For students, it was the start of a new school year. For Charlie Kirk, it was a return to the road — and when the 31-year-old landed in Utah on the morning of September 10, 2025, he was brimming with anticipation.

Kirk had every reason to expect a receptive crowd. Utah, a reliably Republican state where nearly 60 percent of voters had backed Donald Trump the previous year, was fertile ground for Turning Point USA, the pro-MAGA youth organization he helped build into a national force.

Still, he knew the visit would not pass without resistance. Across the state, nearly 8,000 students had added their names to petitions urging universities to bar his American Comeback Tour from campus. Kirk, however, was eager to meet that opposition directly, inviting critics to step up to the microphone and challenge him beneath a tent stamped with the words: ‘Prove Me Wrong.’

The tour was set to begin at Utah Valley University in Orem, about 45 miles south of Salt Lake City. From there, Kirk planned to continue to Fort Collins for an event at Colorado State University, followed by stops at the University of Minnesota and Virginia Tech, before returning to Utah for a September 30 appearance at the State University.

Kirk and his team had promoted the schedule as a series of ‘high energy evenings featuring candid conversations about conservative values.’

The flier read: ‘Don’t agree with Charlie? Great, you go to the front of the line.’

Hours later, Kirk, father of a three-year-old daughter and 16-month-old son, would be shot dead.

Tyler Robinson, a 23-year-old apprentice electrician, has been charged with Kirk’s murder and faces the death penalty if convicted. A trial date will be set at the next court hearing, on October 23. He has pleaded not guilty.

This is prosecutors’ version of events.

Wednesday, September 10

8.29am:

Tyler Robinson, who lived with his lover Lance Twiggs at an apartment in St George, 260 miles south of Orem, is seen on surveillance footage arriving at a parking garage on Utah Valley University’s campus.

Robinson is driving a grey Dodge Challenger, wearing a maroon T-shirt, pale shorts and light gray Converse shoes with white laces.

He walks from the parking lot to where Turning Point USA workers are preparing the grassy courtyard for Kirk’s event, and speaks to them. It’s not known what was said.

Around 9am:

People start gathering for the event, which Kirk and his team requested be held in the open air, rather than inside an auditorium.

When he visited UVU’s campus in March 2019, for his first ever event in Utah, he spoke in a ballroom. But by the time he last visited the state, for an April 2024 event at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, he had switched to holding events outdoors so that people could approach him and challenge his ideas.

9.25am:

Robinson is seen returning to the car and driving away from campus.

Just after 10am:

Robinson is caught on UVU surveillance camera footage returning to campus on foot, wearing the same clothing as earlier and carrying a blue backpack.

He walks to the Sorensen, a student center overlooking the courtyard where the event will be held, and buys food from Chick-fil-A, sitting to eat at one of the tables.

Robinson is then seen walking across campus to a wooded area beyond the perimeter of the university site.

He returns to campus shortly after, but this time he is not wearing his backpack.

11am:

Robinson is seen once more walking away from campus and heading back towards the wooded area.

11.52am:

Robinson returns to campus wearing different clothing – dark jeans, a dark t-shirt and a baseball cap. He still wears the Converse shoes.

He moves across the campus, walking up the stairwells with a very pronounced limp. His strange gait is believed to be because he has parts of the gun hidden in his pants leg.

The gunman is seen climbing onto the roof of a building some 450 feet away from the courtyard tent where Kirk was scheduled to speak at noon.

12 noon:

Three thousand people have now gathered in the grassy courtyard for Kirk’s event.

Turning Point USA has hired eight private security guards to accompany Kirk. The university has deployed eight of its own security officers – most of its 15-officer force. Six are in uniform, and two are patrolling the crowd in plain clothes. A campus police officer from Utah State University is also present, in preparation for Kirk’s September 30 appearance at their university.

12.09pm:

Kirk emerges and takes up his seat beneath the Prove Me Wrong tent, microphone in hand.

He delivers some prepared remarks and then begins taking questions from the crowd. The first question is about Mormonism and Kirk, an Evangelical Christian, spends eight minutes debating the questioner, who claims that Mormonism is more historically accurate than Protestantism.

‘First of all, I love Mormons,’ says Kirk. ‘I love how Mormons have more kids than they can afford,’ and gestures to members of his team who he says are Mormons.

‘You’ve got to get your mojo back,’ says Kirk. ‘No more of this LGBT stuff.’

The crowd roars in reply.

A second questioner, 29-year-old Hunter Kozak, takes the microphone and asks Kirk: ‘Do you know how many transgender Americans have been mass shooters over the last 10 years?’

