Kings

of Cocaine
Inside the Medellín Cartel – An Astonishing True Story of Murder, Money and
International Corruption Guy Gugliotta and Jeff Leen

Garrett County Press Digital Edition 2011

Copyright © 1989 by Guy Gugiiotta and Jeff Leen

All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any
form.

First published by SIMON AND SCHUSTER in 1989

Cover design by Kevin Stone
En la vida se presentan dos o tres
ocasiones de ser heroe, pero casi
todos los dias se presenta la ocasión
de no ser cobarde.

In our lives we have two or three

opportunities to be a hero, but almost
every day we have the opportunity
not to be a coward.

--FAREWELL MESSAGE FROM

AN OFFICER IN THE COLOMBIAN
ANTINARCOTICS POLICE TO
A FRIEND FROM THE U.S. DEA, 1986
1. DADELAND
On a hot July day in 1979, a white Ford parcel delivery truck rolled into the
parking lot of the Dadeland Mall, the largest shopping center in south Florida. If
anyone had looked closely at the truck, he would have noticed that the signs on
its sides did not match. The left side read “Happy Time Complete Party Supply,”
while the right side read “Happy Time Complete Supply Party.” The signs were
crudely stenciled in red paint. There was a telephone number underneath, but if
anyone had called it, he would not have’ learned anything about party supplies.
The truck drove toward the southwest corner of the mall, where a
Crown Liquors store was tucked between a Cozzoli’s Deli and Mr. John’s, a
beauty salon. Dadeland was a showcase of subtropical suburban living. Spread
over fifty acres, it sat on a small canal in Kendall, a vast bedroom community
that every weekday sent an army of white-collar workers ten miles north into
downtown Miami. Kendall was a place of manicured lawns and ranch-style
homes, not quite up to the luxurious Spanish architecture of Coral Gables, but as
ail-American as things got in Dade County.
The white truck had come to Dadeland for a rendezvous with German
Jimenez Panesso, a man who was going to make a purchase at Crown Liquors.
Jimenez was one of the top cocaine dealers in Miami. The men in the white truck
were also cocaine dealers. Like Jimenez, they were Colombian. The truck
stopped at the curb near the liquor store, as if to make a delivery. The motor kept
running.
About 2:20 p.m. Jimenez and his twenty-two-year-old bodyguard, Juan
Carlos Hernandez, pulled into the Dadeland parking lot in a new white
Mercedes-Benz sedan. They left a loaded 9-mm Browning automatic pistol on
the floor in the backseat and walked unarmed into Crown Liquors.
Inside they asked clerk Thomas Capozzi for a bottle of Chivas Regal.
Capozzi pointed to a shelf on the right. Hernandez went to fetch the bottle for his
boss. Just then, two men walked from the white truck into the liquor store. One
leveled a silenced .380 Beretta automatic handgun at Jimenez and opened fire.
The other joined in with an Ingram MAC-10 machine pistol. The shooters
sprayed Jimenez and Hernandez, shattering bottles on the shelves. Hernandez
died where he stood, falling on his back, the quart of Scotch unbroken on the
floor next to his left elbow. Jimenez dropped face up as he tried to run out the
door, part of his head blown away by four or five .45-caliber slugs from the
MAC-10. Capozzi, wounded by a stray bullet that hit his right shoulder and tore
through his chest, staggered out of the store. The bullets went through cases of
liquor and wine and the store’s ceiling. The man with the MAC-10 emptied his
thirty-round clip and reloaded.
Morgan Perkins, an eighteen-year-old stock boy eating lunch in the
backroom, heard the commotion and came out front. He saw a man in a white
shirt and dark pants shooting up the store. Perkins fell to the floor behind the
counter, crawled to the front door, bolted into the parking lot, and scrambled
under a parked car.
Next door in Cozzoli’s, people heard the noise, and somebody yelled,
“Skylab is falling.” Everybody laughed. A woman and her son finished their
lunch, walked out, and saw glass all over the sidewalk. They heard the gunfire.
The boy ran ahead into the parking lot and spotted Capozzi, the wounded clerk.
“Somebody’s hit in the parking lot!” the boy yelled.
The woman ran back to Cozzoli’s, but by then the owners had locked
the door. “They’re shooting! Call the police!” she yelled.
The woman ran to Mr. John’s on the other side of the liquor store. The
beauty salon customers had heard the slugs hitting the liquor store walls and
thought it was just teenagers making noise. Then it dawned. “Call the police,”
the salon manager yelled to his receptionist. “Dial 911.”
After firing more than sixty times, the killers stopped. They dropped the
MAC-10 inside the liquor store, ran outside, and jumped into the cab of the
white truck. Another man in the cab spied Perkins hiding under a car and fired a
.30-caliber carbine at him. Perkins took bullets in both feet. “Why are they
shooting at me?” he screamed. “I didn’t do anything.” To cover their getaway,
the men in the cab indiscriminately blasted the mall parking lot with their
weapons. They got so excited, they shot out their own rearview mirror. The
bullets tore holes into parked cars and shattered plate-glass store windows. One
shot ruptured a car’s fuel tank, spilling gasoline into the parking lot. Another
bullet whizzed by the ear of a pedestrian. The white truck finally disappeared
around the Jordan Marsh store at the south end of the mall. The shooting was
over in less than three minutes.

THE call came on a crackle of static into the Dade County Public Safety
Department’s homicide squadroom: a machine-gunning involving Latin males at
the Dadeland Mall. It was 2:35 p.m., July 11, 1979.
Oh, shit, here we go again, thought Detective Al Singleton. Latins with
machine guns meant Colombians and homicides. Here’s another number two for
the shelf, he thought. A “number two” was an unsolved homicide.
There was a cocaine war going on, and Colombians had been turning up
dead in Miami and surrounding Dade County for months. The department had
put together an eighteen-man squad to work on twenty-four Latin drug
homicides dating back to November. The cases rarely got solved. The squad was
called the Special Homicide Investigation Team--the S.H.I.T. squad.
Singleton was a regular homicide detective, not part of the S.H.I.T.
squad. His own squad was not in line to handle the shooting at Dadeland. But it
looked like one of those cases where a lot of people were needed to assist. So
Singleton got into his light blue unmarked Plymouth Satellite and went west on
the Dolphin Expressway.
Singleton’s route bisected the populated part of the county. As he drove,
he left behind Miami’s budding skyline and headed to the flatter suburbs of
southwest Dade. At thirty, Singleton was a jug-eared, rail-thin ex-marine who
was just getting confident in his job after little more than a year in homicide. He
wore a blue three-piece suit, sum-merweight, to deal with Miami in July.
Nobody in law enforcement had any clear idea why there was a cocaine
war going on, least of all Singleton. The operative theory involved a rivalry
between the Colombian cocaine factions. Others thought some of the killings
were between the Colombians and the Cubans they were easing out. For years
the balance of power between the Cuban middlemen and their Colombian
suppliers had kept things on an even keel. Colombians bought the coca leaf in
Bolivia and Peru, processed it into powder in their own country, and shipped it
north. Then the Colombians decided to cut out the middlemen and in 1976
started to take over the cocaine distribution in Miami. Longtime Colombian
traffickers came south in force from their traditional stronghold in Jackson
Heights in Queens. Illegal aliens--an estimated twenty thousand of them--poured
in from Colombia. Within three years, four or five Colombian groups controlled
nearly all of the Miami trade.
The business was getting out of hand by the late 1970s. The country’s
tastes were changing from marijuana to cocaine, and surging demand sent the
price sky high: a kilogram (2.2 pounds) of cocaine, the standard unit of measure
in the trade, sold for $51,000 in Miami, up from $34,000 just a year earlier. And
there were more kilos coming in than ever before. South Florida was a
smuggler’s paradise. Miami was closer to Barranquilla, Colombia, than to
Chicago, and Florida had 8,246 miles of shoreline to patrol.
By 1979 Miami was a boom town and cocaine was its currency, filling
its banks with laundered cash and its nightclubs with Latin men in champagne
booths watched over by other men with bulges in their suits. There was a fever
in the air, a surface tension with a mean edge.
SHOOT-OUT AT THE COCAINE CORRAL, blared a front-page story
stripped across the top of the newspaper Al Singleton had read that weekend.
The Miami Herald detailed a series of drug executions the likes of which the
locals had never seen. Colombians were dying in all sorts of interesting ways:
stuffed in a cardboard box and dumped in the Everglades; delivered DOA to an
emergency room in a white Cadillac; wrapped in plastic and dumped in a canal
in Coral Gables; machine-gunned to death while sitting in noontime traffic. “It’s
Dodge City all over again,” said a federal prosecutor. “A replay of Chicago in
the 1920s,” a county coroner called it. Colombians crowded the Dade County
morgue--Dead County, the Colombians called it. “The Colombians are like
Dixie Cups,” said the coroner. “Use them once and throw them away.” The story
ended with a detective predicting, ‘Tt’s just a question of who else is unlucky
enough to get in the way.”
Some of the dead were on the bad side of a bad debt; others were the
creditors themselves, fallen to debtors with itchy fingers, figuring they’d do unto
others before they got done themselves. The dead told no tales, but neither did
the living, those the cops were lucky enough to catch. They had fake IDs, fake
passports, or names like Jorge LNU --last name unknown. To identify people,
the cops had taken to showing around a “book of faces”--personal photographs
of unidentified Colombians collected at murder scenes.
The weapon of choice was the Ingram MAC-10. The Military
Armament Corporation Model 10 was a compact, box-shaped, little black killing
machine that could send big .45-caliber slugs through a car body at the rate of a
thousand per minute. Cops had taken to calling it the “Miami chopper.”
Such a weapon figured prominently in the most notorious of the drug
killings that Al Singleton and his fellow detectives were having such a difficult
time solving. Less than three months before the Dadeland shooting, a balding
man leaned out of a shiny black Audi 5000 and squeezed off a burst from his
silenced MAC-10 at a pursuing white Pontiac Grand Prix. The Grand Prix had
chased the Audi in broad daylight for nearly ten miles down the Florida
Turnpike and U.S. 1 while the occupants of the two cars traded fire. When the
cars finally stopped, the balding man jumped out of the Audi, took a stance
behind a concrete pole and continued firing at the men in the Grand Prix, who
fired back over the hood of a car filled with teenagers. Somehow no one was hit.
The Audi was found abandoned. Police opened the trunk and stared at
the body of a Colombian. He had two Florida driver’s licenses, both valid. The
one that called him Jaime Arturo Suescun turned out to be correct. His mouth
was taped shut, his feet were bound, and his hands were cuffed behind his back.
A taut rope looped from the handcuffs to his blood-encrusted neck. An autopsy
later revealed that he had died from asphyxiation. Next to him were Ziploc bags
containing twenty kilos of white powder, which turned out to be milk sugar, a
popular ingredient used to cut cocaine.
Police arrested two Colombians in what came to be known as “the
turnpike shoot-out.” One was the balding gunman, whose nickname was El
Loco. Murder charges for the body in the trunk failed to stick, so the Colombians
ended up charged with attempted murder for shooting at the Grand Prix. Less
than a month after the shooting, El Loco’s bond was reduced from $500,000 to
$100,000. A satchel bearing $105,000 was delivered to a Miami bail bonding
agency. Within two ho jrs, El Loco walked out of jail and vanished. That sort of
thing was ge ting typical.

AL Singleton turned south at the Palmetto Expressway. He arrived at the

Da,deland Mall parking lot about twenty-five minutes after the radio call into the
squadroom. Singleton parked quite a ways from the mass of cars arranged
around the mall’s southwest corner. It was the caution of a good detective: he
didn’t want to run over a piece of evidence in the parking lot.
Three coconut palm trees grew out of the lot in front of the stores where
the green-and-white county police cars gathered. Gawkers pressed forward, and
the uniforms kept them back with the yellow nylon rope that demarcated murder
scenes. Singleton stayed outside the rope, careful not to disturb the scene. The
lead detective appeared and told Singleton that the suspects had abandoned a
white getaway truck in back of the mall. He dispatched Singleton to “process”
the truck. Scene and body processing was Singleton’s specialty.
Singleton drove to the rear of the mall and parked beside the truck. A
television crew was already filming the scene. Singleton took out a yellow legal
pad and began recording in meticulous detail what he saw.
The truck sat near a bridge spanning a canal that separated the shopping
center from a residential neighborhood. The killers had apparently fled across
the footbridge into suburbia. The truck was a white 1979 Ford on an Econoline
chassis. The driver’s door was open. The keys were in the ignition, and the
motor was still running. The inside was done up in red shag carpet. The
odometer had 108.2 miles on it. Singleton saw sunglasses and a blue police-issue
bulletproof vest on the front seat. A sawed-off .30-caliber carbine lay on the
passenger seat next to a .357 Magnum and another revolver. On the floor, a
MAC-10 rested between the driver and passenger seats not far from a 9-mm
Browning automatic pistol and another .30-caliber carbine. Very seldom do
killers leave murder weapons at the scene. Here he had six. Singleton had never
seen anything like it.
He drew a diagram and carefully noted the position of the weapons.
Later, back at the station, he removed the weapons from the front of the cab and
found that every gun had been fired. Like bandits in a cowboy movie.
When Singleton looked in the rear of the truck, he saw six more
bulletproof vests hanging like smoked hams from the ceiling. The side panels
were reinforced with quarter-inch stainless-steel plates. Whoever was inside the
truck could look out small windows of oneway reflective plastic taped above the
armor plating. In the truck’s rear cargo doors, two circular holes stared out, each
big enough to accommodate the muzzle of a gun. A pump shotgun, a .380
silenced Beretta, another 9-mm Browning, and homemade shotgun shells were
ditched in the rear of the truck. By evening, everyone was calling it “the war
wagon.”
Even in the middle of a cocaine war averaging one murder a week --
Jimenez and Hernandez were the thirty-seventh and thirty-eighth drug homicide
victims of 1979--Dadeland was unique. Colombian hitmen had carried out
brazen machine-gun assassinations in broad daylight before. But at Dadeland the
Colombians turned their weapons on innocent bystanders for the first time. And
then there was the war wagon. The police looked at it and got a very real chill.
The killers had planned to escape, even if it meant blasting through a ring of
police. The police decided to do something very out of character: they opened up
the truck for inspection by a newspaper reporter, Edna Buchanan, the stellar
crime writer from The Miami Herald. It went against the book to let a journalist
get so close to a vital piece of evidence in an open homicide investigation, but
the homicide chief wanted the uniform cops to know what they were up against.
Al Singleton had always carried a .38-caliber Model 19 blue-steel Smith
& Wesson, standard issue for county police. After Dadeland he went out and
bought a fourteen-shot 9-mm Browning automatic.
The Dadeland shoot-out was national news, introducing “cocaine
cowboys” into the language. More than any other single incident, it shaped a
Wild West image of Miami that would later surface on Miami Vice and in
innumerable national magazine stories.
Dadeland did little to clarify Miami’s cocaine war. Since Jimenez was
hit in the face, it took several days to identify him as a thirty-seven-year-old
Colombian drug fugitive wanted in New York. (“I started counting the bullet
holes in them and gave up,” said a county coroner. “They looked like Swiss
cheese.”) Jimenez was said to be either the Number-1 or Number-2 man in one
of the Colombian rings running the cocaine trade in Miami. His death was
believed to be retaliation for the killing of Jaime Suescun, the body found in the
trunk of the Audi in the turnpike shoot-out. Suescun was another alleged
kingpin, and his killing was thought to be revenge for the murder of Jimenez’s
fifty-year-old maid, who was found strangled in a field on Easter, a week before
the turnpike shoot-out. She had apparently died after witnessing a forty-kilo drug
rip-off by Suescun at one of Jimenez’s stash houses. This theory was
strengthened by the fact that Suescun died exactly as the maid had: both were
strangled and hogtied. To top it off, the Audi bearing Suescun’s body was
registered to Jimenez. And El Loco, the balding gunman, was known to be
Jimenez’s close friend.
As the investigators dug deeper it got even more complicated. It turned
out that one of the people Jimenez supplied with cocaine was Suescun’s boss,
one Carlos Panello Ramirez. The theory went that Panello feared Jimenez’s
wrath after his man Suescun killed Jimenez’s maid during the forty-kilo rip-off.
So Panello decided to go after Jimenez before Jimenez came after him. But
Panello feared Jimenez and needed an ally. He found such a person in another
Jimenez customer, Griselda Blanco de Trujillo, a Colombian woman known
variously as “the Godmother of cocaine” and the “Black Widow.” Cocaine is a
credit business. The wholesaler fronts the drug to the distributor, and the debt is
paid when the money comes in. Blanco owed Jimenez a lot of money for
cocaine, and she had a habit of paying her debts with bullets. Blanco’s chief
hitman was Miguel “Paco” Sepulveda. And it turned out that Paco was upset
because Jimenez was sleeping with his girlfriend. An afternoon of violence that
would terrorize Miami for years to come was born out of the theft of forty kilos
of cocaine and a sexual indiscretion.
Though they soon had plenty of suspects, the detectives investigating
the Dadeland shoot-out had no arrests to show for it. Everyone was a fugitive:
Paco, El Loco, Panello, and Blanco. After Al Singleton and the other detectives
had looked at things long enough, all sorts of leads appeared, though what the
detectives ended up with only got harder and harder to follow. The ex-wife of El
Loco, for instance, turned out to be Griselda Blanco’s bookkeeper. There were
interesting connections all over the place. But what did they add up to?
2. The New Breed
Dadeland and the turnpike shoot-out served sudden and terrifying notice of the
ascension of a new breed of criminal. The Colombian cocaine traffickers brought
to Miami a stark savagery that U.S. lawmen had never before encountered.
Before the Colombians, Miami’s drug culture had been populated by slick high-
rollers, hip young professionals, casual thrill seekers, and leftover flower
children. Now, the age of Aquarius was over.
The Colombians would transform Miami into the cocaine Casablanca of
the 1980s. Metropolitan Dade County would become for a time the murder
capital of the nation, and south Florida would see an unprecedented federal
police effort against drug smuggling. By the end of the decade any cocaine
seizure under a ton barely rated a mention in The Miami Herald’s local news
pages.
Supplied by these Colombian traffickers, cocaine would grasp America
in the late twentieth century like no drug had before it. Nearly one hundred years
earlier, Dr. Sigmund Freud had proclaimed the drug an aphrodisiac and answer
to morphine addiction, touching off a thirty-year cocaine frenzy in the United
States that ended with the nation’s first comprehensive drug law, the Harrison
Act of 1914.
The lesson was forgotten in the 1970s. At first cocaine was fashionable,
an antidote to the dull, marijuana-soaked seventies, a chic statement, “like flying
to Paris for breakfast,” Robert Sabbag wrote in Snowblind in 1976. In the
beginning, it dusted jet-set parties with its seductive sparkle and pulled movie
stars like Richard Pryor and Richard Dreyfuss under its destructive sway. “God’s
way of saying you’ve got too much money,” the joke went. Later, as greater
amounts poured in, it strung out sports stars like Hollywood Thomas Henderson
of the Dallas Cowboys and infiltrated the thrill-seeking habits of upper-and
middle-class youth, who danced in clubs to the incessant inner drumming
provided by a “blast of blow.” In the 1980s, best-selling books like Bright
Lights, Big City and Less than Zero would chronicle a generation wasting itself
on “Bolivian marching powder.” Finally, “crack” and “rock” would creep into
the nation’s ghettos, addicting the poor and spreading misery into the most
miserable places. By 1988 six million Americans would use cocaine regularly,
and at least three of them would die every day. Cocaine would become the first
drug to be declared a threat to America’s national security.
 In 1979, however, little of this was obvious. It was difficult, if not
impossible, for Al Singleton and his colleagues to know that they were
witnessing the growing pains of a business that was changing from a modest
smuggler’s sideline into a multibillion-dollar international industry. But by the
time Singleton drove into the Dadeland parking lot, most of the amateurs had
been weeded out.

IN the end, only a handful of Colombians would remain at the top of the heap.
These few would become the kings of cocaine. They would be tested constantly-
-by rival traffickers, by police, even by governments. But they would always
survive, and most of the time they would prevail. They would become famous,
ranked among the most successful, the richest, and certainly the deadliest
criminals on earth. Together they would be known as the Medellín cartel.
There were four of them: Pablo Escobar Gaviria, El Padrino-
-”Godfather”--who exchanged a modestly successful career as a hired gun,
kidnapper, and car thief for a chance to make millions as a cocaine trafficker;
Jorge Luis Ochoa Vasquez, El Gordo--”the Fat Man”--a soft-spoken, lower-
middle-class kid who wanted a better life for his family and found it in cocaine;
Carlos Lehder Rivas, “Joe Lehder,” a wise guy who loved the Beatles and
dreamed of building the world’s biggest cocaine transportation network; Jose
Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha, “the Mexican,” who used the proceeds from cocaine
to buy soccer teams, horses, and vast tracts of land in the jungle.
By the middle of the 1980s these four would control more than 50
percent of the cocaine coming into the United States, as much as fifty metric
tons each year. They would have hundreds--perhaps thousands--of employees:
campesino peasants to grow coca and process it; airplane pilots to carry the drug;
distributors to market it in the United States; lawyers to handle the requisite legal
problems; bagmen to offer bribes and launder money; hired killers to eliminate
enemies. They would keep their own organizations separate, but increasingly
they would cooperate on large deals and make common policy. In the mid-1980s
the Medellín cartel would earn an estimated $2 billion per year--tax free.
In 1979 the future lords of cocaine had already reached the top rung of
their profession, but to U.S. law enforcement they were four names among
many. It was difficult to see the linkages, if linkages existed at all. Still, the
police noticed that Colombian traffickers shared many traits. Most were young--
in their twenties or thirties. Most had little education, and many spoke no
English at all. A lot of them looked grubby and almost sick--pastyfaced chain-
smokers with pitted complexions.
 And yet they had immense success. They were cunning, close-mouthed,
and creative, utterly single-minded, and willing to do absolutely anything to get
what they wanted.

THE first Colombian cocaine trafficker that U.S. law enforcement studied in any
detail was Griselda Blanco de Trujillo, a former whore who had moved most of
her operation to Miami from the Colombian neighborhood in Jackson Heights,
Queens, in the mid-1970s. A federal grand jury in Brooklyn had indicted her in
1974 in a 150-kilo cocaine smuggling case, and by 1979, at the age of thirty-six,
she was the best-known cocaine smuggler in the United States. Police and
criminals knew her as “the Godmother,” “the Black Widow,” “Bety,” La Gaga
(“the Stutterer”), and Muñeca (“Dollface”).
She was suspected as a prime mover in the Dadeland debacle and had a
fearsome reputation both in Miami and New York. Three different husbands, all
of them traffickers, had died in the drug wars--this was her “Black Widow”
persona.
Blanco was short, about five feet two inches tall, big-hipped, and
attractive. She had dark, coffee-colored eyes, fair skin, and a round, full face
with deeply dimpled cheeks that gave her a vaguely chip-munkish appearance-
-”Dollface.” She had a speech impediment--La Gaga--and spent a lot of time on
her appearance, favoring fancy headgear: hats, turbans, wigs. And like many
drug traffickers, she also had a fondness for hand jewelry and claimed that her
favorite diamond once belonged to Eva Perón. The flamboyance was part of her
“Godmother” image, and in some ways it was her favorite. She named one of her
sons Michael Corleone Sepulveda, in homage to the character in The Godfather.
By the mid-1970s the DEA estimated Blanco had several hundred
people on her payroll. She liked to work with other widows and with women in
general and was said to have developed her own line of women’s underwear,
complete with secret pockets suitable for carrying a kilo or two of cocaine
through Miami customs. Her chief Miami distributor was a childhood girlfriend.
For heavy work she had her own gang, known as Los Pistoleros. Full
membership, it was said, was acquired by killing someone and cutting off a
piece of the victim--an ear or a finger--as proof the deed was done. One
prominent gang member had the habit of taping shut the eyes and mouths of his
victims, draining their blood into a bathtub, and folding the corpses into empty
boxes intended for televisions or stereos. Another pistolero earned renown by
murdering Blanco’s enemies with a machine pistol from the passenger’s seat of a
speeding motorcycle. This technique was so admired that it became the
trademark of Colombia’s cocaine killers.

ALTHOUGH Blanco had been born in Cartagena, on Colombia’s Caribbean

coast, and had started her career in Jackson Heights, she, like most of the other
young Colombian cocaine dealers, claimed the Andean city of Medellín as her
hometown. By 1979 U.S. newspapers were calling Medellín the “Wall Street of
Cocaine.”
But most U.S. narcotics cops didn’t know where Medellín was, let alone
what it signified. Yet understanding Medellín was crucial to understanding
cocaine.
At first glance the city offered few clues. Tourist brochures called it the
“City of Eternal Spring” or the “Orchid City”--a fast-growing, mountain
metropolis of 1.2 million people sprawled across a mile-high river valley amid
the pine forests of north-central Colombia’s Antioquia province. The brochures
were right as far as they went. Medellín, the capital of Antioquia province and
the second-largest city in Colombia after Bogotá, was as pretty a place as a
person could find in South America. In 1979 it had a bustling downtown with
new skyscrapers adding a touch of glass-and-steel elegance to the stately
colonial neighborhoods that framed the city’s burgeoning industrial sprawl.
Medellín had three university campuses, a botanical garden, dozens of parks, and
many tree-lined boulevards. Picturesque winding roads crisscrossed the
suburban hills where gentry had built large country homes and weekend chalets.
Small farmers lived in neat white stucco cottages with red trim and flowerboxes
overhanging the verandas. Mean temperature year round was 72 degrees
Fahrenheit. It rained a lot, but Medellín offered plenty of gorgeous mountain
sunshine to compensate.
The men and women of Medellín called themselves paisas, after the
tough, resourceful, adventurous Antioquian “countrymen” of myth. Outwardly
modest, they were an aggressive, ambitious people, hard workers with hard
heads who coveted money and social position. Anyone in Medellín--rich or
poor--could win prestige if he had enough guts, brains, and vision to be a
success.

IN Spanish colonial times Medellín was isolated, squalid, short of social grace,
and unpleasant for those colonists from Bogotá and elsewhere who preferred a
richer, more refined life. The paisa, an in-bred, pale-faced, miserly, loquacious
lout who gobbled his words with a peculiar accent, became the butt of jokes.
Bogotanos found paisas incredibly crude.
By the mid-twentieth century, however, the joke was on the rest of
Colombia. The paisas were creative businessmen, risk-takers not afraid of travel
or bold ventures. Parents encouraged sons to leave home at an early age: “If you
succeed, send money,” went an old paisa saying. “If you fail, don’t come home.”
And it paid off. Medellín started as Colombia’s colonial mining center,
added coffee in the nineteenth century, and became the center of national
industry in the twentieth. By 1979 Medellín was a rich, attractive, arrogant city.
Now the paisas talked only half in jest about seceding from Colombia and
forming their own country. If Bogotá’s rich intellectual tradition had won it a
reputation as “the Athens of South America,” Medellín was its Sparta, a place to
respect, but also a place to watch very carefully.

BESIDES mining, coffee, and industry, Medellín also had a reputation as a

smuggling center, earned in the nineteenth century by itinerant paisa peddlers
who sold notions to rural housewives. By the middle of the twentieth century the
list of available goods had lengthened, and the techniques for transporting them
had changed, but the nature of the business remained largely the same. Perfectly
respectable men--and some not so respectable--made a living bootlegging liquor
and cigarettes by ship from the United States and airlifting television sets,
stereos, and radios from the duty-free ports of the Panama Canal Zone.
This was where Colombia’s cocaine industry took root. The leaves of
the coca bush had been chewed as a stimulant by the Indians of South America’s
high Andes for tw6-thousand years, but it was only in the latter part of the
nineteenth century that enterprising chemists in Europe began to treat relatively
large quantities of the leaf and create the first cocaine. Before 1973 the modern,
criminal cocaine trade was a cottage industry based in Chile and controlled by a
few refiners who bought coca leaf and paste from Peru and Bolivia, transformed
it into cocaine in Chilean laboratories, and sent it north to the United States,
often using Colombian smugglers as middlemen. U.S. demand was limited to
those rich and sophisticated few who wanted something with more kick than
marijuana but fewer unpleasant side effects than heroin. The Chileans made a
lush living from cocaine, but the market was relatively small.
This began to change in September 1973, when Chilean army General
Augusto Pinochet Ugarte overthrew elected Marxist President Salvador Allende
Gossens. Pinochet’s police jailed or deported dozens of drug traffickers. At the
end of Pinochet’s first year, seventy-three of them were in jail in Chile, another
twenty bosses had been sent to the United States, and the Chilean cocaine
business was finished.
The trade moved to Colombia, which had the smuggling know-how,
and, like Chile, easy access to the coca leaf producers in Peru and Bolivia.
Chileans brought the technology north but shortly disappeared. Within two years
the Colombians had eliminated virtually all the foreigners. A few years later they
brought the same philosophy to Miami.

FROM the beginning, Colombian cocaine production was headquartered within

the triangle bounded by the three great Andean cities of Bogotá, Medellín, and
Cali, but almost immediately Medellín was dominant. At first this was not easy
to see. Law enforcement both in Colombia and in the United States concerned
itself primarily with the multiton loads of Colombian marijuana that were
leaving from the Caribbean ports of Barranquilla, Santa Marta, and Rio Hacha.
The coastal marijuana smugglers had little to do with cocaine, and cocaine, it
seemed, had little to do with stateside drug abuse. The U.S. Bureau of Narcotics
and Dangerous Drugs and its successor organization, the Drug Enforcement
Administration, or DEA, maintained an office in the U.S. embassy in Bogotá,
but its agents were concerned mostly with marijuana. The Bogotá DEA bureau
made only occasional forays to Medellín, mostly to observe and harass Griselda
Blanco.
Eyes opened for the first time November 22, 1975, when police at Cali
airport stopped and seized a small airplane that tried to sneak in for a landing in
the radar clutter of an Avianca Airlines commercial jet. The six hundred kilos of
cocaine found in the plane’s cargo bay marked the biggest seizure in history up
to that time and suggested that the cottage industry that Colombia had inherited
from Chile was a cottage industry no more. Police arrested the pilot and co-pilot
of the plane. The seizure touched off a vendetta among Colombia’s traffickers,
the first of the cocaine wars that would periodically shake the nation. The
reasons for the war were not clear. The results, however, were: forty people were
killed in one weekend. What was unusual was that all the murders were
committed in Medellín, not Cali. Regardless of whose cocaine was seized, it
appeared that cocaine policy originated in Medellín.
THE “Medellín massacre” tarnished the “Orchid City’s” carefully
cultivated image. Law enforcement’s attention focused on the city’s working-
class satellite suburbs and the new, slum neighborhoods in the north end. This
was the cradle of the cocaine industry. Here people carried guns, knives, and
whatever else could get them an advantage in the day-to-day struggle to stay
alive. By 1979 north Medellín was as dangerous a place as any in Latin America,
breeding ground for the hard-bitten, cold-eyed hustlers who were laying waste to
Miami. North Medellín was where the teenaged Griselda Blanco, just up from
Cartagena, learned how to become a pickpocket.
 The idea was to get rich, move south into a villa or mansion like the rest
of paisa aristocracy, then buy a chalet in the Andean woods for weekends and a
cattle ranch--a finca--for vacations. Drug money could thus transform a north
Medellín mugger into a respected, conservative. Catholic businessman or -
woman almost overnight. In Medellín, Griselda Blanco owned two houses,
drove her own automobile, and lived like any well-to-do Medellín sehora. If
outsiders thought that was scandalous and unseemly, then outsiders could go to
hell. In Medellín people minded their own business and took care of their own.
The lords of cocaine in the mid-1970s were older men, mostly paisa
smugglers who had added drugs to their portfolios when the opportunity arose.
Most of them were already well established, fairly well-to-do, and even
respectable by the time they started to dabble in drugs.
But they were being supplanted by the younger traffickers who had
started in the late 1960s and early 1970s with nothing going for them but
ambition and intelligence. Many had been introduced to crime by the older
smugglers, but few, even in their earliest days, had ever sold radios or filter
cigarettes. They dealt cocaine, and only cocaine.
In studying Griselda Blanco, the DEA and the Metro-Dade police began
to learn a lot about the Colombians who were making Miami the center of the
cocaine trade. But the trouble with Blanco as a model was that she was never
more than a middle-level trafficker. Much later experts would refer to her as a
classic “floater.” She had some cocaine labs in Colombia, a distribution network
in the States, some muscle in both places, and enough money to get more. Still,
she always moved around the edges of the industry. By focusing on Blanco, U.S.
law enforcement tended to overlook or underrate far bigger and more dangerous
traffickers who at the time were unindicted and unknown, including a young
man from Medellín who by the mid-1970s had quietly become one of the most
important cocaine traffickers in the world.
His name was Pablo Escobar. As late as 1976 the Colombian
Department of Administrative Security (DAS), the Colombian equivalent of the
FBI, described Escobar as a “mule”--a petty criminal who earned an occasional
grubstake by transporting a kilo or two of cocaine for a much larger trafficker.
And Escobar looked like nothing. He was a short, plumpish man, five
feet, six inches tall, maybe 160 pounds. He had hazel eyes, full cheeks, and
black, curly hair that he combed to one side. He was light-complected and
periodically affected a wispy mustache that barely changed his appearance. He
had a totally forgettable face.
Escobar was born December 1, 1949, in Rionegro. a town of green,
piney woods twenty-five miles east of Medellín, but he grew up in Envigado, a
tough, blue-collar Medellín suburb that would become legendary as a font of
cocaine bosses. Escobar’s mother was a schoolteacher, and his father was a
small farmer of some means. Later, paid image makers would extol their boss’s
humble beginnings, but Escobar was not nearly as underprivileged as he
pretended. He was a working-class kid who graduated from high school, no
small accomplishment in Envigado. His parents and his community gave him as
much as any paisa was supposed to need to get ahead. It was up to Escobar to
make something of himself. He didn’t lose any time.
He began his criminal career in adolescence, stealing headstones from
local graveyards, shaving off the inscriptions, and reselling the blank slabs to
bereaved relatives at bargain prices. Associates and enemies would come to
describe him as an undereducated but spectacularly smart man, a quick learner
with a brilliant business mind. Outwardly, of course, his demeanor was strictly
paisa: he was soft-spoken, modest, unfailingly polite, painfully formal.
After high school Escobar went to work as a bodyguard/enforcer for a
middle-aged smuggler who bootlegged stereo equipment from the Panama Canal
Zone. Escobar handled security at the Medellín airport and pestered his boss
about moving up in the business. He rose rapidly, helped along by two million
pesos ($100,000) he made kidnapping and ransoming a Medellín industrialist in
the early 1970s.
Escobar’s first known arrest occurred September 5, 1974, when
Medellín police picked him up for stealing a Renault. Nearly two years later,
DAS arrested him and five others for transporting thirty-nine kilos of cocaine
through downtown Medellín in the spare tire of a pickup truck. The young
prisoners tried unsuccessfully to offer $15,000 in bribes. The arrest marked
Escobar’s first drug bust; the seizure was the biggest in the city that year.
Escobar stayed in prison for only three months, walking out when his
arrest order was mysteriously revoked. Two and a half months later police
picked him up again, but he was freed on bail in less than two months. Over the
years, nine separate judges handled the case. At some point the documents just
seemed to disappear. One judge said a telephone caller told her that Escobar and
his friends were discussing ways she might be murdered. They favored a
simulated traffic accident. The caller also said the gang planned to kill the DAS
agent who arrested Escobar. The judge immediately reported the threat and
handed the case to another judge. Five years later, gunmen murdered Escobar’s
arresting officer on a Medellín street.
This was the last facet of the Escobar persona. The quiet young
Envigado businessman was a stone killer.

ESCOBAR was one of the first of the younger generation to take up cocaine
trafficking. One of the last was Jorge Luis Ochoa Vasquez. Ochoa was born in
Cali but raised in Envigado. He was two months older than Escobar and knew
him from childhood.
Ochoa was the second of three sons of Fabio Ochoa Restrepo and
Margot Vasquez. The Ochoas were an old Antioquia family known primarily for
their expertise in the care and breeding of livestock. Fabio Ochoa, a grotesquely
fat man with a fondness for felt hats, held a reputation as one of the province’s
finest trainers of Andean caballos de paso--walking horses. Margot would claim
much later that in 1963 Jorge accompanied the first Colombian walking horse
ever exported to Miami.
Despite this facade, the Ochoas were not gentry. In the mid-1960s, to
make ends meet, Fabio opened Las Margaritas, a family restaurant specializing
in red beans, arepa corn muffins, sancocho chicken stew, and other paisa
specialties. The whole family worked long, hard hours at the restaurant to make
it a success. Jorge; his older brother, Juan David; his younger brother, Fabio; and
their sisters all bused tables, cooked, and waitressed from the moment they got
home from school in the afternoon until the early hours of the following day.
One of the legends that later circulated in Medellín held that Jorge led his
brothers into drug trafficking because he was tired of watching his mother and
sisters working themselves to death at Las Margaritas.
The Ochoa brothers were introduced to the cocaine business by their
uncle, Fabio Restrepo Ochoa, one of the old-time paisa pioneer smugglers. All
three brothers eventually became deeply involved in cocaine, but Jorge
dominated the “Ochoa clan” from the beginning. Yet he was an improbable
criminal, quiet to the point of reclusiveness, mild-mannered, family-oriented,
and temperate in his personal habits. Except for an occasional glass of white
wine, he did not drink. He did not smoke. Cocaine was out of the question. He
did not permit the word to be uttered in his presence.
Like his father and the other Ochoa men, Jorge had a tendency to get
fat, and his weight yo-yoed with the direction of his personal fortunes. He was
big-framed, a shade under six feet tall, and often carried more than two hundred
pounds. Like Escobar, he was nondescript in appearance, a pale-faced
Antioqueño. And like Escobar, he occasionally sported a mustache.
Ochoa thought cocaine was a harmless vice. If people could afford it,
they could use it. And if that made Jorge Ochoa rich, all the better. Ochoa, more
than any of the other young traffickers, was a paisa businessman.
Ochoa went to Miami in the mid-1970s as manager of the Sea-8
Trading Co., an import-export business. He lived in a modest apartment in
Kendall. His real job, however, was distributing cocaine along the East Coast for
his uncle.
In late 1977, Fabio Restrepo bragged to a DEA informant that he was
smuggling up to one hundred kilos of cocaine a week into the United States. On
October 12 of the same year, Restrepo gave the informant a suitcase filled with
twenty-seven kilos of cocaine and asked him to deliver it to his nephew Jorge in
Miami. The informant told the DEA, and the DEA set a trap for Jorge at the
Dadeland Twin Theatres, a group of movie houses just across the street from the
liquor store where German Jimenez Panesso and Juan Carlos Hernandez would
die two years later.
As the cocaine was exchanged in the theater parking lot, the DEA
swooped in and arrested nine Colombians, including Jorge Ochoa’s sister and
brother-in-law. Jorge alone escaped. He sat on a motorcycle when the trap was
sprung and sped off before he could be caught. It was the beginning of a pattern.
Over the years, Jorge Ochoa would demonstrate an uncanny ability to evade
justice.
After that close call, Ochoa left Miami, never to return. His younger
brother, Fabio, barely out of his teens, had to be sent in to handle the family’s
U.S. distribution. And shortly after Jorge returned to Medel-lin, his uncle Fabio
was murdered. The DEA asked its field office in Bogotá to find out what
happened.
“Jorge Ochoa is currently residing in Medellín, although he keeps a
home in Barranquilla, and it has been learned that Ochoa has inherited the
trafficking organization of the departed Restrepo,” came the reply from
Colombia on July 31, 1978. “It is speculated that Ochoa ordered the murder of
Restrepo to install himself as the undisputed head of the organization. Several
sources of information have related that Ochoa has become one of the most
powerful traffickers in Medellín and the northern coast of Colombia, and is
continuing to introduce between one hundred and two hundred kilos of cocaine
into the U.S. by several unknown methods.”

BY the mid-1970s Escobar, Ochoa, and other young Medellín traffickers had
positioned themselves as leaders within Colombia’s rapidly expanding cocaine
trade. Escobar’s group was known on the street as Los Pablos. Jorge and his
brothers were El Clan Ochoa. But their business was still relatively small. What
they needed was a reliable method of shipping large quantities of cocaine to the
United States and a reliable method of distribution.
Escobar had no experience with the United States, and Ochoa’s brief
sojourn had almost ended in arrest. They needed someone--a Colombian--who
understood how the United States worked, who understood how to manipulate
the gringos.
They needed an interpreter.
3. THE DREAM OF DANBURY
In the spring of 1974, Carlos Enrique Lehder Rivas sat in the Federal
Correctional Institution at Danbury, Connecticut, planning what to do with the
rest of his life. He had plenty of time. Arrested in Miami the year before for
smuggling marijuana, he had been sentenced to serve four years. Danbury was a
minimum security prison that housed mainly white-collar criminals, drug
dealers, and political activists. Along with Lehder, its inmates included G.
Gordon Liddy of Watergate fame, Howard Hughes hoax biographer Clifford
Irving, and the Berrigan brothers, two priests arrested for their protests against
the Vietnam War.
At twenty-five Carlos Lehder had done little to distinguish himself. His
criminal resume showed that in addition to smuggling pot, he had sometimes
shipped stolen cars to South America. He was born September 7, 1949, in
Armenia, Colombia, to Wilhelm Lehder, a tall, courtly German engineer and his
Colombian wife, Helena Rivas. Wilhelm Lehder had emigrated to Colombia in
1922 and opened a construction business. Carlos was the youngest of four
children, three boys and a girl. His parents divorced when he was four. His
mother charged wife beating; his father countered with adultery. Carlos spent his
childhood with his mother in Armenia, one of the hubs of the Colombian coffee
industry, then when he was fifteen he moved with his mother to the United
States. He grew up to be short--five feet six inches tall and 135 pounds--but
handsome, with thick dark hair, boyish features, and penetrating eyes. People
who knew him then said he was somewhat quiet but very ambitious, a smart,
respectful hustler. His criminal career had an unspectacular beginning. He was
arrested for the first time in 1972 for unauthorized use of a motor vehicle in
Mineola, New York. The next year he was charged in Detroit with interstate
transportation of stolen vehicles. He posted bond and fled to Miami, where he
was subsequently arrested for possession of 237 pounds of marijuana and sent to
Danbury.

AT Danbury’s Massachusetts House, the vast orientation unit for new prisoners,
Lehder found himself bunked next to George Jung, also a convicted marijuana
dealer serving four years. The product of an upper-middle-class family in
Weymouth, Massachusetts, Jung had attended the University of Tennessee on a
football scholarship, but his career as a flanker ended when he tore cartilage in
his knee. He ended up at Long Beach (California) City College, where he
studied advertising and started smoking marijuana. In the late 1960s, Jung joined
Students for a Democratic Society and marched for peace in Los Angeles, San
Francisco, and Boston. Jung and a boyhood friend hit on the idea that marijuana
purchased cheap in California could be sold for a lot more money at campuses
back east. The business took off. The friend was a pilot, and they were able to
buy an airplane and fly down to Mexico for marijuana. Soon they were moving
thousands of pounds, and George Jung was making $200,000 a year. Three years
later Jung was caught in Chicago when a connection--the manager of the
Playboy Club--informed on him. Jung jumped bond, lived on the lam for more
than a year, and eventually returned to Cape Cod, where he sold marijuana out of
his parents’ house. His mother turned him in.
George Jung liked Carlos Lehder right away. Lehder spoke perfect
English and seemed very intelligent and well mannered. He did not seem street
smart, more like a roommate in college. Outwardly, the two men appeared to be
opposites. While Jung was a shaggy ex-student radical, Lehder wore his hair
very short and kept his khaki prison uniform spotless. But Lehder had
something, Jung thought, a special charisma. Soon the two inmates were talking
about their crimes. Jung, seven years older, was by far the more experienced
criminal, moving tons of marijuana easily while Lehder had been struggling to
unload a few hundred pounds. Lehder’s interest piqued when Jung told of flying
marijuana out of Mexico. Lehder asked if he knew anything about cocaine. Jung
didn’t know much: he had tried it a few times, and that was all. Cocaine was
easier to smuggle than marijuana, Lehder said, because it was less bulky. And it
was far more profitable. Cocaine could be bought for as little as $2,000 a kilo in
Colombia and sold for as much as $55,000 in the United States. And now, in the
disillusioning shadow of Watergate and Vietnam, people were just naturally
going to want a new high. Lehder himself thought cocaine was poison, good
only for gaining money and power. Jung wanted the money, but Lehder wanted
the power, too. He dreamed of running his own country. He talked constantly of
revolution, and he revered Ernesto “Che” Guevara, the matinee idol of the
revolutionary left. Lehder also admired John Lennon and Adolf Hitler. Jung, a
son of the Woodstock nation whose own tastes ran to Bob Dylan, could
understand Che and Lennon, but Hitler was too much.
Drawn by their common interests in radical politics and drug
smuggling, Lehder and Jung spent every day together. Because he had been to
college, Jung became an assistant in the prison school, teaching inmate dropouts.
Lehder, who had never finished high school, attended the prison school and
quickly got his general education diploma. His grades were high, and he was
asked to join the school to teach Hispanic inmates. Lehder was obsessed with
learning. He was always sitting on his bunk with four or five books, usually
provided by Jung, who considered himself well read and something of an
authority on pop psychology. Jung gave Lehder The Prince by Machiavelli,
Plato’s Republic, Nietzsche, Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, Herman
Hesse, and Carl Jung’s The Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious.
To fend off the tedium of prison, Lehder and Jung dreamed incessantly
of smuggling cocaine. Lehder said he could get an unlimited amount in
Colombia from Pablo Escobar. Jung said he could market the drug in the States
through his old marijuana network. Jung, who had kicked around Haight-Asbury
and the rest of the San Francisco psychedelic scene, knew plenty of people in the
movie and record industries, stars and the like, who craved getting high. “I
figured that if the record industry and the movie industry were interested in it,
they could promote the product through the greatest advertising medium there
was,” Jung said years later. “I saw what they did with marijuana in the 1960s.”
Besides their connections, the two men had something equally
important: the kind of inspiration that serves as a pivot for history. They were
the first to recognize that the methods of marijuana smuggling could be married
to cocaine.
In 1974, cocaine was still coming to the United States a few kilos at a
time hidden in luggage or on the bodies of smugglers who were known as mules.
Marijuana, by contrast, was picked up by American smuggler pilots who arrived
at clandestine airstrips in northern Colombia and carted off hundreds of kilos in
their small private aircraft. Lehder and Jung did not see why private aircraft
couldn’t be used to carry hundreds of kilos of cocaine. They could make millions
providing an air transport service for the cocaine producers, who would be
encouraged to pool their several small loads into one big load. Carlos Lehder
was in a unique position to bring this about. Unlike Griselda Blanco or the
young Pablo Escobar, Lehder was as comfortable in the United States as he was
in Colombia, if not more so. He could be the cultural bridge between the
Colombian cocaine producers and the pilots and distributors in the United States.
And he had a knack for seducing people, a special skill for getting others to do
his bidding. The force of his will and vision attracted weaker men, especially
American criminals like George Jung. No other Colombian had this ability. And
Carlos Lehder needed George Jung; on his own he barely had the ability to move
even a couple of kilos of cocaine.
Lehder and Jung lifted weights together and spent a lot of time in the
prison library looking at maps and plotting out possible smuggling routes into
the United States. They were planning to go through Mexico, where Jung had
been so successful smuggling marijuana. From a doctor in Danbury for Medicare
fraud they learned about Belize, which had no extradition treaty. Belize gave
Lehder the idea of creating a sanctuary for drug smugglers. From an imprisoned
banker they learned about money laundering through offshore banks. Lehder
would always refer to Danbury as his “college.”

IN the spring of 1975, Jung was paroled. He gave Lehder his parents’ address
and told him to get in touch after Carlos was back in Colombia. As an illegal
alien, Lehder would be deported upon his release.
Nearly a year later, Lehder sent Jung a telegram with a message to call
Autos Lehder, his car dealership in Medellín. “Come on down, the weather is
beautiful,” Lehder told him. It was the prearranged signal that Lehder had lined
up his cocaine contacts.
Jung said his parole conditions didn’t allow him to leave the country. So
he sent his childhood friend and fellow marijuana smuggler, Frank Shea.
As soon as he reached Medellín, Shea phoned George Jung in
Massachusetts and told him he was at Autos Lehder, looking at the “snow” at
that very moment.
“We’ve really hit the jackpot this time,” Shea gushed. “We’ve really put
it together.”
Autos Lehder was known by police as an occasional fence for hot cars
from the United States, but it did legitimate business as well, enough to give
Lehder a front in the straight world. In addition, Lehder had the basic credentials
to be successful in Medellín. He had intelligence and guile, traits that could be
more highly valued than money and social position. And he knew some
important people, like Pablo Escobar.
Still, Lehder was never altogether at home in Medellín. His hometown
of Armenia was in Quindio province, about 180 miles to the south. He was an
outsider, and outsiders, particularly those looking for the criminal big time,
ordinarily did not prosper in Medellín. The rising young traffickers like Escobar
did not view Lehder with the same kind of awe as his American friends, though
they were impressed with his ingenuity. Lehder was not a paisa, and the paisas
of Medellín would never quite trust this flashy half-German who loved Nazis.
To them Lehder came across as a handsome swaggerer with a quick line; in
short, a bit shallow. Women found him enormously attractive, but men ran
things in Medellín.
WHEN Frank Shea arrived in Medellín in February 1976, Carlos Lehder was a
long way from his dream of transporting hundreds of kilos of cocaine by
airplane. Instead he had been slowly building his stake by shipping a couple of
kilos at a time in specially modified suitcases. In April Lehder called
Massachusetts and gave Jung his instructions. He should find two women and
send them on an all-expenses-paid vacation to the Caribbean island of Antigua.
The women should bring along some luggage.
“Don’t tell them anything.” Lehder said. “We’ll explain everything
when they get there.”
Jung thought Betsy Strautman, the woman he lived with, and Shea’s
girlfriend, Winny Polly, would be perfect for the job. He tracked them down at a
local schoolyard where they were watching Betsy’s nine-year-old daughter play
softball.
“Would you be interested in a free Caribbean vacation?” Jung asked.
“When?” asked Betsy.
“Now.”

WINNY Polly and Betsy Strautman bought four hard-shell plastic Samsonite
suitcases for the trip. Jung paid for their airline tickets, gave them spending
money, and sent them on their way, telling them as little as possible. The two
women called Jung when they arrived in Antigua and said they had linked up
with Carlos Lehder and Frank Shea. They were having a wonderful time. Betsy
didn’t tell Jung that she had slept with Carlos’s friend, Cesar Toban. Winny was
so smitten with Carlos that she found it difficult to speak in his presence. But
Carlos wasn’t interested. A few days later the women called Jung and said they
were coming home.
The luggage the women carried through Customs at Boston’s Logan
Airport was not the same as what they took to Antigua. After delivering the
suitcases, the women immediately flew back to Antigua on Lehder’s orders.
When he was alone, Jung opened one of the suitcases, removing an aluminum
lip that secured a fiberglass false bottom. Beneath the fiberglass were two kilos
of cocaine, flattened and taped onto the suitcase’s outer shell. Made in Medellín,
the compartment was virtually undetectable.
Several days later, the women returned with more suitcases and a
message for Jung from Lehder. A third of the cocaine--five kilos-- was Jung’s to
do with as he wished. The rest was Lehder’s. Jung was to pay the women and
Shea out of his proceeds. Jung quickly sold four of his kilos for $45,000 apiece.
He paid Shea $25,000 and gave the women a kilo to split. Starting off with such
a huge supply of pure cocaine, Winny Polly soon fell into a habit that ultimately
led her to injecting the drug directly into her veins. (She eventually fled in
desperation to Medellín to try to get clean at--of all places--Carlos Lehder’s
house.) Jung held on to Lehder’s kilos and waited.
A month after the last Antigua trip, Jung turned over Lehder’s kilos to
Cesar Toban and Jemel Nacel, Lehder’s Cuban-American girlfriend, at the
Sheraton Hotel in Boston. By this time Jung’s girlfriend, Betsy, had ‘fessed up
about sleeping with Toban. But Jung was willing to overlook it; there was too
much money involved to let emotions get in the way.

DESPITE the initial successes with suitcases, the ultimate goal was still to
smuggle cocaine by private airplane. But Frank Shea, their would-be pilot, was
upset at his cut of the Antigua deal and had dropped out. Jung had to find
someone else. He went looking during the Fourth of July weekend on Cape Cod.
He figured that with it being the nation’s two hundredth anniversary and parties
overfilling the cape, there had to be a pilot among the crowd. A friend set him up
with Barry Kane, a practicing attorney and, far more important, a pilot who
owned his own plane. Kane, who was something of a playboy on the Cape Cod
social scene, handled divorces and real estate transactions. He was already quite
rich, with homes in Chatham, Fort Lauderdale, and Nassau. Jung spent hours
feeling Kane out during a boat ride to look at the tall ships gathered at the cape.
Jung finally asked if Kane was interested in smuggling cocaine from South
America.
Kane immediately said yes.
Jung told Kane that he and Carlos Lehder had planned in Danbury to set
up a transportation business for Colombian cocaine producers. If they could
involve a pilot like Kane, they could all grow very rich. Jung and Kane flew in
Kane’s plane to Toronto to meet Lehder. The three men talked for several hours
at a Holiday Inn. Kane figured he could carry up to three hundred kilos in his
plane. Lehder said there would be no problem with the pickup in Colombia.
They would use an airstrip near Medellín on a ranch owned by Pablo Escobar.
The authorities would be paid to leave the plane alone.
Kane provided the rest of the plan: his connections with Bahamian
officials through an attorney named Nigel Bowe would allow him to refuel his
plane at the airport in Nassau. Once there, he would file a flight plan for the
remote outer islands. But instead he would fly to Colombia. Returning to
Nassau, he would park the plane at the airport and wait until Sunday. Then he
would blend in with the mom-and-pop traffic that flew between the United
States and the Bahamas on weekends. Staying only a few hundred feet off the
ground, he would follow the coast up to a private strip in the Carolinas.
Lehder was delighted. He and Jung had no concept of the Bahamas, figuring all
along that they would do their smuggling through Mexico. But the Bahamas
seemed perfect. On the spot Lehder wrote Kane a check for $50,000 to pay for
the extra fuel tanks needed to increase the range of Kane’s plane. The three men
agreed to a fee of $10,000 a kilo, of which Kane would keep $6,000.
When the meeting ended, Kane announced he was flying back to the
United States alone. He wasn’t going to take Jung because Jung, a parolee, was
out of the country illegally. Kane said Jung could take a commercial flight into
Portland, Maine, where he wouldn’t be bothered by Customs.

WITH Kane in the fold, the cocaine dreams of Danbury took another step toward
reality. There was a significant hitch: Lehder and Jung didn’t have the money to
finance such a large smuggling venture; Jung didn’t know it, but Lehder didn’t
even have enough to cover the $50,000 check he wrote to Kane. To generate
cash they planned another suitcase trip. Jung sent a woman with suitcases to
Venezuela, but Lehder failed to meet her. On October 19, 1976, Colombian
police arrested Lehder for smuggling Chevrolet wagons into Colombia.
This time prison set Lehder back for only a short while. He and five
thousand other inmates occupied Bella Vista, a new prison in Medellín. But
while most prisoners curled up on dirt floors or stone slabs and ate a thin broth
of rotten horsemeat cooked in a gigantic pot called el bongo, Lehder enjoyed the
best accommodations available. He stayed in a cell block with real beds known
as el patio especial –“the special terrace.” Admittance required a bribe of 1,500
Colombian pesos, about $75.
As he had done in Danbury, Lehder spent his prison time cultivating a
gringo who could help him smuggle cocaine. Stephen Yakovac was a onetime
auto mechanic and computer repairman in his late twenties, a self-described
hippie who wore his hair long and liked to smoke marijuana. Yakovac had come
to South America to collect Indian trinkets with his wife. The trip was a rolling
nightmare: the couple’s car broke down in Central America, and then they were
robbed on a bus in Colombia. When they tried to return to the United States for
the bicentennial, Yakovac made the mistake of packing a pound of Colombian
marijuana; he was now serving three years in Bella Vista, and every day brought
its own special agony, dulled only by marijuana. At six four and two hundred
pounds of taut, wiry muscle, Yakovac endured the anti-American taunts of the
shorter Colombian inmates and considered himself “a cat surrounded by mice.”
 To Steve Yakovac, Carlos Lehder was a godsend. Instead of calling
Yakovac “gringo” as everyone else did, Lehder called him paisa. The two
prisoners passed their days smoking marijuana and playing Monopoly.
Lehder regaled Yakovac with his dream of smuggling cocaine by air.
He said the idea was to form “a conglomerate of small-time cocaine producers
and to put all their merchandise together into one shipment so it would pay for
the equipment necessary to get into the United States.”
The beauty of Lehder’s plan was that it didn’t require much investment
on his part. He would merely charge his clients in kilos--one-fourth of their
shipments. Lehder envisioned a worldwide network of cocaine smugglers linked
by his transportation pipeline. And that was not the end of his daydreaming. He
said he hoped to be president of Colombia one day.
Years later, Yakovac would remember Lehder’s prison ramblings: “He
wanted to pull Colombia up by its bootstraps. He wanted to oust the imperialist
Yankees and build a kingdom based on cocaine in Colombia. ... He wanted to
use cocaine in an almost military way. He wanted to--he was very bitter because
of his incarceration in the United States and the fact that he was banned from
ever returning to the United States. And he likened himself to Hitler in that he
was a small man and could take over the world. ... He respected, almost idolized
Adolf Hitler ... in his strong-arm tactics, his ruthlessness, making the best out of
what resources he had at hand. And to him, that was cocaine.”
Lehder spent only two months in Bella Vista, getting out just in time for
the Christmas holidays. When he left, he wrote his name, phone number, and a
post office box number in Yakovac’s diary.
“I want you to come work for me when you get out,” Lehder told him.
On Christmas day, Lehder sent in a roast pig for his old pals in the
special patio, but Yakovac fell into despair. He figured he would never hear
from his friend Carlos again.

OUT of prison, Lehder called George Jung from Toronto--in Danbury they had
planned to have their meetings in Canada because of Lehder’s problems entering
the United States. Lehder told Jung he needed money. Jung sent a friend with
$30,000 taped inside a weight belt. A few days later Jung went to Toronto
himself to meet Lehder at the Holiday Inn. They had a problem. While Lehder
sat in prison, his $50,000 check to Kane had bounced. Kane had told Jung,
“Lehder’s credibility on a scale of one to ten just hit minus one.”
Lehder said he would take care of the bounced check. Also, Jung should
not worry about the mishap in Venezuela: “Let’s look to the future,” Lehder
said.
In the middle of the night, Lehder called Jung and asked if he would
come to his room. “I think I’m going to marry Jemel,” Lehder told him. “What
do you think about it?”
Wonderful, Jung said. Naive, he thought. But he told Carlos she was a
very nice girl. The partners talked for an hour or so, and Lehder suddenly
announced he was going to call Jemel on the spot and have her fly to Toronto for
the wedding.
Jemel Nacel arrived the next day. She was a dark-haired, petite Cuban
beauty. She and Lehder rushed around getting the necessary papers and blood
tests. The wedding took place in the cellar of the house of a justice of the peace.
Jung was best man. A 45-rpm record provided the music. The marriage
certificate was dated February 17, 1977. The wedding party returned to the
Holiday Inn and celebrated with Dom Pérignon. Then Lehder instructed Jung to
go to Miami, pick up fifty kilos of cocaine, and hold it in Boston.
Jung, who had never been to Miami before, checked into the
Fontainebleau Hotel on Miami Beach and called his contact, an impatient
Colombian who brought a suitcase to Jung’s hotel room. Inside was more
cocaine than Jung had ever seen--fifty kilos wrapped in cellophane and covered
with duct tape. The packages looked like footballs. Jung spent several hours
repacking the cocaine in shelving paper, the kind used in kitchen cabinets; his
marijuana days had taught him that dogs could not sniff through it.
Jung returned to Massachusetts with the cocaine and paid a friend to
drive to Toronto and bring Lehder across the Canadian border into Boston.
Security was lax, and Jung figured Lehder could make it through the cursory
customs check.
The crossing was set for St. Patrick’s Day, but that night the friend’s
wife called Jung. She was hysterical. Her husband had been detained at the
border. Lehder’s whereabouts were unknown. Border patrol officers sweated the
friend for four or five hours and finally released him.
Two days later Jung learned from the friend what had gone wrong.
Lehder had changed the plan at the last instant, deciding he wanted to sneak
across the border on foot. Lehder ordered the friend to turn around right before
the border. On a side road, Lehder got out of the car and trekked off in his street
shoes into the snow-carpeted Canadian woods. But a border patrol officer had
spotted the car backing up and disappearing into the woods, only to return minus
a passenger. Opening the trunk, the border guards found a suitcase containing
Colombian pesos and Carlos Lehder’s Colombian passport. They ran his name in
the computer and suddenly wanted to know more about this Carlos Lehder
Rivas.
Lehder, meanwhile, was running through the woods pursued by dogs.
He crossed the border and after walking several miles found a rooming house
run by an elderly lady. She believed his story about being lost in the woods and
gave him a bed. The next day, he rode a bus to New York City.
Jung didn’t know what happened to Lehder in the woods and was
extremely nervous about baby-sitting fifty kilos of cocaine. He decided to run.
He flew to Los Angeles and turned the drugs over to his old marijuana contact in
Manhattan Beach. The connection was a hairdresser whose hip boutique--there
was a pool table in the waiting room--catered to a Hollywood clientele. The
hairdresser tested the cocaine, melting it on tinfoil above a butane lighter. It
turned out to be nearly pure. The budding California cocaine market, never
before exposed to fifty uncut kilos, snapped them up. It was as if the giant city
itself had inhaled the drug. Within two weeks the hairdresser sold all fifty kilos
and gave Jung $2.2 million. Neither of them had ever seen anything like it. Jung
took the money back to Boston in three aluminum camera cases, which he hid in
the attic of a friend’s house on upper Cape Cod. Then he waited for Carlos
Lehder.
About a week later Jung’s mother telephoned and said there was a nice
young man looking for him. She put Carlos Lehder on the line. Jung told him he
had taken care of everything. He joined Lehder in the restaurant of a Hyatt
Regency Hotel in Cambridge. Lehder recounted the mishap at the Canadian
border, and Jung scolded him and told him to be more careful the next time
because he didn’t want to go back to prison. Then Jung related his news: he was
holding $1.8 million for Lehder, his end of the fifty-kilo sale. There was a great
untapped market for cocaine in Los Angeles, the potential was limitless. Lehder
was very pleased at Jung’s honesty and enthusiastic about California. The two
men decided on the spot to move to Miami and start shipping cocaine to the
West Coast.
Several weeks later Jung drove to a hotel in Hyannis Port for a breakfast
meeting with Lehder, Jemel, Lehder’s mother, and his brother, Guillermo. Jung
took the Lehder family sightseeing around Cape Cod. Lehder wanted to buy a
car, so Jung took him to a BMW showroom. Lehder saw a car he liked and gave
the salesman $10,000 in hundred-dollar bills. He gave his name as “Jose N.
Leone,” a New York restaurateur, and listed Jung’s parents’ address. Horrified,
Jung shrank from the showroom.
When they were alone, Jung rebuked Lehder. “Even the Kennedys don’t
pay cash for their automobiles,” Jung said. “This is asking for trouble, inviting
the police to come down on us.”
Lehder shrugged. He said he wanted to go up the street and look at a
Datsun 280-Z.

LEHDER made arrangements to drive down to Miami in his new BMW with his
new wife. He told Jung that his Colombian contact Pablo Escobar was very
impressed with the potential of the California market. The sale of the fifty kilos
had turned Carlos Lehder into an important man in Colombia. He went from
being a kid who moved a couple of kilos to the man who had suddenly disposed
of fifty of them and collected more than $1 million. Above all, he made it look
easy.
Carlos, Jemel, and Jung moved into a fourth-rate hotel in Little Havana,
the heavily Cuban section of Miami. But Jung spotted drug dealing in the other
rooms and wanted a place that was both more secure and less obvious. They
went to the Ocean Pavilion Hotel on Collins Avenue in Miami Beach, where
they leased a two-bedroom condominium on the eleventh floor. Carlos wanted
all three of them to live together.
“Well, you’re newlyweds,” Jung said. “I don’t think I’m needed here.
Why don’t I just get another place?”
But Lehder insisted. Soon the operation was running smoothly. Lehder
brought the cocaine in grocery bags and shopping carts up the service elevator to
the eleventh floor. The kilos always came in football-shaped packages, covered
with cryptic letters and numbers. Lehder explained that the scrawlings indicated
the owners of cocaine in Colombia.
Once or twice a week Jung carried an aluminum camera case bearing
fifteen to twenty-five kilos on the 5 1/2-hour United Airlines red-eye flight to his
hairdresser contact in Los Angeles. On the return flight, Jung’s case brimmed
with hundred-dollar bills in $10,000 stacks--the money collected for the previous
week’s kilos. Jung usually carried more than $1 million a trip. Lehder and Jung
each kept $100,000 and sent the rest down to Medellín.
Lehder sent most of his money back to Autos Lehder in Medellín
hidden in Chevy Blazers. After the money was removed, the Blazers went out on
the auto showroom floor. Sometimes Lehder would give Jemel $20,000 to go
shopping at Neiman-Marcus in the nearby Bal Harbour shopping plaza. Jung
spent most of his money on Porsches, chartered jets, Dom Pérignon, French
Bordeaux, cognac, women, and, increasingly, cocaine for his own personal use.
At first Jung had been businesslike about cocaine. But soon, with everybody he
knew trying it in California, he plunged in. He found it intensified the thrill he
got from smuggling. Jung thought cocaine was harmless, mentally addicting,
maybe, but not physically. And nothing could control his mind. After all, he had
tried everything--LSD, marijuana, mescaline--and never been strung out. Lehder
smoked a lot of marijuana, but he was careful never to use cocaine. Once, when
Jung snorted a couple of lines for a quick pick-me-up before catching the red-
eye to California, Lehder remonstrated with him: “How can you do that and get
on an airplane? That stuff’s poison.” Soon Jung was snorting a couple of grams a
day.
Jung returned from California one day and noticed aviation brochures
scattered throughout the apartment. Jung and Lehder began visiting small
airports in south Florida, looking at planes. They were eager to advance beyond
suitcases and implement the Danbury plan. The partners spent time in the
Bahamas that summer, looking for an island that could serve as a refueling stop
for planes coming up from Colombia with cocaine. Lehder had never given up
the idea of creating an island sanctuary for drug smugglers. And he had not
forsaken his political dreams, either. The strange combination of hippie and
Hitlerite persisted. Gradually, Lehder’s anti-Semitism emerged. It nauseated the
liberal in Jung, but he thought Carlos would grow out of it. Once, at dinner in a
Miami restaurant, Jung suggested steak and potatoes, and Lehder replied that
“potatoes are for peasants.” He quoted Hitler’s instructions on the conquered
people of Poland: “Teach them only to read road signs and allow them only to
eat potatoes.”
His anti-Americanism also came forward. Lehder said he hated the
United States. He thought it was an imperialist police state. He told Jung that he
hoped to flood the country with cocaine and disrupt America’s political system
and tear down its morality.
By summer 1977, Jung was burning out. He was spending fifteen hours
a week in the air, and the time changes and the sheer hammering adrenaline of
carrying cocaine through airport security had taken its toll. On one California
trip, the cocaine was so high-grade and sold so fast that Jung’s contact
immediately begged for more. Jung was too tired to fly to Miami, so he called
Lehder and asked him to send somebody else with the cocaine.
“I will call you as soon as I have that person in transit,” Lehder said.
The next day, as promised, Lehder called.
“I have someone,” said Lehder. “They’re on the plane now.”
“Who is it?” Jung asked.
“It will be a surprise,” Lehder said.
 The following day, Jung heard a knock at the door of his room at the
Holiday Inn in Hawthorne, California. When he opened the door, he saw a
bellboy with luggage escorting a short, gray-haired woman. It was Carlos
Lehder’s mother, Helena. She shook with nerves. Jung ushered her in and
opened her suitcase. It contained eight kilos of cocaine.
I’ve done things in my life, dealt drugs and what have you, but I never
sent my mother anyplace with a suitcase full of cocaine, Jung thought.
He ordered a drink for Helena. Then he called Carlos in Miami and
asked what the hell he was doing.
“Everybody has to work,” Lehder said. “And she wanted a free trip to
Disneyland.”
4. THE BAHAMAS PIPELINE
The dream of smuggling cocaine by private aircraft became a reality when
Carlos Lehder and George Jung finally met up with Barry Kane in Miami during
the first week of August 1977. Kane said he was ready, after a year of waiting
and delays, to fly cocaine for them.
Kane took off from Nassau, the fuselage of his small twin-engine
aircraft outfitted with collapsible rubber “bladder” fuel tanks to increase its
range. He navigated by a nautical Loran, a radio beacon capable of guiding him
to within a few miles of his target. Over Colombia, a co-pilot sent along to spot
for Kane pointed out a small private landing strip at a farm outside Medellín. It
was Pablo Escobar’s finca.
With 250 kilos of cocaine on board, five times as much as Carlos
Lehder had ever handled, Barry Kane returned to Nassau, refueled, and sneaked
into U.S. airspace. The cocaine was off-loaded in the Carolinas and transported
to a Fort Lauderdale condominium parking lot. Kane divided the load in half and
put it in the trunks of two used cars. When the Colombians came, he gave them
one car and held the other until they paid his fee. Kane had his money in forty-
eight hours. Jung and Lehder split a cool million. Everything had gone like
clockwork.
Soon, however, tension built between the partners. Just a month after
their triumph Jung began suspecting that Lehder was going behind his back.
Before Kane’s trip, Jung had finally given in to Lehder’s badgering and
introduced Lehder to his hairdresser connection in California. This was a
tremendous act of trust. The hairdresser was Jung’s ace in the hole; if Lehder
could deal directly with the hairdresser, he wouldn’t need Jung, and he could
save millions. Jung knew this, but he had come to love Lehder like a brother.
Now Jung grew worried. He had taken to using cocaine to stay alert
during the long flights to California and had become addicted. He was
consuming five to eight grams in a single, monstrous binge, and going three and
four days without sleep. Jung got so he could do a gram--usually enough to keep
a disco queen going all night--in a single snort. The Colombians called him “I-
95” because the long white lines he snorted reminded them of the interstate
highway in south Florida. Jung’s habit fed his suspicions about Lehder.
While Lehder busied himself preparing to move his operations to the
Bahamas, Jung felt more and more isolated. He no longer lived with the Lehders
at the Ocean Pavilion apartment, having moved out after the couple started
arguing and breaking furniture. (Jemel had complained to Jung that Carlos was
only interested in Chevy Blazers and airplanes.) A lot of the time Jung didn’t
know what Lehder was up to anymore.
Jung finally arranged a meeting with Lehder in Nassau. He brought his
new wife, who happened to be the sister-in-law of one of Jung’s fellow
smugglers, a Colombian named Humberto Hoyos. He and Lehder rented a
charter boat and spent most of the day looking at the Bahamian island of
Norman’s Cay two hundred miles southeast of Miami. Lehder said he was
considering a ninety-nine-year lease. He was also looking at another island thirty
miles south. Both islands had airstrips, but Norman’s Cay was better because it
was smaller. It would be easier to force fifty people to leave an island than two
hundred, Lehder said.
After the boat trip, Jung laid out his suspicions in the lounge of the
Holiday Inn in Nassau. “I think you’ve been going behind my back,” he told
Lehder over drinks. Lehder looked like he had tears in his eyes. “No, I wouldn’t
do that,” he said. But Jung could see it in his eyes. And he could feel it all
around him.

JUNG returned to the United States, and Carlos Lehder turned his attention to
Norman’s Cay. Situated in shallow water forty miles southeast of Nassau, the
cay was one of the most beautiful of the seven hundred islands that make up the
Bahamas. Named for a Caribbean pirate and shaped like an upside-down
fishhook that had been squeezed between the fingers of a giant, the cay’s
slender, 4 1/2-mile-long landmass curved to form an ideal harbor for yachts.
Along the island’s northern end, the hoop of the fishhook, a dozen Cape Cod-
style, weathered-wood beach cottages looked out on a rocky coast. The cay’s
southeastern tip, the point of the fishhook, was undeveloped and vacant. At the
cay’s southwestern tip, the shank of the fishhook, a concrete airstrip stretched
three thousand feet. On the western edge of the airstrip were four miles of
sparkling white-sand beach that gently curved along an expanse of water known
as Smuggler’s Cove. Atop a hill east of the airstrip sat the Norman’s Cay Yacht
Club, which had a four-stool bar, a restaurant, and the island’s lone telephone.
The yacht club looked down on a twelve-room hotel, a company store, and a
wooden, L-shaped dock with fuel pumps. Conditions were rustic. Water for the
island came from cisterns and electricity from fuel-driven generators. Scrub
vegetation and sea grape covered the cay, and hills afforded privacy.
In May 1978, Lehder bought the Beckwith House on the northeastern
bend of Norman’s Cay for $190,000. He paid cash, handing a suitcase full of
money to Charles Beckwith in Beckwith’s office at Ocean World in Fort
Lauderdale. Beckwith demanded the money be counted and to his chagrin found
Lehder was about to overpay him by $8,000. Later that year Lehder appeared in
the Nassau office of the Guardian Trust Company and opened a large attaché
case filled with $1 million in U.S. currency. He made no attempt to hide the
money, which caused quite a stir in the office, making everyone a bit giddy. He
said he was a wealthy Colombian money exchanger who wanted to develop
Norman’s Cay into a yacht haven. Lehder struck the Bahamians as intelligent
and perfectly charming. He asked everyone to call him “Joe.” The attaché case
was open on the desk, revealing the blue-green glint of hundred-dollar bills. The
money was deposited in the Bank of Nova Scotia on Paradise Island. The bank
had never seen such a large cash deposit and introduced a “counting charge” of
one percent--$10,000 per million--on subsequent large cash deposits. The
deposit was staggering even to Bahamians hardened to the ostentatious displays
of the very rich. Soon many influential Bahamians wanted to meet this
charismatic twenty-eight-year-old.
Lehder opened seven accounts in corporate names through Guardian
Trust. One of these accounts, International Dutch Resources Ltd., purchased lots
four and five on Norman’s Cay for $875,000 on January 31, 1979. The purchase
encompassed 165 acres on the western and eastern tips of the island, including
the airstrip, the clubhouse, the hotel, and the dock. Lehder submitted a
development plan for a one-thousand-foot airstrip extension and a marina for
forty yachts.
For years Norman’s Cay had been a favored stop for boaters in the
Exuma chain. The cay was perfect for a one-day sail from Nassau, with a
channel no more than twenty feet deep stretching the entire forty miles. Now
Lehder set about converting the cay into his own private island. The yacht club
shut down. The hotel stopped taking reservations. The airstrip closed. The dock
refused to sell yachters fuel. CBS News anchorman Walter Cronkite, an avid
yachtsman, sailed up in his forty-two-foot yacht during his Christmas vacation in
1978 and was surprised to find the harbor empty. When he dropped anchor to
investigate, a man on the pier shouted, “You can’t dock here, and you can’t
anchor out there.”
At the next island, Cronkite was told Norman’s Cay had been taken
over by people who didn’t want visitors. Everyone in the Bahamas knew that.
People had counted as many as twenty Doberman pinscher guard dogs
housed in pens near the airstrip. Blond men with German accents and black
satchels patrolled in Toyota jeeps and Volkswagen vans. When boats got too
close to the island, a helicopter sometimes buzzed overhead. A sophisticated
communications tower went up on the island, and navigational aids were
installed for night aircraft landings.
Soon the island was bustling with activity. Airplanes flew in and out
every day, bringing supplies for the new venture. Lehder’s employees and
associates, an odd collection of Americans, Germans, and Colombians, occupied
several houses on the island. A laundromat serviced their needs. Lehder’s boats--
the sixty-five-foot Margaret Lee, the fifty-eight-foot Chelique IV, and the thirty-
three-foot Fire Fall--docked in the protected anchorage. He drove around in a
1932 Ford Replicar, part of his twenty-two-vehicle motor pool. On occasion he
was accompanied by one of his baby daughters.
As Lehder moved in, others who had been on the island for years were
forced to move out. Philip Kniskern, who owned three vacation villas next to the
airstrip near Smuggler’s Cove, depended on his guests having access to the
airstrip. But he was told by Lehder he could no longer accept bookings.
Kniskern was forced to lease his properties to Lehder’s employees. Richard
Novak, a college professor who leased a diving business from Kniskern, started
asking questions about the new crowd on the cay and was suddenly told that
there was to be no more diving. When Novak returned a month later for his
diving gear, his airplane was surrounded by Lehder’s employees. They
prevented him from reaching the building housing his equipment. Back at the
airstrip, Novak found the fuel drained from his plane. He was forced to take off
and make an emergency landing on the beach at South Eleuthera about thirty
miles away.
Both Novak and Kniskern complained about Lehder to the police, but
nothing seemed to come of it. On Norman’s Cay, Joe Lehder had become a law
unto himself.
One of those ordered off Norman’s Cay was Charles Kehm, who had
brokered the sale of the Beckwith house to Lehder. When Kehm refused to go,
Lehder had a Bahamian immigration officer deport him, even though Kehm was
in the Bahamas legally. Kehm returned, and Lehder threatened his life.
“In case I didn’t make myself clear, if you’re not off this island today,
your wife and children will die,” Lehder said.
Kehm left.

AT the time Carlos Lehder took control of Norman’s Cay, he was also building
his own cocaine distribution network in the United States. He had some money,
but he needed a lot more to get a big-time air cocaine operation off the ground.
He started with Jung’s hairdresser contact and an associate of the hairdresser’s, a
Miami dealer who had been selling ounces of cocaine since high school. It was a
neat arrangement. The hairdresser had the California distribution, the Miami
dealer had some start-up money, and Lehder contributed the cocaine. They
added a friend of the hairdresser’s who owned a recording studio and brought in
another friend to help him distribute to the music crowd. But the real problem
was pilots. Having made his money, Barry Kane had bowed out. Lehder
desperately needed people to fly cocaine.
The hairdresser knew a hulking marijuana pilot who knew a dishwasher
from Park City, Utah, and a disc jockey from Los Angeles, all of whom agreed
to enroll in flight school. The Miami dealer brought in two high school buddies,
one of them another pilot. This was how the early network grew, friends brought
in by friends, all of them American.
Lehder rented a house in Beverly Hills to serve as his West Coast
headquarters and tooled around Los Angeles in a blue Porsche. He started to
compartmentalize his operation, letting his various pilots and distributors have
information only on a need-to-know basis. While George Jung had been burning
himself out riding the red-eye to Los Angeles, Lehder and his new friends had
scouted islands in the Bahamas and rural landing strips in Florida. He bought a
smuggling airplane, a Piper Navajo, for $125,000 cash in California. Soon
everything was in place.

ON June 11, 1978, Stephen Yakovac, still sitting in a Colombian prison, got an
unexpected visitor:
“I couldn’t speak,” Yakovac wrote in his diary. “My jaws opened and
my mind whirled. Carlos. It had been almost a year, a year and a half since we
had spoken, and I had just about given up on seeing him again. See him again I
did. What a trip. We spoke a little of old times, new times and problems. In one
fell swoop, he eliminated our present money dilemma with a gift of 10,000
pesos, and he lifted my spirits incredibly by telling me of his success.”
Lehder was returning to Colombia in triumph. He said he had
successfully smuggled several loads of cocaine through the Bahamas into the
United States and he had a job for Yakovac.
A month later when Yakovac was released, Lehder sent a chauffeur to
pick him up. Carlos told him more details about Norman’s Cay. He had bought a
house there, and he said he was paying the governor of the Exuma island chain
$50,000 a month for protection.
“Let’s go to work, let’s become millionaires,” Lehder said.
 Lehder asked Yakovac if there was anything he needed. Yes, Yakovac
said, a watch. Lehder took the Rolex off his wrist and gave it to him.
Yakovac, his new wife--he had divorced his first wife and married a
Colombian prostitute in prison--and their newborn baby flew with Lehder to the
Bahamas on a rented Learjet. Also on board were three Colombian prostitutes
hired to service Lehder’s men on the cay. At first Yakovac stayed in Lehder’s
house, a spacious affair with a round center and two wings that slanted off at an
obtuse angle. The house sat on a narrow bend of the cay flanked by water on
both sides and had a conical roof that came to a point, leading Lehder’s band to
rename it “Volcano.”
Yakovac went to work flying shotgun once a month on cocaine loads
from Norman’s Cay into the United States. He was paid $5,000 per trip. The
flights were scheduled for weekends, when Lehder’s planes were camouflaged
in the small-aircraft traffic from the islands. The smugglers had learned that
weekends were also a good time to go through U.S. Customs; in the Customs
shack at Fort Lauderdale Executive Airport, Yakovac found the inspectors
routinely distracted by TV sports. Yakovac’s job was also to inventory the
cocaine. In seven flights in 1978, Yakovac helped smuggle 1,358 kilos (nearly 1
1/2 tons) of cocaine into the United States.
On the return trip to Norman’s Cay, Yakovac brought back money,
once as much as $1.3 million. At first Lehder’s men took the cash to the volcano
house, put it on Lehder’s bed, and spent all night counting it by hand. As they
got more sophisticated they added electronic currency counters. The planes
carrying the cocaine from Colombia to Norman’s Cay landed at night by the
light of portable strobes. Usually a different plane was used for the second leg
into the United States. While the crew waited for the second plane, Yakovac
supervised the off-loading of the cocaine, sometimes hiding the kilos in
sinkholes. The word “cocaine” was never said out loud. Lehder had taken to
referring to the kilos as “the children,” and the others copied him. Lehder’s
pipeline soon served a wide variety of clients, from the gringos who worked as
Lehder’s distributors to Colombians who merely used Lehder’s transport service.
Among the latter were Griselda Blanco, Pablo Escobar, and Jorge Ochoa.

NORMAN’S Cay was a microcosm of the cocaine business at the time, growing
geometrically and becoming increasingly sinister as escalating amounts of
cocaine and money poured in. The atmosphere started out fairly informal, just a
bunch of guys in cutoff shorts having a good time and getting rich. The entire
operation had a 1960s counterculture feel. Lehder’s five-bedroom house was
open to his men, and the sound system piped the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and
Joan Baez into every room. Wild parties were held to relieve the tension of the
smuggling missions.
Cocaine was the product of Norman’s Cay, and it was the privilege of
everyone to partake of it, even Carlos Lehder, who had finally succumbed to his
own endless supply. A little cocaine stimulates the central nervous system,
producing exhilaration, euphoria, and a tremendous sense of well-being and
power. A lot of cocaine, over time, produces paranoia. The cay was a situation
unique in the history of the drug: for the first time a large group of people had
access to pure cocaine in unprecedented quantities. It was as if a giant laboratory
experiment was under way to see how people would react when confronted with
an unlimited supply. The results were quickly apparent.
The island soon became an armed camp of tense, haggard men. Scores
of weapons were flown in from south Florida. Yakovac carried a .357 Magnum
and sometimes dressed in army fatigues. Lehder favored a chrome-plated .45
automatic. He also paid a German security firm to provide guards for his
operation. Seduced by more money than they’d ever seen, the guards left their
agency and became Lehder’s personal palace guard. Lehder had a boat dragged
to the top of a hill on the island to serve as a post for armed guards.
Lehder’s own heavy cocaine use--he preferred to smoke cocaine “base,”
the purest and most addictive form of the drug--boosted his megalomania into
the stratosphere. He began to affect a regal, reckless air. His obsession with
power increased, as did his fascination with things German, particularly Hitler.
Cocaine fed his grandiose dreams. He was studying a book entitled How to
Speak in Public and planning a political career in Colombia. He had achieved
almost everything he had imagined in Danbury: the transportation network,
millions of dollars, even the island sanctuary for drug smugglers. The only thing
that eluded him was the presidency of Colombia.
Yakovac and others worried that Lehder’s flamboyance was getting out
of hand. It threatened everyone’s security. The story about Walter Cronkite
getting kicked off the island was known to everybody.
He has set himself up as a king on this island, Yakovac thought.
Lehder didn’t like having his authority questioned. “I’m the boss, like it
or leave,” he told Yakovac.
One of the things Yakovac didn’t like was the way Lehder was clearing
the island of people. To discourage vacationers, he had ordered Yakovac and
others to “leave a bad taste in their mouth so they wouldn’t come back.” This
was sometimes accomplished by driving around in the Volkswagen van with
weapons on open display. A few people were allowed to stay, mainly those who
owned property on the cay and had not run afoul of Lehder. Ed Ward, an
American pilot from Jacksonville, was one of these. Lehder told Yakovac that
Ward was a marijuana smuggler and Yakovac should be cordial to him but not
too friendly.

ON August 16, 1978, the biggest cocaine load yet arrived at the cay on a
Mitsubishi, a high-performance twin-engine turboprop airplane. Sixteen
suitcases full of 314 kilos of cocaine filled the plane from floor to ceiling. The
aircraft also carried its owner, twenty-eight-year-old Jorge Ochoa.
Once the kilos were off-loaded, Lehder himself tested the powder,
seeking to take his own share from the highest-quality cocaine in the shipment.
The cocaine ranged from 88 to 94 percent pure. Some of the kilos were marked
with the letters “CIA,” which was the Spanish abbreviation for Compañía,-
-”Company,” one of the nicknames used by the emerging conglomerate of
cocaine producers.
Yakovac was just thrilled to be in the same room with all the kilos.
“Never had such a rush in my life,” he said later. “We’re talking well over $15
million, to use a good round figure, wholesale, in one room, at one time.” At the
time, the DEA was busying itself making one-ounce busts on the streets of
Miami.
Lehder’s men loaded the shipment onto a Cessna 206, the traffickers’
workhorse smuggling plane, and sent it to the United States. Ochoa stayed
overnight on the cay.
Ochoa was not the only young drug lord to visit Lehder. His friend and
occasional smuggling partner, Pablo Escobar, also came to the cay, according to
Yakovac. One day Yakovac took Escobar and Ochoa and their wives to open
bank accounts in the Bahamas. The Colombians spoke no English, so Yakovac
did the translating. The Colombians wanted Bahamian banks to serve as a
channel for transferring their money to their accounts in Panama. Lehder was
simply to deposit the cash for them in the Bahamas, and then it would be sent by
wire to Panama. Such trusting rapport was critical to their success. The close
relationship between Ochoa, Escobar, and Lehder provided the nucleus of a
coalition that would rule the cocaine trade during its period of greatest
expansion.

AS Carlos Lehder’s business boomed in the Bahamas, George Jung’s anger

about being eased out of control simmered to a flash point. He traveled in the
small circle of Colombian drug smugglers, and every time he went to a party he
was introduced as the man who had set up Carlos Lehder. While Lehder had
become a legend in the business, Jung was looking like a fool, reduced to
moving five to ten kilos at a time. It was driving Jung crazy. In the spring of
1978, Jung returned to the Bahamas for another confrontation with Lehder.
Again they met in the cocktail lounge of the Holiday Inn in Nassau. This time
Lehder came accompanied by two German bodyguards, who stood behind him
while he and Jung sat and talked. Jung could see that the bodyguards made
Lehder feel more secure. He sensed that he was no longer dealing with a friend
but a fawned-over minidictator. Jung pointed out that he had helped start the
business, had risked his life creating cash for the aircraft and the leasing of
Norman’s Cay, and now he was making $500,000 a year in little kilo coke deals
while Lehder was raking in tens of millions. Why had Lehder betrayed him? In
his own heart, Jung thought he knew the answer: he had been Lehder’s big
brother in the business, constantly correcting him and teaching him. Lehder,
obsessed with power, didn’t want to be reminded of the youth he had been.
“I’m not going to let you get away with this,” Jung warned. “There’s
only one end that can result from this.”
Lehder stayed cool. “It’s over,” he told Jung. Lehder suggested Jung go
to work distributing kilos for Humberto Hoyos, Jung’s Colombian brother-in-
law in New York City. Jung left, unsatisfied. Back in Boston, he approached
some gangsters he had met in Danbury with a plan to kill Lehder. Jung was
serious enough to make a down payment of $125,000. But Hoyos talked him out
of it. If Lehder died, it would cause tremendous problems with the traffickers in
Colombia. Lehder had become untouchable. Jung canceled the contract. The
down payment wasn’t refundable.
Like Jung before him, Stephen Yakovac was eventually forced out of
Lehder’s organization. Lehder had become increasingly demanding, always
finding fault and making crazy accusations.
“I’m the leader of this gang,” Lehder said. “This is it. I make the rules.
You live by them, or you leave.”
Yakovac chose to leave. When he returned to Norman’s Cay for some
personal belongings, Lehder met him at the airstrip with the ever-present
German bodyguards. Lehder held his chrome automatic beside Yakovac’s ear,
pointed it toward the ocean, and fired. “Get off this island and don’t come back,”
he said.

A few months later a forty-nine-year-old Nassau businessman deliberately swam

into the heart of the new cocaine business. Norman Solomon had heard the
stories about Norman’s Cay for months and finally decided to do something
about it. Solomon wrote a newspaper column on the side in Nassau, and he had
been a member of the Bahamian Parliament for twelve years. More important, he
was the leader of the Bahamian opposition and a man not afraid to challenge the
official order of things.
Solomon had a good guess about what was happening on Norman’s
Cay. So while boating through the Exumas on July 18, 1979, a week after the
bloody shootings across the water at the Dadeland Mall in Miami, Solomon
purposely drifted close to the cay. Through his binoculars, he noticed pickup
trucks paralleling his boat’s course on the land. The men in the trucks watched
him through their own binoculars.
Returning through the area several days later, Solomon decided to go
ashore. He told his captain to stay in radio contact with Nassau while he jumped
overboard and swam toward land. Onshore, he walked the beach, careful to stay
on sand below the high-water mark, which throughout the Bahamas is by law the
property of the queen and therefore public. Soon a large blond man in tight white
pants appeared and told him he was on private property. The man had a German
accent.
Solomon explained about the high-water mark and kept walking. The
big blond man left and returned with three other men. Two of them had German
accents, and the third seemed Spanish. They surrounded the 140-pound
Solomon. He could see bulges in their clothes that he imagined hid weapons. He
told them all about the high-water mark.
The men were very insistent that Solomon get lost. He was very
insistent that they get lost. A standoff ensued.
Then someone who described himself as the “island manager”
appeared. He told Solomon he could stay, but his safety could not be guaranteed
if he crossed the high-water mark. Having proven his point, Solomon swam back
to his boat. When he got home he wrote a letter to the Bahamian police
commissioner.
5. THE KING OF COCAINE TRANSPORTATION
Carlos Lehder was constantly in need of pilots to ferry his cocaine to the United
States. So it was only a matter of time before he turned to Ed Ward, the
marijuana smuggler whose operation shared Norman’s Cay with Lehder’s.
Edward Hayes Ward had found the island two years before Lehder. He
liked it for the same reasons; it was remote, it had no police force, and it was
located between Colombia and the United States. In short, it was the perfect
smuggling base.
Though they lived on the same island, no two smugglers had less in
common than Lehder and Ward. Ward was an ex-marine who had worked as an
aircraft mechanic for the Navy and settled into a routine middle-class life in
Jacksonville in the early 1970s. First he sold furniture at Sears, and then he sold
insurance, doing pretty well at both but not getting rich. Then he got divorced,
and with three children he found the alimony and child support payments more
than he could handle. Along with some relatives and Greg Von Eberstein, a
coworker in sales at Sears, Ward entered the marijuana smuggling business. He
and his partners were all slightly conservative family men in their thirties, and
they went about smuggling as if it were just a mid-career change. Marijuana,
they reckoned, wasn’t all that harmful, and people did want to smoke it. Ward
went to his mother to borrow the $30,000 to buy his smuggling plane, a twenty-
year-old twin-engine Beechcraft Bonanza.
The Ward gang set about flying 1,200-pound loads of marijuana from
Colombia into Florida and Georgia at $50 a pound. Soon they had more money
than they ever imagined. They created front businesses, purchased a marina in
Jacksonville, and acquired property in North Carolina and Florida. Ward and
Von Eberstein bought fancy houses close to each other on posh Admiral’s Walk
East in suburban Orange Park, a few miles outside Jacksonville. They wallowed
in their newfound wealth. One day a neighbor kid saw a sack of cash emptied
out on one of the beds in Ward’s house.
The conspicuous consumption of Ward’s band of smugglers attracted
heavy police surveillance in Jacksonville. The DEA became interested after one
of Greg Von Eberstein’s brothers paid cash out of a paper bag for a car without
even looking at the sticker price. Watching Von Eberstein led the federal agents
to Ward, and soon they were going through his trash and staking out his house in
Orange Park. By now Ward was remarried to a thirty-one-year-old dental
technician. Ward confessed his true business to his new wife, Emilie “Lassie,”
Ward, but he told her he was less worried about getting arrested for smuggling
than he was about having his assets seized by the IRS. He thought he had come
up with a foolproof way to smuggle drugs. Soon Lassie was part of the business,
counting and banding the money when it came in and playing devil’s advocate
with Ed to help bolster security.

ED Ward first spotted Carlos Lehder on Norman’s Cay while Ward was dividing
his time between Jacksonville and the Bahamas in late 1977. Ward knew
immediately that Lehder was a drug smuggler. After all, Ward was one, too, and
it took one to know one. Ward saw Lehder’s Piper Navajo sitting day after day at
the landing strip on Norman’s Cay and knew it was too expensive a piece of
equipment to lie idle for so long. A legitimate owner would have it in use.
Ward was worried that Lehder would think he was a DEA agent.
There’s two people that look like drug smugglers: drug smugglers and drug
agents, Ward thought.
So one day in early 1978 Ward went over to Lehder’s house on the
northeast end of the cay and asked to speak with him in private. The two men
took a walk on the ocean side of the house. Ward was direct. He shook hands,
told Lehder he was a drug smuggler and thought Lehder was one, too. He didn’t
want Lehder to be concerned about Ward’s operation affecting his. Lehder said
virtually nothing. But for a time the two smuggling groups coexisted peacefully
on the island.
A few months later, Lehder asked Ward if he wanted to become a
cocaine smuggler.
Ward considered it. He was essentially a square person. He had carried
marijuana for over a year before even sampling his own product. Cocaine meant
dealing with rougher people and bigger penalties if you got caught. There is a
saying in the drug trade: A marijuana deal is done with a handshake and a
cocaine deal is done with a gun. But there was more money in cocaine, and it
would be easier to fly because it was less bulky than marijuana. Sometimes with
marijuana you had to stuff the plane so full the pilot wouldn’t be able to get out
of the cockpit if the plane went down. Ed Ward was a practical man. He had
seen Carlos Lehder start small on Norman’s Cay and in a very short time
graduate to Learjets. Ward felt he hadn’t earned enough for all the effort he had
put into marijuana smuggling. He decided to give cocaine a try.
In late August 1978, Greg Von Eberstein brought a “two-gram tooter”
home to suburban Orange Park. Ed and Lassie and Greg and his wife, Gail,
snorted it together.
“He wanted to show us that it wasn’t like heroin, that nobody was going
to die from it, and you didn’t get addicted to it,” Lassie Ward recalled. Greg
wanted to go into the cocaine business with Ed, but Gail opposed it. None of the
wives wanted their men in cocaine.
Ed Ward needed to put Lehder’s proposition to the rest of his band of
marijuana smugglers. On September 6, 1978, eight of them had a meeting on
Norman’s Cay with Ward and Lehder. Lehder had brought a four-inch brown
vial filled with a quarter ounce of cocaine. It was white and sparkly, and
everybody thought it was really good stuff. Ward invited all his men to go into
the cocaine business. Nobody was enthusiastic about the idea. They mulled it
over while they drank beer and played cards. They considered themselves a
different breed from cocaine smugglers, more easygoing, less prone to violence.
They put their concerns directly to Lehder.
“What about violence?” asked one of Ward’s men. “Have you ever
killed anybody?”
“Every once in a while in this business somebody has to die,” Lehder
said.
None of Ward’s men were immediately willing to switch.
Ward and Lehder entered into a ten-point agreement: Ward would make
ten smuggling trips of 250 kilos a trip for $400,000 each. Lehder told Ward he
would have to buy a new airplane. He lent Ward $604,000 for a Swearigen
Merlin III, a twelve-seat corporate turboprop.

