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Escobar is a fugitive in the city he once owned in all but name. He's reduced to sneaking around in the back of a taxi. If he stays in one place too long, the DEA will trace his phone calls. The only people he can really trust are his family. Despite the risks, he calls them repeatedly.
By the end of this episode, Pablo Escobar will be lying in a pool of blood on a rooftop in Medellin. Here's how it happened. The noose is tightening around Colombian drug overlord Pablo Escobar. On the run in the city of Medellin, Escobar has always been careful to change location regularly to keep his pursuers guessing. Now, he starts to get sloppy. On December 2nd, 1993, the police intercept a call he makes to his son.
DEA Special Agent in Charge Joe Toft can sense the drug lord is beginning to crack. He was so angry at his family not being allowed to leave the country that he started calling from one side. The elite Colombian police unit, Bloque de Busqueda, or Search Block, are on the case. The commander of Search Block, Colonel Hugo Martinez, has given the job of tracing Escobar's calls to the one man he knows he can trust absolutely.
his own son. DEA agent Ken McGee watches on in admiration. The dynamics of this story are incredible when you really think about it. Because Colonel Hugo Martinez, a decorated Colombian police officer, brave, strong, loyal, a man of the utmost integrity, his goal in life was finding Pablo Escobar. At that point, he had his son assigned to the unit. And his son was instrumental
And then you have Pablo Escobar, who has a son, communicating via satellite phone, a radio phone. So you have father and son in the world of criminal organization, and you have father and son in the world of law enforcement and what stands for right. The phone trace leads the younger Martinez to a quiet residential street in the neighborhood of Los Olivos. Suddenly, he sees a figure at a second-story window.
Every officer in the Colombian police and every DEA agent knows that face. Hugo Martinez, young Hugo Martinez, looks up in the window and sees someone that he feels immediately is Pablo Escobar. His heart skips a beat. He had worked
on this investigation a lot. He had followed up so many things. He was working very closely with his equipment. He was learning his equipment. And finally, it was about ready to pay off. He was excited, obviously. He says how his heart was racing, how he couldn't wait for the rest of the troops to arrive, how he immediately contacted his superiors, to include his father, to say exactly where he was at and what he had found.
With just two men accompanying him, Martinez Jr. calls urgently for backup. Search block race desperately to his location. When they get there, they don't waste a second. Pablo Escobar escaped so many times in the past. He always had an escape strategy. He always had an escape plan. But the flip side is the police officers had trained and had done so much work and they immediately hit the place. It was very, very well organized.
implemented on the spur of the moment because there was no chance to create a operational strategy to attack that one specific building to make entry. Finally, after all these years, it seems Escobar is cornered. But the Medellin godfather is still dangerous. There is one thing I will say about Pablo Escobar. On that final day, he went out
like a true bad guy. He went out in a blaze of glory. He was armed with two weapons. He had these two semi-automatic pistols. He had a shoulder holster. He was trying to fight his way out of the situation. Pablo Escobar realized that there was no getting out. He didn't surrender. He went out in a blaze of gunfire. - Escobar is not alone. His bodyguard, Alvaro de Jesus, aka El Limón, is the last man by his side.
The two fugitives put up a fierce fight. Bullets whistle past the ears of the police officers as Escobar and his henchmen unload their magazines. As their ammunition starts to run low, there's only one thing for it. Escobar and Limón make a desperate last dart for freedom. They jump from a back window onto a roof of another house. Limón goes down. Finally, bullets make contact with the Medellín Godfather.
As he staggers across the rooftops, Escobar goes down in a hail of fire. The fatal bullet enters his skull through the ear. - On this final day, he went out like a true bad guy. He went out in typical Hollywood fashion. He fired at least 15 rounds at the police officers. He was hit three times. He was wounded. He continued fire. But Pablo Escobar, that day,
lived up to his reputation as being a notorious, cold-blooded killer that fought to the very end. At 3:03 p.m., a search block officer is the first to reach Escobar's body. The report he shouts into his radio will never be forgotten by those who heard it. Pablo Escobar was killed on that rooftop. The very first message transferred over the radio was, "Viva Colombia! Matamos a Pablo Escobar!"
