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Thank you.
we take you to the front line of some of history's most infamous DEA missions. In this 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. ♪
After years on his tail, the Colombian authorities and the US Drug Enforcement Administration have finally got the king of cocaine, Pablo Escobar, behind bars. But it's not exactly going to plan. Unbelievably, Escobar's done a deal with the government. He's been allowed to build his own jail. It's known as La Catedral. He can hire his own henchmen as his guards.
It's a luxury fortress more than a prison. It's a vast ranch complete with a soccer pitch, a jacuzzi, and a waterfall. What's more, there's no sign of Pablo's cocaine business slowing down. Safely ensconced in La Catedral, government raids and shootouts with police are no longer an impediment. Soon, tons of high-purity cocaine are again on the move to the U.S. We knew what was going to happen in the Catedral.
We knew he was going to continue operating from there. We knew he was going to control the place. And we knew that was happening. We had intelligence on this and we had been providing this information to the government, to the president, directly to the president. Nobody wanted to acknowledge that. And I think that was part of the arrangement that they had with Escobar.
This arrangement suits Escobar down to the ground. He's made a lot of enemies. Not just the Colombian and American authorities, but fellow drug traffickers and far-left terrorists. Plenty of people are out for revenge. Good job it's harder to get into La Catedral than to get out.
For a year, Escobar directs operations from his prison resort. According to a police report, in the first three months he receives more than 300 unauthorized visitors. He controls his criminal empire remotely, using secure radio transmitters, telephones, and fax machines. But in July 1992, Escobar orders the kidnapping and murder of 12 rival crime leaders.
The media watches on as two of the captives are dragged into La Catedral for a final face-to-face with the Medellin Godfather. Disbelief at Escobar's phony imprisonment spreads. Enough is enough. Time to move him to a real prison. But it's not going to be that easy. Escobar gets wind of a plot to move him to a nearby army barracks jail. He demands to consult with government officials and the prison warden. When they arrive, he takes them hostage.
On July 22nd, just before dawn, Colombian troops storm the prison. Pablo and his closest hurry downstairs to the basement. They climb into a hidden underground tunnel. Upstairs, the guards get into a shootout with the troops. The army's superior firepower is winning the day. So Pablo, his brother Roberto, and six other men crawl through the tunnel until they emerge into the countryside. Back through the trees, a flash of gunfire lights up La Catedral.
Nightfall. Soldiers comb the densely forested slopes of the mountains around La Catedral, to no avail. In Bogota, President Cesar Gaviria prepares to give a humiliating televised address. A number of Pablo's henchmen are now in custody, but the man himself is on the run. Watching the address in the US Embassy, DEA Special Agent in Charge Joe Toft and his team are hardly surprised. But from where they're standing, there is a silver lining.
Let's face it, Escobar's organization was still operating outside, so we were still working on them too. So, you know, the focus was on Escobar, but also on the Medellín cartel. But we didn't know how long it was going to take. And the day that he escaped from La Catedral, it was a day for celebration because the hunt was back on. You know, I remember celebrating with the police officers that we trusted, we worked with. It was a day, okay, we're back on, the game is back on. Now we're going to go get them.
We realized we would go back to work immediately to try and capture Pablo Escobar. Because in our opinion, at that point in time, the stakes were higher. The stakes were higher. He had escaped from prison, he had violated his agreement, and it placed us in a position to be able to be much more focused and interactive with the government because they now saw that their strategy, their agreement with Pablo Escobar failed.
Escobar's escape from La Catedral will become the stuff of legend. There's one more twist in this particular tale. A local radio station receives a call. The caller claims to be Escobar himself. The cartel chief offers to surrender, but only on certain conditions. He wants a guarantee of safety and a fair trial. And, once back in prison, the United Nations will control access to his jail.
The war will only end, he says, when the government is willing to negotiate. Journalist Simon Strong watches on as multiple operations fail to locate the Medellin godfather. It was a combined army and police operation that was not well coordinated in those operations. All ended in failure, varying degrees of failure. So that was, if you like, I think part panic,
I don't think anybody expected it to succeed. So it was a disorganized response to a moment that is still questioned in terms of the ease, the apparent ease with which he did escape. - The game of cat and mouse is at its highest stakes yet. There could be no more negotiation with Escobar. In Washington, DC, the $1 million reward for Pablo's capture is increased to 2.7 million by the Bush administration. But finding him won't be easy.
