How I brought down El Chapo: Agent tells how he tapped drug lord's phone and saw him order hits, demand 'slim' prostitutes...and reveal a surprising soft side

He's one of the most notorious drug traffickers in history, who once chillingly claimed to have killed between 2,000 and 3,000 people.When Joaquín 'El Chapo' Guzmán, the infamous Sinaloa Cartel leader, stepped into a New York courtroom in 2017, US federal agent Eric Balliet had a certain idea of what he might be like. 'This was the second most wanted man on the planet at the time behind Osama bin Laden, so I was expecting him to resemble some kind of criminal genius,' he recalls.'But he looked like any average, middle-aged Hispanic man. He seemed kind of awkward and gave a sheepish wave to his wife. Then, a few minutes later, we started hearing about all the people he'd killed.'For Eric, the 2017 court appearance was a proud moment. As a US special agent at Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), he played a key role in the operation that brought down the feared leader of Mexico's Sinaloa Cartel.By intercepting texts exchanged between El Chapo and his closest confidants, Eric helped identify his secret hiding place deep in the group's bloodstained heartland. The drug lord lived much of his life on his phone and at times sent nearly 100 texts a day. And after years poring over his personal communications, Eric gained a remarkable – perhaps unrivalled – window into the daily life, habits and personality of the world's most powerful drug trafficker.He found plenty of the murderous, manipulative kingpin depicted in the new Netflix drama Facing El Chapo, with numerous messages detailing contract killings, corruption and multi-million-dollar drug deals.Others revealed his insatiable sexual appetite, including his frequent use of prostitutes – many disturbingly young – and numerous affairs. El Chapo is escorted out of Long Island Airport in New York in January 2017 by federal agents – one from Homeland Security Investigations and the other from the DEA Eric Balliet had a 25-year career in US federal law enforcement. He is now retired Yet there were also regular glimpses of 'the other' El Chapo, with affectionate messages to his children and grandchildren interspersed among talk of drug dealing and murder. In an exclusive interview with the Daily Mail to mark the release of his memoir, Kingpins & Coyotes, Eric reveals how he helped capture the cartel boss not once, but twice – and everything he learnt about his life and criminal empire along the way.Eric first heard about El Chapo in 2001, shortly after the drug peddler had escaped from Mexico's Puente Grande Prison in a pile of dirty laundry – the first of a series of audacious jailbreaks he would become known for.The diminutive son of an impoverished farmer, Guzmán rose to prominence in the 1990s after pioneering the use of sophisticated underground tunnels to move drugs across the US border. After taking over leadership of the Sinaloa Cartel, he ploughed the gang's profits into overseas expansion – while taking care to donate lavishly to community projects to buy the loyalty of local people.In 2009, he entered Forbes' list of the world's richest men at number 701, with an estimated worth of $1billion (£709million) – just a fraction of the $14billion (£10.4billion) he is estimated to have made over his 30-year criminal career.By 2012, Eric had taken his new job at Homeland Security Investigations, the branch of the federal government tasked with investigating international criminal organisations. He began by investigating a money laundering scheme that used aircraft to move drug money between the US and Mexico. But before long, this evolved into looking at a network of drug traffickers who were part of El Chapo's network.The group kept in contact using BlackBerry Messenger – at the time a popular instant messaging app – and before long Eric and his colleagues began intercepting their communications.Homing in on the drug lord's inner circle of bodyguards and couriers, they gradually built up a detailed picture of his travel patterns and daily routine.They hadn't been able to see any texts sent by the boss himself by that point. But in the latter months of 2013, they had a breakthrough. Guzmán is paraded in Mexico city in February 2014 after his second capture The shaft leading from El Chapo's cell to the tunnel that he used to escape from Altiplano Prison on July 11, 2015 The tunnel housed a motorbike that the drug lord could use to move through it at speed 'We came across texts that mentioned several key details, including El Chapo's son - Edgar - who was killed in Culiacán in 2008,' says Eric. 'When we analysed the conversation there was no other reasonable explanation for who it could be. It had to be El Chapo and his second wife, Griselda.'This was a game changer: rather than simply investigating El Chapo's network, being able to read messages sent by the kingpin himself raised the possibility they could go one step further and mount an operation to capture him. Eric and his colleagues assembled a small team in Mexico, made up of several other HSI agents, as well as operatives from the Drug Enforcement Administration, US Marshals and the Mexican Marines.Over the coming months, the HSI squad would continue intercepting El Chapo's communications, before relaying this intelligence to the team in Mexico. Each time El Chapo sent a text, it flashed up on a series of computers in Eric's office. After reading thousands of his messages, the agent developed a remarkably detailed understanding not only of his drug trafficking operation, but of his personal life too. 'He liked to eat good food, particularly Chinese food, so he'd tell his courier to 'bring me Chinese' and the courier would know what he meant and go to a particular restaurant', Eric recalls. 