Warning: Graphic content, readers’ discretion advised. This story contains a recollection of crime and can be triggering to some readers discretion advised.
Pablo Escobar was a small-time thug who became the most feared cocaine trafficker in the world. Backed up by an army of killers and informers he dominated the infamous Medellin cocaine cartel and turned the South American nation of Colombia into a living hell. Anyone who stood against him was bought off or killed. But one DEA agent was determined to bring Escobar’s reign of terror to an end. Working with an elite force of Colombian police he smashed the drug king’s empire and rid Colombia of his evil influence once and for all.
november 27,1989, avianca flight 203 takes off on a routine flight from bogota international airport in colombia.
five minutes later ,the boeing 727 is ripped apart by a massive explosion
110 people are killed , the death certificates red : cause of death blunt trauma due to falling from aircraft.
the plane exploded in midair and then crashed and while the plane was going down many people where still alive on that plane.
colombian accident investigators soon established that this was no tragic accident.
there was a cassette recorder where somebody was duped into believing that when they maintained a certain altitude that it would turn on that cassette recorder and they would receive certain instructions .
the colombian authorities realized the target of the attack was this presidential candidate cesar gavilia , who canceled his flight at the last minute. gavilia has staked his political career on denouncing colombia’s most infamous cocaine godfather Pablo escobar.
imagine on man ordering the destruction of an aircraft and well over a hundred people on board had to perish because of his one desire to kill one man. two of the dead held U.S passports.
escobar’s indiscriminate slaughter has laid him open to the full weight of american justice .
there was always a big effort to capture pablo escobar but this placed it on a worldwide scale because at that point in time you can charge somebody with terrorism which creates a much greater jurisdiction when it came to american authoritites and charges that you could pursue against an individual.
the destruction of flights 203 is the latest outrage in a brutal criminal career
that began when escobar was just a boy .
the son of a farmer and a school teacher the future drug lord grew up in the dangerous streets of medellin in the northwest of columbia.
they initially started robbing gravestonees from cemeteries and shaving and then reselling them he was known to local law enforcement he was a car thief, he was a bit of a thug a juvenile delinquent ,that was his background.
but he soon realized there was a better way to make big bucks , smuggling cocaine.
at the time cocaine was grown and processed in chile , peru and bolivia . then the marijuana smugglers of colombia began to take an interest in this more profitable drug .
they started to bring in cocaine from peru .
from bolivia and converting it into cocaine hydrochloride and then from there if they had access to the caribbean ocean and they were able to use some of the caribbean islands as transshipment points into the united states . principally southern florida
by 1985 ,eight million americans are hooked on the cocaine flooding into the country from colombia.
The DEA faces an uphill battle to identify the traffickers behind the surge in demand for this new must -have drug.
the 1989 were really the boom era if you will , of cocaine in united states and for some reason it became a status symbol, it bevame a fad and you were not part of the in crowd unless you had large quantities of cocaine or use large quantities of cocaine and as a result of that it became the economic law of supply and demand and the colombian criminals are probably some of the more astute in the world .
and emmissaries of the cartels from colombia coming into united states and opening up distribution points throughout the united states .
there was states there was a market for cocaine and there was nobody filling the market and so colombia jumped in because they were very well positioned geographically and they had the infrastructure and they had the know -how.
at 26. escobar enters the cocaine business and rises quickly from smuggler to trafficker and then producer. nothing and no one gets n his way.
he was arrested in the early 1980’s with 18 kilograms of cocaine by the colombian national police, he was let go because he threatened the judge and then he went after the police officers that arrested him and had them all killed .
Escobar became very powerful ,because he was willing to do whatever it took to advance the cocaine buisness.
by the mid -1980s he is head of the powerful and infamous cocaine organization known as the medellin cartel. and the payoff is colossal.
pablo escobar’s organization was huge he had the money to make it huge.