Long live Colombia. We've just killed Pablo Escobar. In the years to come, internet forums will hotly debate exactly what happened on that Medellin rooftop. Did Pablo go out swinging? Was he executed? Did he commit suicide? The Colombian National Police probably got him fair and square, but we may never know the precise circumstances of his final moments. In any case, Search Block have at last settled the score. The police officers that I met with after they returned to Bogota
were euphoric in regards to still living what transpired that day on that rooftop in Medellin, Colombia. It was a moment they were extremely proud of. They talked about it. They were elated. They were ecstatic. They were jubilant. You could use many words to describe how they felt, but one word most importantly is that they were proud.
In Bogota, 150 miles away, Joe Toff gets the news he has been waiting to hear for six long years. It was just a regular day for me. And around 3 o'clock in the afternoon, I'm in my office and I get a phone call from General Vargas. And he used to call me Joey. He says, "Joey, we got Pablo." I said, "Are you sure?" And he says, "No, we're sure." "Listen," I said, "are you 100% sure?"
And he said, "I'm 100% sure he was just killed." I went out in the hallway and I was loud as I could be, you know. I mean, it was a big office. We had the biggest office outside of the United States. And I screamed. I said, "Pablo is dead, you know. Pablo is finally dead." I was ecstatic. Then I ran up the stairs to the ambassador's office. So I said, "Mr. Ambassador, Escobar is dead."
I mean, it was like, whoa, I've been here for almost seven, no, six years at the time, you know, and it finally happened. It finally happened. The news of Escobar's death has flashed to Washington. For the DEA, its mission accomplished.
We even had a party at the embassy to celebrate what we had worked so hard for. So many months, so many hours, so many leads, so many concerns, so many fears. Because again, this was war. Pablo Escobar was the enemy and his entire organization.
So when you look at Pablo Escobar being the enemy and his entire organization, he represented something. He represented evil. He represented
How much money could corrupt people, could corrupt governments, could buy off politicians, could influence law, could influence an entire society? So although he was one man, it's what he represented. And for that reason, it is why members of the DEA in that small group, in that embassy in Bogota, Colombia, the day he died on that rooftop in Medellin, Colombia, we celebrated.
Journalist Simon Strong is having a lunch with a colleague when he gets the call he's been waiting for. He got a message coming in that something was happening and we broke up early for lunch and then raced off to the airport to get on the next plane to Medellin.
and made it up to the chapel where his body was in the coffin, lying in state with his sisters and his mother just nearby. And there were a few local photographers outside. I was sort of sitting on, kneeling on my knees while chatting to his family while Escobar was just there that night.
There was no sense of there could be a violent reaction, no sense of that. There wasn't one. The next day there was a far bigger crowd turned out when his coffin was put in a larger chapel for people to go and look at it. There was an outpouring of interest. How much of that was pure curiosity? How much of it was
a manifestation of grief for a fallen hero. I think it's very hard to say, but a lot of people turned out. So I was aware that this was a huge event. I do not recollect tears per se. There was, I think there was a sense of inevitability. There was pain and shock.
and a sense that their brother had been let down, that he'd been abandoned, that all the politicians and everybody else who had protected him and who he'd financed had finally cut him adrift. It was incredibly convenient at that moment that Escobar should no longer exist. For the DEA agents who've worked this case for years, Elation is tempered with remorse for the losses their Colombian police colleagues have suffered over the years.
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Joe Toft had a certificate created to honor those police officers in regards to their contributions towards the search for Pablo Escobar. When those certificates were given to those police officers, numerous police officers had tears in their eyes, tears of pride in regards to what they had accomplished as a team working
two nations together, and that those individuals were involved in a situation that brought so much proud that a simple piece of paper commemorating their actions given by country attache Joe Toft brought tears to their eyes. I think that is symbolic of how much it meant to them and that in the end they were victorious and they had great sacrifice along the way.
