#1309
Original Air Date: March 25, 1997
Produced by William Cran and Stephanie Tepper
Written and Directed by William Cran
NARRATOR:
Thunderstorms roll down from the Andes, but they still come to the
cemetery in Medellin. They are retired school teachers, come to honor a
man killed by the police in December, 1993. They believe he was the
innocent victim of political persecution and police brutality. They come
and pray for the man and for his mother.
HERMILDA GAVIRIA DE ESCOBAR [through interpreter]
I think of the ingratitude of people. I think of the brutal persecution
that was inflicted on him. He was just a man.
NARRATOR:
When the teachers leave, two men with scarred faces appear and knock on
the grave for luck. They seek the blessing of El Patron, the boss of the
Medellin cocaine cartel, Pablo Escobar.
The story of Pablo Escobar is the story of the
modern cocaine industry.
THOMAS CASH :
Escobar was to cocaine what Ford was to automobiles.
JACK BLUM:
Compared to Capone and Trafficante and Lansky, this guy was way over them,
head and shoulders.
THOMAS CASH:
Escobar started the cocaine shipments. He started the international
transportation.
RICHARD GREGORIE:
He organized the drug industry to - to a point where it was an equal of
some of our leading legitimate corporations anywhere in the world.
THOMAS CASH:
Escobar is probably the head of the largest criminal organization the
world's ever known.
NARRATOR:
Before he was killed at age 44, Escobar had amassed a personal fortune of
$3 billion. He was perhaps the most successful criminal in history.
NARRATOR:
In Pablo Escobar's home town, the narco-trafficker is still a folk hero.
Here Senor Escobar is Robin Hood.
Pablo Escobar was born in 1949, the son of a
peasant farmer and a school teacher. When Pablo was 2, the family moved to
town. Escobar grew up in Envigado, a suburb of the city of Medellin.
Escobar was growing up in a violent time in Colombia's violent history.
JACK BLUM, Senate Investigator, 1987-89:
Colombia went through a period called "La Violencia," "the
violence," in which two political parties waged war for close to 40
years.
NARRATOR:
The legacy of La Violencia is long-simmering guerrilla war. Marxist
insurgents control large parts of the country. Almost every day there are
clashes with the security forces.
JACK BLUM:
I don't think I've ever been in a place where so many people are so
heavily armed and so quick to show you that they're heavily armed.
NARRATOR:
In Colombia, rich children don't brag about a parent's car, but the number
of their bodyguards.
JACK BLUM:
The sense of menace and fear one has is being in a country that has one of
the world's highest, if not the highest, murder rate.
NARRATOR:
In Medellin there's a shrine where paid killers come to light a candle
before going to work. In a city of two million people, there are four
murders a day.
As a teenager, Pablo Escobar was expelled from
school and drifted into petty crime. He got his start in the drug business
driving coca paste from the Andean Mountains to the laboratories in
Medellin. He used to race his cousin to get there first. The winner
pocketed all the proceeds. He was caught once, but the charges were
dropped on a technicality. By the time he was 26, Escobar had made the
transition from courier to smuggler. Cocaine was worth $35,000 a kilo. A
small plane could make big money. His flight coordinator was an American
named Max Mermelstein, who appears here in disguise.
MAX MERMELSTEIN:
In '75, '76, '77, it was just in its infancy. Within a matter of a few
flights, a man was a multi-millionaire and the moneys were invested. Land
was purchased.
NARRATOR:
Before Escobar was 30, he bought Hacienda Napoles for a reported $63
million. He owned his own helicopter and a private zoo and thousands of
acres. He hired a professional cameraman to shoot his home movies. He and
his men posed in front of his proudest possession, a car that had once
belonged to the gangster Al Capone. He saw himself as a future Al Capone.
Alcohol was once illegal, just like cocaine today.
RICHARD GREGORIE, Anti-Drugs Task Force 1982-86:
In the late '70s, there was a group of independent cowboys dealing in
narcotics. By that, I mean that they were getting their own dope. They
were processing it by themselves, transporting it and trying to find
buyers here in the U.S.
NARRATOR:
American drug pilots who landed at Escobar's hacienda were impressed by
the grip he kept on his people and his organization. The man at the
controls of this plane says he flew 20 trips for Escobar.
FORMER DRUG PILOT:
Pablo Escobar's outfit was probably the most efficient of all the groups
that we worked for. The merchandise was always on time. We would take off
at normally twice the gross weight of the airplane. For the first couple
of hours, until you burned some of that fuel out, you were a flying bomb.