Forbbes magazin came out with their richest men in the world and he was right near the top of the list so right off the bat you knew that this man was not a millionaire he was a billionair.
escobar flaunts his immense fortune by building a vast luxury estate in the hills near medellin.
the ranch had nine man- made lakes
water slides
life -sized dinoaurs made out of fiberglass
he easily spent about maybe about 10 million dollars in cconstructing that ranch
the cocaine godfather tainted millions by more than just fancy homes.he uses them to win the hearts and minds of the poor.paying for food banks, hospitals and homes for slum dwellers.
makes escobar a hero .
pablo escobar exploited poverty but he was doing that not for altruistic but for very selfish reasons to make sure that people weren’t selling him out that they looked upon him as the robin hood and he had places to go and hide then if necessary
escobar is so convinced that his robin hood image will make him untouchable, he takes the extraordinary step entering politics, he wanted to be elected to office so it would bring some sort of legitimacy to pablo escobar.
escobar’s money has bought him so much popular support he’s a shoeing as a local representive to the colombian congress.a position that guarantees immunity for past crimes. but then the escobar roller coaster hits the buffers .
in april 1984 the justice minister rodrigo lara bonilla accuses him outright of bribery and corruption he has signed his own death warrant.
lara bonilla leaves his office ,he’s being tracked by a motorcycle,he’s in his car,the motorcycle weaves to the right hand side of the vehicle and shoot bonilla several times in the head
the shooter was 16 years old, and the driver of theat motorcycle was 19 years old. that would vbe equivalent to very young teenagers assassinating the attorney general of the united states.
bonilla’s murder sends chock waves through colombia . it seems escobar has finally gone too far and then the game changed completely.
because then escobar had directly attacked the colombian government and that was something that no sitting president no city colombian government could tolerate .
he realized he lost his protection that’s when he turned to violence big time.
it’s almost like he lost his mind with it ,violence became his cause celeb of the day and if you were in his way he would get shot.
escobar beginsa reign of terror and his medellin stronghold this once booming commercial city becomes a killing field.
cadavers on the side of the road. in the evening a lot of those cadavers were still there.
because the police and the local authorities just couldn’t keep with a number of killings that were taking place in medellin.and it was at that time known as the murder capital of colombia
but one thing still spooks the king of medellin.the only thing escobar really feared was the feared exhibition to to the U.S and feared DEA as a result of that he felt that he could work his way around the rest.
escobar has been on the DEA’s radar since the the early 1980s but its agents need an iron- clad case to guarantee his extradition to the U.S now he uses his muscle and money to derail their investigation
the DEA aren’t the only ones who want escobar etxtradited .
in august 1989 presidential luis gallan makes it clear ifhe is elected , escobar will be on the first plane out of colombia.
but escobar strikes first ,gallans murder launches open warfare between escobar and the colombian government.
escobar’s attack on the authorities in colombia goes hand in hand with a tidel wave of his cocaine reaching the united states .
the more that comes in , the more the price goes down until millions are hooked .the addiction rates were skyrocketing, cocaine became an epidemic of trementdous proportions.
the order goes out to the DEA to focus all their efforts on taking escobar down . special agent in charge joe toft finds himself leading the hunt.
from day one out here , seizures the bombings that colombia was experiencing because with escobar and his efforts trying to intimidate the country. was much greater than joe toft thought.
but if anyone can get escobar is joe toft .
joe toft would be classified as a hard ass ,he was a compassionate hard ass but he demanded sucess and in this case he he made sure that no stone was left unturned
the DEA has no authoritiy to arrest escobar in colombia , instead they work hand in hand with an elit new colombian police unite.
escobar at the time as one of the most dangerous jobs in the world but any unit is only as good as its leader. and the colombian police find just the man a lean no- nonsense police colonel called hugo martinez.
the leadership has to be from a person that’s completely committed to the cause he’s gonna know that pablo escobar is going to try and hurt him to his family.
and martinez provedt o be that man . martinez has a personal score to settle. in 1989 escobar’s men murdered his best friend, his task is immense.informers working for escobar inside the colombian national police threatened to reveal every move he makes .
and escobar has lost none of the ruthless instincs that brought him to the top of the colombian cocaine trade.
joe Toft thought within a year or two they were able to get escobar but as time went by it became clear that the corruption factor, the intimidation factor made all of the normal police work that they would do up there pretty unlikely to succeed
despite colonel martinez efforts, escobar is tipped off by his sources in the police again and again. local unites were completely penetrated by escobar’s people and by those who where to benefit by protecting escobar.
using informants wiretaps and surveillance the DEA built picture of escobar’s network if they can’t get him they can get what he owns
in order to take down a drug empire there are numerous approaches that are taken . one of them is to attack the wealth to seize the assets.
starting with his lavish ranch .all escobar’s property is taken over by the government.
then it’s his cash and his cocaine.
the other thing they ‘re trying to cease as mich of his dope not as much of his cocaine as possible and they had record seizures.
sixty thousand kilos of cocaine and dozen of escobar’s rop men are grabbed by the police .
the drug lord’s retaliation is swift and lethal. pablo escobar put a 700 boundary for every police officer that was killed and they just started killing police officers like it was going out of style.
and that started a savage war…
and there was slaughter on the streets.
and medellin became a battleground between the drug traffickers and civil authorities.
