The Jordan Harbinger Show - 453: Javier Peña and Steve Murphy | Taking Down Pablo Escobar

Episode Date: January 7, 2021

Javier Peña and Steve Murphy (@deanarcos) are former DEA agents best known for bringing down Colombian drug kingpin Pablo Escobar in the '90s, as dramatized on the first two seasons of Netflix series Narcos and chronicled in their book Manhunters: How We Took Down Pablo Escobar. What We Discuss with Javier Peña and Steve Murphy: How do you conduct an effective investigation against a murderous yet charismatic criminal on their home turf with a $300,000 bounty on your head? Why was there such friction between the DEA and the CIA during the Pablo Escobar investigation? Why do countries like Mexico and Colombia resist extradition to the United States when we catch a big fish drug trafficker? Have Javier and Steve been back to Colombia since bringing down Pablo Escobar, or do they still have to fear for their lives there? Do Javier and Steve see the permanent dismantling of drug cartels as a possibility, or are they too entrenched in the infrastructure of the countries where they thrive? And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/453 Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course! Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Coming up on the Jordan Harbinger show. I helped arrest a 15-year-old thug, Sicario, and he told me I worked for Pablo Escobar. He says, I will die and kill for Pablo Escobar. And he admitted already that he had killed 10 police officers at $100 a head. And then he said, you know what? I will be dead by 22, 23 years old, so I'm going to work. I love my boss, and I will die and kill for him.

So that was the attitude. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of some of the world's most fascinating people. We have in-depth conversations with people at the top of their game. Astronauts, entrepreneurs, spies, psychologists, even the occasional arms dealer, drug trafficker, money laundering experts. Each episode turns our guest wisdom into practical advice that you can use to build a deeper understanding of how the world works and become a better critical thinker. If you're new to this show or looking for a handy way to tell your friends about it, which we always

appreciate. We now have episode starter packs. These are collections of your favorite episodes organized by popular topics to help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Just go to Jordan Harbinger.com slash start to get started or to help someone else get started here with us. Now, today on the show, we have Steve Murphy and Javier Peña. If that sounds familiar, that's because those are the DEA agents that were in charge of tracking down and stopping Pablo Escobar with the help of the Colombian National Police, of course. And the reason you may have heard their names is because of Narcos on Netflix. So these are the real guys behind the guys. These are the real agents that that story is about. And as you might know from Netflix, by watching it, that is

a true story or based on a true story. If you didn't know that, well, you're in for a treat because these guys are the real deal. During this time, there's so many incredible stories from these guys. First of all, Pablo Escobar had killed most of the members of the Colombian Supreme Court. He killed people in the government, in the Justice Department, pretty much anyone that stood in his way. He's responsible for like 30,000 murders or something insane like that. During his reign, Medellín was so dangerous that these agents, Steve and Javier, were only able to stay a few days at a time. They had to move around a lot. I mean, these are DEA agents for crying out loud.

Pablo Escobar, of course, then essentially goes to war with Colombia. And here's how much of a charmer this guy is. He's threatening one of the police colonels that's chasing him. And he says, I'll kill three generations of your family. I'll dig up your grandparents and shoot them and bury them again. So this is the kind of person that these guys were tasked with chasing down and somehow bringing to justice. And this is a super interesting story to hear firsthand, especially after watching Narcos on Netflix. If you haven't seen that, definitely watch it.

The hype is real. Loved the series. If you haven't seen it, go ahead and tune in here and then get ready for. a great binge just in time to start off, or hopefully end the rest of our lockdown here with a good old Netflix binge, similar to what you did all of last year, I assume. If you're wondering how I managed to book all these great authors, thinkers, and celebrities every single week, it is because of my network, and I'm teaching you how to build your network for free over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. And by the way, many of the guests on the show

they've contributed to the course in some way. So come join us. You'll be in smart company. Now here we go with Steve Murphy and Javier Pena, the real-life Narcos. Thanks for coming on the show, guys. Kind of cool to have you both here at once. Thank you, Jordan. We're happy to be here with you. Also, I am I. Thank you, Jordan.

So I know this is an involved question here, but how did you guys end up chasing Pablo Escobar in the first place? Was he on your radar before, or was it like, Pablo who? Yeah, let me look into this guy. And then it just turned out to be the biggest narco terrorist the world has ever known. Basically, I got there in 88. And I had heard of Pablo Escobar. Didn't really know who he was. Just, you know, I came out of Austin, Texas.

