The Connect- with Johnny Mitchell - I Was A Tourist Selling Cocaine In Medellin | Ep #7

Episode Date: November 3, 2022

Johnny describes his time living in Colombia, where he flourished selling coke to tourists, paid off the police, rubbed shoulders with the most powerful drug cartel in the world, and fell in love.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I immediately was like, this is a place I could live. We shook hands. He said, come back anytime. All the order. You know, I was excited because for the first time in almost a decade, I saw a future without drugs. This was my moment to walk out of the casino while I was still up. I mean, it's a beautiful city, and the women are stunning, gorgeous.

I was feeling myself thinking, man, I'm a real Paisa. I'm a real Colombiano at this point. I'm a real machico. And he goes, no, no, no, no, no. We have a problem. You're in danger. I need to meet you somewhere. They walk straight up to my window in the back seat.

And they pulled me out of the car. They walked me over to the curb. And I knew something was very wrong. They routinely kill police and military that go up to try to take them down. And all of a sudden, my fortune flips and I'm in danger again. What's up, guys. Welcome back to The Connect. I am your host, Johnny Mitchell. As always, like and subscribe to the channel and follow us on Instagram at Not the Connect and at Mr. Johnny Mitchell. We drop new episodes every Thursday, so make sure to turn on your alerts so you get

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Let's get into it. So today we're sitting poolside to tell you about one of the most special experiences that I've had in my life, and that was the time that I spent in Colombia, South America. Back in 2009, I spent about six months down there, and I rubbed shoulders with some pretty high-level members of the cartels in Medellin and up in Cartagena. So this video is going to go into detail about all of that. It was the fall of 2008 in Portland, and things were getting hot for us. My business partner, I had a stash house that we had on the outskirts of Portland, and it was just a

station for where we would drop all of our work off after bringing it up from southern Oregon and it got rated we found out that one of our workers one of our best customers used to pick up 10 15 pounds from us every few days he had set us up he must have got jammed got caught somehow and he turned around and fingered us to the cops so we get the door kicked in they got search warrants guns drawn the whole nine they'd bring the dogs through the house tearing the place apart but They didn't find anything. Sometimes you get lucky in this game. They searched the whole house, tore the place apart, but we had sold our last pound a few hours before that. They found drug

ledgers, they found scales, they found empty baggies, they found a little bit of cash, but they didn't find any work. It was like a dirty diaper that just had shit stains, but no actual feces in it. We got lucky, but I felt the pressure. I knew that the heat was just going to keep turning up. I knew that we were under a microscope with the Portland cops. So I told we got to tighten up. I mean, if a client knows where our stash houses, that means we're getting sloppy. So I thought this would be a good time to get the fuck out of town. I'd save some money and I'd always wanted to travel to South America.

So I said, what better country than Colombia? It's kind of fitting, especially in the business that I'm in. And as I told you in a previous episode, one of my scene alone, suppliers in Northern California referred me to a guy in Medellin. So I packed a bag. I took 10 grand in cash, which is the legal limit that you can bring on an airplane, and I flew to Columbia. So to give a little background, in 2009, when I was down there, Columbia was just about to pop as this huge tourist destination that it is today. Before then, no outsiders would go there. Everybody was still scared of Pablo Escobar and the Cocaine Wars of the 19th.

1980s and the early 90s. But by 2009, the secret was getting out that this is like an amazing place to be. I flew directly in to Medellin and I immediately was like, this is a place I could live. I mean, it's a beautiful city and the women are stunning, gorgeous, and they will fuck you, unlike the United States, where I couldn't get laid to save my life. And the people were incredibly friendly. I mean, it's completely juxtaposed to the images, and the history of the drug cartels and the violence. So it's a very weird dichotomy down there. And when I was there, backpacker hostels were starting to spring up all over the place.

