The mid-1980s - Americans are using over $20 billion worth of cocaine
every year, and one man supplies 80% of it.
Pablo Escobar was the biggest drug kingpin the world has ever seen.
Despite our best efforts,
illegal cocaine is coming into our country at alarming levels.
Pablo Escobar was responsible for making cocaine an American epidemic.
He built an empire rivalling any Fortune 500 company.
They estimated his wealth at 30 billion, not million.
With a "b," - billion dollars.
He rewarded loyalty with riches,
and defiance with ruthless brutality.
He didn't kill just you. He killed your children,
your wife, whole families.
He would wield the kind of firepower
that brings a whole country to its knees.
Placing a bomb on a commercial airliner.
That shook the government to its roots.
Yet, at the height of his power,
only one thing terrified Pablo Escobar - American justice.
I'm here today to talk about war.
There was a war on drugs and Pablo Escobar was the number one focus.
This is the story of a handful of brave US Government agents
who travelled deep behind enemy lines to take on a kingpin's army.
We were the lead DEA agents for the United States
on the Pablo Escobar investigation.
But you probably know us best as the guys from the hit series Narcos.
Escobar. One way or another, he pays.
It's a brutal foreign war to fight an American epidemic.
Regardless of what you read, what you see on television,
that's just scratching the surface.
A deadly struggle to stop a monster
told by the men who helped bring him down.
The search for Pablo Escobar, to me, was personal,
because of my friends that he killed.
This is The Rise and Fall of Pablo Escobar.
Medellin, Colombia's second largest city,
and one of its most impoverished.
Work is scarce in 1980,
and hunger and homelessness plague the poor.
Colombia at that time,
it wasn't quite as advanced as it is now, it was a third-world country.
Every day in Medellin, there's danger.
In Medellin, you have all of the hopes and tragedies of Colombia
most profoundly and most vividly lived.
It's a city looking for a hero, and it finds an unlikely one
in rising cocaine kingpin Pablo Escobar.
By 1986 Escobar's cocaine empire earns him $420 million a week.
He wanted to be extremely wealthy, which he... He became very wealthy.
By 1987 Forbes magazine rates Pablo Escobar
one of the richest men in the world, for seven straight years.
Escobar is quick to share his fortune with the poor of Medellin.
He gave away cash to these people cos they didn't have anything.
It was the first time anyone had ever done anything for those people.
At very small expense to himself,
when you consider how much he was making,
he was able to play Robin Hood.
Pablo's generosity has a valuable upside for him
as it forges the kind of fierce loyalty
that turns his hometown into his fortress.
The epicentre of the biggest drug empire the world has ever seen.
Pablo Escobar was born in December 1949, in Medellin, Colombia.
Here's a guy who grew up very poor, as I understand.
Not the poorest of the poor,
but certainly from a very humble background.
You know, his mother was a teacher.
His father was some small-time farmer.
He had the kinda crazy-lookin' hair. Wasn't big in stature.
He was a nothing. He was about five foot six inches tall.
He was always a little bit plump.
He wasn't anything to look at.
But Escobar's unassuming appearance hides a ruthless ambition
that changes Colombia's history.
His criminal enterprise starts small.
Escobar, to me, was not a smart person.
But he was very, very street smart. He knew how to work people.
He was a car thief. He used to steal tombstones.
And sand names off of the grave markers
and selling it back to the companies that sell those.
He would steal goods from trucks and then try and peddle them.
But it's Escobar's cunning gift as a smuggler
that sets him apart from your average hoodlum.
By 1975 he's in the marijuana business
carving out some of the early smuggling routes
he later uses to build a cocaine empire.
He was dealing small amounts of marijuana.
And then he went to work for a man who at the time
was probably the biggest trafficker in Medellin.
Pablo goes to work for an up-and-coming Colombian dealer
named Fabio Restrepo.
But young Pablo has already set the goal of becoming a millionaire
by the age of 22.
That ambition puts Restrepo in Escobar's crosshairs.
He went to work for him and one day the man was found dead,
shot in the head.
Once Pablo realised how much money was to be made
in the cocaine business he killed Restrepo, creating an opening.
The dead Restrepo's employees are told they have a new boss,
Pablo Escobar, and that they don't have a choice in the matter.
They grew up on the street, they don't have much education.
And so they really only know power and brutality,
and that that's how you get power, is you become brutal.
It was just a basic instinct.
If it was pig's knuckles he woulda done pig's knuckles.
It was just any way he could make money,
regardless of what he had to do to get it.
Pablo's signature brutality becomes the cornerstone
of his fledgling empire.
Escobar wrote the book on using violence to extremes
to get your business done.
By the late 1970s, while Pablo uses deadly violence
to gain his foothold in Colombia,
the United States is undergoing a major change
in its relationship with narcotics.
The main drug of choice at the time was marijuana.
There was some Mexican brown heroin.
And we started seeing some cocaine too, but not in large quantities.
In 1978, the Herrera organisation uses their "Heroin Highway"
from Mexico to the US to smuggle $60 million worth of heroin.
But by 1980, cocaine is starting to take America by storm.
In the early '80s, cocaine was becoming very prevalent.
Cocaine was the drug of choice.
It was a big Hollywood drug. It was a big elitist drug.
It was doctors, it was lawyers.
There was a cultural acceptance of it.
Doing it was not viewed as harming anybody.
People, a lot of times, viewed it,
as they did in places like Studio 54, as kind of a party favour.
I think we were surprised at how quickly this blossomed
and how quickly it was accepted by the American public.
Today, there's a new epidemic - smokable cocaine,
otherwise known as crack.
It is an explosively destructive and often lethal substance,
which is crushing its users.
It is an uncontrolled fire.
It became a drug of choice that went from being for
the folks that had a lot of money to much more accessible
because people like Pablo Escobar were pioneering ways to make it
readily available, cheaper,
and distributed massively across the country.
In Washington today a politician did his best
to say that we have our priorities wrong.
The use of cocaine, he said, is more dangerous to America than terrorism.
As the 1980s party on, demand for cocaine skyrockets,
and tons are smuggled across America's borders
to the streets of New York, Los Angeles and Chicago.
Most of it from Colombia.
Police!
Combating these smugglers becomes the dangerous work
of a new and highly specialised federal agency
started by President Richard Nixon in 1973 -
the Drug Enforcement Agency, known as the DEA.
We want to try to stop drugs coming into this country at the source.
We have the law enforcement,
and that's punish the pushers and the peddlers.
DEA is one of the smaller federal law enforcement agencies
in the United States. But it has the largest foreign footprint
of any federal law enforcement agency.
Headquartered in Springfield, Virginia,
the DEA is about a third the size of the FBI,
but staffs three times as many foreign agents,
spread across 70 countries around the globe.
The DEA, unlike the FBI, primarily work one very singular mission.
Obviously narcotics.
Their mission is not to go for the users of drugs.
DEA's mission is to go for the highest level
of the drug organisations around the world.
And having agents work undercover
and try to infiltrate these organisations.
And Pablo Escobar is quickly establishing himself as a target
for the DEA.
By 1980, through an increasingly elaborate
and ingenious smuggling operation,
Pablo sneaks an astonishing 150 tons of cocaine a year from his labs
in the remote jungles of Colombia to Miami, Florida,
where he's established an ideal base of operations in the US,
only 1,000 miles, three hours by plane, from Colombia.
The great phrase of Miami that I think describes it,
yesterday and today and perhaps forever is,
"A sunny place for shady people."
In the '50s Miami was, you know, a somewhat Southern beach town,
where not a whole lot went on.
When cocaine was becoming king here in South Florida,
the city transformed from a sleepy, touristy location
to the cocaine mega capital of the United States.
You started seeing these huge condos being built.
You started seeing the sports cars everywhere,
the really fancy, expensive cars.
I mean, Miami was a perfect fit for Pablo and his organisation
because Miami had a history of turning a blind eye,
if not overtly welcoming illicit businesses and illicit money.
Miami offers Pablo another advantage.
With nearly 1,100 miles of coastline,
and 11,000 miles of waterways,
Florida provides endless avenues
for bringing narcotics into the US mainland.
Miami juts out into the warm Caribbean waters.
There are a thousand islands in the Bahamas.
Traffickers had a network of bribed officials in their countries
and in Caribbean islands to be able to use them.
Escobar's web of corruption is so complex
the DEA quickly realises the only way to stop his flow of cocaine
is to cut it off at its source.
Pablo Escobar and the United States DEA
are on a violent collision course.
There was a war on drugs and Pablo Escobar was the number one focus.
