The Stowaway
written by by Matthew Bremner — read by Anthony Rey Perez

Oh, you mean the polizón?” The stowaway? replied the waiter. It wasn’t the first time I had heard the word. From the moment I had arrived in Roldanillo, a somnolent town in the lush, sticky Cauca Valley of Colombia, people had said it more times than I could remember. Still, it was curious: Though everybody seemed to know the name Juan Carlos Guzmán-Betancur, they knew surprisingly little else.

As I sat in a coffee shop on the main square of Roldanillo, a few days into my trip, Guzmán was proving as elusive as ever. I had tried to contact his mother, Yolanda Betancur, and while at first she seemed willing to speak, she soon stopped responding to my calls. I phoned and emailed brothers, aunts, and uncles without success. I had spoken to dozens of people by the time I finally tracked down Guzmán’s cousin, Jhon Calzada, who described him as a “genius” and a “legend,” and someone of whom he was “very proud.” Calzada explained that the family situation was tense and that Guzmán had not given him permission to speak to the press.

Still, I had managed to dig up one good lead: Jose Guzmán, Juan Carlos’s half-brother on his father’s side. He lived in the town of La Union, just outside Roldanillo, and was willing to speak to me.

The next day, on the patio of a sprawling bungalow shaded by towering eucalyptus trees on the outskirts of the village, I met with Jose and his brothers. Unlike most people I had spoken to so far, they were open and friendly, and it was from them that I got closest to the center of the mystery.

Juan Carlos, it turned out, was no son of privilege. He was the product of a fleeting affair between Yolanda Betancur and Oscar Guzmán. According to a retired local policeman, Guzmán Sr. was a philanderer and schmoozer who lived in the nearby town of La Union. He had nine children with his wife, who was from a prosperous land-owning family, and although he would officially recognize Juan Carlos as his son, he played no role in the young boy’s upbringing.

Yolanda Betancur was no saint, either. “One day she brought Juan Carlos here, to La Union,” recalled Jose. Jose’s mother was well-off, at least by the standards of her rural surroundings, and Yolanda thought she would do a better job bringing her sons up. “But my mother said no,” Jose recalled. The retired policeman, who was there the day Yolanda tried to give up her son, remembered the “shy, restless” toddler having to face the humiliation of being rejected by both his families.

The last time Jose saw his half-brother was when Guzmán was 13. He showed up saying he was in a bad way and that he needed help, but he didn’t elaborate. Jose told him he would keep an eye out for opportunities, but the teenager never returned.

“In the end, I didn’t know him that well,” Jose concluded as our conversation wrapped up. He suggested I visit Guayabal, a shantytown outside of Roldanillo, the place Juan Carlos actually grew up.

I made the 20-minute drive to the settlement. The area was rundown: Ramshackle huts slouched on either side of a coffee-colored canal running parallel to the swollen Cauca River. Palm trees loomed and lurched overhead and insects hissed and spat from dawn till dusk. Walking along those muddy embankments , the atmosphere was not friendly. People didn’t want to talk; they turned their backs, shouted and slammed their doors, or just feigned ignorance. One person told me that two “gringos” had visited the previous year asking for Juan Carlos. “We thought they might have been DEA agents or hitmen, how do we know who you are?” Another man told me to leave the neighborhood immediately when I tried to talk to one of Juan Carlos’s aunts, who still lived in the area. “She’s not here, and she’s not coming back to speak to you,” he shouted, “Go and find him if you want information.”

Still, some locals did speak to me, albeit surreptitiously and out of sight of their neighbors. They told me that Guzmán grew up in Guayabal with his grandmother, mother, and two brothers. He had attended school in a small, single-story whitewashed building not far from there — though he didn’t make it through high school. Some people remembered Guzmán as introverted and shy: “He kept himself to himself,” a childhood friend later told me. There were others, though, who said that Guzmán was flamboyant in his early years, and one neighbor told the local press that he seemed “gay.” Back then, the Cauca Valley, where Roldanillo lies, was filled with Colombian narcos and guerilla groups such as the ELN and the FARC. The culture was macho and often unforgiving of difference, particularly for a young man. “I’ve known since I was a young boy,” Guzmán once said of his sexuality in the only interview he has given as an adult. He had relationships with other boys, but nobody knew about them. They couldn’t. What would they say? Back then, Guzmán had no one to confide in, not even his own mother, and so he kept his own confidence.