There were high-end European restaurants catering to wealthy tourists. And of course, cocaine. Cocaine everywhere. And it's good blow, too. Colombians are great business people. They're very customer service oriented. For example, if you go to buy Coke in Mexico, They know you're a tourist, so they're going to sell you some stepped-on bullshit because the Coke is controlled by two cartels that have monopolized the whole industry, and they don't care. They know you have no other option.

In Colombia, the drug dealers want the tourist dollars. They want you to have a good experience, so they'll sell you the best shit. They'll sell you shit like you just bought it fresh out of a lab in the jungle. And it's not just cocaine, of course. That's the stereotype. It's one of the main export products, but Colombians, normal Colombians, are into all kinds of business. And those are the people that I'm attracted to. I like hustlers.

And Pisces, as they call the people of Medellín, are the most hustling motherfuckers I have ever seen in any place, in any part of the world that I've traveled to. You know, there's good reason that it was the Colombians who were the first ones to take the niche cocaine trade and make it a booming international business. and not the Peruvians or the Bolivians, let's say, who actually grow more coca leaf than they do in Colombia. It's because the Columbia people, I don't know if it's the violent past, something in the water, it's the mixture of European and indigenous blood, but they are opportunists, they are hustlers,

they are money-motivated business people. You know, in the 1970s, when cocaine was first exploding, they called the traffickers, Magicos, or magicians, because it was like magic the way they took this chalky white substance, which is no stronger than, you know, a good cup of coffee, and just poof, turned it into billions of dollars. It was magic. It was a complete boom for the country.

I mean, Colombians don't like to admit it. They're ashamed in many ways of their past, but cocaine built that country. And it's the reason that it is now being flooded with millions if not billions of legitimate tourist dollars every year because people want to go down and see the cocaine culture. And I was there at the precipice at the beginning of all this. Okay, so I fly into Medellin, I go into my hotel room, and I call up the Connect. So as I talked about in a previous episode, my first day in Medellin, I was blindfolded

and driven to the stash house of a lieutenant for the Medellin cartel. Who exactly is the Medellin Cartel today. It's a group called La Officina, the Office, and it originated in the 1990s as a money collector for Pablo Escobar. Obviously, we know that the biggest trafficker in the world back in those days was Pablo Escobar and the Medellin Cartel. A wing of that became later La Officina, and the way that they functioned was as an armed wing of the Medelline cartel, so they would collect money, they would pull hits, they would settle disagreements among the different factions of the Medellin cartel. And if you go back and watch Narcos, Columbia, I think it was season one, they reference a man named Don Berna. Now Don Berna was the founder of La Officina, and after

Escobar was killed and the Medellin cartel, as they knew it, imploded, the Ophesina stepped in and became the main supplier and exporter of Coke out of Medellin. And today they exist as a group of loosely affiliated clans or cartilitos within Medellin. And they run everything from cocaine to extortion to prostitution. They also function, as I said before, as an intermediary between feuding drug gangs. They're not the main exporter of Coke to the rest of the world. That's Los Urabegos, which I'll go into later in this episode. And it's funny because even though they don't produce any cocaine in the city of Medellin, it's still a way station and a stopover point for all of the coke that's leaving the country

to be exported. It's not the factory, it's the distribution hub. And that was who I was meeting with that day, after getting blindfolded in one of those barrios in Medellin. I was meeting with a faction of La Oficina. And I told you how cheap the drugs were down there. He had wholesale pot, kilos. They don't sell them in pounds down there.

They use kilos. 1,000 grams of weed for 50 bucks and kilos a blow wholesale for 2,000 to 2,500. The price went up and down by like the week. It's almost like the stock market. So that day, I picked up five bricks of weed and one brick of cocaine. They put it in a big duffel bag. We shook hands. He said, come back anytime.

Al-a-Orden. At your service. That's how they left everything. Even the drug traffickers were the best at customer service. To this day, unmatched anywhere else I'd been. And I get into this special yellow taxi cab that brought me there. I put the blindfold back on, and I'm escorted back to my hotel. And later I would find out that I was in a barrio, barrio Popular, like a slum area,

sitting just above the neighborhood of Envigado. And Envigado is the headquarters for the officina and also the neighborhood, that Pablo Escobar grew up in. Okay, so now here I am in Colombia all alone, and I've got 6,000 grams of drugs I got to get off. I don't give a shit about the weed. I could smoke it, I could give it away, I could throw it away, it didn't matter, it was so cheap.

