The Nazi Fugitive Who Created The Modern Cocaine Cartel & Befriended Escobar
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It's July 17, 1980 in the Bolivian capital city of La Paz and a brutal coup d'etat has sputtered into life. Hooded paramilitaries dressed in civilian clothes are racing through the streets in jeeps and ambulances stopping to execute dissidents and seize state buildings. The group raids warehouses and loot stores in a frenzy.

Some of them have European accents and swastika armbands on their shirts. The mutilated bodies of leftist politicians are burned and left to char in the city streets. The gang storms La Paz's prison and turns its drug traffickers loose. Pandemonium. Citizens scatter. Policemen and soldiers cower in their barracks. Nothing can stop the gang now.

The city ransacked, the murderers make their way to the Bolivian Workers' Centre, headquarters of the nation's trade unions. 35 unionists and lawmakers are inside, drawing up emergency plans against the same narco-fascists who are now bursting through the doors, 20 of them in total, with 30 more standing guard outside. The victims barely have time to think.

18 of those inside the building escape, but the gang shoots some dead and kidnaps others, dragging them back into their hijacked vehicles. They'll soon be introduced to a new life of captivity, beatings and electroshock torture, all at the hands of a regime led by bitter and violent military despot Luis Garcia Mesa.

But Garcia Mesa is only the front man for this terrifying year zero. Paying for it all is one of the world's biggest drug kingpins, a man they call el rey de la cocaína, the king of cocaine. Roberto Suárez Gómez was a rubber baron and a cattle rancher before he realized there was far more cash supplying the cartels of Colombia with Bolivian coca paste.

Now he's the foundation of an enterprise worth billions, fueling the rise of another narco-terrorist, Pablo Escobar. This blood-soaked July morning is Suarez's doing. Little wonder Bolivians will come to know it as simply the cocaine coup. But neither Suarez nor García Mesa could do any of this without the help of those hooded men.

the ones with European accents and swastikas on their arms. These are the "Nobios de la Muerte", the bridegrooms of death, a cabal of fugitive killers and war criminals.

They're SS veterans, Rhodesian mercenaries, Frenchmen on the run from a failed plot to kill Charles de Gaulle, and Stefano Della Chiali, the world's most notorious right-wing terrorist, wanted for his role in a Bologna bombing that just weeks earlier had killed 85 people. But there's another guy, short and slight, with a round face, thinning hair, and dark, flint eyes.

Locals know him as Klaus Altmann, a German businessman living in La Paz with concerns in timber, medicine and shipping. Altmann is rich, that much is clear. And he's been tight with Suarez and Bolivia's far right for years. That's because Altmann isn't Altmann at all. He's Klaus Barbie, a former Nazi who escaped Europe after the war with Washington and the Vatican's help.

Barbie was a Gestapo chief in occupied France and his work torturing, murdering and dispatching Jews and French resistance fighters to the death camps had earned him the moniker "The Butcher of Lyon". It's Barbie's electro shock torture the cocaine coup leaders will use to terrorize their opponents. And it's his interrogation skills Garcia Mesa's men will employ as they install one of the most repressive states in Cold War Latin America.

For Barbie, whose identity has just been revealed by two of the world's most prominent Nazi hunters, the coup isn't just his chance to escape justice for good. It's part of a dream to revive the Fuhrer's vision, almost four decades after the Allies thought they'd destroyed it for good. Should that dream mean slaughtering dozens of Bolivians, quarterbacking the global cocaine industry and backing Pablo Escobar, Barbie thinks, so be it.

And on this day, the dream has never seen closer. This is the Underworld Podcast. Underworld Podcast

Hello, Guten Morgen, Buenos Dias and welcome to the weekly organized crime podcast that shows you just how awful the human race is and why nobody should procreate or say anything positive about mankind ever. I'm Sean Williams, a writer and investigative reporter in Wellington, New Zealand, and I'm joined by the talented, the wonderful and uncancellable Danny Gold in New York City. Feliz Año Nuevo. Danny, you're going to watch the ball drop in Times Square tomorrow?

I mean, I'm hopefully not in New York right now when this airs. Like the city from post-Christmas through April is just a nightmare hellscape. I wouldn't wish on anyone. Yeah, I mean, you've made it through SantaCon, right? That's dreadful. I don't know what comes after that. But I say tomorrow. I think I mean in a few days because we're not actually recording us on December 30. We're recording the weekend before Christmas, which means I'm still in Wellington looking ahead to a Christmas week in Melbourne with the fam. Test match at MCG, sunbathing.

All of which has happened because the listeners are in the future and we're in the past and podcasting is a circular industry and I'm confused already. Please send help. You know, the commenters seem to really love that you've started doing journal entries before every episode kicks in, by the way. Really, everyone's really big fans of that. I'm extremely glad. Yeah, I'm sure it gets a lot of downloads. Now, I know we're past Christmas, that we're not, but...

not, but you are. But the best gift you can give us is to follow, subscribe, review, and perhaps even throw us a few bucks a month for the Patreon exclusive interviews, a monthly stash house organized crime review to go with it. Yeah, patreon.com slash underworld podcast or Spotify, iTunes, and all that good stuff.

