New York’s new DEA boss brought down El Chapo — now he’s tackling the city’s opioid crisis

In addition to cracking down on narcotics in America’s biggest drug bazaar, Ray Donovan, the new boss of the US Drug Enforcement Administration’s New York City division, fights other battles.

Mostly it’s with fellow law enforcers who constantly remind him of “Ray Donovan,” the Showtime crime-series starring look-alike Liev Schreiber ­in the titular role.

The real Ray Donovan grew so exasperated with colleagues and friends bombarding him with images from the show that he put up a sign on his desk.

“Ray Donovan knows there’s a show called Ray Donovan. Thanks for Asking,” it reads.

Before his appointment in December as the special agent in charge of the DEA’s New York Office — the agency’s largest operation in the country — Donovan, 49, headed the manhunt for El Chapo.

Based at the DEA’s headquarters in Virginia, he coordinated hundreds of agents over dozens of agencies in both Mexico and the US — picking up the moniker, “The Wizard of Oz.”

After Joaquin Guzman’s escape from a high-security Mexican jail in July 2015, Donovan launched the operation that would see the Sinaloa cartel boss recaptured less than six months later.

Donovan would only say this about how his team tracked him down: “I’ve studied him for years. I know how he thinks.”

El Chapo was convicted in Brooklyn federal court in February on all counts related to drug trafficking, and Donovan is clearly proud of having helped bring him to justice.

On one wall of his Chelsea office, framed photos from the mission are arranged alongside the sand-colored Mexican prison T-shirt the ruthless drug dealer wore when he was extradited to the US in January 2017. The shirt is folded to show El Chapo’s prison number — 3912 — written in magic marker.

Under it is a quote attributed to Genghis Khan: “One arrow alone can be easily broken, but many arrows are indestructible.”

“This was a collective operational mission,” said Donovan, who has Irish and ­Puerto Rican roots and grew up in The Bronx.

He graduated from St. John’s University in 1993 with a degree in criminal justice and began his career as a US Border Patrol agent in San Diego in 1995.

Two years later, he became a special agent with the DEA’s New York Drug Task Force, the largest and oldest in the US.

Now Donovan is focused on what he called his greatest challenge: Ending the explosion of thousands of kilos of heroin and fentanyl in the city.

He knows the opioid trade well. He was one of the original managers of a DEA task force that investigated the trafficking of heroin and fentanyl across the country and the world.

Between 2017 and 2018, there was a 273 percent increase in the seizure of fentanyl, he said.

“Our number one priority at DEA is to save lives,” said Donovan, who oversees the work of 1,100 agents across the state. “My people are focused on heroin and fentanyl, which is killing Americans.”

Some of the fentanyl arrives in courier packages from China, where many of the chemicals used in the manufacture of the synthetic opioids originate. Both fentanyl and heroin also make their way to the city in tractor-trailers and rental cars, Donovan said.

Synthetic opioids are also manufactured by Mexican drug gangs, like the Sinaloa cartel, and shipped to New York, where they are distributed by Chinese and Dominican gangs working mostly in Flushing and Brooklyn, he said.

“Chinese criminal gangs have these strong connections to the Mexican cartels going back to the 1980s,” Donovan said.

While the illicit drugs that stream across southern border have changed since Donovan began his career as a Border Patrol guard in the 1990s, New York remains one of the biggest drug markets in the world.

“We need to end the flow of drugs before it kills a lot more people,” he said.