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The rise and fall of Pablo Escobar and how he violently amassed a $4 billion fortune through international cocaine smuggling alliances.

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00:00:00Tonight on Frontline, Pablo Escobar, the richest, most violent criminal in history.
00:00:15Escobar is probably the head of the largest criminal organization the world's ever known.
00:00:20Escobar was to cocaine what Ford was to automobiles.
00:00:24And more than any other man, he brought cocaine to America.
00:00:32Tonight on Frontline, the godfather of cocaine.
00:00:45Funding for Frontline is provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
00:00:49And by annual financial support from viewers like you.
00:00:57This is Frontline.
00:01:00Frontline.
00:01:19Thunderstorms roll down from the Andes, but they still come to the cemetery in Medellin.
00:01:28They are retired school teachers, come to honor a man killed by the police in December 1993.
00:01:39They believe he was the innocent victim of political persecution and police brutality.
00:01:50They come and pray for the man and for his mother.
00:01:55I think of the ingratitude of people.
00:02:00I think of the brutal persecution that was inflicted on him.
00:02:04He was just a man.
00:02:05When the teachers leave, two men with scarred faces appear and knock on the grave for luck.
00:02:20They seek the blessing of El Patron, the boss of the Medellin cocaine cartel, Pablo Escobar.
00:02:28The story of Pablo Escobar is the story of the modern cocaine industry.
00:02:43Escobar was to cocaine what Ford was to automobiles.
00:02:49Compared to Capone and Traficonti and Lansky, this guy was way over them, head and shoulders.
00:02:56Escobar started the cocaine shipments.
00:02:58Escobar started the cocaine shipments.
00:03:00He started the international transportation.
00:03:03He organized the drug industry to a point where it was an equal of some of our leading legitimate corporations anywhere in the world.
00:03:13Escobar is probably the head of the largest criminal organization the world has ever known.
00:03:19few men have ever testified against Escobar and lived.
00:03:26The most important is Max Mermelstein.
00:03:31Today, there's a contract on his life, and he appears here in disguise.
00:03:37I was the only American that ever sat on the council of the Medellin cartel.
00:03:44Living undercover and wearing disguises is necessary.
00:03:49There's still an, in effect, $3 million contract on my head.
00:03:52I personally, responsible for bringing 56 tons of cocaine into the United States, shipped out $300 million of their profits.
00:04:03I also paid out over $100 million in their expenses here in the United States.
00:04:08And when I decided to cooperate with the government, Escobar wanted me dead.
00:04:19In the basement of Columbia's old National Police Headquarters, a strange museum preserves the memory of Pablo Escobar.
00:04:31These tracks dummies illustrate the life of a man once elected to the National Assembly.
00:04:40But Escobar aimed for the president's palace.
00:04:45For years, no government could stop him.
00:04:48No prison could hold him.
00:04:54Before he was killed at age 44, Escobar had amassed a personal fortune of $3 billion.
00:05:00He was, perhaps, the most successful criminal in history.
00:05:03He was, perhaps, the most successful criminal in history.
00:05:20But in his hometown, the narcotrafficker is still a folk hero.
00:05:25Here, Sr. Pablo Escobar is Robin Hood.
00:05:34Pablo Escobar was born in 1949, the son of a peasant farmer and a local schoolteacher.
00:05:44One day, when he was two years old, he wandered away from the house.
00:06:00He was very little, and I found him next to a tree.
00:06:05He had a little stick, and he was playing with a snake.
00:06:09And he was saying, see, I'm not hurting you.
00:06:14I think he was very sweet, and he loved animals.
00:06:18When Pablo was two, his mother left her husband on the farm and went to teach in a city school.
00:06:33Escobar grew up in Envigado, a suburb of the city of Medellin.
00:06:41The people of Medellin have a reputation for working hard, making money, and getting ahead.
00:06:49Pablo was a happy child, who loved soccer.
00:06:57At home, the atmosphere was heavily religious.
00:07:00We have a Christ in the bedroom.
00:07:03It's sad because you can see his blood, and it looks real.
00:07:08The bruises and everything the Jews did to him.
00:07:13I taught the children about all that when they were very little.
00:07:18This made him very sad.
00:07:23Once I served lunch, and Pablo put a piece of meat in his corn cake.
00:07:29The corn cake is typical of our province.
00:07:33And he went and said,
00:07:35Poor man, who made you bleed?
00:07:38Do you want the little meat?
00:07:41This shows that he was very religious and very kind.
00:07:48Escobar was growing up at a violent time in Colombia's violent history.
00:07:56It was a time when 300,000 people were killed.
00:08:00Colombia went through a period called La Violencia,
00:08:04the violence in which two political parties waged war for close to 40 years.
00:08:09The legacy of La Violencia is long-simmering guerrilla war.
00:08:14Marxist insurgents control large parts of the country.
00:08:19Almost every day there are clashes with the security forces.
00:08:25I don't think I've ever been in a place where so many people are so heavily armed,
00:08:29and so quick to show you that they're heavily armed.
00:08:33In Colombia, rich children don't brag about a parent's car,
00:08:36but the number of their bodyguards.
00:08:39The sense of menace and fear one has,
00:08:43is being in a country that has one of the world's highest,
00:08:46if not the highest murder rate.
00:08:48This is a country with a history of violence,
00:08:51where people are armed,
00:08:52where there's an expectation of a short and brutal life.
00:08:55In Medellin, there's a shrine where paid killers come to light a candle before going to work.
00:09:06In a city of two million people, there are four murders a day.
00:09:11And this is where Escobar grew up.
00:09:15As a teenager, Escobar was expelled from school and drifted into petty crime.
00:09:22Police have few details about his early career.
00:09:26There are all kinds of stories about Pablo Escobar.
00:09:28The most common is that he started out by stealing tombstones.
00:09:44At that time, it was easy to make money from tombstones.
00:09:48It was a simple scam. Escobar stole tombstones from local cemeteries.
00:09:53After shaving off the epitaphs, he sold them as new.
00:10:00His first recorded arrest was in 1974,
00:10:05when he was suspected of stealing a red Renault.
00:10:12In a number of the conversations that I've had with Pablo,
00:10:16he'd go back into his early days as to when he was stealing cars for a living,
00:10:20and from stealing cars, how he graduated into taking contracts to killing people.
00:10:25He started killing people in his late teens, 18, 19, somewhere in that vicinity.
00:10:30It was on contract, it was for salary.
00:10:34It wasn't because of meanness or anything like that at the time.
00:10:38It was his elder cousin Gustavo Gaviria, seen here in his trademark flat hat,
00:10:47who introduced Escobar to drug smuggling.
00:10:51The people of Medellin grew up in the smuggling business.
00:10:55Coffee, electrodomestic items, whatever had to be brought in and out of the country.
00:11:00Smuggling was their livelihood growing up through the years.
00:11:03Cocaine became fashionable and they picked up on it right away.
00:11:09In the US, law enforcement was still concentrating on marijuana and heroin.
00:11:15Nixon had his war on drugs, Ford did, Mr. Carter did,
00:11:20but tended to focus so much on Mexico.
00:11:23By focusing on marijuana and heroin from Mexico,
00:11:27the Drug Enforcement Administration created a gap in the market for cocaine from Colombia.