Yeah, and given it's two days before the new year or a day or whatever it is, you got any new year's resolutions you'd like to commit to, Danny? I mean, perhaps you could play them back around this time next year. I'm pledging to stay fit enough to play competitive football past the age of 40, which should be doable given my entire personality now is just playing sport and this podcast.

Oh, and I want to sell a screenplay to Hollywood, which is going to be easy, right? Because we're going to sell the Cornbread Mafia movie. You know, people like that episode, but I don't think it's kind of not our script to write. So we'll see how that goes. I don't want to culturally appropriate Kentuckians, no. No, I don't mean like that. I mean, someone else really wrote the book on them. So it's not like, you know, it is what it is. That's true. Well, we can steal that. Now, I can't promise you many uplifting thrills and spills from today's show. I mean, you read the title. You listened to the cold open.

Clive's History of Klaus Barbie

by American spies, Vatican bishops, but rather than fade into the scenery like so many Nazis who escaped to Latin America during the time, Barbie actually used his experience in the Gestapo to set up fascist escorts, prop up dictators and yes, this is not overblowing it, help found the modern cocaine industry going so far as to meet and befriend El Patron himself.

Pablo Escobar. And that's just today's show, right? In a couple of weeks, we're going to go into the life and crimes of Roberto Suarez Gomez, the king of cocaine. He's probably the biggest drug lord that you've never heard of. More coups, the Medellin cartel, a deal with the Castros of Cuba, and...

with Oliver North and his mad Iran contraplan. Oh, and Barbie's downfall, which could be its own Hollywood movie alone. I mean, honestly, there are so many insane parts to this story. I had to check to make sure they weren't conspiracy theories. But trust me, I'm a journalist and everyone trusts journalists. They're not. This is an actual real life Barbieheimer. Can I say that? You know, you kind of blew the whole crazy, fascinating story thing with that terrible joke there, bud.

Thank you very much. Thank you. But here is the story of Klaus Barbie and it begins on October 25th, 1913 in Gordesberg near Bonn in the Rheinland of Western Germany. For a lot of this, by the way, I'm using the book The Devil's Agent, The Lifetimes and Crimes of Nazi Klaus Barbie by Peter McFarren and Friedrich Iglesias, which is comprehensive, if a little confusing at times. I think I've said this before about a few books, but listen to the show.

Also, this episode, comprehensive, a little confusing at times, but trust me, it's worth it. Thank you so much. It's Christmas. It's tough to concentrate. There's a lot of parties and family stuff. Anyway.

Klaus Barbie's path towards infamy begins right upon his birth because his school teacher mother and father don't marry until three months after the boy arrives and that's a big no-no in a culture where bastards in the purest sense of the word and the other are to be questioned and will never inherit their family's wealth so Barbie's father returns from the trenches of the great war disabled physically and mentally broken by the Saarland region where he then grows up

which is taken by France after the war, is a place of constant political turmoil and protest against French occupation. Barbie's father is a savage man. He's a heavy drinker and he doesn't spare his kids the rod. Barbie is remembered by friends and neighbors, however, as a kind, unassuming boy, punctual, I mean, they love that, don't they? And self-reliant. But now we're at 1930 and that's where the Nazi party are making inroads across Germany and

attacking Jews and communists everywhere. Barbie buys up Nazi literature, including, of course, Mein Kampf. And in 1933, age 19, Klaus Barbie joins the Hitler Youth and he becomes an enthusiastic, card-carrying National Socialist.

Barbie wants to get into academia, but this requires cash. And because he's technically a bastard, Barbie's grandfather won't give him any of the family's cash. So instead, he joins the Nazi Sicherheitsdienst, the intelligence wing of the SS. See, nowadays, instead of joining the SS, he would just, you know, start a YouTube channel or a podcast or yell at people like me on social media.

to get his message across. So more options, I guess, nowadays, but still not great. Yeah, I'm not giving you a lot to work on, but that was pretty good. We can lighten the mood of a Nazi. I'm going to keep trying, but it's going to be a tough battle here with this one. It is a little bit. Now, God knows there's enough, well,

a worrying amount of information about the SS and the functions of the Nazis, so you can head elsewhere for that. But basically, Barbie climbs its ranks, lives for a while in occupied Holland, Belgium, and then in May 1942, he's assigned to Lyon, France.

That's only a few months after the official formulation of the final solution. The war is now in full bloom and Barbie's role in Lyon is to expose and dispatch Jews, communists and French resistance fighters to the death camps. Now you don't need me or anyone to tell you how awful this is, but Barbie by 1944 is an officer in the so-called Geheimstaatspolizei, better known as the Gestapo, the secret police of the regime.

