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$45 upfront payment equivalent to $15 per month. New customers on first three-month plan only. Taxes and fees extra. Speeds lower above 40 gigabytes. See details. The world will never see a criminal as big as Pablo Escobar again. He was ruthless. He was a villain. He was notorious. He was a murderer. He was a terrorist. He had every component that represents evil woven into the fabric of what made Pablo Escobar.
He had big ambitions. He was able to realize those ambitions through a combination of bribing whoever he could bribe and killing whoever he couldn't bribe. What made him particularly terrifying was that he didn't always give you the choice. He didn't try to buy you off a lot of times. He would just kill you. If the American government asked you to move to Colombia to hunt down the world's most brutal narco-terrorist, what would you say?
In the 1980s, Mike Vigil, Ken McGee, and Joe Toft were asked that very question. They were young DEA agents looking to tackle crime. So when they were tasked with capturing history's most notorious drug lord, Pablo Escobar, did they agree? You bet they did. My name is Jon 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. From the godmother of cocaine, Griselda Blanco, to the most powerful drug trafficker in the world, El Chapo, we take you to the front line of some of history's most infamous DEA missions.
In this first episode, we'll be embedded with Mike Vigil, Ken McGee, and Joe Toft, and follow their game of cat and mouse as they try to take down legendary Colombian drug lord, Pablo Escobar. These guys are the real deal, and this is Real Narcos. Real Narcos.
I would see Pablo Escobar on a regular basis. He was always dressed in blue jeans that had a huge crease, immaculate white tennis shoes, and a very inexpensive velour shirt. No jewelry. When you work undercover, you really have to play the role because, you know, you stand to lose more than just an Oscar.
When you're dealing with drug lords, they suffer from paranoia. And as a result of that, you know, they're going to be testing you and you have to maintain a certain calm. You have to dress the part. You have to know the prices of drugs. You have to be able to deal with them on a one-on-one situation. And if you make a mistake, these people will kill you in the blink of an eye.
A lot's been said about the hunt for Pablo, and in this episode, we let the people who were there tell us what really happened. These agents lived and breathed to hunt for Escobar for years. Now, they're going to show you what it was like. I was already used to seeing violence, but not as bad as it was there. You could get assassinated at any time.
And it was kind of a situation where violence begot violence. November 27th, 1989. Avianca Flight 203 takes off on a routine flight from Bogota International Airport in Colombia. At 7:13 a.m., the wheels of the Boeing 727 leave the runway. Five minutes later, it has climbed to 13,000 feet, halfway towards cruising altitude. The captain radios down to air traffic control,
Takeoff went smoothly, but the passengers will never reach their destination because at 7:18 AM, an explosion detonates in the plane mid-flight. The force of the blast tears the nose section of the plane from the tail. Both halves crash towards Earth in flames. On the ground, three bystanders look up to the sky to see debris speeding towards them. They're killed instantly.
Ten minutes drive from Bogota Airport, down Avenida El Dorado, staff arrive for work at the U.S. Embassy. Amongst them are agents for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, the DEA. In the lobby, the televisions on the walls are covered with the same gruesome news story: Avianca Airlines Flight 203 has exploded above the city. More than 100 people have been killed in a plane crash near the Colombian capital Bogota.
The plane, an Avianca Airlines Boeing 727, was on a domestic flight to Cali. It crashed shortly after takeoff, killing all 107 on board. Witnesses say the plane was blown apart by two explosions, others that they saw smoke pouring from one of its engines. Local radio stations are inundated with calls from eyewitnesses. Two Colombian Air Force pilots witnessed the explosion across the sky from their own aircraft.
Another caller assumed the explosion came from the local electrical station. Looking up, he saw bodies and luggage falling through the air.
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A rumor is going around that the explosion was caused by a malfunctioning fuel system. It was right around Thanksgiving. I remember it very well because we almost had a de-agent on that aircraft. Two agents were supposed to travel to the north coast of Colombia for another investigation, and their trip got canceled for a totally different reason. But Agent McGee soon learns this is no tragic accident.
We learned exactly how it went down. There was a cassette recorder loaded with an explosive where somebody was duped into believing that when they maintained a certain altitude that they would turn on that cassette recorder and they would receive certain instructions through a tape-recorded message. And what it really was, was an explosive device. A smartly dressed young man had entered the plane carrying a briefcase, given to him by the Medellin cartel.
