True Spies Classic: True Narcos | DEA
50:49 Share

This episode is brought to you by LifeLock. The holidays mean more travel, more shopping, more time online, and more personal info in places that could expose you to identity theft. That's why LifeLock monitors millions of data points every second. If your identity is stolen, their U.S.-based restoration specialist will fix it, guaranteed, or your money back. Get more holiday fun and less holiday worry with LifeLock. Save up to 40% your first year. Visit LifeLock.com slash podcast. Terms apply.

This message is sponsored by Greenlight. We all know the old saying about teaching a man to fish. And as parents, we want our kids to learn the things that will set them up for success. So this holiday season, give kids money skills that last well beyond 2024 with Greenlight. Greenlight is a debit card and money app made for families where kids learn how to save, invest, and spend wisely with parental controls built in. Sign up today at greenlight.com slash Spotify. Greenlight is a debit card and money app made for families

Greenlight.com slash Spotify. Hello, True Spies listeners. Welcome back. You're joining us as we venture into the vaults to revisit some of your favorite episodes from our collection. We hope you enjoy this classic True Spies rendezvous. We think it's well worth catching up with. This is True Spies, the classics from Spyscape Studios. Incoming transmission.

Welcome. Welcome to True Spies. Week by week, mission by mission, you'll hear the true stories behind the world's greatest espionage operations. You'll meet the people who navigate this secret world. What do they know? What are their skills? And what would you do in their position?

This is True Spies. This is vengeance. I mean, it's human nature. It's that revenge. I can't tell you how many of our friends we saw killed in the operations that went on out there. This was personal. Episode 8, True Narcos. My name is Javier Pena, and I worked for the Drug Enforcement Administration for 30 years.

Hi, my name is Steve Murphy. I'm a retired DEA special agent. I worked for DEA from 1987 and retired in 2013. Prior to that, I was a police officer for about 12 years. Keen True Spies listeners will have immediately noticed a couple of things that are different about this week's guides. Number one, yes, there's two of them, partners. And number two...

They're not spies, strictly speaking. But these two agents used classic spy skills in tracking down their legendary prey. My partner and I, Steve, worked on the search of infamous narco-trafficker Pablo Escobar. You know, we use the term in analogy, you want to cut the head off the snake. Well, in this particular case, not only did we cut the head off, we chopped up the snake. Here's the debrief.

It's the late 1980s and Colombia, a beautiful country bridging Central and South America, is in the grip of narco-terrorism. At the height of its operations, the Medellin Cartel, run by Pablo Escobar, is smuggling tons of cocaine into countries all over the world, bringing in 60 million US dollars a day in profits.

In retaliation for the Colombian government's attempt to extradite the drug traffickers to the United States, the cartel has declared war on the government and the police. The picturesque city of Medellin has become a battle zone. There are, on average, 20 homicides a day. There are so many people shot that the city runs out of ambulances.

Taxis and private vehicles often come to a screeching halt outside the public hospital's emergency entrance. As the resolve to bring Escobar to justice stiffens, the cartel mounts a campaign of car bombing and hundreds of innocent people are murdered.

This is the scene young, ambitious DEA agent Javier Pena walks into in 1988, having drawn the short straw. I didn't want to go to Colombia. I wanted to go to Mexico. I had to go look on the map where, you know, Colombia was. So I'm there about a month where they say, hey, Pena, you're going to be working in Mexico.

Escobar is responsible at this time for 80% of the world's cocaine supply. And the world's biggest consumer of cocaine? You guessed it, the United States of America.

Colombian cops want him for the violence he's brought to the streets of Medellin. The DEA want him for the violence he's exported to Miami, where the US government is fighting its own war with the cartel.

With DEA, we go after the biggest traffickers. You're not looking for the low-level dealers. You know, you're looking for what we call climbing the ladder. So if you do arrest somebody, you're looking to maybe flip them into becoming an informant, gleaning all the information that they have available, and then you want to keep going up to that ladder so that when you take out an organization, you're just not taking out the people at the lowest level. You want to take out the entire organization. Chop the head of the snake.

