The New Yorker Radio Hour - The Star Witnesses Against El Chapo

Episode Date: November 20, 2018

Last year, the Mexican government finally agreed to extradite the notorious drug kingpin El Chapo to the U.S. Born Joaquín Guzmán Loera, he was once ranked by Forbes as one of the most powerful people in the world. His trial began in New York, on November 5th, and Guzmán faces seventeen counts related to drugs and firearms; prosecutors have said that they will also tie him to more than thirty murders. The government’s star witnesses against the notoriously elusive drug lord are identical twins from Chicago, Pedro and Margarito Flores. While still in their twenties, the Flores brothers became major drug traffickers, importing enormous quantities of drugs from the Sinaloa cartel. They avoided violence and feuds with rivals, but eventually got caught in the middle of a cartel war. It was a dangerous position, and the only way out was to seek government protection. The Flores brothers flipped; they began working secretly for prosecutors—recording their business calls with Guzmán and others—in exchange for leniency in their own trials. Tom Shakeshaft, the former Assistant U.S. Attorney who flipped them, tells The New Yorker’s Patrick Radden Keefe how it all went down. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of the New Yorker and WNYC Studios. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. The trial of Joaquin Guzman Loera began this week in New York. Known better as El Chapo, Guzman was regarded once as the biggest trafficker in the entire drug business, and Forbes called him one of the most powerful men in the world, full stop.

El Chapo had twice before escaped from Mexican women, prisons, the second time through a tunnel that his henchmen dug right under his cell, and after that, Mexico finally agreed to extradite him to the United States for trial. He faces 17 counts related to drugs and firearms, and prosecutors intend to tie him to more than 30 murders. Convicting a cartel boss is no easy feat, but the government has two-star witnesses, two Americans, major drug traffickers who worked very closely with the Sinaloa cartel and became federal informants. Patrick Raddenkief has covered the drug war for years. And Patrick, who are these guys, these witnesses? So they're a pair of identical twins from Chicago, Pedro and Margarito Flores. They're

Mexican-American. They're born in the U.S. and actually grew up on the west side. It's funny, you know, I've been writing about the drug trade for years, but there's this one aspect of the business that always remained kind of stubbornly mysterious to me. We all know about these big drug cartels in Mexico. I've written about them for the magazine. And we know they import huge amounts of cocaine, heroin, marijuana, methamphetamine to the United States. And we're also probably familiar with the idea that there's a retail drug market here where people buy these drugs. You have mental images, maybe because you watch the wire, or maybe because you buy pot from time to time.

I take the Fifth Amendment on that. No accusation intended. But the one thing I've always been curious about is where do those two worlds intersect? Where do they meet? Who are the middlemen who actually negotiate with the big suppliers who deal in kilos in Mexico and the street corner dealers who deal in grams here in the United States? And these guys are the middlemen in some way? Yes.

So they actually grew up in a family where their father was an immigrant from Mexico, had dabbled in the drug trade himself. But by their early 20s, they'd really gone into the business in a big way. And what they were wholesalers. They would negotiate directly with Mexican cartels to buy just enormous volumes of drugs. What kind of volume? What kind of money are we talking about? Literally tons of drugs.

They imported tons and tons of cocaine to the United States, but also dealing in heroin and marijuana. And why were they so successful? Well, there are a few things that are required in order to do this. You need the kind of comfort level with people on both sides of the border. You need to be able to interact with people in Mexico, but also people here. The other thing you need to be able to do, which is really interesting. is buy these drugs on consignment, on credit, because nobody puts down cash on the barrel

for that volume of narcotics. No kidding. That's the way you buy drugs, is on consignment? All based on trust. What kind of trust can there be in that world? Oh, there's a great deal of trust when unwritten contracts are enforceable with death. Part of what made them so successful is there's a great deal of betrayal in the underworld,

but these guys were twins. They were brothers. They were incredibly close. They could finish each other's sentences. And so this allowed them to, to really be a unit and they would never double cross one another. Margarito was kind of more outgoing. He was sort of the relationships guy. Pedro was the logistics manager, but they worked very closely together and they could kind of communicate in shorthand. The trust between them was

unshakable. So what you had is the, you had the front guy, the people guy and the systems guy. Absolutely. Like in a business. That's amazing. And the other thing about them that distinguished them was that they weren't violent. They were never violent. You remember that line from the famous line from the godfather about how violence is bad for business. They really internalized this to a kind of astonishing degree. Wait, wait, wait. They were basically drug lords, and yet they were of the nonviolent variety? Yeah, working for very violent organizations buying their drugs. I'll give you an example. So at a certain point, one of the twins is actually kidnapped. Pedro is kidnapped by a rival in Chicago and held for ransom. And Margarito just pays a ransom of over a million dollars to get them released.

