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The Nineteen was picked up by authorities soon after Felipe began to talk. Once the trafficker flipped, more secrets came out. The Nineteen described meeting with the director of intelligence of SIEDO, Fernando Rivera, at a bar near the Angel of Independence in Mexico City. As the men drank, Rivera made an opening bid, noting that he had once been offered $450,000 to go easy on an investigation.
"Have you already been offered the suitcase?" the Nineteen asked.
"No," said Rivera. "That's what I'm waiting for."
"Well, this is your lucky day."
At a meeting a few days later, the Nineteen slipped a black bag containing $150,000 under the table.
Over the next six months, in return for this monthly stipend, Rivera provided the cartel with information on everything that happened inside SIEDO -- investigations, names, photographs, cellphone numbers of agents, dates and times of planned operations. On the night of Mochomo's arrest in January 2008, the Nineteen said, Rivera called him at dawn, warning that the drug lord was going to be busted in the city of Culiacan. The operation was being run by the military, not SIEDO, so Rivera had just learned of the raid. The Nineteen offered him $5 million to abort the arrest, but it was out of Rivera's hands.
"He always wanted to know if there was any news about the Beltran Levyas," Felipe
When I was in Sinaloa last year, sources with connections to Mochomo told me that the kingpin's brother, "El Barbas" (the Bearded One), had wanted to stage an assault to bust Mochomo out of prison.
At the time, it was impossible to confirm the rumor -- but the Nineteen has corroborated the story.
Rivera provided the Nineteen with a map of the interior of the SIEDO building where Mochomo was held. At night there would be only 11 guards.
If the Nineteen paid them $70,000 each, plus another $3 million for Rivera, they would allow Barbas' men to drive an armored car into the back of the building to free Mochomo. But Chapo apparently used his own connections in law enforcement to squelch the plan, and the next day Mochomo was transferred to Puente Grande, a maximum-security prison where escape is considered impossible. Unless, that is, you are as smart and daring as Chapo, who managed to break out of the facility in 2001, a feat renowned in Mexico in song and in mythology as the "golden kilogram," a reference to the weight of gold legend says he paid as a bribe.