Still, there are perks to hunting notorious drug dealers, as Javier quickly found out. It was 25% for danger pay and 25% for hazardous pay. So it was basically 50% above your salary. So the danger pay is because of the car bombs, the assassinations that Pablo Escobar had paid. And the bounty on their heads, of course.

as agent Steve Murphy realized when he arrived. There was a price tag on all DEA agents' heads placed there by Pablo Escobar. It was $300,000 back in, I guess, 1991, so I don't know what that equates to in today's money. For two agents, about a million dollars, give or take. Whereas hazardous pay, you're working in a different environment. It's not a safe environment. There was no kid post.

This was made abundantly clear the first time Javier visited Medellin, where a team of Colombian police officers, dedicated solely to catching Escobar, were based 24-7.

He was met at the airport by a convoy of three armoured vehicles. So I said, hey, Javier, hey, come on in. You know, so I get in the back seat and, you know, I'm beginning to know these guys. And one of the guys says, Javier, you got a gun? I said, yeah. He said, pull it out. Sort of like yelled at me.

This is the way we drive around Medellin, where you put your gun on your chest. He says, look at all those motorcycles, a lot of them are Pablo Escobar sicarios. And once they find out who you are, they're going to try to kill you. I've never had done that, drive around with your gun on your chest. I mean, it was just an eerie feeling. Sicarios, hired killers, thugs.

but also often young men living in the city's shanty towns who were promised an escape from abject poverty in return for a life expectancy of just 22 years, riding around two to a motorbike looking for cops to slaughter. Columbia was an interesting overseas posting for a husband and wife to pick. Life in Miami had been very, very exciting, being a DEA agent and...

you know, quite honestly, I was looking for more excitement. Boy, I didn't realize what I was getting to in Columbia though. It was somewhat of an eye-opener. But my wife being there, she's a tough girl. She's much tougher than I've ever been in my life.

You know, it was actually her idea to what's the next most exciting thing we can do after Miami. Go to the source, I suppose. If you're going to take out an organization, you need to go to the origins, you know, where the cocaine is coming from. But taking out the organization looked remarkably like a fait accompli.

When Steve arrived in Colombia three years after Javier. I arrived in Bogota in June 1991. And three days later is when Pablo Escobar surrendered to his custom-built prison. Pablo Escobar, DEA case number TKO558ZE880008, is, in June 1991, on the run and in hiding.

And the first major manhunt mounted by the Colombian National Police to capture him is about to end in victory for Escobar. Drug dealer one, police zero. His campaign of terror and bribery has backed Colombia's president into an impossible corner.

Having either bribed or executed the government officials trying to extradite him and his henchmen, the Colombian Congress has voted to ban extradition entirely, and Escobar has volunteered to come in from the cold and surrender. But he negotiates his own deal. And the deal is, he gets to live in a prison of his choosing. And what a prison.

The ranch-like complex, nicknamed the Cathedral, includes a pool, jacuzzi and football field.

He has a five-star cell with his own private bathroom, and the whole place is fitted with serious security designed not only to keep Escobar from escaping, but also to keep him safe from his enemies. He even turns up with his own security detail for protection. It was, as you might say, a joke. And the feeling in the law enforcement community is that the president has caved in to terrorism.

There was nothing punitive about his prison whatsoever. And then you learned about all the details and what a joke that plea agreement was. And then, you know, very quickly you understand why these guys were upset that Pablo Escobar had surrendered. They'd seen hundreds of their fellow police officers, you know, Colombian national police officers that were killed there, innocent citizens being killed by Pablo and his henchmen. It's Steve and Javier's job to find out what Pablo is up to inside his luxury jail.

That was our sole responsibility. And it's hardly life on the chain gang. That first year, while Pablo was in prison, he rebuilt his power base. He rebuilt his finances from the drug trafficking business. He got his organization back in order. So the car bombings stopped for a while for that year, but Pablo's violence did not stop. He still imposed his violent will on anybody that he felt crossed him. Everything changes. Nothing changes.

Cocaine was still flowing out of the country. Pablo Escobar had taken on the Colombian government and won. And then, barely even a year into his self-orchestrated sentence, power and greed got the better of him, and he murdered two of his business associates inside his private prison.