Any turbulence at all would create an accelerated stall. You had to stay
out of thunderstorms, if you were fortunate enough to be able to do that.
If you were not, you didn't make it. There were a lot of people that
didn't make it.
NARRATOR:
Pilots who did make it could earn a million dollars a flight.
THOMAS CASH, DEA Special Agent in Charge, Miami:
You have to look at the pilots that were arrested in Florida. Most of them
were arrested on their 28th or their 32nd trip.
MAX MERMELSTEIN:
One crew that did 38 flights over a six-month period of time, every one of
them came through.
NARRATOR:
The drug planes had to run the gauntlet of U.S. Customs, who had planes of
their own. But only 1 in a hundred was even detected. Escobar's planes
were smuggling about 400 kilos of cocaine a trip. One flight could net $10
million. The bales of cocaine were off-loaded at remote airstrips or
dropped into the water. High-speed motor boats made the final run.
JACK BLUM:
Miami was kind of Wild West because it was the point of entry for so much
of the cocaine, so you'd have great chases across Biscayne Bay in
cigarette boats with Customs right behind them.
NARRATOR:
As in the days of Prohibition, fashionable opinion was on the side of the
smugglers. Cocaine was widely believed to be non-addictive.
MAX MERMELSTEIN:
It was a harmless vice, as far as we were concerned. And the demand in the
United States was so great that we just couldn't get it up fast enough.
NARRATOR:
At the age of 32, Escobar was earning half a million dollars a day. But he
had serious competition in Medellin. The biggest smugglers were the three
Ochoa brothers. This restaurant is owned by their father. His 4-year-old
daughter is its star attraction. Outside the head of the family, Don Fabio
Ochoa, sits beneath a sign that says, "Please don't shake my hand.
Thank you."
NARRATOR:
There was also Jose Rodriguez Gatcha, alias El Mexicano, a gangster with
an appetite for extreme violence. And Carlos Leder, who had helped Escobar
create a sophisticated transhipment network. In 1981, the question for
Pablo Escobar and his rivals was whether to compete or cooperate.
JACK BLUM:, Senate Investigator 1987-89
What these people were were a kind of loose grouping of business
organizations - the Ochoa organization, the Escobar organization. And
these different organizations began to work together cooperatively.
MAX MERMELSTEIN:
We would bring in 400, 450, sometimes 500 kilos on a shipment and if it
all belonged to one person and we did take a loss, it would be a bad hit.
It would hurt.
JACK BLUM:
They then began to mix shipments so if there were three groups in one
shipment, each group would lose a third of the shipment. And it spread the
risk. It diversified things.
RICHARD GREGORIE:
And put altogether, they made this a major industry, as opposed to
individual cowboys who were trying to do the business by themselves.
NARRATOR:
Escobar and his new partners came to be known as the Medellin cartel. The
cartel divided up the U.S. market with its competitors from the Colombian
city of Cali.
NARRATOR:
Soon the Medellin cartel was running five flights a week into the U.S. and
Escobar would be making a million dollars a day.
THOMAS CASH:
The average person can appreciate how rapidly the money was made, but it
was not unusual for 12 and 13 million dollars to be transported back and
forth in private jet planes.
DEA PILOT:
They're smiling at us.
DEA CO-PILOT:
If you had a quarter million bucks in your pocket, wouldn't you be
smiling, too?
THOMAS CASH, DEA Special Agent in Charge, Miami:
They saw themselves as involved in nothing illegal. They were involved in
a business and they compared themselves to the Kennedys, like in the
Scotch business during the time of Prohibition. "One day it'll be
legal. Then we'll have money. We'll be legitimatized and we'll be famous,
like they are."
NARRATOR:
Escobar was also becoming famous for something else.
JACK BLUM:
Violence was a trademark of the Medellin cartel and extraordinary violence
was their special trademark.
NARRATOR:
The trademark of Escobar's hit men was a snub-nosed machine gun fired from
the back of a motorbike. Young thugs with street names like Rene, Mugre,
La Quica, and Zarco became valued employees in Escobar's
multi-million-dollar business.
MAX MERMELSTEIN:
To Escobar, it didn't matter whether you were a man, woman or a child. If
you were going to die, you were going to die. If he had to kill the
father, he'd kill the whole family.
JACK BLUM:
Mother, father, cousin, nephew, niece, children, grandchildren - you name
it - all dead.