00:11:31Colombia did not solicit the nefarious distinction of being the drug capital of Western Hemisphere.
00:11:40It came about by a combination of rather curious circumstances.
00:11:44In a sense, first of all, the Mexicans were very, very successful in the mid-1970s
00:11:50against both marijuana and Mexican brown heroin.
00:11:53And the drug traffickers, you know, began to look for someplace else.
00:11:58And they wanted a nation which, first of all, was in relatively close flying distance to the United States.
00:12:04So it all came together in Colombia.
00:12:06Escobar got his start driving coca paste from the Andean Mountains to the laboratories in Medellin.
00:12:12He used to race his cousin to get there first.
00:12:18The winner pocketed all the proceeds.
00:12:23He was caught once with 39 kilos of cocaine.
00:12:28But the charges were dropped on a technicality.
00:12:36So at the age of 26, Pablo Escobar made the transition from courier to smuggler.
00:12:43With the street value of cocaine worth $35,000 a kilo, a small plane could make big money.
00:12:49Escobar's flight coordinator was to be Max Mermelstein.
00:13:0075, 76, 77.
00:13:03It was just in its infancy, within a matter of a few flights, a man was a multimillionaire.
00:13:08And the monies were invested.
00:13:11Land was purchased.
00:13:13Before he was 30, he bought Hacienda Napolis for a reported $63 million.
00:13:24He owned his own helicopter.
00:13:27And a private zoo.
00:13:29And thousands of acres.
00:13:34He hired a professional cameraman to shoot his home movies.
00:13:37He and his men posed in front of his proudest possession, a car that had once belonged to the gangster Al Capone.
00:13:45He saw himself as a future Al Capone.
00:13:49Alcohol was once illegal, just like cocaine today.
00:14:00In less than five years, he had gone from car thief to multimillionaire.
00:14:04But as a drug smuggler, Escobar still had a long way to go.
00:14:11In the late 70s, there was a group of independent cowboys dealing in narcotics.
00:14:19By that I mean that they were getting their own dope.
00:14:23They were processing it by themselves, transporting it and trying to find buyers here in the U.S.
00:14:28After Pablo did his own first flight into the United States, in order to brag about it and show everybody how big a man Pablo was, he actually decommissioned the plane and had it mounted above the entryway to his farm.
00:14:43So everybody in the world can see that Pablo Escobar is flying cocaine into the United States.
00:14:47American drug pilots who landed at Escobar's hacienda were impressed by the grip he kept on his people and his organization.
00:14:57The time that I met him, he was in total control.
00:15:04You got the impression that he was always thinking about what to do next or what to say next.
00:15:09And the people that were working for him, every move that he made, everyone would watch him.
00:15:13We met at a hacienda in Colombia and he rolled out the red carpet.
00:15:22He was very interested in making our stay as comfortable as possible and very intent on assuring us that if we stayed together, not only would our operations improve each time, we could have a long and prosperous association.
00:15:38The man at the controls of this plane says he flew 20 trips for Escobar.
00:15:49Pablo Escobar's outfit was probably the most efficient of all the groups that we worked for.
00:15:59The merchandise was always on time.
00:16:03We would take off at normally twice the gross weight of the airplane.
00:16:06For the first couple of hours until you burned some of that fuel out, you were a flying bomb.
00:16:14Any turbulence at all would create an accelerated stall.
00:16:18You had to stay out of thunderstorms.
00:16:19If you were fortunate enough to be able to do that, if you were not, you didn't make it.
00:16:23A lot of people that didn't make it.
00:16:27Pilots who did make it could earn a million dollars a flight.
00:16:34You have to look at the pilots that were arrested in Florida.
00:16:42Most of them were arrested on their 28th or their 30 second trip.
00:16:47One crew that did 38 flights over a six month period of time.
00:16:52Every one of them came through.
00:16:53Every one of them came through.
00:17:01When in 1979 Pablo Escobar struck up a partnership with Carlos Leder, it was a significant milestone in the history of the cocaine industry.
00:17:10It was later who persuaded Escobar to begin using bigger planes to shift bigger cargoes of drugs.
00:17:18To avoid American airspace, they flew to the Bahamas, where the cocaine cargo could be broken up into smaller parcels and smuggled into the US.
00:17:26It was in the Bahamas that they encountered Robert Vesco.
00:17:34Robert Vesco was one of the first world class criminals who understood moving money and understood the industrialization of crime.
00:17:43Vesco is the person who taught later that doing cocaine smuggling on a flight at a time was not a good idea.
00:17:53So Escobar and later purchased an island off the Bahamas called Norman's Key.
00:18:01They would fly large plane loads of cocaine to Norman's Key, stored in a refrigerated warehouse, and then use small planes to transship it all over the United States.
00:18:15It was a kind of Federal Express operation for the delivery of cocaine.
00:18:19They were making so much money that they could afford to lose planes.
00:18:30The drug planes had to run the gauntlet of US Customs, who had planes of their own.
00:18:36These came equipped with FLIR, forward-looking infrared radar.
00:18:42FLIR gave its operators a technical edge, but only one in a hundred was even detected.
00:18:49It was just slightly to the right.
00:18:50It was just a quick break.
00:18:51The same bag?
00:18:53Yeah, it sure did.
00:18:56Escobar's planes were smuggling about 400 kilos of cocaine a trip.
00:19:07One flight could net $10 million.
00:19:10The bales of cocaine were offloaded at remote airstrips or dropped into the water.
00:19:20High-speed motorboats made the final run.
00:19:23Miami was kind of wild west because it was the point of entry for so much of the cocaine.
00:19:30So you'd have great chases across Biscayne Bay and cigarette boats with Customs right behind them.
00:19:37As in the days of Prohibition, fashionable opinion was on the side of the smugglers.
00:19:53Cocaine was widely believed to be non-addictive.
00:19:55It was a harmless vice as far as we were concerned.
00:19:59And the demand in the United States was so great that we just couldn't get it up fast enough.
00:20:08It wound up being the fashionable drug in the early 80s.
00:20:12Lawyers' offices, judges' chambers, movie stars, you name it, the upper echelon, cocaine was the way to go.
00:20:18At the age of 32, Escumar was earning half a million dollars a day.
00:20:32But he had serious competition in Medellin.
00:20:41The biggest smugglers were the three Ochoa brothers.
00:20:44This restaurant is owned by their father.
00:20:54His four-year-old daughter is its star attraction.
00:21:04Outside, the head of the family, Don Fabio Ochoa, sits beneath a sign that says,
00:21:09Please don't shake my hand. Thank you.
00:21:18There was also Jose Rodriguez Gacha, alias El Mexicano, a gangster with an appetite for extreme violence.
00:21:28And though Carlos later was now addicted to his own product,
00:21:31he was still bringing plenty of merchandise to market.
00:21:34In 1981, the question for Pablo Escobar and his rivals was whether to compete or cooperate.
00:21:45What these people were were a kind of loose grouping of business organizations.
00:21:52The Ochoa organization, the Escobar organization.
00:21:55And these different organizations began to work together cooperatively.
00:22:02We would bring in 400, 450, sometimes 500 kilos on a shipment.
00:22:07And if it all belonged to one person and we did take a loss, it would be a bad hit.