Feeling they couldn't let this slide, the government sent in officials to investigate, who were then taken hostage. Hundreds of Colombian troops swarmed the premises to rescue them, and Pablo Escobar escaped with a handful of other inmates through a conveniently placed tunnel. Well, the very next day is when Javier and I moved from Bogota to Medellin. And that's where the next scene starts.

But let's zoom out of Colombia and Medellin for a bit and focus on our DEA agents, Javier and Steve. How did they end up here?

Unlike some of our CIA or FBI spies, Steve and Javier are not middle-class Americans.

They don't come from a background of generations of prestigious military service. It's not preordained that they will serve their country. They're just normal Americans. Javier's father is a cowboy. Steve's family are strict Baptists. Both start out as small-town cops searching for excitement beyond their state borders. The thing that was attractive with the DEA was the pay. I was making about $10,000 a year.

And I had just got my degree, so I was looking to better myself. And DEA was paying $17,000 a year, which is quite a huge bonus. And someone told me, if you join DEA, you're going to see the world. And that's what I wanted to do. While I was a railroad cop, one of the other detectives had been a former Virginia State Trooper that had worked with DEA on a task force.

And I just thought that was real exciting. And this is what really sealed it for me. When I went to DEA, the most powder cocaine I had ever seen at one time was two ounces. The first undercover case I worked on a DEA, we went to the Turks and Caicos Islands from Miami and picked up 400 kilograms. So I went from two ounces to 880 pounds of cocaine. You know, to be quite honest with you, I'd never even heard of the Turks and Caicos Islands at that time. I didn't know where they were.

I had an addiction, but it was the opposite of being addicted to cocaine. It was addicted to being a DEA agent. Is it time to reimagine your future?

The right business skills may make a difference in your career. At Capella University, we offer a relevant education that's designed to focus on what you need to know in the business world. We'll teach professional skills to help you pursue your goals, like business management, strategic planning, and effective communication. And you can apply these skills right away. A different future is closer than you think with Capella University. Learn more at capella.edu.

Bored with your boring cardio? Stop pedaling that snooze cycle to Nowheresville and try some cardio that's actually fun. Supernatural Fitness, available on MetaQuest. Isn't that right, Jane Fonda? Cardio will never be boring again. Sweat to the beat of thousands of chart-topping songs inside stunning virtual landscapes. Bet your stationary bike can't do that. Visit GetSupernatural.com and join the next fitness revolution. Supernatural VR Fitness, only on MetaQuest. Wait a team for team.

Steve's first posting as a DEA agent was Tropical Miami, the entry point for the majority of cocaine coming into the country from Colombia. This sounds silly, but I'd been watching the show Miami Vice and, you know, you tend to think some of the things that you see on TV might be true.

Steve had dreams of being the new Sonny Crockett, driving around Miami in a Ferrari Daytona Spyder, catching the bad guys. Nothing was further from the truth, but it was extremely exciting. DEA agents work the streets. They're used to getting their hands dirty, used to having guns to their heads. It comes with the territory. It's not just a job, it's actually a lifestyle.

It impacts every area of your life if you're out making successful cases, you know, and that means you're placing yourself in danger.

Whether you're working undercover or doing surveillance, whatever it might be, but also making sacrifices are your family because it's very, very time intensive. It's absolutely not a 40 hour a week, nine to five type job. You have to be available when the drug traffickers are out there. Typically, drug dealers, you know, they like to party at nighttime. So there's lots of times when you might be out all night. Better work on that coffee habit then.

Your job as a DEA agent is to develop informants who will help you climb that ladder to the top of the trafficking organization. Informants who are, let's remember, first and foremost, criminals.

Some of the informants will try to lie to you. They'll try to use you. And, you know, you have to determine what their motive is for doing that. Are they really drug traffickers? Do they really have the information? You know, are they trying to take out the competition? Are they just trying to lie to us to throw us off somebody else's trail? There's a lot of different motives why someone would come on and want to be an informant.

But once you find someone like that and they can make introductions for you, then you just were actors. You play the part. Your informants made the introduction. It's now up to you to convince the next guy on the rung that you mean business. What we put out on the street through our informant is that we had access to planes and boats and we were willing to transport anything, anytime, anywhere for a fee.