He had been told that the briefcase held a secret recording device which would record the conversations of two American passengers on board. But the young man had been deceived. Inside the briefcase was a bomb. This was an act of terrorism. The Colombian authorities realized the intended target of the attack was presidential candidate Cesar Gaviria, who canceled his flight at the last minute.
Gaviria has staked his political career on denouncing Colombia's most infamous cocaine godfather, Pablo Escobar. By some estimates, the seventh richest man in the world, Pablo Escobar will stop at nothing to enforce his rule over Colombia's drug trade. This assassination attempt is the work of the world's richest criminal. At the embassy, DEA agents part the vertical blinds and peer out the window. On the street below,
Fire engines and ambulances speed past, on their way to the crash site, a short drive up the street. The plane exploded in midair and then crashed. And I am sure that while the plane was going down, many people were still alive on that plane. I just thought of the terror that was involved. Imagine blowing up an international airport.
airliner, Avianca Airlines. Imagine blowing it up, killing everybody on board because you want to kill one person that you think is going to be on board. That was worldwide news, number one. Number two is that elevated the focus tremendously on who did this, why did they do this, and what are we going to do about it? Two of the dead hold U.S. passports. Escobar's indiscriminate slaughter has laid him open to the full weight of American justice.
In Washington, D.C., the administration of President George H.W. Bush reacts by ratcheting up the war on drugs. And our message to the drug cartels is this: The rules have changed. We will help any government that wants our help. When requested, we will, for the first time, make available the appropriate resources of America's armed forces. We will intensify our efforts against drug smugglers on the high seas.
in international airspace and at our borders. And for the drug kingpins, the death penalty. Mike Cain is senior special agent in Columbia, later to become chief of South American operations at DEA headquarters in Washington.
In 1989, when Avianca Plain was destroyed, I think it was a realization on the part of Colombian authorities that they were dealing with something that was beyond their control and they were better to get in league with the United States government to address this issue.
The U.S. government thought they were doing enough, thought law enforcement could handle it. But when George H.W. Bush became president, the efforts were increased where we started getting the United States government's intel agencies involved as well as military agencies involved. Agent Ken McGee is ordered by Washington to obtain the death certificates of those killed on board. These will be key articles of proof in the effort to bring terrorism charges against Escobar.
There was always a big effort to capture Pablo Escobar, but this placed it on a worldwide scale. At that point in time, you now had a charge where you can charge somebody with terrorism as well as the act of violence in regards to an American citizen killed overseas, which creates a much, much greater jurisdiction when it came to American authorities and charges that you could pursue against an individual.
So I went to the area where the medical examiner was and I obtained death certificates for the individuals that were American citizens that were on board that plane. I remember looking at them and seeing what the cause of death was. And it said blunt trauma due to falling from aircraft. And I remember looking at that and recalling how it must have felt to be on that plane.
The Avianca Airlines bombing is a shocking high point of violence in the war on drugs. As leader of the Medellin cocaine cartel, Pablo Escobar has achieved extraordinary influence. He was a violent man. He had no, absolutely no remorse for anyone that he had assassinated, murdered, kidnapped or tortured. It is how he ruled.
He ruled with threat and intimidation backed up by the money that he could hire anyone to get a job done. Whether it would be blowing up an airplane, blowing up a police station, kidnapping and murdering journalists or members of government or family members of political officials, he had no limitations in regards to how ruthless he could be. So how did Colombia get to this point?
bent to the will of Pablo Escobar. Rewind to the late 1970s and the early 80s. For decades, Colombian drug smugglers have dealt in marijuana. But now, in the booming consumer market of the USA, in the clubs and discos of New York, Miami, and Los Angeles,
cocaine is the drug of choice. Agents like Mike Cain witness a steep change in drug trafficking. - It was in the late '70s that we started addressing the cocaine problem. I was a special agent with the DEA in the New York field division in those days.
Up to that point in time, the focus of the DEA was heroin. There's no question about that. When we first started seeing cocaine come into New York, the attitude of the DEA was it was kiddie dope compared to heroin. Cocaine becomes freely available and transforms American society. DEA agent Mike Vigil sees this happen. The 1980s were really the...
boom era, if you will, of cocaine here in the United States. And for some reason, it became a status symbol, you know, became a fad. And you were not part of the in crowd unless you had large quantities of cocaine or used large quantities of cocaine. Cocaine trafficking was having a major impact here in the United States.