In his home city of Medellin, Escobar still commands the respect of some locals. He blends into the city, entering an underground world of code names and aliases, of safe houses and ever-changing radio frequencies. He did it successfully for quite a while, running around in a taxi, you know, with different costumes or whatever, you know. Escobar is constantly on the move. He zips around the city in the backseat of vehicles driven by his bodyguards.
He has a stack of old cell phones that he uses on a loop. The police shut off Medellin's entire cellular network in a bid to isolate him. So, Pablo switches to radio phones. He knew what we were doing. I mean, there's no doubt in his mind that he knew that we were using directional finding equipment, that we were monitoring his conversations.
Whenever he was talking on a phone, they used to call them radio phones there, he would always be moving because the triangulation is impossible to do if you're moving. And he knew that. Conventional methods have failed to bring Pablo to justice, either in court or at the barrel of a gun. It's time to harness the power of the latest technology. A new asset will help the DEA penetrate the fog of secrecy that has fallen over Escobar.
Codenamed Centrospike, and operated by a top-secret U.S. Army intelligence unit, this asset consists of two specially converted civilian light aircraft. Kitted out with state-of-the-art radio direction-finding equipment, the planes circle the airspace above Medellin, homing in on radio telephone calls. Jotoft and Colonel Martinez follow up on leads from Centrospike. But Escobar never stays in one place too long. Each time search block arrives, he's gone.
Escobar can sense his pursuers closing in. He leans on contacts in the neighboring country of Guatemala to go for the DEA's Joe Toft. I think I was in Guatemala at some meeting that I had to go to and somebody had fired a rocket at the embassy. The embassy's wall was thick, you know, and it went right through, but it didn't explode. And my window at the office, which was bulletproof and everything, had some chips from the, I guess, from the concrete.
Then, on January 30th, 1993, Escobar targets General Miguel Maza Marquez, head of the Colombian Security Service. There was one occasion, I remember when they tried to kill Maza, where they put a bomb on the street. His car was going by and his car was bulletproof and it blew the car to one side and there were half bodies of children and people all over the street that were waiting for the school bus.
Shortly after I got to the embassy, I called other cops that I knew that were friends of Mazza and they told me, no, he was fine, he was alive. And later that day, I went up to check out the bombing and it was amazing, you know. Part of the carriage of the bus that contained the dynamite was on top of the 11th floor of the building. So it gives you an idea as to how big an explosion that was. 21 people are killed in the attempt on Mazza's life.
many of them children. Dozens more are terribly injured. But still, no one turns Escobar in. His popularity in Colombia surprised me because everyone knew the atrocities that he was committing. And it's hard for me to understand how even the poor people, how they can look past that.
and just take the fact that he built the soccer fields, he built this barrios. Sure, they benefited from that, but they were getting this money from this monster. They were getting, you know, how do you do that? And I guess you can justify anything, but he was the Robin Hood in the eyes of many people out there. - By now Escobar isn't only being hunted by the Colombian government and the DEA. Rival drug traffickers want him taken down too.
The city of Cali, down in the southwest of Colombia, has now got its own cartel, one derrival that of Medellin. They don't like publicity. They don't like visibility. They've been watching Escobar and learning from his mistakes. Journalist Guy Gugliotta watches them. His partners in Medellin and other cartel members in Cali
And unwanted attention was coming to them because of stuff that he was doing. And it was bad for business. And eventually, they turned on him. And they started to take down all his people. I mean, kill him. I mean, go after him and kill him. And they isolated him. They isolated him more and more and more. And besides the Cali cartel, another murderous group is set out to destroy him.
They call themselves "Los Perseguidos por Pablo Escobar," "Those Persecuted by Pablo Escobar," or "Los Pepes" for short. When we first heard of Los Pepes, we thought they were a bunch of patriots that got together and said, "Okay, we're going to wage a war against Pablo Escobar. You know, the cops are not doing it. We're going to do it." And it didn't take long until we started identifying who the Los Pepes were, that they were actually Escobar's people.
They had gone to the Cali Cartel and switched sides for fear of their lives. What happened in La Catedral to some of their fellow traffickers. And so it became evident that the Los Pepes were nothing more than an arm of the Cali Cartel. And the Cali Cartel had been at war with Medellin for quite some time, waged this dirty war against Escobar. Escobar can thank his own brutality for bringing Los Pepes into existence.
