The Zombie Drug Robbery Gangs of Medellin Preying on Dating Apps w/ Toby Muse
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Well, we got a minute. I'm going to buy that truck I've been wanting. Wait, don't you need, like, weeks to shop for a car? I don't. Carvana makes it super convenient to find exactly what I want. Hold up. You're buying a car on your phone? Isn't that more of a laptop thing? You can shop wherever you want.

I like to do my research, read reviews, compare models. Plus, Carvana has thousands of options. How'd you decide on that truck? Because I like it. Oh, that is a great reason. Go to Carvana.com to sell your car the convenient way. Medellin, Colombia, last November. The body of 27-year-old American tourist Paul Huynh is found on a street corner. Authorities are quick to ID him. They've already had a description and have been alert to his disappearance the night before.

At one time, a murdered body on the streets of Medellin wouldn't have caused that much of a stir. See, it's a city that for a long time has had a fearsome reputation. Pablo Escobar's home base that became the murder capital of the world as the original co-cartels fought for control. Once Escobar was taken down and out, things calmed a bit with some brief flare-ups, like when infamous cartel leader Don Berna was extradited to the U.S. in the late 2000s and a war for control popped off yet again.

These days though, the city is a far cry from drug warfare, despite the name conjuring up images of powders and guns. In fact, the city's seen amazing growth in the last decade, becoming a tourism hotspot for Westerners of all types, the kind of place families go to take in the beautiful culture, people, and food.

Since COVID, it's also become a hotspot for the digital nomad scene. You know, the young professionals in industries like tech who don't have to show up to an office and can work from anywhere in the world. A recent spate of news, though, has threatened to once again jeopardize the city's reputation. And it has to do with Paul's death. See, this doesn't have to do with cartel wars. It has to do with Tinder and a popular honey trap that's been going wrong in Colombia for a few years now.

turning it into the date app robbery capital of the world. It's basically foreigners, usually Western, matching with attractive women on dating apps, then meeting them out and being set up by small gangs. And it's usually done with the help of the fearsome drug known as scopolamine or burundanga, something that's like GHB on steroids. A recent report put the number of incidents in Colombia at 50,000 a year, which sounds completely insane.

Paul Nguyen isn't the first, and he won't be the last, and it's becoming a big problem. But what's really going on in the city? This is the Underworld Podcast. ♪♪♪

Welcome back to another episode of the Underworld Podcast, where two journalists take you through the trials and tribulations of transnational organized crime from the past, present, and future. Every week with a different story. I am one of those journalists. My name is Danny Gold. I am usually joined by Sean Williams, but I have no idea where that guy is. I can't be held responsible for his actions or what he does. We do have a special guest who I'll get to in just a moment, but as always, welcome

bonus episodes on patreon.com slash the underworld podcast sign up there on Spotify or iTunes and we are pumping things out on socials YouTube tick tock all that some different content actually shorter content so get that

Anyway, my guest for today is intrepid reporter and filmmaker and author and one of our favorite guests. I think people always ask him to come back. Toby Muse, who wrote the book on cocaine, the book on cocaine called Kilo that we've talked about here with him quite often. Toby, how's it going?

Good, good, good. Thanks to be back on the podcast. I am officially friend of the pod at this point. Yeah. How many times has it been? Yeah, this is the third time, I think. I think it's three. That's what I was thinking. Yeah. So thank you for the gift basket. 66 was a great year for champagne. So...

I'll save that for a special occasion, but the whiskey as well. I'm glad to get some of these scraps of the podcast billions that have been thrown around. Yeah, yeah, definitely. Yeah, three, you are probably our most reoccurring guests and people always, even other things, they'll be like, yeah, bring back Toby. If you guys haven't bought his book, Kilo, it's out everywhere and it is basically the book

on cocaine and how it gets from the fields to your nose in a bathroom stall in Bushwick or Berlin. So pick that up. And you actually, you have a film that just came out, right? Because you also make documentaries. I think that's on streaming transition, which I've seen. You know, you really have to see it to believe it. It's a wild story. I don't even know. Can you just give us a brief intro to that movie before we get into our main topic? Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely. Transition is this incredible documentary, and it was made by my girlfriend, Monica Bijamizar, who's this incredible journalist who worked for PBS, CBS, Vice, and then has moved on and started. This is her debut film, Transition. It tells this just almost unbelievable story of a female filmmaker called Jordan Bryan, who arrives to Afghanistan in the year of 2016 and settles into life there, making films, reporting.

And over that time, decides to, or begins to transition to becoming a trans man. At the same time, Afghanistan goes through this complete collapse of the Taliban taking over. And you've got these incredible sequences of Jordan driving around Kabul the day the Taliban are taking over, trying to get people out of the country. Jordan stays on and continues this process of transition. And at the same time, starts making a documentary of

about a unit of Taliban start spending a lot of time with them going to their village. And I helped out in this documentary in a small way, filming the beginning of it and helped out producing a small bit. But I was there filming Jordan as he was interacting with these Taliban now. And it's just this incredible story. And Jordan and his friend, Teddy, his Afghan friend, Teddy, really come to the conclusion that

They can't stay in Afghanistan as we see the Taliban crack down more and more. It's just an incredible story. I'm so proud of what Monica's done. And it's out this week. It's on any platform where you can buy and rent films. So the big ones are obviously Prime and Apple. But anywhere where you can get a film, you can get Transition there. And all of the support is really welcomed. And just a final point. Documentaries have become quite formulaic. There's archive, archive, archive.

perfectly lit interview as someone tells you about the past archive archive archive interview this is cinema verite

The story is happening in front of us. We're filming the story. No one's doing a sit-down interview. We're watching life happen. And that takes a lot of time. It was a long process, probably around two years filming this. But I'm really proud of this story. And it's got incredible reviews. When people have seen it in a place like The Guardian, The New York Times, people have really reacted well to it. So yeah, I urge people to seek this film out.

