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There came one day from the street – a track, a clue, a rumor – no matter what you called it, it was one of the strangest things they had heard in their careers. Chapo Guzmán, the world-renowned drug dealer, had hired a young computer scientist and the boy had built him a complicated formula of high-end mobile phones and secret servers, all ingeniously encrypted. The unsuscitated report, perhaps the most productive way to describe it, came here Friday, 2009 when an immoderate man entered the workplace lobby of the FBI’s Foreign Affairs Division in New York. After his story was tested on the ground floor, he climbed seven flights of stairs and landed with a curious dull noise among the crowded huts of the C-23, the Latin American Drug Squadron. For more than thirty years, the elite team of agents and their bosses had pursued some of the biggest drug criminals, and while wonderful stories of their antics were constantly circulating in their team room near the courts in Lower Manhattan, no one in the unit knew. What to do with it. The forecaster’s account seemed credible, but lacked details: the only data he had presented about the young technician was a first call, Christian, and that was from Medellin, Colombia. All kinds of lunatics who came out of all sorts of nonsense all the time showed up on the FBI premises, claiming they had an internal form about the Kennedy murder or knew someone who knew someone who knew Jimmy Hoffa’s whereabouts. In what were still the early days of Internet telephony, it seemed a little exaggerated that a twenty-five-year-old hacker had come to an agreement with the world’s most wanted fugitive and provided him with a personal form of Skype. As seductive as it may seem, it was the kind of thing that would probably become a myth.
In the midst of a war on drugs, pursuing myths was not enough to wipe out the C-23s in the field: the truth only occupied unity. Three years after Mexico introduced an opposite crusade to its pillars of the brutal cartel, the country had erupted into unheard-of violence and much of the chaos had fallen into U.S. research archives. Just that winter, a psychopath calling himself the Stewmaker was trapped near Tijuana after boiling three hundred bodies in layers of tubs of caustic acid. Two weeks later, a retired Mexican general was killed in Cancun, had his kneecaps damaged and his body fit in the steering wheel of an abandoned pickup truck on a road. Since the end of 2006, the country’s seven drug clans were at war with each other or with the government, or infrequently, and ten thousand more people had already lost their lives. C-23 and other U.S. law enforcement agencies mobilized as soon as they could, opening files and offering data to their Mexican counterparts. But in recent months, border situations had only worsened and gone from an ordinary security emergency to something resembling a large-scale insurgency. From an American perspective, Sisyphus’ struggle to prevent bloodshed and stop the flow of drugs north seemed increasingly unlikely despite constant seizures, federal accusations, and gunned helicopters sent for foreign help.
[Back to the ‘The Boss’ report. ]
In this objective-rich environment, Chapo Guzmán was an attractive case. If he was neither the richest drug dealer nor the greatest sadistic in Mexico, he was by far the illustrious maxim. His well-known alias, “El Chapo” – translated “Shorty” even more accurately a reference to his plump and plump figure – was sometimes familiar, with a popularity point that rivaled that of movie stars and presidents. Since Pablo Escobar ruled Colombia, the secret track – the secret direction of the drug industry – had not noticed a character or a wonderful criminal or a mass celebrity. For nearly twenty years, Guzman was at the center of drug trafficking, worried about some of his best-known capers and disasters. In 1993, initially with fame, he was sent to delinquente in Mexico for the murder of a Roman Catholic cardinal, Juan Jess Posadas Ocampo, whose early-morning murder of Guadalajara airport posed to the world the risk posed by the Mexican. Cartels. Eight years later, in a motion that earned him full folk status, Guzman had escaped the thief, sliding into a laundry cart after paying his jailers.