And that April, he leads a raid on a Jewish children's orphanage in the village of Vizier, outside Lyon. The men force all 41 children and 10 adults onto trucks and deport them to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where only one child is spared the gas chamber on arrival. Deport them or shoot them, writes Barbie, adding, quote, it's the same. You know who else survived Auschwitz?

My grandmother, shout out Bubby Mira, rest in peace. How's that for breaking up and lightening up the episode right there? Wow, I don't even know what to say to that. And if she hadn't survived that, then you wouldn't be hearing this story.

And that's the thing that really matters, is it? We just got to keep going. Barbie also hunts French Resistance members with a joyful sadism. He's not a very nice guy, this guy. Tortures them by beating them almost to death with a blackjack, which is a small car show baton. Then he pushes them in a freezing bath to wake them back up and injects acid into their body.

On one occasion, a French resistance fighter recalls Barbie hanging people in front of him while playing music in the background, while another remembers seeing bodies piled in cells, quote, literally swimming in a sea of blood, having been torn apart by machine guns. The most famed of all French resistance heroes is Jean Moulin, a philanthropist

a Federer-wearing civil servant who unites cells nationwide under Charles de Gaulle. He's arrested at a meeting on June 21st, 1943, when the now Oberführer, or paramilitary leader, Barbie, storms in.

Moulin is tortured in a horrific variety of ways I'm not even going to get into here, and he dies a couple weeks later in Berlin. For all of these reasons, Barbie is unsurprisingly known as the Butcher of Lyon. Says one Frenchman he tortured, quote, As the Allies push back the Nazis at D-Day and sweep through France, Barbie then gets into the thriving black markets across all of Europe.

We've gotten into these kinds of illicit networks in our shows about the Yakuza, whose early godfather, Yoshio Kodama, made millions off of steel and other stuff in occupied China. You've got Victor Boot and others profiteering off the firearms and other weapons lying around when the Soviet Union falls.

This ain't new, probably as old as the Sumerians, but it's going bonkers at the end of the Second World War. Economies collapsing, U.S. soldiers selling to locals, gangs selling to soldiers, locals going underground with everything from bread to looted artifacts. Yeah, I mean, I've mentioned Naples 44 a few times, I think, on the show, and that deals more with while the war was still going on, but the occupation of Italy. But it kind of gives a fascinating look into some of this stuff, too, just the underground economies. I'm actually reading...

Tokyo underworld right now, which I assume you used for the Yakuza episode. It was so long ago, but it really goes into that, that sort of post-occupation underground economy stuff too. It's just what happens when it like, you know, countries collapse and there's a vacuum of power and there's really nothing on the ground. Like it's bound to everyone's poor. Yeah. It's just, it's, it's pretty crazy. I mean, Germany too, what was split into four countries.

Four quarters, right? All of them have their own underground economies and just craziness when it comes to black market stuff and everything like that. Yeah, yeah. And this guy is like thick. He's right in the middle of all of this. He's running lines all over the country, right? Hamburg to Western Germany, Berlin, everywhere.

He's actually captured twice during this time, but he escapes both of them. And even in 1945, when Hitler does the honorable thing, Germany is defeated and the Allies learn the full horrors of the Holocaust. Barbie's name is among 70,000 wanted for torture and murder. They know who he is. This is key. But rather than face the gallows, his story now takes a pretty weird and scurrilous twist. All right, guys, let's talk factor meals.

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Both Sean and I have dealt with pretty topsy-turvy careers that have been rollercoaster rides, you know, with the added anxiety of covering wars and violence and the PTSD that results from that. And I personally, you know, when things have gotten too much, found it helpful to speak to a therapist. It really helped calm me down, deal with pressure, and move past things when I was stuck.

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Because as we've gotten into about shows on this period...

Neither the Americans nor the Soviet Union had too many qualms about bringing Nazis into their chief scientific programs. Even in the bonus I did recently about a con man in Ghana, the capital Accra was then a hotspot for Nazis just chilling out with British consent after the end of the war. Right, the Americans had Operation Paperclip and the Soviet one was...

Oso Aviakim, I think. Operation Oso Aviakim. It's an acronym, but that's what it was called. Yeah, I mean, and this was the chief rocket scientist and nuclear scientist and that kind of stuff. But

Also, I mean both sides, but the Americans for this show, specifically the Counter Intelligence Corps or CIC, which is a Cold War era intel group later swallowed into the army. They are also very keen on anybody who A, knows how Europe works and B, hates commies. So guess who falls into both these categories? Yep, that's right, Nazis. And not only does Klaus Barbie know his way around Europe's network of leftists because he spent the last few years hunting and killing them,

But he can tell the CIC all about Europe's gangbuster black markets in weapons, drugs, jewellery, because he's been deep in that too. I mean, it's a bit like finding a chicken coo torn to ribbons by a fox and thinking, what we need now is someone who's a menace and hates chickens. I know, a fox. Except the metaphor doesn't really work, does it? Because no one cares about chickens and Klaus Barbie is despised, even for a Nazi.