IN January 1979, Ward, Lehder, and Ward’s co-pilot, a fifty-five-year-old ex-

navy War World II aviator named Lev Francis, made the first trip in the Merlin
carrying five hundred kilos of cocaine from Colombia to Norman’s Cay. The
airstrip was muddy, Ward’s plane had been loaded with double the agreed-upon
amount, the gas from the refueling was bad, and Ed Ward was furious.
Thereafter Ward averaged about one smuggling trip a month for Lehder, but he
hated being Lehder’s contract employee. Ward, who was so precise in every
detail, detested working for the sloppy, free-wheeling Joe Lehder. He said
repeatedly he only wanted to work for Lehder long enough to get himself started
in the cocaine business.
Sometimes Ward brought the cocaine up to the Bahamas from
Colombia in the Merlin and a smaller plane took it into the United States. By this
time Lehder’s organization had changed. Gone were the early people like
Stephen Yakovac. Jack Reed, a dishwasher from Park City, Utah, who had
turned cocaine pilot, was now Lehder’s right-hand man. Reed was nineteen
years older than Lehder.
The operation was growing. Lehder’s island staff now numbered
between thirty and fifty. He had two or three Colombian pilots and three or four
American pilots. None of his pilots knew what the others were doing. More than
half a dozen planes now crowded the airstrip at Norman’s Cay, including a
Sabreliner and a Learjet. The jets were sometimes used to transport money to
Armenia, Lehder’s birthplace.
Lehder’s obsession with security worsened. When the planes came in
with the cocaine, the Colombians and Germans went into a frenzy, brandishing
weapons and scurrying about the island as if an air raid were in progress. Ward
asked Jack Reed to try to reason with Joe Lehder.
“Can’t you talk to him?” Ward asked Reed. “You know, there’s too
much attention being drawn to the island. It’s not like it used to be. It’s not fun
anymore.”
Ward, the straight-arrow ex-marine, was getting seriously strung out on
cocaine. He had made the mistake of regularly using the product soon after he’d
started transporting it for Joe Lehder. He couldn’t stop himself: he would go into
the bathroom of his house on the cay so his kids wouldn’t see him using it and
just stay in there, withdrawn and miserable. He got so fond of cocaine that he
held an entire kilo out of one of the shipments for his own personal use. He
buried the kilo in the backyard, figuring he’d dig it up whenever he wanted
some.
“After two or three nights of getting up in the middle of the night to go
out and dig it up, Ed said, ‘This stuff is going to the States in the morning,’”
Lassie recalled. “‘It’s going to kill us,’ he said.” Still, Ward couldn’t stop.
“Even when we started seeing that it did have adverse effects, it was
still too good because you could feel really lousy and really depressed and you’d
do cocaine and the depression and that lousy feeling just completely went
away,” said Lassie.
Ed and Lassie Ward had much to feel depressed about. Ward had
loaded up his family and moved to Norman’s Cay for good in the summer of
1979 after learning that the IRS was hot on his trail. As the Wards left
Jacksonville, the IRS slapped a lien on the house on Admiral’s Walk and
accused Ed Ward of failing to report $900,000 in income in 1977 and 1978.
Now the law was moving in on their island sanctuary as well. On the
afternoon of September 13, 1979, Ed Ward took off from the cay and flew at low
altitude toward Nassau. In the air he saw three Royal Bahamian Defense Force
boats coming in a line from Nassau to Norman’s Cay. Ward did a 180-degree
turn and flew back to the cay. He told everybody a raid was coming.
It had been common knowledge for weeks that the cay was about to be
raided. Lehder himself was predicting it; he always seemed to have advance
knowledge about police comings and goings. But the longer they went without a
raid, the more it began to seem like crying wolf. The attitude about the police
had grown lax. After giving his warning, Ward took off again and flew to
Nassau for the night.
The next morning, more than ninety officers of the Royal Bahamian
Defense and Police forces raided Norman’s Cay as part of “Operation Raccoon.”
Bahamian authorities had known for a long time what Lehder was up to. Nearly
a year earlier, the DEA had asked and received Bahamian government approval
to conduct undercover operations on Norman’s Cay. The DEA, trailing Ed Ward
from Jacksonville, had happened onto Carlos Lehder. In March 1979 a senior
police official pointed out that Lehder had gained control of almost all the island.
Three villas at the airstrip were full of armed Colombians who discouraged
visitors. The officer recommended a major raid. Three months later the police
received Norman Solomon’s outraged letter at having been driven off the beach
at Norman’s Cay.
The raiding officers were told they were confronting a large, heavily
armed drug trafficking operation run by “Latin-looking people who control the
entire island.” Police intelligence said the ringleader was “a very rich man who
has good connections worldwide to enable him to conduct a lucrative business.”
But it was a crude, poorly coordinated raid. Several senior officers later said they
weren’t even told they were looking for Lehder.
At seven a.m. on raid day, a Bahamian police corporal landed on
Norman’s Cay beach in a rubber dinghy and saw a man run to a white
Volkswagen bus. The corporal fired warning shots, but the man drove off. The
corporal later identified the man as Carlos Lehder. Fifteen minutes later, Lehder
ordered the mate of his thirty-threefoot powerboat Fire Fall to get under way for
Nassau. As the Fire Fall headed out of the sound, a defense force boat signaled it
to stop. Lehder, at the helm, ignored the signal. Two marines in a rubber dinghy
fired at him. He increased his speed. The defense force vessel pursued. Its
commander saw a man on the Fire Fall dumping a white powdery substance
from a plastic bag into the water. The Fire Fall entered shallow water on the
western side of the cay, and a police sergeant fired at it from shore. Finally
Lehder gave up and allowed the Fire Fall to be taken in tow.
On shore, Lehder, wearing blue jeans, a thick gold chain, and an
expensive watch, got out of his boat and started walking away. A Bahamian
inspector shouted, “Joe!” and Lehder turned. He was arrested and handcuffed.
Caught in a bedroom at Lehder’s house was his German teacher, a young woman
named Margit Meie-Linnekogel, who was later alleged to be a German terrorist.
A small child was with her. Police searching the bedroom also found a .357
Magnum and small amounts of marijuana and cocaine. Open on the bed was a
red Samsonite suitcase with a combination lock. The suitcase held U.S.
currency.
Lehder, in handcuffs, complained bitterly as he watched the search of
his house. He was overheard saying he was investing $5 million on the cay, and
he was going to pack up and leave because of the police harassment.
The prisoners were brought to the airstrip around noon. There, Lehder
continued ranting. He denied any knowledge of the items seized inside his house
except for the red suitcase, which he said contained the cash payroll for his
employees. Assistant Police Commissioner Howard Smith, the commander of
the raid, ordered one of his men to give Lehder the suitcase. Lehder opened it
and started counting the money in front of the police.

AFTER spending the night in Nassau, Ward and his wife decided to fly back to
Norman’s Cay despite the raid. They figured they had no reason not to. After
Ward landed on the cay, defense force officers with drawn guns told him they
had a warrant to search his house. Inside, they found cocaine and marijuana
residue and a small amount of ammunition. They also found $10,000 that Lassie
Ward had wrapped in a scarf. The money later disappeared.
The Wards were taken to the villas at the airstrip, where they saw
Lehder, also under arrest. But Lehder was taken outside the villas to talk with
Assistant Commissioner Smith. Smith had Lehder’s handcuffs removed. Lassie
Ward saw Lehder leave with a couple of officers and come back with Manfred,
one of his German bodyguards. Lehder carried a red suitcase.
Lehder walked over to his girlfriend, a dark-skinned Colombian woman
who went by the name Chocolata. She was standing next to Lassie Ward and
crying hysterically. He told her not to worry. Everything was going to be fine, he
said. He had paid the police off. They would let her go as soon as they finished
the paperwork.
“Everything is copacetic,” Lehder said.
“Are they taking you to jail?” asked Chocolata.
“No, I don’t have to go,” he said.
“Why aren’t you going?” she asked.
 He soothed her in Spanish.
In all, thirty-three people were arrested, nearly everybody in Lehder’s
organization except Lehder and Manfred. The Bahamian police seized eight
handguns, two automatic rifles, one shotgun, thirty-five sticks of dynamite, and
618 rounds of ammunition. The police transported the prisoners to Nassau on a
DC-3. Lehder spoke to them before they left and told them not to worry, he’d be
there to pick them up tomorrow. Everyone was angry, Lassie Ward recalled,
especially the men. “The men were upset that Joe was not being arrested,” she
said.
As the plane took off, Ed Ward looked out and saw Lehder, standing on
the airstrip with Manfred. Lehder waved. Lassie Ward heard later that Joe had
refused to stay on the island without a bodyguard.
Several police officers wondered why Lehder wasn’t going to Nassau, too.
“Don’t worry ‘bout him,” said Assistant Commissioner Smith. “He’ll
come later.”
But he never did.
Ward spent the weekend in jail, sharing a cell with another of Lehder’s
German guards, Heinrich, an imposing man with a black beard who liked to tuck
two .45-caliber automatics into his belt. One of their Bahamian jailers offered to
warn Lassie Ward about future raids on Norman’s Cay for $500.
Everybody arrested in the raid was released on $2,000 bail. Only one
conviction was ever obtained, and that was against a Bahamian who possessed
an unregistered shotgun. When Ward returned to Norman’s Cay, he asked
Lehder how he’d done it.
“I paid money,” Lehder told him.

THE man who decided not to arrest Joe Lehder was Howard Smith, the assistant
commissioner of the Royal Bahamian Police Force. Smith, the second-highest-
ranking police officer in the Bahamas, later said the evidence against Lehder was
lacking. This conflicted with Smith’s own pre-raid briefing: the two ranking
officers under Smith said the assistant commissioner specifically told them
Lehder was the “boss” of Norman’s Cay and should be arrested.
Newspaper reports later said something very curious had happened
during the raid. A police constable searched one of the houses on the cay and
found a plastic bag in a garbage bin. The bag held $80,000 in U.S. currency, and
the constable spent forty-five minutes counting it. He said he gave the money to
Assistant Commissioner Smith. The money promptly disappeared. Smith denied
ever receiving it. The constable stuck to his story.
 Five years later, Smith’s finances became a focal point for a Royal
Commission of Inquiry investigating drug corruption in the Bahamas. Within
three years after the raid on Norman’s Cay, Smith paid $7,500 for a Toyota,
$17,500 for an Oldsmobile Cutlass Brougham, and $18,000 in cash for a house
under construction. He invested $30,000 in a shipping company and took out a
$25,000 loan for yet another car while his bank balance stood at $29,500. The
commission looked at Smith’s bank accounts and found $57,000 that Smith
couldn’t account for. Asked about this, Smith said he “played the horses, the
numbers, and the dogs.”
The commission concluded that “Lehder did bribe the police to ensure
his freedom, and we find that there must have been complicity on the part of
Assistant Commissioner of Police Smith and other senior police officers.”
But four days after the Norman’s Cay raid, Lehder was mad enough to
try to make good on his threat to leave the Bahamas. “For Immediate Sale: The
Norman’s Cay Yacht Club, Norman’s Cay, Exumas,” read the ad in The Miami
Herald. Lehder offered to sell his entire operation: the airstrip, the clubhouse,
the marina, ten vacation villas--all 165 acres. He threw in twenty cars, vans,
trucks, and tractors; eight boats, and two of his best smuggling planes. Total
price: $2,932,000. “Only serious qualified enquiries considered,” the ad warned.
Interested persons were to contact International Dutch Resources Ltd., Lehder’s
corporation.
In the wake of the raid, the ad was strange enough to generate news
stories, DRUG FUGITIVE OWNS MYSTERIOUS NORMAN’S CAY, The
Miami Herald headlined. The story went on in some detail about Lehder’s
operation: “Norman’s Cay, the Drug Enforcement Administration suspects, has
been used for most of this year as a staging area for the smuggling of cocaine
and marijuana into the United States.”
But even with the police heat and the publicity, business on the cay
resumed as usual. Only days after the raid, Ward flew a 250-kilo load from
Colombia to Norman’s Cay and on to Reidsville, Georgia. The cocaine trip went
off without a hitch, but Ward’s tax problems in Jacksonville followed him to
Georgia. At the airport in Atlanta, the IRS seized Ward’s aircraft, the Beechcraft
Bonanza. Ward was present when it happened, and at first he thought he was
being arrested for smuggling. When the authorities seemed interested only in the
plane, he got his luggage and paid an airport mechanic to drive him away. The
Bonanza was only a temporary loss; Ward just had his attorney line up a third
party to buy it back from the IRS. It cost $40,000--$35,000 for the plane and
$5,000 for the third party--and Ward had the plane back within a month. In four
months the plane carried another 350 kilos through Norman’s Cay and into the
United States for Carlos Lehder. In all, Ward transported 3,000 kilos--more than
three tons--for Lehder. The cocaine was worth $150 million wholesale in the
United States. Lehder funneled more than $22 million through Bahamian banks-
-the “counting charge” alone came to $205,590. A lot of Lehder’s money ended
up in the pockets of Bahamian officials.

THE Bahamas in 1979 was a nation for sale, and Carlos Lehder wasn’t the only
one buying. More than a dozen marijuana and cocaine entrepreneurs
independent of Lehder had set up pipelines of their own on seventeen Bahamian
islands. The seven hundred islands of the Bahamas were scattered over one
hundred thousand square miles of ocean, and it was simply impossible to police
them. Raids had little effect, court prosecutions went nowhere. The nation had
turned into the prime way station for America’s drug habit.
It’s not clear when various Bahamian officials decided to start profiting
off something they could do very little to stop, but by the beginning of the 1980s
the Bahamas had become, in the words of one smuggler, “a payable situation.”
The extent of the corruption Carlos Lehder sowed in the Bahamas
would take years to surface. The evidence indicates he was merely taking
advantage of a system that was already in place. Lehder’s lawyer was Nigel
Bowe, who had once paved the way for Barry Kane’s smuggling flights through
the Bahamas. Bowe was a well-known fixer for his wealthy drug clients. Court
cases against his clients seldom brought prison sentences. Bowe was also very
close to Prime Minister Lynden Pindling. A DEA informant later said Bowe
visited Norman’s Cay on the twenty-second of each month, allegedly to pick up
$88,000 in bribe money destined for Pindling. Another informant eventually
charged that Lehder paid a flat $200,000 a month to Pindling. Lehder gave the
money to Bowe, who in turn funneled it to Everette Bannister, a notorious
bagman who was very close to Pindling, according to the testimony of
Bannister’s son, Gorman, who much to his father’s dismay developed a cocaine
freebasing habit.
The Royal Commission of Inquiry considered Pindling’s finances and
concluded that “the Prime Minister’s expenditure over the years from 1977 has
far exceeded his income.” But the commission could not determine if Pindling
took drug money. The prime minister denied every allegation against him. The
commission made a harsher determination against Nigel Bowe, finding that “Mr.
Bowe’s involvement with drug traffickers far exceeded a lawyer/client
relationship and that he benefitted materially from his numerous associations
with them.”
 The fact that cocaine smuggling continued on Norman’s Cay after the
September 1979 raid was well known in the Bahamas. Two months after the
raid, Norman Solomon spoke out in the House of Assembly that the island was
being used “as one of the biggest drug smuggling operations in this part of the
world.” Two years later Solomon’s house was firebombed.
In December 1979 Carlos Lehder was officially told to leave the
Bahamas. At first the pressure didn’t budge him, and the smuggling went on.
Mysterious things continued to happen near Norman’s Cay. On July 31,
1980, boaters found a drifting yacht, the Kalia III, her decks slick with blood. A
shotgun blast had perforated the teakwood, and a man’s corpse, the scalp nearly
peeled from the head, lay facedown in a trailing dinghy. When the Bahamian
police arrived a day later, the body was missing.
The Kalia III belonged to a retired Fort Myers couple who had set out
on a six-month cruise to the Bahamas. The couple disappeared without a trace,
and the crime was never solved. Years later one of Carlos Lehder’s smugglers
would testify that at the time that the Kalia disappeared Lehder had sent out his
German bodyguards to “take care of” a sailboat hovering too close to Norman’s
Cay.
There were two more police raids, in 1980 and 1981, but Lehder was
tipped off each time. Sometimes he merely got in his Learjet and flew back to
Colombia, always returning to keep the business going. Carlos Lehder remained
on top of the cocaine world at the beginning of the 1980s. In the fall of that year,
he told one of the smugglers on Norman’s Cay he had brought in “10,000
children”--kilos--and earned $30 million.

IT was during this period that an old friend went to Colombia for an audience
with the man they now called, with utmost respect, Don Carlos. George Jung had
never forgotten his onetime smuggling partner. In July 1980 a humbled Jung
traveled to Colombia to ask Lehder to take him back. Jung wanted to distribute
cocaine again for Lehder in California. Jung was asking to come back not as a
partner, but as an employee. He was nervous, but determined. He still felt
Lehder owed him. Only now he was willing to settle for much less.
Jung went to the Intercontinental Hotel in Medellín, called Autos
Lehder, and left word. In a few hours Lehder showed up at his hotel room with
his bodyguards. All of them, Lehder included, were dressed in combat fatigues.
Lehder and Jung had some drinks and snorted some cocaine. Jung thought
Lehder looked like something off the cover of Soldier of Fortune and told him
so. It was the first time Jung had ever seen his former partner use the drug. Jung
himself was now extremely wary of cocaine and considering giving it up. Two
years earlier, he had suffered a mild heart attack during a marathon eighteen-
hour cocaine binge while waiting out the birth of his daughter.
Finally Jung made his pitch to return to Lehder’s fold.
Lehder said yes. He was in an expansive mood, and the cocaine made
him talkative. He said he had control of Norman’s Cay and a fleet of aircraft,
and he was transporting most of the cocaine out of Colombia into the United
States. He bragged of his influence in the Bahamas. He said that Robert Vesco,
the financial swindler, had introduced him to Bahamian Prime Minister Lynden
Pindling.
Lehder described Vesco, who had embezzled $224 million from
American investors in the early 1970s as a financial genius. A fugitive hiding in
the Bahamas, Vesco was now telling Lehder what to do with his millions,
schooling him in the use of offshore banks to launder money. And, Lehder said,
Vesco had introduced him to Fidel Castro. Lehder himself was supporting the
M-19, a revolutionary group in Colombia. He seemed very pleased with himself.
To Jung his ego seemed as big as the hotel. Lehder had always admired Che
Guevara, and now he was starting to emulate Che by wearing fatigues and
growing his hair long. Jung reminded Lehder about what happened to his idol,
Che. Mixing politics with the drug business was a recipe for disaster.
“This is going to destroy you,” Jung said.
Lehder just gave Jung a cryptic smile.
He bragged to Jung that he had made several hundred million dollars.
He called himself “the king of cocaine transportation, the king of cocaine.” By
now Jung had made a few millions in cocaine himself, but the comparison with
his former partner was painful, something he would never completely get over.
But the meeting had gone well. Jung was full of optimism.
Jung returned home and was promptly arrested on drug charges in
Massachusetts. He would not speak with Lehder for five years.

ED Ward left Norman’s Cay in the summer of 1980. He was on the Bahamian
immigration “stop list”--if detained in the islands, he could be deported. And it
looked certain he would be facing criminal charges in the United States soon:
Ward found out that Lev Francis, the co-pilot on some of his cocaine flights, had
turned informant before a federal grand jury in Jacksonville. With no place to go
in the United States, Ward tried everything to straighten out his legal quandary
in the Bahamas. He retained the services of Nigel Bowe, the Bahamas’ all-
purpose fixer. He paid $100,000 to Everette Bannister, Pindling’s close friend,
and Agricultural Minister George Smith, the Bahamian cabinet official who
presided over the Exumas chain of islands that included Norman’s Cay. Ward
believed the money was going to Pindling himself.
“These people came to us and told us that that was the Bahamian way of
life, that’s the way they did things, and they could help us,” Lassie Ward
recalled.
But the bribes didn’t fix the Wards’ problems. Perhaps most important
of all, Carlos Lehder wanted him out. As with Jung and Yakovac, Ward had
outlived his usefulness to Lehder. It was clear that the DEA had zeroed in on
Ward, and Ward and his smuggling planes had become “hot.” In April 1980
Ward had to abort a 150-kilo smuggling trip, and one of his men was arrested on
the ground in Georgia. Lehder was angry at Ward for bringing the heat down on
the island. So one day Ward picked up his family and went to Haiti, where Nigel
Bowe had told him there was no extradition treaty. The Wards moved into a
three-story luxury residence on a mountaintop overlooking the bay in Port-au-
Prince. The two-acre tract was surrounded by an eight-foot wall. From Haiti,
Ward did some cocaine smuggling of his own. But without Lehder’s
connections, he was only able to put together small loads of a dozen kilos or so,
which he sent to Norman’s Cay for refueling. Lehder was talking about charging
his ex-partner $50,000 for using Norman’s Cay. And the law was moving in
again.

ON January 8, 1981, the hammer dropped in Jacksonville. Carlos Lehder, Ed

Ward, Lassie Ward, and eleven of Ward’s fellow Jacksonville smugglers were
indicted on thirty-nine counts of smuggling, conspiracy, and income tax evasion
by the federal grand jury.
Two weeks later, Ed and Lassie Ward, Greg and Gail Von Eberstein,
and two other couples from the Ward group went out to a nightclub in Port-au-
Prince. “It was kind of a last hurrah,” Lassie Ward recalled. “We had the feeling
that the chapters were closing in on us, that this was kind of like, ‘This is it.’ “
At the nightclub their suspicions were confirmed: they saw the DEA agent from
Jacksonville who had pursued them for three years.
The next day Ward, Lassie, and ten of Ward’s men were arrested in
Haiti. The police in Haiti tried to solicit a bribe for the Wards’ release. “It’s just
like the Bahamas all over again,” Ed Ward told his wife. “I’m not paying another
government to stay in their country. I’d just as soon go back and face trial.”
They rode to the United States in handcuffs, but their spirits soared. Gail Von
Eberstein told her husband she was glad he was under arrest; now he could
finally get off cocaine. On the DEA plane they sang “Homeward Bound.” On the
ground back in Jacksonville, Greg Von Eberstein shook the DEA agents’ hands
and told them: “It was fun while it lasted, but now it’s over, and you won.”
Carlos Lehder escaped capture, of course. Before the year was out,
Ward reached a plea bargain agreement-he would eventually serve five years;
Lassie received probation. Ed Ward gave testimony against his old partner
before the federal grand jury. Carlos Lehder had now replaced Griselda Blanco
as the DEA’s most wanted Colombian drug fugitive.
Lehder left Norman’s Cay in September 1981. By now he was also on
the Bahamian stop list, and the Bahamians had decided to place a permanent
police station on Norman’s Cay. It was clearly time to go. Lehder, Jack Reed,
and several Colombians loaded Lehder’s Rockwell 690 Commander with all
their suitcases. Everybody shook hands. Jack Reed, an avid pot smoker, laughed
and said he was going to go to Colombia to grow high-quality marijuana.
But Lehder merely moved his residence from Norman’s Cay, not his
smuggling operation. He returned often and kept a contingent of Colombians on
the island to look after things. In June 1982 Nigel Bowe brought an American
pilot and drug smuggler to meet Lehder on Norman’s Cay. Lehder told the pilot
he was running a very successful operation and was paying “a lot of money in
the Bahamas,” but he needed pilots to transport cocaine. Lehder’s hand showed
again when the Bahamas celebrated its independence from the British Empire on
July 10, 1982. Two Bahamian police officers found a Bahamian pilot and four
Colombians loading boxes onto an airplane in one of the hangars on Norman’s
Cay. The boxes held leaflets demanding “Nixon-Reagan’s Drug Enforcement
Agency Go Home.” The aircraft took off and dropped the leaflets into crowds
celebrating in Nassau and on Bimini. Several of the leaflets had U.S. currency
taped to them; some had S100 bills.
Lehder’s symbolic public shower of money on the Bahamas paralleled
his secret largesse toward Bahamian officials. The month the leaflets were
dropped, a Bahamian police corporal stationed on Norman’s Cay said his
inspector told him Joe Lehder was vacationing on the island for six to eight
weeks and the police were supposed to protect him. The corporal said he was
told the order came from Assistant Police Commissioner Howard Smith, who in
turn was receiving the command from “cabinet-level” authority. The corporal
saw Lehder twice on the cay. Two other constables were nearby, but none made
a move to arrest Lehder.
6. MIAMI 1982
By 1982, things had gotten far worse in Miami. Since the Dadeland shooting
three years earlier, killings had continued and the cocaine trade had
mushroomed. South Florida reeled from the effects of the Mariel boatlift of
1980, which added 125,000 Cuban refugees--thousands of them former residents
of Cuban prisons--to an already volatile mix of trigger-happy cocaine cowboys.
Every year murders set a new record, from 349 in 1979 to 569 in 1980 to 621 in
1981. At one point, 40 percent were drug-related; 25 percent of the victims died
with automatic bullets in their bodies. The Dade County Medical Examiner’s
Office was forced to add a refrigerated trailer to handle the overflow of corpses.
The murders were as bold and bloodthirsty as ever. A killer wearing a
motorcycle helmet shot a well-dressed Latin man carrying his luggage through
Miami International Airport’s baggage claim area and then jumped on a black
motorcycle and sped off. Three bodies turned up in the trunk of a car in Kendall.
In late 1981 the killings brought action from the DEA, which established a
“Centac”--Central Tactical Unit--an elite task force of DEA agents, New York
City police, and Metro-Dade detectives funded out of Washington to go after
high-level targets in Miami. Centac 26, as it was called, immediately set its
sights on the worst of the cocaine cowboys: Griselda Blanco, Paco Sepulveda,
and El Loco. Still, the bloodshed continued.
The flow of cocaine also surged to record levels. At the same time--and
as a direct consequence--money was flowing out of the country--drug money.
Money laundering was epidemic through Miami banks, and the astronomical
amounts of cash made some people realize, in a way the murders and cocaine
did not, just how encircled they were by the drug trade. In 1979 the Federal
Reserve Bank of Miami reported a $5.5 billion cash surplus, which was greater
than the combined surpluses of every other Federal Reserve Bank branch in the
country.
The next year Operation Greenback, a combined U.S. Customs Service-
IRS probe, began to make the first real progress against the Colombian
traffickers. Greenback caught a young Colombian woman at Miami International
Airport trying to smuggle $1.5 million in cash out of the country in six
Monopoly boxes. It was a record seizure, but it was surpassed within three
months, when police at the Opa-Locka airport seized $1.6 million from a private
plane bound for Colombia.
 Soon the Greenback task force was zeroing in on the failure of bank
officials to comply with the Bank Secrecy Act. The law required the filing of
Currency Transaction Reports (CTRs) with every deposit or withdrawal of more
than $10,000 in cash. Before the Greenback crackdown, the traffickers brought
millions of dollars into banks stuffed in suitcases, cardboard boxes, and duffel
bags. Some bank officers just looked the other way. Customs investigators
estimated that $3.2 billion in cash went unreported in south Florida in 1981.
Early that year Greenback agents searched the Landmark Bank branch in
Plantation, a suburban bedroom community west of Fort Lauderdale. Hernan
Botero Moreno, a soccer team owner from Medellín, was charged with
laundering $56 million through the bank. Operation Greenback was on a roll.
Three weeks later the agents raided two Miami banks, the Bank of Miami and
the Great American Bank of Dade County. Isaac Kattan Kassin of Cali, a plump
balding man with two teenaged daughters, was charged with laundering $60
million through Great American Bank. Kattan, forty-six, drove a Chevy Citation
and looked so much like the prime minister of Israel that the investigators
watching him on surveillance code-named him “Begin.” The United States
attorney for Miami called Kattan the biggest drug financier in South America.
The truth was that the feds were merely catching up with the cocaine
trade’s subcontractors. Botero and Kattan were just currency dealers--Colombian
businessmen whose firms converted foreign currencies, including U.S. dollars,
into Colombian pesos and vice versa. The money merchants provided support
services to the real drug lords, who stayed well out of harm’s way in Medellín.

DEATH, money, and drugs: the gaudy, violent kaleidoscope fed a fear, and the
fear created a ground swell. Miami was outgunned and overrun. In December
1981 four powerful men from Miami ventured to the White House with a plea
that conjured up visions of a beleaguered cow-town sheriff calling on the U.S.
marshal. The delegation was led by Eastern Airlines chairman Frank Borman
and Knight-Ridder newspapers chairman Alvah H. Chapman, Jr. (Knight-Ridder
owned The Miami Herald). They had joined together to form Miami Citizens
Against Crime. Miami wanted federal help. Its wish was granted.
On January 28, 1982, President Reagan announced a cabinet-level task
force to coordinate a federal offensive against drugs in south Florida. Reagan
called Miami “the nation’s major terminal for the smuggling of illegal drugs”
and named Vice President George Bush to lead what quickly became known as
the Vice President’s Task Force on South Florida.
“The nearly two million people of south Florida are unfairly burdened
financially in addition to being denied their constitutional right to live in peace
without fear and intimidation,” Reagan said.
A formidable “federal posse” was heading to south Florida--more than
200 federal lawmen, including 130 Customs agents, 60 DEA agents and 43 FBI
agents. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms added 45 agents to crack
down on the proliferation of automatic weapons. IRS agents promised to target
money laundering. U.S. Army Cobra helicopter gunships, used for fire support
in Vietnam, were brought in to chase drug planes. U.S. Navy Hawkeye E2-C
radar surveillance planes were added to help spot smuggling flights. Navy ships
were authorized to board boats smuggling drugs. For the first time since the
Civil War, the Army and Navy were helping to fight civilian crime. It was an
unprecedented response to an unprecedented problem, U.S. CAVALRY IS
COMING, AND IT’S ABOUT TIME, headlined The Miami Herald.
Yet in the real corridors of federal power in Miami, where one could
finally get a good look at the progress of “the drug war,” the view was bleak
indeed. The U.S. Attorney’s Office was such a place, and it faced serious
problems in the effort to stem the flow of drugs. The office handled every case
made by the DEA, Customs, and all the other federal agencies fighting the drug
war. But it was woefully understaffed, with only seven full-time prosecutors
assigned to major drug cases. Turnover was high, and sights were set low.
Seizure cases came in piecemeal and were tried as such. Nobody followed the
trails up the pyramid of the cocaine trade. Nobody had the time. Manpower was
one problem, and adequate laws were another. The powerful Racketeer
Influenced Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, which provided for the seizure of
a criminal organization’s assets and which had been used to great effect against
the Mafia, was seldom invoked. Money laundering alone was not even a crime;
agents had to find a drug connection or a currency transfer violation before they
could move. Cooperation between agencies was often a joke; Customs and DEA
had feuded openly for years. And rivalry within agencies was just as bad.
Nobody tried to put the big picture together. Agents were rewarded by
the amount of drugs and money seized, which encouraged a “body count”
mentality, an unsophisticated rush to see who could put the most “powder on the
table” at the press conference. Agents were also rated on the significance of the
traffickers they arrested, but here, too, the sights were low. The highest level of
trafficker--”a class-one violator”--was someone capable of moving merely one
hundred kilos a month. Nobody seemed to be targeting the people moving tons
of the stuff. By the end of 1982, the DEA knew about the big Colombian cocaine
organizations, but the significance of Jorge Ochoa and Pablo Escobar was
known only to a few agents.
OPPOSING the government’s lawyers was an armada of high-priced legal
talent, including many former prosecutors gone off to quadruple their salaries as
defense attorneys working for the men they once pursued. The “drug lawyers”
packed gold Rolexes and roamed the federal courthouse like gunslingers in
three-piece suits. They were expert at obtaining lenient sentences. “I don’t think
I have a single client who got a two-year sentence, or anything near that, for a
[drug] conspiracy in the Southern District” of Florida, bragged “Diamond Joel”
Hirschhorn, one of the best drug lawyers, in 1981. When the government wasn’t
losing in court, it found ways to botch things up in the field. The Suarez case
was the crowning embarrassment. Roberto Suarez Levy, the twenty-three-year-
old son of Bolivian coca king Roberto Suarez Gomez, was caught in a sting
operation that yielded a U.S. record 854 pounds of cocaine base. The elder
Suarez, then considered the largest known source of cocaine, offered to turn
himself in and pay off the Bolivian national debt--estimated at just over $2
billion--if the U.S. government released his son. The offer was turned down. But
young Suarez was freed anyway in 1982 because a Miami jury believed his word
over that of four DEA agents.
Along with the additional drug agents, the South Florida Task Force
promised more resources for the Miami U.S. Attorney’s Office. Stanley Marcus,
a Harvard Law School graduate who had led the Justice Department’s Strike
Force in Detroit, was putting together a new team of prosecutors. Marcus called
on Dick Gregorie, a career strike force prosecutor like himself, to be his
narcotics chief. Resources were always a problem, but Marcus added people
rapidly, luring bright young legal talent from the private sector. A vigorous
leader who projected a can-do image, Marcus would pump up a prosecutor by
telling him he was working on “the most important case in the office.” The joke
quickly went around that there were twenty “most important” cases in the office.
Five days before the task force agents arrived in Miami, everyone got a
glimpse of things to come during a routine cargo inspection by Customs agents
at Miami International Airport.
Transportes Aereos Mercantiles Panamericanos--TAMPA, for short--
was a two-jet Colombian air cargo company that had operated between Miami
and South America since 1979. In the spring of 1982, an informant caught in a
seventy-pound coke deal in Miami fingered TAMPA as a smuggling pipeline.
The airline was already on notice for an earlier seizure of eight pounds. And
about this time, the word came up through DEA channels in Colombia to expect
a big load of cocaine in a shipment of blue jeans on a cargo flight from Medellín
to Miami.
 The three Customs inspectors had no idea what they would find when
they showed up on March 9, 1982, to meet the 3:15 p.m. TAMPA flight from
Medellín. Based at Miami International Airport, the inspectors were part of a
Customs team that regularly checked incoming flights from South America. The
team looked for cocaine in cargo and luggage. For cargo, the procedure was
known as an “LQV” --landed quantity verification--which simply meant the
inspectors verified that the cargo brought in was properly listed on the flight’s
manifest. The inspectors were always hearing that cocaine was coming up on
TAMPA, but they heard that about every airline that flew between Colombia and
Miami. There were more flights than they could possibly check.
When the inspectors arrived at TAMPA’s warehouse at the airport,
hundreds of cardboard cartons of “wearing apparel” were already stacked on
pallets not fifty feet from the Boeing 707 that had carried the cargo up from
Colombia. Seeing the inspectors, the dockworkers began to drift away from the
pile of boxes. The inspectors saw that a number of the brown boxes were
haphazardly labeled and unnumbered. Most of them were bound with thin
yellow plastic banding, but several had white banding. The inspectors also
noticed a sharp, medicinal scent in the air--ether. Inspector Tony Knapik pushed
a short screwdriver into one of the cartons with the white banding. It was labeled
“JEANS.” When he pulled out the screwdriver, white powder poured from the
box. Inspector Jerry Dranghon, who was standing nearby and saw Knapik’s find,
had a flash that a van would appear carrying machinegun-wielding assassins.
Dranghon radioed his boss, Vann Capps, the chief of the Customs
contraband search team.
“Hey, Chief, we got a bingo with TAMPA,” Dranghon said. Capps,
who was in his car patrolling the airport, immediately began calling for
reinforcements to set up a perimeter around the TAMPA warehouse.
Meanwhile, Dranghon and the other inspectors noticed that the
warehouse workers were taking off.
“They saw us hit it,” Dranghon told Capps. The inspectors field-tested
the cocaine and found it was pure. Then they began going through the boxes. “It
looks like a good load,” Dranghon radioed.
“I’m en route,” Capps radioed back.
“It’s a big load,” Dranghon said. “You better bring a truck, it’s so big.”
Capps got to the TAMPA warehouse within five minutes. He was the
fourth man on the scene. They were badly outnumbered to be sitting on such a
big cocaine load. They went through the rest of the boxes; the ones with yellow
banding held clothes; every one of the twenty-two boxes with white banding
held nothing but cocaine. The symbolism of the white banding was brazenly
obvious. The smugglers hadn’t even tried to hide the cocaine inside the boxes.
Five of them were solidly packed with white powder and weighed 195 pounds
each. The seventeen others held the kilo-size “footballs” that were the standard
of the Colombian cocaine trade. The kilos were wrapped in yellow plastic and
covered with cryptic markings: RC, TOTO, Ml, X100.
Soon the place was filled with Customs and DEA agents. The area was
quickly cordoned off, and klieg lights were mounted, making the whole place
look like a movie set. The agents began to interview the remaining TAMPA
employees in the loading area.
Capps called Regional Commissioner Robert Battard, the top Customs
official in Florida.
“Oh, shit, you’re not going to believe this one,” Capps said. “We had
three inspectors doing an LQV on TAMPA, and they hit it--it was a cold hit. Mr.
Battard, you’re not going to believe it. It’s nothing but cocaine. Nothing but
boxes of cocaine.”
At first Capps estimated five hundred pounds, which would have put the
seizure among the largest ever found in airport cargo. But Capps quickly radioed
back. “It looks like maybe one to two thousand.” The last time he called, his
estimate was three to four thousand pounds. Nobody believed him.
The TAMPA seizure finally added up to 3,906 pounds of pure cocaine.
The load was worth more than $100 million, wholesale. Just short of two tons, it
was more than four times larger than the previous U.S. record cocaine seizure.
It was even more remarkable for what it suggested about the Colombian
cocaine trade. No one single trafficker could have amassed a two-ton load. The
TAMPA seizure indicated cooperation among the Colombians on a scale far
beyond what U.S. law enforcement thought possible. Every previous assumption
about the traffickers was dwarfed by the TAMPA load. No one was arrested that
day at the Miami airport, nor was anyone ever charged with bringing in the
record load. The DEA determined the cocaine represented the collective efforts
of fifteen separate trafficking organizations, including those of Jorge Ochoa and
Pablo Escobar. The DEA was getting its first look at the shadow of the beast.
7. JOHNNY PHELPS
Johnny Phelps arrived in Bogotá in mid-1981 to take over as DEA special agent-
in-charge for all of Colombia. He had thirteen men working for him in Bogotá
and in branch offices in Cali and Barranquilla on the northern Caribbean coast.
He also had a newly opened but as yet unproven bureau in Medellín staffed by
one man. Information was pouring in, choking Phelps’s single storage vault.
Paper threatened constantly to overwhelm him.
Phelps looked like Central Casting’s idea of what a narcotics officer
should be. He was six feet four inches tall, red-haired and apple-cheeked with a
slow Texas drawl and an easy way about him. He was a Dallas Cowboys fan.
Phelps was thirty-seven years old when Washington sent him to
Colombia. He had never had a foreign posting and had spent much of his career,
first with the Immigration and Naturalization Service, then with the DEA,
making heroin and marijuana cases on the Mexican border. He was a prodigy of
sorts, moving rapidly upward in the DEA hierarchy without a whole lot of
visible credentials. He looked good in a dark suit and the boots he loved to wear,
spoke excellent Spanish, and gave a good talk for visiting congressmen and
others he needed to impress.
But Phelps was no pretty boy. He had been born poor and grew up in
west Texas, a holes-in-the-pants country kid who learned his Spanish from
Mexican bracero farm workers.
Phelps got married right out of high school and went to work
immediately as a lineman for the local power company. He endured it for three
years, escaping when he saw a chance to get a job with the Border Patrol. From
that moment law enforcement was his life.
In 1973 Phelps joined the DEA in San Diego and spent the next eight
years on the Mexican border, making cases either as an undercover agent or in
joint operations with Mexican police. He specialized in playing the dumb gringo
buyer, slightly naive and baby-faced with an “aw, shucks” demeanor. It was an
act, to be sure, because the real Phelps was a hardhead and a driver, street smart,
stubborn, ambitious, and absolutely single-minded. He didn’t party or make
small talk, and he didn’t joke around with the guys. He came on hard if he
thought one of his agents was easing off.
He brought this style with him to Colombia, and at first the hard line
didn’t go down too well. Phelps didn’t care: “You have to volunteer to come to
Colombia,” he explained. “Why volunteer if you’re not prepared to work? When
I see people who aren’t doing the best they can, my tolerance level is very low.”

PRACTICALLY from his first day, Phelps was certain that cocaine was “the
coming thing,” even though there was little evidence--at least on the surface--to
support his theory. The TAMPA Airlines seizure, the event that would
permanently alter U.S. law enforcement thinking, was almost a year away. Up to
1981 the biggest seizure in Colombia had been the six hundred kilos found in an
airplane in Cali six years earlier. The biggest recent bust was a four-hundred-kilo
seizure at a Bogotá lab.
Phelps was puzzled by this. He had helped seize large lots of
Colombian cocaine coming across the Mexican border, and in his first few
weeks in Colombia he had overflown the Guaviare region in the eastern llanos
(plains) and spotted huge coca cultivations. Everybody knew that Colombian
jungle coca made lousy cocaine, but if the traffickers were planting the bad stuff
in such quantities, imagine how much high-potency Bolivian and Peruvian coca
must be around.
Law enforcement had dropped the ball by focusing so heavily on
marijuana, and Phelps figured politics, more than anything else, was the cause.
Shiploads of marijuana were leaving north coast ports every day, and bales of it
were washing up on the beaches of south Florida every week. Congress was
leaning all over the brand-new Reagan administration to do something about it.
Hardly anyone, as yet, was thinking about cocaine.
Except Phelps. Within five months he had instructed his field officers in
Medellín, Cali, and Bogotá to devote themselves full-time to cocaine
intelligence. He wanted to know everything about cocaine, who was selling it,
how much they were moving, how much it cost, where it was going.
Phelps immediately discerned that the tools available to go after drug
traffickers were severely limited. The government had given the Colombian
army control over the Caribbean coast marijuana traffickers, but the army had
botched the job. The minister of defense said he didn’t want his soldiers working
with drugs anymore and virtually admitted that the traffickers had corrupted
them so badly that they were useless as a police force.
The government was creating a special Anti-Narcotics Unit within the
National Police that would eventually take over marijuana, cocaine, and
everything else. But until the unit was in place, the DEA’s counterparts in
Colombia would come from a grab bag of agencies: F-2 police intelligence,
generally quite good, but overworked; DAS, uneven everywhere, hopeless in
some places; the attorney general’s police, horribly corrupt in Medellín and in
some other substations but possessed of helicopters and other riches obtained in
the late 1970s when they were the DEA’s pet organization.
Spotty law enforcement was one thing, but what exasperated Phelps
most of all was the laissez-faire attitude that many Colombian officials had
toward trafficking. Colombians could tolerate a high degree of everyday
lawlessness, and anyway, the argument went, marijuana and cocaine were
harmless vices. It wasn’t the same as, say, rifles, so what was wrong with a little
smuggling?

BY the end of the year Phelps had his first list of “top ten” traffickers. From
Medellín, there were Pablo Escobar, Jorge Ochoa, Jose Ocampo, and two
remaining old-timers--Santiago Ocampo Zuluaga and Manuel Garces Gonzalez.
Jose Ocampo was a former cabdriver and was known as Pelusa (“Curly”)
because of his spectacular pompadour. Ocampo Zuluaga, no relation to Jose, was
in his fifties, a classic smuggler/trafficker and a semiretired rancher who served
as an occasional counselor and elder statesman for the young Turks. Manuel
Garces, about forty-five, had a lot of legitimate business interests--mostly in real
estate--and was the only front-rank trafficker Phelps knew who dealt in
marijuana as well as cocaine.
From Cali there were Gilberto Rodriguez Orejuela, “the Chess Player,”
and his sidekick, Jose Santacruz Londoño, “the Student” or Don Chepe, a pair of
onetime kidnappers now using cocaine to turn themselves into a business
conglomerate. Bogotá had Veronica Rivera, a former street vendor and fence
who had killed half of a leading Bogotá crime family to gain control of its
trafficking network. Bernardo Londoño was an elderly money launderer known
as “the Diplomat,” and finally there was Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha, “the
Mexican,” the one who was so tight with Escobar and the Medelli’n crowd. Just
after the “top ten” was Carlos Lehder, the Armenia loudmouth wanted by the
U.S. attorney in Jacksonville.

THE traffickers were career criminals, tough, smart, and in many cases deadly.
They had survived and thrived for years in one of the world’s most dangerous
businesses, and thus far they had managed it largely without disturbing the
national consciousness.
This was because Colombia had made violence a national trademark
long before drug trafficking came along. Phelps, like every other foreigner who
worked in Colombia, began learning about Colombian violence from the
moment he arrived in the country. In perpetrating kidnaps, street murders, and
massacre, drug traffickers were simply following Colombian tradition.
In fact, the benchmark event in modern Colombian history was known
simply as La Violencia, a back country bloodbath between rival militiamen
belonging to the country’s two traditional political parties, the Liberals and the
Conservatives. La Violencia began in 1948 and lasted through most of the
1950s, killing an estimated three hundred thousand people before the army
arranged a truce and prevailed upon the two political parties to share power in a
“National Front.”
The National Front stopped La Violencia and achieved a certain degree
of social peace for most of two decades, and for that reason alone it could be
accurately described as a brilliant idea. But government remained a cooperative
affair, and by the time Phelps arrived in 1981, Colombia’s “democracy” was
widely criticized as a glorified old-boy network at the service of the country’s
Liberal and Conservative mandarins.
With no way to let off steam, political outsiders of the left and right
resorted to violence. Colombia in 1981 played host to half a dozen guerrilla
groups of various persuasions. The army spent most of its time and resources
dueling them in vicious little pitched battles across the country. Right-wing
“death squads” periodically entered the fray to “restore order” in particular cities
or towns. Everybody involved was well schooled in the savage skills needed to
keep the war going. In this context, the drug traffickers were simply one more
violent outfit.
La Violencia had taught Colombia everything it needed to know about
violence. The National Front provided a mechanism to manage the strife and
contain it, protecting Colombians from themselves. But there were limits to what
the Front’s creaky institutions could tolerate. The Medellín cartel would cross
these limits repeatedly.
Colombia in 1981 was a nation of twenty-six million people--third
largest in South America after Brazil and Argentina. Besides its reputation for
violence, the rest of Latin America knew Colombians for their beautiful spoken
and written Spanish (Gabriel García Marquez, Latin America’s best-known
novelist, is from Cartagena). Bogotá, the capital and biggest city, was famous for
cultural and intellectual erudition; Cali was known for beautiful women;
Barranquilla for salsa music and tropical hustle; Cartagena for prizefighters. And
then there was Medellín.

PHELPS’S resident agent in Medellín was thirty-two-year-old Errol Chavez. He

had opened the office a couple of months before Phelps arrived in Bogotá, and
his brief was to find out everything he could about cocaine. Like Phelps in
Bogotá, he was immediately swamped. He had no secretary, no files, no typist.
He worked up to fourteen hours a day, seven days a week, and couldn’t ever
seem to get ahead.
Everything was brand new. First, identifying the drug traffickers. Ochoa
cropped up all the time. There were Jose Ocampo and Santiago Ocampo, or were
they the same? There were Fabio Ochoa Restrepo and Fabio Restrepo Ochoa.
And what about the Pablo Correas, Correa Arroyave, and Correa Ramos? Which
was which?
Next, sources. He spent his mornings at the National Police
headquarters. DAS and police F-2 intelligence were telling Chavez from the day
he arrived that there were shipments of anywhere from two to five tons of
cocaine moving regularly out of Medellín to the United States. Chavez tried but
failed to get independent confirmation, so he didn’t report it because he didn’t
believe it at first and because he didn’t want to be laughed at. Someone in
Washington will think I’m snorting some of that stuff, he thought.
Chavez divided the Medellín traffickers into two groups, “brokers” and
“others.” “Brokers”--maybe a dozen crime families led by Ochoa, Escobar, and a
couple of others--were those traffickers capable of putting together a big load of
cocaine, financing it, and arranging for transportation and insurance. The
definition of “big load” in 1981 was “several hundred kilos.”
“Others” were invited to piggyback on the brokers’ loads, sending one
or two kilos, or fifty or one hundred. The broker called a meeting at a Medellín
restaurant or hotel and invited anyone who wished to contribute to a load.
Brokers brokered for other brokers or for as many “others” as wanted to
participate. Each trafficker, big or small, packed his cocaine in kilos and coded
them with his personal combination of colors and symbols. These were the
ciphers that U.S. Customs would later spot on the TAMPA Airlines cocaine.
Some traffickers had more than one set of codes; some changed their code
periodically. The main broker and his distributor in Miami, Los Angeles, New
York, or elsewhere, had a list of codes so they could handle the accounting for
the load.
Chavez stayed in Medellín for two years and developed six informants.
Every one of them was murdered. Every time he found somebody, or every time
somebody came into his office, he’d say the same things: “We appreciate that
you’re trying to help the DEA, but don’t try to call us directly, don’t try to work
undercover, and don’t try to negotiate any deals.” They never listened.
Pablo Escobar’s cousin, a down-and-outer who had lost all his money in
Peru, approached the DEA and hired on. Chavez gave him some money, told
him to be careful. He immediately tried to do a two-hundred-kilo deal with
Escobar. He was found naked, hands bound behind his back, shot six times.
Jorge Ochoa’s brother-in-law, a pilot, made the mistake of calling
Chavez on the telephone and meeting in public with DEA agents. A brace of
Ochoa’s hired killers met him at the airport when he landed one day, but he
managed to run to his Bronco and drive off, the gunmen in hot pursuit. He drove
into a shallow riverbed, apparently hoping, to shake the tail. Police found the
abandoned Bronco that afternoon. They found Jorge Ochoa’s brother-in-law a
couple of days later, washed up in a culvert. Someone had gouged out his eyes.
Finally there was the time when Chavez’s father, a law officer back in
the United States, came down for a visit at Christmas. Both men were walking in
Chavez’s backyard one morning when they spotted something odd lying on the
lawn.
“Is that what I think it is?” asked Chavez.
“It sure is,” his father replied.
It was a human tongue. The previous week police had found one of
Chavez’s informants with hands tied behind his back, apparently hacked to death
with a machete. Chavez didn’t know whether or not this was the tongue from
that corpse. He didn’t want to know.
Chavez, his wife, Julia, and his three small children were protected
twenty-four hours a day by six national policemen. Chavez rode to work in a
police-escorted jeep with a machine gun tucked out of sight on the floorboards
between his feet. He wore a 9-mm Smith & Wesson pistol on his waist and later
added a .38-caliber revolver in an ankle holster. When he went to lunch, he took
an escort; when he went out for a drink, he took the escort; when he saw an
informant, he took the escort.
He and the public affairs officer who shared the U.S. consulate
requested Medellín be made a hardship post so they could get some extra money.
The city’s homicide rate, they noted, was “64 per 100,000,” more than twice that
of any city in the United States and five times that of most.
Drug killings, their report said, “were entirely commonplace,” and the
public affairs officer had twice seen corpses in their bullet-riddled cars “only
moments after a ‘Mafia hit.’ Mob killers use machine guns and often strike in
public places, shooting all in sight to ensure the killing of a single victim.”
Police told Chavez “everybody knows who you are,” and he had no
reason to doubt it. One trafficker bragged around town that he had Chavez’s
phone tapped. Chavez brought in technicians to sweep the building. They found
multiple taps on his lines, inside his office, and outdoors. More than once he
dialed Bogotá only to get an empty, moaning sound on the line that required him
to yell to be heard. Sometimes the information he had was so important that he
had to pass it anyway. One of the cables he dictated to Bogotá was found almost
verbatim in the handbag of a trafficker’s wife arrested in Miami.
Chavez’s marriage was in trouble when he got to Medellín, and soon it
collapsed altogether. He couldn’t blame Julia; Medellín was hard on the nerves.
But several things made it worth the trouble. Most important from Chavez’s
viewpoint, the work was fascinating and important. Practically every scrap of
information he produced was new. The traffickers were everywhere, and Chavez
saw them constantly. He saw them at restaurants, discos, hotels. He practically
sat next to Jose Ocampo at the bullfights, bending over backward to try to take
his picture. He saw the Ochoas at a horse show. He trailed after Escobar when he
went into the slums to hand out twenty-dollar bills. Every day Chavez listened to
traffickers talk over their phone patches to distributors in Miami, telling which
color-and number-coded kilos of cocaine went to which client. Deals were going
down constantly, and for the first time the DEA was in a position to get a steady
supply of usable information from Medellín and act on it.
And with Johnny Phelps in Bogotá, Chavez had the confidence that
every report he filed, every phone call he made, and every cable he sent were
getting into the right hands. This was because under Phelps, Bogotá, which for
so many years had given almost all of its attention to north coast marijuana, had
awakened to cocaine.
What Chavez didn’t know until much later, however, was that Phelps
lived in mortal fear of what could happen to his branch office field agents,
especially Chavez. Phelps believed the Medellín police were either compromised
or terrorized and not to be trusted. He wondered constantly whether he should
scale back Medellín or shut it down altogether. Phelps tried to get to Medellín
fairly often to check on Chavez and show the flag, but it was a delicate exercise.
Phelps wanted to show his appreciation for Chavez’s enthusiasm, but he didn’t
want to get him killed, either.
Phelps needed some way to send a signal to the traffickers that the DEA
was serious about its business. The opportunity came in February 1982, when a
north coast marijuana trafficker kidnapped two DEA agents and tried to kill
them on the highway outside Cartagena.
Neither man was badly hurt, and Phelps stayed on the road for the next
two months until he and Colombian police hunted down and arrested the
trafficker. The incident made Phelps’s reputation in Colombian law enforcement
and gave him the unequivocal respect of his own agents. Johnny Phelps, one of
his subordinates said later, “takes care of business.”
Twice during the Cartagena investigation, Phelps contacted and met
with one of Colombia’s leading cocaine traffickers. He wanted his agents’
kidnapper, he told the cocaine boss. The first time the trafficker stalled, but the
second time he admitted he knew the kidnapper: “He’s crazy, he’s causing us a
problem. He’s bringing a lot of heat down on us.”
The heat was Johnny Phelps. Soon Medellín police confirmed to
Chavez that Phelps’s visit had shaken up the traffickers. The big American with
the Mexican accent was trouble, the traffickers felt, and they didn’t want
anything further to do with him. Phelps had made his point.
8. THE CARTEL’S GOLDEN AGE
On April 18, 1981, just before Johnny Phelps arrived in Bogotá, Colombia’s
rising young cocaine lords gathered for a summit meeting at the Ochoa family
ranch at Hacienda Veracruz on the Caribbean coast near Barranquilla. The theme
was expansion. The Ochoas had so much cocaine backlogged that they needed
more and better ways to move it to the United States.
The invited guests arrived by private plane at the ranch’s five-thousand-
foot paved landing strip--big enough to accommodate commercial jets. Jorge
Ochoa also used the occasion to bring some of his stateside distributors to
Colombia. Pablo Escobar didn’t attend, but Pablo Correa Arroyave, one of
Escobar’s top lieutenants, represented Los Pablos. Correa Arroyave had the
additional advantage of being Jorge Ochoa’s brother-in-law.
Jorge and his younger brother, Fabio, met each plane in a white
Chevrolet pickup truck. It was raining for much of the day, and Jorge insisted
that his guests ride in the cab while he sat in the bed of the truck. Hacienda
Veracruz was big enough to encompass several small towns within its borders. It
was entirely self-sustaining, producing everything from cheese to ice. The
Ochoas had constructed a bullring and a private lake, and a man-made island in
the middle of the lake was being prepared to accommodate several lions and
tigers. The ranch already resembled a zoo: elephants, giraffes, and buffalo freely
roamed the rolling pastures. Herds of cattle dotted the landscape.
The ranch house was low-slung but magnificent, a big, sprawling,
country-style mansion with a red-tile roof. Armed guards hovered discreetly in
the distance. Jorge Ochoa, unlike Carlos Lehder, did not flaunt his security.
Carlos Lehder was an honored guest at the summit. Although still well
established on Norman’s Cay, Lehder, like Ochoa and Escobar, knew that the
tiny island could not handle the volume that the U.S. cocaine market now
demanded. The traffickers needed more planes, more pilots, and more
transportation routes. At Hacienda Veracruz the young traffickers strengthened
the links first forged at Norman’s Cay. The deepening alliance marked the
beginnings of what would come to be known as the Medellín cartel.

AT the summit Ochoa outlined plans for expansion. The previous year his
family had imported a U.S. engineer to establish a long-range navigational and
communications system at Acandi on Colombia’s northwestern edge a few miles
from Panama. With this system the Ochoas could route and track all their flights
into the United States. The family liked to have four or five groups of pilots
operating at any one time, but each had its own distributors and its own routes.
All were strictly compartmentalized. If the DEA penetrated one group, the others
would remain intact.
Ochoa and Los Pablos were interested in sharing loads, dividing up the
jobs and bringing a greater degree of control to the business. Escobar dominated
cocaine production and enforcement. He ran labs, bought coca paste, paid
necessary bribes, handled security, and, when expedient, killed whoever needed
killing. Lehder’s Norman’s Cay operation was still an extremely lucrative
concern, but it was now one among several. What Lehder still had, however,
were contacts with distributors and pilots all over the Caribbean and the United
States. No one could match his address book, and his value as a counselor was
immeasurable. In the future Carlos Lehder would not lack for either power or
prestige.
But Jorge Ochoa had now clearly assumed Lehder’s old role as “king of
cocaine transportation.” The Acandi beacon, the runway at Hacienda Veracruz,
and the network of pilots and planes that the clan had set up in the United States
and Colombia were unique in the cocaine business.
The results were immediately apparent. In Miami during the months
after the summit one of Ochoa’s distributors alone coordinated cocaine flights
totaling nineteen tons--easily dwarfing the 3.3 tons that Ed Ward had moved
through Norman’s Cay for Carlos Lehder the previous year. And that was only
one network. At the same time, other Ochoa smugglers were moving 450-kilo
loads into Louisiana, Alabama, Tennessee, and Georgia.

CARLOS Lehder’s departure from the Bahamas and the emergence of Ochoa
and Pablo Escobar signaled a fundamental restructuring of the cocaine industry,
a reorientation away from Miami and the Bahamas and back to “corporate
headquarters” in Colombia.
The process of transforming cocaine into a multinational enterprise took
several years, but it was a time of spectacular growth for the Medellín cartel.
Escobar and Ochoa brought greater cooperation to the industry. Cooperation was
what produced multiton cocaine loads.
The realignment in Colombia, as in Miami, was a bloody, terrifying
saga punctuated by kidnappings, torture, and murder. The eye of the storm was
Medellín, and police could do nothing to stop the bloodshed. By 1982 the city
belonged to the young cocaine traffickers. Police and politicians took bribes and
kept their mouths shut. Otherwise they died. Cocaine traffickers did not go to
trial.
The old-time smugglers had no place in the new scheme and for the
most part gave ground gracefully. They had neither the imagination nor the will
to compete with the up-and-comers, and most retired. Others evolved and
adapted, content to take a subordinate position in the new order.
The few who wouldn’t go along were forced out or killed. Griselda
Blanco was an early casualty. She had worn out the goodwill of her peers by
failing to pay for cocaine deliveries and creating ugly messes like the Dadeland
shooting. She refused to change her style, and by the beginning of 1981 her star
was fading rapidly and she had to leave Medellín. It was a new time now, a time
for team players, not mavericks.

ESCOBAR and the rest of Los Pablos were progressing rapidly, buying
businesses and property all around Medellín, elsewhere in Colombia and in
Miami. In March 1980 Escobar bought a Miami Beach mansion for $762,500,
making a down payment of more than $400,000. Almost exactly a year later he
paid $8.03 million for the King’s Harbour Apartments in Plantation, Florida,
north of Miami.
Jorge Ochoa’s father had left the restaurant business forever, selling Las
Margaritas to an old family retainer so he could devote himself totally to
breeding walking horses. Young Fabio was learning the cocaine business in
Miami, and Jorge’s older brother, Juan David, was useful if not particularly
inspired.
As time passed, the Medellín underworld began to refer to Escobar
respectfully as El Padrino, “the Godfather,” and to Jorge Ochoa as El Gordo,
“the Fat Man,” but at first it was difficult to separate the two biggest bosses from
the rest of the nouveau riche young traffickers swaggering around town. Pablo
Escobar fancied race cars and sponsored a team in local rallies and formula
competitions. Jorge Ochoa, old Fabio, and Juan David loved walking horses and
kept large stables. Young Fabio had pretentions as a bullfighter. It was this that
brought the lone cloud on the Ochoas’ otherwise sunny horizon. On July 21,
1981, Jorge Ochoa was indicted by a Customs court in Cartagena for importing
128 Spanish fighting bulls to Hacienda Veracruz without proper licensing. The
bulls were infected with hoof-and-mouth disease and had to be shot. Jorge
Ochoa, meanwhile, had his first legal black mark in Colombia. It didn’t seem
like much to worry about--at least not at first.

THE big traffickers were just a few among Medellín’s growing corps of
conspicuous consumers. Cocaine was the vice of the eighties, money was
pouring into the city, and there seemed to be a race on to see who could spend
most lavishly. The golden age had arrived.
Office buildings, apartment houses, hotels, and discotheques sprouted
up all over town and spilled into the beautiful hillside suburbs south of the city.
The traffickers’ chief watering holes were Las Margaritas, the Intercontinental
Hotel, and Kevin’s. All had spectacular mountainside views of Medellín and
parking for as many Mercedes-Benzes and four-wheel-drive Broncos as cared to
make the trip.
The Intercontinental, where George Jung had his final confrontation
with Carlos Lehder, had Muzak, coffee shops, and ample meeting rooms where
traffickers could gather for fun or business. Griselda Blanco and her second
husband put on what many remembered as the most spectacular party ever seen
there, renting out the grand ballroom and inviting all their campesino laboratory
staff in for a huge celebration. Half the guests arrived wearing ponchos and
sandals, smashed already from drinking shots of licorice-flavored aguardiente
on the trip in from the countryside. After a couple of hours of Black Label
Scotch and champagne, the merrymakers were retching on the ballroom floor,
pissing in corners, and trying to chop each other up with machetes.
Kevin’s was owned by former cabdriver and current cocaine boss Jose
Ocampo, who also owned a huge finca outside the city, where he paid a famous
international chef $12,000 a month to cook for huge house parties. The food was
served outside on long tables and was replenished for as long as guests kept
coming, sometimes for days. A kilo of pure cocaine was served as an appetizer.
Ocampo’s most talked about show occurred the day a drug pilot buzzed the
crowd in one of his small planes, then flew straight up into the air until his
engine stalled. He crashed and burned. It was sensational.
The traffickers outdid themselves in their rush to buy up or build the
most spectacular houses in the city. One homeowner opened his door one
morning to confront a twenty-five-year-old kid wearing a fortune in gold jewelry
and inquiring politely about the possibility of buying his house. “Oh, I wouldn’t
take less than one million dollars U.S.,” the man said offhandedly, not taking the
boy seriously and not wanting to sell anyway. Suddenly he had a suitcase in his
hand.
“Count it,” the young man said.
The traffickers loved ornate, garish Louis XIV furniture, the more
grotesque the better. Every mantelpiece had to have a painting of Jesus with a
bleeding heart hanging above it. The idea, in this as in practically everything the
traffickers tried to do with their money, was to buy respectability and status, to
be accepted as paisa aristocracy.

AMONG those living it up in Colombia was Carlos Lehder. By 1980 he was

twice divorced, unattached, and thirty-one years old; his millions were intact and
burning a hole in his pocket. He decided to invest them in his hometown of
Armenia, where he had not lived for fifteen years.
Armenia, some 180 miles south of Medellín, had about 180,000 people.
It was the capital of Quindio province in the heart of Colombian coffee country.
It was a homespun city, not particularly attractive. It looked like a backwater,
and it was.
But what Armenia lacked in sophistication, it more than made up in
prosperity. The farmers of Quindio were rich and comfortable, but they kept
their money and their pride on their fincas. Most of them spent as little time in
town as possible. Armenia was where they bought tractors.
In November 1978, the Quindio governor received a letter from one
Carlos E. Lehder Rivas, who identified himself as “president” of Air Montes
Company Ltd. of Nassau, the Bahamas. Air Montes, said the letter, “is a
business dedicated to the international buying and selling of airplanes.” Each
year, “per our bylaws,” the company donated airplanes “to deserving
communities who lack air transport of their own.” Air Montes, the letter
continued, had chosen the province of Quindio as the 1978 beneficiary of this
largesse. A Piper Navajo 1968, serial number 31-196, was arriving forthwith.
After checking around, the leading citizens of Quindio determined that
Carlos E. Lehder Rivas had to be a son of Wilhelm Lehder, the German
immigrant engineer they called “Guillermo” or “Bily.” Guillermo lived quietly
in a modest second-floor walk-up apartment in a stucco building in downtown
Armenia.
No one could remember seeing anything of Carlos himself since his
student days at Carlo Magno High School fifteen years earlier. Townspeople
recalled a high-spirited, generous boy who often shared his lunch with his fellow
students. He did not take discipline well, however, and once hurled an inkwell at
the blackboard, prompting his teacher to expel him. He was smart, aggressive,
and resourceful, with a massive ego and a large helping of paisa adventurism.
His dream, his father would say later, was to go to Hollywood and become a
movie star.
The Piper Navajo was flown to Armenia during the Christmas holidays
by a tall, blond gringo in his mid-twenties who did not speak a word of Spanish.
The pilot waved at the reception committee, handed the technical manuals to the
nearest Quindio official, smiled at everyone, and left in a chauffeur-driven car,
never to be seen again.
The state of Quindio then began a long and ultimately fruitless effort to
resolve the “airplane affair.” The Navajo had arrived without documents, and
throughout its first year in Armenia officials had to fend off U.S. firms who
claimed the plane had been stolen. Quindio finally obtained unrestricted title to
the plane but then had to figure out how to use it. Quindio was a tiny province,
and Armenia was its only airport. Where was the governor supposed to fly the
plane? The plane sat on the tarmac at Armenia’s El Eden airport and gathered
dust.

LEHDER himself began making forays to Armenia in 1979, breezing in

periodically with a batch of glittery friends to raise a little hell, spend some
money, open some businesses, make some pronouncements, and generally
portray himself as an international mover-and-shaker newly arrived to share with
his countrymen the fruits of his business genius.
By 1981 Lehder was spending as much time in Armenia as he was in
the Bahamas. With his fast cars, gold jewelry, and fancy friends he was already
the most fascinating man Armenia had seen recently, and he had all that money.
Lehder was a rich, handsome world traveler. He spoke excellent English and
German and managed easily in Portuguese and Italian. He explained nothing and
with effortless aplomb transformed himself into “German-Colombian
industrialist Carlos Lehder” virtually overnight.
He bought huge tracts of farmland north of the city and announced he
was going to build a gigantic tourist complex with a Bavarian motif. He
commissioned Rodrigo Arenas Betancur, Colombia’s finest sculptor, to craft
him a seven-foot bronze of the Beatles’ John Lennon to serve as the project’s
centerpiece. He tramped his holdings in a hard hat and boots and said important
things about Quindio economic development.
In town he bought townhouses, office buildings, and condominiums,
prompting local businessmen to engage in a surge of real estate speculation,
driving prices to double and triple what they had been.
Headquarters for the Lehder empire was Cebu Quindio, S.A., his all-
purpose holding company on the Avenida Bolivar in front of the Parque de los
Fundadores. The building had a huge parking lot, which was soon filled with
exotic vehicles: armored four-wheel-drive wagons, Mercedes-Benz sedans,
Porsche sports cars, and stretch limos of various types. The cars came and went
at all hours, seven days a week, sometimes alone, sometimes in convoy,
zooming up and down Armenia’s normally empty streets.
People wanted to know where Lehder got his money. One boyhood
friend asked him the question in 1981:
“I worked in restaurants in New York,” Lehder said. “Then I sold cars;
and later I sold airplanes in the United States.” In the next three years Lehder
would be asked the same question many times and would answer it in many
ways. Sometimes he would almost tell the truth.
Lehder’s presence in Armenia had a profound effect on the city’s
teenagers. Boys imitated his center-parted, tousled haircut and called him Don
Carlos in the street. Teenagers hung out at Cebu Quindio waiting to carry a
message, wax a Mercedes, or go out for coffee.
And women thought he had fallen from heaven. Lehder was charming,
polite, and always elegantly turned out. Mothers loved him almost as much as
daughters. He organized fantastic parties, knew fascinating people, and told
wonderful stories about faraway places. A little later, when some of the
daughters started having drug problems, mothers would change their thinking.
Still later, when four or five of the daughters showed up pregnant with Lehder’s
children, mothers would warn their daughters away from Lehder. But in the
early days it was all a lark. Lehder had realized the paisa dream. He had gone
away at a young age, made his fortune, and returned in triumph.

IT was only a question of time before it occurred to someone that there was big
money to be made by kidnapping Lehder. Colombia--even sleepy, conservative
Armenia--was not the same as the Bahamas or the United States. In Colombia,
kidnapping was an art. It paid and paid handsomely for those with the necessary
skill and audacity.
In November 1981 Lehder left Cebu Quindio in midafternoon in a
chauffeur-driven car en route to his favorite finca, Hacienda Pisamal, about
twenty minutes south of Armenia.
He ordinarily carried a handgun and usually traveled with either an
escort car or a pair of pistoleros. Still, he had no regular bodyguards, and for
some reason on that day traveled without a personal weapon and with only his
driver to accompany him.
The car drove south through the city and took the highway toward Cali.
About eight miles out of town, near the airport, an automobile was stopped in the
middle of the road with its hood up and its driver bent over, peering inside.
Lehder ordered his chauffeur to pull over, and both men got out of the car. The
chauffeur left his pistol on the front seat.
Suddenly two men appeared brandishing pistols. They gagged Lehder’s
chauffeur and left him by the roadside. They bound Lehder’s hands behind his
back and tossed him on the floor of their car in the backseat. Then the hood
came down, the ignition turned, and the car sped away with its hostage.
As Lehder told the story to his friends, muscular coordination saved
him: “Since I studied karate, I knew several things I could do to free myself.” He
squirmed out of his bonds, opened the car door, and flung himself onto the
highway verge, rolling down a grassy slope into a recreational park.
Then he was up and running, his erstwhile captors spraying bullets in
his path. One slug hit Lehder high in the back, knocking him down, but he
scrambled to his feet and took off again. His pursuers kept up the chase for a
while but soon broke off.
The would-be kidnap caused a sensation in Armenia. Radio
commentators interrupted regular programming to talk about the attack against
the “German-Colombian investor.” Police mobilized for a massive manhunt.
Reporters hung around Quindio Central Clinic in downtown Armenia, waiting
for news. Lehder spent about two weeks in the hospital, attended by the best
doctors in Armenia, wished well by legions of fans. His entourage hung around
the clinic waiting for the latest bulletin on his condition. It was all gratifying to
Lehder the “industrialist,” but Lehder the drug trafficker had learned a lesson.
He would never again be without an armed escort, and he would do his best to
take revenge. At the same time that he played the innocent in the Central Clinic,
his own pistoleros were out looking for answers.
Soon they had them. The kidnap was the work of the April 19
Movement, or M-19, an urban guerrilla group of about 2,500 cadre whose stock-
in-trade was the spectacular guerrilla stunt. M-19 had started out as an
ultranationalist, right-wing radical movement but in recent years had drifted into
nebulous leftism. It had no coherent program and was known to do occasional
contract work for drug traffickers or anyone else who could pay well for
organized mayhem. Kidnapping was an M-19 specialty, but so was the double
cross, as Lehder now had good reason to know. A year earlier he had bragged to
George Jung about his revolutionary alliance with M-19. Now the group had
kidnapped him.
Still, there was no real contradiction. M-19 had no enduring loyalty to
Colombia’s drug lords. Working for them paid well, but working against them
could pay better. Kidnapping them would seem to pay best of all. The drug lords
had as much money as anyone in Colombia, and there was nobody in the country
less likely to call the police. The traffickers were easy prey.
Or at least they seemed to be.
9. MAS
The small airplane described lazy circles in the Sunday afternoon sky above
Cali, waiting for the soccer match to get under way far below. It was a big game,
between America, the local favorite, and Nacional, the hated rivals from
Medellín. As the whistle blew to open the first half, the plane’s crewman opened
a stern hatch, slid a bale of leaflets to the doorway, snipped the string binding,
and pushed them out. Soon a cloud of paper was fluttering toward the midfield
stripe.
The leaflet, dated December 3, 1981, was a manifesto. In stark, chilling
language it spoke of a recent “general assembly” in which 223 top-level
Colombian “businessmen” decided they would no longer tolerate ransom
kidnappings by guerrilla groups seeking to finance their revolutions “through the
sacrifices of people, who, like ourselves, have brought progress and employment
to the country.” The “businessmen,” it transpired, were Colombia’s 223 top drug
traffickers. No one who attended the assembly made a secret of having been
there.
Each of the conferees, the manifesto said, agreed to contribute two
million pesos ($33,000) to a common defense fund and ten men to a common
vigilante force. The new organization would be known as Muerte a
Secuestradores--”Death to Kidnappers,” and that was exactly what it had in
mind:
“The basic objective will be the public and immediate execution of all
those involved in kidnappings beginning from the date of this communiqué.”
The manifesto offered twenty million pesos ($330,000) reward for
information leading to the capture of a kidnapper and guaranteed immediate
retribution. The guilty “will be hung from the trees in public parks or shot and
marked with the sign of our group--MAS.” Jailed kidnappers would be
murdered, and, if this proved impossible, “our retribution will fall on their
comrades in jail and on their closest family members.”
The formation of MAS marked the beginning of a new era in the history
of Colombia’s cocaine lords. Before MAS the bosses cooperated with each other
in business; they had partied together; they had even taken the first steps toward
building a common cocaine trafficking policy. But until MAS, they had never
taken a joint public position on any matter in which they had an interest. MAS
marked the consolidation of the Medellín cartel.
 Kidnappings among traffickers themselves were commonplace. If a
cocaine boss couldn’t collect from a colleague, he would kidnap his colleague’s
daughter and use her for leverage. Traffickers also had been known to provide
another trafficker with a wife or a son as a security deposit during a complicated
business deal. But recently it had escalated, the M-19’s attempted kidnapping of
Carlos Lehder being the most notorious instance.
The Lehder kidnapping was not, however, what brought MAS into
existence. The pivotal event was the M-19’s November 12, 1981, abduction
from the University of Antioquia of Marta Nieves Ochoa, youngest sister of
Jorge Ochoa. The guerrillas demanded anywhere from $12 to $15 million--
accounts differed--probably to make a big weapons purchase. The Ochoas did
not intend to pay.
The traffickers’ “general assembly” took place in late November. Jorge
Ochoa called the meeting and set it for Medellín at Las Margaritas, although
some accounts name the Intercontinental Hotel as the site, while still others say
it occurred in Cali. Accounts also differ regarding the number of traffickers in
attendance. Some suggest there were only 20 bosses--the top names in cocaine--
but most agree that the 223 described in the Cali manifesto showed up. These
included cocaine traffickers from all over the country, the north coast marijuana
smugglers, and the airplane pilots that served both groups.
Lehder, still convalescing from his gunshot wound, played a major role
in the assembly, but Ochoa-seconded by Pablo Escobar--ran the meeting. The
traffickers drafted the communiqué agreeing to distribute it in Cali, Colombia’s
third-largest city, rather than Medellín, in part to give MAS a more national
flavor. Also, however, the idea was to catch partisans from two important cities
in the same place at the same time. The America soccer club, Cali’s pride, was
owned by the Gilberto Rodriguez Orejuela crime family, while Nacional of
Medellín belonged to money launderer Hernan Botero.
The traffickers elected Santiago Ocampo, Manuel Garces, and Jorge
Ochoa as president, vice president, and treasurer of MAS. The first two were
well respected and middle-aged, big names from the past. Ochoa was the future.
After the communiqué was written and the meeting broke up, Escobar
lieutenant Pablo Correa Arroyave invited everybody to a big picnic at his finca
outside Medellín. The bosses ate, drank, and chatted, finding they had quite a bit
in common.
But before the new feeling of fellowship could take hold, there was the
matter of Marta Nieves to resolve. On the night of December 30, 1981, a badly
frightened woman named Marta Correa de Bernal was found chained to the
barred steel gate of El Colombiano newspaper in downtown Medellín. A placard
hanging around her neck identified her as the wife of the M-19 chieftain who
kidnapped Marta Nieves Ochoa. Bernal’s daughter had also been kidnapped but
was left with relatives, a MAS communiqué said, because MAS could not “do
harm to innocent children.”
By mid-January the list of deeds attributed to MAS had reached mythic
proportions. The gang was supposedly cutting through M-19 like a hot wind,
reputedly killing or turning in more than one hundred guerrilla militants in the
six weeks since MAS’s formation. Squads of gunmen were reported quartering
the countryside, pounding on doors, asking questions, and drubbing to death or
shooting anyone they thought could conceivably have had anything to do with
the Marta Nieves kidnapping.
It was impossible to determine how much of this was true, but MAS’s
verifiable acts were impressive. In January MAS captured the Antioquia
province chief of M-19, stripped him, tied him up, dumped him in a vacant lot in
northern Bogotá, and called the police. In early February MAS smuggled a
loaded pistol into a jail outside Medellín, where a convict used it to murder two
street punks imprisoned as kidnappers.
It also became clear that a lot of free-lancers were using MAS’s smoke
screen to settle scores of their own. In January five goons carrying machine guns
walked into a real estate office in Medellín’s fashionable El Poblado section and
opened fire, murdering all six people inside. They were looking for the owner of
the office, a second-echelon cocaine trafficker named Joaquín Builes Gomez.
Builes was out.
And on January 26 Medellín union leaders denounced MAS to the
Attorney General’s Office, charging the gang was nothing more than a bunch of
management stooges sent out to intimidate labor. Thugs identifying themselves
as MAS members had murdered three union bosses in the previous week.
In all, police counted thirty homicides in Medellín in the first two weeks
of 1982. On February 6 MAS issued a new communiqué demanding Marta
Nieves: “Our patience is wearing thin.”
Marta Nieves was released unharmed on February 17, 1982. The next
day MAS freed five of its own hostages, all M-19 cadre. Rumor had it that the
Ochoas in the end never paid a centavo, that through the force of the MAS
example they had demonstrated to M-19 the folly of what they had done. Better
to give back the girl and forget it happened. Later in 1982 fat Fabio Ochoa, the
family patriarch, appeared in local horse shows riding Rescate (“Ransom”). Was
the horse bought with the money Fabio didn’t have to spend on his daughter?
 In fact, the Ochoas did negotiate with M-19, and they did pay a ransom.
One police report said M-19 settled for $535,000. Other sources said the
payment was much higher and may have been made with a combination of
money and guns. The talks took place in Panama over several weeks, most likely
under the auspices of the Panamanian armed forces and with the participation of
at least one Panamanian government go-between. The behind-thescenes
supervisor of the negotiations was Panama’s chief of military intelligence,
Colonel Manuel Antonio Noriega.
Sources familiar with the negotiations cited the Marta Nieves affair as
Noriega’s first opportunity to meet the young Colombian traffickers, and it was
the beginning of what became an extremely profitable association. Court papers
filed much later in Miami said Noriega in 1982 closed a deal with Escobar and
his cousin Gustavo Gaviria allowing the traffickers to transship cocaine through
Panama for a fee of $100,000 per load. Escobar’s people trained Noriega’s pilot
to fly Escobar’s personal Piper Cheyenne, loaded with cocaine, back and forth
between Escobar’s ranch and Panama. By the end of 1982, the documents said,
Escobar had moved four hundred kilos of cocaine to Panama, and Noriega had
upped the price to $150,000 for the next load. Both sides seemed satisfied, and it
soon became obvious that the traffickers had picked the right ally. In 1983
Noriega became chief of the Panamanian armed forces and the most powerful
man in Panama.

THE MAS affair gave a tremendous boost to the mystique of Medellín’s drug
lords. Regardless of what had really happened, Colombians began to see them as
omnipotent. They had captured M-19’s top man in Antioquia, something the
Colombian army had tried and failed to do for years. They had wanted M-19 to
give up Marta Nieves Ochoa, and M-19 had complied. They had brought
Medellín another bloodbath, and authorities had shown themselves totally unable
to cope. When the shooting started at night, the police sat in their cars and
waited. When the shooting stopped, the cops picked up the corpses.
And regardless of the size of the ransom, it quickly became clear after
Marta Nieves’s release that M-19 had no further interest in kidnapping drug
traffickers’ family members. In coming years M-19 and the traffickers would
cooperate much more often than they would clash. The Medellín cartel had won
its first war. There would be others.
Finally, the Marta Nieves kidnapping had demonstrated once and for all
that Medellín sat at the center of the Colombian cocaine industry. When the
Medellín traffickers called a meeting, every dope dealer in the country showed
up. And when law enforcement wanted to spot new trends in cocaine, Medellín
was the place to look. The Medellín cartel was open for business.

FOR the DEA’s Errol Chavez, 1982 was a pivotal year. After the TAMPA
Airlines seizure, his bosses in Washington finally began to think of cocaine
traveling by the ton instead of by the hundredweight. But the high volume meant
the DEA had to revise its thinking about the criminals it was chasing. Every day
the cocaine traffickers were behaving more like the international entrepreneurs
they had become and less like the seat-of-thepants adventurers they had once
been. Cocaine had become big business.
As before, smaller traffickers were piggybacking their cocaine on
Escobar’s and Ochoa’s loads, but, unlike before, the big guys were reported
“unhappy” if smaller traffickers tried to work independently. Ochoa and Escobar
would ship as small a quantity of cocaine as anyone wanted to send; they would
even front cocaine for a little trafficker on the understanding that they would be
paid later. They insured all the cocaine in their loads, never shipping unless they
had an identical amount of backup warehoused and ready to go in the event of a
seizure. This service was sometimes described by U.S. drug agents as “Lloyd’s
of Medellín.” The traffickers made the cocaine trade almost risk free for the
small investor--an easy way for a person to earn the cost of a new car, a new
house, a new mistress.
But the word was that if you bucked the system, “you suffered.”

Errol Chavez understood that Escobar, the Ochoas, and a handful of other big
traffickers were trying to control the market among both sellers and buyers--
create a true cartel. They wanted to sell only as much cocaine as would keep the
price high, and their profit margin was enormous. In February 1983 Chavez
reported that cocaine cost $8,000 to $9,000 per kilo wholesale in Medellín--at a
time when it sold for $42,000 per kilo in Miami. “There is increasing evidence
that numerous cocaine trafficking groups are pooling their resources to a greater
extent to market their cocaine in the United States,” Chavez reported to the
Bogotá DEA office. ‘These groups are using sophisticated techniques to market
multihundred and even multithousand kilo loads.”
In 1982 the cartel was also doing research on a new product, the results
of which were encouraging. By midyear 1983 Chavez reported that 80 percent of
Medellín’s drug users had switched from cocaine to a crudely refined and highly
addictive form of smokeable coca paste called bazuko, driving the per-kilo price
of bazuko up to the point where it was more expensive than cocaine. At
approximately the same time--April 1983--cocaine prices were diving below
$5,000 per kilo, an indication that production had taken a quantum leap. By
dropping the price, the traffickers had opened a vast new market: cocaine for the
masses, a new idea from the Medellín cartel. In the United States, mass cocaine
use was preceded by the introduction of “crack,” a smokeable form of cocaine
base (a purer, more refined, and even more addictive product than bazuko).
Crack was a child of the great cocaine glut produced by the Medellín cartel in
the early 1980s. On the streets of Miami, in the summer of 1983, cocaine was
more plentiful, purer, and cheaper--$14,000 per kilo--than ever before.
In Colombia, authorities either weren’t catching on to what was
happening or simply didn’t care. After the Marta Nieves affair, Carlos Lehder
went home to Armenia and talked pridefully about how he was a member of
MAS and how he and the other “kidnappables” had played a vital role in MAS’s
formation. Later in the year he boasted that he had contributed generously to the
Liberal Party and its presidential candidate, Alfonso Lopez Michelsen. With this
indiscretion Lehder did himself and his cartel colleagues the disservice of
linking them publicly to both vigilante murder (MAS) and the Colombian
political establishment. All the traffickers tried to buy influence, but only Lehder
bragged about it.

PABLO Escobar was known not to be particularly fond of Lehder, because of

Lehder’s increasingly obvious cocaine habit and his tendency to say stupid
things. Escobar was said to refer to Lehder as bocón--”big mouth”--in private
conversation. But Lehder’s 1982 indiscretions were nothing compared with
Escobar’s. The quiet, humble-appearing paisa was no more. In 1982 Escobar
won election to the Colombian Congress as an alternate representative from
Envigado. When Jairo Ortega, his partner on the ticket, was sick, absent, or
otherwise indisposed, Escobar substituted for him. The richest drug trafficker in
Colombia was now a congressman.
Escobar and Ortega were allied with Senator Alberto Santofimio
Botero, a Liberal Party boss with enormous power and influence. Santofimio sat
on the Liberals’ board of directors and at one point harbored presidential
ambitions. His association with drug traffickers eventually torpedoed this
ambition, but otherwise he suffered not at all. Santofimio was the cartel’s
favorite politician; he came to symbolize the traffickers’ corruption of the
Colombian political system.
Escobar served Santofimio well. Even before his election Escobar had
been a presence in the slum neighborhoods of northern Medellín. Now he was
Don Pablo, a soft-spoken, dumpy man with chino pants, polo shirts, downcast
eyes, and a gold, diamond-encrusted Rolex watch. Escobar installed lights at
soccer fields, built roller-skating rinks, spoke at public events, and handed out
money.
Soon he had a radio show, Civics on the March, and a social action
program called “Medellín Without Slums.” He announced that he would build a
one-thousand-unit low-income housing project on a piece of north Medellín
landfill, to be called, appropriately, Barrio Pablo Escobar.
A corps of publicists and paid journalists handled his public image. For
about two years these sycophants had fairly good luck portraying Escobar as a
humble, dirty-fingernailed man of the people bent on giving something back to
the poor but proud neighborhoods from whence he came. Escobar’s newspaper,
Medellín Cívico, promoted the cause in a cloud of purple prose. Said one Cívico
columnist: “Yes, I remember him ... his hands, almost priestlike, drawing
parabolas of friendship and generosity in the air. Yes, I know him, his eyes
weeping because there is not enough bread for all of the nation’s dinner tables. I
have watched his tortured feelings when he sees street children--angels without
toys, without a present, without a future.”
The campaign’s culmination came in April 1983 when Semana,
Colombia’s leading news magazine, profiled Escobar as “A Paisa Robin Hood.”
The article slid by the problem of Escobar’s occupation, remarking only that the
sources of his wealth “never cease to be the object of speculation.” In this
particular instance, limited speculation, since the word “cocaine” did not appear
in the text.
Semana later won a reputation for hard-hitting investigations of the
cartel, but in 1982-83 it clearly hadn’t caught on yet. It let the paisa Robin Hood
do the talking: “When I was 16 I owned a bicycle rental business . . . then I
started buying and selling automobiles, and finally I got involved in real estate.”
His interest in civic good works, Escobar told Semana, dated from his
high school student days: “I didn’t have any money but as a community action
member in my barrio, I promoted the construction of a school and the creation
of a fund for indigent students.”
Escobar fooled a lot of people, but the police knew that whatever else
he was trying to become, he remained at heart the same cold killer who used to
ride shotgun on five-kilo loads. Escobar’s popularity in north Medellín was also
predictable. North Medellín was as tough an area as existed in the Western
Hemisphere, the place where Colombia’s vaunted school for pickpockets was
rumored to be, the place where the cartel was said to train its motorcycle
murderers.
And, apart from rumors, north Medellín was, without doubt, home for
an unknown number of murder gangs. Escobar had stopped doing his own hits
long ago, but he always had plenty of dirty work available, and north Medellín
was the place to hire it out. More than anybody in the Medellín cartel, Escobar
was known as an enforcer. He never forgot an insult; he held grudges; he took
revenge.
10. THE COLONEL AND THE AMBASSADOR
Belisario Betancur won election to the presidency of Colombia in March 1982
and took office in August--the same time Pablo Escobar became a congressman.
Betancur was a pillar of the Conservative Party and a would-be reformer whose
first priority was to seek peace with Colombia’s myriad guerrilla groups, an
objective that had eluded his predecessors for nearly twenty years. Second, he
wanted to launch an ambitious program of economic and social reforms,
particularly in housing and education.
Drug trafficking hardly made Betancur’s list. It was a back-burner item,
of concern largely because it bothered the gringos so much. Betancur was
against drug trafficking when he thought about it, but he didn’t think about it
very often.
For the Medellín cartel, Betancur’s election was good news, at least at
first. The new president had pronounced himself “philosophically opposed” to
the extradition of Colombian nationals to the United States. Carlos Lehder, who
a few months before Betancur’s inauguration had been an enthusiastic supporter
of Betancur’s Liberal presidential opponent, Alfonso Lopez Michelsen, suddenly
proclaimed himself “fanatically Belisarista.” As well he should have been.
Lehder led the United States’ list of extraditable drug fugitives.
By 1982 extradition had quietly become the drug traffickers’ central
concern--and the only thing they feared. The United States and Colombia had
signed a bilateral extradition treaty in 1979. By mid-1981 both nations had
ratified it. These procedures caused little comment at the time; extradition was a
mundane matter, not front-page news.
Things began to change with Ronald Reagan’s arrival in the White
House in 1981 and Johnny Phelps’s arrival in Bogotá the same year. Reagan
made drugs a top priority in the United States’ bilateral relations with Colombia,
and Phelps became the treaty’s first prophet. In conversations with visiting
congressmen and U.S. prosecutors, he tried to spark interest in “a new tool that
can be useful.”
And by 1982 the cocaine bosses had had enough time to figure out that
the document seemed to have been drafted with them in mind. The crucial
language was hidden away in article 8, paragraph one: extradition of nationals of
one country to the other country “will be granted” even “where the offense
involves acts taking place in the territory of both states with the intent that the
offense be consummated in the requesting state.”
This meant that a Colombian drug trafficker could be extradited to the
United States even if he had never left Colombia. All he had to do was organize
a criminal conspiracy aimed at the United States--in other words, send a load.
Once U.S. prosecutors figured this out, things were never the same.
Article 8 meant the prosecutors could ask for any trafficker they could implicate
in a case, and they implicated as many of them as they could. Bosses like Carlos
Lehder and Cali’s Gilberto Rodriguez Orejuela, who had spent years building
false fronts of respectability, suddenly found their names and faces smeared all
over the papers just like those of any two-bit street punk. For the traffickers, the
extradition treaty was like a cross to a vampire. They came to hate and fear it as
they feared nothing on earth.

BETANCUR’S “philosophical opposition” to extradition had nothing to do with

his views on drug trafficking per se and everything to do with views on national
sovereignty. Regardless of his reasons, the effect was the same: he chose not to
enforce the provisions of the treaty. This decision early in his administration had
tremendous implications both for the drug traffickers and for law enforcement,
for by 1982 extradition was rapidly becoming the axis around which Colombian
drug policy would revolve. And despite Betancur’s soft line against drug
trafficking, his administration soon began making a series of small bureaucratic
moves whose cumulative effect would be enormous. By the end of 1982, half the
attorney general’s police had been fired for corruption, and new Attorney
General Carlos Jimenez Gomez was doing the best he could to take the agency
out of drug enforcement altogether. The U.S. embassy was looking for a new
place to put its antinarcotics aid resources. It did not search for long.
In December National Police Colonel Jaime Ramirez Gomez took over
leadership of the still relatively new AntiNarcotics Unit. He had five hundred
poorly equipped men, a tiny basement office in south Bogotá, and nothing to do.
There was a list of addresses where drug traffickers might be located, but the
police rarely bothered because they believed the bosses were too politically well
connected to be seriously molested.
For this reason Ramirez wondered why Betancur’s police chief had
chosen him. He had a reputation as a hard charger who made lots of waves. If
the brass thought he was going to sit in a south Bogotá basement and count
paper clips, they could forget it.
Ramirez was forty-one, five feet four inches tall, with a homely
houndlike face and a tendency to eat too much too often. He had a small potbelly
that he worried about constantly. He talked a lot, laughed a lot, told jokes, and
kidded people unmercifully. As a boy he had been an outstanding soccer left-
winger; now he loved tennis, but his wife wouldn’t play with him because he
gave too much advice. Ramirez came across as a man who was pleased with
himself, pleased with the world, and happy to be doing what he did. This was
understandable, for Ramirez was a terrific policeman, and he knew it.
Ramirez’s passion was information--gathering it, evaluating it, holding
it, and acting on it. It was the secret of his success. As a street cop his first jobs
had been in intelligence, and over the years he had made case after case on the
strength of what he knew, what he remembered, or what he could find out from
the hundreds of sources he cultivated all over Colombia. He “collected” people,
and when he met someone who knew something he wanted to know, his eyes lit
up, and he smiled hugely and exclaimed: “You know about helicopters? I don’t
know anything about that! Sit down, I want to know everything.”
Ramirez’s people thought he was God. His knowledge of crime in
Colombia was encyclopedic; he could tell whether an informant was lying by
asking five or six questions. His men called him “the human lie detector” or “J.
Edgar Hoover.” If somebody needed background information on something, he
just asked Ramirez. Ramirez was always correcting his subordinates’
intelligence reports, fleshing them out with arcane tidbits and otherwise driving
everybody crazy.
Ramirez got along famously with the U.S. embassy and the DEA, no
“nationalistic chip on his shoulder,” as one DEA agent put it. Ramirez wasn’t
bashful about looking for help, and he pestered people--gringos and
Colombians--until he got it. Johnny Phelps was fascinated by Ramirez’s ability
to lean on his superiors or end run them if necessary. Ramirez, Phelps thought,
“doesn’t recognize anything that can’t be done.” Phelps, long, tall, handsome,
and standoffish, and Ramirez, short, thick, homely, and loquacious, were an
unmatched set, but they worked well together.

RAMIREZ moved quickly. Before long he had traded his south Bogotá
basement for a pillbox-shaped rooftop office on the new National Police
headquarters building in Bogotá’s El Dorado district, near the airport. Phelps and
Caesar Bernal, chief of the U.S. embassy’s Narcotics Assistance Unit, began
steering aid, money, training, and other resources toward Ramirez’s
AntiNarcotics Unit police.
The unit began to expand, ultimately to triple in size to 1,500 men. In
early 1983 Ramirez sent five companies of police up to the north coast to take on
the marijuana traffickers. Pretty soon Ramirez’s office began reporting
enormous pot seizures.
Ramirez then began interviewing specialists for his headquarters team.
He and a group of subordinates grilled each candidate separately. Ramirez was
determined to keep corruption out of the unit. Just to remind him that his fears
were not groundless, the cartel tried constantly to bribe, blackmail, or otherwise
put him in their pockets. When money didn’t work, they sent beautiful women
around with sad tales “that can only be told in confidence, to you alone.”
Ramirez politely invited the visitors to sit down, then brought an office
full of aides in to stand against the wall. “How can I help you?” he asked the
women. “You can speak freely. These are all trusted friends of mine.”
Next, the cartel tried to flatter him with attention. Cartel lawyers and
confidants approached him constantly, letting him know that Pablo Escobar
“wants to talk to you.”
“I have nothing to talk to him about,” Ramirez said.
And then the approaches got even more direct. Ramirez received as
many as ten threats a week, so many that they lost meaning. Every time a DEA
agent talked to an informant, the informant told him, “Hey, you know these guys
are really mad at Ramirez.” Ramirez laughed off some of the threats and paid
attention to others. He always felt that as long as he ran the AntiNarcotics Unit,
his intelligence machinery would warn him of any serious plot before it could
get off the ground.
He was confident--perhaps overconfident. Like a lot of experienced
police officers, he had known some of Colombia’s most important criminals for
years; he had trouble visualizing them as anything more than the neighborhood
punks they had once been. He respected the cocaine bosses’ ability to do
violence: that fit the profile he carried in his mind. But his family and friends
didn’t think he respected the bosses’ ability to plot and organize. Pablo Escobar
hadn’t gotten to the top of the cocaine business by thinking like a car thief.

