Pablo Escobar Part 2: Making a Narco-Terrorist
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Osama bin Laden was a choir boy in comparison to Pablo Escobar. A life meant absolutely nothing to him. I would say that during his lifetime, he was probably the most important terrorist in the entire world. His name, legendary. Escobar, the king of cocaine. A man responsible for the loss of thousands of innocent lives. His legacy is indisputable.

And yet, his visage is etched into the concrete and reflected in the skyscrapers of modern Medellin. In this episode of Real Narcos, we'll pull back the curtain on Pablo's empire and examine the legend that formed in the dark shadow of his presence. You'll hear from experts on the ground and the scholars of his sins. These guys are the real deal. And this is Real Narcos.

In the 1970s, Pablo Escobar begins a small-time smuggling operation that sets him on a path to becoming one of the wealthiest people on the planet. The son of a local farmer and schoolteacher, he has his first taste for violence at a young age. Growing up amidst a vicious civil war, Sean Atwood is the author of the book Pablo Escobar's Story.

Pablo grew up in a department of Colombia called Antioquia and this was when a civil war called the violence was taking place in Colombia and the violence is in full steam across the country and it spills over into the village so this mob, this conservative mob comes into the town and they start to hack up and kill

The neighbors, they're chopping at the door and banging the door and trying to get in. The parents, they start praying to the holy child of Atocha, basically the Christ child. And they say, "Look, all right, we understand that we're probably going to die right now when the mob gets through that door."

At least we could save the kids. Please save the kids. So they get the kids and they hide them in the mattresses and the bedding and they're on the knees and they're praying and they're waiting to die. The mob could not get into the house through the door. So they set fire to it.

So smoke's coming in the house now and it's getting even more of a scary situation for terrified little Pablo and his brother Roberto. Fortunately, the Colombian government soldiers come into town, scare away the mob, and in the end, they did get rescued by the soldiers. And as they're coming out of the house,

They're seeing their neighbors hanging from lampposts. There's so much blood. People are on fire on the streets. And there's so much blood that Pablo's brother Roberto is stepping through blood as he's holding little Pablo, just clinging to him. You've got to understand, in Colombia at the time, life was brutish. And there was all this political violence. As a young child, Pablo's parents leave farming life behind and move to the nearby city of Medellin. Pablo settles in quickly.

But as he enters adolescence, his uncompromising personality begins to emerge. In school, Pablo is starting to bump heads with the teachers and he's starting to disdain authority. Pablo is hanging out with his cousin, Gustavo. This is the beginning of their partnership, really, for the Medellin cartel. They become the dominant force. The first early crimes are stealing fruit,

Either they'll not like fruit carts over, let the oranges and apples roll away and then they'll pick them up and resell them later. Thieving, small scale. Then it progresses to fake lottery tickets. Then it escalates to robberies. Then they are stealing cars and the car operation gets to the point whereby

They're getting car certificates from the officials who issue car certificates. Corruption in Colombia back then was a way of life. So the people who were reporting their cars stolen, it was the same people who were getting the reports of the cars stolen that were getting paid to issue Pablo these car certificates so he could resell them to other people. That's how corrupt it was. Now, it got to the murder level with Gustavo because they became hitmen.

in a war called the Marlborough War. Preceding the cocaine cartels were contraband kingpins. So Pablo and his cousin got in with one of the contraband kingpins

And he later boasted that during the Marlborough War, he killed up to 200 people. So that's how he earned his stripes as a murderer. They would also go into banks, do bank robberies. They would kill police. So the murders started very early in his career. It didn't come later on when the government was prosecuting. So that's how Pablo developed from this lad out on the farm

to ending up in Medellin where he's formed a gang. The young people are saying that whenever there's a situation, a dangerous situation, Pablo is so calm throughout the situation. It makes them warm to him. He's showing these leadership skills.

So this is all now the beginning of the Medellin cartel because a lot of the people that were attracted to him as a young person, they went on to work for him later in life. Before becoming the DEA's chief of international operations, Agent Mike Vigil is posted to Medellin. Like all U.S. agents posted to Colombia, Vigil is well-versed in Pablo's backstory.

He initially started robbing gravestones from cemeteries and shaving the names off and then reselling them. But where he really took off was when he met an individual by the name of Alvaro Prieto, who would smuggle liquor, cigarettes into Colombia, became a multimillionaire, and he hired Pablo Escobar to handle a lot of those loads in the logistics industry.