By 1982, Pablo Escobar is fast on his way to becoming
the wealthiest and most brutal drug smuggler in history.
People compare him to Chapo.
Chapo was nothing compared to Pablo Escobar.
Every week, he smuggles over ten tons of cocaine
past the southern borders.
Our job is never easy because drug criminals are ingenious.
For every door that we close, they open a new door to death.
Say yes to your life.
And when it comes to drugs and alcohol, just say no.
But Pablo brings more than cocaine to US cities.
He brings a flood of violent crime.
Whether it was up to New York, Atlanta, Houston, LA,
we saw the violence started to increase.
New York and Miami drug-related shootings skyrocket.
The US murder rate spikes a shocking 50% since the 1960s.
The Mayor of Washington, DC told reporters today
that while the city is suffering from a record murder rate,
it's not really random violence.
The victims and killers, according to Mayor Marion Barry,
are drug abusers.
Still, a near doubling of the murder rate this year
has local and federal officials in an uproar
over how to stop the bloodshed.
Violence in the '80s was off the charts.
I had never seen anything like it as a law enforcement officer.
Life was cheap.
And every day, unfortunately,
I expected or wasn't surprised when something really bad happened.
In the wake of the mayhem,
Pablo Escobar isn't just making billions in cash,
he's making a fearsome name for himself.
Soon, he's on the radar at the highest level of US law enforcement.
Vice President Bush created an anti-drug taskforce
in the early '80s. It consisted of DEA agents, FBI agents,
ATF agents, marshals, pretty much all federal agencies,
to come in and get a handle on what was going on here.
Their mission - to identify and dismantle
the narcos' multibillion dollar pipeline,
follow it back to its source and cut off its head.
In the short time that it has been in operation,
the South Florida Task Force has brought about a 27% increase
in drug-related arrests
and confiscated over $3 billion worth of illegal drugs.
As the gloves come off in the war on drugs,
some police departments' top officers leave their local posts
for action on the front lines with the DEA.
I was with the sheriff's office.
I saw a bulletin that the DEA was hiring.
And I remember they were paying $17,000 a year.
I was making $10,000.
In 1984, Javier Pena leaves the relative safety
of his sheriff's post in Laredo, Texas
to enlist in the DEA's war on drugs.
His new assignment puts him head-to-head with hardened narcos
smuggling cocaine and heroin past the Mexican border
in East Austin, Texas.
I did a lotta street cases.
There was a lot of Mexican traffickers
that were doing a lot of heroin,
so I did a lot of undercover work with informant, surveillances.
You're learning the job.
So basically you're doing all the dirty work.
Three years later, in 1987,
Tennessee-born and West Virginia-raised Steve Murphy
leaves his local police force to join the DEA.
And he's immediately dispatched to America's ground zero
in the war on drugs, a place infiltrated by Pablo Escobar
and his cartel - Miami, Florida.
I was assigned to what we called a Caribbean Enforcement Group.
We investigated a lot of the importation of cocaine
into the United States.
My first undercover deal, we had 400 kilos of cocaine.
Prior to me becoming a DEA agent the most powder cocaine
I'd ever seen at one time was 2oz which is about this much,
to 880 lb.
I knew right then I had selected the right career.
I knew I'd picked the right agency.
But in the years it takes the DEA to ramp up its assault
on the narcos' trafficking operations,
back in Colombia, Pablo Escobar has become the king of cocaine,
spending the better part of a decade entrenching himself,
forming an alliance with other Medellin dealers, manufacturers
and smugglers, that becomes the feared Medellin Cartel.
The reason that the Medellin Cartel was formed
was that it gave them more power.
In a quest for unimaginable wealth,
they pool together their individual resources
in an attempt to control the entire cocaine supply chain.
It was a criminal enterprise
where these people were allegedly equal members.
But they were not - they feared Escobar.
Escobar's first so-called partners are the Ochoa brothers -
Jorge-Luis, Juan-David and Fabio.
The Ochoa brothers already had a lot of money in Colombia,
they had a lot of ranches, a lot of land.
But they liked the trafficking business.
Escobar knows cornering the Colombian cocaine market
means controlling the supply of coca leaves and cocaine paste
needed to manufacture powder cocaine.
With the Ochoa's financial backing, the Medellin Cartel quickly
expands their business, buying up the coca supply before their rivals.
Next, Escobar turns to Jose Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha, El Mexicano.
Gacha was the founder of all the cocaine labs in Colombia.
With the Ochoas securing the coca,
Gacha's labs can produce the massive quantities of cocaine Escobar needs
to meet American demand.
These labs, I mean, were huge.
And when I say big, they were run like little towns.
He ran the operations just like a company.
They had their own presses.
They put the powder, they press it, and out comes the kilo.
And I always remember the first wrapper I saw was called Centavo.
When people in the United States would see Centavo,
they'd say, "Well, this is primo stuff. This is coming from Gacha."
All the cocaine in Colombia will do the cartel no good
without means to smuggle it into the United States.
When it came to moving cocaine, Carlos Lehder was Escobar's top man.
Carlos Lehder was very visionary.
He went and bought Norman's Cay, an island in the Bahama island chains
that had a nice, big, long runway
and made that a trans-shipment point for cocaine
coming to the United States. Pablo took great advantage of that.
Using Lehder's island, Escobar experiments
with bolder smuggling methods than ever before.
When it comes to smuggling anything, there's only one limitation.
That limitation is your imagination.
They were dropping bails of cocaine into the ocean and picking it up
and taking it to the Miami coast.
We were seeing things,
everything from aircraft and boats to cargo containers.
We saw people who were willing to take condoms
filled with powder cocaine
and then they would swallow as much as 800g of cocaine.
They took grapefruit, they sliced them in two,
scooped the pulp out, put bags of powder cocaine in there...
..glued the two halves back together,
put it in one of those mesh fruit bags, and shipped it.
And it worked.
It took us a little bit of time to kind of try and catch up.
And we'd never catch up because every time that we understand
a certain system of smuggling,
they would come up with another one.
While DEA agents like Pena and Murphy spend years
struggling to intercept the tons of cocaine pouring into the US
from Medellin, Pablo Escobar fortifies his empire back home,
viciously ruling Colombia's drug trade in the bright light of day,
solidifying his power, and relishing the folk hero status he's built
among the poor in Medellin.
He spent tremendous amounts of money trying to get support from the poor
to create a base.
He built clinics. He gave away food.
He went to people who were literally living on a trash dump,
he went in and built free housing for them
and just let them live there.
He created the neighbourhood Pablo Escobar Gaviria,
that if you go to Medellin today, you can see that neighbourhood.
Whether it was building soccer pitches
so their kids could play soccer,
or electrifying the communities with electricity,
they saw a figure in which the wealth and the privilege
that the upper class had always characteristically enjoyed
being redistributed among the people.
Escobar knows his charity work will spark fierce loyalty in Medellin,
as the locals soon realise that Pablo's success and safety
means their prosperity.
But even with the support of his hometown,
assassination from rival traffickers or arrest looms
as a constant threat. He needed muscle and found plenty of it
in the grateful slums of Medellin.
They were called his sicarios -
a fierce legion of bodyguards and hit men.
Pablo would have as many as 500 sicarios working for him.
He personally would go and recruit these people.
Sometimes they were tested. A young 16-year-old kid would say,
"OK, you want to come and work with us? You have to go to this corner
"and shoot somebody in the head that's waiting for a bus."
And they'd go out there and prove that they could do it
and they'd get hired.
And make no mistake about it,
these people would kill for him, which they did,
and they would die for him, which they did.
With the devotion of his people and an army behind him,
Pablo imposes his will on rivals,
and, brazenly, government officials, by giving them all a simple choice.
Pablo invented a saying called "plata o plomo".
"Silver or lead". You work with me and I'll give you silver,
or you work against me and you'll get lead...bullets.
With a simple offer, Pablo begins to expand his powerful influence
throughout the Colombian government.
Under Pablo's orders, two sicarios would go to a judge,
they would show him a picture of his wife.
"Judge, is this your wife?"
Then they would show him a picture of the judge's kids.
"Judge, are these your kids at this school?"
And they would tell the judge,
"Mr Escobar wants you to drop the charges against him.
"And if you drop the charges against him,
"here's a briefcase full of money."
You could get treated like a king, be set for retirement,
have your family good for the next generation,
or you could be dead in a horrible way.
And there was no middle ground between those two things.
I remember, one of the first judges did not take the money.
Pablo Escobar had him and his family members killed.
A typical day in Colombia -
three more judges have quit their jobs after being threatened
by the murderous drug cartels.