Escobar had finally made enemies of his closest lieutenants by having them, you know, having their legs sawn off with chainsaws in his presence. Well, obviously he made enemies of them as they died, but, you know, of their families and those around him. The tide had turned. It was just a question of time before Escobar was going to be taken down at that stage, even though I don't think
any of us realized how close it actually was. As the walls of security began to crumble around Pablo Escobar's family and his associates, where those walls that were insulated with his millions of dollars started to crumble to the ground,
he would see how vulnerable his family was, his son, his young daughter, and his wife. The fact that many Los Pepes killers had been part of Escobar's organization gives them a huge advantage. Now, for every one of Escobar's attacks, there is a Los Pepes revenge killing. Los Pepes are violent criminals. They're the enemy. But at the same time, these lethal vigilantes are crippling Pablo's network in a way SearchBlock and the DEA never could.
Luis Pepe's were tremendously effective and I think they were key in isolating Escobar fairly rapidly after his escape from his hideaway because they just, they pretty much stripped him of much of his organization. There's a lot of speculation and
I don't know if it's true or not that Colombian law enforcement and perhaps even the DEA made common cause, made overt common cause with Los Pepes. And because Los Pepes was a paramilitary organization, I make no mistake about it. I mean, it may have had linkages to Colombian law enforcement and maybe the DEA, but it was not organized by them. It was organized deliberately.
to go after Escobar and get him out of the picture. He was causing trouble. He was giving the cocaine business much too high a profile, giving them a bad name. And so they wanted him out of the way. You know, initially when Los Peppers came out, I mean, we were going to have t-shirts made of "We support Los Peppers." But I'm glad we didn't waste that money.
We were waging the war through seizures, drug seizures, money seizures, you know, intelligence, whatever. But the Los Pippers were actually getting results. Escobar is under attack from all sides. He disappears in the maze of Medellin's back streets. Search blocks raid Escobar's suspected hideouts. But every time, he's tipped off. Then, Colombian police receive intel that Pablo's hiding out at a riverside ranch deep in the forest.
DEA Special Agent in Charge Joe Toft accompanies search block on the mission. They pile into a helicopter. Up ahead, a clearing in the trees. A village in the forest. The aircraft tilts as it begins a descent, but then the pilot notices something. It's not going to be possible to land here. He had placed around this area, this open area,
Around this house, he had placed these poles, these huge poles that were probably 40, 50 feet high to prevent helicopters from landing. And somehow or other, he got tipped off or he heard the helicopters. But he and Jorge Ochoa were able to escape. On the ground, the locals confirmed the inevitable. Escobar was here, but he's long gone.
We learned he took some horses that were out there. He went through the woods on horses for a couple of miles. And there was a small boat by a river out there. He took the boat another few miles to a Land Rover that was there with a driver waiting for him. There were a lot of D-days that I thought were going to be D-days. I mean, probably dozens of them during my time out there where we knew where Pablo was.
"We're gonna run an operation and we're gonna go out there." And I was excited that this was gonna be the day we get Pablo. And it ended in disappointment because he got tipped off. I mean, the man was always prepared. He always had escape route wherever he was at. He never stayed in a place more than a couple of days because he knew sooner or later intelligence would leak out as to where he was.
All that's left from Escobar's visit is the fear that he might one day return. While we were at the ranch, the police started interrogating some people out there. And we learned that not on this particular trip, but on a previous occasion when Escobar had been there, he had gotten very angry at someone that worked for him out there. They didn't know why. They didn't know the reason. But they did see, they witnessed the fact that they took him out to the river.
There was a tree with a branch over the river. They tied him to the river. They hung him upside down. They threw some gasoline on him and lit him up. And they would drop him in the river, bring him up again, and did it several times. And the message was, don't mess with me. This is what happens to you. The hunt for Escobar has been long, frustrating, bloody. Sometimes it feels like the noose is tightening. Other times, like it could go on forever.
Then, on October 11th, 1993, Sentra Spike intercepts a call. They pinpoint the location to an isolated farmhouse. As usual, Pablo's gone by the time they get there. But the receipt on the call is intriguing. Escobar keeps calling them. They could be the key to bringing him down. His wife, son, and daughter.