NARRATOR:
What set Escobar apart from other cocaine smugglers was not just
ruthlessness, but an ability to use violence strategically. At the same
time, he was a devoted husband and father who would interrupt any business
meeting if his small son or daughter demanded his attention.
STEPHEN MURPHY, DEA Special Agent, Medellin, 1991-94:
An intercepted conversation was obtained by the Colombian national police
between Pablo Escobar, and I believe it was his wife. And in the
background, while he was talking to his wife about family matters and
things like that, everyday living-type matters, screaming could be heard
in the background. And during - during this conversation, Pablo put his
hand over the receiver and turned around and asked whoever was committing
this torture to please keep the guy quiet, that he was trying to talk to
his family on the phone.
NARRATOR:
Now in prison and blinded by a letter bomb, Escobar's brother managed the
finances. Roberto won't hear a bad word about Pablo.
ROBERTO ESCOBAR, Escobar's Brother:
[through interpreter] They call him El Patron, "the boss,"
because in Colombia, people who own a company are called Patrones. And the
poor people began to call him El Patron because he would bring two or
three trucks to the poor barrios and he'd distribute food to people who
didn't have any.
NARRATOR:
Escobar's image as a modern Robin Hood was born in the slums that surround
Medellin. There is a place here known as Barrio Pablo Escobar. They still
say masses for Escobar's soul in the church which he built here. Music
from the steeple drifts over 200 homes which Escobar built for the poor.
People here prefer to forget Escobar's violent reputation.
RACHEL EHRENFELD, Author, "Evil Money":
He built a soccer field and he sponsored a soccer team. He did a lot in
order to help the poor. And he hired the local people in order to do
construction, to run businesses for him, to teach in the local schools,
which he built. He did a lot of good - much, much more than the local
government - than the Colombian government did.
NARRATOR:
Escobar had created a power base for himself in the barrios of Medellin.
He decided to run for office and entered himself as a candidate in the
Congressional elections. In 1982, Escobar was elected as a member of
Congress. In one sense, he was no stranger to politics or politicians.
MAX MERMELSTEIN, Ex-Cocaine Smuggler:
There was a basic competitive nature amongst all of the heads of the
cartel, not only in how much coke they could ship, but it was a game
between them as to who could buy the most and the heaviest-duty
politicians.
NARRATOR:
For the next 10 years, Escobar could afford to buy almost anyone he
wanted. Here a hidden camera shows a Medellin cartel lawyer delivering a
payoff to a politician.
ALBERTO VILLAMIZAR, Politician and Diplomat: He offered a lot of
money. If politicians didn't accept the money, they say, "I'm going
to kill you, so what do you prefer? You prefer money or you prefer to be
killed?"
NARRATOR:
The new ambassador at the American embassy found it difficult to get the
government of Colombia to care about a trade that was doing so much for
the country's balance of payments.
LEWIS TAMBS, U.S. Ambassador to Colombia, 1983-85:
When I was ambassador down there, basically, the Colombians felt that it
was not a Colombian problem. They didn't use it and, basically, it was
going to the consumers in the United States. They were making money. And
it was a U.S. problem, not a Colombian problem.
NARRATOR:
Escobar was still not even a target of American law enforcement when he
posed for this picture. But in 1982 there was a significant shift of
policy inside the White House.
Pres. RONALD REAGAN:
My very reason for being here this afternoon is not to announce another
short-term government offensive, but to call instead for a national
crusade against drugs, a sustained, relentless effort to rid America of
this scourge by mobilizing every segment of our society against drug
abuse.
NARRATOR:
The DEA made cocaine a higher priority. It soon learned that a Colombian
working for Escobar and the cartel wanted to buy a huge amount of ether
and was willing to pay cash.
JOHNNY PHELPS, DEA Special Agent in Charge, Colombia, 1981-84:
Ether, at the time, was extremely important to the manufacturing of
cocaine simply because it's one of the basic ingredients for the
traditional method and formula for processing coca paste to
coca-hydrochloride.
NARRATOR:
The Colombian buyer was in the market for 1,300 barrels of ether. He was
told to try Elk Grove Industrial Park near Chicago's O'Hare Airport. From
a nondescript building here, Mel Schabilion and his partner, Harry
Fullett, were in the business of selling ether. But Harry and Mel were
more than they seemed. They were, in fact, DEA agents running a
sophisticated sting operation.
MEL SCHABILION, DEA Special Agent:
We purported ourselves to be brokers for ether and I told him that we
would be willing to assist him in spending his $400,000 cash that he had
with him.
