Historically High - Pablo Escobar

Episode Date: May 15, 2024

To put it plainly Pablo Escobar lived a crazy life. Not many people can say they survived a civil war to go on to create one of the most vicious yet successful drug cartels in history. He beat the odds of a bad upbringing and became one of the richest people in the world. From putting down a guerilla group who made their money by abducting the family members of narcos, to becoming a member of the Colombian government, to literally going to war with the Colombian government, El Patron craved control. Get ready for another crazy narcos episode as we get Historically High on Pablo EscobarSupport the show Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

What is up, folks? Welcome back to class. We're at it for another week. We got a goodin for you here, a bigin. Probably the biggest white whale of international drug trafficking. I couldn't do this alone. Not in my wildest dream. So I got the guy next to me.

He's the ice-kewed by easy. He's the kick of my play. The Millie to my Vanilly. Professor Adam, ladies and gentlemen. Was Millie Vanilla one person? There's a group, I thought. Oh, I. I wouldn't say the ones that caught lip syncing

Right Could be Yeah Yeah that The Ashley before the Simpson The Ashley to my Simpson This is I drug you back into my web

Just like sometimes you drag me into military stuff That I didn't really know a whole lot about I feel like my contribution to our duo Is stuff like grug cartels And narcos That maybe you didn't know a whole lot about It's called being well-rounded. Yeah, this is a, this is point guard center type stuff here.

I fed you it. I think you got into it. I enjoy whenever you get into something that I don't think is like right up your alley. And Pablo Escobar, just as a study, is very fascinating to me because we did Noriega, we did pineapple face. Noriega was kind of like a drug dealer of convenience where his play was for the power and the drugs were just kind of along with it. I think we're like Noriega was.

It was more like politics than drugs. Yeah. It was already established in that position as far as political and militarily and then drugs were just like an ins to a means. Whereas this was kind of the reverse. Yeah. And chopo kind of along that same lines.

No interest in politics. No. Just straight, straight dealing. He wanted to make money. Pablo was at a fight with an entire country, whereas Chapo was fighting other cartels, whereas Noriega was fighting like other countries. So there's kind of three different approaches to it.

And the fact that Pablo himself, just as the Medellin cartel can fight an entire fucking country, I don't know what Columbia's standing military was at the time. but Pablo was making more money than the GDP of a lot of countries back then. Oh, yeah. I would venture to guess if you took the list of all the countries, just Pablo alone in the Medellian cartel, 50% more, or we're probably making more than 50%.

I think that's even conservative. That has a good chance. But the man's just a lot of very interesting research. The time that he grew up in, anything in South America always kind of feels like it's up for grabs but again it's usually up for grabs between like a country or there's a civil war going on that's one thing I think that we really don't see

living in the US is because there's such a structure here and basically there are so many different places in the world that are still in their like Wild West days it's just a time frame where they still have certain technologies that we have of the day and everything, but from a standpoint of like enforcement for things or being able to squash essentially these outside the law type establishments and everything, it's still very much like they feel like they don't have the resources to do it. Well, naturally, I think here in America, they took care of this issue by rounding up

anybody that would be an issue for war to try to take land back or to try to take over and just killed them immediately or pushed them into little remote areas where they couldn't do a whole lot. Whereas down here in South America, it's from Chile all the way up to whatever's Panama. Yeah. Yeah. You can, there's war infections everywhere in there. Every country has someone that's trying to topple the current regime.

Well, and I guess that's true too. There's so many countries in that one area where the United States just spans such a large, vast area that to get into it it's Canada on top or Mexico on the bottom like there's not 14 countries that touch us that could sneak in a different way down from north to south seems just to be an escalation of the shit going on like Canada everyone in Canada is just like yeah okay whatever we don't want to split up let's just stay together then you come down to the US and it's like there's you know 50 50 divide here then you go down to Mexico and you have essentially like warring cartels and everything like that there's a smathing

of contention. Yep. And then you get down to South America and it's just fucking shit running a while in South America. So the further south you go, the crazier it gets. I will say, though, South America is intriguing to go see. There's a lot of stuff down there that seems like it would be very cool. It seems like it's such a juxtaposition of like extreme lows, but then just stuff that looks like it's fun of shit.

Yeah, you get everything. Costa Rica is one of those, they're called Blue Bands, I want to say, where it's like the people live the longest and have the best life. Yeah, yeah. Blue zones. Blue zones. Yeah, blue zones. All right.

Well, we're not going to keep you waiting any longer. We might as well jump straight into Pablo. The El Patron. The boss. The Robin Hood of South of the Robin Hood of fucking Columbia. Whatever you want to call him, we're getting into Pablo. You missed terrorists on that list of things. Oh, I was going more toward like the self, the self-given nicknames.

So the ones given by the people that still to this day, at him and revere him is essentially a not a messianic figure but more of a champion of the of the poor and of the downtrodden. Yeah, and I truly, this is immediately, I think, where we differ and I really have no problem with it.

Pablo, to me, just the way that he's grown up kind of paints a picture of a guy who wants to do things, but saw so much much bad shit as a kid that he just has no like barrier to how he wants to handle things. So like he wants to accomplish things that maybe from from just like a quick glance perspective, a benefit to people who need the most benefit.

Yeah. But at the same time, he doesn't have that moral compass that says, I can go to this point to try to help these people. But going any further, what I'm doing, the good I'm doing definitely isn't going to outweigh the cost that it's going to take for the bad shit that I'm going to have to do. Yeah, he was just like, as long as I'm doing some good here,

I can just do whatever the fuck I want over here, and it all somehow bounces out. Yeah, if I save 100 people from dying, like building them houses and infrastructure and everything like that, I can go knock off 500. Is that, what's the... Like, the scales did not make sense whatsoever.

No, the ratios were very far off. But he grew up at a time called La Vuelencia. And La Vient, Lincia was a 10-year civil war between 1948 and 58. It was the role, oh, shit, the result of an assassination by this guy named Jorge Alessierre, uh, guy, dietin, I don't know. I feel like I was so much more confident, uh, with Spanish than English or Spanish than like Greek. But I think it's just different. It's all great to, it's still hard.

Yeah. but he was the frontrunner for the liberal party and after his assassination happened which there's questions just like any point in time America had a lot of hands in things that happened in South America with the hope of keeping democracy

or spreading democracy basically just trying to keep communism out yeah well and on the other end of that spectrum like you just said the communists were also very interested in South America as well. Yeah. After Cuba, working their way down in there.

You needed to have a foothold. Like Cuba was an island. It was easy to go ahead and kind of like, basically what do they call it, like put an embargo on an island and keep them from establishing a foothold there. If they could have a permanent base landlocked of operations

in which to go ahead and kind of spread communism from, that was the key goal. Cuba definitely wasn't the key goal there. No. So I don't know who, committed the assassination. There were kind of like American factions that were helping out. There were communist factions that were helping out. And then you had two parties who had still established themselves because Colombia had been a country, I think, for a pretty decent amount

of time. The Liberal Party and the Conservative Party of Colombia just basically went to war. And they went to war to the tune of 200,000 people. 2% of the population died in 10 years and love Valencia. It's a lot of fucking people to die in a civil war, it feels like. And these kind of rebel groups just took over

different parts of the area. A lot of this was in the countryside. There wasn't a whole lot of fighting in the city. But the countryside is so important because that's where all the agriculture comes from to feed the cities. Well, especially during this time

where you're talking about, you know, the 1940s to 1950s, this is in a time where there's a ton of like, technological industrialization. So it's still very much an agricultural, like, type economy. Yeah. So everything that's being grown, you know, that's all not being able to be done in the city. And so when you're trying to essentially take over areas, you're just kind of moving through these small towns and villages, pretty much just fucking burning and decimating it everywhere you're going. Well, and that's where we get to our guy.

Pablo Emilio Escobar Gaviria. Gaviria is interesting to me because it's going to come up later on, and maybe Gaviria and Columbia is like Smith or Johnson here. But Pablo went by these four names, and again, something that's completely foreign to me. I would love for a South American listener to explain this. But his father was able to Jesus Escobar. The Escobar makes sense. And his mom was Himalinda Gavaria.

So, like, the kids get both last names, essentially, or can you choose, like, which one is last based on which parent you liked more? I think the parents have to establish that. I think there's probably a commonality to it, like, in, I want to say, it's in certain ancient cultures where it's the last name is technically said first. And then the, so your family name is what's said first. your individual name is what said second. There's got to be, we're so used to how things are now where it's just like the concept

of just taking the father's name, that's something that's got to be almost from an economical standpoint. It's patriarchal. Yeah, exactly. And so maybe they're just, you know, they're still rocking that, that advancement in being able to go ahead and be like, no, there's two mergings here. You're a merging of two different people, and so you're going to carry both names. It could be.

I think it's sort of interesting because Chappo Guzman Lorea, his mother's last name is Larea, and you have Pablo Escobar Gaviria, but you don't know that second last name because you just know their father's last name. Maybe that's not interesting. Maybe it just caught me a little off guard. He was the third child of seven.

Abel was a farmer, and Hermalinda was a teacher. There's always questions. that I don't understand is to like where these people were born because he was born in what I thought was Rio Negro but I've heard like two other places where he could have been born. What were the other two places? There's one that's like the prefect of... So I also had Rio Negro and it was in the Antiochia department. So Antiochia would be essentially state.

What we compare to a state? Oh. Because if you're saying so it would be like Los Angeles would be Rio Negro. anti-Ekea department, which is such a weird way to phrase, it would be the state, California, and then Columbia, the country, the United States of America.

So I think maybe it's just kind of divided up like that. Hmm, okay. And he was born during La Violencia, and one of the earliest memories that we heard about him was the conservative party was rolling through town at night, and they were going door to door,

and they were just raiding these houses, and murdering people in the street. So Abel and Melinda blocked the door. They put Pablo and his brother

and the kids in one room together in the back of the house and just started praying to God that that door didn't get broken down. Somebody must have been listening because the door didn't get broken down. Somebody also may not have been listening

because when the door didn't get broken down they set a fire to the house. Yeah. If we can't get in we're just going to burn it down. Yeah. Um, luckily, they all made it out of the house alive. Unfortunately, making it out of the house alive, young Pablo being carried by his older brother,

just saw all of his neighbors and everything being murdered out in the street. Oh, yeah, I think they, they made it out basically after, and I can't remember which party it was. Was it the conservative party that came through? I believe so. So after they came through, they had to, you know, the house is on fire. It's fucking filling with smoke. Coincidentally enough, at the time this is all. happening, I think the, what would be considered the opposing forces kind of started to come through and started to push them out. And so someone was able to get them out of the house or they got out of the house. When they came out, essentially the conservative group had moved on and was, you know, moving down the road, killing people. But when he came out, like you were saying, basically, literally like blood in the gutters to where like it's coming up on your feet, he saw neighbors hung from like either street lamps or trees. So,

seeing this as a young kid would definitely, seeing how normal this seemed and everything, would just be like, okay, I guess this is where I'm living. I guess this is how things just happen. Yeah, your moral compass, your right from wrong is so messed up right at the beginning of life that I think it's sort of tough to come back from. They end up moving to Medellin. They left Abel back in Rio Negro. I don't know if Abel just didn't want to come.

if he was still using the farm to make them money still. It kind of seems like that with his mother being a teacher. She was able to go ahead and get work in Medellin. And his father, I think if both of them were to try to leave, I think that's at a time where, you know, you can't just restart and reestablish yourself, especially because moving to Medellin, I don't know how much his farming skills or what his, you know,

I don't know if he had any other skills that would lend themselves to any other jobs. if you grow up essentially a poor farmer, chances are that that's really all you're probably able to do. Yeah, he wasn't a city folk. Yeah, and so him, you know, regardless of he wanted to leave or not, he definitely, I think, would have justification being like, take the kids and go. But this is all I know. This is all I'm going to be able to do. I'll be able to send you some money as I continue to do this. But there's nothing for me where you're trying to go. So they move into Medellín.

Pablo starts hanging out more with his cousin, Gustavo. Gustavo and him have this lifelong friendship family that I think is kind of sweet. Yeah. Like it's kind of cool. Pablo was a hustler at a very, very young age. One of the things that they used to do was they would play street soccer, street football. That was something that was a lifelong love of Pablo's that I find very interesting to, just how much interaction he has once he gets famous with the country.

And I think that later on he ends up financing. the Colombian soccer team or there's like a Colombian professional team and just pours money into it. And they become like a powerhouse in South America. But the way that they would play soccer in the street would be they would shove a bunch

of clothes into a bag and tie it off really, really tight so it's strong enough to be able to kick. And the police had come through and they would take the guy's balls because they didn't want them playing out in the street. And finally one day, Pablo was like, I've had enough of these fucking police officers. I've run out of fucking clothes. Yeah. I didn't have a lot to start with.

Those are my fucking underwear, man. I need that ball back. We had to pool our clothes together to create a soccer ball this time. You guys are just going to take it. So this group of friends at Pablo Ed is like, fuck it. As soon as they steal our ball, you guys start hucking rocks at their patrol car. And as soon as the police came, they stole their ball. They started hucking rocks at the police car. Some of them got away. This is a running from the bear type scenario. You don't have to be the fastest guy. You just have to be faster than the slowest guy. And Pablo and Gustavo both got picked up.

And Pablo does something at a young age that's going to set the tone for the rest of his life again. And he asks if he can pay off the police to get the ball back. Yeah. And he does. So he started to figure out that even as low as just kids playing soccer in the street getting their ball taken, everybody's got a price. The first time you try something and then you succeed at it,

you're going to be like, oh, shit, this is easy. Yeah. This works. Like, I'm going to just go straight for this tactic in the future. And growing up poor, you kind of need to know how to navigate run-ins with the police. He sees that there's a chance that maybe the police can be bought really at any level. And once he realizes that crime is that easy and you might be able to get out of it, he just kind of starts going nuts.

He left school before his 17th birthday and spent two years just doing some crazy stuff with Gustavo. one of the things that they did that I thought was really, really weird. They would steal headstones and they would blow the names and everything off. Yeah, just like either grind it down or blast it to where it and then just resell them. Yeah. Who's buying headstone second hand off the street like that? Like, is that a hot market? I don't know.

Maybe it was because we're going to get into a point where like there's a lot of death. True. And maybe it's more of like, hey, you know, we could sell a lot more headstones if we were to create a lot more demand and need for these. Headstones. Drew. Yeah, they got to replace them somehow if they can. So if they're just buying it back, we're making our money back. That lasted until he realized that cars were kind of a better way to go, which makes a lot of sense.