Yolanda Betancur, for her part, had a series of boyfriends and flitted between Roldanillo and Cali looking for work. In a sworn statement Guzmán would later give to police in Miami, he described his domestic life as volatile. At the age of 13, he claimed he was forced to live on the streets because his mother’s boyfriend beat him constantly. “She preferred him to me,” he told officers. For months, Guzmán said he had “no home” and no possibility to get regular work. His only real escape was his imagination. He was obsessed with airplanes and would often tell people when he saw one that he would be up there one day. For him, they must have seemed like symbols of a future escape.

Guzmán first tried to flee to Venezuela but couldn’t get a resident’s permit there because he didn’t have a passport. That’s when he set his sights on the U.S. “I was planning it for five months, I was thinking about it all the time,” he later told officers in a police report. He was working at Cali airport when it struck him: There was a window of time when every plane paused at the top of the runway to prepare itself for take-off. He would hide away in the wheel well of a plane and fly to the USA. It would be risky and he could die, he realized, but it would be worth it if he could escape.

Guzmán would later say that he just wanted a better life than the one he had when he’d been “poor and alone,” when he “was eating trash from dustbins,” in the slums of Cali. He didn’t imagine himself turning to crime. Still, he was good at it, and he would have done anything to attain the life he felt he deserved.

So he climbed into the wheel well and left his old life behind. He had been hopping into new ones ever since.

Towards the end of December 2004, Guzmán was walking down Berkeley street in central London. Icy drizzle fell from the murky winter sky and hordes of haggard faces paraded down the grey sidewalk. Guzmán was wearing a long leather Valentino coat and a Franck Muller watch, both lifted from previous jobs. He was accompanied by another man, with whom he’d been living in an apartment in North London. The man would later claim that he and Guzmán were lovers, although he knew the Colombian only by the name David.

As the two men turned into a Sainsbury’s supermarket, none other than Detective Swindells happened to be walking back from a bar in central London after work. He stopped momentarily outside the market, and as he turned around, his trained eye stopped on something familiar. It was a face that he had only seen in blurry photographs, but there was no mistaking it. The hair was dark and wavy, and there was that mole between the eyebrows. Swindells fumbled for his phone and dialed his partner.

Plowman received the call on the steps of Marleybone Police Station. “It’s him, it’s our robber’,” he said, “I’m sure of it!” Plowman thought his boss was joking. “No, Christian. I’m deadly serious, he’s got that mole.” Plowman, who was at that moment on another case, literally ran the mile and a half from Seymour Street to Berkeley Street. He arrived out of breath and nervous. “Where is he?” he gasped. Swindells pointed out a tall man several meters away, looking at fruit and vegetables.

The coincidence was barely believable, but both men tried to remain calm. Plowman went in front so that he could see the suspect’s face; “I glimpsed the mole, and I thought it’s obviously him.” He gave Swindells a knowing nod and strode toward the suspect. “I grabbed him by the arm, showed him my I.D. card, and I said, ‘Are you …’ and then I listed all of his aliases.”

Plowman had memorized eight of the criminal’s names. Guzmán tried to wriggle out of his grasp. “Apples and oranges spilled onto the floor, and he looked crestfallen,” the detective remembered. Several minutes later, a police van turned up and transported the three men to the police station.

A few days later, while Guzmán sat in custody, Swindells and Plowman searched through an apartment on the Lisson Grove in North West, London. Inside the apartment was a trove of evidence. There were fraudulent tickets, boarding pass stubs, forged documents. “My favorite was the Russian passport with his photo in it,” Plowman told me.

While Guzmán had been reticent in early interrogations, he now had little choice but to admit to the London hotel burglaries. He confessed to three burglaries in November 2004 and to being the mysterious thief who had hit four London hotels in 2001, but he continued to use the name he had given at the time of his arrest: Gonzalo Zapater Vives. His belief in his own disguise was so strong, the detectives reported, as to be almost unnerving.

After a trial where he was found guilty, Guzmán was sent to Standford Hill on the Isle of Sheppey, an island of 40,000 people, flat green expanses, and two other large prisons some 42 miles from London. Despite his string of high-profile crimes, which throughout his career are estimated to have netted millions and would have been worth hundreds of thousands in London alone, he was handed only a light sentence of three-and-a-half years. In large part this was due to the fact that he was never physical, never used violence or threats, even if caught in the middle of a crime. None of his identities seemed capable of inflicting physical pain on others.

