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It's the late 1970s, and Barry Seal, a former commercial airline pilot, is at the front line of a booming international drug smuggling network. Everything is going to plan until it isn't. My name is John Cuban, and each week, Noiser Podcasts will delve deep inside the world of organized crime and take you undercover with the men and women tasked with capturing criminal masterminds. We take you to the front line of some of history's most infamous DEA missions.
These guys are the real deal. And this is Real Narcos. On December 15th, 1979, Barry Seal gets into real hot water. He's halfway through a job on a stopover to refuel in the Central American country of Honduras. And someone's tipped off the cops. Seal waits on the runway, under guard, while they search his plane. They don't find any coke.
But they do find an M1 rifle. It's enough to send him down for a seven-month stretch. Jails in Honduras are not pleasant places. But even here, at his lowest ebb, Seal is the kind of guy who can turn a desperate situation to his advantage. He's got a knack for finding people that can help him out. In July 1980, Seal gets out of jail and is flown back to the United States. He'll later claim it's on this flight where he meets a man called Roger Reeves.
Reeves is the dark-haired guy with thick, bushy sideburns. He has a penchant for wide-brimmed hats and tailored three-piece suits. He and Reeves hit it off on the six-hour flight home. Turns out, Reeves has contacts who can connect SEAL's Louisiana operation with the infamous Medellin cartel in Colombia. Reeves is offering access to the biggest cocaine suppliers in the global market, a vicious criminal cartel headed up by the notorious, world-famous narco-terrorist Pablo Escobar.
Barry Seal is exactly what Escobar and his cronies need. Elaine Shannon is author of Desperados. Barry Seal could fly anywhere. He could land just about anywhere. He knew his craft very well. He was perfect for what the Medellin cartel at its inception needed, which was skilled pilots who were willing and able to go into some very rough territory. This is it.
Time for Barry Seale to really hit the big time. Jeff Lean is co-author of Kings of Cocaine. Barry Seale started working for the Medellin Cartel in 1981 when the cartel was at its peak. Cocaine was exploding in the United States. The cartel by then had, you know, several transportation methods and he, you know, obviously was a big part. But they were bringing a lot of cocaine into South Florida, tons and tons.
over a ton a week. It's raining money. Seal is getting richer than he ever dreamed possible, making his family very comfortable.
Well, he had five kids. He had with his third wife, Debbie, he had three children. And I think that, you know, he was the kind of man who would come up in a period where, you know, you could be a smuggler and a family man. And I think he felt like he was providing very well for his family. There's a story that on his son's 15th birthday, he gave him $10,000 in cash.
in 20s and you know you have to be a bit of a family man to be that generous but also he had the money. SEAL's flying operation goes from strength to strength. Money just keeps rolling on in. All this despite the US government's continuing war on drugs. Federal drug task forces are springing up all over the country. Ronald Reagan is plowing resources into his war on the transnational cocaine trade. Drugs are menacing our society.
They're threatening our values and undercutting our institutions. They're killing our children. From the beginning of our administration, we've taken strong steps to do something about this horror. Say yes to your life, and when it comes to drugs and alcohol, just say no. When it comes to drugs, Seale doesn't touch them himself.
but he takes a pretty carefree view. I think Barry's view of smuggling was, you know, how much worse is marijuana and cocaine than alcohol and tobacco? He had that kind of viewpoint on it. He might turn a blind eye to the health risks of his product, but he's under no illusions about the legal jeopardy he's in. To protect himself and his family, Seal keeps his identity secret. He has no direct contact with the drug cartel bosses, and the Columbians down in Medellin know him only as El Gordo.
The fat one. And to avoid wiretaps, Seal conducts all his communication through payphones. Delhan is a former FBI agent and author of Smuggler's End. Back in those days, they didn't have any cell phones. He had a pager, and whenever anybody would call his answer service, he'd get a page, and he would go to the nearest payphone, which they had back in those days, and return the call. So nobody knew what was going on. Lewis Unglesby was Barry Seal's attorney.
