- The most violent drug lord in history.
- Part of El Chapo’s rise is just how ruthless he was.
Innocent people would be caught in the crossfire.
- The most secure prison in Mexico.
- Chapo’s incarcerated in Altiplano prison,
which is super-maximum security.
- It was thought to be impregnable.
- And a daring attempt to break in.
- A one-mile tunnel.
How would you be able to pinpoint where to come up?
[dramatic music]
- You can see him pacing back and forth in the cell,
and then all of a sudden, he’s gone.
♪ ♪
- Some of the greatest stories ever told start behind bars.
♪ ♪
Locked up in the most notorious prisons
in the world,
spied on by guards and fellow prisoners.
It takes a devious mind to find a way out.
It could lead you to freedom.
Or it could cost you your life.
But wouldn’t you try,
when you have nothing left to lose?
♪ ♪
[tense music]
♪ ♪
This is an isolation cell
in Federal Social Readaptation Center Number Two,
known as Puente Grande,
just outside of Guadalajara, Mexico.
To escape means overcoming layer
after layer of impenetrable walls
and an army of guards that outnumber the inmates
almost two-to-one.
Seem like overkill?
Not if you’re dealing with a very special class
of criminal--the drug lord.
[helicopter whirring]
Drug lords have their own private armies,
so the walls of Puente Grande need to be able to withstand
a full-scale assault from the outside.
Above the walls, armed guards and towers
keep an eye on everything
and everyone that comes and goes from this lock-up.
Any attempt to get in or out must avoid their watchful eye.
- Puente Grande had a vast surveillance
and security apparatus.
It was the place that narco-criminals were sent.
It was thought to be impregnable.
- This cell is home to one of the most
notorious and bloodthirsty narco-criminals
of all time...
Joaquín Guzmán, known to the world as El Chapo.
♪ ♪
He’s a billionaire, a murderer,
and a folk hero.
To the Mexican government,
he’s just public enemy number one.
- El Chapo is the 21st century’s
narco-celebrity of all narco-celebrities.
[chatter]
- If you ask anybody, he’s still
the most feared drug trafficker in the world.
There are places in Mexico
where his name is just whispered now.
Part of El Chapo’s rise is just how ruthless he was.
There were certainly tens of thousands,
if not more that were collateral damage
as a result of the raging drug war
that he was at the center of.
♪ ♪
- Joaquín Guzmán starts growing marijuana in 1972,
and rises quickly
in the violent international drug trade.
By 1989, he’s head of the infamous
Sinaloa Cartel.
But during a bloody turf battle
with a rival cartel,
a beloved Catholic bishop is killed in the crossfire,
and El Chapo becomes a wanted man.
- As a result of this, the Mexican government
mounted a massive manhunt.
[gunfire]
They finally apprehended him in Guatemala
in June 1993.
And from there, he goes to Puente Grande prison.
- But despite the prison’s intense security,
Puente Grande doesn’t turn out to be
such a bad place for El Chapo.
♪ ♪
Using his reputation for brute violence,
plus $2.5 million worth of bribes,
he soon makes the prison a comfortable base
from which to run his empire.
- The life that Chapo Guzmán lived inside Puente Grande
was almost more luxurious than the Italian gangsters
who were locked up, you know, in "Goodfellas."
[upbeat music]
He had his pick of liquor, lobster, women.
He was allowed to have visits not only from his main wife,
but from his second wife.
He also had a prison girlfriend.
He had--he essentially had free access to telephones.
And all of this was possible because he had befriended
the deputy warden for security of Puente Grande,
a guy named Dámaso López.
[suspenseful music]
♪ ♪
López, who, in exchange for small gifts,
like cash and a nice house,
essentially gave Chapo Guzmán
the run of Puente Grande.
- At some point, he had paid off
almost every single official in the prison.
- Chapo was still able to organize drug shipments,
even though he was within Puente Grande prison.
♪ ♪
- It’s at this time that El Chapo makes
a brilliant innovation in the drug-trafficking business.
- How do you get anything across what is
a heavily-patrolled border?
What if you could evade detection by going below?
