Locked In with Ian Bick - Pablo Escobar Tried to Kill Me – DEA Agent Behind Narcos | Steve Murphy

Episode Date: August 4, 2025

Former DEA Agent Steve Murphy reveals the untold story behind the manhunt for Pablo Escobar. From his early days as a police officer to going undercover in Miami and eventually being deployed to Colombia, Murphy walks us through the real events that inspired Netflix’s Narcos. He shares what it was like tracking the world’s most dangerous drug lord, how the day of Escobar’s death really went down, and the truth vs. fiction in Hollywood’s version of the story. If you think you know the story of Pablo Escobar, think again. #Narcos #PabloEscobar #DEAAgent #TrueCrime #SteveMurphy #LockedInPodcast #DrugWars #Colombia #Cartel #NetflixNarcos #EscobarTruth Connect with Steve Murphy: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEUxmx5tbdX1fI5Zx7NdldQ Website 1: https://gameofcrimespodcast.com/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/GameOfCrimesPodcast Instagram: https://Instagram.com/gameofcrimespodcast TikTok: tiktok.com/@gameofcrimes Patreon: patreon.com/gameofcrimes LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/stephenmurphydea Website 2: www.DEAnarcos.com Book: "Manhunters - How We Took Down Pablo Escobar" - available on Amazon, or can purchase autographed and personalized copies at www.DEAnarcos.com/shop - I ship those out myself. Hosted, Executive Produced & Edited By Ian Bick: https://www.instagram.com/ian_bick/?hl=en https://ianbick.com/ Get 50% off the Magic Mind offer here: https://www.magicmind.com/IANB50. #magicmind #mentalwealth #mentalperformance Presented by Tyson 2.0 & Wooooo Energy: https://tyson20.com/ https://woooooenergy.com/ Use code LOCKEDIN for 20% OFF Wooooo Energy Buy Merch: http://www.ianbick.com/shop Timestamps: 00:00:00 The Story of Steve Murphy: From Local Cop to DEA Agent 00:07:17 Early Influences on a Law Enforcement Career 00:14:45 Early Career in Law Enforcement 00:21:54 Transition to Norfolk: Career and Personal Life Changes 00:29:02 Tense Standoff and Police Response 00:36:11 Journey to Becoming a DEA Agent 00:43:41 Undercover Operation in Miami 00:51:00 Violence and Hierarchies in the Narco World 00:58:48 Pablo Escobar's Luxurious Prison Deal 01:06:56 Working with Colombian National Police 01:14:40 Daily Operations Against Pablo Escobar 01:22:21 Colombian High School Memories 01:29:47 The Final Pursuit of Pablo Escobar 01:36:52 Pablo Escobar's Family Confrontation 01:45:43 The Unseen Heroes of the Escobar Investigation 01:51:27 The Decision Against Glorifying Pablo Escobar 01:58:17 Embracing Change and Support Powered by: Just Media House : https://www.justmediahouse.com/ Creative direction, design, assets, support by FWRD: https://www.fwrd.co Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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He put a $300,000 bounty on each of us. I got to tell you what, Ian, that was one of the most disconcerting moments of my entire time in Columbia. It was to hear the world's first narco-terrorists are to know that he knows your name. Steve Murphy wasn't recruited by the DEA. He built his credentials as a local cop, fought railroad crime, and earned his spot through hard-earned grit. After more than a decade in law enforcement, he joined the DEA. Soon enough, he was going undercover in Miami-smuggling cases. and tracking hundreds of kilos of cocaine from Cuba.

Then he was abruptly deployed to Colombia, where he and partner Javier Peña teamed up with the Colombian National Police to take down Pablo Escobar. From the moment Escobar escaped his custom prison to that day, the narco terrorist was finally gunned down. This is the real story. Forget narcos. Let the man who lived it tell you how fact and fiction diverge.

Steve, welcome to Lockton, man. This has been months in the making. and I'm so glad we finally got to do this. Thank you very much, Ian. I appreciate you having me up here, and I appreciate you being on my podcast. It was, I told you before, my wife thinks you're the best guest I've had so far.

Well, tell the audience a name of it, too, so they could find it. It's Game of Crimes with Murph in the Morning. You can find it on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, anywhere you can find audio podcast, plus the video is on YouTube. And you're also the author of Manhunters. Correct. My partner, have your opinion now. I would like to say we wrote it,

but we had a ghost writer. Hey, all the greats have a ghost writer. Well, thank goodness, because, you know, a funny story with that, I tried to write it myself because I'm, in law enforcement terms, I'm a pretty good writer. Because, you know, you've got a chronological order that you have to follow. So I sat down one day after I first retire back in 2013 and started making an outline and jotting notes down. And I wrote for about six hours.

And then I waited a day or two and came back and I read it. And I'm like, what a bunch of crap. So I gave up on that idea. Yeah, well, without the book, there wouldn't be a Narcos, right? Or do you think that would have developed if the book didn't exist? Believe it or not, we did it backwards. We did Narcos and then wrote the book. But the book came out around the same time as Narcos?

Gosh, let's see. Let me think. So we signed contracts. We started filming in 14. Yeah, you know, the book, I think maybe season one of Narcos. was already out when the book came out. Oh, interesting. I never have gone back and looked at the dates.

I'm not sure. We'll have to check it out after. Yeah. So, Steve, you're our first, I think, DEA agent on the show. We've had Homeland Security. We've had, I don't know if we've had FBI. We have a corrupt FBI agent coming on the show. Well, I'm not going to mention the name, but I've got a feeling I know who it is.

And, yeah, but it's so grateful to have you on the show. Thank you. Truly, it's an honor to be here. And I'm not kidding you about when I said what Connie said about you. She was excited that I was going to come up and meet you in person. Yeah, you're a great interviewer. That was one of my – I normally don't like doing Zoom interviews, but for you, I did it. And it was good.

You had a lot of good questions. Yeah. Well, you know better than I. It's all about the research. Yeah, absolutely. Well, hopefully I bring my A game today so the audience doesn't get mad at me. I'm seeing a pile of notes in front of you. I'm thinking, holy cow.

I've been looking forward to this. What's this guy to know about me? Well, so where did you grow up, Steve? Where are you from? I'm originally from Memphis, Tennessee. When I was about two or three years old, we moved to a place called Murphy's Burr, just south of Nashville, stayed there until I was going into high school. My mom and dad originally from West Virginia. My dad was a Southern Baptist minister. When he retired from the ministry, he and my uncle, my favorite uncle Joe, got out of the Air Force. He retired from the military, and they decided to open a carpet store there in Nashville. Well, when we'd go to visit our grandparents in West Virginia, of course, you know, they're looking at the market up there and they realized that the people up there were being screwed over. The markup on the carpet was like 100%. And typically back then, the markup should have been about 30%.

So they decided we're all moving up there. I graduated or I got out of my school year at the end of May of, I think it was 69. And next week, moving, you know, we got a U-Haul truck and we moved two. families to West Virginia. So I don't know a soul in West Virginia except my grandparents. I had some cousins up there, but they were all girls, you know, so there really wasn't anybody to run around with. But anyway, I went to high school and college in West Virginia and really I call West Virginia home now. How would you describe yourself as a kid? Easy going, you know. I, uh, so when I was in Tennessee, I think I was one of the popular

kids. I don't know if, you know, now looking back and you kind of analyze your life, I think I was. And all of a sudden, now I'm in West Virginia and I don't know a soul and I go try out for football. I've never played organized football. I've only played backyard football. And these kids have been playing organized football for several years. And, you know, I had a very strong Tennessee accent. Now I just have a country accent. But all these kids from West Virginia are making fun of my accent. And I'm thinking, have you listened to yourselves? You're hillbillies. But that peer pressure at a young age causes you to adapt the ability to change your accent, to fit into whatever your surroundings are because you want to be accepted. So didn't do well at sports.

Just wasn't accepted by the other people. And my friends ended up being people that were just moving into town. And I just kind of developed there and ended up, my two best friends were from there, Mark and Greg, and I won't say the rest of their names there, but still friends to this day. But I was very heavily involved in the church, which was a good thing because it kept me out of a lot of trouble. And it, I don't know why, but I've always been a good listener. So, which really helps in a podcast because like right now, you're maintaining eye contact, and that's what a good interviewer does.

You know, I've been on a lot of TV shows where they'll ask you a question, and then they're checking their phones and they're looking here and they're checking their nails and they're not paying attention they don't care what you're saying so the kids that I was really close friends with were very comfortable comfortable coming to me and asking me or tell me their problems and asking me of my opinion and I'm thinking what in world you asking me for you know but but I think it just kind of developed a desire or even maybe a need to help others to you know help them with whatever their problems were if they needed help with a project.

As you get older, if somebody needs to help around their house, moving, whatever it might be, you just, I think the good man upstairs just instilled in me the gift of service to others. And I think that had a lot to do with me going into law enforcement. Yeah, that's what I was just going to ask. If you think that, looking back on it now, that was the first stepping stone that you probably didn't realize at the time, but would be the platform, the ground to, your career in law enforcement. And it would also be a major tool, I'm sure, in your career. Well, I think I got the law enforcement bug when I was about 10 or 11 years old. And we were

living in Tennessee and it was summertime. And this story is in the book. Me and some buddies are camping out. It's about 1 o'clock in the morning. We lived out on the edge of town. And so we're on our bikes doing things you're not supposed to be doing in the middle of the night. And there was an all-night laundromat in our neighborhood and had vending machines. So we went up to get some sodas and some crackers and of course nobody had any money so we're thinking okay where can we get some money and one of the guys says let's go break in a house and we all looked at each other and said okay let's try it well we go and we're outside this house yet this window we're getting ready to break in and you know we obviously haven't thought this through very much and the next thing you know this spotlight hits us

and it's like we're like a deer in the head like we were so scared we didn't even run and these two uniform officers came over and they're boys what are y'all doing and so we We, you know, we festered up. We told them. And there's like, well, who lives here? And one kid said, that's where I live. And they said, why don't you go in the front door? Well, if I go in, mom and dad will make me stay in.

I won't be able to come to camp out all night. So the two police officers were, this was back when law enforcement had the discretion to make decisions on the street on how to handle a situation, which a lot of that discretion is no longer available to the police officers out there. It makes the job more difficult. But anyway, the officer. looked at each other. They looked at us and said, well, boys, y'all got a decision to make. You either go with us and we're going to put you in prison the rest of your lives or we can take you home to your parents. Now, you decide.

We all look at each other and say, take us to jail. I don't want to go home and face my parents. And of course, they chuckled and they're like, get in the car either. And they took us all home. And it was not a pleasant experience from my parents because my dad did not believe in sparing the rod to spoil the child. But I think just, and I don't know that I had a conscious thought back then about being a police officer, but apparently it left an impression on me because as I continue to get older, I didn't want to do anything else but be a cop. That's the only thing I've ever wanted to be. When I first went to college in 1974, I went to West Virginia University. I enrolled in business administration because I was the only son and the two families between our family and my uncle's family. and it was always anticipated that I would take over the carpet store.

Man, I had to start working carpet at 14 years old. I hated it then. I hate it now. God bless the installers. That's man's work, what they're doing. But I was way too immature to go away from home to go to college because we lived in southern West Virginia, a little town called Princeton.

And here I am up in Morgantown up next to Pittsburgh, party in my butt off. So when those first semester grades came in I was on academic probation. My dad, I came home for Christmas and he said, boy, we don't pay for that. You know, you're coming home. So I had to go back and pack all my stuff, come home. And there was a local state college, Bluefield State College, was there.

And they had just started a criminal justice program. I mean, it was the very first year. So I was one of the first students to enroll in that. And I thought, I'm not going to tell my parents it's criminal justice. I'm going to let them think I'm in business over here. And I thought I had the wool pulled over their eyes and, you know, It wasn't long before like, we know what you're doing. And that's just that kind of how it all got started.

Why do you think you wanted to hide that from them, the criminal justice aspect? Just because they wanted me to take over the business. You know, they're really, I guess they could have turned it over to one of the girls. My sister was older than me. She was eight years older than me. And she still lived in Tennessee. So she had no interest in it whatsoever. And my uncle Joe had three daughters, but I don't think they were interested in it either.

