The Connect- with Johnny Mitchell - Meet The Cop Who Brought Down The CALI CARTEL: DEA Agent Exposes World's Most POWERFUL Drug Empire

Episode Date: November 30, 2025

In today’s episode Johnny sits down with legendary DEA agent Chris Feistl — one of the most effective and consequential drug enforcement agents in U.S. history. Chris personally arrested Miguel and Gilberto Rodríguez Orejuela, the elusive bosses of the Cali Cartel, widely considered the most powerful drug trafficking organization of all time. If you watched Narcos Season 3 on Netflix, you’ve already seen part of his story — Chris is the real-life blond agent portrayed in the series. In this extended interview, Chris opens up about the rise of the Cali Cartel, the downfall of Pablo Escobar, and the hidden history behind the bloody wars that reshaped Colombia forever. He breaks down the complex structure of the cartel, their revolutionary “cell system,” their political influence campaigns, and the global smuggling routes that made them richer than Medellín ever was. Chris also pulls back the curtain on his own journey — from a 20-year-old Jersey Shore seasonal cop, to busting multi-ton Miami cocaine loads, to chasing the most dangerous traffickers on Earth in the streets of Cali. He reveals what Narcos got right, what it didn’t, and the shocking tactics used by the Rodriguez brothers, North Valley Cartel, and paramilitary groups like the AUC. If you’re fascinated by cartel history, undercover work, international manhunts, or the real story behind Narcos, this is a must-watch. 📘 Pick up Chris Feustel’s bestselling book, After Escobar — available wherever books are sold. https://www.afterescobar.com/ 🎧 Get the bonus episode with Chris: ➡️ https://www.patreon.com/theconnectshow This Episode Is #Sponsored By The Following: Mood! Head to https://mood.com to find the functional gummy that matches exactly what you're looking for, and let Mood help you discover YOUR perfect mood. And don't forget to use promo code CONNECT when you check out to save 20% on your first order. PrizePicks! Visit https://prizepicks.onelink.me/LME0/CONNECT and use code CONNECT and get $50 in lineups when you play your first $5 lineup! 🔥 Topics Covered: -Chris Feistl’s path to the DEA and early undercover work -Miami in the late ’80s — the cocaine capital of the world -The true origins of the Cali Cartel -How the Rodriguez Orejuela brothers built the most sophisticated trafficking network ever -Their political infiltration strategy and the failed “Submission to Justice” deal -How DEA agents cracked the cartel’s encrypted communication and cell structures -The manhunt in Cali and the real events behind Narcos Season 3 -The rise of the North Valley Cartel & the AUC paramilitary death squads -Why Colombia today exports more cocaine than ever -What the show got right — and wrong — about the DEA’s role 00:00 Intro & Chris Feistl's Background 04:00 Becoming a DEA Agent 09:00 Early Law Enforcement Stories 13:00 Miami, Drug Boom & Cartel Landscape 18:00 Rise of the Cali Cartel 20:54 This Episode Is Sponsored By MOOD 22:55 Cartel Structures & Operations 30:00 Medellín vs. Cali: Different Styles 34:00 Working DEA Cases in Miami 39:00 DEA Recruitment, Spanish & Moving Overseas 46:00 Arrival in Colombia & Prepping for Cali 47:23 This Episode Is Sponsored By PRIZEPICKS 49:48 The Surrender Deals & Narcos Accuracy 56:00 1994 Colombian Elections & Cartel Political Influence 01:00:00 DEA Operations on the Ground 01:05:00 Navigating Corruption in Colombian Police 01:09:00 Breakthrough: High-Level Sources & Raids 01:15:00 Capturing Gilberto Rodriguez 01:22:00 Turning Jorge Salcedo & Targeting Miguel 01:30:00 The Operation for Miguel Rodriguez 01:39:00 The Final Raids & Arrests 01:47:00 Extradition, US Sentences & Aftermath 01:54:00 Legacy, War on Drugs & Modern Challenges 02:04:00 Corruption & Reflection on History 02:05:00 Final Thoughts & Book Outro Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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I got to go to the mecca of drug trafficking, which was Colombia. There was this massive load of probably 24,000 pounds of cocaine. Suspicion a lot of times in these drug cartels will get you killed. Pablo basically told him, we're going to war. You were able to move a television away and behind in the closet, there was an entrance and he was there with a pistol in each hand. Today I spoke with Chris Feistel. Chris is arguably the most successful DEA agent in history.

He personally arrested both of the Orojuela brothers, Miguel and Gilberto, who were the leaders of the Kali cartel, the most powerful drug cartel of all time. He's portrayed in Narco's Season 3 on Netflix. He's the blonde DEA agent. That was Chris. Chris is part of narco history. And today, he goes into detail about how he did it, what the show got right and what it didn't, and how he went on to take down not only the Kali cartel, but the Norte de Valle,

Cartel and the AUN, the ultra-violent paramilitary group led by the infamous Castagnos brothers. Chris unveils secrets about how they built a case around the most powerful drug trafficking duo of all time, the Orojala Brothers, and explains how it relates to the situation in Colombia today, which is currently exporting more cocaine than the Kali Cartel could have even dreamed of. Go pick up his best-selling book after Escobar. It's a super fun, interesting read, available wherever you get books. And for a great bonus episode with Chris, head over to Patreon.

Patreon.com slash The Connect Show. Ladies and gentlemen, a man who played a pivotal role in the history of the war on drugs, the one and only Chris Feistel, right here on The Connect with Johnny Mitchell. The feds is some evil body, which, you know, there's an argument to be made there, but I love cops. Always have. Even the guys that arrested me, I was like, you guys are legal. guys are, let's go, let's hang out. Yeah. Let's hang out. Let me take a, let me try to bribe you.

No. Oh, I guess we're not friends. How do you say your last name? Feistel. Feistel. Okay. So is it, are you from like, you trace your roots to like Northern Europe? Bavaria, Germany. There we go. Yeah, you're big, big, big German brawling. We got German in my family, six foot six. Yeah, I would say you're pretty big dude. Yeah, Germanic tribes. We still got the DNA. Yeah, Columbia's back in the spotlight these days. They laid low for decades, but now the secret is out with everything that's going on with Venezuela.

Like, no, Colombia, you guys are moving below. They have not stopped. They have not. And I think what you've seen over the last three or four years is the production, the production in Colombia of cocaine has risen exponentially. So they're producing a hell of a lot more cocaine now than they did back in the 80s and 90s. Yeah, because everybody, they have way more hectares to grow coca leaf, all of the guerrillas that controlled those areas even back then are now vertically integrated.

They become the drug cartels. But you are a part of history. So we're happy to have you here. a lot of fans of season three of Narcos. Did you get a nice payout from that? I did all right. Okay. I wish I got royalties, though.

Yeah. Because that's where you would make the big money. But, you know, no royalties and streaming. No royalties. That's how they get you. Hey, guys, if you could do me a quick favor, just take one second out of this episode and go subscribe to my channel to connect with Johnny Mitchell and then turn on that alert bell so you get updated whenever we drop new episodes.

All right. Back to the show. Okay, how did you become a Fed? How did you join the DEA? Well, I grew up in Northeastern Pennsylvania and I went to college there. And while I was in college, I majored in criminal justice and political science. And my initial intention was to be an attorney, to be a lawyer. I wanted to be a sports attorney. I played basketball in high school and college. I had some connect. So I thought that would be a good way to make a living. But the summer of my junior year, we went down to the shore, the Jersey Shore. And, you know, we did a little bit of surfing,

hang out on the beach. And so you need some job, you need some money to support yourself while you're down there. And I ran into somebody in the street and they said, hey, you need to go look at, go to the municipal building because they have summer jobs for police officers and lifeguards. And I was like, what the hell would be a summer police officer job, right? So I went in and I got to scoop and they hired seasonal police officers because, you know, anywhere in the, you know, Jersey or anywhere along the East Coast,

the population in those beach communities swells during the summer. So they hire these seasonal or special police officers. So I'm like, hey, man, that sounds pretty good. Paid five bucks an hour in 1984. Wow. Summer of my junior year, I was 20 years old. I wasn't even 21. You couldn't pay me enough to police those animals on the Jersey shore.

Those guidos are finest Americans. We had a lot of, a lot of, you know, South Philly and have. evidence that would come down there for sure. And so five bucks an hour. And now check this out. I went to a one week training academy where, you know, they gave us classes on New Jersey state statutes and laws. And we qualified with a weapon. And I carried a gun after 40 hours. Get the fuck out of here. Yeah. So as a 20-year-old kid, I thought, hey, man, this is pretty cool. Did you pull that shit out? There were a few times when we had to pull it out. but it never got into any kind of firefights as a seasonal police officer.

But is that exciting, though, to draw down on somebody? I can't imagine how drunk off power I would feel. If you gave me just my personality, if you let me use that on people. Well, I mean, you're using it to defend yourself or someone else. So the circumstance, you have to pull your weapon, there's a good reason why you're doing it. But at the time, you're not really thinking about that. You're just going along with, you know, training, instinct and trying to get out of the situation that you're in. But when I was there, I was in a bar called The Fairview.

And they had this thing called Beat the Clock. So from 9 to 10 drinks were a quarter, 10 to 11, 50 cents, and it went all the way up to a dollar. So I'm sitting in there. And this girl comes up and approaches me and asks us, she wants to sell me methamphetamine. And I always, you know, I was 20 years old. I really didn't know what to do at the time. So I figured that, man, I'll just play along. You know, what do you got?

How much? Blah, blah, blah. And, you know, I say, I give me a number. I'll give me a call back. And so I went to the police department the next day. And I'm like, hey, man, this girl approached me in the bar. I wanted to sell me a bunch methamphetamine. Do you guys want to do anything with it?

I'll pass it. Here's a phone number. And they said, well, call her back. Set up an undercover deal. And I'm like, I'm here like a month. I mean, set up an undercover deal, right? So, yeah, it's summer, right? And I parlayed that into an internship.

So I call her and we set up this deal and up on the boardwalk. And that's what kind of really piqued my interest in law enforcement was. I'm like, hey, man, this is pretty cool. I can make a difference in, you know, in what we're doing. And I started looking into various jobs with, you know, FBI, DEA, CIA. And, you know, I went back to school. I graduated. Did you get a rush out of that, though?

A little bit because it was something new. It was something that I had never done, obviously, before. And, you know, I really didn't know what I was doing. Just like kind of wing it. But. Because I know cops, you know, feds, drug cops, they say, yeah, I can make a difference. I forgive that at such a young age. But I feel like a lot of guys get into it for the rush.

Because that is exciting, right? I think so. You're make believe. you're playing undercover, you know, it's exciting. That's fair. That's fair. But it can also be very dangerous. So you really need to be careful of what you're doing.

Definitely. It was part of adrenaline. So, but the more I looked into a career in law enforcement at that time, because then I say, you know what? I'm not going to go to law school for three years and then sit behind a desk. That's just, that's not me. I got a job in the meantime after I graduated college with Virginia Beach Police Department. So during that time, I applied with DEA.

because DEA for me, I thought that's probably the best fit for me because you can work overseas. You know, they had probably back then maybe 60 or they were in 60 different countries, give or take. I thought, man, what a great opportunity. I can learn a language. I can travel the world. You know, as a federal agent, I can work anywhere in the United States.

So that kind of really piqued my interest. And then, you know, finally they called me and I got hired. I had just turned, just turned 24. Actually, they called me. I was 23. I report to the academy. I was 24 years old at the DEA. Okay.

So where did they shoot you off to first after the academy? Well, the academy, we went up into the FBI Academy, Quantico, Virginia. So we did about 17 weeks there. And my first assignment, so I got hired out of Norfolk, which was right next to Virginia Beach. So I went back there for two or three months. And then my first duty station was Miami. Yeah. Yeah, it was great.

