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Commercial airline pilot turned cocaine smuggler extraordinaire Barry Seale has made a fortune flying drugs from Latin America into his native United States. But the law has caught up with him. Now, in a bid to avoid a lengthy jail sentence, Seale has flipped, becoming a highly valued informant for the Drug Enforcement Administration.
How seriously did Barry Seale take his new role as DA 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. 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. If you break one rule when you're a DEA informant, all bets are off. The whole deal crashes. These guys are the real deal. And this is Real Narcos. Barry Seale's cover has been blown at home in America thanks to a well-publicized court case. Everyone knows what he does for a living.
Everyone knows he's a smuggler. But luckily, the cartel bosses haven't yet put two and two together. They haven't clocked that their fat American pilot is that American pilot. They don't even know Seal's real name. I think at this point, they still didn't know who Barry Seal was. They knew who Ellis McKenzie was. They knew who the El Gordo and the Fat Man were. But by keeping the names separate, it was hard for them to know that Barry Seal was the person they were dealing with.
It's incredible to think about it. There was no picture of him, it wasn't on the internet, so information flowed much differently back then. With his identity still protected, the DEA are willing to send Seale back to the front line to honor the deal he made with the Medellin Cartel. The DEA hope that in agreeing to ship their illicit wares from Colombia into the Central American state of Nicaragua, invaluable intel can be gleaned. For the Medellin Cartel, time is money.
They want to get a move on. The American pilot has agreed the deal to get their coke out of Colombia and into Nicaragua, and it's time for him to fulfill his side of the bargain. The cartel are in a hurry, and the risk they're willing to take get bigger and bigger. A jungle airstrip near Medellin, Colombia. Seal stands on the runway, watching on as Escobar's henchmen load up his plane with 3,500 pounds of pure-grade cocaine. That's a lot of drugs. A lot of weight.
there's no way it's safe to attempt a takeoff. When you're smuggling cocaine, weight is everything, when you're smuggling any drug. And, and, and, Seal was always very cognizant of that and always, you know, he always took steps to make sure the airstrip was long enough and it was the right composition, the ground wasn't, you know, too muddy or too wet or anything. But the cartel heavies have different ideas. Holsters click open and guns are drawn.
This shipment has got to go, and it's got to go now. There was a large quantity, like 1,000 pounds or something like that, that was lined up and ready to go the way I understand it. That's what he started to try and haul, get that big load up here. He wanted the whole load to go. Barry said, apparently told him, "No, we can't do that. The plane's overloaded." And which time he supposedly was waving the machine gun and said, "This flight's going to go."
So Barry, against his better judgment, took off, tried to take off. And as I understand it, he was on a dirt strip. It was sloppy, muddy. The plane could not get up the speed to take off, and it crashed. Seale powers up the grassy runway. He's going as fast as he can, but he's struggling to produce enough momentum to get this hunk of metal off the ground. He's running out of runway. The plane veers off the runway and crashes. Bang!
Seale is lucky to escape without injury. An experienced prodigal pilot like him isn't used to losing control. He's pretty shook up. But the cartel aren't interested in slowing down. Jorge Ochoa provides a second plane, a twin-engine Cessna Titan 404. This bigger model fares better with the heavy load. But there's still one problem. The flight hasn't been cleared with the Nicaraguan authorities. The guy that was the fixer was a Frederico Vaughn.
some kind of an official of the government. He apparently neglected to tell the army that Seale would be taken off with a load of dope. - Shortly after takeoff, Seale is fired on by an anti-aircraft battery. For a moment, it's like being back in Vietnam. At first, he manages to evade the hail of bullets, but then the plane takes a direct hit to the left engine. Time for an emergency landing. - Seale got in the air and the way he's playing today, shot out his, I think his left engine.
And so he had to force land, didn't get killed, but it probably scared him a bit, even though he's a good pilot. On the ground, Seal is arrested by the Nicaraguan authorities. Yet again, he's heading back to the slammer.
