And we had all other kinds of evidence, obviously, but we spent that last day I believe that was August. Yeah, we spent that last day milking him dry of every detail. This is all on video, audio, audio tape, to the point that I finally got a message from our team saying, no Moss, no more. You got it. I then brought up the other European guys, the telephone, the attorney, everybody else. That was one other thing I should point out. I would never talk dirty to anybody other than Manuel.
So when I would meet with the lawyer, I would meet with the financial guy, I would meet with the distributor, and that's the way chopper would operate. I would only talk to the most trusted person. That last day, I'm sure they were surprised, because here I am telling the whole story. Well, there's a reason, because the Spanish cops are waiting downstairs. All right, so we go through this. It was a long day, but a very productive day.
And then at the end of the day, they were all arrested in Madrid. And then there's another step to this process in terms of as soon as they're arrested, you want to talk to them. Right. So what happens is they're arrested, and we obviously arrested them in Europe so that Mexico wouldn't know about it right away. But we also know that if they didn't report in by a certain time, that that meant there was probably a problem. So we did start to interview them.
We did start to gather intelligence and additional information. But for a series of reasons that still aggravate me, we weren't allowed to pursue those new evidence. We were basically said, you accomplished what you were supposed to, shut it down. So they were telling you about other links that El Chapo had higher up in the Mexican government. Is that okay to say? Yes? Okay. Yeah. Not to pursue that. We were told that we had achieved our objectives because we were basically a drug case
and we now seize the drugs. We'd arrested them. That we had accomplished our objectives, that we were now going down a different path. And that wasn't authorized. It's just the internal workings of the legal system in the FBI. Yeah. You can speculate if there was other reasons, but again, we were told that our job was done. Okay. And they go to trial. Everybody pled guilty except the lawyer. The lawyer is always the smartest guy in the room. Remember, he went to trial. He went to trial.
I think it lasted five days. And he was convicted on all counts in less than 5 hours. Okay, so these guys were all pulled away except for Chapo. Everybody got arrested. Everyone was convicted. They averaged about 20 to 25 years each. And then Chapo obviously was beyond our grasp at the time. And then he was later obviously captured and extradited to the United States. Yeah, I think it was grabbed in 2016. I think it's 2016, correct? Yeah. January of 2016. And you got the word of that arrest?
The case agent called me or texted me, and it just said, we got him, and there was no further explanation needed. Right. You knew who he met? When they said, we got him, I said, hopefully they'll hold on to him this time, because as we know, he fled a second time before we were able to actually get him right. For good. And that's another fallacy. TV and films. The day of the arrest is the last. No, that's just the start of the process.
What good is working three years if these guys don't go to jail? What do you know about the raid in Mexico where they finally grab Chapo? Were you privy to any of that? Or was that just a phone call where you heard they got did you know it was in the process? I want to be careful how I present this. I would say that I was not surprised when he was arrested. I knew that they were getting closer and closer.
They don't call us up and tell us everything, but we're kept because we're one of the offices with a prosecution, we knew that they were tightening the news. It was clear that Mexico had kind of had its fill of Chapo and was willing to work with the United States becoming a liability. Yes. It affects the State Department, many things outside of the law enforcement arena. The squeeze was being made on Mexico. So, like I said, I didn't know exactly when and where they would get him.
It was a vicious shootout. I know that. Right. And I give a tremendous amount of credit to the Mexican Marines that went and got him because it was a nasty situation. People were killed. I know bad guys were killed. I don't know if any good guys were killed. I just don't remember. Yeah, but the Mexicans basically arrested him themselves. Yes. The United States. We extradited. The United States and Mexico work together, but the actual and again, I would like the same thing if it was on our side.
They arrested their own, and they handed them over. I'm sure we made it very clear to them that we wanted him. The political pressure exerted on Mexico had to be incredible. But we weren't going to give up. We weren't going to stop. So they finally decided it was in their best interest to turn them over. Right. And then he was extradited here. He was extradited here. He was put on trial in New York. There were historical cases throughout the United States. Chapo had been a target of the US.
Government for many years. Chicago, New York, Houston. So all of the cases we had, the only case that had the simultaneous evidence, the time evidence, all of our evidence was collected and forwarded to Washington, and then it was prosecuted in New York. And obviously he was convicted and sentenced to life in prison in the Supermax. What a case. And how was that received in the FBI? That must have been a big deal. It was well received. It was a big deal. It's interesting.
From where we started to where we finished, there were some people that never thought it would happen, which I understood. It was a long shot. There were other people who were very supportive, and there were times that we, as the investigators, would get frustrated, and then we would talk to certain people, and they'd say, hey, keep your head down. Keep going until they don't answer your phone call. Keep going. It's going well, yeah.
People don't recognize that's three years of work that each time we contact them, it could blow up in our face. So that's like constant pressure for three years. And when it was over and done with, I was very proud. And again, I told you, I got a lot of accolades, but the people most responsible for that success was the case agent, the informant, and the other three undercover. But don't think that just because Chapo was taken off the streets that they're still a very powerful organization.
We heard them pretty good back then. They took a hit for a while, but as long as there's a demand for drugs, there'll be cartels. Whether it's Mexico whether it's Europe It's just the way it is. It was never simply a case of seizing El Chapo. In order to lock him away in prison, the FBI had to make a legal case against him. Mike and his team accomplished that over three years in a brilliantly planned and executed undercover operation.
On August 7, 2012, mike and his team had arrested eight top members of the Sinnella cartel. A few days later, the US. Justice Department issued an indictment of El Chapo. On January 7, 2016, el Chapo was arrested in Mexico. Soon after that, he was extradited to the US and put on trial. The evidence against him was incontrovertible. Shortly after the trial, then FBI Director James Comey traveled to Boston to handle wards to Mike and the other FBI agents who had worked the case.
When it was Mike's turn to go to the podium, he remembered looking at Director Comey and thinking that the FBI leadership had actually let them down, and it shut off their investigations for reasons he didn't understand. In his own words, he thought, what the fuck does outside the scope of your original objective mean? That's how Mike's mind works.
The case was a huge success, but make no mistake about it, the Sinaloa cartel continues to smuggle huge amounts of illegal drugs into the United States. Just before El Chapo went to trial, mike and I met for lunch in Santa Monica, California. As we entered a cafe on Third Street, mike sort of maneuvered to a certain table in the back. He turned to me and said, ralph, do you mind if I sit facing the door? And I said, no, not at all. Why?
And he said, Well, I'm a major witness in the case against El Chapo, and they might have some people, like, looking out for me. It's like oh, okay, Mike. Thanks for letting me know. But that's Mike McGowan. Thanks for listening, and don't forget to subscribe. And make sure to tune in to the next episode of Heroes Behind Headlines. Bye.