Pablo Escobar became very adept at that and he would bribe police and customs officials to let the loads go through and he learned the art of the bribe. Cocaine bought for $60 a kilo in Peru and Bolivia can be sold for $60,000 on the streets of New York.

The wily Escobar leaps at the business opportunity. He would go to Peru and Bolivia, and he would have his mother sew pockets into his jacket...

and he would bring in a few kilograms into Colombia. There were three countries he had to travel through, and he had a different car for each country with the license plate of that country on it so that it would not attract attention. In the beginning, him and his cousin Gustavo went down there, they got the product, they would hide it in various areas of the car, such as behind the wheel well or in false compartments.

The business grows quickly, as does Pablo's nerve. But Pablo has a problem. Getting a hold of cocaine in Colombia is the easy bit. To make the fortune he desires, Pablo needs to find a way of getting his drugs into the USA. He thinks laterally and develops ingenious ways to transport his goods. They would have blind people or pretend blind people with cocaine in canes.

people in wheelchairs with cocaine in the wheelchair frames. They would put cocaine in luggage and someone would just pick the luggage up at the other end. People would sometimes get on planes with the cocaine sewn into their clothes or into their shoes. They would bribe air hostesses, they would bribe pilots, they would bribe the cabin crew. So much money was being made, they found all of these different methods.

Sadly, a method that caused a lot of people to die was the people who put cocaine in plastic, condoms, cellophane, and they swallowed it, and the cocaine was inside them. If one of those packages bust open, this substance was so pure, it quite often killed the person. There were a lot of media reports of that.

Medellin is nestled in the Yabura Valley in the northwest of the country. Today, it's a thriving city of 2.5 million people. Cable cars carry locals and tourists alike up the surrounding hillsides, overlooking high-rise blocks and multicolored houses. Guides lead groups of international visitors on narco tours. Few cities have undergone as big a transformation in the last 25 years. Medellin is unrecognizable from the days of Pablo Escobar. It's the early 1980s.

Medellin's drug trade is growing fast, but at this stage, the drug kingpins don't have it all their own way. They're fighting a war not only with law enforcement, but also with far-left guerrilla fighters and terrorists. These Marxist revolutionaries want their share of the cocaine trade. A series of kidnappings of cartel family members is the catalyst for the city's drug lords to team up. DEA Agent Mike Kane.

I arrived there in the summer of 1981. I remember driving to work one day with my partner downtown Medellin, and there was a number of police on the street. And as we drove by, we saw a body hanging in the tree, and the sign around it had "Death to Kidnappers." They knew they had a problem with the terrorists. They wanted to protect themselves. In unity, they're a strength.

So not only were they banding together to protect themselves from the terrorists and law enforcement, but then the light bulb went on and they said to each other, why are we fighting with each other? Why are we competing with each other? Let's ban our talents and our resources and we'll be much stronger and much more capable of shipping cocaine and selling cocaine, distributing cocaine in the United States and perhaps elsewhere. And we'll all make a lot more money doing that. So that is truly how the Midian cartel was born.

United as one single organization, the Medellin cartel is ready for liftoff. Simon Strong is a British journalist and author who moved to Colombia to investigate the cartels. I spent a lot of time in Medellin and it was a very, very tense place indeed. At that stage, the taxi drivers, most of them were on Escobar's payroll. Things could happen just like that without you realizing that there was danger 30 seconds away.

I had been in Peru a couple of years earlier and I was really looking to see what sort of book could be written on Pablo Escobar at a time when Colombia was going through the most extraordinary violence, the really enormous civilian bombing, terrorism. And it seemed to me there was a very obvious opportunity to look at Colombia more deeply through the life of Escobar. Was Escobar an aberrant figure in Colombia or did he in some way represent

a wider society where the other currents that had created him, to what extent was he an isolated figure, to what extent was he really part of a much bigger picture. So that was what interested me and that was what took me there. I was particularly interested in the younger Escobar and people who had known him at an early point, going and pulling his grade scores from his school, that kind of thing. He was a product of his time. He was a product of his social group.

Violence came about primarily when he was seeking to protect himself and his people and his trade. And if somebody tried to double-cross him, somebody tried to displace him, that's when violence was resorted to. But slowly it snowballed.