So you're saying it's different from, you know, the Netflix doc series about a dentist who's a serial killer. A little bit. Yeah. I mean, is that out yet? I'm sure there's I'm sure that's in the works. There's like 15 different different versions of that. But it will be and it will be executive produced by some actor. That's it. No, just absolute fucking nonsense. Yeah.

But anyway, we are talking today about your old mainstay, not your old home, I guess you were in Bogota, but about Medellin. I get criticized for my pronunciation every single time we do an episode on that. But yeah, there's some crazy stuff happening there right now that's for once not related to the cartels. I think it's not related to the cartels, but you're going to tell us more. What's going on there? Yeah.

There may be a link to the cartels. We'll get to that later, though. So essentially what you have is you have Medellin has basically become this tourist hotspot. Medellin's approaching 2 million visitors a year. And there's all of these things to do. There's this nightlife. There's the culture. There's a, you know, it's a vibrant city filled with people.

energetic people who are welcoming to strangers and welcoming to tourists. So you've got all of these tourists coming in. But over the past three or four years, there's been this worrying rise in a number of foreigners who are being drugged and sometimes killed when they go out on these dates. And it's almost always, I think it's exclusively foreign men who

The majority of, sorry, mainly Americans going out on dates with Colombian women and ending up drugged with these drugs that is sometimes called Burandanga or Scopolamine or sometimes, and I'm not sure if this was kind of an invention by the media or not, occasionally called the devil's breath. Now, again, I'm not sure because I've never heard that in Spanish referred to as that. But anyway, what it does is it's a drug that basically renders someone a zombie. It doesn't actually knock you out.

It does make you very compliant. So these guys are going out on these dates and the idea is they're being slipped something into their drink. And what happens is, is that in the best case scenario, they're waking up the next day and they're realizing they've lost their phone, they've lost their passport and they're a bit kind of droggy, but they've survived. In other cases, the people administering the drugs are giving them fatal dosage and they get the fatal dose and they never wake up. On purpose?

No, because it's very difficult to sort of understand exactly what the dosage should be. And this talks to who the people who are doing this are. These are women often recruited from the slums around Medellin, often they're prostitutes. And I should mention.

Normally, the way these dates actually happen, either you'll meet someone in a bar and she'll come on to you, or the big one is using the dating apps. That's Hinge, that's Bumble, and that's Tinder. Now, this has become so frequent

that they're actually putting out warnings, warning men to be very careful when they go out on these dates. But back to your question about if they're deliberately doing or not. No, these women come down from the slums and they're actually having to guess, just looking at this guy sitting across the table from them, how much of the drug to give. So you can see how easy it is to make these sorts of mistakes. And there's been a number of these cases. Medellin puts out...

statistics about Americans meeting violent deaths. Sorry, foreign tourists meeting violent deaths. And they say there were 41 last year. Just around half of those were Americans. Now, included in that number is people dying from these druggings, but it's also people dying from things like an overdose.

And this year, so far, we're only in March, and already there's been 16 foreigners have died in Medellin. And I think this is an incredible story because I can't think of a tourist hotspot where foreigners are dropping at such a rate and the foreigners just want to go even more. And I think it's this incredible story because there's a dark side to this that isn't really being touched by the media, is that Medellin has become this center for drug and sex tourism. And this is kind of overlapping opportunities.

it overlapping that world. Yeah. I mean, that's one of the questions I had about it. Cause I, I actually heard of this, you know, there's a digital nomad board that I read on Reddit sometimes just for people who are looking to travel and kind of work there. And,

Medellin gets brought up as sort of a go-to place and has been for a while because for some of the reasons you mentioned, not the cocaine and the women, though that's definitely a part of it, but because it's cheap, the food is great, the people are great, the weather is great, the beach is there. It's an amazing place. I mean, I went there with you. We were working and met a bunch of cartel guys and various sicarios, but I still got to see how amazing a place it was. And that was 12 or 13 years ago. So I can't even imagine now.

But these guys that are going there, are these, you know, they're meeting them on apps. So they aren't, it's not, they're not picking up prostitutes and getting drugged. Are they? They're actually just meeting women who maybe aren't, are pretending not to be or pretending to be single women in Medellin. Like what's the, how is this coming about?

Yeah, and it's various ways. And I think this is an important thing that we should qualify. There is this, there's been a number of very famous cases. There was a 27-year-old man from California, and I think this was 2022. I think he met a woman on Tinder, if I'm not wrong.

We don't know what his... I think, look, I mean, part of this conversation is as well, is that the women of Medellin are world renowned at this point for their beauty. That is part of the thing, I think, with a single man who may be going there.