00:22:12It would hurt.
00:22:13They then began to mix shipments.
00:22:17So if there were three groups in one shipment, each group would lose a third of the shipment.
00:22:23And it spread the risk, it diversified things.
00:22:27And put all together, they made this a major industry as opposed to individual cowboys who were trying to do the business by themselves.
00:22:35Escobar and his new partners came to be known as the Medellin Cartel.
00:22:43The cartel divided up the U.S. market with its competitors from the Colombian city of Cali.
00:22:49The Cali folks operated primarily out of New York, whereas the Medellin people operated in Miami and they made a division out in Los Angeles between the two.
00:22:59Soon, the Medellin Cartel was running five flights a week into the U.S.
00:23:08And Escobar would be making a million dollars a day.
00:23:12The average person can appreciate how rapidly the money was made.
00:23:19But it was not unusual for 12 and 13 million dollars to be transported back and forth in private jet planes.
00:23:27The money was rolling in so fast and became such a problem because of its volume and bulk that just to make things go faster, we used to weigh it.
00:23:49You know, a quick estimate. We'd separate everything in its own denominations.
00:23:53And one bill, U.S. currency, is approximately a gram.
00:23:58So we'd just package it up, weigh it, get a quick estimate of what we had, and when we had time later, we'd count it.
00:24:04They saw themselves as involved in nothing illegal.
00:24:11They were involved in a business, and they compared themselves to the Kennedys, like in the Scotch business during the time of Prohibition.
00:24:18One day it'll be legal, then our money will be legitimatized, and we'll be famous like they are.
00:24:23Escobar and his partners were getting noticed.
00:24:30In Colombia, the rich are always at risk from kidnappers.
00:24:36In 1981, one of Don Fabio Ochoa's older daughters was kidnapped by urban guerrillas.
00:24:42The cartel members all got together to get her release from the leftist guerrillas in Colombia.
00:24:52The terrorists were terrorized.
00:24:55The kidnappers found themselves being hunted down by a death squad called MAS.
00:25:02The initials, MAS, stand for Muerte a los Sequestradores.
00:25:07In English, it would be Death to Kidnappers.
00:25:08It was established late 1981, December of 81, after one of the Ochoa sisters was kidnapped.
00:25:16The kidnappers were assassinated by the traffickers.
00:25:19In some instances, they were turned over to authorities, and it was effective.
00:25:24Pablo basically took control of MAS, and MAS was in excess of 2,000 men, all of them ready to kill somebody on his orders.
00:25:31And with MAS, he now had more control than any of the other cartel members.
00:25:39There was no shortage of killers in a city like Medellin.
00:25:44The trademark of Escobar's hitmen was a snub-nosed machine gun fired from the back of a motorbike.
00:25:59Young thugs with street names like René, Mugre, La Quica, and Zarco became valued employees in Escobar's multi-million dollar business.
00:26:09He reached the top of his business by making it clear to everyone that if he was crossed, they were going to suffer a violent penalty for having crossed him.
00:26:23Violence was a trademark of the Medellin Cartel, and extraordinary violence was their special trademark.
00:26:32Escobar didn't matter whether you were a man, woman, or a child. If you were going to die, you were going to die.
00:26:38If he had to kill the father, he'd kill the whole family.
00:26:43Mother, father, cousin, nephew, niece, children, grandchildren, you name it, all dead.
00:26:50What set Escobar apart from other cocaine smugglers was not just ruthlessness, but an ability to think strategically.
00:27:03Whenever Pablo Escobar was thinking of something big, he would put little bits of paper in his mouth.
00:27:09It showed he was up to something, a murder, a kidnapping, or a business deal.
00:27:16When something was cooking, he would go, that's what he did when he had to take a big decision.
00:27:24At the same time, he was a devoted husband and father, who would interrupt any business meeting if his small son or daughter demanded his attention.
00:27:37An intercepted conversation was obtained by the Columbia National Police between Pablo Escobar and I believe it was his wife.
00:27:45And in the background, while he was talking to his wife about family matters and things like that, everyday living type matters,
00:27:51screaming could be heard in the background.
00:27:55And during this conversation, Pablo put his hand over the receiver and turned around and asked whoever was committing this torture to please keep the guy quiet that he was trying to talk to his family on the phone.
00:28:06Don Fabio Ochoa once said, he was a man who would be a terrible enemy and a wonderful friend.
00:28:20He was a man of extremes and prone to violence.
00:28:23We know that he ordered, for example, the eyes of some people to be taken with what they call the hot spoon, which consisted just with a spoon to take out the eyes of a living person.
00:28:44Popeye, who was one of Pablo's most trusted sicarios, one of his assassins.
00:28:48One of Popeye's favorite forms of torture was to heat a spike or a large nail and then drive it into the victim's head until it reached their brain and killed them.
00:28:58A man is tied to a tree with barbed wire and the Colombian people got his family on a cellular telephone and got him to say hello and explain what his situation was.
00:29:13And then as they listened, utterly horrified, tortured him to death.
00:29:16Now in prison and blinded by a letter bomb, Escobar's brother managed the finances.
00:29:24Roberto won't hear a bad word about Pablo.
00:29:27They called him El Patron, the boss, because in Colombia people who own a company are called Patrones.
00:29:38And the poor people began to call him El Patron because he would bring two or three trucks to the poor barriers and he'd distribute food to people who didn't have any.
00:29:55And the poor people who didn't have food, he'd distribute food to them so they had a better way to feed themselves.
00:30:05Escobar's image as a modern Robin Hood was born in the slums that surround Medellin.
00:30:10There is a place here known as Barrio Pablo Escobar.
00:30:22They still say masses for Escobar's soul in the church which he built here.
00:30:25Music from the steeple drifts over 200 homes which Escobar built for the poor.
00:30:40People here prefer to forget Escobar's violent reputation.
00:30:43Two of the first people to be rehoused by Escobar were Mr. and Mrs. Flores.
00:30:50Before then they were so-called throwaway people who lived in a city garbage dump.
00:30:57Next to a burning candle and crucifix, they keep a picture of Pablo Escobar.
00:31:04Mrs. Flores says he is going to be the next saint.
00:31:08He was a good man, an intelligent man, very kind to the poor.
00:31:22He built a soccer field and he sponsored the soccer team.
00:31:26He did a lot in order to help the poor.
00:31:29And he hired the local people in order to do construction,
00:31:33to run businesses for him, to teach in the local schools which he built.
00:31:38He did a lot of good, much, much more than the local government, than the Colombian government did.
00:31:43Proud of his good works, Escobar commissioned a painting to celebrate his gifts to the people and city of Medellin.
00:31:49Pablo Escobar was a great megalomania.
00:31:54He liked to make his power felt and he enjoyed it.
00:31:58His whole life was a display of power.
00:32:01When you have your own fleet of airplanes, when you have your own zoo, and when you have your own stash of gold bullion, the next logical step is political power.
00:32:15It's true in this country, it's true in Colombia and it was certainly true in the case of Pablo Escobar.
00:32:22Escobar had created a power base for himself in the barrios of Medellin.
00:32:28He decided to run for office and entered himself as a candidate in the congressional elections.
00:32:41In 1982, Escobar was elected as a member of Congress.