So Barbie convinces a CIC guy in Augsburg near Munich that he's better use alive than dead. And he's taken on as part of something called the Pedersen Network, which is basically a bunch of former Nazis now working as spies for the Allies. Incredibly, Barbie is then put to work tracking down French socialists. So he basically goes back to the same job he had just a couple of years previous.

And once they've hired him, the Americans kind of have to keep him, right? Because now the U.S. is worried they'll not only squeal about the moral ambiguity, shall we say, of hiring him, but also about their top secret missions holding back the tide of global communism in Paris, Lyon and Marseille.

and they pay him a lot to do this stuff. $1,700 a month in 1947, or about $23,000 a month today. And keep Marseille in mind too, by the way, because that's going to come up later.

Anyway, this entire time, the French authorities are piling on the pressure for their American counterparts to hand over Barbie so he can face trial, for the orphans of course, for the resistance fighters, and for Jean Moulin, who's become and still is a French national icon.

As late as 1950, the CIC is telling the French he has no idea where Barbie is, even though he's working directly for it. By 1951, though, the heat is getting too much for the Americans to take, so they decide to smuggle Barbie out of Europe via the so-called rat lines to South America.

Now these usually go one of two ways, either via Franco's Spain or Italy, with the help of Catholic leaders sympathetic to the Nazis, and that, by the way, is a surprising number of them. It's this Italian rat line that Barbie takes, but there are far higher ranking Germans who flee Europe this way, most notably Adolf Eichmann and Joseph Mengele, the so-called angel of death at Auschwitz.

Another SS commander to take this route is Walter Ralf, who gets into the Americas via Quito before being hired by the Bundesnachrichtendienst, or the BND, which is the West German CIA. Remember, Germany is divided now. Ralf then does intelligence work for, get this, the Mossad, before, get this too, returning to Germany to pick up his Nazi pension and then getting recruited into the military intelligence of Chilean fascist dictator Augusto Pinochet.

So you actually got that a little backwards. He goes to Syria and this is actually related to stuff that's happening right now. He goes to Syria, I believe in 47 or 48 where he serves as a military advisor to the Syrian leader at the time when they're fighting a war against Israel, the 48 war when there's a war between them and Israel.

And then there's a coup and he somehow gets let out of Syria. He commits them. He wasn't a big commander. And then he is basically a double agent. And he, the Mossad uses him for information out of Syria, I believe to, you know, get information on their governments. But then later on, I think that was in 49, not so it was before 1950. And then I think 20 years later, there were attempts to kill him when they were going after Eichmann and stuff in like 79 and 80. But I think he was in Chile then, but I think it was, um, it

It was unsuccessful. But the reason I say it's relevant to today was if you've been following the news, you know, the the mass industrial prison torture murder place in Syria said Naya. There's another Nazi, Alois Brunner, who was Eichmann's right hand man. Yeah. Fled to Syria, ended up in Syria. And he was basically the guy who helped develop and advise and teach the Syrian Baptist Party, Assad's party there.

How to torture their prisoners. Yeah, the comparisons with Nazism for that are pretty fair enough given all these guys were working for them. And I think a few more of them actually worked for the Iranian regime at some point as well.

They really got around after 1945. They were all over the place, those guys. Really just filtered out. I think Walter Rauf's big thing was making mobile gas vans that could go around executing people wherever they were, which is... Wow, what a cool invention. I was going to say, they...

The when they were trying to kill him, they actually had a letter that was supposed to be delivered to the press in Chile, I believe it was that mentioned that that's why he was killed because the mobile gas fans in like 79 or 80. But I think it was unsuccessful for I don't remember the specific reasons.

Yeah, it's pretty crazy. We're going to get into a tiny bit of this in this show, but the way that they managed to keep evading justice, all these guys, even when they were living right out there in the open, is pretty insane. He's going to come into this story later. On all different sides, too. It was like they were all over the place. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, they really did get around. Yeah.

If at this point, by the way, you're wondering, probably like Danny is, hey, Sean, you handsome guy, aren't we straying a bit from organized crime? To which my response is, what, you mean my show that I make that you listen to for free? That show? I actually, I actually, I tell you this, I feel like every third episode, I'm like, dude, what does this have to do with organized crime? And I'm like, here we are. Let's do a hideous story about a slaughter in some country in Latin America. And you're like, cool, that sounds like a really uplifting show.

But second, I'm giving you this history because it makes Barbie's work for Western intelligence and his role in Bolivia and the drug trade all the crazier to grasp. So no, guys, we're totally in the wheelhouse here. Bear with me. We'll get into the drugs soon enough. You guys.