So it was always planned for Steve to take over, and Steve didn't want anything to do with it. Did you consider the military route at all? I did. I did. There was one of my really good friends in high school, Jerry Leger, we were going to go in the Air Force on the Buddy System. And so this was 1974. We're starting to withdraw from Vietnam. We were just old enough to make the last draft.

But my number was, I want to say, it was like in the 120s, 130s. and that year they were only drafted up through like the 60s. So I wasn't even close to being drafted, but we thought, hey, we'll go in there and there's got to be an adventure in there somewhere. Well, when it came time to go, Jerry joined the Air Force and Steve went away to college. And Jerry and are still friends today. But he did a full life service in the U.S. Air Force. We were real proud of him.

Now, back then was it common for police officers to go to college for criminal justice before coming a cop? Well, I didn't think so, but they're in this little town of Bluefield. And Bluefield back then probably had a population of maybe 25,000 people. When I eventually, that's where I first became a police officer in 1975. There were only 35 officers and probably at least 20, if not more, had a minimum of a two-year degree and quite a few of those had a four-year degree, which is pretty impressive in a little small, you know, coal mining town, especially in southern West Virginia.

So I was impressed by that that, you know, you've got, it's not just a bunch of country bumpkins out there, you know, with the doing the Arnie, you know, the Barney Fife thing. Was becoming a police officer everything you expected it to be growing up as a child and having those thoughts about it? Man, I loved it. I loved it. It was, you know, you come in with all these idealistic thoughts. that you're just there to help people. And you learn pretty quickly that everybody you talk to is lying to you. You learn that most of the time, whatever you respond to, those people really don't want you there. If you're pulling somebody over for a traffic violation, they don't want you there.

If you meet them in an accident, they want to come and tell you their version of the story so they make it look like the other guys at fault. It just, and then, you know, criminals, whether it's a felon, that are committing burglaries or thefts or murders, not so much. It just, everybody lies to you. It was very eye-opening for me because I was very naive. I was pretty protected by my mom and dad. I certainly wasn't a sane as a kid.

I got a lot of spankings, and I deserved everyone and more than I got. But I got away with a lot. But I never looked back. I mean, I was, now, I will say, my first one, wife, call her my practice wife. She, before we got married, I'm thinking, you know, could I support a family on this? I was making $9,600 a year back in 1975 as a police officer. Wow.

$9,600 a year. And that's full time. That was full time. So I'm thinking, you know, maybe I should go back and give my family a try. So I went to the chief. Well, back up just a second. And at the college I went to, the first summer there, this would have been the summer of 75, they had a summer internship program. And so I was the first student from that college to sign up to be an intern for the summer.

So I did five weeks with the city police, and I did five weeks with the sheriff's department. Really liked the city police. I mean, nothing wrong with the sheriff's department, but I didn't want to be a jail. I don't want anything to do with the jail. So you know what kind of people are in there. I'm just kidding, just kidding, guys. Hey, we've had a few jailers on the show. You've had a lot on the other side of those bars, too.

Yep. Which that's what makes your show unique. I love it. I mean, I love how the law enforcement can, I could sit down with like an ex-felon and vice versa and have just different aspects of it. It's so entertaining because you get some people that went to prison that are like, I hate law enforcement or I'm against it. And if I just talk to ex-criminals every day, I'd probably shoot myself. I would not want to do that every day, you know? It needs to have that mixture.

Well, and it's the same on my show. So I primarily bring in law enforcement and military first responders, but occasionally throw in somebody that was on the other side of that thin blue line. And believe it or not, those are the biggest audiences I get. Because people want to hear from that side. You know, they listen to me pontificate and they listen to the guest and all the good things they're doing to help mankind. But there's just that curiosity.

Everybody wants to know, what is it like on that other side? I mean, why did you do something like that? How did you live? And the guys that were involved with organized crime, the old Italian mafia, and bikers. That's the biggest ones. And a little white kid from Connecticut that ran a Ponzi scheme. My wife thinks, you know, walks on water, man. She's enamored with you.

So you were doing that internship. Yeah, so I do the internship. And so this is summer 75. I just graduated high school in 74. Okay? So I come out with fall semester starts of 75. I'm 18 years old. The criminal justice professor comes into the class one day,

and he says, hey, everybody, they're going to offer the civil service test. And I think anybody in here has ever interested in going to law enforcement should take it. And I'm thinking, I'm 18 years old. Don't you have to be 21? And so the professor's name was Gary Willis. And I said, Mr. Willis, I don't think I should take the test. They're not going to hire me. And he said, you're not going to get hired at 18 years old, but you get the experience

of taking the test so that when it's time for you to get hired, you'll already have that behind. You'll know what to expect. You'll be more uncomfortable and made perfect sense to me. So I took that test. Scores came out. I scored higher than anybody else on the test. But I'm in college.

I'm used to taking test, you know. And lo and behold, the city called me and offered me a job. Now, they knew me because of the internship I had done. you know and the chief there I admired him Andrew Dodson with his name so I went and told my parents that hey I'm going to take this job I turned 19 in October of 75 and the next month in November I got hired as a police officer at 19 years old barely 19 years old now back then the city provided your uniforms and cruiser and you know shotguns things like that, but you had to bring in your own leather gear, your gun belt, and your own weapon.

I wasn't known enough to buy a gun. So one of the patrolmen there that I'd gotten to be really close to Kelly Walls, who's retired police officer now, retired college professor as well, he said, listen, give me your money. You bring you, bring the funds. You tell me what kind of gun they want, and we'll go get you a gun. So I went and bought a four-inch colt python revolver because semi-automatics weren't out back then. And then my dad bought my bullets. So, I mean, it's just so ironic. The reason I'm smiling, it's so ironic that I could carry a gun and I could use it if I deemed it necessary in the

line of duty to protect myself or you or somebody else. But I couldn't buy cigarettes. I couldn't buy beer. I couldn't buy a gun. I couldn't buy bullets. But yet, I could take someone's life in the line of duty if I deemed it necessary. It just seems so ironic back then. And today, it still does that. with real lime, blue agave nectar, and real margarita taste. Taste your escape.

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Up front payment of $45 for three-month plan equivalent to $15 per month required. Intro rate first three months only, then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. See full terms at Mintmobile.com. I mean, what were we thinking? So you probably couldn't have it off duty then either? Like cops now today would be able to have it off duty? I carried a gun everywhere I went.

for 38 years. Even off duty? Oh, yeah. At that age, you were able to have one? Yep. Oh, wow. Because, I mean, you're sworn officers, so you're always a cop. I guess that's true.

So how long did it take you on the force to start having those thoughts about maybe I want something more? I need to make some more money. Right. So that was, I see, I got hired in 75, and we got married in 77. So it was late, 76, early 77. And I went to the chief and I said, look, I've got this marriage pending. My family has a business.

Could I have a 90-day leave of absence? Just let me go back and test and see should I go back and support the family business. And he was very understanding. He said, sure. I made it about 35, 40 days and came back and said, Chief can have my job back now. Because I just, once you get bitten by the bug, you can't walk away from it. It's a little bit addictive. You can't say you didn't try.

I tried. I'm not sure that I made mom and dad happy about it, but, and I'll be honest with it. I was probably a cop four years, five years before my dad ever told me he was proud of me. And I'm not, not that he was not proud of me. It's just he didn't express it that way. When did you start to have aspirations to do something more beyond being a police officer? Well, so I got married in 77. I was a city cop for six years. So that, from, from, you know, from, you. I got hired in 75, 77, get married, 79, my first son is born, 81, my second son is born. We were not getting along. I was working every off-duty job I could get. I was working as much overtime as I could get. I picked up the contract for the college basketball games at Bluefield State College,

so I had that contract going. I worked for one of the firemen as an electrician's helper and building new houses. I even sold Amway. I don't know if you know what Amway is. No, it's Amway. It's a Ponzi scheme. They don't call it that, but when I explain it to you off camera, you'll understand. Okay.

You're selling products to other people, but you're trying to recruit people to come in and sell under you. Oh, pyramid scheme. Exactly. Okay. Exactly. So, you know, I was killing myself. I was always working, never home, had these little, you know, my first son was born, and just wasn't spending any time.

And there was a guy I went to college with used to be a Bluefield police officer was a railroad cop. And he was a captain down in Norfolk, Virginia. And he called me one day, and he says, hey, he said, I'm hearing that you might be interested in being a railroad policeman. Would you move to Norfolk, Virginia, and worked for me down here? And I said, sure. And the pay was going to double.

And by this time, I'm probably making $13,000 a year. I mean, it was pathetic. And so I said yes, and he hires me. And that was in 81. And so I picked up, I'm divorced. I've actually met Connie, my current wife. And I take off and head to Virginia Beach. Get me a little apartment down there.

And I'll tell you what, between, you know, just trying to live on your own and paying child support. It was very lean times. Let me tell you, it was very, very lean. I mean, it was, there was times when you're just, you might be eating peanut butter out of a jar and that's going to be your meal for the day. I don't mean to sound like I'm asking for pity or sympathy on that. That's just what you go through and you just deal with it. You don't go around whining about it.

Go do something to improve your situation. I ended up being, I did get an off-duty job eventually as a bouncer in a nightclub down of Virginia Beach. So that helped out financially. About two years doing that. And I'd been there for a while. Then Connie, she decides she's going to move down because we were starting to get a little serious. And she got her an apartment.

She was in a nurse and got a job at Virginia Beach General Hospital. We lived about a mile apart from each other. Well, I was really missing my two sons because I wasn't getting to see them, but maybe once every three months. And an opening came back for a railroad policeman in Bluefield came up. So I applied for that. The guys there knew me because they were all former Bluefield police officers. and they went to the chief, and so it was approved, and we moved back to West Virginia, southern West Virginia.

We're there for a couple years. I ended up being a railroad cop for almost six years. But after I'd been there several years in Bluefield, or a couple years in Bluefield, a new railroad police officer comes in named Pete Ramey. Pete's one of my dearest friends, big mountain of a man, former Virginia State Trooper, had worked on a DEA Task Force out of Ronoc, Virginia, work narcotics, and he would tell me stories, and I loved it. I mean, to me, it sounded so exciting.

And you got to understand when I was on the Bluefield Police Department, I went through the West Virginia State Police Academy for basic officers, basic training. I'd come home on the weekends. It was a living academy, so you'd come home on the weekends, and I got together with one of the other rookie officers, who was a good friend of mine, Jackie, and we had a friend who worked at a gas station. He called us, and he said, hey, guys. He said, there's this 17-year-old kid running around here selling pound quantities of weed.

Well, in 1975 or 1976, a pound of weed in Bluefield, West Virginia was a lot of dope. And so I think he was charging, I don't know, $1,100 or something like that. And so we told her friend, we'll call him, see if he'll come down here. He'll call him the kid, and he says, I'll be right there. So we go high in the back in the Bay Area of this gas station, and the kid shows up, and he brings it back to our friend and hands it over. And it wasn't like we jumped out and slammed him to the ground. we opened up a closet that we were hiding in and said hey pal how are you doing what you got there

and we're in plain clothes we're not in uniform he's like oh hey how you doing and he's like oh who's this and so we take the weed and we do a little field test with one of the snap kits and it tests positive said turn around kids you're under arrests it wasn't like they show on TV it's where we're just bam and slamming and you know and yelling and screaming it wasn't any of that we'd pull guns out took him to the police station The death sergeant, now we're off duty, and I'm in the academy. The death sergeant's like, what are you two guys doing? He said, well, this, you know, explained everything.

And I said, what are we doing? We didn't even know what to do with the kid. He said, call the detective on duty. I'm not getting involved in this. So the detective on duty was a guy named Roger Witt. Roger comes down and he sees everything. We explain it to him. And he's like, explain this all to me again.

How did you guys pull this off? Nobody sees his pound quantities of weed around here. And it just surprised everybody that we could do something like that. Well, we had a kid's 17 years old, so we call his parents to come and get him. His dad came up there, and he is, man, he's hot. I mean, I'm not sure I've ever seen my dad that mad. And so Roger finally comes around to us, and he says, guys, he said, can I make a suggestion to you? And I said, we said, sure.