Escobar’s thugs kill 30 search block officers in just 15 days. by 1991 a total of 457 police have been gunned down in medellin.
for joe toft the loss of so many colombian colleagues is almost unbearable.
escobar isn’t just targting colombian police officers at the top of his list hit list is the DEA chief himself.
and DEA wanted to pull him out of the country the ambassador said”your’re done here”
escobar has always been able to kill or threaten his way out of trouble.
but the blood flowing in the streets of medellin turns the tie against him .
and in jotov escobar has a relentless enemy. joe toft didn’t want to leave colombia without escobar being in jail or dead.
as the DEA and search block step up the pressure ,escobar blindsides them with the move no one exptected.on june 1991, he hands himself over to colombian authorities on the condition they deny U.S extradition requests.
the DEA can only watch as a helicopter flies him out of their reach to a private prison . when escobar turned himself in then DEA were extremely disappointed because they felt they were really getting close to him . it was just a matter of time.
sentenced to just eight years on a minor drugs charge, the authorities think escobar will be harmless behind bars.
as much the DEA did not approve . the government was facing a situation they never seen before , no governement has ever seen before where a man setting off explosives, paying off politicians, killing politicians, killing journalists, killing innocent civilians .what were they going to do they were searching for a solution .
form day one of his jail time .it’s obvious that escobar isn’t going to suffer behind bars . the whole complex has been designed and built by his organization . even the guards are on his payroll and no police are allowed within 12 miles.
they had a discotheque, soccer field with lights. big tv:s .
there’s stereos .
there were double walls that containe weapons. money , drugs . it was not a prison it was not a jail it was a country club living basically .
joe toft i s disgusted by the one -sided deal.
“it was just a complete capitulation by the government again because of fear.”
-joe taft
with the search block and DEA off his back , escobar has time to rebuild drug empire. thousands of kilos of cocaine are again on the move to the united states.
DEA knew that was happening they had intelligence on this and they had been providing information to the governement to the president .nobody wanted to acknowledge that and that was part of the arrangement that they had with escobar.
a year later protests about escobar’s luxurious conditions forced the government to order his transfer to high security prison.but nothing goes right.
it was a combined army and police operation that was not well coordinated.
tipped off byh his informants escobar is not ready to go quietly.
while his men try to hold off the troops sent for him ..
he breaks out and heads back to medellin.
joe toft and his team welcome the news. he’d escaped from prison,he violated his agreement and place DEA in a position to be able to be much more focused and interactive with the government because they know saw that their strategy their agreement with pablo escobar failed.
DEA celebrating with the police officers that they trusted ,they worked with.
” it was a day we’re back on the game on , now we’re going to get him”
– joe taft
once again the elite colombian search block unit and the DEA are back on the hunt.DEA realize immediately that they would going back to work exclusively to truck down pablo escobar.
the government realizes there can be no more negotiation with escobar .
the one million dollar reward for his capture is increased to 2,7 million dollars by the bush administration .
but findinghim won’t be easy.
escobar enters an underground world of code names and aliases of safehouses and ever-changing radio frequencies. he did it successfully for quite a while.
but a new asset helps the DEA penetrates the fog of secrecy that has fallen over escobar.codenamed centra spike and operated by a top secret U.S army intelligence unit . this is a flight of specially converted civilian light aircraft.
their state -of -the -art radio direction finding equipment homes in on escobars radio telephone calls. the role of the US in terms of providing the high -tech capability to track the phone calls. it was clearly absolutely crucial.
toft and his team feed information from central spike to colonel martinez and the search block to help them locate hish is hideout .
sensing his pursuers closing in, escobar ratchets up the violance .
on january 30th 1993 he tries unsuccessfully to kill the head of the colombian security service with a car bomb.
his car was going by and his car was bulletproof vehicle
it blew the car to one side.
there were half bodies of children and people all over the street, they were waiting for the schoolbus
21 people are killed .many of them children.