I would love to have a date with a woman. These women who were renowned for their elegance, their beauty. And I think that's part of the thing. So I think men do go there on Tinder looking for a date. But I've also been told by people who use Tinder in Medellin that certainly recently Tinder is just

a mess. It is just filled with prostitution because Medellin has become this destination for this sex tourism. And in fact, I was speaking to a prostitute for a story I was planning on doing precisely on this. And she was saying her main way of meeting clients is using Tinder.

I do think an important part of this, I do think the Medellin now has an open air sex market in what was once one of the most, most exclusive zones in the city. It's a place called Parque Geras, which if you look 15 years ago, this is where the executives would take their wives for dinner. It's this beautiful, small little park and it's surrounded by restaurants looking down on the park.

and it was exclusive bars, high-class restaurants. Now that is just absolutely filled with hundreds of prostitutes every night or certainly on the weekend. And these foreign men are meeting prostitutes there. And I do think there are cases where they're getting drugged. Now, there's a further part about this is whenever you speak to people, they say that the actual real level of druggings, the real numbers, no one knows. Because if they have hired a prostitute,

They don't really want to talk to the police about it. And in fact, we have heard of cases where people have just wanted to get the fuck out of Colombia. They've lost everything. And I think this is another part of the story. Burandanga and this type of drugs, I've known about for 15, 20 years, all my time living in Colombia. I knew Colombians who had had it, who had suffered this.

They would go to a bar. They would get chatting with people they've just met at the bar and someone would slip something. They would wake up the next day. They would have lost their keys, maybe their car, maybe all of the cash they were carrying and their phone. But also maybe they would have gone to the cash machine because, again, it makes you very compliant. Someone will say, hey, let's go to the cash machine. You'll say, sure, let's go. Hey, why don't you give me some money?

Okay, yeah, that sounds a good idea. So you are still conscious, but you're just very susceptible to everything. So anyway, Colombian friends would lose these things and they would lose the money they had, their phones, whatever. But now because we've concentrated so much of our lives into the phone, the results can be devastating. I interviewed one guy. He's a YouTuber, a travel YouTuber called Dr. Travel.

And he said he met this woman. She said, oh, come over. We're going to be doing some cooking with a friend. He went over. They're all talking in this apartment. They're all they're all listening to music. And then he was handed a drink. That was the last thing he remembered. He woke up the next day. He had lost tens of thousands of euros because they accessed his wallet.

And they act as if it's a Bitcoin and they act as this bank account. So the consequences can be devastating now because of our own reliance and centralizing of our finances in these funds. But that also tells you about how they're operating because...

The women are sometimes the hook, the bait, sorry, I should say. But we think that there are people very sophisticated that can crack open these funds, who can navigate in English, who can navigate these banks, who can know how to empty a Bitcoin wallet in a question of minutes. And so the police in Medellin have been painting this as kind of very disorganized, almost duggish.

oh, well, you know, they're just kind of drugging these foreigners. And observers of these crimes have been saying, no, this has all of the hallmarks of being very, very sophisticated.

Medina has this kind of like, or was this story, I think, of great success, right? When it came to making the city, cleaning it up, making it more safe, right? First, we had the Escobar Wars, and then it got a lot safer. Even when we were there, I think was 2010, 2011, there was this new cartel war that was sort of about to pop off potentially. But all we've heard about, all I've heard about, again, the last like five, 10 years is how safe it's gotten, how is this sort of miraculous recovery story? Yeah.

Is that the case? And is that now being threatened by these stories? Yeah. So, I mean, there's various layers to this story. And this is why I think it's such a fascinating story. You're right. It has been one of the miracles of,

of urban renewal in the world in the past half century. You take the city that is the most dangerous place on planet Earth in the early 1990s, the late 1980s, Medellin, the height of Pablo Escobar, the height of the cocaine wars as they're all battling each other, the Cali cartel versus Pablo Escobar, the Medellin cartel fighting Los Pepes, you know, all of these final days of Pablo Escobar, just total narco anarchism, lunacy.

Pablo Escobar was put down like a rabid dog in 1993. And then you have this process of essentially...

one of the most famous Colombian traffickers that isn't well known outside of Colombia takes over. You know, I'm speaking in broad strokes now, but this is Don Berna, this incredibly powerful drug trafficker who really imposes order on the city of Medellin. And that kind of helps bring a stability. Because what you don't want is anytime there's rival cartels

that can be a problem. That's the potential for war. But if there's one king, that means there's peace. Then in 2008, Don Berner is extradited to the United States where he's still in prison. I believe he's in New York. And then chaos reigned. So just after you left, we were speaking to these guys from the office of Envigado, which is exactly, this was a organization that was set up by Pablo Escobar, really established

as his armed wing of the Medellin cartel. These were the sicarios, came out of the office of Embigado. But then something interesting happened. It became something more than that. It became a collection agency for drug debts. It was a way of adjudicating disputes between different drug lords. So it became almost something unheard of. And that was, Don Berner then took that over.

And this was the way he controlled that city. We met two guys from there and they were talking about their fears for new violence. They were saying, oh my God, I'm just staying home. I'm not going out to the club anymore. And then that violence exploded in a war for the control of the office of Embigado. We think over the course of around three years, 7,000 people were killed just directly related to this war for control.