With a fierce cartel and an unlimited supply of cash
and firepower, Pablo Escobar seems to control Colombia
without fear of challenge.
Those he cannot buy off, he intimidates or kills.
But with the US drug epidemic exploding,
the DEA is ready to fight the smuggling at its source.
If one thing keeps Colombia's cocaine kingpin up at night
it's the threat of American justice.
Pablo Escobar feared American prisons
because he couldn't bribe his way out of it
and he was going to be locked in a 6-by-6
for the rest of his natural life.
By 1987, Pablo Escobar's Medellin Cartel is smuggling
a staggering 15 tons of cocaine into the United States each day,
earning him over $400 million a week.
Drugs are a problem in every large city in America,
but more and more it is when drugs crop up in the little places
that we understand how pervasive the problem is.
Fuelling demand is a full blown crack cocaine epidemic
that's turned US cities like New York and Miami into war zones.
Well, it's no question the nation's drug problem
is getting major attention these days,
especially the potent new form of cocaine called crack.
Domestic drug arrests are up 210%. Gang murders skyrocket.
In New York alone, nearly half of all murders are drug-related.
We were on the wrong end of this train.
They were doing the driving.
It was frustrating for all law enforcement.
Overwhelmed and frustrated, United States DEA agents are convinced
the only way to stop the relentless flow of cocaine into the US
is to cut it off at its Colombian source.
The issue - getting the Colombian government to agree
on the source of the problem.
President Barco, in a broadcast to the US,
made it clear he held IT responsible
for the demand that sustained the supply.
There was a huge disconnect for many years
between what the US viewed the problem as being,
and what the Colombians viewed the problem as being.
The United States viewed the cocaine epidemic
as being primarily supply-driven and not a demand problem.
The Colombians viewed the problem as being really a demand problem
because supplies were obviously simply filling demand.
DEA agents know the only way to break the back
of the cartel's smuggling operation
is to put Colombian cartel heads in US prisons.
But Pablo Escobar has spent the entire decade protecting himself
against that fate, and there's no ploy he won't try,
no money he won't spend, no person he won't kill,
to avoid the inside of a United States prison cell.
Escobar felt in control in Colombia.
He felt that he could control his destiny in Colombia,
through corruption, through money, through intimidation.
The risk of US imprisonment first became real for Escobar
on March 4th 1982,
when the Reagan Administration signs an extradition treaty
with the Colombian government.
Now, if the United States can prove that Escobar has committed crimes
on US soil, the Colombian government can put Pablo on a plane
to face trial in the United States.
The only thing he feared was extradition.
He understood that he could not corrupt the US system
and that he would probably end up the rest of his life in jail.
Upon hearing the extradition treaty was being negotiated,
Pablo Escobar makes a bold move.
The head of the Medellin Cartel, becomes a political candidate.
And do you know what his stance was?
Anti-extradition.
He didn't want Colombian nationals extradited to the United States,
principally himself and his associates
in the drug trafficking business. That was his whole platform.
In 1982, Pablo runs as an alternate congressman
for the Colombian Chamber of Representatives.
If elected, he'll attend Congressional sessions
when his congressman is absent.
One of the reasons that Pablo wanted to be elected
was that with it came a blanket of immunity.
Most narcos are content to be the kings of their little narco kingdom,
and he wanted actual formal political power.
And on March 14th, 1982,
only ten days after the extradition treaty goes into effect,
Escobar is elected.
He saw that as a shield against being packed into a plane
and extradited to the US. And obviously, for somebody
who's involved in highly illegal activities,
that's a really appealing benefit.
Pablo's ulterior motives are clear
to the newly-appointed Justice Minister, Rodrigo Lara Bonilla,
who risks his life to take a stand.
Bonilla hated the narcos.
He started cracking down on all the narcotic traffickers,
arresting them.
So traffickers did not like Rodrigo Lara Bonilla.
And on August 16th, 1983,
when Escobar attends his first Congressional session,
he and Bonilla face off.
They're in open Congressional session.
Lara Bonilla eventually gets to the point where he stands up
and he calls Pablo Escobar what he is.
A thug, a criminal, a murderer, a drug trafficker.
And he didn't make his money licitly
and he has no business being in the Chamber of Deputies.
Back in 1982, many in polite Colombian society
might have been blind to Pablo's sordid past.
And those who weren't, feared challenging him, or were profiting.
But with his crimes now put on public display,
Congress is forced to move quickly and expel him.
Now, my hat's off to Lara Bonilla for having the guts
to stand up and call him what he was.
And he was telling 100% of the truth.
But it wasn't long after that,
as he's being driven home one evening,
a motorcycle with two people on it pull up beside him.
And the guy on the back has a machine gun
and kills Lara Bonilla right there in his car.
Justice Minister Rodrigo Lara Bonilla
is assassinated on April 30th 1984,
shocking Colombia and the US Government.
It was a warning to the world.
It was a warning to the Colombian government,
but in my opinion, a big mistake,
because the killing of Bonilla was kind of an awakening
for the world, DEA, too,
and the Colombian government, as to what this man really was.
Bonilla's murder is more than a black eye
for the Colombian government.
It's a signal of a bloody war to come.
Stinging from public embarrassment
and robbed of the political and criminal immunity he coveted,
Pablo Escobar unleashes a reign of terror.
Pablo Escobar was the world's first narcoterrorist.
What's a narcoterrorist?
It's a narcotics trafficker who employs terroristic activities.
He introduced car bombs.
We had never seen that in law enforcement investigations.
Pablo Escobar was putting 10 to 15 car bombs
on a daily basis.
He was placing car bombs at shopping malls,
public areas.
Pablo Escobar was trying to kill as many people as he could.
For Escobar, the point of the violence is simple -
to show the Colombian government
that as long as the extradition agreement exists
no-one in Colombia is safe.
He wanted to show Colombia that he was winning - and he was -
because of his terrorism acts.
People were afraid of Pablo Escobar, which is what Pablo Escobar wanted.
Between 1983 and 1987,
Colombia has a homicide rate four times higher than the US,
and becomes the murder capital of the world,
under orders from Pablo Escobar.
In Colombia it's been one of the most violent nights
since the latest attempt to bring the cartels to heel.
There were 13 bombs which went off overnight,
35 people were injured.
In Medellin, two employees of the newspaper El Espectador,
which has crusaded against the drug trade, were assassinated.
In response to the carnage, the Colombian government
finally allows more United States DEA boots on the ground.
I went to Colombia
and I thought that I was prepared for what I was walking into.
I knew it was going to be a rough situation
and it was going to be tough.
I knew it was a very dangerous situation.
But I had no idea that it was going to be that hard.
When Joe Toft arrives in Colombia
as station chief of the DEA's Bogota office in 1987,
he's tasked with capturing Escobar.
But his toughest job is navigating
the touchy relationship with the Colombian government.
We don't have any authority in a foreign country.
And so whatever power you have in those locations is informal.
We had had a much more traditional approach.
"Could we please do this? Would you let us do that?"
Which one should do in a foreign country, obviously,
but there was a lot of, "No, you can't do that.
"Nope, sorry, we don't want this to happen.
"No, you have to ask permission to do this and this."
In a country where Pablo Escobar has spent years corrupting local
government and law enforcement, trust is hard to come by.
The corruption level was so great out there
that it reached the highest levels,
A lot of the cops that were allegedly hunting Pablo Escobar
were actually on the payroll of Pablo Escobar.
When you work in these third-world environments like Colombia,
the police are not paid that much.
So as a result he had a lot of police in his pocket.
People say, "Well, how bad was corruption?"
95% of the operations that the police ran were compromised.
It was a very difficult obstacle to overcome.
In Colombia, where a single cartel bribe could be 10-20 times
an agent's yearly salary, corruption is rife.
But nonetheless, DEA agents frequently combine efforts
with DAS, the Colombian equivalent to the FBI.
As opposed to sending in the DEA just to beat down doors
and sort of trying to dictate terms, you had to create some level
of cooperation with the Colombian government.
For US DEA agents on the ground, good information is critical,
and to get it they must find ways to intercept cartel communications.
Every organisation in the world, illegal or legal,
has to be able to communicate.
So when you're trying to infiltrate an organisation
you focus in on that.
One crucial method is wiretaps,
which occur when an agent splices into a suspect's phone line.
We used to have like 50 lines
with the old Ranch recorders on the shelves.
And there would be about five analysts.
Beyond the tech, agents rely most on human assets -
informants willing to risk their lives to help.
Pablo hated informants.
But he just didn't have them killed, he had them tortured first,
because he wanted to know everything they had told the government.
I've seen photographs of one of the bodies.
It's unspeakable.