What if you could construct an easy pathway from Mexico
into the United States,
one that was air conditioned, one that had lighting,
one that had an elaborate railcar system
that could transport hundreds,
thousands of kilograms-- marijuana,
cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine?
Well, if you could figure that out,
you’d be a successful man.
A man who pioneers the use
of tunnels to transport narcotics
across the United States-Mexico border is El Chapo.
♪ ♪
- He employed highly-skilled architects and engineers
to design these tunnels for him.
He managed to maintain an operation
that was netting him
in the neighborhood of $20 million a month.
Guzmán’s empire grew almost more than it had
before he was incarcerated.
- El Chapo’s business savvy and the intense loyalty
he instills in his underlings
keeps the Sinaloa Cartel running from behind bars.
But all that is about to change.
- In the mid to late ’90s,
Mexico is not extraditing Mexican nationals
to the United States.
But something changed beginning in 2001.
The Mexican Supreme Court issued an opinion saying
that it would restart extraditions
of Mexican nationals to the United States.
And Chapo was not having it.
- Hanging around in his plush prison hideout
is no longer an option.
El Chapo is a sitting duck
if he can’t get out of here--fast.
- Chapo learns that he has been charged
with drug trafficking crimes here in the United States,
and he’s worried. He’s concerned that
if he gets extradited in the United States,
he’s not gonna have the same ability
to control his cartel,
give out instructions, coordinate drug shipments
from inside a U.S. prison cell.
So he realizes that he has to get out.
- El Chapo isn’t just the mastermind
of an international drug cartel.
He’s also an escape artist.
♪ ♪
He knows he needs to be very careful
who he confides in about his plans.
♪ ♪
- What you see is, within a matter of weeks,
Chapo put together his escape plan
from Puente Grande Prison.
[suspenseful music]
- He orchestrates a complex series of getaway vehicles
to be put in place for his jail break.
He threatens the lives of anyone
who could reveal the plan.
And of course, he greases a lot of palms.
- For this escape,
he bribed a much smaller group of officials,
the idea being the fewer people that know,
the less trouble there will be.
And so ultimately,
he bribed one of the workers, a man named Chito.
♪ ♪
- It’s Chito’s job to take this laundry cart
out of the prison in a van, and take the laundry
to be cleaned to bring it back to the prison.
- El Chito, or the Quiet One, is a perfect accomplice,
since, in his lowly janitorial position,
he’s off the radar of the other guards.
♪ ♪
[gate squeaks]
- The Quiet One opens his cell door,
helps him into a cart of dirty laundry,
conceals him, walks him out of the cell.
- Chapo knows exactly how many gates
he has to get through in order to be free.
Now, at some point, Chito lets go of the cart
in order to ask one of the guards to open the gate.
The cart starts rolling back,
and Chapo winds up being terrified
that the cart is gonna spill over,
he’ll fall out on the floor,
and he’ll be sent right back to prison.
But the cart stays upright.
Chito collects it, walks out of the prison,
into the parking lot, opens the trunk
of a Chevy Monte Carlo that El Chapo hops into,
and then the prison guard drives him away.
- He’s got a head start,
thanks to having the local police
in his pocket.
But federal law enforcement gets word of the escape,
and the chase is on.
He still has a long, dangerous road
ahead of him to safety.
♪ ♪
- He was met by yet another car,
an armored Volkswagen, so it is said,
from which he was driven to a place
where he was picked up in a helicopter.
The helicopter flew him to yet another location,
where Guzmán got into a third car,
and made a multi-hour drive from that secret location
to Mexico City.
Arriving in Mexico City,
Guzmán is said to have looked up
from the back seat of the vehicle
and seen police squad cars
and motorcycles surrounding him.
♪ ♪
- In the complex web of local, state, and federal police,
El Chapo can never be 100% sure
who’s clean and who’s dirty.
- He nervously asks his driver, "What’s going on?"
And he was reassured, "Don’t worry, amigo.
Those are our police."
♪ ♪
- He has his own corrupt Mexico City police officers
form, essentially, a motorcade to prevent
any other law enforcement from stopping Chapo,
and Chapo winds up going to the safe house
and essentially starting up again.
♪ ♪
- So the fact that he was able to escape,
waltz out of the maximum-security prison
at Puente Grande in 2001
creates the legend of Chapo
as the uncatchable, the untouchable.