IN April 1983 U.S. Ambassador Lewis Tambs arrived in Colombia. He was

fifty-five, a heavy smoker with a loud, abrasive personality that seemed designed
to grate the nerves of the very formal Colombians. He was a hard-line Reagan
conservative who had coauthored the Santa Fe Report, a blueprint for containing
communism in Latin America that was adopted by the Republican National
Committee as part of the official party platform in 1980. He was not bashful
about voicing his opinions--about drugs, guerrillas, politics, and almost anything
else--and from the beginning of his tour he established a combative public
persona that frequently irritated his Colombian hosts and made his aides cringe.
Yet he got away with it, for despite everything Tambs was simpático,
which meant everything in Colombia. He was a warm, friendly, personable
fellow who mitigated the ferocity of his opinions by not force-feeding them to
others. He told jokes on himself and escaped awkward interviews by rattling off
humorous sayings that he collected and wrote down in a little book. Betancur,
very nationalistic, very Latin American, and very opposed to Reagan policy in
Latin America, nonetheless liked Tambs, and Tambs liked him.
Tambs also took his job seriously. He was a professor of Latin
American history at Arizona State University. His Spanish was superb, and he
worked long hours studying Belisario Betancur before arriving in Bogotá. He
understood the origins of Betancur’s hispanidad (“Spanishness”) and accepted
that Betancur would naturally oppose the Reagan administration’s tough,
interventionist policy in Central America.
Tambs would always be emphatically anticommunist in his public
utterances, but the Reagan administration regarded communism as a secondary
matter in Colombia. When Tambs went to the White House for his final briefing,
National Security Adviser William P. Clark had only one thing to tell him: “We
want you to go down to Colombia to do anything and everything you can about
the drug problem.”
And that was it. Tambs had “two songs on my harp” when he arrived in
Bogotá: “marijuana and Marxists; cocaine and communism.” He held press
conferences, gave speeches, went to receptions, and invited small groups of
acquaintances to join him in tertulias, informal after-work gatherings that are the
social lifeblood of Latin America’s professional class.
He saw Betancur at the Nariño Presidential Palace once or twice a
week. Sometimes these conversations took place around ten p.m., and Tambs
found Betancur, who went to sleep very early and got up before daybreak, in his
pajamas, ready for bed. Most of the late sessions involved Tambs getting bawled
out for some sort of indiscretion. At one point the Foreign Ministry sent a
circular around to all the embassies reminding ambassadors they were not to take
public positions regarding Colombia’s internal affairs, a clear slap at Tambs.
Despite everything, Tambs and Betancur understood and respected each other
and never held grudges. Tambs knew that Betancur’s “job was to take care of
Colombia. He knew what I was doing.”
What Tambs was doing was looking for a way to get the Colombian
government interested in doing something about drugs. The embassy was
pushing hard for both extradition and herbicide eradication of marijuana, but it
wasn’t getting anywhere. Old hands in the embassy were convinced that the
government would never do anything about drug trafficking because Betancur’s
Conservatives, like the Liberals before them, simply did not see drugs as a
problem for Colombia. Tambs spent a lot of time visiting local treatment centers
to try to turn this attitude around: “Look, if you want to stay an underdeveloped
country forever, get into drugs.” But Colombia was not convinced.
Also unsuccessful were Tambs’s efforts to promote the idea that drug
traffickers and guerrillas were allied in a joint venture aimed at tearing down
Colombian society. In 1983 this was thought to be an outrageous idea,
apparently the product of Tambs’s fertile anticommunist imagination. The MAS
affair, still fresh in people’s minds, demonstrated that the opposite was true.
Still, Tambs had some ammunition. In the first half of 1983 his DEA
agents had received information that a north coast marijuana trafficker had
bought a pot shipment from guerrillas and had paid for it with guns. Late in the
year, the Colombian army told the embassy that guerrillas from the Moscow-line
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, had a training camp in the
eastern llanos near Villavicencio, an area known for several years to be crawling
with coca growers and mom-and-pop cocaine labs.
Tambs coined the term “narco-guerrillas” to describe this phenomenon,
but the Colombian public scoffed. Worse, Betancur was clearly irritated. FARC
cooperation in a negotiated truce was essential to the success of Betancur’s
“Peace Process,” and Tambs’s meddling wasn’t helping.
The FARC had been in existence since at least 1963. Its leaders were
old-line Marxist-Leninist ideologues, and its soldiers were mostly backcountry
campesinos. There were about five thousand of them in 1982, and they had
strongholds in Colombia’s eastern llanos, a vast wilderness of savannah and
tropical forest, and in the central Magdalena River valley. The FARC financed
itself through kidnappings and by shaking down rich rural landowners. The
FARC was much bigger than M-19 and was taken much more seriously. Many
Colombians believed the FARC was the armed wing of the Colombian
Communist Party. In 1982 it was almost inconceivable to think of them as allies
of drug traffickers.

BY mid-1983 three dedicated people--Tambs, Phelps, and Ramirez-- opposed

the Medellín cartel and were ready to do battle. What the three still lacked,
however, was a spokesman, a political heavyweight capable of putting narcotics
at the center of Colombia’s national debate. Tambs was amusing, vocal, and
forceful, but he was a gringo. Ramirez was a policeman, prohibited from making
public policy statements. If Colombia was to mount an aggressive war against
the Medellín cartel, it needed a capable Colombian politician to articulate the
strategy and drive it home. Betancur wouldn’t do it; there had to be somebody
else.
The political issue of the day was “hot money,” contributions by the
drug traffickers to Colombia’s politicians. Opposing candidates during the 1982
general elections had accused one another of accepting hot money and had used
the issue as a means to smear entire sectors of the major political parties. Two of
the biggest targets were Envigado Congressman Jairo Ortega and his cartel
alternate, Escobar.
The principal accusers in the hot money debate were the so-called New
Liberals--the reformist wing of the Liberal Party. The New Liberals had made
hot money a cornerstone of their political campaigns the previous year and had
subsequently brought the debate into legislative committee and onto the floor of
Congress.
Under terms of Colombia’s National Front, presidents were obliged to
allocate a certain number of cabinet posts to the opposition. Betancur, a
Conservative, assigned the justice ministry to the New Liberals, and in early
August 1983 he appointed Senator Rodrigo Lara Bonilla to the post. (The
Colombian justice minister is the equivalent of the U.S. attorney general. The
Colombian attorney general is a public administration watchdog, a sort of
national ombudsman.)
Lara Bonilla was thirty-five, a handsome, charismatic, aggressive
politician, one of the brightest young lights of the Liberal Party. As justice
minister the task of investigating the hot money scandals fell to him. He
embraced it both as an honest reformer and as a political pragmatist. Hot money
was hot press, and Lara Bonilla was aware of the political gains to be made from
a successful crusade.
Lara Bonilla’s biggest impediment was official inertia. Betancur had
known Lara Bonilla’s record on hot money and had appointed him justice
minister, so presumably the president was ready to back Lara Bonilla to the hilt.
The trouble was that Betancur never said so. He was busy with the Peace
Process and economic reform. Lara Bonilla was his hot money man; let him
handle it.
This was easier said than done. The suspicion among most journalists
and other skeptics was that almost everyone--Liberals, Conservatives, New
Liberals, Marxists--had taken hot money. Lara Bonilla and the other reformers
were trying to look under the rug, and Colombia’s political chieftains didn’t like
it. Thus, in the absence of a clear endorsement from Betancur, Lara Bonilla’s
status remained somewhat ambiguous. He was not of the president’s party; he
was a politician himself and not a technocrat; he was attacking a lot of people
from his own party. Many of his targets determined that they could stonewall
Lara Bonilla and probably escape unscathed. They decided to sit tight and await
events.
The second thing Lara Bonilla failed to anticipate was the power of the
Medellín cartel. In 1983 it was still possible to think that a man could build a
political career by attacking the traffickers. Everyone knew that the cartel for the
last few years had been buying its way into the halls of power, but everyone still
thought that the trend could be easily reversed, that state power, when brought to
bear, was infinitely stronger than cocaine power.
This was a miscalculation. Betancur himself was making it, ignoring the
rot that had set into Colombian political institutions and the danger it posed to
the integrity of his government. Politicians down the line were also making it.
They had played footsie with the traffickers, taken their money, and pretended
they didn’t know where it came from or that it didn’t matter. They didn’t
understand the extent of cartel influence. The cartel was not trying to buy favors
with hot money; the cartel was trying to buy a government. Lara Bonilla, the
reformist political zealot, wandered into this jungle like a child. The traffickers
were on him like leopards.
Lara Bonilla thus became something of a reluctant crusader. He was not
prepared for the cartel’s money, its threats, its intimidation, or the pressure it
could put on its enemies. For all that, he was a crusader nevertheless, a
courageous man who had accepted--and now had to accomplish--the most
dangerous job in Colombia: challenge the Medellín cartel and knock it down.
And he had friends. In 1980 he had served as mayor of his hometown of
Neiva when Jaime Ramirez was based there as police chief of Huila province.
He was also good friends with the family of Ramirez’s wife, Helena, a Huila
native. Ramirez counted himself a friend of Lara Bonilla’s and determined to
help him.
So did Tambs and Phelps. Both already knew Lara Bonilla slightly, and
both could see that the enormity of his task threatened to overwhelm him.
Phelps, in particular, was extremely irritated that Betancur had not been been
more out front in the hot money debate. The president was leaving Lara Bonilla
to twist in the wind.

PHELPS and Tambs visited Lara Bonilla together soon after his appointment.
Lara Bonilla confirmed he did not feel he had the support of the government. On
the other hand, he was politician enough to understand that there was no turning
away from the cocaine traffickers. He was the point man, like it or not. Could
Tambs and Phelps help him?
They could, and would. As the two Americans left the Justice Ministry,
Phelps turned to Tambs and said, “This is a man who’s looking for allies.”
11. HOT MONEY
Jairo Ortega began his speech slowly. He welcomed the opportunity to talk
about hot money, he said, because he was troubled by a “web of hypocrisy” in
government. He had “no personal axes to grind,” but the truth, he said, should
come out. Furthermore, he wanted to respond to accusations plaguing him
constantly about his alleged ties to drug traffickers, his liberal use of hot money,
and his alleged association with suspicious characters, among them his own
Envigado alternate, Pablo Escobar.
His words carried across the floor of Congress, easily heard by Justice
Minister Rodrigo Lara Bonilla and other cabinet ministers on hand for the
debate.
Did the justice minister know a citizen named Evaristo Porras Ardila?
Ortega asked.
No, the minister shook his head, he did not.
Well, Ortega said, Evaristo Porras lives in the Amazon border town of
Leticia and has served time in a Peruvian jail for drug trafficking. In April Porras
had written a check for one million pesos ($12,821) to Senator Rodrigo Lara
Bonilla to help defray campaign expenses. Ortega raised a photocopy of the
check in his right hand and showed it to the assembled lawmakers.
In addition, Ortega continued, the justice minister had in fact spoken
with Porras by telephone, had acknowledged receipt of the check, and had
thanked Porras for his concern. Ortega then played a tape recording reputed to be
the phone call in question. It was incomprehensible.
“Let the Congress analyze the minister’s conduct with this person who
offered him a million pesos; Mr. Porras is a recognized international drug
trafficker, according to Peruvian police,” Ortega said. “But far be it from me to
try to detain the minister of justice’s brilliant political career. I only want him to
tell us what kind of morality he is going to require of the rest of us. Relax,
Minister. Just let the country know that your morality can’t be any different from
that of Jairo Ortega and the rest of us.”
Lara Bonilla was in trouble. He had never heard the name Evaristo
Porras. He knew nothing of a million-peso check or a telephone conversation
with its donor. That said nothing, however. He, like any other politician,
accepted campaign contributions happily without questioning their origins very
closely. Still, this was one of the practices he wanted stopped, and there was a
possibility that he was guilty of it.
But he would deal with that later. Now he stood up to reply. There were
two ways to go. One, the bureaucrat’s, was to admit nothing, investigate, and
talk later; the other, the politician’s, was to take the adversary’s accusation and
fling it back in his face. It was August 16, 1983. Lara Bonilla had been justice
minister for less than two weeks; he had been a politician for fifteen years.
“My life is an open book,” he began. He was blameless and had always
been blameless; there was no way his enemies could discredit him. “Any
moment that any suspicion whatsoever falls upon me,” he would resign his
office “knowing that I will not be followed by complacent ministers affected by
the blackmail and the extortion being perpetrated against Colombia’s political
class.”
Warming to his task, Lara Bonilla damned the Medellín cartel practice--
again demonstrated by Ortega--of casting aspersions on those allegedly
receiving the money instead of those who sent it--”those, who, yes, have to
explain here or anywhere else in this country where their fortunes have come
from.
“Morality is one thing, but there are levels: one thing are the checks . . .
that they use to throw mud at politicians,” Lara Bonilla said, a shock of hair
falling over his forehead as he leveled an accusing forefinger at his enemies.
“But it’s another thing when somebody runs a campaign exclusively with these
funds.”
What about Pablo Escobar? he asked. It was strange how “from one day
to the next” Escobar had amassed a “gigantic fortune” from the proceeds of a
bicycle factory and other “clever deals.” With the money he bought “nine
airplanes and three hangars in the airport at Medellín,” set up a whole flock of
nonprofit organizations “that he uses to try to bribe the people,” and “created the
Death to Kidnappers movement.”
Lara Bonilla was winging it, parlaying the little he knew into a blanket
accusation. His political instincts were sound. He had to give people something
to think about for a while, gain time so he could better prepare himself. What he
had told Congress was hardly earth-shaking news. Escobar’s résumé was well
known to anyone in official Colombia who listened to gossip. What was news
was the fact that Lara Bonilla had spoken out. No Colombian politician had
dared do this. With one speech he had forever forfeited any chance of peaceful
coexistence with the Medellín cartel. He was now their public enemy number
one. Live and let live was over.
Escobar, recognizing what was at stake, picked up the gauntlet,
notifying Lara Bonilla August 17 “that you have twenty-four hours to present the
proofs” of Escobar’s participation in MAS, otherwise Escobar would denounce
him in Congress and ask for an investigation. He described Lara Bonilla’s
rebuttal in Congress as “a show of false moralism”; Lara Bonilla had changed
from “accused to accuser” only “when he found himself corraled” by Jairo
Ortega.
Evaristo Porras also contributed to the cartel cause. An important
Escobar underboss and coca leaf shipper, he was contacted by reporters in
Leticia, where he confirmed that he had donated the million pesos to Lara
Bonilla and that he had indeed been indicted by Peruvian police for drug
trafficking, “a youthful indiscretion.” His current immense wealth, he said, was a
windfall. He claimed to have won the lottery three times the previous year.
And the battle was joined. Lara Bonilla backtracked slightly, briefly,
owning up to having received the Porras check but claiming it was payment for a
debt contracted to his family. He visited Betancur, who accepted his explanation.
Ortega, Lara Bonilla said, had concocted a “political cock-and-bull story” to
discredit him.
Escobar asked for an investigation of Lara Bonilla, and a judge actually
started probing the Porras affair. In fact, Lara Bonilla never put the matter
entirely to rest, but he didn’t need to once he got rolling. Fed by Jaime Ramirez
on one side and Johnny Phelps on the other, he had all the information he could
use, not only about Escobar, but also about the rest of the Medellín cartel and its
underbosses. Lara Bonilla was ready to play for keeps, and the traffickers
weren’t altogether ready for him.

THE drug lords were extremely exposed and vulnerable by mid-1983. Since
MAS and its accompanying bloodbath, no one was left to mount a serious armed
challenge to the cartel. Vendetta was bad for business, and revenge killings were
being discouraged. Escobar and Los Pablos, Jorge Ochoa and his clan, and
Carlos Lehder dominated the business and set the rules, surrounded by their
satellites and a dwindling number of independents. Everybody did fine, and
everybody got fat together. The cartel members were living like real people, and
their money had begun to make them forget that there were a vast number of
honest Colombians who hated what they were doing to the country.
It was easy to forget when you were Pablo Escobar, “paisa Robin
Hood.” Throughout 1983 Medellín Without Slums and Civics on the March
were constantly in the news. The first two hundred units at Barrio Pablo Escobar
were scheduled for completion at the end of the year. Escobar was reported to be
worth $2-$5 billion, and everywhere in Medellín, Antioquia province, and
beyond, he was Don Pablo.
He could get away with anything. He hosted a charity art auction at the
Intercontinental Hotel and called it Pincel de Estrellas (“Paintbrush of Stars”). In
April he sponsored a “Forum on Extradition” at Kevin’s, which, not surprisingly,
found that extradition was “a violation of national sovereignty.”
But perhaps his greatest accomplishment was to woo part of the
hierarchy of the Roman Catholic church to his cause. From the end of 1982 and
through most of 1983 he was accompanied on his civic meanderings by two
Medellín priests, Reverends Elías Lopera and Hernan Cuartas. They appeared
with Escobar and Jairo Ortega on the board of directors of Medellín Without
Slums. They co-sponsored Escobar’s soccer benefits, helped with the “Forum on
Extradition,” blessed his auction, and generally gave him the Church’s
imprimatur as a doer of good works.
Lopera, in particular, was present everywhere. He tramped the slums
with Escobar, introduced him at rallies, traveled with him through Antioquia,
and gave speeches. In one memorable appearance he instructed Colombia to
“wake up!” and proceeded to enumerate all the economic and social ills from
which the nation suffered, twenty-three items in all. Drug abuse was not on the
list.
Medellín Cívico, Escobar’s newspaper, loved Lopera and ran news
stories about him with accompanying photographs, usually side by side with
Escobar. In February it published a picture of Lopera in animated discussion
with Pope John Paul II, with whom he had managed to obtain an audience.
Medellín Cívico described this as a “historic interview.”
Escobar was able to use the priests for months despite repeated
attempts--by lay people and many other churchmen--to denounce them. This was
because they were protected, either deliberately or unwittingly, by Medellín’s
archbishop, Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo, the leading conservative among
Latin America’s bishops and one of the most powerful Catholic prelates in the
world.
Critics tended to confuse their dislike of the narco-priests with their
dislike for Lopez Trujillo’s politics and ostentatious lifestyle, prompting Lopez
Trujillo to view the denunciations as personal attacks. His own propagandists
branded one journalist a “viper” and kept up a steady counterbarrage against
anyone with the temerity to question the way he ran his archdiocese. This kind
of exchange was never funny in Colombia, a nation where the Catholic Church
wields immense political power and moral force. Yet largely because of Lopez
Trujillo, Escobar’s two priests toiled on his behalf for months without even
having their knuckles rapped.
Outside of working hours, Escobar played the gracious host at one of
his many estates. His favorite spot was Hacienda Los Napoles in Puerto Triunfo,
a seven-thousand-acre finca some eighty miles east of Medellín on the
Magdalena River. The land alone, Escobar told Semana magazine, cost him 4.5
billion pesos ($63 million), but that was only the beginning. He landscaped the
property with artificial lakes, a network of roads, and an airport. Then he
imported more than two hundred exotic animals and turned them loose. In 1983
some sixty thousand visitors made Hacienda Los Napoles Colombia’s most
popular zoo. Guests drove through the grounds and viewed the animals as they
roamed about. There were camels, giraffes, bison, llamas, hippopotamuses, a
pair of black cockatoos valued at $14,000 each, a kangaroo that played soccer,
and an elephant that would steal the food out of visitors’ cars or pluck the
billfolds from their hands.
The entrance to Hacienda Los Napoles featured a cement gate with a
small airplane mounted on top. This was reputed to be the plane that flew
Escobar’s first load of cocaine. At the main house, closed to the public, Escobar
could sleep one hundred. He had billiard tables, a swimming pool, and a
Wurlitzer jukebox stocked with the records of Brazil’s Roberto Carlos,
Escobar’s favorite singer. The swimming pool was flanked by a marble Venus
and a mortar emplacement. Under a canopy Escobar had mounted a 1930s
vintage automobile peppered with bullet holes. It was variously described as
having belonged to John Dillinger, Al Capone, or Bonnie and Clyde.
Escobar constantly entertained his friends and associates at Hacienda
Los Napoles, flying them to his private airport, fixing them up with drinks,
swimming, and talk about the events of the day. Father Lopera was a regular
visitor, as were Jairo Ortega and the redoubtable Senator Santofimio, Escobar’s
political godfather. The Ochoas were not nearly as splashy. In Medellín the
family stayed at La Loma, a gorgeous hilltop estate south of the city. Guests
driving up the winding road were likely to be met and escorted by a herd of old
Fabio’s tiny pet ponies, which ate out of a person’s hand and snuffled and
bunted like affectionate puppies. Old Fabio, Juan David, and Jorge also spent a
lot of time at Hacienda Veracruz, breeding horses and tending a zoo of their
own. Jorge diverted himself by collecting vintage Harley-Davidson motorcycles.
Young Fabio was often in Portugal trying to make a career fighting bulls from
horseback. The whole family could be seen regularly at horse shows in Medellín
and throughout Antioquia.
IN Armenia, Carlos Lehder’s influence had reached its apogee. The Posada
Alemana, a huge tourist complex/discotheque/convention center, opened to great
civic fanfare in the middle of 1983. Lehder’s favorite priest, Pereira Bishop
Dario Castrillon, gave the blessing. A year later Castrillon would admit having
received money from the cartel “and distributing it to the poor.”
Posada Alemana, Lehder’s answer to Hacienda Los Napoles, was
fifteen miles north of Armenia. It had a rustic Bavarian entrance, but the rest of
the estate, which twisted and wound for several square miles about the beautiful,
green Quindio hills, was Colombian campesino--thatched, two-story stucco
bungalows, clubhouses, restaurants, and other outbuildings arrayed amid
gardens, gazebos, and wire aviaries filled with exotic birds. Maestro Arenas’s
statue of John Lennon topped a small knoll just inside the posada entrance.
Lennon was nude, had a bullet hole in his chest and back and a guitar in his right
hand. His left hand was extended outward holding the letters P-A-Z --”peace.” A
pedestal inscription read “To the Greatest Musician of the Century.” A gently
climbing flight of stairs led up to the statue and a walkway surrounded it. Kids
went to the posada’s discotheque, danced all night, got stoned, then made a
pilgrimage to the Lennon shrine to watch the sun come up.
On March 11, 1983, Lehder founded the National Latin Movement, a
new political party whose fundamental purpose was to get rid of the U.S.-
Colombia extradition treaty. By this time the Jacksonville case against Lehder
was in Colombia, waiting to be examined by the Supreme Court. Lehder was
number twenty-two chronologically on a list of more than one hundred
extraditions contemplated by the United States, but Ambassador Tambs and the
U.S. embassy left no doubt that he was number one in the minds of U.S. law
enforcement.
The National Latin Movement set up shop in a garagelike building in
downtown Armenia. It had a podium, a small office, and a bunch of benches for
the faithful to gather for Saturday afternoon rallies. Behind the rostrum the party
mounted a twelve-foot photograph of Lehder giving a speech, making the
movement’s “maximum chief a constant, larger-than-life presence even when he
wasn’t on the premises. The party newspaper, Quindio Libre, had a full-color
capability and a press run of sixty thousand. Lehder’s minions distributed it in
Medellín by driving down the street and hurling it into the air.
The movement pitched an ultranationalist, vaguely Third World line
with an alarming neo-Nazi flavor. Lehder had a corps of youthful, club-carrying
“Woodchoppers” to keep order at rallies and claimed that “an incorrect image
has been spread of Germany” and of Adolf Hitler, whom he referred to as
“Adolfo.” He claimed that “international Zionism” was behind “torture and
terrorism” in Central America, and that “rabbis collect taxes for Israel.” He said
his party was a lot like the West German Green Party, “especially on
environmental issues.” Green and white were the party colors.

FOUR months after the formation of the National Latin Movement two U.S
federal prosecutors and a pair of DEA agents from Jacksonville arrived in
Colombia on a secret mission to press the case for Lehder’s extradition. The
team was led by Robert Merkle, the U.S. attorney for the Middle District of
Florida. Merkle was a huge man, nicknamed “Mad Dog” and not known for his
delicate touch. But he was a brilliant prosecutor, well able to articulate the U.S.
case for extradition. He wanted Lehder, and he was led to believe that the
Colombians would give him a sympathetic hearing.
Lehder himself was well aware of the problems posed by the
Jacksonville indictment. Not only did he risk extradition from Colombia, but he
could be arrested and deported to Florida from any third country that had a U.S.
bilateral extradition treaty of its own. Lehder had sent feelers to the U.S. State
Department in 1982 and had actually met with a DEA agent in Colombia. He
offered to sell Norman’s Cay to the U.S government for $5 million if the United
States would drop the Jacksonville case. Maybe the U.S. Navy could turn the cay
into a base, he said. The DEA passed the offer to Jacksonville. It was rejected.
A year later, in July 1983, Merkle was hunting Lehder, not offering
deals. He was unfamiliar with Colombia and Bogotá a city he found tense,
packed with security checkpoints and armed guards. The day after he arrived,
Merkle took a rickety cable car into the mountains above Bogotá to attend mass
at a primitive church overlooking the capital. During the ceremony, a
“worshiper” picked his pocket. Outside again, he discovered the cable car was
no longer working. He had to walk down a stone staircase to return to the city.
The following week Merkle and his team presented credentials and
documentation at the Justice Ministry. Lara Bonilla, who would make Lehder a
test case for extradition a few months later, was not yet in office, and Merkle
encountered a low-key, matter-of-fact atmosphere. He came away “hopeful but
not optimistic.”

LEHDER’S shamelessness, like Escobar’s, knew no bounds. Since his kidnap he

had given up driving his own car and now traveled with an armed escort
composed of twenty-five ex-police officers. In an interview with Bogotá’s Radio
Caracól in late July, he acknowledged membership in MAS because “kidnap
victims have to protect their interests.”
 He also told Caracól he had bought “my islands” in the Bahamas for
“more than $1 million” and had put them “at the service of the Colombian
bonanza,” which was the euphemism he used to describe the billions of drug
dollars that Norman’s Cay had helped earn. Without mentioning the word
“cocaine,” he admitted he was a transport specialist for his friends, an
“intermediary, you could say, because of the land I had next to the United
States.”
He had been arrested and put in a U.S. jail because “I was a Latin
neighborhood leader” who wanted to “defend my race, my principles, and my
Colombianism.” He was looking toward a career as a senator, “to represent the
kidnappables and the extraditables of Colombia. I want to represent unions, and I
want to represent the poorest of the poor.
“They say that I conspired against the United States,” he said. “I would
say that not only did I conspire, I also will continue to conspire until the day the
extradition treaty is canceled.”
Lehder traveled to Bogotá to be present for the Ortega-Lara Bonilla
confrontation. Denied entrance to the floor of Congress, he migrated upward to
the press gallery, where as publisher of Quindio Libre he was guaranteed access.
He and his bodyguards cheered raucously for Jairo Ortega and grinned
maliciously at the regular reporters covering the event.
But bravado wouldn’t be enough. While Lehder was in Bogotá, the
Colombian Supreme Court was nearly ready to rule on the constitutionality of
Lehder’s extradition. Lehder told reporters at Congress that Colombia would
extradite him “over my dead body.”
Then, on September 2, 1983, the Supreme Court issued a finding
favorable to the United States. Colombia put out a warrant for Lehder’s arrest,
but Lehder had already disappeared, tipped off, he would say later, “because my
friends in the Ministry of Justice alerted me regarding Lara Bonilla’s intentions.”
Lara Bonilla approved Lehder’s extradition order and forwarded it to Betancur
for his signature.

ESCOBAR was next. In forcing Lara Bonilla to the wall on the Porras check, he
had left himself wide open to counterattack. Lara Bonilla had nothing to lose,
and, it turned out, he had plenty of help. Others were quick to follow his lead.
On August 25 the Bogotá newspaper El Espectador published a front-
page story detailing Escobar’s 1976 Medellín cocaine bust, the one that had
dismissed him as a low-echelon mule working for a larger trafficker. El
Espectador’s reporters had come across an old in-house newspaper published by
the Department of Administrative Security (DAS), the Colombian FBI, that gave
details of the arrest and published mug shots of Escobar, his cousin Gustavo
Gaviria, and four other defendants. There was no mistaking the pictures or what
the story implied. Escobar reacted instantly: thugs driving around on
motorcycles or in automobiles bought every single copy of El Espectador to
reach Medellín. El Espectador followed up daily, describing how the case had
been passed among different courts and judges, how Escobar had been jailed and
freed, how the court records had been misplaced, lost, or “disappeared.”
In early September Lara Bonilla, working with information supplied by
Jaime Ramirez, asked for an investigation of several private air transport and
charter firms believed to be controlled by drug traffickers. On September 8
Colombia’s Civil Aeronautics Board canceled flying permits for fifty-seven
aircraft, a large number of which were believed to belong to the Ochoas and
their charter firm, Pilotos Ejecutivos.
That same day, an investigative judge outside Medellín formally
reopened the 1976 case against Escobar. On September 10 Senator Alberto
Santofimio, finally unable to take the heat, ordered Escobar dropped from his list
of supporters, asked him publicly to get out of politics, and suggested he waive
his parliamentary immunity, answer the charges being made against him, and get
things cleared up. At that point parliamentary immunity, the constitutional right
of every sitting Colombian congressman, was the only thing standing between
Escobar and a jail cell.
On September 11 Escobar severed his connection with Santofimio,
claiming he had gotten into politics eighteen months ago because “only inside
the government could a man best serve the community.” Now the community
was turning its back on him. He would return the favor. He would not, however,
give up his congressional seat or his immunity.
Twelve days later the Medellín judge studying the 1976 case ordered
Escobar arrested. The charge: that he had conspired to murder the DAS agents
who had originally arrested him. Two had been killed in 1977. Antioquia DAS
chief Major Carlos Gustavo Monroy Arenas, the officer in charge of the
operation against Escobar, was murdered in Medellín by motorcycle assassins on
August 25, 1981.
The only thing restraining Lara Bonilla at this point was Betancur and
his continued refusal to extradite traffickers. In October the Supreme Court
found in favor of extradition in the cases of two north coast marijuana
traffickers. Lara Bonilla approved the order and sent it to Betancur, who refused
to sign it and instead remanded the case to Colombian courts. The Lehder order
was still unsigned and would remain so for months. The message emanating
from the presidential palace regarding extradition was clear--find another way.
So Lara Bonilla kept pushing. On September 26 newspapers resurrected
Escobar’s 1974 car theft indictment. In mid-October Congress carefully
consented to engage the possibility of revoking Escobar’s immunity to make him
liable to prosecution. Tambs, interviewed in El Tiempo, Colombia’s biggest
daily newspaper, denounced the “penetration of narcotics smugglers into
politics” and praised Lara Bonilla for taking steps to control it: “How is
democracy going to continue in Colombia if it is managed and manipulated by
these criminals?”
In late October, again with an assist from Ramirez, Lara Bonilla
dropped another bombshell. Six of the nine teams in Colombia’s professional
soccer league, he said, were either partly owned or controlled by drug
traffickers. He named Hernan Botero (Nacional of Medellín), Cali cartel boss
Gilberto Rodriguez (America), and Bogotá cocaine lord Gonzalo Rodriguez
Gacha (Millionarios) among others. Next month El Espectador obtained a full
list and added more names.
Finally, on November 17, Colombia’s National Institute of Renewable
Natural Resources fined Pablo Escobar 450,000 pesos ($5,000) for bringing
eighty-five zoo animals into the country illegally in 1981. The list included two
camels, two elephants, two elk, six ducks, three Canada geese, a capybara from
the Amazon, and assorted others.
For Escobar this was the last straw. On January 20, 1984, in the formal,
polite language for which he was rapidly becoming known, Escobar sent a
message to Jairo Ortega announcing his withdrawal from public life: “The
attitude of politicians is very far from the people’s opinions and aspirations.”
Ramirez and Lara Bonilla had finally put fear into the hearts of the Medellín
cartel bigshots.
12. THE ETHER TRAIL
On February 9, 1984, the Medellín cartel gathered at Kevin’s disco to celebrate
the baptism of the son of one of Jorge Ochoa’s key Miami cocaine distributors.
Ochoa stood godfather at the event. Two thousand guests munched quail eggs
dipped in honey, drank Dom Pérignon, and strolled Kevin’s terrace gazing down
the green-clad mountainside to the city of Medellín far below.
The week of the party served as one continuous cartel summit. Jorge
Ochoa usually presided, but Pablo Escobar chimed in when he wanted. Escobar
was “elegant and eloquent,” one guest said, but both he and Ochoa were low-
key, unfailingly courteous, and respectful. Part of this was paisa formality, but
part of it was caution. Both men now had the power to kill anyone in the group
who displeased them. Each needed to take great care in how he acted and how he
addressed his underlings. An offhand remark or a frown of displeasure could be
interpreted as a death sentence.
The traffickers referred to themselves as Nosotros (“Us”) or El Grupo
(“the Group”). As always, the cartel discussed market expansion. The traffickers
wanted to add more smuggling routes, more pilots. They talked about other
means of transportation--cargo containers, ships, even submarines. Ochoa
complained that the kilos of cocaine his planes were “air-dropping” to
speedboats off the Bahamas were getting wet and had to be reprocessed in
Miami. New waterproof packaging was needed.
There was a pressing need for more and better transportation, Ochoa
explained, because the cartel now had more cocaine than ever. A vast complex
of laboratories in the Colombian jungle llanos had come on line the previous
September and was now producing nearly four thousand kilos a month. Tons of
cocaine were quietly accumulating in the jungle, far from law enforcement.
Ochoa boasted that he was ready to start moving two thousand kilos a week.

WHAT Ochoa described was unprecedented--a set of integrated factories

capable of producing more than half of the seventy tons of cocaine estimated to
be entering the United States each year. Making cocaine is complicated, even in
a backyard lab, but in the cartel’s new facility it was a mammoth logistical task,
requiring tons of chemicals, the most important of which was ether.

COCAINE production begins in Peru or Bolivia between 1,500 and 6,000 feet
above sea level in the mist-filled valleys on the eastern slope of the Andes. There
the water vapor from the Amazon rain forest rises upward, providing the proper
warmth and wetness for the shrubs that bear the coca leaf.
Like caffeine, nicotine, codeine, morphine, and heroin, cocaine is an
alkaloid, a psychoactive compound produced by a plant. Most cocaine comes
from one of two varieties of coca leaf. The Bolivian plant has a leaf that is
glossy, greenish brown, and elliptical; the Peruvian leaf--also grown in
Colombia but with poorer results--is smooth but not shiny, pale green, and oval.
The shrubs bearing these leaves can grow to twelve feet. They are
planted in small, terraced plots of usually not more than two acres called
cocales. The campesino coca farmer is called a cocalero. The cocalero plants
about seven thousand shrubs per acre. After four years the shrubs begin
producing coca leaves, which are harvested as often as four times a year, mainly
by women and children who stuff the leaves into flour sacks tied at the waist. A
day’s work for an entire family--twenty-five kilos of wet leaves--yields ten kilos
of leaves when dried in the sun.
Coca is legal in Bolivia and Peru. For more than two thousand years the
leaf has been chewed by Indians and campesinos seeking to ward off hunger and
the chill temperatures of the Andes. By the end of 1970 coca outstripped tin as
the leading source of income in Bolivia and was doing equally well in Peru,
where campesinos could make four times as much from coca as they could from
any other crop.
A certain amount of coca leaf is legally turned into pharmaceutical
cocaine, which is used as a local anesthetic in operations conducted near masses
of fine blood vessels. In the United States the leaves are sent to the Stepan
Chemical Co. of Maywood, New Jersey, which extracts the cocaine and
distributes it to pharmaceutical companies. The residue from Stepan’s leaves--
but none of the cocaine--goes to Atlanta, Georgia, where it still figures in
Formula 7x, the secret recipe for Coca-Cola.
Pharmaceutical cocaine, at 99 percent pure, sold for about $3 a gram
with a prescription in the early 1980s. It brought sixty times that on the street.
Consequently, the vast majority of coca leaf entered the illegal market.
The cocaine pipeline begins when campesino harvesters carry the
leaves, sometimes by llama, to itinerant paste labs near the coca fields. The dried
leaves are treated with an alkaline solution--lime, sodium carbonate, or potash--
which begins to break down the leafs fourteen alkaloids, only one of which
contains cocaine. The next day the leaves are soaked in an oil drum or plastic vat
filled with kerosene. The leaves are sometimes pressed, like grapes, to help
extract the alkaloid-rich kerosene from the soggy plant matter. When the
alkaloids in the leaf have fully dissolved into the kerosene, the dead blackened
leaf is skimmed off and sulfuric acid is added into the mix. The acid interacts
with the alkaloids now contained in the kerosene to form a collection of salts,
one of which is cocaine sulfate. The kerosene is siphoned off, and more alkaline
is added to neutralize the acid. A gummy, grayish goo collects in the bottom of
the vat. This substance is coca paste. A thousand kilos of leaves yields just ten
kilos of paste.
The paste producers in Bolivia and Peru usually sell their product to the
Colombians. In Colombian towns paste is mixed with tobacco and smoked as
bazuko.
But the Colombians refine most of the paste they buy. The process
continues with another kerosene bath. The alkaloids settle in layers. The mushy
crystals at the top are crude cocaine, about 60 percent pure. The crystals are
scraped off, washed in alcohol, filtered, dried, and then dissolved in sulfuric
acid. The acid once again binds with the alkaloids. Potassium permanganate is
added to destroy the noncocaine alkaloids. What remains is filtered to remove
manganese oxide and other impurities. Ammonium hydroxide is added, and the
resulting precipitate is again filtered and dried. What is left is a very pure
cocaine alkaloid known as cocaine base. It takes 2 1/2 kilos of coca paste to
produce one kilo of cocaine base.
The base is not soluble in water, and though it can be smoked
(“freebased”), it cannot be inhaled through the mucous membranes in the nose.
To create a powder good for inhaling, the base must be dissolved in ether.
Hydrochloric acid is added along with acetone. The result, after filtering and
drying, is cocaine hydrochloride, the white powder that in 1984 was being used
regularly by five million Americans. A kilo of base makes a kilo of cocaine
hydrochloride.
Each kilo of cocaine requires seventeen liters of ether. U.S. annual
production of ether was only sixty million pounds from five producers. And
there were only seven foreign producers of ether in the world. Follow the ether,
find the cocaine. Johnny Phelps and his men knew most of this, but Phelps saw
something else that made ether even easier to track in Colombia. Not long after
he arrived in Bogotá in mid-1981, Phelps found a report in an old file, in which a
DEA agent named Lon Sturock had noted that Colombia’s cocaine traffickers
needed to import many of the “precursor chemicals” used to produce the drug--
including ether. This should mean that all the ether in Colombia came through
Colombian Customs. To find out where the ether was going, all law enforcement
had to do was read the manifests. By cutting off or controlling the ether supply,
law enforcement should be able to put the processors out of business.
Phelps decided to test this idea with a survey. His staff would examine
Colombia’s imports of ether and a second chemical, acetone, and see what the
figures showed. Was cocaine the small, urban-lab cottage industry that local
seizures seemed to suggest? Or was there something the DEA had missed?
Phelps’s study, code-named Operation Steeple, used informants, court-
ordered wiretaps, and undercover visits to Colombian chemical firms. The study
took about a year. Agents examined records of Colombian imports of ether and
acetone from January 1, 1978, to June 30, 1981. No one had any idea that the
DEA might be interested in ether and acetone, thus no one had made any effort
to conceal how much was coming into the country. The data was put together by
a DEA analyst in Bogotá. The study was completed on December 14, 1981. Its
findings, couched in dry bureaucratic language, were a revelation:
“A major vulnerability to Colombia’s traditional status in the world
cocaine trafficking community is its dependence on the importation both of
acetone and ether, neither of which is produced in appreciable quantity
internally,” the report stated. After that dry introduction came a bombshell:
“While acetone has fairly wide industrial application in Colombia, ether does
not, with perhaps as much as 98 percent of the latter believed to be destined for
illicit users.”
Ninety-eight percent. Nearly all of the ether in Colombia was going for
the manufacture of cocaine. Phelps was astounded. Colombia’s cocaine industry,
the DEA study found, was supplied by a vast network of illegal ether brokers
who imported the chemical into Colombia for resale to the traffickers. The study
identified thirty-seven illicit distributors and only twenty-two legitimate ones.
The importers brought a total of four thousand metric tons into Colombia,
enough ether to produce three hundred tons of cocaine. The DEA’s highest
estimate for the amount of cocaine consumed in the United States in 1981 was
only forty-five tons.
Ninety percent of the ether came from the United States and West
Germany. The ether exports of one American firm, J. T. Baker Chemical Supply
Co of Phillipsburg, New Jersey, broke down this way: 758.8 tons to illicit and
highly suspect users and only 3.3 tons to legitimate users. “J. T. Baker is the
largest ether supplier to the Colombian narcotics trafficking community,” the
study concluded.
The scale of the illegal ether business was awesome. Merck Colombia
S.A., the subsidiary of the German pharmaceutical firm and Colombia’s largest
legitimate ether importer, brought in only thirty metric tons in the entire 3 1/2
years covered by the study. In a single shipment to one of the illegal distributors
in June 1981, J. T. Baker exceeded thirty-two metric tons.
Phelps couldn’t believe what he was reading. Was it possible, he asked,
that some of the ether was being transshipped to, say, Peru? No, his investigators
told him, they had checked that. That meant, Phelps realized, that cocaine
production in Colombia had reached a magnitude that had never been imagined.
The conclusion of the report was inevitable: “The Drug Enforcement
Administration can effect major damage to the Colombian cocaine processing
industry through the denial of selected precursors, namely acetone and ether,”
the Operation Steeple study stated. “Of the two, ether by far is the most
vulnerable. . . . If the Drug Enforcement Administration can successfully cut the
availability of these precursor substances through timely, coordinated action, the
coca processing industry in Colombia could founder.”
The study recommended that the DEA pressure companies supplying
ether to refuse orders from illegal distributors and tip the DEA off to suspicious
buyers. The study suggested limiting orders to highly suspect distributors to half
a metric ton. No firm, legitimate or not, should receive more than twelve tons a
year. One proposed tactic was stalling: take a suspicious ether order, delay filling
it, and then cancel it. This would cause the traffickers to draw down on their
stocks, creating shortages.
The study also recommended briefing the “host countries”--Colombia,
Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia. Also to be told were Europe and the State
Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics Matters.
Finally, the study suggested some tactics for the DEA’s men in the
field. “Bogotá District Office might also consider establishing a ‘dummy’
chemical supply corporation to supply ether to the narcotics trafficking
community selling ‘bugged’ barrels along with adulterated chemicals to foul
laboratory operations.”
Phelps waited until mid-1982, when the Betancur administration took
office. Then he gathered his statistics, his graphs, and his flow charts and
prepared to present them to two governments. He forwarded the results to DEA
headquarters in Washington, but Washington was skeptical at first, not yet
prepared to believe in cocaine by the ton.
Colombian Attorney General Carlos Jimenez Gomez was another
matter. Phelps scheduled an appointment for his team and presented his
numbers. Jimenez Gomez examined them for himself, mulled them over, and
made up his mind:
 “You’re absolutely right,” he told Phelps.
Jimenez Gomez immediately restricted ether and acetone imports, but
with a glut of ether in Colombia it would take a while for the effects to be felt.
There was nothing to do but wait. Still, if Phelps and his staff were right about
Colombian cocaine production, inventory would be drawn down eventually.
Then something would happen. Phelps would wait for the reaction.

ON November 22, 1983, Frank Torres walked into J. T. Baker in Phillipsburg,

New Jersey, with a big order to fill. He wanted to buy 1,300 fifty-five-gallon
drums of high-grade ethyl ether. He wanted to pay cash, about $400,000. He
wanted the drums unlabeled, and he said he would take delivery anywhere in the
United States. He did not hide the fact that he was Colombian, and he said he
would take care of the shipping arrangements to Colombia himself.
The amount of ether Torres wanted was ridiculous. It came to nearly
two hundred metric tons, roughly equivalent to half the ether imports for all of
Colombia in 1980. During the entire 3 1/2 years studied by Phelps’s Operation
Steeple investigators, the largest single order had been seventy metric tons. The
bulk of the illicit orders averaged between ten and twenty metric tons.
Legitimate orders were all usually below one metric ton.
By 1983 a lot had happened to the Colombian ether market. Jimenez
Gomez’s licensing requirement had been in place for a year. Intelligence reports
told Phelps that a drum of ether now cost $4,800 on the Colombian black
market. Ether stocks were dwindling in Colombia.
A lot had also happened at J. T. Baker since Operation Steeple. The
DEA had approached the chemical company with the survey results, and the
company, tagged as the Colombian cocaine trade’s biggest ether supplier,
changed its ways. There were still no restrictions on the sale of ether in the
United States--a fifty-five-gallon drum sold for about $300. But instead of filling
Torres’s order without question, the J. T. Baker salesman stalled him while he
called the DEA in Newark. The salesman then told Torres he would not be able
to fill the order immediately.
A week later Torres got a long-distance call out of the blue. Somebody
named Mel Schabilion, who said he worked for North Central Industrial
Chemicals in Chicago, offered as much ether as Torres needed. Schabilion had
heard about the delays at J. T. Baker and wanted to help out. An overjoyed
Torres jumped at the offer.
It was a trap. NCIC, which operated out of a Chicago storefront, was a
DEA sting run by Schabilion and Harry Fullett, two DEA agents who had been
partners for years. They complemented each other perfectly. Schabilion was
aggressive, gregarious, big as a pro football lineman, with a sharp street
intelligence. Fullett was smaller, quieter, and wore a gold earring in one ear. The
duo had a sense of humor about the trade. Schabilion had named the storefront
so that its initials matched those of the National Crime Information Center, the
FBI’s computer-access repository for the criminal records of millions of felons.
It was the kind of inside joke dear to DEA agents.
Four days after Schabilion’s call, Torres met with the two agents at the
Ramada Inn in Miami. Torres said he wanted three hundred drums of ether
immediately. He wanted the labels changed on the drums. Instead of “ethyl
ether,” they should read “ethyl formate” and “ethylene glycol.” The following
week Torres flew up to Chicago to visit NCIC. Hidden cameras filmed him
making a $15,000 down payment. Torres struck the DEA agents as incredibly
naive, playing at being cloak-and-dagger and cautious one moment, talking too
much the next.

BY now DEA headquarters in Washington was coordinating the burgeoning

Torres investigation. The DEA suspected something big but didn’t know exactly
what it was. Francisco Javier Torres Sierra was a friendly Colombian family
man in his forties who ran a small import-export business in Miami, one of many
that sprouted up to cash in on the Latin American business boom of the early
1980s. Torres was married and had two daughters and a house in Kendall, a
Miami suburb. He went to mass every day and had no criminal record. Yet
Torres wanted to buy enough ether to produce almost thirty thousand pounds of
cocaine. Who was behind him?
The DEA got a partial answer to that question from Torres’s telephone
records. Before making his $15,000 down payment to NCIC, Torres twice called
a Barranquilla number registered to Armando Bravo Munoz, a known cocaine
trafficker. But this only made things more curious. Bravo Munoz was not big
enough to handle all the ether Torres wanted.
At Torres’s instruction, NCIC sent seventy-six drums of ether to the
Port of New Orleans. Two of the drums, however, were equipped with radio
transponders installed by the DEA’s Technical Operations branch. About the
size of cigarette packs, the “beepers” were anchored in Styrofoam and
surrounded by a bulky long-life battery pack. The entire package was set in a
false bottom welded into the drums. Thin filament antennae ran up the sides of
the drums. The antennae were barely noticeable lines, like a slight crack in the
paint on the outside of the drums. Once a day the beepers “spoke” to U.S.
National Security Agency satellites circling the Earth. The satellite recorded the
precise location of Torres’s ether shipment.
The DEA lost the signal when the shipment got to New Orleans. Agents
in Washington, Chicago, and Miami spent a nervous day, waiting. The next day
the signal reappeared in New Orleans. The day after that, the beepers were
broadcasting from Colombia.
On March 4, 1984, Herb Williams, the DEA’s resident agent in
Barranquilla, fielded a three-way conference telephone call linking him with the
DEA’s cocaine desk in Washington and with the DEA’s El Paso Intelligence
Center in Texas, nexus for all U.S. drug intelligence. The ether, Williams was
told, was now at latitude 10 degrees 34 minutes 20 seconds north by longitude
75 degrees 3 minutes 24 seconds west. The shipment was somewhere outside
Barranquilla near Colombia’s Caribbean coast.
A Colombian police officer went to check the coordinates. Williams
had a pretty good idea what he would find. On March 5 the officer confirmed the
suspicion: the ether had passed through Hacienda Veracruz. Williams described
this in his report as “a ranch owned by the Medellín, Colombia, cocaine
trafficking family Ochoa. The ranch has been identified to be sometimes used as
a deembarkation point for cocaine shipments belonging to the Ochoas destined
for the United States.”

WHILE events unfolded in Colombia, Torres was having second thoughts in

Miami about his Colombian clients. He was nervous, and it made him talkative.
He told Schabilion and Fullett he wanted to stop handling ether, but his clients
were putting pressure on him to fill the 1,300-drum order, and it was bothering
him.
Up to this point, Torres had been careful not to mention cocaine, but
now he began to open up. His clients were killers, he said. Only money meant
anything to them. Life meant nothing. Torres regaled the agents with details
about the cocaine business in Colombia, dropping the names of Jorge Ochoa and
Pablo Escobar, saying that five families controlled the business. The agents
couldn’t decide whether Torres’s information was accurate or not.
By March 5 the ether had already left Hacienda Veracruz, traveling
south by plane. On March 6 the beeper signals came out of Colombia’s eastern
llanos, a vast area of savannah, tropical forest, and little else.
Johnny Phelps waited a day, but the ether didn’t move. On March 7 he
decided it was time to act. Apparently the ether had reached its final destination.
Phelps drove over to police headquarters to see Jaime Ramirez,
something he usually did at least twice a day. On the days when Phelps didn’t
visit Ramirez, Ramirez visited him.
Ramirez, as usual, was sitting in his office writing reports and listening
to his radios. He didn’t have a ham operator’s license, but he was crazy about
radios and had them installed in his offices, in his car, and at home. He listened
to the police, the army, and smugglers talking on their CBs. He knew most of the
frequencies that drug pilots used on their way in and out of Colombia, and his
scanners found others. This had been very useful to the DEA on several
occasions. Now Phelps was telling Ramirez something he had never heard
before.
“You’re kidding,” Ramirez said.
“No,” Phelps said. “We think there’s a major lab in the jungle.”
“Where exactly is it?”
“Here.”
Phelps went to the map, put his finger down in the remote southeastern reaches
of Caquetá province: latitude 0 degrees 1 minute 4 seconds north; longitude 72
degrees 41 minutes 11 seconds west. Almost exactly on the equator at the
confluence of the Yari and Mesay rivers, a jungle wilderness.
Phelps didn’t tell Ramirez how big the ether shipment was, because he
had doubts the Colombian police could actually put together a big operation and
get the people on the ground at the site. Ramirez’s men had never before tried to
bust a lab in the middle of nowhere. It was going to be a logistical nightmare.
Ramirez looked at Phelps’s mark and wondered, not for the first time,
how and where the DEA got its information. His people had nothing in the
llanos. Then he thought about planes, helicopters, and fuel. It would take a
couple of days to arrange, but maybe with a stop at San José del Guaviare. . . .
He smiled. “Hell, let’s do it.”
13. TRANQUILANDIA
As far as anybody could tell, the place where they were going was about 160
miles south of San José del Guaviare. At 9:20 a.m. on March 10, 1984,
Lieutenant Colonel Ernesto Gilibert Vargas, secondin-command of the National
Police Anti-Narcotics Unit, ordered his men aboard two Bell 212 helicopters and
a de Havilland Twin Otter airplane. There were forty-two men, Anti-Narcotics
Unit veterans backed by a fully equipped police Special Operations Group, or
GOES, the Colombian equivalent of a SWAT team. Ron Pettingill, forty-five, a
DEA agent in Colombia for four years, was the expedition’s special guest, the
only gringo making the trip. The task force was going to pay a visit to the tiny
slice of jungle where the DEA’s shipment of bugged ether was giving off
signals.
Jaime Ramirez had moved quickly. After Johnny Phelps told him about
the “major lab” in the eastern llanos, he and Phelps had gone to police
headquarters to get permission for the operation. Once that was accomplished,
Ramirez briefed Gilibert, got himself a GOES team, and arranged the aircraft.
The plan was to leave early from Bogotá, fly two hundred miles southeast to San
José del Guaviare, refuel from the army there, take off again, and hit the target as
soon as possible. The aircraft would be carrying bladder tanks with extra fuel,
but still there was no turning back. Once helicopters were in the air in rural
Colombia, people knew a military maneuver was under way. Give the traffickers
any time at all to warn their friends, and you could kiss your operation good-bye.
Phelps picked Pettingill to accompany the police because he could
operate the portable videocamera and because he had spent a lot of time flying
the llanos looking for coca plantations. Pettingill also knew the area around San
José del Guaviare, the market center of Colombia’s not particularly prosperous
coca leaf industry. This was as close as anyone ever got on a regular basis to the
place where the ether was.
On March 9 the Colombian judicial police issued orders for the assault:
“Based on information from the anti-narcotics command, it has been learned that
in the jurisdication of the eastern llanos there is a laboratory.” On March 10, at
six a.m., the team gathered at the military airport in Bogotá and took off.
Now it was well past noon, and the helicopters were almost out of fuel.
Pettingill was in the Twin Otter, trailing behind at high altitude out of gunfire
range. The choppers were down near the treetops.
 The airstrip, when they spotted it, was covered with junk--oil drums,
tree trunks, and the like. Pettingill could see puffs of smoke coming from the
trees. The helicopter pilots confirmed sniper fire, but it dissipated quickly. Still,
the raid was a surprise. Ramirez and Phelps, listening to the radio in Ramirez’s
Bogotá office, remarked on it simultaneously.
The choppers swept around the airstrip in tight circles, found landing
zones, swooped low, and touched down. Flak-jacketed GOES men, carrying
Israeli Uzi submachine guns, fanned out to secure a perimeter. They waited for
the shooting to start, but there was silence. They took a look around.
There was a lot to see. First, there were people, about forty-five of
them, mostly men of disparate ages, with a smattering of women. They were all
badly dressed and unarmed. Some tried to run into the jungle, but most milled
about or stood quietly, waiting to see what would happen. The police gathered
them in a bunch, patted them down, and started asking for ID. The people
wouldn’t talk much, but they didn’t have to. Five words out of their mouths
branded the majority as Antioqueños, the kind of sullen north Medellín street
people the cartel hired by the dozen to do scut work, everything from message
carrying to contract murder. These were the lavaperros, “dog washers” in
Colombian slang.
The GOES members put the prisoners to work clearing the runway, and
soon the Twin Otter landed. The choppers fueled up from the bladder tanks and
got back into the air to fly reconnaissance. If the snipers were thinking about
coming back, the police wanted to know about it.
The airstrip was bulldozed from the jungle on a north-south axis. On the
west side there were ten large sheds with raised wooden floors and zinc roofs
covered in plastic. Some of the sheds had clapboard sides, and some were open.
At least three looked like offices of some sort; a third was a dormitory with
berths for one hundred people.
There were sixteen more sheds beyond the north end of the runway, at
least one of which, the police could see easily, was a modern, fully equipped
cocaine laboratory. On the eastern edge of the strip were four small airplanes.
There was a helicopter near the lab.
Pettingill was sweating in the humid afternoon and filming for all he
was worth. His arms and neck were bitten constantly by tiny gnats and
mosquitoes; he was thankful he had worn a long-sleeved shirt, and he rolled
down his sleeves.
As the police picked their way through the encampment, elation began
to build. This was no stash area. This was something else, much more than a
“major lab.” This was a fully integrated cocaine factory that employed one
hundred people, fed them and clothed them. There were generators, showers,
washing machines and dryers, bulldozers, four-wheel drive vehicles, pumps, and
other machinery. Pigs, turkeys, and chickens foraged in a garbage dump behind
the sheds.
At the edge of the jungle the police picked up some discarded khaki
uniforms and some automatic rifles. In one of the sheds they found more
uniforms and bolts of cloth to make others. There were also more weapons:
handguns, rifles, and shotguns. Obviously the snipers were security guards of
some kind, perhaps even guerrillas.
Back at the landing site, the police began to get an idea of how big the
laboratory operation had to be. They counted 305 drums of acetone at the site,
363 drums of ether, 482 jugs of red gasoline, and 133 jugs of aviation fuel. It
was an enormous inventory for an enormous enterprise.
The police soon saw why. A discarded logbook showed the airport had
received 15.539 metric tons of cocaine paste and base between December
15,1983, and February 2,1984. It was unbelievable, Pettingill thought. They had
found a grandfather lab.
Finally there was the cocaine. Pettingill filmed it in the sheds at the
north end next to the lab. There were about one hundred big plastic garbage cans
full of semi-liquid, mushy cocaine hydrochloride with the ether evaporating out
of it in a sickly-sweet-smelling cloud.
Gilibert got on the radio to tell Bogotá what his men had found so far.
He voiced his fears that the snipers might return and told Ramirez he had
helicopters flying the area for security. His men would sleep on the airstrip away
from the sheds.
He needed reinforcements, and quickly. He recommended Ramirez pull
together a second expedition as soon as possible. He had to get the prisoners out
of the camp, and he had to be able to start looking around some more. The
helicopter pilots were telling him they had found other airstrips, but he couldn’t
explore without some backup. He suspected there were other complexes to go
with the airstrips, and some of the prisoners had all but confirmed it. By the way,
he told Ramirez, the camp they were investigating now was called
Tranquilandia--”Quiet Village.”

THE next day in Bogotá an automobile stopped outside the cozy row house of
Francisco Ramirez, Jaime Ramirez’s younger brother and closest friend. It was
nine a.m., March 11. Four men emerged from the car, rang the doorbell, and
waited. Francisco, himself a former cop, met the four in the street. They were
polite, soft-spoken. They had a message for his brother:
“Tell him there’s $400,000 for him if he stops what he’s doing and
forgets about it,” one of the men said. “We will put the money in Panama, in the
United States, wherever your brother wants it.”
“I’ll speak to him.”
“Tell him the message is from Los Pablos.”
Francisco called Jaime immediately and told him what his visitors had
said. “What’s going on?” he asked.
“Don’t mess with this,” Jaime said. “Even better, get lost for a while.
This is very dangerous. Tell them that I don’t know what they’re talking about.”
The next day the four returned. Francisco followed orders, but the
spokesman was quietly insistent: “Of course, we understand. Just tell him again
about the $400,000.”
But Francisco couldn’t reach Jaime. The next day he saw why. His
brother, two companies of counterinsurgency soldiers, and what looked like half
the Colombian press corps were on national television examining the biggest
load of cocaine any of them had ever seen in his life.

RAMIREZ arrived at Tranquilandia with the relief column on March 12 and

took command. He sent the prisoners out on what was to become a daily air
shuttle service to Bogotá. Then he talked to Gilibert, who told him about another
airstrip about sixteen miles to the north. Before dawn the next morning Ramirez
scrambled helicopters to the new site. The workers there had simply dropped
their work and fled, leaving behind plastic bags, tape, paper, test tubes, pipettes,
thermometers, heaters, presses, and bags of lye. They also left behind a ton of
cocaine dumped in fifty huge ceramic jugs.
In all there were twenty sheds at the new site. Like Tranquilandia, the
complex had laundry machines, kitchen appliances, generators, cots, mattresses,
electric pumps, food, and bedding. There was also earth-moving equipment,
boats, chain saws, and a milling machine.
The complex was called Villa Coca 84 or Cocalandia, the police
weren’t sure which. The task force explored further, found a path, and followed
it to yet another lab site. This they immediately dubbed Cocalandia 2. It was well
stocked with drums of ether and acetone, but there was no cocaine.
Not believing this, the police retraced their steps to the Villa Coca
airstrip and hunted around. There it was, partially hidden in the brush: 140 pails
full of cocaine, another five hundred kilograms in all. They took the cocaine and
put it in the sheds with the mattresses, the chain saws, and the machinery. Unlike
the traffickers, the police didn’t have the resources to move anything except
themselves. They torched the whole mess and burned it to the ground.
Pettingill reluctantly flew back to Bogotá on the first shuttle to report to
Tambs and the DEA but returned to Tranquilandia in time to film the March 14
seizure of Tranquilandia 2 just across the Rio Mesay from the first site. Here the
police found four metric tons of cocaine packed in fifty-five-gallon drums, the
biggest single cache of the drug ever seized up to that time. The police burned all
of it.
Everyone was ecstatic. “Incredible,” Pettingill told his office. “We’re
knocking off a lab every day.” And so they were. On March 15 the police
destroyed El Diamante, half a ton of cocaine, six sheds, and a dormitory. On
March 16 they found Tranquilandia 3, Palmeras, and an unnamed site without
labs but with an airfield, a ramp for launching boats, and a pair of small cocaine
testing facilities. This, they determined, was where deals were closed. On March
17 they hit Pascualandia, took one airplane as the spoils of war, and burned
another one.
It was also March 17 when the soldiers found the base camp of what
they believed to be a detachment of guerrillas belonging to the Revolutionary
Armed Forces of Colombia--the FARC. Like the cocaine complexes, the camp
had a dormitory, kitchen, and communications center. The soldiers confiscated
an assortment of automatic weapons, including several machine pistols (Israeli
Uzis and MAC-l0s). They also found a base plate for a mortar and a few
semiautomatic rifles. There were piles of Leninist tracts and other guerrilla
documents and manuals, bolts of blue and green uniform cloth, sew-on triangles
of yellow fabric bearing the FARC insignia, and military badges and the rest of
the accoutrements of a full-scale tailor shop, including sewing machines.
Like the police a few days earlier, the soldiers concluded that the
guerrillas were supposed to be handling base security for the traffickers, a task
they had apparently performed without distinction, disappearing into the jungle
as soon as the police arrived. It appeared that the army’s (and Ambassador
Tambs’s) long-held suspicions about a “FARC-narc” connection were true.
In all, the police and soldiers in a little more than a fortnight sent 13.8
metric tons of cocaine up in smoke, along with fourteen labs and encampments,
seven airplanes, and 11,800 drums of ether, acetone, and other chemicals. In an
interview Johnny Phelps called it a “cocaine industrial park” and the “Silicon
Valley of cocaine.” Tambs flew to Washington to brief the State Department and
tell reporters that Ramirez and his men had set “a world record in terms of the
money, the product, and the amounts seized.” Colombian authorities estimated
the jungle labs were likely to have put $12 billion in the coffers of the Medellín
cartel in two years. What the police destroyed was conservatively estimated to
be worth $1.2 billion.
For Phelps and Ramirez, the mere fact of Tranquilandia had enormous
implications. The raid clearly demonstrated that the cartel no longer put together
its gigantic cocaine shipments by pooling the output of dozens-or hundreds--of
tiny, ill-equipped backyard labs. Phelps had never seen labs like those at
Tranquilandia, and nobody in Colombian law enforcement, as far as he knew,
had even suspected such labs existed. Tranquilandia explained the 1982 Miami
bust of TAMPA Airlines. There, law enforcement found that the traffickers were
moving cocaine to the United States in enormous lots. In 1984 at Tranquilandia,
law enforcement found out where it was coming from.
For Ramirez Tranquilandia nevertheless remained something of a
mystery. The DEA didn’t tell him about the transponders in the ether barrels,
and he continued to wonder how Phelps had found the dope. Either he had a
terrific informant--the thought made Ramirez jealous--or he had access to some
sort of satellite “eye in the sky” that could spot cocaine labs through the jungle
canopy.
Tranquilandia posed a challenge neither Phelps nor Ramirez could
ignore. If there was one “Silicon Valley of cocaine,” then there were probably
others. It would be Ramirez’s job to work out a method of finding the labs and
seizing them. It would be Phelps’s job to ensure that Ramirez got the equipment
he needed.
Resources would be relatively easy to obtain, at least in the short run.
Phelps could--and did--use the success of Tranquilandia to pry funds out of the
U.S. government. Tranquilandia was the sort of coup that could suddenly make
everything easy: “See, sometimes your tax dollars are being put to good use.”
As for Ramirez, before Tranquilandia he was one of several rising stars
in the upper ranks of the Colombian National Police. Now he was the nation’s
top cop, responsible for the most spectacular drug bust in world history. His
career was made.
Ramirez understood this and took it as his due, for he was not a modest
man. He loved the spotlight, and he fully expected to be Colombia’s chief of
police one day. At the same time, however, Ramirez had no intention of resting
on his laurels. He was a hunter before anything else, and one success simply
made him hungry for others. His men had kicked the drug traffickers in the face.
Now it was time to stomp them.
 The army, for its part, did its best to expand on the narco-guerrilla
evidence uncovered at Tranquilandia. It circulated excerpts from what purported
to be the final document of the FARC’s Sixth Conference in May 1982. The
document detailed plans for the guerrillas to collect a gramaje, or per-gram tax,
of 80 pesos (75 cents) from traffickers processing cocaine in guerrilla-held or-
influenced areas. Caquetá, the jungle province where Tranquilandia was located,
had been a FARC stronghold for years. Where possible, the document said, the
guerrillas should concentrate “on the big traffickers, seizing the merchandise [for
ourselves] or demanding large sums--but taking care that the movement does not
appear to be implicated.”
Like the army, Ambassador Tambs sounded the theme of “narco-
guerrillas” constantly to the considerable irritation of Belisario Betancur, who
still hoped to woo the FARC to his Peace Process. Betancur wasn’t convinced of
guerrilla involvement with the traffickers. He thought the evidence too thin to
put the Peace Process at risk.
Colombia still wasn’t ready for narco-guerrillas, and the army’s cause
was not helped either by Tambs’s loud voice or by its own proselytism. The
most revealing comment on the matter, oddly, came from FARC secondin-
command Jacobo Arenas, who responded to a reporter’s question two months
after Tranquilandia: “I don’t think you can generalize. It could happen that once
in a while some of our people may have received money--freely offered--from
people we might describe as narcotics trafficking people. We have said that if we
find a wallet filled with money lying in the street, we’ll pick it up because it’s
there.”
Phelps and Ramirez had only a passing interest in narco-guerrillas.
They were more interested in evaluating the information they had obtained. The
presence of so many Antioqueños at Tranquilandia--two of whom turned out to
have rap sheets--said something about the involvement of the Medellín cartel.
Efforts by Los Pablos to get Ramirez to lay off spoke volumes more about Pablo
Escobar’s role.
The Ochoas’ presence had been established when the plane with the
bugged ether refueled at Hacienda Veracruz. And at Tranquilandia, account
books listed four Medellín telephone numbers for Fabio Ochoa and recorded his
acknowledgment of having purchased seven hundred kilos of cocaine base from
Roberto Suarez, Bolivia’s cocaine czar.
But the major revelation from Tranquilandia was that Bogotá cocaine
boss Jose Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha had had a huge investment in the jungle.
Rodriguez Gacha, now thirty-six, had been regarded as a second-level trafficker.
He came from the town of Pacho, north of Bogotá, and had gotten his start as a
specialist in the transport of coca leaf from Peru and Bolivia. He was short,
squat--five feet five, 175 pounds--and somewhat eccentric. He loved Mexico and
things Mexican, especially mariachi music, and named his fincas after Mexican
cities. For this he was generally known as El Mejicano. Others called him “Big
Hat” because he always seemed to be wearing a straw fedora. He was also
believed to be deeply interested in the possibility that Colombia, despite an
adverse climate, might in the future grow its own coca leaf. He was believed to
be experimenting with large coca nurseries in Guaviare.
Although Johnny Phelps had had Rodriguez Gacha on his “ten biggest”
list in 1981, neither the DEA nor the Anti-Narcotics Unit had ever regarded
Rodriguez Gacha as anything more than Pablo Escobar’s man in Bogotá-perhaps
a member of Los Pablos, but certainly a subordinate.
Tranquilandia suggested something different. The first hint that “the
Mexican” was active in the llanos came from a wrecked plane found on one of
the jungle airstrips. Civil aviation authorities listed the owner of record as Justo
Pastor Rodriguez Gacha, Gonzalo’s brother. The plane had lost its license
because of an accident in September 1983.
Next came a letter to the Anti-Narcotics Unit from the police chief in
Leticia, the Amazon river town where the cartel brokered Peruvian coca leaf.
The word there, the chief said, was that Rodriguez Gacha got murdered
financially at Tranquilandia. His sources had told him that Rodriguez Gacha had
been flying paste and base to the Yari River area from Peru since the middle of
December 1983, and had had a huge sum of money tied up in his llano labs.
Besides his brother’s wreck, the chief added, the narcotics police at Yari had
seized at least one other of Rodriguez Gacha’s planes. Finally, although “the
Mexican”--or Don Andres, as he was known along the Amazon-had once lived
in Leticia and was still well-known there, he had not been seen in town since last
October.
This meant that Rodriguez Gacha was probably a much bigger player
than law enforcement had at first believed, the big loser in the biggest cocaine
operation law enforcement had ever seen. From that moment law enforcement
stopped thinking of Rodriguez Gacha as a member of Los Pablos and began to
think of him as a partner in the Medellín cartel.

BEFORE the Tranquilandia raid, the per-kilogram wholesale price of cocaine in

Miami was $14,000. Immediately after the raid it started to rise, an indication of
scarcity for the first time in three years. Law enforcement took heart. The llanos
raid, the biggest cocaine bust in history, had damaged the cartel. But how serious
was it? And what was the cartel going to do about it?
14. THE WHITE MERCEDES
Justice Minister Lara Bonilla’s nerves were wearing thin. Phelps could tell
whenever he went for a visit. The cartel had terrified the family of Rodrigo Lara
Bonilla long ago; now the strain was beginning to prey on the minister himself.
Lara Bonilla had begun his tenure as a reluctant crusader, prodded into
action after Pablo Escobar tried to smear him in the 1983 hot money
controversy. The strategy had backfired, mostly because of Lara Bonilla’s
uncommon courage. Since the hot money affair, the cartel--its immense wealth,
its ostentation, its violent history, its bribes, and its corruption--had become a
daily scandal served up by the justice minister and presented in grotesque detail
by the nation’s newspapers and broadcasters.
The results of this had been truly extraordinary. Carlos Lehder had gone
into hiding, an order for his extradition signed by Lara Bonilla and lying in the in
basket on President Belisario Betancur’s desk. More than three hundred small
airplanes had had their licenses revoked by Lara Bonilla, including most of the
Ochoa family’s Pilotos Ejecutivos fleet. Now the Justice Department was
investigating the Ochoas’ ownership of Hacienda Veracruz, where a plane
loaded with ether had stopped to refuel on its way to the cartel’s jungle lab
complex at Tranquilandia.
And Lara Bonilla didn’t stop there. In early 1984, working with
information supplied by Colonel Jaime Ramirez and the Anti-Narcotics Unit
police, he had denounced thirty politicians for taking hot money in municipal
elections. He had continued to seize airplanes and denounce cartel involvement
in Colombia’s professional soccer league. On April 6, 1984, shortly after the
Tranquilandia raid, he announced that Colombia would begin trial spraying of
north coast marijuana fields with the herbicide glyphosate, raising the possibility
that eight years of furious U.S. diplomacy might finally bear fruit.
It was Pablo Escobar who had suffered most at Lara Bonilla’s hands.
Driven out of Congress by Lara Bonilla’s denunciations and forced to endure a
string of humiliating revelations about his notorious past and criminal present,
Escobar by the end of 1983 had lost whatever pretentions he may have had for a
career as a public servant.
But he did not go quietly. Nor did he really go at all. As long as police
were chasing him and Congress was debating whether to revoke his
parliamentary immunity, Escobar kept a fairly low profile. But whenever the
heat moderated, he was back on the offensive. On February 13,1984, the courts
withdrew an arrest warrant against him, and he immediately announced that
unless the government abrogated the extradition treaty with the United States, he
and Lehder would close down 1,500 businesses and put more than twenty
thousand people out of work. On March 2 he held his first political rally in more
than six months, denouncing Lara Bonilla as a shill of U.S. imperialism and
criticizing the Medellín municipal government for turning off the lights in his
soccer stadiums.
And on March 26, with the cartel reeling from the Tranquilandia raid,
he wrote an “open letter” to U.S. Ambassador Lewis Tambs, denying any
involvement in the jungle labs: “I can only characterize your statements as
tendentious, irresponsible and malintentioned without any basis in reality; they
denigrate the good faith of public opinion. My conscience is clear.”
The letter denounced extradition and labeled “pernicious” Tambs’s
contention that Escobar and the rest of the cartel had hired FARC guerrillas to
guard the Tranquilandia installations. Finally, he described Lara Bonilla as “the
representative of your government in the Colombian cabinet.”
It was this last remark and others like it that weighed heaviest with
Johnny Phelps. He had the utmost respect and admiration for Lara Bonilla, but
his resentment and contempt for the Colombian government was growing almost
daily. During the hot money controversy and in all the months following it,
President Betancur had made few public statements regarding drug trafficking
and had done little to indicate that Lara Bonilla’s policies were his own. He had
taken no action on extradition and seemed to plan none. Now he was sitting by
while the biggest cocaine trafficker in the world--a known killer and career
criminal--was insulting his justice minister.
Phelps was a cop. He accepted risks; it was part of the job. But Phelps
was worried about Lara Bonilla. The justice minister was in way over his head,
and his boss was ignoring him.
Meanwhile, in Medellín, it was obvious that no matter what was
happening to Escobar, the Ochoas, or any other individual trafficker, the cartel
still reigned supreme. Errol Chavez had left the city in August 1983, posted to
Houston. Before he left he had told his replacement, Mike Vigil, that things were
bad in Medellín and getting worse. Vigil had no reason to doubt it. Gunshots
echoed through the city so often that no one remarked on it anymore. Perhaps
once a week on his way to work Vigil would spot a corpse lying on the edge of
the road. No one stopped to stare.
The Medellín police were terrified of trafficker vengeance and would
hardly leave their headquarters buildings, let alone make an arrest. After El
Espectador printed the details of Pablo Escobar’s 1976 cocaine arrest, Vigil
went down to DAS headquarters to get the police photo file so he could make
some mug-shot copies for his own records. The negatives had been stolen and
substituted. Vigil’s secretary, hired by Chavez after immense bureaucratic wire-
pulling, was so scared that she sat in the DEA office with her shoes off “so I can
feel the people walking in the corridor.” She quit shortly.
Security--guarding people and guarding property--was a huge industry
in Medellín, but it was difficult at times to tell whose side the guards were on.
Vigil, unwinding at an open-air Envigado cafe one afternoon, got interested in a
good-looking woman who said she worked as a secretary for a local security
agency—“You know, bodyguards, chauffeurs, armed guards, and that stuff.”
A couple of drinks later she confided that her bosses would also murder
people for a fee, “you know, hits for hire.” Anything complicated--a policeman,
a public official, a judge, a politician--had to be negotiated. The low end of the
line--a quicky job on a nonentity-- was simplicity itself: “We start at $250, you
know--cash.”

IT was in August 1983 that Colombian F-2 police intelligence agents discovered
the first plot against Lara Bonilla. It was a simple assassination organized from
Medellín. In those days Lara Bonilla was giving daily bravura performances in
Congress and had little real appreciation of who was after him or the resources
they could bring to bear: “I am a dangerous minister for those who act outside
the law,” he said in an August news release. “I only hope they don’t catch me by
surprise.”
Tambs and Phelps, under no illusions, went to visit Lara Bonilla after
the plot was discovered. Tambs in particular was emphatic: “You should be
more concerned, you should take more precautions.” He offered to give Lara
Bonilla his own bulletproof vest. Lara Bonilla thanked both men but minimized
the problem.
In the corridor with Phelps, Tambs was more insistent: “Here, take the
vest and see that he gets it.” Phelps gave Lara Bonilla the vest, but he couldn’t
make him wear it.
The next time Phelps went to the ministry with Tambs, it was to tell
Lara Bonilla that the DEA had found that people in Lara Bonilla’s own office
were passing information to the drug traffickers. Again Lara Bonilla either
dismissed the threat or didn’t understand it. Phelps told Tambs, “He’s not ready
to believe what we say.”
 Tambs tried more often. As time passed he and Lara Bonilla grew very
close, partly because they always had business together, but mostly because they
both loved to talk. Lara Bonilla was a politician and a left-winger, with little use
for the United States’ “big stick” policy in Central America. Tambs was an
academic and a sharp-tongued Reagan conservative who helped design Central
American policy. They were natural foes, but each had an excellent sense of
humor and a natural inclination to spend hours discussing what Tambs described
as “life’s eternal verities.”
It was during one of these sessions in February 1984 that one of Lara
Bonilla’s aides interrupted him to tell him about the whistling sound in his
telephone receiver and the difficulty he had making himself heard. The
telephones were tapped. And not just here in the office, said the aide, but also at
his home. Lara Bonilla was appalled: “How could they!”
Finally, Tambs thought, he’s gotten the message.

SOMETIME soon after the Tranquilandia raid--even years later it would not be
clear exactly when--a “group of drug traffickers” gathered in a “bunker” in
Medellín, according to a secret DAS memo, to pool resources and plan the
assassination of Rodrigo Lara Bonilla. One police informant reported that
representatives of the cartel had met at a Medellín soda fountain called Cositas
Ricas (“Tasty Little Things”) to work out the details. The whole job, front
money and fees for everyone, would be done for fifty million pesos ($521,000).
A DEA informant would tell agents years later that he had heard Pablo Escobar
personally order the killing. The contract was picked up by Los Quesitos, one of
several Medellín murder gangs closely identified with and possibly sponsored by
the cartel. Los Quesitos sent three field commanders to handle the Bogotá, end:
John Jairo Arias Tascón, an ex-con with a full rap sheet; Ruben Dario Londoño,
alias “Juan Pérez,” a young hoodlum standing for election as a Pablo
Escobarsponsored Medellín city councilman; and Luis A. Cataño, who
purchased a green Renault, filled it with guns, grenades, bulletproof vests, and
the like, and drove it from Medellín to Bogotá.
These three set up in the four-star Nueva Granada and Bacatá hotels in
downtown Bogotá. They met several times for meals in La Fonda Antioqueña,
where they could sample home cooking and put the final touches on the plan.
With them at this time was German Alfonso Diaz Quintana, known as El Ronco
(“the Croaker”), a first-rank Medellín hitman assigned as the backup killer in
case the initial plot failed.
The chosen killer was Iván Dario Guizado, thirty-one, “Carlos Mario,”
a strung-out drifter with fifteen prior arrests for murder, robbery, and assault
dating back to 1969. The driver would be a kid, Byron Velasquez Arenas, one of
Pablo Escobar’s gofers.
The team sat in Bogotá and waited, speaking Antioqueño dialect, eating
in Antioqueño restaurants, and making toll calls to Medellín from their hotels.
Londoño called his mother half a dozen times. Others called Cataño’s house in
La Estrella, a Medellín suburb. Cataño had left his car in Bogotá and gone home.
Other numbers were linked to offices and political allies of Escobar’s sisters,
Alba Marina Escobar and Maria Victoria Escobar de Henao. DAS would say
later that the plotters several times called another Escobar sister, Ludmila,
directly.

AT ten a.m., April 30, 1984, Tambs received a telephone call from an excited
Rodrigo Lara Bonilla. He had now been complaining for some weeks about the
threats against him and had been getting progressively more nervous and
worried about his family. Finally he had terrific news. The Foreign Ministry was
going to get him out of the country, send him to Prague as Colombia’s
ambassador to Czechoslovakia--deep inside the Communist bloc.
“You’ll be safe there.” Tambs laughed. “All the terrorists are in the
government.”
Unfortunately, Lara Bonilla said, clearance from Czechoslovakia was
going to take thirty days, and he and his family needed a place in which to hole
up for that time. Could Tambs help him?
Tambs could. He called the White House and asked staffers to fix
something up. Soon he had confirmation: a hideout in Texas had been found.
With this piece of news in hand, Tambs left his office for a lunch-time
reception at the Dutch embassy. He left word with an assistant to tell Lara
Bonilla about the Texas arrangement, then he drove to the airport to say goodbye
to a departing U.S. Congressional delegation.

AT seven p.m. on April 30, Byron Velasquez and “Carlos Mario” headed into
traffic to look for a white Mercedes-Benz limousine. Lara Bonilla always sat in
the backseat on the right side. They drove to a residence in the fashionable
neighborhood of north Bogotá, to an address they had learned that afternoon
when they’d met Cataño’s green Renault to pick up the grenades and the MAC-
10. Their contact, who called himself John Jairo Franco, had told them people
“were talking” about them in Medellín. Translation: Find the target and get it
done.
 It was just dusk when they spotted the Mercedes. Traffic was fairly
heavy, but Velasquez and Carlos Mario were riding a new Yamaha motorcycle
and had no difficulty weaving in and out of traffic. Velasquez kicked the throttle
and swooped down on the limousine, tucking in easily just behind of the right
rear fender. He eased off until the bike held position so that the two vehicles
seemed frozen in space while the rest of the world whooshed by.
They had a nice angle and all the time they needed. Carlos Mario
removed the MAC-10 from his jacket, pointed it at the shadow in the backseat of
the Mercedes, and pulled the trigger. He emptied the magazine in about two
seconds.
Rodrigo Lara Bonilla was pronounced dead at Shaio Clinic at 7:40 p.m.,
April 30, 1984. He’d taken three .45-caliber slugs in the head, two in the chest,
one in the neck, and one in the arm. Lewis Tambs’s bulletproof vest was loose in
the backseat, tossed there haphazardly. It wouldn’t have helped.
After the attack, Lara Bonilla’s escort limousine chased down the
Yamaha. A bodyguard’s lucky shot hit the gas tank, setting the bike on fire and
spinning out of control until it crashed into a curb. Byron Arenas Velasquez,
shot in the arm and stunned, was arrested. Ivan Dado Guizado, “Carlos Mario,”
was dead in the street, his head practically blown off by bullets from a body
guard’s machine gun.

BELISARIO Betancur and the Colombian cabinet visited the clinic shortly after
the shooting, then retired to the Nariño Presidential Palace. The ministers were
appalled and disgusted. Betancur was serious, very careful in what he said, very
severe. Shortly after midnight he issued a statement proclaiming a state of siege
in Colombia and promising to “rescue the national dignity.” Then he returned to
the conference room, where he remained with the cabinet until three a.m. At one
point he polled the ministers on their opinions regarding what else might be
done, then announced peremptorily: “We will extradite Colombians.”
Lara Bonilla’s body, in a closed coffin, lay in state in the Rotunda of the
Capitol Building while thousands of Colombians paid their last respects. In the
morning, under a bright sky, a military honor guard escorted the coffin across
the Plaza Bolivar to the National Cathedral. The plaza was mobbed with people-
-rich, poor, middle class-crying and chanting in a collective bellow of rage and
anguish: “We love you, Rodrigo!” “¡Venganza, justicia! ”
Tambs stood inside the cathedral in a roped-off section reserved for
diplomats. Betancur arrived along with his cabinet. Most of the Congress was on
hand, as were the leading officers of Colombia’s armed forces. The memorial
service was short but emotional. Outside, the crowd continued restive and
outraged. Inside, Betancur stood stone-faced, but the tension had drawn sharp
vertical lines in his features.
After the service Tambs walked outside to his limousine. People in the
street recognized him, waved at him to get his attention: “¡Viva los Estados
Unidos!”--”Long live the United States!” It was not often that he heard that.
Lara Bonilla’s body was flown to his home city of Neiva for funeral and
burial. It fell to Betancur to deliver the eulogy. He spoke shortly after four p.m.
It was not a conciliatory moment, and Betancur was not in a conciliatory mood:
“We have reached a point where we must reflect on what is our nation,
what does the word ‘citizen’ mean?” he said. “Stop, enemies of humanity!
Colombia will hand over criminals wanted in other countries so they may be
punished as an example.” The crowd rose and began to applaud.
Six days later, on May 8, 1984, Betancur signed the extradition order
for Carlos Lehder.
15. BARRY SEAL
A month after the fall of Tranquilandia, a pilot known as Ellis MacKenzie
approached the coast of Colombia in a twin-engine Cessna Titan 404 that had
been purchased in Miami for Jorge Ochoa. MacKenzie rode as co-pilot; a
Honduran friend of the Ochoa family piloted the plane. Both men were very
tired. They’d left at two a.m. from South Caicos, an island south of the Bahamas,
hoping the early hour would help them avoid the Colombian air force. Now, near
dawn, they found that the radio beacons along the Colombian coast had been
turned to low power, and they were having a tough time navigating in heavy fog.
Finally they spotted the skyline of Cartagena, and the plane banked left, crossing
the coast several miles east of the city.
“We’ll be going right over Jorge Ochoa’s ranch and farm,” said the
Honduran, a Vietnam veteran and former commercial airline pilot named Felix
Dixon Bates. “Would you like to see it?”
“Certainly,” MacKenzie said.
The Titan circled Hacienda Veracruz, and the two pilots waved to
somebody on the ground. MacKenzie admired the ranch’s paved 5,400-foot
airstrip as only a good drug pilot could. But the plane didn’t land, continuing
instead south along the Rio Magdalena toward Medellín. The Titan finally set
down on a five-thousand-foot grassy jungle airstrip north of the city. As soon as
the plane cut its engines, workers on ladders painted over its U.S. registration
number. The new number would be Colombian, the number of another Titan
owned by the Ochoas that had just been confiscated with cocaine in the
Bahamas. That way, if the Colombian government asked about the seized plane,
the Ochoas could show them the new Titan and claim the other one must be an
imposter.
MacKenzie studied the airstrip cut into the moist, dense vegetation.
Rain would make it muddy and dangerous. Large pools of standing water from a
recent downpour still spotted the runway. A small plane sat refueling nearby
while a tractor towed duffel bags of cocaine out of the jungle. The pilot of the
refueling plane told MacKenzie that he was headed to Andros Island in the
Bahamas with three hundred kilos.
MacKenzie and Bates transferred to another small plane and flew to a
complex of hangars on the outskirts of Medellín. This was Jorge Ochoa’s aircraft
base, Bates explained, where he kept his private helicopter and jet. A driver
picked them up and took them south into the mountains about a mile past the
Hotel Intercontinental to a large estate with a winding driveway. This was La
Loma, home of the Ochoas.
They were ushered into a sitting room and welcomed by Jorge Ochoa,
Fabio Ochoa, Juan David Ochoa, Pablo Correa Arroyave, and Pablo Escobar.
Jorge Ochoa presided. MacKenzie did not speak Spanish, so Bates translated for
him. Ochoa politely exchanged pleasantries with MacKenzie and acknowledged
that they had spoken previously by telephone.
“Yes,” MacKenzie said. “I am very glad to meet you after all this time.”
MacKenzie was a man on a mission. Actually he had two missions, but
the Colombians would have killed him on the spot if they had known about the
second one. Ellis MacKenzie was not the pilot’s real name. He was Adler
Berriman Seal, and he was an informant for the U.S. Drug Enforcement
Administration. Born and raised in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Barry Seal was
quite larger than life. He weighed about three hundred pounds, sported big
muttonchop sideburns, and had the attitude that Barry Seal was smarter than just
about anyone around. Despite his girth, he was something of a ladies’ man. He
did not smoke or drink. Women and flying were his passions. Most people who
knew him and knew anything about flying said he was the best pilot they had
ever seen. He didn’t fly an airplane, he wore it like a suit of clothes. When he
was just twenty-six, he became one of the youngest pilots in the history of
Trans-World Airlines.
But Seal got bored with commercial airline flying. He had done a stint
in the U.S. Army Special Forces in the pre-Vietnam 1960s, and he’d been flying
since he was fifteen. “Full of fun, full of folly,” his high school yearbook had
said. A born leader who could charm paint off a barn, Seal needed excitement,
something more than just putting in his time during the week so he could drift
off to the suburbs and follow the LSU Tiger football games. He found the thrill
he needed in smuggling. In 1972, when he was thirty-two, Seal got arrested for
the first time by Customs in New Orleans in a conspiracy to fly seven tons of
plastic explosives to anti-Castro Cubans in Mexico. The arms buyer turned out
to be an undercover agent. Although the judge threw out the case, the publicity
cost Seal his job with TWA.
Seal then became an “airline broker,” a handy euphemism for which the
words “all-purpose smuggler” could easily have been substituted. He started
flying marijuana in 1976. He had his own group of aviation mechanics and co-
pilots, and his business often took him to Central and South America, where his
skills as a pilot were much appreciated.
 In 1979 Honduran police caught him with an illegal handgun in his
cockpit and sent him to jail for eight months. On the flight home he met William
Roger Reeves, another smuggler who told him that he worked for the Ochoa
family of Medellín. Seal began to fly cocaine for the Ochoas in 1981 and soon
found himself dealing with the Colombians directly. One contact was a woman
who sometimes dressed in a nun’s habit. She was replaced by an Ochoa
distributor in Miami who called himself “Lito.” Lito’s real name, like Seal’s,
was a closely guarded secret. Seal got in touch with Lito by calling one of three
numbers on Lito’s pocket telephone pager.
By this time Seal had become something of a smuggling genius. He
studied mistakes traffickers made by reading the testimony in big federal drug
conspiracy cases. He even attended the trials when he could, soaking up
information like a student attending seminars. Ultimately he created a system
that was nearly fail-safe. His planes always departed from and returned to his
Louisiana bases at night. Like all smugglers, they flew without lights. Seal and
his pilots wore third-generation night-vision goggles, which at $5,000 a pair
electronically magnified the available light from the stars and moon fifty
thousand times. Over Colombia, his planes flew through “windows” in
Colombian airspace--precise periods when the military would look the other
way--paid for with $25,000 bribes. Reentering U.S. airspace, Seal’s smugglers
dropped to 500 feet and slowed to 120 knots. On radar screens, they looked like
helicopters coming ashore from oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico.
Entering the United States, Seal’s planes would pass over a radio
checkpoint. If the man on the ground with the radio determined that the plane
was being followed, the mission was aborted. If there was no trailing aircraft,
Seal’s planes followed radar beacons to drop sites in remote parts of the
Louisiana bayou. Duffel bags full of cocaine were parachuted into the swamp.
Helicopters swooped down, retrieved the bags, and ferried them to off-loading
sites. The cocaine went to Ochoa distributors in Miami by automobile. In 1982
and 1983 Seal brought in more than five thousand kilos and grossed $25 million,
even though every drug agent in Louisiana considered him the biggest smuggler
in the state.
On stakeouts, agents watched Seal use two pay phones at a time,
working from a little green canvas tote bag full of hundreds of quarters. He
talked in code to Colombia and sometimes transmitted messages over the line by
Hewlett-Packard computer so the agents couldn’t listen in. He loved the
challenge presented by law enforcement. Seal once bumped into a Louisiana
State Police agent on the street in Baton Rouge and told him, “You dumb
sonofabitch. You’ll never catch me.”
When Seal finally got caught, it was in south Florida, not Louisiana. It
didn’t take any sophisticated hardware, just an informant. The informant worked
for Randy Beasley, DEA case agent for Operation Screamer, a mammoth sting
aimed at penetrating the network of mercenary drug pilots. The informant led
Beasley to a smuggler who knew a hot-shot pilot from Louisiana willing to fly
Quaaludes out of South America. Beasley called the DEA in Baton Rouge.
“Hey, I got a guy, he’s a pilot, he’s from Baton Rouge, and they call
him El Gordo,” Beasley said, “‘the Fat One.’ “
“We know who you’ve got, and if you’ve got him, we’re going to come
down and kiss you,” said the agent in Baton Rouge. “We’ve been working him
ten years, and we’ve never been able to get him.”
Based on the informant’s testimony and numerous wire-tapped
telephone conversations, a federal grand jury in Fort Lauderdale indicted Seal in
March 1983 for smuggling two hundred thousand Quaaludes. His name and
several of his aliases made the papers in small print with seventy-five others. In
fact, for some reason Seal was listed twice, as “Adler (Barry Seal, Bill Elders,
Gordo) Seal” and “Adler (Bill) Seal.” Either way, his cover was intact. To the
Ochoas, he was Ellis MacKenzie; the names Barry or Adler Seal meant nothing
to them.
Seal surrendered voluntarily and was freed on $250,000 bond, but he
faced sixty-one years in prison in two separate court cases stemming from the
Screamer indictment. Immediately he tried to make a deal with the government.
Seal approached Beasley and offered to “flip,” to turn informant and go
undercover. He promised big things, more cocaine than the agents had ever seen,
but he wasn’t specific. He wanted to travel outside the country with very little
control by DEA. What an ego, Beasley thought. He thinks he’s untouchable.
Seal even had his own conditions for the government. He wanted the charges
dropped against two of his men who were also caught in Screamer. He also
wanted to cut the deal without telling his attorney, Richard Ben-Veniste, a
former Watergate prosecutor. That made Beasley uneasy. Beasley and the
Screamer prosecutor decided to turn Seal down.
Seal then tried to make a deal with the U.S. attorney in Baton Rouge,
Stanford Bardwell, a high school classmate. Bardwell knew that Seal was still
under investigation by a state and federal task force in Baton Rouge and New
Orleans. He refused even to see Seal, explaining later that Seal’s request was
“too cryptic.”
All during this time. Seal had managed to stay in touch with Lito and
even moved three cocaine loads for the Ochoas while he was out on bond in the
summer of 1983. But as his court date neared, he quit smuggling to prepare his
defense, trying at the same time to keep his problems a secret from the
Colombians.
This was somewhat difficult. Lito, for one, was perturbed because
MacKenzie wasn’t bringing in enough cocaine. He pressed MacKenzie to make
another trip. Lito’s brother had just smuggled three thousand kilos for the
Ochoas. Why couldn’t MacKenzie do that?
Seal was stunned to hear the Ochoas were bringing in so much at a
time. He asked for details. Lito asked if he wanted to make such a trip himself:
“Yes,” Seal replied. “I’ll just have to find an airplane.”

Seal went to trial on the Quaalude charges in Fort Lauderdale in February 1984.
Things did not go well. On February 17 he was convicted of conspiracy and
possession with intent to distribute Quaaludes. He could get ten years in prison.
U.S. District Judge Norman C. Roettger was known as the toughest sentencing
judge in the Southern District of Florida. And Seal faced a second trial on related
Screamer charges that could add forty-seven years to his prison term.
Even so, Seal continued his preparations for a three-thousand-kilo load
for Lito and the Ochoas. On March 9 he bought a twin-engine Lockheed
Lodestar, a World War II submarine chaser rebuilt into an executive aircraft that
could carry a payload of more than three thousand kilos. But the next day
Tranquilandia was raided, and Seal’s trip was delayed.
By now Seal was getting desperate to cut a deal with the government.
He again tried Stanford Bardwell, without success. But when the going got
tough, Barry Seal got brash. Finally, he just got in one of his planes, flew to
Washington, and contacted the offices of the Vice President’s South Florida
Task Force. The task force’s DEA liaison sent Seal to the DEA’s Washington
headquarters. Agents there were impressed enough to call Bob Joura, a veteran
group supervisor newly posted to the DEA’s Miami Field Division. Joura asked
his men if anybody wanted to handle a guy named Barry Seal. Ernst “Jake”
Jacobsen, a hulking Mississippian with a walrus mustache, had heard of Seal
when he’d worked with Customs in Gulfport. Jacobsen knew that Seal was big
time. “I’ll take it,” he said.
Jacobsen and Joura met Seal for the first time at a small shopping mall
in Miami. Seal, wearing a ridiculous disguise of dark glasses and a hat, jumped
into the backseat of the agents’ car, very afraid. He didn’t want to be seen in the
DEA office. The two agents took him driving through Miami and nearby
Hialeah to calm his nerves and listen to his story.
It was hard to believe. Neither Joura nor Jacobsen, both of whom were
new to Miami, were familiar with the name Jorge Ochoa, but the amounts of
cocaine Seal talked about were ridiculous. Jacobsen thought he was blowing
smoke.
Seal said he had worked for the Ochoas since 1981, flying or arranging
more than one hundred smuggling trips of more than three hundred kilos each.
The Ochoas paid an average of $3,500 a kilo. The math was astounding: if Seal
was telling the truth, he had moved more than thirty thousand kilos of cocaine
into the United States and received $75 million.
Jacobsen was still skeptical; informants always promised a lot. That was
how they got attention. But then came the kicker: Barry Seal said he could do a
3,500-kilo cocaine deal with the Ochoas and deliver it in two shipments to the
DEA. Seal was offering to nearly double the two-ton TAMPA bust, the largest
cocaine seizure in the history of the United States.
Seal continued. The Ochoas wanted a big score now because they were
hurting. In addition to Tranquilandia, their Bahamian pipeline was giving them
trouble. They had lost several loads in the islands to corrupt police who were
turning around and reselling the cocaine--about two thousand kilos--in Miami.
The Ochoas had just bought a new plane in Miami, a Titan 404, to
replace one they had lost. They wanted Seal and another Ochoa pilot to deliver
the aircraft to Hacienda Veracruz. Seal was to meet with Jorge Ochoa to discuss
the 3,500-kilo deal.
The briefing lasted two hours. Jacobsen weighed the pros and cons. The
DEA agent and federal prosecutor in Screamer hadn’t liked Seal. The DEA and
state police in Louisiana were still investigating Seal. But as Seal talked,
Jacobsen became more and more convinced. Things he said checked out. By this
time Jacobsen had found out from other agents in the office about the Ochoas.
This could be a rare opportunity. Jacobsen and Joura decided to pursue it.
On March 28 Seal signed an agreement to cooperate with the
government without his own attorney present; he was so concerned with security
that he didn’t want a private lawyer knowing the details. He agreed to plead
guilty to the remaining charges against him, and sentencing would be withheld
to see what he could do for the government. No promises were made, but all
parties knew if Seal could deliver, it would significantly reduce his prison time.
The next day Jacobsen formally debriefed Seal. Seal was given the informant
number SG1-84-0028. That number or the initials CI--cooperating individual--
would be substituted for Seal’s name on all reports in his case file, which was
given the number G1-84-0121. The information Seal gave, Jacobsen wrote, was
“relating to the smuggling of cocaine by the Jorge Ochoa family.”
On April 3 Jacobsen called the prosecutor supervising Seal’s
cooperation and told him the investigation was on. The target was Jorge Ochoa.
Four days later, as Ellis MacKenzie, Seal greeted Jorge Ochoa at La
Loma, becoming the first DEA informant to penetrate the inner sanctum of the
Medellín cartel. The meeting lasted an hour.
Ochoa asked Seal how his friend William Roger Reeves was. Seal said
he was glad Ochoa had asked, because Reeves had told Seal that Ochoa owed
him $5 million. It was Seal’s trademark to take the bold approach, even with the
world’s largest cocaine trafficker.
“Oh, don’t worry about that money for Roger,” said Ochoa. “I gave it to
a friend of Roger’s, and it’s all taken care of.”
Ochoa didn’t speak English, but with translation everyone entered the
conversation to some degree except Juan David, the eldest Ochoa brother. Jorge
Ochoa told Seal he had an inexhaustible supply of cocaine to fly into the United
States. He also had problems. Half the three hundred kilos he sent into the
Bahamas each day was getting seized. But that was nothing compared to the
catastrophe at Tranquilandia.
Pablo Correa Arroyave, Jorge Ochoa’s brother-in-law, said the llanos
raid had turned up records with several of their names on them. “Things are real
tight for us now,” Correa told Seal. “People are investigating this large
laboratory down in the llanos valley that Mr. Lehder was running for us.”
“Mr. Joe Lehder?” Seal asked. Seal, like any mercenary drug pilot,
knew the name well.
“Yes,” Correa said.
Correa said Lehder had hidden the rest of the cartel’s cocaine in small
underground bunkers throughout Colombia. The Tranquilandia raid and
subsequent investigation had forced the cartel to move its laboratories. At this
point, Seal said later, the traffickers motioned him forward. They were
whispering now. The cartel had struck a deal with some ministers in Nicaragua’s
Sandinista government. The arrangement, Seal said later, “was at this point in its
infancy, and I was not at any time--Felix [Bates] and I were sworn to blood
secrecy that we are, you know, not ever to mention the name Nicaragua again.
Even in the meetings from then on, it was going to be referred to as Costa Rica.”
The Sandinistas were helping the Ochoas develop an airstrip for
refueling their planes in Nicaragua. That meant a plane out of Colombia heading
to the United States could carry less fuel and more cocaine.
 Seal expressed surprise that the Ochoas were dealing with what he
considered “communists.”
“No, no, no. We are not communist,” one of the traffickers told him.
“We don’t particularly enjoy the same philosophy politically that they do, but
they serve our means and we serve theirs.”
“Well, I’m not real sure that an American would be welcome in
Nicaragua smuggling cocaine,” Seal said.
“You have nothing to worry about,” he was told.
Ochoa outlined the mission: Seal was to fly to the jungle airstrip north
of Medellín, where Seal had dropped off the Titan 404, to pick up the first 1,500
kilos. He would fly it directly into the United States, where half the cocaine
would go to Miami, the other half to Los Angeles. The Ochoas planned to
stockpile cocaine for the spectators attending the 1984 Summer Olympic Games
in Los Angeles.
Immediately after delivering the 1,500 kilos, Seal and Bates were to fly
south to the Sandinista airstrip in Nicaragua and wait for the Ochoas to gather
another 2,000 kilos. Seal was to make the first flight within ten days.