Through bribes or extortion,
Pablo has spent years stacking the deck in his favour.
Still, he knows the DEA is mounting forces against him,
and extradition to a US prison is his biggest threat.
And Pablo Escobar deals with every threat the same way - violently.
In 1987, the people of Colombia are subjected to violent,
daily acts of narcoterrorism.
Drug-related violence is so pervasive in Colombia
that the threat of death, even the fear of death,
extends to almost every segment of the society, even the children.
All at the hands of the Pablo Escobar and his Medellin Cartel.
When Pablo killed people, he wanted credit.
Escobar's motivation is simple.
Knowing that he can't intimidate
or bribe his way out of an American arrest,
he's using the violence to pressure Colombia's government
to revoke its extradition agreement with the United States.
He didn't kill just you. He killed your children,
your wife, whole families,
Those were the lengths he was willing to go to,
to protect himself.
It all comes back to extradition.
Escobar and fellow cartel collaborators even start
a sinister public relations campaign to make sure the terrified public
understands just who's behind the violence and why.
They form a group called The Extraditables.
He had these leaflets and business cards made up.
And it said on there The Extraditables. Bold letters,
And underneath that was their saying.
"Better a grave in Colombia than a prison cell in the United States."
So what he's doing is he's sending a message to the government.
"As long as you support extradition, I'm going to continue
"to support my murderous campaign of killing innocent people."
He wanted the world to know that I'm still in control.
Escobar's brutal strategy works, and in 1987,
after more than 3,000 car bombs,
22,000 murders, including judges,
the Colombian Supreme Court breaks,
striking down its extradition treaty with the United States.
The US Government is stripped of its most powerful weapon
against Escobar. But the DEA is still determined to serve justice,
which means the US agents must find Colombian agents they can trust
and take down Escobar together.
I quickly learned that this was their country. It's not ours.
It wasn't a one way street.
In 1988, DEA agent Javier Pena arrives in Bogota
as a seasoned field agent,
having worked to infiltrate smuggling rings north of the border.
His mission is clear - use his intelligence gathering skills
to help Colombian forces capture or kill Pablo Escobar
and end his reign of terror.
The search for Pablo Escobar, to me, was personal,
because of my friends that he killed.
Back in the States, Javier developed a reputation
as a master recruiter of informants,
with a gut instinct that told him good info from a set-up.
The main key was corroboration.
Once they started providing information that was leading
to results, then we knew who to trust.
But Javier's instincts can't protect him from the random brutal violence
that is Escobar's trademark.
I feared Pablo Escobar.
My biggest fear was being at the wrong place at the wrong time.
As Javier spends more time in Bogota,
it becomes obvious the dangers he faces are not so random.
He's on Pablo's radar - a dangerous place to be.
We intercepted telephone calls
that narcotics traffickers from the Medellin Cartel had identified
the address where Javier lived, his exact address,
even the apartment number.
So the embassy relocated him.
It wasn't all that much longer later it happened again,
and they found his second apartment.
But he was so dedicated to the mission.
He said, "Just find me another apartment,"
And he continued on with the job. He maintained his focus.
In a country flush with drug money and rife with corruption,
finding local law enforcement they can trust is tough
for US DEA agents on the ground in Colombia.
But no Colombian took the fight to Pablo Escobar
like General Maza Marquez, Director of DAS,
the Colombian equivalent to the FBI.
Pablo Escobar hated General Maza Marquez.
Escobar was trying to kill him constantly.
Pablo tried to kill him seven different times.
He sent a letter bomb to his office.
He would set bombs in the streets of Bogota
as his vehicle was going through.
Desperate to kill General Maza Marquez,
Escobar coordinates his most violent bombing yet.
And in the fall of 1989,
he drives pure destruction to DAS's front door.
He took 500kg of dynamite, TNT,
put it in a bus and parked a bus outside of the headquarters
of the DAS building.
Detonated the bomb.
I remember I was at our old embassy,
and our embassy shook when that bomb went off.
There was a crater on the street probably 10, 15 deep.
And the carriage of the bus that contained the bomb
ended up on top of the 11th floor of the building.
The General survives, but 100 innocent lives are lost.
I mean, how vicious can one person be?
It's just unbelievable.
While Escobar's violence escalates,
back home, the United States government steps up its efforts.
When President Bush takes the Oath of Office in 1989,
he reinforces the US war effort in Colombia with a flood of cash
and a commitment to take out Escobar.
This is crack cocaine seized a few days ago
by drug enforcement agents
in a park just across the street from the White House.
It's as innocent looking as candy
but it's turning our cities into battle zones
and it's murdering our children.
This stuff is poison.
If we face this evil as a nation united
this will be nothing but a handful of useless chemicals.
President Bush, who had history running the CIA,
he really had an international perspective
of how things were working.
The United States government is ready with cash, trained agents,
and a willingness to get its hands dirty
in the fight against Escobar.
What it needs is a partner in the Colombian government
who's ready to accept that help. In 1989, all hopes lie
in presidential candidate Luis Carlos Galan.
He was dynamic...
We used to love Luis Carlos Galan.
..and he's ready to take on the narcos.
Galan was a huge threat to Escobar
because he made the priority of his candidacy
the war on drugs and the war on the cartels.
He starts his campaign basically saying that,
"If I'm elected, I'm going to bring back extradition."
It's a threat Pablo Escobar won't take lightly.
By 1989, Pablo Escobar has created the largest
and most feared drug cartel the world has ever seen.
Every day he smuggles 15 tons of cocaine into the United States,
and rains brutal terror on Colombia.
So what he's doing is he's sending a message to the government.
"As long as you support extradition, I'm going to continue
"to support my murderous campaign of killing innocent people."
Now, a new opponent emerges as a threat to Escobar's empire,
and has become the hope of a nation.
On August 18th 1989,
Colombian presidential candidate Luis Carlos Galan
stands before a crowd of 10,000 at a rally outside the Colombian capital.
Luis Carlos Galan was
who I think most of the drug traffickers
believed was their biggest threat
in terms of someone who would actually extradite them
to the United States.
If elected, he's vowed to take a hardline on the narcos
that have wreaked havoc across the country.
In particular Pablo Escobar,
who's violent terrorist campaign
has killed a staggering 400 Colombians in the last year alone.
As Galan takes the stage, a gunman opens fire...
GUNSHOTS
..and assassinates him.
I'll never forget.
I was at a restaurant. The waitress comes over to us,
says, "They've just killed Galan.
"Everybody get outta here, they just declared martial law."
We left the restaurant. And it was chaos.
I remember the sirens, the police, military.
I remember crying for Luis Carlos Galan.
Galan was like the hope for the country.
That was like the end of a dream.
The killing of a presidential candidate
sends a shock wave through the country and the world.
The President of Colombia has declared his country
under a state of siege after gunmen last night assassinated
a leading presidential candidate and wounded ten other people.
Pablo Escobar has overplayed his hand.
Hours after Galan's death,
sitting Colombian president Virgilio Barco Vargas
finally declares all out war on Escobar
and turns to the US for help.
Colombia's survival is now at risk.
I was so happy after Barco declared war.
The idea that the Colombian government was getting
really serious about this was a very welcome sign for DEA.
Ambassador McNamara and myself visited President Barco
at which point he told us what he was doing
and we in turn told him we would support their effort in every way
we could. He ordered the military, he ordered the police
to raid every place that we knew that was associated with Escobar.
Built on the back of DEA intelligence,
over 350 raids are carried out in the first three days
of the war against Pablo, and one raid hits very close to home.
His pride and joy was Finca Napoles.
This was his primary ranch, this was his showplace.
The gate to the entrance to the ranch,
on top is a single engine aircraft. Well, he liked to brag,
"That's the first airplane I ever used to move a load of cocaine."
His jewel. He loved Finca Napoles.
Had a huge house on it, swimming pool.
Had a runway for airplanes to come in.
He had a fleet of aircraft, including jets.
Cars galore, air boats, jet skis, ski boats.
He had a zoo on it, brought in all these exotic animals.
Rhinos, zebras, camels.
He introduced elephants into Colombia.
Forced from his home, Escobar is on the run.
And as the war against him continues the Colombian government seizes
four tons of cocaine and over 11,000 cartel associates,
but not Pablo
whose long investment in loyalty among the poor of Medellin
is paying big dividends.
The challenge with Pablo was
that he had bought his way in
so that he knew every move the police were going to make,
and he had absolute loyalty from a whole army of people
with whom he would pay relatively little.
As soon as any truck or car would leave a police barracks,
someone would simply pull out their phones
and tell Pablo where the convoy was moving, where the car was moving.