♪ ♪
[dramatic music]
♪ ♪
- After his escape from this cell
at Puente Grande,
El Chapo manages to stay out of the grip
of the Mexican government for more than a decade.
- Even though El Chapo is living as a fugitive
in the remote mountain hideouts
that he has carved out of these valleys and peaks,
he is able to really become the narcotrafficker
that we think of him being today.
In the few years after Guzmán escaped from Puente Grande
and reignited his American cocaine
and heroin distribution organization,
he was able to get almost a billion dollars of cocaine
to Chicago alone.
- His empire grows by him doing what he’s always done--
trafficking ton quantities of drugs
all over the world.
[gunshots]
- It was during this time that he decided
that the way to control Mexico,
the way to control drug trafficking,
was to do it violently.
So he went out from Sinaloa,
which is on the western side of Mexico,
and he sent his soldiers to places like Ciudad Juarez,
Nuevo Laredo, Nuevo Leon,
and you began to see these really bloody turf battles
that hadn’t existed in Mexico prior.
You’d see these almost military-esque war zones
break out.
Gas stations would be set on fire.
Innocent people would be caught in the crossfire.
And it was really just remarkable
to see these pockets of Mexico that had had peace for so long
really just spiral out of control
as a result of El Chapo’s violence.
♪ ♪
- By 2014, both the Mexican and U.S. government
want this guy back behind bars.
The heat is on.
- We just started climbing
the ladder of the cartel hierarchy.
We looked at our organizational chart
and organized all efforts towards Chapo,
because we were able to target him from multiple angles,
not just one line of intelligence
but we started targeting through his pilots,
his sons and family members, his girlfriends, his spouses.
- The FBI was able to identify and turn
Guzmán’s personal IT man,
a young, twenty-something Colombian kid.
And through this cooperation from the IT man,
they hacked into his encrypted cell phone network.
♪ ♪
[tense music]
- So we had Chapo’s location down to a block radius.
We knew he was holed up in a safe house,
ad we ended up finding the safe house
and hitting the door.
[banging]
- Chapo’s secretary comes in and says
that the Mexican military was there.
And they can literally hear the banging
on the steel-reinforced door
that was covering the actual door
to the safe house.
[dramatic music]
- They could see people moving in the windows
hurriedly through the house.
- So they immediately ran into the bathroom.
♪ ♪
- But the sneaky El Chapo
is not dashing into the bathroom to hide.
He’s going to escape through a tunnel.
- After pioneering the narco-tunnels,
he realized it was just a cookie-cutter plan.
He could use these as escape tunnels.
- He’s really kind of built up his tunnel game
without a whole lot of people knowing about it.
- On the night of the raid,
Guzmán was able to escape this safe house into a tunnel,
and that tunnel was hidden beneath a trap door
under a false bathtub
in the bathroom of the safe house.
There was a switch on the bathroom wall,
and if you took what was essentially a paper clip
and you jammed the paper clip
into the electrical outlet on the wall,
it created an electric current that went around the seal
and essentially burned out all the caulking
that sealed the bathtub lid closed.
And then you had to prop the bathtub lid open,
and it kind of opened on a hydraulic hinge,
and beneath that false top
was the entrance to the tunnel
and the ladder going down.
It’s remarkable.
♪ ♪
- Because of this quick escape plan,
Chapo, his girlfriend, the secretary,
and Chapo’s cook,
they all descended down the stairs
into this network of tunnels, and they were able to escape
before the Mexican Marines could get to them.
♪ ♪
- By the time that they got into the house,
the house was completely empty.
I got there, saw the reinforced steel door,
and walked through the house, and came in through a bedroom,
and there were clothes littered all over,
and drug prescription bottles.
- They found Chapo’s diamond-encrusted pistol,
with his initials on it. They found a bunch of drugs.
They found, you know, every accoutrement
you would imagine a drug lord would have at the ready.
- El Chapo’s mastery of building secret tunnels
has made him a rich man,
and helped him outrun the police.
And if they ever catch him,
it’s a skill that could really come in handy.
♪ ♪
- In 2014, the bloodthirsty drug lord El Chapo
is still on the lam.