When Pablo Escobar tries to bribe you, you have a choice: take the money or get shot. Plata o plomo. Silver or lead. Slowly the need to act like that on an ever more provincial and national basis became all the bigger as the threat increased. DEA agents set about trying to get close to Escobar. It's a dangerous business. When you work undercover,

You really have to play the role because you stand to lose more than just an Oscar. You have to be able to answer the questions because 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. Pablo Escobar went after anybody that spoke out against the drug trade. If you happen to be in a public area and you said drug trafficking is really hurting Colombia,

Within 48 hours, he would send assassins after you and they would kill you. The Medellin cartel are a confederation of drug traffickers. Officially, there's no leader, but there's no doubt Escobar is in charge. They were afraid of him.

They were literally afraid of him because he was not afraid of killing friends and they knew that like a rabid dog that he could turn against them at any time.

One of his close associates, by the name of Jorge Ochoa, in an interview said that Pablo did not listen to him, did not listen to his associates. He felt that with the money and the power that he had, he was a god unto himself, and he had the ability and the right to determine who lived and who died.

They weren't issuing a paycheck and health benefits or retirement benefits or anything like that. It was an informal organization.

In many ways, the Escobars and other major traffickers wanted it that way. They wanted it compartmentalized, if you will. They didn't want a lot of people knowing their business. So the organization was loosely that there were only a few trusted lieutenants that knew everything that was going on, and that was done purposefully by the cartel. It's not just agents of espionage that find it difficult to build up a picture of the Medean godfather. Journalist Simon Strong continues to investigate his early life.

He tracks down Escobar's father. He's living in a small village in the countryside near Medellin. Strong remembers the moment he traveled to Escobar's father's home to try and interview him. It was about 40 kilometers from Medellin. It was a Sunday. I took a bus out there. Strong gets off the bus and asks for directions to Escobar Sr.'s home. A priest points the way up the street. After an attempt to knock on the door and a denial that he was there,

Everything happened at once. Cars came out of side streets. I was pulled over to speak to a guy. Window comes down, Uzi machine guns under their seats. I made it quickly down to the marketplace, grabbed a cab and just headed back to Medellin. Strong dives into the back of a taxi. The men with machine guns hot on its tail.

The cab driver is a little confused, but happy to put his foot on the gas. I was chased for 40 kilometers back to Medellin, outskirts of Medellin. This beige Jeep was still a few lights behind us. The pursuers are still hot on their tail. This neighborhood isn't far from where Strong lives. He throws caution to the wind.

I literally dived out of the vehicle into a ditch and made my way back to where I was living and I saw this jeep chasing the taxi through into an underpass. So things happened fast. That was close. Too close. Later, Strong finds out why Escobar's men chased him. One of Escobar's prized stallions had been found castrated on the side of the road.

So there was extra tension that particular day, extra anger. And things can happen when you're completely blind that can significantly influence an approach or any action that you take with what happened on that particular day. So yes, it was a very, very tense place at that time. The longer Simon Strong stays in the country, the closer the close shaves get.

He marries a Colombian woman, a fellow journalist, whose forceful reporting provokes the wrath of the cartel. Her first prominent job ends in sacking. Her second nearly ends in tragedy. My wife's journalistic career kicked off on a radio station and one of the erstwhile colleagues of Pablo Escobar called up the owner of the radio station and said, get rid of her.

because she was simply reporting on what was happening in the battle against the drug trade. So she was summarily dismissed. Her next position was for a lunchtime television news show.

And one day after the show, after lunch, her boss, whose show it was, offered her a lift back to the office and she said no, she was going to walk. And he was mown down by machine gun fire and killed in his car three minutes later. And that was the end of the show. So that just shows you the manner in which there can be a reaction to reportage.

In time, many foreign reporters will decide Colombia is simply too dangerous a country in which to continue living. Guy Gugliotta is one. After a while, in about 1988, '89, I stopped because my newspaper, the Miami Herald, was receiving phone calls and people trying to, warning, you know, that not to send anybody back to Colombia. And so I stopped. I didn't go to Colombia for several years.