Once someone takes over the office of Enmigado, peace returns. At the other side, we've also got this other element that Medellin itself has done a lot of things. And it was interesting to hear their own explanation of how they saved their city. They said even at the height of the violence, they started thinking about trying to create cultural events so the city wouldn't only be identified with bloodshed. So for instance, they would do a poetry festival.

Well, people may have thought this is lunacy. You're talking about poetry in the middle of drug war, but it was important for them to say, we have other sides to us. And when the violence started to go down, these institutions were already there. Literary festivals, cinema festivals. Then you also had

And this is the thing that's unique about this city. I have never met a people who are more proud and love their city more than the people of Medellin. It is just something innate within them. And so you see this all the way across that city.

Compare about how we live in places like DC, London, New York. We get on a metro that's just normally people are tossing rubbish around, whatever they want. If you do that in Medellin, someone's going to tell you. Someone's going to tell you off. Someone's going to say, pick that up.

If you try that, if you leave a box of stinking food on your seat next to you, that's just we've accepted this as normal in American England. Someone in Medellin is going to say, hey, take that box of food and get it out of here. This is a public space. They have this insane, incredible culture.

pride in their city and they take care of it. So you had people trying to come together to save their city as soon as the violence started to recede. And that really did change the image. Medellin went from being the home of Pablo Escobar all throughout the 90s, all throughout the early 2000s, to now, if you ask people, I would say most people now probably identify the Medellin of the reggaeton, J Balvin, Karel G.,

the nightlife as a tourist destination.

That's why this story about the deaths of these foreigners is so dangerous, because it threatens everything like that. And it's also this new sex tourism and this new hard drug tourism is the thing that the people in the city who aren't directly benefiting from it hate it because they think they say they salvage their reputation. They became known for something more than drug trafficking. And now they feel they're going to become synonymous with prostitution and drug dealing.

So is there a lot of anger in the city right now among the population about these deaths that are happening? Are they mad at the foreigners that are coming in and taking these risks or are they just mad at their own city governments and police for not being able to stop what's happening?

I would say kind of a little bit of all of them. There was a recent case. Now, I don't think there's video of it, but it was reported in the Colombian newspaper, El Colombiano, which is the Medellin newspaper. And a woman reported that she stumbled Saturday morning, I believe. She came across an American who was called John.

That was the name he gave. And he was stumbling around in a very exclusive area. And she thought, oh, this poor young man. He said he was a DJ, an American DJ. Everyone, exactly. Everyone claims to be a DJ. But she claims he was stumbling around, clearly seemed to have been drugged. And so what she does is she gives him some water. She buys him some food.

She takes out her phone and says, do you want to phone your mother? He takes all of this. Then he hangs up the phone and she says, he says to her in English, he says to her, I'm going to tell all of my friends never to come to Medellin. She tells this story that she immediately replies to him. If your friends are coming for drugs and prostitutes, then please tell them do not come here. So there is this real, they're very tired of that type of

dark tourism, I would say, because it is increasingly evident. This is also tapped into the thing about the digital nomads you meant. It was during COVID and certainly after COVID that digital nomads in Medellin exploded. They discovered this city. They kind of walked around like they were the first people to have ever heard of Medellin. But they all reported back to these digital nomad forums saying about how cheap it was, how great it was, the great weather, the great people.

And now they've been there. They're driving the prices up so much. The word gentrification is being used all the time in Medellin. The rents are through the roof. I was doing a story on this and I interviewed a woman who was in a kind of very lower middle class neighborhood. She was saying she was being thrown out of her apartment because the rent was doubling because foreigners were now moving in there.

This is a place where you can find a rent for probably $500, but you're getting all of these retirees, these digital nomads, they're all turning up and taking over these properties. Now, one of the problem was the Airbnbs. That was also linked to the sex industry, the sex tourism as well. So because the hotels of Colombia will not let someone bring a prostitute in. So what the sex tourists would do is they would rent the Airbnbs. Now,

The landlords would just simply take these properties off the market. They just wouldn't sell. They wouldn't rent to Colombians because they could make so much money jacking up the prices for the foreigners. So now the mayor of Medellin has announced a kind of crackdown on those Airbnbs. We should also say that this got to such an extent that the U.S. embassy warned Americans at the beginning of this year to take care of these dating apps.

People from the Match Group, which is the company that owns, I believe, Hinge and Tinder, sent people to Colombia to start to coordinate with the Colombian police to give them early access to the different profiles if there was any sort of problem with it. Also, now, I believe, news reports say that if you crack open Tinder or Grindr in Medellin, you will receive a warning to be very careful about the people you meet with.

I mean, is it really that, like there were that many people there going to be digital nomads that was driving the prices up all over the city? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's incredible. Really? I mean, yeah. I've been going there for 20 years, Median, and I was just there a month ago or so. It's just, it's incredible. There is just a...

It's like any, take your top tourist destination in Paris or Barcelona. That's what parts of Medellin look like. Yeah, it's incredible. I mean, it's changed the face of it. And now there's also this unspoken thing. And again, I think if we had a better media, someone would have covered this, but we don't. Is that there's a drug tourism going on there. People know that you can rock up to Medellin, get the purest drugs you will ever have in your life,

A fraction of the price, you'll never get them cheaper. And people are going out to these clubs for these incredible nightlife as well, these incredible clubs. And that is really pissing off a lot of the local people of Medellin. And again, you've got to get into the psyche of how Colombians see drugs.