His reign of terror has left a trail of corpses
all across Mexico.
The Mexican government, along with the DEA,
is doing everything it can to put him back behind bars.
[dramatic music]
- What Chapo decides to do is go to somewhere
he feels he would be sort of inconspicuous,
which is a beach town of Mazatlán.
You know, it’s a vacation destination.
A lot of Americans vacation there.
So, it didn’t seem like an obvious choice.
He didn’t go to one of his mountain warrens,
which would be an obvious hiding place.
He went somewhere that was completely out of the box.
♪ ♪
They tracked down Chapo at Hotel Miramar,
which is a tourist hotel.
- I was in the front of the hotel at the time,
and I heard, "We’ve got the target.
We’ve got the target." And I drove my vehicle
down into the underground parking garage.
♪ ♪
And I ran right up to him and just jumped in his face
and said, "What’s up, Chapo?"
It was, like, the first thing that came to me.
Was just kind of all the excitement
just rushing out. Couldn’t believe it.
- When El Chapo returns to prison,
the Mexican government does not make the mistake
of returning him to Puente Grande.
He’s getting locked up here,
in Federal Social Readaptation Center Number Uno,
AKA Altiplano.
Altiplano is the most secure prison
in all of Mexico,
and one of the toughest maximum-security prisons
in the world.
Not only is it a no-fly zone, its walls are thick enough
to resist a full-scale military assault,
cell phones don’t work anywhere in the prison,
and most important of all, in here,
El Chapo is no longer being watched
by guards his cartel can control.
Altiplano is considered impossible to escape.
But with U.S. extradition hanging over his head,
El Chapo wastes no time coming up with a plan
to be the first person
to break out of this formidable fortress.
- The only way that Guzmán,
once he was in prison at Altiplano,
was able to communicate with the outside world
was through people who were permitted to visit him there.
And those people were essentially his lawyer,
Oscar Lopez, and his third and much younger wife.
- He coordinated with his wife,
Emma Coronel, with his sons,
who are known by the nickname Los Chapitos,
that he wanted to put a plan into action.
And so immediately, they began paying the appropriate bribes,
getting the personnel lined up
who are necessary to implement such a plan.
- One key player is a familiar face
from El Chapo’s previous jailbreak.
- After Guzmán’s first escape from Puente Grande,
Dámaso López was essentially blamed for it,
and he was unemployable. He lost his job.
He had nowhere to go, and ended taking a job
with Guzmán and the Sinaloa Cartel.
He rose in the ranks, and by the time
that Guzmán was in prison a second time,
at Altiplano, Dámaso López
was more or less Guzmán’s Chief of Staff.
He was his true right-hand man,
and really the guy who was running much
of Guzmán’s operations while Guzmán was in prison.
- Even with all these people doing this bidding,
El Chapo’s escape is far from a sure thing.
He’s confined to this cell 23 hours a day,
not allowed to take part in any prison sports
or activities,
and he can only have court-approved visitors.
A GPS monitor is permanently strapped around his ankle.
El Chapo knows he won’t be able to roll out of the front door
like he did at Puente Grande.
Even worse, he’s under constant video surveillance...
♪ ♪
By two Mexican national intelligence officers.
El Chapo has finally met his match.
♪ ♪
Or has he?
♪ ♪
- This being El Chapo, a tunnel
has to be part of the plan.
But where are you going to tunnel from?
- The plan was to first acquire a piece of property
that was close enough to Altiplano
that it would enable the construction of a tunnel
into the prison, but not too close
so as to attract the attention of any authorities.
So there was first a search team
that was essentially a real estate team
that went out looking for such a property.
Altiplano stood on its own in essentially the midst
of a vast agricultural region and was just a huge complex
that emerged from this vast Mexican flatland.
There was virtually nothing around it,
minus a few small smatterings
of villages.
Within about a mile
of the prisons gates
was a vacant industrial site
that perhaps had been used
by some of the local farmers
at one point.
Once the property was acquired,
the engineering question
of how to build this tunnel was breached.
♪ ♪
- El Chapo’s men are facing
their most difficult engineering task ever:
how do you break into a maximum-security prison?