The first couple of days on the job, my bosses were assigning you the Pablo Escobar investigation. There was a senior agent. She was getting ready to leave. And so I started, you know, researching him, trying to get involved with the case. And then all of a sudden, it's like, Pablo Escobar. Like, this is like the biggest trafficker in the world we had ever seen. It was a learning process, learning what Pablo Escobar was, and what he was all about. And when you say we got there, you mean Columbia?

Or were you guys in El Paso? Where were you guys at this point? Yeah. I was in Austin, Texas, and I got there in Columbia, 1988. Okay. And I was down in Miami from 87 to 91, and then June 91 arrived in Columbia. I assume if you were in Miami in the late 80s, everybody thought your job was basically like Don Johnson from Miami Vice. You mean I don't look like it still?

Yeah, well, I mean, I don't know what he looks like now, but... A lot better than this guy does. So I assume at this point in the 80s, growing up the way you guys did, which is explained in the book, you probably hadn't done a ton of international travel to exotic places like Columbia by that time in your life, in your 20s or whatever. Yeah, no, I had never been out of the country. I think my first experience was also in the chase of our fallen agent, Kika Kamerina. I was brand new on the job when I was called to go help on the search in Maselan, Mexico.

So that was my first experience. I went there without a passport, so that'll tell you. They just, how do you get into a country without a passport? Driver's license. This was back in the 80s. Just had a driver's license. They let me in. Yeah, that makes sense.

I think even when I was younger, you could drive to Canada and Mexico, and they would just say, oh, you're American, no problem. And now it's not quite the same deal. You're chasing the guys who had abducted Kiki Kamerana. Can you tell us the 10,000-foot overview of what that was? Because I think people who haven't seen Narcos or it's been a minute, they maybe have never heard that name. Yeah, Kiki Kamareira really was our first DE agent that was kidnapped by Mexican traffickers. He was working on a case that was going to put a lot of people in jail.

They found out it was Kamerana. So basically he got kidnapped. And then all of a sudden, we could not get any assistance from the Mexican gun. government. We finally, I think it was President Reagan, they closed the border down, and then we got the assistance we needed. Then it was just a tragic story. He was tortured. They would not let him die. They would pump adrenaline into him to beat him up some more, asking more questions. Bottom line, it was a terrible death. It was torture. They tortured an American DEA agent, and then the search was on for the guy who orchestrated it, who was a guy by the name of Miguel

Carl Quintero was put in jail. He has thus now escaped and he is on the run. That's a travesty. Wow. So he's out and just freely floating around where, Mexico probably at this point, I guess? We don't know. Well, they're saying they're searching for him. I don't think so. I'll be honest. They know where he is. He just bought too many people off, you know, with a corruption and that's a travesty, I imagine. Yeah. Looking at the Comerena case, it's nightmare fuel. So if you're at home wondering about that think twice before you get into the details on it because you can't unlearn that stuff. When you guys found out about what they did to him, you were in your 20s, right? So were you like, let's go get these sons of bitches? Or were you like, oh, I really don't want this to happen to me

because it's terrifying. Like, it's really disgusting what they did to him. And if you've ever seen a cartel video on the internet, it's that times 10, right? I mean, it's just disgusting. Well, for me, I was still a local cop when Kiki was murdered. It didn't have much impact on my life back then. But, you know, when I came on DEA in 87 and then ended up in Columbia in 91, it was encouraging to see that tracking down Kiki's murderers was still a priority within the agency. And you know what, to this day, here we are at the end of 2020. It's still a priority.

And I was, I had one year on the job. I had just become an age in 1984. I barely had the year when I got the call from my boss. I didn't know anything about, you know, hey, go to Mexico, we need help. You know, I speak Spanish and, like I said, I learned a lot, saw a lot. And like you said, it was just that violent not letting a person die. They would, you know, that's what really ticks everybody off. They just kept him alive so they could beat him up some more.