For reporters and DEA agents alike, if you're on the cartel's radar, life is never the same again. One evening, Mike Vigil leaves his office late after a long shift. Night has fallen. The roads are virtually empty. It must have been about 8 o'clock in the evening, and I was tired. I was going up this mountain road, headed home, and I had my windows down, the radio off.

and all of a sudden I heard a motorcycle right behind the car. I could hear the hum of the engine, which was very loud, but I couldn't see it because there were no traffic lights in the area, which is completely dark. The motorcycle is driving fast and is nearly caught up with the car, but its headlights are turned off. Alarm bells are ringing for vigil as he struggles to get a view of the driver in his rearview mirror.

This is a common assassination technique of Pablo's. What he would do is he would send his hitmen out normally on a motorcycle. You would have the driver and then you would have the gunmen sitting in the back that could manipulate the weapon, which was usually a Nuzi or a Ningram that was fully automatic. And they would follow the

the vehicle and being on a motorcycle, they had tremendous mobility where they could weave in and out of traffic. And once the individual that they were after got bogged down in traffic or came to a traffic light, they would come alongside. And if the individual happened to be blinking, he would die in darkness. It was that quick.

A quiet drive home up the hillsides of Antioquia province has turned into a life-or-death chase. Vigil knows he has to avoid offering the hitman a clear shot. He swings his steering wheel from side to side. As I started to weave back and forth on the highway, you know, obviously I had the headlights on so I could see the margins of the highway. There was no way that they could come alongside of me. They could fire at me.

from behind, but I was not a stationary target. And I knew that by weaving back and forth, if they tried to come alongside, I would just ram them. I was very calm, and I had a weapon handgun, you know, next to me. And I knew that I could probably survive as long as they didn't come up alongside, but I had the weapon ready.

just in case, and, you know, I figured that I would be able to kill both of them if they attempted something. The chase continues for several miles. Vigil continues to block the road to prevent the motorcycle coming up alongside his car. At the same time, he keeps his movements erratic, so the assassins can't line him up for a shot. As they approach Vigil's home, he's finally able to throw off the pursuers. As I pulled into...

The area where I lived, you know, there were two individuals that sped by very quickly in a motorcycle and the one in the back was crouched very low and he had his hands around something which I have to assume was a weapon. And I knew that they were after me because if they weren't, they would have had their lights on. That was a very close call.

Afterwards, you know, there was a sigh of relief, obviously, and I knew when that happened that I had to be really extra careful from then on because, you know, through time, you start to get a little bit lax in terms of your security. But when something like that happens, you know, it just gives you a motivation to heighten that security. And that's exactly what happened. Vigil is now a marked man.

You will never enjoy the same freedom in Colombia again. Now, you must show constant vigilance. I started to leave the office during daylight hours. I would try to minimize leaving the office in the evening when it was really dangerous and you couldn't see if you were being followed.

So I left earlier and if I had to do additional work, I would just do it from home. But, you know, being out and at dark in Medellin, you know, could cost you your life. I always had a weapon with me and at least one or two extra clips. I usually had a Beretta 9mm that had 15 rounds.

Because I knew that a revolver was not going to cut it in Medellin. You needed more significant firepower. Journalists in the DEA alike are hot on Escobar's tail. And he knows it. The drug barons need a new tactic to keep them at bay. Something to undermine their morale. As a family man himself, Pablo knows just what to do.

In 1984, they started threatening the children, the United States Embassy children and the school where our children were attending school, Colegio Nueva Granada. I had a reliable informant that reported that Pablo Escobar, his response was, let's kidnap the children at the Colegio Nueva Granada. And if these gringos are going to extradite any more of us, we're going to kill their children.

Well, once that happened, once we developed and learned that information, and in fact, corroborated the information as being reliable, the United States ambassador, Mr. Louis Thames in those days, ambassador to Columbia, he gave the order that all independence, non-essential dependence,

wives, husbands, children would have to leave Colombia. And they did. And that was 1984. And I believe from 1984 to 2000, 2002, Colombia remained a non-dependent post. That is, anybody assigned to the embassy in Bogota had to go there without their family. DEA agents expect to be in danger.

It's what they signed up for, but they don't anticipate their families being caught in the crossfire. The agents have no choice but to wave their wives and children on the planes back to the United States. At El Dorado International Airport, they watch on as passenger jets power up the runway, take off, then disappear behind the Andes Mountains. With their families gone, it's time to head back in to downtown Bogota, back to the relentless fight against the cocaine trade.