Well, I don't know if Barry could have survived in today's world with modern technology and all of the capacities of communication, but he may have figured it out. I know back then he had mastered
the idea of codes, payphones, and beepers. And I would always know-- I have an office in a quiet street in Baton Rouge-- and I always knew when Barry was coming, because you could hear all these beepers going off by the time he hit the door. There'd be four or five of them. Now, I don't know what those beepers were telling him, but he was very much into that kind of communication. And supposedly, he would use these payphones
and would have a conversation that would mean something to his confederates that you could never decipher. It was all a predetermined code that would change, I suppose, from time to time. He carried around bucket loads of quarters. Barry wore these jumpsuits, they called them in those days, which are these very big, loose-fitting, all-in-one piece of clothing. A roll of quarters is pretty heavy.
And you could tell when he was walking, he had a lot of stuff in his pocket. Those were quarters. Barry makes sure that no one knows more than exactly what they need to know. His employees don't know each other. They don't even know each other's names. Del Han. He compartmentalized. I've heard him use that word once. People on the ground didn't know who the pilot was, allegedly. The pilot didn't know who the people on the ground were.
Nobody knew when the load was coming in except the pilot and Barry. The drivers of the cars, I don't know who they were. We never could get that out of him. They probably did not know who the pilot was either. They didn't know when it was coming until they were told. By keeping people in the dark, he had a good chance of not getting caught. It seems to be working. Seal's pretty sure he's got smuggling down to a fine art. He's outsmarted them all. Lewis Unglesby.
Jeff Lean: He had the brains, the guts.
the will, and he loved the adrenaline. He loved the game with the cops. He knew they were watching him, he knew they were trying to catch him, and he loved the fact that he could do this and they couldn't catch him. But alas, Barry Seal is not quite as smart as he thinks. The whole time he's been building up this international drug smuggling network, for years, he's been under surveillance by the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Del Hahn worked for the FBI at this time.
Well, I guess the fact that he dealt on the phone helped us up here to be able to go on the phones ourselves and be able to listen to him. We didn't get what we wanted all the time, but we knew how he was operating and how he was communicating, so that gave us a leg up on our investigation. Like I said, we didn't have cell phones. If we had, I don't know what we would have done. We had, at one time, 10 pay phones being monitored, and that's a lot of equipment to handle that many phones.
We're back to that smoky bar in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, near the banks of the mist-covered Mississippi. DEA Special Agent Randy Beasley has been tasked with stinging Barry Seal once and for all. He's been tailing Seal, building a case, and now he's got him exactly where he wants him. Barry Seal likes to boast, and this has been his undoing, because Beasley has got the whole thing on tape. No sophisticated technology needed, just an informant,
An overconfident perp in a good old fashioned wiretap. In March 1983, Barry Seal is indicted for smuggling 200,000 Quaaludes. The bond hearing takes place on April 23rd. Reporters flock to the courthouse. This guy's the biggest smuggler around. He sells a lot of newspapers. Inside, the hearing begins and Seal puts on quite a show. Seal thinks he's indestructible and won't take the bond hearing seriously. He tells ridiculous lies.
When the judge asks his income for the past year, he says it's a mere $250,000. And when he's quizzed on his occupation, still deadpans. No, he's not a drug smuggler at all. He's an oil and shrimp broker. Del Han. He had to come up with some story, and I think he's smart enough not to say I'm a smuggler. So he has to come up with something and maybe start accounting for some money. As far as I know, he didn't broker any shrimp, but I think that...
That information is what he put out when he made Bond. He had to tell the bail bonds people something. We got enough shrimp in Louisiana, he didn't have to go down there to be a shrimp broker. In truth, in 1982 and 1983 alone, Seal has brought in more than 5,000 kilos of cocaine to the United States. Not to mention the Quaaludes and other contraband. He's grossed over $25 million in that time. Seal is confident there's no way he's going down.