Kirk quickly replies: ‘Too many’ – a comment again greeted with loud applause.

12.23pm:

The gunman, lying on the roof of a nearby building, pulls the trigger on his rifle from a distance of around 415 feet.

Kirk is hit with a single bullet to the neck and slumps over.

The crowd screams and people leap to their feet and run from the scene, while a group of Kirk’s supporters carry him to a nearby SUV, which drives off in such a hurry the rear door is still open.

Kirk is taken to Timpanogos Regional Hospital, 3.3 miles from the UVU courtyard.

Surveillance footage shows the gunman running across the roof; jumping down; and walk-jogging off campus towards the wooded area.

12.39pm:

The first FBI agents arrive and secure the scene.

Sometime after the shooting, according to charging documents, Robinson texts Twiggs and says: ‘Drop what you are doing, look under my keyboard.’

ALSO READ: French Lifeboat Service Refused to Rescue 120 Migrants on Dinghy

Twiggs finds a note which reads: ‘I had the opportunity to take out Charlie Kirk and I’m going to take it.’

Twiggs replies to Robinson and asks: ‘What??? You’re joking, right??’

Robinson replies that he is ‘stuck in orem for a little while longer,’ and had hoped to keep his involvement a secret ’till I died of old age.’ He apologizes for involving Twiggs.

Twiggs asks: ‘You weren’t the one who did it, right????’

Robinson replies: ‘I am, I’m sorry.’

12.48pm:

Utah Valley University sends out an emergency alert saying police are investigating ‘a single shot fired toward a visiting speaker’ – and that a suspect is in custody.

1.02pm:

President Donald Trump shares news of Kirk’s shooting on Truth Social, as videos of the shooting circulate online.

He writes: ‘We must all pray for Charlie Kirk, who has been shot. A great guy from top to bottom. GOD BLESS HIM!’

2.40pm:

Trump announces that Kirk has died.

‘The Great, and even Legendary, Charlie Kirk, is dead,’ he writes on Truth Social. ‘No one understood or had the Heart of the Youth in the United States of America better than Charlie. He was loved and admired by ALL, especially me, and now, he is no longer with us. Melania and my Sympathies go out to his beautiful wife Erika, and family. Charlie, we love you!’

4.00pm:

The Republican governor of Utah, Spencer Cox, holds a press conference on the murder and calls it a ‘political assassination.’

Cox says there is a ‘person of interest’ in custody but says that the investigation is ongoing.

4.21pm:

FBI Director Kash Patel tweets that the ‘subject for the horrific shooting today that took the life of Charlie Kirk is now in custody.’

5.59pm:

Patel tweets that the ‘subject in custody has been released after an interrogation by law enforcement.’

Beau Mason, commissioner of the Utah Department of Public Safety (UDPS), later says two people were taken into custody and then released.

George Zinn, 71, told police: ‘I shot him, now shoot me,’ but later admitted he lied to distract from the immediate manhunt. He was charged with obstruction, while Zachariah Qureshi was released without charge, UDPS said. Qureshi, 25, a newly engaged MBA student, was standing about 25 feet away from Kirk when he was shot.

Investigators quickly concluded that neither had ties to the shooting.

Thursday, September 11

Early hours:

A campus security officer stops a driver attempting to access the campus and notes the vehicle license plate.

The vehicle is registered to Robinson.

7.00am:

Mason, the UDPS commissioner, and FBI Special Agent in Charge, Robert Bohls, hold a press conference.

They confirm that the gun used in the shooting, a Mauser .30-06 caliber bolt rifle, has been found wrapped in a towel in woods near the campus as well as a footprint, palm print and forearm impression.

A screwdriver has been found on the roof.

9.58am:

The FBI posts the first set of photos of a person of interest. The pictures show a person in sunglasses and a baseball cap walking through a building wearing a long-sleeve black shirt, with the emblem of an American flag and bald eagle. Gray Converse sneakers are visible.

10.44am:

The FBI announces a reward of up to $100,000 ‘for information leading to the identification and arrest of the individual(s) responsible for the murder of Charlie Kirk.’

6.17pm:

The FBI releases more photos of the person of interest on social media.

7.30pm:

Cox says more than 7,000 tips have been made to the authorities, and investigators have conducted nearly 200 interviews.

The governor says the state will push for the death penalty when the suspect is caught.

7.45pm:

Air Force Two, carrying Kirk’s casket, lands at the Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport in Arizona.