So I grew up in northeast Pennsylvania, so I hated the cold weather. Yeah, it's awful. one of the most miserable places, I would say, on earth. And I put it up there with Gaza, Sudan. It was just brutally cold. And so when I was in the academy, what they do is they give you a, back then, it's changed a lot over the years. But they give you a wish list and you kind of put down where you want to go. But that doesn't guarantee where you're going to go, right?

So I put down, because I would always joke around. I go, man, if I get New York, I'm going to quit. I'm not going anywhere where it's cold. And it was kind of like a running joke when I was in the academy. So I got my list and I put down Miami, Fort Lauderdale, West Palm, Tampa, and Fort Myers. So I think they got the hint that I wanted to stay in Florida. So they'd call you up in front of the room. I opened up my piece of paper and it said Miami.

And I was like, thank you. At the jackpot. Good to go. Yeah. Well, because look, back then, the late 80s, Miami was ground zero, right, for the drug, so-called war. Yeah. which it's not, and we could talk about that later. But, you know, it's a home of Miami Vice.

It was the home of the cocaine cowboys. It was the place to go if you wanted to be a DEA agent back in the 80s. It was rocking. It was rocking. We joke around that cocaine was falling out of the sky, basically, and literally it was because of all the air activity that was going on there. So it was a great place to learn a job, and that's what I wanted to do. Learn the job as quickly as I could, become proficient as a DEA agent,

and, you know, move on and go work overseas. Right. Okay. So the whole goal was to work overseas. Yes. Was Pablo? Was the Kali Cartel, the Orojuela brothers, were they already known as these superstars to the DEA by the time you went to Miami? They were more in the shadows back then, but everybody knew about them.

And if you look back in history, you know, Pablo's decline pretty much started in the late 1980s or even 1990, 91, when he surrendered to Columbia. authorities in June and 91. And by that time, and then when he escaped from Cate Drol in 92, not escaped, he just basically walked out the back door because there was nobody there. It was a manhunt after that, right? He was on the run. He was hiding. So he had lost a lot of his power and influence, you know, by 91, 92.

And Dementian Cartel, too, was pretty much destroyed by that point, right? You had Carlos Lader had been arrested and extradited to the U.S. Rodriguez-Gaucha was killed. Right. And the three of Choa brothers, Jorge Juan David and Fabio, they were in prison. So Pablo was pretty much on an island by himself, being hunted down by the government because he had declared war against the Colombian government. So you saw that Cali Cartel was, even back then, was gaining a lot of market share.

And everybody knew that once Pablo was done, the entire focus was going to shift to Cali. And they had been selling drugs. rugs, they're a lot older than Pablo. They had already been in the game moving weight for as long as Pablo had been, like since the late 70s, I believe. Early 70s. Wow. Yeah, they started, it's a fascinating story of their beginnings. They started as like a kidnapping group. Correct. That's wild because they're like these frumpy little, they look like soccer coaches. They're just these tiny little, you know, look like harmless Colombian men. Like, you know, you're, you know, father-in-laws, right?

But they were like kidnapping rich Colombians holding them for ransom. I think they were killing, you know, they started off like killing like vagrants on the street. And then, yeah, they basically got in on the ground floor of the cocaine boom. So in the late 60s, you're right. They formed this group, this criminal group called Los Chamas. And it was Hilberto Rodriguez, his brother Miguel Rodriguez, and Jose Santa Cruz, Chepi Sentegris. Right.

And they got into like the kidnapping and extortion business. So in 1969, they kidnapped the Paris Swiss citizens and they got about a $700,000 ransom. Who were the Paris Swiss citizens? One was, I think one was a student and the other was a professor, I think. And were they doing the kidnappings himself or did they hire like street guns? Well, they had part of the whole little criminal group that did it. But sure, they were the ones that were calling the shots.

Organizing it. Okay. Right. So after they got that $700,000. dollar ransom. And Shepi Santa Cruz had kidnapped some people in Bogota as well. So he had some money. So they got that money and they kind of pulled it into this drug trafficking little network. And they ended up meeting this guy, Benhamine Hareda, who was called the Black Pope of Cocaine. Right. So he was a very well-known Afro-Colombian drug smuggler in Colombia. So he kind of introduces them into this world of drug

trafficking. They get involved in, you know, a little bit of marijuana, but then they realize, like, marijuana, it's too big, it's too smelly. The return on investment isn't that good. You got to move a real lot of product to make any kind of money. So Helberto, who they call the chess player, because of his long-rein visionary strategy, he was always thinking a couple moves ahead, thought about, hey, you know what, I think we can do better with cocaine. He was the oldest brother. He was the oldest. Yeah, he was the one that they portrayed as like the shrewdest, the shock caller, the leader. Is that true to life?

For a while. And we can get into exactly when that changes and how it changes. So he has the idea to smuggle a couple kilos of cocaine up into New York. So they drive it up along the Panamanian Highway into New York. And sure enough, boom, it starts exploding in New York. So this is the early 70s. So you're getting cocaine in Colombia. I don't know, with everything, expenses.

total process transportation fees, maybe, you know, $2,500 you're out of pocket. Yeah. But man, you're selling a brick of Coke in New York in the early 70s, 50, 60, sometimes even more thousand dollars. So you can see how the money starts adding up quick. Did they actually drive their first kilos all the way from Columbia? Huberto himself, along with another person, drove the whatever, 3,500, 4,000 miles up to Panamanian, American Highway into New York.

Took a couple weeks. Finally got it up there. Wow. Yeah, I think bricks in their 70s were going for like 100. At times. At times. But you know, you're introducing this new product in there. So initially it starts off a little bit lower.

And as demand builds, the price goes up. Yeah. Okay. So and that's, and then they were off from there. Then it was, you know, you see like, and I think in Blow was a pretty good depiction, the movie Blow, where they start bringing. like double-sided suitcases. They're strapping it to their bodies.

They're putting it in shoes, right? So it's just the evolution of how the cocaine and the amount that's coming in. And, you know, sure enough, later on, a couple years later, they're sending it in planks of lumber to the East Coast. And then, of course, in containers and, you know, Norman's K, aircraft, containerized cargo, you name it. Did they send people from Kali to live in New York, like they portrayed it in the show,

to receive the work and then distribute it out? They did because Chepi Santa Cruz was one of those main architects that set up shop in New York, came along with Paco Hereta, which they don't really depict in Narcos as much. But yeah, those two were key in setting up the distribution of cocaine in New York as well as laundering money. And those guys wreaked havoc on New York for many, many years. Okay. So how did the operation work? once it blew up and by the time you got down there, how it was portrayed as like a franchise.

Like the Kali Cartel, I think people have myths about it. Like it was, they said that a lot of times the people that were actually moving product out of that region didn't even know that they were moving Kali cartel cocaine. How did it become this like international clandestine enterprise? Well, as we said, you know, you start off small, you get set up in New York. And then, you know, as cocaine starts to, you know, because first of all, no one was looking at cocaine back in the 1970s, right? The New York Drug Enforcement Task Force, the state police. Everyone was concerned with what back then?

Heroin, right? Heroin was the major problem in New York back then. So cocaine kind of flew under the radar. And so did these guys operating in New York. You know, 95% of the overdoses in the hospital. admissions back in the 70s were because of heroin. So these guys kind of quietly wrapped up a lot of money. So what do they do with Hilberto? They start to expand, right? And back then, they also worked in conjunction with the Medellin cartel. You know, a lot of people don't know that. These guys used to work

together for many, many years until the, you know, they had an issue and a problem. And then, of course, you had the major war between Cali and Meneen starting in 1988 for the lasted six years until Pablo was killed. But they started setting up shop in all these other U.S. cities, right? So the agreement was that Medellin and Cali would work together, right? New York was Cali's and Miami was Medellin's. The rest of the country, the U.S. was up for grabs, right? It was fair game. Right.

So if you wanted the traffic in L.A., it was fine. Open market. Open market. But New York exclusive to Cali, Miami exclusive to Medellin. Were they sharing drug routes, too? Like, were they actually, would Colley give product to Medellin pilots? Would they, you know, share different cargo spaces?

Like when they started shipping it, you know, in big containers or? Not really. The one common thing that they did use fairly often was Norman's K. So Norman's K was an island in the Bahamas. It was set up by Carlos Slater, right? And that was like a transshipment and refurbment. refueling Mecca. And Carlos later, if you, you know, we always say that he doesn't get enough credit for, for that, but he basically revolutionized the cocaine trade by that, by setting up Norman's K.

Because back then, these planes couldn't travel from Columbia to the U.S. with a load and then come all the way back. They couldn't do it without refueling. So by him establishing that Norman's K as that transshipment and refueling strategic place, that just revolutionized cocaine trafficking into the U.S. And Cali also shared that, and they would fly some of their loads into, of all places like Alabama and some other places in the southeast, and then drive it up into New York. Right. Mina, Arkansas. With the help of the CIA, Bill Clinton.

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B-21. Historically and initially, the main route for cocaine. coming into the U.S. was that Caribbean corridor, right? Through up through the Caribbean Sea or into the Bahamas, even into, you know, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and into the U.S. But then, of course, as law enforcement is always adapting, they set up this thing called Operation Bat, Bahamas and Turks and Caicos. And they sent a lot of military assets.

They sent a lot of other resources to that Caribbean corridor, which basically made it hot and made it a lot harder for them to smuggle cocaine there. certainly by air. And as I think you see in 1982, later gets basically kicked out of the Bahamas and he goes back to Columbia. So you see Cali says, okay, even before that, where do we go from here? Right. So what's the most logical next step? Europe and Mexico.

So when you start opening those routes into Mexico, either by aircraft or by vessel, you start to see some of that eastern Pacific, those routes start to. to open on the western side of Columbia going into Central America and into New York. Was the Kali cartel, how was it different from Medellin? Because the Medellin cartel was effectively just different drug traffickers from the Antioquia Valley, right? All of those characters that we just named. It was kind of more of just a loose federation of people sharing drug drugs. Everybody had their own crews. Pablo might have been the strongest. Maybe it was the Ochoas. Maybe it was gotcha. But,

Who knows? Was the Kali cartel more set up like a top-down structure? Like, these are the heads, everybody works for us? Or was the structure similar to Medellin? It was exactly that structure. So initially you had the three heads or leaders of the Cali cartel, which they refer to as the Kali godfathers. Right. Helberto, Miguel Rodriguez, and Jose Santa Cruz. So later on, there's a major dispute, which happens up in New York, one of Paco's guys kills one of Pablo's guys and, you know, there's a major war. Pablo wants to kill Paco Herrera. He kind of goes back to Columbia and he goes under the protection of the Rodriguez or the Whaler Brothers.

And Pablo basically calls the Rodriguez and says, you have to kill Paco and you have to kill the assassin that shot up my guy and they refuse. So Pablo basically told him, if you don't give me Paco and you don't give me the Sicario, it's game on. We're going to war. So what they do is they bring Paco in at that point in time. This is probably late 1987. And he becomes the fourth godfather,

the fourth leader of the Cali cartel. So you have those four guys at the top and a lot of lieutenants and underlings under him. And at their time, you know, between their legitimate businesses, their front companies and their whole drug trafficking organization, they had well over 10,000 employees that were working for.

Wow. And they're like employees. Well, they're on salary. Well, they had, well, through their legitimate businesses as well, they owned a chain of drugstores. Right. Drug. They had their height at over 400 drug stores and employed 4,000 people. Right.

You know, they own banks. They own the soccer team, America de Cali. You know, all kind of different real estate and other businesses, not only in Colombia, but all throughout Europe as well. So, yeah, they were a massive conglomerate by then. And everybody knew that those four guys were the bosses, were the godfathers. Okay. So their shit was a lot tighter than the Medellín cartel. Much tighter, much more structured, much more compartmentalized.