Well, you know, once the word gets out through the criminal community, you start getting phone calls. Hey, I've got 400 kilos of cocaine I need to transport from the Guajira Peninsula of Columbia to South Florida. Or, you know, do you have a plane? Do you have a boat available? I've got a load in Haiti that I need to bring into the Florida Keys. And sometimes that means playing it as close to straight as possible.

Well, I was actually Steve Mitchell. That's my undercover name. I'm a white guy. I have an English-Irish background. I'm very light-skinned. I have light-colored eyes, you know. I didn't have the dark, ruddy skin like somebody from South Florida would have. You know, another key, I mean, I always use my first name because that way if somebody calls you by your first name, you're going to turn. Whether you're undercover or not, it's something you have to be aware of. It's important to be aware of your vulnerabilities.

And it's equally important to know your edge.

The street awareness in any law enforcement job is critical. It's something that they try to train you. However, when you go out on the streets, a lot of it comes out at that level. Street smart, you can't teach it. They try to, but it's something that's innate in all of us. It's that common sense factor.

Back when Javier was a cop in Laredo, Texas, he used to hop across the Rio Grande to hang out in the seedy bars and strip joints the Mexican side had to offer. It was a habit he continued when he became a DEA agent in the state capital, Austin. He had a sense that's where he'd pick up the best intel. Some of my best cases were made, you know, hanging out at bars, which I shouldn't have been doing in the official capacity.

Then again, hanging out in seedy bars might just have saved his life. I remember walking in to a hotel room undercover, which we shouldn't have been doing nowadays. That's not safe to do. But, you know, it's Friday afternoon. Everybody wants to go home.

"Peno, let's get the deal done right away. You know, it's a simple by bus. You go in, the guy's got the heroin and we're gonna arrest him, you know. So make sure you do it quick because we all want to get out of here. It's Friday afternoon. No problem." I walk in, the first thing that the crook does, puts a gun to my head and says, "If you're a cop, you're the first one I'm gonna kill." Freeze frame. You've broken the rules.

You've rushed a deal and you've forgotten the first rule of undercover work. Don't be complacent. And now there's a twitchy drug dealer with a gun to your head. The scenario didn't come up in training. What are you going to do? Rewind the last three minutes on double speed. There, that's it. You've got it.

I noticed he was a Mexican from Mexico. He mentioned something about Nuevo Laredo, which is right across Laredo, and my street mode goes into effect, and I start naming off some of the places

Some of the city bars, which I'm not proud of, that I used to hang out in Nuevo Laredo. And wow, he recognized the names. And all of a sudden, I could see that gleam in his eye. He puts the gun down. He tells the other crook, hey, he's not a cop, man. He hangs out at all these bars I hang out. So he started hugging. And obviously, you know, later on, once he relaxed, I got the jump on him and I arrested him. Well done. A close call. It sounds exciting, right?

pretending to be the bad guys, negotiating drug deals, turning suspects into informants. But could you keep your wits about you with a gun to your head? What about when it's pointed at your partner? We have the ability to focus on a mission and to stay focused on that mission. Even when you become discouraged and you're seeing friends being killed...

You still have to maintain your focus and do what's right. You have to have unquestionable integrity because if you're caught lying, you've just given up your integrity and you can no longer testify in court.

You have to be forward thinking. You can't just look at what's in front of you and think, OK, if I take this guy down, he's out of the way. We have to think, all right, how's that going to impact what's to be gained by arresting this person if we arrest him now or if we leave him out for a little while longer? Does he pose a danger to the community? So you have to use a lot of common sense. But at the same time, we have to be strongly aware of what your responsibilities are.

not only to your agency and brother and sister agents, but also to the public, because as a DEA agent, you're nothing more than a public servant. And in Colombia, not only are you public servants, but you're there as guests of the Colombian National Police, and they hold the keys to your success.