HARRY FULLETT, DEA Special Agent:
He came to our store and paid us $15,000 as a down payment to begin the
1,300 55-gallon drum order.
NARRATOR:
Before the first 76 barrels of ether left for Colombia, DEA technicians
cut two open and concealed battery-powered transponders inside. Escobar
had no idea that when the ether left the plant it could be traced all the
way to Colombia. Signals from the transponder were being picked up by a
spy satellite as it moved south through New Orleans and Panama to
Colombia. The signal from the transponder indicated a spot near the Yari
River, deep in the densest part of the jungle, for it was here that Pablo
Escobar and his partners had built a huge laboratory to process cocaine.
Tipped off by the DEA, the anti-narcotics unit of the Colombian national
police set off to raid the location. The men were not allowed to know the
nature of the operation until after they were airborne. The only American
on the raid was DEA agent Rollin Pettingill.
ROLLIN PETTINGILL, DEA Special Agent, 1970-90:
We took off at dawn on March 10, 1984. We flew approximately two hours due
south. There are no roads that get into this area within 100, maybe 200
miles. It's an extremely remote, dense jungle. Approximately an hour into
the flight, we started monitoring the transceiver, listening for
bumper-beeper tones to appear. And they did.
NARRATOR:
The evidence videotaped by Agent Pettingill was astonishing. What they
found was an entire complex of airstrips and laboratories capable of
refining and shipping cocaine on an industrial scale. All this was in a
place so remote that the drug lords had invented a name for it:
Tranquilandia, "land of tranquility." There were almost 14
metric tons of cocaine, worth more than a billion dollars. There were also
weighbills, receipts and accounts. It was not until Tranquilandia that the
DEA even knew that the Medellin cartel existed.
MEL SCHABILION:
It was the first time that the actual cartel was identified, that showed
that all the various families, the Ochoas and Pablo Escobar and Carlos
Leder and Gatcha and a number of the other major players of the world,
would bring their raw materials, their raw cocaine, cocaine base and paste
to a specific spot, Tranquilandia.
NARRATOR:
The next day they found a second airstrip and another laboratory, then
another and another. It was the greatest drug bust in the history of the
world. Colombia's head of anti-narcotics, Colonel Jaime Ramirez, came to
see for himself.
JOHNNY PHELPS, DEA Special Agent in Charge, Colombia 1981-84:
While the forces were still on the ground at Tranquilandia, Jaime Ramirez
contacted me and told me that he had been contacted by his brother and
told that people from Medellin had come to his home, his residence, with a
message for Colonel Ramirez that if he would cease all operations in the
Tranquilandia area and withdraw his forces, that there would be a
multi-million-dollar payment made to him.
NARRATOR:
Ramirez's response to the bribe spoke for itself.
ROLLIN PETTINGILL:
They threw five or ten gallons of ether into each room and lit each
building with a torch. It was quite explosive, as we found out.
NARRATOR:
As Tranquilandia went up in smoke, police recovered a death list. Colonel
Jaime Ramirez's name was on it and so was that of his boss, the minister
of justice.
NARRATOR:
In public, Escobar, the politician, denounced the minister of justice as
an American puppet. In private, he put out a contract on his life. The
government of Colombia was unable to protect its own minister. Death
threats pursued Lara Bonilla in Congress, in the ministry and in his home.
LEWIS TAMBS, U.S. Ambassador to Colombia, 1983-85:
And what happened was, is that he called me up one morning and he said,
"Lew," he said, "they're going to get me out of here."
He said, "They can't protect me anymore and I need some place to hole
up. The next thing we knew, that evening, you know, he'd been
assassinated.'`
NARRATOR:
The assassins were little more than children. Escobar was later indicted
for the minister's murder, but he never stood trial.
The assassination showed Colombia that cocaine
was not just an American problem. The government raided Escobar's hacienda
and for a while it cracked down on the cartel. But the real godfathers of
cocaine were not to be found. They were all in Central America, where they
were safe from arrest.
Pablo Escobar found a special welcome in
revolutionary Nicaragua. Castro's Cuba was doing business with the cartel
and so were the Sandinistas.
ERNST "JAKE" JACOBSEN, DEA Special Agent, 1973-86:
Escobar was in his heyday in Managua, Nicaragua. He had everything going
for him. He had the Sandinista government completely behind him because he
was paying them such large sums of money and he had it made there.
NARRATOR:
Escobar continued coordinating new drug routes with the governments of
Panama, Cuba and Nicaragua. In all these plans, an American drug pilot
called Barry Seal was to play a leading role.