You know, the addiction rates were skyrocketing. And the fact of the matter is that, you know, it was starting to generate violence because drug trafficking is synonymous with violence. A series of narcotic busts point towards Colombia. We started to see, you know, emissaries of the cartels from Colombia coming into the United States and opening up.
distribution points throughout the United States. And cocaine became an epidemic of tremendous proportions. Agent Mike Cain is tasked with investigating links to suppliers in Latin America.
The New York Task Force started addressing the problem of cocaine on the streets of New York, specifically Jackson Heights in Queens, New York. Jackson Heights was an enclave, if you will, of Colombian immigrants, most of them legitimate, hardworking people.
But the Colombian cocaine traffickers also took up residence in Jackson Heights, trying to hide from authorities and blend into the community. In those days, we knew little, if anything, about what was going on. But then over the next few years,
We started making larger and larger seizures. We started hitting apartments that were stash houses for the ill-gotten gains, if you will, the money. We were seizing hundreds of thousands of dollars. And that was the first time that we started to realize as an agency what we were dealing with. Throughout the 1980s, the state of Florida is the entry point of choice for Southern American traffickers seeking to get their illicit products to market.
The flow of cocaine into the southern United States grows exponentially. Mike Cain watches the drugs stack up. The numbers are mind-boggling. I'm talking about thousands of kilograms of cocaine a month. We had a road being built in those days, an interstate highway called the Sawgrass Expressway. Well, while it was being developed, '85, '86, '87, and before it was actually open for traffic, we
we had aircraft landing on that unfinished paved road. They would throw duffel bags of cocaine out to waiting counterparts who would then get the cocaine, jump in vehicles and drive off, and then the plane would just take off again. So it was nothing for these people to fly off the north coast of Colombia where they'd pick up a shipment of cocaine and then either fly under the radar and either land directly in Florida someplace or fly over to Jamaica
fly over to Cayman Islands, fly to the Bahamas, refuel, and then perhaps the next day they'd have a short hop again into the U.S. One particular drug seizure blows Cain's mind. March 17th of 1982, I had an informant in the Medellin office that told us that the cartel was about to send a large shipment of cocaine on a flight out of Medellin to Miami on Tampa-Columbia Airlines.
That informant was telling us that it would be at least 500 kilograms of cocaine. I think the largest seizure up to that point in time had been about 100 kilograms. Not only did they find 500 kilograms, they found 1,700 kilograms of cocaine. So for the first time, that was an eye-opener for us. We in the DEA understood what we were dealing with. It's no longer sufficient simply to seize drugs in the U.S.,
The DEA needs to get closer to the source of the problem. They assign undercover agents Mike Vigil, Mike Cain, and Ken McGee to Columbia to find out more about the people trafficking the drugs. Their Pablo Escobar story has just begun. You're surrounded by mountains right in this high altitude area of Bogota, Columbia, a city of several million people. It's like New York, but it's in the mountains. Working at the American Embassy in Bogota was a very stressful job.
Going my first day to the embassy and seeing all the security required, the bunkered embassy, the scanning of the vehicles and the checking underneath for explosives, and the vehicles assigned to us to drive were all bulletproof and bomb resistant in a certain way that would stop small mortar fire or certain small street bombs. The agents were all very dedicated. We worked very, very hard. Camaraderie was very important to us.
So sometimes on a Sunday evening, we would get together and have a barbecue and talk, blow off steam and relax. During those times, frequently, we would monitor and look out at the landscape of the city. We're high in the mountains, we're high on top of a building having a barbecue, and we would hear explosions and we would look out.
And we would wait, and we would see a puff of smoke coming, whether it be in northern suburbs of Bogota or the southern suburbs. It wouldn't matter, but we would be able to hear the explosions because it would travel through the crisp air.
At that point in time, we also realized that the majority of these explosions on a Sunday night were in shopping districts and things of that nature or near government buildings or other places, banking institutions, where normally people were not going to be at on a Sunday evening.
The bombs were messages sent by Pablo Escobar or whatever other group decided to send a message to the government. And so from that point, sometimes you'd hear 10, 20, 30 explosions in a night, whether they be smaller pipe bombs or larger bombs, it wouldn't matter. But the messages were always being sent. American journalist Guy Gugliotta arrives in Colombia around the same time to document American efforts to bring the traffickers to justice. It's a shock to the system.
Life in Colombia in the mid-1980s when I came in was always scary. I had at the time had been spending a lot of time in nasty places, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras.