Still, though he evades capture,
life on the run takes its toll on Escobar
and his multibillion dollar business.
He was still running his business but he was very uncomfortable
and the pressure that the government was putting on him
was very effective.
And over the next several months he responded with more bombs,
and more intimidation, more kidnappings, more threats.
Meanwhile, the 1989 Colombian presidential race
is in a sprint to election day.
The slain Galan is replaced by his debate chief
and a former finance minister, Cesar Gaviria,
who rallies Colombia against Escobar,
and puts him directly in Pablo's crosshairs.
On the run and under pressure, Pablo is desperate to end his persecution.
To do it, he's going to carry out his most craven act yet.
Escobar thought Cesar Gaviria was going to be onboard an airplane,
on the Avianca commercial airline that was going from Bogota to Cali.
Pablo entrusts one of his deadliest sicarios, La Quica,
to co-ordinate the mission.
La Quica got a briefcase and La Quica told another sicario,
"The boss, Pablo Escobar, is trusting you with this job.
"Here's a briefcase, it's a recording device.
"He wants you to record the guy who's going to be on your right.
When the plane takes off the sicario flips a switch and it's a bomb.
More than 100 people onboard were killed
when the Boeing 727 blew apart just after taking off from Bogota.
On November 27th 1989,
110 civilians lose their lives in the bombing,
including two Americans.
One life is spared - the target himself.
Gaviria narrowly escapes death
thanks to last-minute intel which keeps him off the plane.
That's as low as you can go.
That's how heinous this guy...
This is how evil Pablo Escobar... There...
I don't have enough adjectives in my vocabulary
to adequately describe just how terrible,
how horrible this man really is.
It's the kind of terrorism no country can let go unanswered.
The destruction of Avianca flight 203 makes one thing clear -
to fight Pablo Escobar, you have to become as violent as Pablo Escobar.
And some in Colombia are finally prepared to do it.
It's 1989, and after more than a decade of wanton violence
and destruction at the hands of Pablo Escobar,
US and Colombian forces have finally coordinated
a massive joint attack against the cocaine kingpin.
I'm here today to talk about war.
They've raided his home...
His pride and joy was Finca Napoles.
This was his primary ranch, this was his showplace.
..seized drugs and large amounts of cash,
and sent him on the run.
He was very uncomfortable
and the pressure that the government was putting on him
was very effective.
But the millions spent buying intense loyalty
from the poor of Medellin helps Escobar survive.
He had absolute loyalty from a whole army of people.
And somehow, even struggling to evade capture,
Escobar manages to run his empire,
determined to avoid his biggest fear, a US jail cell.
And over the next several months, you know,
he responded with more bombs, and more intimidation.
Cornered, Escobar lashes out with his most violent attack yet -
the bombing of Avianca flight 203 and the murder of 110 people.
Escobar becomes not just a threat to US and Colombian security,
but an international terrorist.
I think that the levels of violence that Pablo was willing to go to
with the bombing gave the United States
sort of a different view of the threat.
Presidential candidate Cesar Gaviria,
the actual target of the plane bombing,
goes on to win the 1989 election in a landslide.
Initially when President Gaviria was elected, you know,
I was somewhat optimistic because he talked about
the importance of bringing peace to Colombia.
Since the United States war on drugs began a decade ago,
US efforts had been stymied by Colombian government interference
and their unwillingness to provoke Escobar
or threaten him with extradition.
The US hopes Gaviria's election will finally deliver Escobar
to United States DEA agents, but, in December 1990,
Gaviria issues a decree that shatters the DEA's hope
of inflicting American justice on Escobar.
Gaviria, now president of a war-weary Colombia,
makes a deal any cartel head would jump at -
any trafficker who surrenders can confess to a single crime,
be housed in special jails,
and under no circumstances can they be extradited.
He gave in to every demand that Pablo Escobar asked for.
But Pablo wants it in writing.
And he gets his chance in 1991,
as the Colombian Congress goes into session to draft a new constitution.
It became very evident from intelligence that we were gathering
that Escobar was playing a very aggressive role
in trying to influence the assembly members by buying votes.
On June 19th 1991,
four years after Joe Toft arrived in Bogota hoping to capture Escobar,
the Colombian Congress votes to permanently outlaw extradition,
and hours later, Pablo surrenders on his own terms.
Pablo Escobar, the leader of the Medellin drug cartel,
gave up just hours after the Constitutional Assembly of Colombia
said no more extraditions to the US.
Later that same day,
a helicopter carries Pablo away to his private prison,
The Cathedral, where he'll carry out only a five-year sentence.
I remember watching it on TV as nobody was allowed to go
near the surrender site.
The DEA agents who've risked their lives to fight the cartel
can only watch as Pablo slips out of the United States' reach.
The day that Escobar surrendered,
um, I was sick.
It was one of those moments in your life where you say,
"What was all this for?
"What was all the innocent people that got killed,
"the police officers that got killed,
"all of this was for nothing."
While many in the DEA's Bogota office
are demoralised by Pablo's coup,
Steve Murphy arrives still determined
to break the back of the Medellin Cartel.
A veteran agent but new on the ground in Colombia
and speaking little Spanish, Steve quickly finds a perfect partner
in Javier Pena, a seasoned Bogota field agent.
My first week in Colombia, I arrived on a Sunday.
On Wednesday of that week is when Pablo Escobar surrendered
to his custom-built prison.
High in the mountains south of Medellin,
Escobar chooses a prison that gives him a commanding view
of his empire's capital city.
He personally selects who will be guarding him,
and the single crime he pleads guilty to.
Every other crime the man had ever committed in his life,
including thousands and thousands of murders,
were absolved, just went away.
There were no stipulations to take his wealth away from him.
In a stunning addition,
Escobar declares that no Colombian National Police will be allowed
within a 12-mile radius of his prison.
It's obvious to the DEA that Pablo's planning on running his operation
from within, which means the best way to hurt him
will be to continue disrupting his cartel.
We knew he wasn't going to stop his criminal activities.
I've been meeting with the Colombian National Police
in conjunction with Javier. We've been trying to collect intelligence
and investigative leads against Escobar.
Pena and Murphy's informants deliver devastating news.
Pablo's prison is no prison at all.
Pablo's imprisonment in the Cathedral
was a farce from the beginning.
Once Escobar entered the prison, he started furnishing the place.
Pablo is using a truck with a false wall
to smuggle in whatever contraband he desires.
Pablo's cell was a two-room suite with a full-size refrigerator,
flowery curtains that matched the upholstery on the couches,
with million-dollar pieces of artwork on the wall.
He had an audio-visual centre there.
I mean, it was quite, you know, the life of a millionaire narco
with barbecues and with parties and pretty women.
His prison is more of a fortress,
and earns the nickname Hotel Escobar.
The DEA tries to tell the Colombian government
that Escobar is embarrassing them but all warnings fall on deaf ears.
We started sharing our intelligence with the president,
and the president kept telling us that it was not true,
that our information was false.
If he accepts that intelligence, what is he going to do?
How does he accept the fact that his deal with Escobar was a failure?
Safely behind the walls of his prison,
with US extradition outlawed
and a massive army of sicarios ready to take orders,
Pablo steps up his efforts to maintain his cartel's dominance.
He puts day-to-day control of his empire
in the hands of his childhood friends,
Fernando Galeano and Gerardo Moncada.
When Pablo surrendered himself to the prison
he imposed what we call a war tax
on all his fellow members of the Medellin Cartel.
In exchange for his sacrifices,
Escobar demands each of his lieutenants pay him $200,000 a week,
and over the next year Escobar stashes away
hundreds of millions of dollars.
One day, some of his sicarios found a stash of money
that belonged to the Moncada and Galeano brothers.
This money had been shrink wrapped and hidden in a cave
and it was beginning to rot, and they said,
"Pablo, here you are suffering in a prison,
"and they think it's such a joke, they're just letting it rot away."
Pablo's cushy prison sentence
might have removed the threat of extradition,
but being isolated from his smuggling operation
leaves him feeling increasingly paranoid about threats
from within his own cartel,
causing Pablo to see betrayals at every turn.
So he summons Moncada and Galeano for an audience.
They start trying to explain to Pablo.
"Pablo, it's not what you're thinking.
"We were not hiding this money from you."
Pablo became so mad, so upset, he took a stick and killed,
personally killed, Moncada himself.
The sicarios, they jump in, they kill Fernando Galeano.
When Moncada and Galeano don't return from their slaughter
at the Cathedral, the scandal sweeps across Colombia.
Police started looking into it, and it became a...
The news media got involved and Gaviria had his nightmare -
it finally happened.