Supposedly, it was in a terrible— I mean, those are not jails, you know. They're like just big holes dug in the ground and they throw you down in them. At least that was what was said. And I think that may well be true, you know, that they don't waste any time, food, or money on a gringo that's a drug smuggler in Honduras unless somebody wants to come pay a lot of money to get him out. Over in Florida, SEAL's DEA handlers reach out to the CIA for help tracking him down.
Little do they know at the time that this is a mistake that will cost them their mission. Yeah, the DEA did not know what had happened to him, actually. The DEA didn't know whether he was dead or alive. So they went to the CIA and said, "You got connections down there. Find out if this guy named Barry Seale is dead or alive or in jail." And that's when the CIA first heard about him. By this point, the war on drugs is really escalating. The federal government is mobilizing every available asset to tackle this threat to the American way of life.
The late '70s, early '80s, the cocaine situation had gotten out of hand in South Florida. This was the era of the cocaine cowboys. And the thing that really frightened people were the murders. And, you know, the machine gunnings at the Dayland Mall happened in bright daylight.
and also the money going into banks. It was so obvious, the millions of dollars being brought in double banks. It just gave you the sense that this was a lawless period, things were out of control, people got very scared. So the top civic leaders in Miami went to the White House, they beseeched President Reagan to do something, and he launched a major effort
to redouble drug enforcement in South Florida with the Vice President's Task Force headed by George H.W. Bush. And they poured in a bunch of agents,
They began making more cases, they went after the money laundering, they went after everything. The CIA is fascinated to hear that there's a cocaine smuggling operation going down in Nicaragua, with the cooperation of the Nicaraguan authorities. If SEAL can get them the proof, this is a golden opportunity to publicly discredit the Sandinistas regime.
The national security team of the Reagan White House was looking for every opportunity to get damaging evidence against the Sandinistas because the Sandinistas had a lot of political support in the United States. There were a lot of affluent liberals in the United States who thought that the whole Contra War was terrible and unfair.
So any chance to show that the Sandinistas were not only murderous but corrupt would be excellent. To do that, they really needed photographs. Oliver North at the White House got very excited when he heard there might be photographs. The CIA desperately wanted photographs because, again, corroboration is terribly important to having some fat guy come back from
and say, "Hey, I met with the Sandinistas," that wouldn't carry any water. It would not influence American opinion. But people were terribly upset about cocaine, and this was an opportunity to influence the American public in the heartland. DEA tends to want to arrest people. They also want to
blackmail information, but for another purpose. DEA is much more single-minded about drugs. So they're usually conflicting over their missions. This was one of those occasions. Everybody was nervous. Everybody was unhappy. But there was a higher goal, and that was to get the cartel for the DEA and for the CIA. It was to get evidence of what the Sandinistas were really like to give to the White House. The CIA wanted to get pictures of
Sandinista officials with the cocaine. Their goal was to, you know, I don't think, you know, the CIA is not a law enforcement operation. And at that point, they were not interested in Pablo Escobar or Jorge Ochoa in and of themselves, but they were interested if it could be proven that the Sandinista government was involved in cocaine trafficking. Once the CIA heard that, you know, there was a drug smuggling operation involving the Sandinistas,
This would have been a very important part of the propaganda war against, you know, 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.
Back in Nicaragua itself, Seal is taken straight from the landing site to jail. The next day, to his relief, he's released. His savior is a guy called Federico Vaughn. He's a Sandinista official and friend of the Medellin Cartel. The Cartel need Barry to continue smuggling their coke ASAP, so they've pulled the necessary strings to get him out. They need Seal to get on with this job. They fly him straight back to the US on one of Pablo Escobar's private planes.
Back on US soil, it's clear to Seale that power has changed hands in the investigation. Now, the CIA are the ones calling the shots. After reaching out to them for help, the DEA have found themselves marginalized. Seale could do with a break, with getting his breath back, but there's no rest for the wicked. During his absence, the CIA has hatched a plan to get proof linking the Sandinistas to the illegal drugs trade.