The role of the US in terms of providing the high-tech capability to track the phone calls, it was clearly absolutely crucial. But ultimately, it came down to an effective ground operation. Escobar had nowhere else to run.
The reach out to his family, I mean, that was when they got him, but it only happened because of a lot of work that the Colombians had done to have Escobar isolated enough to make those calls. Pablo Escobar's death marks the end of a bloody reign of terror in Colombia. For a decade and a half, Escobar has dominated Colombian society, visiting devastating violence upon anyone of his choosing.
In the weeks, months, and years after the fateful shootout on the Medellin rooftops, DEA agents reflect on the journey they've been on.
As I said, I started working Escobar in the late 1970s and he wasn't taken down until 1993. And in one capacity or another, I was working against the Colombian cartel for 15 years. So yes, it's a good feeling to know you finally, you and your colleagues, colleagues from many agencies, accomplished some good work. Pablo Escobar started to make serious mistakes, which later cost him his life.
We have to remember that any individual that engages in the drug trade, there's only two ultimate outcomes and that's either that you're going to get killed or you're going to go to jail. Those are the only two outcomes that they have available to them.
Pablo Escobar was sooner or later going to take a fall because if the United States wants you and you have the political will of that particular country, in this case, Colombia, it's a matter of time before you fall, either directly through U.S. law enforcement efforts or mistakes that they make. And Pablo Escobar made a lot of mistakes.
I don't like to see a human being lose their life, but the fact of the matter is that he had become a cancer to Colombia and people were tired of his brand of terrorism because he was a narco-terrorist in every sense of the word. So I was glad because I felt that that would bring some peace
to the Colombian people and that my friends within the Colombian National Police were no longer going to lose their lives as a result of this psychopath. Being part of the team that brought down Pablo Escobar, the work was addictive. It really was. You enjoyed it. You knew that you were making history. You knew you were involved in something that was so important. Then
what was only considering tracking a fugitive? No. You realize it stood for a lot more than just taking down one man. It was so addictive in regards to knowing the fact that you were making history, but also the team, the components, the chemistry, the people you worked with, to me, was one of the best feelings I could ever have as a young DEA agent at the time, knowing
that we were making history and years from now people are still talking about it. Escobar to me was a monster. I wish he would have spent the rest of his life in prison. I mean that's what I wanted. But he deserved what he got. I had the greatest job in the world. I had, I mean I was the head of the office going after Pablo Escobar. What more can you want if you're of the age? Yeah it was an incredible experience.
I think every DEA agent would have liked to have had that job. I was just a lucky one. Never got to meet Escobar. I would have liked to have sat across from him. I would have liked to have talked to him and see who he really was. As Bogota chief, Joe Toft gets the credit for bringing down the Medellin kingpin.
I'm not the hero of the Pablo Escobar story. I think I might be the face of the Pablo Escobar story for the American side because I was the head of the DEA. But we had an office of tremendous agents up there, not only agents, but analysts. So I wish we could all be the face as a group. You know, you hear all this stuff about
Escobar actually being shot by an American, either by a DEA guy or by a Delta guy. None of that's true. None of that's true. The cops that serve the credit, they got him.
For journalist Guy Gugliotta, Escobar has been on a downward spiral since murdering Justice Minister Rodrigo Larrabonilla in 1984. He was the architect of his own downfall in my view. Before 1984, he was rising in power, had a very, very nice political following and something of a political future.
But then he made this grave error in attacking the Colombian government directly by killing the justice minister, and the game changed overnight. His ability to become legitimate or his ability to function in a very public manner in Colombia just disappeared.
He killed newspaper editors. He killed a sitting cabinet minister. He killed the attorney general of Columbia. He paid off a guerrilla group to kidnap the entire Supreme Court. And all but five or six of the nine justices died in a total bloodbath.