But as the trial comes to an end on March 17th, 1984, the jury finds him guilty. It's a bullet between the eyes. Seal is staring at a 10-year sentence. As the cops lead him out of the court in handcuffs, Barry catches his wife's eye. He's a family man at heart. Seal can't bear his wife Deborah seeing him locked up as a criminal.
I interviewed Deborah, his third wife. Theirs was a very strong and powerful love affair, and she, you know, she worshipped Barry. She thought the world of him. He didn't want to go to jail at all, I don't believe, and most people don't, but he was looking at substantial time.
and it would be federal time. He didn't see his kids. I mean, that had to bother him. It's not like he was some ogre that didn't love his kids and wife. So I'm sure that bothered him too. And I think that that was a great motivator to him. He didn't want to go to jail. -Seale is willing to do whatever it takes to save his own neck. To this end, he breaks the golden rule of drug traffickers. He tries to cut a deal with the DEA. Seale and his attorneys manage to get a meeting with the agents on the case.
He's willing to flip to become an informant. As they sit down to talk, Seal is in his element. He teases the agents, stirring their interest with little bits of intel on the suppliers he works with down in Columbia. At first, they dismiss Seal as a consummate liar. But Bob Jora, new to the DEA's Miami division, is willing to take a chance. Jora and his partner, Ernest Jake Jacobson, grill Seal about what he can actually offer.
Bob Jura was the group supervisor for Group 7, and so he was in a management position and a very experienced agent, very professional, you know, kept things close to the vest. Jake Jacobson had been in U.S. Customs. He was from Mississippi. He was a big guy. Back in the day when I knew him, he had kind of a walrus mustache. He had a little bit of a temper, but he was a really good guy, and I think he...
He had the ability as a fellow Southerner to relate to Barry Seal, to make Barry Seal feel comfortable. So I think the team of Jake Jacobson and Barry Seal is a very good team. From where the agents are sat, if Seal can deliver, they could deal a fatal blow to the flow of illegal drugs into the USA and make a name for themselves.
You know, the DEA is a government agency and as such it's a big bureaucracy. They used to have a saying that big cases, big problems. Medium cases, medium problems. Small cases, small problems. No cases, no problems. So that was the joke they would make, but the truth is that
A big case like this could make your career. And, you know, there's all kinds of incentives that go with that. You know, you could win all kinds of awards. They were staring at the kind of case that would change their career. And I think they knew it. Well, how...
credible was Seal. Well, he looked like a hot mess. He was fat, he was, seemed to be undisciplined in the way he ate and conducted himself, and he did some crazy things, or at least he said he did. As he undergoes extensive debriefings, Seal struggles with the level of scrutiny. But with the prospect of jail looming, he's not going to let this chance at freedom slip. The classic Barry Seal kicked into operation, which is
I can find a way out of this. I'm going to find my way out of this by I'm going to be the best informant they've ever had and I'm going to be such a good informant that I'm not going to have to spend a day in jail. So that's when, you know, the gears started working. Hey, I've got a lot to trade here. I have a lot of information and I can, you know, give them a case that they've never seen. I can outsmart everybody once again. The clock is ticking. The agents are unconvinced.
But just before he runs out of time, Seale takes one last desperate gambit. He claims he can deliver the DEA's most wanted, the head of the Medellin cocaine cartel, Pablo Escobar. Seale told a lot of stories, debriefings, whatever you want to call it. But the most enticing and ridiculous was that he could get Pablo Escobar, he could get him on a plane and take him someplace where the DEA could arrest him.
Escobar was notoriously slippery. He was surrounded by his own army, large army. He had people with listening devices. He had counter surveillance agents. He had all kinds of technology. He could buy anything he wanted and he could buy just about anybody he wanted. So the idea that Pablo Escobar would get on an airplane with Barry Seale and fly away, that was pretty crazy. Now the agents are listening.