By the mid-1980s, as head of Colombia's notorious Medellin cocaine cartel, Pablo Escobar is making millions. He gets even richer as he adapts and refines his drug production line. Cocaine used to be grown and processed in Chile, Peru, and Bolivia. But increasingly, Colombian drug lords start to manufacture in-house.

Agent Mike Kane starts to piece this together. We started investigating members of the cartel whose responsibility were to obtain the chemicals, in Spanish, insumos, that the Colombian cartels were using to produce cocaine in countries.

You had the coca paste that had to be converted to coca base, and you had the coca base that had to be converted to cocaine hydrochloride. All this was done in clandestine laboratories in the jungles of Colombia, but the first step to do it was to obtain these chemicals.

The Colombian cartels had people that they employed, chemists, salesmen, many of them otherwise legitimate businessmen, that they employed to import these chemicals from either the United States or Europe so that they could use them in their labs. So it was a very, very complex, sophisticated organization that we were dealing with.

For quite a while, they were one step ahead of us. The objective was never about seizing cocaine. If that was your objective, it was a losing battle. The objective was about indicting, arresting, prosecuting, and jailing those responsible. If you don't put the people in jail who are responsible, you're just spitting in the wind, if you will.

But with police, lawyers, government officials, and judges on his payroll, Escobar seems immune to prosecution. His net worth grows exponentially as he hides in plain sight. Pablo Escobar's organization was huge. He had the money to make it huge.

He would hire many people. He had many lieutenants. He compartmentalized a lot of things. So not only the fact that he had the ability to compartmentalize transportation, processing of cocaine, financial transactions, money laundering. So his organization spread throughout the land. There's no question about it. Not to mention the fact that he would have

numerous assets and wealth placed in various countries around the world. It was around that time that Ford's magazine came out with their richest men in the world, and he was near the top of the list. So right off the bat, you knew that this man was not a millionaire, he was a billionaire. He didn't have a thousand people that

He paid on a weekly basis. That's not the way it worked. He had trusted lieutenants. They had people working for them. They, in turn, had people working for them. And all along their way, they took their cut of the action, if you will, of the monies they had coming to them. But most of that money, the vast majority of it, probably 70%, 75% of it, and that's a guess on my part, but most of it went back to the leaders of the cartel, the Escobars and the Ochoas.

Escobar flaunts his immense fortune by building a vast luxury estate in the hills near Medellin. Police and government officials scour the perimeter. They know their quarry is inside, but they don't yet have the clear evidence of criminality needed to arrest Escobar and secure a meaningful conviction. There's nothing they can do except stand and gop. Known as the Hacienda Napoles, this mansion is another level of opulent. DEA agent Mike Vigil takes a visit.

As you came to his hacienda, he had a huge gate there. And on top of that gate, he had a single-engine aircraft. And that aircraft had been used by Escobar to bring in cocaine from Bolivia and Colombia. He retired the aircraft because then he started to use, you know, larger aircraft, twin-engine aircraft, much more expensive aircraft.

And he put that up there as a symbol of his early days in importing cocaine into Colombia. And as you entered the area, it was a long road. And then to the right, you started to see all these exotic animals. He had rhinoceros, hippopotamus, giraffes. He had elephants.

Then he had his ranch to the left-hand side, and right next to it was a long airstrip that could accommodate Lear jets. And he had huge fuel tanks at one end that were used to refuel the aircraft. The ranch had like about nine man-made lakes.

He had all kinds of slides, water slides, you know, massive structures like life-size dinosaurs made out of fiberglass. We estimate that he easily spent maybe about $10 million in constructing that ranch.

he opened the largest zoo in Colombia. He had to build a new road system on his estate, Hacienda Napoles, because it was taking him hours just to get from one side of the estate to the other. Now, to this day, Colombia's got the biggest herd of hippos outside of the natural habitat where they were sourced from in Africa.

It made me angry because I knew that the mortar and concrete of that entire structure and structures had come from blood money. And a lot of people had died and given up their blood in order for him to have the wealth that he did and build this extravagant lifestyle for him and his family.

The cocaine godfathers tainted millions by more than just fancy homes. He uses them to win the hearts and minds of the poor. Paying for food banks, hospitals, and homes for slum dwellers makes Escobar a hero.