'He'd be very specific about what he wanted and once ordered birria stew [a traditional Mexican beef dish] for breakfast.''There were two Chapo Guzmáns: one was the man who would have people killed and corrupted anybody if it suited his needs.'But then there was this very affectionate side of him when he was talking to his kids, especially about his granddaughters or his young twins, and he'd be saying 'send my love' or 'I'm sending you strong hugs.''He could have had someone brutally killed and then five minutes later be sending someone a cake or an elaborate bouquet of flowers for their birthday.'Eric recalls one incident that epitomised El Chapo's lack of regard for human life.'There was one time they lost more than 600 kilos of cocaine on a boat west of the Galapagos Islands and they thought a guy stole it.'He actually didn't - it was jettisoned overboard because the local coast guard approached the boat, but they blamed this poor bastard, so El Chapo told them to 'take care of it'. The guy wasn't heard of again.'I'm sure some clinical psychologists would have a field day trying to understand how you can operate on those different axes.' The Miramar Hotel, a 10-storey set of luxury condominiums in the beach resort city of Mazatlán and the scene of his second capture Eric - pictured with a large drug seizure - worked for US Border Patrol before joining Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), which is responsible for tackling international criminal networks I know why Jack the Ripper was protected for so longHi, I'm Alex Matthews, Editor of The Crime Desk.In 2014, we revealed the bombshell evidence identifying Aaron Kosminski as the fabled Jack the Ripper. Now, we can reveal his astonishing connection to the Freemasons and claims this motivated his killings and protected him from life in prison. Sign up here to get our exclusive piece for free. That's not to say El Chapo was always good to his family. In one intercepted conversation, he ordered the killing of one of his nephews, prompting US agents to travel to a Guatemalan prison to warn the man in person.'As law enforcement we have an obligation to notify someone if we believe their life is in danger, so we travelled down and told the nephew, who took in the information without saying anything,' says Eric.'Then, about two years later, he was at a Christmas party, got p***d drunk and got into a fight with one of his other relatives before getting shot dead.'So he wasn't killed in prison. He ended up being killed at a Christmas party by a relative, which is kind of ironic.'The messages also revealed El Chapo's concerning sexual preference for younger women, whom he ordered to be delivered to him 'like food'.'He was ordering prostitutes multiple times a week. It was gross - he liked them younger, with dark hair and would tell his couriers to make sure they weren't chubby,' says Eric.'They had this elaborate scheme: person A would pick up the women and take them to location B where another person would pick them up in a car - they'd do that multiple times before ending up at his place.'Documents later released in a US court contained claims from witnesses that he engaged in sexual acts with minors, who he referred to as 'vitamins'.One cooperating witness claimed the cartel boss had him drug girls as young as 13 before he raped them at one of his Mexican hideouts in the late 2000s. The gangster's lawyers denied the allegations, describing them as 'extremely salacious'.Summing up El Chapo's 'disgusting' treatment of women, Eric says: 'He was ordering women in a similar fashion to how he would order food.'He'd say 'have them dressed like this or that' and describe exactly what he wanted before his confidantes would go out and find the women for him. He had his fair share of mistresses too.'One challenge Eric's team faced was El Chapo's relatively isolated lifestyle. He rarely travelled and shuffled between several different hideaways around his home city of Culiacán, which he largely controlled.'Chapo moved between five different locations,' he says. 'They were nice, with high walls, a pool and big screen TVs, but they weren't elaborate for someone with that amount of wealth.'Just south of Culiacán was a little resort with swimming pools and a bay where he felt very comfortable going. He would go there, relax and call his sons. But he didn't have a massive entourage and lived a fairly isolated existence.'Every time a new message appeared, Eric would scan it for 'actionable intel' about El Chapo's movements that could be fed back to the team on the ground in Mexico.The wire tap team began to focus on one man in particular, a courier nicknamed Nariz, or 'nose' in Spanish.'When we saw a picture of him, we kind of understood why he was given that name,' Eric laughs. The modest interior of El Chapo's safehouse in Los Mochis, scene of a bloody 2016 raid that led to his final capture Heavily armed Mexican marines stormed the safehouse. El Chapo escaped through another tunnel but was later captured On the night of February 17, 2014, the Mexican marines picked up Nariz on a street in Culiacán. He broke under interrogation and identified El Chapo's house, which was then assaulted by the heavily armed soldiers.But they hit on a problem: the door to the house was heavily reinforced and it took a painfully long time to break it down using rams and sledgehammers.By the time they rushed inside, El Chapo was gone – scuttling into Culiacán's sewer system through a secret hatch beneath his bathtub, opened by activating a sequence of light switches.It was a crushing moment. But rather than curse their luck, the agents were back on the chase – aided by brave Mexican marines who raided every local location associated with El Chapo to try to find him.Based on information from dozens of seized Blackberry devices, an American agent called Jack traced the gangster to the Miramar Hotel, a 10-storey set of luxury condominiums in the beach resort city of Mazatlán.In the early hours of February 22 – five days after his bathtub escape – Mexican soldiers smashed down the door of El Chapo's room on the fourth floor to find him in bed with his new wife, Emma Coronel, a former teenage beauty queen 32 years his junior. Nearby were the couple's two daughters, aged three to four.Describing the moment as it was relayed to him, Eric says: 'Chapo ran into the bathroom, and the soldiers heard him trying to lock and load an