00:32:51In one sense, he was no stranger to politics or politicians.
00:32:57There was a basic competitive nature amongst all of the heads of the cartel, not only in how much coke they could ship,
00:33:10but it was a game between them as to who could buy the most and the heaviest duty politicians.
00:33:16For the next ten years, Escobar could afford to buy almost anyone he wanted.
00:33:21Here, a hidden camera shows a Medellin cartel lawyer delivering a payoff to a politician.
00:33:29They offer a lot of money.
00:33:32If politicians didn't accept the money, they say, I'm going to kill you.
00:33:39So why do you prefer? You prefer money or you prefer to be killed?
00:33:44Alberto Villamizar was one who was threatened.
00:33:47Alberto, you are my friend. Don't fight again. It's impossible. They are very powerful.
00:33:54You have a wife. You have a child.
00:33:57And these colleagues were congressmen?
00:33:59Yes, of course.
00:34:00From?
00:34:02Well, politicians who used to work with the Medellin cartel.
00:34:07The new ambassador at the American Embassy found it difficult to get the government of Colombia
00:34:12to care about a trade that was doing so much for the country's balance of payments.
00:34:18When I was ambassador down there, basically the Colombians felt that it was not a Colombian problem.
00:34:25First of all, is that they didn't use it.
00:34:29It basically was going to the consumers of the United States.
00:34:32They were making money.
00:34:33And it was a U.S. problem, not a Colombian problem.
00:34:39One of the few Colombian politicians to take a hard line against drugs was the Minister of Justice, Rodrigo Larabonilla.
00:34:46But he was attacked as a puppet of the gringos by Escobar and his political allies.
00:34:50But there was a political dimension which can be described, I think, as hispanidad, which means Spanishness against the Anglo-Saxons or anybody else.
00:35:01One of the main pitches to gain popularity with the Colombian people was to say that cocaine is a third world atomic bomb against the imperialists, right?
00:35:11And basically the idea is to destroy, as they would put it, imperialism from within by its own excesses.
00:35:18Because the fact is, if our people did not consume this, they would not produce it.
00:35:24And that's just the reality of the equations of the free market, right?
00:35:28Escobar was still not even a target of American law enforcement when he posed for this picture.
00:35:34But in 1982, there was a significant shift of policy inside the White House.
00:35:42My very reason for being here this afternoon is not to announce another short-term government offensive,
00:35:48but to call instead for a national crusade against drugs.
00:35:53A sustained, relentless effort to rid America of this scourge by mobilizing every segment of our society against drug abuse.
00:36:00The DEA made cocaine a higher priority and began monitoring ether factories.
00:36:09And that's how it learned that a Colombian working for Escobar and the cartel wanted to buy a huge amount of ether and was willing to pay cash.
00:36:18Ether at the time was extremely important to the manufacturing of cocaine simply because it's one of the basic ingredients for the traditional method and formula for processing coca paste to coca hydrochloride.
00:36:35The Colombian buyer was in the market for 1300 barrels of ether.
00:36:48He was told to try Elk Grove Industrial Park near Chicago's O'Hare Airport.
00:36:54From a nondescript building here, Mel Chebillion and his partner Harry Fullett were in the business of selling ether.
00:37:00But Harry and Mel were not all they seemed.
00:37:04They were in fact DEA agents running a sophisticated sting operation.
00:37:09We purported ourselves to be brokers for ether and told him that we would be willing to assist him in spending his $400,000 cash that he had with him.
00:37:23Came to our store and paid us $15,000 as a down payment to begin the $1,355 gallon drum order.
00:37:33Before the first 76 barrels of ether left for Colombia, DEA technicians cut two open and concealed battery powered transponders inside.
00:37:50Escobar had no idea that when the ether left the plant, it could be traced all the way to Colombia.
00:38:05Signals from the transponders were being picked up by a spy satellite and relayed down to a monitoring station in El Paso.
00:38:13Well initially they left Tuscola and went down through Louisiana through the port of New Orleans.
00:38:22It went on a barge through the free zone in Panama.
00:38:29From Panama went to Barranquilla and then from Barranquilla it actually ended up on a ranch of one of the cartel members in Colombia.
00:38:44The ether drums didn't stay there, but moved again to one of the most remote parts of Colombia.
00:38:50The signal from the transponder indicated a spot near the Yari River, deep in the densest part of the jungle.
00:39:05For it was here that Pablo Escobar and his partners had built a huge laboratory to process cocaine.
00:39:11Tipped off by the DEA, the anti-narcotics unit of the Colombian National Police set off to raid the location.
00:39:24The men were not allowed to know the nature of the operation until after they were airborne.
00:39:31The only American on the raid was DEA agent Ron Pettingill.
00:39:34We took off at Don on March the 10th, 1984.
00:39:45We flew approximately two hours due south.
00:39:49There are no roads that get into this area within 100, maybe 200 miles.
00:39:56It's an extremely remote, dense jungle.
00:39:59Approximately an hour into the flight, we started monitoring the transceiver, listening for a bumper beeper tones to appear.
00:40:11And they did.
00:40:16We saw planes on an airstrip and knew something big was going on because it was miles away from civilization.
00:40:23According to our plan, the first helicopter was to land at the head of the airstrip and drop off some troopers.
00:40:40A second helicopter flying overhead would give it cover.
00:40:44As the troopers landed, they found themselves coming under sporadic sniper fire.
00:40:54Apparently, the site was guarded by Marxist guerrillas, who were being paid by the drug cartel to provide security.
00:41:00There was intense gunfire in order to protect our lives and capture the place.
00:41:14The evidence videotaped by agent Pettingill was astonishing.
00:41:19What they found was an entire complex of airstrips and laboratories capable of refining and shipping cocaine on an industrial scale.
00:41:31All this was in a place so remote that the drug lords had invented a name for it.
00:41:36Tranquilandia.
00:41:38Land of Tranquility.
00:41:39There were almost 14 metric tons of cocaine worth more than a billion dollars.
00:41:44There were also way bills, receipts and accounts.
00:41:48It was not until Tranquilandia that the DEA even knew that the Medellin cartel existed.
00:41:57I think it's the first time that the actual cartel was identified that showed that all the various families,
00:42:02the Ochoas and Pablo Escobar and Carlos Leder and Gacha and a number of the other major players of the world,
00:42:10would bring their raw materials, their raw cocaine, cocaine base and paste to a specific spot, Tranquilandia.
00:42:17The next day they found a second airstrip and another laboratory, then another and another.
00:42:24It was the greatest drug bust in the history of the world.
00:42:27Colombia's head of anti-narcotics, Colonel Jaime Ramirez, came to see for himself.
00:42:36While the forces were still on the ground at Tranquilandia, Jaime Ramirez contacted me and told me that he had been contacted by his brother
00:42:46and told that people from Medellin had come to his home, his residence, with a message for Colonel Ramirez
00:42:53that if he would cease all operations in the Tranquilandia area and withdraw his forces,
00:43:00that there would be a multi-million dollar payment made to him.
00:43:05He was Colombian to the bottom of his feet, sort of a feisty kick-ass type of guy.
00:43:11He was very proud of his country and he wasn't going to let drug traffickers run him or anybody else off the reservation.