He said, you see how his dad's acting? The punishment he's going to get from his dad is worse than anything he's going to get from the state, would you consider just not charging him and just turn him over to his dad? We said, do you think that's the right thing? And he said, absolutely. And he's experienced. He's got yours on the job. He said, if you think that's the right thing to do, that's what we'll do. So we let the kid go. I'm sure his life was life of hell for quite a long time after that. And here's just a side story on that about four or five years ago. When I retired from law enforcement, you could not find me on social media because of our DA Narco speaking business and

show Narcos and our now the podcast and the book and everything else we got going. We're all over social media. So on Facebook one day, I was just scrolling through because I rarely look at the messages. And this guy is on there saying he was telling somebody else, I'm telling you, that's the guy that locked me up when I was 17 years old. And I looked at his name and I remembered it. So we went over, is it direct messaging? Is that what you called on Facebook?

Yeah, DMing. So we went over and I sent him a message and he answered back and he's like, oh, man, He said, thank you for contact me. He thanked me for how the situation was handled. He went on to be a professional businessman. He was already retired and had his own family. And, you know, just thankful that we had cut him some slack. And I didn't know all this until just a few years ago.

So this has nothing to do with the other thing. It's just a neat story. So anyway, Pete's there and he's telling me all these stories. And one night I'm working. It's a Saturday night. I'm the only railroad police officer on duty in 20, counties between West Virginia and Virginia. And I'm just, I'm up there around the office buildings in Bluefield.

And it's, I don't know, 2, 33 o'clock in the morning checking the building doors and you're checking cars and make sure nobody's breaking into company vehicles and just that kind of stuff. And it's in the downtown section of Bluefield. I hear gunshots sounds like a couple blocks over. Well, being the nosy person I am, I'm like, what's that? You know, let's go find out. Not when I say lust, it's just me.

So I make my way over and this street goes really downhill real sharp. And at the bottom of the hill, this is a business district. There's a police officer crouched down behind a police car shooting at a guy in a third floor window straight up. And this guy shooting back anyway, he's got the high ground, which gives him the dominant point to control this gun battle. I look down on the sidewalk and there's a guy I land on the sidewalk. It's already been shot. So I make my way down there to the police officer. And this is where I used to be a cop.

So I knew everybody. This was a rookie that was there. And I came down and said, what happened? What's going on? What was going on? He said, well, see, that guy up there shot that guy over there, and he keeps trying to shoot him again, and I'm trying to keep him from shooting. I said, you got back up on the way, and he's like, oh, no.

Dude, that's the first thing you do is call for help. So we get help rolling, and I said, you know, listen, I'm going to go and drag that guy up in the, there was a recess doorway. I said, I'm going to drag him up in the doorway. Cover me if that guy leans out to shoot. And so I'll run over and drag him up in there, as the guy, he's, I mean, this guy's, he's got a 44 magnum, and he's trying to shoot straight down. So get back over the car, now helps rolling in there.

I'm actually laying on the ground underneath a cruiser, trying to lean out and get a bead on the guy. This went on for maybe 45 minutes to an hour. We shot exchanged. Nobody was hit, thank God. We killed that building dead in hell, but thankfully we didn't hit the suspect up there. And he surrenders. And what turns out, this guy came home and found this guy in bailed with his wife. And so this guy was trying to run and that guy up there shot him in the butt.

So that's what that all stem from. So I stayed with the police and helped him process the crime scene and everything. And so about 630, I'm on duty until 7.30 on the Sunday morning. About 6.30, I go on the station, I call my chief. I said, hey, chief, I was just letting you know I was involved in shooting last night at the city police. And, man, he went through the ceiling. He's like, you don't go anywhere. You stay right there.

I'll be down there shortly. And I said, I got an hour to shift change. So, okay. So he comes in and he is me. He's yelling and screaming to me. You had no business getting involved in the city police. You're not a city cop anymore. You're a railroad employee.

He's going off. And I said, I'm like, well, okay, whatever you say, Chief. And he said, well, give me your gun. Well, back then I was carrying a snub-nosed Smith-Western Model 15, 357. And so when you hand somebody a gun, you don't hand them a loaded gun in the law enforcement culture. So you pulled out your holster, you pop the cylinder up, or you dump the rounds out, and then you hand them the weapon. Oh, you unloaded the weapon. I can't believe you unloaded the weapon before you gave it to me.

I'm chief. You know, you don't hand a loaded weapon. I feel like I'm talking to a school child, you know. So he said, well, how do I know how many rounds you fired? And I said, Chief, do you think I got in a gunfight and I didn't reload my weapon? You think I'm walking around with the empty gun? Because that's just a paperweight. And he's like, well, how many where's the empty casings?

I said, right here in my pocket. I fired four rounds, so I gave him the casings. And he just goes back and forth. And by this time, you know, quitting times rolled around. I'm tired to get my butt chewed out. And I said, well, chief, if you don't have anything else, if you're just going to yell at me all day. I'm going home. He said, let me tell you right now, I'm going to get your job over this.

I said, really? For helping another cop? I said, let me ask you one question. Who do I call when I need help? I'm the only railroad cop on duty in 26 counties. Who do I call for help, Chief? I don't know. I said, I call those guys over there that I went helped.

He's like, get out of here. So I'm getting ready to go out the door. And I said, Chief, just so you know, given the same set of circumstances, I will respond the same way next time. See you. So it blew up. It went to, I think our main office was in Roanoke. And Norfolk and Western had just merged with Southern Railroad. So you had headquarters in Atlanta and Roanoke.

Fortunately, the bosses in the railroad police had all been cops. My chief had never been a uniform cop. So they called and asked me what happened, explained it to them. They said, don't worry about it. We'll take care of this. And then the city, they gave me a proclamation for coming and helping an officer in need and all that kind of stuff and it got out in the newspaper

and all that kind of thing. The head of the railroad police said, do not worry, we will take care of your chief. Well, I thought they were going to do something, and they didn't. So I'm still working for this jerk. So I just decided then, I don't need this. I don't want to continue doing this.

It's just not what I want to do. And I'm not ditsing on railroad police. They do a fantastic job. Some of the best criminal investigators I ever met were current. were railroad police officers. So I finished my college degree. I only took me 11 years to get that four-year degree.

And through my buddy Pete telling me these stories, I had never heard of DEA. I didn't know what that was. I knew what the FBI was. I knew what ATF was, the marshals. But I never heard of DEA, and I got really excited about it. So I applied.

I graduated in May of 85 and immediately sent my application in. Almost two years later, I haven't heard a thing from them. How old are you when you sent your application? I'll see I'd be 85, 29. So I just, I'm living in southern West Virginia and my recruiter is in Washington, D.C. for D.A. So I got my wife and I said, let's go to D.C. So we drove all, you know, six, seven hour drive, get a hotel room. Next morning I go to the DEA office in Washington and just knock on the front door.

I said, is the recruiter here? And the receptionist says, yeah, do you have an appointment? I said, nope. they said well who are you and I said well I applied for a job but I haven't heard anything so they go get the recruiter and just luckily I mean I'm not a believer in luck I think everything happens for a reason I'm a Christian and and so the recruiter comes out and he said who are you and what are you doing here and did we have an appointment and I said no and I explained everything to him he said you drove all the way up here six and a half hours just on the chance that I might

be here I said hey I want a job he said all right sit down I'll be right back he comes back He said, well, I found your application on the bottom of the pile. He said, I'm telling you it's on the top of the pile now. I can't believe you did this. The guy's name was Charlie West. We ended up being friends later on. And it was during that same time, I was tired of working for that chief in West Virginia. And an opening came up back in Norfolk.

And my buddy was still the captain down there. So I applied and I got to transfer back to Norfolk, Virginia. This is my first week there. Everybody knew I'd applied to DEA. So there's no secrets. I'd been there. I got started work there on a Monday, and on Wednesday or Thursday, DEA calls. Now, Mr. Murphy, if you're interested, we have an opening, could you be here Monday at the Academy?

And I said, yes, I can. So I hung up, went over, I was in an office over in Chesapeake, drove over to the Norfolk office, met with the captain, I said, anybody. They just offered me the job. I've got about three weeks leave, staved up. I'm going to start that tomorrow, if it's okay. with you and he said start it today. Very understanding. I was still living in a hotel. So, you know, packed all my stuff up. Connie hadn't even moved down yet. We were already married by this time. We got married in 84 and this was 87. So drove back to Princeton where we lived,

got all my stuff together to go to the academy and Sunday drove up to Quantico and started my life as a DE agent. Was it the same training as FBI agents? No, a lot of the classroom is similar. And here's the difference, though. DEA is what's referred to as a single mission agency. We do narcotics, anti-narcotics. The FBI, they have around 400 different crime categories they're responsible for. And that's everything from international terrorism all the way to bank robberies to.

They've even got one category that says if no other agency has jurisdiction, we've got jurisdiction. So they go through a lot of different training where ours is all focused on narcotics, money laundering, but also weapons because there's always weapons involved with narcotics. The physical training was, the firearms training was pretty similar, but the physical training was quite a bit more strenuous, almost militaristic. You know, we spent a lot of time on the tank trails up at the Quantico, Marine Corps based Quantico doing your five-mile runs and things like that. but it wasn't it wasn't overwhelming I guess would be the I'm not a tough guy

you know I'm never pretended to be a tough guy when I'm working I can get very focused and I can I know how to finish a mission but it's not like I'm walking around stud you know that kind of thing it's just it's just not my personality

so that's how I ended up in DEA how long was the training back then was 13 weeks I think now it's 18 weeks do you know what the differences with the extra five weeks that they added on to it? A lot of it has to do with the laws that change every day just about. But I remember they did add several days of training for integrity.

I'll think, how do you teach integrity? You know, you either have it or you don't. So I don't know, but it's, I think what they do is fantastic. You know, my partner Javier and I, we get to go to the DEA Academy two or three times. a year to talk to the trainees and we tell the Escobar story and and I love it. It's just, as corny as this sounds, it's almost like going back home because when I went through the academy, it was at the FBI Academy, but it was in the FBI buildings. There was no DEA Academy.

And then I think, oh gosh, I forget how many years later, DEA actually built their own academy about a mile away from the FBI Academy on the Marine Corps Base Quantico. No, you had mentioned you didn't really know what DEA was before you joined. Why do you think it wasn't talked about as much as the other agencies in America at that time? Well, it was. I just wasn't aware of it. You know, the – I know we probably had some small drug problems in Southern West Virginia that eventually grew to huge, you know, like painkiller problems. But that was years and years later.

President Nixon had created DEA in, what was it, 82, I think, to address the drug problem. But the drug problem back then was primarily Southern Florida. So that's, you know, eventually they came out with the task forces down there when I got hired. But I don't know. It just, I don't know. I don't know what the answer to that would be. I just don't remember. Oh, so it was a fairly new agency, though, because you said 82.

was founded. I'm sorry, 70. Oh, 72. So it had been around for 10 years about by the time you got in. 15 years or so. What was your first location assignment, state-wise? Miami, Florida. That was probably nice to be able to go down there with your wife.

Let me tell you. You talk about a fish out of water? My wife and I, we're small-town country people. And here we end up, and I'm stationed in Miami. We're living in Fort Lauderdale. I mean, we were just. it was shocking to us to see all that. I mean, it fell in love with Miami.

To this day, that's still our favorite city in the whole United States is Miami, Florida. And we live in Orlando now. But this is how naive we were. On the weekends, we would, you know, you go exploring around town. And at that time, we were living in a suburb of Fort Lauder called Plantation. And so you go to the Brower Mall or you go to the different shopping centers. And we're walking down the strip center. And there's just huge business there.

And they've got the doors or, you know, these like garage doors are wide open. And we thought, well, let's go in here and see what it is. And we go to walk in and the guy said, can I see your membership? I said, my membership to what? He said, your membership to the store here. I said, I've got to be a member to shop in your store. I got to be a member to spend money in your store. Are you kidding me?

He's like, yeah, that's what it is. It was BJ's warehouse. We had never even heard of these warehouse clubs, you know, that you go and buy in bulk. That's how naive we were. And then you, we, I'll tell you about the first case I worked on. Yeah, definitely. So I get to Miami in November of 87, and they signed me to a senior partner, a guy named Gene Frankor.