Where were we? Ah, yes, cut to July 22nd, 1992. Steve and Javier are now partners, and Pablo Escobar has just escaped from his luxury prison. Well, the very next day is when Javier and I moved from Bogota to Medellin.

to the Olguin police headquarters to be exact, the compound in Medellin where the search block, a group of Colombian police who exist solely to get Pablo, is based. And the truth is, it was well known that the Colombian national police were not there to seize money. They were not there to seize drugs. They were there to find, capture, and kill, if necessary, Pablo Escobar. That was our mission. Our boss, Colonel Hugo Martinez, who's a real hero in Colombia,

Pablo Escobar hated Colonel Martinez. I would see the letters that Escobar would write to Martinez. I mean, it got to the point where the colonel had to hide his family. It was just a very, very bloody personal war between Pablo Escobar and the search block. It was very risky to be at the search block. Escobar, yes, he knew who Steve and I were. He mentioned our names.

in some intercepts. And we were the only two DEA guys at the search block. So everybody knew who Steve and I were, the neighborhood people, all the cops. The first rule of a manhunt is to know your target inside out. Get inside their head.

When you're going after someone, you have to learn everything about that person, his family, their family, their friends, associates, anything that's going to help you broaden that investigation. Harvey won't tell you this, but he has a mind like an encyclopedia. I've never met anybody like him that has the recall at a moment's notice of organizations, the membership.

who's responsible for what, what's the relationship, who the family members are, the locations they're associated with. And the second? Make friends and influence people. You're the only gringos around.

So if you're going to get anywhere, you need the Colombian cops on your side. They meet him. As a matter of fact, he hasn't said it, but his nickname was Stick because they couldn't pronounce Steve in Medellin. So he was known as Stick, but he got along with people.

And part of our job in Medellin was getting along with our cops. You know, them trusting us, we trusted them. And then all of a sudden, it was we were a team and we considered the Colombian National Police our team.

true partners in matter of fact they were the ones who had the information they were the ones that were getting their guys killed by Pablo Escobar they were the ones that were working day and night on weekends to go after Pablo Escobar so you develop that trust within the search block there was trust but outside where they had prices on their head anything was possible

My wife and I were on our way home from the embassy one night, and I had a suit on, she had her dress and heels on, and we took some back streets to get home. And Bogota is just terrible all the time. And as we're on the backside of this military base, this small car starts to run a red light and pull out in front of us.

You beep your horn. You're American and you're a former cop. You expect a certain traffic etiquette, even in Bogota. But a couple of miles down the road and you spot the same small car and it's blocked you in. And these three guys get out. This is when Harvey and I were living in Medellin. I'd come home for a couple of days. We knew that Pablo had Sicario's out looking for us. You know, we felt like we were wanted men by him.

And here comes three guys and they come over to the driver's door and they're trying to get me to open the door and get out. You're driving a vehicle more akin to a tank than a car. And you're an experienced agent who's had more than a few guns pointed in his direction. But still... Well, they can't get to me because of all the steel plating and the bulletproof glass. But when they would raise their arms, you know, giving me gestures and so forth, you could see their pistols in their waist belt, you know, inside their waistband there. You're trapped.

It's nighttime in what is then one of the most dangerous places on the earth. And you're wanted by no less than Pablo Escobar. What's running through your head? You are. You're thinking when you get out of the car, you know, you need to remember to lock the door and slam it behind you because if you lose, now they can't get access to your wife. She did not have a weapon with her.

But you're also looking at angles and, you know, you're assessing these guys by their mannerisms. Who's going to react the quickest? You know, which one are you going to go after first? It sounds like something you'd see on a TV show, but these thoughts actually do go through your mind because you want to survive. What are you going to do? Confront them?

So I got on the radio and tried to call the embassy. They never answered. One of the agents at home, this guy's wife heard us on the walkie-talkie because each of our apartments, we had radios in there that we could talk to each other. She came up on the radio. She's like, hey, is everything okay? And you want me to call your boss? I said, sure, call him. And he said, well, listen, you want me to bring Margarita with me? That was our code word for a mini Uzi machine gun. And I said, yeah, you know, these guys are armed, so bring her.

So when my boss got there, I had him move into a position where he flanked them. They had no idea who he was. And the goal was that we were just going to get out and confront them. And if they pulled their weapons, we'd have them in a crossfire. And, you know, unfortunately, somebody was going to get killed.

That's not what we wanted to happen at all. Hello, listeners. This is Anne Bogle, author, blogger, and creator of the podcast, What Should I Read Next? Since 2016, I've been helping readers bring more joy and delight into their reading lives. Every week, I tech all things books and reading with a guest and guide them in discovering their next read. This is Anne Bogle.