I think you're going to get a lot more money for cars. He starts out, too. He starts kind of like, I can't remember the guy he initially starts working for. But he's running apparently illegal cigarettes were a thing. Oh, yeah, we'll get to him. Okay. So he also kind of smuggles some illegal cigarettes. They had a fake lotto ticket scam.

that they were running, which I don't even know back then what a lottery ticket looked like. No? So is it more so when I think lottery ticket like that, for some reason, my head admittedly goes to scratchers. But I know it's probably more so like a Powerball type thing where they're just forging numbers and giving people tickets. And then, yeah, finally moves on to car theft. He actually, I think, went back to high school or tried to realizing that he needed to try to finish that. just because he did start to have aspirations of doing more and realize that college was probably going to be a necessity

for him to do that, he doesn't end up graduating, but he definitely forges a high school diploma than he used to get into college. Yeah, maybe. But yeah, and forging a high school diploma is no different than one of the car rackets that they had.

If you can forge a lottery ticket, I'm pretty sure you can probably forge a high school diploma. Yeah. But when they had the cars, and they were stealing cars, they had to resell them. As soon as somebody would come out and say, hey,

my car is stolen, that information would go to the police and you can't resell a car that's hot. So he went to the police station and started bribing whoever was taking the calls about stolen cars to not put the cases in so he could sell them. When that didn't work,

he started going directly to like the DMV and was issuing fake titles to these stolen cars. So he already learned that you could pay the police, excuse me, also you can pay government officials to forge documents for you to be able to keep selling stolen cars. But his idea to go to college was he wanted to be a defense lawyer. And he, I guess maybe had a pretty good idea of how the law worked because he was running a foul of it constantly. But I think he wanted to help his area. And maybe it was so he knew he could get himself out of trouble because of his life.

You know thy enemy? Yeah. Well, and I think too, because of his aspirations wanting to get into politics, I think it was more of a power thing. He saw at that point that the people that had the power were the people in political appointments. And so also looking at that, he's like, well, what do all these people that are in these political appointments have in common? A lot of them tend to be lawyers or went to law school or had some type of background of that.

So in order for me to get to position B, I need to first get in. to position A. So he ends up going to college to study law, but kind of finds that maybe it's not what he thought it was going to be, as far as what is required of him to get a degree in law, and goes back to the thing that seems to be working. You go back to the well, and he goes back to crime. He was just so good at crime.

This, I think, is where we're probably going to deviate from most of the podcast about Pablo Escobar, is there's a lot of people that want to and I think we do this with a lot of bad guys you just want to go ahead and dismiss everything that a bad guy did because he was a shithead I kind of look at situations like Pablo and like well he was really good at doing what he did

it was awful what he was doing you're trying to separate the art from the artist yeah his art was phenomenal his art was terrible for everybody else but he was really good he was a good artist he was extremely good at a bad thing loved Robin Banks and the people

this is again not but not not he loved doing it he was successful at it but the way in which he went about it you would just be like no that's how are you successful at that

yeah because he wouldn't ever point the gun at anybody no and he would walk in in broad daylight yes and then sometimes he would wait until the police got there the police would get there and somehow that didn't matter to him he was able to get out

of the situation there's just so many odd things that go on down there that he gets away with. And at the age of 22, he gets his first real big score. In Medellin, there's like a textile market, and the textile factory is run by a guy named Diego Etchavaria. And Etchavaria is a not great guy.

He's kind of running a sweatshop operation. There's a lot of people in Medellin that work for him that aren't really big fans of him. So at 22, Pablo kidnaps him. And then gets a $50,000 ransom that was paid by his family. And then Diego's body is found a couple months later in a ditch outside of Pablo's hometown.

So, but at the same time, this guy was a really bad guy for the people. And so whenever the people started to see Pablo around town and knew that he was the one that did it, they started, they nicknamed him doctor. They're like, hey, doctor, has it going on. Thanks, doctor, because he kidnapped Diego and killed him. like it's one of those things where like you look at the means in which he's using to accomplish these things but then also the results so as the people living in this area medelline and medine essentially becomes like this industrial hub and aside from bogatah during this time medine ends up becoming the second largest city in columbia so this isn't like when we say hometown and everything it's where he's from but this is a pretty fucking big city and when you have a

essentially like a local person that is using not the best means to accomplish something, but in the end, the benefit is benefiting the people. They're going to look at that person and say, well, he's doing it with good intentions. And we're not exactly having to suffer for the bad shit that he's doing. We're only kind of gaining the benefit. Yeah. Like this guy's doing things to stick up for us. When in actuality, he's just like, well, no, I'm doing this for money.

and if I happen to gain the love of the people while doing this or some type of positive status within the community, then that's just icing on the cake. Well, Andrew Maria was a bad guy. So he did what a lot of the town people would have wanted to do and kill him. Also, they kind of probably forgot about

the $50,000 ransom that he took for killing him. I don't know how many of them were privy to that. Yeah, probably not a lot. That's not publicly available information. No. So after the, that, and he's no stranger to the law at this point, he does end up getting arrested

in 1974 for stealing a car. That's not where the famous mugshot comes from. I don't think that's actually coming up, but he beats that case because he's bribing people left and right to be able to get out of it. He starts working for a gun named Raphael Puente,

or Puente, and he's smuggling contraband. He starts out as a bodyguard because him and Gustavo got some bodies under their belts. They've done some contracts. killing and excuse me Raphael gives him this foothold into this contraband ring because he's got an issue where

there's shipments that are coming that he's losing like half or more of the supply rolling in. Yeah so the stuff is coming in but it has to be essentially unloaded, sorted, distributed all that kind of stuff so the people that are doing this they're the first ones you know that are getting their hands on this product and before it even gets back to Rafael,

I think they said he's losing somewhere in the neighborhood of like 50% of his product from basically stuff being stolen from him by these guys that are unloading all this, all of this. So he sends in Pablo and he's like, hey, I'm going to put you in charge of this. And instead of kind of going at it heavy-handed, Pablo ends up meeting with all of these guys

that are in charge of like the distribution, the receiving of all of these products and are like, hey, we need to stop. you guys need to stop stealing but I know why you're doing it you're not making enough money yeah so he goes and he makes a deal essentially with raphael and he's like i can fix this problem but i want what was the amount they wanted it was 30% they want half okay so he wanted half of the proceeds but he said he was going to be fixing his problem by fixing his problem raphael's already losing half of this so he's already losing half the money so if he can have it fixed yeah he's

still losing half of it but then the process itself is being fixed to where then they can make more money overall. Well, and he won't be losing more than half. Half is kind of like the minimum that he was losing. Yeah. And what Pablo does is he keeps, I think, this was the 40% or 30% that he was keeping. He used the rest of the proceeds to pay the guys. And the guys were so happy that one of the reports said that they were actually bringing stuff back that they had stolen from before because they felt guilty that Pablo was there trying to take care of them. Yep. So Pablo completely fixes Puente's deal.

He's got a good understanding that you have to take care of your guys, so those guys will take care of you. And he was kind of tired of working for anybody at that point. He wanted to be his own boss. There was a time before this where I think he had told Gustavo, or maybe his brother, who we'll talk about here in a second, he told him that if he didn't make a million pesos by the time he was. was like 30, he was going to kill himself. He had that drive to where he wanted to make so much money that he thought if he didn't have a million pesos by the time he was 30, his life wasn't well lived.

So in order to make that money, they follow a lead. Him and Gustavo follow a lead that they get from a guy named La Cucco Rocha. Cockroach. You've heard that song, right? Yeah. Yeah. I had no idea that it was the cockroach that we were singing about the whole entire time. That's based on this guy?

La Cuccovach. No, not this guy, but I didn't know what a cockroach. Cupertcha. I didn't know that we were just singing the cockroach, the cockroach, to get some cocapes down in Peru. And when they would go down to Peru, they had a very interesting way of the way that they would get there and the way that they would come back. They would go from Columbia to Ecuador. Once they got across that line, they would pick up another car with Ecuadorian plates on it. And they would drive that to the Ecuador-Peru-Pru country line.

jump over to Peru, switch cars again to one of the Peruvian license plate. And so that way they thought that they would arouse less suspicion if there weren't a ton of different plates crossing through. Yeah, if you don't have a plate going through Peru that's actually registered in Columbia, your assumption is that this car is coming in and then going to be going back to Columbia. Well, why would it be driving back to Columbia? Yeah, it's a pretty far drive.

I don't know how big Ecuador is, but I'm sure there's, you have to have a reason to be making that drive. they would pick up the cocapes in Peru then they would do the same thing the cars back and forth and back and forth and him and Gustavo used to race to get back to see who could get back the fastest but again Pablo's still doing the work

Pablo wants to be the head nut he wants to be the guy and so Pablo starts hiring drivers to make these same trips down and back through he gets to the point where he's just like I'm kind of assuming a lot of risk on this by doing this myself

when I can be paying people. The whole point of this is to distance myself essentially from positions that I can then be tied to it or arrested for it or get in trouble with it. That's why I'm needing to pay these people for. So he starts stepping back

from the actual physical act of doing this stuff, but at the same time brings in people and this whole thing has kind of been what he's been doing up to this point has almost just been like training for what he's going to be doing in the future. He learns kind of what he can get away with,

what he can't get away with as far as like stealing things like that as far as like the smuggling of contraband he figures out how to kind of do that and then also kind of in a weird way like his management skills being able to go ahead and manage this contraband and people and everything he learns that

that skill set as well well he does end up getting popped one time he got pulled over and I think it was in his like one of his fenders or something like that but he gets found with a bunch of coca paste yeah so the Colombian security services which are the DAS so doesn't, the acronym isn't like ours

where it stands for something. It's probably in Spanish. Oh yeah, probably. He's arrested in May 76 with 39 kilograms of coca paste hidden in a spare tire. Oh, a spare tire. And once he gets arrested, he goes to work doing

what he does all the time, trying to bribe people to get him out of it, and ends up finding he's running into a bunch of dead ends probably because they don't know Pablo's power, and so they're sort of underestimating it. End up talking one of the guards into letting him go for a stroll and sneaks out. He gets back to his mother and his mom's like, no, I didn't raise you to do this.

Go back to prison. She still has no idea, essentially, that he's a criminal at this point. He's probably like, Mama, Mama, you know, I'm working doing this. And she's like, oh, good for you. You're such a good boy. Yeah. And somehow he is put into a situation being incarcerated where he is able to kind of like go on walks. It seems like white collar.

Yeah. Like white color prison at this point. And is just like, yeah, I'm going to go and go for a walk with the guards. Like, see in a little bit, Pablo, and he just ends up leaving. Well, before he comes back to turn himself in, they come up with this scheme to basically show them this series of x-rays. They're, of course, not his. But the x-rays are suggesting that he's, is it terminally sick? Yeah, there's some lung issue that he's going to die soon.

And so the first judge that they have, he's somehow able to facilitate changing that first judge. I'm not sure exactly the specifics of it. And then gifts himself into a position where the second judge is someone that's able to be bribed. And the second judge pretty much dismisses the case. And then surprise, surprise, a year later, the arresting

agent that had arrested him with the DAS ends up being assassinated. Crazy turn of events. I don't know. I'm sure it was totally unrelated. Yep. But the empire has to start the empire has to do the Medellin cartel has to have a starting point at some point before we get to that I also forgot oddly I none of this is odd I guess um Pablo ends up marrying

15 year old Maria Victoria Hanao and he actually met her when she was 13 so I guess at least he didn't marry a 13 year old he married a 15 year old yeah he was like 26 at the time yeah there's a very large gap in age. Roberto, who I believe was an architect, has stepped in to keep his books. So he's got family in there and they buy

an estate eventually. I didn't really know where to put it in so we can talk about it now because it's fucking awesome. Hacienda Napolis. Yes. Hacienda Napolis brings up some of my favorite parts of the Pablo Escobar story.

The estate was gigantic. It was approximately 150 kilometers or 93 miles east of Medellin, 155 miles north of Bogota. The estate covered 20 kilometers square kilometers. Yeah, like 7.7 square miles, I think is what they said. Of land, yeah. And it was huge. They actually said that he had to create a road from one side of the estate to the other because it was taking him hours driving the roads that they had to get across it.

And in order to go ahead and fund this, he has started moving into the production of cocaine at this point. When they started running coca paste and everything, they knew that it was going to essentially lead to them distributing and actually manufacturing the cocaine itself. And while he's doing this, just kind of the smaller operation that he has at this point, was he flying the initial plane himself as well?

I don't think he was flying it into America. I think he had hired a, he's actually very, very famous, the first guy that he did it. Barry Seal? Barry Seal, yes. Okay, he was one of the guys that was helping do that. At the Hase Andapolis, the entry, like the little, I guess, archway that you go through, he actually had a replica of, like, his first smuggling plane placed on top of that.

So when you're driving into the Hacienda, you would pass under this, basically, plane that was pursed on top of this, like, entry arch. And it was just like, this is what built. you're seeing the small meager beginnings of what built this you know fucking sprawling complex and you're starting to get you get an idea of what just kind of the um trying to think of the phrase for the the the tastes the Pablo starts to have as far as like the opulence and things like that anything that you could think of like even on a whim that you would want at your house it it's all possible due to how much wealth he's you know accumulating at this point

some of the features of the Hossienda. I'll let you talk about the zoo. I want you to talk about the zoo. So he had a Formula One race track. What the fuck, man? Who's racing there? The fuck, who's racing there? Especially in the 70s?

Like, that had to have been the first Formula One track in South America probably. Probably somewhere in like Rio. Okay, yeah, Brazil. But he probably saw that and he's like, hey, maybe if I create one eventually all become so powerful that they'll start doing races here. Well, and he probably had to see it somewhere. Yeah, exactly. He, a bull ring.

Very cool. The house was, of course, was of course huge. But these weird, like, metal dinosaur structures that he built, he built, like a, I don't know if it was a water park, but some type of, like... He had a bunch of water slides.

A bunch of water slides and everything with, like, this giant octopus statue. Man-made lakes all over the estate. Mm-hmm. But again, what did he love to do as a child? He loved to kick the soccer ball around. Oh, yeah, and his own soccer pitch.

Yeah, like a very big, nice, well-maintained. They said it was one of the best soccer pitches in the country. Yeah. Just at this private estate. He also brought the largest zoo to Columbia. Not a public zoo. No, he did. He opened it up to the public.

Oh, he did. Some parts, sometimes they would have, like, come see all this stuff. In the zoo, the animals were from all sorts of different continents. He had antelope, elephants, exotic birds, giraffes, hippopotamuses, which we'll get to. Ostriches, ponies, just anything that you could think of. There was actually a brothel on the land that they would bring prostitutes in for his guys to bang. He's also running a lot of this, his operation out of this too.

So this whole thing complex is, you know, part home for his family, part for. Portress to go ahead and protect everyone, but then at the same time, an operations center for the Medellian cartel. So he's got basically living quarters for all of his guards and everything like that. That's why, you know, they're out there playing soccer on the fucking soccer pitch, holding their fucking oozy's. Fucking probably has their like shoulder holsters and everything while they're out there kicking the ball around. But yeah, you got to keep your guys happy. So why wouldn't you put a brothel? And I just imagine like they're processing coca paste.

And he's like, you guys have had a really hard day. What's he say? We all go out on the soccer pitch and go kick the ball around. And there's like everybody gets on their radios and like, hey, leave your buddy come. We got a soccer game going on. There's different teams. They're like the chemist team. Uh-huh. There's the packaging team. The security forces. Yeah, the sorting team, all that shit.