They want Seale to secretly photograph the drug cartel being helped by the Nicaraguan Sandinista government. The Reagan administration believed that the Sandinista government was going to provide a base for the Soviet Union. It was urgently important to the Reagan administration that the Soviets could be kept out of Central America. Barry Seale played into this policy.
by being on the ground and possibly able to provide evidence of the Sandinista corruption. The CIA wanted to be involved in the cartel sting in Nicaragua because the CIA wanted and needed evidence
of Sandinista complicity with the Medellin cartel, particularly photographic evidence. So that's why the CIA proposed that it attach a camera to the plane that Seal was driving. Despite Seal's protests, two hidden 35-millimeter cameras are attached to his new, bigger plane. How did Barry Seal feel about cameras being attached to his plane? Well, he didn't like it in the first place.
He distrusted the CIA. This goes back to Vietnam. Secondly, when the CIA technicians did it, the first couple of tries were bad because the cameras were too evident. They ended up with a camera that whined, made a noise. And finally, Thiel agreed and figured that, well, he could rev the engines and do other things to...
cover up the noise of the camera, but it was still very risky. If this mission goes wrong and the drug lords figure out what Seal is up to, it's game over. He knows how the cartel deals with informants. He would have ended up without a head and disemboweled, hung from a tree, God knows what. And it would have happened very slowly. It's all gone up another level, several levels.
Barry Seale is now not only an undercover drug smuggler dealing in eye-popping quantities of cocaine, he's an undercover drug smuggler who is also a spy for the US government. The freewheeling pilot from Baton Rouge, Louisiana is on the front line of America's war against communism. Seale is being forced to double-cross not only a vicious drug lord, but also the most dangerous communist regime around. On June 26, 1984, the mission begins.
Seale lands his plane in Los Braziles Air Base in Managua, Nicaragua. His new, bigger aircraft is capable of transporting 24,000 pounds of cargo. Sandinista military personnel emerge out of the trees that surround the airfield. Pretty soon, Seale is surrounded by hard-nosed communist soldiers. There's no guarantee they won't open fire at any moment.
I think that's probably been confirmed as the way it happened. And 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.
There was a number of risks and a number of ways things could have gone wrong, and the cartel is merciless, especially with people who they don't consider loyal. And Barry Seal was trying to sting them. So this was the ultimate showdown between a drug cartel and a drug informant that we've ever seen. It was the peak moment of tension and excitement in the drug war in some ways. Anybody in the cartel that found an informant, they killed them.
often slowly and painfully, and kill family members too. Family members were hunted down and butchered in horrible ways. So, Seal could not be confident that this wouldn't happen even in the United States. Even though his family was in the United States, he couldn't be confident that he would escape and that if discovered, his family would escape.
Seale needs to get the photos ASAP, then get the hell out of there. To do that, he needs the main players to show. It's his lucky day. It couldn't turn out better. When Federico Vahan appears with Pablo Escobar himself.
So he lands the plane and lo and behold, there's everything that he'd hoped for. The Sandinista officials, Sandinista soldiers, and Pablo Escobar. They got 1,500 pounds of cocaine, which they load onto the airplane, and he gets photos. What could be better? There was one problem and the camera didn't work well. It was loud.
You'd think that American tech, CIA tech, would be better, but it wasn't. It started making clicking sounds, so he rubbed up a generator that masked the sound of the camera so he wouldn't get caught. At any moment, the cameras could be discovered. The tension is unbearable. Barry Seale thought on his feet, "If you're going to be in a DEA informant, you better be able to think on your feet under the worst kind of pressure." And this was the worst kind of pressure.
Apparently a very funny story behind it because they outfitted the plane and it had this clicker and you could click and not make the pictures. And the story was that what happens when he's down there, Barry had lost a lot of weight so that the device that he'd put for him to have on didn't fit anymore and he stepped on it.
Because it was longer, because he was thinner. And when he stepped on it, it broke. So he had to find another way to make the pictures work. And so he had to make up some story about trying to fix the airplane and that, you know, the blower wasn't working or something. And what he was really doing was up there trying to click that as fast as he could and having his co-pilot click it. The plan is just about holding together.
