In the Thrall of the Mountain King: The Secret History of EL CHAPO, the World’s Most Notorious Narco

by Phoebe Eaton

Investigative journalist PHOEBE EATON separates man from myth, journeying past cartel checkpoints up to El Chapo’s remote hometown hideout in the Sierra Madre. She meets Chapo's family and reveals the surprising telenovela details of his childhood, discovering exactly how this third-grade dropout, Mexico’s most controversial narcotrafficker, rappelled his way from the rock pile that is La Tuna, Sinaloa, onto Forbes magazine's big-time billionaire list, governing a $14-billion empire even as he was on the lam, living in simple pine shacks with plastic folding chairs where the phone service went down if it was raining. She discovers the Pentecostal faith his mother (and he) credit with keeping him alive all these years and helping him escape jail and the authorities numerous times, the gift his mother and sisters (and, they say, even he) have of speaking in tongues. Including many never seen before color photographs of Chapo's haunts in La Tuna in Badiraguato, the surprising seat of his empire, and also rare material from his 12-week Brooklyn court trial where he was convicted on ten felony counts before shipping off to a life term in Colorado's Supermax prison.

Eaton unmasks how Chapo lived and how he loved, the deal with his many wives and his very many children. These are real-life Tarantino-ish tales of el narcotráfico, the most dangerous business in the world.

Eaton's reporting for this book won her Mexico's National Journalism Award (2021), the Premio Nacional de Periodismo conferred by the Club de Periodistas de México (Press Club of Mexico).

47 pages, Kindle Edition

First published February 11, 2019

About the author

PHOEBE EATON is a multi-award-winning journalist, playwright, screenwriter, and sometime photojournalist. A regular contributor to the New York Times Magazine, New York magazine, Vanity Fair, Air Mail, the New York Observer, the New York Post, Harper’s Bazaar, Men’s Vogue, GQ (UK), and The Daily Beast among many others, she's also had work appear in the Guardian, the Saturday Telegraph magazine, the Observer magazine, et al.

As a journalist, Eaton has covered politics for the New York Observer and has reported ringside from the trial of Sinaloa Cartel boss Joaquín “ El Chapo” Guzmán—now the basis for her Sinaloa-researched Amazon Kindle Single nonfiction book IN THE THRALL OF THE MOUNTAIN KING, work that earned her Mexico's National Journalism Award 2021 (Premio Nacional de Periodismo) from the Press Club of Mexico (Club de Periodistas de México). A three-time National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Award winner (2020-2021), a Newswomen's Club of New York Front Page Award winner in 2020 (Investigative Reporting categories), and a 2017 New York Press Club Award winner, she has taken tea with both Tokyo yakuza and the man cloning the woolly mammoth. Traveled the South of France with high-end call girls. Walked the tequila-bottle-scattered cemeteries of Juárez/Sinaloa, and also Cairo’s tumultuous traffic island, Tahrir Square.

A finalist for the 2017-2018 Woodward/Newman Drama Award, a Wurlitzer Foundation playwright fellow, and member of the Actors Studio Playwright/Directors Unit, Eaton has seen her work for the stage published in such anthologies as Smith & Kraus’s BEST STAGE MONOLOGUES 2021, BEST STAGE MONOLOGUES 2019, and also in Applause Books’ SHE PERSISTED: MONOLOGUES BY WOMEN 2021.

Eaton's magazine stories (and screenplays, for that matter) tend toward fables on power and its attainment, her nonfiction subjects as varied as Harvey and Bob Weinstein, Anthony Weiner, Katie Couric, Ivana/Ivanka Trump, Karl Lagerfeld, Ralph Lauren, Valentino, L’Wren Scott, Sony’s Tommy Mottola, mafia defense attorney Gerry Shargel, screenwriter Joe Eszterhas, shock-photog Terry Richardson, etc. Her story “Penitents, Pedophiles, Poets, Movie Stars, Silversmiths, and Drug Lords: When Hollywood Flocked to Cartel Country” was the winner of a 2017 New York Press Club Award for cartel reporting in Guerrero state, Mexico. She has appeared on Fox’s Good Day New York, Dateline NBC, Entertainment Tonight, and NY1, among others.

Eaton graduated with a B.A. from the University of Chicago.

For Eaton ad nauseam and contact/reprint/rights information, visit www.phoebeeaton.com/bio

Reviews

[Scott Clark · Rating 5 out of 5]

Organized-crime groupies really get their moneys work on this one. For In the Thrall, journalist Phoebe Eaton meets El Chapo’s Mom and sisters who have a lot to say about what goes on with him. Stories and factoids about famed narco El Chapo and the women surrounding him that have never appeared anywhere.In the Thrall of the Mountain King: The Secret History of EL CHAPO, the World’s Most Notorious Narco