But how do I move the blow? How does one a foreigner in Colombia, of all places, not connected to a cartel, doesn't have any hitman, has no protection? And my Spanish was not great at the time. I didn't feel comfortable trying to sell any kind of a wholesale to locals who didn't speak English. I knew that I needed to improve my Spanish and I would down the line become fluent, but at this point, I was still uncomfortable trying to sell Coke to people in Medellin, from Medellin. How does he get off a full chicken, a full unit of

cocaine? Well, I told you it was exploding with tourism. So I picked up and I got a hotel room right across the street from what's called Hostel Row. And it's in a neighborhood called called El Poblado, which is the rich neighborhood. It's where all the tourists stay. And there's like three or four blocks of nothing but backpacker hostel after backpacker hostel. And it's people from all over the world staying in these places, but mostly rich European countries.

So you got people from Britain, Ireland, Scotland, Spain, Germany, France. And of course, Australians, we all know what animals, those people are. They got vacuum noses. And they come to Columbia, and they're used to paying three, 400 bucks a gram for good Coke back home and they get here and they're putting it up their nose for $20 a shot. They could sniff a half a kilo in a fucking weekend, those people. So remember, I bought

the kilo of Coke for $2,000 bucks. That's 1,000 grams at $2 a gram. And I can sell it to these Europeans for about $18 a gram, American. And sometimes they would try to haggle with me and would say, oh, mate, I got a don't connect. And I'm like, hey, if you want to get blindfolded and driven into the slums of Medellegene, be my guest. So I started going hostile to hostile, introducing myself and offering my services. And very quickly, I was the go-to guy for Coke in that little neighborhood. And it took about a week, but I moved that entire brick of Coke. And my profit was about 15 grand.

And that was just my default at the time. You could drop me anywhere on earth. And I would become the drug dealer's drug dealer. Shortly after finishing off the brick, I had some cash on me at the time. I was leaving my hotel room and I jumped in a cab. We're about a block from the hotel when I look in the rear view mirror and I see we're getting lit up. It's the Colombian police on motorbikes and they pull us over and they don't even walk to the driver's side window. They walk straight up to my window in the back seat.

And I knew something was very wrong and they pulled me out of the car. Didn't handcuff me. So I knew immediately that something. something was strange about this. They walked me over to the curb, and one of the, either the lieutenants or the captains introduced himself, and he spoke good English and he said,

I understand that you know from the officina. At that moment, I just started laughing, A, because I was so relieved that I wasn't going to jail, and B, because of the irony of it, I knew exactly what was coming. He explained to me, you need to pay us. You owe us a mouta or a fee. And I said, okay, well, this is where I'm staying. You obviously know that I'm staying up the street at the hotel. Why don't you come by at four o'clock this afternoon? We'll get some coffee and I will slip you an

envelope. He didn't tell me how much. I just knew that I had to give him something to wet his beak. I wasn't sure how they had found out about me. At the time, I thought maybe it was from La Ophiccena in Endigado, who had told them, hey, there's this gringo. He's moving work down on hostile row. He's a good guy. Go see him, and he'll take care of you. And that was the point of paying off the cops.

It wasn't some big aggressive thing. It was obviously so they would look the other way and to have your back to make sure that no other dealers fuck with you. Or maybe it was a rival cartel. Who knows, right? I mean, everybody has eyes everywhere in that business down there. So we agreed we would meet back at the hotel. I gave them my phone number and they let me go.