Americans and English people who haven't thought about this, about, oh, well, you know, Colombians are drugs, you know. Half of Colombians hate drugs. They have almost an irrational reaction to when they hear about Europeans taking drugs because they say those drugs have caused so much harm to my country. That's

That's a very common sentiment. So the idea of some English dipshit flying in to like snort cocaine for seven days will enrage certain Colombians. Other Colombians, you know, go out partying themselves and they're like, oh, welcome to the nightlife. But there is this kind of duality in the way drugs are seen.

Is that new, though? I feel like people have been going to Colombia for decades to do, you know, for drug tourism or whatever you want to call it. Or is it now that Colombia is seen as such a safe place, you have way more people going? Exactly. They've been going there, but I mean, there's been a, I mean, let me just say, we are not sending our finest to Colombia. Let's just put it this way. I mean, these

doofuses that you see going there. And it's really instructive. Are you speaking as an Englishman or an American or someone who's lived in both? Remember, I'm half American and half British. No, I'm just saying the English are about as bad as the Americans. You know, obviously there are people turning up from England and, you know, Holland, France, who are interested in Colombia, who are there to see, you know, who are there to go out partying. But

you've got these sex tourists who walk around. I mean, these people are just total mouth breathers. And what they're doing is they're wandering the streets and they're just, they've got no, they've got no verve. They've got nothing to them. So they're just walking around kind of hunched over waiting for the brothels to open up again. They can't even enjoy this incredibly rich city. All right, you're going there for the prostitutes. All right, well, but what about a museum during the day? What about just do something? But no, these people are so just...

their entire existence. And I'm on these forums. And because I've been, again, researching this story and part of it is the growth in sex tourism. And these forums were kind of really interesting. They're men only. And they're talking about this. And there was this kind of movement. Wait, so just to cut you off, this wouldn't be like a normal digital nomad forum, right? No, no. No, these are specifically talking about men who are talking about traveling around the world,

it was often to meet local women. And a lot of these forums were talking about this about six months ago. A lot of these forums were talking about their desire to travel the world and meet a more traditional wife. They would paint it that way. So you've heard about this, right? But these forums rapidly degenerated into just talking about prostitution at this point. And these guys would come in and they would swap tips on it. I mean, it was just this kind of

I mean, it's really, you felt like taking a shower sometimes. I like one guy came in on the other day. He said,

yo, I'm a felon. Is that going to be a problem? And I'm thinking, I fucking hope so. I really do. Because God, I mean, these, who knows who these guys are turning up to. And you just feel for these Colombian prostitutes who are just, you know, getting into incredibly, about as intimate as it gets. And these women can't scan, they can't, they've got no way of scanning these guys, of assuring their own safety. And,

So it is this... It's very... These forums constantly talk about prostitution in places like Medellin. And yeah, as I say, they're constantly just sharing anecdotes. But yes...

So people have been going to Colombia for a long time for the drugs. That's right. But it's just the sheer scale at this point. And again, I think there was something different about someone who ventured to Colombia 10 or 15 years ago. They were interested in it. They had heard personal recommendations from people to visit the Amazon jungle. Hey, and if you're in Medellin, you're going to have great nightlife and then go to the beach or go to the coffee region.

now you've got guys who are just absolutely going there only for drugs and prostitution. And half the guys can't spell the fucking name of the country. They literally will write it with the letter U. And it's like, if you're going to travel to the country, there should be at least an IQ test where you can actually spell the name of the country you're traveling to. That doesn't strike me as asking too much.

Okay. But, uh, so when it comes to like circling back to the guys that are getting, or people in general that are getting murdered or, uh, you know, accidentally overdose, whatever it is, you mentioned at the beginning of the episode, this idea that the cartels might be involved. I don't know if the cartel is code for just organized crime group in general. Can you speak a bit further on that?

Yeah, so to understand Medellin, it's this incredible city. The thing about Colombia, it's always, for me, and I'm sure Colombians won't appreciate this, but this is just the way I try to understand and I try to explain it. You can never understand Colombia if you don't understand the art, the incredible inspiration of and the legacy of someone like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, just one of the greatest novelists of all time.

And you can't understand Colombia if you don't understand Pablo Escobar. If you're only looking at Pablo Escobar, you do not understand Colombia. If you're only looking at Gabriel Garcia Marquez, you don't understand Colombia. It's always this incredible duality. So on the one hand, Colombia at Medellin is this incredible city of it's the center of it was the center of industry for Colombia. It was a major financial center for the country.

It was the kind of hub for the coffee sector, renowned to be the best coffee in the world. This is all what Medellin was. Medellin is not some backwater that's just been selling prostitution and rum for the past 400 years. Medellin is an incredibly interesting metropolis, but it also suffers from massive crime problems.

There are thought to be around 400 gangs in Medellin. They're called combos. And the combos control around two thirds of the city. And these combos, when they control a neighborhood, they control a neighborhood in ways that we just cannot imagine. They will extort people from the houses they live in. You may only have to pay 25 cents a week, but you have to pay 25 cents a week to the combo. It's almost like they're imposing taxes.

The combo will draw the outlines of the barrier of the neighborhood. It's almost like they're the government and they're drawing the borders of it. They'll resolve problems. If anyone steals from you, you wouldn't go to the police normally. You'll go to the combo. Hey, you know this guy, and he better have permission to have done it. And if he did, you're just going home empty-handed. But if he hadn't, and you're in good with the combo, that guy's in for a kicking at the least.