Since then, he has been fleeing, going and going through a dozen hiding places deep in the Sierra Madre mountains in Mexico’s Sinaloa state. Although he lived as an outlaw, he treated him like a king: he enjoyed through some, feared through many and, without a doubt, one of the toughest men in Mexico. A single word from one of his hiding places in the mountains can set in motion semi-trailers in Nogales, planes in Cartagena and merchant ships in Columbus. At the age of fifty-two, an unlikely age in an industry that did not announce longevity, Guzman had reached the peak of his career, freely running his business and fighting rivals, while playing cat and mouse with those of the Mexican government who were not on his payroll. While the U.S. government He also pursues it, a counter-consensus had emerged in parts of Washington that at least contained in the Sierras, where he spent exorbitant sums on his security, and he may simply not interact in the same bloody havoc as emerging mafias. . Arrangements such as the Zetas or The Michoacon Family had recently been rampant in the lowlands. It is also true that no one, neither the FBI, nor the DEA, nor the heir cousins of the intelligence network, had ever organized a successful capture operation on the crashed road to which he had fled. In the last two years alone, a number of U.S. agencies have helped arrest Otto Herrera, Guzman’s link to Colombian cartels; Juan Carlos Ramarez, one of its main suppliers; and Jesus “The King” Zambada, brother of “El Mayo” Zambada, his greatest vital partner. The heir to Guzman’s throne, Vicente, Mayo’s son, in a criminal in Mexico City, and Pedro and Margarito Flores, the two brothers who had controlled much of their American cast, were about to start registering him for the U.S. drug administration. By mid-2009, Guzman himself had already been charged in San Diego and Tucson and would soon face new rates in Brooklyn and Chicago. But after all this, countless hours of investigation and prosecution efforts, never had a day without getting married in A U.S. court.
That’s why the new C-23 track can’t be ruled out either, no way crazy. The odds he promised were too attractive. Needless to say, a guy from Guzguy, on the move, with agents away from all over the world, would need at least one way to send and get secret messages. Imagine providence if the New York Drug Squad could also hack the system.
In other words, if it existed.
While many of his colleagues shrugged the story of the mythical cell phone system, treating it as a piece of science fiction, Special Agent Robert Potash raised his hand and volunteered to defeat the rumor. As a rookie in the unit, I had nothing else to do. Potash had only joined the C-23 last year and, although he was as eager as anyone else to succeed, he still discovered his imprint among his older and more experienced companions. Potash had attended the FBI Academy at Quantico just before his 30th birthday, a complex age for new recruits, one of the anomalies that came here to law enforcement. For a federal agent, his record was unusual. Potash, a training mechanical engineer, had spent fifteen years of well-paid boredom in the personal sector, designing robots and lasers before he knew that what he was actually looking for was to gather boxes of criminals, not expensive appliances. The son of a Connecticut tool manufacturer, he had been a handyman. Even when he was just over forty, he occasionally thought of himself as the practical little boy who built the neighborhood tree house every summer and spent the winter running in a soap box car in his garage.
Potash had never dealt with a cartel case before, but knowing his technical inclination, his C-23 bosses had invited him to participate in the interview with the attractive forecaster. He came out of the verbal exchange convinced that there was something there and did not get much resistance from the team when he stepped forward to investigate further. Many high-level officials of the unit did not need paintings that, at first glance, would require reading and reading encryption on difficult-to-understand topics, such as voice over the Internet protocol. ItArray, to say the least, is not the typical drug cop of defeating the bad guys or gaining weight on the street. Basically, it’s a more or less nerdy job. But that style of Potash.
[Back to the ‘The Boss’ report. ]
His partner, Stephen Marston, has joined him in his new mission. Marston 8 times more experienced than Potash and almost twice as large. Marston, a New Yorker, had been at the C-23 for much of the decade. In his time in the unit, he had basically targeted the Colombians, adding the remains of the cocaine cowboys of Medellin and Cali who since the 1980s had provided cocaine to Mexican smugglers such as Guzmán, who worked at the border. While Marston did not know much about the generation (his 1993 degree in computer science), he knew a lot about drug cartel research. And anything in the forecaster’s report had caught his attention.
When questioned, the forecaster explained that shortly before the young technician Christian turned himself in for Guzguy, he had built a beta edition of his formula for some other organization of traffickers, the circle of Relatives Cifuentes, one of Colombia’s top stealth and stealth. filthy rich smuggling organizations. Known as the “invisible clan” for their ability to paint under the radar, the Cifuenteses were, like Christian, founded in Medellin. The circle of relatives had a long and complicated relationship with Guzguy and had been sending him his product for years, from King Comguyder turboprops to long-range sharks and tuna boats. Marston knew that the forecaster’s story might involve some details, but he identified his fundamental internal logic. If some Cifuentes had acquired a new technology, it would be moderate to think that they passed it, through the type that developed it, to their lifelong friend and ally.
