Beer was flowing and music was pounding inside a Denver nightclub as suspected members of Tren de Aragua (TdA) partied their way into the early morning hours.
The Venezuelan gang has established a number of clubs across Denver, Colorado that serve as hangouts, drug dens and brothels for its foot soldiers. Their locations are secret and invitations are highly selective.
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But that night, the festivities didn’t last long.
Shortly after 4am, federal agents massed outside on the snowy streets before storming in and taking over the building within minutes, shuffling the partygoers outside to be handcuffed and loaded onto coaches.
The operation, which involved agents from multiple federal agencies, was the result of months’ work of painstaking intelligence gathering, as The Telegraph can exclusively reveal.
TdA entered the national consciousness last year when footage emerged of alleged gang members, some of them armed with handguns and rifles, bursting into an apartment block to demand rent from residents in Aurora, Colorado.
Donald Trump, in the midst of an election campaign, declared they had taken over the city and vowed to summarily deport its “vicious” footsoldiers.
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The ensuing media spotlight prompted the gang to scatter.
Anderson Zambrano-Pacheco, who is alleged to be the ringleader that day in the Aurora apartment complex, was recently arrested in New York and charged with being a fugitive in possession of a firearm.
Some of his alleged comrades closer to home, are setting up shop in Denver – roughly a 20-minute drive from Aurora.
Jonathan Pullen, a special agent in charge with the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), told The Telegraph that it had used its “robust intelligence collection network” to track these gangsters who had made the short trip east.
A TdA member who crossed over the mountains bordering Denver carrying some 120,000 fentanyl pills put the gang on Mr Pullen’s radar who ordered agents to begin tracking them.
“It raised a big red flag in my office here. From that point, we really started to dig into what the connections were,” Mr Pullen said.
“We were going to identify the entire network. It really opened the aperture for us, and we started to identify quite a few TdA members and TdA associates.
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“We discovered that these guys were setting up night clubs across the city.”
These clubs ran “invitation-only events”, which were sent out on TdA channels on social media and intercepted by the authorities.
The nightclubs were fairly nondescript on the outside: essentially a building where gangsters had installed a bar and brought a few cases of beer.
Photographs from the raid on Jan 26 show empty cardboard boxes of Corona lager had been flung carelessly outside. They were not the type of establishments that a passer-by might head into from the street, entirely by design.
Inside, investigators collected photographic evidence via covert surveillance, which found that the clubs were not just being used as drug dens – they were makeshift drug factories.
TdA associates were using the buildings to manufacture “tusi” or “pink cocaine”, where cocaine, ketamine and other drugs are mixed together in a bowl with a pink food dye.
“Every weekend we’re seeing drug trafficking, we’re seeing weapons on display, we’re seeing sex trafficking,” Mr Pullen said. “These are serious criminals.”
The location of the clubs changed several times over the next few months as the DEA worked to gather intelligence, using undercover work and intercepting messages from gangsters to convince a federal judge to sign a search warrant.
Finally, agents from the DEA, immigration and customs enforcement (ICE) and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) massed outside, waiting for the go-ahead.
It was a close-run thing: there were questions about whether anybody would actually show up as the snow began to fall heavily and temperatures plummeted to 8F (-13C).
And the operation was almost derailed when an armed carjacking took place a short distance from the nightclub just before the party was due to start around 2am.
“They see the police and then there’s messages going around that we were able to intercept about, ‘Oh my God, the police are in the neighbourhood. Maybe we shouldn’t go tonight,’” Mr Pullen said.
Authorities were able to pull some strings, seemingly convincing the local police to back off while the federal officials went to work.
By 4am, guests had started flooding back in – some of them with pistols thrust into their back pockets – and the party was back on.
So was the raid. More than 100 agents flooded into the club, leading alleged TdA associates and gang members outside to handcuff them before they went to work, seizing cash, guns, and drugs that included crack and pink cocaine.
They moved so quickly that, by the time the operation had finished, the ice that had been used to keep the beer chilled hadn’t melted.
Of the 49 people that had been led out of the club, 41 were found to have been in the US illegally when they were transferred over to ICE.
In the days since that operation, the DEA has conducted more than 12 operations, made several dozen arrests, and seized tens of thousands of fentanyl pills.
Although the raid was the culmination of months of planning, Mr Pullen said there was a “sense of urgency” since Mr Trump had entered office, adding that the security agencies were now being directed to work together to “get the worst of these criminals off our streets”.
“This is just the beginning of the search,” he vowed.