Anyway, Barbie gets out of Italy thanks to a Croatian bishop who's an avowed fascist wanting for war crimes himself. These are all really lovely guys. And in 1951, Barbie hops on a plane from Genoa to Buenos Aires with his wife and two kids under the name Klaus Altmann, which he's adopted from a German rabbi killed in Auschwitz. I told you you couldn't make this stuff up.

The CIC actually wants Barbie to work from Argentina, which is the prime destination for tons of these Nazi fugitives. It should be mentioned, by the way, that in addition to around 300 Nazis, Argentina took in 460,000 Jewish refugees, which is more per capita than any other nation bar Israel.

But Barbie doesn't wind up in Buenos Aires. He, through the Croat priest, meets another Catholic missionary tirelessly preaching the word to indigenous people in the Bolivian city of Cochabamba. So he travels 1,500 miles north to La Paz. Barbie is still only 37 years old, and he immediately spots in Bolivia a nation whose politics he can channel through the lens of Nazi Germany. Here's Magnus Linklater in his book The Nazi Legacy, quote,

Here, on one side stood the rulers, committed to the same ideology of force and order in the name of a nation that Barbie had long since made his own. There on the other side was sullen masses, generally of inferior race, their cause supported by international communism. It was simple. In South America, there was a job to be done, and Barbie knew how to do it.

At first, Bobby sets himself up working with indigenous Bolivians, however, in the Yunga Subtropical Region. And this is one of the country's prime coffee and, more importantly, coca-growing regions.

But Barbie's not interested in that just yet. He lives with his family in a wooden shack near the village of Chulamani. He learns the lumber business pretty quickly, and he becomes close friends with a prominent empresario and neo-Nazi named Alvaro de Castro, who will become his confidant for decades to come. Barbie himself actually paints swastikas on the walls at the sawmill, which is owned by a German Jewish emigrant. But when somebody calls him out, he's like, oh, those? They're just markings for the wood going out.

Barbie makes a good living in Chilamani before he moves to La Paz in 1954. He sets up a logistics firm called Transmaritima, and despite the US knowing his full identity, he makes several business trips to the States. Barbie himself rises the ranks and cozies up to right-wing leaders vying for control of Bolivia. Here's Peter McFerrin in The Devil's Agent again. Quote,

It was not unusual to see Señor Altman, or Don Klaus as he was called by his friends,

wearing a sweater or high neck jersey, walking along the Paseo del Prado with De Castro or eating salteñas at lunchtime in the terraces of the bars in La Paz or dressed in a suit and tie on his way to embassy receptions where he hobnobbed with ministers and diplomats. The fashion information, it seems a little unnecessary, but it's good. It's good detail. Yeah, I'm guessing roll necks don't go that well with the humidity there. But yeah, yeah.

I don't know. Barbie managed this to keep his true identity under wraps until it is he has a few drinks. Typical, typical. Yeah, exactly. And he does this a lot. At one point, DeCastro says, quote, after the fourth drink, he became a Nazi again. I can see him even today. The euphoria took over. Barbie sang hymns and praises to National Socialism.

A lot of this occurs at the Club Aleman, the German club in La Paz where allegedly there are Nazi flags, eagle motifs and Hitler statues hidden away in the basement. At one point, Barbie causes a scene when he starts praising the Führer in front of the German ambassador to Bolivia who gets mad and storms out, and it causes quite a bit of a diplomatic stir.

But Barbie's too in the loop to suffer any major consequences. Club Allemagne, yeah, it's still going by the way. It's got a rather fancy website too. And the Germans can hardly be surprised there are full-blown Nazis hanging out in South America. According to an internal report, around 200 members of the BND are former Nazi intelligence officers during the time, including Barbie and Ralf.

Even into the 70s, it's estimated that up to 30% of BND staff had Nazi backgrounds. So the denazification of West Germany is gold-plated BS. Always was. Don't get me started. Anyway, the CIC has already got Barbie on the books, making sure Bolivia doesn't turn communist. And in the 60s, the BND has him too. So he's a gopher between them and the military dictator's rule in Bolivia.

They give him the code name Adler or Eagle and he delivers them at least 35 reports. All the while, he's turning more and more to smuggling, not least in a thing called quinine out of Vietnam, which is a medicine needed to treat malaria. Writes Linklater, quote,

Barbie's career in South America began, as it had in the ruins of post-war Germany, with crime. Larceny, fraud, forgery and blackmail. Then spread into the more profitable trades of arms dealing and freelance espionage, before launching into the jungle of high politics.

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All of this comes to a head in 1966. That year, the Argentine guerrilla leader Ernesto Che Guevara arrives in Bolivia to lead what he hopes will be a peasant revolution against the military. That's kind of half-assed, really. The CIA cacks its britches at this time, and it turns to Barbie, who in turn provides information leading to Che's capture and death by firing squad in a mountain village outside of La Paz.