And Pablo's just getting a hat trick every game because they're letting him score. Someone is on a breakaway and Pablo just fucking encaps them while they're running. He can't catch up until he pulls his guy out and shoots him. They probably just pull him running. off the field and bring another guy on. But the guy just... Offsides. Yeah.

The ref goes to pull a red card on him and he just pulls up his shirt. There's a guy and he's like, ah, never mind. He turns around and hands the red card to somebody else. He's like, I wasn't talking to you. I was talking to the guy behind you. But he seems like he was just... I don't want to say he's a fun billionaire, but the way that he spent his money all pretty much lines up with shit that I think I would spend

my money on. It's Richie Rich type shit. Yeah. Yep. Blank check. Zoo, a very odd thing, but he was bringing in animals. He was getting animals shipped into Colombia from all these different. It's not like he has a permit.

He's like, I'm opening a zoo. I have this permit from the country. I'm able to bring in these animals. All of this is done illegally. Can you really call it smuggling, though, when it's an elephant? Like, everybody knows going through the port that there's an elephant on the ship. There's no. It's still smuggling because you're paying those people off.

Do you think that he started out with like six elephants and only two of them? made it, so he just called that a win. I guess. I think, I don't remember if it was the rhinos or the hippos, but he'd actually purchased them from the San Diego Zoo. I believe it was. So he's getting

animals from zoos and I don't know how much money he's spending to do it. But these hippopotamuses that he has ends up getting out, or they end up breaking out excuse me, is the Hacienda kind of falls into disrepair. We'll talk about how that happens.

but Columbia has the largest living grouping of hippopotamuses in the world outside of like their natural habitat in Africa. It got so bad that the government in like 2017 or 2020 had to go through and sterilize the hippos because they have no natural predators in South America. So that process, there's I think a little bit more to it. So I think for the, there's actually documentaries called like one of them is called

like cocaine hippos. And it's just focused on essentially, the hippos that now live in Columbia that were brought in originally by Pablo to be part of the zoo. So in 2021, there were about 100 hippos that they stated had escaped and were in areas like

in the river and in these lakes and everything. Which, can you imagine that? There's just this section of fucking Colombia that is just like, okay, which ones are the hippo lakes? Which ones are the hippo rivers? And in 2023, it was up to

166. So there were 166 hippos that they were able, well, you could really consider any hippo there was a descendant of the followers. They sterilized when they were going through. And I think part of this was just kind of giving out the good information without really providing the bad information. So they did actually sterilize some of them. I think it was like 20 that they decided to sterilize. Oh no, I think I know where this is going. Some of them were transferred and I'm doing that in quotes. And then some were euthanized. So I'm assuming that they sterilized enough of them to where they were like This is fucking taken too long

Like how are we supposed to fucking like We're 20 hippos in and this is getting to be a fucking nightmare Well we're just gonna transfer some of them And then we're gonna euthanize some of them So I'm guessing a vast majority of those were Transferred and euthanized They met a Pablo-esque ending They said when they were doing kind of the extrapolation of how bad the hippo problem could be

They said if they wouldn't have touched it They were gonna reach somewhere around the neighborhood of 1,000 hippos by 2035. Well, I want to say this is just pulling it out of the hip because I know they're very dangerous. Hippos are like one of the most dangerous animals in the world. Yeah. Because they're so large and they're so angry

and you're taking them on usually in a water environment that they're going to thrash your ass and they're going to kill you very unceremoniously. Like, you know how, what do they say? Like the deadliest animal in Africa is actually the water buffalo. Something like that. Yeah. I want to say it might be hippos. And I think hippos are right there with it as far as it.

Yeah, they're insanely territorial. They're enormous. They fucking attack you from under the water so you don't know where they're fucking coming from. So the fact that it even got to be 100 or 166 hippos. A lot of hippos. They were just like, they did not nip this fucking hippo problem in the ass before it became a big issue. No, and there wasn't a large swath of land that 160 hippos were on. It was pretty concentrated.

Yeah. So you were seeing quite a. few of them. You wouldn't just go out and see one usually. But to talk about the kind of good family man that Pablo was and how much he loved his family, his youngest, his most precious daughter

comes up to him one day and he says, baby, what would you like for your birthday? And she goes, El Patron, father, I would love a unicorn. What did Pablo do for his daughter? I'm assuming he made a unicorn. He made a unicorn. He

stapled a horn to its face and he stapled wings to its back. And on her birthday, this horse who was just stapled very, very hard to get... Probably injected with some fucking horse pain killers. Comes trotting out of the barn and his daughter's eyes light up. Oh my God, Dad, you found me a unicorn. This is the greatest day of my life. The horse just constantly going to kill me. And then a month later, the horse dies because of the infection from the staple.

just checks out. The thought process... It flew away. Yeah. It flew away. Yeah, but you're like, well, how can I create a unicorn? I mean, I literally brought in hippopotamuses from Africa. How are you not fucking satisfied with these goddamn hippos and the giraffes and all that kind of stuff?

I'm not going to... On the off chance that there is a unicorn somewhere, I'm probably not going to be able to find it. So let's just go get some paper mache and build some wings and a horn. We'll just staple it to one of the horses in the barn. So his daughter, Manuela? I think so. Yeah, was the youngest kid and then his son, Juan Pablo, was the older child. Yeah, Juan Pablo is a very fun documentary out.

I believe it's called Sins of My Father. And it's pretty interesting to hear sort of the counter programming. And we always, we got the whole story. We hear it from our side of it. And I don't think our side of Pablo Escobar's life is completely wrong. I think that it's very, very accurate. Yeah. But there is this misunderstanding that his son Juan Pablo growing up heard everything going on from his family's point of view.

So more of the victim side of it than what Pablo was doing to just hundreds and thousands of people. Well, and it's interesting too because he takes, you know, whereas you see the situation with like El Chapo, you have his son who is just like his second in command is running the family business with him. you basically have a situation where strangely enough, I'm not sure had Pablo Escobar survived longer, what would have happened to his son if he would have been brought into the fold or whatnot, but you have him not being able to take that step because his father eventually is going to be out of the picture,

and now he's someone who's basically very staunchly anti whatever his father stood for. So you kind of see the juxtaposition of like, I don't know if he tried to keep his son and his family away, from that lifestyle, which I'm sure he did as much as possible, but the fact that he wasn't willing to, like, bring his children into it, I mean, I'm not saying

it's a silver lining, but at least he was trying to keep some separation, whereas some of the other guys like El Chapo are just basically like, come with me, boy. I will show you how the family business works. Well, and I think a lot of that too was by the time, one, Pablo, was old enough to kind of get in the mix. Things

weren't going super good for Pablo. So maybe there wasn't that opportunity for the torch. The timing was definitely beneficial for him not ending up in this lifestyle. Yeah. But the start of the Medellin cartel comes in a very, I guess a good way for smugglers, but Pablo brings all these other smugglers in. There's a group called the Ochoas that are also sort of running cocaine. And they have a problem with a rebel group called M19. M19 is a rebel faction in Colombia that's trying to topple the government again.

And the way that they were making money in order to do this was they were kidnapping the children and family members of smugglers. Which, I mean, not to say that's a smart move, but you know. Yeah. Well, that's what I'm saying. Not to say it wasn't. But you're looking at a situation where you're like, we can either go ahead and kidnap people that are going to be able to pay us. or pay ransom. So they're going to have to be

in a wealthier class, politicians, things like that where that's going to bring down so much fucking heat from the government, the, what do they call me? It was the federal police.

Federales? Yeah. And you're going to get that pushback. Whereas if you are kidnapping people that are in the drug trader like their families, those people aren't being able

to go to the police. You know that they have a shit ton of money. And so you're much more likely to essentially maybe not get paid, maybe the same likelihood of getting paid as you do if you kidnap a politician, but you're not having to deal with any of the blowback of the government. Yeah, they're not calling the police when one of their kids get stolen. So in order to do this, they form something called the MAS, the Morte equestradorus,

death to kidnappers. And the MAS made some waves pretty quick. In the first six weeks at the MAS was around, they had killed over a hundred M-19 members. And, uh, let's see, how do we go about this? If you don't want to hear some very gruesome things that they did to these people, what do you think? 30 seconds to talk about the necktie and the flower vase? Nope, skip forward a minute. Okay.

Yeah, a minute. Two minutes. Two minutes, maybe. Um, if you skip forward too far, it's, you're probably not going to miss anything super crucial. but one thing that they would do starting now one thing they would do was something called the Columbia necktie and the Columbia necktie was a very effective way I'm sure to scare people into not talking

I thought it was just a method of strangulation yeah a necktie around the throat pretty much what they would do would be they would slit your throat then they would reach up inside and grab your tongue and pull it out to slit so ha ha you're wearing a necktie that happened to be your tongue inside your body The second thing, which I would argue is less fun and more an art piece, was something they would call the flower vase. Flower vase, very interesting as to how these things were come up with.

These things actually happened during La Villancia, so maybe that's where Pablo saw it. The flower vase was where they would cut your head off. Then they would cut all your limbs off, and then they would actually shove your limbs into the cavity. Yeah, they would turn your head upside down with the open, hole in the bottom of your fucking neck being the vase

and then would somehow... And I'm just trying to figure this out of size perspective and everything like that for arms, legs, but they would shove your limbs to where they were all sticking out of the top of your decapitated head. And just from a psychological standpoint, looking at this, like,

taking this from La Violencia and everything, he had to have looked at that and been like, this, that stuff stays with you. Yeah. Like knowing the psychological fucking terror that causes, It's weird to say like it's a product of an environment type thing where he's now doing kind of the same shit that affected him as a child that was so horrible. Because you know, I think that it got results.

Yeah. And it really did get results. They shut down M19 pretty quickly. There was a situation where there was a woman and a believer child that were tied up in a town of they were the wife and son. of one of the big M19 members. And they still had a code of ethics. Apparently they didn't kill any women or children. So they didn't kill this lady and her son,

but eventually they did find her husband and killed the shit out of him. M19 gives up. They're like, oof, we've had enough of this. You guys seem to have really gotten a handle on getting rid of us. I think that's how Pablo really ingratiated himself to these other smugglers in order to go and form. the Medellin cartel because it wasn't just Pablo in charge and then it was everyone working for

Pablo to start there were these different sections of smuggling rings things like that smaller outfits and when he pulled them all together because once you know that first guy his daughter got kidnapped they were like this could be something Pablo saw that and he gathered them all together and said this is something that can happen to any of us I'm going to go ahead and spearhead this thing and I think we should create this death to kidnappers type group and everyone was on board of something they could get behind. Well, because it was so successful, that puts Pablo in a position where it's like, well, he came up with this. It kind of gives him the credit to be like, well, since I did this, why don't you guys, you know,

everyone kind of like work under me a little bit. I can try to facilitate. I have now a method of distribution that a lot of you guys don't have. And so he was already during his methods of distribution. It wasn't all his cocaine that he was. selling. A lot of the cocaine he was getting was also from these other essentially outfits or cartels

and he was facilitating the means of transport to get those into the United States or get them out of Columbia and taking like what 30%? Yeah he still wanted to wet his beak to the tune to 35% but it was also getting these other smuggling groups

into places that they had never been before Pablo smuggling routes were so good at that point he'd figured it out they'd gone from single engine Cessna's to I think it was DC3s that they were flying their cocaine on. And once you move up to these bigger airplanes, Pablo could get his product in there, but there's still so much room that can be utilized. So he started, they would all stamp their product with whatever their logo was. These planes would fly into America. And as the planes were coming into America,

they would know these different spots that they would drop off these different packages through these distribution networks. So everybody kind of went to one different area, like their buyer in the United States, they would get their product. But each one of the distributor, or each one of the guys with Coke on the plane, their product would only go to their purchasers.

Yeah. So we're coming out of essentially the 70s at this point, which, you know, free love, all that kind of stuff, very much if you're going to try to identify a type of drug with a decade, very much more of a weed. Weed centric, you know, psychedelic for the 70s. Oh, I think 70s were a very large cocaine time.

Really? You've heard disco music. Well, that's what I'm saying. The 80s is essentially where it really starts to come in with not only disco music and everything, but also the advent of all of like the nightclub scene and everything. So I always kind of go from 70s weed to 80s disco powder. And that's where you start to get the demand essentially. And this whole thing with Pablo Escobar is.

he would not exist if there wasn't a demand for the product. So again, not singing his praises or anything like that, but he's definitely a creature created out of the necessity and demand for the product that he just found himself in the position to supply. So being the largest consumer of cocaine, the United States was the first stop where this stuff was coming in, both through the port of Los Angeles was a huge distribution hub of coming in, and then Miami, of course, is probably where the most,

you think of Scarface and everything it was the Caribbean coming in over in that the fucking cocaine cigar boats that would fucking run product and everything anything coming from Cuba into America one of the coolest things was basically Normans

a place called Norman's K So Normans K was an island in the Bahamas that was purchased by basically the co-founder of the Medellin cartel named Carlos Later Yeah

So Carlos Lader bought this island in the Bahamas called Norman's K and the island was large enough that they installed a 3,300 foot air strip on it which was able to accommodate the dual engine or the DC3s that they were doing. It included a harbor, a hotel, they built a refrigerated warehouse to go ahead and keep all the cocaine. So because this was also outside any jurisdiction for the United States, they basically had a staging area where they would fly a shit ton of cocaine into Norman's K

and then from that point would load it then onto the smaller planes that could drop low, flying under the radar into the United States, and you get the circumstances where they said it was different methods of distribution at that point to get them to the guys on the ground, but, you know, kind of like you were talking about Barry Seal, that guy would fly a single-engine plane in, and as he flew over a target area would just dump out these duffel bags or these huge packages, they would be designated where they were going to be landing, and they would already have guys on the ground on this schedule. It's not like they're just sitting.

They hit the ground and within minutes they're being picked up by these guys in trucks and vans to then take them and start distributing this stuff. They also had places they said where they would find. There was a place in, I think, I want to say either Louisiana, where they had started construction on this giant neighborhood. Florida. Was it Florida? Yeah, it was down in the Everglades.

Okay, where they had created this in big neighborhood that they had started on, poured all the concrete for the roads, had all the streets laid out, and then because of some environmental dispute over building it in the Everglades, the project was shut down. So you had all this is basically landing strips out here that they built to where they would fly in these little single engine planes. They would have trucks waiting on the ground, hit the ground, unload everything, and take right off. So you have this happening within the course of, we kind of talked about it as part of the SOE episode. Yeah, dropping the spies. Very similar.

Touching ground instead of unloading spies, they're unloading coke and then taking right off. but yeah you have this place in the Bahamas that they had bought if you've ever seen the movie Blow that was the story of George George Young that actually part of that takes place in Norman's K where he's in the Bahamas and everything sitting on this island with you know one of these guys might have been Carlos Letter fantastic movie yeah I love Blow but their methods of transport are just the coolest thing about this whole just idea to me And again, not praising him as far as what he did as a whole, but as a drug trafficker, he was pretty brilliant. Just along with the planes, there was a, I think it was an interview that I was listening to where he was a, he must have been a D agent in America and in Florida.