He blew up an airliner to kill a presidential candidate. He blew up the headquarters of the Colombian FBI. He was instrumental in helping build this enormous cocaine lab in the jungle. In the end, his own audacity or his own sense of the outrageous is what trapped him because others turned against him. And that's what brought him down in the end.
Pablo Escobar's notoriety lives on. And you'll still see that today. Escobar has a tremendous persona in Colombia even today. He is a Colombian original. There's no doubt about it. But there is something fundamentally lacking in him. Could Pablo have been stopped? Oh, I think Escobar could have been stopped. I think Escobar could have been stopped. What made Escobar is...
Colombia, you know, has been for the last probably 60, 70 years, has been a country in turmoil. There's been a lot of violence there. It's a society that lives in violence because of the guerrilla activity up there. And so Escobar, I think, very early in his career,
He discovered the power of money and corruption and intimidation. You know, he had all the money he could possibly have. He didn't have any limits. So consequently, he was definitely the richest man in Colombia. I mean, without a doubt. I mean, no one came close to him. He owned thousands and thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of acres of the best land in Colombia, buildings, you know, office buildings.
His economic power helped tremendously, but what really put him in control was his ability to manipulate people through fear. And I think at a very early stage, while he was not as powerful yet, where he hadn't attained that level of economic power, it could have been stopped, but it didn't happen. For many involved in the hunt for Escobar, his death represents the pinnacle of their career.
They can take off their badges and hand in their firearms knowing they've seen the end of the world's biggest narco-terrorist. But life in Colombia goes on, and so does the cocaine trade. In the years after Pablo's death, the Cali cartel in Colombia's southwest will rise to the fore. As I'm sipping on my champagne there, you know, I'm getting this sick feeling in my gut.
Because yeah, this is a momentous day. We got Pablo. But who really won this one, you know? Did Cali just win the big battle? And then I started the thoughts about the corruption aspect and the whole thing. So it was a bittersweet time for me. I felt a tremendous load off my shoulders.
But at the same time, I felt that, you know, I wish we wouldn't have shared this celebration with Callie. And I'm sure there was a celebration of Callie going on at the same time. There's a contrarian in me which does view him as in some way having had the sins of his country heaped on him and then everybody conveniently thinking that with his departure, you know, the sins are over.
And that's absolutely not the case. There was hope that it spelled the end of the era of civilian terrorism, which it did not, by the way. It did continue both from the guerrillas and connected to the other drug traffickers as well. But it spelled the end of the main era of bombing.
There was a very, very quick change of focus by the police to focus on the Cali cartel. I mean, almost instantaneous move to set up a bloc de búsqueda in Cali. At the same time, there was also a battle and adversity between the surviving lieutenants of Escobar and the PEPAs. There was some slugging out taking place as well and a jockeying for position. No one individual will command the authority Escobar had.
but cocaine will continue to flow from south america to the u.s and across the atlantic to europe i don't know what you learned from the escobar question because history tends to repeat itself i mean there is no pablo escobar in colombia right now um and there is no pablo escobar anywhere i think and hopefully there wouldn't be another one colombia thinks much better now
The war on drugs rages on. After all the lives lost in the hunt for Escobar, was it all worth it?
Unequivocally, yes. You hear a lot of people complaining about, "We're losing the war on drugs. It's been a monumental waste of resources and manpower." And those arguments come from both conservatives on the extreme right and liberals on the extreme left in our government. But the mission of DEA is
to bring to justice those responsible for the illicit trafficking of drugs. Did it take us a while to bring these people to justice? Absolutely. But it was through the dedication
and the sweat, if you will, and blood of a lot of dedicated people that we finally brought those people to justice. So in that sense, by all means, DEA has been a very, very successful organization. Just because the Medellin cartel has been destroyed, the Cali cartel has been destroyed, there are other members in Colombia
that have developed their own cartels, are still producing cocaine. And unfortunately, there are people still in the United States of America and in Europe and elsewhere in the world that are looking for the end product. So as long as there's a customer, there's going to be somebody there to provide the supply. So what happened to the key players in this story who survived? Colonel Hugo Martinez of the Bloc de Boscuera retired in Bogota.