Reports from prison guards described Guzmán as a quiet and well-behaved prisoner, and he did little to draw attention to himself. That was, until he escaped several months into his sentence. Taking advantage of lax security, Guzmán used a toothache to secure a trip to the dentist, which was all the cover he needed to slip away.

Police combed the area. He had no credit cards and little or no cash. Authorities alerted airports and ports, but there was no trace of him. Somehow he had gotten off the island and onto the mainland.

Back in Marylebone station, Swindells and Plowman received a call from a journalist informing them of Guzmán’s escape. “Our first reaction was we laughed,” Plowman said. His escape surprised neither man.

Several weeks later, Guzmán turned up in Ireland, where he hit the five-star Merrion Hotel in Dublin and stole 2000 euros in cash, a ruby ring, and an American Express card. He subsequently took the credit card to town, where he bought C.D.s, designer clothes, and an $11,000 Daytona Rolex watch.

“I remember we had been reading the paper after the hotel had been robbed, and I saw an article about the escape of an international prisoner near London,” Peter MacCann, manager of the Merrion, told me. “The crimes that the man had committed seemed similar to the one committed at our hotel.” MacCann passed the article on to the lead detective in the case, who showed the newspaper photographs to the hotel staff and confirmed it was the same man.

When Guzmán was found several days later, surrounded by clothes, jewels, and wearing the stolen Rolex Daytona, he insisted his name was Alejandro Cuenca, that he was 25 years old and hailed from Cádiz, Spain. In interviews with the police, Guzmán explained that both his parents had died when he was young and that he grew up in an orphanage in Seville. He claimed he had then “escaped” from this institution at the age of ten, lived on the streets, and had never attended school. He said he had no birth certificate.

“I would have been convinced had I not known for sure he was Guzmán Betancur,” the lead detective on the case, Bryan McGlinn, told the local papers at the time.

Guzmán was a master manipulator, but his fattening criminal record, the increasing urgency of his crimes, and improving police technology were now working against him, as were the growing number of investigators on his trail.

Since the Las Vegas robbery, Detective Kirk Sullivan hadn’t been able to forget about the conman’s brazenness. He had accumulated multiple binders stuffed full of documents from Interpol and ICE, as well as numerous emails from police departments all over the world. “I couldn’t let it go,” he told me.

In January 2005, Sullivan was sent an article from The Guardian newspaper by someone who had been working at the Four Seasons Las Vegas at the time of the burglary. The employee thought the description matched that of the man who had hit them two years earlier. Sullivan contacted Scotland Yard, and there he spoke to Plowman and Swindells, who provided him with a mugshot of Guzmán. That mugshot clearly matched CCTV stills at the Four Seasons.

Plowman told Sullivan that he had become aware of the Las Vegas investigation when Daniel Gold, the victim of the Four Seasons robbery, had read the same Guardian newspaper article, and had notified Scotland Yard. Convinced this was the same man, Plowman put Sullivan in touch with Detective McGlinn in Dublin, who set up a call with Guzmán in his new cell in Dublin.

On the phone, Guzmán was curt. The Colombian had little interest in speaking to yet another cop, especially one that might have something on him. “It seemed like he wanted to hang up,” Sullivan told me. But the American detective was an experienced interrogator and promptly changed tactics. “I started speaking to him in Spanish,” he told me. “I had worked as a Christian Missionary in Guatemala for 2 years, and so my Spanish was fluent.” In his mother tongue, Guzmán began to open up. He was really more Spanish than he was Colombian, he told Sullivan, a reference to his time living in Spain, and wondered out loud if he was to be extradited to the U.S.

The detective pounced on the opening and moved to the topic of the Las Vegas burglaries. Had he hit the Four Seasons? Guzmán insisted he had never been there. So why was he worried about extradition to the United States? Sullivan thought. In the explanation that followed, Guzmán maintained he hadn’t robbed the Four Seasons — only he also mentioned that the hotel was located in the Mandalay Bay.