AK-47.'The commander on the ground said to kill him, but Emma started screaming and begging them not to kill him in front of the kids, that sort of thing.'They were ready to start pumping rounds through the door before they saw hands coming around the door.'They cuffed him and took him into the basement of the Miramar, where there was that famous photo of someone with their hand on his head.'Despite his joy at El Chapo's capture, Eric knew the game was far from over – with the Sinaloa Cartel certain to carry out a rescue attempt.He began to feel slightly more comfortable after the drug lord was whisked away to a Mexican Navy base in a Black Hawk helicopter and presented to the media in Mexico City, before being thrown into the maximum-security Altiplano Prison. But he wouldn't stay there for long. A year later, on July 11, 2015, he escaped through a shaft connecting his shower to a mile-long tunnel, which had been fitted with a modified motorcycle running along a track.Back in the US, where Eric and his colleagues had been cataloguing evidence to present at his upcoming trial, the devastating news came in an early morning flurry of text messages.'My phone was blowing up - we all had a group chat together and I looked at it to see he had gone,' he recalls. 'I thought 'there's no f*****g' way. He'd managed to escape from a maximum-security prison a second time.'By then, Eric had moved to Washington DC and, similarly to many of the agents in the original El Chapo operation, had moved on to a new role.'I remember my boss calling me from Arizona and asking what he thought we should do. I was like, 'Dude, we have to get the band back together.''I knew there were only a small number of people in federal law enforcement who were really in Chapo's head, understood how his network operated and could almost predict where he was going to go.' Sean Penn and Kate del Castillo pictured with El Chapo while he was still on the runEric's superiors agreed with him and quickly reassembled the original team – pulling them back from their various new postings into a new operations centre in Chantilly, Virginia.Immediately, they began combing through data for clues about El Chapo's likely whereabouts, including the flight manifests of private jets he might have travelled in after fleeing jail.In October, four months after his escape through the tunnel, Eric heard some truly bizarre news: Sean Penn, the American actor and film-maker, was heading to meet the drug lord for a now notorious interview.'I was like, 'what the f*** are you talking about - Sean Penn?!'' he recalls. The story of what happened next has been widely documented. El Chapo – keen for a biopic to be made about his life – agreed to sit down with Penn in a meeting brokered by Mexican actress Kate del Castillo.What is less well known was the fact federal agents – including Eric – were monitoring the actor's every move in Mexico in the hope he could lead them to El Chapo.'The DEA put a team on the ground and were doing surveillance on del Castillo, Penn and the film crew,' Eric says.'They lost him getting out of the airport but managed to identify an airport, and electronic surveillance put them at a ranch in the mountains.'There were geopolitical considerations. The Mexican Marines were ready to assault that ranch the moment they realised El Chapo was there.'But because Penn was a US citizen and del Castillo held dual nationality, the State Department was concerned a raid could turn into a bloodbath, so they nixed our involvement.'A couple of sicarios were killed. We received conflicting reports about whether Chapo had escaped. To this day, I couldn't tell you whether he was there, but he certainly wasn't on site when the Marines went in.' The US agents renewed their hunt for the kingpin by focusing on his brutal head of security, El Cholo Iván (real name Jorge Iván Gastélum Ávila), and another figure who went by the moniker 'Medusa'.Convinced both men were regularly at El Chapo's side and would know his whereabouts, the team focused on their daily routines before Mexican Marines zeroed in on a house in the Sinaloan coastal city of Los Mochis.On January 8, 2016, the soldiers stormed the property, leading to a massive firefight. A diamond encrusted gun seized from El Chapo that's now displayed at a drug museum in Mexico City A cell at the supermax prison in Florence, Colorado, where El Chapo will spend the rest of his days 'There's grenades being lobbed back and forth, sicarios shooting through windows, a guy on the roof with an AK-47 and a pistol,' says Eric.Five sicarios were killed in the raid but El Chapo and Ávila managed to flee down an escape tunnel that led to the city's sewer system – now a familiar tactic. After emerging, they stole a vehicle which quickly broke down, before hijacking a red Ford Focus.It looked like he had evaded capture again, but before long the pair were intercepted by two federal police officers. In a bizarre twist, they initially pulled them over for speeding but quickly recognised the pair and arrested them without a firefight. One year later, El Chapo was extradited to the US before a headline-grabbing trial in Brooklyn – where evidence gathered by Eric and his team was used to convict him.Since 2019, he's been languishing in the supermax jail in Florence, Colorado – dubbed the Alcatraz of the Rockies.Sitting in his home around two hours away from the prison, Eric feels justly proud of the part he played putting him there. But does he believe the operation dealt a decisive blow to the cartels? Far from it.'These organisations are built to survive - there are always succession plans if someone is arrested or killed,' he says. And of course, he's right. Following El Mayo's arrest, the organisation is now largely controlled by El Chapo's sons. Known collectively as 'Los Chapitos', two have been captured, while the others – Iván Archivaldo Guzmán Salazar and Jesús Alfredo Guzmán Salazar – remain at large. 'At the end of the day, it comes down to supply and demand,' Eric says. 'As long as people want drugs, someone will step in to provide them.'Kingpins & Coyotes is available to order now.