BACK in Miami a week later, Seal met Lito at Auto World, a luxury car
dealership Lito said he owned with Pablo Escobar. Lito said Escobar moved five
hundred kilos a week through Auto World.
Lito told Seal that Jorge Ochoa had lost six planes in two days in the
Bahamas and was overhauling his Miami distribution network.
The man picked for the job was Lizardo Marquez Perez, a former
Venezuelan naval officer. Marquez was wanted in his own country for
smuggling 667 kilos of cocaine and joining in an attempted coup d’état. The
Ochoas considered Marquez an intellectual and called him El Professor; he had
graduated with an electrical engineering degree from Georgia Tech in 1967. He
shared the Ochoas’ passion for walking horses. When Seal met Marquez in mid-
April, Marquez described himself as like a godfather to the three Ochoa brothers.
He also told Seal that the Ochoas were unhappy with Lito’s slackness.
He and his people had gotten complacent and started talking freely on their
home phones instead of using pay phones. “I have to improve security,” said
Marquez.
Marquez was very orderly. He was buying beepers with security codes
for the distributors in south Florida and making notes for a security manual. He
showed Seal a draft copy, laid out neatly on a table. Entitled “Notes to Meditate
on (Ponder),” the ten-page, single-spaced typed document discussed the
advantages and disadvantages of renting safe houses under fictitious names:
“The opportunity to obtain credit is lost . . . which makes it difficult in the future
to obtain a new residence.” But fictitious names allowed “the one who lives in
the house” to “appear as the butler of the house. To any question [he can answer]
‘the owners are traveling.’” The manual never mentioned the word “cocaine,”
describing it instead as “the foods” in the house. “If something happens and the
butlers are able to escape, no traces have been left on the foods, and so there
wouldn’t be any connection between: butler and food, between butler and the
company and consequently, company and food. For this reason it is always
necessary to use gloves.”
Minimum standards for the houses included “residential location,
preferably in a low traffic street; lots of green space; garage for two cars; garage
hopefully not within the neighbor’s sight.” The persons living in the house
should be “preferably a couple with children.” The manual also described
“Obligations of the Occupants: to live a normal life. . . . Try to imitate an
American in all his habits, like mow the lawn, wash the car, etc. He must not
have extravagant social events in the house, but may have an occasional
barbecue, inviting trusted relatives.”
Marquez was pleased that Seal shared his views on the importance of
security. That night, though, the DEA had Marquez’s beeper number, thanks to
Barry Seal.
When Seal and Bates flew to Panama for a business meeting with
Ochoa, Pablo Escobar, and other traffickers, Seal carried a batch of daily reports
from Marquez for Ochoa. The cartel leaders were anxious for Seal to fly the
1,500-kilo load as soon as possible. But Seal insisted on inspecting the
Nicaraguan airstrip first.

BACK in Miami, Seal and Bates bought a Winnebago to carry the cocaine once
it got into the United States. Bates had to put down a $500 deposit and griped
that Lito still owed him $100,000 for a load he had flown into the Bahamas.
“If he owns half of Auto World, why don’t you tell him that you will
take a brand-new automobile as part payment on your bill?” Seal said. “Or two
cars. One for you and one for your wife. And give me one while you’re at it.”
“Well, I never thought about it that way,” Bates said.
So Bates and Seal went to Auto World and picked out cars. Seal fancied
a big four-door Mercedes 500 SEL priced at $63,585.
“If you want that one, you can have it,” Lito said.
Seal took it as an advance on his fee.
 The mission was scheduled to go in two days, but Seal blew an engine
in the Lodestar during a test flight. It took a week and $30,000 to replace. Then
another snag came up in Colombia. The cartel had arranged the murder of Lara
Bonilla, and its members were forced to flee Colombia for Panama.
Seal finally met the cartel leaders again in Panama City. It was May
1984, a few days after the Lara Bonilla killing, and everything in Colombia was
in chaos. All three Ochoa brothers were staying with their wives, children, and
several of their employees in a rented house about ten blocks east of Panama
City’s Caesar Park Marriott Hotel. Juan David, the eldest and softest of the
Ochoa brothers, was teary-eyed, and the rest of the household was in dismay.
Old Fabio had been arrested in Colombia and was now in prison.
Pablo Escobar was also in town. He told Seal that Carlos Lehder was
hiding in Brazil. Neither he nor Lehder, he emphasized, had had any part in Lara
Bonilla’s assassination. He speculated it was a DEA or CIA plot to encourage
the Colombian government to use the extradition treaty. All the cocaine
laboratories in Colombia, Escobar said, had been dismantled and were going to
be moved to Nicaragua. Lara Bonilla’s assassination had resulted in cocaine
supplies being moved into the mountains for safekeeping. In the meantime,
Panama would be the home away from home.
Despite current misfortunes, the Ochoas were more determined than
ever to move the 1,500 kilos quickly. From now on, the family told Seal, he was
to call them at the Panama house for instructions. On May 20 Seal met the cartel
leaders in the basement office of a nondescript, two-story, white stucco house in
downtown Panama City. Ochoa and Escobar were there, along with Gonzalo
Rodriguez Gacha, Felix Bates, and a man Seal did not recognize. Escobar
introduced him as Federico Vaughan and identified him as a government official
from Nicaragua. Seal immediately began mispronouncing Vaughan’s name as
“Frederico.”
Escobar said Vaughan would escort Seal and Bates to the Nicaraguan
airfield so Seal could inspect it. If they followed Vaughan’s instructions, no
harm would come to them. Vaughan told Seal he was an assistant to Tomás
Borge, the Sandinista interior minister. Vaughan said his government stood
ready to process all the cocaine base the Colombians could deliver. The ether
was coming from East Germany.
Later that day Seal and Bates took a Copa Airlines flight to Augusto
Cesar Sandino International Airport in Managua, Nicaragua. Vaughan was also
on the flight but purposely did not sit with them. At the airport, however, he
went ahead and smoothed things with Immigration so Seal and Bates could get
into the country without having their passports stamped. Vaughan’s wife,
Marquesa, picked them up. That night they stayed at Vaughan’s house on the
south side of Managua. The next day Vaughan drove them to the airfield. He
told them not to be alarmed by the guards or the checkpoints. It was, he said, a
mere formality.
As they drove northwest, the urban landscape of Managua turned rural.
About five miles outside the city they came to a large oil refinery, and Vaughan
stopped. This was the country’s only refinery, he said. Never fly near or over it.
He pointed out antiaircraft batteries on the perimeter. Any aircraft that flew over
the refinery, friend or foe, would be shot down immediately. That got Seal’s
attention. They walked a few hundred feet and came to a huge sunken lake, an
inactive volcano crater that had filled with clear blue water, about a quarter of a
mile across. Vaughan said it was the purest water in the country and the only
unpolluted drinking water for Managua. In its own way, it was as vital as the
refinery. If they flew near it, they would be shot down.
They continued northwest, around a mountain behind the volcano crater
and across a railroad track. Here they turned left into Los Brasiles, a military
airfield with a single paved runway. They passed through several roadblocks and
security checkpoints staffed by guards armed with Kalashnikov AK-47 assault
rifles, the Soviet bloc’s weapon of choice. Vaughan showed them a hangar that
was going to be used in the smuggling operation. Inside, he pointed out Pablo
Escobar’s personal Piper Cheyenne. Seal inquired about the runway length,
foundation, and texture, his standard procedure for every smuggling flight. As
they talked, Seal, Bates, and Vaughan walked the entire three-thousand-foot-
length of the runway. When Seal and Bates ventured into the grass to inspect a
drainage ditch on the western side of the runway, Vaughan yelled for them to
stop.
“It is mined with land mines,” Vaughan cautioned. “If you have any problem
landing your aircraft, don’t veer to the western side, or you will be killed.”
After the tour Vaughan took them to a steak house. On a map of
Nicaragua he drew arrows showing the entry and exit routes for their smuggling
flights. He also gave a code for entering Nicaraguan airspace. They were to call
the Sandino tower on a certain VHF frequency and identify themselves as
Yankee November Whiskey X-ray Yankee--YNWXY. The tower would reroute
them to Los Brasiles. Seal scrawled the code on Vaughan’s map. He wrote
Vaughan’s home and office telephone numbers and codes for reaching him by
high-frequency radio on the map’s left-hand corner. Vaughan warned that all the
approaches to the city of Managua were covered by antiaircraft guns to protect
against night attacks by the contra rebels. On the Managua portion of the map,
Seal circled the gun emplacements, the refinery, Vaughan’s home, and the
headquarters for the Sandinista Peoples’ Army.
Seal and Bates then flew back to Panama City to report to Escobar and
the Ochoas. The runway was perfect, but the hangar was too small for the
airplane Seal intended to use. Escobar asked if his own airplane, the Piper
Cheyenne, was still in the hangar. Yes, Seal said. Escobar then added another
change to Seal’s mission: no longer was Seal to return to Nicaragua for a second
shipment of 2,000 kilos after delivering the first 1,500 kilos to the United States.
Instead, Seal was to fly to Bolivia to pick up 6,000 kilos of cocaine base for the
new cartel laboratories in Nicaragua.
Seal and Bates returned to south Florida via private plane. Upon
landing, Seal immediately dashed to the Fort Lauderdale Federal Court House
for his sentencing before Judge Roettger. No one had bothered to tell Roettger
that Seal had become a valued government informant. Roettger called him “an
evil man” and sentenced him to the maximum, ten years in prison. He ordered
Seal taken directly to the Broward County Jail. A frantic Seal was now behind
bars without an attorney to help him.
The DEA’s undercover operation came to a standstill while Seal
languished for two days in jail. Finally, Jacobsen and Joura, in a closed hearing
before Roettger, convinced him to let Seal out on bond.
16. THE NICARAGUA DEAL
As soon as Barry Seal got out of jail, he called Felix Bates. They had to get
moving. The 1,500-kilo load was set for the next day. Bates asked Seal where he
had been. Busy, Seal said.
Then Bates told Seal he thought his wife might be a government
informant. She had been arrested in Miami for cocaine possession while Bates
and Seal were in Panama, but when Bates got home he found that she had been
released. She had accompanied Bates on earlier money-laundering trips to
Panama; now he feared she had traded information about those trips for her
freedom.
Bates, who freebased cocaine heavily and was getting very paranoid,
refused to go with Seal unless he could bring his wife along to keep an eye on
her. Seal finally relented, then flew to Louisiana and waited for two days. Bates,
always promising to be on the next flight, never showed. Finally Seal prevailed
on his best friend, Emil Camp, to fly as his co-pilot. At 2:30 a.m. on May 28,
they took off in Seal’s Lockheed Lodestar from a small general aviation base in
northwestern Arkansas. They landed several hours later at the Ochoas’ grassy
airstrip north of Medellín.
As Seal feared, recent rains had turned the ground to mush. When Seal
questioned the ground crew, they told him to wait for Don Carlos. Soon a long-
haired man appeared on a horse, waving a machine gun and shouting orders.
Don Carlos, it turned out, was Carlos Lehder, and he was showing more than the
ordinary strain of someone who had sat on a cocaine load for a week. The
Lehder that Seal had heard about was a legend in the cocaine business. But the
Lehder that Seal saw outside Medellín was just a harried, frantic man, spouting
anger at the delays. Lehder worried out loud that someone might see Seal’s plane
from the air. He wanted it fueled and off the strip right away.
That, Seal said, was impossible. The overloaded airplane would never
lift off the muddy strip.
“I don’t care what you say,” Lehder told him, gesturing with the
machine gun. “We are going to load this airplane, and you are going to get out of
here. You start loading fuel.”
Seal did as he was told. Meanwhile, in fifteen minutes the ground crew
loaded 1,500 kilos of cocaine stuffed in duffel bags and burlap sacks, and Seal
rolled the Lodestar up the wet runway. It bobbed but could not build speed. At
takeoff, Seal lost control and crashed. He and Camp were all right, but
everybody had to work feverishly to recover the cocaine just before the plane
blew up, severely burning two workers.

THE cocaine went by tractor back for inventorying at its stash sites, and a small
plane carried Seal and Camp into Medellín. They took hot showers and
freshened up at the home of Pablo Correa Arroyave, who guided them around
his huge mansion, showing off his tropical garden, his waterfall, his swimming
pool, and his Olympic-sized velodrome. Correa had returned to Colombia while
the other cartel leaders remained abroad. Afterward, Correa said he had arranged
with Jorge Ochoa and Pablo Escobar to keep the smuggling trip alive by
replacing Seal’s burned Lodestar with the smaller Titan 404 aircraft that Seal
had delivered to Colombia back in April. “Certainly you are not going to be able
to carry the full 1,500 kilos that you tried to carry with the larger airplane,”
Correa said. “Can you carry half of it?”
“No, sir,” Seal said. “Because then I wouldn’t be able to add any fuel.”
Seal was afraid of running dry and crashing in the Gulf of Mexico. Until now the
plan had been for Seal to fly the cocaine directly from Colombia to the United
States without a refueling stop.
“And with a stop in Nicaragua?” Correa asked. “How much can you
take?”
“Well, with the stop in Nicaragua, we can probably take 700, 750
kilos,” Seal said.
If the Lodestar hadn’t crashed, Seal would have flown the cocaine
directly into the United States without a refueling stop. Now he was going into
Nicaragua sooner than expected. That night from the Hotel Intercontinental in
Medellín he called Bob Joura in Gulfport to tell him about the change in plans.
Joura and Jacobsen, Seal’s two DEA handlers, had driven the Winnebago to
Gulf port to await the 1,500 kilos.
The next morning Seal and Camp flew back to the jungle airstrip and
amused themselves by taking pictures of each other on top of the burned
Lodestar wreckage. They spent the next three days with Lehder in the jungle.
The onetime “king of cocaine transportation” was now clearly an underling to
Ochoa and Escobar, relegated to guarding their cocaine. Lehder showed Seal a
stash of three thousand kilos and said six thousand kilos of base was in northern
Bolivia ready to be flown to Nicaragua.

ON June 2 Seal called the DEA. He was flying to Nicaragua the next day. At
10:30 p.m. the following night, Jacobsen got a call in Miami from one of Seal’s
people in Louisiana who had received a cryptic radio transmission: Seal “was
returning to Nicaragua after experiencing some engine trouble.” Three hours
later Jacobsen learned Seal “was on the ground in Nicaragua, and he might have
some legal problems.” There was no further contact.
The DEA didn’t get a full explanation until Seal returned to the United
States with no cocaine three days later. Seal gave the following account at his
DEA debriefing:
He and Camp left Colombia in the Titan 404 on June 3 with a reduced
load of seven hundred kilos of cocaine. They landed at Los Brasiles as planned,
but the refueling ran several hours over schedule. Seal took off in darkness and
flew without lights through the Nicaraguan mountains. Just north of Managua,
antiaircraft tracers lit the sky around his plane. A round pierced his left engine,
and the plane rapidly lost altitude. It was going to crash. Seal elected to go back
to Los Brasiles, but the airfield was dark, and landing without lights was suicide.
Seal tried desperately to reach Vaughan on the radio, but Vaughan had gone
home.
Quickly running out of options, Seal called a Mayday into Sandino
International along with the code Vaughan gave him. When he landed soldiers
approached, and Seal told them he had to talk to Vaughan. Seal was allowed a
phone call, but Vaughan wasn’t at home. A Sandinista army sergeant who
worked for Vaughan appeared and unloaded the cocaine from Seal’s plane. The
sergeant told Seal and Camp to keep their mouths shut and go along with what
was happening. Everything was going to be fine, he said.
Seal and Camp were jailed overnight at a military compound in
downtown Managua that had once served as former dictator Anastasio Somoza’s
headquarters. The Sandinistas still called it “the bunker.” The next day Vaughan
obtained Seal’s and Camp’s release and took them to a hacienda in southeastern
Managua, where Seal was reunited with Pablo Escobar, who had moved from
Panama to Nicaragua to supervise the cocaine-processing operations there. From
the house, Seal could see the mountain bearing the letters FSLN, the Spanish
acronym for the Sandinista National Liberation Front.
A couple of days later, Vaughan visited, bringing a Nicaraguan
newspaper, El Nuevo Diario. “This is the reason we wanted you to keep your
mouth shut at the airport, because we had to keep this entire incident very quiet
in the newspapers. We don’t control all the newspapers here,” Vaughan said.
The newspaper had printed a two-paragraph Sandinista Peoples’ Army
communiqué saying that antiaircraft gunners at Sandino Airport shot at an
Agrarian Reform Air Transport Co. plane because the plane was unable to signal
its location.
“The DAA [AntiAircraft Defense] had to signal and fire warning shots
to induce it to land at the airport-which happened without untoward
consequences,” the communiqué said.
Vaughan said the mishap really occurred because he hadn’t planned for
a smuggling flight in darkness. The gunners didn’t see Seal, but they heard him,
and they fired at the sound. Obviously the operation needed better
communication--Seal was astounded that he hadn’t been able to reach Vaughan
once he got in the air; he suggested they buy walkie-talkies.
Pablo Escobar told Seal the new Nicaraguan cocaine lab complex was
located at a finca south of Managua and was now about two weeks from going
into full production. Escobar referred to the Bolivian cocaine base that Lehder
was now gathering in Colombia: there was ten to fifteen tons, roughly equal to
one-fifth of the cocaine consumed in the United States for the entire year.
“Well, that’s going to take a real large airplane,” Seal said.
Seal suggested they buy a military cargo plane he had seen advertised in
an aviation trade magazine. Escobar loved the idea. He said Seal should get the
plane and return for the first seven hundred kilos.
“Is that cocaine safe?” Seal asked.
“Every gram of it,” Vaughan said. “We haven’t lost one single gram.”

SEAL and Camp flew home in Pablo Escobar’s Piper Cheyenne III, which
Escobar was sending for maintenance in the United States. Seal immediately
called Lito to present Escobar’s shopping list. With $200,000 in cash, Seal
bought night-vision goggles and a dozen ITT McKay high-frequency radios, top-
of-the-line equipment at $12,000 apiece. Next Seal acquired a Fairchild C-123K
Provider, a twin-engined military transport shaped like a whale that had been
used extensively during the Vietnam War. Seal called it “The Fat Lady.” Seal
obtained the C-123K, one of the few in civilian use, by swapping another plane
with an airplane broker with known CIA connections in New Smyrna Beach,
Florida.
By now the CIA had signed on to the Seal mission. Two weeks earlier,
while Seal was in Colombia with Lehder, the CIA had checked Seal’s
description of Los Brasiles. “The CIA has provided us photographs of this
airfield, and it matched to perfection the description given by the informant,”
noted a DEA agent in the Cocaine Investigations Section in Washington.
The CIA’s contribution to the Seal case was mainly technological: on
June 18 Seal flew the C-123K to Rickenbacker Air Force Base in Ohio.
Technicians there rigged a 35-mm camera provided by the CIA in the airplane’s
nose and another inside the plane in a fake electronics box atop a bulkhead
facing the rear cargo doors. The box had a pinhole lens to allow the camera to
film anybody loading onto the rear of the plane.
Back in Miami three days later, Seal called Vaughan in Managua. He
secretly tape-recorded the call for the DEA.
“I was going to see my grandmother at noon on Saturday,” Seal told
Vaughan.
That was the code for the cocaine pickup.
Seal told Vaughan about the C-123K. “It’s a big Cadillac . . . very big,
big car. . . . I just wanted to make sure that my grandmother, uh, was going to
tell the landlord that the . . . that the car was very big so that the landlord
wouldn’t be uh, uh, excited when, when, when they saw it.”
The “landlord” was the Sandinistas. Seal was worried about getting shot
down again.
“No, no, no,” Vaughan said. “Everything is okay about that.”
Seal called Vaughan again on June 24, the day before the flight, and
again talked about “the party tomorrow” at his grandmother’s.
“Uh--I mean, everybody is coming to the party, and you’ve notified
those, uh, boys in green?” Seal asked. He was still worried about getting shot
down.
“Right,” Vaughan said.
“They’re all--everybody is notified?” Seal asked.
“Yes,” Vaughan said.
“Excellent,” Seal said. “Okay. I just want to make sure, I don’t want
any problem.”
“Yes, everybody is going to be there,” Vaughan said.
“Okay, good,” Seal said. “And is Pedro coming? Because I have that
liquor for him.”
Pedro was Pablo Escobar. The liquor was the list of things Escobar
wanted in Miami.
“Uh, yes, yes, he’s coming,” Vaughan said.
Seal said he was leaving for the party at midnight. He asked if it had
been raining on “the yard where we park the cars at the party.” In other words,
was the airstrip muddy? Vaughan assured him it was dry and hard and only a
little bit muddy in one small area.
 “I can’t stay at the party long,” Seal said. “I have to try to leave as soon
as possible.” He wanted to refuel as fast as possible.
“Yeah, we’re going to be ready for that,” Vaughan said.
“Okay,” Seal said. “Now remember this, this uh--motor home is very
big, and it’s a funny, funny color, so don’t let anybody get excited.”
The C-123K was painted camouflage green according to U.S. military
specifications. Seal was still scared the Sandinistas would shoot it down on sight.
But Vaughan only laughed. “No, that’s perfect, that’s perfect,” he said.

SEAL took off from Key West and landed the C-123K at Los Brasiles at one
p.m. June 25, 1984. When the loading began, Seal noticed that the radio-
controlled trigger for the hidden cameras was malfunctioning. Seal or his co-
pilot had to operate the rear camera by hand. Seal could clearly hear the shutter
clicking inside its box. But the camera worked. It caught Seal loading twenty-
five-kilo duffel bags of cocaine with Pablo Escobar, Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha,
and Federico Vaughan.
At 4:50 a.m. the next day, Seal landed the C-123K at Homestead Air
Force Base south of Miami with seven hundred kilos of cocaine aboard. That
night he called Lito and set up a meeting at Dadeland Mall. The two men talked
in Lito’s car in the parking lot.
“Where is the load?” Lito asked.
“It’s sitting right there in the Winnebago,” Seal said.
Lito didn’t like that. It was nearly ten p.m., and the parking lot was
emptying rapidly. The Winnebago would stick out like a sore thumb.
Seal left Lito at the Winnebago. A team of DEA agents watched a white
Chevy truck drive up. A man in a white T-shirt got out, unlocked the
Winnebago’s door, climbed inside, and drove off. Agents in several cars and a
helicopter followed the Winnebago onto U.S. 1. The Chevy truck and a gray
Mercedes-Benz also followed. At the chosen moment, a DEA agent in an old
white Buick junker picked for the task smashed into the camper. On cue, a
Florida Highway Patrol car drove up.
The DEA had hit on a daring plan to keep the Seal investigation alive as
long as possible. By law, U.S. agents are not allowed to let drugs pass through
their hands and onto the streets, even if it means ending an undercover
investigation prematurely. The seven hundred kilos had to be seized, but to keep
the investigation going, the DEA wanted the smugglers to think that it was just
an accident. The DEA staged its own traffic accident: ram the Winnebago and
have a trooper just happen by. The trooper was instructed to allow the driver of
the camper to escape.
The plan almost worked. The young Colombian inside the Winnebago
produced his license but could not find the vehicle’s registration. He asked the
trooper if he could go across the street and make a telephone call. The trooper
said yes. The man got across the street to a Wendy’s restaurant. One of the
surveillance agents did a play-byplay on his car radio as the man walked behind
the restaurant and bolted: “He’s crossed the street, now he’s rounding the corner.
And . . . there ... he goes.”
But the DEA hadn’t counted on the instincts of a civilian crime stopper
blowing its most sensitive investigation. A bystander who had seen the accident
chased the young Colombian when he started running and tackled him. They
fought until a Coral Gables police car pulled up. Now the police had no choice
but to make an arrest.
At 2 a.m. that night Seal got a call from Paul Etzel, a Colombian who
sold cars in Miami and worked for Lito.
“Have you heard the news?” Etzel said. “The load got busted.”
The next day Seal got a message that Lito wanted to see him
immediately. Seal thought his life might be in danger and asked Jacobsen to
arrange surveillance. Seal and Lito met at a Tony Roma’s restaurant near
Dadeland. Lito said that the highest-ranking member of Ochoa’s organization in
Miami, a man he described only by the name “Jota,” Spanish for the letter J,
wanted to see everybody immediately.
“One of our people was following the Winnebago, and he said he saw a
car ram into the side purposely,” Lito said with Etzel translating. “He is trying to
say it was a setup.”
Seal got in a station wagon with Lito, Lito’s wife, Luz, and Etzel and
rode to a condominium off Brickell Avenue, an exclusive address just south of
Miami’s midtown skyline. The four of them took an elevator up to an apartment
where Jota and a group of Colombians waited. Jota said he had been asked to
investigate the seizure. He ordered the young man who had followed the
Winnebago to speak. Etzel interpreted for Seal. The young man said he saw a
driver deliberately ram the Winnebago.
“He doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” said Lito, who as architect
of the deal felt a vested interest in showing the seizure was nothing but an
accident.
Jota asked Seal for his opinion. Seal said that if Jota thought there was
something wrong, they should immediately shut down. There was brief
conversation that wasn’t translated for Seal’s benefit. Then Jota asked Seal to
show him his driver’s license. Jota told Seal he would get back to him. Then
everybody was forced to wait until Jota left the apartment. He did not want to be
followed.
Lito called a day later with the good news that everything had been
settled. He asked Seal if he would be willing now to return to Nicaragua and
pick up more cocaine. Seal said yes, then called Vaughan in Managua. He
mentioned the accident.
“My friend told me that everything was okay,” Vaughan said.
“Yeah, only one person in the hospital, and he seems to be okay,” Seal
said. He meant only one person was under arrest. Seal complained to Vaughan
about the bust and said someone with authority needed to make changes.
Vaughan said everyone would listen to Seal.
“They have a very, very good and special, uh, consideration for you,”
Vaughan said. He told Seal that “our common friend”--Pablo Escobar--wanted a
favor. Vaughan struggled with the name of what Escobar wanted.
“Sometimes my English is not so good,” Vaughan said. “Small water
vehicle for, uh, to have fun. . . . It’s some kind of boat. Water boat.”
Seal figured out that Escobar wanted a rubber raft with an outboard
motor. Escobar had given Seal another shopping list on his last trip into
Nicaragua. Part of it was practical, airplane parts and so on, but it also contained
capitalist consumer goodies hard to get in Nicaragua: video recorders, ten-speed
bicycles, Johnny Walker Black Label Scotch, Marlboro cigarettes.
Escobar also wanted Seal to bring him $1.5 million in cash. The money
was needed to pay the Sandinistas for landing rights in Nicaragua. Lito took his
time getting the money together, and soon Seal was pressing the deadline for his
next flight. So from his suite at the Omni International Hotel in Miami, Seal
called Escobar directly. Etzel, on hand to translate, got on the line in the suite’s
sitting room, and Seal picked up the receiver in the bedroom. When the call went
through, Seal attached a small suction cup from a Sony Walkman recorder to the
receiver. Etzel could not see Seal and was unaware that he was taping the call.
“It’s MacKenzie, calling Pedro,” Etzel said in Spanish to the male voice
that answered in Managua. “What will I tell him?” Etzel asked Seal.
“Tell him that they’re jacking me around,” Seal said. “That you and
MacKenzie are preparing to leave tomorrow night, and we have all of the
airplane parts and everything, that the bill is about $150,000, and they won’t
give us that money.”
When Escobar came on the line, Etzel translated Seal’s message for
him.
 “The gentleman with whom he works didn’t deliver anything to him?”
Escobar asked. Told no, Escobar said he didn’t have anything to do with that--
Lito worked for Jorge Ochoa, after all. But Escobar said he would call Los
Amigos--”the Friends.”
Then Etzel gave Escobar the rest of Seal’s message: “And about the
material for you, the big one, they say they don’t have any.”
The big one was the $1.5 million Escobar wanted.
“Oh, I see,” Escobar said. “I’m going to get in contact with them, then,
to see what the problem is.”
A little later, Seal got an angry call from Lito.
“I am down in the Keys vacationing, and I just got notified you need
this million and a half dollars,” Lito said. “And I got it from Pablo Escobar and
his people, and I don’t work for Pablo Escobar and his people. I work for Jorge,
and I don’t appreciate getting called out at this time of night to bring you this
million dollars.”
The next day, though, Lito brought the money to the Omni in three
suitcases and a cardboard box. When he had left, Seal called Joura, who sent a
DEA agent over to his room to photograph the cash, $1,553,500.

SEAL left in the C-123K for Nicaragua a day later on July 7. When the plane
landed at Los Brasiles, Seal told Vaughan he had received a radio message in the
air from one of his men in Mississippi that the off-loading site was under police
surveillance. Seal wanted to leave the load on the ground in Nicaragua. Vaughan
took Seal to see Escobar, who listened to Seal’s arguments and thanked him for
being cautious. In the future, Escobar suggested, Seal might consider digging
underground hiding places near his landing strips, as he, Escobar, had done in
Colombia. The second Nicaraguan load, nine hundred kilos, stayed on the
ground at Los Brasiles.
Seal’s apparent concern was an act. If Seal brought in the load, the DEA
would have to seize it, just as it had with the first load. The agents wanted to
pursue the case much further, and after the Winnebago bust they felt they could
not explain away a second seizure. Joura wanted Seal to fly the Bolivian cocaine
base up from Colombia so the DEA could identify the cartel cocaine labs in
Nicaragua. Most of all, he wanted Seal to lure Ochoa and Escobar into a country
where they could be arrested and extradited to stand trial in the United States.
Now, with Seal preparing to return to the United States from Los Brasiles
empty-handed, Escobar talked again about the Bolivian cocaine base destined
for the cartel’s labs in Nicaragua. Seal would fly the finished cocaine in the
C123K from Nicaragua to a landing strip in northern Mexico. Rodriguez Gacha,
head of the cartel’s West Coast distribution, had acquired this Mexican airstrip.
Pilots in small planes would take the cocaine from Mexico to the United States.
One of the small planes would head to a strip in Georgia controlled by a friend
of Carlos Lehder. Escobar wanted Seal to inspect the strips in Mexico and
Georgia, and Seal agreed. The DEA hoped to seize the cartel leaders in Mexico.

THE DEA was poised for what might have been a sensational coup, but the case
suddenly unraveled. The Sandinista involvement was so politically hot that it
burned a hole through the investigation. On June 26, the day Seal arrived at
Homestead Air Force Base south of Miami with the seven hundred kilos, details
of his secret mission were already known to Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North,
the National Security Council adviser who ran the Reagan administration’s
secret aid pipeline to the contra rebels fighting the Sandinistas.
That day North jotted the name “Freddy Vaughan” into his desktop
notebook. Underneath that he wrote “Works for Tomás Borge” and “Photos
show Vaughan and Nic Int Troops.” Finally, he added, “750 pounds of cocaine.”
Ron Caffrey, chief of the DEA’s cocaine desk in Washington, had
personally briefed North and CIA official Dewey Clarridge about Seal’s flights
into Nicaragua. In late June or early July, Caffrey said North and Clarridge
already had the Seal photographs when Caffrey arrived to brief them at the Old
Executive Office Building on the White House grounds. Caffrey was furious at
the security breach.
North asked if the story could be leaked to the press, Caffrey recalled
four years later during hearings in Congress. A key vote on contra aid loomed
and evidence of Sandinista complicity in drug trafficking could only boost the
contra cause.
But Caffrey told North a leak would end Seal’s usefulness to the DEA
and ruin the mission. The briefing ended with the general understanding that
Seal was going to continue with his undercover activities and return to
Nicaragua with the $1.5 million bribe for the Sandinistas. If Seal could fly
money into Nicaragua, North asked Caffrey, why couldn’t he land the plane
somewhere outside the airport in Managua and turn the money over to the
contras?
The suggestion was ignored by DEA.
A day later, Army Lieutenant General Paul Gorman, commander of the
Panama-based U.S. Southern Command, told a U.S. Chamber of Commerce
audience in San Salvador that the United States “now had firm proof that the
Sandinistas were actively and recently involved in drug trafficking, and the
world would soon be given proof.” On July 6 North wrote concerning a call
from Clarridge that “DEA thinks CIA leaked info to Gorman.”
When Seal returned from Nicaragua on July 8 after leaving the nine
hundred kilos behind, Joura got even more troubling news. He learned that the
right-leaning Washington Times newspaper, a Reagan administration favorite,
was about to leak details of Seal’s mission. The source of the leak was obvious
to DEA.
Joura knew he had to wrap up the case quickly. He told Seal to set up a
meeting with Lito and Etzel. At the Skyways Motel in Miami on July 17, the
DEA arrested both men. Lito produced a driver’s license that said he was Jorge
Negrete, but by now the DEA knew his real name: Carlos Bustamante. He had
no passport. He told the agents he made his living washing cars on a football
field. The agents caught Felix Bates at the Miami Airport Hilton with $20,000 in
cash. Safely outside the United States, Vaughan, Escobar, Ochoa, Lehder, and
Rodriguez Gacha all escaped.
The Washington Times story appeared the day of the arrests. The article
and the follow-up stories it generated in newspapers throughout the country
focused on the Sandinistas’ role in the case. Nicaragua denied the charges: “It
would be a lack of seriousness on my part if I responded to that accusation,” said
Interior Minister Tomás Borge, Federico Vaughan’s alleged boss.
The Sandinista connection eclipsed the fact that the leaders of the
Medellín cartel had been indicted together for the first time. Politics grabbed the
headlines, while the cartel leaders largely escaped notice. They were variously
described as “often accused Colombian cocaine barons” and “top-level
traffickers in Colombian cocaine.” The headline in The New York Times read
U.S. ACCUSES MANAGUA OF ROLE IN COCAINE TRAFFIC. The Times
story didn’t mention Ochoa or Escobar until the ninth paragraph, and then it
misidentified Escobar as Nicaraguan. The significance of the Medellín cartel
was lost beneath the politics.
17. CRACKDOWN
The assassination of Rodrigo Lara Bonilla had put the Medellín cartel on the run
for the first time in its existence. The problems in Nicaragua were only a
symptom of a much graver malaise. For three months after the Lara Bonilla
murder, everything the traffickers touched turned sour.
Worst of all, the cartel had disgraced the nation and insulted its
president beyond endurance. Before Lara Bonilla no sitting cabinet minister had
ever been killed in Colombia. It was an appalling act of consummate arrogance,
and Belisario Betancur could not afford to ignore it.
In addition, drug trafficking was destroying Colombia’s international
image. Betancur wanted to raise Colombia’s profile in Latin America, but all
anyone ever wanted to talk about at inter-American gatherings was drug
trafficking. Now Betancur was branded as the president of a country where drug
bosses killed cabinet ministers.
Lara Bonilla’s murder marked the moment when Colombia first
identified the Medellín cartel as the enemy: savage, ruthless killers willing to
challenge the integrity of the Colombian state. There was no more talk of drug
trafficking being a “U.S. problem and not our problem.” There was no more
discussion of the drug traffickers’ capitalistic enterprise and creativity. The days
when Pablo Escobar and Carlos Lehder could strut their stuff across Colombia’s
political landscape were over.
Under Betancur’s May 1 state of siege, drug defendants were to be tried
in military courts and would not be offered bail. Conviction brought heavy
prison sentences with no possibility of parole. On the street, police acquired
broad powers of search and seizure and arrest and could hold somebody for
questioning without probable cause. They were also allowed to pull the gun
permit of anyone suspected of drug trafficking. It was this measure that had
prompted the detention of old Fabio Ochoa.
Within days, hundreds of suspected traffickers were rounded up and
thrown in jail. Police searched more than one hundred buildings believed to be
owned by the cartel. Planes, cars, trucks, and other property were seized all over
the country.
In Medellín police raided one of Pablo Escobar’s apartments and found
Escobar’s address book open on a settee beside the telephone. Someone
apparently had warned Escobar that the police were coming, and he had escaped
just in time.
Police also invaded Escobar’s Hacienda Los Napoles and traipsed all
over his fancy mansion. Within a couple of weeks Colombia’s humane societies
were complaining that Escobar’s zoo animals were starving. The government
took over the zoo and reopened it as a tourist attraction. Masons resumed
pouring cement for the brontosaurus that Escobar had wanted to use as the
centerpiece for a new theme park.
Carlos Lehder, too, had lost his favorite plaything. His staff at Posada
Alemana hadn’t been paid since he’d left for the jungle after Lara Bonilla signed
his extradition order the previous September. Now his people quit en masse--
perhaps two hundred families--leaving his prized pair of tigers to starve. The
tigers required a regular diet of freshly killed horses at $70 apiece. The Humane
Society put the tigers on the dole. The rest of the estate languished, the
bungalows and outbuildings scarred by rain damage and fire. John Lennon
endured, the lone reminder of the posada’s past glories.

MOST of the cartel, as Barry Seal had discovered, decided to sit out the
crackdown in neighboring Panama. It was a good choice for a number of
reasons. The traffickers had been familiar with Panama for several years, ever
since they began setting up dummy holding companies there and laundering
drug money through Panamanian banks in the 1970s. They had also often used
Panama as a meeting place or a vacation playground. Panama City was less than
an hour from Medellín by plane.
More important, however, the cartel had a Panamanian patron. General
Manuel Antonio Noriega was chief of the Panama Defense Forces and the most
powerful man in the country, able to make and unmake presidents at will.
Noriega was the only friend an outsider needed in Panama.
The traffickers had known Noriega personally at least since early 1982,
when, as chief of military intelligence, he had helped the Ochoas during the
Marta Nieves kidnap negotiations. By the end of that year Escobar had set up a
deal with Noriega to use Panama as a transshipment point for cocaine loads
headed from Colombia to the United States, with Noriega collecting fees for all
services rendered.
Sometime around the end of 1983 the cartel-Noriega association moved
into a new, more ambitious phase. The traffickers built a large cocaine lab on the
Rio Quindio in the Darién jungle of southern Panama, some fifty miles from the
Colombian border. Cartel members-- Ochoa, Escobar, and probably others--paid
$5 million to high-ranking Panamanian military officers to ensure they would
not be bothered. It was not clear whether Noriega received the money directly,
but it would have been impossible for a lab of that size to be built without the
general’s knowledge and approval.
This was a dangerous game for Noriega, but if anyone could play it, he
seemed to be the man. He was a small, gnomish career officer with an acne-
pitted face that caused him unending embarrassment and earned him the
nickname Cara de Piña--”Pineapple Face.” He had no public presence, projected
no human warmth, and had no visible political skills. But he was, in fact,
politically brilliant, a manipulator and tightrope walker capable of posing as a
Third World leader and friend of Cuban Communist leader Fidel Castro while at
the same time remaining in the good graces of the United States and serving as a
CIA asset. Rumors of corruption, drug trafficking, gun running, and worse
swirled about him for years, but he was able to weather every storm because the
gringos felt he was the key to Panamanian political stability and the unhindered
operation of the Panama Canal. He was untouchable and as well connected as
any man in Latin America.
After the Lara Bonilla murder, Noriega took the cartel exiles under his
wing. He provided them with bodyguards, listened to their complaints, and gave
them counsel. Ochoa, in addition to his rental house near the Marriott, often
stayed at the Continental Hotel in Panama City’s banking district. Escobar
stayed at the El Valle and Bambito hotels or at the Holiday Inn in Paitilla, near
the municipal airport. The cost for sanctuary, for Escobar alone, was $1 million,
payable to the general.

THE cartel wanted a truce with the Colombian government, and an opportunity
presented itself almost immediately. Panama was holding presidential elections
May 6, and a flock of prominent Latin American politicans was streaming into
town to serve as observers.
The chief Colombian delegate was former President Alfonso Lopez
Michelsen, who had lost his bid for a second presidential term to Betancur in
1982. Lopez Michelsen was a tall, distinguished, vigorous man in his mid-
seventies, an elder statesman in the Liberal Party and the current patriarch of one
of Colombia’s most influential families. He was also a political maverick with a
sardonic wit and the instincts of an alley fighter. His campaign, like Betancur’s,
was widely reported to have been tainted by “hot money” from Escobar, Ochoa,
and other cocaine traffickers. A Metro-Dade police document said his campaign
manager “had a relationship” with Jorge Ochoa and Pablo Escobar.
Still, Lopez Michelsen was no dirtier than anyone else and had, in fact,
been vigorously defended by Lara Bonilla during the minister’s days on the floor
of Congress. For a variety of reasons, Lopez Michelsen was the traffickers’
perfect vehicle: he was widely respected, politically astute, and accustomed to
hearing all sorts of strange propositions. He even advertised his availability as a
go-between, often describing himself as “a mailbox” for anyone who wanted to
send a message.
Lopez Michelsen’s advisers received word that the cartel wanted to talk
to him once he got to Panama City. Lopez Michelsen had no idea how the
contact would be made, but he telephoned Betancur to inform him what was
planned. Betancur took the information under advisement.
Lopez Michelsen arrived in Panama City May 4 and checked into the
Marriott. He was still unpacking his bags when one of his advisers called.
Escobar and Jorge Ochoa were in another suite in the hotel. They wanted to meet
now. Was that all right?
Lopez Michelsen went to the indicated room, knocked on the door, and
was greeted by two nondescript-looking men in sport clothes, one short, one tall,
both slightly heavy. The short one was Escobar; the tall one was Ochoa. They
introduced themselves politely and invited Lopez Michelsen, who had never
before met either man, to sit down.
They began by explaining how disturbed they were about the Lara
Bonilla killing and the “persecution” they and their families had suffered as a
result. Escobar insisted that neither he nor anyone closely connected with him
had had anything to do with the murder. He had been trying to discredit Lara
Bonilla with the Porras check, he said, so “it made no sense for me to kill him.”
Lopez Michelsen nodded, signifying that he had heard what Escobar
had said. Otherwise he was noncommittal. He had listened to plenty of nonsense
in his life and could listen to more, if that was what this was.
Two things, though. First, Escobar and Ochoa seemed very disturbed,
anxious, maybe even scared. Sitting in Panama did not seem to agree with them.
Second, they spoke convincingly and well. Lopez Michelsen had been led to
believe that they were low-lifes; instead he found them soft-spoken and polite. It
was true they didn’t look like much, but they were extremely astute politically,
something Lopez Michelsen could appreciate. Also, Lopez Michelsen was
looking for hierarchy here but couldn’t find it. The two took turns speaking,
neither man dominating the conversation.
The two traffickers said they represented a “large group” of people
involved in the drug trade, everyone but Carlos Lehder. They had broken with
Lehder, they said, because of his distressing habit of talking too much. Lehder
had also tried to compete with them as a cocaine producer. They didn’t like that.
They were disposed to return to civilian life and to get involved in legitimate
business. They also said they planned to bring their money home. The pair kept
the discussion away from specifics. They asked for no commitments from Lopez
Michelsen, and he gave none, simply nodding his head that he understood. After
an hour or so they were finished.
Lopez Michelsen observed the Panamanian elections, a fraud-tainted
fiasco resolved after a fashion when voting officials proclaimed Noriega’s
candidate the winner. Then Lopez Michelsen flew to Miami for a few days of
sun and shopping. He called Betancur and told him what had transpired with the
cartel bosses. Then he forgot the entire matter.

THE Lopez Michelsen meeting marked the beginning of an ambitious “two-

track” recovery policy by the Medellín cartel. On one hand the traffickers were
trying to reach an agreement with Colombia in hopes that the slate might
eventually be wiped clean, all sins forgiven. At the same time they were running
a big lab in Panama’s Darién jungle, talking about setting up others in Nicaragua
and fixing up the details of a 1,500-kilo cocaine shipment with Barry Seal. Thus,
if Colombia wouldn’t accommodate them, Nicaragua would. Or Panama. Or
somewhere else. Cocaine was a movable feast.
The success of this strategy depended on secrecy and the cartel’s ability
to maintain a low profile while they remained in hiding. But suddenly everything
seemed to fall apart in Panama. Almost immediately following the election
debacle, the Defense Forces discovered the Darién lab and arrested twenty-three
people--all Colombians. What the hell was going on? The cartel was supposed to
have a $5 million fix in. Enraged, the traffickers approached the government for
an explanation. General Noriega was in Europe, Panamanian officials said. We
don’t know what happened. Well, find out, the cartel demanded.
Discussions took place in Havana under the sponsorship of Cuban
President Castro, who had served in the past as an intermediary for the
traffickers in some dealings with Colombian guerrillas--specifically M-19.
Castro also had a long-running and cordial relationship with Noriega. The cartel
and a Panamanian government official held a preliminary conference before
Noriega flew in from Europe. The general then talked privately with Castro and
returned to Panama. The twenty-three Colombians were immediately released,
some of the lab equipment was returned to the traffickers, and $3 million in cash
was returned to the cartel.
After the Darién affair, both Noriega and the cartel leaders sought a
meeting to clear the air. Noriega also wanted to discuss how long the cartel
planned to stay in Panama; he gave permission for the traffickers to host a
second meeting with Colombian government officials, this time with Attorney
General Carlos Jimenez Gomez. The meeting, like the Lopez Michelsen
encounter, would be a “secret” affair managed exclusively by the cartel.

JIMENEZ Gomez left Bogotá with a somewhat sizable delegation on the

afternoon of May 26. His ostensible mission was to find out about $13.5 million
in Colombian government monies that had apparently disappeared from the
Chase Manhattan Bank. The traffickers called Jimenez Gomez at the Hotel
Soloy in downtown Panama City. A spokesman said he represented “various
Colombian citizens who wanted to discuss their situation.” Jimenez Gomez
agreed.
They met that night. This time there were about seven traffickers, chief
among them Escobar, Jorge Ochoa, and Rodriguez Gacha. Jimenez Gomez
listened to them, agreed to carry the traffickers’ message to Betancur, and
suggested they put it in writing.
The next day the traffickers returned with a six-page letter addressed to
Belisario Betancur. Jimenez Gomez took it and flew home to Bogotá.
The traffickers described this extraordinary document as a “unilateral
declaration” outlining our “frank and honest position on the subject of narcotics
trafficking.” After discussions among themselves, the traffickers said, they had
decided to “simply and openly ask you, Mr. President, to consider the possibility
of our reincorporation into Colombian society in the near future.”
The first part of the memorandum was a brief history of drug trafficking
in Colombia. It contained the assertion that “our organizations . . . today control
between 70 and 80 percent of the total volume of Colombia’s drug traffic”
representing “for us an annual income of around $2 billion.”
The memorandum then repeated the assurance made earlier to Lopez
Michelsen that “the organizations that we represent” had no responsibility
“either directly or indirectly” for the murder of Lara Bonilla. Furthermore, the
traffickers denied any connection with Colombia’s guerrillas or any desire to
change “the democratic and republican system currently in place in Colombia.”
The traffickers had gotten involved in politics, they said, “exclusively” to lobby
for the abrogation of the U.S.-Colombia extradition treaty.
The second part of the memorandum outlined the deal the traffickers
were offering. They would turn over all clandestine airstrips and laboratories,
dismantle their infrastructure, stay out of politics, bring their money home, help
develop crop substitution projects to replace coca and marijuana, and
“collaborate with the government... in campaigns for the eradication of domestic
consumption of drugs and the rehabilitation of addicts.”
In return, the traffickers wanted Betancur to lift the state of siege,
restructure extradition procedures, and agree not to apply the extradition treaty
for offenses committed before the date of the letter.
In other words, amnesty. If the traffickers earned $2 billion per year and
kept a lot of it outside the country, the amount of money that could come back to
Colombia was hard to imagine. It was a colossal bribe.

THE cartel members heard nothing about the proposal from Betancur or anyone
else and continued to mark time in Panama while their fortunes collapsed around
them. Relations with Noriega, sensitive since the Darién affair, were further
exacerbated on June 15, when U.S. Customs at Miami International Airport
seized 1.2 metric tons of cocaine sealed in freezers and packed in cartons labeled
“perfume” aboard a cargo jet belonging to a Panamanian charter company. A
week later Panamanian drug agents confiscated 6,159 drums of ether in the
Colón Free Trade Zone, at the Atlantic terminus of the Panama Canal. And a
week after that the fourth man in Panama’s military chain of command was
arrested, publicly disgraced, and forced to retire from the Panama Defense
Forces for conspiracy to traffic in ether. The same officer had served as
Noriega’s bagman in the cartel’s $5 million Darién payoff. Relations with
Noriega were supposed to have been smoothed over, so what was going on?
The cartel members were defenseless and trapped in a foreign country
while disasters occurred all around them. There was simply too much public
scandal. By the end of June the first reports were surfacing in Colombia about
the cartel’s Panama meetings with Lopez Michelsen and Jimenez Gomez. The
next month in Washington the Nicaragua case broke on the front page of the
Washington Times.
It was obvious that the cartel was going to have to get out of Panama.
Neither Escobar nor Ochoa felt comfortable outside of Colombia, and the
Panamanian experience had confirmed their worst fears about how fast things
could go to hell if nobody was watching the business. The traffickers began
looking for new foreign sanctuaries. They also began to look wistfully at
Colombia. Ultimately, they knew, they would be safest at home, where their
money could buy them the protection they needed and where their hired killers
could keep their enemies at bay.
But Betancur showed no sign of easing off. To succeed Lara Bonilla as
justice minister, Betancur named another drug hard-liner. Enrique Parejo
Gonzalez. Parejo was a New Liberal also, and just as tough as Lara Bonilla.
Unlike Lara Bonilla, he could count on Betancur’s support. By the end of the
summer, the United States had initiated extradition proceedings on more than
sixty Colombian defendants. By the beginning of November, Colombian
authorities had thirteen of the fugitives in jail. At midmonth Parejo approved
five extraditions, and on November 16 Betancur signed two of them.
It was also Parejo, working closely with Jaime Ramirez and the U.S.
embassy, who helped obtain final approval for herbicide spraying of marijuana.
After full-scale spraying started in the fall, the north coast marijuana business,
the United States’ primary drug target in Colombia for more than a decade,
started to collapse almost immediately.

FOR Lewis Tambs and Johnny Phelps, the twin victories on extradition and
marijuana spraying meant that they had fulfilled their two most important
missions. Tambs called 1984 a “breakthrough” year. Phelps, skeptical and more
cautious, was nonetheless finally pleased with Betancur. The president hadn’t
moved until Lara Bonilla was murdered, but now that he had finally made up his
mind, “he stuck with it.”
And on August 14, Bogotá Superior Court Judge Tulio Manuel Castro
Gil issued a summons and preliminary finding against fourteen suspects in the
Lara Bonilla killing, including most of the Quesitos hit team and the alleged
“intellectual authors” of the crime: Pablo Escobar, the three Ochoa brothers,
Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha. On that day Escobar had five arrest warrants pending
against him: two for homicide in the murders of Medellín DAS agents, one for
questioning in the Lara Bonilla killing, one for smuggling animals for his zoo,
and one for extradition to the United States as a drug trafficker. On October 19
Castro Gil indicted Escobar for the murder of Rodrigo Lara Bonilla and named
the Ochoas and Rodriguez Gacha as material witnesses.
The case against Escobar rested primarily on the testimony of Jaime
Ramirez, who appeared twice before Judge Castro Gil prior to the Lara Bonilla
indictment. The cartel knew Ramirez was denouncing them and apparently
received a blow-by-blow report. In 1986 police searching an Escobar finca
would find a copy of Ramirez’s deposition lying open on a coffee table.
Possession of the document was a felony.
Ramirez didn’t care what the cartel knew about him. He felt somewhat
responsible for Lara Bonilla’s death, felt he should have warned the minister of
the risks attendant in making public the dirty cartel secrets Ramirez had in his
files. When Lara Bonilla was killed, he promised that “I will fight even harder.”
And he did. By mid-1984 Ramirez had 1,200 men in the police Anti-
Narcotics Unit. He was making gigantic marijuana seizures in the north almost
every week. He was hitting cocaine labs constantly and developing new sources
of intelligence to such a degree that he and most of his men were in the field
almost all the time.
And after Tranquilandia, Ramirez and Phelps found that success bred
success. New informants began coming unsolicited to the police and the DEA
with news about labs “like that one you found in Caquetá’ As the two lawmen
had suspected, rural labs were the rule in Colombia rather than the exception.
Whenever police or DEA agents received a tip, they attempted to verify
it with aircraft overflights and aerial photographs. The hunters always looked for
the rural lab signature: a water source, lake, or river; and an airstrip. Without
these two things, no cocaine processor could do business.
In the first seven months of 1984, police seized 1,500 metric tons of
marijuana, 26 metric tons of cocaine and cocaine base, and 37 metric tons of
bazuko. The 63-ton haul represented an elevenfold increase over all cocaine
seizures in the previous four years. The police also counted 84 labs destroyed
and 144 drug-trafficking airplanes seized.
While it was relatively easy to seize property, labs, or even cocaine on a
rural raid, Ramirez was frustrated that it was almost impossible to catch a big
trafficker. It was just too hard to get to a jungle lab, and the traffickers always
knew when the police were coming. On May 4 Ramirez’s men missed Carlos
Lehder at Airapua, in the llanos one hundred miles southeast of Bogotá, by
about four days. Ramirez felt there was no way his men could have come any
closer.
For Ramirez, Lehder became a special project. Unlike Escobar, Ochoa,
and Rodriguez Gacha, hiding out in Panama, Lehder was available in Colombia.
And unlike the expatriates--and much more important--Lehder’s case was
closed. Ramirez was a realist, and he knew that even if he arrested Escobar or
Ochoa, it would be a miracle if a Colombian jail could hold either man. History
had shown that the Medellín cartel bribed or murdered anyone who opposed it,
and there wasn’t a judge or a prison warden anywhere in Colombia likely to
escape one of these two fates. Even though the United States had asked for
extradition, there would be a long legal road to travel before anyone in the
Medellín cartel was sent north.
Except Carlos Lehder was different. Betancur had signed Lehder’s
extradition order; his appeals were exhausted. The Justice Ministry soon
confirmed what Ramirez suspected: if he arrested Lehder, he could quite likely
simply put him on an airplane and send him to the United States without any
bureaucratic hassle whatsoever.
Ramirez began to stalk his quarry. He set his men to work collecting
intelligence and developing informants. The Airapua incident had not scared
Lehder off. In fact, within two months he was calling up radio stations and
sending “open letters” denouncing “U.S. imperialism” and predicting his return
to public life. He told Semana magazine that he was “not hiding, simply
extremely busy. Soon I’ll be in Bogotá without any problems at all, because
they’re going to fix my case.”
In early 1984 Lehder had tried unsuccessfully to sell Norman’s Cay. In
June 1984 the DEA reported sighting Lehder in Miami, possibly visiting a
nephew. In November Ramirez’s men tracked him to Finca Chipre near
Magangue, about one hundred miles southeast of Cartagena in the Magdalena
River valley. There he was supposed to be setting up a new smuggling operation.
Police busted it November 18, seizing 230 kilograms of cocaine, but Lehder
wasn’t there.
At the end of the year Ramirez’s informants traced Lehder to Colón,
where he was reportedly living in a three-story, red-roofed house about three
blocks from the Panama Canal. A little over a week before that, the informants
said, he had been in Medellín. Clearly he was back in touch with his colleagues.
Lehder now had twenty-five aliases and passports from Colombia, Uruguay, and
West Germany. He was corresponding with Bogotá lawyer Pablo Salah
Villamizar, a favorite of the drug dealers, which was probably the way his news
releases were getting out.
Finally, in February 1985 he gave an interview to Spanish television
from one of his llanos hideouts. It was the usual neo-Nazi claptrap but this time
overlain with a touch of paranoia. Too much cocaine? Lehder was bearded and
shaggy, dressed in fatigue pants and a sleeveless black vest and sitting on a chair
with his back to a river. He told the television reporters he was planning to form
a “five-hundred-thousand-man” army to “defend the national sovereignty.” Lara
Bonilla, he said, was “shot by the masses” in self-defense.
“The extradition problem has grown to become a problem of national
liberation,” he said. “It was the people who shot Lara Bonilla before he could--
with imperialism’s help--send more than three hundred Colombians en masse to
be processed in the United States.”
Lehder deftly skirted, as always, the question of what he did for a
living. Then his interviewer asked him how he could get good ideas from Adolf
Hitler, who, “among other things, killed six million Jews.”
“That is misinformation,” Lehder said. “We know that there were never
more than one million Jews in Germany. Half of the blood running through my
body is German, right? In other words--if there is someone who can talk about
Germany, it is not the Jew, it is the German! If one can talk about Colombia, it is
the Colombian! It shall not be a Brazilian or a Czechoslovakian. Am I right?
“I say with all honesty that--Adolf, along with six million soldiers,
eliminated twenty-one million communists, right? And he eliminated ten million
Allied enemies. In other words he, Adolf, is and shall be . . . right? . . . until
someone surpasses him, he shall be the greatest warrior the world has ever
seen.”
Lehder meandered rhetorically, with little regard for ideology. Along
with “Adolf’s anticommunist Nazism, he blithely embraced modern
revolutionary socialism. He denounced the United States as a society “guided by
Playboy magazine . . . drunk on pornography” and “guided by a military industry
that forces the United States to open fronts of war and fronts for the sale of arms,
and one of the newest and most novel excuses [to do this] is the struggle against
drug trafficking. ...”
18. Drawdown
Apart from the tragedy of the Lara Bonilla killing, 1984 was looking like the
year of successful moves against the Medellín cartel. The Tranquilandia bust, the
beginning of marijuana spraying, and the enforcement of the extradition treaty
had given both the Colombian and U.S. governments cause for optimism.
But almost immediately after Belisario Betancur proclaimed a state of
siege, law enforcement began to notice that crackdown had its limits. Arrests in
the aftermath of the Lara Bonilla assassination reached the impressive total of
398, but few of the suspects could be held beyond questioning. For example, the
weapons charge against old Fabio Ochoa collapsed, and he was soon released.
Furthermore, police only picked up two “extraditables” in the post-Lara
Bonilla dragnet. Johnny Phelps, still not particularly trusting of the Betancur
administration, immediately called a news conference at the U.S. embassy in
which he described the prisoners as a “test case” of the Colombian government’s
new resolve to extradite drug traffickers. By the end of the year the United States
would have more than one hundred extradition requests filed in Colombia.
Phelps wanted to hold Betancur’s feet to the fire.
Phelps was one of the first to realize that the Lara Bonilla killing had
dramatically raised the stakes in the drug war. If Colombia wanted to arrest
traffickers, it better have the laws to prosecute them and the security to keep
them in jail. And if Colombia wanted to extradite traffickers, it better have the
institutional strength to endure the cartel’s threats. The Colombian justice system
was going to be tested as never before.
The traffickers, hunkered down in Panama or hidden away in jungle
fincas in Colombia, had no intention of backing off: “I am a symbol of those
men who battle imperialism,” said Carlos Lehder from his llanos hideout. “In
this struggle the end justifies the means.”
Suddenly Colombia was a much more dangerous place. In July
Betancur told an audience of Roman Catholic priests that traffickers had
threatened him on his private telephone line at the Nariño Presidential Palace.
Only his closest advisers were supposed to know the number. Betancur, who
used to seek out the multitude to bask in its adulation, now traveled in an
armored car and showed up for appointments at odd times. In the days when he
was “philosophically opposed” to extradition, the cartel had left him alone. Now
that he had declared “all-out war” on drug trafficking, he was their enemy.
LEWIS Tambs had begun to notice his deteriorating security almost from the
moment he arrived in Colombia. At first he had ridden in a U.S. Army armored
Cadillac limousine and had a “follow car” loaded with security agents to back
him up. He carried a .357 Magnum revolver at all times. But early on he had
discovered that he could outshoot every one of his Colombian bodyguards. Since
Tambs knew he was no Wild Bill Hickok, this was, as he put it, “unnerving.”
So he took his bodyguards to a firing range and practiced with them
regularly, both with pistols and with Israeli Uzi submachine guns. It was good
for morale; everybody liked to shoot, Tambs included. He got to where he could
hit 242 out of 250 with the pistol, and his bodyguards, thank God, did better than
that.
As time passed, Tambs’s security advisers kept adding cars to his
convoy. By the time of the Lara Bonilla killing he had five: a “scout” car, a
“lead” car, his limo, and two follow cars. He had two personal bodyguards
besides his regular escort and could draw reinforcements from a corps of five
hundred Colombians assigned to guard the U.S. embassy and its personnel.
The rest of the embassy staff rode to work in heavy, armored black
four-wheel-drive vehicles. Embassy kids rode to school in buses escorted by
army jeeps with machine guns mounted on the back. Tambs had forced
everybody to move out of houses and into apartments and had provided
everyone with armed guards.
Three times Washington re-called Tambs to question him about the
drug traffickers’ threats and to talk about security. In late May 1984, shortly
after the Lara Bonilla killing, the White House sent Tambs a team of specialists
to advise his security people. This was after an empty automobile rolled
downhill toward the U.S. embassy residence, collided with a curb, and exploded,
sending flames shooting three hundred feet into the air. With a slightly better
angle, whoever was responsible could have put the car at the gate of the
residence. Tambs took a look at the wreckage and found only a front axle. The
rest of the car had disappeared.
The White House team stayed a few months, then went home.
Nevertheless the threats still came regularly, by phone and in the mail. Now, in
October 1984, Tambs felt the embassy was under siege, and Washington agreed.
The State Department cabled him to “draw down” the official U.S. delegation to
a bare minimum. Tambs first asked for volunteers to leave Colombia, then made
up an additional cut list. In all, he reduced the staff by 30 percent.

JOHNNY Phelps spent the final months before his midyear departure riding to
work in an armored van, carrying a Swedish machine gun along with his usual
pistol, living in an apartment with security guards and listening to running gun
battles in the neighborhood practically every night. His daughters had watched a
shooting from their school bus, and his eight-year-old son had seen a dead man
lying in the street beside a police van. In the United States for a visit after a
particularly long stay in Colombia, he had stared through a friend’s picture
window, feeling slightly bemused because there were no bars on it.
And if this was “success” in Colombia, it had failed to make any lasting
impression in the United States. After Tranquilandia, the wholesale per-kilo
price of cocaine had risen above $25,000 in Miami. Five months later it was
back at $14,000 and dropping lower than at any time in history. The Colombian
foreign minister, frustrated at the lack of progress and disturbed at the damage
that was being done to Betancur’s presidency, complained repeatedly to Tambs:
“We have been able to capture more drugs than any country in the world, why
can’t you stop consumption?” Tambs had no answer.

IN the immediate aftermath of the Lara Bonilla assassination, all but the biggest
chieftains were back in Medellín. And in September, resident DEA agent Mike
Vigil spotted Pablo Escobar, his wife, and a retinue of bodyguards at the
bullfights. Crackdown, it seemed, was over.
A secret police memo dated in August reported that Escobar and
Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha were living in a house in a fashionable residential
district of Medellín. They were in town for the christening of Escobar’s newborn
daughter and getting ready to visit a finca. Young Fabio Ochoa, the memo said,
was driving a yellow-and-black municipal cab for fun and wearing a beret. Two
police captains periodically briefed the cartel members so they could avoid
arrest.
And even if the cartel chieftains were seldom seen, their presence was
everywhere felt. Besides their informers in the police department, the traffickers
had so many bodyguards and hired gunmen that it made no sense to try to arrest
them. Anybody who wanted to question Pablo Escobar had better show up with
a platoon of soldiers.
As if to drive this point home, the rumor spread in October that
ambitious underworld types had sensed weakness in the traffickers and had
kidnapped Escobar’s seventy-three-year-old father, Abel de Jesús Escobar
Echeverri, hoping for a quick payoff from the absent “Godfather.’” Within
hours, the rumors said, Escobar put as many as five thousand gunmen in the
street, scrambled helicopters, and started turning Medellín and the surrounding
countryside inside out. Escobar’s father was released unharmed after sixteen
days. Not a centavo was paid. No one was ever able to figure out if the story was
anything but a publicity stunt, but true or false, the message conveyed was clear
enough: Escobar was back; Escobar was in control.
Escobar’s money was everywhere. On October 23 Judge Tulio Manuel
Castro Gil, who had indicted the cartel in the Lara Bonilla case a few months
earlier, was met outside a Medellín courthouse by an Escobar bagman with a
proposition. He sought the “temporary dismissal” of the indictment:
“Ask for whatever you want, and they’ll put it wherever you want it, in
Colombia or outside the country,” the bagman said. Once he made up his mind,
he should get in contact with one of Escobar’s sisters. “Then you can relax,” the
bagman concluded. “Neither your life nor the lives of your family members will
be in danger.”

THE Lara Bonilla assassination had caused Phelps to revise his thinking about
his Medellín office. On the one hand, he regarded the murder as an incredibly
stupid stunt for which the traffickers had paid dearly. On the other hand, it was a
warning. First with Errol Chavez and now with Mike Vigil, he had perhaps
blithely assumed that the cartel wouldn’t dare touch the DEA in Medellín. The
Lara Bonilla murder had changed that. If they would hit a sitting cabinet
minister, they would hit anyone. This was true everywhere in Colombia, but it
would happen first in Medellín.
Vigil’s security was negligible. He drove everywhere with the window
down so he could hear the motorcycles when they came up behind him. He was
deathly afraid of the motorcycles, especially in the traffic circles where the
killers could sneak between lanes of cars, murder their victims, and scurry down
a side street leaving everyone else mired in a traffic jam. Once, driving home at
night, Vigil heard a motorcycle behind him but couldn’t see any lights. He sped
up, dodged back and forth in the roadway so the bike couldn’t come up
alongside, then screeched into his driveway and ran for cover. He spotted the
motorcyle as it drove by. There was a passenger who held his hands between his
legs, looking at Vigil. Sorry he missed his mark? Or wondering about the crazy
driver? Vigil ran up to his apartment and had a double shot of Jack Daniel’s.
Like Chavez before him, Vigil lost all six of the informants he
developed, many of them in grotesque ways. One man was beaten and tortured
with pins jammed beneath his fingernails, then shot in the head and tossed in the
street with a sign around his neck: “Killed for Being a DEA Informant.”

AS the year wore on, it became obvious that the crackdown had failed. The flow
of cocaine to the United States had not been interrupted and the drug traffickers
had not been scared away, extradited, or even arrested in meaningful numbers.
After several months Colombians began to get weary of the tension.
Public opinion alternated between outrage and resignation, crackdown and
appeasement. These wild mood swings would occur again and again in
Colombia, with increasing frequency and intensity--a collective manic
depression.
The first spasm happened less than three months after Lara Bonilla’s
death. El Tiempo in Bogotá leaked the news of the cartel’s May meeting in
Panama with Alfonso Lopez Michelsen; soon the Jimenez Gomez encounter was
public knowledge, along with the cartel’s famous proposition. The revelations
caused a sensation.
At first they brought widespread condemnation from most influential
Colombians. One senator said talking to drug traffickers was “like inviting bank
robbers to a symposium on bank security.”
But Lopez Michelsen refused to be chastised about it. He again said that
he was willing to act as a “mailbox” and then said nothing further. Congress
summoned Attorney General Jimenez Gomez and demanded that he defend
himself, but it got little satisfaction:
“I told them I would deliver their note, but that obviously it should be
understood that it was a unilateral declaration, that it could not be interpreted as
a promise of an agreement or as a bilateral treaty,” Jimenez Gomez said. “I did
not expect, nor do I expect, any answer because it was a unilateral declaration.”
Betancur, prodded to make some sort of a statement, waited a week
after El Tiempo’s revelations before condemning the cartel’s proposal: “Under
no circumstances will there be a dialogue. . . . There haven’t been and there
won’t be negotiations between the government and the authors of the memo.”
Yet Betancur did not convince. El Tiempo noted that letters in favor of
talks with the drug bosses were running slightly ahead of letters opposing them.
A television poll found that 48 percent of respondents favored talks. And even
Justice Minister Parejo Gonzalez, hardest of the hard-liners, defended Jimenez
Gomez: “What the attorney general did was try to find a solution to the
problem.”
Finally, there was no denying that the cartel still wielded considerable
political influence. Even with its “maximum chief hiding in the jungle, Carlos
Lehder’s National Latin Movement in the 1984 off-year elections managed to
win two seats in the Quindio provincial legislature and four city council seats.
In addition, on July 9 Pablo Escobar gave a telephone interview to
Bogotá’s Radio Caracól from “somewhere” outside Colombia. It was a classic
Escobar political pitch, carefully worded and tedious as an address to a
Communist Party congress: “People who know me understand very well that I
am involved in industry, construction, and ranching,” he said. He described his
role in narco-dialogue as that of an “intermediary,” claiming that “the fact that I
attack extradition does not make me extraditable.” The Lara Bonilla indictment
was a “gratuitous and capricious accusation.” He had left Colombia because he
“had no guarantees of any kind.”
What gave credence to this debate was the public’s knowledge that the
hard line didn’t seem to work. Escobar was unrepentant, alive, and well. The
cartel’s proposal outlined what could be a peaceful solution to an impossible
problem. The government may have scoffed, but a lot of Colombians thought
maybe the government should take the proposal seriously.

SHORTLY after midyear Ramirez’s antinarcotics police could see that the cartel
was building new labs and growing new coca fields in several llanos provinces.
Escobar was heavily involved, but the leading figure was Gonzalo Rodriguez
Gacha, now Escobar’s frequent partner and constant companion. It was
Rodriguez Gacha who put the campesino growers on the payroll and negotiated
the per-gram coca tax with the FARC guerrillas who provided security. The
FARC-narc relationship was ambiguous and changeable as always but seemed to
survive as long as both sides profited from it. On August 9 soldiers had a
firelight with FARC guerrillas and recovered documents suggesting the rebels
were financing weapons purchases with cocaine profits. On October 12 the
FARC attacked police raiding a jungle lab. Later in the year army intelligence
reported the FARC had taken sixteen people hostage near Tranquilandia and
released them five at a time in return for 150 barrels of ether and acetone, 592
kilos of cocaine, and 25 million pesos ($250,000). At the end of the year an
informant told police that Escobar had five hundred acres of jungle coca with
accompanying labs and that a one-hundred-man FARC column was not only
providing security but also operating both the farm and the factory. On
Christmas Eve Escobar visited the site to pay Christmas bonuses.

IT was the guerrillas who finally decided things for the DEA in Medellín. In
November Vigil got tipped off that the traffickers had put out a kidnapping
contract on him and a guerrilla hit team had picked it up. Shortly after the
warning, Medellín DAS agents told Vigil they had discovered people watching
him and tracing his movements. Vigil called Bogotá and talked to George
Frangullie, Phelps’s successor. Frangullie told Tambs, and Vigil was gone
before Christmas. The DEA closed its Medellín office.
At the same time, Tambs in Bogotá was taking even more precautions.
After the embassy drawdown, he ruled that only single people or couples
without children could stay. Next he put the embassy on “flex time” so people
would show up for work at different hours. Then he fed the work schedule into a
computer so that it would become even more random. On November 26, a small
white Fiat sedan exploded outside the U.S. embassy, breaking windows up and
down Eighth Avenue and covering the streets with debris for two square blocks.
Six people were seriously injured, and one woman passerby was decapitated by
a sheet of flying glass.
In early December Tambs’s security staff told him they believed one of
his Colombian bodyguards had been bribed to kill him. The State Department
wanted him out of Colombia on Christmas Eve. Tambs stalled, then took a
“vacation” and flew home with his family December 26. After he left, his
security officers gave everyone on the staff a lie detector test. One man, the one
who had aroused suspicion, refused to take it, resigned, went down to his bank,
and withdrew a lot of money.
In the United States, Tambs was told that his wife and children were not
going back to Colombia. A few days later Tambs was informed by the State
Department that his Colombian tour was over.

FROM mid-1981 to the beginning of 1985, four men had hounded the Medellín
cartel without mercy. Their achievements were impressive, but their failure was
also evident. The cartel had suffered badly at their hands but had fought them to
a draw. It had murdered Rodrigo Lara Bonilla; it had outlasted Johnny Phelps;
and now it had chased away Lewis Tambs.
That left only Jaime Ramirez.
19. THE AUDIENCIA
By the fall of 1984, the Medellín cartel had begun to recover its power and
influence. Pablo Escobar and Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha were back in Colombia,
quietly reestablishing their processing and trafficking networks after five months
of neglect. Carlos Lehder remained in internal exile in the llanos, but Escobar
and Rodriguez Gacha had enlisted his help as an overseer for the cartel’s
burgeoning jungle operations and as a diplomatic go-between in guerrilla
relations. Old Fabio Ochoa was living quietly and breeding horses at La Loma
and Hacienda Veracruz. Sons Juan David and Fabio were keeping a lower
profile but were hardly invisible. They were back in Medellín and back in
business.
But nobody had seen or heard anything from Jorge Ochoa since Carlos
Jimenez Gomez’s visit to Panama in May. When the Nicaragua deal blew up in a
cloud of publicity, Jorge Ochoa had seemed to vanish.
In fact, sometime in July or early August Ochoa had emigrated to Spain
with Cali cocaine boss Gilberto Rodriguez Orejuela. Ochoa showed up in
Madrid as “Moisés Moreno Miranda,” while Rodriguez Orejuela held a
Venezuelan passport in the name of “Gilberto Gonzalez Linares.” Both men
were traveling with their wives, and both appeared outwardly respectable.
Shortly after their arrival, the wives began to deposit large amounts of
U.S. dollars in local banks--$370,000 in all. Ochoa bought an eight-thousand-
square-foot mansion on a huge tract of land in one of Madrid’s most fashionable
suburban neighborhoods. He had a swimming pool, tennis courts, a storehouse,
and a discotheque to go with the four Mercedes-Benzes parked in his garage. He
registered his five-year-old son in the bilingual American School.
Rodriguez Orejuela stayed in a fancy downtown hotel, but he bought
two huge apartments, one of them still under construction, and picked up his
own pair of Mercedes sedans. Both men had made their purchases through
holding companies set up in their wives’ names.
At the end of August a tipster approached Spain’s Special Prosecutor
for the Prevention and Repression of Drug Trafficking and suggested that
“Moreno Miranda” was not who he pretended to be. The prosecutor went to the
Group IX judicial police, who put “Moreno Miranda” under surveillance.
What the police investigators saw at first was a married couple having a
grand time eating in fancy restaurants, going to concerts, and driving around in
beautiful new automobiles. They discovered that the “Moreno Mirandas”
socialized with a Venezuelan couple named “Gonzalez Linares.” Soon after that
they found where the two men lived, watched their wives prowling around banks
during the day, and came to the conclusion suggested by their informant:
“Moreno Miranda” and his friend were probably drug traffickers seeking to
resettle in Spain. Their wives were laundering drug money. The police also
noticed that the two men met frequently at an empty downtown apartment,
where they apparently did business.
The Spaniards ran the two men through their mug books and identified
Rodriguez Orejuela almost immediately. Soon they had Ochoa identified as well.
By September 25 the police had five wiretaps in place. Ochoa had been calling
Colombia, London, Panama, and Belgium.
The judicial police told the DEA in Madrid, and the DEA cabled home:
“Intelligence . . . has indicated that suspected Colombian trafficking group
intends to create investment company with unlimited funding and is in the
process of purchasing several extremely expensive residences, indicating intent
to remain in Spain.”
Rodriguez Orejuela had been sought since 1978 on Los Angeles and
New York drug trafficking warrants: Ochoa was sought in the Nicaragua case.
The Justice Department prepared extradition requests on the two fugitives and
gave them to the State Department, which passed them to the U.S. embassy in
Madrid. On October 17 the ambassador passed a “verbal note” to the Spanish
Foreign Ministry requesting the arrests of both men.
Altogether, Spanish police watched Ochoa and Rodriguez Orejuela for
2 1/2 months, growing increasingly nervous as time passed. The stakes loomed
much larger in November when investigators found out that Ochoa was planning
to buy ten thousand acres of ranchland in southern Spain. Police feared what this
might be used for. One of their internal reports said, “In Colombia right now, the
cocaine traffickers have a serious problem finding ether and hydrochloric acid.”
Spain, the report said, “could be converted into a world cocaine distribution
center.”
On November 15, 1984, the Spanish judicial police arrested Ochoa,
Rodriguez Orejuela, and their wives, froze all their bank accounts, and seized
$90,000 in cash lying loose in their residences. In Rodriguez Orejuela’s hotel
room they found an account book describing 1983 sales of more than four metric
tons of cocaine. The DEA saw to it that Ochoa’s son was taken out of the
American School.
FOR the Reagan administration, the capture of Jorge Ochoa seemed like a gift
from God. Not even four months had elapsed since the U.S. government had
named Ochoa and the rest of the Medellín cartel as criminal partners of
Nicaragua’s Sandinista government. Now the Spaniards had caught Ochoa, and
he stood an excellent chance of being extradited to the United States. The
political advantages to be obtained from such a circumstance were enormous.
The Spaniards seemed cooperative. DEA agent William Mockler had
arrived in Madrid a couple of days before Ochoa’s capture to assist the Spanish
police and the DEA’s resident agent in Madrid, Jimmy Kibble. Mockler had
been stationed in Miami and was familiar with the Nicaragua case and with
events in Colombia since Tranquilandia. More important, he was the DEA’s
expert on Rodriguez Orejuela.
Spanish police telephoned Mockler and Kibble a couple of hours after
Ochoa and Rodriguez Orejuela had been picked up. The two DEA agents arrived
at the station about 10:30 p.m. and took a look at the defendants through a one-
way mirror. The two Colombians were casually dressed and grim-looking.
Mockler identified Rodriguez Orejuela and chatted with the Spanish
police about Colombian cocaine dealers in general and the Medellín cartel in
particular. He made a formal deposition, describing what he knew about both
defendants, what he called “information from investigations,” as well as “general
facts” about Colombian cocaine trafficking.
It took about thirty minutes, and the Spanish were impressed. Mockler
taught them how to read Rodriguez Orejuela’s account book, showing them in
the process that they were holding a man accustomed to dealing enormous
quantities of cocaine. The Spaniards noted that they had seen such books before,
but until then had never known what they were. In Spain in 1984, three kilos of
cocaine was a big bust.
The Spanish police’s frame of reference for cases like Ochoa’s was
political. The Spaniards didn’t know a great deal about international drug
trafficking, but they were accustomed to terrorism and ideological extremism of
all types. In Spain political tolerance had been almost unheard of until the last
ten years or so.
The Spanish police knew that Ochoa was wanted for running cocaine
through Nicaragua with the help of the Marxist government there. This gave
them a political peg that they could understand. Mockler took it further. He was
able to connect Ochoa to Tranquilandia, which, he said, had been guarded by
“M-19 guerrillas.” The Nicaragua operation had been handled at a military
airstrip with Nicaraguan soldiers loading the cocaine. For the Spaniards, all of
this tied together: Rodriguez-Ochoa, M-19, Nicaragua. In other words, cocaine,
terrorism, the Soviet bloc--the triple nightmare of the free world.
The Spaniards announced that Ochoa would be held on special anti-
terrorist laws pending a review of the charges. Throughout the case the Spanish
would treat Ochoa the way they treated imprisoned Basque separatists--as an
extremely dangerous man with extremely dangerous friends. This was probably
wise. Ochoa was dangerous enough, and although he didn’t have dangerous
friends immediately available to him in Spain, he certainly had the money to hire
some.
It was clear from the beginning that the terrorism-communism-drugs
link--accurate or not--offered a comfortable framework within which U.S. and
Spanish law officers could discuss the Ochoa case. The Spaniards knew a lot
about terrorism but almost nothing about cocaine traffickers who dealt in tons.
The Americans knew a lot about big drug lords but almost nothing about
terrorism (Mockler in his deposition confused M-19 with the FARC at
Tranquilandia). In lumping everything together, however, both sides could
appear knowledgeable about the case, even when they weren’t.
Unfortunately, this strategy backfired in Spain as it did in the United
States. Many Spaniards regarded the Spanish police and the DEA, like the
Reagan administration, as so virulently anticommunist that they would go to any
lengths to discredit the Sandinista government--even to the extent of accusing it
of dealing drugs. For its part, the Nicaraguan government was quick to denounce
what it described as U.S. deceit. Nicaragua, in a statement issued by Interior
Minister Borge’s office, rejected “in absolute terms the false accusations made
by the American government, whose objective ... is to discredit our country and
justify the illegal war of aggression promoted and directed by the United States.”
Such sentiments had a certain resonance in Spanish America’s mother
country, and Ochoa’s lawyers quickly recognized the advantage and exploited it.
As Kibble and Mockler left the police station, Mockler told the inspectors that
they could expect large numbers of attorneys to show up momentarily. The
inspectors chuckled. Three lawyers were at the station within an hour; within
two days each defendant had around ten, including some of the most eminent
jurists in the country.
And on November 27, 1984, only twelve days after Ochoa’s arrest, the
lawyers filed a complaint charging that DEA agents had participated in the initial
police interrogation of Ochoa and Rodriguez Orejuela. At the agents’ behest, the
complaint charged, Spanish police tried to induce both defendants to denounce
the Sandinistas as drug traffickers. In return, the complaint said, the U.S.
government had offered to ensure that documents required to complete the
extradition package would “arrive too late.” Ochoa and Rodriguez Orejuela
declined the offer, the complaint said.
Kibble later described the allegations as “100 percent, unequivocal
nonsense” concocted by the Spanish press, probably with the help of Ochoa’s
people. Neither he nor Mockler, he said, ever spoke a single word to either
defendant.
Still, there was reason for the Spaniards at least to consider the story.
The Reagan administration, in its haste to smear the Sandinistas, had already
blown the DEA’s Nicaragua investigation. What was to stop it from trying to do
something else in Spain?
The United States formally requested Ochoa’s extradition on the
Nicaraguan indictment shortly after his arrest in Madrid. Extradition for
Rodriguez Orejuela was also quickly filed, based on two older trafficking cases,
from Los Angeles and New York. The Spanish government examined the
documents and on January 10, 1985, submitted them to the Audiencia Nacional
for review. Five days after that, Colombia asked for Ochoa’s extradition on
charges of “falsifying a public document”--namely the license to import 128
Spanish bulls into Cartagena in 1981, or smuggling. On February 23 the Spanish
Justice Ministry sent the Colombian request to the Audiencia Nacional as well.
The battle was on.

AT the outset of the Ochoa case, the United States appeared to be in a stronger
position. Drug trafficking is more serious than bull smuggling; the U.S. claim
had been filed first; the Spanish government was known to favor the U.S.
request over the Colombian.
The defense team had to whittle away these advantages or circumvent
them. Within six months Colombia had submitted a second request for Ochoa’s
extradition, this one sent from Medellín and based on the Nicaraguan indictment
on file in Miami. Clearly what had happened was that an Ochoa crony had gone
into Miami public records, photocopied the Nicaragua indictment, taken it home,
and sent it to a district court in Medellín. As a result Colombia now had two
requests to the United States’ one, including one that was just as serious as the
U.S. accusation. In fact, it was the same one. Rodriguez Orejuela worked the
same scam with his indictments. Both his cases were refilled in Cali.
The legal battle in Spain bore little resemblance to the courtroom cases
of the United States. The Spanish justice system, like the Colombian, was
“Napoleonic” rather than “adversarial.” Verdicts were made on the basis of
interpretation of written laws rather than legal precedent and juries’ decisions.
The judge was in charge of the criminal investigation of a case, and judge,
prosecutor, and defender met together to present arguments, hear evidence, and
file motions. This took place not in a public courtroom, but in the privacy of the
judges’ chambers. Everything was written down, studied, and discussed, and a
conclusion was arrived at. The case was summarized and the verdict announced
after a single hearing, the only time the public had a chance to see the defendant.
In Colombia the traffickers took tremendous advantage of these
procedures. Since so much of the case took place in closed rooms, it was an easy
matter to intimidate or otherwise manipulate judges. On the other hand,
defendants seldom saw their accusers or the witnesses arrayed against them.
Judges taking depositions in chambers or a closed courtroom were extremely
kind to hearsay evidence, as Mockler had found. In Colombia Jaime Ramirez
had become the chief prosecution witness in the Lara Bonilla killing largely by
recounting what he knew of Pablo Escobar’s life history and the reason Escobar
would be likely to want to murder the justice minister.
In Spain the integrity of the courts was more rigorous than in Colombia,
but there was plenty the defendant could do to play on public opinion. The first
news accounts of the arrest and interrogation of Ochoa and Rodriguez Orejuela
invariably referred to the two men as “Colombian mafiosi.” As the months
passed, however, the pair frequently appeared in print as “Colombian rancher
Jorge Luis Ochoa, 36,” and “Colombian banker Gilberto Rodriguez Orejuela,
46.” Headline writers never altogether lost their affinity for “Colombian
mafiosi,” but the cartel publicity machine was getting its message across.
Also pure cartel was an April 2, 1985, story in the Madrid newspaper El
País citing unnamed Spanish and Colombian “diplomatic sources” as saying the
CIA was responsible for shooting at the Spanish embassy in Bogotá on two
occasions “to justify and accelerate the extradition of the drug traffickers and to
discredit them before the public.” In June El País printed a story about the
DEA’s attempt to induce Ochoa to denounce the Nicaraguan government. It was
accompanied by Mockler’s testimony. The U.S. embassy told Mockler he would
be well advised not to return to Madrid.
One Ochoa lawyer denounced the Reagan administration’s “dirty war
against Nicaragua” and portrayed his client as a pawn in a dishonorable political
chess game. Ochoa’s attorneys also took advantage of hearsay, citing statements
by conservative U.S. Senator Paula Hawkins and other U.S. dignitaries who
spoke out about Sandinistas and drugs. At one point the lawyers even quoted a
mid western farmer willing to do “anything we can do to support President
Reagan in Nicaragua.” The plan was to portray “Colombian rancher” Jorge
Ochoa not as a drug trafficker, but as a victim of U.S. politics.
The prosecution could not match the defense in publicity, but it did
have a few tricks of its own. At one point the story spread that friends of Ochoa
had tried to break him out of jail with a daring helicopter rescue attempt. And a
couple of days after the Mockler story was leaked, “police sources” told the
Spanish news agency EFE that Ochoa and Rodriguez Orejuela had attempted to
bribe the police in charge of the case. The sources also denied they had tried to
get Ochoa to denounce the Sandinistas. The sources did not say whom,
specifically, Ochoa had tried to bribe and for how much. The EFE story
described Ochoa as the “viceroy of world cocaine traffic” behind Escobar.