You know, if you look back at Cali, they were run like, you know, IBM, Dell computers, you know, name any one of these Fortune 500 companies. They were broken down into five separate divisions. right you had the military wing which was responsible for corruption recruitment of assets security killings he had the financial division which was responsible for you know laundering the money the trafficking division obviously for narcotics and then they had the political wing which was responsible for corrupting government officials you know trying to get legislation changed trying to get them on their side to kind of do their bidding. And then they had the legal division,

which was the division that basically represented traffickers or money launders or anybody else who got arrested by Colombian law enforcement or in the U.S. Wow. And everything was completely compartmentalized. Right. Right. So if you were in one division or one arm, you didn't know who was in the other arm or what they were doing.

And that's how they ran their trafficking. and money laundering cells as well. So take New York, for example, right, their hub, you can have, and we'll pick up a, we'll just throw out a number. Say 20. You have 20 independent drug trafficking and money laundering cells in New York. Okay. They report to either a cell head or a regional head who reports directly back to Miguel Rodriguez

and Cali. If one of those people in one of those cells gets arrested, he can't talk about any of the other money laundering or drug trafficking cells because he doesn't know. He doesn't have any information. And even if you wiped out one of those 20 cells, you still had 19 operating there that nobody knew anything about it. So they were set up like Al Qaeda, right? Almost like a terrorist organization. Compartmentalized, completely insular. And that's what made them so hard to penetrate by law enforcement. Yeah. Oh my God. They revolutionized the cell structure, which is now the way that all all of drug trafficking basically is conducted around the world.

They were the first ones to do it like that. Well, every drug trafficking organization or criminal enterprise learns from the previous one that wasn't as successful, right? Yeah. So Cali, Cali learned from Medellin, right? So what was Medellin's M.O., so to say, right? How did they conduct business? It was violence, threats, intimidation, murder, kidnapping, extortion, right?

They assassinated government officials. They killed Rodrigo Lara, the minister of justice in 1984. They assassinated Luis Carlos Golan, a presidential candidate in 1989. They blew up the fucking Avianca flight. Killed 100 people, right? Blew up the Daz building. They say that was Robert Escobar, Pablo's brothers. Yeah, Roberto.

He says that that was actually the government. The government killed a lot of people. The government horribly. The Colombian government. was brutal in their response. And so were Los Pepepes. But anyways, I just want to point that out. Those Pepe's, yeah, we can get into that.

They were extremely brutal. But Callie learned from that, and they saw that because what happened? You know, Pablo and the Dominican cartel declares war on the Colombian government. They're the extra diatibles, right? They're committing all this violence. So Columbia goes after them. And they basically hunt down. They kill Gotcha.

They shoot Pablo barefoot on the top of a roof. of a building, right? So Cali learned from that. They're like, you know what? We don't want any part of this stuff. Far better for us to buy people in key positions than kill them, right? So Callie's weapon of choice was what? It was the bribe.

Yeah. And it proved to be even more effective and more lethal than killing these people because they got tons of government officials, military police, judges, prosecutors. They contributed over $6 million to the president. campaign of Ernesto Sanpair in 1994. So they basically bought their presidency. So they had all these people in their pocket, which is why it was so hard to go after them.

Right. And Colley, when they were at their strongest, and citizens, when we were just there last month, would tell us it was so much safer than it is now. I mean, they kept, they would do cleansings where they would tell people in the bar, the colonias, the really dirty, drug-infested neighborhoods of Collie, like, hey, if you love your sons or daughters,

keep them inside because we're coming to kill the riffraff. And so, Cali, I believe, was a safe city. Well, it depends what you consider safe because at the time in the early 90s, right when we got there, even right before we got there, Columbia was the most dangerous country in the world, right? It led the world in murders for years, homicides. It led the world in kidnappings by far for years. And, you know, in Calley alone, in the early, you know, 91, 19. you had 25, 2,600 homicides over an 18-month span.

So there was a lot of violence. There was a lot of killing. But, you know, if you are, I guess if you were a respectable working citizen, yeah, probably was pretty safe for you. What were all those homicides over if there's so much money going around? Just whatever, you know, like you said, a lot of some of it's cleansing, some of it is a remnants of the Median cartel trying to to take over but there was a lot of violence it's been documented and go back and look at the murders there there were a lot maybe it's it's just different now

there's there's a lot more street crime now there's a lot more petty crime there's a lot more they call it quality of life crimes you know there's there's homeless people everywhere there's huge oysias which are like basically like skid row style just drug uh you can't even imagine like how dirty and drug infested these a lot of these neighborhoods are in cali now so maybe that's what people say like it was there was a lot more murders back then but they were like targeted and over like war like actual cocaine war where now it's a lot more chaotic i think that's probably the difference yeah i i have to agree with that okay so wow uh you're in miami uh how long are you in Miami for? And do you start working on the Kali case when you're in Miami? Or how does that

lead to then you going down to Columbia? Great question. So I get to Miami and like I said, for me to be a real DE agent, I had to go to Miami because that's where everything was happening. And we knew that, or I knew back then, that, you know, the Colombian cartels, that was one of their main focal points and their main introduction points for cocaine. So we can, you know, we can. And we can, you know, the Colombian cartels, that was one of their main focal points. And that was, get there. And of course, Miami's dominated by Colombians. So there's cocaine everywhere. As I said, we used to say, you look up, it's going to fall in the sky. It's washing up in the ocean. So I started to work a lot of cases that were tied back to either the Cali and the Median cartel. Because in Miami, you're working some of the most significant investigations in the United States.

If you're in Miami, L.A., New York, you have major investigations. So a lot of those cases, they went back to Cali, they went back to Medellin. And so I had a pretty good idea of who these guys were. Even Pablo back at the time, the Medellin cartel, the Rodriguez's, they were on the radar. And my kind of niche when I was in Miami is I did a lot of maritime smuggling investigations, right? We had a good network set up. We had access to coastal freighters. We had access to go fast boats.

We had undercover houses in the Florida Keys. So we would pose as transporters in offering our services to bring in large quantities of cocaine for these cartels or these independent organizations, bring it into Florida and then turn it back over to them. And, of course, we'll get money sometimes transportation fees and we arrest everybody involved. So because of that, I started working exclusively on investigations related to Cali. Okay. And then I said, you know what? my next logical progression, if I want to be a real DEA agent, is I got to go to the motherland, right? I got to go to the mecca of drug trafficking, which was Columbia.

If Kali had an agreement to just keep New York and Medellin had an agreement to strictly, exclusively control Miami, why were there collie cells in Miami? Well, and that's part of what starts the war is because Medellin starts. starts to infringe on New York territory, right? There's a couple killings up there. And of course, Miami or Cali is trying to introduce more drugs into Miami. And that's when you start having these problems. So, of course, their agreement starts to unwind.

And like I said, by late 1987, it completely falls apart. And they're at war. They're at war. And now it's free game. We're moving Coke wherever we get it to. Okay. If this cell structure, these distribution cells, one doesn't know the other, how are you able to crack that and actually get information that's going to move you closer to the Orojuela? Well, you know, that's a lot of back then in New York or even in Miami.

That's where law enforcement comes in, right? You have a lot of cooperating sources or assets. You're up on wiretaps. You arrest people. They start to cooperate. and they start to tell you exactly how things are happening. But if a cell that's working independently from another, and they're supposedly they don't know any information about the source of the drugs,

how are you able to get information if everything is so compartmental? Well, that's where you're trying. You're working one cell basically at a time, right? So I'll give you an example in Miami. They were able to get up on a wiretap on one of the, of the main cell heads that was running everything. I see. Like a manager.

The manager. He was basically running everything. So they had him on the phone. They had him talking to his underlings. They had him calling back to Columbia speaking to Miguel Rodriguez. So through that, boom, you're able to completely dismantle an entire cell. And then you have other, remember, you have other investigations, other sources, other wiretaps going on that you may be tarting other cells in that area.

So you're not going to knock out all 20 at one time. Right. It's kind of one by one. Sometimes you get lucky and you take down two. You seize drugs. Perfect example is Operation Cornerstone in Miami. Right. There was this massive load of probably, it was over 12 tons, so about 24,000 pounds of cocaine.

It was the second largest cocaine seizure in history at the time. Came in in fence posts, concrete fence posts sent from Venezuela into Florida and containerized cargo. and customs and DEA back then they found out about the shipment. We did survey it. The whole Miami Field Division was doing surveillance on this thing for months, right? So somebody finally comes to pick it up. They follow them. They come over here to Texas.

They arrest these guys. They seize drugs and they're able to trace a lot of that back and, you know, dismantle a major part of one of the cells. So there's a lot of different ways that law enforcement is able to investigate them to go after and completely dismantle those cells. And was that Operation Cornerstone, did those guys that they busted give up? They were the ones that basically were able to link the colleague cartel directly to the Oroahuas, right? Like, that's how you guys got warrants for them, right?

That cellhead was calling directly back to Columbia and talking on the phone to Miguel and Alberto Rodriguez-Otoweila. So there was a very easy direct link to that cell head. It seems so reckless. Why would Miguel be the one talking to the managers? Like, why wouldn't he have an intermediary? I never understood that. Like, Chapo was the same way. Chapo was on the wire talking to the Flores twins about drug deals, you know?

Like, Mayo was never on the fad. He put Choppo in front of him to create a barrier. You know what I mean? Because Miguel Rodriguez was the ultimate micromanager. Ah. He was neurotic in some of the things that he did. He was, like I said, the ultimate micromanager. So all of those either regional heads or cellheads reported back to him, right?

They were calling to him all day long. And not only that, he was on the phone with the Mexicans, with Russian organized crime, with the Italians. And we can get into, this is part of the, one of the ways that we were able to identify where he's at later on. because he's up until three, four, five o'clock in the morning talking to these European crime families. Wow. So that's a pretty good story. We could talk about that later. But remember, there's several vulnerabilities of drug trafficking organizations back in the 80s and 90s, right?

One of them was transportation. They always had a need for pilots, boat captains, people who had access to freighters, because transportation was always an issue for them to get drugs into the country. Another one was moving the money back. The third one was communication, right? You have to be able to communicate with your cellheads or your regional managers, not only in the U.S., but in Central America, South America, Europe. So that was one of the ways that law enforcement was successful by exploiting that communication, that vulnerability.

Because you couldn't just change phones like you can now. Like everybody can just use an encrypted phone. You know, back then, it wasn't so easy to just say, use a burner phone once and chuck it. Well, they used phones. They used early on they used pay phones, which was obviously problematic. But they used pagers and faxes, right? Cali used a lot of faxes too. So we were able to get access to those and gain information as well as by recruiting these high-level assets.

Okay, when you were in Miami, name like how many kilos do you think you busted? Like, what was like a memorable bust? Do you ever keep any of them? Yeah, I got a lot of photos. No, no, no, but I mean, do you ever take a few home? No, come on. Of course not.

Oh, dude, well, you're talking to Johnny Mitchell, trust me. Just give me five of them. It's not worth it. Because at the end of the day, you're going to get caught, and you're going to end up going to prison, right? Did you know any DEA agents that did that? Well, there were several agents that got arrested when I was there.

And my first probably six or eight months on the job, there were two people in my group that got arrested and went to prison for, you know, someone that wore IRS stuff. Other was for, you know, potential alleged corruption, you know, selling information.

But they bid the forbidden fruit. It happens. You know, you're not going to deny it. Do you ever do Coke? Never. Absolutely not. That's disqualifying if you're,

if you're, you know, when I apply it at the. Yeah, especially in any law enforcement agency, immediate disqualification. Okay. You missed out, but I'm glad you didn't. Anyways. Okay, so tell us about, yeah, tell us about like, yeah, some, what was our average bus when you were in Miami when you were tracking down Collie?