They share three books they love, one book they don't, and what they've been reading lately. And I recommend three titles they may enjoy reading next. Guests have said our conversations are like therapy, troubleshooting issues that have plagued their reading lives for years, and possibly the rest of their lives as well. And of course, recommending books that meet the moment, whether they are looking for deep introspection to spur or encourage a life change, or a frothy page-turner to help them escape the stresses of work, or a book that they've been reading for years.

school, everything. You'll learn something about yourself as a reader, and you'll definitely walk away confident to choose your next read with a whole list of new books and authors to try. So join us each Tuesday for What Should I Read Next? Subscribe now wherever you're listening to this podcast and visit our website, whatshouldireadnextpodcast.com to find out more. Finally, the Colombian police arrived and settled the dispute.

It turned out it was a simple matter of road rage. The three young men, members of the Colombian army, enraged because a gringo had blown his horn at them. But, you know, I didn't know their military. I didn't know who they were. In my mind, I'm thinking I'm working with a search block in Medellin. These are probably three Sicarios. And in a fight between an Uzi and three guys with pistols, I'd put my money on Margarita, wouldn't you?

But it's getting on and you want to know about Pablo, don't you? It turns out that nobody has a clue where he is. We knew something was wrong. We just could not figure out the frequency. We could not figure out and we had the best technology systems out there. The signal has gone cold. The drug deals continue. The killing hardly abates.

They know he's on the run. He knows it's only a matter of time before they track him down. So he tries through his son, Juan Pablo, to negotiate another surrender, this time through Colombia's attorney general.

And I became friends with the assistant working in Medellin, Colombia. He was dealing with Juan Pablo. So one day he's out with Juan Pablo and he notices a radio and he notices that

The kid is talking to his father. So he goes up and he memorizes that frequency. Wow. You know, all of a sudden, you know, I get that frequency and we pass it to, you know, all the intel agencies, CIA, CIA.

We pass it to them, and then all of a sudden... We're intercepting Pablo Escobar. We knew Pablo Escobar's voice. We didn't have to give any analysis. After six months of silence, they're listening in to the notorious murderer. A man who has killed their friends and colleagues.

A man who has terrorized Colombia for over a decade. A man in hiding who is grooming his son to take over the family business. And it was always about five o'clock in the afternoon that Pablo and his son would talk every day. The knocks are now eavesdropping, but it comes at a heavy cost.

The assistant attorney who received it, who copied it, later on was killed in Medellin because he's the one who gave us that frequency. And that's why it's personal. The hunt for him intensifies. All available resources are going into catching him. They've got wire rooms in both the search block in the Medellin and the embassy in Bogota. And the intercepts are generating leads that Javier and Steve are following up.

50 phone lines used by the biggest traffickers in the country are being tapped to facilitate raids, to seize funds, to turn allies into informants. And there was a recessed bookcase built into the wall. You'd reach up inside the inside lip of the bookcase and there was a hidden switch that

which when you turned it would release the mechanisms holding the bookcase in place, and it would swing out into the room like a door. And then you'd step through the wall there, and that's where these wire rooms were located. Of course, there were other exits out of the wire rooms in case there was an emergency and so forth, you know, but I just, when I first saw that, I was thinking, wow, this is really like I spy kind of stuff, you know, it was, I'd never seen anything like that.

In the eight months since Escobar's escape, 136 police officers have been killed in the line of duty by Escobar's hitmen. The death tolls throughout the country have also increased. Colombia sees its deadliest year with nearly 29,000 homicides. In Medellin and Bogota, 112 civilians have died from random car bomb attacks, 427 injured. But Escobar's world is shrinking.

In a classified report prepared by Javier and Steve in March 1993, they note that Escobar is worried and under extreme pressure due to the police's constant everyday operations aimed at arresting him. They are targeting his accountants, lawyers and financiers as well as his sicarios.

Authorities seize more than $14 million of the drug dealer's assets. A total of 25 of Escobar's loyal hitmen are wiped out. 95 others are arrested and 22 voluntarily surrender to authorities. Colombians are tired of the violence, tired of living in fear.