I got back in the cab and I went to wherever I was going. I think I was going out to lunch or something like that. And at 4 p.m. I leave my room and I walked down to the hotel pool. And sure enough, it's the three cops who had pulled me over, but they're not in uniform. They're in plain clothes this time because you don't want to be walking around taking bribes from drug dealers wearing your uniform, of course. So we sit, we have a drink, we talk, we bullshit, we talk sports, and I slipped them an envelope. I gave them $2,000 American, whatever that was in pesos, and they kind of looked it over,

thumbed it through, seemed satisfied, and they said, as long as you're here in Medellin, you're good, you're safe, you're with us, we'll be back next week. And I said, okay, and that's the way things operate. down there. Corruption. One hand washes the other, and that way everybody eats. Everybody makes money. I moved one more brick after that. I put the blindfold back on. I got in the cab. It took me up to the barrio to me and I took it back to Hostel Row. And this time I moved it even faster than the first kilo. I actually had some Australians in one of the hostels on the row that wanted to sell some product themselves. So they came to me asking for wholesale Coke. And I think I sold them like four or nine ounces,

a quarter of a key. So I actually became for a brief time a wholesale supplier of Coke. I mean, it was just crazy. Now it's time for another re-up. So I hit my man. I said, hey, buddy, I'm ready to come up there again. And he goes, no, no, no, no, no, we have a problem. You're in danger. I need to meet you somewhere. And it's funny because I was feeling myself thinking, man, I'm a real Paisa. I'm a real Colombiano at this point. I'm a real machico. And all of a sudden, my fortune flips, and I'm in danger again. So I'm like, okay, well, what the fuck now? So I met him that afternoon. He came down from the barrio to meet me and have lunch. And he's very nice. He explains to me, my friend, there's members of La Ophicina that are not happy with you. They say,

they don't want you moving product through our territory. And I said, I thought this was all taken care of. I'm paying off the cops. You said, nobody could touch me. And he goes, I'm sorry, it's out of my hands. And that was that. I mean, there was nothing I could do, though. I certainly wasn't going to fuck around and ignore that.

That's a real threat. So I took this gigantic bag of money that I had made selling Coke to these Europeans, and I got out of town. But I was not ready to leave Colombia, not by a long shot. I was having the time of my life, and I was seriously considering moving down there. And I went and visited Cartagena, which is in the north. From an officeina was kind enough to refer me to a friend of his that owned a really nice hotel right there on the coast.

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Now I'm in Cartagena, which is a beautiful city right on the northern Caribbean coast. And the women are even more beautiful than Medellín, if you can believe it. It's like the Miami, South America. When I got to Cartagena, I went to the hotel that I told me to go to,

and I called up the owner. And he met me for lunch. It was a guy from Sweden who had picked up and moved to Colombia. And of course, we both pretty much knew that both of us were into some dirt because our mutual friend was a lieutenant in a drug cartel.

So after some drinks, I got the Swedish guy to tell me how he was able to purchase and build up this beautiful new luxury hotel. And he told me, well, back in Sweden, I was the main Coke importer. And I knew who was helping my drug shipments. And he had taken his money, moved to Colombia, and was now laundering it through a hotel. And he had plans to expand and open up a chain of them throughout the country. And that was fascinating and it got my wheels turning because back in the States, I had almost a million bucks in cash that I also needed to start moving. So I'm in Cartagena for about a week and this Swedish guy is showing me around, introducing me to people, introduces me to his wife who's pregnant with their child, and just kind of treat me like a member of the family. And I told him, I'm interested in buying some property down here.

And he says, great, I got the guy for you. So one day I'm introduced to a man named Andres, and Andres was at the time one of the main money launders for La Officina and other drug cartels in Colombia. And being the money guy for these big cartels is one of the most dangerous jobs in the entire drug business. These men, whoever they are, whether they're in South America or Europe or Asia, control billions of dollars of illegal money. And they are the first ones to get killed when that money gets fucked up. They're also the people who the law goes after because they hold the gateway to the financial secrets of these drug organizations. And Andres is like out of a movie. He is the slickest guy that I've ever met.