The walls are impenetrable, the guards are heavily armed,
and the closed-circuit TV camera
can see every inch of El Chapo’s cell.
Well, almost every inch.
The shower drain is obscured by this half-wall.
The only way to get in unnoticed
is to dig a tunnel that opens up right here.
♪ ♪
- The foremost challenge
that the escape crew had to face
was how do we dig underground for what was essentially
a mile, sightless, beneath the surface of the earth,
scratching away at rock and dirt,
to get directly to the target?
- A one-mile tunnel, with the aim of it
coming up directly in El Chapo’s shower stall.
How is it that they would know
exactly where his shower drain was?
- Without some way to locate the shower stall,
El Chapo’s team is searching for a needle in a haystack.
What he’s asking for borders on impossible.
♪ ♪
[dramatic music]
- Drug lord Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán is locked up
in a fortress--Altiplano maximum-security prison.
But he has a plan to escape.
A mile from here, outside the prison walls,
his men are attempting to dig an underground passageway
that leads to this exact spot.
If their angle of measurement is off by a single degree,
they’ll miss the target by 92 feet.
Somehow, they need to make sure
they get from there to here, exactly.
♪ ♪
- Once you enter the warehouse,
you see what looks like a sand floor.
And so, you descend into a chamber
that’s supporting the sand floor
with cinder blocks on the sides
and a wooden ceiling.
From there, you descend a further 30 feet
to the actual tunnel. It’s almost inconceivable
that something like this could take place.
This isn’t tunneling below a wall
and emerging on the other side and making a break for it.
This is a feat of coordination,
structural engineering,
planning, and bribery, the likes of which
we haven’t seen in the history of great escapes.
How would you be able
to pinpoint with such precision
a 3x2-foot hole in the ground to know where to come up?
[suspenseful music]
- In January 2015, El Chapo comes up with a cunning plan
to help his men find his cell.
- The idea was, they were going to smuggle
into the prison a GPS device,
so that Chapo could turn it on
and the people building this tunnel would know exactly
where the other end of the tunnel needed to be.
- At Altiplano, smuggling anything
is next to impossible.
♪ ♪
- When you get into the prison,
there’s roughly half a dozen,
perhaps more checkpoints you have to go through.
You can’t bring anything in that could potentially
be used as a weapon or as a tool to escape.
- El Chapo would have to risk it.
There was no other way to move forward with the plan.
So he enlisted the help of the people he trusted most.
- Chapo’s family members smuggled a watch to him
that had a GPS locator on it.
- And the digging crew was able to follow the signal
that that watch emitted even underground,
digging day after day,
night after night,
to reach that signal.
- His GPS watch lets El Chapo’s men know
that their aim is true.
But down here in the tunnel,
there are other challenges to overcome.
- You need air down there to breathe,
or else you will asphyxiate.
You’re talking about a digging crew
of 10 to 12 guys
working in this thing.
So they had to blow air into it and ventilate
in order to survive.
- They wind up lining the tunnel
with thousands of feet of PVC pipe,
and they have a compressor putting forced air
through the tunnel so people could breathe inside.
They also needed to outfit it with lights,
so that it wasn’t completely dark.
To do that, you needed to have a generator.
So they hide a generator in the building
on the land that they’ve purchased,
and they hide that generator
by making it look like a barbecue pit.
- It’s a massive undertaking.
♪ ♪
- The scale of the endeavor boggles the mind--5,000 feet
of PVC piping for ventilation,
thousands of fluorescent light bulbs,
moving over hundreds of thousands
of pounds of dirt,
and not be detected.
- It was laid with a makeshift railroad track,
atop which sat a kind of modified mining cart,
which had been outfitted
with the stripped-down frame of a motorcycle.
- Chapo was very impatient.
We now know that he was writing letters,
saying, "Why is it taking so long?"
And he was being told, "Compadre,
this is not an easy job. We’ve got to get this right."
But he was eager to get out of there as soon as possible.
♪ ♪
- El Chapo gets the word
that the tunnel is almost ready,
and he gives word back about a special date
he wants the escape to happen on.
- Guzmán’s plan was to have his escape from Altiplano
fall on Saturday, July 4th. It was a Saturday that year.
That was an important fact, because on weekends,
Altiplano’s prison staff was low.