Then, Sill hits the absolute jackpot. Astonishingly, Federico Von himself starts to help the Sandinista soldiers load the plane. Then, if that wasn't good enough, Pablo Escobar himself rolls up his sleeves. It was a cargo plane.
So it had one of those doors that opens in the back. So it's actually a really nice view of the loading. And I think that, I mean, why would Pablo Escobar load a duffel bag of cocaine on a plane? He had to have been caught up in the moment. It had to have been viewed as kind of a ceremonial thing, like a dignitary hitting a ship with a champagne bottle. Same with Federico Vaughn. I mean, they could have had
Soldiers do that. As SEAL's camera clicks away, Escobar is caught red-handed. Bingo. But they thought they were 100% safe. You know, they trusted Ellis McKenzie. They had to have been very excited about getting this giant new plane to do their smuggling because they could have done a much bigger load.
And they were planning on using it to do much bigger loads. So I think this was the ceremonial moment at which they were kind of christening this plane by loading it, by having the top drug smuggler in the world, Pablo Escobar, personally carry cocaine and put it on there. And they got a picture of him in his striped shirt, which has become iconic ever since.
I can't think of another picture out there of Pablo Escobar loading cocaine, or with Pablo Escobar even holding cocaine. And so it's quite phenomenal. And then to get him and a Sandinista official in photographs, it's incredible evidence in any criminal case, but it's also incredible propaganda windfall that here's the world's biggest drug smuggler working with the Sandinista government to bring cocaine into the United States.
It proved to be the mission's downfall because that evidence was so powerful and irresistible, it could not stay contained. The cargo is safely loaded. Steele reboards the plane. Ensconced in the cockpit, he sets a course north for the United States. The photos he's taken are a game changer. They will cement his place as the DEA's number one informant, but they will also herald his demise.
Back on American soil, when the agents handling Barry Seale see his photos, they're ecstatic. Perhaps a little too ecstatic. When Washington sees the pictures of Nicaraguan official Federico Vaughn loading drugs onto a jet bound for the USA, excitement levels hit the roof. This is just what the government needs to discredit the Sandinistas. Rumors circulate the DEA office that CIA officials have even sent enlargements of the photos to the president himself.
I think that it was a little too much for everybody. I mean, it was, like I said, it was the most sterling evidence you can get of drug smuggling. Here's the drug smuggler loading the plane. Here's a picture of it. Here is the Sandinista official next to him loading the plane. And I think it was too good to be true. I mean, it was true, but it ended up burning a hole in the investigation because
Everybody had to share it. Everybody was excited about it. They sent it up to Washington. It's being shared around up there. Ollie North hears about it in the White House almost like the same day it happens. So he's all excited about it. And then it becomes this political football. And it was only a matter of time before it leaked out and got into the Washington Times. But it destroyed the investigation. So it was too good.
in some ways, for the health of the investigation. It ended up blowing it apart. Seale is enjoying his success as the DEA's top informant. But then, on July 17th, 1984, he gets the worst news of his life. Details of the mission have leaked to the press. Barry Seale has been outed as a government informant.
There was a great deal of anger about that disclosure, that certain people in the government disclosed it against the knowledge and against the promises to Barry that it wouldn't be disclosed. The DEA are furious. The story has blown the cover of their most valuable informant, a man they've positioned at the heart of the most abominable drug organization in the world. Barry Seal almost
brought them the cartel on a silver platter. If there had not been a leak of his mission in that Washington Times article, they might have captured all of them in 1984. And that would have changed history. It's game over for Barry Seale. His mission with the DEA is dead in the water. If you look at case after case, the CIA often burns assets. The investigation, the inquiry, the intelligence gathering mission is considered
far more important than individuals. Worst of all, the cartel kingpins now know Seal's identity. They put a bounty on his head. Half a million dollars dead, a million bucks alive, and that's because if you could get him alive, you can torture him for information. They did this commonly. Gosh, in Colombia, there are people who will kill you for your shoelaces, so it was no problem getting somebody to come up into the United States and kill him.