Kirk’s widow Erika is on board and is seen being comforted by Vice President JD Vance and his wife Usha.

7.59pm:

The FBI releases video of the man they believe is the gunman jumping off the rooftop and running away from campus.

10pm:

Robinson’s mother, according to the charging documents, recognizes her son and contacts him. He tells her he was at home in St George and was sick – and that he had been at home all the previous day.

Robinson’s father believes that the gun the police say was used is the gun he gave to Robinson, so asks his son for a photo to prove he still has it with him. Robinson refuses.

Robinson texts Twiggs to complain about his father asking for the gun and requests that Twiggs delete their conversation.

Robinson tells his father he plans to kill himself, but his father convinces him to drive to the family home, which is near Robinson’s own apartment.

Once there, Robinson’s parents persuade him to speak to a family friend, who is a retired deputy sheriff.

Robinson, accompanied by his parents and the family friend, surrenders to the Washington County sheriff’s office, and is driven north towards Orem, where he is booked into Utah County jail.

Friday, September 12

6am:

Trump appears on Fox and Friends and announces ‘with a high degree of certainty’ that Kirk’s suspected killer is in custody.

7am:

Cox, Patel and other officials hold a press conference and name Tyler Robinson as the suspected killer of Kirk.

They say they believe he acted alone.

For some Americans, Sept. 11, 2001, has receded into the pages of history. But for the families who lost someone that day, 9/11 remains painfully close — even 25 years later, as vivid and immediate as if it happened yesterday.

That morning began with an ordinary civic ritual: I walked to my polling site to cast a ballot in New York City’s mayoral primary. Not long after, the first reports arrived that a small plane had hit the World Trade Center. But when the television images showed the massive wound torn into the tower, I knew instantly this was no small aircraft. Then, moments later, the second plane struck.

Three Bloomberg LP employees — Peter Alderman, Bill Kelly and Paul Ortiz — were attending a
customer conference at Windows on the World in the North Tower. They never returned home to their families. Nearly 3,000 others were also killed that day.

The magnitude of the loss, and the depth of the grief that swept through New York City, still defy easy description. It is etched permanently into the city’s memory — and into our hearts. Yet sorrow is not the only thing we remember.

In the bleak days after the attacks, New York and the nation drew together with extraordinary purpose. People lined up to give blood, donated food and supplies, volunteered wherever they were needed, prayed together, flew American flags, thanked first responders and service members, and filled vigils and funerals. Everyone tried to do whatever they could — even when it felt impossibly inadequate.

That spirit of unity was unlike anything most of us had ever experienced. It was patriotism at its best: love of country in action, through service to one another. And it was a spirit I was determined to keep alive as I began the greatest challenge and privilege of my life — leading our city forward as its new mayor.

When I took the oath of office, many wondered whether the city would ever recover. People worried that residents and businesses would flee and crime and decay would return. And the most pressing question of all hung over us: what to do with the World Trade Center site.

Some wanted the whole 16 acres to be a memorial. Others wanted cultural buildings but no commercial ones, while others wanted to rebuild exactly what had been there. After attending so many funerals and seeing so much grief, I made a solemn promise that the city would build a memorial worthy of the sacrifices of so many.

But I also believed the greatest tribute we could pay to those we lost, and the strongest rejection of the terrorists we could make, was to bring new life and vitality back to the site, and all of Lower Manhattan, by reimagining and rebuilding in ways that would attract new families, companies and visitors.

Doing that meant making room for all the proposed elements: commemoration, culture and commerce, plus a renewed spirit of community, through new housing, open space and a reconnected street grid.

Not everyone agreed, of course, and we didn’t control the site; the states of New York and New Jersey did, through the Port Authority, which had leased it to a private company, Silverstein Properties. We could not dictate what got built there, but we collaborated closely with them and we got to work on what we could control — what happened all around the site.

READ MORE: Remembering Charlie Kirk, Indispensable Voice for Truth

We began working to turn an area that had long been a 9-to-5 business district into a 24/7
neighborhood, with new homes, schools, parks, businesses and cultural opportunities. “A downtown for the 21st century,” I called it.

As the years passed, we made steady progress that people could see and feel on the streets, but the World Trade Center site remained empty. Disputes among different groups kept arising, which kept turning into delays, which kept pushing out construction timelines.

By 2006, the Memorial plan had stalled. Costs had soared. Design decisions became divisive. And as people began to wonder if it would ever get built, donors stopped giving.

Failure was not an option. We owed it to the families — and to the city and the country — to do everything we could to get the Memorial and museum built, so I agreed to become chairman of the effort.