And he chose July 4th because he wanted to embarrass
the American government--that he could break out of prison
on America’s greatest national holiday.
It didn’t quite work that way.
They couldn’t pull it off by Saturday, July 4th,
and so they had to delay one week.
♪ ♪
- El Chapo isn’t able to give the U.S. authorities
the 4th of July fireworks show he was hoping for.
But his own independence day is coming soon.
On Saturday, July 11, 2015,
his team will attempt to break through
and whisk him away to freedom.
♪ ♪
[tense music]
- After almost a year of waiting,
the big night for Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán
is finally here.
He will be attempting to break out of Altiplano prison.
- A video exists of Guzmán on the night of the escape,
taken by prison authorities.
And you can see him in his cell,
lounging on his bed, listening to what seems to be
a television comedy show in a digital tablet.
you can literally here the laughter
and applause as he sits there waiting.
Every once in a while, he gets up,
he kind of paces around the room,
he sits back down, listens to his comedy show.
- You can hear, in the background,
you know, really loud television,
which you can tell is trying to cover up this banging
and clanging sound of the workers
digging up the floor of his cell.
[banging]
♪ ♪
- It’s at that point
that Guzmán sits on the edge of his bed,
puts on his shoes, gets up,
and walks into the shower cell,
the only place in the entire cell
that is obscured from view by a video camera
because obviously, they gave him some semblance
of privacy while he was bathing.
- You can see him pacing back and forth in the cell,
and then all of a sudden walking into the shower,
and then he’s gone.
♪ ♪
- Guzmán goes into a hole that has been punctured
in the bottom of his shower cell
by the conspirators underground.
He climbs down a makeshift ladder 15 to 20 feet.
He is met by his wife’s brother.
Guzmán is said to have climbed on the motorcycle.
It kicks into life.
It spirits him away a mile forward
to the exit of the tunnel.
He is taken up a ladder on the safe side.
- When he gets to the cinder block house,
there’s an ATV waiting to speed him away quickly
from the scene of the crime.
- It takes almost 40 minutes before the guards realize
that he’s gone and go into his cell.
- Cell number 20 sits empty
as a shocked security officer radios in to his commander.
[alarms blare]
The alarms goes off at Altiplano.
But it’s too late.
El Chapo is on the move, with a serious head start.
- He is driven through the night
to a waiting semi,
18-wheel truck.
♪ ♪
The truck drives him two hours from the town of Toluca,
where Altiplano prison is, to a much smaller town,
San Juan, Queretaro,
where he is placed aboard a small private plane
flown by one of his most trusted and favorite pilots.
- Shouldn’t surprise us that El Chapo, by this point,
is taking every precaution possible,
including making sure that there’s not one
but two planes ready to spirit him away to safety,
one as a decoy,
and one that will actually carry him to freedom.
♪ ♪
- And his plane spirits him away
from the Mexican flatlands
back to his home base in the Sinaloa mountains,
to his sort of most secure private hideaway,
known as the Sky.
- Watching the video, it’s just incredible
the amount of noise that was happening,
the amount of drilling and banging that could be heard.
And nobody raised a head. Nobody lifted a finger.
Nobody questioned as to why that was happening.
So it’s pretty remarkable, but, really,
expected at this point in time.
He escaped Puente Grande in 2001.
He escaped law enforcement for 13 years.
He escaped us during our operation,
out of his safe house.
And now you put him in a maximum-security prison
in Mexico, and you think that he’s going to be secure?
I don’t think so.
I think it was probably inevitable.
I had some initial shock when he broke out.
But went right back into "let’s go get this guy.
"He’s done this before to us.
Let’s mount up the team and get after him."
- Following this escape, El Chapo attempts to resume
his regular activities, but now it’s not as easy.
This escape is a significant embarrassment
to the Mexican government, who had, only a year before,
trumpeted his capture as a major accomplishment
in the nation’s war on drugs and crime.
That only adds fuel to the fire
to try to see him apprehended once again.
- There doesn’t seem to be a prison in Mexico
that can hold El Chapo for good.
Once again, he has escaped.
And now, for the third time, the chase is on.
♪ ♪
- It’s 2015.