Gene's just sharp as attack, man. He's baby faces he could be. He's kind of heavyset. But, man, he was just sharp as attack. He was one of the smartest people I ever met in DEA. And so I'm just being, and I've been a cop for 12 years, but I'm new to DEA, so I'm the rookie. And there was, the enforcement group we were in was group 10 in Miami. It just had started. They had four senior agents. And then they had about eight of us new guys come in. And we were all

GS-7s or GS-9s, which is, that's the pay scale. So Gene's been working this case with these two old informants. One was an older white guy and one was an older Asian guy. So our nickname's for him was Cheech and Chong. And so we're going to meet. Chief and Chong at a, you know, for an undercover meeting, and I found out that Gene had, they have an import-export business over next to Miami International Airport, and DEA had gone in and wired up the office with hidden cameras and hidden microphones and all that, and then they would have bad guys come in and they'd negotiate deals and so all that kind of stuff. So we're going down to meet them, and I'm thinking, oh, this is going to be cool, you know.

This is my first time out of the office with a, I'm a DEA. I've been watching Miami Vice and Don Johnson, you know, Sunny Crockett and all that crap. and we go out and Gene was the kind of guy wore penny loafers and polyester pants man there's nothing a Gawai Bear shirt. There's nothing really Don John Johnchinus about him, you know. So I'm thinking we're going to go out and get in his Lamborghini or whatever it is.

It's going to be so cool. We go out and get in this like seven-year-old piece of crap dodge. There was so much junk in the car. Gene had to move clothes off the front seat and throw him in the back for me to have a place to sit in his car. And I'm thinking, okay, well, we're in the car. So I guess we're going to go down to like the Intercontinental down on Miami Bay. We went to Denny's restaurant on 36th Street over next to the airport.

I didn't see this on the South Miami Vice. And so we go and we sit down. We're waiting. And finally these two old men, I've never met these guys before. These two old men come walking up, stop at our table. And I'm looking up and can I help you? And Gene's like, sit down guys. And that's Chief and Chong.

And I'm looking at these guys too, like, what's wrong with this picture? I mean, these guys are older than dirt. But this is just something's wrong here. I mean, I'm thinking, are they setting me up, coming out on the new guy? You know, is this a test? Well, they sit there and they discuss the importation of 500 kilos of cocaine. The most cocaine I'd ever seen before I got to Miami was two ounces.

I mean a baggie about like this. And they're talking about 500 kilos. So I'm smart enough to keep my mouth shut. And we meet them for 45 minutes or so, just drink coffee. And we get in the cars and live. leave. And we're on the way way back to the office. And Gene says, well, Murph, what do you think? And I started laughing. I said, gee,

those guys are full of shit, aren't they? He's like, what do you say that for? I said, they're talking about 500 kilos of cocaine. There's not that much coke in the world at one time, is there? He hit the brakes and he looks like, boy, where are you from? So that's another example of how naive I was. Well, that

was late, that was probably December, of 87 in January, well, we were supposed to go undercover in January, but didn't go until February. And Gene says, look, we've got a 53-foot hatter sport fisherman that had been seized from some narcotics traps. It's nice fishing yacht. And we've got it wired with video and audio. We've got two undercover DEA boat captains, and we need somebody to be a deckhand and take care of the evidence. You want to do that, since we're partners. I said, you bet I do. So I had to go buy me a pair of boat shoes because if you're going to build a boat, you've got to have boat shoes.

And so we take off and we're going to the Turks and Kekos Islands, which I had never heard of. Luckily, this boat has twin engines, inboard engines, because on our way out of Fort Lauderdale over to the Bahamas, we hit a shallow reef and bent the prop, one of the props. So now we limp into, I think it was Treasure Key is where we ended up. The boat captain's called the DEA office back. in Miami and said, hey, this is what happened. They said, okay, we'll get back to you. They called back a couple hours later. Okay, limp into Nassau tomorrow. We'll have the D.E.A. Air Wing. They'll go by the new prop, which is several thousand dollars. They'll fly it to

Nassau to the airport. The D.E.A. Office of Nassau will pick it up. They'll bring it to you at the marina. There's a U.S. Navy subtender close by. They're going to come in close enough to bring in two divers, and they're going to fix the prop for you. And I'm thinking, we can control the U.S. Navy like that? I mean, we can call for help and they respond. And I thought it's just the coolest thing. So next day, we limp into Nassau, and then it goes into a third day when we're fine, you know, everything's done. We're taking off, heading on down to Turks and Kekos. Took us two more days to get there. All three of us ended up getting sick on the boat. I found out that I'm a land lover. I'm not an ocean-going kind of guy. They were just exhausted. So I told

them one night, we had, you know, you had an autopilot on the boat. And I said, listen, guys, just set the autopilot. I'll watch the things up here and check the radar ever so often, and you guys get some rest because they were sick. They were actually throwing up. I wasn't. And don't touch anything. Okay, we're going to do this.

Well, the next morning when the sun's coming up, you've been looking at this radar screen that goes out 17 miles around you. And there's nothing out there. I'm thinking I'm pretty good shape. I could probably swim five miles. There's no way I could swim 17 miles. And I don't even know which direction to swim in. And this is shark-infested waters.

Well, then as the sun's coming up, I start catching a glimpse of something out of my peripheral vision. And I thought I was starting to hallucinate. And finally, it was flying fish jumping out of the ocean. I thought, wow, okay, I guess those are real. So we end up in Providencialis. Of course, the deal just like when we got there, the two boat captains and I were ready to throw each other overboard. We had, our lifeboat was a rubber dinging, we call it Zodiac on the front of the boat. And I thought, I said, put the Zodiac in the water.

I'm going to shore. And they're like, what do you think you're going to do? And I said, where are you going to stay? I said, I'm going to go sleep in the floor of Jean's hotel room because I've had it with you guys and they'd had it with me. And so, you know, most guys would go get a C bag or something. I went and got my hard side Samsonite suitcase. They put me in the Zodak, went over there, slept in the floor. Well, it didn't go, like a typical drug deal, it didn't go for about two weeks.

So I flew back to Miami, left the two boat captains down there, get the deal set up again. Gene does through the informants. Go back down there. I'm on the unloading crew, and we're working with the Providencialist cops down there. Got an old pickup truck. So this twin-engine plane flies in from Cuba, and the airport is so small, there's just a runway. There's no taxiway. So when a plane lands, it just turns around the end and comes back up.

the runway. And so as he, this plane comes down and as it taxis, the back door opens up and this guy's chucking out these big green duffel bags. And we're running over like little mice, you know, and grabbing them and throwing them in the back of the pickup truck. When all of a sudden done, I went from two ounces of cocaine to 400 kilos to 880 pounds of cocaine. I'll tell you what, Ian, I was addicted to coke at that time, but just in a different way. I was the most exciting thing that I ever done in my life. I also found out, you know, because I was asking, Gene, how do we know these guys came from Cuba? You know, because, I mean, you know, you're investigative sent. You're starting to learn. And he said, because we had an Air Force P3 radar

plane up tracking them. And the whole focus of this investigation was to prove that the Castro brothers, Fidel and Raul, were allowing Cuba to be used as a transshipment point for cocaine coming out of Columbia into Southern Florida. And that was the purpose of this investigation. was to prove that. Well, eventually, this is all covering in my book as well, somebody leaked this out

so that the, it came out in the press. This was months and months later. And so Castro, Fidel Castro addressed it publicly. He said they did an investigation based on what the Gringo said and the accusations that were made

by the United States and what he discovered was four of his military generals had authorized that plane to land and take off. So he had them all shot. And it's all Wishing you could be there live for the big game,

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Bring home timeless style as serena and Lily.com. documented. He really did. He killed four of his Cuban generals. Wow. So the plane that was emptying the bags, did they realize you guys were DEA agents, or they just thought that you were just henchmen or something working for them? Yeah, we just thought we were dopers. What happened to the guys that were actually supposed to pick up that load? No, it was us. Oh, so it was just that was your undercover.

Yeah. So the two informants, Cheech and Chong had set up the deal, and then we're just transportation specialists. You know, we eventually, another partner of mine, Kevin Stevens, and I, We had informants and other people in our group had informants where we presented ourselves as a company transportation specialist. We've got access to planes, boats, whatever you need, cars, and we'll move anything anywhere at any time for the right amount of money. And that was the one undercover business we had going. Was it hard going from police officer to a DEA undercover agent? No.

You know, criminals are criminals. It's a different level of criminal. It's a lot more violent in the drug world. Although, one thing that I learned is that the bigger the drug criminal, the less chance there is for violence against law enforcement. The small dealers, and this is the way, you know, I've sat around, we've had this conversation with a lot of different people. If you're a rock dealer out here dealing crack on the street corner and I take your stash and your cash and your cabs, Well, I've just taken everything you've got. If you're a Colombian drug cartel leader

and I take 500 kilos off of you, well, you've probably got, you know, 20,000 more kilos. I really haven't hurt you a whole lot. It just seemed so ironic to me. I mean, we were, we had undercover informants that we were sending to Columbia picking up four or 500 kilos at a time. They might do an air drop. They might land in the Everglades.

We're out there with M16 rifles. Nobody ever resisted. They just, they went ahead and gave up. Because they look it as like the cost of doing business. Yeah. Yeah. So it was, I'll tell you what, I was having a blast. I was, at that point, I knew that I had finally found where I felt like I belonged.

And that was as a DE agent. How long were you with the DEA before Pablo Escobar comes across your desk? Well, hired in 87 and transferred to Bogota in June of 91. So four years exactly. So I came on in June of 87, transferred to Bogota in June of 91. That first week I was in Columbia is when Pablo surrendered and went to his custom-built prison, the cathedral, which I thought was, that's fantastic, man. He must have heard Murphy's in country. He might as well give up.

And that's a joke. But what I saw in the office and the embassy was disappointment. I mean, the agents were ticked off. And I was just meeting, this is the very first week I'm there. I've just met Javier Pena, who ended up being stilled to this. day is to tell my partner, his partner at the time was Gary Sheridan. Gary and I got to be friends quickly, and Javier was a little bit standoffish initially. And finally I asked Gary after a few days of seeing this. I'm like, why is everybody so mad? I mean, the world's first narco-terrorist is in

custody. He's like, Murph, you don't understand. He said, he built his prison. It's a joke. And then they started telling me the terms for which he surrendered. It was outrageous. It's the worst plea deal law enforcement has ever heard in the world. And he said, you don't understand how long we've been working with the Colombian National Police. How many Colombian police officers have been killed just working against Pablo Escobar? How many innocent people were in the wrong place at the wrong time when one of Escobar's car bombs went off?

So, you know, it all started making sense. So I started working with Gary and Javier. Gary ends up getting promoted and moves up to Bering Kia. So that leaves me and Javier partners. And that first year gave me the opportunity to really learn what's going on in Columbia, all about Escobar, all the efforts that are being done to combat him and his organization. And so a year later in June of 92 is when he escaped. And that was, everybody was happy then.

All the longfow, all the good guy side was all happy because every, because everybody felt like, hey, we got another shot at this guy. I mean, you go back and look after it's all said and done, Pablo was responsible for killing over 1,000 Colombian national police officers. We're just talking about one case. You see in the news when a U.S. police officer is shot or killed, you see the response. Everybody in their brother comes running.

You know, we drop everything else to try to catch the person who killed that police officer. Can you imagine a thousand cops being killed in one investigation? And then the tens of thousands of people that he either outright murdered or killed because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. When Harvey and I retired in 2013, we estimated that Pablo Escobar was responsible for 10 to 15,000, maybe 20,000 murders. Well, years later, there's a documentary. We've been filmed on a lot of documentaries. And I think this one's called Finding Escobar. But they interviewed one of his few remaining Sicario's,

a guy who went by the street name of Popeye, John Hiro, Vasquez, Velasquez. Popeye says, you know, those Gringoes say that Pablo's response for 10 to 15,000 murders, they're way off. He said the number's more like 50,000 people that Pablo Escobar killed. and Popeye says on that documentary that he himself arranged the murders of as many as 3,000 people

and that he actually pulled the trigger on 300 murders. These are the kind of, here's this naive redneck hillbilly country boy. This is who I'm fighting against. You know, as stupid as it's going to sound when I'm getting ready to say, this most exciting thing I ever did in my life. Was it common for the DEA to send someone that was only four years on the job to a case like Pablo Escobar? Um, no, not really. And it wasn't that, you know, that nobody else wanted to go. I know there was, there's probably 50 people put in for the job. But I had already been working some cases with the office at Bering Kia. It was money case, money laundering cases. And we were knocking off million dollar loads based on their information. And when they needed anything from the United States, whether it parts for their government cars or whatever, I was taking care of all that. And so I was initially selected to transfer to Beringia. and was ready to go and my transfer resented because I was going to have to go to language school for six months to learn how to speak Spanish.