They resolve problems. And that was one of the things I saw in my book that when I went up to one of these slum neighborhoods, the guy was saying, look, you know, just understand I'm trying to investigate a killing. We found a dead body last night in our neighborhood. They were taking over the investigation because in this case, he was like, I don't know what this means. I need to figure out why this guy was killed. Is this the start of a new war with our neighbors? So their power is complete.

And the combos report to the cartels. Every combo works with one of the three cartels that operates in Medellin. So we talked about the office of Embigado. At some point in the last 10 years or so, the biggest cocaine organization in Colombia, which is the Uribeños, or often called the Gulf Clan, or sometimes called the AGC, they came in and took

the neighborhoods right on the edge of the city. They took them by force. And that set off a new war in Medellin. But finally,

peace was achieved and this kind of uneasy peace has remained since then. And then there's a third cartel called Bejo. So you've got these three cartels living together. All of the combos will answer to one of those three cartels. And there's something that someone told me here when I was investigating this again a month ago in Medellin. And someone in the local government said, he said, look, this is off the record. He said, the thing about Medellin is

nothing happens in the city without the say-so of somebody so when we go back to guys possibly earning ripping off an american and getting 50 60 70 000 in a night these guys are going to have to pay someone off so this money is going to end up i would assume a cut of this money is going to end up in the pockets of someone from the cartel by the way

Also, the prostitutes usually have to pay some sort of extortion often. If they're going to work in that open-air sex market, like I said, they have to pay extortion to somebody. Again, that person, that extortion money will end up in the cartel pocket as well as the drug sales. So there is an element to this that this drug tourism and the sex tourism is funding now.

And a lot of people in the city are aware of that, and that annoys them even more. And a final thing I should say just about this, about why the locals are so annoyed, is because, again, we're sending real idiots, and people just don't know how to behave. So people are just getting too high and then running through the streets naked.

It's a hassle for your city to become the wild tourist destination for someone to lose their mind for a week and then go home and go back to normality. This is where you live. You don't want to wake up and see a couple having sex in front of your house and they're saying, oh my God, I'm making memories. No, you're pissed. You know, and this is what these foreigners will do. These tourists will do. It's...

Because it's such a, because this drug and sex tourism is such a, it's not the majority of the tourists, I should say this, it's just not. There is clearly so much more to do in Medellin. But it is, I would say, an important chunk, an important minority of the tourists are turning up just for that.

They're misbehaving in really crude, obnoxious ways. As you could imagine, someone who's coming just determined to get out of their nut for the next seven days on as much drugs as they can handle, you know, they're going to act like an asshole, right? And they do. Yeah, I mean, it's got, you know, uh...

It's got, it's reminiscent of, you know, I think a lot of stuff that's happened in Thailand or the Thais do not tolerate some of that for the most part. I think they've set things up well, but reminiscent of that. I mean, it's reminiscent of, I remember being in Prague, you know, 20 years ago and just the stag parties from England, just, you know, just not, not looking great. It's a shame, shame Sean's not here because I would love to throw some insults his way, even though he's a, he's a gentleman and whatnot. Yeah.

Oh, and the English really are just the absolute... God, they're just so bad. I mean, I remember the English. I was in... This was about 15 years ago. I was in the Amazon. And there's a place called Leticia, which is this beautiful jungle. It's literally just carved out of the Amazon jungle, this little city in the middle of the jungle. It's impossible to get there from...

You can only get there by air or by boat. I mean, the roads just end at the jungle. It's like the jungle is kind of over. It's going to take over at any moment. So it's this beautiful point. And it's the jumping off point if you want to explore the Amazon. And I was there having dinner with a friend and I could see this group of people walking down tourists. I was like,

ah, they look English to me. And I said, look, just deal with it. I'm just going to pretend I don't speak English because I don't want to have a conversation with them. And the guy comes up, he says, obviously he's fast. Does anyone speak English? I just said, come on, man. But anyway, you know, my friend says, all right, well, look, I'll speak to them. And she starts talking to them and says, look, we look, it's Sunday night, by the way. And he said,

yeah, we're looking for a club. And she says, well, look, if you cross into Brazil, because it shares a border with Brazil, there's a lot of nightclubs there and they play like the local Brazilian samba music. Okay, yeah, great. Yeah, we're looking for somewhere techno though. I said, mate, for fuck's sake. You're looking for a techno rave in the middle of the Amazon jungle. Like why bother traveling if you're just going to stick to the things you do back home? This is the thing that kind of frustrates me about these new people. And I'm also on the Median expat groups.

And it's this constant whining about, hey, where do I find guacamole like I had it back in Dallas or something? It's like, why did you bother moving to a new country if you just can't let go of anything back home? Pull it back. Pull it back. No, I get it. I mean, you're seeing a place that you love and you spent a lot of time invested in change and not for the positive. So I understand that. Yeah.

Well, I mean, you know, I mean, certainly over the course of my life, I should say that I do. I should say that Colombia has become much, much more, much more, much more peaceful since whence I first arrived there. But I would add a final thing. Just I think that's a good thing. There is an immense criminal organization that I think these foreigners don't understand that is just below the surface. And they are richer than they have ever been because peace has worked out well for cocaine. Well,

Colombia is producing more cocaine than ever before.