Well, Callie, I mean, it depends what kind of cases you were working. I mean, sometimes we were just out there doing, you know, what we call by bus, where somebody would show up, bring you five or 10, 15, 20 keys of code. and you would arrest them, you know, on the spot and take the victory and move on. Other times we were doing the transportation cases, which would go anywhere from, you know, 200 kilos at a time to, you know, 1,500, 2,000 kilos in a shipment. So it varied depending on what you're doing. Wow. Did you, and that must become so routine where you're like, oh, 20 bricks, like you called me for this shit.

You know. It's funny because we used to, when I. got to Miami, we used to fight over, like, who was going to do the next case because it was, there was this so many, because you'd have these informants, these assets coming in, you know, a couple times a day sometimes saying, hey, I got this guy, you know, Manuel wants to sell five kilos. And I got this guy who's got 10 and this guy wants to do two. And it'd be like, okay, you know, Chris, you're up. And I'm like, dude, I just did the one yesterday.

Right, right. You know, and somebody said, well, I did it the day before. I got court. So it was, it was, you know, great. It was busy. But yeah, it was hectic because there was just so much cocaine back there in Miami. Was it competitive, like, amongst the officers? Like, you know, going down to Columbia to chase the number one guys in the world, like that, like, how do you get that above, like, other people that might want to go down there?

It seems like a coveted job. I mean, there's a selection process, obviously. They look at your evaluations. They look at the cases that you did. They look at kind of like the kind of person you are. Are you easy to get along with? You know, are you single? Because back then, Columbia was a, you only have a spouse, right?

You couldn't have any kind of children, right, because of the danger and stuff. So that eliminated a lot of people who had kids. They just couldn't go there. But there was, you know, an interview process. So they had a, you know, a pretty good selection process. But back then, Miami was kind of a popular recruitment ground because for any kind of foreign assignment, in Central or South America because people knew that if you were in Miami and you were a good worker, a good case agent, that you were busy, you traveled a lot. That was the other thing.

We traveled extensively when I was in Miami. So, you know, I had some guys that I was with in Columbia that were from like Detroit or Chicago, never been out of the U.S. in their life. They get down to Columbia. And you know how it is when you get to a, you know, a third world country or a place that's, you know, outside the U.S. and you're like, oh, my God, this isn't what I expected. I'm not in Kansas anymore. So, you know, in Florida, you got exposed to all that. We traveled extensively through Central America, South America, and the Caribbean. So it wasn't a big deal. So Miami was kind of a good recruitment ground for those foreign offices. Did you learn Spanish? I did. So my initial partner in Miami was a guy by the name of Alex Dominguez,

it was Cuban, spoke fluent Spanish. I had access to all these, these crazy, you know, Cuban sources, and these myelitos that came in. So just by kind of osmosis, I would pick up a little bit by hearing the debriefings and stuff. But it's a requirement for by just about every federal law enforcement agency that if you get sent overseas,

you need to go to language school and you need to be proficient. You need to pass a test prior to being deployed to that country. So if you're going to Russia, you've got to learn Russian, you've got to pass a test. If you're going to Thailand,

same thing, or Colombia, Mexico. So, yeah, we went to language school for a couple months. Yeah, you're the Spanish of your character in Narcos is, he speaks great Spanish, like fluent Spanish. It was one of the reasons why he got to part, right? Because he had learned Spanish, Michael Stahl, David, did a great job. I actually saw him in a movie last night when I was sitting in the hotel. Oh, really? But, yeah, his Spanish was very good.

Better than your actual Spanish? About the same. maybe his was a little bit better, but yeah, his was really good. Today's episode is proudly sponsored by PrizePix. Prize Picks is America's number one daily fantasy sports app. It's the only thing I use when I want to fire on action. I am a casual sports fan at best, so I leave the guesswork up to the experts.

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What year did you get the call that you were going to Cali? So I applied, initially, I applied in late, mid to late 1993. And the first time I applied, I didn't get the job. And I thought, like, what the hell's going on? I mean, how can I not get the job? I had outstanding evaluations. You know, my Spanish was pretty good back then. I had worked all these cases, you know, going back to the Cali Cartel.

I knew all the players So I called Steve Murphy, right? The one and only Steve Murphy from Narco's Season 1 and season 2 who was integral with Javier Pena

and bringing down Paulo Escobar. Steve used to work in Miami and knew I'm like, Steve, what the fuck, bro? How can, how come I didn't get accepted? And he's like, dude, you got to get your haircut,

man. You know, the boss down here is like pretty strict and I had hair down to the middle of my back. No shit. I didn't get a haircut from the day I left the academy until I got denied for my first job in Cali, which was over five years.

So I had hair down to the middle of my back. I was wearing three earrings. I was like an extra at a point break, right? I looked like a surfer. Was that purposely to be posed as like a drug smuggler, drug trafficker? Do a lot of undercover back then. And it was one of those things that, you know, you can do it. so why not go ahead and do it.

And so I said, shit. So I went out one afternoon after I got that call and I got my haircut, right? I lopped off a good, you know, 12, 14 inches of my hair. And, you know, a week or so later, I got a call from the boss in Columbia. And he said, hey, Feistel, I heard you got your haircut. I was like, yes, sir, I did. Says, don't worry, things will work out for you. And then I ended up getting a job.

Okay. So. So 93, Pablo is in his last day. So now it's like it's go time. Now it's time to take down Collie, the godfathers. So when I get selected, Pablo's still alive. So I'm thinking, man, I am going to Columbia at the absolute best time. I can work against Pablo Escobar, help bring him down.

And I knew back then that once he went down, Cali was the major player because, you know, there was a, you know, a Time magazine article even back in 1991. They were on the cover of the Time magazine, the new Kings of Coke. So everybody knew that that was the next progress. But by the time, you know, I did all my administrative stuff. I went to language school. Pablo was already.

Pablo was killed. Right. So I get there, you know, months after Pablo is dead. And boom, it's right into, okay, this is what you're being sent there to do. You're going to work on the Cali cartel. You're going to work with Colombian security forces to try to bring them down. Okay. So you're in Collie that the surrender.

If Narco Season 3, it starts with them agreeing, making an agreement, making an agreement with the Colombian government to surrender themselves in exchange for getting minimal prison time in Colombia and them getting to retain all of their assets, all the billions of dollars legally and illegally that they've accumulated. Is that true to life? Partially, yes. Partially. Now, why do I say partially? Because that was an idea floated out by the Calais Carly.

hotel, right? That was one of their three projects that they had. And this one was called the submission to justice project. And I outlined this very well, I think, in the book. And that's what they wanted. They wanted to surrender to Colombian authorities. They wanted prison sentences of five years, but to serve no more than three. And they wanted to keep all their assets, right? It was never going to happen. I just want to point out, that's exactly what Jorge Ochoa did. and he got to keep all of his money and he spent five years in a Colombian prison and he's living happily ever after.

He is the most successful kingpin of all time, in my opinion. Definitely very smart. The three of Chal brothers took that deal. Yeah, one of them got popped, Fabio. He just got extradited back. Right, but I'm saying back then, right? 1991.

Right. All three of them agree to surrender to the Colombian government. Extradition is off the table and that they were going to do minimal present sentences, right? And that agreement was basically honored, though. It was honored, but we'll see what happens. And this gets into the question that you asked. So Jorge and Juan David do about five years. Fabio does a little bit over five years. Okay. Pablo

goes a little bit later. He surrenders. But what happens, right? Pablo goes to Catadryl, right? It's a complete farce. It's, it, the Colombian government is criticized all over the world for he builds this lavish basically condominium or house.

He has his own security. He does whatever they want in there. And Columbia is the laughing stop. So as Cesar Gaviria, the president of Columbia for years. So when the Rodriguez has float this out after that, Columbia

government wants no part of it because they realized, Kaviria realized the president, that was a disaster what happened with Pavel. We're not going to entertain that. Now, there were a few people in the Colombian government that thought, hey, you know what, we should probably do this, but it never gained a lot of traction. It was what they floated out. I think in Narcos, they kind of portray it more as it's, it was more of like a done deal. And that was the thing, but I don't think it ever got any ground.

And Miguel was very opposed to that. That was more of Hilberto's plan. So that never happened. Okay, so the Oranguela were too late. They were too late after the surrender deal. The debacle, which was Prado Escobar and Cutta Drol. I see. I see.

Okay. So now it's 1993, 94. That surrender is, it seems like they're just hoping that the Colombian government goes for it. They are. So what happens, right? 1994 comes up. You have the presidential election in Colombia. So you have the conservative candidate, Andres Pastrana, and the liberal candidate Ernesto Sampere.

So Callie's idea is, and that's another reason why, because the outgoing administration with Gaviria and the Attorney General Gustavula Grief, they were on their way out. No one was going to agree to it. They thought, you know what? Let's see if we can buy the next two presidential candidates. Because if we do, they'll be more inclined to go along with our. submission to justice program. I see. So, Cali tries to help finance both of the presidential candidate's elections. Pastrana reportedly denies any of the money. Team Sam Pair, they're all in. Cali Cartel provides, you know, the low estimate is $6 million. The higher estimates are up to

10 or even over $10 million. $10 million, $6 million back in 1994. It's a lot of money. In Colombia? It's a lot of money, right? So they figure, let's do that. And then once we get our president in the Casa Nalino, which is the White House, they'll have to go along with our project. So, of course, they provide the funding.

Sam Pair gets elected, but he doesn't go along with it. Okay. There's too much heat. There's too much pressure from the U.S. deal kind of falls apart. And they're basically told, don't get caught. Interesting. Okay. So when you got there, was that, had Sampere already gotten into office? So Sampere won the election in May was the election. None of the candidates got 50%. They had a second runoff in June. He gets elected in June and he takes office in August of 1994. So we are in Columbia, me and my partner, Dave Mitchell, before Sampere. He's the president elect, but he hasn't taken office.

office. Okay. All right. So and by the time he took office, did it become clear to the Orojuela that the deal was off? Or did that, did he betray that deal later? I think they knew because of the pressure that the deal was off, but word like officially got to them a little bit later down the road. I see. Like this is, this is not going to happen. My hands are tied. Basically, the administration is telling them the U.S. is putting an in an ordinent amount of pressure on me. and the government to go after you because like I said, everybody knew Cali was the next target. So it wasn't,

the timing was bad. And did you know your targets were Miguel and Gilberto? Did you know that they were going to get extradited? Did they assume they were going to get extradited if and when they were caught? Or was that, was it still kind of was, were they planning on on even doing time in Colombia? Was the Colombian government planning on keeping them for,

after you guys arrested them. Yes. And this is why, because Colombia has this on again and off again relationship with extradition. Right. Right. So it was instituted. It was banned. It was reinstituted.

It was banned. Yeah. So part of the reason or the main reason, Pablo Escobar surrenders in June of 1991 is because he's given assurances that you will not be extradited, right? So they changed the constitution to outlaw the extradited. of Colombian nationals to the U.S. then. So from that period from 91, until the time we're in Columbia, there is no extradition of Colombian nationals to the U.S.

U.S. citizens, Canadians, whatever, fine, but no, no Colombian national. So they knew that if they got caught, they were going to spend time in Colombian prison. Okay. So you're in collie now. You've gone through all the training and the onboarding. you're obviously not under cover because you're a gringo you're working with the collie the military and collie right police and the military okay uh in the show you get assigned you and uh Javier painia by the way he was not with you that's explained that that was the the Hollywood version

of what happened but uh Javier Pena who's the guy Pedro Pascals character he was not actually actually with you in Kali busting the Orojuela. Correct. Yeah. So Javier Pena, he actually picked me up from the airport when I arrived there. But he left Columbia shortly after I arrived. His tour was over. You know, him and Steve had taken down with the Colombian government, Pablo.

So his time was done. He rotates back to the United States. So he wasn't there. But who was your partner? Who was like your main guy? Dave Mitchell. Okay, Dave Mitchell. He's your road dog.

So, right, he's, he's my, he's my partner. And in Narcoe season three, they refer to him. In Narcoe season three, I'm Chris Feistel, right? His character is Daniel Van Ness, not Dave Mitchell, because Dave at the time is still an active agent with the DEA. Right. So they're not using his name. They have to change his name.