In the months that followed, the great team we assembled broke logjams, brought down costs and raised money needed for construction. We worked with victims’ families to resolve difficult questions, including how the names would be arranged on the Memorial. And we set a clear goal: open it by the 10th anniversary.

Thanks to countless people, we kept our commitment. On September 11, 2011, families gathered at the completed Memorial. Its brilliant design, by a city employee and immigrant named Michael Arad, was selected by a special jury after an open competition that drew more than 5,000 submissions.

Standing at the Memorial and seeing the names etched in bronze, the reflecting pools set in the footprints of the Twin Towers and the waterfalls that drop beyond our line of vision is deeply moving. More than 100 million people from around the world have experienced it, and many of them have also visited the powerful and inspiring museum completed several years later.

The museum’s mission — preserving the stories of 9/11 and honoring its heroism and compassion — grows more urgent with each passing year. About one in three Americans are now too young to remember the attacks. In the decades ahead, responsibility for carrying that history forward will pass from those who lived it to those who learned it.

In 2023, we opened the Perelman Performing Arts Center (PAC NYC), a project we championed in City Hall and that I have chaired. The center stands next to the Freedom Tower and the tree-filled Memorial plaza, bringing together culture, commerce, commemoration and community, all in one place. Today, people come to the World Trade Center to remember, to work and to meet friends and see theater — just as we had hoped all those years ago.

On the sacred ground of the World Trade Center, memory lives on. So does life. And so does the spirit that inspired us in the wake of 9/11: unity, resolve and a patriotism that transcends party lines.

Twenty-five years later, our country could use more of that spirit. And so in honoring the vow we made back then — “Never forget” — let us also remember, and share with the next generation, the full extent of its meaning.

Michael R. Bloomberg is the founder of Bloomberg and Bloomberg Philanthropies and chair of the 9/11 Memorial & Museum and PAC NYC. He served as mayor of New York from 2002-2013.

As Americans pause Friday to mark 25 years since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Kathleen Palladino will recall the morning not as history, but as a 6-year-old New Yorker struggling to make sense of what was unfolding around her.

Palladino was in kindergarten in Brooklyn when students’ names began echoing over the school’s PA system, one after another, summoning them to leave.

Her mother eventually arrived to take Palladino and her older sister home. During the walk back, the young girl turned her attention toward Manhattan.

“It was like a dividing line,” Palladino recently told News Media. “From the bridge backwards was just blackness.”

The other side of the afternoon sky remained clear and blue.

“Mommy, why is the sky black?” Palladino remembers asking. “She just kept squeezing my hand, and we just kept going,” she said.

A quarter-century later, Palladino teaches nursery school at St. Patrick Catholic Academy in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, where her 3-year-old students were born more than two decades after the attacks that shaped their teacher’s childhood.

She is one of several educators at the school whose memories of 9/11 stretch back to their own school days.

As the nation remembers Friday, they are teaching children about an event that remains deeply personal to them but that their students know only as history.

Their principal, Kathy Curatolo, carries an even more personal connection — she watched one of the towers collapse from a school roof that morning, unaware her youngest brother, 31-year-old FDNY firefighter Robert Curatolo, was underneath it.

For Palladino’s young students, the lessons begin simply.

“I don’t go into the events of 9/11,” she said. “They are too young, and the scope of what happened is just beyond their understanding right now.”

Instead, she teaches them what they can do when someone is hurting.

“Can we clean up our toys without being asked? Can we go give them a hug?” she said. “Anything to show the ones that we love that we’re here for them.”

For fourth-grade teacher Elizabeth Giacchino, 9/11 begins in her memory with a ringing telephone.

Giacchino was a sixth grader at Our Lady of Guadalupe School in Brooklyn when her teacher answered a call and told the class something had happened involving the Twin Towers.

“So many of my classmates around me just started screaming and crying because they had family members that were working in the city,” she said.

Outside the window, Giacchino could see smoke. Parents began arriving, but Giacchino and her older sister remained because their mother worked at the school.

“All I wanted to do was just be with my family at that time,” she said.

Years later, after becoming a teacher herself, another memory took on new meaning. Giacchino remembered how calm her own teacher had remained while children cried around her.

“I don’t even know if she was feeling some type of way or if there was any personal situation she was going through, because all she thought about was us,” Giacchino said. “So that’s what I always make sure to do with my students too.”

Nikki Fregara, now a third-grade teacher at St. Patrick, was a high school senior when a phone call interrupted her first class of the day, history.

