Mexico's drug emperor was generous before his capture and escape

The notorious drug kingpin who escaped from a maximum-security Mexican prison on Saturday loved gourmet food so much that, before his February 2014 arrest, he would emerge from hiding in the Sierra Madre mountains just to eat at his favorite restaurants.

Joaquín Guzmán Loera — known as "El Chapo," or "Shorty" — was "maddeningly obscure" and a master at evading the Mexican police, Patrick Radden Keefe reported in The New Yorker last year.

Guzmán eventually became overly confident,
and he wanted to spend his millions rather than live like a pauper in the mountains: "There is a saying in the Mexican drug trade that it is better to live one good year than 10 bad ones," according to Keefe.

Still, while he risked being seen in public to eat at elegant restaurants, Guzmán took the same extensive security precautions every time.

"The choreography was always the same," Keefe writes. "Diners would be startled by a team of gunmen, who would politely but firmly demand their telephones, promising that they would be returned at the end of the evening. Chapo and his entourage would come in and feast on shrimp and steak, then thank the other diners for their forbearance, return the telephones, pick up the tab for everyone, and head off into the night."

El Chapo owned hundreds of legitimate businesses throughout Mexico and was hyperaware of all police efforts to capture him.

His nationwide network of informants was unrivaled, and he was known to pay off his captors with drug money. In 2001, Guzmán escaped the high-security Puente Grande prison near the city of Guadalajara by paying guards to help him slip out.

He was also fond of secret tunnels and intricate escape routes. In February 2014, Guzmán fled the police through a network of underground tunnels accessible via a secret door beneath the bathtub in his Sinaloa home. Mexican marines caught him shortly after he arrived in the city of Mazatlan.

ReutersEl Chapo once evaded authorities by using a tunnel hidden under a bathtub that exited into the city of Culiacan's drainage system.

Guzmán employed a similar tactic to escape from his prison cell last weekend. While in the shower, Guzmán slipped down a shaft into a mile-long ventilated tunnel he had constructed over the course of a year.

Attorney General's OfficeMexican Attorney General Arely Gómez González looking into the entrance of a tunnel connected to the Altiplano Federal Penitentiary and used by El Chapo to escape, in Almoloya de Juarez, on the outskirts of Mexico City, on Sunday.

Before Guzmán's escape, the US had been pressuring Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto to have him extradited for smuggling billions of dollars worth of cocaine, marijuana, and methamphetamines across the border.

El Chapo's escape is a major embarrassment for Nieto's administration, which has been trying to convince the US that it can deal with the drug war on its own and does not need to extradite its drug lords.

"It's shocking, embarrassing, a huge blow, almost everything under the sun," Eric L. Olson, a scholar at the Mexico Institute of the Wilson Center who follows crime trends in Latin America, told The New York Times.

"It is almost Mexico's worst nightmare, and I suspect many in US law enforcement are apoplectic right now."