And it finally became too great an embarrassment
for the Colombian government to endure any more.
Allowing Pablo to commit murder from his luxury prison
is a political disaster for the Colombian government.
President Gaviria is forced into action.
The President calls in the Vice Minister of Justice,
a guy named Eduardo Mendoza.
Tells him, "I want you guys to take some troops up there,
"and I want you to transfer Pablo from Medellin to Bogota."
He's sending Mendoza, who was a young guy, he was 29 years old,
to ask Escobar to please allow for him to be moved to another location.
I honestly feel that he was petrified of Pablo Escobar
and the power that he yielded in Colombia.
While the US and DEA are left to watch the events unfold,
Mendoza arrives at the gates of the Cathedral with over 400 soldiers,
vastly outnumbering Escobar's 12 jailed sicarios.
But Mendoza's rank and file still fear Escobar's wrath
and refuse to storm his fortress.
So Mendoza decides to enter himself with only a Colombian colonel
and a few guards as protection.
I think Escobar made the incorrect decision
that he was going to be killed.
Driven by fear, Escobar and his crew overpower the guards
and take the Vice Minister and Mendoza hostage.
Pablo Escobar is trying to talk to the president of Colombia.
Nobody's answering the phone. Pablo Escobar is going ballistic.
He's getting madder and madder.
The sicarios want to kill the Vice Minister of Justice.
It's a nightmare scenario for the Colombian President -
a cartel leader has taken a high ranking official hostage
in an attempt to bring a president to heel.
The Colombian government is finally done letting Escobar dictate terms.
They bring in a specialised military unit.
They launch an operation to go save Mr Mendoza.
Now, you've got to remember,
all the guards at the prison were Escobar's people.
He selected the guards.
They engage the Colombian military in a firefight.
GUNFIRE, DOGS BARK
And Pablo has already planned
at least three successful escape routes out of there
and so his hit men go out one way, he went one way.
And Pablo walks out that door from his prison untouched.
Escobar and some of his cronies who came in with him
were installed here in a facility on a mountaintop.
The world was told it was a prison, but it was a prison in name only.
The 13 months Pablo Escobar had spent in the safety
of his private prison, The Cathedral,
had helped him maintain control of his cocaine kingdom,
with over 70 tons of coke landing on US shores each month.
And all the while, neither Colombian forces nor the United States DEA
could come within 12 miles of Escobar's luxury prison fortress.
But after Pablo brutally murders two of his top lieutenants,
the Colombian military storms The Cathedral,
only to find that Escobar has escaped.
It was a huge embarrassment for the Gaviria government,
who had been assuring both the United States and his own people
that everything was under control, and the United States was left
saying, essentially, "We told you so."
We thought it was ridiculous. It was a joke.
Gaviria's fear of Escobar nailed him.
I mean, he looked like a fool.
Lots of questions and finger pointing today,
but no sign at all of Colombian cocaine boss Pablo Escobar.
Escobar's escape is bad for a humiliated President Gaviria,
but good for the US DEA agents,
who have a new opportunity to capture him.
Gaviria is forced to ask the DEA for help.
It was a good moment for me
because I was overjoyed over the fact that he had to face the truth.
So he said, "You know, we gotta do something. You guys gotta help us."
And every American at the US Embassy in Bogota
is ready to come to Colombia's aid.
That's not something that cops normally would celebrate,
you know, when a criminal escapes,
but that was a day that we all celebrated.
I was happy. I was real happy
because we were given another chance
to go after Pablo Escobar.
What follows is the biggest manhunt in DEA history.
And the Colombian government commissions an elite task force
whose sole focus will be hunting Escobar -
the Search Bloc, Colombia's most elite national police unit.
They picked the best of the Colombia National Police officers.
They brought in the best of their tactical unit,
the uniform guys who were especially trained for mountain operations,
for urban operations.
They had about 500 uniformed police officers.
And they had the plainclothes officers
who were the intelligence-gathering arm of the Search Bloc.
And the only mission was going after Pablo Escobar.
The first order of business is to make sure nobody in the Search Bloc
is compromised by Escobar.
Not a single one of those police officers was from Medellin.
They had to leave their families.
They were all brought in from other parts of Colombia
to try to escape the potential for corruption.
Command of the Search Bloc is considered the most dangerous post
in all of Colombia, and nobody wants it.
So the Colombian government turns to a man who has proven incorruptible,
and is an old enemy of Escobar's - Colonel Hugo Martinez.
Pablo Escobar hated, hated, Colonel Martinez.
There's one letter that Colonel Martinez received from Pablo Escobar
that Pablo was going to kill the Colonel's family.
I'll always remember that day - the look in Colonel Martinez's eyes.
The guy had guts.
You know what, Colonel Martinez never gave up.
Before Escobar's surrender to The Cathedral,
Colonel Martinez had led the hunt for Pablo.
Now, given a second chance to capture Escobar
he and the Search Bloc know they need to work alongside
the United States' best agents, Steve Murphy and Javier Pena.
Javier and I had earned the respect of the Colombian National Police
and they knew that we were dedicated to the mission.
We had proven ourselves in battle before with them,
and they trusted us. That's what led to the invitation
for us to come and live with them full-time.
So Steve and Javier leave their life in Bogota behind,
and head to Medellin in July 1992.
And everybody lived in the same place.
The famous Carlos Holguin School, it was an old police base in Medellin.
There was one time when Pablo hired a lady to become a cook,
there in the police base.
She gained everybody's trust, and she was doing a good job as a cook.
And then she put poison in the food, trying to kill us.
We didn't die, obviously. Nobody died. We were sick
and we spent a lot of time in the bathroom there for a while.
In South America today, a powerful reminder, if one were needed,
how determined and dangerous the Colombian drug traffickers remain.
Escobar's loyal army of sicarios prove as deadly as ever.
In the first 15 days of the Search Bloc's operation,
Escobar murders 30 of Colonel Martinez's men.
So they have to move quickly.
Wiretaps are going up left and right, informants are calling.
We're trying to pursue every potential lead we can.
Primarily restricted to advising and gathering intelligence
for the Colombians, Steve and Javier are further limited
by orders from their own embassy.
The orders from the US Embassy were
that we were to stay within the confines of the base in Medellin.
Now, Javier and I, we've never broken the law.
But we did break rules and policies and procedures.
We would go out and meet informants.
One of the places we met lots of informants
was the big bus station in Medellin. It's huge,
and it was a little bit easier for us to blend in there.
Cartel sicarios and lookouts are everywhere.
And every time an agent meets with an informant,
both are risking their lives,
but the critical information Steve and Javier learn on the street
forms the backbone of the DEA strategy
to dismantle Escobar's organisation.
We were targeting his assets,
and we seized tremendous amounts of money from Escobar.
throughout the world. not only in Colombia.
We were targeting his labs. We were targeting his properties.
We'd go on patrols in the mountains
where the helicopters would bring you in.
You just, you come in, you hit the ground,
and you bail out the doors, and typically Javier and I would go
with whoever the commander of the operation was.
You kick the doors and you go in and search.
But unlike their Colombian counterparts,
Steve and Javier rush into danger at a disadvantage.
They had the machine guns and the shotguns.
Javier and I were allowed to carry one 9mm pistol with two magazines.
We weren't allowed to carry a long gun at all.
The government of Colombia and the US government
did not want the appearance
that the United States was there leading the efforts.
After Escobar's escape, he manages to evade capture for months,
as the Search Bloc launches daily raids in and around Medellin.
But Pablo is nowhere to be found.
We knew that when Pablo was on the lam
after he'd escaped from his prison, that he was communicating.
And we also knew that he knew he couldn't stay on the phone too long.
Because we'd... You would hear him say that on the intercepts -
"I've got to hang up now."
It was extremely hard to hunt Pablo, not only because of the corruption
but also because of the fact that he was constantly moving.
He hardly ever stayed in any one place more than a couple days.
He had an incredibly loyal base of people where he could hide,
where people viewed him as a really good guy,
the only person who had ever done anything for them,
and where no-one was going to rat him out to the police.
His loyalty to them, and theirs to him, was unconditional.
Often, it seems the DEA's noose is tightening,
only to see Escobar somehow slip through.
We almost found him several times.
There was a couple of operations in which we were there.
He had just left.
The coffee was still hot. The food was still hot.
We would find weapons stashed, communications gear,
military-style clothing, ammo, hand grenades,
almost anything you can think of that you need to fight a war.
Despite many close calls, Escobar is still on the loose.
So the DEA takes a page out of Pablo's playbook
and tries to turn his allies against him with money,
and asylum in the United States.