Carlos later, Escobar's old ally is still incarcerated in the US. The surviving Escobars fled to Mozambique, then Brazil in the years following Pablo's death. They settled in Argentina. His wife, Maria Victoria Hinao, lives in solitude. Pablo's daughter Manuela lives under an assumed name. Little is known about her. Escobar's son changed his name to Sebastian Marroquin. He is an architect in Buenos Aires.
He's been vocal about his father's legacy and his desire for forgiveness from his victims. Pablo's four pet hippos remain on the site of his lavish ranch Hacienda Napoles. Over the years they bred, today dozens roam the hillsides of Antioquia. Escobar's infamous self-built prison La Catedral is now the site of a monastery. In 1995, the heads of the Cali Cartel were arrested. But cocaine is still manufactured and trafficked in Colombia on a massive scale.
The drugs trade goes on under the leadership of various individuals and cartels. 26 years on from his death, in the annals of history, Pablo Escobar stands out a mile. In the words of Guy Gugliotta, he's a Colombian original. Scrap that, a world original. The last word goes to DEA agent Ken McGee. I reflect and I try and compare him to any criminal that people in the United States might recognize as criminal.
notable figure, Al Capone. Al Capone, in my opinion, might have been a bodyguard for Pablo Escobar, might have been a driver, might have been something of a much lower status, where Al Capone was involved in a murder here and there to maintain his empire at the time. Pablo Escobar was responsible for thousands of police officers dying.
Thousands of politicians being feared, corrupted, or murdered. Thousands of innocent people living in fear. 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.
When you look at Pablo Escobar and the devastation that he caused in the country, whether it be bombings, whether it be the murders of so many people, so many police officers, so many politicians, so many innocent civilians, so many other traffickers, so many human beings in general, and the fear that he placed, and he relished in it, and he enjoyed it. The world will never see someone that big again, a man that could blow up an aircraft without
A man that could have a political candidate running for president assassinated on stage, what was referred to at the time as the Bobby Kennedy of Columbia. A man that would bring people into his prison that he made and murder them and torture them.
The world will never see somebody like that again. It can't happen. All of these lessons have been learned because of people like Pablo Escobar. There will be drug traffickers. There will be other criminals. But no one will grow to have that amount of power. The next episode of Real Narcos truly is stranger than fiction.
It's about a guy who knew Pablo. He worked for him, smuggled for him. His name is Barry Seal. He's an American, born and bred in the state of Louisiana. Tom Cruise played him in a Hollywood blockbuster movie. He was a risk taker. He was an adventurer. He loved adrenaline. He was charming. He was a bit of a ladies' man.
But he looked nothing like Tom Cruise. The physical difference, I mean, he looked more like John Candy than Tom Cruise. He was 5'9" and 240 pounds. He's the oversized, thrill-seeking pilot from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, who smuggled cocaine for the Colombian cartels. Barry Seal is the biggest homegrown drug smuggler America has ever seen.
He had flown in Vietnam for the U.S. Special Forces and he could land just about anywhere. He was perfect for what the Medellin Cartel at its inception needed, which was skilled pilots who were willing and able to go into some very rough territory.
He's a big guy, but he handles an airplane like nobody else. He's scared of nothing except jail.
In a bid to avoid jail time, he'll flip and become the DEA's most prized informant, getting closer to the heart of the Medellin cartel than anyone else before him. He thought he was smarter than everybody else. He had that arrogance that he could get out of any situation. He was always a guy who didn't think the rules applied to him. The epitaph on his tombstone says it best. It calls him a rebel adventurer, the likes of whom in previous days made America great.
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 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, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. ♪
