El Chapo wanted the Hells Angels to kill ‘Catboy,’ a Canadian trafficker he suspected of stealing his money
Canadian drug trafficker Stephen Tello, known as “Catboy,” came within a whisker of being murdered on the orders of Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, who suspected the former real estate agent was stealing from him.
To do the hit, Guzman’s team singled out the Hells Angels.
That’s according to stunning court testimony this week from Hildebrando Alexander Cifuentes-Villa, or “Alex,” who took the stand against his old boss El Chapo and outlined extensive links between Guzman’s Sinaloa Cartel, Colombia’s Cifuentes-Villa crime family, and major Canadian cities.
Fielding questions from prosecutor Gina Parlovecchio in Brooklyn, Alex, who turned government witness for a shot at a reduced sentence, said he first started setting up El Chapo’s Canadian deals in 2008, as he “had a friend who was Colombian-Canadian and he had clients there.”
As well as Tello, official court transcripts obtained by the National Post show the narco outlining a longstanding relationship for cocaine, heroin and ice (or crystal meth) deals with a man called “Tony Suzuki,” believed to be Antonio Pietrantonio, a well-known Montreal mafia operative.
Stephen Tello, who is suspected of working with “El Chapo” Guzman.
Tello, 39, who has lived in Toronto, Montreal and Kitchener, Ont., was handed a 15-year prison term in 2018 following a 2015 Nova Scotia drug sting called Operation Harrington. That case involved plots to smuggle tons of cocaine from Latin America and the U.S. into Canada, with 15 people charged in eight smuggling conspiracies after their ring was infiltrated by RCMP.
However, the National Post reported last week that Tello is also indicted for suspected cocaine importation by the Southern District of New York. Listed with him are El Chapo, Alex Cifuentes-Villa and another Canadian, former Toronto resident Mykhaylo Koretskyy, alias “Russian Mike” or “Cobra,” who has been detained in Curacao and is fighting extradition to the U.S.
Now, with Alex outlining the chilling orders he was taking from Guzman as he ran Canada for El Chapo, Tello’s precise place in the cartel’s orbit has come into focus.
He may not have known it as he was sitting in Ontario Superior Court but Tello, it seems, was lucky to escape from his alleged dealings with El Chapo with his life.
Product
Alex, whose brother was once a pilot for Colombian kingpin Pablo Escobar, was in charge of selling El Chapo’s product once it ended up in New York and Canada, he told the court this week.
“El Chapo” Guzman, left, seen with Alex Cifuentes-Villa and an unidentified woman. Canadians Stephen Tello and Mykhaylo Koretskyy have been indicted in the U.S., suspected of working with Guzman and Cifuentes-Villa.
The Colombian said he first went to live with El Chapo in late 2007, reaching the mountains of Sinaloa by small plane and living in “several” properties with Guzman for at least two years of a six-year Mexican stay. Essentially, Alex said he was there as a “guarantee” for money that El Chapo was sending to Colombian cocaine suppliers. Alex’s brother Jorge Milton came to visit, too; like Alex, he has turned sides and testified against Guzman.
In court, Alex said Guzman eventually left the Canadian side of things to him.
Tello was his Canadian “worker,” Alex said, outlining how the former Concordia University student even travelled to Mexico and met with El Chapo’s group in Cancun, Los Cabos, Puerto Vallarta and Culiacan, Guzman’s stronghold.
Alex would coordinate deliveries to Canadian wholesalers and collect the proceeds, then re-send this cash to Colombia and Ecuador to buy more drugs. Once money was sent south, more cocaine came back north. Just one small example: a 6,000-kilogram load sent from Ecuador to Canada, via the Pacific route by ship.
Alex had his own phone dedicated to the Canadians, and would translate for El Chapo at meetings with them. The operation saw drugs go from the U.S. to Canada in “trailers, also by helicopter, and over the Pacific Ocean to Vancouver,” he said.
At one point, the Sinaloa Cartel planned to cross drugs over an area Alex called “Lake Vermont” by renting houses on both the U.S. and Canadian sides, each with a dock for boats. Given the geography of the area in question, it is presumed the Colombian meant Lake Champlain.
In court, the star witness was played a tape of chats between, allegedly, El Chapo and another contact called “Proceso,” in which they talked about finding “some ranches on the U.S. side and on the Canadian side in an area that’s isolated, with nothing nearby.”
On the surface things looked to be going well. Alex said they made “dozens of millions” from Canadian sales.
But it wasn’t long before Tello was on very thin ice.
Mishandling
The paranoid El Chapo became suspicious that Tello was mishandling Canadian funds, and plans were soon afoot to get rid of the Canadian as well as one of El Chapo’s many secretaries, Andrea Velez Fernandez.
“Well, Steven (Stephen) Tello, I mean there had been many complaints that I had gotten from Joaquin and also from Andrea herself, that he was stealing in Canada,” Alex said, according to the transcript. “He was stealing the product or the profit of the drug sale.”