Of course, till this day, he's still upset about that. But that's why he's referred to as Daniel Van Ness in the show. I see. Okay. So what do you, What do you get thrown into? What are you doing when you first get to collie? So it's pretty funny.

What happens is that, so since we had a lot of cases targeting the Cali cartel when I was in Miami, we had a lot of good assets. And we had one asset that was actually had face-to-face meetings with, with Hilberto. So when I get to Columbia, like the first thing, I go in pretty much the next day. And I'm like, hey, so when can, when can, you know, me and Dave go to Cali? We want to get rolling. and I want to follow up on some stuff. And my supervisor tells me,

we're not sending anybody to Cali right now. It's too dangerous. I was like, what do you mean? Why am I here? What are we doing? So they tell me the story of what happens is there were two Hispanic agents who were there before. They were assigned to Cali.

They had their photograph taken by a double agent, one of their sources, who was actually working for the cartel. Photograph comes back to the embassy. They show it around. Hey, we know who these guys are. They're DEA agents. We know where they live. We know where they stay.

We know where they eat. We know where they're went-day cars. So we can pretty much have them at any time. It's basically what it's all, you know, knee-jerk reaction. Nobody can go to Cali. And I'm like, well, how am I supposed to investigate the Cali cartel if I can't go to Cali? I said, well, you have to do it from the embassy in Bogota. So I was like, man, this is not a very good strategy.

So after, you know, a few weeks of complaining and prodding, we're finally allowed to go to Cali, right? The ambassador gives us approval. DEA gives us approval, but we have extremely strict restrictions and guidelines, right? So listen to this. So they say, okay, you guys can go to Cali, but here's the deal. One, you have to be back by nightfall. Can't stay overnight. Okay.

Two, and this is important in the book and it plays a big part later on as well. Two, can't leave the police or military base without a police escort or military escort at any time, right? you can never do anything on your own. You have to be in the company of them. And the third thing, no unilateral action. No unilateral activity. You can't do anything yourself. You've got to be with Colombians.

You've got to do it. So those were our, that was my welcome to Columbia moment. So we had to go over for the day. We met with the military. We met with the police. And we tried to establish a liaison with them and get things rolling. Okay. So in the show, that first liaison, the commander of the military and colleague,

turns out that he is on the payroll of the collie cartel. Is that true? Did that happen in real life? That's true. But he was a Columbia National Police. Yeah, right. He was Colombian National Police. And he's a captain.

Okay. And that is our initial contacts were with the military, but there's a lot of things that happened with the colonel in charge of the military bloke, and we kind of migrate more to start working with the police. And our initial police contact is a captain. And yes, he was one of the main spies for the CaliCard. cartel. How long after you got there did you realize that? Well, it's a good question, but we had our suspicions for a long time. Operation after operation after operation was compromised, right? We were on the

ground a year almost before we had any real major success. And a lot of the operations that we did, it's like you see on TV, man, you go into some of these TV shows, right? You know, you get this big raid planned and you raid the apartment or the house and you go in and, You have good intel that somebody's there and then there's nobody there. But there's a cup of coffee sitting there that's still hot, right? Or there's a cigarette burning. Right. Or there's a piece of toast sitting there half eaten.

So we were like, you know, these operations are compromised. Our intel is good. Right. But, you know, who is behind it? So this captain was always like asking a lot of questions. He was always hanging around our bunks, you know, our little barracks where we were staying. So we were very suspicious of them from the start.

But, you know, we can't do things on our own, right? We have to work with the police or the military. We have to go to them with the information and then launch these operations. So it took us almost a year to figure out and to circumvent that corruption, right? So we had to come up with a better plan or a better MO as to how we were going to do stuff. Right. Okay, so you would, did you eventually start giving him bad information, like intentionally giving this captain misinformation? We did, and what we did is we started to violate.

That's why I said we come back to that and support it. We started to violate every one of those restrictions and guidelines that we had, right? So we had to start leaving the police or military base without an escort. We had to go out on our own. We had to start working unilaterally to start doing this. stuff to try to circumvent the corruption. So what we finally did, and again, this is, you know, 11 months, almost a year into our tour where I said we did hundreds and hundreds of raids where we basically came up empty. We started raiding houses, buildings, apartments, anything in

Cali where our intel suggests that one of the godfathers is at. So we start to utilize these vetted teams, right? These are polygraphed, highly trained. specialized police units that are detached to the CIA, to the agency. So the CIA is there? The CIA has a big presence there. But DEA didn't have any of our own vetted units. So we had to utilize the vetted units to the agency. So what we did is we started to bring these very small,

a very small group of these vetted police members from Bogota 200 miles away. over land to do some of these operations and surveillance and completely discard the search block who is what we were using because of the corruption. So that was our very first big break in going after Cali is that we had, we developed, there were three things that were very, what's the word, very, that led us to arrest the Cali leaders, right?

One of them was utilizing the vetted units two was the recruitment of very, very high-level assets on the ground. Okay, who are these assets? We'll get into that. And then the third one was Dave and I basically being allowed, not allowed, but doing unilateral work. Okay. So with all of that, we recruit very two high-level sources. They provide us with information on where Hilberto could be.

And the information they give us is that, look, Hilberto utilizes this personal assistant. who travels from his apartment every day to where Hilberto's at, works with answers the phone, relays messages, sets up meetings, and then he comes home. So if you follow him, he will lead you till Hilberto Rodriguez. So we're able to locate,

this guy's name's Flacco, we're able to follow him over the course of a week, and we follow him to an area in Kali, in central Kali, in the Santa Monica area, where we end up losing him, but at the top of the stairs, there's only five townhouses there, right? So we think he had to have gone into one of these townhouses.

There's nowhere else. It's a dead-end street. There's nowhere else he could have gone. So we rate all five and we basically find Hilberto, June of 1995, after almost a year on the ground. Okay. Was he in a Caleta when you went to his place? Yeah, he was in like a rudimentary Caleta.

It was kind of like a room. you were able to move a television away and behind in the closet, there was an entrance, and he was there in the room with a pistol in each hand. Wow. And basically when he saw the Columbia National Police there, he was like, look, I'm a man of peace, don't shoot. And they didn't. And they arrested him. And Hilberto was arrested there.

Wow. Okay. Can you tell us who the sources were? No, obviously not. Still not. No. Okay. In the famously in the show. One has never been, never been identified ever at any point at any time. Was he, can you tell us who their, what their functions were within the organization at least?

They were members of the Calais Cartel, is all I can tell you. Wow. So is that legally you can't do that or just ethically? Well, both. I mean, you know, we never reveal who our sources are for obvious reasons. Jorge Salcedo in Narco's season three is the main asset who lead you guys to take down Miguel and the whole operation. He's the head of security for the Kali cartel. Did you guys, did he come in later? Yes. Okay. So this is not, this is different than the two sources.

Right after Helberto's arrest. Okay, got it. So, wow, you still, to this day, they could be touched. They could, their lives could be in danger if you revealed who they were. Potentially. Wow. Okay. So you got the number one guy.

You arrested him. That's exciting. That's exciting. So he's sitting in Colombian jail, fighting his case. What happens after that? How did you flip Salcedo? So immediately after Hilberto's arrest, I'm thinking to myself.

myself and with Dave, my partner, we need to get another, we need to find another source, like the two that we used. And it's a very long story about what happens, but we're able to get in contact with Jorge Salcedo, right? He's kind of looking for a way out of the cartel at this time. We're looking for a way in, and when we kind of hook up, it's the perfect storm, right? Because he's got that real-time, actionable intelligence that we need. And then, of course, we bring to the table, you know, resources, the trust factor, and a couple of other things. So I finally make contact with Salcedo in, it would have been July. Right. So let me backtrack a little bit. So I call Operation Cornerstone, which was one of the main, it was the main investigation against

the Kauai cartel in Miami. We go back and forth, hey, you guys got to send me, you know, anything you got places where these guys hang out, names of assets, potential people to follow. So I get this list. And it says the first one is to follow Miguel's like executive assistant, just like what we did with Herberto. So me and Dave, now we're working with another Colombian vetted unit attached to the Navy. And we're following this guy around for well over a week, 12, 14 hours a day. He's not doing anything, right? And we're like, this is bad, this is bad info, right? And I talk about this very extensively in the book. So we need to go to option number two.

Option number two was to follow one of Miguel's attorneys. You know, we can't be sitting in the car again for this long. It's killing us. So option number three was call Jorge Salcedo because there's a possibility he may want to cooperate. So that's how we eventually get to him. So I call him one day and I go, hey, you know, I'm a friend of Eddie in Miami's. I think we should talk. And he's like, okay.

I said, well, we're in Cali right now. Can we meet? And he says, meet me at 3 o'clock at this place called Siott, which is a joint agricultural center, an hour outside of Cali. Now, remember, at the time, he's the head of security for the Cali cartel. Right. Right. And we know a little bit about his background, but not a whole lot.

And a little bit that we do know is not comforting to me and day. Because Salcedo gets recruited into the cartel in 1989 because he has contacts with British mercenaries and soldiers of fortune. Right. So he gets lured to this meeting with the godfathers and they basically tell him, hey, we know you have contacts with British mercenaries and soldiers of fortune. We want you to utilize them to kill Pablo Escobar at Asiena Nopoulos. Wow. So imagine you walk into a meeting. with the four heads of the Calais cartel,

and they dropped this humongous bomb on you that they want you to go kill Pablo Escobar, right? What do you say to that? Yeah, you can't say no. Exactly. It's like the godfather. It's a deal you can't refuse. So he realizes that.

And he basically says to himself, I'm not walking out of here alive if I say no. They just basically told me that they want to kill the biggest narco-terrorist on the planet. So he agrees with the, with the qualification that, okay, when Escobar is dead, I'm out. I go back to my normal life. I got my own company.

You know, I'm a well-educated guy. He was a captain in the military reserves. So, you know, he was an expert in counterintelligence, weapons, communication. So he was like a very good pool for these call guys. And so that's how he gets drawn into the cartel. And they launched this operation against Pablo, this two helicopter assault. on Aseando-Napolis. One of the helicopters crashes, you know, pilots killed.

One of the sold mercenaries is, you know, breaks his ribs. So the operation gets shut down. Ryan Reynolds here for MintMobil. I don't know if you knew this, but anyone can get the same premium wireless for $15 a month plan that I've been enjoying. It's not just for celebrities. So do like I did and have one of your assistants assistants to switch you to MintMobile today.

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Wow. Right out of a movie. People don't talk about that in history. No, but I outline it very, very well in the book. So you can get the whole story about how this happens. So the operations of failure. South Sada realizes now, man, I'm still stuck here in the cartel. So the sequel to the first movie is just as crazy as the second one to the helicopter assault

is that now Paco Hareda comes up with the idea, look, Escobar is at Katta D'Raw. We know where he's at now. So let's drop a bomb on him. Right? How outlandish is that? So. Well, in these days, that's a possibility. The drone strikes and shit, but they didn't have that back to that.

That's right. So they get Salcedo to travel to El Salvador. He has contact with the colonel there, and he buys three, or he buys four, actually, MK82 500-pound bombs. So they're going to take these bombs back to Columbia, and now they need a delivery device, right? So he goes to Miami, he goes to Opelaca, he tries to buy this A37 dragonfly, which they're going to attach the bomb to to drop on Katta Draw, right? Crazy, outlandish, right? But he suspiciously thinks it's like a law enforcement sting. It's not adding up.

The plane is new. He walks away from him. So they bring three of the bombs back to Colombia. The fourth one ends up getting seized in El Salvador, it turns into a major. major international incident. You know, the colonel gets exposed. Salcedo gets exposed. He's now a military target by Escobar because now Escobar knows he's part of this plan

to kill him. So he's stuck in the cartel again, right? So he needs that way out. We need that way in. Just to cut you off, I want to clarify the show versus what actually happened. Two things. Did the corrupt military general in Kali, did he get killed by Miguel after he allowed Gilberto to get arrested? You mean the police captain?