I think that with somebody like Barry Seale, they had a philosophy of, "Let's see how far he can take us." Now obviously, he's a charmer, he's a manipulator, he's trying to use them, but he has great incentive to make this case. As the meeting goes on, and Seale talks and talks, the agents grow gradually more convinced.
What impressed the DEA agents about Barry Seale? Well, things that he said checked out. He could be corroborated. And remember, in the religion of DEA, it's corroboration, corroboration, corroboration. He could get them evidence. If you're a DEA agent, you're no good. If you have theories and fantasies, you have to produce evidence that comes into a court of law and that a jury of 12 strangers will believe. They started to see
as a man who could produce that hard evidence, had to do a little training with him to show, here's what hard evidence looks like. No, we don't want fantasies. We don't want theories. We don't want suppositions. We want documents and we want pictures. And he ended up being able to do that. The DEA also has a motto, a deal with the devil is better than no deal at all.
So they looked at him, maybe they saw him as a devil and they said, "Okay, but he can take us up to the top of the Medellin cartel." So that's what he had to do. He had to produce that. DEA's grand plan in those days was to get the Medellin cartel, to take it apart, to decapitate it. The DEA agents had a pretty good understanding of how it worked and who was at the top of the cartel.
The philosophy at DEA has always been to disable the heads of any criminal organization and the key players, the people who cannot easily be replaced. It's easy to replace couriers and money launderers at a certain level and some other minor functionaries. And you can replace a lab pretty easy. They're pretty cheap, actually. And you can get lab workers because there's a lot of poverty down there.
But people who know at a high level where to funnel the money, money is crucial, you're not doing it for any other reason but the money. And the leadership structure, the executive suite, that's always the target. The potential gains are huge. They seem to outweigh the risks. Steele is doing a good job of convincing them that he is in fact the real deal.
that he can get them the heads of the Medellin cartel on a plate. And they looked at his actual record and they found it credible that he wasn't using a lot of drugs. And they had to weigh things. Is it worth taking a chance with this guy and sending him back down to Latin America? Had many debates about it and ended up saying, well, let's give it a try. What else have we got? Actions speak louder than words. You can say anything.
But I think Barry must have been able to prove to them, when I tell you I can have a contact with this person, or when I tell you I can talk to that person, or when I tell you I can go get a meeting with this other person, whenever they gave him a test, he passed it. Nobody with a 10-year sentence gets to leave the jurisdiction usually of where you're in trouble.
You definitely don't get to go flying around the world in your airplane with bags of cash and drugs under the auspices of the United States government unless they're very confident that they can trust you. The DEA wanted to see if he could produce on his promises. I mean, it all sounded great. It sounded unbelievable. And they wanted to see if he could do it.
The agents are on board. Barry Seal is now a DEA informant. But he's way out on a limb here. Even his own lawyer is completely in the dark. I probably represented Barry Seal for a year and a half or two years here in Baton Rouge fighting at the various grand juries and the investigations and did not know that Barry Seal had begun to cooperate with the federal government. He never told me. Finally, the U.S. attorney told me one day
after we'd had some legal issues, and it was very contentious. And he said, "Why don't you just tell Seal to call the cavalry?"
I don't know how you go about meeting people in the Medellin cartel. I never did ask Barry, "How did you meet these people in the Medellin cartel?" I didn't want to meet them and I didn't want to know. I didn't know he knew who those people were until the day that we were brought into the federal government and they had the warrant they wanted him to sign. And all of that was disclosed to me. I didn't have any idea how he knew those people. Little did the DEA agents know, Seal is pulling the wool over their eyes.
In truth, Barry Seal has never had any direct contact with the big dogs down in Columbia. He's lying. It's his associate, Roger Reeves, the guy he met on a plane back from Honduras. He's the one who handles the South American connections. Seal is confident he's talked himself out of prison. But then the agents throw a curveball. They're not stupid. They're not just going to take Barry's word for it. They need confirmation that he does in fact have access to the cartel that he says he does.