He was like a Latin George Clooney, $1,000 suits, expensive cars, jewelry, the whole thing. And he brings me out to a piece of property. It's a beautiful old mansion in a cliffside neighborhood overlooking the city of Cartagena. And he said, you should buy this. This country's blowing up with tourism. You could buy this, convert it into an Airbnb or a hotel or a hostel, and just start cleaning your money that way. And I said, yeah, that's a great idea. But I said, Andres, how am I supposed to physically move my cash down here to make the purchase?

And this is how we were going to do it. So Andres was connected all over the world and he had a guy in New York City in Queens, which is a diaspora of Colombia, a big Colombian community there. And he said, I got a guy there who works for me. You're going to bring him cash the buy price of the property, which I think he wanted 300,000 for. He said, you bring this guy to cash. When he has the money, I will use my own funds in Colombia to purchase this property for you

then transfer the deed of trust into your name. And I said, that's simple but brilliant. So basically, I would have to go back to the States, bring his contact up there, the money to buy the place, and then he would purchase it with his own money down there and then sign it over to me. I said, great. And that's actually a very typical way that drug dealers acquire property overseas. They don't physically move the cash there and pay for it. They have contacts all over the place that move the money around for them. So now all I have to do is fly back to the states, tell what's happening, take my share of the money, move it to Andres' guy in New York, and boom, I own a piece of property in Colombia. And for his services, Andres charged me 20%. So 20% of the

money that I was going to launder. So if the buy price of the property was 300 grand, he would charge me $60,000 on top of that, which is chump change to him. In hindsight, he was just doing me a favor. This guy moved hundreds of millions for the cartel. So with me, it was just small potatoes. Now, I have to admit, as all this is going on, as I'm negotiating with Andres and spending time in Cartagena, I was also sneaking around having a little fling with his fiancé. Now, take it for me. The only thing dumber than moving cocaine for the cartels in Colombia is sleeping with the fiancé of one of those cartel members. She was an absolutely gorgeous woman, we'll call her Maria, and we fell very deeply in love.

And she confided in me that Andres was a monster, for lack of a better term. The guy beat her, he cheated on her, he would sexually assault her, make her have sex when she didn't want to, threatened to kill her if she tried to leave, really revealed the kind of man who I was dealing with, which made me feel horrible. But of course, I needed to get this piece of property, so I just put my morals to the side like I used to do a lot back then. Maria herself was connected to the cartels. Her uncle was a high-up lieutenant in Los Urabaneos. Los Urabanios are the number one drug cartel in Colombia and the world.

They are the modern equivalent of Pablo Escobar and the Medellín cartel. And if you know your Colombian history, you know that Los Urabanios began. as a paramilitary group called the ELN. And they were the right-wing paramilitary group that sprung up to fight the FARC, who were the left-wing guerrillas fighting the Colombian government during the 80s and 90s.

And they operate out of a region north of Antiochua, which is where Medellin is, called Urabah. And they're like Colombian hillbillies. They live up in the jungles, and they live very different than Pablo Escobar and the Medellin cartel and the Cali Cartel you know, these ostentatious, very oligarchic kind of drug organizations, Los Urbeños, live in the jungle and operate in secrecy. And what makes them different than the cartels of the

1990s is that they don't own every rung of the drug trade. So back in the day, Pablo Escobar used to own the coca fields, own the labs where it was turned into coca paste, own the factories where the Pace was turned into cocaine and even own the drug routes and the retailers around the world who eventually ended up selling his product. Los Urabenos don't operate that way. They allow for like a division of labor. They buy kilos of base, Base, from the peasants who grow it and turn it into coca paste, and then they produce the Coke and ship it around the world.

And that's what's allowed them to survive as a cartel a lot longer. than the cartels of yesteryear, is because everything is compartmentalized and it's harder as an organization for the law to bring them down. And actually, they just took down the leader last year, I think his name's Usaga or something, but that guy had been on the run for like 20 years

and was estimated to have made as much or more money than Pablo Escobar himself. And Maria is connected to members of this organization, dangerous guys. They routinely kill police and military that go up, to try to take them down. The day they arrested Usaga, in protest, they started creating blockades in the roads up in Urabah,

and they lit buses on fire and shot at military helicopters. So these are not guys to be fucked with. What gives Los Urabenos a strategic advantage is that they control the ports on the Pacific coast of Colombia, where most of the cocaine gets shipped out from. So that's the port of Buenaventura, and the port of Urabah. Back in the day, most of the Coke went out the Caribbean side, the northern side, and went through Miami.