The Medellin cartel was very violent. You crossed them, you got in your way, you were dead. Seal's rollercoaster ride as an informant has come to a juddering halt. Now, he and his family are in grave danger. Barry Seal had bodyguards, and bodyguards with guns, and that was one level of protection. And, you know, he took precautions. You know, he moved around. Seal realized that he was...
and he would have known that immediately because he knew the cartel. He put his family into hiding, but he himself couldn't hide because he had to be in court. Convicted drug smuggler Barry Seal became an informant to avoid jail, but his efforts to buy more time has only put his life in mortal danger. After a high-stakes mission gathering intel on the Medellin cartel, Seal's cover has been blown. Now the drug lords know he's double-crossed them, and they're not too happy about it.
Seale originally became an informant so he could avoid being sentenced for previous crimes. But now with his work as an informant over, he must appear in an open court to answer the original charges. January 24th, 1986. The federal courthouse in Barry Seale's hometown of Baton Rouge in the state of Louisiana. There's nowhere to hide in the packed courtroom. Barry Seale still faced charges.
When you're an informant and you've made a deal, it is normal for you to do your service first. Do all the services that you can possibly think of for the American people. And then the DEA and the prosecutors will vouch for you before a judge where your case is being heard. There are no guarantees.
A plea agreement is a last ditch effort to minimize your sentence. You're probably never going to get free. Only in the movies do you get to just disappear. You have to have your day in court. The judge looked at Zeal as a drug trafficker. He recognized that he'd done some good works.
they weren't enough to erase his history of drug trafficking, his enthusiastic history of drug trafficking. And so he wasn't going to let him walk. When we got to court that morning, it was full. I mean, the courtroom was full, and it was full of nothing but policemen, Louisiana policemen, you know, high-ranking policemen.
State police, FBI, DEA, I mean, you know, I recognized all of them. And, I mean, the room was full of policemen. Well, and U.S. attorneys. They're not all coming down to court to watch Barry Seale be told he's going to be on probation. Even Seale's handlers from Florida branch of the DEA can't get him off the hook. Barry had said, these two guys are the guys I'm working for and they'll help me. But I didn't meet them or see them until they came to court. And then they got sent home. They didn't get to testify.
Well, they were very nice people, but I mean, they're DEA agents, you know, they're policemen. They were high up in the DEA and they were very professional and they were very much authoritarian kind of people that have those jobs, you know, that they were dedicated to eliminating people like Barry Seale. And so it was interesting to me that here these men had spent their lives and probably taken a lot of personal responsibility
risked with their own safety over the course of their careers, that were willing to vouch for Barry. That said a lot about what he must have done for them. Now, much more than some informant.
Because of Barry's original plea agreement, Judge Palazzola is unable to incarcerate the drug smuggling pilot. It's clear the judge is not too happy about this. The judge did not like the deal. But after vigorous arguments by the federal prosecutors who were working with the DEA agents, he grudgingly accepted it. Instead, the judge gives Seal the toughest sentence he can: six months probation in Baton Rouge with no guns and no bodyguards.
Supposedly, Barry had bodyguards because it came out in his sentencing in court that he couldn't have any guns, which he knew he couldn't, he was a convicted felon, but that he couldn't have any people around him that had guns. And presumably,
That did cause him to be in greater danger because he had people around him that had guns. And whether they could have protected him or not, I don't know. But he couldn't do that. The judge made it real clear that he could not have any bodyguards. He's not to travel outside of the Baton Rouge Middle District without prior written approval of the court. On top of that, Seal is ordered to reside at a Salvation Army Community Treatment Center.
He must be in the facility by 6:00 p.m. each night and must remain there until at least 6:00 a.m. each morning. Then, the final nail in the coffin, when the judge reads out the address to the open court, the Salvation Army Community Center on Airline Highway, Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He sentenced Varysil to time served plus six months of community service. But then he said where the community service was going to be.
and that would identify where Barry Seal was each and every day. And that was a terrible, terrible error, or maybe it was deliberate, but whatever it is, it was certainly a breach of security. The judge read the address of the halfway house in an open court,
The cartel had representatives there, and it's well known that the cartel has lawyers in the United States that study every pleading, every filing. They gather an immense amount of intelligence there. So this was routine for the cartel to surveil and counter-surveil everything that the U.S. government has to say about a proceeding involving the cartel.
