Ray Donovan, US special agent who obsessively pursued 'Chapo'

Seven years ago, US special agent Ray Donovan began an in-depth study of the Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman saga -- and it quickly became an obsession.

Now, the tall, 48-year-old New Yorker displays behind glass in his office the beige T-shirt that prisoner 3912 -- Guzman, the former head of the Sinaloa cartel -- wore when he was extradited from Mexico to the United States on January 19, 2017.

Guzman -- considered the most powerful drug lord on the planet after Colombian Pablo Escobar was killed in a police shootout in 1993 -- has been sentenced to life behind bars, nearly two decades after he first escaped from a Mexican jail in a cart of dirty laundry.

It took a massive team and years of work that saw Donovan manage to identify Guzman's suppliers and partners, along with hitmen, lawyers and lovers -- intel that led to captures in 2014 and 2016.

According to Donovan, the New York chief for the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), he now even knows how the kingpin thinks.

"To go after the highest level drug trafficker in the world is always a dream of every agent," he told AFP from his office in the Chelsea neighbourhood.

Guzman's confinement in a maximum-security prison located in Colorado's mountain desert brings things "full circle" for Donovan.

"I don't think many people thought that we would capture him," Donovan said. "There is this myth that he was almost untouchable." But "there was a team of people that absolutely believed that if we put everything together and we pursued him relentlessly, we would capture him."
"They are Mexican national heroes. If it wasn't for them and their partnership, their willingness to collaborate with us -- there's no way El Chapo would be in Colorado today."
"It's personal."
Donovan said extraditing criminals, which the US has done for years from Colombia, is the way to go in Mexico and elsewhere: "The one thing that these drug traffickers fear more than anything else is the American judicial system."