“I hate to tell you all this, but I’m afraid that the Twin Towers got hit,” she remembers her teacher saying.

The students went to the window.

“We saw the smoke,” Fregara said.

She remembers crying and screaming in the hallway and students gathering in the auditorium around a small box television to watch the news. Fregara worried about her father, whose work took him to buildings around the city, and her sister and brother-in-law, who worked nearby.

READ MORE: How an Agent Tapped El Chapo’s Phone and Helped Bring Down the Drug Kingpin

Today, she steers her third-graders away from the graphic details and toward the first responders who ran toward danger.

“Helping others is so important, especially when they are in need,” Fregara said.

Her message to them is simple: “Never forget to be an everyday hero.”

For Curatolo, however, the hero she tells students about was her younger brother.

Curatolo was headed to a principals’ meeting on Sept. 11, 2001, when she heard on the radio that a plane had struck the World Trade Center. 

At the meeting, she and the other principals watched the second plane strike on TV before returning to their schools.

Curatolo had four brothers, three firefighters and a police officer, and her mother initially called with reassuring news: all four were OK.

Curatolo turned her attention to her students and eventually went onto the school roof.

“I saw the second tower fall, not realizing that tower killed my brother,” she said.

Robert Curatolo had been an FDNY firefighter for six years and was assigned to Ladder 16 in Manhattan.

Kathy said Robert had just gotten off duty when the attacks began and headed toward the World Trade Center with two other firefighters in a police car. One survived, allowing the family to later learn some of what Robert did that morning.

Robert began directing dazed people away from falling debris, Kathy said. When the first building collapsed, he was in a walkway between the towers. Curatolo survived and then returned to the rubble.

Kathy said her family learned that Robert pulled a man with two broken legs through the debris and into the street. When the second tower collapsed, Robert dove beneath a fire truck, she said, but it could not withstand the collapse.

People have asked Kathy why he didn’t leave after surviving once. “That’s not who he was,” she said. “That’s not how we were raised.”

Yet that is not the only Robert she wants her students to know. The youngest of eight siblings, Robert was funny, easygoing and athletic. He loved movies and traveling and was, Kathy remembers, almost always late.

“So he actually ended up at the Trade Center on time, where we’re like, the only thing you ever got to on time,” she said.

Robert had married at Disney World just three weeks before 9/11. The wedding was the last time Kathy saw him, though she spoke to him by phone the day before he died.

“I want them to know that Robert was — he was a regular kid growing up just like them,” she said.

Curatolo remembers realizing around the 10th anniversary that students increasingly had no memory of 9/11.

“These kids have no idea what I’m talking about unless they learn it from us in school or their parents who had experienced something,” she said.

Today, she said, children accustomed to smartphones and instantaneous communication are astonished to learn survivors sometimes couldn’t contact their families.

She tells them about grounded planes, postponed baseball games and packed churches and remembers that after the attacks, “people were kinder to each other.”

Twenty-five years later, Curatolo said she also wants students to understand that remembering tragedy does not mean allowing it to define a life.

“My brother is always with me, but I don’t let 9/11 define me,” she said. “You can survive a tragedy and still live a good life because the people who were lost don’t want you to stop living your life.”

Her family continues to honor Robert through a scholarship foundation, charitable work and support for Tunnel to Towers.

Kathy still counts him among the eight Curatolo siblings.

“There are eight of us,” she said. “Four live in Florida, three live on Staten Island, and one’s in heaven.”

He is counted among the most infamous drug traffickers the world has ever known — a man who once made the chilling claim that he had taken between 2,000 and 3,000 lives.

So when Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, the notorious former boss of the Sinaloa Cartel, walked into a New York courtroom in 2017, US federal agent Eric Balliet had already formed a picture of what he expected to see.

“This was the second most wanted man on the planet at the time behind Osama bin Laden, so I was expecting him to resemble some kind of criminal genius,” he recalls.

“But he looked like any average, middle-aged Hispanic man. He seemed kind of awkward and gave a sheepish wave to his wife. Then, a few minutes later, we started hearing about all the people he’d killed.”

For Balliet, that 2017 hearing marked a defining professional moment. As a special agent with Homeland Security Investigations, or HSI, he had helped drive the operation that ultimately brought down one of Mexico’s most feared cartel leaders.

By intercepting texts exchanged between El Chapo and his closest confidants, Eric helped identify his secret hiding place deep in the group’s bloodstained heartland. 

The drug lord lived much of his life on his phone and at times sent nearly 100 texts a day. And after years poring over his personal communications, Eric gained a remarkable – perhaps unrivalled – window into the daily life, habits and personality of the world’s most powerful drug trafficker.