ERNST "JAKE" JACOBSEN:
Barry Seal, from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, was probably the most successful
smuggler in his time. He had smuggled approximately 50 loads of cocaine
into the United States. He made $1 million per trip, which was paid by
Escobar and the Ochoas.
NARRATOR:
Seal was such a flamboyant character, he even appeared in a T.V.
documentary. But the cartel knew surprisingly little about their star
pilot. Seal always used pay phones and beepers and never gave them his
real name. Escobar and his associates simply knew him as El Gordo,
"the fat man," and this is why the cartel did not know that Seal
had finally been arrested and, rather than serve a long prison sentence,
he had agreed to become an informant for the U.S. government.
ERNST "JAKE" JACOBSEN:
Barry Seal loved living on the edge. He loved excitement. So when he began
working for us, the government and DEA, he enjoyed it.
NARRATOR:
Jake Jacobsen was Seal's DEA handler. Jacobsen still has the high-tech
message encrypter which Seal gave him.
ERNST "JAKE" JACOBSEN:
Well, after Barry started working for us, he made numerous trips to meet
with Pablo Escobar and the Medellin cartel. During these meetings, Pablo
essentially started telling Barry that he had met with the Sandinista, the
Nicaraguan government, and that they were in the preparations to give the
Medellin cartel and Pablo Escobar a 6,000-foot strip on a Sandinista
military base. Pablo said that he had approximately 18,000 pounds of
cocaine paste that he would like Barry to fly from Bolivia and Peru into
Nicaragua weekly.
NARRATOR:
Seal bought this old military transport plane to carry Escobar's cocaine
paste. He nicknamed it "the Fat Lady" and flew her down to
Nicaragua. He landed at the military airfield, where Nicaraguan soldiers
were waiting to load the drugs and refuel the plane, but the whole
operation took a dangerous turn when Seal tried to use one of the cameras
the CIA had hidden on board his plane.
ERNST "JAKE" JACOBSEN:
This camera was supposed to be in a soundproof box, but as soon as they
took the first picture, everybody could hear it. So Barry being as
intelligent as he was, he started all the generators inside of the
aircraft so that - you know, to cover up the sound of the camera going.
RICHARD GREGORIE:
And we have a photograph with Pablo Escobar helping Nicaraguan soldiers
load cocaine onto an airplane to come back to the U.S. You can't get much
better evidence than that.
ERNST "JAKE" JACOBSEN:
The White House was extremely interested to show that, hey, the Nicaraguan
government, the Sandinistas, were financing their - their economy through
the drug trade and we had definite proof that they were doing it.
NARRATOR:
In Washington, a DEA official was asked to go to the Old Executive Office
Building and brief a White House official, Lieutenant Colonel Oliver
North.
FRANK MONASTERO, DEA Chief of Operations, 1982-85:
Oliver North asked about the fact, could the investigation be disclosed to
the public. And I think that related to the fact that there was a vote in
Congress that was imminent whether the Congress was going to support the
Contras against the Sandinista or not.
Pres. RONALD REAGAN:
[March 16, 1986] I know every American parent concerned about the drug
problem will be outraged to learn that top Nicaraguan government officials
are deeply involved in drug trafficking. This picture, secretly taken at a
military airfield outside Managua, shows Federico Vaughan, a top aide to
one of the nine commandantes who rule Nicaragua, loading an aircraft with
illegal narcotics bound for the United States.
MAX MERMELSTEIN, Ex-Cocaine Smuggler:
Seal just flipped and Escobar and some other people are starting to go out
of their minds. They're starting to get very, very worried. This is
something that they've never experienced before, the fact that they might
have to face justice in the United States. Ochoa wanted him kidnapped.
Escobar wanted him dead. I get a - get on the telephone. I speak to
Escobar on the phone. The orders were to kill him.
NARRATOR:
Thanks to Seal, Escobar was now an internationally wanted criminal. At a
Salvation Army halfway house in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, a four-man
Colombian hit team finally caught up with Barry Seal. Seal's death brought
the DEA's most important investigation of the cartel to an abrupt and
bloody end.
ERNST "JAKE" JACOBSEN:
Ending the case prematurely - we were so well-entrenched at that point
that, in essence, we could have probably arrested 90 percent of the
Medellin cartel.
NARRATOR:
There was nothing Escobar feared more than the American justice system,
where prison guards cannot be routinely bribed or judges easily
intimidated. He used to say, "Better a grave in Colombia than a cell
in the USA."