THE cases against Ochoa and Rodriguez Orejuela were handled in the penal
chamber of Spain’s Audiencia Nacional--roughly translated as “National Court.”
Spain had no state or provincial justice system or specialized courts, so the
“National Court” absorbed huge numbers of cases that in the United States
would be parceled out among several jurisdictions.
The Audiencia Nacional examined the evidence for nearly nine months.
Ochoa pronounced himself willing to stand trial for bull smuggling in Colombia
but professed innocence in the drug charges and refused to accede to a
trafficking trial either in Colombia or the United States. Ochoa’s lawyers
continued to push the political nature of the accusations and tried mightily to
discredit the U.S. case by ridiculing Barry Seal, denouncing him as a criminal
and a liar.
The prosecution handled these objections capably, assisted on several
occasions by lawyers sent to Spain from the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office
of International Affairs. The visitors explained grand juries and plea bargaining
and “flipping” drug offenders to turn them into informants, the latter two
practices virtually unknown and viewed with extreme distaste in countries that
use a Napoleonic justice system.
And in the matter of Seal, hearsay again came to the rescue.
Newspapers described Seal as the only witness against Ochoa and questioned his
reliability, pointing out that he was a crook cooperating with the DEA only to
stay out of jail himself. Seal was, in fact, the only witness, but the defense was
forced to acknowledge depositions submitted by Seal’s two case agents. These
were nothing more than the Seal story retold by the people who debriefed him--
that is, hearsay--but under Spanish law they were admissible. So the prosecution
now had three witnesses, only one of whom was a flipped felon.
THE Audiencia Nacional’s public extradition hearing was held September 17,
1985. The case rated a special courtroom built for dangerous defendants. It was
copied from the 1975 film The Man in the Glass Booth, about the trial of Adolf
Eichmann. Pews for the public--enough seating for perhaps eighty people
altogether--occupied the back half of the room. The public was set off from
judges, defendants, and prosecutor by a three-foot-high wooden panel and a
floor-to-ceiling sheet of bulletproof glass. The audience could see and hear the
proceedings but could not breach the glass wall. This discouraged political
activists from interrupting trials with a grenade.
A panel of three judges sat behind a wood podium at the front of the
room, gazing out over the courtroom. Defense and prosecution were installed on
either side of the judges, facing one another. The accused sat before the judges
on a low wooden bench backed up against the glass dividing wall. In addition,
there was a specially constructed bulletproof “bullpen” for extra defendants.
On trial day the gallery was almost completely filled with Colombians--
members of the Ochoa family and others whose purpose was not immediately
apparent. A handful of nervous lawyers from the U.S. Justice Department were
also on hand, curiosity overcoming caution. The atmosphere was noisy and
vaguely unpleasant at first, but the crowd quieted immediately when the hearing
began. Ochoa, in a dark suit, sat quietly with his back against the glass wall,
flanked by two policemen wearing berets. He looked good; he’d lost a lot of
weight. He was well groomed, hair neatly trimmed, no mustache, no fat cheeks,
no hair tonic. He was quite the prosperous young Colombian businessman.
Except for the eyes, noted DEA agent Kibble. The eyes were those of a man
much older than Ochoa. Anybody who saw the eyes could tell Ochoa was no
fool.
The hearing lasted about three hours, which was longer than usual. The
three-judge penal court panel opened the proceedings and invited the prosecution
to summarize its case. Then the defense made its response, the prosecution
delivered a rebuttal, and the defense closed with a rejoinder. The judges
interjected a few questions, but this was largely a formality. The case had
already been presented and compiled in lengthy legal-sized tomes stored in
chambers. The judges would consult these later. The hearing served two largely
ceremonial but nevertheless important purposes: an oral, public confrontation
between prosecution and defense and a public affirmation that the court had
done its duty.
The judges closed the hearing, dismissed everyone, and retired to
confer. On September 24 they spoke: by a vote of 3-0 they denied the U.S.
petition for extradition because of its “political context.” Ochoa would be sent to
Colombia to stand trial for bull smuggling.
“To accede to the petition formulated by the United States,” the finding
said, “the defendant could run the risk of seeing his situation aggravated because
of political considerations.” The judges noted that Seal “has a direct interest” in
denouncing Ochoa because “of a pact he had with American authorities to obtain
a pardon for a sentence of ten years.” The court did not find convincing the U.S.
argument “implicating the government of Nicaragua” given “the notorious
animosity between the current U.S. government and that Central American
Republic.”
Ochoa’s lawyers had won the game by playing the anti-imperialist card,
denouncing Seal, and expressing willingness to allow their client to be extradited
to Colombia. “The finding has been juridically correct,” said Enrique Gimbernat,
one of Ochoa’s lawyers.
But it was not the last word. The prosecution filed an appeal, also
within the Audiencia Nacional, also within the penal chamber. This time all
seven of the chamber’s judges would examine the evidence. The prosecution
argued--and forcefully enough to convince the court to reexamine the case--that
“the fact of bad relations between governments” had nothing to do with the
merits of a legal case in any nation “ruled by law.” The United States was such a
nation.
And, incredibly, on January 21, 1986, the Audiencia Nacional by a vote
of 4-3 reversed itself and agreed to send Ochoa to the United States. The court
noted that besides Seal, the United States had presented evidence from two
“American agents” (Seal’s DEA case officers). Finally, the judges said, “the
notorious and undoubtable fact” that the United States and Nicaragua had
unfriendly relations “does not constitute a legal impediment to extradition.”
Ochoa was accused of drug trafficking, which could not be “reconstituted as a
crime of a political character.”
The defense immediately appealed.
20. UNCLE SAM WANTS YOU
When Jorge Ochoa was arrested in Spain, Barry Seal’s value to the U.S.
government skyrocketed. If Ochoa was extradited to the United States for trial in
Miami, Seal would be the only eyewitness to his crimes. Yet despite the fact that
Seal had made the most important case in the history of the U.S. Drug
Enforcement Administration, federal officials in Baton Rouge and New Orleans
had not given up trying to indict him for drug smuggling in Louisiana.
Federal law enforcement is broken up throughout the United States into
fiefdoms known as federal districts. Seal’s problems centered on crimes he
allegedly committed in the Middle District of Louisiana before he became an
informant in the Southern District of Florida. Seal had been targeted by a joint
federal and state task force run out of Baton Rouge and New Orleans by veteran
federal Organized Crime Strike Force prosecutor Al Winters, a big, bearish man
with a rumbling basso voice. As a strike force prosecutor, Winters worked
directly for the Justice Department out of Washington, but the man who
ultimately called the shots on the Seal investigation was Stanford Bardwell, the
U.S. attorney for the Middle District of Louisiana. Bardwell was a political
appointee of the Reagan administration, a civil lawyer who had never tried a
criminal case. But like the rest of the law enforcement community in Baton
Rouge, Bardwell badly wanted to indict Barry Seal.
Soon Al Winters found himself caught between two federal districts
with wildly conflicting visions of Barry Seal. Louisiana knew Seal as a cunning,
arrogant manipulator who had made fools out of law enforcement in Baton
Rouge while bringing tons of cocaine into the state. But in the Southern District
of Florida, Seal was the contrite informant who had had a change of heart and
become the DEA’s most productive undercover operative. Both visions were
accurate. “Miami thinks the guy is the greatest thing since sliced bread, which is
usual because he’s helping them,” Winters said. “And Baton Rouge thinks he’s
the worst drug dealer in the history of Louisiana, which he was.”
Federal drug conspiracy investigations are usually made with
informants. Federal prosecutors find some of them by inducing convicted drug
dealers to “flip.” Others are intimidated by the threat of a federal grand jury,
where witnesses can be summoned to testify under oath without an attorney
present and can be thrown in prison if caught in a single lie.
When Seal found out in August 1984 that a federal grand jury in Baton
Rouge was hauling his friends in, he held true to form and took the offensive.
First he tried to get his federal friends in Miami to intervene. It seemed logical.
The federal investigation of Seal in Louisiana made the south Florida feds
uneasy. An indictment of Seal in Louisiana could damage Seal as a witness in
Florida. The Miami feds understandably wanted things resolved in Louisiana
before Seal testified for them. But the Louisiana feds thought they had a case
against Seal, and they intended to make it. The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Miami
and the Justice Department in Washington both took the position that if
Louisiana had a case, they should pursue it. Nobody wanted to stand in the way
of a legitimate investigation. The situation was extremely tricky, calling for a
delicate balance between three parties with different goals--the Louisiana feds,
the Miami feds, and Seal.
The solution was a plea bargain. Everybody hoped to make a deal that
would satisfy Seal and the feds in Louisiana yet preserve Seal’s credibility as a
government witness in Miami. The man whose job it was to work this out was
Thomas D. Sclafani, Seal’s attorney. Sclafani, a graduate of Notre Dame and
Brooklyn Law School, was savvy about the workings of federal law
enforcement, having served as chief of narcotics in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in
Miami. Sclafani figured the Louisiana feds had a very weak case or they would
have indicted Seal long ago. His suspicions were confirmed early in the plea
negotiations, when he learned they were trying to tie Seal to a mere two-
hundred-kilo load that had been seized in Louisiana in the early 1980s.
Louisiana offered Seal a ten-year sentence in return for his guilty plea. Sclafani
scoffed and told them no thanks: “Take your best shot.”
As the negotiations foundered, the friction increased between Louisiana
and south Florida. In Miami, DEA agents Bob Joura and Jake Jacobsen stood as
Seal’s biggest supporters. They had gotten very close to Seal, who had made the
biggest cocaine case in the history of DEA for them.
In Louisiana, on the other hand, drug agents and prosecutors looked
with suspicion on Seal’s relationship with Miami DEA. The Louisiana State
Police believed Seal still smuggled drugs into Louisiana while using the Miami
DEA as his shield against investigation. The state police continued to stake out
Seal’s aviation office in Baton Rouge long after he became an informant for
Miami DEA. Things got so bad that Jacobsen and Joura were told to stay out of
Baton Rouge.
When Seal learned that the state police were trying to corner him,
outrage was added to his normal competitiveness with law enforcement. Ken
Webb, a troubled drifter whom Seal helped out from time to time, had been
approached to turn informant against his benefactor. Webb claimed the state
police told him they would do whatever they had to do to get Seal, even if it
meant putting cocaine in the wheel well of a tire.
Feeling desperate, cut off from Miami DEA, and pursued by the
Louisiana feds. Seal devised his own plan. In September 1984 he called John
Camp, a veteran, prize-winning investigative reporter at WBRZ-TV channel 2,
and told him about his undercover exploits for Miami drug agents and the CIA.
Seal showed Camp videotapes of network news broadcasts corroborating
portions of his story. Seal gave Camp an earful of allegations about how the U.S.
Attorney’s Office in Baton Rouge had tried to set him up. Camp was skeptical at
first. He didn’t see a lot to be gained by taking up the cause of an admitted drug
smuggler against law enforcement officials, some of whom were news sources
and personal friends.
But a lot of what Seal said checked out. Seal even allowed Camp’s
camera crew to secretly film a meeting in Miami between Seal and one of his
DEA handlers. John Camp began to believe Barry Seal.
As word got around that Camp was making a documentary with Seal,
things thawed a bit. In Miami, Assistant U.S. Attorney Richard D. Gregorie, who
now held Sclafani’s old job as chief of the narcotics section, had monitored the
Seal negotiations with great concern. Gregorie knew Seal’s tremendous potential
as a government witness and was anxious for a solution. Gregorie was also a
friend of Al Winters; both had backgrounds as longtime Organized Crime Strike
Force prosecutors. So Gregorie called Winters and got the talks started again.
In November 1984 Winters and Bardwell traveled to the U.S.
Attorney’s Office in Miami to meet with Seal and his two lawyers, Sclafani and
Lewis Unglesby of Baton Rouge. Up to now, Unglesby had handled Seal’s
problems solely with the Baton Rouge grand jury and was unaware of Seal’s
cooperation with Miami DEA. He was a sharp Baton Rouge lawyer, but he’d
never heard of the Medellín cartel. He learned that his client was a witness
against the most powerful drug smuggling organization in the world over
breakfast with Seal and Sclafani at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Miami.
“We really shouldn’t be sitting next to Barry at this public restaurant,”
Sclafani said.
“Why?” asked Unglesby.
“What do you mean, why?” Sclafani said. “Don’t you know there’s a
contract out on him?”
“You’re kidding,” Unglesby said.
“Don’t worry,” said Sclafani. “He’s sitting closer to me than he is to
you.”
After breakfast the three men made the short walk to the U.S.
Attorney’s Office overlooking the Miami River. After several hours of
negotiations, the parties reached agreement that Seal would plead guilty to
charges in Baton Rouge and in return would be sentenced to whatever time he
ended up getting from Judge Roettger in Fort Lauderdale on the Quaalude
smuggling charges; Roettger was considering a motion to reduce Seal’s ten-year
sentence based on his cooperation with Miami DEA. The Baton Rouge sentence
would run concurrently with the final sentence from Roettger. Bardwell and
Winters left happy, expecting Seal to serve at least three years in prison. Getting
Seal to do time was the moral victory they sought.
Seal was also happy. Once again he had resolved his problems with the
legal system. And he expected to be rewarded by Judge Roettger. After the
meeting, Seal, Sclafani, and Unglesby left the U.S. Attorney’s Office and walked
a block south to a public parking lot under an overpass. It was Veteran’s Day,
and downtown Miami was nearly deserted as twilight approached. Just to needle
Unglesby, Sclafani said, “Gee, Lewis, this is a great place for a hit.”
Bardwell, Winters, Seal, and Sclafani signed the deal roughed out in
Miami on November 19, 1984, in the offices of the Organized Crime Strike
Force in New Orleans. Seal agreed to plead guilty to two counts: conspiring to
possess with intent to distribute 462 pounds of cocaine and failing to file
currency transaction reports for $51,006.04 deposited in four Baton Rouge
banks. The sentence on count one, the drug charge, would match the sentence
Seal ultimately received from Roettger. On count two, the money laundering
charge, Seal would receive no prison time. U.S. District Judge Frank Polozola
would merely be allowed to set conditions of probation for Seal: “As to count
two of the instant indictment, the defendant will receive a period of probation to
be determined by the Court.”
On November 20, Camp’s documentary, entitled Uncle Sam Wants You,
aired on channel 2 in Baton Rouge. Camp opened his piece by showing footage
of the meeting between Seal and Jake Jacobsen in Miami.
“Barry Seal is an enigma,” Camp said. “On one hand he has been
working closely with federal drug agents in Miami and with the Central
Intelligence Agency. He is a key witness in one of the most significant drug
investigations ever conducted in south Florida. But at the same time here in his
hometown of Baton Rouge, the veteran pilot has been a target of an intensive,
and what he describes as unfair, investigation.”
Seal appeared on camera wearing sunglasses and a combat flight suit.
He was arrogant and baiting.
“I’m not a drug smuggler,” he said. “I say prove it. Where is the proof?”
“A gun smuggler?” Camp asked.
“No,” Seal answered. “Where’s the proof? Why am I not on the front
page of the paper at Ryan Airport or any other airport with a load of dope, with a
load of guns? If they’re such good agents and I’m so big, the biggest in the
world, you know, the biggest in the world don’t get away from the law and from
justice, you know that.”
Seal accused Baton Rouge drug agents of asking him to set up a drug
bust and then trying to set him up when he refused.
“The bottom line was, ‘How about helping us make a bust? How about
setting somebody up? Give us a load. We’ll let you get away ... if you don’t help
us, we’re going to get you anyway.’ I said, ‘Well, it’s real hard for you to knock
on the door of my airplane at night, when I’m doing two hundred miles an hour
and say, “You’re under arrest.” You’re not going to involve me with anything.’ “
Camp said Baton Rouge investigators had gone to “extreme lengths” to
prove Seal was a major air smuggler. He went on to present an account of the
Louisiana investigation. It must have seemed like Stanford Bardwell’s worst
nightmare.
“I think that the investigation being headed up now by Mr. Bardwell has
floundered,” Seal said. “I don’t think that they--in fact, I’m positive they have no
evidence of wrongdoing, because they have threatened grand jury witnesses,
they have threatened attorneys, local attorneys. These are things that just aren’t
done. I’m not caught up in a feud between two government agencies. I think
what we’re caught up in here, as I mentioned before, is now Mr. Bardwell has
found himself in the middle of a cover-up.”
Seal accused the local federal prosecutors of forcing witnesses to lie to
the grand jury and on camera offered the testimony of Ken Webb, who said the
federal government had pressured him to do “whatever it takes” to get Seal.
Webb said he had lied to the grand jury about Seal.
Seal continued, laying it on thicker as he went:
“The federal authorities are, I think, for the most part good people. I
think that there are bad eggs in every nest, but I think there’s no real mystique
about me. Most of what I do is out in the open. I don’t hide anything I’m doing.
When I’m employed by government agencies and they ask me to keep discreet
what they tell me, I do. I try to move in the method and the ways that they ask
me to move, and maybe to some of the local authorities it may seem that
sometimes it’s on the border of criminalism, sometimes--sometimes not. But I
think that the overzealousness of the local federal authorities in the Middle
District of Louisiana has caused them to cross their fine line that they walk also
between right and wrong.”
Seal described himself as “an aviation consultant” and expounded on
his life of adventure:
“The cost of living an exciting life is high. You can’t sit in Baton Rouge
and go to work from nine to five on Monday through Friday and go to the LSU
football games on Saturday night and church on Sunday and have an exciting
life. That may be exciting to ninety-nine percent of the population, but to me it’s
not. And the exciting thing in life to me is to get into a life-threatening situation.
Now, that’s excitement. . . . Whether you call it soldier of fortune or what, it’s a
way of life to me. I enjoy it, and I’m going to keep doing it.”
Camp asked about rumors that the Ochoa family had put out a $350,000
murder contract on him.
“John, there’s a risk in all covert operation work,” Seal said. “There’s
risk in everything you do in this line of work. That’s why the pay is so good. . . .
If you can’t stand the heat, don’t work in the kitchen. I can take the pressure. I’m
not worried about the contract. If it comes, it comes.”
Camp asked Seal, “Do you see yourself getting indicted?”
“No,” Seal said. “If they indict me, it means that I go to court. It means
that then I get to tell my side of the story. All of this and much, much more that
you’re now hearing from me will be put out in the public eye. The Justice
Department is not going to tolerate this. There’s no way they can indict me.”
Camp summed up:
“It is not the purpose of this report to suggest Barry Seal is innocent, or
for that matter guilty of anything other than those crimes for which he has
already been convicted. Certainly Seal had chosen a lifestyle that lends itself to
suspicion. His association with Colombian cocaine suppliers and his
involvement in exotic plots hatched by the CIA and DEA have given him a
certain mystique. He claims it is this mystique that has made him a target of
overzealous investigators.
“We have repeatedly sought comment from U.S. Attorney Bardwell and
other officials about the allegations of investigative and prosecutorial
misconduct. They have refused to be interviewed and expressed considerable
resentment that Seal was even given a forum to express his complaints. But
Barry Seal and others have made allegations that go beyond their own personal
problems with prosecutors. The targeting of individuals, the pressuring of
witnesses, and the abuse of the grand jury process raised questions about the
integrity of our system of justice. And when such questions are raised, regardless
who asks them, they deserve to be answered.
“I’m John Camp, channel 2, Eyewitness News.”
The show badly embarrassed the Baton Rouge feds. Bardwell’s refusal
to be interviewed meant the documentary could not help but be one-sided. Lewis
Unglesby, Seal’s Baton Rouge attorney, thought it amounted to “a declaration of
war on the federal government here. You don’t spit in the eye of a hurricane and
then not plan to evacuate.”
MAX
The Federal officials in Louisiana weren’t the only ones watching Uncle Sam
Wants You. Shortly after the program aired, a private investigator in Baton
Rouge slipped a Betamax videotape of the documentary into a mail pouch
destined for Fabio Ochoa in Medellín.

A few days later Max Mermelstein, a stocky Jewish engineer, drove by on his
daily visit to Rafael Cardona’s office in a house north of Miami. Mermelstein
worked for Cardona in the cocaine trade.
Inside the house, Max greeted his boss and several other Colombians,
among them Carlos Arango, better known as Cumbamba, one of the most feared
hitmen of Miami’s cocaine wars, and a man named Cano, whom Max knew to
be an employee of Fabio Ochoa. With Jorge Ochoa in jail in Spain, Fabio now
ran things. Cano’s brother had been the administrator of Tranquilandia.
Mermelstein learned that Cano had traveled from Colombia with a videotape
from Fabio Ochoa. Cano had come to the United States to see if he could
straighten out the Ellis MacKenzie situation. Max learned that MacKenzie had
flipped and was going to testify against Jorge Ochoa and Pablo Escobar.
Rafa Cardona put the tape in a video machine, and he, Cano, and Max
sat down to watch. As the tape rolled, Max learned for the first time that
MacKenzie’s real name was Adler Berriman Seal.
Afterward they talked about the need to locate MacKenzie. Cano had
flown with MacKenzie several times as guide pilot on smuggling trips to
Colombia. He discussed MacKenzie’s habits while Rafa made a list. Cano gave
Max Seal’s home address in an exclusive section of Baton Rouge, the models of
the cars his wife and secretary drove, descriptions of several of his aircraft and
their registry numbers, and the names of several restaurants he frequented. Cano
said they would prefer a kidnapping of MacKenzie. For a kidnapping they would
pay $1 million. But if that couldn’t be accomplished, they must do whatever had
to be done to quiet him. For MacKenzie’s murder they would pay $500,000. The
contract came from Fabio Ochoa and Pablo Escobar.
It dawned on Max that he was being asked to kill MacKenzie. Max had
been chosen because he was an American. Rafa told Max that he would be going
out to Baton Rouge because Colombians would be too conspicuous there. Rafa
told Max to make whatever arrangements he needed to silence MacKenzie. If it
was to be a murder, the cartel wanted it to look like a traditional organized crime
hit.
Max accepted the contract. Turning it down, he felt, would amount to
forfeiting his own life.
Then Rafa called Colombia and handed the phone to Max, who found
himself talking to Fabio Ochoa. Fabio thanked him for accepting the contract
and wished him luck. He told Max it was necessary but he seemed reluctant
about killing MacKenzie. He preferred a kidnapping. Then Fabio said there was
somebody else who wanted to speak with him. Pablo Escobar got on the line and
also thanked Max. Fabio got back on the line and asked him if he needed any
expense money. Yes, Max said. They asked him how much, and he told them to
use their discretion.
After the phone call, Cano mentioned that Seal was married and had
some small children. Max said he wanted absolutely nothing to do with killing
women and children. If it had to be done, it had to be done, Rafa said.
Before the meeting ended, Rafa asked Max if he could handle another
chore. He said Lito Bustamante had been arrested as a result of MacKenzie
turning informant in the Nicaraguan deal. Bustamante was in the federal
Metropolitan Correctional Center in South Dade, the holding facility for federal
prisoners awaiting trial. His trial was set for the summer. Could Max arrange to
get a helicopter and pilot to fly into the prison and break Lito out?

MAX Mermelstein had become sort of an all-purpose gringo handyman for the
Medellín cartel. He had come a long, circuitous route from his childhood in
Brooklyn. Mermelstein’s father had put Max to work at thirteen “to learn what
money was all about.” He earned his own tuition to a New York community
college, where he graduated in 1963 with an associate’s degree in applied
sciences. He worked for consulting engineers by day and studied mechanical
engineering at the New York Institute of Technology by night. But he got bored
sitting behind a desk and drawing board all day, so he went into sales. He sold
air-conditioning and heating equipment to contractors, but that also bored him.
He went through a divorce and moved to Puerto Rico to make a clean break of
things in the early 1970s. There he became the chief engineer for a chain of
shopping centers and department stores, then rose to the same job at the Sheraton
Hotel in San Juan. After six years he moved to the chief engineer’s job at the
Princess Hotel in Freeport, the Bahamas.
By then he had a Colombian wife whom he had met in Puerto Rico. To
help out her family, he set up a pipeline to smuggle illegal aliens through the
Bahamas into the United States, a kind of underground railroad for Colombians
seeking a better life in America.
In 1978 Max had moved to Miami and gotten a job as chief engineer at
the Aventura Country Club. Even with Mermelstein gone, Colombians still
passed through the pipeline he had set up in the Bahamas. One of those who
used it was Rafael “Rafa” Cardona Salazar, a Colombian in his mid-twenties
from Medellín. Rafa came to see Max when he got into the United States. He’d
drop by the house, and he and Mermelstein would go out together. Slowly, trust
was building.
Cardona eventually told Max that he smuggled cocaine, up to fifty kilos
a week. Gradually he drew Mermelstein, up to this point nothing more than a
mere alien smuggler, into the cocaine business.
One day a long-haired kid named Fabio showed up at Max’s house with
a kilo for Cardona. To Max he looked like a high school kid, carrying
schoolbooks under one arm and a plastic bag containing the kilo under the other.
Just out of his teens, the boy smuggler dressed punk, wore his hair long, and
drove a Datsun 280Z car. But he was extremely mature, with fine manners and
elegant Spanish.
A few weeks later Max accompanied Cardona to a stash house at a
garden apartment complex in Kendall. Cardona was picking up another kilo.
Rafa left Max in the car when he went inside the apartment. While Max waited,
Fabio appeared with another man and put a package in the backseat of the car.
Fabio then asked Max to come inside the apartment, where Rafa and several
other people lounged about. Rafa took Max into a room and showed him two
steamer trunks containing hundreds of kilos of cocaine. In 1978 that was an
unheard-of amount of cocaine.
Max had no idea how important the long-haired kid was until Rafa told
him when they left the stash house. Fabio Ochoa Vasquez was one of the Ochoa
brothers from Medellín. The Ochoas, Max learned, were about as big as anybody
ever got in cocaine. Fabio Ochoa had been sent to the United States by his
family to handle the distribution in Miami after Jorge was nearly arrested the
year before outside the Dadeland Theatre. Cardona himself distributed for the
Ochoas in the southeastern United States.
For a few months Max dabbled in the cocaine business, distributing a
kilo here and there. Then, on Christmas Eve, 1978, everything changed. That
night Max threw a party at his home west of Miami. Rafa was one of those in
attendance. After all the guests had gone, Rafa returned with a friend, Antonio
“Chino” Aries Vargas. They roused Max from sleep at 2 a.m. They had been
drinking and using cocaine, and Rafa asked Max to drive them home.
Max took the wheel of Rafa’s white van, and the three men set out on
the empty streets of suburban Dade County. Rafa sat in the passenger seat and
Chino, who worked for Rafa, sat in back. Rafa and Chino were arguing. It turned
out that Rafa had shot a man in the face that night at another party. The man had
said something Rafa didn’t like, and Rafa just shot him. Chino told Rafa the
shooting was stupid.
Rafa still had his gun with him in the van. Suddenly he twisted and
emptied five or six bullets from the .38-caliber revolver into Chino.
“All I saw were the flashes,” Mermelstein said later. “My foot just froze
to the gas pedal, and I couldn’t move, I just kept driving straight ahead.” Max
was too stunned to speak.
After they dumped the body in a field off a suburban side street--10800
SW 84th Street--Rafa explained. One of his cocaine shipments were short three
kilos. He suspected Chino and another man. So the killing was for the theft--and
to impress upon Max that Rafa was not afraid to do what was necessary.
“Basically, from that point on he controlled my life,” Mermelstein
would say much later. “I saw him commit murder, and he allowed me to live. I
think it was a well-thought-out plan.”
Max and Rafa then left Miami for a while, Rafa back to Medellín, Max
to New York, to work for Colombians there. Rafa called Max about once a week
or had one of his men stop in and see him. Max knew he was being watched.
Two years passed, and Rafa finally summoned Max to Miami on
February 28,1981. He wanted Max to go to work for him. Max, Fabio Ochoa,
and Rafa met at the King’s Inn near the Miami International Airport to discuss a
two-hundred-kilo seizure that had occurred in Okeechobee County the day
before. Such losses were taken very seriously. Detailed ledgers were maintained,
and record-keeping procedures were very strict. Every kilo had to be accounted
for. If a cocaine seizure resulted from a legitimate bust or an unavoidable
accident, it was written off as a business expense. If someone’s incompetence
caused it, that person was responsible for paying for the lost load. In many
instances the payment was that person’s life as Rafa had demonstrated with
Chino.
From their lofty perch in Medellín, the Ochoas rarely demanded blood.
They didn’t have to. Often their lieutenants, feeling the subtle pressure from the
boss’s accountants in Medellín, took it upon themselves to exact the brutal
balance.
In April 1981 Max Mermelstein attended the summit meeting of the
rising young Colombian cocaine lords at Ochoa’s Hacienda Veracruz ranch.
Jorge Ochoa struck Mermelstein as well mannered and down-to-earth. He used
his great wealth to collect vintage Harley-Davidson motorcycles. Ochoa was
extremely solicitous toward his guest, asking Mermelstein several times if he
was “pleased” with being at the ranch. Ochoa did not seem the least bit violent.
Max felt Ochoa had “an aura.” He was so considerate of Mermelstein’s feelings
that Max found himself responding in kind. Jorge Ochoa was a hard man to say
no to.
Back in Miami, Mermelstein coordinated thirty-eight cocaine flights for
the Ochoas, bringing in nineteen tons in the last seven months of 1981. At least
once a week Mermelstein was on the phone to Jorge Ochoa, scheduling flights,
counting inventory, or discussing distribution and collection. In January 1982,
Mermelstein and Rafa attended a planning meeting in Cali for the Tranquilandia
labs.
Mermelstein returned to Colombia when the cocaine bosses gathered in
Medellín for the baptismal party of Rafa Cardona’s son in February 1984. As
Rafa’s right-hand man, Max had a position of honor at the party. After all, Rafa
had stood godfather to Max’s youngest daughter back in Miami. Rafa had
requested Max make him the child’s godfather; Colombians took such family
rituals seriously. As in all his dealings with the Colombians, Max felt it was a
request he could not refuse.
All the big traffickers were at Rafa’s party. Max thought of it as
“Apalachin Colombiana,” recalling the 1957 summit meeting of Mafia chieftains
at Apalachin in upstate New York. Max’s ability to speak Spanish, along with
his closeness to Rafa and the Ochoas, allowed him to mingle easily among the
trafficking elite, even though he was a stocky forty-year-old gringo with a
Brooklyn accent. It was at one of the meetings during the week of the party that
Max first heard mention of a gringo pilot named MacKenzie who was about to
fly a huge load for the cartel. The traffickers referred to MacKenzie as El
Pajarito--“ the little bird.”
Max’s transportation group competed with MacKenzie’s. Acting on
Rafa’s authority, Max had subcontracted with a group of American pilots and
powerboaters to bring in tons of cocaine for the cartel. Beginning in September
1982, the smuggling group’s aircraft, a Piper Navajo, flew from Colombia and
air-dropped cocaine into the waters off Long Cay in the Bahamas. The plane
then continued on to Nassau, where it picked up “cover girls,” women paid
$2,000 to pose as tourists for the flight into south Florida. Meanwhile, the
floating cocaine was retrieved by crews in speedboats who made the seventy-
five-mile run into Miami at speeds of up to ninety miles per hour--each run
required a new $100,000 engine. A “spotter plane” circled the drop site looking
out for Customs planes. Under cover of darkness, the boat slipped into Biscayne
Bay while a lookout with binoculars scanned the water from the eleventh floor
of a nearby condominium. A communications center in Miami monitored law
enforcement frequencies and provided the radio link-up for the planes and boats.
Except for the cocaine getting wet, the system was foolproof. Load after load got
through undetected.
When the cocaine came into Miami, Max took care of the accounting
and distribution. He earned about $500,000 a year as Rafa’s employee, a mere
fraction of the money he handled. In three years he had arranged for the
importation of more than seventy thousand pounds of cocaine for his bosses and
had sent more than $200 million back to Colombia. He lived well but not
phenomenally so: he had a $350,000 house in Miami Lakes, an $80,000 yacht, a
$30,000 car, $30,000 in jewelry, several small businesses, and $275,000 in stash
money. Even so, Max felt sometimes that he was nothing more than a well-paid
slave. He had tried to ease his way out of the business four or five times.
Rafa told him: “There’s only two real ways to get out--going to jail or
getting killed.”
Max lived in constant fear of Rafa, who kept two hand grenades under
the front seat of his car and $1 million in a nearby suitcase. Rafa was always
well armed and usually coked up. He could be the nicest person in the world, or
he could be the most vicious stone killer depending on whether he was drinking
and using his own product. Unlike the Ochoas and Escobar, Rafa lived the life of
a cocaine cowboy. He was very concerned about clothes--his tastes were Italian
and expensive--and he spent lavishly. When he gave a birthday party for his
fouryear-old daughter at the Sheraton in upscale Bal Habour north of Miami
Beach, he flew down a twenty-piece orchestra from New York. Rafa’s gift to his
son on his first birthday had been a kilo of cocaine or, more accurately, the
proceeds from the sale of the kilo, about $30,000, which were placed in a bank
account in the child’s name. Rafa often said he expected his son to take over the
business when he retired.

RAFA was plagued by his own craving for cocaine. He was addicted to
freebasing “Colombian style”--rolling the cocaine base up in a Marlboro
cigarette and smoking it. When he smoked cocaine he became so paranoid that
he forced his family to sit at the dinner table with him so he could watch them.
He even followed them into the bathrooms of their house in Miami Lakes.
Rafa’s wife, Odila, blamed their daughter’s rare eye disease--she suffered from
muscle deterioration behind the eyeball--on the long sessions spent watching
Rafa freebase. But cocaine trafficking was a family business for Colombians;
Odila kept her husband’s books.
Unlike the Ochoas, who stayed far away from the south Florida cocaine
wars, Rafa and Max were forced to deal with the many violent and unpredictable
Colombians distributing in Miami. Most of the murders in Miami could be
traced back to Griselda Blanco, who was still a vicious wildcard in a cocaine
world rapidly heading toward an almost corporate order. By late 1981 Blanco
had pretty much left Med-ellin, but Rafa and Max continued to work with her in
Miami. Blanco loved killing. She bragged about shooting her second husband,
Alberto Bravo, in the mouth. She and her third husband, Dario Sepulveda,
argued in Max’s living room over who was the better killer. But killing had
unpleasant side effects: Blanco said she could not sleep alone. She needed to lie
next to a man, whose hand she held in an iron grip while she slept. In her dreams
she was haunted by the ghosts of those she had murdered.
Early in 1982 Rafa brought Blanco to Max’s house in Miami Lakes and
told him that she had tipped him off about an assassination plot and saved his
life. He was going to reward her by becoming her cocaine supplier. Thereafter
Rafa and Max sent about twenty to fifty kilos a month to Blanco and her
organization, which included her son, Dixon, a motorcycle killer, and his two
brothers.
Then in late 1983 another cocaine war erupted. Blanco had become
estranged from Dario Sepulveda. When he was killed by police in Colombia,
Blanco was blamed for his death. She and Sepulveda were in a custody fight for
the son, Miguel Corleone Sepulveda, who was so important to Blanco that it was
rumored she had a man killed for being twenty minutes late picking him up at
Miami International Airport. The death of Dario Sepulveda brought Blanco into
direct conflict with her onetime chief enforcer, Dado’s brother, Paco. Rafa sided
with the Sepulveda faction against Blanco, and Mermelstein immediately moved
from the house Blanco had visited to a house at 500 N. Island Drive in Golden
Beach. He rented it for $3,500 a month under an assumed name.
With Rafa no longer a source, Blanco found another supplier in Marta
Saldarriaga Ochoa, a cousin of Jorge Ochoa. Soon Blanco had amassed a $1.8
million debt to Saldarriaga. Instead of paying it, Blanco simply had the young
woman killed, or so police suspected. Marta Ochoa’s body, wrapped in a sheet
of plastic and perforated with bullets, was fished out of a canal in Kendall. The
Miami cocaine community braced for slaughter. But Marta Ochoa’s father came
to Miami for the funeral and made an impassioned plea to stop the killing.
Vengeance was his, he said, and he had decided not to take it. Griselda Blanco
moved to California, and the Ochoas did not pursue her.
While Max was lying low in his Golden Beach house, he received a
visit from Rafa and Carlos Arango, the jut-jawed onetime Blanco hitman known
as Cumbamba who now worked for the Ochoas. Cumbamba carried a black
attaché case. He opened the case, and inside was a silenced MAC-10 machine
pistol set on blocks and rigged with a trigger mechanism that allowed it to be
fired without opening the case. There was a hole in the side of the case for the
gun’s muzzle. A business card covered the hole. The weapon’s serial number
had been bored out so it couldn’t be traced. Rafa wanted to test-fire it by Max’s
pool, an idea that Mermelstein nixed. Instead Mermelstein went into the garage
and returned with a plastic beer cooler and five telephone books. He filled the
cooler halfway with water and soaked the phone books in it. Then he moved the
cooler into a small apartment behind the garage and told Rafa to fire away. Rafa
took the gun out of the case. The homemade silencer muffled the noise; the only
sound was the slapping of the pistol’s bolt, like someone clapping his hands. The
MAC-10 had too much velocity for Mermelstein’s makeshift backstop. Several
of the bullets went through the plastic foam and phone books and lodged in a
wall. When Max moved out of the house several months later, he had the bullet
holes plastered over.
22. FLIPPING
Max Mermelstein had never killed anybody, and the Barry Seal contract put him
in a quandary. But he thought he knew where to turn. He called his friend and
fellow trafficker Jon Pernell Roberts, who had once told Max he could arrange it
if Max ever needed someone eliminated. Max told Roberts about the contract
and gave him a viewing of Uncle Sam Wants You. Roberts said he would take
care of it.
Then Max picked up a cardboard box full of cash from a young
Colombian sent by Fabio Ochoa. Inside the box was $100,000 in twenties. Max
was to use this to finance the hit.
The urgency of the mission to kill Barry Seal was underscored on
January 5,1985, when the first four Colombians ever extradited to the United
States landed at Homestead Air Force Base. The prisoners arrived aboard a
Colombian C-130 cargo plane and were taken into custody by U.S. marshals.
None of the four was a kingpin, but a quick look at them revealed that the United
States was striking close to the heart of the Colombian trade. Hernan Botero
Moreno was a soccer team owner wanted for laundering $55 million through the
Landmark Bank in Plantation in 1981. Two others were defendants sought in the
Operation Swordfish money laundering case of 1982. The fourth man was
Marcos Cadavid, a midlevel trafficker linked to Jorge Ochoa. Extradition for
Jorge Ochoa suddenly seemed much more possible--and the damage Barry Seal
could do was incalculable.
In late January 1985 Mermelstein and an associate of Roberts’s flew
from Miami to New Orleans to try to find Barry Seal. While Mermelstein stayed
in New Orleans, Roberts’s associate drove to Baton Rouge to try to locate Seal.
Mermelstein wanted to stay as far from Baton Rouge as possible. He paid the
man $28,000 to look for Seal.
The man found many of the restaurants and places Seal frequented, but
he returned without spotting Seal. Mermelstein was then forced to accompany
the man back to Baton Rouge to help search. They made no progress and
returned to Miami.
They had found everything Cano had put on his list except Seal’s
helicopter business. And they weren’t sure the restaurants were the right ones.
Max asked if Cano could be sent back from Colombia to help them. Cano
returned, and he and Max set off for Louisiana, driving from south Florida in
Max’s pewter-gray 1985 Jaguar. On the way, Max asked Cano if Jorge Ochoa
“was aware of the situation and what was being done about it in Baton Rouge.”
Cano told Max that Fabio Ochoa had been in touch with Jorge in Spain a number
of times, and Jorge had given his approval.
Max and Cano stopped in New Orleans and rented a car; Max didn’t
want to drive around Baton Rouge with a Latin in a Jaguar with Florida license
plates. Once in Baton Rouge Cano pointed out Barry Seal’s house, his airplane
brokerage offices, and several restaurants Barry favored. They found Seal’s
white Cadillac. It took almost a full day, but they also found the helicopter
business. But they didn’t find Seal. From the Holiday Inn on Airline Highway in
Baton Rouge, they called Fabio Ochoa in Colombia and Rafa in Miami. By now
Max was beginning to wonder if the Colombians had picked up on the fact that
he was stalling.

CANO returned to Miami, and Max stayed in Baton Rouge, looking. But he
didn’t find Seal, and eventually he returned to Miami. One day he was sitting in
Papucci Shoes, his import shoe store at the Four Ambassadors Hotel, when Rafa
and Cumbamba dropped by. Rafa wanted to know what was going on in
Louisiana. Why were they having so much trouble locating Seal? What was
taking so long? He said he was getting pushed very hard by the Ochoas and
Pablo Escobar. They wanted it taken care of fast.
Max said it took time and Rafa had to be patient. When Rafa left,
Cumbamba stayed behind. Max had known Cumbamba for nearly three years.
For Griselda Blanco, Cumbamba had been one of the most feared killers in the
Colombian drug underground. He didn’t look the part. He wore black-rimmed
glasses that were nearly as thick as the bottom of Coca-Cola bottles. He had the
pale Antioqueño skin and tightly curled black hair. These features combined
with his massive chin to make him look slightly handicapped.
Cumbamba was angry. He felt left out of the Seal hit. How come a
contract was given out and he wasn’t involved? He asked Max how much it was
worth, and when he heard he got more upset. Why was Max having so much
trouble filling it?
Seal lived in a secluded area, Max said. There was one way in and one
way out. The road came to a dead end. There was no way the hit could be done
unless everybody in the house was taken out, and Max wasn’t about to do that.
Cumbamba said that didn’t bother him at all.
Max told Cumbamba he had no authority to hand over the contract.
Cumbamba had to talk to Rafa, Fabio Ochoa, and Pablo Escobar. Cumbamba
said he would do that.
Max made one more trip to Baton Rouge. He drove past Seal’s house
and saw a blue Chevy pulling out of the driveway. On Cano’s list, the blue
Chevy was Seal’s secretary’s car. Max followed the car but got stuck at a light
when the woman turned into an industrial park. When he caught up to her, she
was somehow behind him. He gave up and went home.

A TASK force of federal and local drug agents arrested Max Mermelstein on
June 5, 1985, as he drove his Jaguar through a sparsely populated suburban area
about twenty miles west of Fort Lauderdale. The agents moved in on him, and he
gave up quietly. The agents later said it seemed that he wasn’t surprised, as
though he had known all along that he was under surveillance. It almost
appeared to them that Max sighed with relief. The agents found a loaded .22-
caliber Walther in the glove compartment of the Jaguar. Max lived nearby in a
secluded suburban ranch house with his wife and two children, next to neighbors
who thought he worked as an engineer. In Max’s house the agents found twenty-
five more weapons, $73,000 in cash in a wall safe, and $200,000 in a tote bag
under his bed.
A few days earlier Rafa had told Max they were about to be arrested.
But while Rafa took off for Colombia, Max decided to stay behind. For three
months he had known he was being followed. But he felt it was time to get out
of the business, and getting arrested was the only way he knew to do that and
stay alive. Mermelstein and Rafael Cardona had been indicted in Los Angeles
early in 1985 and charged with smuggling 750 kilos of cocaine into California.
Automaker John Z. DeLorean’s alleged attempt to use cocaine to finance his
failing auto company led the L.A. feds to Mermelstein. The cocaine in the
DeLorean case was marked RCX--Rafa Cardona’s code. DeLorean was
acquitted in 1984 in a controversial trial that courtroom observers saw as a
stinging critique of the kind of government “reverse sting” operations later
perfected by Barry Seal. But the government’s informant against DeLorean also
knew Mermelstein. After DeLorean was acquitted, the informant gave the DEA
Mermelstein.
The Los Angeles indictment accused Mermelstein of operating a
continuing criminal enterprise--the potent “CCE” charge that all drug traffickers
feared because it could land them in prison for life without parole. For
Mermelstein there was no way out: cooperate or spend decades behind bars. “In
the language of The Godfather, we made him an offer he couldn’t refuse,” said
James P. Walsh, chief of the major narcotics section for the U.S. Attorney’s
Office in Los Angeles.
 Mermelstein didn’t spill his guts at the first opportunity. He didn’t tell
the feds about the contract on Seal’s life until three or four weeks after his arrest.
Four months later he sat down for a full debriefing with a single DEA agent in
Los Angeles as informant number SRI-86-0015. Mermelstein told about how
he’d met Rafael Cardona, how he worked as the Colombians’ go-between with
American drug smugglers. He told about the baptismal party for Rafa’s son in
Medellín. He said Cardona told him two days before his arrest that they were
going to be arrested. But all that was just the beginning.
When Mermelstein started talking, he proved to be an even better
informant than Barry Seal. Seal was a pilot, a transporter of cocaine;
Mermelstein was a trusted intimate, a member of the inner circle. Max’s position
with the Medellín cartel was akin to Joe Valachi’s with the Mafia. Like Valachi,
whose dramatic testimony before the U.S. Senate in 1963 served as the first
public unveiling of the Cosa Nostra, Mermelstein took the feds deeper than ever
before into an uncharted area of organized crime. During the debriefing,
Mermelstein described how the “Medellín combine” dominated the cocaine
trade. He named its members: the Ochoas, Pablo Escobar, and a name little
known to law enforcement, Jairo Mejia. He estimated the amounts of cocaine
they moved a month: Rafa--800 to 1,000 kilos; Fabio Ochoa--1,200 to 1,500;
Escobar--1,200 to 2,000; and Mejia, the largest of them all, at 2,000 to 3,000.
Mermelstein described the “Cali group,” another powerful Colombian cocaine
combine that worked in concert with the Medellín group. He talked about the
Marta Ochoa kidnapping and the forming of MAS. Rafa had ordered Max to buy
weapons in Miami to arm MAS: 200 Colt AR-15 rifles and 30,000 rounds of
ammunition. Mermelstein revealed a smuggling technique of the Cali group--
hiding the cocaine in the nose cones of Eastern Airlines jets.
Max claimed that Rafa had met with DeLorean in the Bahamas and later
provided the cocaine DeLorean was arrested with. Mermelstein said that he had
smuggled accused Miami cocaine queen Marta Libia Cardona and Operation
Swordfish money launderer Jose Javier Alvarez Moreno out of the United States
after they’d posted bond; the cartel got its fake IDs through a passport office in
Puerto Rico at a cost of $5,000 apiece.
Max talked and talked and talked. He recalled Rafa’s shooting of Chino
in the van on Christmas Day nearly seven years before. He had a phenomenal
memory for names, places, and dates.
Max’s second debriefing a month later drew a crowd. DEA agents came
from Fort Lauderdale, Miami, and Cleveland. The FBI sent a man, and so did
Customs. Al Singleton of Metro-Dade Homicide and Centac 26 showed up.
Mermelstein addressed the many individual interests of these agents, tying loose
strands together. For Singleton’s benefit, Mermelstein talked about the Dadeland
shooting, identifying one of the Colombian killers in the war wagon. For Bob
Palumbo, the DEA agent from Cleveland, he told what he knew about Griselda
Blanco; Palumbo had been part of Operation Banshee, the original case against
Blanco. Mermelstein told the agents that each kilo contained an identifying
paper that could be found only if the kilo was carefully unwrapped. He said that
“Mono,” Lito Bustamante’s brother, now handled the cocaine distribution for the
Ochoas in the southeastern United States, moving 1,200 to 1,500 kilos a month.
It was an astonishing performance.

WHILE Mermelstein revealed the cartel’s secrets, Barry Seal honed his legend
as a DEA informant, working undercover despite the contract on his head. On
January 24,1985, Seal engineered the seizure of ninety kilos of cocaine and the
arrests of nine Colombians in Las Vegas. It was the biggest cocaine bust in the
history of Nevada.
Less than a month later, Seal scored another amazing coup at a meeting
in Miami. He paid a $20,000 bribe to the chief minister of the Turks and Caicos
Islands, a British colony south of the Bahamas. The money was for protecting
drug shipments. “I don’t want you to feel as if I’m trying to push you into
anything,” Seal told Chief Minister Norman Saunders. “You do exactly what
you feel in your heart.”
The whole scene was taped by a hidden DEA video camera. Saunders
and two other government officials were arrested immediately after a second
meeting with Seal in Miami. It marked the first time a foreign head of
government had been arrested on drug charges in the United States.
On June 28,1985, Seal surrendered to U.S. marshals to start serving the
ten-year sentence Judge Norman Roettger had given him in the Operation
Screamer case in Fort Lauderdale. Seal had to serve the sentence in the federal
Witness Protection Program, because by this time his life clearly was in danger.
For the first fifty days he was kept in a windowless, underground
cubicle with a bed, a television, and a bathroom, shut off from all the noises of
the outside world. He received no visitors and ate all his meals in his room. Then
he was transferred to his “permanent protection facility,” where he was allowed
one hour of exercise a day, according to his attorney, Thomas Sclafani. Seal’s
wife, Debbie, flew 1,500 miles and tried to visit him with their two small
children, but she was turned away because the family’s names were not on the
visitor’s list. Seal, a free spirit who hated confinement, was gradually reaching
his limit.
Seal’s life turned into a series of courtroom appearances. In the summer
of 1985 he was the chief witness in the Nicaragua and Turks and Caicos cases in
Miami and in the record cocaine seizure in Las Vegas. Assistant U.S. Attorney
Dick Gregorie supervised Seal’s testimony for the government at the two trials
in Miami. Gregorie had been a successful career Mafia Strike Force prosecutor
in Connecticut when he was picked to lead the narcotics division in Miami
during the dark cocaine cowboy days of 1982.
An intense, dark-eyed man in his late thirties, Gregorie had a boyish
innocence, a single-mindedness that manifested itself in the capacity to become
morally outraged at cocaine traffickers. The Medellín cartel incensed him. He
had been educated by Jesuits, and his beard and balding head gave him a slightly
monkish quality, but he had an easy laugh, and his eyes gleamed when he spoke
about his cases. His one extravagance was a Datsun 280Z, which he’d bought
cheaply through an FBI contact.
The son of a doctor in Boston, Gregorie couldn’t stand the sight of
blood and found himself in law school at Georgetown. Not knowing what he
really wanted to do with his life, he took an internship at the U.S. Attorney’s
Office in Boston. The Secret Service was making a big counterfeiting case. For
the first time, Gregorie saw informants and federal agents up close; the whole
cloak-and-dagger world of federal law enforcement opened up to him like a
Technicolor adventure. A young prosecutor in the office named George Higgins
was working on a novel that would become The Friends of Eddie Coyle.
Gregorie was hooked.
Now, nearly fifteen years later, Gregorie warned Seal that he must tell
him everything in his background, leaving out nothing that might hurt the
government’s case.
“Barry, if you’ve held anything back, the slightest single thing, those
defense attorneys will bring it out and crucify you,” Gregorie said. “I want to
know about everything. If you slept with some pygmy hippopotamus out in
some bayou in Louisiana, I want to know about it. There better not be any
pygmy hippopotamus out there.”
“There’s no pygmy hippopotamus, Dick,” Barry said.
Seal proved to be an unflappable witness with an encyclopedic recall of
drug smuggling minutiae. His first appearance came at the Turks and Caicos trial
in Miami, where prosecutors played the videotapes of Seal’s meetings with
Norman Saunders. It was vintage Seal: “If you’re sitting here conspiring,
brother, it’s called conspiracy,” Seal said in his typical bold way on one of the
tapes. “You gotta be careful. You gotta know who you’re dealing with.”
Seal’s performance drew grudging praise from several top-flight
criminal lawyers who jammed the courtroom to watch the tapes. “This guy is
really good,” said Jay Hogan, one of the best defense attorneys in Miami.
Seal wowed the jury, too, winning four convictions. Norman Saunders
became the first foreign head of government ever convicted on drug charges in
the United States.
Then Seal testified in the Nicaragua case, the trial of Lito Bustamante,
Lizardo Marquez Perez, Felix Dixon Bates, and Paul Etzel in Miami. In his
opening argument, Gregorie called the defendants part of “one of the largest
cocaine organizations in the world.” Seal called it “the Jorge Ochoa cartel.” The
case attracted little attention. Cocaine-ravaged Miami had become jaded about
big drug trials. The story of the trial’s opening ran on page 2B inside The Miami
Herald’s local news section under the headline: Sandinistas linked to coke cartel.
Seal spent two days on the stand, and his testimony was devastating. After the
first day, Bustamante, Marquez, and Bates all changed their pleas to guilty. Only
Etzel saw the trial to the end, and the jury convicted him. Next Seal went on to
testify in Las Vegas, where the results were seven convictions. In three cases,
Seal’s testimony brought seventeen convictions.
Despite their guilty pleas and their looming heavy sentences,
Bustamante, Marquez, and Bates apparently didn’t plan on spending a lot of time
in prison. One of the things Max Mermelstein told the DEA about was a bold
plan to break Lito Bustamante and Lizardo Marquez out of the federal
Metropolitan Correctional Center in South Dade.
The plot could have been lifted from a bad thriller: land a sleek, jet-
powered helicopter inside the prison, blow away the guards with machine guns
and hand grenades, and whisk away Bustamante, Marquez and Bates. With
Mermelstein’s help, DEA agents were able to identify the helicopter, a turbo-
powered, black-and-gray Hughes 500 Ranger purchased with $500,000 in small
bills. The Ochoas were offering $300,000 to attract a pilot willing to set down
inside MCC.
In late October 1985 the agents began round-the-clock surveillance of
the teardrop-shaped helicopter at Tamiami Airport. Timing was critical: the three
cartel members were going to be sentenced on November 1; afterward they
would be moved to more secure federal prisons. The plotters had to strike before
the sentencing.
The escape plan threw the DEA into a frenzy of activity. There were
only a few days to go until the sentencing, and the agents did not know the exact
date of the breakout attempt. The DEA alerted officials at the prison, a forty-
two-acre complex that housed about seven hundred inmates under security
ranging from minimum to maximum. Bustamante, Bates, and Marquez were
held in separate medium-security cell blocks. The three men were allowed to
mix with the prison population and had jobs that gave them freedom of
movement. Bates worked in the prison laundry, and Marquez was an orderly.
As the November 1 date neared, details of the escape plan became
clearer. From the prison, the helicopter would fly low and fast at speeds of up to
160 miles per hour to a nearby farmhouse. There the helicopter would be blown
up, and the escapees would be driven to a small airstrip in the Everglades and
flown to the Bahamas. From there they would board a jet for Colombia. The
DEA agents who watched the plan take shape were struck by the unfathomable
arrogance of the Colombians to attempt such an escape. “The motivation was
probably ego--to show up the United States,” said Billy Yout, one of the agents
involved. The agents did not know the day of the planned escape, but they did
know the time: seven a.m., when all the prisoners would be in the open yard
getting ready for their work assignments. It was the best possible time for a
jailbreak.
On October 30 the agents watched the helicopter practicing quick
“touch and go” landings and takeoffs. The agents were torn. They wanted to let
the plot proceed and then nab the helicopter inside the prison, but that was
deemed too dangerous. The DEA impounded the helicopter without waiting to
make any arrests.
“Our fear was that there might have been a second helicopter that we
didn’t know about,” Yout said. “We could have pursued the investigation, let it
go on longer, but we were running out of time.”
Two days later, Bustamante, Bates, and Marquez were taken before a
federal judge to be sentenced. Bustamante and Marquez each got forty years, and
Bates got twenty. Immediately after the sentencing, the prisoners were taken to
serve their time at the maximum-security federal prison in Atlanta. The Medellín
cartel had been foiled again. But how long would luck stay on the side of the
good guys?
23. “THIS IS DOUBLE-CROSS”
Barry Seal, the consummate manipulator, ended up out-manipulating himself. At
first it looked as though he had pulled it off again, resolving his legal difficulties
with another plea bargain and once again having the last laugh on his enemies in
Louisiana law enforcement. In December 1984, a month after the Uncle Sam
Wants You documentary aired, Baton Rouge U.S. Attorney Stanford Bardwell
held a press conference to announce Seal’s indictment.
In fact, it was merely the formal execution of Seal’s plea agreement,
consisting of the two counts to which Seal had agreed to plead guilty: a two-
hundred-kilo cocaine conspiracy charge and a $51,000 money-laundering
charge. But Bardwell staged the announcement as a victory for his office, an
attempt to recoup some of the face lost in the Uncle Sam debacle. He didn’t
mention Seal’s plea agreement, choosing instead to emphasize the “fifteenmonth
investigation” that brought Seal down. The top law enforcement officials in
Louisiana paraded out for the press conference, but almost immediately the
occasion turned into another opportunity for Barry Seal to one-up the
government. Once again it was John Camp, the WBRZ-TV investigative
reporter, who asked the embarrassing questions.
“Is there a plea bargain arrangement that has been made that will
guarantee Mr. Seal not receive any time excessive to what he’s been sentenced
to in Florida?” Camp asked Bardwell.
“I’m not prepared to comment on that at this time,” Bardwell answered.
It didn’t help that Bardwell’s flustering “no comments” immediately got
contrasted with Seal’s cocksure grins.
“I’ve reached exactly the type of settlement that I wanted to reach,”
Seal told Camp on camera. “Whether they’re happy or not, you’ll have to ask
them.”
While Seal openly predicted he would serve no time in prison on the
charges, Bardwell said Seal would have to serve at least a portion of the ten-year
sentence Judge Roettger had given him on the Quaalude smuggling conviction in
the Operation Screamer case.
“It is my view that the sentence will not be reduced,” Bardwell told
Camp on camera.
But under questioning by Camp, Bardwell seemed uncertain about what
the judge would do.
“How could you possibly make that judgment if you haven’t talked with
the judge?” Camp asked.
“Well, just based on prior experience, I just have a feeling that he’s not
in a position--he’s--he’s got no reason to change it,” Bardwell said.
Camp concluded that Bardwell was being kept in the dark about the
promises being made to Seal in south Florida. Seal had told Camp privately that
he had been assured in Miami that he would not serve any jail time. He hadn’t
been specifically told, but the message had been conveyed through “nods and
winks,” Camp said.
The next month, when Seal appeared in federal court in Baton Rouge to
plead guilty to the charges in Bardwell’s indictment, U.S. District Judge Frank
Polozola asked him about the statements on Uncle Sam Wants You.
The judge, who happened to be a close friend of Bardwell, pointedly
asked Seal if he knew of any wrongdoing by federal officials in the Middle
District. This time Seal kept his mouth shut.

ON October 24, 1985, Barry Seal appeared before Judge Roettger in a “Rule 35
hearing,” a proceeding in which a judge considers the work an informant has
done for the government and makes a ruling on whether to reduce that
informant’s sentence. For informants, it’s the payoff at the end of the rainbow,
the quid pro quo for risking their lives.
By now Barry Seal was the most famous informant in the history of the
DEA. He had single-handedly pulled off three of the best investigations the
agency ever had. In the Nicaragua case, he had tied the Sandinista government to
cocaine trafficking and brought about the first indictment of the Medellín cartel.
In the Turks and Caicos case, he had garnered the first drug indictment of a
foreign head of government. In the Las Vegas case, he had set a record for
cocaine seizures in the state of Nevada. And it hadn’t stopped there. Seal had
gone on to testify brilliantly at the subsequent trials. He had shown an enormous
amount of courage under fire and put himself at great personal risk. When Barry
Seal decided to become a government informant, he set out to be the best.
So it came as no surprise that Seal’s Rule 35 hearing collected an
impressive array of law enforcement testimonials. Bob Joura appeared for the
Miami DEA, along with Dick Gregorie from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in
Miami, a federal prosecutor from Las Vegas, and a British police official who
had worked on the Turks and Caicos case. Seal’s attorney, Thomas Sclafani,
questioned the witnesses before Roettger.
 “DEA considers the Ochoa investigation or the Nicaraguan
investigation the most significant investigation that DEA has been involved in
since its inception,” Joura told the judge. “I have worked with a lot of informants
over my career. I have never met someone who had as much potential and
produced as much as Mr. Seal did. I have known him for over a year and a half
now, and we have had almost daily contact during that time. He has been
debriefed extensively. I have never caught him in a lie. I think once he decided
to cooperate, he decided to cooperate wholly and completely. I think he has
come to realize the effect that cocaine has on the fabric of society in the United
States, and I don’t think it’s something that he totally realized before his arrest
when he flew drugs into the country. I think as a person who provided
transportation, I don’t think he ever considered the impact of what he was doing.
I think now, through working with DEA, he has come to have some realization
of this, and wants to correct some of the things he has done in the past.”
Sclafani asked Joura, “If Mr. Seal had done the things that he has done,
and if instead of being a cooperating defendant he was a DEA agent, can you tell
us what kind of reward he would have gotten?”
“I suppose he would have been proposed for the Attorney General’s
Award, which as far as I know is the highest award available to somebody in
DEA,” Joura said.
Roettger listened to the testimony and then ruled. He referred back to
when he’d originally sentenced Seal to ten years in prison the year before. “At
the time of trial, I thought the evidence portrayed a defendant who was bright,
cunning, and frankly amoral,” Roettger began. “I would clearly have given Mr.
Seal more than the ten-year maximum at the time of sentencing because, from
the evidence I saw, he struck me as being a man who, if I may describe in a word
that most Americans shy away from these days because our language has
become very bland ... I thought he was evil.
“I think well known to all people in this district, promises of
cooperation don’t cut any ice with me at all, and the only time I let anybody out
of jail entirely, rather than just a reduction of sentence, is when their cooperation
rises to the level that they have put their life in a position of peril. And when
they do that, then I think they deserve to be suitably rewarded. “Consequently, I
am going to reduce his sentence to time served.” Barry Seal walked out of the
courtroom a free man.

THE reaction in Baton Rouge was fury. One of the angriest was U.S. District
Judge Frank Polozola, a strict law-andorder judge whose hands were now tied by
Roettger’s sentence. Polozola was bound by the plea agreement not to sentence
Seal to any more time than what Roettger had given him.
When Seal appeared December 20, 1985, for sentencing before Judge
Polozola, he was accompanied by only one attorney, Lewis Unglesby. Bardwell
appeared for the government. Tom Sclafani didn’t attend because he considered
the matter a foregone conclusion. The plea agreement was very clear: Polozola
could not sentence Seal to any more prison time than what had been handed out
by Roettger. That meant no time at all.
Polozola vented his anger at Roettger’s sentence: “If I had the remotest
idea, the slightest idea Mr. Seal would not receive a jail sentence in Florida,
under no circumstances, absolutely no circumstances, would I have accepted this
plea agreement,” said Polozola. “As far as I’m concerned, drug dealers like Mr.
Seal are the lowest, most despicable type of people I can think of, because they
have no concern for the public. ... In my own opinion, people like you, Mr. Seal,
ought to be in a federal penitentiary. You all ought to be there working at hard
labor. Working in the hottest sun or the coldest day wouldn’t be good enough for
drug dealers like you.”
Then Polozola laid out the conditions of probation. If Seal broke any
one of them, he could be sentenced to five years in prison. First, Seal would need
the judge’s permission to travel outside the state of Louisiana; usually convicts
on probation needed only to report to a probation officer. The condition applied
for any travel, even for work as a government informant.
“I don’t care if it is the Drug Enforcement Administration, I don’t care
if it is the CIA, I don’t care if it is the State Department, I don’t care if it is the
U.S. attorney, I don’t care who it is, you don’t go any place, any place, without
getting my personal written approval in advance,” Polozola said.
This was getting to be too much for Unglesby. He couldn’t resist a little
sarcasm.
“Do you want me to refer all those agencies, since he talks to all of
them, to you?” Unglesby asked.
“I don’t care,” said Polozola. “I don’t care who they are. The probation
department is going to see it. The U.S. attorney is here. He is the government’s
lawyer. We only have one government.”
“I have found that, in this case, not to be entirely true,” Unglesby
observed.
Then Polozola stripped Seal of the bodyguards he had hired to protect
him in Baton Rouge.
“It’s come to my attention that there are certain people around you that
carry guns,” Polozola said. “If the guns are in your houses, you are going to have
a serious problem with revocation [of the probation].”
“I don’t possess a gun, and I don’t intend to,” Seal said. “But I do intend
to have bodyguards.”
“Well, your bodyguards are going to have to be without guns,” Polozola
said.
“Well, why is that? If they have legal permits to carry them?” Seal
asked.
“You take your chance, Mr. Seal,” Polozola threatened.
Polozola then fined Seal $35,000 and ticked off other, routine
conditions. Then came the clincher, the one he’d saved for last:
“And as a further condition of probation, the defendant shall reside at
the Salvation Army Community Treatment Center, 7361 Airline Highway,
Baton Rouge, Louisiana, for a period of six months.”
Seal and his lawyer were entirely unprepared for this turn of events.
They immediately started whispering to each other. The details of a plea
agreement are usually worked out so well in advance of the court date that the
sentencing itself is merely a scripted performance. Judges usually ratify what the
two sides bring before them. No one had said anything about a halfway house.
The judge might as well have ordered a target hung on Barry Seal’s back.
“Well, we want to talk about that, Judge,” Unglesby said, recovering his
composure.
“There is nothing to talk about,” said Polozola.
“That’s double-cross by the government,” Unglesby said.
“That is not double-cross by the government,” Polozola said.
“Yes, sir, it is,” said Unglesby.
“Read the plea agreement on count two,” Polozola said.
“I’ve read it,” Unglesby said. “I’m very familiar with it. I hammered it
out, okay? It says no incarceration.”
“This is not incarceration,” said Polozola.
Seal had walked into a government booby trap. When they drew up the
plea agreement, the feds in Louisiana had not intended to hand over all control
of the fate of Barry Seal to Judge Roettger in Fort Lauderdale. The indictment
worked out in the plea agreement had two charges. On the first and far more
significant charge, the two-hundred-kilo cocaine conspiracy, the Louisiana feds
had agreed to abide by whatever sentence Roettger finally gave Seal.
On the second charge, the relatively insignificant $51,000 money-
laundering count, there was to be no prison sentence. But Louisiana reserved the
right to set the conditions of probation. It had seemed innocent at the time, but
Louisiana feds had entered into the plea agreement anticipating just such a
contingency as Roettger’s sentence freeing Seal. The trap was ready to spring
when Seal appeared for his sentencing before Polozola. “Looking back, I think I
got run over by a truck and should have seen it coming,” Unglesby said later.
After Polozola ruled, Unglesby threatened to appeal.
“Let me tell you what,” Polozola said. “I’d love for this plea agreement
to be broken. I’d love for this plea agreement to be broken right now.”
Polozola offered to let Seal withdraw his plea on the spot.
The judge had Seal over a barrel. If Seal took back his plea, he would
lose his immunity for all the crimes he had already admitted. Bardwell left the
courtroom smiling. He had finally beaten Barry Seal. A private investigator paid
by the Ochoas also exited the courtroom.
After the hearing, Lewis Unglesby ran into one of Bardwell’s assistants
in the hall. Unglesby asked if the judge knew the full extent of Seal’s
cooperation with Miami DEA.
“You know what he said?” Unglesby said later. “He said, ‘That’s
Florida and Las Vegas. Barry hasn’t done anything for us in Baton Rouge, and
until he does something for us we’re not that concerned about it.’ Of course,
there wasn’t anything for Barry to do in Baton Rouge. Barry was Baton Rouge.”
All his smuggling life, Barry Seal had bet on his ability to outsmart the
government. Up until the Polozola hearing, he had won nearly every round. He’d
brought tons of cocaine into Louisiana even though the Louisiana State Police
had had him under surveillance, and every fed in Louisiana wanted to indict him.
He had worked his way out of a tough jam in Operation Screamer. When the
DEA and U.S. Attorney’s Offices in two districts had turned down his offer of
cooperation, he’d still managed to fly to Washington and go to work for the
government on his own terms. In the Nicaragua case he had duped Jorge Ochoa
and Pablo Escobar, the world’s biggest cocaine smugglers, men who made
empires through the sheer force of their ruthless will. He had fooled Carlos
Lehder and Federico Vaughan, Lito Bustamante and the cartel security chief,
Lizardo Marquez Perez. He had survived a plane crash in Colombia and
antiaircraft guns in Nicaragua. He had overcome them all, even the relentless
men in Louisiana who wanted more than anything else to see him behind bars.
Now, just as freedom was staring him in the face, it began to slip away.

BARRY Seal did not go into the Salvation Army halfway house right away;
there were no immediate vacancies. Polozola refused to stay the sentence, but
Seal’s attorneys asked for and got another hearing set for January 24, 1986. This
time they would introduce testimony from the Rule 35 hearing before Judge
Roettger in hopes of getting Polozola to change his mind.
On January 21, two days before the hearing, something happened that
cast everything into a far more urgent light. A Spanish appeals court granted a
U.S. request to extradite Jorge Ochoa to stand trial in Miami. All of a sudden
Seal, the only eyewitness against Ochoa, became far more valuable to the federal
government--and far more dangerous to the Medellín cartel.
“The case against Ochoa was going to be all testimonial, and it was
going to be Seal with very little corrobation,” Sclafani said. “Without Seal the
case is finished.”
Sclafani filed a motion to “correct” the probation set by Polozola. He
called Seal “the single most important government witness in the United States
today.” The motion said Polozola’s sentence “will place Seal in a life-
threatening position, especially given the anticipated extradition of Jorge Ochoa
to Florida.”
Sclafani took pains to point out that Seal “has been the subject of an
open $350,000 contract on his life.” The motion said the contract now stood at
$500,000 dead and $1,000,000 if brought back alive to Colombia.
A motion from the Louisiana prosecutors argued against changing the
probation: “The government does not see how residing at the Salvation Army
imposes any more of a threat than Mr. Seal residing at his home in Baton Rouge,
La.” The motion was signed by Stanford Bardwell and Al Winters.
On January 23, the day before the hearing, Sclafani flew to Baton
Rouge, checked into his hotel around noon, and found a note from Lewis
Unglesby telling him there was going to be a “status hearing” in Judge
Polozola’s chambers at four p.m. Such status hearings are usually held to see if
preliminary differences can be worked out and resolutions reached before the
court hearing. At the meeting were Sclafani, Unglesby, Polozola, Winters, the
U.S. marshal for Baton Rouge, and the chief federal probation officer for the
Middle District. Seal awaited the meeting’s outcome in Unglesby’s law office
nearby.
Polozola made it clear from the outset that Seal would have to surrender
at one p.m. the following day. The exchange then got “relatively free,” Sclafani
said. Sclafani reminded the judge about Ochoa’s extradition. “Judge, my client
wants to get out of town,” Sclafani said.
The judge said that Seal should go into the federal Witness Protection
Program. Now it became clear what the halfway house gambit was meant to
achieve: the Louisiana feds wanted to scare Seal into the Witness Protection
Program--anything to prevent him from driving around Baton Rouge in his big
white Cadillac and rubbing his freedom in their faces. Sclafani said Seal
wouldn’t go for the Witness Protection Program; he hadn’t seen his family for
three months the last time he was in the program while he was testifying in
Miami and Las Vegas.
Sclafani instead suggested transferring Seal to protective custody in
another federal district. It wouldn’t be the same as the Witness Protection
Program; Seal would have more freedom, and his wife could visit more easily.
The judge agreed to consider it provided that Sclafani could find another district
willing to take Seal. According to Sclafani, the judge chuckled sarcastically and
said, “Good luck.”
That got under Sclafani’s skin. He accused the judge of not being
concerned that Seal might get killed. Then it was the judge’s turn to take offense.
Sclafani said the judge launched into an angry tirade, and that his face reddened
and his voice thickened as he spoke.
“Let me tell you something about your client,” Sclafani remembered
Polozola saying. “Your client likes to tell radio stations and television reporters
that Judge Polozola does not have the last word. He’s right. The court of appeals
has the last word. But I’m not going to give him anything to appeal.
“So, in effect, Judge Polozola has the last word. You tell your client the
next time he shoots off his mouth to the television cameras about Judge
Polozola, he better watch what he says.”
Then the judge paused and said, “Your client needs to be taught a
lesson.” Sclafani said the lesson could result in Seal ending up with a bullet in
his head.
After the hearing in Polozola’s chambers, Seal, his wife, Debbie,
Sclafani, Jacobsen, and Joura all went to dinner at Ruth’s Chris Steak-house,
Seal’s favorite restaurant. The mood was one of cautious optimism. Everybody
hoped the halfway house sentence would be averted. During dessert, Sclafani
telephoned Dick Gregorie in Miami; Gregorie went to work trying to find
another federal district that would put Seal in protective custody.
The next morning Gregorie called Winters and told him that the U.S.
attorney in the Northern District of Florida had agreed to take Seal as a favor to
the U.S. attorney in the Southern District of Florida. Winters said he had no
problem with that.
Soon after, Sclafani spoke with Gregorie and learned of the
arrangement. But at 9:20 a.m., when Sclafani arrived at the courthouse, Winters
and the rest of the Louisiana feds told him they vigorously opposed sending Seal
to Pensacola, Florida.
“We can’t let him go to Florida, Florida is a drug state,” Winters said.
Sclafani was furious.
All parties met in chambers with the judge. The judge was suspicious of
the proposal to send Seal to Pensacola. Why, if cocaine kingpins were
threatening Seal’s life, would Seal want to go to Florida, the cocaine capital of
the United States? The judge agreed to call the chief federal probation officer in
the Northern District of Florida. He went to another room to make the call.
While the judge was on the phone, Sclafani went down the hall to a witness
room and called Gregorie. The arrangement was unraveling before his eyes.
Sclafani felt Winters had betrayed him and Gregorie by not supporting the
proposal. “You had one federal prosecutor in Louisiana specifically back-
dooring a brother prosecutor in Florida,” Sclafani said.
“Do you realize Winters didn’t go along with it?” Sclafani told
Gregorie. “What’s going on here?”
Then Winters came into the room and got on the phone. He told
Gregorie the judge was not likely to accept the proposal. Several witnesses in the
room overheard Winters say into the phone that he was sorry, but he just
couldn’t go along with it. The people from Baton Rouge wouldn’t budge, and
there was nothing he could do. Twenty-five minutes later the judge emerged
from his phone call with the chief probation officer in Pensacola. The judge said
they knew nothing in Pensacola about Seal’s case or the conditions of his
probation. Since everything was so confused, the judge was turning down the
transfer.
Time had run out: it was nearly noon. All the parties went into the
courtroom to go through the motions. Polozola insisted that Seal enter the
halfway house at one p.m. Before the judge ruled, Seal’s attorneys desperately
sought to have the courtroom proceedings sealed.
“It is our position that this should not be publicly said, any more than
necessary, that he is to go to the halfway house today at one o’clock,” Unglesby
said.
The Louisiana prosecutors opposed closing the hearing; they needed to
get approval from Washington for that. Then Polozola refused to grant a gag
order preventing all parties from talking to the press.
“Your man is the one who really talks to the press,” he said.
Seal was taken directly from court to the halfway house. He was not
given time to pack or see his family. Characteristically, he gave a telephone
interview from the halfway house.
“I’m trying desperately to understand the logic behind Judge Polozola’s
ruling,” Seal told the Baton Rouge newspapers. “At the sentencing, he said he
wanted to make sure I didn’t bring any more drugs into the Middle District. I
brought twenty thousand pounds of cocaine into the Middle District of
Louisiana, nowhere else, and I never left my house. I did it all by phone.”
24. THE HALFWAY HOUSE
No one expected Barry Seal to remain for long in the Salvation Army halfway
house. It was absurd. It was too dangerous, and Seal was too valuable a witness.
Al Winters thought Seal would give in and finally enter the federal Witness
Protection Program. Even Seal didn’t have the brass to run around Baton Rouge
stripped of bodyguards with a $500,000 contract on his head.
“If this doesn’t force him to leave Baton Rouge, nothing will,” Winters
told Dick Gregorie.
When the weekend came and went and Seal stayed in the halfway
house, Winters started to grow concerned. After two weeks he called Gregorie
again. They discussed going to Judge Polozola jointly to ask to have Seal moved
out of Baton Rouge. But Gregorie said it was no use: Barry was determined to
stay in Baton Rouge to serve out his six months at the halfway house and
become a free man again.
Seal told Jake Jacobsen that he didn’t think the Colombians would try to
kill him. “It’s just business,” he said. He felt relatively safe in Baton Rouge. If
any Colombians showed up in that part of Louisiana, they would be obvious.
Cumbamba had taken over Max Mermelstein’s contract to kill Barry
Seal in May 1985. But Seal entered the Witness Protection Program the next
month, and the contract was put on hold. The plot remained dormant until
January 21. 1986, when Jorge Ochoa was suddenly ordered extradited from
Madrid to Miami. Three days later Seal began reporting to the Salvation Army
halfway house at six p.m. every day. He checked out at seven a.m., and his days
were his own as long as he returned to the halfway house at night.

AFTER Seal had been in the halfway house for fifteen days, three men from
Medellín flew to Mexico via Panama and crossed the border illegally into the
United States. Four days later Bernardo Vasquez, a Colombian who lived just
north of Miami in Hialeah, checked in under his own name in room 270 at the
Kenner Airport Hilton outside New Orleans. Cumbamba showed up four days
after that, February 16, and rented room 312 under the name Miguel Velez. The
next day the three Colombians from Medellín arrived, and Vasquez bought a
1982 gray Buick for $6,500 in hundred-dollar bills. He registered the car in the
name of Mary L. Cook. That night Vasquez and one of the Colombians from
Medellín went to Baton Rouge and rented room 228 at the Jay Motel Lounge
Restaurant, a $15.91-a-day dive next to a used-car lot on Airline Highway. The
motel no longer had a lounge or a restaurant, and the second-floor room had no
telephone. But it did have a clear view of the Salvation Army parking lot just a
few hundred yards away.
The following day Vasquez picked up the Buick and rented a red
Cadillac Sedan DeVille from Avis on his American Express card.
The next day, February 19, Vasquez went to Anthony’s, a men’s
clothing store in Kenner, and purchased three baseball caps and two plaid
raincoats. That afternoon Cumbamba drove one of the three Colombians from
Medellín, Luis Carlos Quintero Cruz, to the halfway house parking lot in the
Buick. The new car sticker was still on the Buick’s window. Cumbamba backed
the Buick into a parking space three spots away from the three large white
Salvation Army drop boxes for donated clothing. The boxes sat in the center of
the parking lot. Witnesses said later that Cumbamba and Quintero Cruz got out
of the car and dropped something into the boxes. Then Cumbamba got inside the
Buick and smoked Marlboro cigarettes while he waited for Barry Seal.
In his weeks at the halfway house, Barry Seal had seemed friendly and
unafraid. He showed up on time every evening at six. He usually had a friend
drive him or follow while he drove into the lot in his father’s white 1972
Fleetwood Cadillac. On the morning of February 19, Seal rose and left the
halfway house at 7 a.m. as usual. He had no business office to go to. In the first
week of his halfway house stay, the IRS slapped a $29,487,718 “jeopardy
assessment” lien on all his property. A jeopardy assessment was designed to
keep suspected drug dealers from liquidating their assets. Seal’s own testimony
for the government had done him in: the IRS arrived at the $29 million figure by
using Seal’s statement in the Turks and Caicos trial that he had grossed $75
million smuggling drugs. While Seal had immunity for any crimes he’d admitted
to in his testimony, he had no immunity for civil tax liabilities. The IRS took the
white Mercedes convertible that Barry had gotten from Lito, a helicopter, two
boats, three planes, Seal’s business office, and nearly all the furniture in his
house. The house itself was under a seizure warrant.
Seal spent much of his time trying to come up with a strategy to solve
his tax problems. “This IRS thing has me very, very time-limited,” Seal told
John Semien of the Baton Rouge Morning Advocate on February 19. “I’ve been
with attorneys twenty-four hours a day. The whole time I’m over at the Salvation
Army I’m on the phone with them, and it’s gotten to be a very involved thing.”
Even so, Seal usually made time for lunch at home with Debbie and the
kids. The morning mail brought more bad news. The Federal Aviation
Administration was revoking his pilot’s license because he was a convicted
felon.
Just before six that evening, Seal was speaking on the car phone in his
Cadillac with Bill Lambeth, an aviation consultant in Phoenix. Seal wanted to
buy an airplane propeller. Seal told Lambeth he would call him back at 6:15 p.m.
from the Salvation Army. “He sounded very harried and troubled,” Lambeth
later recalled.
Maybe he was preoccupied when he arrived at the Salvation Army lot.
He drove right past the parked gray Buick and backed the Cadillac into a space
flush against the drop boxes. The boxes stood between him and the Buick. They
would shield him on the driver’s side as he got out of the Cadillac. The car itself
would provide cover from the passenger side. He was thirty feet from the
Salvation Army’s door.
The witnesses who saw Quintero Cruz carry something to the drop
boxes were right: minutes before six Quintero Cruz had put something wrapped
in a raincoat inside one of the boxes. Then he hid behind the boxes, empty-
handed and loitering, as Seal arrived in his father’s Cadillac.
When Seal opened his car door, Quintero Cruz reached into the drop
box and unwrapped the raincoat from a silenced MAC-10. He leaped toward
Seal. With the muzzle less than two feet from Seal’s head, Quintero Cruz fired
twelve times in two seconds. Even through the silencer the shooting sounded
loud, like firecrackers going off. Three bullets hit Seal in the left side of the
head. Two of them entered behind his left earlobe, making oval holes in the skin
with burned rims one centimeter in diameter. All three projectiles passed
completely through Seal’s head, severing the cerebrum from the brain stem. A
fourth bullet put a red furrow in his scalp. A fifth bullet passed through his upper
arm and rib cage. A sixth tore through his chest. All the wounds were “through
and through”-- none of the bullets were stopped by Seal’s body tissue.
After the firing, Seal slumped over, bleeding profusely onto the
Cadillac’s seat, his hands cupped over his ears as if to shut out all sound.
Inside the Salvation Army building, Major Bennie Lewis heard the
popping noise. He ran outside to the Cadillac. He leaned over Seal and saw a
hole all the way through his head.
“Barry, can you hear me?” Lewis asked.
There was no response.
At 6:04 p.m., John Camp was in the WBRZ newsroom when the word
came over the police scanner:
“There’s been a shooting in the Salvation Army parking lot,” someone
said.
About fifty people were in the room for a staff meeting. The room went
dead silent. Camp felt as though he had been kicked in the stomach.
“Jesus Christ, they got him,” Camp said.
When Lambeth in Phoenix got tired of waiting for Seal to call back, he
telephoned the Salvation Army himself.
“He’s lying in the parking lot,” someone told him. “He’s just been
shot.”
Lambeth immediately telephoned Debbie Seal at home. Either someone
was playing a bad joke, he told her, or she had better get down to the Salvation
Army right away.
Debbie Seal called over there. “Miss Seal,” someone said, “I don’t think
you should come out here.”
“Then which hospital should I go to?” she asked.
“He won’t be going to a hospital.”

THE next day U.S. Attorney Stanford Bardwell called a press conference. “He
deserved to be prosecuted,” Bardwell said. “He deserved to be sentenced.”
“Were you trying to teach him a lesson?” asked an angry John Camp.
Seal’s lawyers had told Camp what the judge had said in chambers.
A pained look crossed Bardwell’s face, but he leaped at the question
anyway. “Sure,” he said. Then he paused, seeming less sure, and added a little
too quickly, “Not to get killed.”

BARRY Seal, forty-six on the day he died, had been right about one thing: the
Colombians in Baton Rouge were conspicuous. Seal just didn’t see them
coming. In the pandemonium after the killing, the FBI took only forty-eight
hours to trace, identify, capture, and charge six suspects.
Immediately after the shooting, Quintero Cruz, the man with the MAC-
10, ran back to the Buick. A witness saw him hand the MAC-10 to Cumbamba
in the driver’s seat. The Buick peeled out of the parking lot, almost running over
another witness. A third witness got a good look at Cumbamba loitering outside
the Buick a few minutes before the shooting.
The witness said the driver of the Buick had been wearing green
surgical pants.
A quarter mile away in a children’s activity center parking lot, the
Buick screeched to a stop, and the two men abandoned it, engine idling, the
MAC-10 inside on the floorboards. The men ran to a second getaway car, a red
Cadillac, parked nearby. They were laughing.
Across the street, two off-duty sheriffs deputies, hired as security for a
bingo game, noticed the commotion and got a description.
The FBI immediately flooded the airport with agents. Others began
checking hotel registries for guests with Latin-sounding names. The hit team had
been extraordinarily sloppy. Vasquez and several others had used their true
identities. Vasquez had even used his American Express card to rent the getaway
car. And the price tag from the clothing store was still on the raincoat that
Quintero Cruz had wrapped around the MAC-10.
At 7:30 p.m. Vasquez and another member of the hit team checked out
of their rooms at the Hilton in New Orleans. The Cadillac was abandoned at the
New Orleans International Airport. The car entered the lot at 8:36 p.m.
At 8:45 p.m. two FBI agents watched a Latin man approach the Eastern
Airlines ticket counter at the airport. The man was sweating and appeared
nervous. He had been unable to obtain a direct flight to Miami. The agents
questioned him. He played the naive, lost traveler. Although he gave hesitant,
uncertain answers, he possessed a proper passport in the name of Miguel Velez.
The agents did not yet have the description from the witness who saw the green
surgical pants. They had no probable cause to make an arrest; they had to let
Velez go. He told the agents he was going to go back to his hotel to call a cab to
take him to another airport. About fifteen minutes later, when a description of
the killers came over the radio, the FBI agents realized they had had one of
them. They checked at the hotels and found that Velez had rented a cab. The cab
was heading to Jackson, Mississippi. An all-points bulletin went out for the taxi.
At 2:20 a.m., in Meridian, Mississippi, a police officer spotted a
disabled taxi on the highway. The cab had hit a deer. The officer questioned the
passenger, who was wearing green pants. The cabbie couldn’t understand why
the police were making such a big deal about a dead deer. In the passenger’s
pocket was $3,270 in twenties and the keys to the rented red Cadillac getaway
car. The officer arrested “Miguel Velez” immediately. It turned out that Velez’s
pants, though green, were not the type worn by surgeons. Later, investigators
found the green surgical pants inside Velez’s luggage. He had changed clothes
after the shooting, but he had made the cardinal mistake of taking off his green
surgical pants and putting on pants that were also green.
Bernardo Vasquez spent the night at a safe house, a friend’s home in
Algiers, a suburb of New Orleans. What he didn’t know was that his friend was
a confidential informant for the FBI. The FBI arrested Vasquez the next day with
$860 in twenties and $9,800 in cashier’s checks. Cruz was caught in Marrero, in
another suburban safe house, carrying $3,127 in twenties.

BARRY Seal’s funeral took place the day after the arrests. The family put a
telephone pager and a ten-dollar roll of quarters in the coffin. What was Barry
Seal without his quarters and his pay telephones? The Reverend Joe Hurston
recited an epitaph that Seal had chosen long ago and written down in his
personal Bible: “A rebel adventurer the likes of whom, in previous days, made
America great.”
No drug agents attended the funeral of the greatest drug informant in
DEA history. The bosses in Washington let Jacobsen and Joura know that it
wouldn’t be a good idea.
Nearly a month after the murder, President Reagan went on national
television to pitch for congressional aid to the contras. He displayed the grainy
black-and-white pictures Seal had taken on his undercover mission to Nicaragua.
“Every American parent will be outraged to learn that top Nicaraguan
government officials are deeply involved in drug trafficking,” Reagan said.
“There is no crime to which the Sandinistas will not stoop. This is an outlaw
regime.”
There was no mention of Barry Seal.

FOUR months after Barry Seal’s death, Dick Gregorie and Al Winters went to a
secret location outside Miami known as “the submarine.” The submarine was a
small, windowless living quarters so named because its occupant could not know
if he was underground or underwater. It had a bedroom, bathroom, and
television set, but there was no door that the occupant could see. Entering the
submarine required navigating secret passages. It was the most secure spot in
south Florida for a witness, the natural place to put Max Mermelstein.
Seal’s death profoundly affected Max, who was now the leading living
witness against Jorge Ochoa and Pablo Escobar and thus Barry Seal’s successor
as the most important drug informant in the United States. The two federal
prosecutors had come to debrief Max for different reasons. With Seal dead,
Gregorie needed a witness to refashion a case against Jorge Ochoa, whose
extradition status in Spain had been thrown into doubt again by Ochoa’s
lawyers’ legal maneuvering. And with Seal’s murder, Winters had gone from
being Seal’s prosecutor to his avenger. It fell to Winters to build the case against
Seal’s killers in Baton Rouge. Max chain-smoked in the submarine while he
heard the details of the hit. Winters told Max that the murder weapon had been a
MAC-10.
 Suddenly Max started peppering Winters with questions. Did the
weapon have a drilled-out serial number? Yes, Winters said.
“Not only can I identify it, the weapon was test-fired at my house in
Florida,” Max said.
Agents were immediately dispatched to the house Max had rented in
Golden Beach. They dug into the wall and, sure enough, found five .45-caliber
bullets. The bullets matched the ones that had killed Barry Seal. Max had just
directly tied the Medellín cartel to Seal’s murder. Based on Mermelstein’s
information, Fabio Ochoa, Pablo Escobar, and Rafael Cardona were indicted the
next month by a federal grand jury in Baton Rouge. The charge: conspiring to
violate Barry Seal’s civil rights by plotting to kill him.
25. PALACE OF JUSTICE
One day in August 1985, Supreme Court Justice Alfonso Patiño was in his
chambers in the Palace of Justice in Bogotá when he received a telephone call:
“We want you to declare the extradition treaty to be illegal,” a voice said.
“What?” asked Patiño, incredulous. “Who is this?”
“We want you to declare the extradition treaty illegal.”
And that was all. Patiño thought it strange. Who were these people, and
how did they get his private number? He puzzled over it, decided not to tell his
wife, Maria Cristina, then reconsidered. “Be careful,” he told her.
“Of what?” she asked. Patiño said it was probably nothing. The court,
he said, was examining a challenge to the constitutionality of Colombia’s
bilateral extradition treaty with the United States. He understood vaguely--he
read the papers--that some criminals, drug traffickers, he thought, were
especially affected by the treaty. This wasn’t any of his business, though. His
business was to worry about questions of law. He had nothing to do with drug
traffickers. What could they want with him?
In early September Patiño received three letters in the mail. Each one
had the same warning as the earlier telephone call, and each one was signed “the
Extraditables.” Patiño didn’t mention it to his comrades in the Supreme Court’s
constitutional chamber. He didn’t want them to know that this was happening;
he didn’t want to know if it was happening to them.
“I’m having a little trouble,” he told Maria Cristina. “You should
change your travel routes during the day, don’t talk to me over the phone about
your plans, and, really, be very, very careful.”
Patiño admitted then, without telling her any specifics, that Colombia’s
cocaine traffickers were trying to influence his position on extradition. The
Colombian Supreme Court had twenty-four justices in four chambers: civil,
labor, penal, and constitutional. Extradition was a constitutional question and, as
such, would be discussed and ruled upon by Patiño and the other members of the
constitutional chamber. Whatever they decided was virtually guaranteed to be
accepted by the court meeting in plenum.
At first Alfonso and Maria Cristina Patiño were more scandalized than
frightened by the letters and telephone calls. The Patiños were from one of
Colombia’s august Conservative families, with a record of public service that
stretched for generations. Alfonso was a noted jurist and a member of one of the
finest Supreme Courts in Colombia’s history. Maria Cristina was a ranking
bureaucrat in the Foreign Ministry, in charge of administering Colombia’s
diplomatic missions and other real property all over the world. Criminals simply
didn’t bother people like the Patiños. Until now.
On September 14 the second letter arrived. Alfonso got two copies, and
Maria Cristina got three at home. This one opened, Hola, Perro (“Hello, Dog”),
and noted that “we know everything about your life.” It came with an
accompanying tape cassette that contained excerpts from several private
conversations by Alfonso and by Maria Cristina from their respective offices at
the court and at the Foreign Ministry. The most useful bit of news in the
conversations was about Maria Cristina’s upcoming inspection tour of
Colombia’s European embassies: “Maria Cristina will not be alive to make the
trip,” warned a voice on the tape.
At this juncture the Patiños paid a visit to the Ministries of Justice and
Interior, seeking to shake things up. Alfonso came away with a four-man DAS
escort, and Maria Cristina got a bodyguard.
The Patiños also braced the rest of the justices and demanded to know
what sort of attention “the Extraditables” were paying to them. Quite a lot, it
turned out. All had received the letters. One justice had taken his daughter to the
hospital and left her there for a minor but urgent operation. Nurses paged him in
the receiving room before he left, notifying him he had a telephone call: “We
know where she is.”
Another justice had received so many telephone threats on his private
line that he’d changed the number. Two days later he received a call on the new
line: “Hey, c’mon, don’t be an asshole. . . .”A few days later the same justice
received a tiny, elegantly made coffin in the mail with a brass nameplate bearing
his name. He had a heart condition, he was in a constant state of panic, and he
hadn’t told his family.
The third set of letters to the Patiños arrived October 15, all of them
addressed personally to Maria Cristina and delivered at home. There was neither
wheedling nor insults in this one:
“You must convince your husband to abrogate the treaty,” it said.
“Remember, we are the same people who dealt with Rodrigo Lara Bonilla. Your
bodyguards won’t save you, no matter how many you have.” There was another
cassette with more tapes of Maria Cristina’s office phone calls. She changed the
number.
Now Maria Cristina had four bodyguards of her own. Alfonso stopped
taking walks. Both Patiños ceased going out at night and invented several
number codes to use with one another and with relatives to let them know their
whereabouts and plans. Alfonso suggested Maria Cristina start driving her own
car to work instead of riding with him: “That way you’ll save yourself.”
Then one Tuesday early in November, Alfonso came home from work
and confided that the next day the court planned to discuss the constitutionality
of extradition. Neither Patiño slept that night. In the morning they dressed, had
breakfast, and chatted. Then Alfonso kissed his wife and climbed into his car:
“Take great care today.” It was November 6.

IN the early days of Colombia’s cocaine wars, disputes between the drug barons
and the criminal justice system were personal matters to be settled on a personal
basis. A drug boss bought the policemen he needed, and, if he got arrested
anyway, he bought the judge who had his case. It was easy. In the early days a
dismissal cost the peso equivalent of $30,000. More recently the tab had risen to
$50,000, but it worked just as well. The judges were still largely the same
career-oriented thirty-year-olds as before. They lived in one-room walk-ups, ate
red beans and arepas (corn cakes) most days and ajiaco chicken stew on
Sunday, if they were lucky. They made $230 a month prosecuting vomit-covered
bazuko freaks and hired killers whose future no one cared about. The judiciary
was a separate branch of government with no political influence. The judges
hated the executive and hated Congress. Congress paid the judges the bare
minimum to attract candidates. Judges, after all, had no constituency. No votes,
no money.
If bribes were refused, traffickers tried a few threats or maybe paid
clerks to steal the briefs. Sometimes the traffickers put a loose tail on the judges
for a couple of days, get them to wondering. Or gave them a beating. The
possibilities were legion. At some point the judges usually came around. Then
they either took the money or quit their jobs so the cases could conveniently get
lost.
When none of this worked--and this happened surprisingly often, at
least two dozen times, by last count-the traffickers killed the judge. There simply
was no other way to deal with an honest judge. And what was the harm? Nobody
cared; nobody investigated; nobody was ever arrested.
With the coming of the Medellín cartel, however, patterns of judicial
intimidation, like patterns of everything else to do with cocaine trafficking,
became institutionalized. By 1985 the cartel’s bagmen were hanging around
arraignment courts with briefcases full of cash. Everybody knew them. By 1985
the cartel had so many cops on the pad that judges could never tell if their court-
ordered bodyguard was protecting them or following them. By 1985 intimidation
had become such a science that one of the cartel’s heavy breathers could threaten
a judge without even naming the case. He was calling on behalf of all of the
defendants.
In short, by 1985 the cartel had correctly identified the criminal justice
system as the weakest link in Colombian drug enforcement. The judges were
badly overworked, badly paid, badly protected, and horribly maligned in the
newspapers and by public officials. They were resentful of the treatment they
received, and they were defenseless--easy targets for intimidation and murder.
Why mess with an armed cop when the judge who gives him his orders doesn’t
even know how to cock a pistol?
And by 1985 the judges had learned the basic lesson well: “You can
take the $50,000, or you can die,” as one young prosecutor put it. To make sure
the judges remembered the maxim, the cartel periodically demonstrated its
validity. The Lara Bonilla assassination had done a lot in this regard, but
memories faded and needed jogging.
Pablo Escobar, as in the past, was the expert in the field. He was already
believed to have murdered almost everyone concerned with his 1976 dope bust,
and he had followed that up by getting indicted for killing Lara Bonilla.
On July 23, 1985, five gunmen in a Mazda waylaid Bogotá Superior
Court Judge Tulio Manuel Castro Gil outside the University of Santo Tomás and
shot him to pieces as he climbed into a taxi. Castro Gil had written the Lara
Bonilla indictment and had turned down unlimited money offered by an Escobar
bagman the previous year. Escobar was apparently still willing to murder his
tormentors. “You can take the money, or you can die.”
Extradition had complicated matters, for it took traffickers out of the
familiar, malleable Colombian ambience and put them in a place where judges
spoke English, didn’t investigate cases, and were treated like gods. The whole
legal system in the United States was different and, most Colombians thought,
merciless. Put a Colombian in a gringo court on drug charges, and he would be
sent away forever. In Colombia nobody wanted to try drug cases; in the United
States it seemed as though courts were competing for the opportunity.
The cartel had never been able to deal with any of this--it was too
foreign--and from the moment the bilateral extradition treaty took hold in 1982,
the cartel had lobbied furiously to have it either ignored, declared
unconstitutional, or abrogated, preferably all three.
This was an old story, but what made 1985 different was that the
traffickers were seeing their worst fears realized. Hernan Botero, the
“respectable” Medellín banker extradited in January as a money launderer,
couldn’t get bail in Miami and was taken back and forth from court in Miami in
chains. In August a federal jury convicted him; he would be sentenced to thirty
years in jail and fined $25,000.
For Marcos Cadavid, extradited at the same time as Botero, it was even
worse. He was sentenced to fifteen years for cocaine trafficking after only three
months in the United States. Colombian traffickers were accustomed to the
Napoleonic system with its myriad briefs and endless procedural delays.
Marathons like the Ochoa affair in Spain offered all kinds of opportunities for
sophisticated legal maneuvers. In the United States, it seemed, defendants were
denied bail, went to jail, went to court, were convicted, and went to prison. That
was it.
So the cartel did what it could in Colombia. It had the highest officials
of the government under constant threat, and it killed when necessary or
desirable. First came Castro Gil, then on September 11 motorcycle gunmen
murdered La Picota prison warden Alcides Arizmendi. A week earlier
Arizmendi had foiled a plot to break out extraditable prisoner and cartel
associate Juan Ramon Mata Ballesteros. Minutes after Arizmendi’s death, Mata
Ballesteros’s fellow prisoners began to chant and jeer in their cell blocks. Pablo
Escobar called a Medellín radio station to accuse Arizmendi of “mistreating
prisoners.”
Besides intimidation, the cartel made excellent use of propaganda,
focusing its campaign on cultural differences and racism. It was, they said,
impossible for a Colombian to get a fair trial or decent treatment in a U.S.
courtroom. The press and the DEA had given the gringos the idea that all
Colombians were wiry, beady-eyed little brown men and savage killers. Look at
the way they shackled people. The chaining of Botero, videotaped and shown on
Colombian television, caused such a public uproar that the Foreign Ministry
made a protest to the U.S. embasssy. U.S. diplomats explained that U.S.
marshals transported all federal prisoners in chains, regardless of nationality.
Still, the nationalist appeal struck a sympathetic chord among a
populace grown weary of the endless killing, corruption, and institutional
damage. The United States was doing nothing to curtail cocaine consumption,
the argument went, and Colombia was paying the price. If there were no
extradition, the traffickers would leave us alone.
But the Betancur administration held firm. By September 1985 six
defendants had been extradited, nine more were in custody, and 105 U.S.
“Requests for Provisional Arrests” were active in Colombia. Justice Minister
Parejo Gonzalez, unremitting in his support for extradition, said the United
States and Colombia were “cooperating beautifully.”
The Medellín cartel had apparently reached the same conclusion a
month or so earlier. Extradition, now embraced by both the United States and
Colombia, could not be shaken by either public opinion or threats to political
officials. The only thing left was to get rid of the extradition treaty itself. That’s
when the traffickers decided to go after the Supreme Court.

THREE ambassadors were presenting their credentials to President Betancur in

the Protocol Salon of the National Palace. Ordinarily the procedure should have
taken about forty minutes. It was just after 11:30 a.m., November 6, 1985, on a
beautiful Bogotá morning. Betancur had greeted the new Indonesian ambassador
and was now receiving the Mexican envoy. There was a playing of national
anthems and a presenting of arms by grenadiers in the courtyard. Everything had
a certain martial air, so it took a moment for Colombian Foreign Minister
Augusto Ramirez Ocampo to register alarm when he heard gunshots in the street
outside. Wait a minute, he thought, that’s not part of the ceremony.
A courier interrupted briefly, confirmed there was gunfire coming from
the Plaza Bolivar about two blocks away. Betancur heard this news and began
the ceremonial again, moving quickly this time. The shots continued briefly,
then were replaced by the sound of a large number of marching feet. Police,
thought Ramirez. What in hell is going on?

AT 11:40 a.m. about thirty-five M-19 guerrillas, loaded down with machine
guns, automatic rifles, and grenades, leaped from the back of a covered truck and
flooded into the Colombian Palace of Justice, an unsightly, blocklike, four-story
stone building on Bogotá’s central Plaza Bolivar. Within minutes they had
seized the entire building and more than 250 hostages, including Alfonso Reyes
Echandia, chief justice of Colombia’s Supreme Court, and the majority of the
court’s twenty-four associate justices. Alfonso Patiño and the other members of
the constitutional chamber were discussing extradition in a third-floor
conference room.
Around noon eleven police plainclothesmen tried to break into the
palace basement. Guerrillas greeted them with gunfire.
For the next twenty-six hours hundreds of soldiers, police, and
commandos attacked the building and tried to subdue its defenders. On the face
of it, it was an unequal struggle. The soldiers had tanks, rockets, and helicopters
and used them with abandon, blowing great holes in the palace’s masonry and
bashing in the main door to establish a salient on the ground floor.
But the guerrillas had planned well. Extra combatants had infiltrated the
building in civilian clothes before the guerrilla shock troops arrived, and there
were more than enough riflemen to cover key entrances and windows. Police
helicopters landed GOES units on the palace roof, but guerrilla snipers kept
them at bay by shooting through skylights.
Most important, the guerrillas had mounted their heavy machine guns in
makeshift pillboxes of furniture, cushions, cabinets, and junk jammed into
stairwells throughout the palace. From these strong-points, guerrilla gun captains
had superb fields of fire and could pin down entire police or army units virtually
without risk. After the initial probes and fireworks, the struggle quickly reached
stalemate.

YESID Reyes Alvarado, a young lawyer working in north Bogotá, heard about
the seizure over the radio. He tried to telephone his father, the chief justice,
Alfonso Reyes, about 1:30 p.m. Unable to get past a busy signal, he called the
secretaries next door. They were scared but reasonably coherent. His father was
all right; his bodyguards were with him, and there were no guerrillas on the
fourth floor where Reyes and most of the other justices had chambers. His
father’s line was busy because he was talking to government officials. Yesid
called back a half hour later, got more or less the same report, and began to
wonder what he might do to help. Just before he hung up he heard a commotion,
and one of the secretaries screamed, “They’re coming through the wall!”
Yesid dialed and dialed, getting no answer for more than an hour.
Finally, a little after three p.m., he got through on his father’s private line. An
excited, angry voice yelled at him: “Tell the police and soldiers to stop
shooting!”
“Who is this?” Yesid wanted to know. “Let me talk to my father.”
His father came on the line then. He was with M-19 Comandante Luis
Otero, he said. Otero was in charge of the assault. Reyes was calm; he spoke
slowly and carefully: “I’m all right, but see if the DAS and the police will stop
shooting. ...”
Otero’s voice cut in: “If they don’t stop shooting in fifteen minutes,
we’re all going to die!”
Yesid called the police to press for negotiations, then reached Otero and
his father again. Otero was frantic, almost inarticulate. The government wouldn’t
talk--wouldn’t even begin to talk; the guerrillas were stuck in the palace with
nobody to listen to their demands. Nothing. The entire event was rapidly turning
into a nightmare.
Yesid’s father, by contrast, was still calm, still insistent: “The shooting
must stop.”
Yesid hung up and dialed Radio Caracól. He spoke to the editors’ desk,
gave them his father’s private number, and suggested they open a line. They did
so immediately, and Yesid, along with most of Colombia, tuned in. Again he
heard his father urging a cease-fire.
Yesid waited for an hour, then called the palace again to talk to his
father, who was finally beginning to sound a bit haggard. “The guerrillas want to
negotiate,” he said. Then the line went dead. It was just after five p.m.

DOWN the hall from Alfonso Reyes and Comandante Otero, Justice Humberto
Murcia Ballen was huddled on the floor of his office, somewhat scared and
getting more scared by the minute. He was in the court’s civil chamber, had
never been threatened, and had scoffed at Patiño and the others when they told
him about their problems. His first thought after the guerrillas arrived was that
they would “shoot up the place, paint the walls, break some windows, and
leave.” Then the army came, and he expected negotiations to begin. But instead
of peace talks there were bullets whizzing all over the place. Murcia had lost a
leg to illness several years earlier, and a bullet shattered his artificial limb during
the first hours of the siege. Since then he had been immobilized, which didn’t
present an immediate problem. He wasn’t going to remind anyone where he was
or what he did for a living.
The fires started about seven p.m. After the siege ended, some
Colombian government and U.S. embassy officials would maintain that the
guerrillas lit them so they could purposely burn extradition cases on file in the
court archives. Opponents of the government would maintain that the police
started the fires in order to burn cases having to do with death squad activity and
other sins of the security forces.
Although the fires did indeed destroy extradition cases, death squad
activity cases, and much, much more, accusations of arson on either side did not,
ultimately, seem credible. The palace was a virtually impregnable fortress for
somebody outside trying to get in, but inside it was largely composed of salons
broken up by wooden dividers. Anybody who worked there knew the place was
a firetrap. Put several hundred men with hand grenades and tracer bullets in there
for a nine-hour pitched battle, and fire was inevitable.
It was the smoke that finally made Justice Murcia give himself up.
Choking and terrified, he crawled to the top of the fourth-floor stairs and
surrendered to the guerrillas below. They hauled him to a bathroom and threw
him on top of some sixty other hostages heaped inside. Murcia was sure now
that he would die. He thought about his family; then he thought about his life;
then he thought about nothing at all.
Early the next afternoon the final assault began. At that point the
bathroom was filled with hostages and guerrillas, living and dead. The guerrillas,
increasingly desperate, ordered the living hostages to get to their feet, then
shoved them out the door. Murcia, supported by another hostage, lurched into a
grenade explosion. Stunned and bleeding from the face, he fell to the floor. Most
of those who were with him were dead. The remaining guerrillas pitched the
corpses down the stairwell--Murcia among them. Then they went away. Murcia
waited, then crawled to the cellar. He knew there was a tank on the first floor, so
he dragged himself up one flight and peeked over the edge into the lobby.
Taking heart, he pulled himself erect and put his hands in the air:
“Don’t shoot!”