I mean, I think it's getting up to, I think it's probably getting close to 2,000 tons of cocaine. Pablo Escobar couldn't have dreamed of this much cocaine. So a piece in Medellin that remains the capital of cocaine has been very good. But those organizations are there just beneath the surface. Yeah, I wanted to ask you about that because it's one thing if these...

that are happening, are they... If they're coordinated by the cartels or if they're just people operating in their sphere, you know, like the mafia does. They're operating in their spheres, so they've got to kick up. You know, it sounds like it's the latter, but I assume there's no coordination from the higher level of the cartel. I mean, this thing seems like pretty chump change for someone who's trafficking large amounts of cocaine. Yeah, I think... I just don't know, to be honest. I think...

I think there are very talented people, but I don't know if this is coming straight out of the cocktails. I think you're right. I think they just have to kick up. They have to operate. They're operating in someone's pond and they're saying, all right, look, we know what you're doing and you know what you need to do and you need to kick up. Exactly. I don't think that there is a...

a cyber unit to the cartel. But I don't know. I don't know. And I think it's not as organized as perhaps...

You might think, but it's also certainly not as disorganized as I think that the police have tried to say. And there's a lot of frustration with the police, by the way, about them just not really being on top of this. And I'll give you an example. I mentioned this 27-year-old guy from California who died in 2022. So he had gone out with this girl. He had snapped a photo of her.

when she didn't realize um and he sent this back to his friend saying on snapchat oh the language difficulty is tremendous and the police and then he was never heard of again and his body um he didn't come home that night to the hotel he had rented or the airbnb sorry his family were obviously getting very worried and then they start noticing strange um charges on his credit card on his bank account and this is when they get very worried his body is found the next day but

he had snapped a photo of the woman who was going to be involved in his death. And the family got to Medellin, I believe, and realized after five days, the police had still not really opened a homicide investigation, that there were just this unexplained delays. They hired a private investigator and it still took them with this perfect photo of this woman, six months to find this woman. And you would think that the institutions...

involved in this would be trying to capture anyone who in any way endangers the tourism because tourism is becoming a huge part of the local industry. I spoke to this private investigator and

And he was the one who kind of really clarified for me. He said, you know, this woman was absolutely replaceable. They just find a woman who's a young prostitute. They offer her a fraction of what everyone else involved in the scheme is going to get. She doesn't. She's never told how much was emptied from a bank account. She'll get $500 if she's lucky. She went into hiding. She changed her look, but was finally arrested by the police. And he told me that, you know, she was

had very little schooling, so made every single decision was the wrong decision in the way she approached her criminal case. If she had negotiated, she could have got a significant reduction. She said, no, I'm not going to. Maybe she was terrified that she would have to tell on some of her accomplices.

And he said, look, it's just a really sad story. She's heading for decades likely behind bars. And she almost certainly didn't intend to kill this man. But again, the family have the right to their own revenge. But sometimes these stories just end up being really sad stories. And you just feel that the real higher ups are the ones who just keep getting away with it. Yeah. I mean, it kind of leads into the last question I wanted to ask you, which is that

You know, we had a situation or I don't know if we had a situation, but there was a, you know, Tulum and Cancun, right? They were seen as basically off limits for cartel violence for a long time. They all sort of agreed to stay out of those areas because you had the retail drug trade to tourists, which was great. But then also a lot of the higher ups had investments, whether it was in hotels or

other hospitality, restaurants, bars. So it kind of was protected in a way because you don't want to jeopardize the tourism dollars. We're talking hundreds of millions, maybe billions of dollars that flow into those areas for tourism. Definitely billions, actually, that flow into those areas for tourism. But it started to kind of creep in in recent years. It seems like I would assume that these groups have investments in the hospitality industry in...

in Medellin as well. And that if these deaths start affecting the tourism there, people stop coming, you know, the hotel stops selling out, the restaurants can't make money. That's going to have an effect too. And they might want to try to slow this violence down. I think your assumption is right. It's not something I thought about. But I think you're right. I think if they are putting in substantial money and they, you know, we know drug trafficking

It's a huge injection into the legal economy. They're constantly trying to get those legal investments. If they do decide, then you will see this stopped out. I mean, it will just stop from one day to the next. If the cartels really are investing that much in tourism, you do not want to be screwing around with their business. So it would tell me that the cartels have not invested up to this point significant amounts of money in tourism, but that could all change and they could be starting now. But

you know, the crime world is also in itself, it's weird because we keep thinking of this kind of monolith. So we think of, again, much more organized sometimes. There are people in Colombia whose entire life is dedicated to trying to rip off drug couples. I mean, that's an extraordinarily dangerous line of business. But the criminality is so widespread, no one's safe. I remember speaking to a

um, uh, drug trafficker. He said, yeah, you know, we get caught in these things where they try and rent us boats and it's not their bow. And we, uh, you know, he was talking about, he was in like a three day negotiation about hiring this boat. He was looking at the end of the pier and it turned out the guy who was trying to sell him the boat just didn't have it. Criminality is quite widespread in Columbia in ways that, again, I think it's hard for us in, um,

in England or a place like America to really understand. And this is why Colombians are so protective of foreigners. They're like, there's so many different ways to get scammed in Colombia that they always take the foreigner under their wing to sort of protect them from those who will scam them. And, you know, they're scamming each other as well. The amount of different scams I've seen in Colombia from the guy who's crying next to an upset woman

box of ice cream on the floor on the main street that's a scam you know people come by and they feel bad for him uh the people who sell you things that don't work it's just constant and so that there could be people who would just keep trying to do it and hope that they stay off the uh off the cartel's radar

Yeah, that paints a very depressing picture. I think one question Sean wanted to ask if he was here was that, is it possible that scopolamine for yourself to take recreationally?