Yeah, the police captain. No, no. Okay. So that didn't really happen. No. Okay. It does not happen. Salcedo.

But we do know, or at least I read that after Gilberto got arrested, Miguel started to get paranoid and they started to kill a lot of people. Well, they weren't sure of who the source was, right? Who the informant was. And suspicion a lot of times in these drug cartels will get you killed. Right. Even if you're completely innocent, you know, better to kill 10 people than they can get one rather than take a chance and let one get away. So, yeah, there were a few people that were eliminated. Yeah, okay.

But that wasn't the reason that Salcedo approached you guys. No. But he sees the writing on the wall. Right. He's like, I'm either going to get arrested or I'm going to get killed. But he needs to find the right way out. And he's the head of security for the Cali cartel. And as he told us, trust no Colombians.

Right. He wants no part. And I'll tell you when we first meet what he says. So we go back to the thing. I call him. I'm in Cali. Let's meet. So I just told you.

his background. So he tells me on the phone, and I have it on speaker and Dave sitting there next to me. He says, meet me at 3 o'clock at Siott. And I'm like, dude, are you fucking kidding me? You're the head of security for the Cali cartel. You're the counter security officer. I'm not going an hour outside of Cali to meet you in the middle of nowhere. Now, Seattle is in the middle of a sugar cane field. There's nothing around it. It's in the middle of nowhere. Right. So this smells to me like a complete, you know, ambush or, you know, we don't know what to expect. We're going to get kids. kidnapped, killed, tortured, all three, exposed, arrested by the police. So we're hesitant.

We're weary. And I tell him, look, I'm not going to go out there. And I said, we need to meet somewhere closer to the city. He goes, impossible. If we're seeing together, it's not going to end well for either one of us. So I'm thinking to myself, like, this guy's like he's killing me. So finally, we agree to meet. I said, I'm thinking to myself, screw out.

We're going to meet him. he goes, come along. So I'm not coming along. They have to bring my partner. We don't go anywhere in Columbia by ourselves, especially with the counterintelligence officer in the head of security. So he agrees, and we finally meet one afternoon at Seattle, an hour outside of the city, just me, my partner, Dave, and South Sado. And I think they dramatized that fairly well in Narcos, although the meeting was much more extensive in the show. They show us meeting for five minutes. we were actually out there for three hours the first time. Wow.

Did you have automatic weapons? We did. Okay. So you had automatics and sidearms. We looked like Neo and Trinity. Yeah. When we went into the government-controlled building to free Morpheus. Dude, we had bags of weapons, automatic weapons, you know, pistols, we, you know, extra mags.

We had every, we were loaded as much as we could. Had you been in shootouts up to that point in your career? No. You never had to bang it out? He shot at, but not return fire. Okay. Wow. All right.

So after that meeting, did you guys lock in the agreement that he was going to help you guys take down the rest of the cartel? So when we first meet, he says, this is a one-time meeting only. And, you know, I will pass some information. That's it. All I want is safe pass. for me and my family to the U.S. But, you know, as we started to talk a little bit, and we got into a lot of things, it was, oh, the other thing,

let me throw back. So when we first meet, you know, we go to introduce ourselves, and I go, I'm, Chris and Chris Feistland, Dave Mitchell. He knew exactly who we were because of the corrupt officer that we were dealing with because he was reporting directly to Salcedo. Right. So he knew everything. So that was a little bit unnerving as well.

Wild. Yeah. Because they had the whole city under surveillance, right? They had everybody under surveillance. They had everybody paid off. So again, that was unnerving. We finally started talking. And, you know, when we were deep, because we had talked to so many different assets, right?

And a lot of these guys were so, they're full of shit, right? They try to bullshit. And so we started asking him a lot of questions that we knew the answer to, right? And everything that he responded to, was right, right? What we knew to be true. So after five minutes, we're thinking, this guy's, he's on the up and up, right?

We still have to be careful with him because he's the head of security. He could still screw us. But, you know, and he started to realize that we weren't just, you know, two young DEA guys that didn't know anything. These guys have a pretty good handle on, you know, on what's going on.

So the meeting turned into a three-hour meeting. We talked about a lot of different stuff. And then by the end of the meeting, it was starting to get dark. You know, he gives us information where he thinks Miguel is at. Because we ask him, where is Miguel at now? He says he's in the Santa, he's in the Santa, he's in the Santa Rita area of Cali along the river, which we had intel that he was. So then we set up surveillance that night. But he agrees to meet with us the next morning.

So what turns out with a one-time meeting turned into a, you know, a long-term multiple-time meeting to get this information to go after Miguel. Okay. Miguel's now, you know, staying in different safe houses, huge penthouses with security everywhere. In the show, Salcedo ends up getting discussed. covered and you guys have to shoot it out to basically rescue him from being executed by Miguel. Did that actually happen? No. Damn.

Didn't that happen? Damn. Less dramatic. One of the good liberties that they took. Yeah. Okay. So how long after the meeting with Salcedo did you capture Miguel? So we launched a raid three days afterwards after the meeting.

That's it. Right? Wow. But it's not successful. this is the first one which they outlined very, very well in Narcos where we're drilling into the wall. Right. And he escaped. Was he in the wall?

He was in the wall. And then did you guys get, just like in the show, did you guys get stopped by the Colombian police? Exactly. Wow. What if you had refused? Well, we were already got arrested while we were there. Like they typed up a denuncial, like an official complaint against us and they detained us and they locked us in the room. So I'll get to that.

Okay. So what he does is he tells us, look, he's in this part of Santa Rita. And this goes back to what we had talked about earlier, is that he says, look, I'm not quite sure of the building, but Miguel stays up until four or five o'clock in the morning. He's always on the phone with the Europeans, with the Russians, with the Italians, coordinating money laundering and drugs. So if you sit there in the hills and watch do surveillance, these buildings, whatever light goes out last is, probably going to be where he's at, right? Genius idea. So Dave and I, we go up into the hills, you know, we're sitting there for two or three nights. We're with binoculars, you know, we're getting carried away by mosquitoes, very uncomfortable. And we kind of narrow down two

floors in one building. He said, this has to be it because these are the last lights to go off every night. So now we have the building identified, or we think we have the building identified, but we don't know the name or anything. We don't know the layout. So Salcedo as the head of security tells us, you know, everything that's going on. So we're getting this incredible inside information about how the cartel works, how their security apparatus works, the corruption that's involved, where they stationed security, perimeter security, everything.

So he's like, look, to get into that neighborhood, we have perimeter security set up here. and it consists of several different operatives there. So anybody who comes down, and Miguel would always stay in these places where there was one way in and one way out that were backed up to the mountain. Right. Because they figured they have to come past

this certain choke point and our surveillance will see them and they're not going to be able to come down the side of the mountain because it's too steep. So he's like, you're not going to get in there unless I pull the security. So he agrees to pull the cartel security for like a 15-minute meeting,

which gives Dave and I a chance to drive through where the security's at, the checkpoint. Go in there, we identify the name of the building, we get the lay of the land, and we're able to come back out, and that's how we're able to identify his location, and then we're able to put together an operation. So once we do that, you know, Dave and I try to, you know,

we did our recon, we got our information. that's when we call these specialized units from Bogota to come over. And how many people in this specialized unit? Well, we only used a handful about five or six. But once we got there, what our plan was then is, and then we had to learn again not to do this the next time. Once we got there, and we brought some other troops from Bogota, these enter narcotics troops, but they had no idea where they were going or what they were doing. They were just told, you know, go to Kali, follow these guys, and they'll tell you.

what to do. Right. So we got to the building, we surrounded the building, and then we called the search block to come in because they have a prosecutor that's embedded with the police and they would come and coordinate the operation. But only after we had everything secure. Right. So, of course, this turns into a disaster. Right. How? We're in the apartment for about 10 hours. We can't find them. So what happens initially is the prosecutor comes from the search block. He doesn't bring. bring the necessary paperwork to be able to raid the apartments. So he has to go to the regional office, get the paperwork, fill it out, and then come back.

In the meantime, we're sitting outside the building, surrounding the building for two hours before we get access to it. Right. So we're thinking, Miguel's either gone. He's walked out of the building. He's in another apartment or he's inside of Colette and we're never going to find them. So that's when we finally get in there, that's our thought process. So we know that the executive assistant who's with Miguel, he's there. So we know this is the place.

And Salcedo also tells us during that initial debriefing, all this great insight information that Miguel uses like a 20 to 25 line telephone switching station, right? So if you had to get a hold of Miguel, you never had his real number. You would call a number. The number would go here and then it would get a. it transferred to wherever he was at. So you never knew where he was. He went through that central switching station. So he said, if you look for that, he's going to have one of two executive assistants. He gave us the names. It says Miguel's hypoglycemic. He only eats, you know,

certain kinds of food at certain hours to control his blood sugar. So look for a lot of fresh fruits and vegetables in the refrigerator. He's neurotic, right? He's, he's OCD. He only uses Panasonic phones, hardlines. I don't know why. because he liked them. So when we get into the apartment, the first thing we do, we look, okay, there's the 25-line switching station. We go to the refrigerator. There's the fresh fruits, right? I look, we find the Panasonic phones.

And then the last thing, the executive assistants there, I ask him, what's your name? He says, Jorge Castile. That's him. So we knew that that was the right apartment, and we knew Miguel was either in a Coletta there or he had gone because it took us two hours to get in. Right. Now, the prosecutor that didn't bring the right paperwork, was that on purpose? Was he being paid off? Most likely. Okay.

So what happens later on, and you can form your own opinion on that, is that during this time, we're constantly going outside, we're on the phone, we're communicating with Salcedo. And we're getting sporadic pieces of information over these 10 or 12 hours that were in the apartment. And, you know, the first information we get is he was there. I don't know what happened. A couple hours later, we get the he's there. He's in the apartment. He's in a hidden compartment. So we're going around, you know, knocking on walls and floors and ceilings and trying to move bookcases, you know, everything.

We can't find anything. So at one point he calls back and he. he says, hey, is there a big red, wooden desk in the office? And I say, yeah, the only thing we found was a written down piece of paper with our license plate of the car that we drove in Cali that was given to him by the corrupt captain. Yeah. So there's nothing else. He says, inside the desk, and this is very well portrayed in Narco Season 3, it said, inside the desk

is a hidden compartment, and it has Miguel's most sensitive and confidential papers. you got to find those because that'll give you more time to stay in the apartment with the prosecutor. So like that way, you know, we're looking for buttons. We're, you know, we can't find anything. So one of the agents that's there with us, Jerry Salome, he picks the desk up and crashes it to the ground and it completely breaks open.

And we look in, I look, I crunched down, I look in the back and there's a hidden compartment in the desk. And it has these three thin leather briefcases. So we pull them out, we give them to the colonel who's there, and they start going through the documents. And these documents are highly explosive. Like, damn. It's unbelievable. Corruption-related information, information about the financing of the presidential campaign.

Wow. We found a list, check this out, 2,800 corrupt officials, a list that tells you the amount of, and this is in one raid, right? canceled checks where Miguel, when he paid people by check, he used to make a photo copy of it. He kept these documents. Why would he do that? So that he knew who he paid and he had leverage over people, right? Oh, right. Sure.

So one of the checks was made to the campaign treasurer for Ernesto Sanpair, right? So this opens this huge explosive investigation into the campaign financing. So gives us a little bit more time. Finally, he gives us the information. Look, Miguel is in a compartment. in the bathroom because he knows this because he's meeting with Miguel Rodriguez, his son. Right. So he has the information.