they had a rough idea of who it was, who had done this, but did they go out and seek revenge? No, it would have been bad for business. They just accepted the loss and kept moving. So I'd always heard about the Flores twins, but I'd never really known a great deal about them. And then just recently a guy named Tom Shakeshaft, who was a federal prosecutor in Chicago who had brought some really major cases against the Sinaloa drug cartel retired. And he agreed to come in and talk with me about the Flores twins. And he told me that they were really just kids. They were brought. born in 1981, at the height of their power. They were still in their mid-20s. Yet they became a kind of indispensable bottleneck. Follars brothers were moving so much quantity of drugs and were making enough money that customers needed them worse than they needed any particular customer. And so they would just cut them off. The twins were thriving in Chicago, but eventually they got indicted in the U.S. And here's where their cultural fluency on both sides of the border really helped them. What they did is they just moved to Mexico and relocated their operations and started essentially running their Chicago business remotely from down in Mexico. And that worked

out pretty well until 2008 when their main supplier, the Sinaloa cartel began to fracture. The Sinaloa cartel was part of what been referred to as the Federation, which included a number of cartel leaders who were working together. And that at some point there was a a split within the Federation. Well, the Flores Brothers were being supplied by two different cartels within the Federation. And when those two different cartels went to war with one another, the Flores brothers were put in a very tenuous position of getting an ultimatum from each side that the Flores brothers were to work only with that side or else. But this really sounds like the godfather, doesn't it, Patrick? I mean, you have a split in what's

called the Federation, and the brothers have to decide what to do. Who do they go with? Exactly. It was an impossible situation. It turns out, however, there was a third option. They let it be known through a lawyer who was working for them, that they might be willing to cut a deal with the U.S. government. In other words, the Flores twins were going to flip. So Shakespeare and a few of his colleagues traveled down to Mexico to debrief the twins and see if they were serious about actually coming over to the other side in the drug war. And this wasn't as simple as it sounds. The Sinaloa cartel is famous for having corrupted parts of the Mexican government.

It's part of the reason Chapo Guzman, the head of the cartel, managed to stay at large for so many years. So when Shakeshhaft and his team went down to Mexico to meet their potential informants, they had to do it in secret. They couldn't tip off the cartel that they were down there meeting with these guys, but they also couldn't tip off the government. That was one of the more James Bondian experiences. I've ever had because I got picked up in an armor-plated Jeep at the airport and driven to a hotel. And then the next day, we went to the U.S. consulate and then got driven around the streets of Monterey at about 110 miles an hour to make sure that nobody was following us and nobody knew where we were going.

And we ended up going into the basement of a western hotel in Monterey and taken up to a security. floor in that hotel with a lot of agents and other U.S. government personnel who had been there to make sure that it was a safe place to meet. And this kind of cloak and dagger stuff might be normal for a DEA agent, but Shakehshaff was just a lawyer. Well, when I started in the U.S. Attorney's office, I was still single. And this case all came along sort of just after I'd gotten married and just after I'd had my first kid. And the stakes go up when all of a sudden it's not just you. There are other people relying on you. Sure. And I wrote a letter to my wife, and it was sort of explaining two things.

One was the usual things you would say about, you know, that you love her and that kind of thing. The second, though, was trying to explain why I went. Because I had started this, I felt like it was my responsibility to go. and that number two, that if I sort of chickened out of going at that stage, she wouldn't want to be with me anyway because I'd be pretty miserable for having blinked in the eye of being personally nervous or scared about doing my job. Shickshaf and his colleagues were gathered in the hotel room

when Pedro Flores walked in without his brother. He would be negotiating for both of them. They were largely inseparable. in the sense of they had been in this together from the outset. And it is my belief that if only one of them had wanted to cooperate, neither of them would have. Peter was slight, soft-spoken, a guy who would blend easily into a crowd. But as he started talking about the brother's operation,

Shakeshaf was stunned. His initial description of the, structure of his organization, and by his organization, their organization, and the volume of drugs that they were distributing on a monthly basis was jaw-dropping. The brothers agreed to help Shake Shaft and his colleagues in exchange for lenient treatment when it came to their own crimes. So while they were still in Mexico, what they did is they started making phone calls, negotiating deals with the cartel, and recording them.