And they needed a Spanish speaker immediately. So a guy in headquarters, I don't know his name. Somebody I've never met my life called me. He says, you know you just got screwed, right? And I said, I figured. He said, well, we've got three openings coming up in Bogota. If you want one of those, I'll put your name on the list. And that's how I got the position.

And when you got out there, you thought that the case was closed because he said. he was self-surrendered in this prison? Well, we got there on Sunday night. I would come to the embassy on Monday, and then he surrendered on Thursday of that week. So, excuse me. So we had already been in country for, what, three days, four days? But little did you know that was just going to be the beginning of everything?

Oh, yeah. I mean, to the case of a lifetime. I mean, it's, there's nothing special about us. So, you know, Javier's like me. I'm, well, no, he's not. We're actually opposites. I'm very organized. I can sit down and write pretty good in law enforcement terms.

I've got connections, get things done. Javier's the most unorganized person you've ever seen. I've been married my whole life. My wife and now, now we've been married 41 years. He was back then, had never been married, didn't like to write reports, kind of shotguning it. you know, running and gunning type thing. So we kind of complimented each other.

I mean, even other agents in the embassy were like, dude, you guys, you know, you're like the odd couple. But that's what made it work. And even to this day, and a lot of things that they showed on Narcos on the series, most of that's not true. I mean, they show me and how we're shoving each other. We're getting ready to get in a fist fight and cussing each other. To this day, we've never even had a real disagreement.

You know, it's just the best partnership I've ever had. What was the objective? Was it to capture him and bring him back to America to face charges? Yes. Well, that's what our objective was. Columbia National Police said, we're not here to capture Pablo. We're here to kill Pablo. But that was after he escaped from his prison.

Why did he end up escaping if he had such a cushy deal with the government? He did, too. It was, I don't know if you're aware of the deal. He got to build his own prison, and he paid for it because he didn't. wants the citizens to have to bear that tax burden. All the guards, he paid their salaries because, again, avoid that tax burden on the citizens. Well, who are you loyal to?

The person that gives you your paycheck? Probably. He got to handpick his fellow inmates, which included his brother and his most trusted Sicario's. There's only 14 of them, Count Pablo. The good guys were not allowed to come within two miles of

the perimeter of the prison because he didn't want anybody spying on him. There were no stipulations for him to give up any of his assets that $30 billion that he was worth, he gets to keep it. And his sentence was five years. And in exchange for surrendering, they absolved him of every other crime he'd committed his life, including mass, mass, mass, mass murders. That's why we call it the worst plea deal in the history of the world, right? Now, when he's there, his empire is still running. Oh, yeah. So think about it. At one point, he had as many as 500 Sicario's protecting him.

He's got his own army. And rightfully so, because he's battling the government. He's battling the insurgent groups, M-19, FARC, E-LN, AUC, the different groups that were down there. And he's battling the Gringos, the Americans, battling the Cali cartel. So he's got his own army. When he's in prison, because of that plea agreement, who's protected him now? the government. I mean, you talk about cutting your overhead costs,

your return on investment there? That was a pretty savvy move on his part. But while he's there, the indication is that he wasn't moving his own loads of cocaine anymore, but what he did, his organization, the Medellin cartel was still operating. So those different factions within the cartel, if they were moving a load,

he imposed what he called a war tax on him. And a war tax was either $400,000, per load cash or half of the load was Pablo's. So, and he enforced that. So all it did that one year, that whole year that he was in jail down there is country club prison, it just, it allowed him to rebuild his financial base because of what all the other people were doing. And he was well protected.

What were you doing over that year when he was in the prison? That's when I was learning. You know, we had, so I said, we say, that we have wiretap rooms, it's Columbia National Police, we're just, we're there, we have no jurisdiction in their country, you know, we're there as guests, but we have access to things that they don't, and a lot of that as contacts around the world. So, like in Bogota, the wire room we had there would, they could wiretap 50 phones at one time. And it was even, to get into the wire room, you had to go into this captain's office, his private office,

and it was a recess bookcase, and there was a hidden button in there. You push that, and the bookcase would pull out of the wall, and you step through the wall, and there was a wire room. So the equipment back then was very antiquated. It was the old Morantz recorders with actuators and the lines are voice activated. When a phone call was recorded, then an analyst would have to go pull that cassette tape out of the Marant's recorder and go listen to it on headphones. If they thought it was something that we were really interested in, you know, they'd call us, we'd go over and listen to the calls. They didn't have what we call a trap and trace. And a trap and trace is a device that when you're doing a wiretap, it gives you five pieces of information.

You give you the number that's doing the calling, the number that's being called, the date, the time, and the duration of the call. That's the five pieces of information you get. Well, they didn't have those. So what we would do, people love it when we go to these technology conferences, and we explain this to them. We would take that Morantz record or that cassette tape, and we would dub that over to an old style reel-to-reel. Remember the old big reels? and then we turned the volume all the way up on that reel to reel, and we would advance the reel with our finger,

and we counted the clicks. And that's how we identified the phone number that was being called. Wow. So this whole time you guys are trying to build another investigation or another operation against him while he's in the prison? It's more – yeah, yeah, because he was already under indictment in the United States in several different locations. But you guys couldn't touch him because of his deal with Columbia.

basically. Yeah. Because when I first got there, Pablo's whole, his whole argument with the government was anti-extradition. He did not want Colombian nationals to be extradited to the United States

because he knew he'd have to go to a real prison up here. So he threw coercion, bribery, whatever you want to call it, threats, murder,

convinced, he got enough people in Congress to vote against extradition so that the government of Columbia would not extradite Colombian nationals to any other country. But when he escapes, that all changes. That's thrown out the window.

Oh, let's see. Yeah. So prior to all this, in 89, there was a, the leading presidential candidate was a guy named Louise Carlos Golan. This guy's approval rating was up in the 90 percentile range. People loved him. And his campaign was based on pro extradition. So he's campaigning on a Friday night in a suburb of southern Bogota as he's getting up on stage.

This is on YouTube. The video is on YouTube. As he's getting up on the stage, the Sicario show up and kill him right there on stage with machine guns. What that led to is that night, the existing president was a guy named for Hiliobarco. He got really ticked off. So he overrode Congress that night. And on a piece of paper, he authorized extradition. Called the DEA at the embassy.

We exchanged called headquarters. Within a couple days, we had a lot of analysts and agents come down to support. And working with the Colombian National Police, Colombian military, and the government, the entire government, we were able to extradite about 30 people. And this was before I got there. This was in 89. I didn't get through until 91.

But Javier was there. Extradite about 30 people. So that really ticked him off. I'm thinking that just as I got there is when Congress had voted to outlaw extradition again, so it took from 89 to 91 to make that happen. And how did it go from there? I don't remember when they authorized extradition again.

I don't remember, I think it was when I was there because, but it might have been later because I remember later on the extradite of the Achille brothers, the three brothers up to the United States. I just don't remember what year that was. I don't even remember if it was when I was there. I left in 94, so I was there for three years. How do you guys know who you can trust in the government to work with? You know, it's wrong to stereotype people.

I had stereotyped that entire country because the only Colombians I ever met was the ones I put in jail in South Florida. I didn't know any Colombians before I went to DEA. And you go down there with this in the back of your mind, and then you start talking to the other agents, and what you find out is you're completely wrong. There is corruption. That's a major issue.

Columbia is still a third world country. But there are a lot of honest people there that just want to do the right thing. We worked with a very elite unit of Columbia National Police Officers called Deheen, D-I-J-I-N. These were the can-do kind of guys. These are the guys that will get intelligence and they didn't sit on it. They went and acted. So as the whole thing goes on for three years, that's who I work with. already been working with them for three years, plus the three years I'm there, so six years.

When eventually we moved to Medellin and live for 18 months with the Columbia National Police, that's, you know, we're going on operations with them, we're going on helicopters with them, the gunships, we're meeting informants, getting in gun battles, all that stuff. And when all said and done, after Pablo's dead, there was always two majors in charge of the Deheen unit. Turns out one of those majors that was one of our best friends, was a member of Los Peppies. And after he retired from the Columbia National Police, went to work for the Cali cartel, and then he was eventually murdered. He went to prison and then he was eventually murdered. But at any time that we were there, they could have killed us. But we trust them. These are the

guys that if we're out grabbing dinner or something, and we're doing a lot of open air, you know, meat on the grill type thing, plantains and that kind of stuff out in the open. If the guys, the gun battle started, that's who protected us. We knew they wouldn't run. They'd stand there and fight for us. But because of that mutual respect, they knew we wouldn't run either. And again, I'm, I'm scared every time you get into a situation like it. I'm not saying I wasn't, but they knew we wouldn't run either. When you're hunting down someone like Pablo Escobar, are there rules about not, are there rules in his organization about not harming Americans, specifically DEA agents that are after him, or is it open season?

That's a good question because he put a $300,000 bounty on each of us. Actually, on every DEA agent in Columbia. So it makes you wonder that, you know, at that time, 300,000 bucks, I think we looked that up not long ago. I forget how many millions of dollars that's equivalent to in today's numbers. And you know he's dead. You can't collect that bounty, right? So get that look at you guys.

That's funny. But so, you know, you wonder how did you survive? Well, one reason, I've got several reasons, I believe. The number one is I'm a Christian. I believe the good Lord has a plan for everybody, and his plan for me was not to die in Columbia. I can't tell you how many gun battles we were in down there, just not because it's a secret,

just because there were so many I don't remember. But I think that he, you know, give him all the praise and glory for keeping me alive. I'm here with you today. explain to you about the cops that we worked with, the Dehing guys, how they would stand there with us, toe to toe. If you look back to the case of Kiki Camerina, he was the DE agent who was kidnapped, tortured, and murdered three times, murdered three times, believe it or not, in Mexico back in the early 80s. And the response of the United States back then, because we had a president that had a set of stones on him, was to shut down the border between U.S. and Mexico. So if you're looking at it from a narcotics traffickers point of view in Columbia or Mexico or whatever country, if you can't get the dope into the United States, you're not making any money. That's what it's all about.

It's all about that money. There's no other thing. It's this personal greed and their personal power and ego that is fed by U.S. cash. So it's counterproductive for them to kill one of us. but, you know, one of the wiretaps, after Escobar had escaped from his prison, one of the phone calls, he makes reference to the two gringoes.

Now, Hummier and I are living with Columbia National Police in Medellin in their base for 18 months after Pablo escapes up until the day he's killed. There were a lot of other gringoes there, but we know who's talked about. And then, it wasn't long after that, there's an intercepted call

where Pablo actually mentions the name is Pena and Murphy. I got to tell you what, Ian, that was one of the most disconcerting moments of my entire time in Columbia was to hear the world's first narco-terrorists are to know that he knows your name. So, I mean, you know how we are with our egos and everything. We're like, oh, yeah, Pablo is who I am. I'm somebody now, which is really stupid to think like that because you just don't want to show fear in front of your your cohorts. But, and people say, well, you know, how could you continue to work like that, knowing that?

Well, maybe I'm just not the brightest bulb on the Christmas tree. I mean, you just, quite honestly, you took it as a point of pride. You can't dwell on something like that because if you do, it will consume you. There's one of the things I talked about to police officers were people that want to go into law enforcement. But, you know, everybody says, weren't you scared? Damn right, I was scared. I'll be the first to tell you. But if you let that fear override your common sense, you're going to get killed or you're going to get some of your friends killed.

And I'll give you an example. If the gun battle starts and you're behind cover, your human reaction is to run away from the bullets. That's true for everybody. So if you get it from run, though, you've just given up your cover. and now you're out in the open where you can get hit. Whereas if you maintain your common sense and think, okay, how can I control this cell? How can I take control of this situation?

What can I do? You know, you're taught a lot of tactics in training, especially when you're a gun battle. You don't stay stationary and shoot at somebody like they portray on TV. You shoot and move. That's what keeps you alive. But you've got to maintain cover.

And then there's a difference between cover and concealment. Concealment could be a bush where somebody can't see you through, but a bullet can pass right through a bush. right? Cover could be a car or a concrete wall, whatever. You get the meaning there. There was one case where Javier was in Medellin with a couple of guys from the CIA. And they're getting burgers and beers. And this was at the police base. And the base, there was an inter-perimeter and an outer perimeter. And between the two perimeters, there was a community.