THOMAS CASH:
Well, they had a lifelong fear against extradition and the ability of the
United States to extradite drug traffickers from Colombia to our shores
and before our courts became something of a Holy Grail that they simply
had to change at all costs.
NARRATOR:
To change it, the cartel brought Colombia to a state of virtual civil war.
When terrorists acting in league with the cartel kidnapped the justices of
the supreme court, government troops were forced to lay siege to the
Palace of Justice.
LEWIS TAMBS, U.S. Ambassador to Colombia, 1983-85:
It was Pablo Escobar and the Ochoas who understood that the destruction or
intimidation of the judiciary system in Colombia was the first step to
taking over the entire country.
NARRATOR:
The attack on the Palace of Justice came on the very day the supreme court
was to have ruled on the law of extradition. In the fighting that
followed, nearly 100 people were killed and all the files on extradition
cases were destroyed. The slaughter of half the members of the supreme
court was part of a relentless campaign of murder and intimidation.
LEWIS TAMBS:
When I was ambassador down there, a judge would be assigned a narcotics
case. Within a very, very short time, a bright, young, well-dressed lawyer
would show up with, first of all, a briefcase in which he would lay a
plain brown envelope on the judge's desk, right?
JACK BLUM:
They'd tell a man, "You have a choice. You can have lead, bullet in
your head, or silver, some money as a payoff. And it's your call."
LEWIS TAMBS:
Then the bright young lawyer would reach in his briefcase and take out a
photograph album.
JACK BLUM:
There'd be a photo album of everybody in their lives they considered to be
near and dear.
JACK BLUM:
Shots of their children, children coming out of their home in the morning,
going to school, playing in the playground, talking to their friends.
LEWIS TAMBS:
So the implication was very clear.
JACK BLUM:
"Cooperate with us or you and your family will be dead."
NARRATOR:
No honest policeman was safe anymore. Escobar tried to kill this man eight
times. He is General Maza, then head of DAS, Colombia's equivalent of the
FBI. Maza could go nowhere without carloads of armed bodyguards.
His friend and colleague, Colonel Jaime Ramirez,
needed the same kind of protection because Escobar had never forgiven him
for the raid on Tranquilandia.
MIGUEL MAZA, Chief of DAS, 1984-91:
[through interpreter] Pablo Escobar was a paranoid with delusions of
grandeur. He was a man without scruples. He fought just as hard against
friends and enemies. Pablo Escobar sent a message to Jaime Ramirez that
he'd canceled the contract on his life because he said Jaime was no longer
in anti-narcotics and he knew he was only doing his job. Jaime thought
he'd keep his word.
NARRATOR:
For the first time in months, Ramirez felt it was safe to take his family
away for the weekend.
HELENA DE RAMIREZ, Colonel's Widow:
[through interpreter] The 17th of November, 1986, was the first weekend
the four of us had gone out as a family. At 4:00 in the afternoon, we left
for Bogota. Jaime and I were talking about how we were getting on in years
and how we'd like to spend the rest of our lives together. And at that
very moment it happened.
JIMMY RAMIREZ, Colonel's Son:
[through interpreter] I opened my eyes. There was gunfire. It was
horrible, an absolute hell. There was blood. And I screamed, "Get
down!"
HELENA DE RAMIREZ:
[through interpreter] The car stopped. I got out and went around the car
to help Jaime. I bump into one of the killers, who had a machine gun, and
I said, "Please don't kill me." All he did was to go over to
Jaime and finish him off.
NARRATOR:
Incredibly, there were still brave Colombians who dared to take a stand
against Escobar and the cartel. The press found itself in the firing line.
The newspaper El Espectador was car-bombed twice. Ten of its staff were
killed. Investigative reporters, political columnists, editors who opposed
Pablo Escobar paid with their lives.
The entire democratic process was under attack,
but Escobar's death threats failed to silence the presidential candidate
Luis Carlos Galan, an outspoken opponent of the cartel. Even so, Galan was
frightened when he came to address a political rally on the outskirts of
Bogota.
JUAN LOZANO, Political Campaign Strategist:
[through interpreter] We had a bad feeling. Here was the most threatened
man in Colombia at night in the middle of a drunken crowd with no
protection. When he got to the plaza, he got down from the truck and he
walked to the platform, which had been put up in the middle of the square
for him to give his speech. We were a few meters behind him. He got on the
platform and when he stepped forward to wave to the crowd, they shot him.
There was gunfire and complete confusion. People were shooting from every
corner of the plaza. Guns were going off everywhere.