Well, yeah, it's nasty. And we can link to the Wikipedia entry on that in the show notes, because if you find the wrong description, it's, it'll keep you up at night. It's pretty horrific. It is. It really is. I know that when you started going after Pablo in Colombia, there were threats against your lives. I kind of wanted to get an overview of what it's like when the most notorious drug dealer

in the entire world is looking for you personally, right? Not just like, hey, stop them from getting me, but they're like, these two, you know, get these two jokers and the bounty on your head was $300,000 or something like that if memory serves. Yeah. And just keep in mind, they didn't hire us because we were the brightest bulbs on the tree, okay? Well, Javier was. You know, when you get to Columbia, when you get these foreign offices, you don't know which case you're going to be assigned to. And, of course, I came into a great position because Javier had already been there three years when I arrived in 1991. He had already been working the case for three years.

I knew who Pablo was based on investigations in South Florida, but I'd never had a case that got me up to that level, you know. So I come in and team up with Javier and another guy, Gary Sheridan. And I say it's a great position because they had already earned the respect and, trust of the Columbia National Police. And simply because I was their partner, I was accepted in, I still had to earn their respect. You know, it was a great position to come into. That was one of the first things they told me when I started working with Javier and

Gary is you just need to know there's a price tag on your head now. Really, how much is that? And they told you. And it was $300,000. And, I mean, be quite honest with you, it was, it will cause you to pause for a minute and think about it, you know, and not trying to sound macho. I mean, there's nothing special about Javier. We don't pretend to be tough guys or anything like that.

We're actually a couple small town country boys that got to work a really big criminal case. But, you know, in law enforcement, you're already very aware of your surroundings. Now you're, it's like a hypervigilance that you're aware all the time of what's going on because you can't even go shopping. I don't blend into a Hispanic community. Yeah. For those of you who are not watching us on YouTube, but actually are just listening to the podcast, you're a pretty white dude, right?

And you probably had what, did you have blonde hair back then, like the guy who, played you in the series, or is that just for the movies? I had light brown hair, but I mean, my heritage is English and Irish. I'm about as white as you get, you know? Yeah, walking around with the sunburn and everything, yeah. Light colored eyes, and I'm six foot two, which I'm makes you taller than most men in Columbia. I mean, I stuck out.

It was obvious. And this is 300,000 in 80s money, right? It was. It was in the 90s. And, I mean, during our speaking events, what I like to tell people is that the biggest threat I face from that bounty is that my wife would kill me in my sleep because I was worth more dead than I was alive. Yeah, it's about $600,000 in today's money. It's actually more than that. So depending on which year we're talking about, you know, if we're talking 1991, it's like $600,000.

That's somebody who's going to get that in Columbia. That's like probably more than they would make in their entire life, maybe, working a normal job in Colombia. So that's scary. That'd probably be like having $5 or $10 million bounty on your head here in the United States, except for a land that's essentially lawless and full of narco-traffickers. So, yeah, you can't even go to the grocery store. You can't go downstairs, grab a beer. You can't get up at night and go outside and walk the dog if you have one. You can't really do much of anything. Which one of you had the fancy apartment downtown where you'd bring girls back all the time? I assume that ended up pretty abruptly. Come on, George. Of course that's me, man. Come on, man. I give you a little credit here, buddy. Yeah, now, when I got there the first time,

Man, it was a, I came from, I had a little one-bedroom apartment living in Austin, Texas. I think when I got to Austin, there was a moving special or 250 bucks a month. So you can tell, right, what my little apartment was. So Bogota, when I got there, says, Javier, you're going to be living here. Like, what? And I still remember the living room. It was all glass, mountains on one side. You had the city on the other side.

I was on the 18th floor. And Bogota, weather is always at nighttime, that coldish in the 50s. 50s, 60s, had a great fireplace. Anyway, and I think even back then, 88, the rent, the paying was like $2,500 or $3,000 a month. Wow, that's a lot today. And this is in Columbia. Yeah, it was like a penthouse.