It was... you can only call it a death sentence because once the cartel has your address where you're staying, that's it. One of the problems Barry had eventually was there was all these different people had different agendas.
And here he is in the middle, and when he needed people to come to his aid and really put their foot down and say, "Look, you cannot send this man to the halfway house. I mean, you can't do it. You can't have a situation where the whole world knows where Barry Seal is every minute of the day and what time he's going to leave and what time he's going to come home. That's just too dangerous." There was so much conflict within the government that I observed, at least,
that there was no one who was willing to take absolute responsibility and say, "This is what we, the law enforcement community, want to happen." Now maybe there are communications that were going on that I'm not aware of, but I could never find the guy who would say to the federal judge, "You're wrong. You can't do this. This is a matter of
Other people might decide this is an opportune moment to enter the Witness Protection Program. But Barry Seal isn't other people. He's not cut out for a life institutionalized in federal care. He's got other ideas.
Why does SEAL turn down witness protection? Well, at that time, the Witness Protection Program didn't have a good reputation. It was considered overly restrictive and not very effective, and probably penetrated. The Colombian cartels had plenty of money to penetrate
American government agencies and while the Marshal Service that ran it was very proud of it, other people were not so trusting of it. Seale had a different plan. He had talked his way in and out of a lot of situations and he was going to just jump the surveillance. He was going to jump his sentence, his probation and beat it. He's going to boogie to Costa Rica and start a new life.
From what I observed, when I knew Barry, he was at home. He was very interested in his children. He was very-- when all the troubles came, he was very defensive about his family and protective of his family. I think one of the reasons he didn't want to go into witness protection was because it would take him permanently away from his family or take his family permanently away from the life that they enjoyed. The nature of the sentence was a very strict
you will be at this place at this time every day. You must be there by this time of day. You can't leave until this time of day. So this is all in the newspaper, this is all on television, this is all over the media. If you want to find Barry Seal, you want to come to Baton Rouge and find Barry Seal,
You only gotta go one place, go out to the half of Salvation Army on Airline Highway and wait, which is exactly what the assassins did. I don't think Barry lasted two weeks in the halfway house. - Last time I ever talked to him was after I had retired. And it was totally different because he'd already had his sentence, I was retired.
He was out of the business, he says anyway, and we had a pleasant conversation. It was a happenstance meeting at a convenience store near our house. We both lived not too far from each other, and he was leaving and I was just driving by, and he saw me and waved me down, so I stopped, talked to him. I had nothing to lose. And that was a whole total different meeting. He was very friendly. He can be very friendly, very gracious individual.
when there wasn't any pressure on him. Barry Seal's fate is sealed. It in fact was a death sentence because any idiot could find him and somebody smarter than an idiot did. Somebody who was a good shot found him. He has no choice but to stick to the terms of the probation. It takes just three weeks for the inevitable moment to come. 6 p.m. February 19th, 1986. Seal pulls up outside the Salvation Army halfway house in an asphalt parking lot.
A few bays down, another car pulls up. Two men get out. A quick glance around. They're both holding guns. Seal spots them, but it's too late. The shooters stand on both sides of the car. Seal cowers in his seat. He ducks his head under the steering wheel. He dies instantly when seven .45 caliber bullets hit his head, chest, and neck. Across the lot, staff and customers in a coffee shop watch on as the two hitmen abandon the scene.