He found plenty of the murderous, manipulative kingpin depicted in the new Netflix drama Facing El Chapo, with numerous messages detailing contract killings, corruption and multi-million-dollar drug deals.

Others revealed his insatiable sexual appetite, including his frequent use of prostitutes – many disturbingly young – and numerous affairs.

Yet there were also regular glimpses of ‘the other’ El Chapo, with affectionate messages to his children and grandchildren interspersed among talk of drug dealing and murder. 

In an exclusive interview with the Daily Mail to mark the release of his memoir, Kingpins & Coyotes, Eric reveals how he helped capture the cartel boss not once, but twice – and everything he learnt about his life and criminal empire along the way.

Eric first heard about El Chapo in 2001, shortly after the drug peddler had escaped from Mexico’s Puente Grande Prison in a pile of dirty laundry – the first of a series of audacious jailbreaks he would become known for.

The diminutive son of an impoverished farmer, Guzmán rose to prominence in the 1990s after pioneering the use of sophisticated underground tunnels to move drugs across the US border. 

After taking over leadership of the Sinaloa Cartel, he ploughed the gang’s profits into overseas expansion – while taking care to donate lavishly to community projects to buy the loyalty of local people.

In 2009, he entered Forbes’ list of the world’s richest men at number 701, with an estimated worth of $1billion (£709million) – just a fraction of the $14billion (£10.4billion) he is estimated to have made over his 30-year criminal career.

By 2012, Eric had taken his new job at Homeland Security Investigations, the branch of the federal government tasked with investigating international criminal organisations. 

He began by investigating a money laundering scheme that used aircraft to move drug money between the US and Mexico. But before long, this evolved into looking at a network of drug traffickers who were part of El Chapo’s network.

The group kept in contact using BlackBerry Messenger – at the time a popular instant messaging app – and before long Eric and his colleagues began intercepting their communications.

Homing in on the drug lord’s inner circle of bodyguards and couriers, they gradually built up a detailed picture of his travel patterns and daily routine.

They hadn’t been able to see any texts sent by the boss himself by that point. But in the latter months of 2013, they had a breakthrough.

‘We came across texts that mentioned several key details, including El Chapo’s son – Edgar – who was killed in Culiacán in 2008,’ says Eric. 

‘When we analysed the conversation there was no other reasonable explanation for who it could be. It had to be El Chapo and his second wife, Griselda.’

This was a game changer: rather than simply investigating El Chapo’s network, being able to read messages sent by the kingpin himself raised the possibility they could go one step further and mount an operation to capture him. 

Eric and his colleagues assembled a small team in Mexico, made up of several other HSI agents, as well as operatives from the Drug Enforcement Administration, US Marshals and the Mexican Marines.

Over the coming months, the HSI squad would continue intercepting El Chapo’s communications, before relaying this intelligence to the team in Mexico. 

Each time El Chapo sent a text, it flashed up on a series of computers in Eric’s office. After reading thousands of his messages, the agent developed a remarkably detailed understanding not only of his drug trafficking operation, but of his personal life too. 

‘He liked to eat good food, particularly Chinese food, so he’d tell his courier to ‘bring me Chinese’ and the courier would know what he meant and go to a particular restaurant’, Eric recalls. 

‘He’d be very specific about what he wanted and once ordered birria stew [a traditional Mexican beef dish] for breakfast.’

‘There were two Chapo Guzmáns: one was the man who would have people killed and corrupted anybody if it suited his needs.

‘But then there was this very affectionate side of him when he was talking to his kids, especially about his granddaughters or his young twins, and he’d be saying ‘send my love’ or ‘I’m sending you strong hugs.’

‘He could have had someone brutally killed and then five minutes later be sending someone a cake or an elaborate bouquet of flowers for their birthday.’

Eric recalls one incident that epitomised El Chapo’s lack of regard for human life.

‘There was one time they lost more than 600 kilos of cocaine on a boat west of the Galapagos Islands and they thought a guy stole it.

‘He actually didn’t – it was jettisoned overboard because the local coast guard approached the boat, but they blamed this poor bastard, so El Chapo told them to ‘take care of it’. The guy wasn’t heard of again.

‘I’m sure some clinical psychologists would have a field day trying to understand how you can operate on those different axes.’

That’s not to say El Chapo was always good to his family. In one intercepted conversation, he ordered the killing of one of his nephews, prompting US agents to travel to a Guatemalan prison to warn the man in person.