and dozens more terribly injured.by now escobar isn’t only being hunted by the DEA in the colombian government .rival drug traffickers want him taken down too. the cali cartel was furious with him, because he brought so much unwanted publicity to him and they were actively hunting him.
besides the cali cartel, another murderous group is out to destroy him . they called themselves los passegidos por pablos escobar. those persecuted by pablo escobar or los pepes .escobar kan thank his own brutality for bringing los pepes into existence
escobar had finally made enemies of his closest lieutenants by having them their legs sewn off with chainsaws in his precence. well obviously made enemies of them as they die.their families and those around.
the fact that many los pepes killers had been part of escobar’s organization gave them a huge advantage.
they knew about escobar’s infrastructure, they knew most of the people that worked for him, they knew pretty much everything about him .
so they systematically went out and started to hunt down escobar’s entourage and his remaining followers and killed them outright. now for every one of escobar’s attacks there is a los pepes revenge killing.
walls started to crumble for pablo his attorneys were killed, his associates were killed.
other members of pablo escobar’s distant family were killed .
for the DEA los pepes at a volatile new factor in an already complex and dangerous operation.when DEA became aware that the los pepes, who the los pepes were, it was very important for DEA to recognize that and not in any way get tainted by the los pepes.
joe toft made sure every day as they shared their intelligence with the cops asked the police to make sure that this not end up in the hands of those los pepes ,because joe toft could just see them DEA provide intelligence the results in the killings of his people or something to that effect so it would have been horrible.
but there is no denying that these lethal vigilantes are crippling escobar’s network. in the way DEA and searchblock couldn’t. los pepes were tremendously effective and they were key in isolating escobar fairly rapidly
pretty much stripped him as much of his organization.
it was to DEA advantage .DEA give los pepes a lot of credit for pablo escobar’s demise. because they are the ones that waged the dirty war.
“the los pepes are really responsible for the fact that pablo escobar at the end was pretty much alone.i mean he didn’t have many people anymore”
-joe toft
under attack from all sides escobar disapears into the maze of medellin’s back streets.
to stay in control of his organization ,he uses a radio phone, despite the risk of being tracked by police radio location teams on the ground .
and in the skies overhead.
escobar was a very streetwise, he knew what DEA were doing,he knew they were using directional finding equipment that DEA monitoring conversations.
he would never speak from one place ,whenever he was talking on a phone he would always be moving because the triangulation is impossible to do if you’re moving and he knew that.
again and again the search block raid escobar’s suspected hideouts.but every time he’s tipped off before they can get him.
he was always prepared ,he always had escape routes, wherever he was at he never stayed in a place more than a couple of days.because he knew sooner or later , intelligence would leak out as to where he was.
then on october 11th, 1993 , central spike intercepts a call from escobar to his wife. trangulating on the signal, they pinpoint the location…
.. to an isolated farmhouse.
immediately colonel martinez orders his search block to mount an operation .
as the ground force close in on his hideout U.S monitoring aircraft can still hear escobar on the phone.
the assult team gets the command “go”
they keyed up troopers burst into the house ready for the intense firefight.
but there is no sign of their prey.
there were lot of days that joe toft thought this was going to be the day they get pablo and it ended indisappointment.
escobar had gone to nearby woods to get a better signal for the call to his family.the brutal killer just won’t cut contact with his wife ,maria victoria, 16 year old son juan pablo and nine year old daughter manuela. this gives joe toft a crucial tactical advantage
focusing on his family preventing the family leaving colombia was a very key factor and once DEA recognize that and DEA emphasized that , they could see the end coming around.
but the los pepes ‘s death squads made up of escobar’s former gang members have his family in their sights .
on october 12th ,los pepes detonate a massive bomb outside the family’s apartement in medellin. they escape with only minor injuries.
but it’s too close a call.
escobar is desperate to get them out of colombia. his next move stuns the hardened DEA.
one day ,the ambassador calls joe toft and he says ,” your not going to believe who’s downstairs” and joe said “who”.
the teenaged juan pablo walking into the embassy was suprised enough but the deal his father proposes takes toft’s breath away.
he basically said;myself my mom and my sister are afraid that we’re going to get killed here by the cali cartel will you please help us get out the country we would like a visa to the United states
joe toft told him , if you came in here with a platter, with the heads of the cali cartel members ou still couldn’t get a visa.
escobar realizes there’s no chance of his family escaping to the united states. europe seems their best chance to stay out of los pepes reach.
a last -minute tip- off alerts toft that the escobars are on the move.
agent ken mcGee races to the airport.