And believe me, everybody was vetted in there. The Columbia National Police kept very close tabs on who was in that community. Well, at the outer perimeter, at the main entrance, there's gunshots exchanged. Well, Javier and the two CIA guys are in plain clothes, obviously, jeans and tennis shoes. And the two CIA guys, they pull their guns out and they're like, come on, we've got to run back to the base. And Javier grabs them, almost tackles them to the ground. And so, are you crazy? You two guys, nobody knows you, and you're going to go running towards the base where these gunshots just happened up there with a gun in your hand?

what do you think the guard's going to do down there? They're going to shoot your ass. And so he convinced them to stay put. And then things calmed down. And it turns out it was a friendly fire up there. But that's just an example of how you've got to be able to control that fear to stay safe, to survive. What was going on on a daily basis between the time he escaped and the time he's ultimately killed as a part of your investigation? Well, it could be anything from – we did a lot of days.

daily sorties out on the Huey gunships with the Columbia National Police, some with the Colombian military, sometimes, it's mostly the Hueys, but every once in whether they bring the Black Hawk helicopters in. A lot of that, some days they would take you and drop you off on a mountain top, like a 60-man

patrol, and you just patrol for the whole day of the mountains, trying to find anything related to drug trafficking, maybe hideouts for Pablo, maybe some intel had come in, and he's hiding out in a certain area. You're going out meeting informants with the Columbia National Police.

It's not like you saw in the Narco series where we're going out and doing stuff unilaterally. We're always with the Columbia National Police. Always. We started a 1-800 tip line and the U.S. government was offering a $5 million reward for information leading to the capture death of Pablo. People calling that number, they didn't want to talk to the Colombians. They want to talk to the gringos. So you spent a lot of time on the phone talking to those people. And I'll be honest with you probably eight.

or nine out of ten calls were bovis. Some of it's past and false information. I'm sure some of it was Sicario was calling in under Pablo's instructions to give us, you know, give us bad information. Some people are just trying to collect that reward, you know, they don't have a clue what they're talking about. But occasionally, you know, you might get a good tip. We worked with a guy named, his street name is Don Bernard Diego Murillo,

who, when he first showed up as an informer, an informant, the Attorney General of Columbia had authorized him to work with our search block, the Columbia National Police, it called it to Blockade de Buscada, search block. And Hamer and I looked at this guy, and he just looks sleazy. And so finally we went to Colonel Martinez, who was our boss in Columbia, the Columbia National Police Colonel. He said, Colonel, who is this guy? And he says, hey, the Attorney General authorized him, just be careful.

We don't know anything about him. We think he's very suspicious. He's obviously a former drug trafficker. Later, after Pablo was dead, Don Burner was the head of Los Peppies. This murderous vigilante group that had a lot to do with bringing Pablo down in the end. I mean, these guys, they were killing people just as gruesomely and as often as Pablo Escobar. But what they did is they took Escobar's tactics and used them against him. So, like, if I'm going to kill you, I'm going to kill your family first.

Probably go get your parents. I might even kill your dog. And then I'll kill you. those guys were doing the same thing. If they found attorneys that helped out the Escobar family, they killed them. Doctors, dentists, cleaning people, anybody, educators, school teachers, anybody that assisted the Escobar family, they were targets for Los Peppies. I don't know how many people were murdered by them. You know, and later on, we're thinking, holy cow.

I mean, it's one thing to find out that this major with the DeHen unit could have killed us. And I think, honestly, I think the only reason he didn't is because we'd become such good friends with him. You're living with these guys every day. You're going out on these raids. And, you know, you're just, you're eating together. You're sleeping in the same barracks. So I think that's the only really kept us alive. But Don Berna, he's still in prison here in the United States, he's got no problem pulling the trigger on you.

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Well, it does. And actually there's two explanations there. One is, so Pablo's killed in December 93, probably in the summer or early fall, or maybe in the fall, is, how many of us? We went through like a little self-pity party type thing. Some people call it burnout. But we're just talking to each other like, man, I wish this guy, just let him surrender and have the old deal back.

Let him go back to that joke of a prison up there. Let's go home because I've left my wife in Bogota. I'm living in Medellin. We adopted our first daughter in Columbia in October of 93. And I'm still in Medellin. You know, I'm not getting to be home with my wife and my new daughter. But then you see some of your brothers, you know, your brothers in arms, some of the Colombian police officers getting killed in the line of duty. And then reality comes back.

It's like, quit feeling sorry for yourself, jackass, and get back to work. Get back on mission. And so your focus comes back and then, you know, you're back at it. But, and I forgot the second part of the question. So we're talking about. The burnout. Bringing down different drug factions and they keep popping back up. Got it.

So now after Pablo's dead, did cocaine manufacturing and distribution drive up in Columbia? People say, did you guys really, did you really have a positive impact on that by taking out Pablo Escobar? We did. It lasted about two weeks because we saw the Cali cartel step up. So eventually they take out the Cali cartel. Well, then the North Valley cartel step. up. We take them out. Then Don Berna steps up with his group. They called the

officina de Envigado. Envigado was a suburb of Medellin. And he's in prison here in the United States. And then the question comes down to, can you go out or anybody go out on almost any street corner of the United States today and buy cocaine? And we know the answer is yes. So did we have a positive impact? Well, this is the way I look. look at it. And Javier agrees. We looked at the murder rate in Median Columbia in 92 and 93, and during those two years, and I'll challenge you to go research what I'm saying to confirm that what I'm telling you is the truth. In 92 and 93, many in Columbia was the murder capital of the entire world. There were times that if we got to go home on a weekend back to Bogota,

we'd leave on a Saturday morning and had to be back on Monday morning. There'd been as many as 300 murders committed in two days in a city of two million people. More dangerous than Chicago or Baltimore. Seriously. So what we did is we looked at the murder rate prior to Pablo's death in Medellin, and then after he was killed, we waited a couple months and we checked the murder rate again. What we found, and what you'll find if you check it, is the murder rate in Medellin had dropped by almost 80 percent, simply because one man's dead.

here's a guy that at one point had as many as 500 Sicario the day he was killed by the Colombian National Police one Sicario so how many and so haven't explained all that how many people in Colombia are alive today because Escobar was killed in December 1993

that's I'm not trying to justify it in my mind but that helps me to sleep well at night almost every place we speak speak in the world. We always do a Q&A, and afterwards we'll stick around if people want to meet us and take pictures and so forth. Almost every audience, whether in the United States or somewhere else in the world, a

Colombian will wait. I mean, even I've done a couple of high school things, and they'll come up and they'll say, I wasn't around back then, but my family was, and they tell stories about, you know, my grandfather was killed or my grandfather was kidnapped or all these different atrocities. And their message to you is thank you for what you did for our country. Man, that's a good feeling. It gives me goosebumps now just thinking about it. It makes you feel good.

Like maybe you did have a little impact on a positive outcome by helping to take out this jackass. What was a big break in the case that led to his downfall? He was the big break. He knew we were listening to his phones. The phones weren't 3G, 4G, 5G like we enjoy today. they were basically radio telephones, worked off at radio frequencies. He knew we're listening. I mean, he used to send a lot of nasty messages on some of his phone calls,

especially to Colonel Martinez. They hated each other. He threatened to kill Martinez's wife, his children, kill his dog, and blow up the apartment building where they lived in Bogota. So if he wants to thwart our efforts to listen to his phone calls, all he's got to do is change frequency. You know, we say spend the dial. But it's not quite that easy because he's got to get that frequency.

frequency to whoever he wants to talk to, right? So he knew he couldn't stay on the long, the line too long because we had, this is all in class now. We could talk about. C.A. had an operation called Center Spike. And basically, Centra Spike was a twin-engine King Air that was flying over the city of Medellin with radio intercept equipment. So when Pablo had changed his frequency, those guys were flying over. That was their job was to find his new frequency. On December 2nd, 1993, Pablo was talking to his son. Prior to that, the government of France had donated these vans that contained radiodirectional finding equipment to Colombia in the hopes of trying to help capture Pablo Escobar.

The algorithm that they used back then was triangulation, which tells you, you know, Medellin is built kind of in a bowl. And so you put those three vans in three different locations around the city. in high spots, so they're shooting their beams out. And where the three beams, signals come together, that's where your target telephone is emanating from. But the margin of error back that time, that could be two or three city blocks large. So to refine that margin of error,

you send people in holding these handheld antennas, and they got a meter. And the way you use these is you ride down the street holding out the window like this. So there's this lieutenant with Columbia National Police Lieutenant Hugo Martinez who happens to be the son of Colonel Hugo Martinez, our boss.

He had taught himself how to use these antennas. So on December 2nd and we know we're getting close to Pablo. You just kind of feel it. And Pablo's on the phone talking to his son and they've triangulated on it. They've gotten it to a

general area and Lieutenant Martinez with the drivers driving down the street trying to refine that margin of error. As he's driving down the street, he looks up. His little meter's telling him, look over this way, he looks up, and he says he can see Pablo standing in the window, looking out the window on a phone. Now, do you ever see anybody driving down the street holding an antenna out like that? That would stick out in your memory, right?

So we asked the lieutenant, how did Pablo react when you looked at him? He said he didn't react at all. Well, all the phone calls are being recorded. So afterwards, you know, this is like a day or two later. We go back and listen until there was a recorded calls. and what we're listening for is is Pablo's talking to his son and he's like, okay, boy, this is what I want you to do, you call the,

what the heck is that? You know, because he had seen it. There was no change in his voice and in inflection and his tone, nothing. And the only explanation that any of us have ever come up with, I believe we've had this conversation a lot of times, is that as Pablo, as you and I are talking,

like even right now, I'm talking to you and I'm looking at you, but I'm not really seeing you. I'm reliving all this stuff in my mind that I'm telling you about. So I can maintain eye contact with you, but I can't tell you, you know, I can't tell you, I know now you're holding a pen, but I wouldn't know that. So we're thinking that Pablo was so engrossed in his conversation that he's not realizing what he's seeing as a lieutenant's driving along in front of him.

Because, you know, if he'd have seen it, you'd have heard a reaction on the phone call, and I'm sure that him and his one Sicario's left, Limon, would have taken off out the back of the, they were in these row houses, but it didn't. So what happens when do you find this location? Well, I'm actually, there's a quad area, which is where the command of the Columbia National Police was. And over here's the colonel's offices, and there's offices all down through here, and then there's a barracks over there, and then this is kind of an open area, but it's real steep going downhill. I'm standing in the room with all the other gringoes, and And by that, I mean, we had Navy Sill Team 6 with us, and we had the Army's Delta Force with us.

Studs of the world. I mean, I'm just, I'm in such all of those guys. They're unbelievable. If they had been allowed to do their job when they first got there, we believe that they would capture Pablo within three weeks of his escape, certainly not more than three months. But because of politics, they weren't allowed to go outside. the base. We weren't allowed to go outside the base. Well, they're military. They follow orders. Hobbit, you know, we kind of thought

they were strong suggestions. And then we went and did our job. But I'm standing and they're just chit-chatting. Because, you know, you've been away from home for 18 months. It's nice to talk to another gringo. Talk sports or whatever. You know, pizza or, I mean, just whatever it might be. A lot of the guys were single in the military so they won't talk about girlfriends. And I see the colonel's executive staff running out of the barracks towards his office.

run for anything unless there's gun battle. And so I told all the rings, I say something's going on, I'll be right back. So I go to the colonel's office. We had a good enough relationship with the colonel. He sees me and he motions for me to come on in. The Colombians had a hard time saying the name Steve. So it came out of Steak or Stick. Everybody had a street name, so mine was Stick.

I'm a lot of things. I'm not a damn stick. But he's like, Steak, come on in, come on in. So I go in and there's a couple lieutenant colonels and some majors and I ask one of Lieutenant Colonel's on what's Capisa? And he said they think they found Pablo. And the colonel's on a walkie-talkie talking to his son, Lieutenant Martinez. And so you hear the colonel say, okay, we're getting the troops together, stand by, just secure

the scene, wait on us to get there because we're going to bring a 600 man force. That's what we had, 600 guys. Well, you know, loading up 600 people, that doesn't happen in three minutes. You got to call these guys out. You've got to issue their weapons. You know, you've got to give assignments. You've got to divide them into squads and load them up on the trucks and they drive them out there. So it's going to take a little while.