And U.S. reporters were always treated pretty well, and you knew that because both sides in all of these struggles wanted to make sure they got their message out, and to get their message out, they would make nice with us. Of course, with cocaine traffickers, you didn't have that problem.
They knew what the United States government wanted to do to them. Reporters were getting murdered, intimidated, thrown out of the country or leaving the country. So there was no way that getting alongside the drug traffickers was going to be good for me. The DEA's headquarters are in the capital city of Bogota. But it's soon clear the vast majority of cocaine is coming out of Medellín, a city in the northwest of the country. The city needs its own task force.
The DEA sets up a resident office in 1981. Before becoming the DEA's Chief of International Operations, Agent Mike Vigil is posted to Medellin. When I arrived in Medellin, I saw that it was a beautiful place. It was a progressive city, you know, a lot of skyscrapers, a lot of construction. But once I was there for a month, I started to see bodies.
throughout Medellin, you know, and I would leave my house early in the morning and I would see cadavers on the side of the road. And when I returned in the evening, a lot of those cadavers were still there because the police and the local authorities just couldn't keep up with the number of killings that were taking place.
Medellin at that time was the most dangerous city in the world and the violence there created the streets to run red with blood. It was just highly dangerous. I knew that there was a good possibility that I could get killed there.
Pablo operates from the shadows, using a network of assassins to enforce his rule over Colombia. Agent Mike Vigil takes a seat at a bar. He orders a drink, watching the locals go about their business. But an undercover agent is never off duty. These two women came to the table and said, "Do you mind if we sit here?" Because, you know, the place was full. I said, "Sure." So we got into conversation.
And I asked them, "What is it that you do?" And one of them told me that she was a secretary at an office where they did contract hits for hire. In other words, they killed people for money. And I asked her, I said, "Well, what do you charge?" And she said, "For regular people, $50. And if it's a high-ranking politician, it's going to be a little bit more." The DEA agent's first priority is to gather intelligence on Pablo.
But to their surprise, little is known about this enigmatic drug lord.
When I arrived in Medellin, we really didn't have a lot of intelligence on Pablo Escobar. I went over to DAS, which is the Directorate for Administrative Security, it's kind of like the Colombian FBI, to get his photograph and records. And when I went there, they gave me the file on Pablo Escobar, and he had already had somebody switch the photographs in that file.
To help the Colombian police bring Pablo to justice, the DEA will need up-to-date information. Reliable informants embedded in Escobar's networks are essential assets. They started to provide me with a lot of invaluable information on Pablo Escobar, you know, who his parents were, you know, his family members, and a lot of other information in terms of how that cartel operated.
Within days of arriving in Medellin, Agent Mike Kane receives a tip-off. Pablo Escobar is in town and expected to attend a local bullfight.
One afternoon, we were out on surveillance at the bullfight in Medellin, Colombia, and we were taking clandestine photos of Pablo Escobar. Probably the first time anybody ever got a good picture of this man. Photos of him socializing with friends of his at the bullring in Medellin. He was just having a good time for himself. DEA agents are at the front lines of the war on drugs, but they themselves have no actual jurisdiction to arrest Escobar.
Only the Colombian authorities can apply the handcuffs or fire the shot that brings Escobar down. All the DEA can do is get as much intel on Escobar as possible and pass that on to Colombian National Police.
I would see Pablo Escobar on a regular basis because I would go to soccer games. They had a huge soccer stadium in Medellin. Sportscasters calling the soccer game would call him and then put him on the air and ask him questions. And, you know, he would come back and sit in the middle of his limousine
little assassins there. He was only a few feet away from me. He was low-key, you know, smiled, and he was never ostentatious. The DEA are keeping Escobar in their sights, but Pablo has a surveillance operation of his own, and it won't be long until Pablo's assassins are given their next high-profile targets.
I left work. It was already dark. It must have been about 8 o'clock in the evening. I was going up this mountain road, headed home, and all of a sudden I heard a motorcycle right behind the car. And I knew that they were after me because if they weren't, they would have had their lights on. I had a weapon next to me, and I figured that I would be able to
kill both of them if they attempted something. In the next episode of Real Narcos, journalist Simon Strong goes in search of Pablo's father. Agent Kane uncovers a plan to kidnap the children of DEA agents in Colombia, while Escobar himself begins construction on the lavish mansion, complete with a bullring, water park, and a private zoo.
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 James Tindall, 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. ♪