Well, no, I don't know about that. But I mean, just a step, I should actually explain a little bit by that. It's a naturally occurring fruit. And the indigenous use it for rituals, I think. I think they use it in light amounts. I've never spoken to the indigenous. I've only heard from non-indigenous sort of like report this to me. So I don't know exactly how they use it, but presumably to enter into a kind of vague, you know, out of body experience state.

They've been using it and they have it in their mythology that they say that if someone takes a nap under this Burundanga fruit, you wake up with this pounding headache. So the indigenous have always kept it kind of, they use it, but they also know that it has this dark side for it. I use the term Burundanga and that's the main one that's been used for decades in Colombia, but

But there's a host of other drugs they're using at this point as well. So this guy from California, this 27-year-old, when they did the autopsy, they found it wasn't actually Burundanga. It was other drugs that he had been administered that also presumably put him in a similar sort of zombie state.

Is there anything else you want to add about the reporting that you've done or anything you found since you've been looking into this story? Well, no. I mean, one final thing is, so the Bogota, I had been working on this for about the last six months and

I really was getting a lot of interviews and I was just kind of surprised that, well, you know, this seems to be an incredible story. The Bogota embassy, by policy, never breaks news. It's just, you know, they've been funding the government fighting a civil war. They've been funding this fight against the cartels. Their policy is just not to break

break news. They don't give away news stories. So you see all of these American journalists arrive to Bogota. They're like, oh man, I'm going to make contacts with the embassy. They never get anything for it. And then the one time the U.S. embassy in Bogota decides to break a story, it's earlier this year when they announced, look, everyone watch out. And so then my story was just up in the air. I pitched it around and yeah, I couldn't sell it. So I've got a book proposal on this. And

But I don't know. The story's also just been kind of done a lot. I still don't think someone's brought this whole thing together because it's, you know, it's like a Brian De Palma film from the 1980s. This is sleazy. This is like kind of the sex tourism, this drug tourism, but it's also this city struggling to kind of reframe its identity. And by the way, another thing I was speaking to another prostitute for this proposal, she was talking about the distorting effect of,

this sex tourism has on the city. She was studying to be a social worker. And she said, I know my city needs me as a social worker. I need to go into these slums and help the kids there and help the people who are suffering. But prostitution pays me too much. So instead of her going, actually doing something useful with her life,

she's getting paid by some guy from Ohio for sex. That sounds like OnlyFans and people in the States, though. No, absolutely. But I think it is this distorting effect that has on this really important city. And I just think the city, it's sad for me because I think the city's selling itself cheap. And that's the frustrating thing for me. It's such an incredible city. Medellin is just an experience unlike anything else.

And it's just frustrating to see the sort of worst men of England, the worst men of America rocking up there. It's just, you know, it's just depressing. But anyway, people should go see Medellin. It's an incredible experience. And of all of the places in Colombia, people go to Cartagena on the coast. They get ripped off. That's notorious in Cartagena. Everybody who comes out of Medellin comes out saying what an incredible experience it was. That's one thing I have noticed. Yeah, so...

So Toby Muse, if you guys need him, he works for the tourism board of Medellin, Medellin, however you say it. Not anymore. Now I got fired. It was sort of like that. I was like, come, but don't come, but also do come. I don't know. But your book Kilo is out there on all book selling websites and it's, it's,

One of the best reads ever on drugs and cartels and things of that nature. Thanks. Transition, I can't even say it, is out on all the streaming platforms if you guys want to watch an insane movie about Afghanistan and the Taliban taking over and everything else that went with it. And is there anywhere else people can check? You just had a big story in Rolling Stone, right? About...

I've been talking about this story for years, so I'm glad you finally got it published about bullfighting in Colombia. Yeah, that came out a couple of weeks ago. It's the Colombian bullfights. They're called the Corrales, and the important difference is from Spanish bullfighting, the bull never dies, only the men.

So you've got 2,000 drunk men get into a coliseum and try and play tricks with the ball, and the inevitable happens. Like the death toll. There's even a saying, it's a six-day festival, and there's a saying that says, it's not a real Corraleja if no one dies. So that's the level, and it's just everyone's drunk, there's music, and it's just it's like going to the Gladiator Games in 2024. It's

utterly thrilling, exciting. I had a lot of fun doing that story. It's a cool story. Check it out in Rolling Stone. Look for that. Yeah, we really missed out

on not having Anthony Bourdain alive to go down to Columbia with you. That would have been a good hour-long TV special right there. That's right. Rest in peace, Anthony. Rest in peace. But as always, patreon.com, sessionworldpodcast, bonuses, all that other nonsense. And thanks again, Toby Muse, for coming on. We really appreciate your time. Good to be back. Thanks. ♪♪♪

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