The agents tell Seale he'll have to call up his contacts in Medellin direct before they sanction anything. When an informant makes a claim to something you have to try and verify, you can't take them just for their word. You have an obligation to find out if they are telling the truth or if they can do it. Otherwise you're wasting your time. They've called his bluff, but Seale has one more move left to play. He might not know anyone down in Colombia, but he has at least got a few phone numbers.
He calls a contact for the Medellin cartel and introduces himself under a fake name, Ellis McKenzie. I'm sure that they probably figured, okay, show us. And my understanding is that's exactly what he did. He picked up the phone and called Lito Bustamante and said, I want to talk. I want to go to the top. I want to hold more and more and more. And once they convinced he was able to do that, that's pretty good credentials to at least take a chance on the guy.
Seale claims he wants to start flying more than 300 kilos of cocaine in one go. The contact is immediately interested. They agree to set up a meeting with the heads of the Medellin cartel. Against all odds, Seale has pulled a rabbit out of a hat. Seale was going to try to get the heads of the Medellin cartel in a place where they could be arrested. In exchange, DEA would go into court
and tell the judge that Barry Seale had been an immense help to dismantling the cartel. The DEA agents make no promises, but they agree that if Seale can deliver, his sentence is likely to be significantly reduced. So Barry enters a guilty plea to his indictment, and his sentencing is postponed. It's time to see what he can do for the government.
Everything now hinges on whether he can deliver the goods to his DEA handlers. As far as the deal Barry Seal made with the DEA, there wasn't anything specific like, if I do this, I'll get no time in prison. It was more, if I do the best I can for you, you'll do the best you can for me during my sentencing.
But the idea was if he made the biggest drug case ever, he probably wouldn't have to do much, if any, time. And that was his goal. I mean, he was staring at a 10-year sentence. I can't speak for the CIA. I don't know. I only know that Barry Seale was considered, apparently, at the time they all talked to me, a very important person. And by that, I mean they being the various alphabet agencies of the United States.
and they wanted him to assist them. I never was clear on how he did it, but he went from being in jail with a 10-year sentence to being allowed to fly all over the world, really, on behalf of the federal government in his own airplanes. - And so Seal's life as a DEA informant begins.
with all the risks to his health and well-being that that involves. Barry Seal took tremendous risk as a DEA informant because he was an agent of penetration. He was on his own. I've talked to many people who've been undercover, and if anybody suspects you, you have to talk your way out of it.
You don't have time to draw your gun, even if you have a gun. There's certainly no time for anybody to burst in from the next room, and there wasn't a next room for Barry Seale. It's all in your head, in your heart, what you can say, how you can wiggle out of it verbally. He was good at that.
What I'm trying to say is if you are an informant or an undercover agent, you have to be prepared to think three times as fast as anybody else. And you have to keep your eyes straight ahead, but you're looking at where the doors are because there are five or six people usually around you and they all have guns and they're all quite willing to use them immediately. There's no time to call for help. You are the help.
As one of the police said, Barry Gaseel could do everything in the world except time. He couldn't do time. And I think once he got that 10-year sentence, he was absolutely determined to do whatever it took to get rid of it. And so he went from a bad guy that was a very successful bad guy to a very successful good guy. And he put the same amount of energy
into trying to atone for his sins and get himself out of trouble that he'd put into getting himself into trouble. When Barry Seal became an informant for the DEA, he treated that just as he had treated being a smuggler. If he was the best and smartest smuggler, he was going to be the best and smartest informant. So he was entirely professional. He also knew his life was on the line. But he still-- I mean, he took risks.