Right. It had a mage quarters. I'm by myself, so I was, you know, of course, elated. It's a great apartment. You know, you can't afford that, you know, where I came from. No. But you had to move twice, didn't you? Yeah, yeah, I'm sorry, but the point of the story is, yeah, I had to move twice. One of them, and it was kind of, I'll never forget. My boss calls me up. And he was a great, he is a great guy, Bruce Stock. And he's been around the foreign arena for a long time. He knows the foreign stuff. So anyway, he's, hey, here, just don't panic. Just get in your, I had an old Bronco, bulletproof. He said, get your gun, get your Bronco, come to the embassy. I'll explain here, but get out.

out of there right away. When he said right away, I say, yes, boss, I am getting out of here. And I remember, I'm nervous. I'm like, what are I watching? Who's watching me? And, you know, the apartments were, the garages are like two floors. So I think I hit the Bronco about three or four times trying to get out of there. You know, at the embassy they're waiting for me. They opened up the gate. And yeah, yep. So I go in. Now they tell me, hey, they intercepted a phone conversation where some of Pablo Sicario were going to come after me. And we're not sure it was just to kill, to kidnap, to send me a message. We're not sure.

But you know what? I don't care. We got out of there right away. Yeah, especially after the Comorana case, you don't want to find out what they're going to do. Right. You kind of have to assume the worst. Even if they drive you around the block and they say, hey, you're going to book the next flight home. Right.

Not really a gamble you want to take. No, no. You don't want to be around there. So I went back to the embassy and actually I learned that the threat was real. And it came off an intercept. So, yeah, that's true. Right. It wasn't somebody who sent a letter to the embassy. It was something. No, right. What they thought was a private conversation. So at that age, are you kind of more afraid of the Sicario's or are you more afraid that you're going to miss out on some of the action? Because I know in my 20s, I would have been like, oh, come on, you know, I'm invincible. It'll be fine. Let me, let me go chase these guys.

Yeah. Well, you know what for me? They just moved to an apartment and says, all right, I'm here. Get back to me to eat. So it was basically, all right. Yeah, we got your new place, but you're still. involved, which is good. I never thought of it because the worst that could have happened is they could have sent me home back to the stage and I didn't want that. I'm like what you said, Jordan. I was a little younger and I wanted to stay in the change. So I'm glad I'm glad I didn't get sent home. Who was it that got trapped by the Renault Otto in the book? Because a book alternates between your two stories. So I, you know, I'm a little fuzzy on what crazy things happened to which one of you. So you might have to straighten me out here. But there was one of you

was with, I think, was it your wife you were with? And you got trapped by a car. And this is right afterwards, right after Kiki. And so it's like, what's going to happen? Which one of you was that? That was me. Okay. So my wife was in the car with us. And it wasn't after Kiki, but we were part of the search block. You know, we were living in Medellin at the time. And I'd come home for a few days working in the embassy. And you know what? It wasn't anything more than a traffic dispute. You know, it was road rage. It's basically what it was. When the guys blocked us off, of the three guys, you know, and it's my wife and I almost hit them. And I had a full-size bronco, the old style broncos that were huge and it's, you know, it's armor-plated and it's got the

bulletproof glass and everything. But when these guys got out, they wanted to fight. And when they would raise their arms, you could see pistols in their belts. And I'm sitting inside my Bronco with my gun in my hand. They can't see it, of course. But, you know, I've got my wife with me. She's got her dress and heels on. We've been at the embassy. Called for backup on our radios still, to this day, I'm still waiting on the patrols to arrive there. They never showed up. And luckily for us, a police patrol, a motorcycle patrol of about 10 Columbia National Police officers came riding by.

So I laid on the horn. But the funny thing about that story is that my wife, she's a tough girl. I mean, she's never been bash about adventure. And after we'd been sitting there for about 10 or 15 minutes, she looked over and she said, hey, if you can take those two, I'll take that little one right there. I'll take care of him. But of course, you're not going to expose your wife to danger like that, knowing they have weapons. So anyway, the police turnaround came back.

And by the time I got out of the Bronco to go talk to the sergeant and charged the patrol, these three guys had already gone over and, oh, you know, it's the screen go over here and he's causing problems and he's doing this, that, and the other. And so the sergeant starts giving me a rough time. And I pulled out my Columbia National Police IDs and said, look, look at the position of the cars. I'm not blocking them. They're blocking me. They're blocking me. they actually had me blocked sideways in front of the Bronco.