They were building a highway through Florida. And before they had gotten the free or the highway open, it was just a big, vast, long runway. that during construction, they would land planes on and have vans roll up and pick everything up and then spread and leave. So they were using American infrastructure that hadn't been finished but was perfect to land planes on. You need a 15-minute window. Yeah. Even that, those cars roll up, the plane lands unloaded, the planes off the ground. Like, how do you have the manpower?

And at this point, too, being kind of the 70s and 80 surveillance isn't what it is. No. We're able to track this kind of shit. So you don't have enough eyeballs to keep all this shit from coming in. You can grab one van. You're not grabbing 15 vans. And just different ways that they would do it. They would use big long PVC pipes that they would put electrical magnets on.

And as these cargo ships were coming through, they would strap them to the bottom of them. Yeah, I think what it was is as the cargo, so like you're thinking huge PVC pipe, caps on the end to make it watertight and everything. Fucking remote controlled electrical magnets like you were saying attached to these. And I think what would happen is because they had the infrastructure. there probably. So Medellin and the area that it's in, it's not a coastal town of Columbia. It's pretty landlocked.

Kelly is, though. Huh? Kelly is. Yeah. So you would be moving this product essentially over to the coast and you have all of these ships coming in. Well, because you're paying off people that are working for essentially probably customs, things like that, you know where the next stop for these ships are going to be.

So ships that are going to be heading into Miami, heading through the Caribbean, heading toward New Orleans, Is anywhere within a Gulf? What you would do is they would wait until these ships were in the harbor loading up their actual cargo and everything, you know, shipping containers. And he would have guys go and put, you know, I don't know if it was at night, I assume. They had a fucking system for it. But go and below the water line where it couldn't be seen would be attaching these PVC pipes to the undersides of these huge ships.

As these ships would then pull out and then get to a certain point where they were within a distance of the coast, didn't wait for them to get into like the port of Miami or things like that. They would wait for them to get a little bit further off the coast. The electromagnets would be deactivated and it would drop these giant cocaine-filled PVC pipes down to the bottom of

the ocean. Well then guess what? They just have ships out there or like boats out there with guys in scuba gear that would then swim down, get these huge pipes, and then transport them in these boats back to the coast. Yeah. Then he also gets creative. He finds his muse

in allegedly a James Bond film where he sees a lotus turn into a submarine and go below the water. He's like, well, why can't we just make a cocaine submarine? That was the other thing. I think part of Pablo's creativity and smuggling was he wasn't, he didn't do cocaine. He loved weed.

He loved getting stone. So maybe him and his boys were sitting there watching a James Bond flicked high as could be. He's like, well, we can build a cocaine submarine. So they brought engineers in I want to say it was one guy from the USSR

and somebody else from Europe that were like submarine architects. Yeah, engineers. It created, yeah, engineers I guess is what they would be, architects or buildings. They would create these submarines that were very, very

expensive that they could just pack with cocaine and this is I think where Chapo got the idea of his cocaine submarines. And these things could be loaded with thousands of kilos of cocaine. And I would love to see the inside of one. That's the one thing that I should have looked at for pictures.

I don't think it's built for comfort. No, but just to know that you're out in the middle of the ocean in your 20, 30 feet underwater and there's just between you, it's steel, cocaine, and then you just like behind a wheel driving the submarine. It would be incredible to know how they did it. And he had a fleet of them by the end of it, but I think he started out with two of them. and I don't know if it was in case one got caught, but they would submarine their way into American waters or international waters.

They would come up and they would just load them onto boats and those boats would transfer everything in. They did smuggle across the border through Mexico. I think that was kind of where Chapo and Escobar might have crossed paths and done some business together. But they would bring them like in wheelchairs and canes. they would just pack the structure of the wheelchair with cocaine, bring them across the border. One of the things that they had an issue with was in the beginnings they would make people swallow balloons.

And for some reason, they couldn't figure out a good enough balloon that was durable enough. So there was a lot of people that were ODing. Part of the reason that this was a bigger problem back then was because cocaine now in America, anytime it gets here, it gets cut. Because you're making so much more money off of it if you can cut your problem. Usually it's like baby formula or a laxative, something that's not really great to ingest. But back then, the purity was so high because nobody would cut it. A lethal overdose was like it would take you a lot more cocaine now to get the same kind of overdose just based on purity standards. They developed a system too where they found out.

And this guy, because he's making so much money at its peak, the Medellin cartel was making $420 million a week. from cocaine sales per fucking week. Because you're making this much money, you can essentially pay for anyone that is not currently working in a government job. Because if you think of like, well, how did they fucking get the guys building submarines because those guys would be working for the government?

You have guys that are just wanting to get paid for things that are working as like private contractors. You also have these people he's bringing in that are world-class chemists to develop strategies for making this. This isn't just some guy he found out. out in the Colombian jungle. And he's like, hey, can you figure out how to make cocaine? He's bringing in chemists a la fucking breaking bad

to go ahead and run these giant manufacturing centers in the jungle. And they develop a way to where they're able to then start putting cocaine into liquids. Yeah. And figure out the process and how to then extract the cocaine. So now you go from a situation where you're happening to smuggle in kilos in bricks, things like that, to now be like, you know, could just go ahead and put this shit into mix it in with wine bottles and all these other goods that are coming in legally into these countries once they get there then take these strain or

process the cocaine out of them and now you've got another channel in which you're flooding flooding the market everybody's going to be looking for bricks of cocaine coming through a port not a lot of people are going to be looking at liquid cocaine soaked jeans that are coming through the border i don't know how i forgot that fucking soaking blue jeans in cocaine, bringing them in, and then knowing the process in which to wash the genes

into which, in the way that it extracts the cocaine from that. Why is this cocaine blue? It's a product of a little bit of the dye from the fucking denim, sorry. Yeah, it's a, a cocaine,

or it's a Pablo Escobar Wrangler jeans crossover. Collaboration, yeah. Yeah. Even in that time at Pablo's height, this number is just startling to me. 80% of the cocaine that was done in the world,

mainly the United States, was coming from Pablo Escobar. To have a market share of 80% in any business is really, really incredible, but to have it in cocaine? Worldwide. Yeah. Oh, worldwide market share in that. Which, again, worldwide market share, $420, $460 million, anything like that. I can see that.

His net worth was estimated to be around $30 billion, which I think is really, really low for how much money they were making. He had made the Forbes list of the richest people in the world. I think he was like number seven at the time. I wondered myself, I was like, there's no way that he wasn't one of the first billionaires. I was so wrong.

Rockefeller was a billionaire, I think it was in 1916, so not even close to the right time frame. But to know that a drug dealer was estimated to be the seventh most, or richest person on the planet, An industry that has to remain secret. Yeah. So you don't have the resources to go ahead and have it in the public eye to where you can just do your thing without worrying about interference. But to have an operation that had to be done and is actively trying to be destroyed, but to still be so successful that you're making the Forbes list and making that much money is just fucking crazy.

Oh, well, and the funny thing is, is that accounts for all of the losses. in seizures. Like, had that not been happening, he would have been, not double that, but he probably would have been two-thirds richer. I mean,

it's just incredible how much money that they did make while they were actively, like you say, being fought against. Well, and you mentioned it before we started recording,

but because this kind of takes place around the same time as Iran Contra, and as part of that being the United States selling cocaine in order to make the money to then fund the arms sales

that are going to the Contra Rebel. you kind of made the point like was Pablo working for or with the CIA when they were running this regardless if that was his intention or not the CIA I believe to get this cocaine I think they were seizing enough of it that they never had to be in a position to have to buy it from him but it would be extremely likely that if they're using any cocaine at all to do this they're using Pablo Escobar cocaine. Yeah. I believe that there were some connections. I believe that he was pretty in touch with the CIA, partially based upon the way that they wanted to close this loop. Because when Pablo goes down, we're past Iran-Contra, there's really not a whole lot of use

for him anymore because they don't have a lot of private things to fund. And the CIA and DEA were completely independent of themselves. So the CIA is going to be in on a lot more shit. to allow the DEA maybe like once Pablo outlived his worth, we can go ahead and take a step back and stop protecting him. Yeah. And let the DEA kill him before he can come out and say that he worked with us. Yeah. Like I think there was a lot of crossover there.

And I enjoyed doing shit like this because to me, when I say that, I fully believe it. And then I realize like, oh, that's just a conspiracy. It makes so much sense to me. but in essence it's just a conspiracy because we don't have any proof of it. But for them to be able to be making that money to fund Iran-Contra, just like you were talking about,

there had to have been a crossover. I think that the crossover was a lot more direct just based upon the amount of cocaine that was coming to Freeway Rick and going into Los Angeles. And then also, it makes the DEA want to try to shut him down more because they see the influx of it.

Like, it's, to me, they just play with each other so well. Yeah. All right. Well, we've gone in and focused on Pablo the drug dealer. Now let's talk about Pablo the philanthropist. But before we get to that, I got to take a bathroom break. Good call. Oh, my God, Adam.

What is that up in the sky? It's a bird. It's a plane. It's socials! Oh, my God. It's faster than Instagram. That's historically high pod on Instagram. More power.

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historically high podcast at gmail.com. All right, guys, back to the show. All right. I got to close a loop on my conspiracy before we move on. We'll talk about them later. G.W. Bush, G. G.H.W. Bush. George Herbert. Walker Bush was involved in something called Iran-Contra with Ronald Reagan.

And it turns out that Bush being the president after Reagan sends a lot of resources down to maybe kill the guy that they were in cahoots with. Call me crazy. I've been called worse. I sort of feel like maybe that was the closing of a loop. We've talked about enough stuff with government programs. And the, you know, I can definitely see it from the perspective of this stuff, you know, with the United States being the largest

user of Pablo Escobar's products and everything, which we weren't the only ones. Like, surprisingly, people don't think about all that stuff going over to Europe. Yeah. And all that area. Like, they love them some cocaine, too, as far as Europe goes.

But the United States was predominantly the major user of cocaine. It seems more fun over there. I could be completely wrong. But I think the fact that there's less of it over there and it costs more money, it is harder to have people like, I don't know when crack got to England because it's so cost effective

to get it over there. I don't know if you would break it down and make more money. Don't hear a lot about a lot of European crackheads. You think? No, you don't hear about it. Oh, no, not at all. That seems like a standard American thing.

Yeah, yep. But yeah, so with us using so much of it, you can definitely see where the government felt like they had to step in would have public support. This is when, you know, of course, the war on drugs is going on right now. You know, Nancy Reagan getting that thing started. But you have this essentially reason to be going in and dipping your feet into the

Colombian drug pool because we could say, hey, all this stuff is making it our way up to us. So under the guise of that, you could easily send down people to try to tie up some loose ends for you. Mm-hmm. And none of this, we might be the first generation to understand that the government has done some very bad things. Yeah. And so maybe that's where the conspiracy theories start to lend a little bit more credence is we've seen them do some bad shit. We've covered a lot of the shit that they've done under the radar. You always wanted to believe that the people in charge were the people that should be in charge for the people that got there because they were the best of what they do and not just the best at getting into. to that position to do what they want to do.

And as you do get older, you start looking at the people around you. And when you become an adult, you always have this expectation as a kid. When you become adult, you have stuff figured out and you're the people that should be making decisions. And then as an adult, you either yourself realize you don't know what the fuck you're doing or you see other people as adults and you're like, oh, there's stupid people just across the board. There's just people that are very manipulative and stupid.

And so you're like, these are the people that do find their way through any, you know, through various means into positions of power. And you're like they, and when you have power, you're going to probably more often than not misuse it. Yeah. Use it to some degree. I don't really think there's a ton of situations

where power has been used wholly and utterly benevolently, I guess. Especially if you didn't earn it. Especially if you're the child of somebody important, a Bush to Bush connection where I don't know if the second Bush had a whole lot of fun in office. I think he probably may not have won. wanted to go into politics. We will not stand for these terrorist threats.

Yeah. Now watch this drive. No, we should bomb it down the fairway. One thing that kind of getting back over to Pablo that he was very smart about was knowing the people that he had to ingratiate himself with. And for the people of Medellin, he was, and still to this day, has a type of reverence in a very positive light because of the things. things he did for them. And if you just kind of take Medellin as just like a microcosm, like let's biodome this thing without Polly Shore, you're looking at it and you say, these are all the people closest to Pablo. These are also the people providing a protective barrier for Pablo against people

getting into the city or people trying to, you know, assassinate him, get close enough to him to do that kind of stuff, that those are the people you most need to be on your side. So Pablo goes through this time frame or this phase once he gets this money is he starts to actually clean up areas of Medellin there's a huge fire that burns down this this big section of like a poor neighborhood that was inside of a dump that's what I think oh shit that we forget about some of this like poor in America and poor in Colombia look very very different yeah think of like in a situation where you're looking there's the big in Rio the favelas The house is built on the hillsides and everything.

That's kind of what you're looking at for Medellin around this time is there's just a lot of shanty towns. Yes. Around like a larger central city. So, yeah, poor is third world country poor on this scale. It's not poor as in what the United States knows. But, you know, after this big fire, he comes in, he rebuilds these areas. He starts really kind of posing as a champion for the poor and kind of the downtrodden.

He, I think, funds hospitals. soccer stadium, I think he builds a soccer stadium or a couple soccer pitches, schools. Yep. And is doing this all for the local populace to where they're looking at him and saying, okay, here's this guy that, yeah, we know he's probably up to some nasty shit. But he's also employing a lot of people. And he apparently did, like you were saying, he paid his people fairly well. Even the people that were doing what you would consider more than menial jobs.

Like you always see, you think of like a manufacturing. factory place in the jungle, you have all the people that look like shit that are having to scoop and everything and measure out the cocaine. He was paying those people much better than they would be paid doing what their other skill sets would allow them to do for farming things like that. So not only are you, the business in town that's employing a bunch of people, then you're pouring some of those resources back in for the betterment of the city. And because more of the populace was essentially poor than were essentially the richer. even more middle class people, those people still have a presence to do things like vote.

And so during kind of this philanthropic work, Pablo decides that he can take a dip into the political pool and decides to basically run for what I consider to be a House of Representatives seat. Yeah, they do it in a little bit. He was kind of running for what would be known as like an alternate seat. Yeah, so he ran for the 82 Colombian Congress, or he won the Colombian Congress alternate seat, which I'm guessing was for the Anti-Akiah District. Could have been. I don't know how they divided up.

Yeah. But, yeah, it was basically an alternate, so if the person that was actually there couldn't do their job or was gone, he would fill in. Well, and what's the best way to get as many votes as possible? Just pay people to do it? when he would have his campaign rallies, he would, the one rally that I heard a lot about, he had his son and daughter

get up on stage and sing a song that they had written about their father before he went up on stage. And then once he got up there, he would give a very big rousing speech. Never dressed fancy. No, yeah, he was a man of the people. Well, he said that he wore a velour shirt.