incredible risks. Going down there to meet with them in person, you know, he didn't know that he wouldn't be compromised. He didn't know that he could be stepping into a death sentence. All these guys are adventure junkies. Everybody wants to be a pirate. All little boys, when they're little, they want to be a cowboy, they want to be a pirate. Here are adult pirates. Nothing else changes. How did
Seal get his thrills when acting as a DEA informant very easily. Flying into the Ochoa estate, into the heartland of cocaine country was just fabulous. I mean, it was a coup. Seal is so desperate to impress, he even self-funds his DEA missions. He provides his own planes and pays for his own expenses. One of the valuable things about Barry Seal was that
They didn't have to ever ask permission. There was no government to go to to say, "Can we have $10,000 or $50,000 in cash?" Or, "Can we have money for this or money for that?" You know, they didn't have to ask. Barry Seale put his own jet fuel in his airplane. And he'd buy his own communications equipment. So I think that's one thing that made him particularly
and maybe one of the reasons they liked him so much is that whatever ideas they'd have or he'd have could be implemented without any restrictions because he got his own capacities. - Seal is providing the DEA with intel on the Medellin cartel that they've craved for years. - It was very difficult in the beginning to infiltrate the cartel because, you know, you had the English-Spanish thing. Most of the DEA agents were English-Spanish
English-speaking and the cartel was Spanish-speaking. But the cartel also needed English-speaking intermediaries to fly its cocaine, to transport it, and to distribute it. So, you know, they do what they call a ladder case. They get a low-level drug trafficker, get him to flip on somebody higher who flips on somebody higher. He was flying incredibly dangerous missions into the heart of the cartel and their estates.
Hacienda Veracruz, Las Lomas. He went there, he went into the belly of the beast. - Becoming an informant may have allowed Barry Seal to skip jail, but he'll get more than he bargained for when the DEA take things up a level. They're about to send him on a dangerous mission to catch not just any drug trafficker, but the world's most wanted cocaine baron, Pablo Escobar. - By the late '70s,
early 80s, cocaine was a multi-billion dollar business in South Florida. The Federal Reserve had a $5.5 billion surplus in cash, which meant that that's how much cash was being returned from the local banks into the Federal Reserve System. So that gives you an indication
That was largely cocaine money. You know, in those days, the cocaine was moving out of Latin America, out of Colombia, into the Caribbean, into the Bahamas, through the Gulf of Mexico. But it was all ending up in Miami and then being transhipped from Miami to various destinations for distribution.
But it was a multi-billion dollar a year exercise. It was fueling the entire Miami Vice lifestyle. And all of the luxury cars, the Ferraris, the nightclubs, the bottles of Dom Perignon, those are the trappings of it. But the $5.5 billion in the Federal Reserve is a good indication of how big it was.
Well, at that point, the chief cartels were the Medellin cartel, based in Medellin, and the Cali cartel, you know, based in Cali and Bogota. Those were the two main cartels. They were the great majority of the business at that point. And then later on, others came, but they were the players back then.
The Medellin Cartel were known as the most ruthless, probably criminals perhaps in the history of the world. In South Florida, the cocaine wars ended up with all kinds of bodies in trunks of cars and canals full of machine gun bullets. But, you know, the MAC-10 became the symbol of the Medellin Cartel. April 8th, 1984.
A twin-engine Cessna Titan 404 light aircraft rises into the clouds. Behind it in the distance, Florida juts out into the Gulf of Mexico. A couple hours later, SEAL approaches the coast of Colombia. The plane crosses over the city of Cartagena, then down over rainforest, national parks, and lakes toward the city of Medellin. Finally, the plane comes in to land on a jungle airstrip. SEAL clambers out of the cockpit onto the runway.
waiting to greet him or a group of cartel associates. Sihl glances left and right. Around the airstrip are other light airplanes. Some are refueling, some are being loaded up with bags of coke. Sihl is bundled into another small airplane and flown across to the suburbs of Medellin. This time, they land at an aircraft hangar. It's the cartel's aircraft base. A car takes him south into the mountains. The winding roads overlook stunning views of the forest-laden peaks.
All kinds of shades of green. The car pulls into a vast country estate deep in the hills. Barry Seal is about to come face to face with the Medellin cartel for the very first time. Seal waits in the huge ornate living room for his host to show. He's a confident kind of guy, but even so, the nerves are jangling. The living room door opens and in step the most wanted drug traffickers in the world. Pleasantries are exchanged.