AT least ninety-five people died in the Palace of Justice, including Supreme

Court Chief Justice Alfonso Reyes Echandia, his two bodyguards, and
Comandante Luis Otero. Alfonso Patiño and the rest of the associate justices of
the court’s constitutional chamber all died, probably among the first people
killed. In all, eleven of the twenty-four justices died, all by bullet wounds. Early
reports said the guerrillas executed the justices, but this was never confirmed.
Apparently all the guerrillas were killed. Twenty-two were identified,
and at least nineteen unidentified corpses were believed to have been part of the
attacking force. Eleven police and soldiers were killed, as were thirty-two other
people: auxiliary justices, secretaries, lawyers, and bystanders of one kind or
another.
Belisario Betancur’s presidency never recovered from this horror. Early
kudos for being “tough” with the guerrillas gave way to bitter recriminations.
Why had there never been any meaningful attempt to negotiate? Surviving
justices, among them Humberto Murcia, denounced the government in a
paroxysm of despair. Relations between Betancur and the Colombian justice
system hit bottom.
Justice Minister Parejo expressed the opinion that the seizure was
probably a cartel job, but he was the only top-level government official to say so
publicly. At first Colombians thought the cartel conspiracy theory was just
propaganda to deflect attention from the draconian performance of the
government and security forces. But as time passed the conviction would grow
that the cartel had indeed been involved. A year later every Colombian in a
responsible public position would accept without question that the traffickers
ordered and paid for the Palace of Justice assault in a joint venture with M-19:
good guerrilla theater, good intimidation for the traffickers.
But this postmortem did Belisario Betancur no good. When he spoke at
a memorial mass for the dead justices on November 10, the survivors boycotted
the service in disgust. Finally, Betancur believed in narcoguerrillas, just as he
had believed, finally, in extradition after the cartel killed Lara Bonilla. Death, it
seemed, was a convincing argument. Now the Medellín cartel was killing
Colombia.
26. BETANCUR AT TWILIGHT
In February 1986 President Belisario Betancur was halfway through his last year
in office. His presidency had begun with more fanfare and enthusiasm than any
in recent memory, but there was little left at twilight.
Betancur had suffered a massive loss of public confidence in the past
several months. Eight days after the Palace of Justice bloodbath, a devastating
volcano eruption and mud slide buried the Magdalena River town of Armero and
killed some 22,000 people. Relief efforts were slow and inefficient, the
magnitude of the tragedy not fully appreciated. Scathing criticism rained down
on the government, adding salt to Betancur’s already festering political wounds.
Betancur was double-damned for the Palace of Justice debacle. He
could never adequately explain why he’d failed to negotiate with the M-19
guerrillas in the early stages of the takeover. At the same time, he could never
adequately explain why his administration would ever have wanted to negotiate
with guerrillas in the first place. Betancur’s vaunted “Peace Process” lost
prestige. Until a few months before the seizure, the Colombian government had
had a cease-fire with the M-19. Did it now make any sense to try to achieve
peace with such savages?
Apparently Betancur still thought it did, and as his presidency limped
into 1986, he could point to what looked like a solid achievement. While the M-
19 peace initiative had collapsed, a truce with the much larger and more
prestigious FARC had held. The FARC, the Colombian Communist party, and
several Marxist labor groups had united to form the Patriotic Union party and
had stated their intention to participate in March parliamentary elections.
Betancur could not run for a second term in the presidential balloting two
months later, but if he could bring FARC into participation in legitimate
governmental activity, his Peace Process still had a chance to go forward. What
Betancur chose to ignore was that the Peace Process, like virtually every other
political initiative in Colombia, was already compromised by the Medellín
cartel. Since Ambassador Tambs had coined the term “narcoguerrillas” 2 1/2
years previously, the conviction had grown in Colombia that the FARC and the
cartel were indeed permanently involved with one another in a series of joint
ventures and business deals in the eastern llanos.
By the beginning of 1986, security forces accepted the connection.
Operations against llanos cocaine labs were always planned with the knowledge
that police would likely be challenged by highly trained jungle guerrilla cadre.
But evidence was also growing that the FARC-narc relationship had
started to deteriorate. Virtually from the moment the Patriotic Union put its new
electoral organization on display, its above-ground leaders and cadre began to be
attacked and assassinated in alarming numbers. Many Colombians, particularly
those who lived in the llanos, knew that the FARC and the cartel were
competing for control of campesino coca growers, and that both sides were
becoming increasingly impatient with the high-handed way in which the other
insisted on doing business. The llanos were basically FARC turf, and the cartel
knew that it couldn’t compete with the guerrillas there. What the cartel could do,
however, and do better than anyone, was murder the FARC’s urban cadre, that
is, prey on the Patriotic Union. It began to do so.

BY 1986 the cartel had moved into direct confrontation with the Colombian
government and had begun systematically to attack and destroy any Colombian
institution that it could not shape to suit its purposes. The criminal justice system
was a joke. The cartel murdered people at will, and the killers were almost never
pursued, let alone caught. The judges were just as poorly paid and poorly
protected as ever, working in primitive conditions that made their jobs almost
impossible. The atmosphere in the courts was so contentious and embittered by
mid-1986 that the conflicts became ridiculous. When the United States tried to
give the court system $290,000 for administrative reform, the employees’ union
rejected it “categorically” as “one further step in [the United States’] abusive
policy of intervention in the internal affairs of other states.”
The cartel had murdered one of Betancur’s justice ministers and had his
successor under constant threat of death. Betancur’s attorney general,
supposedly the watchdog of the courts, had gone to Panama to listen to the
cartel’s peace proposal. The Supreme Court was devastated. Justice Fernando
Uribe Restrepo, successor to Alfonso Reyes Echandia as chief justice, resigned
in March after four months in office because of cartel death threats. His
successor, Nemesio Camacho Rodriguez, would resign in January 1987 for the
same reason. On July 31, 1986, motorcycle killers ambushed and murdered
Justice Hernando Baquero Borda, last of the court’s old-guard, proextradition
hard-liners. Baquero was riding in a chauffeur-driven limousine with a
motorcycle escort. Besides Baquero, the gunmen also killed a bodyguard and a
bystander. Baquero’s wife, driver, motorcycle escort policeman, and another
bystander were wounded. Betancur blamed “organized crime’s hired assassins.”
One former justice summed up the sad state of Colombia’s Supreme
Court at midyear: “A year ago, to be a justice was every lawyer’s aspiration;
now everybody hides, so they won’t be asked to serve.”
Many Colombians continued to lobby for some sort of deal with the
cartel, arguing as always that cocaine was a gringo problem, not a Colombian
problem. But in 1986 even this was no longer true. Cocaine cost $15 per gram in
Bogotá, well within the means of any middle-to upper-middle-class Colombian.
For the less well-to-do there was always bazuko, now widely used in big city
slums. While no statistics existed, drug rehabilitation workers estimated users at
anywhere from three hundred thousand to three million. Most of the time bazuko
had traces of leaded gasoline, kerosene, ether, sulphuric acid, and other
chemicals used in the cocaine refining process. It could cause permanent brain
damage.
Still, Colombians were to a certain extent correct when they said that
Colombia “doesn’t have a major drug problem.” What Colombia had was a
major problem with institutional collapse. The courts, the political parties,
Congress, the police, most of the professional soccer league, and even the
bullfights were compromised by the cartel. Even the guerrilla groups--a
Colombian institution for thirty-five years-- had been forever tainted by the
traffickers.
Despite all this, extraditions continued, and Justice Minister Parejo
Gonzalez, with Betancur backing him to the hilt, remained implacable in his
pursuit of the traffickers. By the end of 1986 Colombia had extradited thirteen
people in all. All but one for drug-related crimes.
But still the cartel leaders eluded capture. Escobar and Gonzalo
Rodriguez Gacha were seen regularly in Medellín, in Cundinamarca province
near Bogotá and in Guaviare where “the Mexican” had his coca plantations.
Carlos Lehder was reported in and out of the cities but still for the most part
stuck in the jungle. Jorge Ochoa was in jail in Spain, but his organization was
intact and functioning well with his brothers at the helm.
And if the cartel members were invisible, their presence was
nevertheless felt constantly and as never before. The cartel wanted the
extradition treaty done away with, but the government still refused to get the
message. In 1986 Colombia would experience a year of violence such as it had
not seen in decades. Extradition was the theme; the Palace of Justice was the
overture; now came the opera.

THE year opened with a vendetta in Medellín. Rumor had it that the Ochoas had
lost a big load in the United States but for some reason refused to pay insurance
to its piggybackers. The piggybackers, furious at this behavior, tried to collect
from the clan in time-honored cartel style: they kidnapped people and held them
against the day their creditors paid their debts. In this fashion around twenty
people were murdered at the end of January and in February.
Key casualties included Rodrigo Pardo Murillo, Jorge Ochoa’s brother-
in-law, who was kidnapped and killed in reprisal for an earlier killing; Pablo
Correa Arroyave, another Ochoa brother-in-law and a key figure in Los Pablos,
who was ambushed and killed in the street; Pablo Correa Ramos, cartel
underboss and softball fanatic, who was hitting fungoes at a Medellín ballpark
when two spectators stopped watching him, pulled out machine pistols, and
riddled him with bullets.
On March 19, several weeks after these paroxysms, Medellín police
found the corpses of two Panamanians: Rubén Dario Paredes Jimenez, son of
General Noriega’s predecessor as chief of the Panamanian armed forces, and
Cesar Rodriguez Contreras, a former military pilot and Noriega confidant. The
pair had checked into Medellín’s downtown Hotel Nutibara on March 11 and
disappeared two days later. In 1988 a U.S. federal indictment would charge that
the two Panamanians came to Medellín to meet members of the cartel and
negotiate a 322-kilo cocaine deal. The indictment said both men were in
Medellín with Noriega’s knowledge and support.
This sort of ugly intrigue had long been a staple of the Medellín scene,
but the “Orchid City” in the last couple of years had surpassed itself. In 1985
Medellín homicides numbered 1,698, highest incidence per capita in a country
that had had 11,000 total murders, a rate higher than any in the world for a
country not actually embroiled in civil war. The United States, a nation with
almost ten times as many people as Colombia, had 16,000 murders in 1986.
In 1986 Medellín eclipsed these figures. Murder countrywide became
the leading cause of death for males between the ages of fifteen and forty, and
the University of Antioquia documented 1,155 homicides in the city in the year’s
first six months, 80.4 percent of them the result of gunshot wounds. For all of
1986, murders in Medellín would reach 3,500--about 10 a day.
Law enforcement in the city was totally paralyzed. Gossip in Bogotá
held that there were “20,000 unsolved murders in Medellín and only 20
defendants.” DAS in Medellín no longer investigated cases. Instead they were
passed to Bogotá, which sent agents from headquarters. If the agents stayed too
long, with their cultured Bogotá accents and smooth manner, the north Medellín
murder gangs got to know their faces and began following them around.

IN Spain, the Ochoa trial continued to creep through a legal labyrinth that most
Colombians had long ago ceased to understand. As expected, the January 21,
1986, Audiencia Nacional appeal ruling in favor of extraditing Ochoa to the
United States was far from the last word. The defense filed its own appeal
January 24, charging that the prosecution was acting unconstitutionally.
On January 31 the court agreed to consider the new defense motion, and
on February 12 it decided in favor of Colombia. In Baton Rouge Barry Seal had
a week to live, but it was probably too late to call off the hit, even if the Ochoas
had wished to do so.
After the February 12 finding the Ochoa case moved into a new,
extremely Byzantine phase that had nothing to do with the political content of
the indictments. The case had called into question virtually every aspect of
Spanish law relating to extradition, forcing the courts to review their statutes and
finally prompting legislators to enact a completely new set of guidelines. For the
next round of hearings the courts would rule strictly on the basis of a series of
weighted factors: the date of the extradition request, the nature and number of
the crimes alleged, and the nationality of the accused and related matters.
The U.S. request looked sadly deficient at this point, and American
officials despaired of their chances of gaining custody of Ochoa. Colombian
authorities were reaching the same conclusion. It seemed increasingly likely that
El Gordo would defeat the gringos and come home. The Seal murder
strengthened Ochoa’s position still further, removing the U.S. government’s
chief witness from the scene.
If Ochoa reached Colombia, Colombia was going to have to hold him.
The Betancur government got a practical demonstration of what this might entail
on March 19, when Honduran prisoner Juan Ramón Mata Ballesteros, wanted
for extradition to the United States in the murder of a DEA agent in Mexico,
spread about $2 million among eighteen trustees and guards and walked out of
Bogotá’s Cárcel Modelo. The warden immediately resigned. The previous year
motorcycle assassins had killed another prison warden after he’d discovered an
earlier plot to spring Mata.

ON May 25 voters elected Liberal Party candidate Virgilio Barco Vargas as

Colombia’s new president. He won with 58 percent of the vote, crushing his
Conservative party opponent by an unprecedented margin. Barco, a colorless
engineer educated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was known as
an honest man, a capable bureaucrat, and a friend of the United States. He was
supposed to be strongly antidrug and strongly proextradition, but drugs had not
warranted even a paragraph in his election platform.
 Furthermore Barco, like Betancur before him, gave drug enforcement
no priority whatsoever. He was interested in abolishing “absolute poverty”
among Colombia’s twenty-eight million citizens and in dismantling the National
Front, the cooperative political venture through which Liberals and
Conservatives had jointly ruled Colombia since 1958. Barco wanted a Liberal
Party government and had the mandate to impose it. It was an ambitious and
worthy plan, a direct attack on the cronyism that had turned Colombian politics
into the private domain of the nation’s aristocracy.
But again, like Betancur with his Peace Process, Barco was ignoring the
Medellín cartel, failing to recognize that the justice system was in desperate
straits, failing to recognize that his own party was desperately compromised,
failing to recognize that the traffickers were destroying Colombian institutions.
Like Betancur, he would not be minding the store when it most counted--at the
beginning.
It was not as if clues were lacking. After Barco’s election the traffickers
embarked on a chillingly efficient assassinations policy, aimed as always at
further intimidating law enforcement and at inducing the Supreme Court and
other legal authorities to abrogate the extradition treaty.
On July 3 motorcycle killers murdered Avianca Airlines chief of tickets
Luis Francisco Briceño Murillo in morning traffic. On September 1 motorcycle
killers murdered Avianca security chief Carlos Arturo Luna Rojas a few days
after he seized two hundred kilos of cocaine in an airplane tire.
On July 16 Luis Roberto Camacho, El Espectador correspondent in
Leticia, was killed after a protracted struggle with Evaristo Porras and other drug
traffickers over control of the local Chamber of Commerce. On July 18 Rubén
Dario Londoño Vasquez, the “Juan Perez” who had helped lead the plot against
Rodrigo Lara Bonilla in 1984, was murdered in Medellín as he stepped down
from his van. Two weeks later Justice Baquero was killed, and a week after that
Parejo Gonzalez, Lara Bonilla’s successor, was spirited out of Colombia under
guard and sent to Budapest as ambassador to Hungary. Betancur had tried to get
Lara Bonilla to Prague two years earlier, but the cartel had moved too quickly.
Parejo Gonzales had apparently been luckier.
On August 30 motorcycle killers in the Rio Magdalena town of
Barrancabermeja shot alternate congressman León Posada Pedraza of the
Communist Party; he bled to death three hours later. On September 1 another set
of motorcycle killers shot Patriotic Union Senator Pedro Nel Jimenez just as he
was about to get on an airplane to attend Posada’s funeral. The Patriotic Union
denounced Magdalena landowners and paramilitary death squads; by early 1987
they were also damning Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha and his gunmen in Guaviare.
By that time more than three hundred Patriotic Union militants had been killed.
In Cali the widespread lawlessness inspired a particularly vicious spate
of vigilantism. In August and the first three weeks of September, thirty-three
people were killed by gangs of murderers, twenty-one of them during a single
five-hour period the night of September 4-5. For the most part the victims were
whores, pimps, drunks, homosexuals, bazuko addicts, and pickpockets and other
petty crooks. These targets, police said, were killed by “death squads” or
someone with “a personal problem.” The victims also included Raul Echavarria
Barrientos, managing editor of Cali’s El Occidente newspaper, staunch supporter
of extradition and advocate of the death penalty for drug traffickers. He was shot
down by a pair of gunmen who waylaid him outside his house when he came
home from work.

ON July 13, 1986, after twenty months, six separate court findings, a final ruling
by a special panel, and a succession of motions and appeals so Byzantine that
only his lawyers seemed to understand them in the end, Jorge Ochoa came home
from Spain. He looked dough-faced and unhealthy, heavyset but not fat. He
landed at EI Dorado Airport in Bogotá and was taken to DAS headquarters for
fingerprinting and mugshots. His father was crying with joy: “I’m very happy
that my son has been returned. I think justice has been done.”
The Spanish Audiencia Nacional, in its penultimate (fifth) finding, said
it had based its decision on the fact that the Colombian petitions ultimately had
greater weight than those of the United States. The United States had made its
request first but had only made one request; Colombia had two. The charges
were equally serious in both countries. The deciding factor, then, said the court,
was nationality: “From the standpoint of fundamental rights, it is obvious that [in
Colombia] his case would be tried in a country that is his own, where he knows
the language, where the environment, the customs, and the Napoleonic legal
system itself would permit him greater possibilities of full judicial protection.”
Indeed. The way it was supposed to work, Ochoa would first travel to
Cartagena to stand trial for “falsification of a public document”-- in other words,
smuggling 128 Spanish fighting bulls into Colombia in 1981. After that he
would have to go to Medellín to deal with the drug indictment lifted from the
south Florida Nicaragua case. Then, in theory, he would have to face extradition
to the United States.
In fact, however, filing the Nicaragua case in Medellín set up potential
double jeopardy, making it extremely unlikely that he would ever be extradited.
How could somebody be tried twice on the same charges? Gilberto Rodriguez
Orejuela, extradited to Colombia a couple of weeks before Ochoa, had made
precisely this calculation and was sitting quietly in a Cali jail waiting for his case
to come to trial. Rodriguez Orejuela, a first-rank trafficker for perhaps fifteen
years, was a subtle man and probably the financial genius behind the cartel. Not
for nothing was he known as “the Chess Player.”
Ochoa was taken to Cartagena and on August 1 appeared in a
Colombian court--as far as anyone could tell-for the first time in his life. He
described himself as a “rancher” and said he didn’t have an ID card anymore.
Customs Judge Fabio Pastrana Hoyos indicted him for bull smuggling and
remanded him to jail to await trial.
Parejo Gonzalez, still in Bogotá but about to depart for Budapest, was
mindful of what was at stake and had taken great pains to cover all of Ochoa’s
obvious paths to legal escape. Chief among his measures was a message he sent
to Pastrana instructing the judge not to release his famous prisoner under any
circumstances. Regardless of his finding in the bull-smuggling case, Parejo
Gonzalez said, Pastrana should hold Ochoa and make ready to transfer him to
Medellín.
Days after the message, however, Parejo Gonzalez was gone to
Hungary, the Betancur administration had packed its bags, and on August 7
Virgilio Barco was inaugurated as the new Colombian president, bringing in a
whole government full of rookie bureaucrats.
Parejo Gonzalez had reason to worry, for the Ochoa family had already
sent envoys to Cartagena. Much later, documents seized by the Colombian army
would show that the envoys had spread 199 million pesos ($995,000) around the
city. The bagman was described as “Misael” in the documents, and the major
beneficiary was “the Professor,” who collected 132 million pesos ($660,000) for
“lowering bail and fines,” among other services.
On August 15, Judge Pastrana issued his finding. Ochoa was guilty as
charged and was sentenced to twenty months in jail. There was, however,
something else. Unknown to virtually everyone in the country, Ochoa had
already been released. Two days earlier Pastrana had paroled Ochoa on 2.3
million pesos ($11,500) bond. Ochoa had spent precisely thirty days in jail in
Colombia.
Pastrana, who was thirty years old, had told Ochoa to check in faithfully
every two weeks. Pastrana was fired August 21, six days before Ochoa’s first
reporting date. Ochoa never bothered to report to anyone.
THE RAMIREZ CONTRACT
On January 25, 1986, a middle-aged man appeared at the Bogotá headquarters of
Colombian National Police intelligence (F-2). The police knew the man as a
sometime informant who had close ties with M-19 guerrillas in Medellín. On the
rare occasions when he helped police, his information had always been good. He
worked for money and always demanded the going rate--and then some. Police
suspected he was a closet gambler or a womanizer who liked to buy expensive
presents.
His story that Saturday morning concerned Pablo Escobar. A bit over
two months earlier, he said, Escobar had put out a murder contract on an
unnamed “police colonel.” It was a big job: (twentyfive million pesos
($152,000) plus expenses. Someone had held the contract for two months, then
dropped it. A fortnight ago it had been picked up again, this time by the
Medellín chapter of the Ricardo Franco Brigade, a particularly savage FARC
splinter group that had made recent headlines by torturing and murdering as
many as two hundred of its members, charging they were police infiltrators. The
Brigade had named “Chief of Executions” Carlos Espinosa Osorio, alias Cuco
(“Foxy”) to handle the police hit. The informant took care to point out that Cuco
had had nothing to do with the Ricardo Franco massacres. He was a killer, yes,
but he wasn’t crazy.
Escobar, the informant continued, had advanced Cuco two million
pesos ($12,000), which the hit team had used for black market purchases in
Medellín: four 9-mm Smith & Wesson pistols, one .357 Ruger revolver, and one
.45-caliber MAC-10 machine pistol. All of this had been dumped in the back of
a rental van and driven to Bogotá with a motorcycle escort. Now everything was
lying in the trunk of a red Renault 18 parked in front of an Escobarowned safe
house in the town of Chía, a bedroom community on Bogotá’s northern edge.
One hit team member was watching it.
The informant didn’t know who the target was, but he--and Escobar and
Cuco--had a lot of information about him. Much of it was coming from a police
lieutenant “who had the colonel’s confidence” and was betraying it for five
million pesos ($30,000). Cuco and his gunmen knew, for example, that the
colonel was going to start a course at generals school on the twenty-fifth “of
some unspecified month”; that the antinarcotics police had given him a going-
away party at a Bogotá club; that the DEA had lent him an armored Mercedes-
Benz; that his mother lived at Diagonal 63, no. 27-43 in Bogotá, that he had a
country house in Cajica, north of the capital; that he drove a Toyota camper,
license plate AL-26-18.
There was more, and the police wrote it all down, but they already knew
who the target was. The country house was in Granada, not Cajica, and the
armored car was a Ford LTD, not a Mercedes. Still, only one colonel fit the
information: Jaime Ramirez Gomez.
The informant continued. The pre-Cuco hit team, he said, had tried
twice to kill the target. Once, outside a club in Cajica, they had aborted the hit
because the colonel had too big an escort; the second time had been at his
mother’s house at Christmas, and the target had been surrounded by his relatives.
Escobar, he said, wanted to kill the colonel but had no interest in murdering
anyone else.
The informant said the new hit team had picked three places where they
might best locate the colonel and kill him: across the street from the Paz de Rio
Bakery on Avenida 68, on a highway overpass near the General Santander
Police Academy, and at his mother’s house.
The informant said he would be in regular contact with Cuco’s people
and would be glad to provide further information to the police. Anything else the
police wanted, they should get in touch with him. And, oh yes, bring 400,000
pesos ($2,425).
Two days later the F-2 met with Police Lieutenant Colonel Teodoro
Campo, the chief of the AntiNarcotics Unit, and told him what the informant had
said. Campo told the F-2 police to watch the Chía safe house and to wait for
Colonel Ramirez to return from leave. He did not want to disturb Ramirez “until
we are sure.”
Jaime Ramirez had been officially relieved as AntiNarcotics Unit police
chief by Lieutenant Colonel Teodoro Campo Gomez on December 31, 1985. He
took forty days’ leave and returned to duty the second week in February.
Ramirez always felt pretty good about himself and about life in general, but he
was especially bouncy these days.
And why not? In the three years he had served as chief of the
AntiNarcotics Unit, his men had seized twenty-seven tons of cocaine, arrested
7,941 men and 1,405 women, confiscated 2,783 trucks, 1,060 cars, 83 boats, and
116 airplanes. Fifty-four percent of all the cocaine seized in the world in 1985
was seized by his men. Ninety percent of Colombia’s 1985 marijuana crop was
destroyed by herbicide sprayed from his crop dusters.
His unit had been awarded best in the police in 1985, and Ramirez had
been selected for general, moved ahead a class at the Superior War College, and
slated for early promotion. At the beginning of 1986 he was undeniably the most
famous narc in the world--a legend in his own country, revered by the DEA,
sought for his counsel by police from Lima to La Paz to Washington.
Sought, too, by the Medellín cartel--which wanted him as much as it
had wanted anyone else in its history. It was not surprising that Escobar ordered
the hit. Escobar acted as if he kept a book on those who caused him pain. Every
once in a while, it seemed, he took the book out of his pocket and examined the
names he had written. And every once in a while he crossed one off: DAS Major
Monroy Arenas, who had arrested him for dope in 1976; Rodrigo Lara Bonilla,
who had told him off on the floor of Congress in 1983; Tulio Manuel Castro Gil,
who had indicted him for murder in 1984.
Now it was Jaime Ramirez. Nobody had cost Escobar more money than
Ramirez, and now Ramirez was going to pay. It would be a tough hit, maybe the
toughest the cartel had ever attempted. The target was an outstanding
professional lawman. He knew the traffickers wanted to kill him, would almost
certainly find out about the plot, and would take extraordinary measures to
protect himself. It was the kind of bald challenge that would appeal to Escobar.
The cartel wouldn’t dare go after Jaime Ramirez. Would it?
First Escobar contracted the job with his own hitmen. Then he farmed it
out to the Ricardo Franco Brigade. Later he would give pieces of the contract to
other members of the cartel, selling shares in vengeance. Gonzalo Rodriguez
Gacha bought in, to get back for the millions he lost at Tranquilandia. Carlos
Lehder also bought a piece. And he, probably more than any other member of
the Medellín cartel, had reason to wish Ramirez dead.
In his final, superb year as chief of the narcotics police, Ramirez had
hounded Lehder unmercifully. His detectives staked out airstrips and safe houses
all across Colombia, questioned Lehder’s friends and acquaintances, and
meticulously developed a countrywide network of snitches and intelligence
operatives.
Twice they almost got him. In March 1985 detectives reported that
Liliana Garcia Osorio, “Lili,” a twentyfour-year-old party girl from Armenia,
had left the town house that Lehder bought for her, had taken a commercial
flight to Bogotá, and had climbed aboard a privately owned Bell JetRanger III
helicopter and flown into the eastern llanos. Traveling with her was Verónica,
the three-year-old daughter she had with Lehder.
Six weeks later, on April 26, several dozen AntiNarcotics Unit police in
two separate expeditions raided six sites in the llanos of Meta and Casanare
provinces. They stayed five days, searched hundreds of square miles of jungle,
and interviewed dozens of people. Yes, Lehder owned the property; yes, he had
been here; but, no, he hadn’t been around in a while. It was an old story: easy to
seize labs, property, even cocaine, damn near impossible to sneak up on anyone.
But they made him suffer. At Finca La Gaitana on the Manacacias
River in Meta, police found some bandoliers, a few walkie-talkies, and 355 kilos
of cocaine buried in plastic tubs in the yard. And inside a nicely appointed white
stucco house with a corrugated tin roof, they found $1,678,680 in cash, packed
in cardboard rum boxes. La Gaitana had an airstrip, two airplanes, a couple of
Toyota four-wheel-drive vehicles, a swimming pool, and space to sleep fifty
people.
And some twenty miles away, at a rough-cut clapboard farmhouse, the
police found Lehder’s German passport, a pile of other documents, unlimited
baby toys, and baby pictures. They also arrested ten people, including Liliana
Garcia Osorio and Verónica Lehder. Lili was held for trial on charges of
consorting with a known fugitive. She would do two years in Villavicencio and
the Buen Pastor women’s penitentiary in Bogotá.
After the April raids, Lehder moved into the forests on the eastern edge
of Meta to another finca called La Abundancia. Ramirez’s informants said
Lehder was doing a lot of coke, lifting weights, and riding dirt bikes. Lehder also
had no doubt that Ramirez was his chief tormentor, denouncing him in May in
an “open letter” to the minister of defense. He complained of the treatment Lili
and the other prisoners were receiving in Villavicencio and denounced the
United States, “destined by providence to plague America with hunger and
misery in the name of liberty.”
Ramirez’s men hit La Abundancia August 5, 1985. The helicopters got
lost on the way and arrived a day late but still missed Lehder only by seconds.
Two more captured girlfriends said he was last seen running toward the Rio Uva
in his red underwear carrying a machine pistol at port arms.
The police stayed in the area eleven days. They found only sixty kilos
of cocaine and no money, but the finca was chock full of useful documents,
photographs, and other artifacts. Lehder had built a motorcycle repair shed and
put two people to work in it. The house was unpainted clapboard with a tin roof,
but roomy and comfortable. Lehder had a television (but nothing to watch), a
couple of typewriters, a blender, and some stereo equipment. A book rack had an
eclectic selection of Spanish and English titles: V. S. Naipaul’s The Return of
Eva Perdón (Spanish); Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (English);
Tai-Pan (English); a German grammar; In the National Interest by Marvin Kalb
and Ted Koppel (Spanish). The leather chair used by Lehder in the Spanish
television interview was in the front yard.
The police also found a packet of letters indicating a long
correspondence between Lehder and Pablo Salah, the Bogotá drug lawyer.
Lehder’s chief interest, not surprisingly, was to get out of the jungle, either
through exile or by somehow resolving his legal problems.
Salah’s replies--addressed “Dear Charlie”--were uniformly unctuous,
patronizing, and painfully “hip” at the same time, like a middle-aged college
professor suddenly trying to be a swinger. For all that, some of the advice was
sound. On July 27 he told Lehder to keep his mouth shut: “All your problems
began when you started with the politics. The trick is to make yourself dead, the
phantom--no publicity so the gringos and Colombians forget you. . . . The
important thing is not to die rich. The important thing is to live rich--like
before.”
In a later letter, Salah addressed Lehder’s apparent intent to emigrate to
Germany, explaining as to a moron the difference between East and West:
“Watch out for Berlin. Berlin is in the middle of East Germany, Communist as if
Bogotá were in the middle of Venezuela. Take care not to ride Pan Am, not to go
to Berlin, not to enter American military bases or NATO bases.”
Despite the lessons in geopolitics, Lehder in his more quixotic moments
still entertained thoughts of a political comeback. At some point he apparently
decided to enlist the help of the Soviet Union and drafted a letter to the Soviet
embassy in Bogotá. It was addressed “Dear and Remembered Comrades” and
opened with the thought that “rebellion against tyranny is the fiber and texture of
our minds.
“What I know today, after many years of political and revolutionary
experiences, after having become familiar with the brother governments of Cuba
and Nicaragua, of the Bahamas and Belize, of Puerto Rico and Haiti, as well as
all the countries of Latin America, as well as Central America, [is that] . . . their
economic and social problems are caused by the imperialist gringo
industrialists.” He proposed an integrated Latin America, achieved through the
“eradication of gringo imperialism, headed by its paramilitary industrialists and
international Judaism.”
Lehder suggested that he, as leader of the National Latin Movement,
and “your charismatic leader Gorvanache [cq]” are “making common cause” in a
revolution on behalf of “those peoples enslaved by imperialism.”
La Abundancia was Ramirez’s last try. He had failed to capture Lehder,
but he had thrown Lehder’s girlfriends in jail, seized his stash and his money,
and run him ragged for more than a year. In September 1985 a photograph of
Lehder, looking shaggier, hollow-eyed, and slightly crazed, circulated in Bogotá
newsrooms purporting to show how he had joined the Indian guerrilla group
Quintín Lamé under the nom de guerre “Rambo.” Lehder was nothing anymore.
The reason was mostly Jaime Ramirez.

IN February 1986 Ramirez, his wife, Helena, and sons Jaime and Javier moved
into their new quarters on the grounds of the General Santander Police Academy
in Bogotá. As a senior colonel Ramirez was entitled to official housing, but
security was also a concern. Ramirez had been a target for years, but now, as a
student, he wouldn’t have access to the daily flow of information that he’d had
as a field officer. He needed extra protection, so he moved to General Santander.
It was a standard maneuver by police officers with special security concerns, and
many of his former associates had done the same thing. It was restrictive and
often boring living on the base. But it was safe, at least for the family. Ramirez
was going to have to drive to the War College each day.
Still, he wasn’t particularly worried, even when he and Helena heard
Campo’s story. Cops had staked out the Chía safe house for a week after the
informant had visited F-2 and had seen nothing untoward. The Renault was
there, just as the informant had said, but so what? The worst thing that had
happened was that the neighbors had seen the F-2 stakeout team taking pictures
of the house and had called the police, which was quite embarrassing.
Ramirez only began to worry after he visited F-2, saw the informant,
and asked him the famous Ramirez five or six questions. The answers made him
visibly upset. “This guy isn’t lying,” he told his family. “This guy’s telling the
truth.”
Of particular interest were the two alleged assassination attempts that
had already taken place. The first was an obvious reference to Ramirez’s going-
away party at the Finca J. R. near Cajica. Ramirez had no escort, but the
generals and civilian brass at the party did, and there were hordes of bodyguards
all over the place. The second incident clearly described his parents’ Christmas
Eve party. Late at night the entire family--brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles,
children--had streamed into the front yard to watch a fireworks display. The idea
that Escobar’s torpedoes were hanging around filled Ramirez with dread.
He had to put the informant on the payroll, but F-2 could only spend
20,000 pesos ($121). Never mind, said Ramirez. He took the informant with him
and drove to DEA headquarters to talk to Special Agent-in-Charge George
Frangullie. The informant made his pitch, Frangullie nodded and handed over
the money. The informant left for Medellín, promising to stay in touch.

JAIME Ramirez’s life changed dramatically. For the first time in his career he
could not hit back. He didn’t have a command, didn’t have access to unlimited
intelligence, and couldn’t make aggressive tactical moves of his own to keep his
enemies off balance. He had always told his men that “you have to kick the drug
traffickers in the nuts,” and nobody was better at it than he was. Now he had to
sit back and be dependent on other people. It was exasperating, worrisome, and
frightening.
For the next eight months Ramirez drove to school and back and drove
to police headquarters and back, and that was it. He rode in the LTD that the
DEA had given him, carried a .38-caliber revolver and a MAC-10, and wore a
bulletproof vest. His driver also had a .38 revolver, as did the police colonel who
was going to school with Ramirez and who hitched an occasional ride. Both the
driver and the other colonel knew Ramirez was under constant threat, but
Ramirez didn’t give them specifics. It wouldn’t do them any good. The driver
varied his route daily and took careful note of the ambush sites described by the
informant. When possible, motorcycle police scouted the route before the LTD
drove it.
The tension put a terrible strain on the family. Helena, an attractive
woman seven years younger than Ramirez, was nervous by nature and extremely
sensitive to her husband’s moods. She had always worried about him and had
occasionally been terrified--for instance, when the police had talked about
transferring him to Medellín in 1984 but this was different. She felt like a sitting
duck, and she knew Jaime did, too. At times she was so nervous it made her sick.
The boys went to school every day in an armored bus, and everybody
wore bulletproof vests on the rare occasions when the family went out to eat.
Fortunately, young Jaime, “Jimy,” was a lot like his father, calm, intelligent,
confident way beyond his sixteen years. Jimy had learned to use the MAC-10,
and he rode shotgun on family outings. In restaurants he kept the machine pistol
on the floor between his legs.
Still, this was no way to live. Ramirez’s own father, almost eighty, was
asking after him, talking about how he kept dreaming that Jaime had died.
Ramirez didn’t dare visit him, but he called his brother Francisco, told him
everything, and asked him to settle the old man down. “It will be impossible to
avoid telling him about the danger,” Ramirez said. “But minimize it.”
During the week before Easter Sunday, Francisco and his wife, Lucero,
prevailed upon Jaime and Helena to join them for a few days at a cabana at the
Club Militar--the first outing of any consequence either had had since they’d
heard about the threat. Jaime was going stir crazy, fuming with rage and
impatience: “I’ve always been the pursuer, and now they’re pursuing me,” he
said. “I’m the one who puts people against the wall, not the other way around.”

AT first the M-19 informant reported more or less regularly, giving police a
fairly detailed description of Cuco’s current movements. The news was not
good. The hit team was now rumored to have unlimited explosives, rocket-
propelled grenades and launchers, seven cars, a minivan, and a taxi. It was said
that they were thinking of mining the finca in Granada and razing it to the
ground with Ramirez inside.
Then, after a couple of months, the informant stopped calling, and the
flow of news suddenly dried up. The police were extremely worried. They
increased Ramirez’s security and redoubled efforts to develop new information.
But their regular snitches came up with nothing, and they couldn’t make any
progress with the original information. The Chía safe house was a dead end;
nothing was happening there. The traitorous police lieutenant had not been
found, and F-2 had finally concluded that he did not exist. Ramirez now had a
noncommissioned officer, three patrolmen, and a motorcycle escort guarding
him at all times.
In May the AntiNarcotics Unit sent Captain Octavio Ernesto Mora
Jimenez to Medellín to head an intelligence group that would, among other
things, check out the threats against Ramirez. An experienced officer, Mora had
worked for Ramirez in the past and would report to him directly. It was
understood that Mora would attempt to get close to Escobar’s organization--a
touchy assignment, but Mora had done similar jobs in the past.
Mora called Ramirez frequently. He had managed to make contact with
relatives of Escobar. He confirmed that Cuco still held the contract--for twenty
million pesos ($121,200), not twentyfive million-- and that Escobar had sold
pieces of it to Rodriquez Gacha and Lehder. His sources were hinting, however,
that Escobar was thinking of pulling the contract or had already done so. Mora
didn’t know why this was contemplated, but he would keep checking.
By the way, Mora said, Escobar’s people were telling him that Escobar
wanted to meet with Ramirez, talk things over. Ramirez wasn’t interested. This
was just another variation on a theme he had been hearing for nearly four years.
Get him in a room with Escobar, snap a couple of photos, and watch his career
go straight down the toilet. Ramirez told Mora to tell Escobar that if he turned
himself in, Ramirez would ensure that he got fair treatment.
 And that was it. Escobar, ever hopeful, searched for a weakness in
Ramirez’s armor, and Ramirez fended off the advances as abruptly as possible.
The news about the killing possibly being called off was seductive and seemed
on the face of it to dovetail nicely with Escobar’s alleged peace overtures. Still,
Ramirez didn’t put much stock in the exchange so far. Everything Ramirez knew
about Escobar told him to keep his guard up.
This seemed to be a particularly wise course after Ramirez’s caretaker
in Granada reported later in May that suspicious characters had been hanging
around the finca. There were four of them in all, said the man. The leader was
muscular, curly-haired, and about five feet nine inches tall. One of his sidekicks
was shorter and pale-faced. These two walked past the house one Thursday
afternoon, left, and returned the next day with two friends in a red car.
Neighbors told the caretaker that the car was a Renault. All four spent the
afternoon walking back and forth, always keeping Ramirez’s house in sight.
The caretaker saddled a horse and rode to Silvania, the next town,
where he telephoned Ramirez from a booth. Then he got on a bus and traveled to
the police academy. Ramirez questioned him, then showed him a mug book. The
man identified the curly-haired fellow. Ramirez had never heard of him. Helena
burst into tears. “Easy, sweetie,” Ramirez said. “Nothing’s going to happen.”

GENERALS school finished in August, and the class took a month-long field
trip to Europe to visit other police departments and participate in seminars.
Ramirez collected suitcases full of pamphlets and reports, returning to Bogotá
brimming with new ideas about how to make his police force the best and most
modern in the world.
Now he was marking time, waiting for his promotion at the end of the
year and doing make-work at police headquarters. He often broke the tedium--
and the tension--by working as a consultant. The Peruvian government invited
him to give seminars in narcotics law enforcement, and the Bolivian government
and the DEA asked him to participate in Operation Blast Furnace, busting labs in
Bolivia’s eastern Beni wilderness. In the Beni, Ramirez was able to help locate a
couple of labs belonging to Escobar; he watched with glee as the local police
torched them. It was the first time he had been able to hit back in almost a year.
He went to Venezuela, Brazil, back to Peru, and then to the United
States. He visited Washington and talked to old friends, among them Johnny
Phelps, who now ran the cocaine desk at DEA headquarters. Phelps found
Ramirez haggard, fidgety, and worried about his family. Phelps could
sympathize. Police in general were among the most aggressive people on earth.
They hated to feel helpless. Ramirez was more aggressive than most cops Phelps
knew. This thing with Escobar was eating him up.
Ramirez finally got a break October 21, when word reached him that
one Carlos Alberto Espinosa Osorio, more commonly known as Cuco, had been
killed in a Medellín firefight. Captain Mora called and said it now appeared
more likely that Escobar had pulled the contract on Ramirez. Cuco’s demise also
made it less likely that someone would try to kill Ramirez in the near future.
Presumably whoever picked up the contract would have to repeat a lot of Cuco’s
research, if not start over altogether.
Ramirez liked this news so much that he called F-2 and asked that the
department take back his bodyguards. He was feeling more secure, and there was
no indication that any killers had been able to get close to the family. The Chía
safe house had now been raided half a dozen times with no result, and a stakeout
at Ramirez’s finca had produced no further visits from the curly-haired man or
his sidekicks. Mora called almost daily, and Ramirez was starting, finally, to
relax. In a couple of months the ordeal would be over, and he would be back in
harness.
On Thursday, November 13, 1986, Francisco Ramirez, knowing that
things seemed to be looking up for his brother, invited him, Helena, and the boys
to visit his and Lucero’s finca for a family gathering the following Monday. It
would be the last day of a three-day holiday weekend, and the drive for Jaime to
Francisco’s place in Sasaima, about thirty miles northwest of Bogotá, would be
short and relatively risk-free. Jaime said he would think about it.
The next day at ten a.m. Ramirez received a call from Mora in
Medellín. As Ramirez listened his face began to loosen, and he began to talk
animatedly. He spoke for about ten minutes, then hung up.
“They’ve suspended the contract,” he told Helena. Mora, he said, had
researched further and had finally been able to confirm that Escobar was no
longer interested in killing him--at least for the moment. He could take it easy.
He did, however, have a lot more to tell Ramirez.
Ramirez told Mora he didn’t want to talk any more over the phone, but
Mora should come visit him. Fine, said Mora, when should I be there?
“Come Monday evening, about seven p.m.,” Ramirez replied. “It looks
like I’m going to be out of town for the weekend.”
The Ramirezes left Bogotá Sunday afternoon. The DEA’s armored Ford
stayed in the garage, and the family rode in Ramirez’s white Toyota minivan.
Ramirez felt relatively safe for the first time in months. He didn’t discount the
danger altogether, but he knew he wouldn’t be on the road for very long at a
stretch, and he was confident there would be a lot of traffic because of the
holiday. It would be hard to set up an ambush. And just in case, Jimy had the
MAC-10 on the floor in the back of the Toyota.
The family stopped for lunch at a finca in Madrid just outside Bogotá,
then drove northeast for about an hour to Villeta to spend the night at the house
of a friend. At ten a.m. on Monday they climbed back into the Toyota and drove
a half hour to Francisco’s finca at Sasaima.
Everybody--parents, brothers, sisters, nieces, and nephews--was there,
and Ramirez had a wonderful time. He was a gregarious man by nature, a kidder
and a tall-tale teller who liked nothing better than to sit out on the lawn and chat
with his family. It now looked as though he would become the police’s chief of
personnel, and he gushed with plans about how he would get all his favorite
officers working for him again, how he would encourage beat cops and
provincial commands to get interested in antinarcotics work. It was shop talk,
but Francisco loved to hear it. Jaime seemed relaxed, which was good, Francisco
thought. But had the threat really ended? Maybe Jaime just wanted so badly for
it to be over that he pretended it no longer existed.
At 4:30 p.m. Ramirez pushed back his chair, refused another plate of
Lucero’s pig’s knuckles, and summoned his family. Everybody would be driving
back to Bogotá that evening. Better to get an early start. As the Ramirezes pulled
away, several other drivers parked haphazardly nearby started their engines and
swung in behind the Toyota. Later, neighbors would remember that the cars and
drivers had been hanging about for several hours. The neighbors would also
remember that they didn’t recognize any of the drivers or their cars. At the time,
though, no one thought anything about it.
AT 5:43 p.m., November 17. 1986, the Ramirez Toyota started across a
highway bridge over the Rio Bogotá separating Cundinamarca province from the
capital. Traffic was heavy but manageable. The Ramirezes were moving
steadily, albeit slowly, in the far right lane.
A little bit past the middle of the bridge a red Renault 18 came up along
the Toyota’s left side, as if to pass, then paused, matching the Toyota’s speed. A
MAC-10 machine pistol appeared in the Renault’s passenger window. It bucked
once and then coughed in a prolonged burst.
Ramirez, dead instantly from multiple gunshot wounds, slumped against
the steering wheel. Helena, wounded slightly in the right knee, grabbed for the
wheel and twisted it to the right, driving the Toyota into the side of the bridge,
where it stalled against the curb. Javier was all right, knicked in the hand by a
bullet, but Jimy was shot through both thighs and bleeding badly. Nonetheless,
he fumbled in the darkness for the MAC-10. He had wrapped it in a blanket and
stashed it out of sight to keep it away from his young cousins at Franciscos’s
house. Now, when he needed it, he couldn’t find it.
The Renault pulled ahead and stopped in front of the van. The doors
opened, and three men climbed out. They were all in their twenties, all well
dressed and well groomed. Everybody remembered that. All three carried
machine pistols. The driver remained in the Renault with the engine idling.
Two of the gunmen stood guard in front of the Renault and behind the
Toyota. The third man walked to the driver’s door of the Toyota, opened it,
pulled the trigger of his MAC-10, and emptied his magazine into Jaime Ramirez.
Helena opened the Toyota’s passenger door and slid to the ground.
Crouching and crawling, she edged to the back of the van, where she
came face to face with one of the sentinels. “Please don’t kill me,” she said. The
gunman looked at her, then turned away, climbed into the Renault, and drove off
with his friends.

THE new year arrived, and Jaime Ramirez’s classmates became generals.
Helena Ramirez petitioned the government to grant Jaime a posthumous
promotion. Her husband’s superiors seconded her application, noting Ramirez’s
consistently outstanding performance. The letter moved up the chain of
command, acquiring signatures and seals of approval.
On May 20, 1987, the Defense Ministry sent Helena a letter. Her
husband’s death unfortunately did not satisfy “the referenced norm,” it said, in
that it was not the result of “meritorious acts of service” or “acts of public order”
or “reason of combat or international conflict.” In other words, he had not been
killed in action. The ministry did not grant exceptions.
28. THE CARTEL INDICTMENT
For a long time, U.S. Law enforcement had resisted the idea that any one group
of Colombian cocaine traffickers controlled so much of the trade. In the 1970s
the Colombian traffickers appearing in the United States were regarded as an
amorphous wave of criminal entrepreneurs. In 1977 DEA agents in Medellín
discovered the bookkeeping records of Griselda Blanco and began to learn of the
ties among the traffickers they pursued. But the Colombians were merely
lumped together under “the Medellín trafficking syndicate,” a grab bag title that
included Griselda Blanco, Pablo Escobar, and just about any other Colombian
from Medellín. It was a shadow portrait, an outline without definition. No
attempt was made to rank the traffickers, although even by the early 1980s
Escobar, Ochoa, and Lehder always topped any informal list. The problem was
that the three top traffickers were considered separately and not in concert. The
3,906-pound TAMPA seizure in Miami in 1982 demonstrated that the traffickers
cooperated to an extent not previously believed possible. The TAMPA bust
prompted the creation of Operation Fountainhead, a secret DEA program that
used computers to try to break the codes on the kilo-sized cocaine packages. By
1983 Operation Fountainhead had traced dozens of cocaine shipments back to
Jorge Ochoa. A pattern was emerging, a spiderweb of connections. Up to this
point, Ochoa was merely referred to as either “a top echelon trafficker” or
someone “well documented as the head of one of the largest cocaine smuggling
organizations from Colombia,” according to Fountainhead reports. The word
“cartel” was introduced in 1983 in a Fountainhead analysis of the largest cocaine
seizures in the United States: 1,254 pounds discovered in a van near Cleveland,
Tennessee, on July 11, 1982, “was linked to the Medellín trafficking cartel under
Operation Southern Comfort”; codes on packages containing 652 pounds taken
from an airplane in Dothan, Alabama, on March 15, 1983, “revealed that the
cocaine originated from the Medellín trafficking cartel.” The concept was taking
form.
It wasn’t until Tranquilandia, however, that the DEA analysts realized
the scale of the Colombian cocaine trade. And it wasn’t until later that year,
when Barry Seal brought back the first evidence documenting how Escobar,
Ochoa, and Lehder worked together, that the word “cartel” began to gain
currency within DEA. When Barry Seal testified in Miami in the summer of
1985, he called the organization he worked for “the Jorge Ochoa cocaine cartel.”
That same year in debriefings with the DEA, Max Mermelstein referred to it as
“the Medellín combine.” The DEA itself made no attempt to single out the cartel
at the apex of cocaine traffickers. They referred to “Colombian cocaine cartels,”
giving equal weight to the Medellín group and the Cali group run by Gilberto
Rodriguez Orejuela and Jose Santacruz Londoño. Hundreds of cases and
seizures and bits of intelligence information about Jorge Ochoa, Pablo Escobar,
and Carlos Lehder were still disconnected, pieces of a huge picture yet to be
assembled.

IN the summer of 1985 those pieces began to come together between the ninth
and tenth floors of the U.S. Attorney’s Office in downtown Miami. By then, law
enforcement had made great strides against the cocaine trade in south Florida.
The sustained heat of the increased DEA and Customs presence had driven the
traffickers underground. Wild shoot-outs in shopping malls became a thing of
the past. Centac 26, the DEA-Metro Dade police squad that targeted Colombian
cocaine murders, methodically pursued the cocaine cowboys. El Loco, the
balding gunman from the “turnpike shooting,” got caught in Los Angeles in
1982. Paco Sepulveda, suspected but never charged in the Dadeland shooting,
was finally arrested in New York City in 1983. And Griselda Blanco got nabbed
in a DEA undercover operation in southern California in 1985. At the time she
was living in a luxury town house in Irvine and supplying hundreds of kilos of
cocaine each month to the ravenous Los Angeles market through her three young
sons, Dixon, Osvaldo, and Wber.
American laws quickly adapted to the Colombian drug defendants. The
low bonds that produced numerous bond jumpers in the Operation Swordfish
money-laundering case led directly to a new federal law that allowed drug
defendants to be held without bond in “pretrial detention.” Money laundering
became a federal crime. Sentences for Colombians convicted of drug crimes
grew longer and longer.
Yet despite the arrests and advances in the United States, the center of
the cocaine business, the Medellín cartel, remained intact, safely ensconced in its
Colombian strongholds. And the cocaine poured in like never before. In one 15-
day period in January 1985, police and federal drug agents in Florida seized
2,250 kilos of cocaine, more than they had in the first three months of 1984 and
more than all the cocaine seized for the entire year of 1981. And 1985 proved to
be the year of the crack epidemic, when the smoking of a crude form of cocaine
base spread like wildfire through America’s urban areas. By the end of the year
cocaine seizures in south Florida topped twenty-five tons, more than double the
previous record. The price kept dropping, from $35,000 a kilo down to $20,000,
indicating that despite the seizures more cocaine was hitting the streets than ever
before. Cocaine made the cover of Newsweek and Time magazines in the same
week in February 1985. Newsweek even ran a sidebar with its cover story,
“Colombia’s Kings of Coke,” naming Ochoa, Escobar, Lehder, Hernan Botero,
Gilberto Rodriguez Orejuela, and Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha. “Together they
have become Colombia’s cocaine overlords--a small tightknit clique of
smugglers almost as rich and powerful as the Colombian government itself,” the
magazine story said. “To protect their extensive interests, a number have
allegedly formed their own little cartel, buying as many opponents as they can,
murdering some of those they can’t.”
Cocaine, the jet-set high, had metamorphosed into cocaine, the
American middle-class phenomenon. It was in this period when cocaine use
exploded in the United States that a small group of federal prosecutors in Miami
prepared the way for the Medellín cartel’s coming-out party.
In the stairwell of the U.S. Attorney’s Office on the Miami River,
Assistant U.S. Attorney Bob Dunlap bumped into Assistant U.S. Attorney Bob
Martinez. Dunlap was prosecuting the Nicaragua case with Dick Gregorie, chief
of the Major Narcotics Section. Martinez happened to be on his way up to talk to
Gregorie. Dunlap was a repository for information on Colombian traffickers, one
of the few people in the office who could keep all the names straight. He had
been talking about “the Medellín cartel” for more than a year. Martinez was also
obsessed with the cartel; he had handled the Frank Torres ether case that led to
the discovery of Tranquilandia.
In the stairwell, Dunlap and Martinez began talking about their
respective cases. The more they talked, the more it seemed they were working
on different parts of the same, bigger case, a conspiracy involving the Ochoas,
Escobar, Lehder, and others. Why not gather all the evidence involving these
people and indict them as one criminal enterprise?
Martinez went up the stairwell and pitched the idea to Dick Gregorie.
“Why are we trying all these cases separately?” Martinez asked. “Why
don’t we do it as one big case? As one big RICO?”
RICO was the Racketeer-Influenced Corrupt Organizations Act, the tool
that had been used so effectively for two decades against the Mafia. It allowed
prosecutors to define an “enterprise,” an organization put together to commit
crimes. Once a RICO was established, any number of crimes could be pinned to
the organization in a single court proceeding, and all the organization’s assets
could be seized.
Gregorie liked the idea. “Great,” he said. “Let’s do it.”
 The “cartel case,” as it came to be known, was a volunteer project for
Martinez, something he worked on in his spare time. Martinez was supposed to
be handling corruption cases in the office, not drug cases. At thirty-two he was a
product of the Georgetown Law Center and the Wharton School of Business. He
had grown up in an upper-class Cuban family that had fled Fidel Castro’s regime
in 1960. He had been with the U.S. Attorney’s Office for three years.
In late 1985 Martinez selected a federal grand jury and began presenting
witnesses and evidence about the cartel’s activities, a necessary first step toward
putting together an indictment.
For help, Martinez turned to one of the brightest and most dogged DEA
agents in Miami, a thirty-five-yearold woman who had grown up in a small town
in Illinois. Carol Cooper had worked closely with Martinez on the Tranquilandia
case. One of 201 women among the DEA’s 2,630 special agents, “Coops” was
organized and methodical. Her specialty was sifting through mountains of
wiretap evidence and drawing the choice tidbits into a coherent case.
First Cooper pored over individual cases involving Escobar, Ochoa, and
Lehder. Sorting through the Tranquilandia evidence in 1984 she had seen a
pattern emerging. Now she worked to link all the cases, “to show the
Colombians for what they really are.” Cooper’s job was made easier by lengthy
briefings with Max Mermelstein, who served as the original source for most of
the information about the cartel. It was Mermelstein who defined the scope and
shape of the cartel’s activities.
Like Martinez, Carol Cooper worked on the mammoth case in her free
hours. The case wasn’t a priority in the office. One reason was that all of the
defendants were fugitives in Colombia; the indictment would produce no high-
profile arrests. And then there was the fact that most of the defendants had
already been indicted in the smaller cases. To some in the U.S. Attorney’s Office
in Miami, the whole exercise seemed like overkill.
But when Jorge Ochoa was released by Judge Pastrana in Cartagena in
August 1986, the cartel case jumped onto the front burner. Gregorie and
Martinez, enraged by the Ochoa affair, wanted to make a statement that would
gain the attention of the world.
They discussed the case over dinner that night at La Choza, a
Nicaraguan steak house on Key Biscayne. After dessert they went directly to
Gregorie’s nearby apartment to rough out a possible indictment.
Less than a week after Ochoa’s release, Dick Gregorie, Bob Martinez,
Carol Cooper, and Assistant U.S. Attorney Mark Schnapp, another staff
member, met in a tenth-floor room at the U.S. Attorney’s Office. The room was
packed floor to ceiling with files and documents, including copies of the cartel
records seized at Tranquilandia. The four people in the Ochoa War Room, as it
was known, had much in common. They were all single workaholics who poured
their lives into government service. For a week they worked fourteen-hour days,
surviving on Chicken McNuggets and Kentucky Fried Chicken, in a cramped
room full of trial transcripts, drug smugglers’ ledgers, and DEA reports.
To build the indictment, they took Max Mermelstein’s story about
smuggling for Rafa Cardona and combined it with the Tranquilandia portion of
the Frank Torres ether case. To this they added Barry Seal’s Nicaragua
indictment and Mermelstein’s account of the plot to murder Seal. Most
important, they used the indictment to describe, for the first time, how the cartel
actually worked. The finished document brought a new organized crime
phenomenon to the American consciousness. Count one began:
“From as early as 1978 to the date of the return of this indictment there
existed an international criminal narcotics enterprise based in Medellín,
Colombia, South America, known by various names, including ‘The Medellín
cartel’ (hereinafter ‘Cartel’), which consisted of controlling members of major
international cocaine manufacturing and distribution organizations. . . . Through
the Cartel, major cocaine organizations were able to pool resources, including
raw materials, clandestine cocaine conversion laboratories, aircraft, vessels,
transportation facilities, distribution networks, and cocaine to facilitate
international narcotics trafficking.”
The cartel members met at “brokerage houses” in Medellín--private
estates where drug lords dickered for pilots and lab service. The cartel
maintained inventory control, corrupted officials of foreign governments, and
carried out murders to “protect its business operations and enforce its mandates.”
The indictment named the three Ochoa brothers, Pablo Escobar, Carlos
Lehder, and Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha as the cartel’s leaders.
Finally, the indictment branded the cartel as the world’s largest cocaine
smuggling organization. The prosecutors who put the indictment together had no
idea how much cocaine was involved until they stopped and added it all up.
They astonished themselves: the cartel was charged with producing fifty-eight
tons of cocaine between 1978 and 1985. Until the TAMPA seizure, no one had
seen even a ton of cocaine in one place at one time. The cartel indictment was
not just the largest cocaine case in U.S. history. It was larger than any previous
case by a factor of seven.
And that was just what could be documented. The fifty-eight-ton figure
represented only a part of the cartel’s smuggled cocaine. Not all of the cases
made against the cartel were included in the new indictment; doing that could
take forever and produce a document too unwieldy to try in court. The cartel was
too big to prosecute except in pieces. Fifty-eight tons was probably less than
one-third of the cocaine that could be linked to Jorge Ochoa, Pablo Escobar,
Rodriguez Gacha, and Carlos Lehder.
With the indictment drawn up, the final step was to present it to the
federal grand jury and obtain formal action. The grand jury was expected to
approve the indictment the same day it was presented on August 16, 1986.
National television networks and selected influential newspapers were notified
that something big was coming. A press conference was scheduled two hours
after the grand jury finished. Everyone waited.
But the morning the indictment was to be returned, the press conference
was canceled. Washington had called and instructed that the indictment be
sealed. Word of the pending superindictment had somehow leaked to Colombia.
Someone in the Colombian government, fearing another embarrassment on the
heels of Jorge Ochoa’s release, persuaded the State Department to talk to the
Justice Department. And now the Justice Department had talked to the U.S.
Attorney’s Office in Miami.
Drug agents hastily called their sources at newspapers and television
networks and coaxed them into killing stories that could have dominated front
pages and evening news broadcasts. The opportunity to brand the Medellín cartel
before the world didn’t take place.
Still, there were indications that the cartel members were feeling the
pressure.
In late October 1986, a little-known Miami criminal defense attorney
flew to Colombia to meet Jorge and Fabio Ochoa at a three-thousand-acre ranch
outside Cartagena. Bodyguards carrying machine guns and an ominous-looking
leather satchel surrounded the Ochoas. Fabio wore a baseball cap and appeared
about ten years younger than his age, which was twenty-nine.
Jorge Ochoa told the Miami attorney that he had been summoned
because Ochoa wanted to see an American who could deliver a message to “the
Americans.”
The attorney had been to Colombia previously on the matter. That
spring he had traveled to Bogotá at the invitation of one of his Colombian clients
to discuss the extradition problems facing several major drug traffickers. In
Bogotá, a Colombian woman attorney told him the twelve major traffickers who
controlled 80 percent of the cocaine trade were willing to help stop the flow in
return for amnesty from extradition.
 The traffickers most anxious to negotiate for amnesty were Jorge Ochoa
and Gilberto Rodriguez, who were then under arrest in Spain and awaiting the
outcome of extradition proceedings. The Miami attorney was told that Ochoa
and Rodriguez would eventually be sent to Colombia instead of the United
States, but influencing the Spanish court was going to be expensive.
When the Miami attorney took the amnesty proposal to FBI agents in
Miami six months later, Ochoa and Rodriguez were already in Colombia, and
Ochoa, thanks to the Cartagena customs judge, was once again a free man.
Despite this turn of events, the attorney told the agents that the traffickers were
still eager to negotiate. The agents took the offer seriously enough to set up a
meeting between the attorney and Dick Gregorie at the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
Gregorie listened to the attorney, found the idea preposterous, and gave it little
further thought.
Now, in late October, just three weeks after the meeting with Gregorie,
the Miami attorney faced the Ochoas for the first time.
Jorge Ochoa had summoned the attorney because he was upset with his
own American lawyers. He screamed about having paid millions without getting
satisfaction, including $2 million to an attorney who represented a friend of
Ochoa who had been sentenced to twenty-five years. The only attorney he had
ever trusted in Miami, Ochoa said, was a man who had been machine-gunned in
his law office during the cocaine wars of the early 1980s.
Ochoa said he was “really mad” that he had been charged with the
murder of Barry Seal. Although he personally hated Seal, he said that he and his
brother Fabio were not Seal’s murderers. He offered to provide a signed
statement attesting to their innocence, to be delivered to the proper authorities in
U.S. intelligence. Jorge Ochoa said he would not cooperate with the DEA. Their
terms, he said, always ended up with people “compromised.”
The Miami attorney returned to Cartagena for his flight home, but there
he was told he had impressed the Ochoas and would be required to meet with
them again in Medellín. Immediately. The attorney objected. Medellín was too
dangerous. But in the end he went because he had little choice.
He resumed his discussion with Jorge Ochoa in “a rather ordinary
house” up in the hills outside Medellín.
“I know what the U.S. wants,” Ochoa said. “I’m not personally
involved with the communists. There are people who are coming to our meeting
who are, however.”
Ochoa said they wanted to negotiate collectively with “the intelligence
arm” of the United States government. They had certain information, Ochoa
said, that could be of interest to U.S. national security.
While they waited for the others to arrive, Ochoa again complained that
his various attorneys were cheating him despite the great fees he paid. He
claimed to have more than one hundred attorneys on retainer. He confided that
he was free now because he had paid $6 million to the judges who released him.
The price outraged Ochoa.
Then a man in jungle garb and high boots sauntered in with a retinue of
bodyguards. The man wore blue jeans and had a rifle slung over his shoulder. He
introduced himself as Carlos Lehder. He struck the Miami attorney as handsome,
with excellent English and the manner of a stone killer.
Another man entered after Lehder. He was introduced as “Escobar”--the
Miami attorney didn’t catch the first name. Lehder pointed to Escobar, who,
though affable, spoke no English. Lehder said Escobar was their boss.
Lehder did the talking for all of them.
“We are here to open negotiations with the U.S. government,” he said.
Lehder said he and the others had been forced to work with “the
communists in the mountains,” whom he described as a one-hundred-thousand-
man army of Palestinians, Libyans, Peruvians, Argentinians, Ecuadorans, and
Cubans. Lehder said they actually hated the communists and would give
information about arms shipments and Cuban personnel in Colombia. Lehder
also offered information about communist activities in Nicaragua, Cuba,
Mexico, and Panama. He said he and Escobar had people in Nicaragua. (The
Miami attorney had been told at the outset that Ochoa financed both contras and
Sandinistas there.) Now Lehder proposed having their cartel operatives in
Nicaragua gather intelligence for the United States for six months or so, and
then, if everyone was satisfied, the cartel leaders would receive amnesty.
This was an immense irony: the cartel was offering the very thing Jorge
Ochoa’s lawyers had accused the U.S. government of trying to orchestrate
earlier in the year during the Spanish extradition proceedings.
Now the cartel leaders wanted two or three U.S. agents--FBI, not DEA,
they specified--to come to Colombia to hear their proposal in detail. Lehder
pointed out that they had never harmed an American agent. They would
guarantee the safety of any who came to hear them.
Then Jorge Ochoa gave the attorney a letter from his mother. Written in
Spanish, it read:
By means of this letter, we give you complete authority to represent my
three sons whose names are Fabio Ochoa, Juan David Ochoa, and Jorge Luis
Ochoa, in negotiations with the government of the United States. It is necessary
for you to prove their innocence in the United States.
The North American authorities have accused my three sons of many
things which are not true. Several Colombian representatives have informed us
that Colombian citizens cannot obtain a fair trial in the United States.
These allegations of discrimination against Colombians in the United
States were mentioned in the Spanish courts during the case of my sons. We
need your immediate reply.
Very Cordially,
Margot Vasquez de Ochoa

The attorney returned to Miami on October 28. Again he met with Dick
Gregorie, who laughed at the offer to provide intelligence about Colombian
guerrillas in return for amnesty. Gregorie didn’t care about Colombian
guerrillas; he wanted more than anything to put the cartel leaders behind bars.
Nor did Gregorie think much of the cartel’s proposal to get out of the
business. He couldn’t see giving absolute amnesty to the biggest drug dealers in
the world based on their word that they wouldn’t produce drugs anymore.
Besides, it was virtually the same offer the cartel had made in Panama in 1984. It
was unacceptable in any light.
Though Gregorie discredited the offer, he felt beholden to bring it to the
attention of his boss, U.S. Attorney Leon Kellner. Kellner, who also didn’t take
the offer seriously, passed it along to Washington. There it died a quiet death.
No one in the U.S. government wanted any part of the cartel’s gambit.

THE cartel indictment was finally released November 18, the day after Jaime
Ramirez’s murder. In the United States its impact was muted. Most Americans
knew nothing about Ramirez and had heard little about Colombia since Jorge
Ochoa’s release from jail. The public unveiling of the Medellín cartel thus rated
about the same attention as any big drug indictment. It offered neither dramatic
testimony nor big arrests, just a rather sketchy account of an enormous, illegal
business operating with great secrecy out of a relatively unfamiliar foreign
country. The Miami Herald and The New York Times, the two newspapers with
the most extensive coverage of international cocaine trafficking, gave the story
front-page treatment, but both featured it under a modest headline below the
fold.
In Colombia the indictment caused a sensation, coming as the latest in a
long line of outrages. Editors scrambled to get copies of an indictment that had
taken all of Colombia’s rotten eggs and tossed them into one basket. El
Espectador, Colombia’s second-largest newspaper, ran stories on the cartel
indictment as a two-part informe especial (“special report”) on December 5 and
December 11,1986. The special report team reviewed the indictment, but it also
used the occasion for a deeper analysis of Colombia’s cocaine traffic.
It was a common technique, developed over several years by individual
Colombian news organizations when they wished to investigate drug trafficking
without incurring the cartel’s wrath. The cartel was much less likely to attack El
Espectador if its reports displayed the information as though it all came directly
from a U.S. federal court indictment. Reporters from Colombian news
organizations were also often eager to pass information to U.S. colleagues in
hopes it would be published in American newspapers or aired on American
television. The Colombians then translated the U.S. reports and printed or aired
“what the United States is saying about Colombia.”
Still, reporting about the cartel on a regular basis was fraught with great
danger and required uncommon courage. No one took these risks more readily
than El Espectador. The informe especial team had not signed a major story on
the cartel or its members in a couple of years, but the paper was nonetheless
known for its categorical opposition to the traffickers. It had drawn special
attention from Pablo Escobar since August 1983, when its front-page stories
denounced “the Godfather’s” first cocaine bust. Nothing had done greater
damage to Escobar’s budding political career than to have his police mug shot
displayed prominently in Colombia’s second-biggest newspaper.
In recent months El Espectador’s anticartel crusades were led by
Editor-in-Chief Guillermo Cano Isaza, who wrote frequently on drugs in his
editorial page column Libreta de Apuntes (“Notebook”). Cano, white-haired and
distinguished, was sixty-one years old, a pillar of the Liberal party with
impeccable patrician credentials. He had fought a long and lonely battle for
stiffer laws against drug trafficking in Colombia. He was very disturbed when
several respectable Colombians had recently attacked extradition and proposed
legalization of the drug trade as a means to escape further violence.
“Legalize drug trafficking?” he asked rhetorically in a recent column.
“That would be like legalizing and justifying all the collateral activities: money
laundering, the assassination of Supreme Court justices, of cabinet ministers, of
judges, and of so many other persons who by doing their duty have fallen victim
to the narcotics traffickers and their hired killers.”
On December 17, 1986, a Wednesday, Cano left work shortly after 7:30
p.m., as was his custom. He walked to his parking space, climbed into the
driver’s seat of his wine-red Subaru station wagon, and edged the car into traffic.
The back of the Subaru was filled with brightly wrapped Christmas presents
Cano had purchased during the lunch hour.
The newspaper offices were in the El Dorado district, on the western
edge of Bogotá near the airport and within a mile of El Tiempo, Colombia’s
biggest newspaper and El Espectador’s great rival. It was a sparsely populated
industrial area, but it had a lot of traffic, and Avenida del Espectador, passing
right in front of the paper, was a major commuter thoroughfare.
Cano’s plan was to turn right coming out of the gate and scoot quickly
to the far left lane so he could make a U-turn around a grassy median strip in the
middle of the avenue. It was a tricky maneuver, but Cano did it five times a
week. This night, however, Cano did not notice the motorcycle parked on the
median on his left; or if he did, he paid it no mind. As he waited to make his U-
turn, a young man climbed down from the motorcycle’s rear seat, laid what
looked like a musical instrument case on the ground, and opened it unhurriedly.
From it he took a snub-nosed MAC-10 machine pistol. Then he stood up, walked
quickly to the driver’s window of the Subaru, and pulled the trigger. Cano died
instantly.
29. THE VIRGIN SMILES
The murder of Guillermo Cano Isaza stirred Colombia against the Medellín
cartel like nothing since the killing 2 1/2 years earlier of Rodrigo Lara Bonilla.
Part of it was that Cano had been one of the two or three dozen most prominent
men in Colombia. Presidents and ex-presidents were expected to be seen
mourning him, and they were.
And part of it was that Cano was a newsman. Nothing enrages and
terrifies reporters more than to have one of their own killed because of
something written or broadcast. Any nobody is better positioned to make a stink
about it.
On Thursday, the day after the killing, President Virgilio Barco led the
funeral caravan that took Cano to a cemetery just outside Bogotá. Thousands of
people lined the route to wave handkerchiefs and Colombian flags. News
organizations recorded it all.
On Friday the Society of Journalists of Bogotá proclaimed a
countrywide news blackout. Colombia’s reporters, editors, and news technicians
held “marches of silence” in Bogotá and other cities. Speeches paid tribute to the
more than twenty newspeople murdered by the cartel in the previous four years.
For Barco the Cano murder was a challenge to act. His administration,
like Betancur’s before it, had been humiliated beyond endurance by the drug
traffickers. First there was the Ochoa affair in Cartagena, a national disgrace that
had once again made a mockery of the Colombian justice system. Then there
was the Ramirez murder. And now, Cano. The Medellín cartel, it seemed, could
get away with anything.
Law enforcement was demoralized. Barco was criticized in the U.S.
Attorney’s Office in Miami as a wimpy do-nothing and in the drawing rooms of
Bogotá’s most prominent citizens as an ineffectual bureaucrat. Voters in the
street didn’t care much for their new president, either. Unlike Betancur, Barco
had no warmth and made few public appearances or statements. Colombians,
like most people, wanted to see their leaders lead.
The time had come. Barco first issued a lengthy package of state of
siege decrees, temporary but far-reaching. These allowed security forces to arrest
and hold someone without showing cause for up to ten days. They also mandated
prison terms of up to ten years for owning an illegal airstrip and up to eight years
for illegal weapons possession. New motorcycle owners had to register with
police within twenty-four hours of purchase. Sales of motorcycles bigger than
125 cc. were forbidden without special permission.
The government inaugurated both a Witness Protection Program and a
reward system for people giving information to security forces. Finally, the
government for the first time issued to law enforcement agencies a secret, most-
wanted list of the 128 top drug traffickers in Colombia. The list included all the
big names as well as fifty-six people currently sought by the United States for
extradition.
After all this, Barco turned law enforcement loose in a full-scale
crackdown and awaited results. This was his second antidrug offensive (the first
had come after Ochoa’s release) and Colombia’s third since Lara Bonilla’s
death. Both of the earlier ones had made a lot of noise. There had been many
arrests, some dope seizures, and some confiscated property, but few people ever
seemed to go to prison, and the cartel never seemed to be damaged, not even in
the slightest. The motorcycle registration gambit, for one, had been tried every
couple of years since Griselda Blanco’s assassins had invented motorcycle
homicide. It was impossible to enforce.
Still, Barco didn’t do badly. In the first three weeks after the decrees,
police arrested 360 people, seized 243 kilos of cocaine, destroyed five labs, and
confiscated more than four hundred weapons. They also crossed eight names off
the most-wanted list, including two extraditables. The prize was Evaristo Porras,
the Leticia gangster whose million-peso check allegedly ended up in Lara
Bonilla’s campaign war chest. Police busted him on the Caribbean resort island
of San Andres and held him for illegal weapons possession. Later in the year
DAS detectives would privately name him, along with Gonzalo Rodriguez
Gacha and Pablo Escobar, as a shareholder in the Cano plot, but by that time
Porras had been quietly released for lack of evidence.

ONE significant way in which the post-Cano crackdown differed from earlier
ones was in Barco’s refusal to ignore guerrilla dealings with the drug traffickers.
Barco’s government had no enduring commitment to Belisario Betancur’s Peace
Process. The Barco guerrilla policy held that the FARC should disarm and rejoin
the larger society. The FARC said disarmament was too dangerous, citing the
three-hundred-plus Patriotic Union militants it said had been murdered by death
squads.
The Barco government gave this view only limited credence, hinting
that many of the murders resulted from a tawdry vendetta with the cartel.
Administration officials said that FARC guerrillas and cartel middlemen in the
llanos for several months had been kidnapping and killing each other over the
guerrillas’ rights to collect gramaje from the region’s campesino coca growers.
By early 1987 the campesinos were marching in the streets to protest the
violence.
The FARC and the Patriotic Union, seeing the ugly propaganda turn this
was taking, began denouncing the traffickers, focusing particular attention on
Rodriguez Gacha, the emperor of Guaviare coca. Patriotic Union leader Braulio
Herrera said Rodriguez Gacha had joined with “sectors of the armed forces, with
ranchers, and also with some politicians to orchestrate plans of assassination
against our people.”
The crackdown’s modest success put Colombia into a manic phase for
four weeks, carrying through the Christmas holidays and into the new year. By
now the traumas of Colombia’s drug wars were capable of transforming even
small triumphs or failures into earth-shaking events. After the horrors of 1986,
the country was on a giddy upswing again. Bad guys were getting arrested; the
police were seizing drugs; things looked pretty good for a change, even if it
didn’t last.
And it didn’t. On January 13, 1987, word reached Bogotá that
Colombian Ambassador to Hungary Enrique Parejo Gonzalez, the former justice
minister who had successfully challenged the cartel for two hard years, had been
accosted in a Budapest blizzard and shot five times in the face:
There was no question who was behind the shooting. Since Parejo’s
arrival in Budapest the previous August, he had received a stream of written
death threats whose theme, repeated over and over, was, “You can run, but you
can’t hide.” Here was the proof. The day of the shooting, Colombian news
organizations received telephone calls from something called the Hernan Botero
Command claiming responsibility for the attack. Botero was the first Colombian
extradited under the 1979 treaty; his extradition order was the first of thirteen
signed by Parejo. Parejo survived the attack, thanks to skillful Hungarian doctors
who removed the bullets in two operations.
But Colombia badly needed a success.

NATIONAL Police Major William Lemus Lemus knew Carlos Lehder was near
Medellín. He heard it on the street; he heard it from his snitches; he heard it
everywhere; he practically smelled the man. Lemus had taken over in December
1986 as police chief in Rionegro, a town about thirty miles east of Medellín, and
from the moment he arrived people told him the same story: Carlos Lehder was
in town, up from his jungle hideaways to talk a little business with Pablo
Escobar. Lehder wanted to set up a few cocaine labs around Medellín and was
looking to make a joint venture with “the Godfather.”
Escobar invited him for a visit, the story went, and put him up in a safe
house in Rionegro. Lemus had been hunting him ever since. Following
Guillermo Cano’s murder, Lemus had been allowed to search anywhere he
wanted and arrest damn near anyone who looked at him cross-eyed. And he still
wasn’t getting anywhere.
It wasn’t the easiest part of Colombia to search. Rionegro was in the
middle of the Andean piney woods that surrounded Medellín, beautiful country,
wildflowers all over the place, crystal-clear mountain air redolent with resin and
pine needles. But it was a semiwilder-ness, vast patches of forest interspersed
with a few secondary roads, many of which led nowhere. Lemus thought
Escobar had probably stashed Lehder in one of the chalets or A-frames the cartel
had built in the mountains as weekend playhouses. But he didn’t know which
one it was or even which town it was in.
Around noon on February 3, 1987, the constable from Guarne, a town
about twenty miles north of La Ceja, showed up with a campesino informant
Lemus had assigned to chase a tip he had gotten about a chalet tucked deep in
the back country. The campesino had been watching it, the constable said, and
had noticed a “bunch of men” shouting, playing music, and generally raising hell
for the last couple of days. The campesino said he had talked to the finca’s
caretaker, who was disgusted with the mess the visitors were making and
distressed about having to clean it up. Maybe, mi Mayor, the constable said,
“you would come take a look?”
Why not?
Lemus and two young policemen cautiously approached the Guarne
house at about four p.m. It was a two-story chalet, new, nicely painted, not
particularly big. It had a small front lawn and one outbuilding off to the side.
Lemus couldn’t see the rear of the chalet, but the caretaker had assured him that
it overlooked a deep, overgrown canyon with a small stream running far below.
The far side of the canyon was a pine-covered hillside. Evergreens cloaked the
rest of the house as well, making it invisible from the main highway. A tiny
secondary road was the only obvious access.
Lemus and his men knelt in the trees for two hours, watching some
sixteen men talk, laugh, and chat as they moved back and forth between the
chalet and the yard. At six p.m. a short, blocky fellow came out the front door
carrying a canvas chair. He walked to the lawn and sat down. It was Lehder.
Lemus had seen him in Armenia in 1983 and knew him.
 This presented a dilemma. Lemus had told his men they were hunting
“guerrillas.” Colombian security forces had fought guerrillas with great
enthusiasm for twenty-five years, but they tended to want nothing to do with
drug traffickers. The guerrillas were anonymous strangers; traffickers would kill
a man’s family if he messed with them. Lemus doubted whether either of his
young troopers had the slightest idea whom they were looking at.
“Do you know that guy?” he whispered to the policeman closest to him.
“No, mi Mayor,’” said the policeman. Lemus bent down so he could
whisper Lehder’s name in the man’s ear. Then he caught himself. What good
would that do? He kept his counsel.
Lemus and one of the troopers stayed in the woods watching the
building. He sent the other policeman to the airport to look for reinforcements,
especially a police special weapons team (GOES) stationed there for special
assignments. The messenger returned shortly, bringing about thirty-six police,
including the GOES men.
Lemus deployed his people on all four sides of the chalet. He
particularly liked the hillside across the canyon because marksmen could shoot
down on the house and even see what was going on in the front yard. He
stationed a dozen men there, then put others in place to block off a couple of
possible escape routes. He himself stayed in front with two snipers.
Then he settled down to wait. He had a couple of problems. Lehder had
posted three sentries--in the front yard and on either side of the chalet. Every
once in a while a sentry would duck into the house and be replaced by someone
else. Everybody Lemus saw entering or leaving the chalet had a machine pistol.
If there were only three of these, the police were okay. If there were sixteen, he
and his people were going to be desperately outgunned.
The search warrant was the other problem. Even under state of siege
measures Lemus couldn’t go into the house before six a.m., and he had to have a
warrant. He sent the Guarne constable off to get one, but the man didn’t return
until four a.m. The constable hadn’t been able to find anybody to sign it, so he’d
signed it himself. Was that all right? Sure, said Lemus.
It was cold and misty during the night, but at dawn the temperature rose
rapidly as the sun began to burn away the fog. At 6:30 a.m. Lemus got a break:
one of Lehder’s sentries spotted one of the police snipers and stupidly fired a
shot at him. The policeman returned fire, wounding the sentry, and the battle
began. Now that the police had been attacked, Lemus didn’t have to worry about
serving the search warrant. His men could set fire to the chalet and burn it to the
ground if they wanted.
 But Lemus could see he wouldn’t need to do that. Lehder’s pistoleros
had all gathered on the second floor and were shooting at the police hidden in
the woods across the canyon. This was cover fire, Lemus concluded, so Lehder
could sneak out the back door. He and his snipers had to get into the house as
soon as possible, or Lehder was going to escape.
Lemus and his two snipers rushed the chalet, weapons drawn. Lemus
flung open the front door and leaped through it, his revolver held with both
hands at eye level. The second-floor gunfire, it turned out, was a diversion, not
cover. While Lehder’s men shot up the woods at the back of the house, Lehder
himself raced for the front door and freedom. Instead, he found Lemus holding a
pistol pointed right between his eyes.
“Little chief, don’t shoot me,” Lehder said.
“We aren’t killers,” Lemus replied. “Put your hands on your head and
get down on the floor.”
Lehder obeyed, reaching into his pocket as he knelt and flinging a huge
wad of two-thousand-peso notes at Lemus’s feet. “That’s a million pesos
[$4,500],” he said.
“Pick it up, senor,” said Lemus. “You’re going to need it for soft
drinks.”
“Do you want green instead?” Lehder asked. “How much?”
“No, I’m just doing my duty.”
“Oh, little chief, what a verraco [’hot number’] you are,” Lehder
continued. “You’re the most famous man in the world. You know those gringo
sons of bitches want to hang me by the balls, and now you’ve got me. Too bad
we didn’t meet earlier.”
Lemus soon had things sorted out. As he’d thought--and his prisoner
confirmed--Lehder and his men had been near Rionegro in the town of La Ceja
most of the time since they’d arrived from the llanos, barely managing to escape
Lemus on a number of occasions. They had moved to Guarne a couple of days
earlier and planned to go back to La Ceja as soon as Lemus left town, working
on the principle that the police wouldn’t immediately return to a place they had
just searched. They were right, Lemus reflected.
Of more immediate importance to Lemus, it turned out that the sentries’
three machine pistols were the only ones in the house. Lemus mustered
everybody in the chalet’s front room, searched them, and lined them up. He was
starting to feel terrific. Really terrific.
“Gentlemen,” he said to his own men, “I’d like to introduce you to
Carlos Lehder.”
 Dead silence.
Lemus was undaunted. That was to be expected. He moved everyone
into the yard and formed them up again for a collective mug shot. Working the
camera himself, he made a motion with his free hand and said to no one in
particular: “Where’s the soccer ball? We’re taking the team picture.” Lehder’s
people laughed. Lemus snapped the photo.
At ten a.m. a pair of police vans picked up Lehder’s sidemen for the
hour-long trip to Medellín. Lemus followed with Lehder in his own car. Lehder
was looking a little seedy from a big night of drinking, Lemus noticed, but he
seemed to be in decent spirits, joking with women along the road and talking it
up with Lemus. At a roadside telephone booth Lemus called the Antioquia
police chief to tell him what to expect. He was nearly breathless at this point, not
believing his good fortune. What a coup!
“¡Mi Coronel, mi Coronel!” Lemus gushed. “We got him, we got him!”
“Yes, yes, calm down,” the colonel answered. “You got who?”
“The Virgin has smiled on us,” said Lemus. “We have captured Carlos
Lehder.”
Lemus’s euphoria lasted until midafternoon. He moved Lehder into the
police station with no difficulty, correctly figuring that all the reporters would be
watching the vans. In the squad room Lemus got Lehder a drink of water and
some lunch. Then about two p.m. an army Fourth Brigade helicopter landed in
the yard, picked up the prisoner, and took him away. Shortly after that the chief
of the National Police called Lemus to congratulate him. That done, he was
advised to go back to Rionegro, pick up his stuff, and get the hell out of town as
fast as he could.
At the Rionegro police station, the telephone had been ringing off the
hook. Lemus’s subordinates summarized the messages: “Lemus is dead”; “That
son of a bitch”; “Who does he think he is?” It was a good thing, his subordinates
told him, that he didn’t have a home telephone number yet, or people would
have been talking with his wife. When was he leaving?
Lemus gathered his family, packed his bags, and flew to Bogotá for ten
days. Then the U.S. embassy got him out of the country.

IN 1984 Jaime Ramirez had figured out that police could make big trouble for
Carlos Lehder if they could catch him. Lehder’s extradition case had been the
only one treated by the Supreme Court in absentia, and the order had been
signed by Belisario Betancur on May 8,1984. This set of circumstances existed
for no other drug defendant in Colombia. Lehder’s case was wrapped up and
signed off. Lehder had no further legal recourse. In theory he could be put
aboard a plane and sent to the United States immediately.
Ramirez was right. The helicopter took Lehder to the airport in
Rionegro, where a Colombian army C-130 waited to fly him to Bogotá. While
this was happening, the Ministry of Defense was on the telephone to the U.S.
embassy. If you want him, the ministry said, you can have him. Do you have a
plane available?
The embassy did. Sitting on the tarmac at the El Dorado military
terminal was a DEA Aerocommander turboprop en route to La Paz from the
United States. The embassy called DEA Washington, and DEA Washington
turned the plane around. The Aerocommander was not a big aircraft, and it
would be a long, uncomfortable flight.
Lehder arrived in Bogotá about four p.m. and was hustled to the
Aerocommander after minimum formalities. At one point the army brought a
television camera to the runway to film an interview for its archives. Before the
interview began, every soldier on camera covered his face with a black shroud.
The Aerocommander took off at 5:15 p.m. on February 4 with Lehder
and two DEA agents aboard. The prisoner looked hung over and tired and wasn’t
particularly talkative. Tom Bigoness, one of the agents along for the ride, noted
that Lehder spoke excellent English. Every once in a while the prisoner would
sigh and confirm: “You got me now.”
Lehder talked briefly about Detroit and his time in Danbury, but
otherwise he was silent. In the middle of the night the plane stopped at the U.S.
Naval Base at Guatanamo Bay, Cuba, to refuel. Everyone was ravenous, but the
base was locked up tight, and the agents couldn’t even get a soft drink. Bigoness
and his DEA companion killed their appetites with cigarettes, but Lehder
declined politely: “No, that’s all right, I only smoke marijuana.” At 1:15 a.m. on
February 5,1987, the Aerocommander landed in Tampa, Florida.
30. “WITNESSES FROM HELL”
Three U.S. marshals brought Max Mermelstein into a Louisiana courtroom.
Ordinarily parish deputies would be guarding the witness. The presence of
federal marshals was an indication of Mermelstein’s importance; even though he
was testifying in a Louisiana murder trial, he was a federal informant. And the
federal government was taking great care to protect its property.
The marshals kept their bodies close to Mermelstein and peered out into
the spectators, who had already passed through two metal detectors. Mermelstein
at forty-three looked like a stocky English professor gone to seed: long gray hair,
white beard, blue blazer, loud shirt, no tie. He sat in the witness box and
accepted a silenced MAC-10 machine pistol from the prosecutor, a petite but
very dynamic dark-haired woman named Premila Burns. At thirty-seven, Prem
Burns was the top homicide prosecutor in Baton Rouge.
“Mr. Mermelstein, would you look at these two exhibits before you
marked State’s 14 and State’s 15, please?” she asked. State’s 14 was the MAC-
10; 15 was the silencer. “Have you ever seen previously either Exhibit 14 or
15?”
“Yes, I have,” Mermelstein said calmly, his expression blank and
unhurried.
As he testified, three men and their lawyers stared at him from the
defense table. Miguel Velez--Carlos “Cumbamba” Arango was being tried under
his alias--wore thick glasses and an aquamarine sweater. His thick black hair
was combed straight back. The courtroom’s four rows of neon lights made
Cumbamba’s pasty-white Antioquian complexion look corpselike. Cumbamba
sometimes smiled at the bailiffs or his co-defendants, but more often his face
hardened into a chilling squint. Bernardo Vasquez, wearing a brown sweater,
stared about, seemingly unable to register the magnitude of the spectacle going
on around him. Luis Carlos Quintero Cruz, the accused trigger man, wore
glasses and a conservative gray business suit. He, too, looked on
uncomprehendingly. Quintero Cruz, dark and Indian-looking, was distinctly
different from the pale Antioquians. He understood no English, so he had to
listen to the trial by translation. Cumbamba and Quintero Cruz did not change
their clothes for the first two days of the trial. The three men sat at the defense
table, staring across the blue velvet carpet toward Max Mermelstein.
Prem Burns had very deliberately handed Mermelstein the MAC-10 that
had killed Barry Seal; she wanted each juror to handle it, too, to feel the weight
of it and appreciate its deadly, alien quality. The weapon weighed 7.5 pounds
and was 22 inches long; more than half of that length--11.5 inches--was taken up
by the homemade silencer. This was no ordinary gun.
“Would you tell the jury the circumstances under when you first saw
that?” Burns asked Mermelstein.
“Sometime in April or May of 1984, they were brought to my
residence,” Mermelstein said.
“By whom were they brought?” asked Burns.
“By Rafael Cardona,” Mermelstein said.
“And why did he have that weapon with him?” Burns asked.
“To show me what he had just gotten,” said Mermelstein. “That he had
just gotten it. He wanted to show it to me.”
“Was anything done with that weapon when it got to your residence?”
Burns asked.
“He showed me the weapon and told me he wanted to test-fire it by the
pool,” Mermelstein said.

THE trial of Barry Seal’s accused killers opened on April 6, 1987, more than a
year after Seal’s murder. It took place in the two-story Lake Charles federal
building, which also housed the post office. Three of the six members of the
Colombian hit team faced first-degree murder charges--Cumbamba, Quintero
Cruz, and Vasquez. The state was seeking the death penalty--the electric chair at
the Louisiana State Prison in Angola. A fourth, lesser member of the hit team
was being tried separately. Evidence was lacking against the fifth and sixth men
arrested, and they were simply deported to Colombia. The trial had started out in
Baton Rouge, but attorneys could not pick an impartial jury, so pervasive were
knowledge and opinions about Barry Seal. So the trial was moved 170 miles
west to the unlikely location of Lake Charles, Louisiana, an oil refinery town of
about seventy-five thousand near the southeast Texas border. The town had once
been a haven for Jean Lafitte, the pirate, a coincidence Barry Seal might have
appreciated.
Lake Charles actively campaigned to host the Seal murder trial, winning
out over New Orleans, Alexandria, and Jefferson Parish. The town fathers were
glad to get what they saw as a needed economic boost and some national
publicity. Jury selection began in an 8,400-seat livestock arena with dirt from the
weekend horse show still on the floor. The stern Cajun judge sat at a makeshift
bench adorned with red, white, and blue bunting. The Colombians arrived in a
blue-and-white armored Louisiana State Police truck. More than a few people
commented on the circus atmosphere.
“This case had been building up to the big top for the past year,” said
Miami defense attorney Richard Sharpstein, who was representing Cumbamba.
Sharpstein led the seven defense lawyers. He was a deeply tanned,
aggressive Miami criminal attorney who made frequent objections in a style that
was both smooth and disruptive to the prosecution. Sharpstein had performed
something of a miracle in his last big drug case: he’d gotten Howard Hewett, the
lead singer of the pop trio Shalamar, acquitted after DEA agents arrested Hewett
and his girlfriend for allegedly selling a kilo of cocaine to an undercover agent in
the Dadeland Mall parking lot. Now Sharpstein was being called upon to conjure
up a similar feat against far greater odds.
The jury seated to hear the case consisted of ten women and two men,
and that troubled Prem Burns. On death penalty cases, she preferred to have a
predominantly male jury. Women jurors tended not to favor the death penalty.
The jurors were sequestered, and they rode to their hotel in a yellow school bus
outfitted with opaque windows.
Burns prosecuted the case with a particular passion. In twelve years as a
prosecutor, Prem Burns had lost only three out of one hundred jury trials, and
she had never lost a murder case. She was barely more than five feet tall with
raven hair and a quick temper. Defense attorneys called her “the Black Widow.”
Burns got the case the day after Seal was shot. She had never even heard of the
Medellín cartel, but as she learned of its power and reach, her desire to pursue
the case grew into an obsession.
Federal officials wanted to try the defendants in federal court on
charges of violating Seal’s civil rights by killing him, which carried a possible
life sentence--there is no federal statute or death penalty. But Burns and others in
the East Baton Rouge District Attorney’s Office had fought successfully to keep
the case as a murder trial in state court, where the defendants would face the
electric chair.
Burns had to overcome a sticky obstacle. The feds had let her know
they had a witness who knew about the contract on Seal, but they steadfastly
guarded his identity, refusing even to tell her his name. The mystery witness was
so important that they wanted to preserve his anonymity and keep him from
testifying at all at the Seal trial; instead the feds went behind Burns’s back and
tried to get Vasquez to take a plea bargain and “flip” against the other
defendants, so the mystery witness would not have to testify. But Vasquez
wouldn’t accept the deal.
 Finally Burns learned the identity of the mystery witness, whom she had
taken to calling “MM,” for mystery man. The initials turned out to be correct:
the witness was Max Mermelstein. Al Winters and Dick Gregorie were
concerned about Mermelstein making his first appearance in a state court
without being guided and protected by one of the federal prosecutors who knew
him best. They worried such a valuable witness could be ruined if he was
mishandled on the stand and mauled by defense attorneys. But eventually Burns
and others in Baton Rouge prevailed on the feds to let her use Mermelstein.
When the trial got under way in Lake Charles, Defense Attorney
Richard Sharpstein’s strategy was to hit hard on Seal’s Machiavellian nature.
“The man was too complex,” Sharpstein said. “The man had many sides, not just
two sides, right and wrong. Adler Barry Seal was a drug smuggler. He was a
soldier of fortune, he was a mercenary. He was a man who would do what
benefited Barry Seal. He was a man who understood the system. ... He always
found a back door out, and he always used it to benefit Barry Seal. He put bullets
in his own head. I tell you the tale of Barry Seal will point in the direction of
that, because he himself is responsible for where he is.”
Max Mermelstein’s testimony was devastating. Besides linking the
MAC-10 to the cartel, he was able to identify Cumbamba. Sharpstein did his
best to discredit the witness: “Max Mermelstein is a man who would make Barry
Seal look like a midget.” Mermelstein, he said, was “another Barry Seal, a clone,
maybe even worse than Seal.” But Mermelstein mesmerized the jury--he
testified to arranging thirty-eight cocaine flights of 450 kilos apiece at a time
when the record U.S. cocaine seizure stood at less than 400 kilos. The total
amount he smuggled, Mermelstein said, was 50,000 kilos--as Sharpstein put it,
about “twenty dump trucks” of cocaine.
“How much cash did you arrange to be taken out of the United States?”
Sharpstein asked.
“Approximately three hundred million,” Mermelstein said in his bland
voice.
The jury gasped.
“You yourself arranged for approximately three hundred million dollars
in illegal money to be taken out of the country?” Sharpstein asked.
“That is correct, sir,” Mermelstein said.
Mermelstein testified in such a tranquil tone that Sharpstein asked him
if he had taken Valium before coming to court. No, Mermelstein answered
mildly.
The rest of the witnesses and the physical evidence were overwhelming.
The fingerprints of Quintero Cruz, Vasquez, and Cumbamba were found in both
the Buick--referred to in court as the “murder vehicle”--and the red Cadillac
used for the getaway. A “neutron activation” test conducted after Cumbamba’s
arrest in Mississippi showed that he had handled a weapon that had been fired.
And to top it off, Cumbamba had been arrested with the keys to the red Cadillac
in his pocket. An expert matched Vasquez’s handwriting to credit card receipts
for hotel rooms and cars in New Orleans and Baton Rouge at the time of the
murder. A car salesman identified Vasquez as the man who had bought the
Buick for $6,500 in cash. A witness at the halfway house identified Velez as the
driver of the Buick getaway car. Two other witnesses placed Quintero Cruz at
the scene of the murder.
Burns took five weeks to present her case and put 118 witnesses on the
stand. The defense called no witnesses. In closing arguments to the jury, Prem
Burns justified using a witness like Max Mermelstein: “If you try the devil, you
take your witnesses from hell.”