One of the things, one of the most important things in regards to tracking a fugitive and finding a fugitive such as Pablo Escobar is family. If you want to find Pablo Escobar, you find family. A traditional investigative technique that has been used for decades in regards to tracking a fugitive is understanding the focus. One of the most important things to any fugitive is family, whether it be mother, wife,
son, daughter, grandparents, whatever. Family is a key. It is a strong bond. We also knew that that bond of love that Pablo Escobar had for his family would be key to tracking Pablo Escobar as a fugitive. Escobar is terrified that one of these times when he calls the family apartment, a hitman sent by the Cali Cartel or the murderous vigilantes of Las Pepes will have got there first.
By repeatedly calling his wife and kids, he's handed Jotov a crucial tactical advantage. He didn't have that much control on protecting his family and his concern over the family increased and he was desperate to get them out. When he escaped the Catedral and little by little the Cali cartel through the Los Pepes were pretty much killing his organization around them.
He felt more and more alone, and he became more and more desperate. And so focusing on his family, preventing the family from leaving Colombia was a very key factor. And once we recognized that and we emphasized that, we could see the end coming around. Keeping Escobar's wife, Maria Victoria, his son Juan Pablo, and his daughter Manuela safe from Las Pepes is essential. If anything happens to them, Pablo will have nothing to lose.
It was pretty obvious that his desperation to get the family was going to cause him to make mistakes. So once we realized that that was the key, the police department put tremendous emphasis on that and they put a lot of surveillance and they tripled the monitoring. In essence, they started providing protection for the family. Pablo was right to fear Las Pepes.
On October 12th, they detonate a massive bomb outside the Escobar family apartment. They escape with minor injuries, but it's too close to call. Escobar is desperate to get them out of Colombia. The DEA team have come to expect the unexpected, but Pablo's next move floors them. One day, the ambassador calls me and he says, "Joe," he says, "you're not going to believe who's downstairs." And I said, "Who?" And he says, "Pablo Escobar's son."
and he wants to meet with me, he said. But I'm not going to meet with him. Do you want to meet with him? I said, yeah, I'd like to talk to him. So I went down and met with him. The teenager Juan Pablo walking into the U.S. Embassy is surprise enough. The deal his father proposes takes Toph's breath away. I was very impressed with the young man, with his maturity. And, you know, he basically said, myself, my mom, and my sister, Toph,
are afraid that we're going to get killed here by the Cali Cartel. And, "Will you please help us get out of the country? We would like to get a visa to the United States." I told him, you know, that's an impossibility, that there's no way he's going to get a visa. He said, "What can we do to get a visa? Tell me what can we do?" And I basically told him, I said, "You know, if you came in here with a platter, with the heads of the Cali Cartel members, you still couldn't get a visa."
And basically that was the end of the conversation. - It's a firm no. Escobar realizes there's no chance of his family escaping to the US. Europe seems their best chance to stay out of Las Pepe's reach. A last minute tip off alerts Toft and his team that the Escobars are on the move. - We had received intelligence that the Escobars were flying to either London, England, or to Frankfurt, Germany.
It would be Pablo Escobar's wife, as well as his son and daughter, as well as his son's girlfriend. We had very little time to prepare, and a decision was made based on my connections at the airport that I would be the one selected to follow the family to whatever location that they ended up going. Very quickly, we saw that it had been somewhat of a circus at the airport. Media was alerted in some way, shape, or form that the Escobar family was going to be at the Bogota El Dorado airport.
From that point, I purchased tickets to go to London and I purchased tickets to go to Frankfurt, Germany, along with two Colombian police colonels who were assigned to work closely with the DEA. After we passed security and walked to the gate is when we knew which flight they were getting on. We had tickets to jump on board either plane. It's Frankfurt. McGee slips onto the aircraft incognito. If Maria, Manuela, and Juan Pablo emigrate to Europe,
They can no longer be bait for Escobar himself. For 11 hours, 10 minutes of flight time, McGee needs to remain alert and inconspicuous. We were on a Lutonza jumbo jet, and the Escobars were seated in a row of five, and they had plenty of space, and we were seated nearby and monitoring their actions, their movement. We tried to get overhears on any conversations they may be involved in.
and we wanted to make sure that there weren't other members of the Escobar organization on the plane. We would look for other things such as making eye contact or passing notes to individuals that might be on the plane as well with them. The purpose of DEA on that aircraft was to meet with DEA agents in Germany,
as well as to meet with government officials if need be to provide them with any documentation that we might have, knowing how Pablo Escobar acted, knowing how he would threaten countries and governments and embassies. To have the Escobars in their country, it was not in their best interest. Back in Bogota, the DEA get on the phones to Germany, working to convince the German government to turn the family away.