Now, Barbie's also closely involved in weapons trafficking from Germany to Latin America via a right-wing front company called Merex AG. AG meaning acting geysershaft or publicly traded, basically. Merex, again, could be an entirely separate show. It's set up by 1963 and headed by CIA asset and former SS weapons expert Gerhard Mertens.

Mertens is actually one of the guys who busted Mussolini out of prison in 1943, and officially he works for Volkswagen. But he's actually travelling the world for Merckx, trafficking shells and firearms via Spain and members of the Corsican Mafia, the so-called French Connection, to right-wing regimes in Peru, Paraguay, Chile, Bolivia, even the Shah of Iran.

A lot goes through the US and also CIA-backed arms dealer Sam Cummings, who you might have heard of before. Barbie, of course, is their man in La Paz, using Transmaritima as a cover for arms shipments. And he makes a fortune out of it, using his neo-Nazi friend De Castro as the front man. But even more powerful in this illegal arms shipment firm Medex is a man named August Josef Record,

A Corsican mobster from Marseille, remember I told you we'd come back to there, Record is a heroin trafficker and convicted Nazi collaborator who had constructed heroin labs all over his hometown to help fund the Nazi fight against Jean Moulin and the French resistance.

Record 2 could be a whole other show, but he flees Europe after the war. He's arrested in 1968 after robbing a Buenos Aires bank with two other exiled Corsican heroin kingpins. He then heads to Asunción, Paraguay. He's arrested in 1972, sent to the US, and he spends 10 of a 22-year sentence for drug trafficking before being sent back to Paraguay and dying soon after.

So at this point, Klaus Barbie must have barely believed how good he had it. He's living like a king in La Paz, wearing his rollnecks, he's close to all the country's fascist movers and shakers, he's making millions from Queen Iron, shipping foreign exchange and even illegal arms, he's in touch with fellow Nazi scumbags hiding from justice in Latin America, he's on the payroll of West Germany and the US, and he never even had to give up his Nazi affiliations.

Things begin to get a little tougher, however, later in 1966. Sure, Barbie's riding high after helping ship in Che Guevara. But that summer, West Germany lose the World Cup final to England in Wembley. And perhaps because of that, perhaps not, the BND decides to ditch the Adler. More likely, they're worried he'll be unmasked by the press or even worse, by the Stasi, the intelligence core of socialist East Germany.

Barbie's handler meets him shortly after Christmas that year in Madrid, Spain, and tells him he's being let go because of budget constraints before paying a thousand Deutschmarks as hush money. And that's around $38,000 today. This guy just keeps falling up.

Soon after, Barbie moves to Peru to extend his business interests with the support of a German man named Friedrich Schwendt, who, like Barbie, earns his keep for a combination of arms trafficking, extortion, fraud, blackmail and the selling of state secrets.

He also happens to be a Nazi too, and a master counterfeiter at that. I'm 100% going to do a show on this in 2025, but Schwent was the mastermind of something called Operation Bernhardt during the war, which was a plan to drop around 300 million fake pound notes over Britain to cripple the economy, possibly the largest counterfeiting operation of all time.

So he's really playing all sides here.

However, Barbie no longer has the backing of the West German intelligence apparatus, and in 1971, he and Schrentz attempt to extort a fellow German called Herbert John, who's working for prominent Peruvian industrialist Luis Banchero Rossi. Problem is, John also moonlights as an investigative reporter, so Schrentz and Barbie's efforts to swindle him backfire spectacularly.

John is able to find out that Klaus Altmann is Klaus Barbie and he sends Trent's address to Beate and Serge Klausfeld, two of the most famous Nazi hunters in the world.

This is huge news, of course. In December that year, Beata Klausfeld determines that, yes, Klaus Altmann is the wanted butcher of Lyon, Klaus Barbie, and she devises a plan to extradite or even kidnap him to stand trial in France, which has already sentenced him twice to death in absentia, by the way.

A few days later, that industrialist Banchero Rossi is murdered at his weekend home near Lima, supposedly by his gardener, who spent seven years in jail before being exonerated. The BND then runs interference for Barbie, worried the truth will come out about his involvement with them and the West German state, not to mention the US and the Vatican. The Klarsfelds write an op-ed in a French newspaper, alongside John's photos of Barbie uncovering his identity.

His response? "I have never changed my name, and the only thing I can say is that I was a member of the German army and held the rank of lieutenant in an assault commando. I am not that ex-Guestapo chief in Lyon. I am a former soldier and nothing more. Now I am manager for Transmaritima Boliviana. The most important thing for me is peace for me and my children." Nonetheless, Barbie is summoned to the Peruvian Ministry of the Interior to explain himself.

Barbie maintains he's only humble millionaire Klaus Altman, but by the time Beata Klaasfeld arrives in Lima four days later to grab him, he's fled to the Bolivian-Peruvian border near Lake Titicaca with his family. Word gets packed to La Paz and Barbie is arrested upon his arrival, but he's got friends in all the right places and Bolivia is a rogue dictatorship. So the Klaasfelds, France and the world are made to wait for their man.

