In May 2013, in a wealthy Dallas exurb of Southlake, Juan Guererro Chapo was murdered in a drive-by ambush in front of his wife. He was a former lawyer for Mexico's infamous Gulf Cartel, a man who wanted out of that hell and cut a deal with the US government to get to safety. He found that there was no such thing as "safe" from Los Zetas.
The brazenness of the crime shocked and titillated the residents of Southlake. There hadn’t been a murder in town in more than a decade—and nothing this dramatic had happened since Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow killed two state troopers nearby, in the thirties. “This sort of thing just doesn’t happen in a place like Southlake,” a Department of Justice official said.
Guerrero’s death was among the lead stories on every local news affiliate for three nights in a row. Fox 4 interviewed one woman who, marveling at the scope of the crime scene, explained that she had to leave her car in a parking lot as investigators examined the area. Another woman, standing by the town’s red brick courthouse, concluded, “It’s a very unsafe situation. Very unstable, and I hope they’re caught very soon.”
The afternoon after the shooting, Southlake police chief Steve Mylett told reporters what many had already concluded on their own: “Obviously, this is a well-orchestrated and deliberate act involving a specific target.” He said the crime appeared to be the work of “an organization that is trained to do this kind of activity.”
Mylett immediately called in help from the FBI and DEA, offering the agencies office space in the local police station, less than half a mile from where Guerrero had been shot. Days later the team was expanded to include representatives from the Texas Rangers, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. All told, there were dozens of officers and agents and analysts assisting the case. But it was largely headed by two men.
The lead investigator, Michael Elsey, is a 25-plus-year veteran FBI agent. He has a deep voice, an affinity for fine cigars, and a remarkable ability to evade media attention. One colleague described him as “the most focused person I’ve ever seen.” Another said, “I would never want to be on Mike’s bad side.”
The lead prosecutor, who worked closely with investigators from the start, was an assistant U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Texas named Josh Burgess. Burgess is tall and lean, with a boyish face, and he has a far different reputation from Elsey. He’s funnier, more garrulous, more likely to grab a beer with his co-workers at the end of the week. At the time, he taught a weekly Sunday school class for young married couples at his church in Fort Worth. A former JAG officer in the Air Force who once deployed for six months to serve as the only attorney on a base in Kyrgyzstan, Burgess had spent most of his career at the U.S. attorney’s office prosecuting cases involving organized crime, including several that employed wiretaps and undercover agents. One case involved a yearlong undercover investigation of the Bandidos Motorcycle Club; another was a two-year case that led to more than sixty indictments.
Around 9 p.m. the night of the murder, Burgess was at home, reading a book in a recliner, when he was interrupted by a phone call. His counterpart at the U.S. attorney’s office in South Texas informed him that the man murdered in Southlake, whose face was already splashed across every local news channel, had been a high-level cooperator for the U.S. government. Burgess remembers thinking it wouldn’t take long for the press to break the news he’d just heard, bringing even more attention to the shooting. (Of the six DOJ officials dedicated to the case full-time, Burgess is the only one able to speak on the record about it.)
Little is publicly known about Guerrero’s upbringing and life in Mexico, but investigators quickly uncovered his deep ties to one of the most violent criminal organizations in the world. Guerrero, it turns out, was the longtime personal attorney for Osiel Cárdenas Guillén, the former leader of the Gulf Cartel and one of the founders of its paramilitary enforcement arm, Los Zetas. Cárdenas, whose nickname was El Mata Amigos (“the Friend Killer”), was arrested after a shoot-out with the Mexican military in 2003. He was then extradited to the U.S. in 2007 for drug trafficking, money laundering, and the attempted murder of U.S. agents. The cartel infighting that followed his arrest triggered a famously bloody power struggle that gripped Northern Mexico for a decade. Thousands of people, many of them innocent bystanders, died in the ensuing mayhem.
Two years after Cárdenas’s extradition, he pleaded guilty in federal court. In exchange for a 25-year sentence—and a chance to one day walk out of prison—Cárdenas agreed to turn over $50 million in cash, real estate, and aircraft to the U.S. government. Guerrero was tasked with helping the American agencies collect the assets, an ordeal that included moving several carloads of cash north across the border. Guerrero’s involvement wasn’t made public, but he was nonetheless a potential target; leaders of Los Zetas and the Gulf Cartel were incensed about the Cárdenas plea deal.
And so, with the knowledge of the U.S. government, Guerrero and his family moved from Monterrey to North Texas. There, he continued cooperating with the Department of Homeland Security. The arrangement was kept so quiet that even high-ranking officials in the local U.S. attorney’s office didn’t know about it until after the murder.
In Texas, Guerrero lived a quiet but complicated life. His autopsy revealed that he had cocaine in his system at the time of his death. He kept a low profile online. His LinkedIn account claimed that he owned a working cattle ranch in the Mexican state of Guanajuato with “a wide range of livestock and farm animals,” including “some of Mexico’s strongest bulls.” It also described, in the third person, his affinity for “the regional flavors of the restaurants in his hometown” and his allegiance to Club León, a second-tier Mexican professional soccer team. A WordPress blog under his name featured three short posts in June 2011 about the Mexican cattle industry. His name was also listed in the paperwork of a few businesses in South Texas, including a gaming corporation and a salvage and recycling company.
The only public photo of him prior to the murder was a mug shot taken in Miami in 2011, in which his dark eyes are glazed and bloodshot, his cheeks bloated and pockmarked. According to a local news report, at around 3 a.m. local officers were dispatched to the posh Fontainebleau hotel, where Guerrero was accused of slapping the 29-year-old woman with whom he was having an affair.
In the spring of 2011, Guerrero was living with Julia and their three kids in Grapevine, just to the east of Southlake, when he got an urgent call from his handler at the Department of Homeland Security. Julia recalled her husband seeming “afraid” and “surprised” after the conversation. “They knew where he lived,” she said. “And they wanted to kill him.”
The family never again returned to the house in Grapevine. They traveled to South Florida, where his brother lived, for spring break, and when they got back to Grapevine, Guerrero told his wife to rent an apartment in her sister’s name and to stop using her cellphone to call Mexico. Soon after, they moved into the house in Southlake. It was purchased in cash, and Guerrero’s name didn’t appear anywhere in the county records.
Julia remembered her husband receiving another distressing call in February 2013, and he fled once again—this time moving from hotel to hotel, traveling to Las Vegas with his brother—but he resumed living with the family again in May. He continued to be cautious, though, she said. He didn’t leave the house often, except to get frozen yogurt.
Even by Mexican cartel true crime standards, this is a good read, and a good reminder of the true cost of the decades-long War on Drugs in America. We lost it long ago, we just have to decide how the story ends.
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