McGee secretly photographs the Escobars during the flight, peering down the aisle of the plane at this young, helpless family. From his position several rows back, he can't help but feel a twinge of sympathy. When I saw Pablo Escobar's young little daughter on the plane, and she had her head wrapped in a scarf, and it reminded me of the
intelligence report that I had read that she had had her ears damaged in one of the explosions that was set off near Pablo Escobar's residence. I felt for that child. When I could see the interaction that she had, she was just an innocent young girl whose father was one of the most violent criminals on the face of the planet.
Young Juan Pablo Escobar was very defiant at the time and supportive of his father. And intelligence revealed in numerous cases that young Juan Pablo Escobar had more knowledge than what you would expect of a 16-year-old boy. And I believe that his wife lived off the fruits of the crimes of Pablo Escobar for many years. She enjoyed the millions that Pablo had.
I feel for a family that's on the run. I feel for a mother of two children, fearful. But I also feel that Pablo Escobar placed his family in this predicament. When they land in Frankfurt, it's obvious that German authorities have been warned about their unwelcome guests. When I arrived in Frankfurt, they stopped the aircraft in the middle of the runway. I remember taxiing down the runway, and I remember seeing tanks,
police cars all lined along the airstrip. It was an incredible amount of security on the sides of the aircraft. And they escorted the Escobars off the aircraft and took them into a quarantined area, so to speak. After the Escobars exited the aircraft,
The aircraft continued to the gate where myself and the two Colombian colonels got off the aircraft and we met with the DEA agents assigned to the office in Frankfurt as well as members of the government of Germany.
And it was at that point in time that we briefed those individuals as to some of our feelings, some of our beliefs. And from that point, those officials met with other officials not in our presence. And ultimately, a decision was made by the Minister of the Interior of the government of Germany to make the determination as to what are they going to do with the Escobars. They did not allow them in the country. Very quickly, the Escobars filed an appeal based on political asylum.
The Germans decided that this was not a case of some sort of family that was seeking political asylum and therefore they denied their request. This was all done very, very quickly. It was done so quickly that the majority of the people involved in this entire part of the investigation stayed at the airport.
and the Escobars never left the airport. McGee meticulously photographs each page of the Escobars' confiscated passports. There were very limited opportunities to actually possess the passports that belonged to the Escobars. I wanted to know what countries they had visited in the past, because there could have been something that we were missing. We could have...
seen from one of the entries for another country, something of that nature that would provide us additional clues. At that point in time, they also sent German officials on that airplane to make sure that the Escobars went all the way back to Colombia. After a further 11 hours plus, the plane touches down back in Bogota. When we arrived in Colombia, it was the exact same thing. The airplane was stopped in the middle of the runway. Security was immense at the airport in Bogota.
The Escobars were removed from the aircraft before it got to the gate and whisked the way. McGee gathers further useful intelligence. I searched the area in which the Escobars were seated on this Luton's airplane. In a seat pocket in front, found documents and pieces of paper that had notes written. I found one set of notes that had numbers, figures written on, which was basically an envelope which had
a lot of money in it at the time, and it was an empty envelope saying how much money was effectively in, American currency. Basically money that they would need to survive wherever they ended up going, wherever they landed. They kept their money when they exited the aircraft. But I also found a handwritten note that was written in English that was going to be passed to someone in the event that they were maintained their quarantine in Germany. They were going to pass a note to someone
which indicated that they needed help. Pablo's family are taken to a hotel in the capital of Bogota under heavy police guard. When he gets the news, Escobar goes into meltdown. As expected, he immediately calls his wife.
The plan to take him down is on a knife's edge. He was becoming desperate. He was taking more risks. He was making more phone calls. He was also becoming more threatening in his tone. Certain things such as calling the German embassy and threatening to blow it up. Things of that nature which were so blatant. His acts of desperation made us feel that we were getting closer and closer and closer. And I think
Colonel Hugo Martinez from the Colombian National Police also felt the exact same thing, that progress was being made, a great deal of progress. And if you take a look at the totality of the circumstances, one of the defining moments in the investigation was his love for his family and trying to send his family out of the country ultimately became his demise. In the next episode of Real Narcos...
Hugo Martinez looks up in the window and sees someone that he feels immediately is Pablo Escobar. His heart skips a beat. Pablo Escobar realized that there was no getting out. He didn't surrender. He went out in a blaze of gunfire. He went out
Like a true bad guy. 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. ♪