Well, with Lieutenant Martinez was our De Hines guys. And so he said, that colonel said, whatever you do, don't let him get away this time. Now, Pablo's in a three-story row house. And these are all attached. We might call them condos. And behind him, the row house behind him is a two-story. And everything else is three stories. So what they do is the Duhin guys go to the front door.

They have been trained by these U.S. special operators on how to breach doors with debt cord, shotgun blasts, things like that. They send a couple guys around back. They use debt cord. They blow the door off of this row house. They go ahead and make entry. They're not going to take a chance of losing Pablo again. They come in the first floor, and it's a combination garage, kitchen, laundry. room type area, but it's all one big room.

So there's a taxi cab parked right there at the counter with the kitchen, which was surprising. But now we know how Pablo was getting around was in a taxi cab because you're in a city of two million people. There's hundreds, if not thousands of taxi cabs moving around. As the guys get up to the second floor, this is more of a living room, dining room. I think there was one bedroom, probably a bathroom in that area. as they get up to that floor,

they see Pablo and Limone going up to the third floor. So there's shouting back and forth, Pablo starts shooting at them, cops start shooting back. Limon gets up to the third floor. There's a window there, and he's able to jump out that window onto the roof of the two-story row house behind him.

He takes off running across the roof. As strange as this is going to sound, the Columbia National Police didn't always send people around back, which is how Pablo escaped a lot. Well, this time they did. Well, the Mones used to nobody being back there. And so he gets over there. The cops ordered him to stop.

The guy's out back. He puts his gun out, starts shooting at both of them. They catch him in a crossfire and shoot him. He falls off the roof dead onto the ground. So now Pablo's getting to that third floor window. He's heard those shots outside. He's already been shooting at the cops inside. He knows he's in a bad position, right?

So he's got no choice but to go through that window. So he does. He hops down to the roof of the two-story. They say that he was trying to scoot along the wall because he knew there's shooters on the ground. And he knows just when a second or two, he's going to have shooters in that window. But they're going to have the high ground on him, shooting down on him. So they say he takes a mad dash across the roof. And these are these old tile roofs, you know, the ceramic tiles.

No shoes on, tiles are busted all the pieces. I'm sure his feet were all torn up. He's, when the cops get to the window, they order him to stop. He shoots at the cops. They shoot him three times. one in the back of the leg, one in the butt cheek, which are, those are knocked down shots, but they're not kill shots. And then the kill shot was a 223 round through the right ear.

I don't know that that was delivered at the same time the other two shots were. I think he was knocked down and I don't know what happened after that. The Narco series shows that I was on the roof when all this happened. That's not true. I just told you I was back to base. So as that's, when that operation culminates, I mean, it was, one of the majors came up on the radio and said, Viva Columbia, Pablo Escobar is dead. And we're high-fiving and back-slapping and laughing.

And everybody, you just feel like the way the world has lived off your shoulders. But I know I've got to notify the embassy. I've got to notify the DEA boss. So I take off running back over to the wiretap room because we've got a landline in there that I can make a phone call to the embassy on. I can't get through to the front office. So I call our admin office at the embassy, the DEA admin office. one of the secretaries comes on. She's like, hey, Steve, how you doing?

I said, get Mr. Toff on the phone. He was our boss. Oh, are you in Maddieen? How's things going? I said, her name was Angie. She said, Angie, get the boss on the phone now. It says, an emergency. Okay, okay, okay.

Well, it probably took two or three minutes for him to come on the phone, but it seemed like two or three days because I'm, you know, I know what's going on outside and I want to get going. When Mr. Toff comes on the phone, the first thing he said is they just kill Pablo. And I'm like, no shit, that's why I'm calling you, boss? and he said, where are you, what's going on? And I explained everything to him. He said, here's your job.

Get out there and confirm that's Pablo. Because we've been down this road before. We want to make sure that, for lack of a better term, they didn't kill the wrong guy. So I've got to run back to the barracks and grab my gear, my gun, and I always carried cameras with me down there and stuff like that. And you get extra magazines. You know, in Narcos, they show us wearing a bulletproof vest. We didn't put a bulletproof vest on not a single time. we were there, stupid. Just the stupid things that we, that's what I say, thank God that we're

still alive today to tell this story. So the time I get out, I come running back out in a quad. There's nobody there, but the guards on the gates. The whole search block is gone. And I'm thinking, oh my gosh, I don't have a ride. I don't know where they are. There's no rental car companies running. I can't find a bicycle to try to ride. And if I had a bike, I still wouldn't know where to ride to. And, you know, I mean, don't forget the fact that I'm English, Irish, by heritage, I'm about as white as you get. I got white colored eyes. I had, I had hair back then, but it was light brown, white skin. I'm six to, you know, Colombians aren't traditionally as tall people. So I would have stuck out like a sore thumb. And I'm just, I'm kind of walk around a circle thinking,

what I'm going to do? How can I get the, maybe the green goes here can help me. Well, as long as be old. Here comes Colonel Martinez in his Jeep and his protection detail coming back to him, pulling back in. And he looks like, Steve, what are you doing? He said, Colonel, I need a ride. And he said, get your ass in the Jeep. And he came back to get his cameras, is what he came back for. So I ride

out with Colonel Martinez, which turned out to be the best thing it could have happened. We get out there. Now, there's just been this massive gun battle, so hundreds, if not thousands of people are starting to pour out. And then when they see this massive police presence, that starts

the rumor that's Pablo Escobar in there. So I go with the colonel. We go in the three-story row house. I'm taking pictures everywhere as we're going. I finally get up to that third floor window, and I look out on the roof, and there's our dehing guys standing over Pablo's body. And I yelled at him, and they're, they don't shoot their guns like they do in the Middle East.

They're holding the rifles up. Steak, Steak, we got him, we got him. And then they're like, take a picture, take a picture. And I'm taking their pictures. And then the colonel says, come on, we're going to go around. So go back downstairs, go around the block, come back up this way, climb the ladder. And that's all those pictures of Pablo's dead body. I took all those pictures.

Oh, really? Because it turns out my camera is the only one that worked. I had four rolls of film. And that's a whole other story. But anyway, there was no doubt in my mind that that was Pablo Escobar based on photographs. Now, I've never seen the man in real life. I mean, the only time I ever saw Pablo is the day he was killed. And that's after he was dead.

as we're standing there, the crowds are getting bigger and bigger. We're still up on the roof looking down. And I can see this, an older lady and a younger lady arguing with the police. And I asked one of the Dehing guys, I said, who's that down there? He said, that's Pablo's mother and his sister. I'm like, oh. Now, for whatever, I always, you know, I'm big on polo shirts. So that particular day, I have to be wearing a red one of all colors to wear,

or something just to make you stick out, you know, even worse than being a gringo down there. So I'm just kind of watching what. going on. And finally, I see the sister, she's kind of elbowing her way over. She's making her way over to where Limon is laying on the ground, the Sicario. And she gets over there and looks at the body and she starts berating the police officers. That's not Pablo Escobar. You killed the wrong person. You guys are so inept. You should go to prison. You've killed an innocent man. And they just let her rant and rave. And after she finally calmed down a little bit, one of them looked at, one of looked at her said look on the roof bitch you know so well she can't get up on the roof they're

not going to let her go up on the roof so she she does back off she goes back over to her mother then finally everybody gets there they bring the body off the roof pablo's body and when i saw their reactions that was 100% confirmation right there that was pablo mommy just looked at him realized her son was dead so for me that was confirmation in addition to what we already knew. Plus, they eventually did fingerprint analysis, dental record analysis, all that. I'm sure there was some, well, I don't think DNA was a thing back then,

but it was confirmed. That was Pablo. Saw all these rumors out there that Pablo is still alive, but well, I guess he's with Elvis somewhere. You know, it's not true. It's not true. When you hunt someone for that long and they're such a big part of your life, what's that feeling afterwards, like in the months,

maybe even the years after when it comes to a close? That's a really good question. I've only been asked one time in all these interviews. That day, it felt like the weight of the world had been lifted off our shoulders. I didn't want to be seen there because we didn't want the appearance that the gringoes had anything to do with the death of Pablo Escobar. We wanted the Colombian National Police and the Colombian government to get the credit because he took the country back from this piece of crap. I mean, all the 50,000 murders? Holy cow

Most deadly city In the entire world For two years running Median, Columbia So One of the lieutenant colonel is Pallias I went to him and I said Colonel can you get me out of here

He's like yeah we want to get you back to the base So they gave me a protection detail It took me back to the base That night when everybody came back in We went into like triple lockdown Because we were expecting retaliation of attacks By the Median cartel Quietest night I ever spent Median

I mean, it was just sweet. And I think he was killed on a Thursday, if I remember this correctly. And then on Friday, the ambassador had made Javier go to Miami to talk to an informant. His nickname is Navagante, who's portrayed in the series. He's a real person. And we knew Navigante was trying to speculate that Pablo was hiding out in Haiti. And that's a whole other story also. But we knew it wasn't true, but finally ambassador told Harvey he said,

You get your ass up to Miami and meet that informant, or you pack your stuff and go home, go back to the U.S. And we liked our ambassador. He was a can-do kind of guy. So when Javier gets in Miami and grabs a taxi out to meet Navigante, as Javier walks in the door, Naviganti's on the phone, he looks at Javier and says they just killed Pablo. Javier said he didn't say or were.

He just turned around, went back out, called another taxi, went back to Miami airport, and flew back that night. So on Friday, Javier flies up on a, on Avianca into Medellin, then they have a, one of the Huey gunships goes and picks him up the airport,

brings him into the base. You know, it's a high-fiving, and just congratulations. He's been down there for almost six years working with these police officers. I've been there two and a half

that time, so he's been at about five and a half. So, you know, spent a couple hours just going over everything and letting him catch up on things. And then he and I flew back to the embassy that night.

We got back to the airport in Bogota, 6.30-ish. And there was nobody. from the embassy there to meet us. And we weren't allowed to take taxis because it was dangerous. A lot of the taxi drivers were criminals themselves. Well, we grabbed a taxi. Come pulling up to the embassy.

We go inside. My wife, who is a registered nurse, was not allowed to work outside the embassy. So eventually DEA hired as a clerk, a file clerk in the office. We come walking in. She's got balloons and streamers all over, hovering our shirt in office. There's boxes of pizzas there. There's like, I don't know, 15 boxes. of pizzas. There's cases of beer everywhere. There's probably 60, 80 people milling around.

You know, now we're high-fiving them, and everybody's wanting to see the pictures because we'd had them developed already. That led into an apart, a little shindig that night. I got home Saturday morning, about 1030 a.m. My wife, we had a lady that worked for us, Rosa, who spent the night, took care of our daughter, who was an infant back then. And it was an all-nighter, buddy. It took a couple days to get over that one. At this point, you still got a lot of loose ends to wrap up. But the pressure now all of a sudden has lifted because it was the top priority of the U.S. government.

Every week in an embassy, they have what they call a country team meeting, and that's where the heads of all the departments get together with the ambassador and report whatever areas of responsibility are. What's the progress in the past week? it could be us, it'd be the FBI, it could be the military groups, Department of Commerce, Department of Agriculture, I mean, all these different groups. Like, you know, you want to know how many soybeans were grown in a hectare of Columbia back in whatever year, I don't care. But the first topic of that country team meeting every week was Pablo Escobar. And so if Javier and I were in the embassy on those days, we had to go and give an update.

So now you don't have to do that anymore. That's how high priority is. I mean, Pablo Escobar was the priority of law enforcement around the world. He was the world's most wanted criminal. He was the leading producer ever of and distributor of cocaine at one point responsible for as much as 80% of the cocaine in the entire world, 80%. I mean, you and I are podcasters. Wouldn't you like to have 80% of the podcast market?

It would be pretty good. Yeah. You'd phone me up here on a private jet, wouldn't you? Yeah, that would be nice. So it's just, that's who you're dealing with. So now they put Javier and I in for the Attorney General's Award, which back then was the highest award you could get in U.S. law enforcement. You know, because of my writing skills, I was ordered to write up my own award for being Javier.