Yeah, but it was a simple velour shirt. Yeah. And he always wore, what were the shoes he always? It was, he wore, he wore, like a really just simple like dad. It would be like new balances. Yeah. The,

uh, shit, what are the Yankees that they always wear? Ooh, that's a bad one for me to not know what they are. But the ones that the big swooshes and the really thick souls. Yeah. You always see,

um, like them, their lawn mowing shoes. Yes. Yeah. And so he would kind of. Air monarchs? Monarchs.

Yes. Monarchs. That's what they are. But he wouldn't, he wouldn't try to look down on people. He dressed just like, like a regular middle class guy would. And then at the same time,

his security were all given briefcases full of money, that they would start handing out to all the people in the crowd. He always did tell them to give more money to older folks and to children, which kind of nice. I mean, he said the older people and the younger people, which you're like, well,

why wouldn't you give it to more of the middle class people? Well, what you're doing essentially, loyalty was everything. And that's going to be definitely a theme going to go throughout Pablo's entire life. Loyalty was everything. So what he's basically doing is

you now have younger people that are going to be voting soon, a workforce that you're maybe going to need to be able to tap into in the future, and you're already making them essentially loyal to you. You're then taking the people that are older and presenting yourself as this benevolent person who's also taking care of like the elderly people,

who then also have a voice to the younger people as well. So you're you're attacking it from two fronts And if this is step one of your political career By the time those young kids that you're given all the money to We're old enough to vote and you're headed to be president It's gonna be good to have a nice base So yeah so even today he he's viewed upon like a Robin Hood-esque figure In kind of the Median area even today knowing everything that was done

Everything like that he's still there's murals of him and everything It's really kind of fucking weird And we've, in America, like we do with so many other things, have sort of turned him into a folk hero. They do, like, Narcos tours around Medellin now, and one of their stops is, like, his gravesite. There are some people that usually like posting on social media of, like, doing bumps or doing lines off of his headstone and shit like that. Like, we've glamorized. Is that a bucket list thing? Uh, not no.

Okay. Definitely, I would consider, if I was in that. position and I had the means to do it as far as the cocaine in Columbia, I don't think I'd pass it up. Okay. At the same time, I know that he was such a bad, bad man, but that's one of those things where like if you're looking over the edge and you're like, I could just jump right now, but you don't do it. That would be me with cocaine around Buffalo's gravestone.

Once you get out of the pool, though, once you're... not the big fish and the small pond that he was in Medellin, and you get to Bogota, you kind of realize that the country is bigger than the area that elected you. And you start to run into issues. And the biggest issue that he ran into was a guy named Rodriguez Laura. And Laura was, shit, what was he? I think he was the leader of the liberal party. He had a role.

What you would consider like how the rules we have in our Congress, Speaker of the House, minority party leader, majority party leader, things like that. Almost immediately, because it's not just like this was a surprise that all of a sudden, Pablo Escobar shows up to fucking,

you know, Congress one day, which was funny because he tried to show up wearing, not wearing a tie. And he had his two bodyguards. He was like the only guy there with fucking bodyguards. He shows up, they're like, we can't, you and you're not wearing a tie.

These are the rules. He gets this like audacious, floral fucking tie from one of his bodyguards puts it on and then ends up going in. Rodrigo Lara was the Minister of Justice and Law. There we go. So you have, you know, him coming in, this guy knows that he's going to be coming in as an alternate. Even participating at all in the politics and lawmaking of this country, this guy's not going to fucking stand for it. He knows what Pablo is.

So as soon as he gets in, he pretty much puts the spotlight on Pablo and is like, hey, where are you getting all your money? they track a check that he made for a political contribution, I think, to one of the other guys, and we're like, where did this money come from? He pulled up the information regarding his arrest and made it like, again, Pablo is in Medellin. He's probably pretty well known throughout the country, but again, he's just still kind of in Medellin. He hasn't really branched out as far as any power outside of there within Columbia. This is giving him that option. Well, in this whole thought process, too, that Lara is having.

is him knowing what Pablo has done and how he got there. We haven't brought it up yet. Just surprised that you didn't bring it up. What's the most important thing that Pablo gets being a member of a political party or being a member of Congress? Diplomatic immunity.

Yeah. Yep. So you can't be extradited if you're a member of Congress. You also get a passport, a political passport that allows you to travel. and everything like that. I didn't show that. So yeah, if he gets this position of power and stays in Congress,

if something were to happen to him, then he can be extradited to America. Not only is he in Congress, but if we break this down of all the things he could do once he was in this position, you know, as one man, like, well, he only gets one vote, same as everyone else. Once he's in a position where he can then spread out his reach

within the people that he knows then are in Congress and start to spread that money around, start supporting their causes. He could essentially build his own political base within that to push through certain legislation, laws, things like that. He was, of course, completely against extradition.

So his goal was essentially to get Columbia to essentially never accept extradition because he knew that there was also heat on him from the United States and that, and for any excuse that he would be extradited to the United States. States and he wouldn't have any poll in the United States like he had

even in his section of Columbia well yeah just like you were talking about when he goes into that meeting the fucking first thing that happens Pablo knows that Laura's coming after him they've already exchanged some talk before there's first meeting of Congress they go in there

the guy that Pablo was an alternate for opens up, starts speaking and immediately the first thing that they do is they'd handed out a piece of paper to all the other congressmen and there was a picture of a campaign donation that Laura had received from a drug trafficker and said,

you're accusing us of doing exactly what you did to come to power because you took money from drug dealers too. Laura's like, that didn't happen. You made that up. You don't have any other evidence besides this one thing that you could have made. I have a ton of evidence. Exhibit A, and he like makes Pablo's mugshot.

He brings it back up from, 70, he's like, this is Pablo Escobar being arrested for drug trafficking of cocaine. And this is where we get the famous picture. Pablo is like, hey man, if you think that I'm involved in drug dealing, I'll give you 24 hours to supply your evidence that you have that I was a drug dealer. And if not, you got to drop it. Laura goes to the paper with this mugshot and prints it on every paper that goes out to Columbia or I guess whoever has the paper that day.

Once Pablo sees it, he sends everybody that he, can out to try to collect the papers before they can be delivered. So like you getting all the papers is going to cover up this major news. But information was probably only disseminated in so many ways to certain people like that. But that mugshot is the famous mugshot of Pablo Escobar where he's like deranged, smiling, knowing that he's up to something. He tried to fucking pass it off that his fortune had been acquired because from a young age he had a bicycle rental company and he had made a fortune up that.

Like, are you fucking, like, that's what you can come up with. Is that the thing that couldn't be traced? They're like, well, boss, they can't trace bicycles. He's like, let's go with that. It was a bicycle rental company that I made my fucking billions off of. Yeah. It makes total sense. It's not that many fucking bicycles in Columbia.

No. So once the news gets out that Pablo is a major drug dealer, his spot in Congress is over. His political time has come to an end. He's removed from Congress. And much like the officer that arrested him for the cocaine, Laura ends up getting assassinated in 1984 via something that they kind of made popular and famous via motorcycle. And what Pablo had done was he had put a bounty on Laura's head.

The motorcycle that pulled up had a driver and kind of a wheelman and then a shooter. It's very well seen in movies nowadays where you have like assassins on like the dirt bikes. Yeah. And so you can get through traffic. You can escape easy. So they'd have one guy driving. The guy on the back would basically have an AK or an oozy or something. And so it got to the point where if you started to hear these motorcycles in traffic,

it was almost a calling card of like an assassination or a hit about to happen. There were also a lot of other people on motorcycles. But if you were getting tailed by one, especially if the light was off on it, it was almost like a calling card. that this was going to fucking take you out. And it became so popular that people would ride around without helmets just to show that they weren't like assassins. Because the people that were helmets wouldn't want their faces. Exactly.

So it was almost like, no, look at me. I'm fine with people seeing my face. I'm not trying to kill anyone. So this motorcycle that kills Lara ends up crashing a little ways up. The guy on the back that was the shooter ends up getting gunned down. I believe the other guy died in the crash. It was his bodyguards that chased him down. one of his like follow cars or something?

Oh, one of Lars, yeah. Yeah. The shooters ended up being a 16 year old that pulled the trigger and a 19 year old that was driving the motorcycle that were just poor people in Medellin that decided to collect the bounty on Lara's head. So not even like his trained assassins. These were just people who wanted that kind of money.

And there comes that question of like, is it okay to take dirty money, blood money, from a guy like Pablo Escobar. And obviously that answer should be no, but you have to remember the people that are collecting those bounties are people that need that money for their next meal.

Yeah. So you kind of start... It's an act of desperation. Yeah, your moral obligations tend to lower when your basic needs aren't being met. And you're also young, so you're still dumb as fuck.

Yeah. You're super impressionable. You see... You sees people living a life in which you could only imagine in your wildest dreams. And then you see essentially the gate that you can open that can get you into that lifestyle. Of course, if you have nothing to lose, you're going to go and try that.

So when he ends up getting kicked out of politics, basically because of the accusations against him, the guy that was the leader of the Liberal Party in which Pablo was a member of basically expels him from the party. And without party support, he's not going to succeed as a politician. Basically, he's a pry at that point. Yeah. And so as soon as that happens, he retires in January of 1984. It's literally three months later that Laura is killed. So at this point, he's not even waiting a year like he did with the guy that arrested him years ago.

Three months later now, he's just like, I'm pretty good about this killing my enemies thing. So we're going to go ahead and just kind of step up the timeline. As soon as he's out, this Bettencourt government was like, well, shit. Maybe this extradition thing is pretty important with the United States. So let's go ahead and sign this. And let's make sure that Pablo is one of the first guys out of here. And not only that, but if you're thinking about, well, he just kills another politician. This guy was basically like the attorney general is what it would be for kind of the comparison for our country.

So he literally assassinations the attorney general. And it's not hard to tie it back to who's doing it because it's three months after he was the main driving force that took Pablo Escobar out of prison. So there becomes a ton of heat even more so than there was. now that he's essentially started, starting to assassinate, like, key political figures, which is going to impact the entire governance of the country of Colombia. So the heat really kicks up on Pablo to try to take him down. And I think he kind of feels that because in fall of 84, that's when he offers to surrender. On the condition that he wouldn't be extradited.

On the condition that he wouldn't be extradited, yeah. And throughout that whole time, there are, judges that are signing off on these different charges that he's going to be charged with. So he's going to these judges and basically making these pleas. Something

excuse me that we've talked about with other drug traffickers. This is, again, this is where this mantra comes from, this plateau or plomo. And you're either getting paid in silver or you're getting lead. Ah, Plata or plomo. That's a very scary

thought that that was your choices. Yeah. And that's literally what they would walk into. If Pablo's guys approached you and they needed something done, whether it be you stepping out of the way or you doing something that they needed you to do, you were offered Block Dollar Ploma. It was silver or lead. And you were either going to get paid for doing what they wanted you to do or they were

just going to remove you. I get people have principles and mean you had this conversation. But at a certain point, your principles don't mean anything if you're fucking dead. Yeah. At this point, this had to be such an issue with. within the country that even if you took the money and didn't spend it, but you were essentially, it would have been like if someone was like,

you can either, we're not going to pay you anything or you can die. You're not going to do, you're going to do what they want without them giving you anything for protection of your own life, for protection of your fucking family's lives. Because who knows if they were going to take you out, they had no qualms about maybe taking out your family.

You didn't fucking know that. You see what these people are capable of. Yeah. And so you're getting money to do this. And so Plata or Ploma was bad. basically what you were offered. It was silver lead. And we both pretty quickly agreed that we're plod to guys.

There's, I think that we're both very morally just men, but when you're faced with an impossible position, sometimes you just have to choose life. And like you say, even if you didn't spend it, if you did, if I heard a judge got that offer and they took the money, I get it, man. This whole idea of Pablo Escobar being able to attack and kill Lara and to assassinate pretty much whoever he wanted to.

At that point in time, when you know, when you see other judges that are falling and dying and being shot around you, I have no issue with those guys taking that money. I take that money, go to another country. I'm sure there's other beautiful places in South America that you can live out your time. Just understand that this isn't worth dying for being a judge. You didn't sign up to deal with a guy like this to be a judge. No. And murder throughout Columbia is an extremely common occurrence.

So it's, I don't know what it would be like to live in a country like that. I really can't wrap my mind around that. Is that it's just such a common occurrence like it, nothing can even make the news of all these people being killed. And so you also have the people that are supposed to appear untouchable, like judges, like politicians, that are basically powerless for their own lives against Pablo Escobar. And I mean, with this whole thing, you know, him offering to surrender,

the whole point was contingent. He didn't just walk in. is like, I'm surrendering, don't extradite me. It was like, I will turn myself in if you guys promise that there's not going to be any extradition, which basically means not having a law for extradition, because if you don't have a law for it, the option to double crosses and even on the table. You're not able to extradite someone. Well, and you're not extraditing anybody else that's a part of my cartel either.

Exactly. So he didn't even just go after them. He had plans to blow up the school that all of the children of the DEA agents, in Columbia we're going to. And it was enough of a legitimate threat that they had all of the buses and everything were being followed by cars, were being watched.

But the DEA had turned Columbia into what they called the non-dependent post. So after this threat of the bombing, and I want to say that there was a bombing that had happened pretty close to then, I think it was when he tried to bomb the DEA building. The DEA building was a bunker that was in the ground because they knew if it was a big building,

it would just be so much easier to bomb that they actually built it with that mind down there. But they made all the DE agents send their wives and children home so you didn't have other targets around there. That's how serious they were taking these threats because these political guys were being killed. So during this time frame, because extradition is essentially hasn't been taken off the table or anything, the Supreme Court of Columbia was going to rule on the issue on November 6th of 1985. So this is a little bit Around a year after he offers to surrender himself So they're as far as Pablo is concerned

They're not taking any steps They haven't taken it off the docket to vote on this And so he's like Well if you guys aren't going to go ahead and do this Then I'm just going to take this into my own hands And make sure this thing doesn't go through Well and after they shut him down the first time He had actually fled to Panama

And was hanging out in one of Noriega's houses So he knew that he had had a good friend and fellow that he could go hang out with. Well, then he started to get suspicious because didn't some he get some he was coming down on Noriega from like the CIA or from the government too.

And he was like, well, fuck, this guy's got a big bargaining chip living in one of his fucking guest houses and fucking booked it back to Columbia because he didn't trust Escobar not to turn him in. Yeah, he didn't trust that Noriega wasn't going to turn around in music. So just to know that those

guys cross paths enough that they were living in each other's houses, That's pretty nuts. Yeah. And especially knowing that Noriega was a U.S. Yes. Yeah. Um, what do you do?