We established a countrywide 800 number for people to call in
with tips about Pablo Escobar.
And the United States government was offering a $5 million reward
if you provided the information that led to the capture of Pablo.
Steve and Javier's information yields bigger and bigger results,
enabling the DEA and the Search Bloc
to catch Pablo's violent sicarios off guard.
We were taking out other members of his organisation.
Not by particularly traditional means.
It's like, we know for a fact, 100% of these guys,
when we surrounded them, we tried to get them to come out
because we wanted to take them alive.
And 100% of them came out shooting.
The Colombian National Police had no alternative
but to react and protect themselves.
But the more success they have,
the more they hurt the cartel's business,
the more dangerous things become for the DEA agents on the ground.
For their efforts,
Steve and Javier are each rewarded with a price on their heads.
Pablo Escobar had put bounties on us.
The bounty on police officers,
Colombian National police officers, at $100 a head.
Pablo put a bounty on Javier and I as well.
And the bounty was $300,000 each.
With prices on their heads
and an army of assassins walking the streets of Colombia,
the DEA agents are in a race to get Escobar before he can get them.
In January of 1993, it's been almost six months
since he's escaped from his prison fortress,
and Pablo Escobar is still on the run.
United States DEA agents Steve Murphy and Javier Pena
are in Medellin, embedded with the most elite police unit
in Colombian history - the Search Bloc -
hunting Escobar from safehouse to safehouse.
The troops scoured the nearby jungles and farms repeatedly,
swooping down on houses and setting up roadblocks,
hunting for Pablo Escobar,
the billionaire cocaine trafficker who killed anyone who opposed him.
But just as the DEA gets a lead on Escobar's location,
Pablo gets tipped off on their arrival.
The cocaine kingpin stays a step or two ahead
of a frustrated Search Bloc.
It's discouraging when you continually follow up on operations
and you're unsuccessful,
and you just think, "Man, is this ever going to end?
"Are we ever going to capture this guy?"
But in their fight against Escobar, help comes from a surprising source.
What we did not expect is the involvement of the Los Pepes.
Shortly after he escaped, the Los Pepes entered the picture.
Los Pepes, the people persecuted by Pablo Escobar,
are the newest player in the war that rages across Colombia.
While the members are anonymous, their mission is not,
and they release statements to warn Pablo
that they're ready for a fight.
Pepes - the vigilantes waging war on those associated
with the notorious drug lord.
We started getting intelligence as to who the Los Pepes were.
Names start popping up that the Los Pepes
were actually people in the Medellin Cartel.
We couldn't quite see what the hell was happening.
After Pablo Escobar killed two of his top men inside The Cathedral,
Fernando Galeano and Gerardo Moncada,
it created a rift in the Medellin Cartel,
with everyone wondering if they'd be next.
Former rivals, survivors,
of business partners he had killed, and others,
joining forces in a kind of illicit collaboration.
These were people who knew Pablo's habits.
They knew the way he thought.
Los Pepes' strategy is to turn Pablo's tactics against him.
And they decided to play dirty. In other words,
to go to try to kill anybody
associated with Pablo Escobar.
Whatever properties they found associated with Escobar,
they'd blow them up.
If you were in any way associated with Pablo Escobar
they would kill you. If you were Pablo's attorneys,
if you were Pablo's doctors, innocent people being killed.
Los Pepes are sending a clear message to Escobar.
They went after people who worked with Escobar,
to say, "Look, if you can't defend them,
"then people will see that you're powerless,"
which for a guy like Escobar, was intolerable, obviously.
Escobar's power came through intimidation.
To have former underlings hunting him
makes Escobar rattled and paranoid.
And Los Pepes turns up the heat by targeting
the people he cares for most.
Their main targets were to kill Pablo Escobar's mother,
his wife and his children.
In 1976, Pablo had married Maria Victoria Henao,
only 14 at the time and 11 years younger than Pablo.
The pair had two children - Juan Pablo, born in 1977,
and Manuela in 1984.
Los Pepes strike at Escobar's family, detonating car bombs
outside the Medellin apartment buildings where they sleep.
The initial public reaction to Los Pepes was all positive.
They felt like somebody was finally meeting Pablo on his own terms.
And it was putting a lot of pressure on Pablo,
which worked in our favour.
We were picking up Escobar on wiretaps.
He's feeling more and more isolated, he's feeling he can't trust anybody.
He's feeling that people around him are disappearing.
Sooner or later we felt he was going to make a mistake.
By late 1993, 15 months after his escape from prison,
with constant attacks from Los Pepes and the DEA on his heels,
Pablo is desperate to get his family out of Colombia and into safety.
He wants his family out of the country in the worst possible way,
because he figures that the Los Pepes
will eventually get to his family.
Escobar is scared, rattled, but defiant,
ready to unleash mass violence
as soon as he can get his family out of harm's way.
Pablo started to come up on the monitor a little bit more.
We knew that if Pablo got his family to a place of safety
he was going to declare war against the country of Colombia -
a war like we had never seen.
As a sign of their desperation,
Pablo's family turns to an unlikely source for help.
At one point the son appears at the embassy
wanting to speak to the ambassador. The ambassador calls me and says,
"Escobar's son is downstairs. Do you want to talk to him?"
I said, "Sure, I'll talk to him."
So Juan Pablo Escobar, only 16 years old,
faces off with the DEA chief hunting his father.
And basically what he said is, "I'm here to beg for US visas.
"You know, we've got to get out of the country.
"Los Pepes are going to kill us."
I basically said, "I'm sorry, I can't help you."
And I felt sorry for the kid. I mean, he'd seen a lot.
Despite Toft turning them down, the Escobars manage to acquire US visas.
The DEA knows that if they leave Colombia,
there's nothing to stop Pablo from raining more terror than ever.
Javier Pena races to the Medellin airport,
desperate to catch the Escobars.
The family's destination is Pablo's old US base.
Pablo Escobar had a lot of associates in the Miami area.
So, sure enough, they had tickets to go to Miami.
They had US visas on their passports.
How brazen, coming to the United States!
As Pablo's family boards the flight for Miami, Javier stops the plane,
and turns to the US ambassador for guidance.
The ambassador gets on the phone
and orders Javier to take their passports
and tear the US visas out of the passports.
With the door to the US sealed shut, Escobar hatches a new plan.
I remember the cops calling me, saying,
"Hey, the Escobar family bought tickets for a whole bunch
"of different flights, maybe even different countries."
On November 29th 1993, the DEA sends Steve and Javier
to the El Dorado Airport in Bogota to run surveillance,
where they get word the Escobar family
is attempting to escape to Germany.
We realised that Escobar was going to do everything he could
to get the family out of there.
And, sure enough, he tried to get them to go to Germany.
They boarded an airplane.
I put an agent and a cop on the plane.
As Escobar's family flies to Germany,
the DEA knows forcing them back to Colombia
is their only chance to exploit Pablo's greatest weakness.
Washington begins to exert pressure on the government of Germany
to not allow the Escobar family entry into the country.
The ambassador called the State Department in Washington.
I called the DEA in Washington.
I called the German Embassy. We told them what the hell was going on.
I said, "You've got to help us. We've got to deny him."
So when the flight finally landed in Frankfurt,
the family was placed in quarantine.
The next morning they were placed on a flight back to Bogota.
With his family trapped in Colombia, in the crosshairs of Los Pepes,
Escobar is alone and on the run, and the United States DEA closes in,
knowing there's nothing Escobar won't do to avoid capture.
Escobar just lost it.
Lost it.
By the fall of 1993,
Pablo Escobar has been evading capture for over a year
since he escaped from his prison fortress.
In addition to the United States DEA and Colombian forces
using all their resources to flush him out,
a violent group of rival cartel members called Los Pepes
has declared war on Escobar and his family.
These were people who knew Pablo's habits.
They knew the way he thought.
Escobar is desperate to move his family out of harm's way,
so he can launch his most epic war against Colombia
without anything to lose.
He wants his family out of the country in the worst possible way.
But on November 29th, after succumbing to US pressure,
Germany sends Escobar's family back to Bogota.
The government decides to put the family
in a very nice hotel in downtown Bogota.
Despite being the most wanted man in Colombia,
the government agrees to protect the lives of Escobar's family.
They asked for protection
because they were being targeted by the Los Pepes.
That's the right thing to do. They would have been slaughtered.
But the Colombian government's generosity has an ulterior motive.
Putting Escobar's family under government protection
infuriates Pablo and puts him under more pressure.
Pablo, because of his necessity,
starts talking to his son, Juan Pablo,
using a radio-type telephone.
In the early '90s cellphones are still extremely rare.