DEA received intelligence that they were going to fly from either to london england or to frankfurt ,germany and the plans were departing within 10 minutes of each other. DEA had tickets to jump on board either plan.
with no power to arrest to detain the escobars in colombia ,the DEA has to work behind the scenes to convince other nations to turn the family away.
” it was in our interest as investigators trying to find pablo escobar, that his family remain in colombia ”
– ken mcGee
during the flight mcgee, secretly photographs the escobars .he has to make sure thaey have no contact with other passangers.
when they land it¨s obvious the german authorities have been warned about that unwelcome guests.
“when i arrived in frankfurt they stopped the aircraft in the middle of the runway, i remember taxiing down the runway and i remember seeing tanks ,police cars , all lined along the airstrip.”
– ken mcGee.
“and they escorted the escobars off the aircraft and took them into a quarantined area in regards to determining what they weregoing to do with the escobars.”
– ken mcGee
thanks to top level contact between the german and colombian governments it dosen’t take long for the escobars to giving the news. that plea for asylum is rejected.
when he gets the news escobar goes into meltdown.
the minute he heard that germany had denied the request he was on the phone making threats calling the germany embassy , saying he would kill people, saying he would blow things up , there was no telling what would happen.
when they get back to colombia,escobars family are taken to a hotel in the capital Bogota under heavy police guard.
as expected escobar immediately calls his wife.the plan to take him down is on a knife edge.
the walls were caving in around pablo escobar.
he was taking more risks he was making more phone calls.he was also becoming more threatening in in s his tones .
his acts of desperation made DEA feel that they were getting closer and closer and closer.the noose is tightening around colombian drug overlord pablo escobar.
on december 2nd 1993 a police radio location team intercepts a call he makes to his son.
his so angry that his family not been allowed to leave the country. that he started to calling from one side and that’s how DEA ,the police was able to triangulate and find him .
the commander of the search block colonel hugo martinez has given the job of tracing escobar’s calls to the one man he knows he can trust absolutely ,his own son .
so you have father and son in the world of criminal organization and you have father and son in the world of law enforcement and what stands for right, good versus evil.
the phone trace leads the young martinez to a quite residential street. suddenly he sees a figure at a second story window. every man in colombian police and DEA knows that face .
it’s escobar.
DEA immediately contacted his superiors to include to his father to say exactly where he was at and what he had found.
with just two men , martinez calls urgently for back up .
search blocl patrols race desperately to to martinez location when, when they get there , they don’t waste a second. they arrived at this location and they immediately hit the place.even when cornered escobar shows how dangerous he can be.
he was armed with two semi- automatic pistols.escobar jumps from a back window to the roof of a nother house. but he had no idea that the place was surrounded .
he jumped out into the roof shooting back at the window thinking that he was being chased .
he was hit three times. he was wounded ,he continued to fire,
escobar goes down in a hail of fire.
pablo escobar, that day lived up to his reputation as being a notorious cold blooded killer
that fight to the very end.
at 3:03 pm a search block officer is the first to reach escobar’s body.
when pablo escobar was killed on that rooftop the very first message transferred over the radio was :” viva colombia matamos pablo escobar, long live colombia we’ve killed pablo escobar.”
the men of the search block have at last settled the score.they were elated,they were ecstatic, they were jubilant, you could use many words to describe how they felt,but one word most importantly is that they were proud.
150 miles away in bogota, joe toft gets the news his been waiting to hear for six long years …
” pablo is dead , pablo is finally dead . i was static”
-joe toft
the news of escobar’s death is flashed to washington
and for the DEA, it’s mission accomplished.
he had become a cancer to colombia and people were tired of his brand of terrorism because he was a narco terrorist in every sense of the word
“escobar was a monster ,i wish he spent the rest of his life in prison i meant , that’s what i wanted.but he deserve what he got .”
-joe toft
the death of pablo escobar has given new life to colombia.
there are many people that think of colombia and the first thing they think of is pablo escobar and drug trafficking but that’s not truehe was a major deal in colombia but pablo escobar is not colombia
and colombia is not pablo escobar the people of colombia are wonderful people
escobar’s cocaine empire left a trail of death from colombia to USA and across the globe.
pablo escobar was the biggest criminal on the face of the planet and the world will never see a criminal that big .
there will be drug traffickers ,there will be other criminal’s but no one will grow to have that amount of power.