CULIACAN, Mexico — After fruitlessly pursuing one of the world’s top drug lords for years, authorities finally drew close to Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman using a cellphone found at a house where drugs were stored.
The phone belonging to a Guzman aide was recovered with clues from a U.S. wiretap and provided a key break in the long chase to find Guzman, officials told The Associated Press on Sunday.
Another big leap forward came after police analyzed information from a different wiretap that pointed them to a beachfront condo where the leader of the Sinaloa cartel was hiding, according to a U.S. government official and a senior federal law enforcement official.
When he was at last taken into custody with his beauty-queen wife, Guzman had a military-style assault rifle in the room, but he didn’t go for it.
A day after the arrest, it was not yet clear what would happen to Guzman, except that he would be the focus of a lengthy and complicated legal process to decide which country gets to try him first.
The cellphone was found Feb. 16 at a Culiacan house that Guzman had been using. By early the next day, the Mexican military had captured one of Guzman’s top couriers, who provided details of the stash houses that Guzman and his associates had been using, the officials said.
At each house, the Mexican military found the same thing: steel reinforced doors and an escape hatch below the bathtubs. Each hatch led to a series of interconnected tunnels in the city’s drainage system.
The officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss details of how Guzman was found, said troops who raided Guzman’s main house in Culiacan chased him through the drainage pipes before losing him in the maze under the city.
A day later, on Feb. 18, Guzman aide Manuel Lopez Ozorio was arrested and told investigators that he had picked up Guzman, cartel communications chief Carlos Manuel Ramirez and a woman from a drainage pipe and helped them flee to Mazatlan.
When he was finally in handcuffs, the man who had eluded Mexican authorities for more than a decade looked pudgy, bowed and middle-aged in a white button-down shirt and beltless black jeans.
In Mexico, he is likely to face a host of charges related to his role as the head of the cartel, which is thought to sell cocaine, marijuana, heroin and methamphetamine in more than 50 countries. Grand juries in at least seven U.S. federal District Courts, including Chicago, San Diego, New York and Texas, have issued indictments for Guzman on a variety of charges.
A Justice Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said no decisions regarding extradition have been made.