NARRATOR:
Democratic governments around the world were shocked by Galan's death. The
Americans urged the Colombians to adopt their own kingpin strategy aimed
at targeting and hunting down the lords of cocaine. Government forces
began hitting Escobar's 40 ranches and residences. But time and again,
Escobar was warned in advance. Once they came so close that his bed was
still warm.
ROBERTO ESCOBAR, Escobar's Brother:
[through interpreter] I went to see him once and spend the night with him
at the farm. The next morning, we told him that the police were coming. He
went into the bathroom, had a shave, then sat down and had breakfast. And
everyone was desperate. "Let's go! Let's go! Let's go! They are
coming! They are just over there!" He said, "Don't panic."
He put on his sneakers and tied his shoelaces. Everyone was running. He
just walk away real slow.
NARRATOR:
Even on the run, Escobar kept a grip on his drug empire. As the crack
epidemic swept through the cities of America, his fortune grew to $3
billion.
RICHARD GREGORIE, Anti-Drugs Task Force,
1982-86:
In 1982, the price of a kilo of cocaine on the streets of Miami, coming in
from Colombia, probably was somewhere in the range of $40,000 to $50,000 a
key. By 1988, the price was down to about $14,000 a key, meaning that they
had brought in so much cocaine, they had driven the price down in the
market.
NARRATOR:
In Colombia the money from drugs financed the car bomb attacks that ripped
through the cities. A new word was added to the vocabulary:
narco-terrorism.
The bomb that exploded outside the police
headquarters, killed 63 and wounded 600. Then, on November 27th, 1989, an
Avianca jet blew up in mid-air, killing 107 passengers and crew.
MAX MERMELSTEIN:
There were a couple of people that Escobar didn't want to reach their
destination, and he ordered the bomb placed on the plane.
NARRATOR:
The state of Colombia had been battered and bribed into submission by the
men from Medellin.
RICHARD GREGORIE:
You have so much money and so much power in the drug dealers that it is
now almost impossible for the leadership of the Colombian government to
successfully deal with governmental problems without dealing with the
narcotics dealers.
NARRATOR:
A new president decided to appease the cartel.
RACHEL EHRENFELD:
President Gaviria, when he came to power in 1990, changed the Constitution
the way the drug traffickers wanted him to. He changed the Constitution so
to eliminate extradition to the United States. From then on, nobody was
extradited to the United States.
NARRATOR:
The cartel had come a long way in 10 years, but its leaders had paid a
price. Escobar had seen Carlos Leder arrested and deported to America. He
had seen Gatcha and his son die in a hail of police bullets. He had seen
Fabio Ochoa's three sons surrender to the government and go to prison.
Escobar's own family was in danger. Rivals had bombed his home and injured
his small daughter.
He wanted to come in from the cold. Secret
negotiations went on for six months. Then a government helicopter came to
arrest him. They found him waiting for them on the edge of a soccer field
at a house which overlooks Medellin. The helicopter took off and, for a
few tense minutes, flew across the town.
The prison to which Escobar was flying was like
no other. It was built on land that he owned and built to his own designs.
Escobar's overriding concern was his own physical safety. Going to jail
would save his life and force the government to be his protector.
The prison was called La Catedral, "the
cathedral." Some called it "Club Medellin." The guards
joked that it was not maximum security, but maximum comfort.
STEPHEN MURPHY, DEA Special Agent, Medellin, 1991-94: Pablo Escobar
had a suite. He had a living room, a kitchen in one room, and the other
consisted of a master bedroom and an office combination. The bathroom had
its own jacuzzi. The prison itself contained its own discotheque, its own
bar. The parties were known to be a weekly occurrence at the prison. He
was known to have visits from family. He had a very strong devotion to his
family, his immediate family. Outside of his personal room at the prison,
he had a very powerful telescope set up which was directed to the building
where his wife and daughter lived, and son. And he would stand there and
talk on his cell phone to his daughter so he could look at her through the
telescope.
NARRATOR:
The prison authorities had turned a blind eye when Escobar continued his
narco-trafficking from jail. But when he brought four of his lieutenants
to the prison to torture and murder them because of a dispute over money,
the government decided Escobar had finally gone too far.
STEPHEN MURPHY:
It was decided that Pablo would be taken out of his custom-built prison
and put into a normal prison in the Colombian prison system. And Pablo
just flatly refused to have any part of that.