He has become the epitome of the phrase justice delayed is justice denied because, writes Der Spiegel, quote, of the interests and perhaps moral blindness of the US and West German intelligence agencies that Barbie served. Barbie has gotten away with it.

And living under state protection in La Paz, Don Klaus re-ups on his network of lancy pals, attempting to bring them together under one evil banner. This network is loosely known by the phrase ODESA, or Organisation des Ermaligen SS Angehörigen, which translates as Organisation of Former Members of the SS.

This is your spectre, your uncle, your black order. And by this point, some of the guys are backed by the US and dictators in Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Bolivia and elsewhere. Barbie formalises some of his gang into the Bridegrooms of Death, naming them for a wing of the Spanish Foreign Legion.

And they really are a gaggle of evil bastards. Over the year, they're thought to have a hand in many of the changes of power in Bolivia, suppressing leftists and promoting whoever has the worst political views, and the deepest pockets, of course. And by the mid-1970s, these tend to be men deep into Bolivia's thriving cocaine trade. And at the top of this trade sits Roberto Suarez Gomez.

Now, we're going to get into Suarez properly in the second part of this show because it deserves more time. But by the late 1970s, he controls the lion's share of the world's coca production, a lot of which comes from poor indigenous growers in the Yungas, that region Klaus Barbie had first lived in in the 50s.

From 1971, Bolivia has been run by a raw bone military general named Hugo Bansa, who actively encourages coca production to boost his country's ailing economy. He also hires Klaus Barbie as a quote, special security aid, i.e. the torturer in chief. That's interesting. Just kind of like how Brunner was in with the Syrian Baathist party. Yeah. And there were others in Chile and elsewhere as well. I can't remember their names right now, but they were

Yeah, they really did like a Nazi torturer. It's pretty rough. Banzer introduces the two men, Suarez and Barbie, and they hit it off. Suarez needs muscle for his business, which he seems is increasingly under threat from Colombian cartels and rebel groups. And that is when the Nazi-Narco alliance in Bolivia really kicks off.

So now we have Barbie and La Paz working with both Banter, the dictator, and Suarez, the narco, offering his and the services of the bridegrooms of death and making sure that whoever's in power will keep the Klarsfelds off his back. But in 1978, this harmony is thrown out of whack by Jimmy Carter, US president.

Bansa is clearly running a narco state, empowering the nascent Medellin cartel in Colombia, and he's leading such repressive tactics against opposition in Bolivia that locals know the time as the Banserato. So, rare Washington W in this story, Carter forces Bansa to agree to a democratic poll and, guess what?

guess what he rigs it beating leftist Hernan Silas Suazo with the help of 200,000 votes more than there are actual voters I mean this is so embarrassingly obviously bad that Banzer has to declare the election void and then his party say he's trying to steal power from them so they instigate a coup which itself is countered by a coup I mean how many coups do you think Bolivia's had since independence in 1825 Danny?

Yes, you guessed it. 190. One nine zero. What the actual heck? In 1979, Jimmy Carter's like, nah, come on, guys. Seriously, just do an election. But when the winner of that vote is sworn in, he's cooed by another general who just days earlier had been seen dining with Barbie and Suarez in La Paz. So,

So violence is creeping up this entire time, especially from the military to trade unionists and others who are clamoring for free and fair elections. I mean, let's be honest, the trade unionists don't really care about that half the time either. They're like on the communist side. And all the while, the power of Barbie, Suarez and Bolivia's narco dollars is getting out of control.

A CIA agent stationed in Bolivia at the time recalls flying over a quote, jungle-based cocaine manufacturing complex containing laboratories, heavy armaments, radio communications and landing fields that could accommodate a modern jumbo jet. He concludes that the Suarez Barbie faction are seeking to use the drug trade as the backbone of a quote, military-industrial setup right out of a West Point textbook. It's unbelievable.

The CIA still have Barbie as an asset at this point, content to let him wreak havoc on Latin America so long as he smashes anything resembling communism. In 1979, however, one of their own men threatens to throw a spanner in the works. Everytown has a dark side. This is Andrew Fitzgerald from the Everytown podcast, where every single week we dive into insane and mysterious true crime stories, most of which you've never heard of.

Stories like the bizarre disappearance of Tyler Davis in Columbus, Ohio, a 29-year-old father trying to find his way back to his hotel when he disappeared and was never heard from again, and Elizabeth Shove from Lugoff, South Carolina, who was abducted from her driveway by a madman and taken to his underground bunker in the woods. We give you all the details you're interested in hearing about without any fluff or fillers, because ain't nobody got time for that.

We cover everything from psychopaths to poltergeists. So go check out the Everytown podcast because Everytown, no matter how nice it may seem, has a dark side.