I mean, how do you, how do you get around the question that you raised of extradition? You raised the legal question that the extradition treaty was just signed by the presidential, uh, attach. That, you know, well, in order for the. to become a law, the Supreme Court of Columbia has to be the one that rules on it. You've got this really, really good track record of bribing or killing judges. Supreme Court's just made up

of a bunch of judges. You start going to these Supreme Court judges and trying to get ruling in your favor. That didn't happen. Apparently, these Supreme Court judges either had really good security, were overconfident, or just really believed that he needed to be

taken care of. So they knew that this Supreme Court voting that was going to be happening November 6th, 1985 was going to be a big blow for Pablo and the Medellin cartel. What do you do? Well, coming back into the story,

we have those pesky guerrillas of MI9. M19. Or M19. And in November of 85, a group of M9, is it, yeah, M19 I can't want to say MI9.

M19 guerrillas. Basically storm the judicial building. They had gotten in the night before and had camped inside so they would have the most crucial positioning in the building. So basically a group of guerrillas take over the Supreme Court. They kill half of the Supreme Court justices. And then in order for there to be a trial or for Paul O'Escobar to be tried and convicted,

there has to be evidence against it, right? And this is not a time when you know, computers are backed up or even exist in or anything like that. So everything is kept on paper as hard files. Well, that stuff will fucking burn. So they also set fire to it and burn all the evidence against Escobar. I, this is something that you could only do at this point in time in life. The fact that that was the easiest, most simple thing to do,

and to prove that it was the easiest, most simple thing to do, once they burned all that evidence, all of the cases against Pablo were dropped due to lack of evidence. So they didn't have backups anywhere else. One of the interviews that I was listening to was for one of the DEA agents. He said that the file on Pablo

when they got down there was pretty tiny and they didn't really know why. So he called for Pablo's case to be brought up to him. And when he opened it up, there weren't any pictures of Pablo inside of his case. He's like, well, how is that possible? possible. Pablo had already gotten down to the police level and had paid somebody to like switch the pictures out and to not have a whole lot of information about him in there because he's paying people internally with the police to do it. They said that the best pictures that they got of him were from the DEA and it was an agent who went to a soccer game and actually got to take pictures of Pablo at a soccer game were like the first legitimate pictures that the DEA had to work off of it.

So they got down to Columbia and he was so good at getting rid of evidence on himself already that they didn't even have a clear picture until the DEA showed up. To me, his ability to cover up for himself is just second to none. And this whole idea of just like, hey, how do we get rid of these cases that these judges won't drop? Well, if we just burn the evidence, they can't do anything. And he became a man free of issue again. Well, yeah, extradition at this point dies because essentially the tree. was only signed for extradition between their, you know, Columbia and the United States,

was only signed by the presidential delegation. It wasn't essentially, I guess, ratified as what you would consider it by all the other necessary parties. In what new Supreme Court justice is going to meet to try to ratify that? Yep. Not a chance. Well, his next target was this guy named

Cesar Gavidia, Trujillo. Yeah. And he was this guy, he was the successor of this guy Galan. Louis Goulon. The guy that actually kicked him out of his political party. So he's come, you know, it's all coming back full circle for who he's taking out.

Well, because he had gone ahead and was Golan? Goulon was killed, correct? Yes. He was assassinated in August on the 18th in 1989. So he ends up assassinating him. Yeah, Goulon had actually escaped a bombing and thought that he was good and showed up for a presidential rally for some dumb fucking reason. showed up to a presidential rally. And a couple guys had made it to the front and pulled out some Mac tens and just iced him on stage.

That's right. That's right. Yep. Why would you go do that once you survived a bombing? Well, there's always the next guy in line. So there's a successor or a successor to Goulon. And basically this guy is supposed to be, I think he's supposed to be traveling on a commercial airline flight. Avansia, Flight 203. This is what I was talking about earlier, not to interrupt.

this guy's last name is Gaviria and Pablo's mother's last name is Gaviria So is that just like a Johnson down there you think I mean it doesn't have to be that common But yeah I'm guessing there were common names Okay Because the whole family idea and aspect of it Like was he taking out somebody

He had a loose relation to That just didn't like him Because it seems like everybody else in the family Was pretty preferential towards Yeah I think it was more of a just same name Okay No relation or anything like that So yeah

Avianca Flight 2 of 4 a commercial airline flight this guy gets on the flight he's got a briefcase with him and he was actually sent by the menying cartel and was told that his mission that the briefcase contained recording equipment

and that his mission was to activate the recording equipment and it would record two American passengers that were supposed to be on this flight and Gaviria and yes one of them was supposed to be Gaviria gets on the flight

plane takes off, gets to about 13,000 feet. This guy goes to open the briefcase to activate the recording equipment and the fucking bomb that was inside the briefcase instead explodes and destroys the flight killing 107 people. And then three people on the ground. And then killed three people on the ground as well. How bad a luck do you have to have to die in a plane crash on the ground? Like, I mean, and still, like I think if it's 13,000 feet depending on which way you're flying, that's got to be still pretty close to residential areas. for you to get up to that height. Two of them were American citizens

and the United States not need hardly any fucking excuse to try to get our fucking beak sweat in international conflicts. That was all the excuse we needed to even put more resources into trying to hunt down Escobar. This guy wasn't even on the flight.

No, Gavaria had missed the flight. It had to be a real bummer for Pablo. The fact that the flight was missed. part of George Here Herbert Walker signing Directive 18

it allocated $300 million to fight cartels One of the first things that they did At this point it's full on like You're taking it from And I'm not saying there hasn't been atrocities committed up to this point But before that it had just Kind of been either

Columbians killing other Colombian people Or the DEA agents Down there being targets in their families but it was still small scale. When you have something to where you're trying to get public opinion on your side up here in the United States and it's saying,

we're fighting, you know, the war on drugs down in Columbia, he's going after our DEA agents. In some people's heads, that's going to be like, well, our guys are down there. Like, trying to kill this guy. Of course, he's a bad guy

and everything like that, but it doesn't have the same, it doesn't build the same support that it's like, this guy blew up a fucking commercial play with two American. Like at this point, people don't like,

people that may hate, drugs, people hate terrorism even more. So now it's moved to the point where it's more like international terrorism now that's occurring at this point, while also on top of the drugs that are occurring too. So it's like, you thought this guy was bad before. Now he's engaging in terrorism acts. He doesn't care about how many people die. Yeah. And one of the first things that the DEA does to try to get to him was part of the breaking it down from the cocaine base into actual cocaine is you have to use ether to create the actual chemical reaction to separate. Not a lot of companies did ether.

So once you need to figure out how that all goes, you find the ether distributors, talk to them, find out where the shipments are going. They end up seeing that this company is sending a ton of ether down into Columbia. They strong arm them, and they put tracking devices in these two drums of ether that go to this place called trinketion. And Trankilandia was in the middle of a jungle in Cajete in Colombia. It was in the middle of nowhere. It was so far away that a runway was so easily spotted that what they did was all of the workers lived in houses that had wheels on them.

And they would actually roll all the houses out onto where the airstrip was to hide the airstrip. And then every day when a plane would be coming in, there would be an alarm that would sound. And you had three minutes to get out of bed, get ready, and then push your house off of the airship before the plane lands. So when the DEA ends up finding... You sleep in late once. Yeah. There is no second time.

Well, probably because you were hit by a plane too. But in order to get down there, they find this ether shipment that's headed down to Trankalondia. And once they get down there and they break into it, the raid that happens is so large. They said that they destroyed, when they did the destruction on the complex, they destroyed 13.8 metric tons of cocaine that was valued at $1.2 billion. That was how much cocaine was ready to go out. So not even everything, all the base and everything that they were manufacturing. That's what I was going to say.

They're manufacturing so much and still shipping so much out at a time for distribution that that's still the stockpile willing to go out. Yeah, dude. That's so much cocaine. And obviously that's a big blow to Pablo. Probably is it a ton of lost product for, but now an actual method in which you use to manufacture that. Like it's damage all over the process.

And it's just gone. So you had the DEA that's starting to lean on Pablo pretty heavy. You have the Colombian government going after him. The last thing that he needs is less friends. He calls together another grouping of the Medellin cartel and has a meeting. They're talking late into the night. And it's just basically like a rah-rah meeting. Like they're going to keep trying to get us.

We need to stay strong. We need to stay together. Everybody leaves that night. Him and Gustavo are still at the house. There was a, I think she was a flower delivery person that showed up at like midnight. And comes, knocks on the door, asks who lives. there the name didn't match up. It was some sort of a doctor that Gustavo heard

and he's like, ah, get out of here lady. Don't need to deal with you. Like, well, that's weird. A flower delivery person showing up this late at night. What's going on? This wasn't at the hacienda, I don't believe. No. Because everyone knew about the hosta.

He owned so many properties as well. I don't think we've touched on this. But he had so much money, had such a huge operation that they had all of this property owned all over Columbia for stash houses. for the money. They had so much money. If anyone has actually watched the show Narcos on Netflix, I think the first two seasons

are Pablo. Maybe. And they got to the point where they had so much money that they had... Their budget for rubber bands to hold it together was like... $2,500 bucks a month. $2,500 a month. Just for the fucking rubber bands to band up the money. They had so much

and not any ways to like laundered or make it legitimate funds that they just resorted to storing money inside walls of properties that they got these stash houses, they would bury them in oil drums on these properties of like lieutenants and things like that. And they had an acceptable loss range that they were losing money to mold and rats and things like that to where they were just losing hundreds of thousands of dollars.

No, it was like billions. They said, I believe it was 10% is what their write-off was. And it amounted to something around a billion dollars that they were just writing off because it was, like you say, they're going moldy, being eaten by rats. Well, I ask you this, too, if you thought that, like, because there was so much money,

essentially going down to Colombia for American currency, that that had to be something where, at a certain point, they were, like, you know, monitoring the circulation of what kind of bills are in circulation. Like, we're kind of fucking short.

Are we getting short on this? Like, how the fuck are we missing this many bills in circulation? Because it was all being sent out of the country. But, I mean, there's still being, I think in, it was a few years ago, in the 2010s, I think his son was actually at one of his properties

and found $18 million stashed inside the walls of this property. So it was fucking being stored everywhere there was so much of it. Yeah, still to this day, every once in a while, there would be a story where somebody ran onto a cash of Pablo's money down there. And that's just because they had so much real estate to hide all this stuff. And time goes on, people forget where these houses were held and go to do a remodel and bust down a wall. And it's just, it's like that megachurch guy.

Yeah. The plumber went into the wall and he found like $140,000 that was shoved into the church wall. Like, oh, I don't know where that came from. Okay. So what do you say? If you're down there and you break into that wall and you find that money, you can't do much with it because it's currency from America in like the 70s and 80s. I still think there's something you can do with it.

You think? Yeah. Because I'm sure a lot of that money can't still be in circulation, because that was back when we had the little faces on the bills? Like, when was the last time you saw a dollar like that or anything? I still think that some of it's probably usable. Could be, yeah. You keep it then. You wouldn't say a word.

Okay. You keep it as a momento. Yeah, that's exactly what it is. It's a piece of history. Yeah. So, this flower delivery thing happens kind of weird. Then all of a sudden, at the hacienda, there's an explosion. and the explosion takes place

and there was concern that the explosion took out his wife and two kids they end up going to the house and they find that everybody's okay they pull him out of the rubble his daughter's ears are pretty mangled from the explosion

other than that everybody seems to be all right and Pablo is just furious that he was able to be attacked like this they find out that there were a few members of the Cali cartel that had showed up to that meeting and that more likely than not, the Cali cartel was the one that pulled off the bombing. So they end up trying to get back to the Cali cartel

by finding somebody who's a bomb tech. And they go back through this guy that was at the meeting. He had done some time. They saw who he did time with. It turns out that there was a bomb maker that he brought before Pablo. Pablo's like, what's your experience? He goes, well, I taught some Cali Cartel guys

how to make a bomb. And he's like, a bomb blew up my house and almost killed my family. Instead of killing the guy, he goes ahead and he's like, hey, train my guys to do what you do. Once that guy trained all of his lieutenants, the city of Cali was just basically like the 4th of July for a few months after that.

There were bombings going on everywhere in Cali, just on the revenge of Pablo. So now you're fighting the government, you're fighting the Cali cartel, and you're fighting the DEA all at the same time. You're just getting in too deep. There's too many, you're fighting on too many fronts. So one thing that they also did was the Colombian president also formed this thing called search block.

And it was a designated government military outfit ran by this guy named Colonel Hugo. What was it? Hugo Martinez. And basically this guy, think of it in the terms of like the untouchables. Like this guy goes through, tries to find all the most incorruptible guys. with the best records, guys that couldn't be bribed and everything to form this search block to basically take the fight to Pablo. And part of what they were doing working kind of coincide or working hand in hand with like the DEA and everything is that resources that, you know, the directive that George Bush signed allocating the, you know, $300 million to fight the cartels. That also came with resources from the United States for technology, for tracking and things like that.

So the hump for Pablo turns in almost to like an electronic warfare at this point where they're trying to triangulate him based on signals, find out where he's at. And so through these methods, it starts to really kind of tighten the noose around Escobar. And kind of with the two front hunt that's going on for Escobar, a car, he's trying to kind of take some of the heat off of him. And on December 6, 1989, a car bomb ends up going off out. outside the DAS headquarters where Martinez is actually stationed? He was the leader of search block. The guy that was the head of the DAS, like the complete thing, his name was Miguel Alfredo Mesa-Muyah.

This explosion was so big that they said they found remnants of the car or on the roof of an 11-story DAS building. It blew parts of the car that high up in the... The air. 111 feet. Yeah. That's insane. How big it was.

I think they said it was like a 12 or 13 foot crater that made into the ground. It killed 52 people. Massa Marquez was in the building and it ended up not killing him. He had like, I think, bulletproof glass on his window. So he was, and his roof had collapsed or part of his ceiling had collapsed. Something had like stopped the complete fall on it. But they said that it was so powerful that there were like chips and pits taken out of like a bulletproof window. So from an explosion.

that's kind of showing people there at this point that Pablo with all of his bomb makers and everything like that is just going to keep escalating the situation and they start kind of making it some headway because search block kind of taking the fight to him and having these resources that the DEA is putting into it they start taking down a lot of his like lieutenants and kind of the guys that are they're trying to cut the heads off the snake.

Yeah and I think that they were making some pretty good headway because a lot of his lieutenants start going down. They end up killing his cousin Gustavo. There's questions as to how that happened based upon, I think, what the facts are and then what Pablo wanted it to look like. So he's starting to, excuse me, get desperate. And when you get desperate, sometimes you've got to go back to the same playbook that got you famous.