PREM Burns pursued the death penalty. She waved the MAC-10 in front of the
jury. “Why did they use a machine gun instead of walking up to Barry Seal and
shooting him?” she asked. “Because this weapon was used to teach a lesson.
Gangland style. To deter other snitches.” The jury took thirty minutes to decide
in favor of life imprisonment.
Cumbamba, Vasquez, and Quintero Cruz listened to the decision
without emotion. Three women on the jury sobbed.
Several weeks later the word went around that there was a seven-figure
contract on the head of Max Mermelstein.
31. THE FINAL OFFENSIVE
It began as a brief torrent of judicial activity, one of those incredibly complicated
but apparently meaningless exercises in legal pedantry for which Latin America
is unhappily notorious. The Colombian Supreme Court, reviewing one of several
dozen challenges to the U.S.Colombia extradition treaty, ruled on December 12,
1986, that the pact’s enabling legislation was unconstitutional because it had
been signed by an interim president and not by the president of Colombia
himself.
The practical effect of the finding was immediate and dramatic.
Suddenly the treaty was rendered useless; it could no longer be applied in
Colombia because of what appeared to be a frivolous technicality.
The Supreme Court did, however, suggest a way out of the impasse:
perhaps current President Virgilio Barco might want to “re-sign” the enabling
legislation in his own name. On December 14 Barco did so; the treaty was back
in force, and that, supposedly, was that. U.S. Ambassador Richard Gillespie
commented that the United States was “pleased” at Barco’s “decisiveness” in
restoring the enabling legislation. “We at no time felt the treaty was inoperable,”
he said.

WHAT the United States ambassador saw as a momentary inconvenience was in

fact the opening skirmish in a much larger and more important campaign: the
Medellín cartel’s final offensive against extradition.
For five years the cartel had battled the bilateral treaty with all the tools
at its disposal. It had murdered more than thirty judges, including half the
Supreme Court. It had put dozens of politicians on its payroll. It had bought
enough publicity to portray the treaty as a violation of national sovereignty.
Nothing had worked--until now. On December 12 the cartel had finally
found a loose thread. It had pulled a bit and sensed it could pull some more. By
Christmas the cartel had filed nine new lawsuits challenging Barco’s right to “re-
sign” the enabling legislation. Barco, the suits charged, had either exceeded his
authority or, at the very least, should be required to resubmit the enabling
legislation to Congress for ratification.
Unlike the United States, the Colombian government had immediately
understood that the treaty was in grave danger. For two days after the Supreme
Court’s initial finding, Barco consulted ex-presidents, legislators, and jurists as
to what action he should take. The answers were fairly daunting. First, there was
no quick legal fix he could make, nor was there anything he could do with state
of siege or executive decree. Second, if he resubmitted the legislation, Congress
would not pass it. Many lawmakers were already in the traffickers’ pockets;
many others were too scared to vote publicly for extradition.
That left the simple expedient of signing the measure again. It was an
unprecedented action and perhaps unconstitutional. It would certainly be
challenged, but it had at least an even chance of being sustained. Meanwhile it
would buy some time. Maybe the government could find another, better
mechanism. It was worth a try.

THE struggle that ensued was an exercise in quiet desperation. During it, Barco,
the unsympathetic cipher who seemed always reluctant to take action, emerged
as extradition’s last champion. On the other side the cartel circled jackal-like,
sensing that the treaty was badly wounded. The traffickers were anxious, finally,
to make the kill.
In the middle, trapped by circumstances, was the Colombian Supreme
Court. Before December 12 the justices--and especially those in the
constitutional chamber--were receiving a steady diet of drug trafficker threats,
both in the mail and on the telephone. The atmosphere was much the same as
what had existed in the few months before the Palace of Justice attack. Now it
was worse, of course, because the Palace of Justice murders had happened.
Justices could see what might happen if they ignored the cartel’s messages.
Then, after December 12, the threats stopped. The message was
unmistakable. Hurt the cartel, suffer the consequences. Help the cartel, and the
cartel lays off.
Still, there were plenty of battles left to be fought. The court had some
advantages. Protection of the justices, for one, was better. Since the Palace of
Justice affair the court had moved to temporary quarters in a narrow brick
apartment building across the street from Bogotá’s Hotel Tequendama, on the
northern edge of the downtown area. The building was easily guarded and
almost impregnable--like a medieval keep. All the justices now had twenty-four-
hour bodyguards and moved about in police-escorted convoys.
But it was no way to live, especially for middle-aged and elderly jurists
for whom membership on Colombia’s highest court was supposed to be an honor
to be enjoyed, not a horror to be dreaded. What sense did it make to spend a
career scrambling to the top of the judicial heap only to have one’s professional
life submerged in a quotidian nightmare?
 Besides the working conditions, the national ambience was horrible.
The government had little confidence in the court’s ability to do its job. The
justices, for their part, had no confidence in the government’s ability to protect
them. The Colombian people by this time had little confidence in the integrity of
either branch of government.
Finally, 1986 had been so bloody, so humiliating, and so full of failure,
that the pendulum of political opinion had once again swung away from
confrontation with the cartel and back to appeasement. The sense of
hopelessness was such that important Colombians had begun to speak again of
accommodation. In 1986 the spokesman was Samuel Buitrago Hurtado,
president of the Council of State, a nonpartisan administrative agency charged
with ruling on questions of governmental administration and procedure. His
solution: legalize drug trafficking. His reasoning: “The drug business will cease
to be profitable for the drug traffickers if it is legalized and if the Colombian
state assumes total control not only of its sale, but also of its use.”
In this fashion, presumably, two-bit gringo hoods seeking to buy a load
could deal with an agent of the Colombian government instead of a member of
the Medellín cartel. Buitrago had not thought about what legalized cocaine
traffic would be like in a world where Colombia was the only country that had it.
Yet the fact that such views got a respectful airing was a testament to
the degree of terror with which the cartel had infected the upper echelons of
Colombia’s bureaucracy. One assistant attorney general could insist that “threats
are not a general fact of life” but admitted that “all you have to do is kill one or
two, and you’ve got a climate of panic.” An assistant interior minister stated the
dilemma starkly: “These people have no problem whatsoever in killing a four-
year-old child.”
The final antiextradition offensive had barely begun when Guillermo
Cano was killed. Then came the state of siege, the crackdown, the Parejo
Gonzalez shooting, and, finally, the capture of Carlos Lehder. Two weeks after
that, Colombian news organizations printed and broadcast stories based on a
four-part series in The Miami Herald entitled “The Medellín Cartel, World’s
Deadliest Criminals.” The reprint was the first venture in a cooperative
campaign to report drug trafficking by sharing equally in the risk. Medellín’s
two dailies, El Colombiano and El Mundo, at first refused to print the Herald’s
series, then finally ran it at the urging of colleagues.

THE Lehder capture, the news campaign, and, most of all, the image of a badly
regarded government finally taking effective, aggressive action created an
illusion of progress. Lehder’s capture and extradition had provoked no
significant cartel reprisals--almost unbelievable for an organization that derived
its power from intimidation and fear. Either the cartel didn’t care about Lehder,
or it was on the run and couldn’t afford to stop and take revenge.
There was a third possibility: the cartel had items on its agenda whose
importance eclipsed the capture of Carlos Lehder. It could not afford to rock the
boat while its grand strategy was unfolding.

AS the year progressed, the Supreme Court issued a series of findings that bit by
bit cut away the government’s maneuvering room. On February 17 the court
refused to rule on seven pending extraditions while the question of the enabling
legislation remained unresolved. On March 5 the court annulled as
unconstitutional Barco’s December state of siege decree giving the armed forces
the power to judge drug traffickers. The ruling forced drug cases back into
civilian courts, where they were virtually impossible to prosecute. Barco
countered on March 11 by creating jobs for thirty-nine new special drug
prosecutors and assigning them military protection.
The government appeared to get a break on May 1 when the Council of
State--queried by Barco--issued its opinion that the extradition treaty was still in
force and that the Supreme Court had to rule on pending cases. The court
responded that no one had ever suggested that the treaty was invalid. The
difficulty was that it could not be applied because the enabling legislation was
no good.
Still, this was all fencing. The government was looking for a way to
escape the trap the cartel was trying to spring. The Council of State had opened a
window, but the Supreme Court wouldn’t let the government climb out. This
meant that in the end, the treaty would stand or fall on the question of whether
Barco had been within his rights when he’d re-signed the enabling legislation in
December. On May 28 the justices, meeting in plenum, emitted their finding: a
12-12 tie. They would have to hire a temporary “alternate justice” to break the
impasse.
From that moment the treaty was finished. On paper the alternate justice
stood a good chance of ruling on either side of the question. In practice the
government never had a prayer. The Medellín cartel had succeeded in reducing
the extradition treaty to a single finding by a single person. By 1987 this
principle always worked in favor of the cartel. Years of murder and terrorism
had taught Colombians the penalty for challenging the traffickers. If it was a
question of one case, the cartel always picked on the judge, and the rest of the
establishment--police, prosecutors, jailers--fell in line. Now the cartel had
managed to do the same thing with extradition. It was unreasonable to suppose
that one lawyer, working as a consultant on one case, could ignore cartel
pressure in making his finding.
And so it proved. The court appointed three justices one by one from a
pool of eminent lawyers assembled precisely for the purpose of breaking ties.
One by one they recused themselves, citing conflict of interest. The fourth,
Alfonso Suarez de Castro, also pronounced himself impeded, but the court
refused to accept his excuse and ordered him to sit. He sat, and on June 25 he
ruled that President Barco had acted unconstitutionally in re-signing the enabling
legislation. By a vote of 13-12, the Supreme Court had hamstrung the extradition
treaty. The Medellín cartel had won its biggest victory.

THE U.S. embassy issued a brave but ridiculous statement suggesting that the
finding somehow did not mean what it meant: “No matter what, international
treaties stand above internal decisions, and as such they must be obeyed.”
Privately, however, one embassy official spoke of a “very bleak
outlook” for drug enforcement now that extradition was no longer possible. The
Colombian Justice Ministry lamented the disappearance of “a very valuable
instrument” in the drug wars.
Others were much harsher: “It is the destruction of the nation’s judicial
system,” said Conservative party leader Alvaro Gomez Hurtado, loser to Barco
in the 1986 presidential elections. “The country should declare to the world that
it has resolved not to have a Supreme Court, that we cannot give it sufficient
guarantees so it can find on the basis of law.”
The cartel, not surprisingly, was ecstatic. Writing to his Armenia
followers from a U.S. jail on July 1, Carlos Lehder pronounced the day of the
finding “the happiest of my existence” and expressed the fond but futile hope
that he would soon be free because his extradition had been illegal. He
apparently forgot that once he had appeared in the United States, nobody in the
U.S. justice system cared how he got there.
Still, Lehder retained high spirits. In a later letter from Jacksonville he
described how the long battle against extradition began “with the burial of a
Supreme Court who had sold out to imperialist interests.” This letter was the
clearest indication to date that the Palace of Justice attack had been a drug
traffickers’ job. As many Colombians already suspected, the cartel had begun its
systematic dismemberment of the Supreme Court on the day of the palace
takeover.
WITHOUT an extradition treaty, drug enforcement agents in the United States
and Colombia had to count on the traffickers’ arrest, trial, and conviction in
Colombia. U.S. government and DEA officials had little faith that this would
happen. This view was reinforced within thirty days of the Supreme Court ruling
when a Cali judge acquitted Gilberto Rodriguez Orejuela of drug charges after a
five-month trial. Rodriguez Orejuela, extradited from Spain in 1986 a couple of
weeks before fellow prisoner Jorge Ochoa, had quietly bided his time in a Cali
jail waiting for his trafficking case to be heard. The trial opened February 4 and
was closed May 30 before amplifying evidence could be submitted by the United
States.
In worse shape was Pablo Escobar, but “the Godfather” moved with
characteristic efficiency to wipe out his pending charges. This time, however, he
worked within the system. On July 22 three U.S.-inspired “Requests for
Provisional Arrest” were dismissed as unenforceable. On August 9 newspapers
discovered that a judge had withdrawn orders for the arrest of Escobar,
Rodriguez Gacha, and Evaristo Porras in the murder of El Espectador editor
Guillermo Cano. Three days later another judge dismissed the indictment against
Escobar for the Lara Bonilla murder. The Cano judge cited lack of evidence; the
Lara Bonilla judge cited improper methods of obtaining evidence. Interested
policemen, of whom there were few, now had to look all the way back to the
mid-1970s to find something on which to try Escobar. And in those cases the
witnesses were all dead.
That left Jorge Ochoa as the only cartel fugitive with substantial legal
difficulties. His two U.S. indictments would not cause him any problem, but all
the maneuvering he had done in Spain in 1984 now came back to haunt him. He
still had a twenty-month sentence to serve for bull smuggling and had broken his
parole after his release on bond. Furthermore, his Medellín indictment for drug
trafficking, copied from the Nicaragua case in Miami and filed in Colombia, was
still alive. Neither case was a serious matter when set alongside the collection of
homicides that had once confronted Escobar. But neither case was going to be
dismissed on a technicality and forgotten. If Ochoa was caught, he was liable.
Barco did not give up after the Supreme Court finding. His new justice
minister, Enrique Low Murtra, was a former member of the Council of State and
a survivor of the Palace of Justice affair. He hated drug traffickers and made no
secret of his, and Barco’s, priorities. “The government wants to continue
extraditing,” Low Murtra told El Tiempo shortly after his appointment.
The problem was how to do it. Barco knew the easiest way would be to
take the Supreme Court’s advice and resubmit the old treaty’s enabling
legislation to Congress for passage. Barco’s aides polled Congress and found
what they suspected. No chance.
Quietly the government opened negotiations with the United States on
possible new measures either to reinstate the crippled treaty, write a new one, or
resurrect older pacts. Under consideration were a multilateral 1933 hemispheric
agreement known as the “Montevideo Convention” and a bilateral 1888
agreement. Both documents in theory were applicable, but both would take a lot
of work before they could be brought into play. In the latter part of the year the
U.S. Justice Department began discussing all the possibilities with Low Murtra
and Colombian Attorney General Carlos Mauro Hoyos. The cartel got wind of
the talks and watched them closely.
By August the cartel could pronounce itself in better shape than it had
been in years. It had lost Lehder, true, but it had also defeated the extradition
treaty through a combination of prolonged intimidation, canny legal
maneuvering and, above all, patience. The cartel of the future, it seemed, would
be more like the U.S. mafia--wellknown, settled, and immensely powerful, but
low profile and nonconfrontational.
Then in early August DAS announced it had solved the Guillermo Cano
murder and broken up the Medellín murder gang that had held the contract. DAS
described the gang, Los Priscos, as the “armed wing” of the Medellín cartel. Los
Priscos included as many as fifty people between full-timers and subcontractors.
It was led by two top echelon Medellín badmen, the brothers David Ricardo and
Jose Roberto Prisco Lopera. David Ricardo had been described as “the number-
one hired killer in Medellín” in an anonymous letter sent to Barco earlier in the
year.
DAS attributed more than a dozen important cartel murders to Los
Priscos but could link them solidly to only two: Cano and Supreme Court Justice
Hernando Baquero Borda. On this pair, however, the DAS investigation was
solid and impressive. Detectives had backtracked the gang through the Cano hit
team’s leader, Luis Eduardo Osorio Guizado, La Guaqua (“The Muskrat”). La
Guaqua was dead, killed in a Medellín vendetta along with his top lieutenant, but
DAS was able to bring the gang leaders under surveillance and follow a Prisco
hit team when it arrived in Bogotá in early August to “score a goal,” Medellín
slang for murder. The gunmen spotted the DAS tail after two days, and
detectives and Priscos shot it out late one night in the quiet residential streets of
north Bogotá. DAS killed four gang members, including Jose Roberto Prisco.
DAS’s description of Los Priscos was a bit folkloric, but for the first
time someone had focused attention on the way the cartel did its dirty work.
Whether it was Los Priscos or Los Quesitos, as in the Lara Bonilla assassination,
or Los Magníficos or any of the other one-hundred-plus gangs that roamed the
Colombian underworld, the method was the same, learned during the Griselda
Blanco days and taught for years, it was rumored, in back alley homicide
academies in Medellín’s northern barrios. Cops called it “the Medellín
signature”: the MAC10 machine pistol, the motorcycles, the sharp division of
labor between planners and gunmen, the safe house, and the multiple cutouts.
Lawmen could trace a cartel hit so far--and no farther.
DAS’s exposé of Los Priscos hurt the cartel. Then Justice Minister Low
Murtra did it further damage on November 12, charging that Gonzalo Rodriguez
Gacha, working through a Prisco-like gang of thugs, had ordered the October
murder of Patriotic Union leader Jaime Pardo Leal. The killing of Pardo Leal, a
well-liked, forty-sixyear-old Marxist lawyer and the Patriotic Union’s 1986
presidential candidate, prompted a twenty-four-hour general strike, two days of
riots, and general calls for Barco to take action against right-wing death squads.
Low Murtra said Pardo Leal had simply been caught like so many
others in the middle of Rodriguez Gacha’s turf war with the FARC guerrillas in
Guaviare. No one doubted him. By late 1987 the Medellín cartel had ruined the
FARC’s reputation for all time. Colombia’s proudest insurgents were now
widely regarded as little more than a band of gangsters who had sold out to the
cocaine barons.
32. CITIZEN JORGE LUIS OCHOA
It was about 4:30 p.m. on November 21, 1987, when the traffic cop gestured to
the driver of the white 1987 Porsche, indicating that he should pull over to the
side of the road. It was a busy weekend afternoon, a Saturday, and the highway
was filled with cars going to or coming from Cali, thirty miles to the west. The
Porsche was outward bound, traveling to Pereira or Antioquia, perhaps, and, like
any other car on the highway, it had to stop north of Palmira to pay tolls. The El
Cerrito toll booths were a natural place for police to size up motorists, and that’s
what they were doing. Later, stories would surface suggesting that the Porsche
was on the watch list, that the two policemen knew who was in it and had been
stalking the driver for days. Another story--the police themselves pushed this
one--said the roadblock was “routine,” a precaution put into effect every
weekend in hopes of catching the odd guerrilla transporting weapons. This
explanation was ridiculous--no guerrilla would be transporting weapons in a
brand-new white Porsche that in Colombia cost $260,000.
The policeman and his partner approached the driver’s window and
asked for some ID. It was never made clear whether they recognized the driver
or what the driver ended up showing them. Whatever he said or did, it wasn’t
enough. The policemen told the driver that he, his woman passenger, and the
Porsche would have to accompany them to Palmira. This did not sit well with
the driver, who suggested something might be arranged, say, for 3,000 pesos
($12). The two officers demurred. Well, said the driver, how about 50,000 pesos
($200)? Really, the police said, don’t make more trouble for yourself. How
about 12 million pesos ($48,000)? No. Well, then, let’s say 100 million pesos
($400,000).
The policemen wouldn’t take the money. Neither man ever made any
public statement about the incident, and their bosses, wisely, never released the
officers’ names. Maybe the two policemen were young idealists, or maybe they
were like Major Lemus, Carlos Lehder’s capturer, honest, ambitious cops who
wanted to arrest bad guys and get ahead. Whatever their motives, there was no
doubt they had trapped lightning in a bottle. The driver of the Porsche was Jorge
Ochoa.
At traffic police headquarters in Palmira, Ochoa finally found some
help. A woman lawyer for the Attorney General’s Office, either by accident or
by design, was on hand to greet the prisoner with a big hug and promises that
everything would soon be made right. She got on the phone and started calling
nearby military and police installations, looking for somebody to sign Ochoa out
of jail. Saturday evenings weren’t good for this sort of work, however, and the
attorney couldn’t find anyone willing to accept such a responsibility. Later the
woman denied having done any of this, saying she was only concerned about
alleged maltreatment of prisoners arrested on drug trafficking charges. The
traffic police were unimpressed. They had seen her at work, and, anyway, who’d
said anything about drug trafficking? The police were holding a warrant from a
Cartagena Customs judge who said Ochoa had broken parole and jumped bail on
a twenty-month bull-smuggling conviction.
The police booked Ochoa and put him in a holding cell, then sent him to
the army’s Codazzi Batallion on the outskirts of Palmira, where he spent the
night and much of the next day in the stockade. At dusk Sunday a helicopter
touched down at batallion headquarters, picked him up, and took him to a nearby
airfield, where he was loaded aboard a Colombian air force C-130 Hercules and
flown to Bogotá. He landed at seven p.m., to be greeted by a platoon of
motorcycle policemen. They put him aboard an armored van. Then lights
flashed, sirens shrieked, and the convoy dashed down the highway from El
Dorado Airport, skirted the city, and headed north to the Brigade of Military
Institutes, a huge military complex on the edge of the capital.
By nine p.m. Ochoa was safely locked away in a maximum security
military prison, where he would stay while the Colombian government plotted
its next move. The police and the armed forces had done their jobs. They had
arrested Ochoa, moved him, and put him in a safe place. Now it was up to the
government to figure out what to do.

OUTWARDLY the circumstances of Ochoa’s arrest closely resembled those of

the Lehder capture nine months earlier: the “chance encounter”; the lack of
serious violence; the quick, capable action by the armed forces; the move to
Bogotá.
Beyond these events, however, the two cases had nothing in common.
Lehder’s extradition was a done deal, signed off by President Belisario Betancur
and simply waiting the day when somebody managed to catch him. Ochoa was
doubly blessed--first, because he had a piddling sentence in Colombia to serve
before any action whatsoever could be taken on his extradition, and second, and
much more important, because the 1979 extradition treaty was effectively
frozen. Not only was there no way to extradite him quickly, there wasn’t even a
working legal mechanism that would allow the government to initiate
proceedings.
 President Virgilio Barco knew all this but wasn’t sure what action to
take or even what action could be taken. The Colombian public, with its limited
understanding of the nation’s byzantine legal processes, expected Ochoa to be
flown momentarily to Homestead Air Force Base in south Florida. The United
States was publicly promulgating this view: “The president of Colombia could
be courageous and greatly assist his country by throwing out Jorge Ochoa,” said
Miami DEA spokesman Jack Hook. “Once Jorge Ochoa arrives in the United
States, he, like Carlos Lehder, will not be able to bribe, murder, or intimidate his
way out of police custody.”
In Colombia, of course, this was a real danger. Ochoa had already
finessed his way out of jail once, and Colombian law enforcement had a long
and terrible history of not being able to hold on to drug traffickers. The longer
Colombia held Ochoa, the more difficult it would be to keep holding him.
The day after the arrest Barco met with a handful of his top advisers to
discuss the government’s options. The inner circle included Foreign Minister
Julio Londoño Paredes, Justice Minister Enrique Low Murtra, and Attorney
General Carlos Mauro Hoyos Jimenez. The meeting was held at Londoño’s
north Bogotá home and lasted all day Sunday, November 22.
In the end the government took the only short-term action possible,
deciding to hold Ochoa on the old bull-smuggling charge--apparently good for
twenty months in jail if necessary--while it tried to arrange his extradition. Low
Murtra announced that Ochoa was being held “under the jurisdiction of the
Cartagena Customs judge.” The judge --successor to the ill-fated Fabio Pastrana
Hoyos--revoked Ochoa’s conditional liberty, citing parole violation. So far, so
good.
To observe the machinations at close range and to offer suggestions, the
U.S. government sent a six-member legal team from the Departments of Justice
and State to Bogotá immediately after Ochoa’s arrest. Their brief was to urge
Colombia to “find a mechanism” that would allow it to extradite Ochoa and
other accused traffickers to the United States.
The team was nervous about the Colombians. Londoño in particular
seemed deliberately obstructionist, anti-American, and bent on “slowing down
and blocking any initiatives and prolonging problems,” as one team supervisor
said later. The team felt the same way about Low Murtra, a curious position
given the justice minister’s hard-line statements on drug trafficking.
But the U.S. team saw him differently. He was another foot dragger,
always looking for ways not to do something. The team knew he’d been
threatened--who hadn’t?--but now they felt that he’d been threatened more
seriously and more specifically. He wasn’t a Yankee hater like Londoño, but, he
wasn’t doing the U.S. cause any good.
For Barco, they had growing admiration. True, he’d started out like
Betancur, ignoring the damage the cartel could do. But, also like Betancur, once
the cartel had swatted him in the face a couple of times, he’d gotten mean. He
was extradition’s fastest friend now and had rapidly come to realize that the
cartel was the scourge of Colombian institutions. He also knew that his
administration could forget about any serious role in international affairs unless
it did something about the Medellín cartel.
The one man in whom the U.S. team truly had confidence was Attorney
General Hoyos, a low-key paisa from Medellín who had quietly moved his
agency into the forefront of the drug wars. Hoyos was a fiftyish bachelor whose
puckish smile belied a desperate shyness. He was never seen at parties and never
hung around in Bogotá. He spent weekends with his mother and his fiancée at
his finca outside Medellín, seemingly unaffected by the chaos tearing apart his
hometown. Long before Ochoa’s capture, representatives of the U.S. legal team
had begun talks with Hoyos on how extradition might be restored. With Ochoa’s
capture the negotiations acquired greater urgency. Through it all, said one U.S.
legal team member, Hoyos was “the one we trusted” and “the one who was
serious.”

THE cartel was serious, too, much more serious than it had been when Lehder
was captured. Lehder had been an outsider, an English-speaking Quindio
interloper who had been living in semiretirement when the police busted him.
Ochoa was a different story. He was El Gordo, a main man, a paisa, the leading
provider for the biggest crime family in Medellín, close personal friend and
associate of Pablo Escobar. He must not be extradited.
The cartel reacted to Ochoa’s capture almost immediately. A little more
than twenty-four hours after the El Cerrito arrest--with Ochoa just settling into
his new Bogotá jail cell and with Barco and his advisers locked away in the
Londoño house--two vanloads of thugs, about twelve gunmen in all, stopped
outside the Medellín home of Juan Gomez Martinez, editor of El Colombiano,
the city’s biggest daily newspaper.
One group banged on the front door. Gomez Martinez’s son peeked
outside, then warned his father that people were waiting to murder him. Gomez
Martinez, watching television with his back to the door, flipped over his easy
chair, crouched behind it, grabbed a pistol, and pulled the trigger.
The thugs returned the fire with gusto. Meanwhile, a second group, still
riding in one of the vans, attempted to breach Gomez Martinez’s defenses by
crashing through the garage door. The van backed up and thumped repeatedly
into the door, which turned out to be made of sheet steel. It bent but did not
break.
Fifteen minutes of this was all the neighbors could take. “Hey, look!”
yelled one man. “They’re trying to kill Gomez Martinez. Let’s do something!”
And then the whole neighborhood opened up. Ten years of near anarchy
had taught the paisas how to take care of themselves and, when occasion
required it, of their friends. Eventually somebody shot one of the gunmen, and
the rest began to lose their enthusiasm. Taking their wounded comrade with
them, they made an orderly withdrawal.
At first it seemed to be comic opera stuff. Then, an hour later, the
gang’s message arrived at news organizations. The idea, said the communiqué,
had been to abduct Gomez Martinez briefly so the gang could deliver the
message personally. Since that didn’t work, here it was anyway.
The communiqué was addressed to Gomez Martinez, began “Respected
sir,” and proceeded with the stilted Antioqueño formality that Escobar had used
during his troubles in Congress more than four years earlier:
“We have found out that the government is trying by whatever means
possible to extradite citizen Jorge Luis Ochoa to the United States. For us, this
constitutes the vilest of outrages.”
The gang wanted Gomez Martinez to let the government know that “in
case citizen Jorge Luis Ochoa is extradited to the United States, we will declare
absolute and total war against this country’s political leaders. We will execute
out of hand the principal chieftains” of Colombia’s main political parties, the
communiqué said. It was signed “the Extraditables.”
In Bogotá, far from the action, newspapers gave the communiqué and
the attack on Gomez Martinez banner treatment. In Medellín, on the front lines,
reaction was somewhat different. Gomez Martinez, in addition to his job as
editor of El Colombiano, was the Conservative party candidate for mayor of
Medellín. The Extraditables had assured him in the communiqué’s last
paragraph that the gang had “no political interests against your campaign,” but
Gomez Martinez was taking no chances. El Colombiano granted the assault on
its editor’s house six discreet paragraphs on page two below the TV schedule.

IF the government won the first battle for Ochoa by arresting and holding him,
the cartel won the second, for after a few days it became clear that the prisoner
would not--could not--be extradited to the United States without some
reformulation of existing treaties.
This meant delay, and delay meant that Ochoa would have a chance to
muster the high-priced legal strategy he would need to beat the rap yet again. He
lost little time.
By the end of the first week he had six lawyers working for him, three
of them former Supreme Court justices, including team leader Humberto
Barrera. Within days the legal team had reactivated the long-moribund Medellín
case that duplicated the 1984 Nicaragua trafficking charges against Ochoa. It
was this document, lifted from public records in Miami, that had tipped the
balance in Spain in favor of extraditing Ochoa to Colombia rather than the
United States. Barrera judged the Medellín case could work again now,
particularly since it looked as though the United States was going to try to get
Ochoa with the so-called Montevideo Convention, which required that pending
charges in the arresting country be cleaned up before extradition. Low Murtra
had announced on November 23 that Colombia had issued a provisional arrest
warrant against Ochoa--the first step in the extradition process under the now
frozen 1979 treaty.
All of this was very confusing, as the defense attorneys meant it to be.
While Ochoa languished at the Brigade of Military Institutions and, after a few
weeks, at La Picota, Bogotá’s maximum security civilian prison, Barrera and his
team set about destroying the government’s case against their client. The
government watched closely at first, but as the Christmas season approached,
officials began to let down their guard.
The U.S. legal team left Bogotá in mid-December, and the case against
Ochoa immediately began to unravel. On December 17 Low Murtra withdrew
the provisional arrest warrant outstanding against Ochoa, recognizing that it had
no meaning in the absence of a working extradition treaty. An exultant Barrera
called the ruling “a victory for international jurisprudence.”
Sometime in the next ten days, members of the Ochoa team went to
Medellín for talks with Judge Maria Cristina Cadavid, ostensibly investigating
the Medellín case, and obtained her assurances that Ochoa’s presence was not
necessary. Later she would admit having also entertained a visit from Juan
David and young Fabio Ochoa and Pablo Escobar, also accused in the case. She
could find “no merit” in the charges against them.
Finally, on December 30 Barrera paid a call to Bogotá Criminal Court
Judge Andres Enrique Montañez. Ochoa had already served his bull-smuggling
time, Barrera said, if the courts counted his jail stints in Spain, Cartagena, and
Bogotá. Actually, he continued, Ochoa had served twenty-one months, not
twenty, but we won’t quibble. Barrera had sought to point this out to the judge in
Cartagena, he said, but that judge was on vacation. Under Colombian law,
Barrera continued, he was now entitled to present his case to any sitting judge.
What exactly are we talking about? asked Montañez. We are talking about a writ
of habeas corpus, Barrera replied. There are no arrest orders pending against my
client. Montañez, without further preamble, signed the writ.
According to Semana magazine’s minute-by-minute account, Ochoa’s
legal team showed up at La Picota at five p.m. on December 30 waving the writ
and calling for Ochoa’s release. Warden Alvaro Camacho stalled, then called for
help from his boss, National Director of Prisons Guillermo Ferro. Unfortunately,
Ferro said, he couldn’t come immediately because he was at another prison
trying to contain a mutiny, which, conveniently for Ochoa, had begun about an
hour earlier.
Camacho stood fast for three hours, enduring a visit by Ochoa’s sobbing
wife: “Why are you being so arbitrary?” Ochoa’s lawyers twice induced
Camacho to order their client brought downstairs, which occasioned two
confrontations with El Gordo himself: “What’s going on, Mr. Warden?” At eight
p.m. Camacho finally caved in, forced to let Ochoa go because he had no reason
not to. Ochoa, wearing a blue flannel suit and carrying an overnight bag, left
with his wife and his lawyers in a blue van. Soon he was on a charter airplane
traveling to parts unknown to ring in the new year.

THE predictable, and by now standard, statements deploring the release of

Ochoa were issued in Colombia and in the United States as well. None of it did
any good, of course. Ochoa was reported lying low in Brazil, perhaps with
Escobar helping him settle in.
But even though 1988 began with the government taking furious action,
the cartel continued to strike hard.
On January 18, in an apparent variation on the attempt to kidnap Gomez
Martinez, gunmen abducted Andrés Pastrana Gomez, Conservative party
candidate for mayor of Bogotá, from his campaign headquarters. In initial
communiqués the kidnappers presented themselves as M-19 guerrillas, but M-19
denied having anything to do with the crime. After a couple of days Pastrana’s
friends were pretty sure the cartel had him. Pastrana, like Gomez Martinez in
Medellín, was a newsman--editor and anchorman of Bogotá’s TV-Hoy--and a
relatively outspoken opponent of drug trafficking.
A week later, right at dawn, Attorney General Hoyos bade his fiancée
good-bye and climbed into a chauffeured Mercedes for the short ride to the
Medellín Airport in Rionegro. He had spent the weekend at his finca and, as
usual, was taking the early Monday plane to Bogotá to begin his work week.
Three carloads of gunmen ambushed Hoyos on the edge of the airport
just before seven a.m., spraying the limousine with machine-gun bullets while a
busload of commuters watched in shock. The chauffeur and Hoyos’s bodyguard
died immediately. Hoyos, gravely wounded and bleeding, was dragged from the
limousine, packed into one of the getaway vehicles, and driven away.
President Barco ordered the area around the ambush saturated with
police. At noon the searchers radioed headquarters. In looking for Hoyos they
had found and freed Pastrana, unharmed after a week in a small farmhouse not
five miles from the site of the Hoyos ambush.
Pastrana confirmed he had been held by the traffickers as part of a
campaign to dramatize cartel opposition to extradition. He was, he thought,
supposed to act as some kind of messenger, à la Gomez Martinez. He said his
captors told him they planned to kidnap others for the same purpose, including
Attorney General Hoyos.
They had botched the job, though. Around four p.m. an anonymous
caller representing “the Extraditables” told the police they could find what was
left of the attorney general in a field a couple of miles from Pastrana’s hiding
place.
Hoyos was covered with blood. His spine had been shattered by a bullet
in the ambush, and he had been paralyzed and perhaps dying even as he was
dragged off. His attackers clearly did not want anyone to know this, for they had
shot Hoyos eleven times in the face. Just to make sure.
“We have executed the attorney general, Mr. Carlos Mauro Hoyos, as a
traitor and a sell-out,” the caller had told the police. “Listen carefully: the war
will go on. ... “
33. THE HENRY FORD OF COCAINE
Enormous publicity attended Carlos Lehder’s capture and extradition. Never
before had a cocaine trafficker of Lehder’s stature been brought to the United
States. The dramatic flight of the Aerocommander added to the excitement. For
the first time American justice would be able to try one of the leaders of the
Medellín cartel. DEA agents worldwide were told to be alert for possible
retaliation. Everybody braced for the worst.
Federal agents with automatic weapons and pump shotguns ringed the
Aerocommander as soon as it taxied to a halt on a remote runway at Tampa
International Airport at two a.m. on February 5, 1987. In ten seconds Lehder was
out of the plane and into a blue four-door sedan. The car sped with four others in
a convoy to downtown Tampa, were Lehder was locked up in a small room at
the federal courthouse.
When Lehder made his first appearance before a U.S. magistrate later
that morning, he showed remarkable composure, smiling and grinning and
speaking in precise, slightly accented English. What he said surprised
everybody:
“I don’t have any money.”
“Is the information true?” asked Magistrate Elizabeth Jenkins.
“Yes, Your Honor,” Lehder answered quietly. “Most of my assets are
frozen by the government of Colombia.”
Jenkins appointed a public defender to represent Lehder at his next
court appearance--a hearing to determine whether he should be held without
bond in Jacksonville, where he would face trial on the indictment brought
against him in 1981. Lehder had been extradited solely on the Jacksonville
charges, and those were the only ones on which he could be tried in the United
States. If convicted, Lehder faced a maximum penalty of life without parole plus
135 years in prison.

LEHDER’S court appearance in Tampa occasioned his first meeting with U.S.
Attorney Robert Merkle, who nearly four years earlier had flown to Bogotá to
personally file for Lehder’s extradition. To Merkle, Lehder appeared scruffy but
in excellent physical condition, his muscles showing through his tight T-shirt.
He also seemed unintimidated, which surprised Merkle.
If a federal prosecutor could have been designed to take on the Medellín
cartel, he would have turned out to be Robert W. Merkle, the forty-three-year-
old top law enforcement official in the Middle District of Florida. Merkle was an
imposing 245 pounds and had been a running back at Notre Dame. His hair was
blond and close-cropped, his face extraordinarily ruddy. As a county prosecutor,
Merkle had gone after public corruption with a zeal that earned him the
nickname “Mad Dog.” As U.S. attorney, he had even taken on Florida Governor
Bob Martinez in a bribery trial involving a Tampa political fixer. Martinez was
not charged, but he had to take the stand and face withering questions from
Merkle. Nine of the twelve jurors told a Miami Herald reporter that they didn’t
believe the governor’s denials.
The “Mad Dog” tag misrepresented Merkle in many ways. He was
aggressive, but he was also a brilliant trial tactician with a mind so quick his
arguments often jumped ahead of the defense attorneys’ responses. Out of the
courtroom he was a family man with nine kids and a fondness for singing and
playing the guitar. He earned $70,000 a year, a pittance compared with what he
could have made in private practice. But he was a man consumed by his job. He
was not humble about his abilities, and mediocre minds drew his scorn. Now
Bob Merkle set his sights on Carlos Lehder.
At the Tampa hearing, Merkle insisted that Lehder be immediately
detained without bond, saying there had been death threats against judges.
“That’s a lie!” Lehder shouted.
“He has said if he was caught, he would kill a federal judge a week until
he is freed,” said Assistant U.S. Attorney Ernst Mueller, Merkle’s deputy.
After the hearing, U.S. marshals whisked Lehder away under the gaze
of a rooftop sharpshooter. Lehder was flown to a military base near Jacksonville
and put in solitary confinement. His exact whereabouts were kept secret, even
from his court-appointed attorneys.
Lehder’s hearing in Jacksonville on February 9 drew the same
unprecedented security measures as the one in Tampa. The metal detectors were
so sensitive that many spectators had to remove their shoes because the nails set
off an alarm. A bomb-sniffing dog roamed the courthouse corridors. Parking was
banned on the four streets adjacent to the courthouse.
Lehder said he couldn’t get access to money to hire a lawyer right away
because the Colombian government had frozen his assets. Merkle noted that he
wore a Rolex watch: “Are you aware that that watch is worth approximately six
thousand dollars?”
“No,” Lehder answered.
At the hearing, Lehder’s public defender, Rosemary Cakmis, accused
Pablo Escobar of setting up Lehder.
“Your Honor, we understand that he was turned in to the police by an
underworld figure, Pablo Escobar,” Cakmis said. She did not elaborate.
The judge ordered Lehder held without bond for the duration of his
trial. Things got worse for Lehder before the day was over. The IRS filed a $70
million lien against him, estimating that he had earned $300 million smuggling
cocaine in 1979 and 1980 alone.
Lehder was then taken to the federal maximum security prison in
Marion, Illinois. This was the best gauge yet of the fear Lehder provoked in
American law enforcement. Marion is the most secure federal prison in the
country, the modern-day equivalent of Alcatraz. It made Lehder’s previous
federal home, the prison in Danbury, look like a summer camp. Marion’s
inmates are drawn from prisoners “who demonstrate an inability to function” in
federal maximum security prisons, according to the Justice Department’s prison
policy manual. In other words, Marion is for the hardest of the hard-core. For 3
1/2 years Marion had been under a “lockdown”--all 350 of its inmates confined
to their seven-by-eight-foot cells for twenty-three hours a day. Carlos Lehder
was one of the few pretrial detainees in the history of Marion.
From Marion, Lehder was moved to the federal prison in Talladega,
Alabama, to make it easier for his lawyers to visit. Again he was kept in total
isolation. At Talladega a mentally ill prisoner bunked near Lehder “spent much
of the night and day yelling and emitting unintelligible guttural sounds,”
Lehder’s attorneys later complained. “Lehder was unable to sleep day or night
because of the incessant noise.” Next Lehder was moved to the maximum
security prison in Atlanta, again to bring him closer to his lawyers. He was kept
in isolation on a floor of otherwise empty cells. The floors underneath him
housed 1,800 Cuban prisoners from the Mariel boatlift. These Marielitos also
kept him awake. “Primal screams punctuate the air minute by minute, and from
time to time the din is so pervasive that one cannot hear himself think,” his
lawyers complained.
Eleven days after Lehder’s court-appointed attorney claimed that Pablo
Escobar fingered her client, a curious letter appeared in the offices of
Colombia’s leading newspapers. It was from Escobar in hiding.
Escobar admitted to “personal quarrels with Lehder on several
occasions, but these would not lead me to perform such a low and cowardly act
as to betray him to the authorities.” Escobar complained that Lehder’s lawyer’s
remarks were part of a “plan to attack my moral and personal integrity.”
Carlos Lehder did not intend to put his future in the hands of court-
appointed attorneys. His emissaries began courting some of the best legal talent
in Miami. Speculation in legal circles set the fee as high as $2.5 million, or thirty
times Bob Merkle’s yearly salary. Surprisingly, several top Miami drug lawyers
declined the case. They feared a new federal law, the Money Laundering Control
Act, which made it a crime for an attorney to accept a fee from illegal sources.
The law was as yet untested, but the thought of what Merkle might do with it
gave plenty of lawyers pause.
Eventually, though, Lehder wound up with two top Miami defense
attorneys, Ed Shohat and Jose Quiñon. Shohat had defended many big
Colombian drug cases in Miami, including the one involving Hernan Botero.
Colleagues described him as “a lawyer’s lawyer--competent, ethical, and very
meticulous.” He was extremely bright, analytical, witty, and aggressive in the
courtroom, the perfect foil for Bob Merkle. He would make most of the
arguments in court. Quiñon, a former state prosecutor, was a Cuban-American
who could speak Spanish with his client. Quiñon did things in a courtroom with
a supernal ease and was noted for his rapport with juries and witnesses.
Delays kept pushing the trial date back, from late spring to early fall.
Then a curious thing happened during a day-long pretrial hearing in May 1987.
Lehder’s attorneys were arguing to get him transferred from Atlanta to the
federal Metropolitan Correctional Center south of Miami, when Merkle unveiled
a surprise: Carlos Lehder had sent a letter to Vice President George Bush
offering to cooperate in return for immunity. Merkle said the letter “got to the
White House,” but he couldn’t release its contents because a magistrate had
ordered it sealed. He said he thought the letter frivolous and added that Bush’s
staff “didn’t take it seriously, either.” Merkle had no intention of making any
deal with Lehder. After the hearing, Lehder’s attorneys denied that he wanted to
turn informant.
“It is absolutely false beyond any doubt that Carlos Lehder is
cooperating,” Quiñon said, adding, “This letter is to some degree the product of
his solitary confinement.”
But the letter made headlines in the next day’s Miami Herald: accused
COLOMBIAN DRUG CHIEF’S OFFER TO COOPERATE DESCRIBED as
frivolous. In the basement of the federal detention center in North Dade, George
Jung read the story with disgust. It brought back the feelings of betrayal that he
had harbored against Lehder for years. The FBI had contacted Jung in prison in
1986 with a proposal that he travel to Colombia and lure Lehder into a trap. Jung
was willing, but unknown to the FBI he had his own plan for Lehder when they
met: he intended to finally exact his revenge and try to kill his former partner.
But before the plan could be implemented, Lehder was captured in Colombia.
Jung was approached to testify, but he refused. He didn’t want to be a snitch.
(Jung was sitting in a federal jail cell, sentenced to fifteen years in prison for
importing three hundred kilos of cocaine into the United States.) Now, if Lehder
was going to start telling on his fellow smugglers, well, then Jung had a few
things to tell, too. He called the FBI and later sat down to write a detailed letter
about Carlos Lehder.

BY the time Carlos Lehder’s trial finally opened on November 17, 1987, Merkle
had amassed an enormous case that stretched from Danbury in 1974 to Medellín
in 1985. Merkle’s strategy was audacious. He had charted a course far beyond
the charges listed in the Jacksonville indictment, which only covered smuggling
acts committed between 1978 and 1980. Merkle planned to lay out Lehder’s
career as one big conspiracy to flood the United States with cocaine. The
prosecutor sought to present the big picture of the Medellín cartel for the first
time in an American courtroom. Merkle’s opening argument was appropriately
grandiose: “This case will take you back in time to 1974, and forward over the
course of many years in which Carlos Lehder pursued a singular dream, a
singular vision, to be the king of cocaine transportation,” Merkle said, adding
later, “He was to cocaine transportation what Henry Ford was to automobiles. . .
.
“He saw America as a decadent society. He saw cocaine as the wave of
the future in the United States, reeling from Watergate and Vietnam, particularly
susceptible to the seductive allure of cocaine.”
The next day, when it was Lehder’s attorneys’ turn, they called their
client “Joe Lehder” and said he was just a cocky young Colombian kid set up by
American marijuana smugglers.
“This case comes down to Joe versus the United States government,”
Ed Shohat said. “The conviction of Joe Lehder has become a cause célèbre like
nothing seen in law enforcement.”
Shohat said Lehder went to Norman’s Cay to develop the island into a
resort haven and befriended Ed Ward. When the DEA caught up with Ward,
Shohat said. Ward lied about Lehder to get off.
“Joe Lehder was his own worst enemy,” Shohat said. “He was a young,
wealthy, brash Colombian, flamboyant to say the least. He did things that left
him wide open for Ward’s plans. ... He confronted the DEA with his mouth.”
For Carlos Lehder, the trial in Jacksonville must have seemed like one
long nightmare version of This Is Your Life. Ed Ward had agreed to testify
against Lehder back in 1981, never figuring he would have to make good on his
promise. Now he was the key witness against Lehder. And after Lehder’s arrest
nine months earlier, witnesses from his past started coming out of the
woodwork. George Jung’s letter got the prosecution’s attention, and he would be
the first witness. Steve Yakovac surfaced, working as a foreign car mechanic in
Fort Lauderdale. He, too, wrote a letter and was now set to testify. A number of
Lehder’s Norman’s Cay cohorts rose like the dead from federal prison cells
around the country. Richard Blankenship, a former naval aviator in World War
II turned drug smuggler for Lehder, wanted to testify after reading in the
newspaper that Lehder had threatened to kill American judges. “I’m an
American convict,” Blankenship said. “Mr. Lehder, no one, by threats to this
country, is going to intimidate me.” Long-buried secrets emerged in the
Jacksonville courtroom. Eben Mann, a Continental Airlines pilot, testified he
once flew loads for Lehder nine years earlier. Russ O’Hara, a California disc
jockey who now did antidrug public service ads for his station, testified that he,
too, had worked for Lehder. Walter Cronkite, now retired from his CBS anchor
chair, was subpoenaed to testify about being run off Norman’s Cay nearly a
decade ago.
Jung took the stand first, recounting the whole story, beginning in
Danbury and going through Norman’s Cay to his last telephone call with Lehder
in 1985. A small man with lanky brown hair and a heavily lined face, Jung at
forty-five looked old and dissipated, the ravages of cocaine showing in his face.
He had made and lost a fortune in cocaine, $10 million by his own count. He had
lost his freedom. Now he testified like a man who had nothing left to lose. He
smiled often while he spoke, finally feasting on the revenge that had eluded him
for so many years.
“You could compare it to somebody at school taking your lunch
money,” Jung said in his Boston accent.
While Jung was on the stand, Merkle brought Barry Kane into the
courtroom; Kane, the successful Massachusetts lawyer, had refused to testify for
the government. Merkle had subpoenaed Kane so Jung could identify the silver-
haired man in the $700 suit as the pilot who had flown Carlos Lehder’s first big
cocaine load.
Winny Polly, who had carried Carlos Lehder’s suitcases with cocaine
from Antigua to the United States, followed Jung. Polly was a hostile witness
who had tried to meet with Lehder’s lawyers before testifying to relay the
message to Carlos that she did not want to take the stand against him.
“I held Mr. Lehder in the utmost respect and awe,” Polly testified.
 Under Merkle’s questioning, she admitted to becoming a cocaine dealer
for Lehder and then an addict, shooting cocaine into her veins.
Saddled with a cocaine habit and a longing for Lehder, Polly flew to
Medellín to be near him and his family.
“Everybody’s looking for love out there,” she told Merkle.
Ed Ward was the key prosecution witness, spending a week on the
stand. While Ward recounted his long tale of smuggling for Lehder on Norman’s
Cay, Carlos Lehder often shook his head in disgust.
Lehder at thirty-eight still retained some of his boyish good looks, but
he had heavy bags under his eyes and the lack of sunlight made him deathly
pale. With his neatly trimmed hair and tailored suits, he looked like a young
banker sitting at the defense table next to Jose Quiñon. During testimony he
rhythmically tapped his right hand against the table, sucked on candy, smiled at
reporters whose faces he had become familiar with, and jotted notes into a spiral
notebook with a felt-tip pen. Three U.S. marshals always sat directly behind him.
Occasionally the static from their earpieces disturbed the courtroom quiet. Once
the trial got started, efforts were undertaken to make the security less obvious.
The only time a weapon could be glimpsed in the courtroom was when a marshal
sat and crossed his legs, lifting his pants to reveal an ankle holster. After a while
the press coverage dwindled down until only three reporters remained in the
courtroom.
As court finished each day, the marshals took Lehder to a fifth-floor
holding cell down a hallway and around the corner from the courtroom. The
room had a nineteen-inch remote-control color television and a private
bathroom. Lehder was allowed to make unlimited phone calls to anywhere
within the United States and to order any food he wanted at any time during the
day. For exercise, he had twenty-five-pound dumbbells, a treadmill, a stationary
bicycle, and a small trampoline.
In the final week of the trial, Lehder could look out the window of his
holding cell and gaze at a blue-andred sign on a thirty-story glass skyscraper:
“Southern Bell Says No to Drugs.”
34. NATIONAL SECURITY
On February 5, 1988, U.S. Attorney Leon Kellner announced a twelve-count
federal indictment charging Panama’s General Manuel Antonio Noriega with
drug-related crimes dating back to 1982. “In plain language,” Kellner told
reporters in Miami, “what he did is utilize his position to sell the country of
Panama to the traffickers.” In addition to Noriega, the indictment listed fourteen
other defendants, among them Pablo Escobar and his cousin Gustavo Gaviria.
Jorge and young Fabio Ochoa were also named but not charged. Noriega, the
indictment said, provided safe haven for cartel members, permitted them to set
up a cocaine lab in Panama, helped them ship cocaine to the United States, and
helped them obtain ether and acetone for their lab operations.
“Manuel Antonio Noriega and trusted associates were able to assure
drug traffickers that Panamanian military, Customs, and law enforcement
personnel would not interfere with their operations in Panama as long as
substantial fees were paid to Manuel Antonio Noriega.” If convicted on all
charges, Noriega faced 145 years in prison and fines totaling $1,145 million.

THE federal grand jury had worked on the Noriega case for months, and the
indictment had long been expected. Nonetheless Kellner’s announcement had
enormous political significance. Noriega had been Panama’s de facto head of
government since he took over leadership of the Panama Defense Forces in
1983. For most of that time he had also been a fast friend of the United States,
capably fulfilling the only requirement that any U.S. government had ever had
for any Panamanian leader: security for the Panama Canal. To that end the
United States demanded that Panama have a pro-American, stable political
regime that did not object to having ten thousand U.S. military personnel
permanently stationed in bases straddling the canal. So long as this formula was
maintained, the United States seemingly overlooked all other sins.
The Miami indictment made it clear that the deal was off, but at first it
was difficult to see why. The litany of conspiracies and racketeering outlined in
the indictment included several items not generally known: Noriega’s deals with
Escobar at the end of 1982; the meeting in Havana to resolve the Darién
misunderstanding; several specific cases in which Noriega was alleged either to
have accepted cartel kickbacks or to have provided logistical support for cartel
loads.
 But Noriega’s other supposed transgressions concerned incidents that
had been public knowledge for years: the Darién lab; the cartel’s presence in
Panama following the Lara Bonilla assassination; the INAIR drug shipment; the
death of Ruben Dario Paredes Jimenez in Medellín in March 1986. For news
reporters and other knowledgeable observers working in the region, Noriega’s
inviolability had been manifest at least since 1984. The United States had always
looked the other way. Why not now?
What had happened was that Noriega had broken the unwritten
agreement: he could no longer guarantee Panama’s political stability by 1988.
Domestic opposition had grown out of control. During 1987 Panamanian police
had put down several noisy and violent anti-Noriega demonstrations, and by
1988 the consensus in Panama was that Noriega was a politically corrupt drug
dealer and a thief. Three weeks before the indictment, U.S. Secretary of State
George Shultz said publicly that Noriega should “step back” from power. His
usefulness as the guardian of U.S. interests in Panama was fast disappearing.
The Panama indictment touched an important nerve in the United
States, sweeping aside years of controversy over U.S. policy in Central America.
Drug trafficking had become such a compelling issue that conservative
Republicans and liberal Democrats came together in an almost unanimous--and
unprecedented--congressional condemnation of Noriega. Drug trafficking had
become so politically important in the United States that it could no longer be
ignored or shunted to the margin of international diplomacy. By 1988 the
activities of the Medellín cartel were important enough to affect the way the U.S.
government managed its national security interests.
Pablo Escobar, who had striven so hard for so long to be a politically
important person, finally saw his dream come true in a way he could never have
imagined or wanted. Noriega’s indictment gave Escobar and the cartel more U.S.
publicity than they had ever had. On February 15 Newsweek magazine published
a cover story entitled “Drugs, Money and Death”; on March 7 Time featured
“The Drug Thugs.” Both magazines had Noriega on the cover. In mid-March, 48
percent of the respondents to a CBS News-New York Times poll said drug traffic
was the most important international problem facing the United States, eclipsing
Central America (22 percent) and arms control (13 percent). Democratic party
presidential hopeful Jesse Jackson made drug trafficking the top item on his
foreign policy agenda.
Just as important, the Panama indictment had suddenly and sharply
limited U.S. policy options in at least one country where the United States had
important and enduring interests. Before the indictment the United States was
impatient with Noriega, hoping that he would leave power, trying to coax him to
depart. After the indictment the United States was committed to Noriega’s
overthrow. The United States publicly and in a very messy way had accused one
of its onetime favorite dictators of drug trafficking in collusion with the Medellín
cartel. Unlike rigged elections and institutional corruption, the indictment could
not be swept aside and ignored.

FIRST in February and again in April 1988, a U.S. Senate Foreign Relations
subcommittee heard testimony on Panama and Central America from a swarm of
witnesses that included former U.S. diplomats and military officers, former
Noriega confidants, and flipped drug dealers and money launderers. “Stopping
drug trafficking into the United States has been a secondary U.S. foreign policy
objective,” said Democratic Senator John Kerry, chairman of the hearings. “It
has been sacrificed repeatedly for other political goals.”
Several of the drug defendants-turned-informants said that the U.S.-
backed contra rebels had at times used cartel money to finance their war against
Nicaragua’s Sandinista government. Although the allegations were unproved,
contra involvement with the cartel was a legitimate question. Over the years the
traffickers had done business with the FARC, the M-19, and half a dozen other
Colombian guerrilla groups. There was no reason to think they wouldn’t do the
same thing with the contras. It was clear that the cartel had no politics.
Governments tied to the cartel included Panama, Nicaragua, Cuba, and the
Bahamas. Drug-corrupted police and public officials came from almost every
nation in the hemisphere. Cocaine had corrupted both the Colombian guerrillas
and government officials opposing them.
The Medellín cartel was marching across Central America, infecting
governments far more readily than communism ever had. The hearings in
Congress demonstrated that the United States had no coherent policy that
examined the effects of drug trafficking on important questions of U.S. national
security. Before the Panama indictment, the Reagan administration had noticed
the Medellín cartel only once, during the Nicaragua case. The administration had
sacrificed a groundbreaking drug investigation on that occasion and now, four
years later, had to confront the same group of criminals in Panama. Now those
criminals had put in jeopardy one of the most important U.S. bilateral
relationships in Latin America.

THE many strands of the Medellín cartel story came together at the end of the
Carlos Lehder trial. U.S. Attorney Robert Merkle presented the testimony of 115
prosecution witnesses over seven months. Several of the witnesses alleged that
Lehder had paid off Bahamian officials; Gorman Bannister said his father,
Everette, was receiving $100,000 a month from Lehder and giving it to his
friend, Prime Minister Lynden O. Pindling. By the end of the trial Merkle’s
office was directing a grand jury investigation of Pindling.
Perhaps most damaging of all the testimony were the radio and
television interviews Lehder gave in Colombia. These were among the last
pieces of evidence presented to the jury. In a famous interview with Bogotá’s
Radio Caracól on June 28, 1983, Lehder said he would not deny helping out
Colombia’s smuggling “bonanza.”
“That was our obligation, to bring the dollars back to our people
however we could,” Lehder said. “So then, that is it. It can be called Mafia, it
can be called syndicate, it can be called a bonanza, it can be called whatever you
like, but the truth is that it is a fact, and it is out in the open. In other words,
Colombia would not be able to deny that it was the world’s foremost producer of
marijuana and cocaine.”
Lehder blamed the drug problem on the United States, “where there are
forty million marijuana smokers and twenty-five million cocaine consumers. . . .
What I ask that they do is help the Colombian drug addict that they themselves
corrupted. And that they help to combat drug addiction existing in Colombia. ...”
The tapes were extraordinary. They displayed Carlos Lehder in all his
colors: the facile mind, the ardent nationalist, the hardworking entrepreneur who
had caught the big wave of his time. Most remarkable, they showed a cocaine
kingpin trying to explain himself with something approaching honesty. He was,
he said on the tapes, a victim of the environment, just “a poor Colombian
peasant who has made something of himself.” It was as if Al Capone were
rationalizing his bootlegging on national television. And Lehder’s description of
Norman’s Cay jibed with every informant’s account of Lehder’s dream: to
provide a means to go beyond the suitcase smuggling of cocaine. But Lehder’s
tapes, though damning, did not amount to a confession. He always skirted the
issue of his own guilt.
“I have never transported, uhh--drugs,” he said. “It is just that my lands,
the flexibility afforded by their location being two hundred miles from the
United States, provided the opportunity for the Colombians, who were being
trapped like flies over there with little suitcases and with little boxes, of going in
there, by means of a different system, a different means, a different platform.”
After Merkle finished presenting his case, Lehder’s defense attorneys
made a surprise announcement: they would rest their case without calling any
witnesses. They would finish with the closing argument of Lehder’s chief
attorney, Ed Shohat.
The arguments for both sides began May 10, 1988. By coincidence it
was national “Just Say No to Drugs” week. Also that day, a full-page ad paid by
the Bahamian government ran in The Miami Herald and The New York Times.
Titled “Setting the Record Straight,” the ad extolled the Bahamas’ war against
drug trafficking and belittled the corruption allegations against Pindling.
“No new evidence with the slightest credibility has been forthcoming,”
the ad said. “Yet we have been besieged with allegations which are eight and
nine years old.”
Merkle had one and one-half days to make his closing argument. Then
Shohat would speak. Merkle would be allowed to make a rebuttal, then the case
would go to the jury.
In his argument, Merkle decided to hammer away at two themes he saw
develop during the trial: the complicity of Americans in the rise of Carlos
Lehder and the destructive nature of cocaine, which mirrored the desire to
destroy in Lehder’s own nature. In the smaller drama of the courtroom, cocaine
had destroyed everyone it touched: George Jung, Winny Polly, Ed Ward, and,
finally, Carlos Lehder himself. As Merkle saw it, the trial of Carlos Lehder was
a reckoning, for both Lehder and the American people.
“Carlos Lehder and Henry Ford had a lot in common,” Merkle began.
“Henry Ford perfected the mass transportation of automobiles for the American
consumer. Carlos Lehder perfected the mass transportation of cocaine for the
American consumer. From there, the differences between the two men become
marked. Mr. Ford sought to better the American consumer’s way of life. Mr.
Lehder sought to destroy the American consumer’s way of life.”
Merkle attacked the defense’s portrayal of Lehder as a legitimate
businessman, holding up a MAC-10. Would a legitimate businessman use such a
weapon to protect his property?
Merkle described the witnesses against Lehder as “human wreckage”
that bore the scars of their cocaine use. “You have seen tragedy upon tragedy
come into this courtroom,” Merkle said. “They were at war with society,
together with Mr. Lehder. He’s still at war. He hasn’t stopped. ... A trail of
bribery, corruption, violence, and personal debasement has been created and
fostered by Mr. Lehder with the help of those witnesses, and that wreckage
exists in Colombia, the Bahamas, and the United States.”
“That wreckage is the legacy of Mr. Lehder’s children. That wreckage
in Colombia and the Bahamas and the United States is an open wound, and that
wound will not be healed by vengeance. That wound will only be healed by
justice and truth and reconciliation.”
At this point Merkle held up a coke spoon. He pointed out that one
spoon of cocaine is equal to 1/30 of a gram. Carlos Lehder, Merkle pointed out,
brought in eighteen million grams. Cut to 50 percent purity, that amounted to
more than one billion snorts.
“Mr. Lehder was an opportunity waiting to meet another opportunity--
the U.S. demand for drugs,” Merkle said. He dismissed the idea that Lehder was
an organizational genius. “His strength, ladies and gentlemen, was he was able
to capitalize on the weakness of others ... the disenchanted, the rogues, the
crippled. He bought, charmed, or pushed aside all obstacles. He’s finally come to
a situation where he can’t do that.”
Shohat followed Merkle to the podium. As he had throughout the trial,
he attacked the credibility of the prosecution witnesses. Where Merkle almost
whispered, Shohat shouted at the jury. He gestured, he flailed, he became
apoplectic with outrage on behalf of his client.
“This was a case in which the government brought into this courtroom
twenty-nine bought witnesses,” Shohat said, referring to the various plea
bargains handed out to some in return for their testimony.
Then it was Merkle’s turn again. At the very end of his rebuttal
argument his tone changed, becoming circumspect, even gentle.
“Mr. Shohat yesterday told you I would have you believe that Mr.
Lehder was the cause of America’s drug problem. No, I do not suggest that. In
fact, I suggest just the contrary.
“The striking side of this case, the striking story in this case, is that
America, a substantial portion of America, has been an active partner with Mr.
Lehder. While it is true, as Mr. Lehder told you on his own tapes, tragically, that
his acts were motivated by hatred and bitterness against the United States, it is
also true that all of Mr. Lehder’s money and all of his guns and all of his power
could not force American pilots to fly for him; could not force American
businessmen to sell property to him; could not force aircraft salesmen to sell
planes for cash; could not force victims of Mr. Lehder’s crimes to inject cocaine
into their arms, such as Winny Polly did, or to snort it up their noses.
“The story of this case is the story of an absence of love, an absence of
responsibility, a fleeing from responsibility by the witnesses in this case and by
Mr. Lehder.
“So your verdict is an act of reconciliation with truth, an act of
reconciliation with the past. You have a duty and you have a privilege of
returning a true verdict in this case, a duty which you must not shirk and you
must not fear.
“Thank you.”
Following Merkle’s rebuttal, Judge Melton ordered the jury sequestered
during their deliberations. After the jury had exited the courtroom, Carlos
Lehder turned to the reporters in the spectator sections and held up a handwritten
sign: “Just Say No to Racism.”

THE Lehder jury did not reach a verdict after the first day of deliberation--or the
second or the third. Finally, on the fourth day, they asked to have the tapes of
Carlos Lehder’s Colombian television interviews replayed for them.
The two tapes provide a portrait in miniature of Carlos Lehder
defending himself, equivocating, rationalizing, smiling, and trying to place the
blame elsewhere. It was as if Carlos Lehder were answering directly the final
arguments of Bob Merkle. The interviews also showed a mind dissolving on
cocaine.
First came the 1983 interview that Lehder gave the day after his Radio
Caracól interview. He was dressed in a sport coat and turtle-neck, his hair neatly
trimmed in a shag.
The interviewer asked, “Any country, any nation, is based upon moral
principles and, well, of course, that includes Colombia. Uhh-- don’t you think
that those moral principles are more important than getting money?”
“The end justifies the means,” Lehder said. “In order to get my country
ahead, and those people that are--that were being persecuted, uh--the truth is that
I’ll hang my misgivings at the door before going into the house and then pick
them up on the way out.”
Next the jury watched the tape of the interview in the jungle in February
1985. Lehder sat on his thronelike chair, hair down to his shoulders. He was
guarded by armed men wearing masks. There was a marked change in Lehder
from the earlier interview. In contrast with the well-spoken businessman of two
years earlier, he rambled and spoke in an agitated, frenetic manner.
“Cocaine has become and marijuana has become a revolutionary
weapon in the struggle against North American imperialism,” Lehder ranted.
“Stimulants from Colombia are the Achilles’ heel of imperialism. That’s why the
persecution against us is not legal, it is political.”
He continued: “The drug phenomenon was brought into Colombia by
U.S. imperialism via the Peace Corps. Nowadays the demand for drugs in the
United States is such--right?--that the countries which produce it, such as
Colombia--right?--play a truly minor role compared to the commercialization
and the consumption incurred in the United States.”
But his sloganeering failed to convince the young Colombian woman
who interviewed him.
“Where did you get so much money if not from drug trafficking?” she
asked.
“Very well, I, ever since I was very young, I went to the United States, I
worked, I studied, right? Eventually, I was charged with marijuana conspiracy, I
was placed in jail for two years,” Lehder said.
“Was that true?” the interviewer asked.
“That was not true!” Lehder said. “I was a hippie, right? I smoked, of
course. I was an adventurer, hey! But I was no trafficker. So then, in the jail in
the United States ... we were chained, like dogs, from the waist, right?
Transported in trucks, uh, buses, let’s say, from the penitentiaries, from Miami
to New York and back again. That was, it was something horrible to see over
five hundred Colombians--this was ten or twelve years ago, imprisoned, by
imperialism.”
“You didn’t answer my question about where you got so much money if
it was not from drug trafficking?” the interviewer asked.
“I, I am a pilot, right?” Lehder said. “And a very expensive one.”
He smiled cryptically.
After forty-two hours of deliberations over seven days, the jury
announced that it had reached a verdict at 11:10 a.m. on May 19. All parties
assembled in the courtroom. Everyone seemed to be holding their breath when
the verdict was announced.
Carlos Lehder was guilty on all counts. He looked down, showing no
emotion. In the audience, his brother, Guillermo, was also stoical. His aunt wept.
Three women on the jury also wept.
Afterward a very drained Ed Shohat attacked the jury’s verdict as
another indication that the drug war had eroded the constitutional rights of
individuals. Saddest of all, he said, the verdict accomplished nothing.
“Until we take the problem out of the schoolyard, you can put all the
Carlos Lehders you want in prison,” Shohat said, “but the problem is it doesn’t
work. What have we accomplished? Do we have one gram of drugs less
available to us because of this prosecution?”
Bob Merkle also held a press conference. Smiling broadly for the first
time in a week, he strode up to the television cameras and said, “In the immortal
words of James Brown, I feel good. This is a victory for the good guys, and by
the good guys I mean the American people.”
 The verdict, he said, “reflects to people in other nations that we are a
nation of laws and will not tolerate the violence of drug traffickers.”
The verdict also meant the Medellín cartel had “nowhere to run,
nowhere to hide. . . . I’m always an optimist. I think their days are numbered.”
Someone asked what would be the effect on the drug trade.
“The war on drugs is not measured in terms of the amount of drugs
that’s seized,” Merkle said. “It’s a war of the human spirit... the real issue is will.
The will of the American people versus the will of the cartel.”
Merkle said the Medellín cartel would eventually be destroyed by its
own penchant for violence. The rest, he said, was up to the American people.
“Carlos Lehder was an opportunity waiting to encounter an
opportunity,” Merkle said. “Carlos Lehder was in a very real sense the product
of a lot of failures on this side, the American side.
“The Carlos Lehders of the world are going to have a narrower and
narrower opportunity to wreak their crimes on this country. Carlos Lehder or
anybody who takes his place can’t put a gun to America’s head and force it to
take cocaine.”
EPILOGUE
Carlos Lehder’s sentencing took place on July 20, 1988. Lehder was allowed to
speak to U.S. District Judge Howell Melton before the sentence was handed
down. But it was a different Carlos Lehder from the one who had sat through the
seven-month trial. Gone was the clean-shaven “businessman.” Now he sported a
full beard and mustache. He spoke in English for twenty-eight minutes without
notes.
“I feel like an Indian in a white man’s court,” said Lehder. He called
himself a political prisoner victimized by an ambitious federal prosecutor. He
described his trial as “twenty-nine confessed criminals against one Latin. . . .
Witnesses that never had a second underwear claimed they made millions from
Lehder. ... I was kidnapped from my own country with the complicity of some
Colombia police officers. ... I was flown against my will to this country. It’s a far
worse crime than any of these allegations.
“I am also against drug abuse. But I am also against kidnapping and
extradition. This trial is illegal.”
Then Judge Melton spoke.
“The truth of the matter is your main goal was to make money, and you
did so at the expense of others,” Melton said. “Your conspiracy burned a path of
destruction and despair from the coca fields of South America to the streets and
byways of this country. Accordingly, Mr. Lehder, the sentence I impose on you
today is meant to be a message for drug smugglers who control large
organizations for importers of cocaine and for street pushers.
“This sentence is a signal that our country will do everything in its
power and within the laws to battle the drug problem that threatens the very
fabric of our society.”
Then he sentenced Lehder to the maximum, life without parole plus 135
years.

PABLO Escobar also fell on hard times in 1988. A little before dawn January
13, a gigantic car bomb exploded outside the Monaco Building, a fancy eight-
story apartment house owned by “the Godfather” in the upper-crust El Poblado
section of Medellín. The bomb killed two night watchmen, dug a thirteen-foot-
deep hole in the street, broke windows in dozens of nearby buildings, exploded
water mains, and cracked the Monaco’s concrete facade for its entire length.
Escobar’s wife, Victoria Eugenia, and his twelve-year-old son were sleeping in
the Monaco’s penthouse apartment when the bomb went off. They escaped in a
Renault within five minutes of the blast. Escobar was not at home.
The Monaco explosion was the showcase event in the so-called War of
the Cartels, a 1988 struggle for cocaine markets, power, and hegemony between
Pablo Escobar and the “Cali cartel” led by Gilberto Rodriguez Orejuela and Jose
Santacruz Londoño. Escobar originally blamed the DEA for the Monaco
bombing, then decided that the Cali group was trying a power play to eliminate
him and take over his networks. Still later he determined that he had a traitor
within his own organization and began a ruthless housecleaning.
At the same time, the Colombian army mounted an Antioquia-wide
manhunt and twice nearly captured Escobar. When the army failed to pursue the
Cali traffickers with the same vigor, Escobar--according to some sources--once
again decided that Cali was cooperating with the government in a vendetta
against the Medellín cartel. He responded the only way he knew: by September
1988, the army reported eighty people murdered in the War between the Cartels.
More than sixty were from Cali.

WHATEVER Escobar’s problem, it was clear by early 1988 that Jorge Luis
Ochoa did not share it. After his holiday departure from La Picota, Ochoa
dropped from view. U.S. law enforcement received reports he had “stepped
back” from everyday operations of his vast cocaine empire because his high
profile made it almost impossible for him to work effectively in Colombia. Other
sources, however, said Ochoa simply reverted to character. When the army’s
crackdown came, Escobar, as usual, attacked everything that stood in his way.
Ochoa, also as usual, hunkered down.
Those who believed in the War of the Cartels blamed the Cali group for
fingering Ochoa at the El Cerrito tollbooth in November 1987 and for murdering
some higher-ups in his organization. Despite these provocations, however, most
sources agreed that neither Ochoa nor his father, Fabio, nor his brothers Juan
David and young Fabio were participating in the alleged vendetta.

LIKE Ochoa, Jose Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha also had no axes to grind with
Cali. Both U.S. and Colombian law enforcement agreed that 1988 was “the
Mexican’s1’ biggest and most profitable year. With Escobar occupied with gang
war and Ochoa out of the picture, Rodriguez Gacha stepped from his colleagues’
shadow to lead the Medellín cartel in an aggressive expansion into the
southwestern United States and Europe.
U.S. lawmen also received reports that in the late spring of 1988
Rodriguez Gacha traveled to New York City in a bid to take over the Cali
group’s longtime distribution network there. His bigfooting in the New York
City borough of Queens, some lawmen said, triggered a summer-long New York
version of the War of the Cartels among local cocaine and crack dealers.
Others, however, maintained that Rodriguez Gacha was instrumental in
reasonably successful efforts to mend fences between Escobar and Cali. The
Queens venture, these sources contended, was simply a business deal--and
Rodriguez Gacha, before anything else, was a businessman. In 1988 he joined
Escobar and Ochoa for the first time in Forbes magazine’s list of the world’s
billionaires.

ON November 30, 1987, DEA agents and U.S. marshals fanned out over Florida
and seized $20 million in property allegedly owned by Pablo Escobar, Gustavo
Gaviria, and Juan David Ochoa. Agents seized an $8 million apartment complex
and a $1 million luxury estate in Miami Beach, both of which Escobar purchased
in his own name in 1981 and later transferred to Panamanian corporations. The
agents also seized Juan David’s horse ranch in central Florida along with thirty-
nine of his prize caballos de paso walking horses.
At the time of the seizures, the officers of the Panamanian corporations
that held the Escobar properties included Escobar’s wife and sister, Victoria
Eugenia Henao de Escobar and Alba Marina Escobar. The two women did not
appear in federal court in Miami to fight forfeiture claims.

GILBERTO Rodriguez Orejuela remained Cali’s first lord of cocaine and

recovered his early 1980s position as an immensely powerful--if no longer
particularly well respected--businessman and entrepreneur. Escobar, it was
rumored, thought Rodriguez Orejuela had cut a deal with the DEA to win his
freedom, another reason for the War of the Cartels. And on August 18, 1988,
arsonists torched the biggest Medellín outlet of Rodriguez Orejuela’s Drogas Le
Rebaja chain of drugstores. Despite these insults and provocations, Rodriguez
did not respond.

JOSE Santacruz Londoño emerged in 1988 as the most visible member of the
Cali group, the apparent manager of its cocaine interests both in the United
States and Cali. It was Santacruz’s ten-year-old Queens distribution network that
Rodriguez Gacha allegedly targeted for takeover. Many lawmen in both United
States and Colombia agree that if there really is a War of the Cartels, Santacruz
will probably fight the Cali side of it.
RAFAEL Cardona Salazar was gunned down inside his antique car dealership
outside Medellín on December 4, 1987, just three days after The Miami Herald
printed a lengthy account of his relationship with Max Mermelstein. Cardona,
thirty-five, died in a spray of automatic weapons fire by assassins who also
killed his twenty-eight-yearold secretary. Later, Colombian police speculated the
Cardona murder was a Cali job, the first killing in the War of the Cartels. The
case remains unsolved.

BOB Merkle did not attend the sentencing of Carlos Lehder. Five weeks after
Lehder’s May 19, 1988, conviction, Merkle resigned as U.S. attorney for the
Middle District of Florida to run for the Republican nomination to the U.S.
Senate.
Starting late with scant campaign funds, Merkle trailed his opponent,
Republican Congressman Connie Mack III, throughout the nine-week race.
Mack, grandson of the legendary Philadelphia Athletics baseball manager,
enjoyed the endorsement of President Reagan and the support of Florida’s
Republican party establishment. Mack spent $37,000 of his campaign funds to
bring in Oliver North, who by then had been indicted in the Iran-contra scandal,
to speak at campaign stops. Mack refused to debate Merkle, who took to
appearing with a life-size cardboard poster of Mack and posing his own
questions to the opponent.
On September 5 Mack crushed Merkle in the Republican primary with
62 percent of the vote, 399,022 to 247,336.

GEORGE Jung was rewarded for his testimony in the Lehder trial with a Rule
35 hearing before a federal judge in Fort Lauderdale in September 1988. His
fifteen-year sentence was reduced to time served. While he was in prison, Jung
wrote a book about his exploits in the drug trade called Grazing in the Grass
Until the Snow Came. He now says his only regret is that he told Carlos Lehder
about his California connection. “I’m just sorry I got screwed out of my $200
million,” he said in a recent interview. But he is proud that his ten-year-old
daughter participates in the “Just Say No to Drugs” program. He still thinks
often of his former partner. “I know that he’s going to come after me,” Jung said.
“He has the money, and money is power.”

DOUG Driver, the DEA agent who was the lead investigator in the Carlos
Lehder case, received the Justice Department’s highest honor, the Attorney
General’s Award for Exceptional Service, during a ceremony in Washington in
August 1988. Attorney General Edwin Meese praised the forty-one-yearold
agent for “unrelenting pursuit of every aspect of the Medellín cartel.” Ten years
had passed since Driver began the investigation that eventually led to Lehder.

STANFORD Bardwell resigned as U.S. attorney for the Middle District of

Louisiana only a few months after the murder of Barry Seal. Bardwell took a job
as deputy general counsel with the Department of Energy in Washington. He
said his leaving had nothing to do with the handling of the Barry Seal matter.

FRANK Polozola remained a federal district court judge in Baton Rouge. He has
never spoken publicly on the Seal case, refusing all requests from the media for
comment.

JOHN Camp, the WBRZ-TV reporter who produced the Uncle Sam Wants You
documentary on Seal, won a Sigma Delta Chi Distinguished Service Award,
widely considered the highest honor in journalism after the Pulitzer Prize, for his
reporting on Seal. The next year, Camp won a second Distinguished Service
Award for his reporting on the state of Louisiana’s penchant for settling million-
dollar law suits. He remains convinced that Barry Seal had a genuine change of
heart after years of smuggling and did not engage in drug trafficking after he
became a DEA informant.

ON October 5, 1986, eight months after Barry Seal’s murder, the C-123K cargo
plane once used by Seal to fly cocaine out of Nicaragua was shot down as it
carried arms to contra rebels fighting inside Nicaragua. The Sandinistas captured
the lone survivor of the flight, Eugene Hasenfus. Within months the flight was
exposed as a CIA-supported resupply mission in violation of congressional
prohibitions, one of a series of revelations that culminated in November 1986
with the disclosure by Attorney General Meese that money from arms sold
secretly to the Iranians had been illegally funneled to the contras. In the ensuing
media frenzy, convicted drug dealers in south Florida claimed they had
participated in the secret contra resupply network trading arms for drugs. The
claims were never substantiated, but speculation emerged in some quarters that
Seal was part of this network and his mission to Nicaragua was a CIA-led effort
to frame the Sandinistas. No evidence has yet emerged that Seal’s mission was
anything but a legitimate DEA operation compromised by Reagan
administration officials seeking to score a propaganda coup against the
Sandinistas at a time when Congress was debating contra aid.

WITHIN a year after Seal’s death, Jake Jacobsen, the lead investigator on the
Barry Seal case, left the DEA to return to the U.S. Customs Service. In the
summer of 1988 he testified before the House Judiciary Committee’s
Subcommittee on Crime, speaking behind a screen to conceal his identity.
Jacobsen said that the DEA in Miami had refused a request from the CIA to
release the photos Seal had taken of Escobar and a Nicaraguan official loading
Seal’s plane with cocaine in Nicaragua. “The CIA at Langley wanted to release
them to the press,” Jacobsen said. “We were in the middle of the most significant
investigation of my career. We had a chance to get together all the cartel
members.” Ron Caffrey, former head of the DEA’s cocaine desk, and Frank
Monastero, former DEA assistant administrator, also testified. Asked why the
DEA had not investigated the leak that destroyed the Seal mission, Monastero
said the decision to leak may have been made at “a very high place” in
government. “There may have been a conscious decision to disclose the
information to the press. If that were the case, there would be no need to
investigate,” Monastero said. Dewey Clarridge, the CIA official who had been
briefed about Seal’s mission along with Oliver North, refused to testify before
the subcommittee. Clarridge had been head of the CIA’s Central American task
force at the time of the Seal mission. North, who at the time was under
indictment for his role in the Iran-contra affair, also refused to testify.

BOB Martinez left the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Miami in 1986 to return to
private practice.

CAROL Cooper was promoted in 1987, becoming one of the three women
supervisors among the DEA’s more than 2,500 agents.

DESPITE overwhelming support from the prosecutors working under him, Dick
Gregorie was passed over when a replacement was picked for the outgoing U.S.
attorney in Miami in 1988. He remained in the office as chief assistant U.S.
attorney.

AFTER testifying at the Barry Seal murder trial. Max Mermelstein went on to
appear at the trial of two Colombians accused of laundering $21 million for the
cartel in Miami. Although Mermelstein had never met the Colombians and had
no connection with the case, he was allowed to testify as an expert witness on
the cartel. Holding a classroom pointer and referring to a chalkboard,
Mermelstein interpreted figures and names found on the cartel accounting
ledgers seized by agents. The two defendants were convicted.
Six months later, Customs and FBI agents rounded up the ring of pilots
and powerboaters that had served as Mermelstein’s cocaine transporters. The
agents arrested fourteen people, including the promoter of the Gran Prix of Palm
Beach. The ring was charged with using what Customs agents called “the most
sophisticated methods we’ve yet seen” to import more than ten tons of cocaine
for the Medellín cartel.
Along with sixteen of his relatives, Mermelstein was enrolled in the
federal Witness Protection Program. He now lives under a new identity in a
remote area in the United States.

LEWIS Tambs began a new assignment as U.S. ambassador to Costa Rica in

July 1985. In 1986 the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Miami investigated rumors that
the anti-Sandinista contra rebels had picked up a Medellín cartel contract to
murder Tambs. Tambs was never harmed, but he was forced to resign in January
1987, when he was named as having helped U.S. National Security Council aide
Oliver North set up an illicit contra resupply network in Costa Rica. Testifying
before Congress in May 1987, Tambs said he had reported his actions to his
boss, Assistant Secretary of State Elliot Abrams, at the time they occurred.
Abrams later denied knowledge of Tambs’s activities. After his testimony
Tambs returned to his history professorship at Arizona State University.

JOHNNY Phelps was head of the DEA’s Cocaine Investigations Section in

Washington for about a year. In late 1985 he took a new assignment as head of
the Office of International Programs. He stayed for two years and in early 1988
moved to Miami, Florida, as the DEA’s associate special agent-in-charge. He
remained one of the DEA’s most highly regarded officials.

ERROL Chavez left Colombia in 1983 to spend eight months with a DEA street
group in Houston, Texas. Then he was promoted to group supervisor and sent to
New York City, where he spent two years pursuing Albanian heroin traffickers.
In March 1987 he was transferred to the DEA’s Cocaine Investigations Section
in Washington. In 1988 he was assigned full-time to gather and evaluate
intelligence on the Medellín cartel and to make cases against its members.

AFTER closing the DEA’s Medellín bureau, Mike Vigil took over as resident
agent-in-charge in Barranquilla on Colombia’s Caribbean coast. In October 1986
he was transferred to Miami and promoted to group supervisor. Like many of his
colleagues, he remained in contact with events in Colombia by talking by
telephone to friends in Colombia law enforcement.
AFTER surrendering the sash of office to Virgilio Barco in 1986, Belisario
Bentancur retired from public life to write occasional newspaper columns and to
pursue an active, behind-the-scenes role in the Social Conservative party (the
word “Social” was added to the party’s name in 1987). In mid-1988 he still
traveled in an escorted armored car and had a twenty-four-hour-a-day security
force guarding his modest north Bogotá home.

LESS than three weeks after a cartel killer shot him in the face in Budapest,
Enrique Parejo Gonzalez was elected chairman of the thirty-second United
Nations Commission on Narcotics Drugs. The Foreign Ministry reassigned him
to Prague as ambassador to Czechoslovakia. Parejo continued to espouse a hard
line, both abroad and in Colombia. In late 1987 he appeared heavily escorted in
Medellín, where he gave a speech and departed unmolested.

FOUR months after the cartel’s gunmen tried unsuccessfully to kidnap him, Juan
Gomez Martinez, editor of Medellín’s venerable El Colombiano newspaper, was
elected mayor of the hemisphere’s most violent city. He promised to “look for a
dialogue” with the cocaine traffickers, but by August 1988 he admitted that the
alleged War of the Cartels had practically made the city unliveable. In 1988
Medellín was averaging nine murders a day.

COLOMBIAN National Police Major William Lemus Lemus left Colombia

within ten days of having captured Carlos Lehder. He was given diplomatic
status as a “police attaché” and put in a makework job in a foreign city. Trying
to live on a police major’s salary augmented by a small stipend, Lemus in mid-
1988 was reported having financial difficulties. The Colombian government was
not contemplating bringing him home at any time soon, and Lemus was
unhappy. Instead of fame, promotion, and success, his capture of Carlos Lehder
had put William Lemus in a prison of his own.

ROBERTO Suarez Gomez, Bolivia’s Black Swan, made the mistake of airing
his views too publicly and too often. Fed up with his antigovernment speeches
on radio and television, Bolivian police in July 1988 trekked through the
northeastern Beni jungles to surprise and arrest him at his hacienda. He was sent
to a La Paz jail to serve a fifteen-year sentence for drug trafficking.

GENERAL Manuel Antonio Noriega, the cartel’s friend in Panama, teetered and
nearly fell from power in March 1988 when widespread street demonstrations
were accompanied by a wave of strikes and an attempted coup d’état by some of
Noriega’s own officers. Noriega took quick action to shore up his power within
the army, then rebuffed countless attempts of U.S. diplomats to negotiate his
departure. Late in 1988 Noriega was solidly in control, but Panama, crippled by
months of economic slowdown and stagnation, was falling apart around him. His
survival was by no means assured.

LYNDEN Pindling was reelected to his sixth consecutive term in July 1987 and
has been prime minister of the Bahamas since 1967. Pindling and the
Progressive Liberal party he heads have held power in the Bahamas ever since
the island nation was granted independence from Great Britain in 1973. A
federal grand jury investigation of Pindling continued in Orlando supervised by
the office of the U.S. attorney for the Middle District of Florida in the summer of
1988. After The Miami Herald and The Washington Post printed stories on the
investigation, the White House announced that future indictments of foreign
leaders would have to be approved by the president, a marked change from the
Justice Department procedure that led to the indictment of General Noriega. By
the fall of 1988, with Bob Merkle gone, the Pindling grand jury was said to have
foundered.
NOTES

Chapter 1: DADELAND

* They left a loaded 9-mm Browning automatic pistol. Carl Hiaasen and Al
Messerschmidt. “The Cocaine Wars,” Rolling Stone, 20 September, 1979, pp.
82-82. page 10 One leveled a silenced .380 Beretta automatic. Philip Ward,
“U.S. Implicates Smuggler in 79 Dadeland Shoot-Out,” The Miami Herald, 21
May, 1984. p. IB.
* Morgan Perkins, an eighteen-year-old. Edna Buchanan. “Assassins Open Fire
in Store,” The Miami Herald, 12 July, 1979, p. I A.
* Another man in the cab spied Perkins. Hearings before the U.S. Senate
Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, “Organized Crime and the Use of
Violence,” 2 and 5 May, 1980.
* Oh, shit, here we go again. Interviews with Al Singleton, 9 June and 30
December, 1987. Singleton, who later went on to investigate the Dadeland
killings as part of a federal task force, Centac 26, provided both a personal
account of what he saw on the day of the killings and details contained in the
official police report. page 11 The operative theory involved a rivalry. Carl
Hiaasen and Al Messerschmidt, “Shoot-Out at the Cocaine Corral.” The Miami
Herald, 8 July, 1979. p. 1 A. page 13 Less than three months before the
Dadeland shooting. Allen Levy and Rick Hirsch, “Gun Battle Shatters South
Dade Noon Hour,” The Miami Herald, 24 April, 1979, p. IB.
* Less than a month after the shooting. Carl Hiaasen and Al Messerschmidt, “El
Loco, Commando in Cocaine Wars Specializes in Getting Away.” The Miami
Herald, 22 July. 1979, p. IB.
* Al Singleton turned south at the Palmetto Expressway. Singleton interviews
with authors. page 15 The killers had planned to escape. Edna Buchanan, “Death
Machine Drove Killers to the Scene,” The Miami Herald, 12 July, 1987.
* Since Jimenez was hit in the face. Edna Buchanan, “Killers Got to Drug Chief
First,” The Miami Herald, 14 July. 1979.
* His death was believed to be retaliation. Kate Wheeler, “Killings Believed Part
of Drug Feud,” The Miami Herald, 29 May, 1979.
* The theory went that Panello feared Jimenez’s wrath. This is based on various
sources, including confidential interviews with present and former Metro-Dade
homicide detectives, DEA agents, and a 1987 prison interview with Rafael Leon
“Amilcar” Rodriguez, a notorious killer of the cocaine cowboy era in south
Florida.

Chapter 2: THE NEW BREED

* By the middle of the 1980s. By 1986 U.S. law enforcement regularly affirmed
that the Medellín cartel controlled 80 percent of the cocaine entering the United
States. See, however, Mario Arango Jaramillo and Jorge Child Velez, Los
Condenados de la Coca, Editorial J. M. Arango, Medellín, 1985, p. 99, which
reprints the cartel’s famous 1984 letter to President Belisario Betancur saying its
members controlled “between 70 and 80 percent” of all the cocaine produced in
Colombia. Based on cartel production records seized at Tranquilandia and a six-
month study of cocaine seizures in the United States, the authors determined that
the cartel easily produced and distributed more than 50 percent of U.S. cocaine
by the mid-1980s.
* The first Colombian cocaine trafficker. Authors’ interview with a
knowledgeable DEA agent who asked not to be identified. 24 September. 1987;
official law enforcement documents made available to the authors in Miami by
sources who did not wish to be identified.
* Blanco was short. Metro-Dade Homicide Section Memorandum, “Colombian
Activities Intelligence Information,” 6 March. 1981.
* At first glance the city. Material on setting and geography of the city gathered
during a visit by the authors in December 1986; see also James J. Parsons,
Antioqueño Colonization in Western Colombia, rev. ed., Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 1968. for the historical geography of Antioquia:
Agustín Jaramillo Londoño’s Testamento del Paisa, Medellín: Agustin Jaramillo
Londoño, seventh ed., 1986, is a fine introduction to paisa customs and folklore.
* This was where Colombia’s. Information on Chilean cocaine traffic comes
mainly from the authors’ interview with DEA agent Charlie Cecil. 24
September, 1987, who worked in Chile in the early 1970s. Cecil also provided a
large cache of newspaper clippings and documents detailing the Chilean industry
and the early days in Colombia. The principal Chile-based trafficker was Adolfo
Tobias Sobosky, captured by Pinochet’s police in the Pacific coast city of Arica,
the center of the Chilean cocaine business, and sent to New York, where he was
arrested. The Chilean newspaper La Tercera de la Horn, 13 November. 1973.
reported Sobosky subsequently named some twenty other Chilean traffickers
who were later arrested and deported. page 22 From the beginning. Cecil
interviews, Cecil documents. The first notorious Colombian cocaine trafficker
was Benjamin Herrera Zuleta, “the Black Pope.” He was first arrested in June
1973 at Miami Airport with a kilo of cocaine. Paroled from federal prison in
1975. he dropped out of site in 1980. On December 15, 1987, DEA agents
arrested him outside Fort Lauderdale, Florida, on a Las Vegas, Nevada, cocaine
trafficking warrant. See Guy Gugliotta “ ‘Black Pope’ of Cocaine Is Captured in
Davie,” The Miami Herald. 16 December, 1987, p. 1A.
* In studying Griselda Blanco. The descriptive word “floater” is from authors’
interview with a DEA intelligence source who asked not to be identified, 29
July, 1987.
* One of the rising newcomers. The daily newspaper El Espectador, Bogotá, 25
August, 1983. reprints 1976 DAS story describing Escobar as a “mule.” page 24
And Escobar looked like nothing. Physical description of Escobar from
confidential Colombian narcotics police documents examined by the authors 28
August, 1987.
* Escobar was born December 1, 1949. Details of early career from authors’
interviews with Colombian narcotics police sources who asked not to be
identified, December 1986.
* After high school. Authors’ interview with DEA agent Errol Chavez, 2
December, 1987.
* Escobar’s first known. El Espectador, 25 August, 1983; see also Fabio
Castillo, Los Jinetes de la Cocaina, Documentos Periodisticos, Bogotá. 1987, pp.
54-65.
* Ochoa was the second. Semana magazine, Bogotá, 1 December, 1987; authors’
interview with DEA agent Errol Chavez, 28-29 July, 1987; authors’ interview
with a DEA intelligence source who asked not to be identified, 27 July, 1987.
* Ochoa went to Miami. DEA 6 report, “Controlled Delivery of Approximately
60 Lbs. of Cocaine,” 19 October, 1977. Ochoa was in Miami officially as
secretary and director of the SEA-8 Trading Corp., 7403 N.W. 7th St. At the
time, Ochoa lived in Miami at 8600 S.W. 67th Ave., Apt. 914.
* “Jorge Ochoa is currently residing in Medellín.” DEA 6 report, “Requested
Information on Fabio Restrepo,” 31 July, 1978.

Chapter 3: THE DREAM OF DANBURY

* Lehder found himself bunked next to George Jung. Testimony of George Jung,
United States of America v. Carlos Lehder Rivas, United States District Court,
Middle District of Florida, 17-19 November, 1987. Authors’ interviews with
George Jung, August 1988.
* As soon as he reached Medellín. Testimony of Frank Shea, U.S. v. Lehder, 13-
14 April, 1988.
* Winny was so smitten with Carlos. Testimony of Winny Polly, U.S. v. Lehder,
23 November, 1987.
* Jung told Kane that he and Carlos Lehder. Jung testimony. Barry Kane has
never been charged with a crime. Jung identified him as the man who flew
Carlos Lehder’s first cocaine load at the Lehder trial in November 1987. Kane
refused a request for an interview by the authors.
* He and five thousand other inmates. Description of prison based on the
testimony of Stephen Yakovac, U.S. v. Lehder, 14-16 December, 1987.
* Stephen Yakovac was a onetime auto mechanic. Yakovac testimony.
* Out of prison, Lehder called George Jung. Jung testimony and interviews.

Chapter 4: THE BAHAMAS PIPELINE

* The dream of smuggling cocaine. Jung testimony, U.S. v. Lehder, 17-19

November, 1987.
* He was consuming five to eight grams a day. Jung interviews, August 1988.
* 1987 Yachtsmans’ Guide to the Bahamas, p. 284. Testimony of Charles Kehm,
former island manager of Norman’s Cay, U.S. v. Lehder, 9-10 December, 1987.
* Beckwith demanded the money be counted. Testimony of Charles Beckwith,
U.S. v. Lehder, 17 December, 1987.
* Later that year Lehder appeared. Testimony of Guardian Trust accountant
Graham Cooper, U.S. v. Lehder, 13 April, 1988.
* CBS News anchorman Walter Cronkite. Testimony of Walter Cronkite, U.S. v.
Lehder. Interview with Cronkite, 28 January. 1988. page 45 Philip Kniskern,
who owned three vacation villas. Testimony of Philip Kniskern, U.S. v. Lehder,
17 December, 1987.
* Richard Novak, a college professor who leased a diving business. Testimony
of Richard Novak, Bahamian Royal Commission of Inquiry report, December
1984. The three-member Royal Commission was appointed by the governor-
general of the Bahamas in November 1983 to investigate allegations of drug
corruption in the islands made in a September 5, 1983, broadcast by NBC News
reporter Brian Ross and producer Ira Silverman. From November 1983 to
December 1984, the commission heard testimony from more than five hundred
witnesses on a number of drug-related matters, including Lehder’s operations on
Norman’s Cay.
* One of those ordered off Norman’s Cay was Charles Kehm. Testimony of
Charles Kehm, U.S. v. Lehder, 9-10 December, 1987.
* The hairdresser knew a hulking marijuana pilot. Testimony at U.S. v. Lehder
of John Finley Robinson, 7-8 December, 1987, and Russ O’Hara, 9 December,
1987. page 47 “I couldn’t speak,” Yakovac wrote. Diary of Steven Yakovac,
U.S. v. Lehder. Yakovac’s diary was discovered in the possession of his ex-wife,
now living in the northwestern United States, in 1987.
* Lehder was returning to Colombia. Testimony of Yakovac, U.S. v. Lehder.
page 50 As Carlos Lehder’s business boomed in the Bahamas. Jung interview,
August 1988.
* A few months later, a forty-nine-year-old Nassau businessman. Testimony of
Norman Solomon, U.S. v. Lehder, 2 February, 1988. Royal Commission
testimony, 1984. Interview with Michael Whiteley, “ ‘Curious’ Englishman
Made Drug Rumor Fact,” The Jacksonville Times-Union, 7 February, 1981.