And so the tips are flooding in to the 1-800 line our agents have established. Working with the U.S. State Department, we were able to offer a $5 million reward. $5 million U.S. cash, not Colombian pesos, which, you know, that resulted in tons of people calling in with tips or potential leads.

And, you know, the thing was they wanted to talk to the gringos. They didn't want to talk to the Columbia National Police because they felt there might have been a certain level of potential corruption there. Which is how Javier wound up dancing with the girl in the red dress, taking out a dangerous Sicario.

It was a Saturday night. It was my informant and she would not talk to any police officers. She would only give me the information. It was one of Escobar's sicarios who she had located who was at this bar dancing. And I remember the police said, Xavier, man, we hate to

The music is loud and pulsating. She leads him to the dance floor, gets up close to the target...

And indicates with her eyes a skinny teenager locked in an embrace with his dancing partner. I was able to take my gun out, you know, put it to his head. And all of a sudden he starts fighting. So by this time, a couple of guys came in, police officers helped me, we subdued him. Got him. A scene straight out of a movie or a TV series. And obviously the girl in the red dress got some money out of that.

And dance with an undercover DEA agent. And I got to dance with her. Beautiful, beautiful lady too. Towards late, late November, early December, Javier and I felt, you know what, we're really getting close. I mean, there's a lot of good information coming in. We had been through a period of, we weren't,

getting many leads. We were becoming discouraged. Harvey and I would talk about it. It's like, you know what? We just regular the guy, go ahead and give up, you know, and just let him go back to his custom built prison. At least the car bombs will stop and things like that because we're just not making any headway. But then,

You know, we would see our friends that had been out on operations and several of them were being killed. And, you know, you'd see their families at the funerals. And it just renewed our resolve to get our focus back on mission, you know, and get back to work and quit feeling sorry for ourselves. But their efforts are beginning to pay off.

They have the frequency and they have the technology to pinpoint his location. I don't know that this is widely known, we don't make a secret of it, but the government of France actually donated several vans to the government of Colombia. And in these vans, they contained the state-of-the-art equipment that we call radio directional finding equipment. That means triangulation. A frequency comes in, and if Escobar stays still long enough, they have his location.

But here's the catch. If you're talking about a compressed area within a city environment, it could be several city blocks large. And if they're apartment buildings and so forth, I mean, there's just thousands of locations where he could be located. The proverbial drug dealer in a haystack. He's got the whole sprawling city to hide in. They've got a huge margin of error.

So to refine that margin of error, they had handheld antennas with monitors attached to them. And the way you use these antennas is you would ride down the street holding that antenna out the window as you're driving along, you know. And that's what happened on December 2nd, 1993. Escobar is making a call. A signal has come in. The radio tracking equipment has given a location. The Olivos neighborhood, west of Medellin, Carrera 79.

A Colombian police officer, who just happens to be the boss's son, has taught himself how to use the equipment and is now driving down Correa 79, holding the antenna out of the window.

As he's driving down the street, his equipment is indicating for him to look over. And he looks up and he can see Pablo Escobar looking out a window talking on his radio telephone. And it's not like Pablo's talking to his son and all of a sudden he says, oh, there's something strange. There's somebody holding an antenna out the window. There was no indication that Pablo recognized or realized what was going on on the street.

So the only explanation we'd ever been able to come up with is that Pablo was so engrossed in his conversation with his son, he didn't realize what was going on right in front of his eyes on the street below. Perhaps he got sloppy. Having evaded capture for 18 months, perhaps he thought he was cleverer than they were. Either way, he's messed up. And this time, he's not getting away.

Steve is at the search block with his boss, Colonel Martinez, when the call comes through. So Colonel Martinez is talking to his son, Lieutenant Martinez. And he's telling him that, hey, we think we found Pablo with zero margin of error here. And so the colonel is saying, listen, secure the location. We'll mount the troops up. We're going to head out that way. But whatever you do, don't let him get away. Thank you, 2-41.

600 armed police officers surround the building where the great, powerful Escobar is holed up with just one guard for protection, a sign of how weak his organization has become. He tries to make a dash off the roof. The police order him to stop.