In this undated photo provided by the United States Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York, Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, left, poses with an unidentified man.
Guzman had been told, it seems, that the Canadian was on the take by other “workers” in Canada.
His solution? Kill Tello.
In around the same time, January 2013, El Chapo asked Velez Fernandez, who also ran a modelling agency, to bribe a military general whom she knew — $10 million to go easy on El Chapo. The deal was that El Chapo would give her one million if she did so, but Alex said that when the secretary returned with bad news — the general didn’t want the deal — El Chapo didn’t believe her.
His solution? Kill her too.
So that he could murder him, Alex then tried to convince Tello to come to Mexico, but the Canadian turned down that particular hospitality package.
“So what we (Alex and El Chapo) did was to ask my wife Valentina for the favour,” he said, the “favour” being to find someone to kill Tello. Valentina was summoned “to see if she could get us a person in Canada who could kill Steven. And Joaquin (El Chapo) said and they can just kill the secretary right away as well because she is a liar.”
With two hits now on his list, Alex said he “had some appointments pending with the Hells Angels, and it was likely that I would do that through them.”
However, the double murder never materialized.
Alex was arrested at the end of 2013, caught in one of Guzman’s neighbourhoods and subsequently struck a deal with the U.S. As for Tello, he was caught in the Canadian Harrington raids of May of 2015, and in April 2018 received 15 years in prison, less time served.
“Is Steven Tello still alive?” the prosecutor asked Alex in court.
”He is still alive,” the gangster replied.
Police standby outside the Brooklyn Federal Courthouse as the “El Chapo” Guzman trial takes place on January 7, 2019 in New York.
Sales
What exactly was El Chapo trying to protect in Canada?
Huge sales of cocaine, heroin and ice, Alex told the courtroom. He helped El Chapo find a manufacturer of ice in Ecuador, he said, after first getting raw materials in Colombia and recipes in Mexico City. Then, he helped him sell it in this country. El Chapo wanted a particular ingredient put into his ice, Alex said — one that caused addicts to become anxious and confused.
As for the cocaine, he said it often stopped in the U.S. en-route to Canada, with truck drivers stopping off in Los Angeles to take on board their northbound loads.
Under cross examination from El Chapo’s lawyer Jeffrey Lichtman, Alex told the court he had travelled to Canada himself, and used an array of fake names, fake credit cards and fake bank accounts during his 2007-2013 Mexico stay.
Though on the run, El Chapo wasn’t exactly a shrinking violet. He liked to travel in a golden Chevy Suburban with tinted windows, Alex said. At one birthday party on April 4, 2008, the drug lord’s cronies gave him watches, cars, motorbikes, a white armoured pickup truck, and even a camouflage-colour Hummer stamped with his initials, JGL.
Guzman’s mountain hideouts were staffed with maids, guards and girlfriends, all surrounded by three rings of heavily armed security guards, who were decked out in camouflage. El Chapo was decked out in camouflage too, and always armed to the teeth with a camouflaged R-15, Alex said.
This undated photo provided by the U.S. Attorney’s Office shows a diamond-encrusted pistol that a government witness said belonged to infamous Mexican drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, at Guzman’s trial in New York, Monday, Nov. 19, 2018.
“It was a medium size and it had a grenade launcher with 40-millimetre grenades. He carried a belt with his black, .38 super gun, with his initials in the handle. And with diamonds,” he added matter-of-factly.
“They had electric generators which generated electricity, obviously. We had Sky, the satellite (TV station). We had plasma TVs, DVDs, washer, dryer, refrigerator; everything that was needed.”
Alex said “hundreds” of people would come and go from El Chapo’s hideouts, asking for their pay. These included marijuana and heroin poppy farmers, pilots, messengers, bodyguards, gunmen, drivers and drug suppliers.
The wild run came to an end, however.
A vendor shows a t-shirt with the face of Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman Loera for sale in the Tepito neighbourhood in Mexico City on July 20, 2015.
El Chapo was eventually fighting wars on various fronts — with his trafficking neighbours the Carrillo Fuentes family, his cousins in the Beltran-Leyva cartel, and others. He would eventually be re-captured, following the second of two prison breaks, in June 2016.
As the net closed, Guzman was being warned by family members that he had a snitch or “dedo” in his camp, but Alex said El Chapo wouldn’t take their advice.
That snitch was, in fact, one that had been accidentally introduced by the Cifuentes Villa brothers. Alex told the court it was he and Jorge Milton who had brought in a systems engineer known to them only as as “Christian” to boost encryption on El Chapo’s IT systems.
“Christian” was Christian Rodriguez, who was eventually turned by the FBI and hoarded a trove of Guzman’s calls and texts, relaying them to the Americans.
The gang eventually tried to find him and kill him, but Christian had vanished. The next time the narcos saw the man they first hired when he was 21 was when the computer whizz, now 32, was testifying against El Chapo in Brooklyn.
Alex hadn’t even known his surname and like Tello, they couldn’t get to him on time.
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