Pablo's radiotelephone allows him to communicate with his son
by selecting one out of thousands of standard radio frequencies
and having both Escobars dial in to the same number.
The DEA knows their best chance to find Pablo
is to figure out that frequency.
The challenge here is scanning the entire radio frequency spectrum
in the hopes of stopping on the exact frequency
that the one person you want to hear is talking at the exact same time
you stop on that frequency.
Talk about trying to find a needle in a haystack.
But Javier's skill at cultivating informants
is about to pay huge dividends.
One of his informants happened to be one of the guards at the hotel
who was walking through the room one day
when Juan Pablo was talking to his father.
The informant happened to look down,
saw the frequency that they were talking on, memorised it,
and called Javier and said, "This is the frequency."
Once Pablo's frequency is identified,
the DEA turns to a World War II-era spy technique - triangulation.
Triangulation uses high-powered antennas
to scan for the source direction of Pablo's frequency
while he's on the phone. Once the first point is charted,
aerial surveillance pulls additional coordinates to create a zone
as large as several city blocks around the source of the call.
When three coordinates are confirmed,
pairs of high-tech surveillance vans deploy across Medellin
in an attempt to close in on the source.
20-plus years ago, the margin of error was pretty large.
And you're talking about a city of Medellin
that's 2-2.5 million people, densely populated.
Escobar manages to evade surveillance
with constant movement and short calls.
But after nearly a year and a half on the run,
a frustrated and war-weary Pablo finally gets sloppy.
He is so upset over the fact
that his family has been denied entry into Germany,
he starts talking on the phone a long time to his kids.
There was a Colombian National Police officer
named Lieutenant Hugo Martinez.
Lieutenant Martinez is the son of Search Bloc leader
Colonel Hugo Martinez.
What you have here is a good guy father-son team -
Colonel Martinez and Lieutenant Martinez -
going after the bad guy father-son team -
Pablo Escobar talking to his son, Juan Pablo Escobar.
The younger Martinez has taught himself how to track
radio frequencies, and has spent months tracking Pablo.
Then, on December 2nd 1993,
only three days after the Escobar family returns to Colombia
from Germany, he locks on to Pablo's signal.
He was having trouble locating the signal.
Apparently there was a creek somewhere in the vicinity
and that signal was bouncing from the water,
so he was desperately trying to find the location.
In Lieutenant Martinez's own words, he says he's driving down the street
and his meter's telling him to look up to the left.
He looks up, and there's Pablo talking on the phone,
looking out the window of a three-storey row house.
He called his father for help.
And he says, "I got a location on him.
"I have a visual on him, he's on the phone."
DEA field agents and thousands of Colombian National Police
have risked or given their lives hoping for this moment.
Pablo Escobar, the richest and most violent drug kingpin
in world history, is cowering in a modest three-storey row house
in the Medellin suburbs.
With an army of informants on the street,
Escobar has stayed one step ahead of the Search Bloc.
This sighting is an opportunity the DEA agents know won't last long.
I'm back at the police base,
I see activity at Colonel Martinez's office.
He motioned for me to come on in. And he's on the radio.
Colonel Martinez tells him,
"Secure the area. We're loading the troops."
Lieutenant Martinez knows that if he waits for his father, or the DEA,
Pablo might once again slip through their fingers.
It takes a while to get 600 people with all their weapons
and gear loaded up and out to this location.
Lieutenant Martinez made the decision to go in
with about seven of the plainclothes Search Bloc police officers.
Two officers circle to the back of the house to secure the property.
And Lieutenant Martinez launches his raid.
They blow open the front door...
EXPLOSION ..they make their way up the steps.
They heard Pablo say on the phone,
"I got to go, there's something going on here."
The raid catches Pablo off guard,
and as the Search Bloc moves through the house,
what they find surprises them.
Here's a man, who at one point in his heyday
had as many as 500 sicarios surrounding him, working for him.
Pablo Escobar only had one bodyguard left.
Inside the cramped row house, Pablo is outnumbered, afraid,
and about to make his last stand.
GUNSHOTS, SCREAMING
For more than two decades, Pablo Escobar built the largest,
most lucrative and most violent drug kingdom the world had ever seen.
He'd held his own poor nation hostage
while keeping a superpower at bay.
It was extremely hard to hunt Pablo, not only because of the corruption
but also because of the fact that he was constantly moving.
But now, on December 2nd 1993,
after a 16-month manhunt through the jungles and cities of Colombia,
the Search Bloc, with the aid of the United States DEA
and agents Steve Murphy and Javier Pena,
has cornered Pablo Escobar inside a three-storey row house
on the outskirts of Medellin.
Surrounded by his enemies,
Escobar has only one bodyguard left to protect him.
Pablo's lone bodyguard, Limon,
goes out the window onto the roof of the two-storey house
behind the row house Pablo was in,
and he started shooting at the two police officers on the ground.
They returned fire...
GUNSHOTS ..he takes off running,
thinking he's going to escape.
The cops engage him in a firefight.
He's shot off the roof and he falls dead on the ground.
As the Search Bloc makes its way through the safehouse,
Pablo begins to exchange fire.
Pablo Escobar is shooting at the police,
the police shooting at Pablo. GUNSHOTS
As they get to the second floor,
they see Pablo on the third floor, looking down.
And he actually shoots at one of the police officers.
He tripped on the step and fell flat on his face, which saved his life
because the bullet went over his head and missed him.
Pablo is pinned down, desperate for a way out.
Pablo gets up to that third floor window.
He climbs out the window down to the second level.
He wants to make his way out, but he doesn't see Limon,
so he knows something bad's happened.
All alone and with the Search Bloc closing in,
Pablo tries to make an escape.
There was an area of that roof
that the guys on the ground could not see you,
if you were in that area.
But Pablo knew the police officers were coming up the steps,
and they would be able to look out the window and see him.
They followed him to the rooftop.
And while they're chasing him, he's got two pistols,
and he is shooting at the police. The police are shooting at him.
Once Pablo Escobar is forced into the open,
alone, with no army of bodyguards to protect him, his fate is sealed.
There's no way for him to hide.
He tries to make a run across the roof.
They catch him in a crossfire... GUNSHOTS
..and he's killed right there on top of that roof.
Colombia's 20-year hell is over in only 20 minutes.
In a barrage of final gunfire,
cocaine kingpin Pablo Escobar finally meets his fate.
Pablo was shot three times.
Once in the back of the leg, once in the rump -
which are knock-down shots, but neither one of those are kill-shots.
And then the kill shot was through the right ear.
With a final bullet, the DEA's decades-long hunt
for the world's most wanted criminal becomes its greatest victory.
You could hear across the radio, "Viva Colombia, Pablo is dead."
I got to tell you, we were pretty happy.
It felt like the weight of the world
had been lifted off of everybody's shoulders.
There's high fives, there's back slapping.
It's hard to explain the exhilaration we all felt,
because this thing was finally over.
It was the mission of any DEA agent's life,
but Steve Murphy has one final task to complete it.
I run back to call my number one boss, Joe Toft.
The phone rang and Steve Murphy's on the phone.
And Steve says, "Boss, Pablo is dead!"
He says, "Murph, I want you to get your camera and get out there
"and make confirmation this is Pablo Escobar."
If you look at his photo, he was barefooted,
he was fat, unkempt.
It was signs of a person who was running,
who was hiding, who was not organised.
One of those photographs, I'm in there.
The reason we're all smiling is because every single one of us knew
that effective the very second that Pablo Escobar was killed,
every citizen in the country of Colombia was safer,
simply because one man was dead.
I got to the Colombian National Police Headquarters
and bottles of champagne are popping.
All the innocent people, all the police officers,
all the politicians,
dignitaries, that were killed by Pablo Escobar.
Colombia finally took their country back.
Pablo Escobar, the Colombian drug king, who was for years
one of the world's most wanted men, was gunned down today.
On December 3rd 1993,
Pablo Escobar, and the reign of terror he inflicted on the Colombian
and American public, is buried in Medellin.
In the wake of Pablo's shooting, Escobar's family is forced to flee
the country by Pablo's rivals, fearing for their lives.
His once mighty cartel is dismantled.
With the demise of Pablo Escobar, this was the first
in international law enforcement history in which we had completely
taken out an entire cocaine criminal organisation.
No narco would ever possess
the unimaginable power or wealth of Escobar.
And no longer would a single figure like Pablo
control the entire chain of cocaine supply.
But what he had invented left blueprints for others to follow.
All these years later,
what's the legacy associated with Pablo Escobar?
In my opinion, his legacy has never been anything
but death and destruction.