00:43:18Ramirez's response to the bribe spoke for itself.
00:43:26They threw five or ten gallons of ether into each room and lit each building with a torch.
00:43:33It was quite explosive as we found out.
00:43:36As Tranquilandia went up in smoke, police recovered a death list.
00:43:51Colonel Jaime Ramirez's name was on it.
00:43:54And so was that of his boss, the Minister of Justice.
00:43:58Ramirez's personal integrity put the lives of his own family at risk.
00:44:06The people that were hurt by the raid were not going to forgive and forget.
00:44:13So we had to be very careful when we went out or else not go out at all.
00:44:19My father used to say we were his best protection.
00:44:25So we went out onto the street with submachine guns on the lookout for a car or motorbike or somebody following us.
00:44:34In public, Escobar the politician denounced the Minister of Justice as an American puppet.
00:44:42In private, he put out a contract on his life.
00:44:47The government of Colombia was unable to protect its own minister.
00:44:51Death threats pursued Larabonia in Congress, in the ministry and in his home.
00:44:58He was devastated because he had a wife and three little children.
00:45:05And what happened was is that he called me up one morning.
00:45:10And he said, Lou, he said, they're going to get me out of here.
00:45:13He said, they can't protect me anymore.
00:45:15And I need some place to hold up.
00:45:18The ambassador called America, where a rich businessman offered protection.
00:45:22And he said, he will give him a safe house with bodyguards for 30 days or more as long as he needs it.
00:45:29And so he's safe.
00:45:31You can tell Rodrigo that it's okay.
00:45:44Next thing we knew that that evening, you know, he'd been assassinated.
00:45:47The assassins were little more than children.
00:45:55Escobar was later indicted for the minister's murder, but he never stood trial.
00:46:05The assassination showed Colombia that cocaine was not just an American problem.
00:46:10The government raided Escobar's hacienda, and for a while it cracked down on the cartel.
00:46:19But the real godfathers of cocaine were not to be found.
00:46:25They were all in Central America, where they were safe from arrest.
00:46:29Pablo Escobar found a special welcome in revolutionary Nicaragua.
00:46:40Castro's Cuba was doing business with the cartel, and so with the Sandinistas.
00:46:46Escobar was in his heyday in Managua, Nicaragua.
00:46:51He had everything going for him.
00:46:53He had the Sandinista government completely behind him because he was paying such large sums of money.
00:47:02And he had it made there.
00:47:09Escobar continued coordinating new drug routes with the governments of Panama, Cuba, and Nicaragua.
00:47:14In all these plans, an American drug pilot called Barry Seal was to play a leading role.
00:47:29Barry Seal, from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, was probably the most successful smuggler in his time.
00:47:36He had smuggled approximately 50 loads of cocaine in the United States.
00:47:49He made $1 million per trip, which was paid by Escobar and the Ochoas.
00:48:00Seal was such a flamboyant character, he even appeared in a TV documentary.
00:48:04But the cartel knew surprisingly little about their star pilot.
00:48:12Seal always used pay phones and beepers, and never gave them his real name.
00:48:17Escobar and his associates simply knew him as El Gordo, the fat man.
00:48:23And this is why the cartel did not know that Seal had finally been arrested,
00:48:27and rather than serve a long prison sentence, he had agreed to become an informant for the US government.
00:48:34Barry Seal loved living on the edge.
00:48:38He loved excitement.
00:48:40So when he began working for us, the government and DEA, he enjoyed it.
00:48:45Jake Jacobson was Seal's DEA handler.
00:48:50Okay.
00:48:52Jacobson still has the high-tech message encryptor which Seal gave him.
00:48:57Well, after Barry started working for us, he made numerous trips to meet with Pablo Escobar and the Medellin Cartel.
00:49:09And during these meetings, Pablo essentially started telling Barry that he had met with the Sandinista, the Nicaraguan government,
00:49:25and that they were in the preparations to give the Medellin Cartel and Pablo Escobar a 6,000-foot strip on a Sandinista military base.
00:49:40Pablo said that he had approximately 18,000 pounds of cocaine paste that he would like Barry to fly from Bolivia and Peru into Nicaragua weekly.
00:49:53Seal bought this old military transport plane to carry Escobar's cocaine paste.
00:50:08He nicknamed it the Fat Lady and flew her down to Nicaragua.
00:50:16He landed at the military airfield where Nicaraguan soldiers were waiting to load the drugs and refuel the plane.
00:50:21But the whole operation took a dangerous turn when Seal tried to use one of the cameras the CIA had hidden on board his plane.
00:50:29This camera was supposed to be in a soundproof box, but as soon as they took the first picture, everybody could hear it.
00:50:39So Barry being as intelligent as he was, he started all the generators inside of the aircraft to cover up the sound of the camera going.
00:50:49And we have a photograph with Pablo Escobar helping Nicaraguan soldiers load cocaine onto an airplane to come back to the U.S.
00:50:59You can't get much better evidence than that.
00:51:03The White House was extremely interested to show that, hey, the Nicaraguan government, the Sandinistas were financing their economy through the drug trade.
00:51:15And we had definite proof that they were doing it.
00:51:18In Washington, a DEA official was asked to go to the old executive office building and brief a White House official, Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North.
00:51:30Oliver North asked about the fact, could the investigation be disclosed to the public?
00:51:36And I think that related to the fact that there was a vote in Congress that was imminent whether the Congress was going to support the Contras against the Sandinistas or not.
00:51:48Oliver North was running the covert operation to supply the Nicaraguan Contras, who were backed by the White House in their efforts to topple the Sandinistas.
00:52:01Later, I had two telephone conversations with Colonel North.
00:52:06He called me to more or less go over the agent's head and ask that we do consider disclosing the investigation.
00:52:14At the time, I explained to him virtually the same thing the agent had told him, that public disclosure at this time would not be beneficial, that it would stop our investigation.
00:52:25But two weeks later, the story did appear in the press.
00:52:29It is not clear who ordered the leak, and Oliver North has denied to frontline any direct or indirect involvement.
00:52:36But it led to Ronald Reagan holding that photograph up in front of TV cameras.
00:52:41I know every American parent concerned about the drug problem will be outraged to learn that top Nicaraguan government officials are deeply involved in drug trafficking.
00:52:52This picture, secretly taken at a military airfield outside Managua, shows Federico Vaughn, a top aide to one of the nine commandantes who rule Nicaragua, loading an aircraft with illegal narcotics bound for the United States.
00:53:08The seal has flipped, and Escobar and some other people are starting to go out of their minds.
00:53:14They're starting to get very, very worried.
00:53:19This is something that they've never experienced before, the fact that they might have to face justice in the United States.
00:53:25Ochoa wanted him kidnapped. Escobar wanted him dead.
00:53:30I get put on a telephone. I speak to Escobar on the phone. Escobar liked to eliminate problems totally, and the orders were to kill him.
00:53:44Thanks to Seal, Escobar was now an internationally wanted criminal.
00:53:51At a Salvation Army halfway house in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, a four-man Colombian hit team finally caught up with Barry Seal.
00:54:00Seal's death brought the DEA's most important investigation of the cartel to an abrupt and bloody end.
00:54:19Ending the case prematurely, we were so well entrenched at that point that, in essence, we could have probably arrested 90% of the Medellin cartel.