El Chapo leaves Mexican authorities in shock
by escaping through a mile-long tunnel
under Altiplano prison.
Embarrassed by their inability to keep El Chapo
under lock and key,
the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency
and the Mexican Marines
are more determined than ever to bring him
to justice on U.S. soil.
- For days now, we have been trying to gain entry
into that home where El Chapo is said to have emerged.
We finally... I had, at the time,
a very high-level source in the Mexican government
who gave me the initial heads up that he had escaped.
When I got down to the tunnel, the first thing I noticed
was a discarded Coca-Cola can, and it made it so humanizing.
Like, the men that had been working to build this
were drinking Coca-Colas and tossing their trash aside.
It was like being in this live-action museum.
There was this overwhelming odor of gasoline,
and the motorcycle still had a half
a tank of gasoline in it,
so it was just like El Chapo had just been here,
and it gives me goosebumps to think,
just a few days before,
the most notorious drug trafficker in the world
was standing right where I was standing.
♪ ♪
- After Guzmán’s escape from Altiplano,
the U.S. law enforcement agents
and the Mexican Marines,
who had spent all of that time and energy
to put him into Altiplano in the first place,
were devastated.
- My initial reaction was shock,
but I was too far gone at this point.
We all were, really.
But thankfully, the Mexican Marines
had our blueprint of intelligence,
and picked that back up and got back after it.
And it didn’t take them long to track him down,
because he really had nowhere to go.
[suspenseful music]
- The Mexican government availed itself
of a very sophisticated Israeli technology
called Pegasus,
this super-secret surveillance technology
that essentially uses
what are known as Trojan horses
to enter the target of an investigation’s cell phone.
Operation: Black Swan was the Mexican Marine
and Mexican intelligence operation
that made Guzmán its high-priority target
once he escaped.
- He’s still feared.
He carries this mysticism to him,
almost this legendary status,
because for so many years, he was in hiding.
Everyone knew that this was the man that was responsible
for the violence in Mexico. But no one knew where he was.
No one seemed to know how to catch up to him.
And that made him an even more legendary figure.
- He escaped on July 11, 2015,
and then he’s recaptured again on January 8, 2016.
♪ ♪
- He winds up getting taken right back
to the same Altiplano prison that he just escaped from.
- Chapo was not deterred by being
re-recaptured, as we called it.
He was gonna try to escape again.
- He hasn’t given up at all.
Nunez testifies that the very next month,
after he’s recaptured,
Chapo’s family reaches back out to him and says,
"We gotta give this another go."
He receives another $100,000 as a down payment
to buy yet another property.
The idea was, they were gonna do it all over again.
A few months later, the Mexican authorities
wind up moving Chapo from Altiplano prison
to a prison right across the Rio Grande
from El Paso, Texas,
and there he stays until January 19, 2017,
when he’s brought to the United States.
[camera shutters clicking]
[reporters whistle, shout]
[dramatic music]
♪ ♪
Given his history of escapes,
I wasn’t entirely sure that he would make it
until he actually landed in New York City
and I was there in the courtroom with him.
And even then, there were moments.
We were all in court one day,
and all of a sudden, with no warning,
the power to the courthouse cuts out,
and we’re all sitting in darkness.
Someone in the gallery yells, "He’s gone!"
And I have to say, for a fraction of a second,
I wondered if Chapo had pulled off
probably the most elaborate escape possible.
But then the power comes back on,
and Chapo’s sitting right there
at counsel’s table, smiling.
- In the end, El Chapo is not able to escape U.S. justice.
- Chapo Guzmán was convicted on all counts,
and ultimately he was sentenced to life plus 30 years,
and he’s now residing in Florence, Colorado,
in the supermax prison.
- Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán is an evil genius.
He ran the biggest drug cartel in the world,
made billions of dollars,
and organized massive clandestine operations
to build tunnels, like this one.
His biggest fear-- landing in U.S. custody.
But today, that’s exactly where he is.
A supermax prison in Colorado
nicknamed the Alcatraz of the Rockies.
He spends his days in solitary confinement
and has almost no contact with the outside world.
Authorities believe they finally found a prison
he cannot escape.
But with someone like El Chapo,
it’s important to never say "never."