Jorge Ochoa, one of the heads of the cartel, does the introductions. This is Ellis McKenzie. He's a smuggler from the USA. And this, Señor McKenzie, is Pablo Escobar. Seale reaches out a hand and holds Escobar's gaze, the face that's ordered thousands of deaths. Seale has just become the first DEA informant to penetrate the uppermost echelon of the Medellin cartel leadership. In the meeting, talk quickly turns to business.
The cartel tells Seal that they've been stocking up to supply crowds attending the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. It's a huge business opportunity, and the cartel have earmarked a load of cocaine especially for the occasion. In 1984, the Olympics were going to be in Los Angeles. In the early 80s, the cartels
primary methods were to get their cocaine into South Florida. They weren't bringing it in to Los Angeles, they were bringing it into Miami and then they were taking it from Miami to Los Angeles. And they knew that there would be a great demand for cocaine, especially at a big event with a lot of people like the Los Angeles Olympics. So their plan was to get 1,500 kilos, 3,300 pounds, get that into Miami and then get that west.
It's more than Seal has ever trafficked in one go. But he agrees. His DEA handlers have sent him here to strike a deal after all.
I mean, it was a sign of his desperation, his willingness to do this, their desperation, their willingness to take this risk because they needed to move these loads of cocaine. And so much of their cocaine had been seized. And they were having problems with their cocaine being seized in the Bahamas at this point. They needed Barry Seale. He needed them. And it was clearly on the knife edge of life and death for him.
If it goes wrong, there's no coming back from this. There's no getting out of it. And he had to have known that. The stakes are high, but they're about to get even higher. The Colombian government has declared war on drug traffickers. Business is booming for the Medellin cartel, but it's becoming harder and harder to base their operations in Colombia. Their jungle labs are being destroyed. Their warehouse is raided. They're desperate for a new location.
Well, in 1984, the Medellin cartel had gone to war with the Colombian government and they had assassinated the justice minister.
And so they were very hot in Colombia. There was a great deal of disruption to their operations. The DEA earlier in the year had raided their operation in the Amazon jungle, their giant cocaine labs, and seized 10 tons of cocaine. So they were hurting on a number of fronts that made them vulnerable, that made them take risks they ordinarily wouldn't take.
Lucky for them, the Sandinista government in Nicaragua has come to the cartel's aid. They've offered a protected hub for their drugs. They had a new base and a new partner, a new ally in their smuggling, and it was the Sandinista government. So their plan was to essentially use a Sandinista military base as a transshipment point for their cocaine, which would allow a much better refueling situation.
and which would provide them security at a time in 1984 when they really needed it and would have provided the Sandinista with funds that they could have used. So it was a game changer when Barry Seal learned that Nicaragua and the Sandinistas were involved in this. The Sandinistas provided a transit point, which was a base, landing strip, place to offload, transfer cargo, armed guards.
and provisions while they were on the ground. And it looked like a really good opportunity for the cartel to expand, and it looked like a good opportunity for the Sandideses to get more hard currency. And they were very corrupt, of course, so it scratched both backs.
The cartel bosses want SEAL to fly their drugs via this Nicaragua base. It's a dangerous demand because the new Sandinista government is officially a communist enemy of the United States government. My fellow Americans, I must speak to you tonight about a mounting danger in Central America that threatens the security of the United States. This danger will not go away. It will grow worse, much worse, if we fail to take action now.
I'm speaking of Nicaragua, a Soviet ally on the American mainland, only two hours flying time from our own borders. The cartel was taking a big risk. At a moment they were desperate, and the DEA realized they had an unprecedented situation. There was the possibility of catching all of these smugglers.
because they were outside Colombia, they were doing something, they were taking risks that they hadn't taken before. And they were in Panama, which the United States could have extended a law enforcement reach into. And so it set the table for the biggest case they would ever make. In an effort to overthrow the Sandinistas, Reagan is funding a local militia, the Contras. But this is highly controversial.