- Seal's limp body bleeds into his leather seat. - He got shot in the head with a machine gun. People walked up to him, he was getting out of his car and they killed him. He never got the door open. And they knew where he was. All this was discussed at their trial. They had rented a hotel room across the street and they'd watched his comings and goings. You know, he always had that big white car. And so they had their guns and when he pulled up,
strolled over there and killed him. The assassins are apprehended as they attempt to flee Baton Rouge. They're given life without parole. Under questioning, they confess they were sent to the U.S. by the Medellin cartel. He was murdered by three Colombians who were sent up here to kill him when they found out he was an informant. That's not unusual for them to do something like that. And Barry wouldn't go into witness protection, which is the only thing the government could do to
you know, to take care of him like they owed him that. But you can't force him. Witness Protection is a voluntary program. It's run by the Marshal Service. You have to ask for it and they have to agree to take him. Barry didn't want to do that. He said it was too restrictive on him. It would take him away from his family. They would probably uproot him and move him. And he would have nothing to say about it. He didn't want to do it.
so he refused to accept witness protection program. I think he thought he could outwit them. I think he overestimated his ability to outwit them. The result was they got murdered. The cartel has successfully taken revenge for what it considers the ultimate betrayal. 2,000 miles away in Colombia, Pablo Escobar hangs up the phone without a word. A satisfied look spreads across his face. Job done.
Barry Seal, the disgraced airline pilot who turned to smuggling and made a fortune trafficking cocaine before cutting a deal with the government to escape jail, is now dead. I know that when he died, he died basically broke. Supposedly, he used a lot of his funds to do the things that he did for the government. I don't think they could get money to pay for him to do the stuff that he was allowed to do. To accomplish these tasks,
that they couldn't pay for and they couldn't fund. I think one of the things that made him uniquely valuable to them was that Barry knew how to do things. He knew how to get certain places. He knew how to set up certain operations involving what would be considered illegal activity that the government could have never taken a role in or claimed to have any knowledge of.
It's believed Seal's family were left to survive on his life insurance policy.
His attorney has had enough of this game.
That's the last drug case I ever did, and ever will do. Because what I learned in all of that experience is that, of course, that's a treacherous world for the participants, and it's a treacherous world for the police. And in Barry's case, nobody was trustworthy. And those who you could trust would have their authority removed. Seale never took down Pablo Escobar.
Nonetheless, he dies the DEA's number one informant. Well, I mean, he was really the first informant who penetrated the cartel in her sanctum, and he brought them the biggest case they'd ever had.
He met with the Ochoas. He filmed Pablo Escobar loading a plane. These were unprecedented feats of daring do and law enforcement ingenuity that the DEA had never seen. So clearly, up until his death, he was the best informant they ever had. A month after Seale's murder, President Reagan displays the photos on national television as ammunition in America's war on communism.
The grainy black and white pictures are defining images of the age. The Sandinistas have even involved themselves in the international drug trade. I know every American parent concerned about the drug problem will be outraged to learn that top Nicaraguan government officials are deeply involved in drug trafficking. This picture, secretly taken at a military airfield outside Managua,
shows Federico Vaughn, a top aide to one of the nine commandantes who rule Nicaragua, loading an aircraft with illegal narcotics bound for the United States. No, there seems to be no crime to which the Sandinistas will not stoop. This is an outlaw regime. The risk-taking pilot flew too close to the sun. Few get away with double-crossing Pablo Escobar.
With their key informant taken out, it's back to square one for the DEA, as they battle the tidal wave of Colombian cocaine washing ashore in the southern United States. As Veriseal is laid to rest in Louisiana, two states over, just around the Gulf of Mexico coast in the state of Florida, the war on drugs is reaching fever pitch.
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
And 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 exercise a year, and 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. Barry Seale may be dead,
But there are plenty of candidates vying to take his place. One will rise far above the others. She would kill you if you owed her money. She would kill you if you encroached on her territory. She would kill you if you personally insulted her.
Sometimes she would just kill you for the fun of it. In the next episode of Real Narcos, we'll follow the story of Griselda Blanco, a woman who used seduction and sadistic violence to become the Miami godmother. We went from probably 80 to 100 murders a year to almost 300 to 400 murders in a year in the early 1980s. We would just find the bodies, you know, shot in cars or in their homes. She revolutionized drug smuggling.
using a network of glamorous women to beguile and flirt their way through U.S. customs. But it wasn't until the '80s, I don't think, in Miami that she really begins to emerge as this female Al Capone. We'll follow DEA agents as they work informants, kick down doors, and eventually come face to face with the godmother herself. Next time on Real Narcos.
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 Fly 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.
Thank you.