RADIO ANNOUNCER:
[through interpreter] Attention. Urgent. Pablo Escobar Gaviria says that
he will face death, but he will not allow himself or any of his men to be
transferred to another prison.
NARRATOR:
Soldiers surrounded the prison, but Escobar had bribed so many army
officers that he simply walked out the back gate. Once again, Escobar and
his gang were on the run.
Thousands of soldiers and police combed the
streets of Medellin. Over the next 17 months, they carried out 11,000
search warrants and mounted 4,000 roadblocks.
Colonel Hugo Martinez commanded the special
600-man unit which had been formed to find Pablo Escobar dead or alive.
Col. HUGO MARTINEZ, Colombian National Police:
[through interpreter] Pablo Escobar handled intelligence very well. He
managed to infiltrate everyone he could, especially those who were
searching for him. We would often hear phone calls warning him about one
of our operations up to two hours ahead of time.
NARRATOR:
Foreign governments donated equipment. This van came from France and was
packed with high-tech directional finders and state-of-the-art bugging
equipment from all over the world.
STEPHEN MURPHY: Pablo knew that he couldn't talk for more than
three minutes without them pinpointing his location. To combat this, on
numerous occasions he would ride around in a taxi with his radio
telephone. And obviously, by the time the Colombian national police had
pinpointed that location and responded troops, he may be five, ten miles
down the road, but still talking on the telephone. On several occasions,
they came very close to capturing Pablo Escobar.
On December 2nd of 1993, Pablo Escobar was
intercepted by the Colombian national police using their radio
directional-finding equipment, talking to his son, Juan Pablo, who was in
Bogota.
NARRATOR:
Escobar had moved his family to Bogota for safety, but he worried about
them all the time. His own family was his Achilles heel and, in the end,
his downfall.
STEPHEN MURPHY:
For some reason, on December 2nd, Pablo was not in his taxi. He made the
telephone call from a fixed location. He called Juan Pablo again and spoke
for several minutes, much more in excess than three minutes. Nobody knows
why because he knew - we had heard him say that he knew he couldn't talk
on the phone for longer than three minutes. However, on this occasion, he
did, which allowed the police to exactly pinpoint a location, which was a
row house. The lieutenant that pinpointed the location had the FM antenna
in his hand, the mobile unit, and looked at the window where his indicator
pointed to and saw Pablo with phone in hand, peeking out the window.
STEPHEN MURPHY:
So the officers, they know that Pablo is on the second floor. They make
their way up the steps. And he has one bodyguard with him. Shots are
exchanged. One officer, as he was running up the steps, tripped and fell,
which probably saved his life because Pablo shot at him at that exact
moment.
When Pablo gets to the third level, he jumps out
the window. He and the bodyguard are running across the roof of the
adjacent row house. The bodyguard jumps off the roof and two police
officers engage him in a gun battle and shoot him dead. Pablo heard the
gunshots and realized that he was in the crossfire, so he's trying to
return fire to the apartment he just escaped out of, in the row house, and
he's also trying to return fire to the police officers on the ground. And
they basically have him in a crossfire and Pablo Escobar is killed on that
rooftop.
STEPHEN MURPHY:
It was such an exciting moment, at that time, that after years and years
of problems, of drug trafficking and murder and extortion and kidnapping
and so forth in Colombia and the world over, that it had finally come to
an end with Pablo Escobar's death. It's the greatest moment there ever was
in Colombian law enforcement history.
NARRATOR:
Minutes after Escobar had been killed, his mother and two sisters arrived.
HERMILDA GAVIRIA DE ESCOBAR,
[through interpreter] I felt something I have never felt in my life. It
was terrible. Since then, my soul has been destroyed because there will
never be anyone like Pablo again.
JACK BLUM, Senate Investigator, 1987-89:
In the end, what brought Pablo Escobar down was a combination of forces
arrayed against him. He had his own men, his own lieutenants who he had
turned on while he was in jail, so they got together to get him. Then you
have the government, which had faced a reign of terror and violence. And
finally, you had the Cali cartel, which was the competition, saying,
"This is our great chance to be rid of a formidable force which is
competing with us and, in the end, reducing prices and complicating our
lives."
JACK BLUM:
The death of Escobar was a landmark in the history of an industry, but it
wasn't a victory, in the sense that it didn't put anything out of
business. It didn't change the pace of trafficking. It didn't raise or
lower the price of cocaine.
By the time he was killed his organization had
basically disintegrated and gotten into the hands of the Cali people, who
were in fact, at the very time he was killed, enhancing it, making it more
efficient, doing a better job with it.