So I did it. I gave it to our ASAC. I said, you know, the deadline's coming up. So this has got to be in like in the next couple days. she fax it up. And he's like, nope. He said, I'm going headquarters next week and I'm going to hand-deliver this to Janet Reno myself. Okay, boss. You're the boss. And I'm just a hump agent back then. I'm not a first-level supervisor or anything. He comes back from his trip and he says, well, had a little snafu. You were right. It was too late and they wouldn't accept it,

but they said, don't worry, we're going to submit it next year. I'm like, yeah, come on now. We're going to be transferred back to the United States. I had a three-year assignment. But Javier is ready to, you know, he's due to transfer back to the United States. I said, nothing's going to ever happen. He's, oh, don't worry, we'll take care of you guys. Okay. You don't go into law enforcement for accolades and awards, but still kind of ticks you off. So we transfer.

I end up in Greensboro, North Carolina. Javier ends up in San Juan, Puerto Rico. The next year, we get a call from Gary Sheridan, who was the original partner with Javier. He's stationed in Miami. And I'm in North Carolina, and he calls and we catch up. on the phone, he says, guess who I just ran into at the airport? I said, who's that? And he said, I'm not going to mention their names, but he said, you're a group supervisor and your ASAC. And the ASAC is the one that had taken the report, you know, or the recommendation, the

recommendation of Washington last year. I said, oh, how they're doing, you know, catch up? And he said, well, guess where they've been? And I said, I'm guessing headquarters. He said, yep, he said, you know why they were there? Because they were given the Attorney General's award for the Pablo Escobar investigation. They got it? I've told the truth. Oh, man. And I'll tell you what. But our ASAC had been to Manning one time when some people from headquarters had come down. They came to the prison to get the, you know, get your glory shots there. And our first line supervisor never once.

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Came to Medell, and they got the award. But you got the book in the show. It works out. It's all worked out. Now, I mean, here we are a little over 30 years later from his death. Did you ever think it would be such a big impact on your life this many years later? No. Even so later in our careers, both of us were promoted up to what we call senior executive service.

So it's the highest rank you can get without being the administrator, which is a presidential appointment or a congressional confirmation hearing. So we're special agents to charge. I have a friend in Northern Virginia, Stephen Klaus, who introduced me to two. two different producers. And he knew all about the Escobar story. We were really close. And he said, you know, somebody was going to do something with your story one day. I'm like, no, they're not.

It's been too long. Nobody cares. And so I met the, and these were months apart that I met them, but both of them were the same. They wanted to take our story and create some kind of documentary that was a political statement against one party or the other. And, you know, in law enforcement, you try to stay apolitical. You're really not allowed to get involved in political discussion like that. because you're a servant of the people.

So, but you get your hopes up, you know. And both times your hopes were dashed and it's disappointing. And Javier, you know, Javier was always one, nobody cares. And I said, you know, you're right. This is all a bunch of crap. Well, roll around to February of 2013. Excuse me. I get a phone call from a retired Marine that we'd worked with down in Columbia.

And I hadn't talked to him in over 20 years. calls me on my cell phone and we're catching up and I said well listen are you if you're in town let's let's get together for lunch or dinner and he said I live here you idiot I've been living I work up on Capitol Hill I'm a staff or he's a he works for a lobby group I'm like okay I'm sorry I didn't know that and he said well the reason I'm calling is well and I said well if you're here where are you calling me he said the reason I'm calling is there's a producer in Hollywood that wants to talk to you and so he gave me his explanation and I said the Marines name is Gil I said Gil, man, I appreciate you call him.

It's good to catch up with you, but we've been down on this road twice, and I'm not going to call the guy. I don't know if you know any U.S. Marines, but they can be a little colorful in their language at times. And he ripped me a new one on the phone, and finally I just said, all right, man, I'll call the guy. Just stop yelling at me. And so I call this guy named Eric Newman. He's the creator of the Narco Series. Super, super guy. And we talk on the phone, and he kind of lays everything out, and he said, you know, we'd like to get your story.

And I said, you know, Eric, thank you very much. I really appreciate you this. But we've been down this road twice, and I'm just going to say no. On behalf of me and Javier, we're not interested. And he got real quiet on the phone. And finally, I'm like, Eric, are you still there? And he said, yeah, but I can't believe you. You just told me no.

And I'm thinking, you know, since that time, we've learned that people will sell their soul to be on TV, some people. And I think we just shocked him so bad that we just said no so quickly. And Javier has always been, even today, we trust each other so much that he'll let me make decisions about things. And he makes decisions for me and we go with it. So this is in February. Eric says, well, listen, next month I'm coming to Washington with two writers on something else. He said, could we meet with you? Would you come out and have dinner with us?

He said, let me just explain to you what our thoughts are about this whole thing. And then if you say it's no, it's no, but just give me another chance. and this is no kidding and I'm thinking it's going to be a free dinner or a really nice restaurant that's a good mindset right there and I said yes I will

and it was we went to a French restaurant I hope you ordered everything Steve you know what I order scallops because that's the only thing I recognized on the menu I'm used to going to Burger King or McDonald's you know so and it's funny because when we came

in the restaurant I'm still in a suit and I'm a couple minutes late And I come walking in and I told him later D.S. I'm meeting some friends. And he said, well, go ahead, you know. So I know I'm looking for three guys. And in law enforcement, you learn to read people. And so I know pretty much what I'm looking for.

And I start walking around the restaurant. And there's couples here and there's families over here. And then there's three guys sitting there. I know that's got to be them. So I just walked over and leaned on the table. And I said, gentlemen, I'm a law enforcement officer. I got a tip that one of you is holding a bag of you cocaine. and get you three asses up on the wall.

And the two writers are like, you know, their eyes are just big of saucers and they can't catch the breath. And Eric's sitting there just starts out laughing out loud. He said, you're Murphy, aren't you? How funny it would have been if you went to the wrong table? I probably wouldn't tell you that story. That would have been hilarious. It would have been. So we have dinner, great dinner.

I mean, loved all three of these guys. And at the end of the night, Eric says, well, what are you going to do? And I said, well, you know what, let me talk to Javier. I mean, this sounds promising. Nobody else has ever said what you said. And let's maybe just follow through and see what happens. Because, you know, we were not, as government employees, we're not allowed to make money on the side unless you're in Congress.

You can do whatever you want to in Congress, right? Because you make the laws. So that would mean we'd have to retire. And he said, okay, well, I'll, he said, I'm anxiously waiting for your response. Please call me as soon as you can. And he said, can I ask you one more question? Why are you guys so hesitant to tell your story? And I said, Eric, the last thing we want anybody to ever do is glorify Pablo Escobar, a mass murderer.

And he made an oath to us that night that he would never promote Pablo Escobar in any kind of positive light. They wanted to show him for the person that he really was. And to this day, Eric has lived up to that. And that was in 2013. So that was March. Two months later in May, we signed contracts. Everybody says Netflix, but it's actually a company called Gamont International Television, held the contract. In June, at the end of June, I retired from law enforcement after 38 years.

In July, we were sitting in Santa Monica starting to write the first episode of Narcos with all the Narcos writers. Not 12 years later, you're with me. There you go. It's getting better and better, right? So that's the story. We honestly thought that through filming that we would be on, you know, we would be on. site for the whole thing. We thought, I mean, we were consultants for the show where we actually got credits at the end of the show and all that. And we got paid for two years. But what we did

is one week each year, we would fly to Hollywood and meet with the writers for a week. You know, and these writers are phenomenal. They had the largest library of narcotics-related books. I mean, they had books I never heard of. And they had all read all of them. I mean, they were the most well-versed people I've ever met with. A couple of them I still stay in touch with. And so we would spend a week of year, and then everything else was on the telephone and on emails. And then when they were finally ready to start filming season one, they brought Javier with him to Colombia. And he showed him where we used to live and hang out in Bogota.

And then they flew up to Medellin. He showed him where the police base was and the Monaco building where Pablo's family lived. And they went out to Pablo's ranch, Fincanapolis, and showed him some of the different places where their bombings had happened. and things like that. And then towards the end of season one filming, they called me and said, Murphy, we want you to come down for a week. And, you know, we want you to be our guest for a week down here. And so I brought Connie and our two daughters because our daughters who were teenagers at that

time had not been back to Columbia since they were infants, were toddlers. So we all loaded up, went down there. Netflix was great. Eric was great. He had a Netflix van and driver assigned to us the whole week. The lady I mentioned earlier, Rosa, who worked for us. My wife had maintained contact with her. We've sponsored to come to the United States a few times,

and she'll come to spend six months with us at a time. She's like part of the family. She came and stayed at the hotel with us. They took us out on set. Our oldest daughter, both of my daughters are adopted. Monica's from Bogota, a little town outside of Bogota, and Mandy's from Medellin. Monica had always wondered about her birth parents.

So my wife, she's phenomenal. She made some phone calls and got Rose involved, and Monica got to meet her foster mother, her birth mother, three sisters, a niece and a nephew while we were there. We went to spend a few hours with them. Mandy is the opposite. She doesn't ever want to meet her birth family because she looks at it.

They gave her away, which they did. So towards the end of the week, Boyd Holbrook, who plays me, you know, we had taken him and Pedro Pascal and working with Netflix and DEA headquarters, we actually embedded them into the DEA Training Academy for a week of training. So they were having to go do PT in the mornings.

They were out on the range. They learned how to do different types of surveillance. They worked under cover. I mean, just all kinds of stuff for a week. It was phenomenal. And Harvey and I were just standing back smiling the whole week. It was a lot of fun getting to those guys.

So towards the end of the week there, there's a scene in episode 10 of season one where they show that I was kidnapped by the Cali Cartel. I was never kidnapped. That's Hollywood, right? But Boyd was explained to the scene. He came to me.

He says, hey, would you like to have Mandy and Monk in a scene? I'm like, sure. I'm sure they'd love it. I'll go ask them, but yeah. And I did, and they got all excited. And, you know, the girls were probably, I don't know, 15, 16 by then, somewhere in their teens. And so they went to makeup and they went to wardrobe and all that. And if you watch that scene as Boyd's pulling into the driveway of our apartment,

apartment, there's a sidewalk and he has to stop because people are walking up down the sidewalks, and those are all extras. Well, he stops and he motions for these two girls to walk in front of him, and those are my daughters. So they're actually in the scene. And then he pulls down at the door and he goes to open the door and gets kidnapped. But the reason I mentioned Boyd is because the cameraman for that scene was in the backseat of this full-size Bronco, Ford Bronco.

And he was shooting up from this angle filming Boyd. And Boyd knew that if he made a motion with his hand, they couldn't cut that out of the scene because they could have cut the girls out. So he did that in motion so they couldn't cut the scene. And that's why the girls are in there. And then Narcos comes out and both my daughters have come up to me and say, Dad, I'm in Narcos or you. Little turds. That's incredible. Well, Steve, thanks so much for coming on the show today, man.

This was an incredible interview, incredible conversation. I really enjoyed it. Oh, thank you for having me. And I mean, you know, thank you for indulging an old man in his memories. This is so long ago, it's 30 plus years now. And what it has led to in our life after law enforcement is something that neither of us ever dreamt of. Not even imagined that something like this would happen. I figured, I always thought I'd be one of those, we call them blue coats.

They're all retired police officers that are security at the federal buildings. I thought it would be a blue coat retirement. Or one of the marshals on Con Air or something like that with the right. You kind of look like one of them. A lot of them had the mustaches and they were a lot of overweight guys, though, I will say, on the, on Conair. My lower chest is much bigger than my upper chest now. No, but you tell the story so perfectly, you know, and you're the type of guy, like you have guests

on the show that you could just talk to them for hours. Like whenever I talked to like the Hells Angels, guys are bikers, they could just go and I interviewed Pee Wee from the Hells Angels, two and a half hour interview. You could have done 24 hours with them, you know? Yeah. So it just, those are, everyone loves those interviews. Well, you got a hell of a show going. It was funny because I think we were introduced to each other by Christy Schiller,

who I think the world. I've never met her in person, but I love the girl. Neither have I. Love that lady. The things that she does are just unbelievable to support people and support law enforcement. And when you and I talked, it was about you interviewing me, and it turned out that I interviewed you, and then you got busy with some other things. But it's taken several months, but here we are.

But thank you very much. And I know your listeners don't know that, but you've been over backwards, you and Matt, to try to help me out on my podcast and teach me some things. This is an old dog trying to learn new tricks, I'm telling you. And you're doing well, and we got your back, you know. You got some new adopted sons now. Thank you very much, bro. I appreciate it. But thanks for having me on the show.

Yeah, safe travels back. Thank you.