00:54:32There was nothing Escobar feared more than the American justice system, where prison guards cannot be routinely bribed or judges easily intimidated.
00:54:42He used to say, better a grave in Colombia than a cell in the USA.
00:54:49They had a lifelong fear against extradition and the ability of the United States to extradite drug traffickers from Colombia
00:54:59to our shores and before our courts became something of a holy grail that they simply had to change at all costs.
00:55:16To change it, the cartel brought Colombia to a state of virtual civil war.
00:55:22When terrorists acting in league with the cartel kidnapped the justices of the Supreme Court,
00:55:28government troops were forced to lay siege to the Palace of Justice.
00:55:34It was Pablo Escobar and the Ochoas who understood that the destruction or intimidation of the judiciary system in Colombia
00:55:42was the first step to taking over the entire country.
00:55:48The attack on the Palace of Justice came on the very day the Supreme Court was to have ruled on the law of extradition.
00:55:54In the fighting that followed, nearly a hundred people were killed and all the files on extradition cases were destroyed.
00:56:06The slaughter of half the members of the Supreme Court was part of a relentless campaign of murder and intimidation.
00:56:22When I was ambassador down there, the judge would be assigned a narcotics case.
00:56:28Within a very, very short time, a bright, young, well-dressed lawyer would show up with, first of all, a briefcase
00:56:34in which he would lay a plain brown envelope on the judge's desk, right?
00:56:39They'd tell a man you have a choice. You can have lead, bullet in your head, or silver. Some money is a payoff. And it's your call.
00:56:51Then the bright, young lawyer would reach in his briefcase and take out a photograph album.
00:56:57There'd be a photo album of everybody in their lives they considered to be near and dear.
00:57:03There'd be a photograph of the judge's home, and then a photograph of the judge's family, of his parents.
00:57:09Shots of their children. Children coming out of their home in the morning, going to school, playing in the playground, talking to their friends.
00:57:20So the implications were very clear.
00:57:22Cooperate with us or you and your family will be dead.
00:57:28No honest policeman was safe anymore.
00:57:33Escobar tried to kill this man eight times.
00:57:36He is General Maza, then head of DAS, Colombia's equivalent to the FBI.
00:57:41Maza can still go nowhere without two carloads of armed bodyguards.
00:57:52His friend and colleague, Colonel Jaime Ramirez, needed the same kind of protection,
00:57:57because Escobar had never forgiven him for the raid on Tranquilandia.
00:58:01Pablo Escobar was a paranoid with delusions of grandeur.
00:58:06He was a man without scruples.
00:58:10He fought just as hard against friends and enemies.
00:58:17Pablo Escobar sent a message to Jaime Ramirez that he'd cancelled the contract on his life,
00:58:22because he said Jaime was no longer in anti-narcotics and he knew he was only doing his job.
00:58:29Jaime thought he'd keep his word.
00:58:32For the first time in months, Ramirez felt it was safe to take his family away for the weekend.
00:58:37The 17th of November 1986 was the first weekend the four of us had gone out as a family.
00:58:49At four in the afternoon, we left for Bogotá.
00:59:02Jaime and I were talking about how we were getting on in years
00:59:06and how we'd like to spend the rest of our lives together.
00:59:13And at that very moment, it happened.
00:59:15I opened my eyes. There was gunfire. It was horrible. An absolute hell. There was blood.
00:59:28And I screamed, get down!
00:59:31The car stopped. I got out and went round the car to help Jaime.
00:59:37I bumped into one of the killers who had a machine gun and I said, please, don't kill me.
00:59:45All he did was to go over to Jaime and finish him off.
00:59:54Incredibly, there were still brave Colombians who dared to take a stand against Escobar and the cartel.
01:00:05The press found itself in the firing line.
01:00:09The newspaper El Espectador was car bombed twice.
01:00:13Ten of its staff were killed.
01:00:17Investigative reporters, political columnists, editors who opposed Pablo Escobar paid with their lives.
01:00:23The entire democratic process was under attack, but Escobar's death threats failed to silence the presidential candidate, Luis Carlos Galán, an outspoken opponent of the cartel.
01:00:38Even so, Galán was frightened when he came to address a political rally on the outskirts of Bogota.
01:00:45We had a bad feeling. Here was the most threatened man in Colombia, at night, in the middle of a drunken crowd with no protection.
01:00:57When he got to the plaza, he got down from the truck and he walked to the platform which had been put up in the middle of the square for him to give his speech.
01:01:12We were a few meters behind him. He got on the platform and when he stepped forward to wave to the crowd, they shot him.
01:01:26There was gunfire and complete confusion.
01:01:47People were shooting from every corner of the plaza.
01:01:51Guns were going off everywhere.
01:01:57Democratic governments everywhere were shocked by Galán's death.
01:02:04The Americans urged the Colombians to adopt their own kingpin strategy, aimed at targeting and hunting down the lords of cocaine.
01:02:17Colombia formed an elite force to hunt down Pablo Escobar and the leaders of the cartel.
01:02:26You find that people and organizations are what drives drug trafficking.
01:02:33If you can take those people out of the loop, you're successful.
01:02:35For five years, government forces kept hitting Escobar's 40 ranches and residences.
01:02:46But time and again, Escobar was warned in advance.
01:02:54Once they came so close that his bed was still warm.
01:02:57No, my brother wasn't the nervous kind. He didn't know the meaning of the word. He was funny that way.
01:03:09My brother was a cool customer. Almost too cool.
01:03:13Escobar maintained a number of safe houses around Medellin.
01:03:19He always chose places on hills so that he could see if anyone was approaching.
01:03:24Emergency food, disguises and getaway kits were hidden around the house.
01:03:29If any passersby seemed too curious, they were killed.
01:03:39Inside were caletas, secret compartments, where he is known to have hidden as much as a million dollars in cash.
01:03:46Some caletas were big enough to hide a man for two or three days.
01:03:49In case the men who built these betrayed him, he had them killed.
01:03:58Police say that for a while, three workmen a day were being murdered in Medellin.
01:04:03I went to see him once and spend the night with him at the farm.
01:04:09The next morning, we told him that the police were coming.
01:04:13He went into the bathroom, had a shave, then sat down and had breakfast.
01:04:24And everyone was desperate.
01:04:28Let's go, let's go, let's go, they are coming, they are just over there.
01:04:32He said, don't panic.
01:04:34He put on his sneakers and tied his shoelaces.
01:04:38Everyone was running. He just walked away, really slow.
01:04:48Even on the run, Escobar kept a grip on his drug empire.
01:04:53As the crack epidemic swept through the cities of America, his fortune grew to three billion dollars.
01:05:00In 1982, the price of a kilo of cocaine on the streets of Miami coming in from Colombia
01:05:06probably was somewhere in the range of forty to fifty thousand dollars a key.
01:05:11But in 1988, the price was down to about fourteen thousand dollars a key,
01:05:16meaning that they had brought in so much cocaine, they had driven the price down on the market.
01:05:25The money from drugs financed the car bomb attacks that ripped through Colombian cities.
01:05:30A new word was added to the vocabulary, narco-terrorism.
01:05:40The bomb that exploded outside DAS, the police headquarters, killed sixty-three and wounded six hundred.