‘As law enforcement we have an obligation to notify someone if we believe their life is in danger, so we travelled down and told the nephew, who took in the information without saying anything,’ says Eric.

‘Then, about two years later, he was at a Christmas party, got p***d drunk and got into a fight with one of his other relatives before getting shot dead.

‘So he wasn’t killed in prison. He ended up being killed at a Christmas party by a relative, which is kind of ironic.’

The messages also revealed El Chapo’s concerning sexual preference for younger women, whom he ordered to be delivered to him ‘like food’.

‘He was ordering prostitutes multiple times a week. It was gross – he liked them younger, with dark hair and would tell his couriers to make sure they weren’t chubby,’ says Eric.

‘They had this elaborate scheme: person A would pick up the women and take them to location B where another person would pick them up in a car – they’d do that multiple times before ending up at his place.’

Documents later released in a US court contained claims from witnesses that he engaged in sexual acts with minors, who he referred to as ‘vitamins’.

One cooperating witness claimed the cartel boss had him drug girls as young as 13 before he raped them at one of his Mexican hideouts in the late 2000s. The gangster’s lawyers denied the allegations, describing them as ‘extremely salacious’.

Summing up El Chapo’s ‘disgusting’ treatment of women, Eric says: ‘He was ordering women in a similar fashion to how he would order food.

‘He’d say ‘have them dressed like this or that’ and describe exactly what he wanted before his confidantes would go out and find the women for him. He had his fair share of mistresses too.’

One challenge Eric’s team faced was El Chapo’s relatively isolated lifestyle. He rarely travelled and shuffled between several different hideaways around his home city of Culiacán, which he largely controlled.

‘Chapo moved between five different locations,’ he says. ‘They were nice, with high walls, a pool and big screen TVs, but they weren’t elaborate for someone with that amount of wealth.

‘Just south of Culiacán was a little resort with swimming pools and a bay where he felt very comfortable going. He would go there, relax and call his sons. But he didn’t have a massive entourage and lived a fairly isolated existence.’

Every time a new message appeared, Eric would scan it for ‘actionable intel’ about El Chapo’s movements that could be fed back to the team on the ground in Mexico.

The wire tap team began to focus on one man in particular, a courier nicknamed Nariz, or ‘nose’ in Spanish.

‘When we saw a picture of him, we kind of understood why he was given that name,’ Eric laughs.

On the night of February 17, 2014, the Mexican marines picked up Nariz on a street in Culiacán. He broke under interrogation and identified El Chapo’s house, which was then assaulted by the heavily armed soldiers.

But they hit on a problem: the door to the house was heavily reinforced and it took a painfully long time to break it down using rams and sledgehammers.

By the time they rushed inside, El Chapo was gone – scuttling into Culiacán’s sewer system through a secret hatch beneath his bathtub, opened by activating a sequence of light switches.

It was a crushing moment. But rather than curse their luck, the agents were back on the chase – aided by brave Mexican marines who raided every local location associated with El Chapo to try to find him.

Based on information from dozens of seized Blackberry devices, an American agent called Jack traced the gangster to the Miramar Hotel, a 10-storey set of luxury condominiums in the beach resort city of Mazatlán.

In the early hours of February 22 – five days after his bathtub escape – Mexican soldiers smashed down the door of El Chapo’s room on the fourth floor to find him in bed with his new wife, Emma Coronel, a former teenage beauty queen 32 years his junior. Nearby were the couple’s two daughters, aged three to four.

Describing the moment as it was relayed to him, Eric says: ‘Chapo ran into the bathroom, and the soldiers heard him trying to lock and load an AK-47.

‘The commander on the ground said to kill him, but Emma started screaming and begging them not to kill him in front of the kids, that sort of thing.

‘They were ready to start pumping rounds through the door before they saw hands coming around the door.

‘They cuffed him and took him into the basement of the Miramar, where there was that famous photo of someone with their hand on his head.’

Despite his joy at El Chapo’s capture, Eric knew the game was far from over – with the Sinaloa Cartel certain to carry out a rescue attempt.

He began to feel slightly more comfortable after the drug lord was whisked away to a Mexican Navy base in a Black Hawk helicopter and presented to the media in Mexico City, before being thrown into the maximum-security Altiplano Prison. 

But he wouldn’t stay there for long. A year later, on July 11, 2015, he escaped through a shaft connecting his shower to a mile-long tunnel, which had been fitted with a modified motorcycle running along a track.

Back in the US, where Eric and his colleagues had been cataloguing evidence to present at his upcoming trial, the devastating news came in an early morning flurry of text messages.