And because of their position in the cartel as these major figures, these wholesale buyers, there was no one they couldn't get to. On November 15, 2008, Pedro placed a call to Chapo Guzman himself. He got to understand at that time, Chappo was the most wanted drug trafficker on the planet. There were no recent photos of him. People couldn't say for sure what he looked like. He was a rumor, a ghost. But Pedro just dialed him up. Suddenly here was his voice saying, Amigo!

How's your brother? I would say that once they decided to cooperate, they became as good a cooperators as they had been drug traffickers when they were on the other side. Remember, the Flores brothers were supposed to be the biggest drug wholesalers in Chicago. So in order to keep up appearances, they had to continue importing drugs. And as the drugs arrived in Chicago, the feds would just happen to do a raid and seize them, which put the twins in a dicey situation. And if you're seizing them, no money's coming back, right?

There are no customers. So you're taking the consignment and they have no way to... To pay for it. And that's one of the reasons that this couldn't go on longer. I mean, when we... Because they're going into debt. Right. And to people who expect to get paid.

To put it mildly. Yes. On time. Hold on a second, Patrick. Let me get this straight. The Flores twins are already in a very tricky position. The cartels had gone to war with each other. each one is demanding that the twins choose sides.

The brothers decide to keep doing business with both cartels running the risk of alienating either one, while tipping off the U.S. government and recording phone calls with extremely dangerous men. What made them so gutsy? Well, it's interesting. Tom Shakeshav said that it was partially guts, but it was also that they were very calculating.

There were some practical reasons that they did all of that. But one is that they're smart guys, and they knew that if the government was to prosecute these folks, corroboration is the name of the game for a trial lawyer. And among the best corroboration that we can have when we try a case is real-time intercepted phone calls and conversations with the defendants as they are currently engaged. in their drug trafficking activity. For you guys who were working this from the government side, there must have been a conversation where on the one hand you're thinking, boy, this is such great stuff. And on the other hand, you're thinking we'd better pull them out

if we ever want them to be alive long enough to testify. Was that a negotiation? That was my concern all along. And because if they didn't survive and didn't make it back to the United States, you've got no case against anybody, those conversations, those recorded conversations, It's become much more difficult to authenticate at trial. You don't have live bodies to tell you the story.

So there's a tension there between wanting to leave them in place as long as you can while you're continuing to get this good stuff, while at the same time constantly being cognizant of the danger involved and knowing that at the drop of a hat, you may need to say, let's go. It's time to get them out. That happened on November 30, 2008, less than a month after Shakespeare and the DEA started working with them. It was a Sunday, and I learned three things simultaneously. One was a big shipment, a big payment was due to the Sinaloa cartel that day or the next day, on the order of somewhere between $4 and $6 million. I also learned that DEA was planning on perhaps searching and or seizing some warehouses in Los Angeles. I became concerned that if, on the same day, the cartel didn't get paid, and they had one or more of their warehouses rated, that the Flores brothers, rightly or wrongly, could get blamed for it. So you realize this is going to happen. This is going to go down the next day.

So was there, so there must have been great urgency in terms of... We got them on the phone. D.A. and I. And we told them, packed your stuff. We're getting you out of there in two hours. Geez. What happened once they got back to the United States? So once the twins got back to Chicago,

Shakespeare knew that word would spread pretty quickly that they had betrayed the cartel. But they still had time to catch some of the buyers in the United States. So the brothers start doing the same thing, phone calls, but this time they're calling a bunch of their customers to arrange deliveries and sting operations. If you're imagining guys with guns pulling up in bleak industrial zones, that's not usually how it works. In the real world, a surprising number of drug deals happen at mundane places, like McDonald's or the parking lot of a mini-mall. You do this job long enough and you realize how much drug trafficking takes place in front of all of us all the time. I mean, I've had, you know, it's funny, I, you know, I'll drive by a mall where I am familiar with the picture of the Best Buy because I prosecuted somebody who routinely, you know, it doesn't take much to deliver, say, 10 kilos of cocaine.

It's a duffel bag. It moves from one trunk to another. Eventually, word does get out that the brothers have flipped. And when it did, the threat of vengeance from the cartel, from all the people that they had betrayed was so really. that it got to the point where even their lawyers, so not the brothers themselves, but the lawyers for the Flores twins, requested anonymity asking that their names appear nowhere in any of the public records associated with their case. All the Flores brothers' relatives have been told to stay in the U.S. where they could be protected by U.S. authorities and really never to go back to Mexico.