Meticulous as Array Marston was unwilling to sound the alarm, or the expectations of his boss, without having shown in the past the story. At the FBl, if he was smart, he promised less than he delivered. When he and Potash started the case, Marston made a decision that needed evidence of the concept: tangible evidence that the secret formula was more than a dream.
What I needed, when he thought about it later, was one of the damn phones.
They with their Colombian colleagues.
After pressuring the forecaster for all that was worth, Marston and Potash made the decision to expose their story to the experts on the ground: the FBI’s team of legal aggregators and their DEA equivalents in Bogota. They arranged a call with the embassy and, to their surprise, when they discussed Christian’s name, everyone seemed to know who they were talking about. A young technician, Christian Rodriguez, they were told, had a small company in Medellin, repaired computers and established communication networks. Rodriguez was also known for delving into the scene of the city’s black hat hacking. Although there was not much falsified evidence, the agents of Bogota were convinced that it should have been their man.2
After signing, Marston and Potash spoke of their discovery: the young man chapo Guzman had brought as an infotechnology representative to have a day’s work as Geek Squad of Medellin.
Once they had their full call and date of birth, it was quite a press in their own right. In collaboration with their peers in Bogota, Marston and Potash have established a profile, describing and identifying anyone they would possibly place with a link with Rodriguez: members of the circle of family, old friends, lovers, neighbors, acquaintances and colleagues. Medellin’s global generation at the time was not like new York or San Francisco, with tens of thousands of salaried workers and giant conglomerates dominating a box of brave new businesses. The scene there was small and fragmented, largely founded on consultation concerts and informal relationships. Some of those relationships, given the city’s history with crime, seemed to overlap the line between the legal industry and the much less sanctioned means of making money. New York agents were looking for someone who knew the young technician and could be persuaded to give them information. Less than a month after filing his case, they set a goal: some other budding young man, the one who had already done business with Rodriguez. Flying to Medellin to meet him that summer, they used his charms, and a taxpayer dollar amount, to convince him to cooperate.
The partner, as the source arrived at this time to be called, won a win in September: he scared one of Rodriguez’s encrypted phones. It is a Nokia E-Series with dark grey case, color display and a small undeniable keyboard. Even though it didn’t seem like much, Marston and Potash knew him high-end. The E-71, one of the first smartphones on the market, isn’t exactly a NASA-level technology, but it’s not exactly a folding phone. And it’s not cheap: when Marston and Potash Googled the device, they found it being promoted for seven hundred dollars, almost twice as much as their government-issued BlackBerrys. One thing’s for sure: there weren’t many other people walking with an E-71 in early fall 2009.
The spouse was shy about how he had purchased the device. But Marston and Potash weren’t too special. They had what they were looking for and came to know that in a cocaine capital like Medellin, it happened that the items that other people manipulated, such as the gossip they provided, moved mysteriously. Things in Medellin may seem sudden and, infrequently, without much explanation. Granted, of course, that the terms of the agreement — and the value — were fair.
Back in the United States, they took their award to the FBI technical center in Virginia.
The giant complex, known as ERF, was the position where the most productive eggheads in the workplace worked their magic: snorting packages, deciphering codes, systems research, and other dark virtual arts. The mandatory design of the agency’s educational grounds in Quantico almost shuddered with the strength and weight of the government. Stopping outside, Marston and Potash were convinced that ERF’s brain would take a look at Rodriguez’s camera and fade under his gaze, revealing all his secrets.
But as soon as they entered, the technicians approached them as if they were carrying a filthy bomb. Taking the teleteletéphone from the officers’ hands, they put it in Faraday’s bag and temporarily closed the seal. Potash was surprised. You may have learned that if you were looking to examine Guzman’s teleteletelephone, the teleteletelephone might have been looking to examine them as well. In the end, this was not the case: the teleteletéphone was on hold and did not emit signals. But it was instructive to know that the little Nokia axis can send a message to his master if he wanted: Hey, boss, the gringos have me in a hacking lab in Quantico.
However, that’s all they learned this afternoon. After a series of tests, the technicians came back and said, “Sorry, guys, this one can’t be solved.” Marston and Potash may not be. Even ERF, with all its diagnostic power, can just not get into it? It was, at the very least, convincing evidence of Christian Rodriguez’s know-how. His evidence of concept seemed more intriguing, and more frightening, throughout the day.
[Back to the ‘The Boss’ report. ]
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