Now that most of the cocaine goes through Mexico, those Urebeños have very strong ties to the Sinaloans. The ports of Buenaventura and Uraba are Urabeños territory, and that's where they ship most of their cocaine out of, which goes around the radars of the Pacific, up the coasts, and lands in Central America, or in Mexico to then be shipped up north to the United States. Now it's time to go back to the U.S. so I can take my dirty money and bring into Andresa's guy so he can then purchase this real estate for me. And I told Maria, no te preoccupies. I'm going to regasar al-pronto and we're going to do a two.

And of course it was a pipe dream. It was a young man's fantasy that I was living out, not seeing how this could end badly. A week later, I'm back in Portland and keep in mind, my boy doesn't know any of this is happening. And as I'm relaying the story of all this, his fucking jaws on the floor, he's like, what the fuck have you been doing all this time? And I said, I know this is crazy, but I'm getting out of the game. I'm moving to Columbia. I'm going to wash this money and open up a chain of tourist hostels and I'm going to, you know, have a bunch of kids with this Maria gal, and it's going to be great.

Don't worry. I love you. And I was basically told him, I'm getting out of the game. And you're going to control the business from now on. And, you know, I was excited because for the first time in almost a decade, I saw a future without drugs and drug dealing. This was my moment that every drug dealer has where he's like, I got to get out. This is not something that I can continue into the future, and this is my way of getting out of the game and being set up to walk out of the casino while I was still up. So I go down to a friend of mine who owns a used car lot, and I buy a minivan, and I have it gutted on the sides.

Because remember, I got to move $300,000 in cash across the country. This is not a light task. I have her help me wrap the money up and stash it inside the panels of the minivan. And it's two days before I'm getting ready to hit the road and drive this money to New York when I get a call from Maria down in Columbia. And she's crying. She tells me, Andres has been murdered. He got hit backing out of his office in Cartagena this morning.

They killed him and his bodyguards. And I was stunned. I mean, I was just there. a week ago with this guy. I very well could have been with him when he got ambushed. To this day, I don't know exactly what happened. And I haven't been back to Columbia since, and I'm not sure that I will go back for a long time. Also, I eventually, of course, lost touch with Maria. She had been planning on moving to the United States to be with me, but I think those plans fell through, and I would not be surprised if she was now working as a cartel member.

Obviously, she was set up to do that. And there's a lot of female kingpins down there now. And I can't prove anything, but I think that she may have even had something to do with Andres's murder, quite frankly. I mean, she could easily go to a member of the cartel that she was associated with and be like, hey, there's this man who's been beating me and raping me. And it's nothing to get somebody sprayed and killed. down there. So who knows, right? Now get this. Years later, I also heard rumors that Andres was working for the DEA. That's right. The DEA has a lot of criminals on their payroll, and I'm going to talk about that in later

episodes about how the law uses informants, but also allows them to continue their criminal enterprises. So the rumor was that Andres was feeding information about opposing cartels to the DEA. And obviously, somebody found out about that and had him hit. I'll never really know the truth, but, man, I think I literally and figuratively dodged a bullet, but I wouldn't really trade it for anything because those were some wild memories down there in Columbia. And it's still one of my favorite places, and I hope once enough time has passed, and I feel safe that I can travel back there.

All right, you guys, that's been this week's episode. Thank you so much for tuning in. make sure to like and subscribe to the channel and follow us on Instagram at Not the Connect and follow me at Mr. Johnny Mitchell. And of course, visit my website, Johnny Mitchellcomedy.com for all my stand-up dates. And we will see you next week. Peace.