The Reagan administration was supporting the Contras. They had a lot of difficulty doing that because Congress had passed certain bans on giving aid to the Contras. So they were fighting a public propaganda war to show, you see, not only are they communists, but they're communist drug smugglers, which made them even worse. So it would have been a giant propaganda coup for an administration that had as a priority supporting the freedom fighters of the Contras in Nicaragua.
The communist government of Nicaragua has launched a campaign to subvert and topple its democratic neighbors. The question the Congress of the United States will now answer is a simple one: Will we give the Nicaraguan democratic resistance the means to recapture their betrayed revolution, or will we turn our backs and ignore the malignancy in Managua until it spreads and becomes a mortal threat to the entire new world?
Will we permit the Soviet Union to put a second Cuba, a second Libya, right on the doorstep of the United States? By promising the cartel he'll fly into Nicaragua, Seale is offering to put himself right in the middle of a brewing and potentially deadly conflict between his own country and a Soviet-backed revolution in Central America. You can imagine, here you are in the middle of a jungle with a bunch of dedicated killers
and illegal government officials, and you're trying to do this circumstance for your government, taking pictures of them. It had to be a very high-adrenaline situation. For the DEA, the news that the Medellin cartel will be in Nicaragua is music to their ears.
And so the fact that they were outside of Columbia, the fact that they were desperate, created a great opportunity for Barry Seale and the DEA to catch them all outside of Columbia and scoop them up in one fell swoop. The operation is all set to go. It's all signed off by the DEA. But the mission of a lifetime is put on hold while Seale attends court to be sentenced on his drug smuggling charges.
Well, while Barry Seal was doing this undercover case with Miami DEA, he still had a case in Fort Lauderdale, Broward County for Operation Screamer. So he was juggling all these different things and he had to go back to court and he was sentenced, but at that time,
The judge, the officials weren't aware that he was involved in a live DEA operation. Seale's confident his status as an informant will keep him out of jail until the judge shocks everyone. May 23rd, 1984. The judge reads the sentence. Two consecutive five-year sentences. Ten years inside. Seale thought he was off to Nicaragua, but now he's in the dock being taken into custody by U.S. Marshals.
Seals' handlers, Agents Bob Jura and Ernst Jacobson, are incandescent. Turns out no one from the DEA or the U.S. Attorney's Office told the judge about Seals' cooperation. Now it looks like they've lost a highly connected informant right in the midst of pulling off the biggest case of its kind in U.S. history. It was a frantic period because this incredibly intense undercover operation is going on. Jura and Jacobson are desperate.
They pull out all the stops to get Seal released on an appeal bond. Their last ditch maneuverings just about come off. The judge has no choice but to back down, and Seal is released on an appeal bond. But there's one problem. This rollercoaster of a case is all over the press. Not just in Florida, but throughout the United States. Now the whole world knows that Barry Seal is a drug smuggler. The mission is still go. It has to be.
The DEA are banking on the fact that given that the internet doesn't exist yet, at least not in a way most people can use, this is the 80s after all, news may not have reached the cartel. SEAL has no choice but to continue as an informant.
knowing his next flight could be his last. How seriously did Barry Seal take his new role as DEA informant? Well, like a lot of them, he took it very seriously because that was his one ticket to a lighter sentence and freedom soon. So if you break one rule when you're a DEA informant, all bets are off. The whole deal crashes. Next time on Real Narcos, everything goes up a level.
several levels. Before he knows it, the free-willing pilot from Baton Rouge, Louisiana is on the front line of America's war against communism.
Real Narcos is a Noiser podcast and World Media Rights co-production hosted by me, John Cuban. The series is created by Pascal Hughes, produced by Joel Duddle. It's been edited by Katrina Hughes. Music by Oliver Baines from Flight Brigade. The sound mixer is Tom Pink. And this is Noiser's first ever podcast, so we would love to know what you think. If you have a moment, please leave us a review on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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