Chapter 5: THE KING OF COCAINE TRANSPORTATION

* Ward was an ex-marine. Testimony of Edward Hayes Ward, U.S. v. Lehder,

19-21, 25-27, 28, January, and 9-10 February, 1988.
* The Ward gang set about flying 1,200-pound loads of marijuana. Ward
testimony at Royal Commission of Inquiry, 1984.
* One day a neighbor kid. Laura Griffin and Larry Hand, “Lehder Connection to
Jacksonville Began in Late ‘70s,” The Jacksonville Times-Union, 15 February,
1987, p. 1A.
* The DEA became interested after one of Greg Von Eberstein’s brothers paid
cash out of a paper bag. Interview with DEA special agent Doug Driver, 19
May, 1988.
* He thought he had come up with a foolproof way to smuggle. Testimony of
Emilie “Lassie” Ward, U.S. v. Lehder, 14-16 March, 1988.
* Ward was worried that Lehder would think. Ed Ward testimony. page 55 In
late August 1978, Greg Von Eberstein brought. Lassie Ward testimony.
* On September 6,1978, eight of them had a meeting. This account is based on
the testimony of Ed Ward, Charles Gregory Von Eberstein, 8-10 March, 1988,
and Leverette Merrill Francis, 29 February and 1 March, 1988.
* Ward, the straight-arrow ex-marine, was getting. Lassie Ward testimony.
* As the Wards left Jacksonville. Michael Whitely, “Indictment Details Drug
Case Charges,” The Jacksonville Times-Union, 9 February, 1981, p. IB. page 57
On the afternoon of September 13, 1979, Ed Ward took off. This account of the
raid is based on Ed and Lassie Ward’s testimony at the Lehder trial and the
Royal Commission report, pp. 43-45,115-123.
* Lehder offered to sell his entire operation. Ad appeared in The Miami Herald,
October 1979.
* In the wake of the raid, the ad was strange enough. Arnold Markowitz, “Resort
Island and Mystery up for Sale,” The Miami Herald, 19 October. 1979, p. 1A;
Markowitz, “Drug Fugitive Owns Mysterious Norman’s Cay,” The Miami
Herald, 24 October, 1979, p. 7D.
* The Bahamas in 1979 was a nation for sale. Carl Hiaasen and Jim McGee, “A
Nation for Sale,” six-day series in The Miami Herald, 23-28 September, 1984.
* A DEA informant later said Bowe. Testimony of Tom Harney. U.S. v. Lehder,
12-13 January, 1988.
* Another informant eventually charged. Testimony of George Baron, U.S. v.
Lehder, 11. 16-17 February. 1988.
* Lehder gave the money to Bowe. Testimony of Gorman Bannister, U.S. v.
Lehder, 24 February, 1988.
* Mysterious things continued to happen near Norman’s Cay. Al Messerschmidt,
“Man Slain: Sea Mystery Investigated,” The Miami Herald, 2 August, 1980;
Messerschmidt, “Blood, Signs of Damage Deepen Mystery at Sea,” The Miami
Herald, 3 August, 1980: Carl Hiaasen, “Bloody Cruise in the Bahamas, Mystery
Shrouds Couple’s Fate,” The Miami Herald, 1 September. 1980. p. 1A.
* Lehder had sent out his armed German bodyguards. Baron testimony.
* He told one of the smugglers. Harney testimony.
* Jung wanted to distribute cocaine. Jung testimony and interviews.
* He retained the services of Nigel Bowe. Ed and Lassie Ward testimony. Bowe
was later indicted on cocaine trafficking charges in the United States in 1985. A
U.S. request for his extradition from the Bahamas had wended its way through
several appeals in Bahamian courts and fallen before the Privy Council in
London by late 1988.
* Gail Von Eberstein told her husband. Gregory Von Eberstein testimony.
* It was clearly time to go. John Finley Robinson testimony.
* Lehder told the pilot he was running a very successful operation. Testimony of
Jack Devoe, U.S. v. Lehder, 30-31 March, 1988.
* Lehder’s symbolic public shower of money on the Bahamas. Royal
Commission report, p. 46.

Chapter 6: MIAMI 1982

* In 1979 the Federal Reserve Bank of Miami reported a $5.5 billion cash
surplus. Andy Rosenblatt. “Operation Draws Dollars from Drug Business.” The
Miami Herald, 9 April, 1981, p. 1A.
* Early that year Greenback agents searched the Landmark Bank branch. Mary
Voboril, “Plot Bared to Launder Drug Cash,” The Miami Herald, 11 February,
1981, pp. 1B,2B.
* Three weeks later the agents raided two Miami banks. Andy Rosenblatt, “Feds
Raid Two Miami Banks in Drug-Money Investigation,” The Miami Herald, 28
February, 1981, pp. 1A, 13A.
* Rattan, forty-six, drove a Chevy Citation. Anders Gyllenhaal. “Drug Funds
and S. Florida’s ‘Al Capone,’ “ The Miami Herald, 24 May, 1981, pp. 1A, 12A.
* Nobody followed the trails up the pyramid of the cocaine trade. Interviews
with Assistant U.S Attorney Dick Gregorie and former Assistant U.S. Attorney
Bob Dunlop, April 1988.
* Opposing the government’s lawyers was an armada. Carl Hiaasen, “The Drug
Lawyers,” The Miami Herald’s Tropic Magazine, 28 June, 1981, p. 22.
* A vigorous leader who projected a can-do image. Interviews with Assistant
U.S. Attorney Mark Schnapp and former Assistant U.S. Attorney Roberto
Martinez, July 6,1987.
* The three Customs inspectors had no idea. Account of the TAMPA bust is
based on interviews with Vann Capps, Jerry Dranghon, Mark Schnapp, and
Robert Dunlop in 1986,1987, and 1988.
* Inspector Tony Knapik pushed a short screwdriver. Fred Grimm and Richard
Wallace, “3,600 Pounds of Cocaine Seized at Airport,” The Miami Herald, 10
March, 1982, p. 1A.
* The kilos were wrapped in yellow plastic. Grimm and Wallace, The Miami
Herald, 10 March, 1982.
* The DEA determined the cocaine represented. Interviews with confidential
sources.

Chapter 7: JOHNNY PHELPS

* Johnny Phelps arrived. Authors’ interviews with Johnny Phelps, 30 July, 21
December, 1987.
* The traffickers were career criminals. For general background on Colombia
and La Violencia, see Mario Arrubla et al, Colombia, Hoy, 4a. edicion, Siglo
Veinte Editores, Bogotá, 1979.
* Phelps’s resident agent. Authors’ interviews with DEA agent Errol Chavez,
28-29 July, 1987.
* What Chavez didn’t know. Authors’ interviews with Phelps and Chavez.
* Phelps needed some way. Authors’ interviews with Phelps. page 81 Neither
man was badly hurt. Authors’ interviews with Chavez and DEA agent Herb
Williams, August 1987. The phrase “takes care of business” is Williams’s.
Details of the agents’ kidnapping from hearings of the President’s Commission
on Organized Crime, “Organized Crime and Cocaine Trafficking,” 27-29
November, 1984.
* The heat was Johnny Phelps. Authors’ interviews with Errol Chavez.

Chapter 8: THE CARTEL’S GOLDEN AGE

* On April 18, 1981, just before Johnny Phelps arrived. Details of Hacienda
Veracruz meeting from the United States of America v. Pablo Escobar Gaviria,
et al, United States District Court, Southern District of Florida, 18 November,
1986.
* The realignment in Colombia. Authors’ interviews with DEA agent Errol
Chavez, 27-28 July,1987.
* The few who wouldn’t go along. Authors’ interviews with Errol Chavez. On
decline and fall of Griselda Blanco, see also the daily newspaper El Tiempo,
Bogotá, 28 September, 1980; also El Tiempo, 21 September, 1981.
* Escobar and the rest of Los Pablos. Property records from Broward and Dade
counties; see also The Miami Herald, 4 December, 1987.
* Jorge Ochoa’s father had left. Authors’ interviews with Errol Chavez.
* Among those living it up. Details of Carlos Lehder’s return to Colombia from
authors’ visit to Armenia and interviews there with Leonel Cabezas Linz, Liliana
Garcia Osorio, Javier Rivas, and other sources who asked not to be identified, 9-
10 November, 1987. Hereinafter described as “Armenia interviews.” See also
George Stein, “Cocaine Kingpin Flees Colombia,” The Miami Herald, 18
September, 1983, p. 1A, and Guy Gugliotta, “Hometown Is Still Spellbound by
Lehder,” The Miami Herald, 16 November. 1987, p. 1A.
* In November 1978. Best account of the airplane affair from Jorge Eliecer
Orozco, Lehder . . . El Hombre, Bogotá: Plaza & Janes Editora, 1987, pp. 26-62.
page 87 Lehder himself began. Armenia interviews.
* “I worked in restaurants.” Armenia interviews, remembered by Leonel
Cabezas.
* Lehder’s presence in Armenia. Armenia interviews.
* It was only a question of time. Armenia interviews. For a detailed account of
the kidnapping, see Orozco, Lehder, El Hombre, pp. 128-131.
* As Lehder told the story. Armenia interviews, remembered by Leonel Cabezas.
* Soon they had them. For background on M-19, see Patrica Lara, Siembra
Vientos y Recogerás Tempestades, Bogotá: Planeta, 1982.

Chapter 9: MAS

* The small airplane. For details on the beginnings of MAS, see Fabio Castillo,
Los Jinetes de la Cocaina, Bogotá: Editorial Documentos Periodisticos, 1987,
pp. 111-114.
* The leaflet, dated December 3, 1981. MAS communiqué dated 3 December,
1981. MAS’s drug trafficking origins from the authors’ interviews with DEA
agent Errol Chavez, 27-28 July, 1987, the resident agent in Medellín at the time,
and with Fabio Castillo, 25 August. 1987, a journalist who worked as a publicist
for the Colombian attorney general during the attorney general’s investigation of
MAS in 1982-83. For a summary of the early debate concerning MAS, see
Agence France Presse dispatch reprinted in the daily newspaper, El Colombiano,
Medellín, 22 January, 1982. Colombian Justice Minister Rodrigo Lara Bonilla
on the floor of Congress August 17, 1983, accused Pablo Escobar of being a
MAS founder, El Especiador, 17 August, 1983. Finally, in a 1983 interview with
Bogotá’s Radio Caracól, Carlos Lehder admitted his MAS affiliation: “Kidnap
victims have to protect their interests.”
* Kidnappings among traffickers. Authors’ interview with Errol Chavez;
authors’ interview with a special antiterrorism prosecutor who asked not to be
identified, October 1986.
* The Lehder kidnapping was not. Interview with Errol Chavez. page 93 After
the communiqué was written. Interview with Fabio Castillo.
* But before the new feeling. MAS’s exploits from newspapers El Colombiano
and El Tiempo.
* It also became clear. Interview with Chavez.
* In all, police. MAS communiqué, 6 February, 1982.
* In fact, the Ochoas did negotiate. Police report related by Chavez; talks in
Panama described by Panamanian government source who asked not to be
identified, July 1987; details of the talks confirmed and amplified by Jose
Blandón in an interview with Andres Oppenheimer of The Miami Herald, 16
December. 1987. page 94 Sources familiar with the negotiations. Blandón to
Oppenheimer; details of Noriega dealings with the cartel provided in indictment
unsealed in U.S. District Court, Southern District of Florida, 5 February, 1988.
See also Stephen Hedges, “U.S.: Noriega Sold out Panama,” The Miami Herald,
6 February, 1988, p. 1A, and testimony of Jose Blandón 2 February, 1988, and 9
February, 1988, before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
* For the DEA’s Errol Chavez. Interview with Chavez.
* In Colombia, authorities either weren’t catching on. Official U.S. law
enforcement documents made available to the authors by sources who did not
wish to be identified.
* Pablo Escobar was known. Chavez interview.
* A corps of publicists. From an undated issue of Medellín Cívico, 1983.
* The campaign’s culmination. See “Un Robin Hood Paisa,” Semana, 19 April,
1983.

Chapter 10: THE COLONEL AND THE AMBASSADOR

* Belisario Betancur won election. Betancur’s goals and original assessment of

drug trafficking taken from authors’ interview with former Colombian Foreign
Minister Augusto Ramirez Ocampo, 26 August, 1987.
* Carlos Lehder, who a few months before. Armenia interviews, remembered by
Leonel Cabezas.
* The United States and Colombia. See U.S. Senate, Treaty Document No. 97-8,
“Extradition Treaty with the Republic of Colombia,” U.S. Government Printing
Office, Washington, D.C., 1981.
* Things began to change. Analysis of extradition treaty from authors’
interviews with Johnny Phelps, 30 July, 21 December, 1987.
* Betancur’s “philosophical opposition.” Authors’ interviews with Ramirez
Ocampo.
* “In December National Police Colonel Jaime Ramirez Gomez. Background on
Jaime Ramirez comes from authors’ interviews with Phelps; with the U.S. State
Department’s former Colombia Narcotics Assistance Unit chief Caesar Bernal,
28 July, 1987; with former (DEA) Special Agent-in-Charge for Colombia
George C. Frangullie, 16 June, 1987; with Ramirez’s brother, Francisco Ramirez
Gomez, 17 June, 1987; with Ramirez’s wife, Helena de Ramirez, 21 and 30
August, 1987; with former members of his Anti-Narcotics Unit who asked not to
be identified, 22 August 1987; and with Ramirez himself on two occasions,
August and December 1984.
* Ramirez’s passion was information. Remembered by former members of the
Anti-Narcotics Unit.
* Ramirez’s people thought. Remembered by former members of the Anti-
Narcotics Unit.
* Ramirez got along famously. Authors’ interview with George C. Frangullie.
page 102 Ramirez then began interviewing. Authors’ interviews with Francisco
Ramirez Gomez.
* Next, the cartel tried to flatter him. Interview with Francisco Ramirez Gomez.
* And then the approaches. Interviews with former members of the Anti-
Narcotics Unit.
* In April 1983 U.S. Ambassador Lewis Tambs. Authors’ interview with Lewis
Tambs, 19 December, 1987; assessments of Tambs’s personality, effectiveness
in Colombia, from interviews with Phelps and interview with former Colombian
Foreign Minister Ramirez Ocampo.
* Tambs would always be emphatically anticommunist. Clark’s words
remembered by Tambs.
* The FARC had been in existence. Estimates of FARC strength from authors’
interviews in 1982, 1983, and 1984 with Colombian army intelligence sources
who asked not to be identified. In 1983 Tambs was literally the only person in
the country talking about “narco-guerrillas.” For an excellent primer on the
origins and history of the FARC, see Carlos Arango Z., FARC: Veinte Artos, de
Marquetalia a La Uribe, Bogotá: Ediciones Aurora, 1984.
* Lara Bonilla was thirty-five. Assessment of Lara Bonilla’s naiveté and lack of
support from Betancur from authors’ interviews with Phelps, Tambs, and
Francisco Ramirez Gomez.

Chapter 11: HOT MONEY

* Jairo Ortega began his speech slowly. The August 17, 1983. editions of El
Tiempo and El Especlador give excellent blow-by-blow accounts of the famous
interchange.
* Lara Bonilla was in trouble. Assessment of Lara Bonilla’s lack of preparation
from authors’ interviews with Johnny Phelps, Lewis Tambs, and Francisco
Ramirez Gomez.
* Escobar, recognizing what was at stake. El Tiempo, 18 August, 1983.
* Evaristo Porras also contributed. El Espectador, 18 August, 1983.
* And the battle was joined. El Espectador, 18 August, 1983.
* Escobar asked for an investigation. Knowledgeable judicial sources consulted
by the authors in Bogotá in October 1986 asserted that Lara Bonilla almost
certainly received the Porras check. It is almost equally probable that he never
had the slightest idea who Porras was or whom he represented. Porras in 1989
remained a major second-echelon cartel chieftain based in Leticia.
* The drug lords were extremely exposed. Description of the Medellín scene
from interviews with DEA agent Errol Chavez, 28-29 July, 1987. and his
successor, Mike Vigil. 16 July, 1987.
* But perhaps his greatest accomplishment. The institutional involvement of the
Medellín Catholic Church with the cartel is impossible to assess accurately. The
links of Lopera and Cuartas with Escobar, however, are well documented and
created a scandal at the time. See the May 15. 1983, edition of Escobar’s
newspaper, Medellín Civico, for a glimpse of the publicity surrounding the
affair. Also well documented are Lopez Trujillo’s rage and his vendetta against
the Colombian journalistic establishment. See, for instance, Maria Jimena
Duzan’s “Lo Santo-fimio de Lopez Trujillo,” in El Espectador, 21 September,
1983, and the church’s response. “Cuando las Víboras Son Periodistas.” in El
Colombiano, 28 September, 1983.
* Outside of working hours. Details of Escobar’s life at Hacienda Los Napoles
from Semana magazine, 19 April, 1983; authors’ interviews with Colombian
journalists who visited the farm.
* The Ochoas were not nearly as splashy. Authors’ interviews with Colombian
journalists who had visited La Loma. December 1986; authors’ interviews with
federal informant Max Mermelstein, 27 November. 1987.
* In Armenia. Carlos Lehder’s influence. Armenia interviews. 9-10 November,
1987.
* On March 11, 1983. Details of National Latin Movement from authors1
interviews with co-founder Leonel Cabezas, 9-10 November, 1987.
* The movement pitched an ultranationalist. Remembered by Leonel Cabezas.
Also, Radio Caracól interview, July 1983.
* Four months after the formation. Interviews with Robert Merkle, April 1988.
* Lehder’s shamelessness, like Escobar’s. Armenia interviews; Radio Caracól
interview.
* But bravado wouldn’t be enough. Authors’ interviews with Colombian
journalists who asked not to be identified, December 1986.
* Then, on September 2, 1983. Quoted in Semana, March 1984. page 116 On
August 25 the Bogotá newspaper. El Espectador, August 25; confiscation of the
newspaper in Medellín asserted in interviews with Colombian journalists,
confirmed in authors’ interviews with Errol Chavez.
* In early September Lara Bonilla. Details provided in authors’ interviews with
Francisco Ramirez Gomez, June 17,1987.
* On September 11, Escobar severed his connection. Quoted in El Tiempo, 12
September, 1983.
* So Lara Bonilla kept pushing. El Tiempo, 26 September, 1983.
* For Escobar this was the last straw. El Tiempo, 21 January, 1984.

Chapter 12: THE ETHER TRAIL

* On February 9, 1984, the Medellín cartel gathered. U.S. v. Pablo Escobar,

November 1986.
* A vast complex of laboratories. Records seized at Tranquilandia raid.
* The process of making cocaine. This account of the cocaine production
process is based on a number of sources: The Coke Book: The Complete
Reference to the Use and Abuses of Cocaine, Bookmark Books Inc., 1984;
Frank Monastero, “Recommendations for the regulation of selected chemicals
and controlled substance analogs,” September 1985, a report that appeared in
“America’s Habit: Drug Abuse, Drug Trafficking and Organized Crime,” the
President’s Commission on Organized Crime, March 1986; Joel L. Phillips and
Ronald D. Wynne, Ph.D, Cocaine, the Mystique and the Reality, New York:
Avon Books, 1980, pp. 119-121; B. J. Plasket and Ed Quillen, The White Stuff,
New York: Dell Publishing Co., Inc., 1985, pp. 75-93; Robert Sabbag,
Snowblind, New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1976, pp. 68-88.
* Johnny Phelps and his men knew most. Conduct and development of the study
from authors’ interview with Johnny Phelps, 30 July, 1987. page 122 Phelps’s
study, code-named Operation Steeple. From 108-page report, “Operation
Steeple: The Illicit Precursor Market in Colombia,” by DEA intelligence analyst
Brian R. Stickney, Bogotá, Colombia, 14 December, 1981. page 124 On
November 22, 1983, Frank Torres walked into J. T. Baker. Affidavit of DEA
Special Agent Carol Cooper in United States of America v. Francisco Javier
Torres Sierra, United States District Court, Southern District of Florida, 1985;
“Little Man Led to Big Drug Bust, DEA Tracked Drums of Ether to Colombian
‘Grandfather Lab,’ “ The Miami Herald, 3 December, 1987, p. 1A. page 125
Four days after Schabilion’s call. DEA report.
* Torres was married and had two daughters. Carol Cooper interview, June
1987.
* About the size of cigarette packs. Interviews with several law enforcement
sources, first appeared in The Miami Herald, 3 December, 1987.
* On March 4, 1984, Herb Williams. Based on DEA report, March 4, 1984.
* Johnny Phelps waited a day. Authors’ interview with Phelps. Conversations
remembered by Phelps.
* Ramirez looked at Phelps’s mark. Thoughts related by Ramirez to his brother,
Francisco, related to the authors by Francisco in interview, June 17, 1987.

Chapter 13: TRANQUILANDIA

* At 9:20 a.m. on March 10, 1984. Details from the official Anti-Narcotics Unit
police reports on the Tranquilandia raid examined by the authors on 29 and 31
August, 1987. Hereafter described as “Tranquilandia papers”; authors’ interview
with DEA agent Ron Pettingill, January 1988.
* Jaime Ramirez had moved. Authors’ interview with Francisco Ramirez
Gomez, June 17, 1987.
* Phelps picked Pettingill. Authors’ interview with Johnny Phelps, 30 July,
1987.
* On March 9 the Colombian. Tranquilandia papers.
* Now it was well past noon. Authors’ interview with Pettingill.
* At the edge of the jungle. Authors’ interview with Phelps.
* Back at the landing site. Tranquilandia papers.
* The next day in Bogotá. Authors’ interview with Francisco Ramirez Gomez.
* Ramirez arrived at Tranquilandia. Tranquilandia papers.
* Pettingill reluctantly flew back. Interview with Pettingill.
* And so they were. Tranquilandia papers.
* It was also March 17. Details of the FARC camp from the authors’ 1984
interviews with Johnny Phelps. See also Guy Gugliotta, “Colombia’s Drug
Runners, Guerrillas: Friends or Foes?” The Miami Herald, 22 May, 1984, p. 1A.
page 134 For Phelps and Ramirez. Interviews with Phelps.
* As for Ramirez, before Tranquilandia. Interview with Francisco Ramirez
Gomez.
* The army, for its part. Tranquilandia is what gave the concept “narco-
guerrillas” its first serious jolt of credibility. Concept of gramaje described in
“Anal-isis de Documentos No. 028,” May 1982, an excerpt of a Colombian army
intelligence analysis of the FARC Sixth Conference Final Document.
* Like the army, Ambassador Tambs. Authors’ interview with Lewis Tambs, 19
December, 1987; authors’ interview with former Colombian Foreign Minister
Augusto Ramirez Ocampo, 26 August. 1987.
* Colombia still wasn’t ready. Arenas quoted in Guy Gugliotta, “Colombia’s
Drug Runners, Guerrillas: Friends or Foes?” The Miami Herald, 22 May, 1984,
p. 1A. page 136 Phelps and Ramirez had only a passing interest. Tranquilandia
papers.

Chapter 14: THE WHITE MERCEDES

* Justice Minister Lara Bonilla’s nerves. Authors’ interview with Johnny Phelps,
21 December, 1987.
* And Lara Bonilla didn’t stop there. Authors’ interview with Francisco Ramirez
Gomez, 17 June, 1987.
* And on March 26, with the cartel. El Tiempo, 27 March, 1984. page 139 It was
this last remark. Authors’ interview with Phelps. page 140 Meanwhile, in
Medellín, it was obvious. Authors’ interview with DEA agent Mike Vigil, 16
July, 1987.
* It was in August 1983. Authors’ interviews with Department of Administrative
Security (DAS) detectives who asked that their names not be used, 21,24, and 25
August, 1987. Hereafter described as “DAS interviews.” page 141 Tambs and
Phelps, under no illusions. Authors’ interview with Lewis Tambs, 19 December,
1987. page 141 Sometime soon after the Tranquilandia raid. Details of the Lara
Bonilla plot from DAS interviews and DAS documents examined by the authors;
outline of the plot and most of the description and details, however, from a
superb, unsigned cooperative reprise and investigative report published by
Colombia’s journalists, one version available as “El Asesinato de Lara Bonilla,”
El Tiempo, 11 August, 1987. Hereafter described as “journalists’ report.”
* At ten a.m., April 30,1984. Authors’ interview with Lewis Tambs. page 143 At
seven p.m. on April 30. Journalists’ report; see also Guy Gugliotta, “Cabinet
Minister’s Murder Galvanizes Colombian Outrage,” The Miami Herald, 6 May,
1984, p. 29A.
* Belisario Betancur and the Colombian cabinet. Authors’ interview with former
Colombian Foreign Minister Augusto Ramirez Ocampo, 26 August, 1987. page
144 Lara Bonilla’s body, in a closed coffin. Details of services, funeral, from
authors’ interview with Tambs.

Chapter 15: BARRY SEAL

* A month after the fall of Tranquilandia. Seal’s testimony in the Bustamante

case.
* Born and raised in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Barry Seal. The description of
Barry Seal is based on interviews with John Camp, Debbie Seal, Ben Seal,
Lewis Unglesby, and Tom Sclafani and on “Fatal Judgement,” a three-part series
by Jeff Leen, The Miami Herald, 11,12, and 13 October, 1986.
* Seal began to fly cocaine for the Ochoas in 1981. Interview with Ernst “Jake”
Jacobsen, 1986.
* Ultimately he created a system that was nearly fail-safe. Seal described his
smuggling methods in testimony before the President’s Commission on
Organized Crime, October 1985.
* Seal once bumped into a Louisiana State Police agent. Jacobsen interview,
September 1986.
* When Seal finally got caught. Interview with Randy Beasley, September 1986.
* His name and several of his aliases: George Stein, “DEA’s Airline for Drugs
Delivers with a Cargo of 84 Indictments,” The Miami Herald, 23 March, 1983,
p. 1A.
* He promised big things. Beasley interview.
* He refused even to see Seal. Interview with Stanford Bardwell, 10 October,
1986.
* All during this time, Seal had managed. Seal testimony in Bustamante case.
* The task force’s DEA liaison. Interview with DEA agent Ken Kennedy, who
was at the time acting as liaison to NNBIS, July 1987. Kennedy, whose
experience lay in fighting heroin in New York City, was unfamiliar with the
Colombian names Seal mentioned. Kennedy sent Seal to DEA agent Frank
White on the cocaine desk at headquarters. White, a veteran of the south Florida
cocaine wars, immediately saw Seal’s value.
* Jacobsen knew that Seal was big time. Jacobsen interview.
* Seal said he had worked for the Ochoas since 1981. DEA reports.
* Ochoa asked Seal how his friend William Roger Reeves was. Seal testimony.
* Ochoa outlined the mission. DEA reports.
* Entitled “Notes to Meditate on (Ponder).” The ten-page cartel manual was
seized from a safety deposit box in October 1985 after Marquez was arrested.
The manual was entered into evidence at the trial of Bustamante, Bates, and
Marquez.
* Marquez was pleased that Seal. DEA reports.
* On May 20 Seal met the cartel leaders. Seal testimony.
* About five miles outside the city. DEA reports.
* A frantic Seal was now behind bars. Interview with Thomas Sclafani,
September 1986.

Chapter 16: THE NICARAGUA DEAL

* As soon as Barry Seal got out of jail. Seal testimony.

* They spent the next three days with Lehder. DEA reports.
* Seal and Camp were jailed overnight. Seal testimony.
* A couple of days later Vaughan visited. El Nuevo Diario, “EPS explica sobre
disparos a avioneta,” 5 June, 1984. The article was entered into evidence at the
Bustamante trial.
* Pablo Escobar told Seal. DEA reports.
* Seal suggested they buy a military cargo plane. Seal testimony.
* By now the CIA had signed on to the Seal mission. DEA reports.
* Back in Miami three days later. Transcripts of tapes entered into evidence at
the Bustamante trial. Tape Number F, 24 June, 1984.
* Seal took off from Key West. DEA reports.
* The two men talked in Lito’s car. Seal testimony.
* The DEA had hit on a daring plan. DEA reports.
* One of the surveillance agents did a play-by-play. Interview with DEA Special
Agent-in-Charge Peter Gruden, July 1986.
* A bystander who had seen the accident. Florida Highway Patrol accident
report.
* At 2 a.m. that night Seal got a call. Seal testimony.
* Seal said yes, then called Vaughan. Tape transcripts. Tape Number G. 5 July,
1984.
* Seal called Escobar directly. Tape transcripts, Tape Number K, 15 July, 1984.
* A little later. Seal got an angry call. Seal testimony.
* Joura wanted Seal to fly the Bolivian cocaine base. Testimony of Robert Joura
at Seal’s Rule 35 hearing.
* The DEA was poised for what might. Material from North’s notebooks and
Ron Caffrey’s testimony about his briefings of North and Dewey Clarridge came
out of hearings conducted by the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on
crime in the summer of 1988.
* A day later, Army Lieutenant General Paul Gorman. Peter Slevin, “U.S.
Details Alleged Sandinista Drug Role,” The Miami Herald, 19 July, 1984, p. 1
A.
* Joura got even more troubling news. Joura testimony at Rule 35 hearing.
* Lito produced a driver’s license. DEA reports.
* Nicaragua denied the charges. Slevin, “U.S. Details Alleged Sandinista Drug
Role,” The Miami Herald, 19 July, 1984, p. 1A.
* Politics grabbed the headlines. Joel Brinkley, “U.S. Accuses Managua of Role
in Cocaine Traffic,” The New York Times, 19 July, 1984, p. 6A.

Chapter 17: CRACKDOWN

* In addition, drug trafficking. Authors’ interview with former Colombian

Foreign Minister Augusto Ramirez Ocampo, 26 August, 1987.
* In Medellín police raided. Authors’ interview with DEA agent Mike Vigil, 16
July, 1987.
* Police also invaded Escobar’s. The Miami Herald, 10 February, 1987.
* More important, however, the cartel had. Details of cartel’s 1984 relationship
with Noriega described by Panamanian government source who asked not to be
identified, July 1987; see also Guy Gugliotta, “Scandals Hint at Panama Role in
Drug Trade,” The Miami Herald, 3 September, 1984, p. 1A; Jose Blandón
interview with Andres Oppenheimer of The Miami Herald, 16 December, 1987;
Sam Dillon and Andres Oppenheimer, “Smuggling Enriched Noriega,” The
Miami Herald, 30 January, 1988, p. 1 A; U.S. District Court, Southern District
of Florida indictment, unsealed February 5, 1988; The Miami Herald, 6
February, 1988, p. 1A; testimony of Jose Blandón 2 February, 1988, and 9
February, 1988 before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
* The cartel wanted a truce. Authors’ interview with Alfonso Lopez Michelsen,
18 June, 1987.
* The success of this strategy. Blanddn to Oppenheimer, 16 December, 1987;
Blandón Senate testimony.
* Jimenez Gomez left Bogotá. The entire document is reproduced in Mario
Arango Jaramillo and Jorge Child Velez, Los Condenados de la Coca, Editorial
J. M. Arango, Medellín, 1985, pp. 94-105. On the manifesto’s effects in
Colombia, see David Marcus and Nery Ynclan, “Colombia’s Drug Kings Want a
Deal,” The Miami Herald, 23 July, 1984, p. 1A.
* The cartel members heard nothing. On the INAIR affair, see Gugliotta,
“Scandals Hint at Panama Role in Drug Trade,” The Miami Herald, 3
September, 1984, p. 1A, and Jeff Leen, “Witness Links Noriega to Drugs,” The
Miami Herald, 17 September, 1987, p. 1A.
* For Lewis Tambs and Johnny Phelps. Assessments made in authors’
interviews with Johnny Phelps, 21 December, 1987, and Lewis Tambs, 19
December, 1987.
* And on August 14, Bogotá. El Espectador, 14 August, 1984. page 178 The
case against Escobar. Authors’ interview with Francisco Ramirez Gomez, 17
June, 1987.
* Ramirez felt there was no way. Authors’ interview with Francisco Ramirez
Gomez.
* Ramirez began to stalk his quarry. Information on Anti-Narcotics Unit efforts
to capture Lehder in 1984-85 generally from reports in confidential Colombian
law enforcement files examined by the authors 28 August, 1987, hereafter
described as the “Lehder papers.” “Open letter” dated 24 July, 1984; Semana,
March 1984.
* In early 1984 Lehder had tried. Lehder papers.
* Finally, in February 1985. From a transcript of the television interview
obtained by the authors, March 1988.

Chapter 18: DRAWDOWN

* Furthermore, police only picked up. Assessment of effects of the crackdown

from the authors’ interview with U.S. embassy officials. December 1984: See
also Guy Gugliotta, “Colombian Drug Dealers Retaliate for Crackdown,” The
Miami Herald, 10 December. 1984, p. 2A.
* Phelps was one of the first. Authors’ interviews with Johnny Phelps, 21
December, 1987.
* The traffickers, hunkered down. Semana. April 1984. page 183 Suddenly
Colombia was a much more dangerous place. Authors’ interview with former
Colombian Foreign Minister Augusto Ramirez Ocampo. 26 August. 1987.
* Lewis Tambs had begun to notice. Authors’ interview with Lewis Tambs, 19
December, 1987.
* In the immediate aftermath of the Lara Bonilla assassination. Authors’
interview with DEA agent Mike Vigil, 16 July. 1987.
* A secret police memo dated. Anti-Narcotics Unit intelligence report dated 22
August, 1984.
* As if to drive this point home. The kidnapping was impossible to confirm. The
official Escobar account holds that the old man was kidnapped October 8. 1984,
and released twenty-four days later. Newspapers received no details of the
“kidnapping” until the elder Escobar was already freed.
* Escobar’s money was everywhere. From a confidential letter dictated by
Castro Gil and handwritten by a companion outside a Medellín courthouse, 23
October, 1984, and submitted to the Department of Administrative Security
(DAS). page 185 The Lara Bonilla assassination. Authors’ interview with
Phelps.
* Vigil’s security. Authors’ interview with Vigil.
* At first they brought widespread condemnation. Liberal Senator Ernesto
Samper quoted in David Marcus and Nery Ynclan, “Colombia’s Drug Kings
Want a Deal,” The Miami Herald, 23 July. 1984. p. 1A.
* “I told them I would deliver their note.” Quoted in El Espectador, 5 July,
1984.
* Betancur, prodded to make a statement. Quoted in Marcus and Ynclan, The
Miami Herald, 23 July, 1984. p. 1A.
* Yet Betancur did not convince. Quoted in Marcus and Ynclan. The Miami
Herald, 23 July, 1984, p. I A.
* In addition, on July 9 Pablo Escobar. Radio Caracól broadcast transcript, 9
July, 1984.
* Shortly after midyear. From confidential Anti-Narcotics Unit police
intelligence documents examined by the authors, 29 and 31 August, 1987.
* It was the guerrillas who finally. Authors’ interview with Vigil.
* At the same time, Tambs. Interview with Tambs.

Chapter 19: THE AUDIENCIA

* By the fall of 1984. Most of material concerning Ochoa’s and Rodriguez’s life
in Madrid comes from the Spanish Judicial Police’s Arrest Report, Direccíon
General de la Policia, RS 14.791/9, Madrid, 21 November, 1984.
* At the end of August. Authors’ interview with DEA agent James Kibble,
February 1988.
* The judicial police told the DEA. Judicial Police Arrest Report, 21 November,
1984.
* The Spaniards seemed cooperative. Authors’ interviews with Kibble and with
DEA agent William Mockler, February 1988.
* Such sentiments had a certain resonance. See the Madrid daily Liberation, 30
November, 1984, for presentation of the case. See the daily newspaper El País,
Madrid, 6 June, 1985, for a summary of the Nicaragua debate. page 194 Kibble
later described the allegations. Interview with Kibble. page 194 At the outset of
the Ochoa case. Descriptions of U.S thinking regarding the Ochoa case and
analysis of how the case developed are from the authors’ interviews with two
U.S. State Department lawyers assigned to follow the matter. The lawyers,
interviewed in February 1988, asked not to be identified. Hereafter described as
“lawyers’ interviews.”
* In Spain the integrity of the courts. Changing descriptions of the defendants in
news stories can be easily noted by studying story display in El País over the
first year of their incarceration.
* Also pure cartel was an April 2,1985, story. El País, 2 April, 1985; Mockler’s
problems described by Mockler in interviews with the authors. page 196 One
Ochoa lawyer denounced. Lawyers’ interviews. Quotes as remembered by the
lawyers.
* The prosecution could not match. EFE dispatch printed in El País, 8 June,
1985.
* The cases against Ochoa and Rodriguez. Lawyers’ interviews. page 198 The
judges closed the hearing. Finding quoted in El País, 26 September, 1985. page
198 But it was not the last word. Finding quoted in El País, 22 January 1985.

Chapter 20: UNCLE SAM WANTS YOU

* Yet despite the fact that Seal. This account of Seal’s troubles with federal
officials in the Middle District of Louisiana is largely based on “Fatal
Judgement,” a three-part series on Seal by Jeff Leen in The Miami Herald, 1214
October, 1986; Uncle Sam Wants You, an hour-long documentary on Seal by
John Camp that aired on WBRZ in Baton Rouge, 20 November, 1984; and
Murder of a Witness, an hour-long documentary by Camp that aired on WBRZ
in February 1986. In addition, the account is augmented by interviews with John
Camp, former Baton Rouge U.S. Attorney Stanford Bardwell, Seal lawyer Lewis
Unglesby, Chief Assistant U.S. Attorney Dick Gregorie in Miami, Organized
Crime Strike Force prosecutor Al Winters in New Orleans, former DEA agent
Ernst Jacobsen, former DEA Special Agent-in-Charge Peter Gruden in Miami,
Debbie Seal, and Ben Seal. Officials with the Louisiana State Police refused
interview requests by the authors in 1986.
* The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Miami. Interviews with Stanford Bardwell, 10
October, 1986, and Dick Gregorie, April 1988.
* Sclafani figured the Louisiana feds. Interview with Thomas Sclafani,
September 1986.
* The Louisiana State Police believed Seal. Interviews with Jacobsen, Sclafani,
Camp, and Unglesby.
* Webb claimed the state police told him. In an interview on Uncle Sam Wants
You.
* Camp was skeptical at first. Interviews with Camp, September 1986, and
Murder of a Witness.
* So Gregorie called Winters. Interviews with Gregorie and Winters, September
1986.
* He was a sharp Baton Rouge lawyer. Unglesby interview, September 1986.
* He learned that his client was a witness. Sclafani interview, September 1986.
* Bardwell and Winters left happy. Interviews with Bardwell, 10 October, 1986.
and Winters in September and October 1986.
* Seal agreed to plead guilty. Letter to judge, “Re United States v. Adler B.
Seal,” 19 November, 1984. The plea agreement, written on U.S Department of
Justice stationery, is signed by Seal, Thomas Sclafani, Stanford Bardwell, and
Albert J. Winters. In the document, Seal agrees to plead guilty to two counts:
conspiracy to possess two hundred kilograms of cocaine and causing a financial
institution to not file currency transaction reports.
* On November 20. Camp’s documentary. From Uncle Sam Wants You.

Chapter 21: MAX

* Shortly after the program aired. DEA sources.

* A few days later Max Mermelstein. Based on testimony of Max Mermelstein
in State of Louisiana v. Miguel Velez, et al, 29 April. 1987: and interview with
Mermelstein, 27 November, 1987. The authors interviewed Mermelstein. who is
hidden in the federal Witness Protection Program, for more than three hours by
telephone while a U.S. marshal monitored the call to prevent information leaking
about Mermelstein’s whereabouts. The interview, which took place in a bare-
walled room at the federal courthouse in downtown Miami, was the first public
account by an insider in the Medellín cartel.
* He told Max it was necessary. Interview with Mermelstein. 27 November,
1987.
* After they dumped the body. Antonio Aries Vargas. Metro-Dade Homicide
Case 335213-Y. Vargas’s body was discovered Christmas Day in a field near an
apartment complex. Cause of death: “Multiple gunshot wounds to the head and
torso from a .38-or .357-caliber weapon,”’ Permanent Subcommittee on
Investigations, “Organized Crime and Use of Violence,” 2 and 5 May, 1980, p.
503.
* “Basically, from that point on. Mermelstein testimony.
Back in Miami. Mermelstein coordinated. U.S. v. Escobar, November 1986. This
document is also known as “the Medellín Cartel Indictment.” page 211 All the
big traffickers were at Rafa’s party. Mermelstein interview. Acting on Rafa’s
authority. Max. United States of America v. Michael O. Munday, et al, United
States District Court, Southern District of Florida, 4 November, 1987.
* When the cocaine came into Miami. Mermelstein interview.
* Soon Blanco had amassed a Si.8 million debt. United States of America v.
Griselda Blanco de Trujillo, United States District Court, Southern District of
Florida, 26 September 1986, p. 5. In a DEA debriefing, Mermelstein said the
Blancos had Marta Ochoa killed. The murder of Marta Ochoa, Jorge Ochoa’s
first cousin, is filed under Metro-Dade Homicide No. 181899-E, 17 May, 1984.
It remains an open case.
* But Marta Ochoa’s father came to Miami. Mermelstein interview.
* Cumbamba carried a black attaché case. Mermelstein testimony.

Chapter 22: FLIPPING

* Max Mermelstein had never killed anybody. Mermelstein testimony.

* The prisoners arrived aboard a Colombian C-130 cargo plane. Marc Fisher,
“Colombia Starts Drug Extraditions,” The Miami Herald, 6 January, 1985, p. IB.
* Hernan Botero Moreno was a soccer team owner. Mary Voboril, The Miami
Herald, 11 February, 1981.
* In late January 1985 Mermelstein and an associate. Mermelstein testimony.
* It almost appeared to them that Max sighed with relief. Kim Murphy, “One
Man’s Word Against World’s Most Dangerous Cocaine Cartel,” The Los
Angeles Times, 6 July, 1987.
* A few days earlier Rafa had told Max. Mermelstein DEA debriefing.
* Mermelstein and Rafael Cardona had been indicted in Los Angeles. United
States of America v. Max Mermelstein, Rafael Antonio Salazar Cardona, et al,
U.S. District Court, Middle District of California, October 1984.
* “In the language of The Godfather.” Murphy, Los Angeles Times, 6 July,
1987.
* Mermelstein didn’t spill his guts. Gregorie interviews.
* It was the biggest cocaine bust in the history of Nevada. Don Campbell
testimony at Seal’s Rule 35 hearing, 24 October, 1985.
* The money was for protecting drug shipments. Liz Balmaseda, “Remote
Islands’ Top Officials Held in Drug Smuggling Plot,” The Miami Herald, 6
March, 1985, p. 1 A.
* For the first fifty days he was kept. U.S. v. Adler Berriman Seal, “Sealed
Motion for Reduction of Sentence,” October 1985.
* The Medellín cartel incensed him. Interviews with Dick Gregorie.
* Seal’s performance drew grudging praise. Brian Duffy, “Case of Mumps
Complicates Turks Trial,” The Miami Herald, 18 July, 1985, p. IB.
* In his opening argument, Gregorie called. U.S.A. v. Bustamante.
* The story of the trial’s opening. Brian Duffy, “U.S. Prosecutors: Sandinistas
Linked to Coke Cartel,” The Miami Herald, 31 July, 1985, p. 2B.
* One of the things Max Mermelstein told the DEA. Mermelstein debriefing.
* The plot could have been lifted from a bad thriller. Jeff Leen, “Prisoners Air
Escape Plot Foiled,” The Miami Herald, 18 November, 1985, p. IB.

Chapter 23: “THIS IS DOUBLE-CROSS”

* In fact, it was merely the formal execution. See plea agreement description,
note for p. 203.
* Once again it was John Camp. John Camp, Murder of a Witness.
* So it came as no surprise. The hearing, on a motion to reduce Seal’s sentence,
took place October 24,1985, before Judge Norman C. Roettger, Jr.
* When Seal appeared December 20,1985. United States of America v. Adler
Berriman Seal. United States District Court, Middle District of Louisiana,
sentencing proceedings, 20 December, 1985.
* The trap was ready to spring. Unglesby interview.
* On January 23. the day before the hearing. Sclafani interview. This account
reflects Sclafani’s recollection of what Judge Polozola said. The judge has
refused to be interviewed about the Seal case.
* The next morning Gregorie called Winters. This account of the collapse of the
Seal negotiations is based on interviews with Sclafani. Winters, and Gregorie
originally published by Jeff Leen in “Court Issued Deadly “Lesson,” Legal Tug
of War Cast Federal Witness’ Fate,” The Miami Herald, 13 October. 1986.
* Characteristically, he gave a telephone interview. John Semien. “Seal Pleads
Guilty, Questions Sentence,” The Baton Rouge Morning Advocate, 23 January,
1986, p. 1A.

Chapter 24: THE HALFWAY HOUSE

* No one expected Barry Seal to remain for long. Interview with Al Winters.
* Gregorie said it was no use. Interview with Dick Gregorie.
* Seal told Jake Jacobsen. Interview with Jake Jacobsen.
* Cumbamba had taken over Max Mermelstein’s contract. Documents filed in
State of Louisiana v. Miguel Velez. et al, also known as the “Seal murder case.”
* After Seal had been in the halfway house for fifteen days. This account of
Seal’s last days in the halfway house is based on court documents and testimony
filed in the Seal murder case.
* Seal spent much of his time. John Semien, The Baton Rouge Morning
Advocate, 19 February, 1986.
* The morning mail brought more bad news. Interview with Debbie Seal.
September 1986.
* Just before six that evening. Interview with Bill Lambeth. September 1986.
* He drove right past the parked gray Buick. This account of the shooting is
based on a visit to the halfway house parking lot and an interview with Salvation
Army Major Bennie Lewis, September 1986.
* Even through the silencer the shooting sounded loud. Testimony of Bennie
Lewis, Seal murder case.
* Three bullets hit Seal in the left side of the head. The description of the paths
of the bullets first appeared in The Miami Herald on October 14. 1986. and was
derived from the autopsy report of Seal placed in the court file.
* At 6:04 p.m., John Camp was in the WBRZ newsroom. Interview with Camp,
September 1986.
* When Lambeth in Phoenix got tired of waiting. Interview with Lambeth,
September 1986.
* Debbie Seal called over there. Interview with Debbie Seal, October 1986.
* The next day U.S. Attorney Stanford Bardwell. Account taken from transcript
of press conference aired on Murder of a Witness.
* In the pandemonium after the killing. FBI reports in Seal murder case.
* They were laughing. Testimony of East Baton Rouge Sheriffs Deputy Brent
Bonnette, Seal murder trial.
* The cab had hit a deer. Steve Wheeler, “Cabbie Recalls Ride with Suspect in
Seal Murder,” The Baton Rouge State Times, 23 February, 1986, p. 1A.
* The family put a telephone pager. Interview with Debbie Seal, September
1986.
* The bosses in Washington let Jacobsen and Joura know. Interview with Ken
Kennedy, July 1987.
* Four months after Barry Seal’s death. Interview with Dick Gregorie, April
1988.
* Winters told Max that the murder weapon. Winters interview in the Los
Angeles Times, 6 July, 1987.

Chapter 25: PALACE OF JUSTICE

* One day in August 1985. Authors’ interview with Maria Cristina de Patiño,
October 1986. See also Guy Gugliotta, “Threats Try Colombia’s Drug Judges,”
The Miami Herald, 26 October, 1986, p. 1A.
* In the early days of Colombia’s. Material on judges’ lives, pay, threats,
attitudes, and so on from authors’ interviews with judges and prosecutors at
Paloquemao Court House, Bogotá, October 1986. All attorneys asked not to be
identified. Hereafter described as “Paloquemao interviews.”
* When none of this worked. Judicial employees union sources listed thirty
judges killed between 1980-86, apart from Supreme Court justices, but were
unable to tell whether all were murdered by drug traffickers. Although no
accurate count existed, by mid-1988 the cartel had almost certainly murdered
fifty judges.
* On July 23,1985, five gunmen. Authors’ interviews with detectives from the
Colombian Department of Administrative Security (DAS), 24 August, 1987.
Escobar is the prime suspect in the Castro Gil killing.
* This was an old story. The uproar that attended the treatment of the extradited
prisoners described in authors’ interview with former Foreign Minister Augusto
Ramirez Ocampo, 26 August, 1987.
* So the cartel did what it could. Escobar quoted in Sam Dillon, “Drug Lords
Are Blamed in Colombian Killing,” The Miami Herald, 14 September, 1985, p.
1A. page 246 But the Betancur administration. Parejo quoted in Dillon, The
Miami Herald, 14 September, 1985, p. 1A.
* Three ambassadors were. Authors’ interviews with Ramirez Ocampo, 26
August, 1987.
* At 11:40 a.m., about thirty-five M-19 guerrillas. Despite its polemics, the most
comprehensive collection of basic information, documents, and accounts relating
to the Palace of Justice affair can be found in Manuel Vicente Peña Gomez, Las
Dos Tomas, 2nd ed., Bogotá Fundación Ciudad Abierta, January 1987.
* Yesid Reyes Alvarado, a young lawyer. Authors’ interview with Yesid Reyes
Alvarado, 27 August, 1987.
* Down the hall from Alfonso Reyes. Authors’ interview with Humberto Murcia
Balien, October 1986.
* Belisario Betancur’s presidency never recovered. During the rest of his
presidency, Betancur never resolved the question of negotiations; the official
explanation given for the guards’ withdrawal was that they had only been
assigned temporarily during a state visit by French President Francois Mitterrand
that had ended November 4. Three years after the seizure neither issue had been
resolved to the judiciary’s satisfaction.

Chapter 26: BETANCUR AT TWILIGHT

* Betancur was double-damned. Author’s interview with former Colombian

Foreign Minister Augusto Ramirez Ocampo, 26 August, 1987. Ramirez Ocampo
confirmed that from the day he was inaugurated until the day he left office, the
Peace Process remained the cornerstone of Betancur’s administration.
* Apparently Betancur still thought. Public acceptance of the “narco-guerrilla”
concept grew gradually. Because of the FARC’s pivotal role in the Peace
Process, the Betancur administration discouraged open debate on the matter.
This changed with the arrival of his successor, Virgilio Barco, in 1986. The
“FARC-Narc” relationship described in the text was first discussed in detail with
the authors in a January 1987 interview with a high-level Barco administration
official who asked not to be identified.
* The criminal justice system was a joke. Quoted in an undated 1986 news
release issued by the National Association of Functionaries and Employees of
the Judicial Branch.
* The cartel had murdered one. The justices’ despair related to the authors in an
October 1986 interview with a former justice who asked not to be identified.
page 253 By the end of 1986 Colombia. Ten Colombians, two U.S. citizens, and
a West German.
* The year opened with a vendetta. El Espectador, 29 March, 1986.
* On March 19, several weeks after. U.S. District Court. Southern District of
Florida, indictment unsealed February 5, 1988; see also Sam Dillon, “Son of Ex-
Panama Defense Chief Snatched,” The Miami Herald, 25 March, 1986, p. 6A.
* This sort of ugly intrigue. On violence in 1985-86, see Guy Gugliotta, “Life
Cheap, Death Easy in Lawless Colombia.” The Miami Herald, 5 October, 1986.
p. 1A.
* In 1986 Medellín eclipsed these figures. See the daily newspaper El Mundo,
Medellín, 9 December, 1986, p. 1A.
* Law enforcement in the city. Authors’ interviews with detectives of
Colombia’s Department of Administrative Security (DAS), 24 August, 1987.
* On January 31 the court agreed. El País, Madrid. 13 February, 1986, describes
the February 12 finding and summarizes the case to date in reasonably coherent
fashion.
* The U.S. request looked sadly deficient. Assessment made by two U.S. State
Department lawyers assigned to the case and interviewed by the authors in
February 1988. The lawyers asked not to be identified.
* Furthermore Barco, like Betancur. See, for example, Colombia Today, vol. 21,
no. 6, a newsletter in English published by the Colombia Information Service, a
Colombia lobby in Washington. The newsletter introduces Barco and gives his
views on fifteen different subjects. Drug trafficking is not among them.
* On July 16 Luis Roberto Camacho. One high-level Barco administration
source who asked not to be identified told the authors in January 1987 that fewer
than a half-dozen people knew that Parejo was leaving Colombia until the day he
actually departed.
* In Cali the widespread lawlessness. See Gugliotta. The Miami Herald, 5
October, 1986, p. 1A.
* On July 13, 1986, after twenty months. Old Fabio quoted in El Tiempo, 14
July, 1986. page 258 The Spanish Audiencia Nacional. Quoted in El País, 26
March, 1986.
* Parejo Gonzales had reason to worry. See, for instance, El Espectador, 9
January, 1988, which prints a photocopy of the document. According to El
Espectador, the document was seized by the Colombian army’s IV Brigade
(Medellín) on February 7, 1987, during a house search. Arrested at the time was
Mauricio Isaza Ochoa, described as a relative of Jorge Luis Ochoa. In all, the
document detailed payments of 318.3 million pesos ($1.6 million) in Cartagena,
Bogotá, Medellín, and to someone or some entity described only as “Garces.”
Efforts to contact Judge Fabio Pastrana Hoyos at the time the document was
leaked proved unsuccessful.

Chapter 27: THE RAMIREZ CONTRACT

* On January 25, 1986, a middle-aged man. Basic outline of the original plot
described in a confidential police intelligence memorandum undated but
probably submitted at the end of January 1986. Hereafter described as “police
memorandum.” Most details on the plot, however, come from National Police
Inspector General Alfonso Gomez Garcia’s report on the death of Jaime
Ramirez. A copy of this confidential report was examined by the authors in late
1987. Hereafter described as “inspector general’s report.”
* Two days later the F-2. Authors’ interview with Helena de Ramirez, 30
August, 1987.
* Jaime Ramirez had been officially relieved. Ramirez’s sense of well-being
described during authors’ interview with Francisco Ramirez Gomez, 17 June,
1987.
* First Escobar contracted the job. Authors’ interview with Francisco Ramirez
Gomez.
* In his final, superb year. Information on Anti-Narcotics Unit efforts to capture
Lehder in 1984-85 generally from reports in confidential Colombian law
enforcement files examined by the authors 28 August, 1987, hereafter described
as the “Lehder papers.”
* Twice they almost got him. Information regarding Liliana Garcia from the
Lehder papers and from the authors’ visit to Armenia 9-10 November, 1987, and
conversations with Garcia at that time. page 263 Six weeks later, on April 26.
Lehder papers.
* Salah’s replies--addressed “Dear.” Salah correspondence contained in Lehder
papers.
* Despite the lessons in. Letter to the Soviets contained in Lehder papers.
* In February 1986 Ramirez, his wife, Helena. Authors’ interview with Helena
de Ramirez.
* Still, he wasn’t particularly worried. Interview with Francisco Ramirez
Gomez; police memorandum.
* Ramirez visited F-2. Remembered by Francisco Ramirez Gomez. page 266 He
had to put the informant. Authors’ interview with DEA agent George C.
Frangullie, 16 June, 1987.
* Jaime Ramirez’s life changed. Interview with Francisco Ramirez Gomez.
* For the next eight months. Inspector general’s report.
* The tension put a terrible strain. Interview with Helena de Ramirez.
* Still, this was no way to live. Interview with Francisco Ramirez Gomez.
* In May the Anti-Narcotics Unit. Inspector general’s report; interview with
Francisco Ramirez Gomez.
* This seemed to be a particularly wise course. Inspector general’s report;
interview with Helena de Ramirez.
* Generals school finished in August. Interview with Francisco Ramirez Gomez;
authors’ interview with Johnny Phelps, 21 December, 1987.
* The next day at ten a.m. Ramirez. Conversation remembered by Helena de
Ramirez.
* Everybody--parents, brothers. Interview with Francisco Ramirez Gomez.
* As the Ramirezes pulled away. Inspector general’s report; interview with
Francisco Ramirez Gomez.
* At 5:43 p.m., November 17, 1986. Inspector general’s report; interview with
Helena de Ramirez.
* The new year arrived. Letters quoted in full in inspector general’s report.

Chapter 28: THE CARTEL INDICTMENT

* In 1977 DEA agents in Medellín. Interview with DEA agent Charles Cecil.
* The TAMPA bust prompted. Interviews with several confidential law
enforcement sources.
* By 1983 Operation Fountainhead had traced dozens. From a 1983
Fountainhead database report.
* At the time she was living. Interview with DEA agent Bob Palumbo, 1986.
* In one 15-day period in January 1985. Jeff Leen, “Cocaine Seizures Soaring,”
The Miami Herald, 10 February. 1985. p. IB.
* Cocaine made the cover of Newsweek and Time magazines. See Newsweek,
“Cocaine: The Evil Empire,” 25 February, 1985, pp. 14-23, and “Colombia’s
Kings of Coke,” pp. 19-22; and Time, “Fighting the Cocaine Wars,” 25
February, 1985, pp. 26-33.
* In the stairwell of the U.S. Attorney’s Office. The account of how the cartel
indictment came about is based on more than a dozen interviews with Dick
Gregorie, Roberto Martinez, Robert Dunlop. Mark Schnapp, and Carol Cooper
in 1987 and 1988.
* Count one began. United States of America v. Pablo Escobar Gaviria, et al., 18
November. 1986.
* The Miami Herald and The New York Times. Jeff Leen, “5 Colombian Drug
Lords Are Indicted, Cartel Called No. 1 Trafficker,” The Miami Herald, 19
November, 1986. p. 1A.
* In Colombia the indictment. El Espectador, 5 and 11 December. 1986.
* It was a common technique. Nevertheless by 1988 most of the members of El
Espectador’s Informe Especial team, their counterparts from El Tiempo, and
more than a dozen others of Colombia’s finest journalists were living outside the
country because of threats.
* “Legalize drug trafficking?” El Espectador, 5 December, 1986. page 283 On
December 17, 1986, a Wednesday. El Espectador, 18 December, 1986.

Chapter 29: THE VIRGIN SMILES

* For Barco the Cano murder was. For details of the post-Cano crackdown see
Guy Gugliotta, “After Murder, Colombia Leans on Drug Lords.” The Miami
Herald, 11 January, 1987, p. 1A.
* Still. Barco didn’t do badly. Authors’ interviews with detectives of Colombia’s
Department of Administrative Security (DAS). 24 August, 1987.
* One significant way in which. Barco’s feelings regarding the Peace Process
and guerrillas from the authors’ interviews with Patriotic Union leader Jaime
Pardo Leal, October 1986, and with a high-level Barco administration official
who asked not to be identifed, January 1987.
* The FARC and the Patriotic Union. Herrera quoted in El Tiempo, 13
November, 1987.
* And it didn’t. On January 13, 1987. Material on Parejo Gonzalez shooting
from El Tiempo, 14 January, 1987, and El Espectador, 14 January, 1987.
* There was no question. Threats against Parejo related to authors by DAS
detectives, 24 August, 1987. Comando Hernan Botero letter shown to the
authors by friends at El Tiempo who asked not to be identified.
* National Police Major William. Most of the account of the capture of Qarlos
Lehder was related to the authors by a Colombian law enforcement source who
asked not to be identified. He was interviewed 31 July, 1987. This material was
augmented during the authors’ interview 16 July, 1987, with DEA agent Mike
Vigil, who had spoken at length with Lemus.
* In 1984 Jaime Ramirez had figured out. Material on the politics, diplomacy,
and logistics of the Lehder capture from the authors’ interview with a high-level
DEA source who asked not to be identified, 27 July, 1987.
* Lehder arrived in Bogotd. Material on the trip to Florida from authors’
interview with DEA agent Tom Bigoness, 22 June, 1987.

Chapter 30: “WITNESSES FROM HELL”

* Three U.S. marshals brought Max Mermelstein. Jeff Leen, “Tale of Intrigue
Spun in Seal Trial, Testimony Paints Vivid Picture of Cartel,” The Miami
Herald, 11 May, 1987, p. 1 A. The observations in this chapter are based on four
days of reporting by Leen in Lake Charles.
* Prem Burns had very deliberately. Interview with Prem Burns, April 1988.
* Sharpstein had performed something of a miracle. Jeff Leen, “Singer’s Drug
Arrest Stuns Friends,” The Miami Herald, 13 January 1986, p. IB.
* On death penalty cases, she preferred. Interview with Prem Burns.
* Max Mermelstein’s testimony was devastating. Mermelstein testimony, State
of Louisiana v. Miguel Velez, Bernardo Antonio Vasquez, and Luis Carlos
Quintero Cruz, 29 April, 1987.

Chapter 31: THE FINAL OFFENSIVE

* It began as a brief torrent. For a summary of the early sparring on extradition,

see “Colombia Resurrects Extradition Treaty,” The Miami Herald, 16 December
1986, p. 15A.
* The Supreme Court did, however. Authors’ interview with U.S. Ambassador
Richard Gillespie, January 1987.
* Unlike the United States. Barco’s discussions with prominent Colombians
confirmed in authors’ interview with former President Misael Pastrana, January
1987.
* In the middle, trapped by circumstances. The desperation and disillusionment
of the Supreme Court and easing off after the December 12 ruling described in
the authors’ interview with a highly placed juridical source who asked not to be
identified, August 1987.
* Finally, 1986 had been so bloody. Buitrago quoted in El Espectador, 2
December, 1986.
* Yet the fact that. Authors’ interview with Assistant Attorney General Fernando
Navas Talero, 27 August, 1987. Authors’ interview with an assistant interior
minister who asked not to be identified, August 1987.
* The final antiextradition. See The Miami Herald, 8-11 February, 1987. The
joint publishing campaign was put into effect January 14, the day after former
Justice Minister Enrique Parejo Gonzalez was shot in Budapest.
* As the year progressed. For a chronology of these events, see El Tiempo, 13
June,1987.
* The U.S. embassy issued. Quoted in Bradley Graham, “Extradition Law
Voided in Colombia,” The Washington Post, 28 June, 1987.
* Privately, however, one embassy official. Interview with DEA Special Agent-
in-Charge George C. Frangullie. 25 August, 1987.
* Others were much harsher. Gomez quoted in daily newspaper El Sigh, Bogotá,
26 August, 1987.
* The cartel, not surprisingly. Letter from Lehder to Leonel Cabezas Linz in
Armenia. Colombia, 1 July, 1987.
* Still, Lehder retained high spirits. Letter from Lehder to Cabezas, no date.
* Without an extradition treaty. Description of the tortuous course of the
Rodriguez Orejuela case comes from authors’ August 1987 interviews with a
DEA agent and a Colombian prosecutor both of whom asked not to be identified.
* In worse shape was Pablo Escobar. Assessment of the cartel members’ legal
situation from authors’ interview with a high-level official of the Colombian
Department of Administrative Security (DAS), 21 August, 1987.
* Barco did not give up. Low Murtra’s interview in El Tiempo, 8 November,
1987.
* Then in early August DAS. Material on Los Priscos from the authors’
interviews with a high-level DAS official, 8 November. 1987. and with DAS
detectives, 24 August, 1987.
* DAS’s expose of Los Priscos hurt the cartel. For Low Murtra’s statement on
Rodriguez Gacha and the Pardo Leal affair, see El Tiempo and El Espectador, 13
November, 1987. For analysis of the narco-guerrilla phenomenon, see Guy
Gugliotta, “Fight between Rebels, Traffickers, Bleeds Colombia,” The Miami
Herald, 14 November, 1987, p 17A.

Chapter 32: CITIZEN JORGE LUIS OCHOA

* It was about 4:30 p.m. For basic information on the facts of Ochoa’s arrest, see
El Tiempo and El Espectador, November 22. 1987, and Jeff Leen and Guy
Gugliotta, “Colombian Drug Lord Arrested,” The Miami Herald, 22 November,
1987, p. 1A.
* Outwardly the circumstances of Ochoa’s arrest. The best analysis of the
government’s plight appears in Semana, 1 December. 1987.
* President Virgilio Barco. Jack Hook interviewed by the authors, 21 November,
1987.
* The dav after the arrest. Meetinc and nature of the discussion confirmed to the
authors by people who attended but did not wish to be identified by name, 22
November, 1987.
* In the end the government. Low Murtra quoted in El Tiempo, 23 November,
1987.
* To observe the machinations. Authors’ interviews with members of the team,
February 1988. Hereafter identified as “legal team.”
* The cartel reacted to Ochoa’s capture. See El Tiempo, 24 November, 1987, for
an account of the Gomez Martinez incident, reprint of the communiqué.
* If the government won the first battle. See El Tiempo, 24 November, 1987, for
an account of the initial sparring. Analysis is from authors’ interviews with the
legal team.
* The U.S. legal team left. Interviews with legal team. Barrera quoted in El
Tiempo, 18 December, 1987.
* Sometime in the next ten days. Interviews with legal team; authors’ interview
with Humberto Barrera, 31 December, 1987.
* Finally, on December 30 Barrera. Authors’ interview with Barrera. page 315
According to Semana magazine’s. Semana, 12 January, 1988; interview with
Barrera.
* The predictable, and by now standard. Authors’ interview with DEA agent
Errol Chavez, January 1988.
* On January 18, in an apparent. Authors’ interviews with close friends of
Pastrana who asked not to be identified, January 1988. The Pastrana family
believed it was a cartel kidnapping by the second day.
* A week later, right at dawn. Details of the Hoyos murder, telephone call,
Semana, 2 February, 1988; analysis of motives in both Hoyos and Pastrana
kidnappings from authors’ interviews with friends of Pastrana, February 1988.

Chapter 33: THE HENRY FORD OF COCAINE

* Federal agents with automatic weapons. Sydney P. Freedberg, “Drug King

Goes to Court, Millionaire Gets Public Defender,” The Miami Herald, 6
February, 1987.
* To Merkle, Lehder appeared scruffy. Robert Merkle interview. 17 April, 1988.
* Nine of the twelve jurors told. Joel Achenbach, “Showdown at Credibility
Gap,” The Miami Herald’s Tropic magazine, 29 March, 1987, p. 12.
* Lehder’s hearing in Jacksonville. Ron Word, “Tight Security for Court
Appearance,” Associated Press, 9 February, 1987.
* Speculation in legal circles. Rosalind Resnick, “1987 Was the Year
Professionals Danced on an Ethical High Wire,” The Miami Herald, 28
December, 1987, p. 15BM.
* Colleagues described him as “a lawyer’s lawyer.” Rosalind Resnick, “Black
Sheep, Big Money,” The Miami Herald, 19 April, 1987, p. IF.
* Merkle said the letter. Joan Fleischman, “Accused Colombian Drug Chiefs
Offer to Cooperate Described as Frivolous,” The Miami Herald, 6 May, 1987, p.
6A.
* In the basement of the federal detention center. Interview with Jung, August
1988.
* Merkle planned to lay out Lehder’s career. Jeff Leen, “Lehder Aspired to Be
‘Coke King,’ Prosecutor Portrays Him as Father of Modern Drug Smuggling,”
The Miami Herald, 17 November, 1987, p. 1A.
* Long-buried secrets emerged. Jeff Leen, “Greedy Pals Aided Drug Boss,
Prosecutor: Lehder Sought Moral Destruction of U.S.,” The Miami Herald, 31
January, 1981, p. 1A.
* Lehder at thirty-eight still retained. Description of Lehder based on the
reporting of Jeff Leen, who attended four weeks of the Lehder trial for The
Miami Herald. page 325 In the final week of the trial. Ron Word, Associated
Press, May 1988.
Chapter 34: NATIONAL SECURITY

* On February 5, 1988. U.S. Attorney Leon Kellner. U.S. District Court,

Southern District of Florida, indictment unsealed February 5. 1988; Kellner
quoted in Stephen J. Hedges, “U.S.: Noriega Sold Out Panama,” The Miami
Herald, 6 February, 1988, p. 1A.
* But Noriega’s other supposed transgressions. See, for instance, Guy Gugliotta,
“Scandals Hint at Panama Role in Drug Trade,” The Miami Herald, 3
September, 1984, p. 1A. During 1984. the Drug Enforcement Administration
refused repeated attempts by the authors and other reporters to discuss
allegations of drug trafficking in Panama.
* Pablo Escobar, who had striven. See Newsweek, 15 February, 1988; Time, 1
March, 1988; The New York Times, 10 April, 1988.
* “Stopping drug trafficking. Kerry quoted in Andres Oppenheimer, “U.S. Urged
to Step Up Drug Fight,” The Miami Herald, 14 February, 1988, p. 1A.
* By the end of the trial Merkle’s office was directing. Jeff Leen, “Bahamian
Leader Targeted in Bribery Probe. Sources Say,” The Miami Herald, 30 April.
1988, p. 8A.
* Afterward a very drained Ed Shohat. Jeff Leen, “Cocaine Czar Lehder Guilty,
Colombian Trafficker Could Face Life Term for Shipping Drugs,” The Miami
Herald, 20 May, 1988, p. 1A.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The authors conducted more than three hundred interviews during the three and
one half years of research that went into this book. Some of those interviewed,
like Colonel Jaime Ramirez and Jaime Pardo Leal, have died in the drug wars.
Others are in hiding or living in exile, pursued by the traffickers because of what
they have written, said, or testified to in court. Many friends in Colombia and the
United States at their own request shall not be named here. They know who they
are, and they know the debt that is owed them.
Special thanks are due to Colombian news organizations and especially
to individual reporters who helped make a difficult and dangerous story
comprehensible to outsiders. Their knowledge and assistance were
indispensable.
Special thanks are also due to James Savage, the investigations editor of
The Miami Herald, who was deeply involved in the conception and execution of
a ten-part series that appeared originally in the Herald and later became the basis
for this book. The authors would also like to thank Janet Chusmir, executive
editor of the Herald, and Pete Weitzel, the paper's managing editor, for granting
the authors leaves of absence and the right to use material that had originally
appeared in the Herald. City Editor John Brecher and Foreign Editor Mark
Seibel were also very gracious in committing their resources to this project.
Finally, Rick Ovelmen, the Herald's general counsel, read the manuscript with a
keen eye and provided sage advice.
This book could not have been written without substantial cooperation
from the people who fight the drug war, particularly those in the U.S. Drug
Enforcement Administration, whose diligence and effort at an often thankless
task receive too little notice. The authors would like to thank in particular Jack
Lawn, the administrator of the DEA, and several of those under his command:
William Alden, Charlie Cecil, Errol Chavez, Carol Cooper, Con Daugherty,
Robert Feld-kamp, George Frangullie, Larry Galina, Jack Hook, Jake Jacobsen,
James Kibble. William Mockler, Johnny Phelps, Mike Vigil, and Billy Yout.
We cannot name everyone who helped us; what follows is only a partial list.
We thank Caesar Bernal. John Camp, Fabio Castillo, Can-dace Cunningham,
Carlson Daniel, Liz Donovan, Ruthie Golden, Dick Gregorie, Gonzalo Guillen,
Carl Hiaasen, Rose Klayman, Bob Levinson, Roberto Martinez, Lynn Medford.
Gay Nemeti, Francisco Ramirez Gomez, Carla Anne Robbins. Timothy Ross,
Enrique Santos Castillo. Mark Schnapp, Tom Sclafani, AI Singleton. Lewis
Tambs, Gray Thomas, Alfonso Torres Robles, and Ron Word.
SEARCH TERMS
Abrams. Elliot
La Abundancia, Meta,
Acandi, communications system at, account books
acetone
Air Montes Company Ltd
Allende Gossens, Salvador Alvarez Moreno, Jose Javier anticommunism
and Medellín cartel’s negotiations with U.S. government Antigua
Anti-Narcotics Unit (Colombian National Police) accomplishments of
Lehder hunted by
Medellín cartel’s approaches to see also Ramirez Gomez, Jaime April 19
Movement (M-19) kidnapping of Lehder attempted by MAS actions against
in Palace of Justice attack.
Arango, Carlos “Cumbamba,”
trial of
Arenas, Jacobo
Arenas Betancur, Rodrigo Arias Tascón, John Jairo Arizmendi, Alcides
Aries Vargas, Antonio “Chino”
armed forces, Colombian
armed forces, Panamanian armed forces, U.S.
Armenia:
Lehder’s residence in
plant given to
Attorney General’s Office, Medellín Audiencia Nacional (Spain) Autos Lehder,
Medellín
Auto World. Miami
Avianca Airlines

Bahamas
corruption in
drug dealers’ bank accounts in Lehder’s development of refueling
Mermelstein’s transportation Ochoa’s trouble with pipeline in, see also
Norman’s Cay J. T. Baker Chemical Supply Co., Bank of Miami
Bank Secrecy Act
Bannister, Everette
Bannister, Gorman
Baquero Borda. Hernando
Barco Vargas. Virgilio
extradition treaty and, Ochoacase and
state of siege decreed by Bardwell, Stanford
Barrera, Humberto
Barrio Pablo Escobar, Medellín Bates, Felix Dixon
Bates, Mrs. Felix
Baton Rouge Morning Advocate Battard, Robert
bazuko
Beasley, Randy
Beckwith, Charles
Belize
Bella Vista prison. Medellín.
Ben-Veniste, Richard
Bernal, Caesar
Bernal, Marta Correa de
Betancur, Belisario
crackdown on drug traffickers ordered by extradition issue and
hot money issue and
Lara Bonilla’s assassination and, Medellín cartel’s rapprochement
attempts and
Palace of Justice siege and Peace Process and
Phelps’s views on
Tambs’s relationship with threats against
Bigoness, Tom
Blanco de Trujillo, Griselda cocaine wars and
Dadeland shooting and
DEA investigation of
gang of
personality of
pushed out of Medellín drug scene Blankenship, Richard
Bogotá, drug dealers in
Bogotá, U.S. embassy in
security concerns at
see also Tambs, Lewis Bolivia
Borge, Tomás
Borman, Frank
Hernan Botero Command
Botero Moreno, Hernan
Bowe, Nigel
Los Brasiles airfield
Bravo, Alberto
Bravo Muñoz, Armando
Brazil
Briceño Murillo. Luis Francisco Buchanan, Edna
Builes Gomez, Joaquín
Buitrago Hurtado, Samuel Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, U.S.
Bureau of International Narcotics Matters, U.S.
Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, U.S.
Burns, Premila
Bush, George
Bustamante, Carlos “Lito”
breakout attempt of
trial of
Bustamante. “Mono”

cabinet, Colombian
Cadavid, Marcos
Cadavid, Maria Cristina
Caffrey, Ron
Cakmis, Rosemary
Cali:
first large cocaine seizure at airport in murders in
Cali group
Medellín cartel’s war with Camacho, Alvaro
Camacho, Luis Roberto
Camacho Rodriguez, Nemesio Camp, Emil
Camp, John
Campo Gomez, Teodoro
Cano (drug trafficker)
Cano Isaza, Guillermo (journalist) Capozzi, Thomas
Capps, Vann
Cardona, Odila
Cardona Salazar, Rafael “Rafa,”
cocaine used by
cocaine wars and
indictment of
 Mermelstein’s information on Mermelstein’s relationship with murder of
Seal’s murder and
Carlos, Roberto
Cartagena kidnappings (1982) cartel case
grand jury hearings in
indictment in
press coverage of
release of indictment in sealing of indictment in Castrillon, Bishop Dario
Castro, Fidel
Castro Gil, Tulio Manuel Cataño, Luis A.
CBS News
CebuQuindio, S.A.
Centac 26 (Central Tactical Unit) Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Seal and
Chapman, Alvah H., Jr.
Chase Manhattan Bank
Chavez, Errol
informants developed by protection of
Chavez, Julia
Chile
Civics on the March
Civil Aeronautics Board, Colombian El Clan Ochoa
Clark, William P.
Clarridge, Dewey
Coca-Cola
cocaine: as focus of law enforcement efforts history of
pharmaceutical
price of
production methods for
psychological effects of smuggling methods of marijuana married to
use of, in Colombia
cocaine base
smoking of (freebasing) cocaine laboratories
ether needed for
guerrillas at
in Nicaragua
in Panama
production methods in
raids on
cocaine laboratories
 run by Lehder
vast network of
cocaine wars
between Cali and Medellín cartels Dadeland shooting in
first
in Medellín cartel’s restructuring of cocaine industry weapon of choice in
Cocalandia (Villa Coca 84) Cocalandia 2
coca leaf
cocaleros
cocales
coca paste
codes, in cocaine shipments Colombiano, El (Medellín) communism
terrorism and drugs linked to see also anticommunism Communist party,
Colombian Congress, Colombian
Escobar’s seat in
hot money issue in
Congress, U.S.
Conservative party, Colombian contras
Cooper, Carol
Correa Arroyave, Pablo
Correa Ramos. Pablo
Council of State, Colombian crack
Cronkite, Walter
Cuartas, Rev. Hernan
Cuba
Currency Transaction Reports (CTRs) Customs, Colombian
Customs Service, U.S.
TAMPA seizure and

Dade County Medical Examiner’s Office

Dadeland shooting (1979) as first attack on bystanders investigation of
war wagon in
Danbury Correctional Institution Darién. cocaine lab in
Dario Guizado, Iván (“Carlos Mario”) death squads
Defense Forces, Panamanian Defense Ministry, Colombian DeLorean. John Z.,
Department of Administrative Security, Colombian (DAS) Cano murder and
Escobar arrested by
Lara Bonilla assassination and El Diamante
Diaz Quintana, German Alfonso (El Ronco—“the Croaker”) Dranghon, Jerry
Dreyfuss, Richard
Driver, Doug
Drug Enforcement Administration, U.S. (DEA) agents of, kidnapped in
Cartagena Blanco investigated by
Bustamante’s breakout attempt cartel notion at
Colombian offices of
see also Chavez, Errol; Phelps, Johnny; Vigil, Mike ether supplies
informants for
also Mermelstein, Max; Seal, Adler Berriman “Barry”
Lehder extradited by
Lehder’s indictment and Ochoa case and
property seized by
safety of agents in
success of, in south Florida TAMPA seizure and
Ward investigated by
“drug lawyers,”
Dunlap, Bob

Eastern Airlines
Echavarria Barrientos, Raul Ecuador
Escobar, Alba Marina
Escobar, Ludmila
Escobar, Victoria Eugenia Henao de Escobar, Echeverri, Abel de Jesús Escobar,
Gaviria, Pablo (El Padrino—“the Godfather”) background of
Cali group’s war with
cartel case against
civic good works of
as congressman
DEA informants anddismissal of charges against as enforcer
father’s kidnapping and first known arrest of
Hacienda Los Napoles estate of hot money issue and
Lara Bonilla assassination and, Lara Bonilla’s attacks on Lehder’s
capture and in MAS
negotiations with U.S. government sought by 1976 case against
Noriega indictment and
Norman’s Cay visited by Panamanian sanctuary and piggybacking of
smaller traffickers on priests associated with public life left by
raids on residences of
Ramirez contract and
 return of, to Colombia
Seal and
Seal’s murder and
truce with Colombian government sought by zoo animals of
Espectador, El (Bogotá) Espinosa Osorio, Carlos (Cuco—“Foxy”) ether
in cocaine production
DEA sting operation in
DEA study on
illegal business in
restrictions in importation of Etzel, Paul
The Extraditables
extradition
amnesty negotiations and Betancur’s position on
first Colombians subjected to of Lehder
Medellín cartel’s offensives against
Montevideo Convention and National Latin Movement’s opposition to of
Ochoa
of Rodriguez Orejuela
U.S.-Colombian treaty on (1979),

FARC, see Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia Federal Aviation

Administration (FAA), U.S.
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Federal Reserve Bank, Miami Ferro,
Guillermo, 315
Fire Fall, 45, 58
Forbes, 337
Foreign Ministry, Colombian Francis, Lev
Franco, John Jairo
Ricardo Franco Brigade
Frangullie, George
freebasing
Freud, Sigmund
F-2 intelligence (Colombian National Police) Ramirez contract
Fullett, Harry

La Gaitana, Meta
Garces Gonzalez, Manuel
García Márquez, Gabriel
Garcia Osorio, Liliana “Lili,”
Gaviria, Gustavo
Gilibert Vargas, Ernesto Gillespie, Richard
Gimbernat, Enrique
glyphosate
Gomez Hurtado, Alvaro
Gomez Martinez, Juan
Gorman, Paul
Grazing in the Grass Until the Snow Came (Jung) Great American Bank
Gregorie, Richard D.
background of
cartel case and
Medellín cartel’s negotiation attempts and Seal affair
Guardian Trust Company
guerrillas
Barco’s antidrug offensive and Betancur’s Peace Process and at cocaine
laboratories linked to drug traffic by Tambs, Medellín cartel’s offer to
provide intelligence on see also April 19 Movement; Revolutionary Armed
Forces of Colombia Guevara. Ernesto “Che,”

Hacienda Los Napoles, Puerto Triunfo Hacienda Veracruz, Barranquilla ether

shipments at
summit at (1981)
Harrison Act
Hasenfus. Eugene
Hawkins, Paula
Henderson, Hollywood Thomas Henao, Maria Victoria Escobar de herbicides,
marijuana sprayed with, Hernandez, Juan Carlos
Herrera, Braulio
Herrera Zuleta, Benjamin Hewett, Howard
Higgins, George
Hirschhorn, “Diamond Joel,”
Hitler, Adolf
Hogan, Jay
Hook, Jack
hot money issue
House of Assembly, Bahamian Hoyos. Humberto
Hoyos Jimenez, Carlos Mauro Humane Society
Hurston, Joe
hydrochloric acid
Ingram MAC-10
Intercontinental Hotel. Medellín Interior Ministry, Colombian Internal Revenue
Service (IRS) Seal and
Ward and
International Dutch Resources, Ltd.
Iran-contra scandal
Isaza Ochoa, Mauricio

Jackson, Jesse
Jacobsen, Ernst “Jake,”
Jenkins, Elizabeth
Jimenez Gomez, Carlos
Jimenez Panesso, German
John Paul II, Pope
“Jota”
Joura, Bob
Jung, George
background of
cocaine used by
at Danbury Correctional Institution hairdresser connection of Lehder’s
break with
Lehder’s operation rejoined by suitcase trips and
transportation business for Colombian cocaine established by as witness
against Lehder Justice Department, U.S.
Justice Ministry, Colombian justice system, Colombian: Medellín cartel’s
intimidation of as Napoleonic vs. adversarial see also Supreme Court.
Colombian “Just Say No to Drugs,”

Kalia III
Kane, Barry
Kattan Kassin, Isaac
Kehm, Charles
Kellner, Leon
Kennedy, Ken
Kerry, John
Kevin’s, Medellín
Kibble, Jimmy
kidnappings
 of DEA agents
of Escobar’s father
of Lehder
of Marta Nieves Ochoa
MAS communiqués
among traffickers
Knapik, Tony
Kniskern, Philip

laboratories, see cocaine laboratories Lambeth, Bill

Landmark Bank
Lara Bonilla, Rodrigo
assassination of
concerns about safety of Escobar attacked by
first plot against
hot money issue and
Lehder extradition and
power of Medellín cartel underestimated by
Las Vegas, cocaine bust in (1985) Lehder, Helena Rivas de
Lehder. Jemel Nacel de
Lehder, Verónica
Lehder, Wilhelm
Lehder, Rivas, Carlos (“Joe Lehder”) anti-Americanism of
anti-Semitism of
Armenia home of
background of
Bahamian refueling stop developed by see also Norman’s Cay at Bella
Vista prison
Betancur’s election and bribes paid by
Canadian border mishap
capture of
cartel case against
changes in organization of cocaine used by
cooperation deal sought by at Danbury Correctional Institution extradition
of
indiscretions of
interviews of
Jacksonville indictment against Jung’s break with
Jung’s return to operation of kidnapping attempt on
 laboratories run by
in MAS
in maximum security prisons murder contract on
National Latin Movement and negotiations with U.S. government sought by
news stories on
Norman’s Cay left by
Ochoa’s expansion of transportation routes and as outsider in Medellín
physical appearance of
pilots hired by
plane given to Armenia by politics and
power as obsession of
pretrial hearings of
and raids on Norman’s Cay Ramirez contract and
Ramirez’s hunt for
as Ramirez’s special project Seal and
sentencing of
start-up money needed by suitcase trips arranged by transportation business
for Colombian cocaine established by trial of U.S. cocaine distribution
network built by Ward as pilot for
wedding of
Lehder Rivas, Guillermo
Lemus Lemus, William
Lennon, John
Lewis, Bennie
Liberal party, Colombian Libia Cardona, Marta
Lito, see Bustamante, Carlos “Lito” El Loco (gunman) La Loma. Medellín
Londoño, Bernardo (“the Diplomat”) Londoño Paredes, Julio
Londoño Vasquez, Rubén Dario (“Juan Perez”) Lopera, Rev. Elías
Lopez Michelsen, Alfonso Lopez Trujillo, Cardinal Alfonso Louisiana State
Police
Low Murtra, Enrique
Luna Rojas, Carlos Arturo

Mack, Connie, III

Mackenzie. Ellis, see Seal, Adler Berriman “Barry”
Madrid. U.S. embassy in
Mann, Eben
Marcus, Stanley
Las Margaritas, Medellín Mariel boatlift (1980)
marijuana
cocaine vs., as focus of law enforcement efforts Colombian traffic in
herbicide eradication of Jung’s traffic in
Lehder arrested for smuggling of smuggling methods of, married to
cocaine Ward’s traffic in
Marquez Perez, Lizardo
Martinez, Bob
Marxists
MAS, see Muerte a Secuestradores —“Death to Kidnappers”
Mata Ballesteros. Juan Ramón Medellín, 20-23
DEA informants in
DEA office in
see also Chavez, Errol; Vigil, Mike description of
drug killings in
early days of cocaine industry in, north end of
populace of
as smuggling center
Medellín cartel
Barco’s crackdown on
Betancur’s crackdown on Cali group’s war with
cocaine glut produced by cocaine industry restructured by conspicuous
consumption of contra involvement with DEA’s resistance to cartel
notion extradition issue and
guerrillas linked to
Hacienda Veracruz summit of (1981) judicial intimidation tactics of
laboratories of, see cocaine laboratories lifestyles of MAS and new
products of newspeople murdered by
Nicaraguan connections of Panama as refuge for
penetrated by DEA informant see also Seal, Adler Berriman “Barry”
politics and
power of
Ramirez contract ordered by return of, to Colombia
RICO case against
summit of (1984)
tonnage produced by
truce with Colombian government sought by see also Escobar Gaviria,
Pablo; Lehder Rivas, Carlos; Ochoa Vasquez, Jorge Luis; Rodriguez
Gacha, Jose Gonzalo
Medellín Cívico
Medellín massacre (1975) Medellín Without Slums
Meese, Edwin, III
Meie-Linnekogel, Margit
Mejia, Jairo
Melton, Howell
Merck Colombia S.A.
Merkle, Robert W. (“Mad Dog”) extradition of Lehder sought by Lehder
prosecuted by
in Senate primary
Mermelstein, Max
arrest of
authors’ interview with background of
Cardona’s relationship with cocaine smuggling entered by cocaine wars
and
courtroom appearances of as informant
murder contract on
Seal’s murder and
smuggling methods of
Metro-Dade police
Mexiko
airstrip used by drug traffickers in Miami
delegation to White House from federal task force in
Lehder’s smuggling operation in, money laundering in
murders in
see also Dadeland shooting Ochoa’s distribution network in Miami,
U.S. Attorney’s Office in cartel case of
Seal affair and
Miami Citizens Against Crime Miami Herald
Miami International Airport TAMPA seizure at
M-19. see April 19 Movement Mockler, William
Monastero, Frank
money laundering
Money Laundering Control Act Monroy Arenas, Carlos Gustavo Montañez,
Andrés Enrique Montevideo Convention
Mora Jimenez, Octavio Ernesto Mueller, Ernst
Muerte a Secuestradores—“Death to Kidnappers” (MAS) communiqués of
as consolidation of Medellín cartel formation of
mystique of Medellín cartel boosted by
officers of
 retaliatory actions of
Mundo, EI (Medellín) Murcia Ballen, Humberto

Nacel, Jemel
Napoleonic justice system National Front, Colombian National Institute of
Renewable Natural Resources, Colombian National Latin Movement
National Police, Colombian see also Anti-Narcotics Unit; F-2 intelligence
National Security Agency, U.S.
Navy, U.S.
Nel Jimenez, Pedro
New Liberals
Newsweek
New York Times
Nicaragua
airstrip used by drug traffickers in cocaine laboratories in contra war in
Medellín cartel’s offer to provide information on Ochoa case and
press leaks on drug traffickers’ ties to Seal’s missions in
Seal’s testimony on
terrorism-communism-drug link allegations and Noriega, Manuel
Antonio
indictment of
Norman’s Cay
ad for Lehder’s property on changes wrought by Lehder on description of
Lehder’s departure from as microcosm of cocaine business news stories
on
Ochoa’s expansion of
transportation routes and Ochoa’s visit to
offered to U.S. Navy
property bought by Lehder on raids on
Solomon’s visit to
Ward’s operation on
North, Oliver
North Central Industrial Chemicals (NCIC) Novak, Richard
Nuevo Dlario, El (Managua)

Ocampo, Jose (Pelusa—“Curly”) Ocampo Zuluaga, Santiago Occidente, El

(Cali) Ochoa, Margot Vasquez de Ochoa, Marta Nieves
Ochoa Restrepo, Fabio
arrest of
Ochoa Vasquez, Fabio
Miami distribution handled by negotiations with U.S. government sought
by Seal’s murder and
Ochoa Vasquez, Jorge Luis (El Gordo—“the Fat Man”) arrest of
Audiencia Nacional hearings of, background of
bull smuggling charges against cartel case against
continuing legal difficulties of, DEA informants and
ether shipments tracked to extradition of
imprisoned in Colombia
indicted in Nicaragua affair Lara Bonilla’s actions against, lifestyle of
MAS and
Mermelstein and
Miami distribution network overhauled by negotiations with U.S.
government sought by Norman’s Cay operation visited by Panamanian
sanctuary and piggybacking of smaller traffickers on plane fleet of
releases of
Seal and
sister’s kidnapping and in Spain
terrorism-communism-drugs link and transportation routes expanded by
truce with Colombian government sought by Ochoa Vasquez, Juan David
Office of International Affairs, U.S.
O’Hara, Russ
Olympic Games (1984)
Opa-Locka Airport
Operation Banshee
Operation Blast Furnace
Operation Fountainhead
Operation Greenback
Operation Raccoon
Operation Screamer
Operation Southern Comfort Operation Steeple
Operation Swordfish
Ortega, Jairo
hot money issue and
Osorio Guizado, Luis Eduardo (La Guaqua—“the Muskrat”) Otero, Luis, 248,
250

Los Pablos
Pais, El (Madrid) paisas
Palace of Justice attack (1985) Palmeras
Palumbo, Bob
Panama
cocaine laboratories in Noriega indictment and
as refuge for Medellín cartel Panama Canal
Panello Ramirez, Carlos
Pardo Leal, Jaime
Pardo Murillo, Rodrigo
Paredes Jimenez, Rubén Dario Parejo Gonzalez, Enrique Pascualandia
Pastrana Gomez, Andrés
Pastrana Hoyos, Fabio
Patiño, Alfonso
Patiño, María Cristina
Patriotic Union
Peace Process
Perkins, Morgan
Peru
Pettingill, Ron
Phelps, Johnny
background of
cocaine vs. marijuana as focus of ether supplies and
first “top ten” traffickers list of laboratory raids and
Lara Bonilla’s safety as concern of Ramirez’s relationship with safety of
DEA agents as concern of Pilotos Ejecutivos
Pindling, Lynden O.
Pinochet Ugarte, Augusto Los Pistoleros
Polly, Winny
Polozola, Frank
Porras Ardila, Evaristo
Posada Alemana, Armenia
Posada Pedraza, León
Prisco Lopera, David Ricardo Prisco Lopera, Jose Roberto Los Priscos
Pryor, Richard

Los Quesitos
Quindio Libre
Quiñon, Jose
Quintero Cruz, Luis Carlos trial of
Quintín Lamé
Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act Radio Caracó1
(Bogotá)
Ramirez, Helena de
Ramirez, Jaime “Jimy”
Ramirez, Javier
Ramirez, Lucero
Ramirez Gomez, Francisco Ramirez Gomez, Jaime
accomplishments of
assassination attempts on bribe offered to
laboratory raids and
Lara Bonilla assassination and, in Lara Bonilla’s attack on Escobar
Lehder as special project of Lehder hunted by
murder contract on
personality and physical appearance of posthumous promotion requested
for threats made against
Ramirez Ocampo, Augusto
Reagan, Ronald
Reed, Jack
Reeves, William Roger
Republican National Committee Restrepo Ochoa, Fabio
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) Barco’s crackdown and
Betancur’s Peace Process and, at jungle laboratories
termed “narco-guerrillas” by Tambs Reyes Alvarado, Yesid
Reyes Echandia, Alfonso
Rivas, Helena
Rivera, Veronica
Roberts, John Pernell
Rodriguez Contreras, Cesar Rodriguez Gacha, Jose Gonzalo (“the Mexican”)
cartel case against, 278
FARC denunciation of
jungle operations overseen by Pardo Leal murder and
Ramirez contract and
return of, to Colombia
Seal and
Tranquilandia raid and
Rodriguez Gacha, Justo Pastor Rodriguez Orejuela, Gilberto, (“the Chess
Player”) acquittal of arrest of
extradition of
 in Spain
Roettger, Norman C.
Roman Catholic Church
Royal Bahamian Defense Force Royal Bahamian Police Force Royal
Commission of Inquiry, Bahamian

Sabbag, Robert
Salah Villamizar, Pablo
Saldarriaga Ochoa, Marta Santacruz Londoño, Jose (Don Chepe—“the Student”)
Santa Fe Report
Santofimio Botero, Alberto Saunders, Norman
Schabilion, Mel
Schnapp, Mark
Sclafani, Thomas D.,
Seal, Alder Berriman “Barry” (“Ellis Mackenzie”) background of
bust of cocaine delivered by CIA and
conflicting visions of
courtroom appearance of documentary on
funeral of
indictment and trial of indictments and trial for murder of IRS problems of
Louisiana case against
murder contract on
Nicaraguan missions of
Ochoa case and
physical appearance of
plea bargain of
press leaks and
probation of
Rule 35 hearing of
sentencing of
smuggling techniques of time served by
turned informant
Witness Protection Program Seal, Debbie
Semana
Semien, John
Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee, U.S.
Sepulveda, Dario
Sepulveda, Michael Corleone Sepulveda, Miguel “Paco,”
Sharpstein. Richard
Shea, Frank
Shohat, Ed
Shultz. George
Singleton, Al
Dageland shooting
Smith, George
Smith, Howard
Snowblind (Sabbag) soccer, drug traffickers’ involvement in Society of
Journalists (Bogota) Solomon, Norman
South Florida Task Force Soviet Union
Spain, Ochoa affair in
extradition hearings in Napoleonic justice system and news accounts of
political frame of reference in Special Homicide Investigation
Team(S.H.I.T.)
Special Operations Group (GOES) State Department. U.S.
Stepan Chemical Co.
Strautman, Betsy
Sturock, Lon
Suarez de Castro, Alfonso Suarez Gomez, Roberto
Suarez Levy, Roberto
Suescun. Jaime Arturo
Supreme Court. Colombian extradition issue in
Palace of Justice attack and

Tambs, Lewis
Colombia left by
combative public persona of guerrillas and drug traffickers linked by
Lara Bonilla’s safety as concern personality of security concerns of
TAMPA seizure (1982)
terrorism
Tiempo, El (Bogotá) Time
Toban, Cesar
Tobias Sobosky. Adolfo
“top ten” traffickers list Torres, Frank (Francisco Javier Torres Sierra)
Tranquilandia—“Quiet Village,”
raid on
revelations of
Tranquilandia 2
Tranquilandia 3
Transposes Aereos Mercantiles Panamericanos (TAMPA) Turks and Caicos
Islands turnpike shoot-out (1979)

Uncle Sam Wants You

Unglesby, Lewis
Uribe Restrepo, Fernando U.S. Attorney’s Office, see Miami.
U.S. Attorney’s Office in

Vasquez. Bernardo
trial of
Vaughan, Federico
Vaughan. Marquesa
Velasquez Arenas, Byron
Vesco. Robert, 63 Vice President’s Task Force on South Florida Vigil, Mike
Villa Coca (Cocalandia)
La Violencia
Von Eberstein, Gail
Von Eberstein, Greg

Walsh, James P.
Ward, Edward Hayes
arrest of
background of
cocaine smuggling entered by cocaine used by
in Haiti
Lehder’s operation left by and raid on Norman’s Cay tax problems of
as witness against Lehder Warm, Emilie “Lassie”
War of the Cartels
Washington Post
Washington Times
WBRZ-TV (Baton Route)
Webb, Ken
White, Frank, 357
Williams, Herb
Winters, Al
Witness Protection Program Colombian Witness Protection Program, U.S.

Yakovac, Stephen
Lehder’s break with
 in Norman’s Cay operation in prison with Lehder
Yout, Billy