And of course, they're telling Salcedo because South Sado is the head of security. Right. He's trying to coordinate this. And by now they're trying to formulate an extraction plan to how to get them out. Right. So we're like, shit, there's like four bathrooms, four or five bathrooms in this place. So again, we go back, start knocking on walls. Finally, what we did is two other guys went down to the apartments below in the apartments

above where we were at. We were in apartment 402. And we start taking measurements of all the different bathrooms. So we finally get to this one half bath, the washroom, and we realize the distances and the measurements are shorter than the other ones, right? So I open one of the cabinet doors to the sink, and it hits the toilet. So I'm thinking to myself, yeah, what is this? horrible construction, right?

So we've been going full tilt for days, weeks on end, right? We're there for a year. We're tired. We're exhausted. We're not thinking clear. And then, of course, it hits us. Well, it's probably because this wall has been modified and moved forward. So then we start drilling, just like in the show, drilling, taking the sludge hammers. And then the prosecutor comes in. And he basically says, you're to cease and desist. You're conducting a unilateral operation in Colombia and violating Colombian law. Stop immediately. Come with me. He shuts down the raid. He goes to the apartment.

the keys are there. He locks the front door, puts the keys in his pocket, gets his little typewriter, starts typing up a formal complaint of denunci against us. So we're basically... Does he have guards with him? Like, could you guys have been overtaken by firepower? Well, in Colombia, the prosecutor runs everything. Okay. Right?

So if he tells the police, you can't seize that, you can't do this, shut it down. We're going home. You do it, right? In the U.S., it's different. different. So yeah, they were all kind of armed police there. So we... Okay, so obviously this guy is fully paid off. Now, did he know that you had the documents seized from the desk? Those explosive documents? He knew they're there. So what happens with that is the colonel looks at him and he realizes how explosive these things are. He basically takes them

and says, I got to go take these to General Serrano, the head of the Columbia National Police. And he leaves with the documents. Okay, before. So that's when things start to really, to really go downhill. But So what happens is the captain from the search block is there during the raid, the corrupt one. Right. So he's reporting back of what's going on. So they knew. The cartel knew, the prosecutor knew that we were getting close. You know, so that's what happens.

Okay, but you guys had to leave. Is that when you got arrested? Yes. Wow. So you were dearmed? No, we were not dearmed. They just told us they typed up the complaint. And after it was done, they shut the raid down and we were escorted out of the building.

Okay. So now we're thinking we're going to get thrown out of the country by the ambassador. Salcedo's going to be killed. So it was probably the lowest point in my law enforcement career that day. Not because we didn't catch Miguel, but because we let Salcedo down. And we thought that he was going to get killed. But at least you had these documents. that literally changed Columbia.

I mean, it literally blew the lid off of the whole thing. So what happens after that is we tell the Columbia National Police, look, stand guard outside the apartment, stand guard outside the building, because he's got to come out. And when he comes out, you can grab him. So what happens? The corrupt captain goes back into the apartment.

apartment. They break Miguel out of the Coletta. They escort him out of the apartment into the garage, into the trunk of the car, and they drive him away. So he escapes. So the next day, we get someone to the ambassador's house. And I'm like, this is it. I'm packing my bags. We're out of here. And Ambassador goes into a tirade. You know, what were you guys doing? You violated all my rules. You were like, we go back to you. You were working unilaterally. you're destroying property because we were hitting with a sledgehammer and everything. But then he finally talks about the documents. So we only saw a few of them, but we knew they were explosive. So he kind of tells us some of the stuff that was found. And it's, again, highly volatile. And then he tells us what happened is that the police went back into the apartment. They found that Coletta broken open right where we were drilling, right where we were hitting it.

So that was the only thing that saved us from getting expelled from the country by the ambassador. So Miguel escapes and now we're back to zero. Okay. So does that expose Salcedo? Like at that point, did Celcedo tell you guys, hey, these guys assume that I'm the one that's leaking this information? So Salcedo is on the very, very short list of potential suspects. Right. We lose contact with him for about five days.

At that point, we think he's been killed. We're not sure. There are people who suspect him, mainly Miguel's son, suspects him. Some other security people that work for Salcedo suspect him. But his cover is that, look, I didn't know where the apartment was. I didn't know anything about the Coletta where it was. And I certainly didn't know anything about the desk where those documents were. So he's able to convince Miguel during his little interview or slight interrogation that, hey,

I don't know any of this stuff. It's not me. So Miguel believes him. Because Miguel wasn't even telling Salcedo where he was staying. Salcedo only knew the area, but he knew where the perimeter security was. That was his job. Right. And because of he knew how Miguel operated, that he knew the one way in, the one way out, the apartment backed up to the mountain.

So he kind of had it narrowed down to several buildings, but he didn't know which one. So it was the son, it was Miguel's son who was basically the only one that knew where Miguel was staying and his assistance. Yes. Okay. For the most part, yeah. Right. Now there may have been one or two other people, but that was it. Okay.

So, yeah, what happens next? So we finally regroup about five days later. He tells us, look, I am under suspicion. Miguel has moved. And I am not sure where he's at. The only thing he knew is he was somewhere downtown, like in the Wanabu or the, in the Christales area of Cali, right? Which is not far from the intercontinental. So he says, give me time.

Let me see what I can do. So over the period of another week or so, he now, by this time, too, Salcedo is completely, like, relinquished from his primary security duty, right? He's in charge now of the secondary or the outlying perimeter security. Right. Right. So he doesn't even know where the inside perimeter is only the outside. So he says, I can't go anywhere near the building because if I'm seeing, you know, they're going to know. So he says, but I know the area and let me do some work.

So he does some recon from up in the mountains. And he says, based on where the security is at again, he's like, look, these are the only two buildings that he could possibly. be. So he sends photographs of these two buildings to us in Bogota by Avianca career. And he goes, look, I think these are one of the two buildings. He's got to be in one of them. And by that time, we had developed independent information of our own that suggests that one of the apartments in the building was owned by or was registered in the name of Miguel Rodriguez as Paramore. Right. So we thought, is what? Paramour. Like his, he had multiple wives, girlfriends. This was like one of his Oh, by my more.

Yeah, one of his unmarried, you know, or by this time she was married. One of his broads, yeah. Yeah. So we think we have an idea. So we reconvene, we go back to Cali and we start doing complete unilateral operations, right? Me and Dave only. We're meeting with Salcedo multiple times a day on our own. We're doing our own surveillance at nighttime.

We're doing our own recon of the surrounding areas. We're thinking about potential approaches and plans. and strategies is how we're going to get to this area, if in fact it is. So after a couple of nights of surveillance, Salcedo finally tells us, he goes, look, I forgot to tell you one thing. He changed his executive assistant. He got rid of his old maids. And now the two domestic employees that are there are two new Afro-Columbian maids from

Buena Wendura. So we're sitting at this elevated park about maybe a thousand meters over. way. And it's, there's a lot of people there at night. So, you know, we're hanging out. We're drinking beers. But we're looking at through binoculars to these apartments. And the good thing was is that it was a big tourist area, just even for locals. There were no Americans in Calais at the time, just to Columbia. They go up there. They get some street food. They drink a beer. They look at the burning sugar cane in the distance. You know, look cool. You could see the city all lit up. So we were there with about 75 other people doing surveillance. And, you know, about

1 o'clock in the morning, we happen to be looking through the binoculars and a light comes on. And I'm looking through the markers. And I see two black maids in the kitchen that I think is the kitchen. And it looks like they're like cooking or washing dishes. So I'm sitting to myself, 1 o'clock in the morning, maids, black maids, cooking, washing this desk has to be the place. Right. Wow. So how far away is this from you guys? About 1,000 meters. A thousand meters. A little over half a mile. So, but still we're not sure the layout of the apartment, how many apartments there are per floor. So we do some, you know, some undercover inquiries with a realtor.

We find out that it's 19 floors and that there's only one apartment per floor. Very luxurious. Yeah. So with that information, we're able to call the vetted units and we're able to launch an operation there, which is pretty funny because we start out with about 40 different, 40 people. Right. We have to insert in this area. We have to climb up a hill. We have to go through this drainage tunnel. We have to basically repel, come down the side of a mountain at 4 o'clock in the morning at pitch black conditions. To go around the security units. To circumvent the security, right? Because there's no way we could go, like in a military convoy through there. And they immediately call him and he'd go in the collecta. So only six of us make it down the mountain.

and we end up hitting the apartment with six people. We knocked the door down. And what happened is we had special approval from the Attorney General of Columbia to basically do a no-knock entry to knock the door down. Right. Because in Columbia most of the time, you knock on the door,

and if one of the kingpins is there, they tell them, hey, law enforcement, the police, the military, get in the collect, and they hide them away and then they come and answer the door. Right. And we knew that these collectives were so highly sophisticated that we would probably never find it.

So we had special approval. We knocked the door down. We go in and then one of the Navy commandos that we were using, equivalent of the Navy SEALs, but on the Columbia side, he gets Miguel Rodriguez right as he's entering the Coletta. It's like in a movie, right? Perfect timing. Had we been a minute later, we probably would have never got it.

But he basically grabs him, pulls him out of the Coletta, and that's how we arrested Miguel. And that chase where you guys had to like, you were getting followed by the police and Kali to get Gilberto or get Miguel onto a plane to Bogota. Did that happen actually? No, but you bring out a good point, though. I said, I know I have to bring that up and I didn't discuss it.

Is that like me and Dave when we were there, we were followed all the time. Okay. By the cartel. They followed us. They wanted to identify our sources and wanted to kill the sources. So we were staying in safe houses, but they followed us a lot. But that instance, no, that was more for dramatic effect. Right.

Okay. So after Miguel gets arrested in what month in 1995? Miguel was arrested August 6th, 1995. Okay. So after that, the show portrays that they think they're good. They're just going to be in prison for a little while in collie until they can buy their way out and make a deal with the government. they stayed in prison in Colombia until 2003 or 2004. Correct.

What was that about? Did they get indeterminate prison sentences in Colombia? And then why were they eventually extradited and given new sentences in the United States? Like, kind of just sum up how that all culminated. So in between the Hilberto arrest and the Miguel arrest, we arrest Chepi Santa Cruz in July of 1995. Right. So in that three months span, you have Alberto, Chipe, and Miguel go down June, July, and August.

So they're in prison doing their time. A short time later, Colombia passes legislation. They change the Constitution and they re-implement extradition again. Right. But this time, it's for crimes committed after December 17, 1997. So we couldn't go back in the U.S. and use any evidence or information that we had obtained during that time frame. So we basically had to start a new case against any drug traffickers that we wanted to try to extradite. So while they're in prison, you know, I think Norco shows that very well.

They're scheming. They're planning. They're running their business basically from prison. They're on the phones. They have visitors coming in and out. Okay. Okay. So they didn't stop drug trafficking. They did not.

Like at all. Did not. Okay. How long were their Colombian prison sentences initially? I think they were initially sentenced to 21 years. But, you know, in Columbia, if you decide to cooperate or surrender some assets, you can get quite a substantial time cut off your sentence, right? So in the meantime, DUS continues to develop evidence against the. them. They're indicted in the U.S. for crimes committed after that December 17th time frame.

Now they are eligible for extradition. Right. So, Hilberto, I think, is first in December of like 2003. It gets extradited to the U.S. And then Miguel follows suit a few months later in early 2004. So they end up in prison in the U.S. Okay. Were you part of that second case? No, I was not.

Okay. But I was there because I did three tours. in Columbia, 94 to 97, 99 to 2002, and then 2004 to 2010. So I was back there the third time when Miguel was extradited. Okay. So after in the wake of the arrest of the godfathers initially, your arrest of them, then the documents shortly after the documents tying them to the corruption of the president, Ernesto Sampere, that.

comes out that explodes Colombia what was how did that affect the extradition law did that because of that scandal did Sam pair come back to try to save his image and implement the extradition law well there were there were several things that led to that we called the Proceso Ocho Mill which was you know process 8000 which was the Colombian investigative number for that and part of the reason that investigation was open was one, the seizure of those documents. There was also documents seized from Miguel and Hilberto's accountant, Giromo Palomari, who's very well portrayed in season three of Narcos. And there was other information in the Narco cassette scandal, right? There were these cassette tapes,

which showed Hilberto and Miguel talking on the phone openly about contributing, you know, millions of dollars to the campaign. So those three things lead to this, invest. against the president. He completely denies it. He says if it happened, it happened without me knowing. In the meantime, the campaign treasurer, Santiago Medina, and the campaign manager Fernando Botero are both arrested. They both cooperate.