I said, if we got a problem here, let's call General Montenegro. He was one of the Colombian police officers that we worked with on a regular basis. And that got everybody's attention. And then I pulled up my military ID, Colombian military ID, and showed them that general's name. And these were three young military guys that just, they thought I'd done something wrong towards them, driving down the road. They almost pulled out in front of him is what happened,

and I blew the horn at them. So after that, it was a lot of Los Hento, Mucho Ciener. You know, we don't want any problems. Can we just go now? Yeah. And so it all worked out. But, you know, being a member of the bloke, you never know, is that some of Pablo Sicario's? Is that somebody that's looking for Javier and they found Steve instead?

You know, so you just, you didn't know quite sure what you were getting into. Yeah. Every little kind of altercation or strange scenario, you guys probably had to be thinking, okay, is this just a guy who's had too many beers? or is this somebody who's a distraction or supposed to rope me into going outside, you know, taking this outside and then I get jumped by five guys? I mean, are you kind of always on your guard at this point for every little scenario? Yeah, at that time, everything. Even in, you know what, there's a great example and is at the search block.

In essence, we're out, I think it was on a Friday night. Steve wasn't there at that time, but I was there. And there was a little burger joint beers. You know, we'd go out there who's right outside the search block, which is our base, you know, half a block. Anyway, so we're there drinking some beer, eating burgers, and then all of a sudden, you know, there's roadblock because, you know, they're checking even the neighbors who's coming in and who's coming out.

Somebody fires a shot. There's a shot, you know, that gets fired. And the two guys who are at the retent, at the stop, they're checking IDs. They're checking IDs and they're two undercover. Colombian cops, you know, playing close. So they hear the shop, they pull of their gun. So the uniform guys checking the search, the roadblock, basically, point the guns, firefight starts.

The shooting starts, I'll never forget. I'm in a burger. I'm drinking a beer I hit behind the car. There's two CIA guys with me. And they say, okay, Benin, we're going to run down this alley to go back to the school. I said, buddy, if you run down that alley, you will be shot. Right now, nobody knows who's bad guys, who's a good. guys. If I was you, I'd stay here with me until, you know, so they decided to stay. And I think,

you know, I think I saved their life that night, the way they were going to be running. Yeah, they'd be shot. But anyway, when it was all over, there were like three police officers did. Oh, wow. So the fire, friendly fire, because nobody knew who was shooting at who, you know, when gunfire erupts, everybody pulls out guns and starts shooting, you know, not knowing, there was a lot of unknown people at the base. So, like I said, that was just one incident where, you know, something, you know, triggered a chaotic situation. So the moral of this story is if you hear gunshots, don't try and run around and find where they're coming from, even if your arm, just take cover and sit quiet.

Yeah, take cover and see what's going to happen. Find out what's going on. That's the moral of the story, yes, sir. So every time you guys are out, you're running into potential issues here. How often did you guys have issues like this? I mean, it seems like from the book, it seems like you, every week, some crazy thing happened down there? Or was, were you down there for years? And this is just all compacted into, you know, 200, 300 pages. Well, we were in Medellin after Escobar escaped. It was almost every day. I mean, it's just too much to put into a book. Yeah. But we're flying out on the Huey helicopter gunships on daily basis going out on raids. We're going out with the plane closed police officers doing surveillance, meeting informants.

Javier now, we were manning the 800-TIP line there. The United States was all. offering a $5 million reward, so we were kind of running that thing. And, you know, informants or people with information, they didn't want to come to the base, so we'd have to go out and meet them. We'd go out with the Columbia National Police when they'd make payments to informants so that, you know, there was no question that they stole, they didn't steal the money. It was, you know, we confirmed that the money was paid to an informant. So, I mean, you were going out every day on something.

Wow. On operations, on search warrants, you know, it was a daily occurrence. And Escobar, on a daily basis, was doing. something like you would say, what did he do today? There's something that you never really expect that, you know, and just real quick, and I'm sure we'll get into it later, but, you know, the famous, the bombing of a commercial airline, the killing of a presidential candidate, putting a bomb at the newspaper editor, because they wrote a bad story on him.

I mean, it was like, what did he do today? It was, you know, and that was the norm of the day. Then, like Steve said, all the assassins, what was the weekend rate for homicides in Medellin was three to four hundred? Yeah, there were times when there was as many as 300 murders in a two-day period. That's insane. Unbelievable. That's like Iraq or something, probably even worse, actually. Well, I think it was worse than, you know, Beirut.