Mike Kane and his DEA are waging a PR war against Escobar, as well as a drug war. You have to understand the environment. Medellin was two cities in one. It had the very wealthy landowners, land barons, cattlemen, businessmen, professional people. These were the oligarchy, if you will, of the city. People who had had money for years and the money was passed down from parents to children to grandchildren.

Then there was a vast majority of people who were called the "pobrecitos," the poor people. You'd see them begging on the street every day, and many of them begging on the street. There were some mothers who went so far as to maim their infant, twist their foot or twist their arms so that the child would be maimed, so that when she was out on the street with the child begging for coins,

The person would see the deformed arm or deformed leg and perhaps give the woman some additional money where they might otherwise walk by. So this was not uncommon. Such was the poverty in Medellin, Colombia. Pablo Escobar used that to his own advantage.

I don't think he was necessarily a benevolent man, acting in the Judeo-Christian sense of, you know, take care of my children. I don't think that was his intention at all. He saw a benefit to providing for the poor people, not for altruistic but very selfish reasons. And those selfish reasons was to make sure that the people weren't selling him out, that they looked upon him as the Robin Hood, and he had places to go and hide then if necessary.

There's a lot to be said for the fact that, you know, the cocaine industry built Medellín, on the other hand. They actually built the infrastructure of Medellín and, to a lesser extent in those days, Miami, Florida. A lot of money, dirty money, coming in and out of both of those cities subsequently found its way into legitimate commercial enterprises, and a lot of commercial buildings were put up in both of those cities during those years. Escobar is so convinced that his Robin Hood image will make him untouchable

he takes the extraordinary step of entering politics. For Escobar, the sky is the limit. It's not hard for Agent McGee and his DEA colleagues to imagine Pablo even becoming president of Colombia. Pablo Escobar was a megalomaniac. Not only that, he was rich, he was narcissistic, and he had a certain value

where he believed in power and that he could change the world through his power. He would give interviews, he would speak to people, he would blatantly lie to the TV cameras, he would blatantly lie to the reporters. And when challenged with those lies, he would continue to keep them up, almost like whatever they're saying didn't matter. What he said was the truth. That's what he believed and that's what he wanted people to believe.

willing to say anything regardless of the facts. Sound familiar? Pablo has mastered the art of political spin. He comfortably clears the first hurdle in his political journey. It becomes what's called a "suplente," a temporary representative to the national government's assembly, filling in if the main representative is out sick. He's soon eyeing his next step. Escobar's money has bought him so much popular support, he's a shoe-in for the Colombian Congress.

a position that guarantees immunity for past crimes. But then the Escobar roller coaster hits the buffers. In April of 1984, the Justice Minister, Rodrigo Larrabonilla, accuses him outright of bribery and corruption. Everyone knows Pablo's a crook, but few have the guts to say it. After all, Colombia's graveyards are filled with dead politicians, police officers, and journalists who've challenged him.

Bonilla gives an incendiary speech, calling out Escobar, trashing his reputation. The facade of respectability comes crashing down. Bonilla even denounces Pablo's dodgy dealings in the national sport. Football is a religion in Colombia. This truth-telling ruins Pablo's image as a man of the people. Rodrigo Lara Bonilla has signed his own death warrant.

DEA agent Mike Vigil survived a cartel assassination attempt himself. And the inevitable attempt on the justice minister's life follows a similar pattern. Lado Bonilla leaves his office. He's being tracked by a motorcycle. He's in his car. He's got a lead car and a follow car. The motorcycle weaves and comes, passes the follow car and weaves to the

right-hand side of the vehicle, they open up with a ningrum and shoot Lado Bonilla several times in the head. Motorcycle takes off. They give chase. Motorcycle then turns over, and the shooter stands up, and he's immediately killed by Lado Bonilla's bodyguards. The shooter was 16 years old, and the driver of that motorcycle was 19 years old. That would be equivalent

to very young teenagers assassinating the Attorney General of the United States. Escobar has finally gone too far. By directly attacking the Colombian government, the drug king has moved out of the shadows. Now, it's open war between the government and the Medellin cartel. In the next episode of Real Narcos...

Pablo Escobar launches an all-out war on the Colombian government, firing RPG rockets at the man about to become president. A new DEA chief arrives in town with a maverick plan, and at a lavish party at Pablo's mansion, a murder in the night threatens to turn the Medellin kingpin's empire upside down.

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 Fly For Game. 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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