From the team that brought you Up and Vanished comes an all-new podcast that brings you a weekly dose of true crime cases. She's in an unknown area. Do you know if she's here now or was she released? They said she was released. I'm Payne Lindsey. And I'm Maggie Freeling. This is Up and Vanished Weekly. Join me as I talk through cases with special guests and true crime experts. There's got to be something at the heart of that evidence that they've got. It's got to be DNA. Yeah. Yeah.

Tune in as Payne Lindsey lays out the crime in true Up and Vanish style. A late night knock at the door, a missing car, and a mysterious shadowy figure caught on camera. We cannot see that person's face ever. Luckiest person in the world. What new evidence will it take to solve one of Florida's most high-profile missing persons cases? Up and Vanish Weekly is available now. Listen for free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

This is Andrew from the Scary Mysteries Podcast, where every single week we dive into insane and creepy true crime compilations on Mondays. And on Wednesdays, we have our Twisted News episodes, where we get you up to speed on the most terrifying and strange news stories currently happening all around the world. We're covering the topics you want to hear about. Missing persons, killers, UFOs, and more.

Best of all, we don't waste your time with any fluff or fillers. Just stray to the true crime details. So go check out the Scary Mysteries podcast. I'll see you there. Michael Levine is an undercover DEA agent from New York living in Buenos Aires and posing as a Sicilian mobster when he meets Suarez's people, learning that over 90% of Bolivian coca paste is sold to Colombians to be turned into cocaine.

He doesn't think the CIA cares about his op, though. In fact, Levine says, the CIA think the DEA are just bozos. Here's Mike, quote, Their main asset for control of the Bolivian military at this time was Klaus Barbie. He was one of several ex-Nazi assets they had working in South America at the time. Klaus Barbie was key in that bloody action as the right-hand man of the CIA.

In 1979, Levine persuades Suarez and several other narcos to sell him over a thousand keys of blow for $9 million. I feel like that's a pretty good deal, but I would expect better back then. But maybe it was their responsibility to move it into the US, in which case it's a great deal. I think it is because it's just him working on his own as far as I can tell. So that's an amazing deal.

Good for him. Yeah, maybe he should have got into another line of business, Mr. Levine. On May 24th, 1980, a Convair cargo plane loaded with the drug leaves a jungle airstrip in Beni, which is a remote Bolivian state border in Brazil, heads for Florida.

At the same time, two Bolivians are arrested inside a Miami bank when they receive payment for the deal. Here's an excerpt from a fantastic feature at Nuevo Sociedad by the excellent late Bolivian reporter Boris Miranda. Quote,

Mike, as everyone calls the New Yorker, believed that his daring operation represented the biggest drug bust in history. He had finally succeeded in incriminating the Bolivian bigwigs. He was very wrong. His government covered up the case and released the detainees.

The drug laws in Bolivia were far from losing their influence with the US special agencies. Levine details this and way more in his explosive book The Big White Lie. But if we're to believe him, and the evidence is convincing, the CIA at this point, in May 1980, helps get Suarez, Barbie and the bridegrooms of death off the hook.

scuppering Levine's massive drug operation and allowing some of the most dangerous criminals in Latin America to keep forging ties with Medellin and Colombia.

And that's likely because, just a few weeks later, the cocaine coup begins, soaking La Paz in blood. Garcia Mesa, the general who's about to take control of the country, has been paid an alleged million dollars by Suarez and his cartel, which thanks to its Italian connections, some dubbed the Coca Nostra. Nice.

This is the first time in history that an entire country has been handed to active drug traffickers, hence why the CIA, which caused it, so thanks guys, calls Bolivia the world's first true narco state. The following year, Roberto Suarez Gomez hosts his 49th birthday party at a villa in a wealthy suburb of Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia's largest city and his seat of power.

At it are members of Bolivia's ruling junta, of course, but also a young Pablo Escobar and his right-hand man Gonzalo Rodríguez Gacha, a.k.a. El Mexicano.

It's there, at that fiesta, that Escobar meets Klaus Barbie, future Nazi and narco death squad leader, for the first time. And it's there that we'll leave this tale for now. Oh, interesting. I wanted to do an episode on Gacha. I have him saved on a list, so that'll be interesting. Yeah, I don't know a huge amount about him, but he's got a whole different story. I can barely remember it from Narcos, but yeah, this is like...

I can't really ever state this. It really is the inception of the Latin American drug trade as we know it today. The founding fathers, man, put them on the Mount Rushmore of cartel guys, right? And I actually, I'm embarrassed to say, I didn't know anything about Gomez either. I knew nothing about him, but his life story is pretty fascinating and we're going to get into it.

in the next show in what, a couple of weeks, I guess. Yeah, so hopefully that will be less deeply unpleasant than this one. It cannot not be, right? Yeah. Happy New Year, guys. Thanks for tuning in. Happy New Year. Happy New Year.

Bye.