“Socalj” for Borderland Beat
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Last May, a team of federal agents chasing the sons of “El Chapo,” caught a break. Through a combination of electronic data and human intelligence, the agents had tracked one of the sons, Jesús Alfredo Guzmán Salazar, to a location in Sinaloa.
Eager to jump into action, the team prepared to work with the Mexican military and go after Guzmán Salazar.
But, according to records obtained by The New York Times and three people familiar with the matter, they were told to stand down by the Justice Department. The DEA was separately investigating “Los Chapitos” and it was thought that any active measures to take them into custody could disrupt their case or even get people killed.
Under the best circumstances, it is challenging for U.S. federal agents to chase drug lords in Mexico, where they are required to work with local partners who can often be unreliable or corrupt. But the episode involving Alfredo Guzmán Salazar points to a problem closer to home: the rivalries that can erupt when different law enforcement agencies go after the same targets.
However, neither the dispute nor its consequences were visible last month when Attorney General Merrick B. Garland, who was flanked by representatives from all of the agencies, announced the new indictments against Los Chapitos.
Combined Cases
Around the same time, federal prosecutors in Chicago, San Diego, and Washington, some of whom had been investigating Los Chapitos for the better part of a decade, came up with a different plan. They wanted to merge three separate cases they had been working on involving Chapo’s sons into a single case based in Chicago, according to five people familiar with the matter.
The Chicago case did not focus directly on Los Chapitos’ fentanyl operation, but it took a sweeping look at the men’s drug sales and violent crimes reaching back, in some instances, to 2008. It was built on the work of a coalition of agents from the DEA, the FBI, and the HSI. It incorporated a vast trove of evidence from a stable of cooperating witnesses and an initial round of indictments against Los Chapitos.
Case Put on Hold
Five people associated with the Chicago prosecution claim that the DEA pulled its resources out of the broader investigation just as it was reaching completion in favor of the New York fentanyl case. The senior DEA official said the agents working on the Chicago case were simply told to put their involvement in it on hold until the conflict was resolved through a kind of mediation process.
In the end, the senior DEA official said, officials at the Justice Department, serving as arbiters, secured an agreement about how to proceed. The consolidated Chicago case could move forward, the DEA official said, provided that the prosecutors in charge of it coordinated with their New York counterparts and did not take any “proactive” measures that might expose the covert sources working with the 959 Group (the Bilateral Investigations Unit that was set up to target traffickers overseas importing cocaine to the US) or otherwise harm the New York prosecution.