01:05:46Then on November 27th, 1989, an Avianca jet blew up in mid-air, killing a hundred and seven passengers and crew.
01:06:05There were a couple of people that Escobar didn't want to reach their destination.
01:06:13I just testified at the trial of the individual that did place the bomb on the plane.
01:06:20Escobar is the one that this individual reported back to and he ordered the bomb placed on the plane.
01:06:27The state of Colombia had been battered and bribed into submission by the men from Medellin.
01:06:46You have so much money and so much power in the drug dealers that it is now almost impossible for the leadership of the Colombian government
01:06:56to successfully deal with the governmental problems without dealing with the narcotics dealers.
01:07:03Narcocracy is a term that I use in my book, Evil Money, to explain the change in the political system in Colombia.
01:07:13A new president decided to appease the cartel.
01:07:21President Gaviria, when he came to power in 1990, changed the constitution the way the drug traffickers wanted him to.
01:07:33He changed the constitution so to eliminate extradition to the United States.
01:07:38From then on, nobody was extradited to the United States.
01:07:41The cartel had come a long way in ten years, but its leaders had paid a price.
01:07:48Escobar had seen Carlos later arrested and deported to America.
01:07:53He had seen Gacha and his son die in a hail of police bullets.
01:07:57He had seen Fabio Ochoa's three sons surrender to the government and go to prison.
01:08:06Escobar's own family was in danger.
01:08:12Rivals had bombed his home and injured his small daughter.
01:08:15Tired of life on the run, Escobar wanted to come in from the cold.
01:08:20Secret negotiations had gone on for six months when a government helicopter came to arrest him.
01:08:28They found him waiting for them on the edge of a soccer field at a house which overlooks Medellin.
01:08:38Then the helicopter took off and for a few tense minutes flew across the town.
01:08:44The prison to which Escobar was flying was like no other.
01:08:52It was built on land that he owned and built to his own designs.
01:08:59Escobar's overriding concern was his own physical safety.
01:09:02Going to jail would save his life and force the government to be his protector.
01:09:09The prison was called La Catedral, the cathedral.
01:09:15Some called it Club Medellin.
01:09:18The guards joked that it was not maximum security, but maximum comfort.
01:09:25Regarding the guards at the prison, I would tend to say Pablo handpicked those guards.
01:09:30We know for a fact that he paid them a monthly stipend just to keep everybody on his side.
01:09:39He surrendered with a select group of people and they were the only ones allowed to occupy that prison with him as inmates, quote inmates.
01:09:51Pablo Escobar had a suite.
01:09:54He had a living room, a kitchen in one room and in the other would consist of a master bedroom and an office combination.
01:10:01The bathroom had its own jacuzzi.
01:10:04The prison itself contained its own discotheque, its own bar.
01:10:10The parties were known to be a weekly occurrence at the prison.
01:10:13A photograph in the bar showed Popeye, Escobar's favorite assassin, entertaining a local prostitute, while a prison guard served them drinks from behind the bar.
01:10:27He was known to have visits from family.
01:10:34He had a very strong devotion to his family, his immediate family.
01:10:37Outside of his personal room at the prison, he had a very powerful telescope set up, which was directed to the building where his wife and daughter lived and son.
01:10:45And he would stand there and talk on his cell phone to his daughter so he could look at her through the telescope.
01:10:55The prison authorities had turned a blind eye when Escobar installed phones, faxes and computers to continue his narco trafficking from jail.
01:11:03But when he brought four of his lieutenants to the prison to torture and murder them because of a dispute over money, the government decided Escobar had finally gone too far.
01:11:11It was decided that Pablo would be taken out of his custom built prison and put into a normal prison in the Colombian prison system.
01:11:19And Pablo just finally refused to have any part of that.
01:11:24Attention, urgent. Pablo Escobar Gaviria says that he will face death, but he will not allow himself or any of his men to be transferred to another prison.
01:11:34Soldiers surrounded the prison, but Escobar had bribed so many army officers that he simply walked out the back gate.
01:11:48Once again, Escobar and his gang were on the run.
01:11:53Once again, Escobar and his gang were on the run.
01:12:01Thousands of soldiers and police combed the streets of Medellin.
01:12:06Over the next 17 months, they carried out 11,000 search warrants and mounted 4,000 roadblocks.
01:12:12No society lost as many policemen as ours did.
01:12:19Pablo Escobar put a price on every policeman's head.
01:12:24Officers were being gunned down on the street corners simply for wearing the uniform.
01:12:29The security forces were not the only ones hunting for Pablo Escobar.
01:12:36There was also a death squad funded by the Kali Cartel.
01:12:41There was an organization that formed during the manhunt for Pablo Escobar.
01:12:46It was known locally as Los Pepes.
01:12:49And that stands for people persecuted by Pablo Escobar.
01:12:53This group basically turned the table on Pablo Escobar.
01:12:58They used his tactics to combat him.
01:13:01And those tactics included them targeting his properties.
01:13:03Anything that they could find, fincas, ranches, whatever.
01:13:07They would target those and blow them up or burn them down.
01:13:10They targeted his attorneys at one point.
01:13:13And I think they killed three attorneys.
01:13:15Unfortunately, they killed an attorney's innocent son.
01:13:18Escobar had shown no mercy in carrying out threats against the families of his enemies.
01:13:23Now it was his turn to fear that his son, his daughter, his wife might become victims of Los Pepes.
01:13:33Inexorably, the search was closing in on him.
01:13:36Constantly forcing him to change his appearance.
01:13:40To sleep in a different safe house every night.
01:13:44Colonel Hugo Martinez commanded the special 600-man unit which had been formed to find Pablo Escobar, dead or alive.
01:13:53Pablo Escobar handled intelligence very well.
01:14:00He managed to infiltrate everyone he could, especially those who were searching for him.
01:14:06We would often hear phone calls warning him about one of our operations up to two hours ahead of time.
01:14:14Foreign governments donated equipment.
01:14:22This van came from France and was packed with high-tech directional finders and state-of-the-art bugging equipment from all over the world.
01:14:29Pablo knew that he couldn't talk for more than three minutes without them pinpointing his location.
01:14:37To combat this on numerous occasions, he would ride around in a taxi with his radio telephone.
01:14:43And obviously, by the time the Columbia National Police had pinpointed that location and responded to troops, he may be five, ten miles down the road, but still talking on the telephone.
01:14:54On several occasions, they came very close to capturing Pablo Escobar.
01:15:00It was very, very close that they came.
01:15:02December 2nd of 1993, Pablo Escobar was intercepted by the Columbia National Police using their radio directional finding equipment, talking to his son Juan Pablo, who was in Bogota.
01:15:18Escobar had moved his family to Bogota for safety, but he worried about them all the time.
01:15:25His own family was his Achilles heel, and in the end, his downfall.
01:15:29That call was traced, and it told us which part of Medellin the call came from, so we knew where to focus our efforts.
01:15:44We sent the directional finder to this area in order to listen for other calls and narrow the margin of error.
01:15:51For some reason, on December 2nd, Pablo was not in his taxi. He made the telephone call from a fixed location.
01:16:05He called Juan Pablo again and spoke for several minutes, much more in excess than three minutes.