The next thing that he did was he kidnapped a journalist named Diana Turbii, I think, August 30th, 1990, she was the daughter of a former Colombian president. So now you've upped it to publicly kidnapping the daughter of a former Colombian president that was looked at as a pretty important figure in the country. Then you also kidnapped the editor of the newspaper, El Tienpo, and used them as a bargaining chip for his surrender. And his surrender is so nuts the way that it all goes down. Yeah.

are fucking insane. He negotiates with the president, Havaria, the guy that he tried to explode in the plane. They agreed to the terms. The terms were defined confession by the government. So he wanted everything that he was going to confess to

to be perfectly outlined, and he wanted to have a say and what the say was going to be, or what the... Charges would be technically. Charges were going to be. There was something that was going on at the time where if you had

committed a bunch of felonies, you could turn yourself in at the deal of pleading guilty to one of the single felonies while everything else is taken off the table. His was like the unknowing facilitation of drugs into another country or some shit

like that. It was I don't know even how to phrase this or kind of think of the thought process behind this. Basically this deal made the DEA pretty much fucking throw up and shit their pants at the same time. So the Colombian government at this point, I think is looking at the situation saying,

we got to fucking try to put a court in this. And we got to go and do whatever we have to, regardless of what we're going to be making concessions for, if we can at least try to stem this or slow it down, we're willing to do that. No, I fully agree with this. I am in full support that Columbia did this. Yes.

Because you do anything that you can to put a finger in the dyke on this one. Like, it's just going to get worse. So the conditions of this are it was going to be a five-year sentence, which sounds fucking insane based upon all the things that he's been responsible for up to this point. I think it was eight-year sentence, but it was five years with good behavior. And, I mean, how do you not have good behavior in that situation? So he gets to choose where he's going to be incarcerated at. Not a choice as in like, here's all the available prisons in Columbia.

you get to pick which one you're going to go to. More so, like, I'm going to go ahead and build my own prison and then I'm going to be incarcerated in my own prison. I also get to choose my own guards. The military and the police are not allowed within that prison. 20 kilometers away they have to stay. Yeah, they kept a base, essentially, 20 kilometers away,

and that was as close as they could get under the conditions here. He designs this place that is called La. Cathedral. Is it the cathedral? Is it the cathedral? Is what it was? And it was Pablo's personal resort slash prison. If you could even fucking try to tack that on to it. The only thing that made a prison was there was a fence around it, I guess, really.

That he got to oversee the building of himself. Yes, that he was in charge of the construction for. This thing had a soccer field, a bar, jacuzzi, helipad. It was up on a hillside overlooking Medellin. He could overlook the entire. city to the point where using a telescope, he would be able to go ahead and focus in on his family where his family was staying at the time. And while he was talking with them on the phone, he could just be watching the house where they were at. I think they said he was not supposed

to have any visitors, but there were like 180 unauthorized visitors that had come in. And the condition of this is that he would be in this prison, but he would cease all of his drug operations. Yeah. And that was the condition. that was essentially kind of the primary kicker here. Well, with all these people coming in and out and with phones, fax machines, all of that kind of shit. Radios, yep. Yep, he's running it from inside this resort.

I got to outline a little bit of this resort because it's pretty incredible. They had a football pitch that when Pablo was brought into the prison, the helicopter landed where it was going. And when he got off the plane, or when he got off the helicopter, all the guards pointed their guns at him and Pablo looks at him and he was hey

point your guns at the ground get that shit away from me and everybody just dropped their guns so the guy that was in prison there got to choose who was there got to choose the guards enough to where he could just tell him what he wanted to do he was the warden yeah along with the football pitch there was a giant dollhouse that he had built it was like a

apartment style dollhouse for his daughter when she would come and visit to be able to play in there was a bar there was a jacuzzi there was a waterfall um he had a teleusel installed like you were talking about to where he could look over his family's residence and then the whole city of Medellin. There were little like haciendas that were built off to the side.

So when they invited prostitutes over, they could have a place to go bang out the prostitutes. That wasn't a good, to go love the prostitutes. I didn't sound very clean when I said it the first time. My apologies. They had their own discotheque. So they were able to throw parties in there. I'm sure there was plenty of drugs that were going on at these parties. They actually had passes to where the guards would let them out

with the assumption they were all coming back to where they could go down to clubs at night and do all that kind of stuff. They had the newest high-fi like sound systems in there. There were big screen TVs. It was like just the best place to hang out ever. If you were creating a prison, it would probably fall short. like if you wanted to make your own prison, it would fall short of the shit that

Pablo had in his. Like he was living it up. Well, it got to the point too where, because this essentially was not really a prison at this point, um, the president decided that he needed to basically take some of the amenities away, a little seizure of amenities.

So he sends a deputy minister of justice, uh, this guy named Eduardo Mendoza. And he's like, you need to go into this place. You need to take away all their fucking toys. because this is supposed to be a sentence. This isn't a fucking vacation. So this guy's like,

you want me to basically go into the resort de Pablo and take this shit away from them. It's like, yep, that's what you're going to need to do. So he ends up going to fucking do it. And he gets there. There's like a fucking truck, like a cargo truck behind him. Some of the military guys were with him.

And I don't think Pablo came out to meet him, but... They had a face. to face. They have a face to face. Yep. So, Pablo comes out and he's like, I imagine at him being looking down and being like, hey, well, gee, Mr. Escobar, I really hate to even be out here, but the president's really riding my ass that, man, I probably got to take away some of your guys's TVs and some of your stereos and some of the stuff like that. And Pablo is just like, you know what? Come inside and we'll go ahead and talk about this. We'll get this taken care of. So the end result of

this is that this guy ends up driving back with an entire truckload of all the things that he was supposed to take away to show to the president to be like, look, see, he's fulfilling the terms, he gave us all this stuff, there was no issue to do this. Well, at the same time, as soon as the fucking taillights are out of you, they just unpack all this brand new shit from wherever they were scrolling away and just install everything back. They said that Pablo actually made the prison guards help him load the back of the cargo truck because the whole reason that it fell to Mendoza was

the president had seen an expose that was done on Lakatu Drol in like Hustler magazine and had had seen all these amenities that he had and was like, no man, this is supposed to be prison. You already embarrassed ourselves enough by giving him his own

prison. What's going to happen if fucking everyone sees what the prison actually is? Well, and he goes to search block, he's like search block go take his shit and they're like, mm-mm, not doing it, man. They all have guns in there and he hired all the guards. As soon as we walk in there, they're killing us. You remember when he said 20 kilometers, we got to stay. Yeah, this is your fucking deal. Like, you made this decision to allow him to be in this situation. So eventually, when it runs down to Mendoza, Mendoza is like just the last one that he can force to do something,

or the first person that has no choice but to go do it. Mendoza did not want to go do it. So yeah, they just went ahead and put back everything that they had just allowed. Mendoza to have. The last straw kind of seemed like a dumb move, but in the grand scope of Pablo, it all kind of makes sense to me. He brought two members of the cartel that were members of, I think it was 12 families that he had put in charge of the whole operation. These two members of the cartel that they brought into Lakati Drol,

Pablo was very angry about because he felt like he wasn't getting the amount of money put in his accounts that he should be and that they were all skimming off the top and scroen him. So he actually has these two people murdered inside of Lakate Draal. Torture and murdered. Yep. Yeah, I'm sure that's these. We should go outside any time we say that someone's murdered and it's not by a bomb or by a drive-by or something like that,

they're tortured first. One of them probably got a necktie. The other one probably was turned into a vase. And then they were cut up and gotten rid of. Somehow that leaks out. The president's like, we can't do the shit anymore. Like we he's got a soccer pitch that he actually flew the Colombian national team into La Cate Drol to play an exhibition game. There's that 30 for 30 Escobar about the Colombian national team that gets flown into his prison, and they have like an exhibition match with him and the guards at the prison.

Are you serious? Yeah. It's a very, very good watch. And so he's done enough to where, maybe murders. It's an embarrassment at this point. Like, this has just got a, you're already embarrassed at the fact that he had all this stuff. If it somehow gets out that he killed these two cartel members, they're like, what is he even like, he's running his business. He's killing the cartel members because they're not doing their job

and running his business. Everything about this, anytime of any of this information, it kind of makes it seem like the real president is at Lakata Day. Yep. He can do whatever he wants. So Mendoza gets another goal. Bendoza has to go back.

This time they bring the Colombian military. There's some questions as to how this all goes down. So I'd like to mash these two stories together that I heard just to make the best thing I can think of. Mendoza shows up with the military at the gate. Pablo sends the guards out there. They make Mendoza come in. Mendoza and Pablo talk for a little bit.

Mendoza, again, is probably staring at his feet. He's like, hey, Mr. Escobar. Can you mention the flop sweat? Oh, God. Just soaking your shirt And probably your fucking pants Yeah, it would be so bad It's like

We heard about the murders I'm sorry But we're gonna have to take you out of here And You're going to a regular prison Yeah you're going to a regular prison We actually need to make some upgrades To your facilities

But I promise then you'll be brought back Knowing full well that it wasn't going to happen And probably was like yeah That sounds good Me and a few of my guys Are gonna head to the back You just stay out here for a little while and we'll come back out in a second, we'll talk to you.

So like eight hours that go by, finally the military ends up raiding the Katta Drol. They get into a gunfight with the guards that were there to keep Pablo in. By the time the gun fight's over with, they go to search for Pablo and the guys that he was locked up with. When the construction happened,

supposedly they told them to build a section of the wall a lot weaker than the rest of the wall. It was like concrete, concrete, and then it was basically just like thin wood with concrete just over it to where literally they just kicked this section and it just collapsed in and there was already a pre-built tunnel

in there that took them out of the jungle because they built this fucking place. So, Pablo's back on the run again, all that we knocked down. That part that was like, we didn't even know that was there. Yeah. Yeah, like, I was threatened. I thought my life was threatened and so I had to try to get out of there.

So the president's like, actually, I think what I'll do is I'm just going to fucking call in all the American forces I can on this one to hunt your ass down. And so the hunt for Pablo is on, and this kicks up a level not just between essentially the Colombian government, the DEA, and Pablo. But now we get this group coming in Los Pepe's. And Los Pepeys starts this bombing campaign and attack campaign on Pablo's safe houses.

Yeah. Starts burning down, his safe houses bombing him, burns down. his mother's ranch. And basically, because the DEA and search block are looking at this and saying these guys, these guys are going after all the fucking targets of Pablo's.

Yeah, they're not part of our affiliation. Technically they're doing this all legally and they're probably not very good people, but you know, they're killing a lot of the lie lieutenants and the guys in the cartel. You know what? Let's just sit back and see how this thing plays out.

This part. frustrates me so much because you always want to cheer for the Americans being American. I think the DEA was pretty messed up and letting these Los Pepepe's guys just do whatever they wanted. This, I mean, I will say Los Pepepe's was a good thing, partially because even before Pablo went into Lakata Drol, Chris was talking about how dangerous this place was before. The first, I believe it was three months in the beginning of 19. 91, 300 police were killed that were search block members. And murders...

Yeah, three months span? Yeah. Murders in Columbia averaged 20 a day. It was the most dangerous place in the world, like per capita for murders. So at its peak in 1992, when it was the murder capital of the world, there were 270,000 violent deaths that year, which equates out to 700. 141. Oh, 74 a day. That's a number that is just, I don't know.

I don't know how you even like quantify lives being lost that much. So Los Pepe is doing a service to Columbia. There's questions about who is funding Los Pepepe's and where they're coming from. A lot of it was his lieutenants that Pablo made feel as if they weren't necessary or weren't being protected. So what the name of the group was The slang was Los Papers But basically it was those persecuted by Pablo And over that translates the get Los Pets out of it

But these weren't people that were like Oh my God, I lost a family member In a bombing attack I'm gonna Batman this shouldn't become a vigilante And try to take down Pablo These were basically people that were Pablo's business rivals When it comes down to it They were disgruntled people from the Medellin cartel

that Pablo had persecuted and had essentially turned and went to the Cali cartel with information, which is why they knew where his safe houses were. They knew where his mother's ranch were. They had inside information on the workings of the Medellin cartel. And it was an enemy of my enemy is my friend type thing, but at the same time, there is collateral damage to some of these Les Pepe's attacks because although they're going after Pablo and everything,

and going after his generals, there's still, you know, innocents are being caught in the crossfire. Yeah, and there's still killings going on. You'd always like to believe that killings going on are going to be investigated, regardless of which side it's happening on. But the DEA knew that technologically,

like you were talking about earlier, they were kind of controlling where Pablo was based upon, like, radar pings and that kind of a thing. Los Pepe's were the guys on the ground that were really making the headway into keeping Pablo on the run. And a lot of it was Los Pepeps

were going after the most important thing to Pablo and that was his family. So they were bombing areas that they were thinking the family might be in. They were doing the thing that essentially a government agency couldn't do. Yeah. Which in a way, I mean, yeah,

that should be off the table just because there's kids involved in everything. Because that's the big thing too when it comes down to it is the wife is completely complicit in this. she's able to stay. She knows exactly where this money's coming from. She knows where her lifestyle is coming from.

Same thing with his mother. All complicit within this shit. But you're looking at this from the government's perspective and the DEA's perspective. You also got to think about the fact that they're like, nothing apparently up to this point that we've tried works. Like even the Colombian dumb shit idea about him designing his own prison that you were so desperate, even that failed when you were giving him control of the entire situation. Somehow that deal still got fucked up.

the only thing we can't do to put pressure on this guy is to go after his family. Maybe we should let someone else have a crack at that and see if that actually works to get him to maybe come to us to turn himself in in exchange for like protecting his family. It had to have been out of desperation and just almost a weird morbid curiosity to be like, let's see how this plays out. Well, part of the reason they needed to kind of keep an eye on the family and did ultimately give them protection from Los Pepe's

was if they were able to track the family they knew that Pablo was going to be making calls to them he was going to be checking in on him he was going to be close there were going to be meetings so it was kind of like Pablo's not a known protection yeah yeah it had to have been like they had to surveil and know what was going on and intervene if something ever happened but it was never something where like they were at a safe house

up to this point of like the dea the company they were just basically keeping an eye on the family and using that as a tool to try to track down Pablo. Well, and they were just better alive than dead for them. There's some really odd ways that Pablo tries to protect him. One of them was he sent them to Germany to look for asylum. And asylum from what? I'm not really sure.

He tried to use some language of like they're persecuted by their government. It changed their names. They had all false doctors. documentation, everything like that. One of the D.A. agents that I heard an interview, so they were tracking Pablo's family. They knew they went to the airport. Him and another guy kind of went undercover to actually follow them and saw them go through security.