That was it, the slip Sullivan had been waiting for. The Four Seasons was located in the Mandalay Bay Casino, but Sullivan hadn’t mentioned that. Indeed, if he hadn’t been there, how would he know such an obscure fact? As the detective hung up, he was convinced he finally had his man.

But he would have to wait his turn. The Colombian was sentenced to two years in jail in Ireland for his crimes in Europe. He was later extradited to France in connection with offenses he had committed years before. In a stroke of luck, he would be released in France with the charges in the United States still pending.

Still, it turned out that Guzmán, who had never forgotten his dream of escaping to America, would soon be headed back there.

It was around 8 p.m. on a September night when Guzmán strode into the Irving Oil gas station in Derby Line, Vermont, a tiny village on the U.S.–Canada border. Still lanky, but a little older now, he dressed in blue jeans, a light sports jacket, and a Colgate-white baseball cap. He approached the checkout counter. Guzmán explained to the clerk that his car had broken down just across the border in Canada. He attended college nearby, he added, and had an exam the next day that he absolutely couldn’t miss. Could he borrow a phone book to call a cab?

Guzmán began flipping through pages, looking for cab numbers. Unknown to him, an off-duty Customs officer had stopped by the gas station to pick up a twelve-pack. The officer had been listening as Guzmán talked with the clerk, and he knew he was lying. There was no college nearby, for one, only a high school on the Canadian side. And Guzmán looked too old to be a student.

The officer called for backup, and within minutes a U.S. Border Patrol agent pulled into the parking lot. The agent cornered Guzmán near the cashier and demanded to know his name. As he had done many times before, Guzmán offered up an alias. This time he was Jordi Ejarque Rodriguez, and in his mind he was already beginning to spin a web of lies.

“Juan Carlos is a mythomaniac,” Andrés Pachón, the only journalist to interview Guzmán as an adult, would later tell me. Truth and lies merged until they became indistinguishable, and Guzmán’s inventions, by now a way of life, were becoming increasingly outlandish and risky, like an addict increasing his dosage. “He didn’t need to tell any of the stories he told,” Peter Costas, the lead officer of the Vermont arrest, recalled. “Why hadn’t he just asked for the taxi number and gone? Why had he told the store clerk that he was a student, or mentioned his car was in Canada?”

After serving 30 months in the U.S., Guzmán was arrested in Hong Kong, where he was found wandering on the 16th floor of a Sheraton Hotel by a staff member who recognized him from a widely distributed photograph. After his release, he was arrested in France, where authorities claimed the Colombian had stolen €217,000 worth of cash and jewelry from the Hotel Disneyland in the city of Chessy. Through his lawyer, Guzmán protested his innocence, claiming he was in Brazil at the time of the burglary and that because of his international reputation he was likely a victim of identity theft. But French justice didn’t buy his story. The great impersonator who had been impersonated was perhaps too much, even for Guzmán. In March 2019, he was sentenced to 15 months.

Guzmán’s whereabouts are currently unknown. To the detectives who followed him all those years, he remains one of the most skilled and untrustworthy criminals in the world. Kirk Sullivan, now retired from the police and working as a property developer in Kentucky, offers a more somber reflection. “Most of us grow up, we get jobs, we work hard, we care for the people around us. But it’s just kind of like he’s still that little kid that crawled into the wheel well of that airplane.”

Perhaps the biggest insight to the truth of his identity that Guzmán ever offered came in the Vermont courtroom after his arrest for sneaking into the country. Before the verdict, he handed his lawyer a two-page letter. Offered as a way of explaining his actions, he told the court that he had had a very difficult life, especially his childhood. Yes, he had lived “a great lie,” but these “false stories” meant something to him. They were the only method he knew that took him away from the “nightmare” that had been his past.

Though they were lies and ruses, Guzmán’s stories revealed a truth about him; they revealed his genuine desperation and a desire for acceptance; a compulsion so strong he had endured prison and had almost frozen to death in the wheel of a plane. His stories showed that he was constantly on the run; not from immigration authorities, Scotland Yard, the Las Vegas Police Department, or Interpol, but always from a past he seemed unable to fully escape.

Guzmán is still out there. I always come back to that security still from the lobby of the Four Seasons Hotel in Las Vegas. He is wearing shorts and a burgundy T-shirt, and he walks gracefully, confidently through the frame, the picture of a man comfortable in someone else’s skin.