‘My phone was blowing up – we all had a group chat together and I looked at it to see he had gone,’ he recalls. 

‘I thought ‘there’s no f*****g’ way. He’d managed to escape from a maximum-security prison a second time.’

By then, Eric had moved to Washington DC and, similarly to many of the agents in the original El Chapo operation, had moved on to a new role.

‘I remember my boss calling me from Arizona and asking what he thought we should do. I was like, ‘Dude, we have to get the band back together.’

‘I knew there were only a small number of people in federal law enforcement who were really in Chapo’s head, understood how his network operated and could almost predict where he was going to go.’

Eric’s superiors agreed with him and quickly reassembled the original team – pulling them back from their various new postings into a new operations centre in Chantilly, Virginia.

Immediately, they began combing through data for clues about El Chapo’s likely whereabouts, including the flight manifests of private jets he might have travelled in after fleeing jail.

In October, four months after his escape through the tunnel, Eric heard some truly bizarre news: Sean Penn, the American actor and film-maker, was heading to meet the drug lord for a now notorious interview.

‘I was like, ‘what the f*** are you talking about – Sean Penn?!” he recalls. 

The story of what happened next has been widely documented. El Chapo – keen for a biopic to be made about his life – agreed to sit down with Penn in a meeting brokered by Mexican actress Kate del Castillo.

What is less well known was the fact federal agents – including Eric – were monitoring the actor’s every move in Mexico in the hope he could lead them to El Chapo.

‘The DEA put a team on the ground and were doing surveillance on del Castillo, Penn and the film crew,’ Eric says.

‘They lost him getting out of the airport but managed to identify an airport, and electronic surveillance put them at a ranch in the mountains.

‘There were geopolitical considerations. The Mexican Marines were ready to assault that ranch the moment they realised El Chapo was there.

‘But because Penn was a US citizen and del Castillo held dual nationality, the State Department was concerned a raid could turn into a bloodbath, so they nixed our involvement.

‘A couple of sicarios were killed. We received conflicting reports about whether Chapo had escaped. To this day, I couldn’t tell you whether he was there, but he certainly wasn’t on site when the Marines went in.’ 

The US agents renewed their hunt for the kingpin by focusing on his brutal head of security, El Cholo Iván (real name Jorge Iván Gastélum Ávila), and another figure who went by the moniker ‘Medusa’.

Convinced both men were regularly at El Chapo’s side and would know his whereabouts, the team focused on their daily routines before Mexican Marines zeroed in on a house in the Sinaloan coastal city of Los Mochis.

On January 8, 2016, the soldiers stormed the property, leading to a massive firefight.

‘There’s grenades being lobbed back and forth, sicarios shooting through windows, a guy on the roof with an AK-47 and a pistol,’ says Eric.

Five sicarios were killed in the raid but El Chapo and Ávila managed to flee down an escape tunnel that led to the city’s sewer system – now a familiar tactic. After emerging, they stole a vehicle which quickly broke down, before hijacking a red Ford Focus.

It looked like he had evaded capture again, but before long the pair were intercepted by two federal police officers. In a bizarre twist, they initially pulled them over for speeding but quickly recognised the pair and arrested them without a firefight. 

One year later, El Chapo was extradited to the US before a headline-grabbing trial in Brooklyn – where evidence gathered by Eric and his team was used to convict him.

Since 2019, he’s been languishing in the supermax jail in Florence, Colorado – dubbed the Alcatraz of the Rockies.

Sitting in his home around two hours away from the prison, Eric feels justly proud of the part he played putting him there. 

But does he believe the operation dealt a decisive blow to the cartels? Far from it.

‘These organisations are built to survive – there are always succession plans if someone is arrested or killed,’ he says. 

And of course, he’s right. Following El Chapo’s arrest, the organisation is now partly controlled by his sons. Known collectively as the Los Chapitos, two have been captured, while the remaining brothers, Iván Archivaldo Guzmán Salazar and Jesús Alfredo Guzmán Salazar, remain at large.

They are now embroiled in a violent struggle for power with a rival faction loyal to the cartel’s jailed co-founder, Ismael ‘El Mayo’ Zambada. 

Nonetheless, the cartel remains a force to be reckoned with and continues to operate through a decentralised structure that does not depend on the direction of a single all-powerful leader.

‘At the end of the day, it comes down to supply and demand,’ Eric says. ‘As long as people want drugs, someone will step in to provide them.’

• Kingpins & Coyotes is available to order now.