But their father, interestingly, Margarito Sr., the guy who taught them the drug trade when they were growing up. He reportedly was really upset when he heard that they had turned on the cartel. He was really disgusted and didn't speak with them again. And eventually, he did go back to Mexico. It appears he may have had another family there and he went down to visit them. While he was there, he was abducted. A note was left on his car that conveyed that his abduction was related to the brother's cooperation. The note said, shut up, or will send you his head. It's kind of, it was a little bit of like your worst, your worst anxieties coming true,

the sense that they could get to somebody. The twins' father's body was never found and he's never been heard from since. Shakespeare had no idea how the brothers would react. That was morning. I just walked in and I said to them, And I mean, I said, you know, I'm the prosecutor and you guys are the witnesses, but when something like this happens, we're all human. And today you can do whatever you want to do. I said, if you want to talk about him, you can.

I said, the only thing I can't let you do is just talk the two of you. Somebody has to be here. You know, an agent has to be here monitoring you. They were visibly distraught at both what evidently had happened to their dad and the fact that they, had played a role in that happening. Did it discourage them from cooperating? It certainly did not discourage them from continuing to do what they were doing. And in fact, that same day, we continued to work.

Was that their decision? Yes. So at a certain point, they said, let's get back to work. Yeah. And even as they were cooperating with ShakeShaff, out on the streets, the Flores brothers were being replaced in the drug-dealing chain of command. I think it stands to reason. Common sense tells you, there are still drugs available in the city of Chicago.

I'm not so naive as to think that it maybe even made much of a dent in the overall war on drugs. I think we played a role. I think it was a good case. In 2008, you know, probably the wholesale value of a kilo cocaine was about somewhere between $20,000 and $25,000. It went up after the Flores brothers were arrested. Today, it's 35. Really? because it actually made it harder to, it was a scarcer commodity just by virtue of taking them off the street.

Yeah, I mean, I think there are a lot of factors behind it. I don't know that it was just them, but they certainly played a role. Unbelievable. What's going to happen to the Flores brothers now? Well, they've been serving out their sentences in a federal prison, but in witness relocation. So we don't know where they are. And they are actually going to emerge pretty soon because this week, Chapo Guzman went on trial in Brooklyn. So he did get extradited in the end to the United States,

and he's now going to face this trial. And it's a huge trial. It's unprecedented security. They've had to shut down Brooklyn Bridge as they bring Chapo back and forth for some of the preliminary hearings. And in fact, the identities of the jurors have been held secret. This was a big fight, but it was decided that this guy is so dangerous that they couldn't try him in a situation where he might. ever find out the identities of any of the jurors. And so their names have been sealed. And in fact, the prosecution has also kept as a closely guarded secret the identities of the witnesses against Chapo Guzman. But just recently, some of those names have come out. And reportedly, two of the star witnesses against him are Pedro and Margarito Flores. So one of these days, quite soon, they will walk into a Brooklyn courtroom and face down Chappo Guzman, this guy they

worked with for so many years and talk about what they know of him and his criminal empire. And it seems pretty likely that on the strength of that testimony and of other cooperators who've turned on Chapo and are working with the government, Chappo is probably going to go down. He's probably going to go away to prison for the rest of his life. And when that happens, the Flores brothers will go back to prison, serve out the rest of their sentences, which is just a few years at this point. And then they'll enter witness protection. And the really interesting thing about this Tom Shake Shaf told me is that he thinks that if these guys go into witness protection, they can survive as long as they follow the rules. And these are the rules that the

martial service has for when you go into witness relocation. But one of those rules is that they would have to be separated. The brothers couldn't be in the same place. They'd have to be in a different city. They'd probably have to be in different states. And there's a real question about whether or not they'd be able to abide by that. So you might have this amazing irony, which, you might have this amazing irony, which is that the fact that the brothers had been inseparable in their criminal career, this thing that had made them so successful, might eventually end up being precisely what costs them their lives. Patrick Radinkeep is a staff writer at the New Yorker,

and we heard from Tom Shakeshaft, a former federal prosecutor now in private practice in Chicago. The trial of Joaquin Guzman Loera El Chapo started earlier this month in New York. I'm David Remnick, and that's it for today. Thanks for being with us, and if you've enjoyed the show, I just want to remind you you can subscribe to the podcast and catch up on anything you missed. See you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Yards with additional music by Alexis Quadrato.

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