They both say that the president knew that they were accepting money from the Calais cartel. But, you know, they opened an investigation. It goes to the accusations committee. and Sampere basically gets absolved. Right. He is the John Gotti. He is the Teflon.

Yeah. Don of Columbia. So he remains in power. Doesn't lose the presidency. No more investigations into that. And that's basically it. So, but in the meantime, I think people start to realize like, look, this corruption goes all the way to the top. It's like the OJ thing, right?

The evidence is overwhelming, even if he gets, you know. Totally. not found guilty but they re-implement extradition and that's how that starts okay um i know you weren't a part of it so you can't really speak to but no you can speak to how i guess after miguel and gilberto and chepe get arrested how did they continue their operations were their lieutenants still in collie that were overseeing the, or were they talking directly to their distributors in all of these different countries,

the mafia in Russia, in Italy, like, how did they keep running shit when they were locked up? Good question. So what happens is that Miguel's son, William Rodriguez, who's portrayed in Narcos, by the name of David, though.

Right. He becomes the de facto leader of the Cali Cartel. Right. And through messengers going into the prison, through cell phones. Remember, this is not like a prison in the United States, right? These guys are living lavish. They have their own maids. They have cooks.

They have suites. They, you know, televisions outlawful. They have everything. Exactly. So it's very easy for them to run their business by cell phone, by visitors, and with William Rodriguez on the outside. Okay. Got it. So he was running shit to see.

he eventually go down? He does. He gets indicted in the U.S. He goes on the run for a few years. He surrenders. He cuts a deal. He surrenders in Panama, goes to the U.S. gets sentenced, I think, initially to like 20 years plus. He must have given up information, right? Cooperated, agreed to testify against his father, Miguel. If necessary, he didn't. He didn't have to because they had pled guilty. agreed to testify against Hilberto, his uncle, identified a bunch of assets that were seized. Probably there, some estimates are like $300 million worth of assets. So he got his sentence cut to about five years.

Probably did four and a half. In the United States. In the U.S. Like, how is that possible? It's such a joke. He surrendered. He cooperated and, you know, gave up a lot of assets, you know, gave up a lot of other information.

That's how the game's played. The bosses, everybody else gets killed, does life, the bosses. This is what it is. So then they get extradized. So all these wiretaps, I'm assuming they got wiretaps on Gilberto and Miguel when they were in prison, making deals. Not to get into sources and methods, but they had incredible amounts of evidence to show that they continued to traffic from prison. Okay. So then they get extradict.

to the U.S., I think they both get sentenced to 30 years in the U.S. Did they give up any information? How were they able to not to avoid getting life without in your opinion? It's a good question. So because of the extradition treaty that exists between Colombia and the U.S. as well as other countries with the U.S., there are provisions in there that for countries to extradite their nationals to the U.S., there are certain things that we have to agree on, we meaning the U.S.

One is no death penalty. Right. Okay. The other is generally no more than 30 years in prison. So the maximum that you generally get, and it's extremely rare if it goes over 30 is 30 years. That's fascinating. So in the case of Chapo, that was a very exceptional sentence. Life with no parole in ADX.

Right. But he's not going to live more than 30 years. Right. Right, right. Okay, interesting. So, but the Mexican government would have had to basically make a deal with the U.S. prosecutors, like, we'll finally extradite Chapo after his third escape, and you can give him as much time as you want. Well, as long as it's not the death penalty or more than 30 years. But they did give him more than 30 years. What did he get? He got life plus 30 years. Right. How old is he? They got him when he was like 52, 55. He's not going to do 30. He's not going to make it.

Of course, he's not going to make it, but it's still on the books. That's an illegal sentence. There's other things, too. If you're expelled or you're just kind of thrown out like some of these other traffickers are from Mexico, that doesn't apply then. Right. You're not being extradited. I see. Okay.

Okay. But just in my opinion, you know, a lot of the Colombian guys got off relatively easy compared to, you know, the Mexican drug lords. the present, the modern Mexican drug lords. A lot of them cooperate and they get lesser sentences. For sure. For sure. And that adds up. But if you take it on the chin, you're going to get a heavy sentence.

So they each got 30. Gilberto just died in prison. A couple years ago. A couple years ago he died in American prison. I think they surrendered all of their assets. They agreed to forfeit, checked the shit out. They agreed to forfeit $2.1 billion with a B assets. Billion dollars.

And one of the reasons you can argue that they don't cooperate or they didn't cooperate is they have a very large extended family in Columbia, you know, many, many, you know, relative sisters, cousins. And, you know, you're not going to cooperate against high-level people when you have all those family members down there. So you take it on the chain, you do your time, and you know, you let the family, let the family alone, so to say. Yeah, yeah. So they turned over all of their legitimate businesses, too, I'm assuming? Supposedly, right? But you know how that works in the underworld and a drug drug drug is they'm sure that they have

assets that they didn't identify or expose, that they had certain businesses that the U.S. didn't know about. They had, you know, real estate and properties that they owned. So do you think the deal, the sentence was already worked out more or less before Colombia allowed America to take them? Well, I mean, I think everybody knew they were going to get 30 years. Right. I mean, that was, you know, even Fabio Cho when he got extradited, I think he only, you know,

you got 30 or maybe 31 years. So everyone was envisioning that that's what they were going to get. Right. Okay. So, and then Gilberto, or Miguel might get out if he can live. I think his sentence is coming up. His out date is coming up. That is...

So he's probably 82 at this point. So, yeah, he doesn't have much time left to serve and I'm gathering. He probably doesn't have that much time more to live. So it's possible that he gets out. Yes, possible. Wow, what an absolute joke the justice system is. You know, there's people they got caught with, you know,

a couple of keys of heroin in the U.S. that are doing as much time as those guys. What absolute bullshit. What have you, you said at the top of the episode that the war on drugs is not really a war. Did you become disillusioned with it?

What did you take away after your time seeing what's going on in Colombia now and how the guerrillas, the former leftist guerrillas in Colombia are now narco armies, and they're exporting 10 times the amount of cocaine every year that the godfathers of Kali and the Medellin cartel ever did. What's your takeaway from the war on drugs and your time, your career, your time in the field?

Well, like I always say, I don't think it was ever a war on drugs, right? At best, it might have been a skirmish, because if you're going to war, you're going to put every resource that you have into that. And let's be honest, law enforcement in the U.S. underfunded. We don't have enough resources. You don't have enough prosecutors. You don't have enough prisons.

I totally disagree. No, but I'm just saying, right? If you're going to do a war, you're going to do these things. Right. Right. And we don't have that. You're going to bring back minimum mandatory sentence. right so if you get arrested with X amount of cocaine or heroin you're going to do X amount of time but

they already have that yeah but they kind of do away with it now the judges have way too much discretion in in sentencing right this defund the police uh no cash bail this is not a war you know you want to talk about a war what the in and I'm not saying one way or the other but trump administration is now blowing boats out of the water okay yeah now if you want to call that a war or you want to go down that path, okay, that's a little different, right? So I think that is the big difference. Sure. By the definition, you're right. That is what Trump's doing now is more of a war. Right. Whether it's winnable or not, I think we can all kind of agree. Declaring them as a terrorist organization. Right. Bringing sanctions back, bringing these some material support charges

to a terrorist organization. Right. Doing that. That's now you're getting closer to the definition of what would be a war. So that's why I say it's not really a war. It's more of a skirmish. But America likes to paint everything as a war on whatever. Right. It's a catchy phrase and stuff. But we always say in the government that we may not win the war,

but we'll win every battle that we fight. Right? Median cartel, Cali cartel, North Valley cartel. You go after these organizations and these kingpins, given enough time. Yeah. Law enforcement's going to get you and you're going to rest. You may lose the overall war, so to say, but you'll win the battle.

Yeah. Yeah, for sure. And now what's going on with Colombia and Venezuela? Yeah, it's completely different, right? You have these left-wing administrations that are not in favor of enforcement. They're providing refuge in safe haven to some of these drug cartels, these foreign terrorist organizations, as they're now classified. you have remnants of the FARC, you have the ELN, you have the Clan de Golfo, you have the Cartel de Los Soles in Venezuela.

And Venezuela now is seen as this kind of safe haven for a lot of these organizations to go into. They set up shop. They traffic. They're complicit with the Venezuelan government. The Venezuelan government provides them with high-grade military weapons, and they're sending out a lot of this cocaine now from the, the north coast of Venezuela as well as Colombia. So it's a big problem, as we talked about,

there's a lot more cocaine being produced now than even four or five years ago. Right. Yeah. Yeah. If you think cocaine is a problem, I don't think it's that big of it. I don't think people should do it,

but it's just like I think one of the Colombian president said, like how much, how many people die of alcohol? A lot more. A lot more. So, but, you know, we can talk the politics of it and the morality of it all day. I mean, the point was you, you, the worst part about the drug trade, in my opinion, in Latin America is the corruption, the deep, deep-seated corruption. It really starts from the politicians, right?

Like, there's no cartels in the United States, overtly, because there isn't that much corruption. it's the fault of the government. It's the Mexican government. That's what allows a lot of the poverty that encourages people to join criminal organizations. And it's what allows the violence that's become out of control in Colombia, in Venezuela, in Mexico, obviously. It starts with them. You know what I mean? I agree.

And I say that all the time in interviews and podcasts that I do is that these drug trafficking cars, cartels or any illegal cartels. It cannot exist without corruption, right? And the analogy, just like you said, it was a perfect analogy, and I say it all the time, that's why you don't see these major cartels in the United States, right? You don't see these drug kingpans operating for 10, 15, 20 years in the United States because you don't have that level of corruption. And the only reason they're allowed to exist is because of that corruption.

And corruption and money laundering, it waters every truth. because if you're able to corrupt government officials, military police, protect your operations and continue on with your legal activities, who's going to stop you? I mean, look at Bolivia, right? There's no U.S. presence there. DEA was kicked out of the country, you know, and you look at Venezuela, too, the same thing. So as long as you have corruption, these cartels and these criminal organizations are going to continue to operate.

Chris Feistel, a part of the way. War on Drug, part of narco history. Truly an honor. Let me show the camera that book. I cannot recommend it enough. Go get after Escobar. Chris Feistel and Dave Mitchell. I mean, yeah, dude, it's a fascinating part of history.

Not just drug history, but like the history of the Americas. Go get it everywhere. It's like a bestseller. So you get it at, get it on Amazon. That's where people buy shit. It's on Amazon. You can get it off our web. site to www.

aftereskabar.com. We got signed copies. Yeah, I think if you're a narcos fan, you're a true crime fan. You're a fan of just Colombian cartels. I think he'd enjoy the book. And not only that, it gives you a great history of what happened in Colombia from the 80s and 90s, not just on the drug side, but on the political

and government side as well. Yeah, exactly. And I actually think it's the Kali organization is a more fascinating structure than even the Medellin cartel. So after Escobar, go get it. Chris Feistel, let's stick around. Let's do a bonus episode because I want to hear about what happened after the collie cartel and the different organizations that you took down in Columbia in the late 90s, early 2000s and your work up until you retired in 2014.

You did a lot of work after this. So head over to Patreon. Patreon.com slash the Connect show. Chris Feissel had a lot of fun, man. That was great. Thank you. It's great conversation, Johnny. All right, you guys.

We'll see you over at Patreon.