He shoots at them, they shoot at him, and he is caught in the crossfire. We go up to the third floor, and I can see on the roof out there the police officers that are our best friends. They see me, they all start yelling, stick, and they're holding their rifles up in the air. They're confirming that that's Pablo Escobar. While I was standing on the roof, Pablo's mother and sister showed up.

And so I'm watching them from the roof and, you know, watching their reactions. Eventually, they allow Pablo's sister to see him.

When I saw her reaction, I knew for sure, without a doubt in my mind, that was Pablo Escobar had been killed that day. This is vengeance. I mean, it's human nature. It's that revenge. That overall concept of Pablo Escobar is finally dead. It meant a lot to me. Shouts of Viva Colombia echo across the country.

They've cut the head off the snake. The Medellin cartel is annihilated. An unprecedented total takedown of a crime organization. Believe it or not, that was the first in international law enforcement. But did it really make a difference when all's said and done? The death of Pablo Escobar made a lot of difference because of all the innocent people he killed. Did drug trafficking stop? Of course not. It didn't.

Probably stopped for about two weeks. Then it was all drug trafficking again was taken off. And now the Cali cartel had taken over. But the killing of Pablo Escobar, it's symbolic. It's legendary. Again, I just stress, I go after why all the innocent people that he killed. Why did you put a bomb on a commercial airline?

I'll never forget that one. Why did you kill your next president of Colombia? What about all this innocent kids? You know, the family members? That to me just stays with me. And you know what cemented all of this was one of his carrios, Popeye. Got out of prison about five years ago. And publicly, publicly, he has stated the number was closer to 50,000 people killed.

killed under the orders of Pablo Escobar. Steve Murphy and Javier Peña received the Distinguished Service Cross from the Colombian National Police for their role in capturing Pablo Escobar, although they received nothing from the DEA. Javier stayed in Colombia a few more years before accepting a promotion in Puerto Rico, and Steve and his wife Connie left in 1994 to a new posting in North Carolina,

taking home with them two adopted baby girls, Monica from Bogota and Mandy from Medellin. The unique thing about Mandy's adoption is the agency where we picked her up at sat in a valley and up on the hillside was a building called known as the Monaco building. And that's the building where Pablo Escobar's family lived. Javier didn't take any children back home with him.

But he did take some amazing memories. After all, how many agents can say they spent the night in Pablo Escobar's bed and lived to tell the tale? We're in Pablo Escobar's apartment, luxury apartment there at the prison. And the colonel who's running the search says, Javier, we bet you that you will not sleep on Pablo Escobar's bed tonight. Oh, it's a bed. So it was a personal bed. They were egging me on. Everybody was having fun with it. You know what I said, colonel? I...

I will sleep in his bed.

And I remember I changed the sheets, of course, but it was a gigantic bed that had been custom built for him. And what always stayed in my mind, I could not sleep thinking, you know what? I'm in a bed of this guy who killed a lot of my friends. And then looking at the ceiling, and that's one of my visions I will never forget. It's a ceramic painting of the Virgin Mary.

So Pablo Escobar, every night went to sleep, would look at the Virgin Mary. Wow. Join us next week for another operation with True Spies. Thank you so much for tuning in to True Spies, the classics.

Disclaimer. The views expressed in this podcast are those of the subject. These stories are told from their perspective and their authenticity should be assessed on a case-by-case basis. If you're enjoying this podcast, please click now to give it a five-star rating or leave a review. Ratings and reviews help people discover the podcast and help us bring you more great stories. And if you have some time, why not forward the podcast to a friend?

Lagunas, as far as I was able to report, he never infiltrated core Al-Qaeda, but he was at the margins of these extremist groups. The paradox is the closer you get to the center of the action, the harder it is for you to do your cover job because you've now succeeded so much that you have to prove your bona fides to the organization in which you're supposed to be a part. At some point,

They might ask you to kill somebody. And maybe you can beg off the first time and the second time. But what happens the third time? You can only make so many excuses before they start thinking something may not be right with this person. So in terms of the stress and strain that Lagunas was under, it's a good bet that this kind of thing is contributing to that all the time, where you need to be a very authentic extremist, but you can't be too authentic.

True Spies from Spyscape Studios. Search for True Spies wherever you get your podcasts.