So they bought two tickets because they figured there were only two places that they could be going based upon the time, things like that. And so they determined after they got through, they saw them at a gate and they were going to someplace in Germany. They hopped on the flight with them and basically were watching them the entire time and during the flight at this point there were like telephones on planes that you could utilize or a radio if you really needed to the guy that was giving the interview told them that he had notified essentially their contacts in germany at the embassy or whatever it was going to be to notify the

german authorities to let them know who was trying to come in to seek asylum in their country and that they should not let these people get a foothold because a b and c if pablo thinks his family's he's going to go all the fucking warpath and it scorched earth and so this plane lands and it doesn't even make it to the gate. They got fucking military vehicles, tanks on the runway, it lands and it stops. And they basically, Pablo's family never left the airport as far as getting any further into Germany than that. Their passports are like photographed and everything. And they are sent back to, so now they have them in a database essentially for them trying to leave the country or anything like that. And they are sent back to Columbia. And this basically was kind of a last

ditch effort from Pablo to try to get his family to safety. And at this point, he doesn't have any other fucking, he doesn't have another leg to stand on. No, no, he's, all of the things that he was trying to do to keep his, excuse me, family safe were, he didn't really have anything. Germany kind of seems like a weird place to send him to. And I guess he was pretty pissed off that the Germans didn't accept them. so he was calling the German embassy

and was like threatening to blow up the embassy in Germany which Germany I think probably can sniff out if well they used to not be able to sniff out if somebody was going to be a threat to their country or not but they knew that Pablo wasn't going to bomb them. Nobody can come of this. Yeah they would rather

Pablo tried to send his people to like You are going to bomb Germany from Colombia when you're hiding yeah okay I was thinking about it Just how easy it would have been though I mean

Could you imagine how it would have gone for Germany If Pablo had been able to organize this and had more resources To be able to like send a bunch of his Sicario To other places in Europe and get to Germany And like know that the family was going to be there And like they met him on the runway Yeah Because I think had he had more power he would have

have had more cover for them when they got there instead of just hoping that there would be some sort of diplomatic help. All of his resources because he was hiding, he didn't have, you know, anywhere near the kind of resources or communication that he had at his peak. Yeah. So if you don't have that, unfortunately, you can't, you know, play the diplomatic card at all. So once that happens, Pablo's family is brought back to Bogota and they're just holed up in a hotel. and Pablo doesn't have a whole lot to do.

Oh, we got to go back. We missed a story. So I believe it was right before, maybe it was after. I think it might have been after he escaped. Him and his brother went on the run and his 42nd birthday party. Do you remember this at all? His 42nd birthday party, Pablo's like, I want to have a party for everybody before we, you know, go on the run. thing. Yep. Yeah. So he's like,

I want to have a party and his brother Roberto's like, fuck you, dude. We're not inviting a bunch of people in here. He's like, I want a band. And he goes, no, that's going to be people that can see us. They're going to find us. They're going to know what's going on. We're going to go down because your dumb ass wants to have a birthday party with a band. Pablo goes, I got it. Don't worry about it.

I don't think that's exactly what he could have said. I don't think that's a good idea, Pablo. He's probably about as far out as... He was his brother. He wasn't going to kill his brother. Maybe. Yeah. Okay. I guess it's probably true. So, Roberto goes and gets his bags and starts throwing shit in his bags to pack to leave. And as he's on his way out the door, he hears the music starting.

And he's like, ah, shit. He looks inside, and the entire mariachi band that's playing that night is blind. So nobody can see. Pablo hired a bunch of blind musicians to come play at this birthday party. They said that when they went to sing happy birthday or Felice Coupilagnoos to him, they asked who they were singing for. And he says, Pablo Escobar and I guess

everybody in the band just started laughing and they sang the song Felice Cunplianos Pablo Escobar all that then as they're leaving and they're getting done Pablo tells Roberto to go over and pay him and he hands each one of them $20,000 that's when all the blind

people realized that they were playing for Pablo Escobar when they just got paid $20,000 each to play at his birthday party and Roberto explained to him to like take the money and break down into smaller bills and don't spend all of it at once, like gave them instructions as to how to smuggle this money because there's no way that all these blind musicians are going to make

that much money. Yeah. How crazy is that to take that risk? But then how brilliant is it to be like, well, if they can't see me, they can't turn me. That's got to be some weird. Like at times he feels like he knows exactly like the severity of the shit that he's in. But then at other times, you think like he slips back into that feeling when he had complete and total control over everything and he was untouchable of like I still got some of that I still got some of that

untouchability left like he has to do something to remind himself that he's Pablo Eskimo so yeah he's fast forward back to where we were um his calls are being traced by search block that Pablo's making to his family his birthday comes they're traced back to a building in medelline uh December 1st 1993 43 third birthday which is insane because you're thinking about it this all plays back to how he established himself in Medellin as like knowing he'd be protected there because it's a huge city at this point and not only is a huge city that he can hide in lots of different places

the local populist looks at him kind of with reverence but at the same time they know where you're at or they have suspicions of where you're going to be at they track you here this is going to be the place where you operated the most which means that this is probably also the place that the DEA and search block have the most knowledge of because they've spent the most time in here trying to go against you.

You would think you would try to get somewhere outside of your fucking hometown where your operation is to do a little bit better hiding. Yeah, you also at the same time have such a limited number of resources available to you. And he's always been untouchable then, I guess. But yeah, he ends up getting traced to a building in Medellin and on December 2nd of 1993,

we always talk about how we feel like the 90s were 10 years ago and when someone tells us it's more than 30 years ago it's like fuck but 93 like that's a time that like we were alive yeah I I have sentience at that point I don't remember a lot of 93 but I can piece some stuff together around then but the day after his 43rd birthday he calls his wife call runs a little bit longer than usual and the longer this was at a time when you're like you know you're watch a movie the FBI's like, keep him on, keep him talking,

because they got to triangulating and get a closer point longer he's on the call. He ends up hanging up. He knows at this point that they're able to trace calls he's known for a while. He hasn't met a system of switching out phones for different, like, he goes through like 10 different phones that he's able to switch between. He uses radio communications in some situations, but he's having to call his family. That's the part that shocked me the most was thinking that all the way back then in 1993,

there were still burner phones around. Yeah. He still had burners in... They weren't accessible like that, but maybe that's the idea is that phones were so... First of all, there's not a ton of them. They still did have problems in triangulating

to the point where the U.S. flew down two specialized planes that would fly over Medellin and could triangulate radio signals and pick up different stuff. You know, cell phones, especially in Medellin, are probably still a luxury at that point. And having 10 of those, you're still having to pay a ton

for each cell phone and everything like that. that so you're even able to say like well we only know there's so many fucking cell phones in this city there's 35 cell phones in medellin 10 of them are Pablo's so he ends up calling a second time to talk to his son and as he's calling and talking to his son they're also staking out locations where they think public could be because they narrowed it down to medine i think they had it nailed down to a certain like section of town or district yep so they're watching these places that were suspected safe houses, places they were able to tie through Shell corporations, names of associates that might be housing Escobar. And one of the guys that actually spots him

is Hugo Martinez Jr. So wherever you have Pablo talking to his son on the phone, you have Hugo Martinez, who is the leader of search block, who has his son working for search block as well. It's a weird kind of coincidence on that. But this guy actually looks out the window as he's talking on the phone and Junior's like, holy shit. That's fucking Pablo. I don't know if they're in a car or they're doing surveillance from another building or something like that, but was able to spot him and fucking gets on the horn is like,

we got fucking Escobar. Everyone get here as quick as possible. We need to take this guy now. They said that they were shocked that Escobar didn't realize what was going on because Martinez Jr. had said that him and Escobar had made eye contact as he was driving by. And again, back in the early 90s, if you were trying to get information, you're going to have to do it in a very obvious way. He said that he was holding a radio dish outside the window of the car that he was driving by, said that him and Escobar had made eye contact, but Escobar didn't realize what it was or something. So he had no idea, but he knew that that had to be Escobar because he was listening to the phone call from the satellite.

he was holding out the window and just put two and two together. So eventually they call in search block. The military shows up and they find the apartment, bust into the apartment, and it's literally just down to El Patron and one of his Sicario's. I think it was two guys that were with him. One stayed behind. Oh, okay.

And he was in a firefight with the search block. And then him and then his longest standing guy that he was with. That was all he had. He was down to bare bones. They end up climbing up onto the roof to try to escape across the rooftops. And Pablo, I think they said he had two pistols that he had, and they were kind of firing it. Search block, they came up.

One hit him in the leg. They caught one of them, I'm trying to think where they said he was shot. He was shot in the foot, the leg. And then the one that put him down was he got shot in the back of the head. And there's some questions. Is that what all went down? Pablo supporters say, that he shot himself.

I don't think it really matters, but... They're also, if they want to turn the tables, that he was executed, that it wasn't during, that he had gone down with the leg wounds and that they went up on him and shot him in the head,

which at this point, I think we kind of discussed this a little bit, if you're those guys in search block, and you've been under constant threat, for years and years, you've been threatened probably multiple times, your family's probably been threatened, you've lost friends to this kind of shit.

There's got to be a pretty strong urge, to exact some fucking some frontier justice. Not to be taken alive. Yeah. And who knows? If you take Pablo alive at that point, are we turning this into a Chapo style escape from prison? And there's so many things that I wonder at this point,

like, had he been taken in alive? Do you think he still had enough pole to where it would have been pretty hard to get him to the United States? No. You think he would have been extradated? At that point, I think he was out the door as far as his power went. if you want to look up the picture, it's not super graphic,

like there's blood on his face and everything like that, but he's kind of fallen over in a weird position, and then there's like eight search block guys behind him, and like two of them are smiling and giving the thumbs up, and the other ones are all happy and shit.

You've got to understand what those guys probably went through. I think the first guy on the radio, they said after they shot him, was it translated to... Viva La Columbia. Yep. And then Pablo is dead or something like that.

Pablo Escobar is murder. Yep. it's the the picture is like if you and your dad were out and you just shot like an eight point buck yeah very much so except the gun's not resting in the antlers yeah but everyone's just standing around like it's like look what we did um my other question is you got to think after a take down like that you're celebrating with some of Pablo's product right these guys I think it stayed so I don't think these were the guys that would do that you got to let your hair down afterwards.

And if you take down the biggest cocaine kingpin in the world, you got to celebrate a little bit of booger sugar, I think. I hope they did. I hope they really enjoyed themselves. The whole thing is so different as far as you were talking about, the support that he's still garnered, because you'd think a major cocaine kingpin that just got killed in such a manner that he had terrorized an entire country for so long. I guess it was mostly just Medellín and then in the capital.

But 25,000 people still showed up to Pablo's funeral. Yeah, like he got some, I don't know how it fucking works. I think I heard that he was held in the state capital. Yes, I don't, I don't get how this. And then it was a cathedral or a big church that he had the one with the 25,000 people showed up. But, okay, so this guy is a wanted terrorist drug kingpin. He broke out of prison. he's murdered, they say it all in all,

estimated deaths attributed to Pablo and everything is not him personally, of course, but attributed to Medellin between 4,000 and 5,000 deaths. For the fucking drug trade, that's fucking nuts. So you have this guy that's responsible for all this, yet he's still, like, is it a religion thing that you're still allowing this? Because it's not like if they took fucking Ted Bundy's body

and he had this huge elaborate funeral or anything like that and I get that it's a completely different scenario but what I'm saying is that this would just be a situation where like you go to the police station morgue and then they just incinerate your body there right you don't

were they trying to make him not a martyr and trying to like I don't get it I don't get how they allowed it to be 25 fucking thousand people showing up for his funeral and I know that Medellin's a huge city who's a fucking folk hero

to those people for reasons we've discussed but like for the government who's in possession of the body to then let is it the same rationale and weird ass thinking about giving him his own fucking

prison playpen that it was just like to try to not make reprisals or something because we did something the body we didn't let people have this we're gonna I don't get it I think a huge element

is religion in Columbia. The reason I say that is because there was a part of this where one of the FBI agents or one of the DE agents was talking about going to funerals of these police officers that they knew. When they were buried down there, they weren't embalmed.

And Columbia is a fairly naturally hot place, I think. So when they would have these funerals for these fallen officers, they wouldn't use any embalming in them and the place would just stink. So they would burn like ceremonial incense to try to cover up the smell of the body. I think if religion is that important that you wouldn't balm somebody and let them stink at their own funeral, you probably are thinking it's important. He's saying that you went to so many of those funerals in such a short amount of time is that the scent triggers like an actual like response.

Yeah. From him of that, like he just got to the point where it was just like the scent was what triggered his responses to stuff. So I think if your religion's held in that high of regard in order to not do that You gotta give maybe something to where you're doing it because you're not going to deny someone these rights Because it's not your place to do it's God's yeah it's God's you know it's his problem once he's got his Catholic funeral or whatever it is Pablo Escobar is officially God's problem let's celebrate That's true the 25,000 people we don't know if they showed up with like or the voooselas like they do with the soccer

games and celebrated or if it was a sad occasion. So there could have been some celebration there. We told this whole story, just in essence, to tell you that Pablo Escobar's death affected the cocaine trade for about two weeks. It had no discernible change in the amount of cocaine that was leaving this country because as soon as he's dead and you had Los Pepe's who was his boys that ended up flip into the Cali cartel. the Cali cartel picks up business exactly where Pablo left it.

And they are still just exporting. Not flashy. No, yeah. And that was the whole reason that the Cali cartel really wanted Pablo gone was Pablo was doing things to draw attention to the cocaine trade that they were then getting tied into too. So if you can hold off and you can fly under the radar, you can still keep making your money without the government being up your ass. So all and all, for Pablo to create. create this big elaborate empire. His death really was meaningless to what he created.

Like he created such a great network before. If he ever felt that God complex of this whole thing needs me. Oh yeah. And it would all come collapse without me. Yeah, definitely not the case. And that's the thing too is like it's not like the Cali cartel came in and had to try to catch up on where Pablo's operation was. They probably anybody that was able to go ahead and switch sides that they left alive

that they knew, you know, they knew was necessity to keep this operation running in the context and everything. It was just like, nope, business as usual, people is just under new management. Exactly.

Everyone still wanted to make the money. They didn't care who they were making their money from. They were bummed up Pablo died because he was probably a pretty fun hang, but beyond that, there was still money to be made. Yeah. Yeah.

Crazy, definitely a fucking shithead of history and everything, but just, it's a weird study of if there's a niche, if there's something that people want, that there's always going to be somebody that's going to be there to provide it

in regards of what it is, and some people are just insanely good at being shitty. Well, all in all, for as bad of a person he was, and that's not taking into account the drug trade, because I think like we talked about before, that's a supply and demand business. You're only as bad as the people that are willing to pay for the bad thing

that you're producing and giving to them. So taking all that out of it, Bad person. It's a Kardashian thing. Kardashians are only on TV because people continue to watch the Kardashians. Cocaine, Kardashians. Okay. I can kind of see that.

It is bad for you, but man, if you enjoy it, it's a lot of fun. So, yeah, I mean, this man, I feel like is a gigantic historical figure because his network that he created brought the flow of cocaine out of South America and into the noses and hearts of so many people around the world. that he's, I mean, he was a contributor to the war on drugs that we still see failing today in this country. He's had impact on legislation in more than one country besides Colombia. I can't think of if someone talks about Colombia, I cannot, I cannot think of Colombia without thinking of cocaine. Yep.

It's an impossibility not to not to connect those two. And you, for great reason, what did you tell me about the exports? It was a report in 2023 from the president of Columbia. he'd said that he believes that their top export of crude oil was going to be overtaken by cocaine. So the cocaine trade will be a bigger industry in Colombia than crude oil. Than oil. Cocaine is going to be oil. It's just white oil.

And to think that you can't take advantage of your number one export. A little bugger lube. Yep. All right, man. You got anything else? No. I think we're good. All right.

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