01:16:08Nobody knows why, because he knew, we had heard him say that he knew he couldn't talk on the phone for longer than three minutes.
01:16:11However, on this occasion, he did, which allowed the police to exactly pinpoint a location, which was a row house.
01:16:17The lieutenant that pinpointed the location had the de-effing antenna in his hand, the mobile unit, and looked at the window where his indicator pointed to, and saw Pablo with phone in hand peeking out the window.
01:16:33He had the telephone in his hand, and when he hung it up, the lieutenant could hear the click in his earpiece, and when we knew it was Pablo Escobar.
01:16:58So they sent two of their officers around to the back side of the house.
01:17:05Colonel Martinez is instructing them, hit the location, let's find out if it's Pablo, let's don't take a chance on losing him.
01:17:11And five officers kicking the front door.
01:17:14And there in the garage is a taxi, a yellow taxi.
01:17:18So the officers, they know that Pablo was on the second floor, they make their way up the steps, and he has one bodyguard with him.
01:17:24Shots are exchanged. One officer, as he was running up the steps, tripped and fell, which probably saved his life because Pablo shot at him at that exact moment.
01:17:34When Pablo gets to the third level, he jumps out the window.
01:17:37He and the bodyguard are running across the roof of the adjacent row house.
01:17:40The bodyguard jumps off the roof. Two police officers engage him in a gun battle and shoot him dead. Pablo heard the gunshots and realized that he was in crossfire.
01:17:51So he's trying to return fire to the apartment he just escaped out over the row house. And he's also trying to return fire to the police officers on the ground.
01:17:59And they basically have him in a crossfire. And Pablo Escobar is killed on that rooftop.
01:18:08During our first operations, he was surrounded by 60 bodyguards armed with rifles.
01:18:15But in the final operation, we found him with only one man armed with one pistol and one shotgun.
01:18:25It was such an exciting moment at that time that after years and years of problems of drug trafficking and murder and extortion and kidnapping and so forth in Colombia and the world over, that it had finally come to an end with Pablo Escobar's death.
01:18:42The excitement, it's hard to explain. There was a lot of hugging and back slapping and high fives between myself and the police officers.
01:18:50It's just, it's like a burden had been lifted.
01:18:55It's the greatest moment there ever was in Colombian law enforcement history.
01:19:01Minutes after Escobar had been killed, his mother and two sisters arrived.
01:19:06They elbowed their way through and one sister went up and looked at the bodyguard who had died on the ground.
01:19:12And Pablo's body was on the roof.
01:19:13And she began laughing and looking at the police officers and saying, you know, you have messed up again, this is not Pablo Escobar.
01:19:20Once again, you have killed the wrong person.
01:19:22You've done the wrong thing.
01:19:23And she was very abusive towards them and laughing at the police.
01:19:26The police allowed her to go on and through her tirade.
01:19:29And after a few moments when she started to walk away, they basically told her, look on the roof at the other body.
01:19:35And when she climbed the ladder and then she realized her brother was dead.
01:19:38I felt something I had never felt in my life.
01:19:48It was terrible.
01:19:54Since then my soul has been destroyed because there will never be anyone like Pablo again.
01:20:04In the end, what brought Pablo Escobar down was a combination of forces arrayed against him.
01:20:20He had his own men, his own lieutenants, who he had turned on while he was in jail.
01:20:27So they got together to get him.
01:20:29Then you have the government, which had faced a reign of terror and violence.
01:20:36And finally you have the Kali Cartel, which was the competition, saying this is our great chance to be rid of a formidable force which is competing with us and in the end reducing prices and complicating our lives.
01:20:51Today, the cocaine trade is dominated by the Kali Cartel, by men unlike Escobar, men who have learned to stay in the shadows and stay rich.
01:21:05For Colombia, stopping Escobar's violent assault on the people and its institutions was a matter of national survival.
01:21:11But for America, killing Pablo Escobar was a deceptive victory in the war on drugs.
01:21:21The death of Escobar was a landmark in the history of the industry, but it wasn't a victory in the sense that it didn't put anything out of business.
01:21:29It didn't change the pace of trafficking, it didn't raise or lower the price of cocaine.
01:21:35The business is so much better that today the Colombians are trafficking drugs, not only in airplanes, but now they have whole container ships and even unmanned submarines that can carry three tons.
01:21:52Three tons.
01:21:55So business is better than ever.
01:22:15Dear Frontline, I am so grateful for Frontline.
01:22:17And now it's time for your letters.
01:22:19Our recent program, What Happened to Bill Clinton, which examined the Clinton presidency at midterm, was remarkably successful in angering liberals and conservatives alike.
01:22:30You should be ashamed.
01:22:32Your program about Bill Clinton's first two years as president was mindless, shallow drivel.
01:22:37It was just another tired echo of the mainstream media.
01:22:40Now we have a president who's made real progress, has the guts to take on some of the biggest, most powerful crooks in the country, like the health insurance industry, and you get down in the gutter with everyone else and wallow around mindlessly instead of reporting and educating the public about Clinton's accomplishments.
01:23:00Chris Fredheim, Minneapolis, Minnesota.
01:23:02Dear Frontline, your Jungian cycle babble about the president's difficult life was pathetic.
01:23:09Your puff piece only went to show what silliness the left-leaning media will broadcast in the name of truth.
01:23:14The problem with Bill Clinton is Bill Clinton.
01:23:16That tautology contains as much new content to the subject as your show.
01:23:19Sincerely, Jim Gungor, Chicago, Illinois.
01:23:24When I learned the topic of tonight's Frontline, I almost switched channels to avoid watching it.
01:23:29I have grown profoundly weary of the regular onslaught of presidential bashings to be heard, seen, or read in the media.
01:23:35I am pleased to say that your sequence of thoughtful, insightful interviews did not live up to my cynical expectations.
01:23:42I learned much that was useful and worth understanding about Clinton's personal history, persona, and working style.
01:23:47Nancy E. Cohen, St. Paul, Minnesota.
01:23:51Now that you have joined the Republican bandwagon to dumb Clinton halfway through his first term, allow me to issue a challenge.
01:23:59Since PBS political telecasts are generally noted for balanced reporting, please put together another documentary focused on his two years in the White House, highlighting the numerous good things he has accomplished.
01:24:11The Reverend Fred P. Davis, Rancher Mirage, California.
01:24:14You can interact with Frontline by sending your comments by fax to 617-254-0243 by letter or home video to this address.
01:24:24They work the subway and streets all across America, but are all their hard luck stories true?
01:24:36Here he is when he's panhandling.
01:24:38And here's Dave a half an hour later.
01:24:40The hidden world of the begging game, next time on Frontline.
01:24:45The blue came to visit me.
01:24:48To Escobar it didn't matter whether you were a man, woman or child. If you were going to die, you were going to die.
01:24:53If he had to kill the father, he'd kill the whole family.
01:24:58Have fun with you!
01:24:59Thank you!
01:25:00Who was also получbi the whole family?
01:25:01Thank you!
01:25:03Oh!
01:25:04Hey!
01:25:05Off!
01:25:06Hu!
01:25:07informSU ling
01:25:08to fan bahきます
01:25:09posting
01:25:11ban
01:25:58From viewers like you.
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