Cellphone led to cornering top Mexican drug lord

CULIACAN, Mexico -- After fruitlessly pursuing one of the world's top drug lords for years, authorities finally drew close to Joaquin Guzmán using a cellphone found at a house where drugs were stored.

The phone belonging to a Guzmán aide was recovered with clues from a U.S. wiretap and provided a key break in the long chase to find Guzmán, also known as "El Chapo," or "Shorty," officials told The Associated Press yesterday.

Another big leap forward came after police analyzed information from a different wiretap that pointed them to a beachfront condo where the leader of the Sinaloa cartel was hiding, according to a U.S. government official and a federal law enforcement official.

When he was at last taken into custody with his beauty-queen wife, Guzmán had a military-style assault rifle in the room, but he didn't go for it.

A day after the arrest, it was not yet clear what would happen next to Guzmán, except that he would be the focus of a long, complicated legal process to decide which country gets to try him first.

The cellphone was found Feb. 16 at a house Guzmán had been using in Culiacán. By early the next day, the Mexican military had captured one of Guzmán's top couriers, who promptly provided details of the stash houses Guzmán and his associates had been using, the officials said.

At each house, the Mexican military found the same thing: steel reinforced doors and an escape hatch below the bathtubs. Each hatch led to a series of interconnected tunnels in the city's drainage system.

The officials said troops who raided Guzmán's main house in Culiacán chased him through the pipes but lost him in the maze.

A day later, on Feb. 18, Guzmán aide Manuel Lopez Ozorio was arrested and told investigators that he had picked up Guzmán, cartel communications chief Carlos Manuel Ramirez and a woman from a drainage pipe and helped them flee to Mazatlán.

When he was finally in handcuffs, the man who eluded Mexican authorities for more than a decade looked pudgy, bowed and middle-aged in a white button-down shirt and beltless black jeans. Now 56, he had successfully eluded authorities since escaping from prison in 2001 in a laundry truck.