And, you know, in their favorite way of killing people was two guys on the motorcycle. So if he saw two guys in the motorcycle coming to you, you better run. The guy in the back would shoot. They would take off in and out of traffic. They never got caught. Yeah, that still is effective. I mean, we heard about an assassination recently in Iran. I don't know if you guys read the news, but it looks like Israel killed a couple of people,

one that was related to, I think, Al-Qaeda and another one that was a nuclear scientist. At least one of them was killed in the same way, two guys on a motorcycle. It's just kind of a timeless way of getting around and doing something like that and then just taking off because you don't get stuck in traffic and you can move around really quickly. Right. By the way, you mentioned search block, and I think a lot of people don't necessarily know what that is. That's the name of what, the military unit that was tasked with finding Pablo Escobar. Is that what that was? No, that was the police unit. That was the police unit that was created by the Colombian government, consisted of about 600 personnel with one mission, and that was to try to find and take down Pablo Escobar and his organization. Now, in addition to the Colombian National Police, the military, Colombian military had elements that would come out and support the search block. Then, of course, Havry and I were there for DEA. We had representatives from the U.S. Army's Delta Force and U.S. Navy SEAL Team 6 with us for 18 months. The CIA would come and go.

It was better when they went, but not so good when they came. But, you know, they were there occasionally. There were a lot of different elements there, but their primary force was the Columbia National Police. Okay. And like Steve said, their only job was to go after Pablo Escobar. And the other factor is you had the uniformed guys who did. the race, and then you had the plain clothes like detectives that Steve and I worked with. There were the intelligence guys, but they were in plain clothes.

And there was a specialized group out of Bogota that was selected. These guys were all hand-picked. You know, they got the best of the best, and that's one of the reasons all of this work. Because at the beginning, we had a lot of corruption, and the problem was we selected people that were from Medellin. So Pablo Escobar, I mean, what did he do? got to their family. Sure.

If your kid doesn't call me, warn me, I will kill your kid, and I will kill you all. So we quickly learned that a lot of information was getting back to Pablo Escobar right away. So we try to just bring people that were not familiar. You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger Show with our guests, Steve Murphy and Javier Peña. We'll be right back. And now back to Steve Murphy and Javier Peña on the Jordan Harbinger Show. How do you investigate someone like that in the country where you,

You don't even know who you can trust, even when it comes to the government law enforcement. I don't know if you guys have heard of Ed Calderona. He was on the show. He said something like 30% of Mexican police and law enforcement today is corrupt and on the take from the cartels. So I can imagine what it was like in Medellin in the 80s and 90s. I'm surprised that that 30% is not higher in Mexico. Yeah, I think that was his conservative kind of estimate of just the Mexican, the regular Mexican police, not, you know, including these specialized units and things like that. but I think that was a conservative estimate from him.

Very conservative. I've had some experience with Mexico. Yeah, very conservative. But in Columbia, it wasn't, you know, and I expected the same thing like you had mentioned, but when I got down there and connected with Javier and Gary was pleasantly surprised to find out that the corruption factor wasn't that bad. It did exist, but nowhere near the level. And everybody asks us that everywhere.

You know, this is our fifth year traveling around the world on a world tour. And everybody asked that question. And it just, we knew who we could. trust that we worked with on a daily basis. Even one of those guys turned out to be one of the leaders of Los Pepys, we found out after Pablo was dead. So he could have had us whacked at any point. But I guess, you know, his loyalty and his friendship, he didn't.

Right. What are Los Pepys again? Because I saw the show so I know. But this is almost like a subplot, right? There are many subplots in the search for Pablo Escobar, Los Pepys. And one thing, going back also, this cops that were fighting. Esquivar hated Eskbar. I mean, it was because of all the police that he, that Pablo Escobar killed. So there was that revenge, hatred. You know what? And they would tell Steve and I, we're not here to seize money.

We're not here to seize dope. We're here to kill Pablo Esquhar. It was revenge because of all the cops that Pablo killed. Real quick, Los Pempes. And like I said, Jordan, that's a little personal. In fact, in the background, there's an article that I have in the poster that came out. And it was basically I was being associated that was a member of Los Peppers. So that's why, believe me, you start doing a lot of memos to Washington to say, hey, that is not true. So they thought you were part of Los Peppers then? Yeah, yeah. And I was accused. And I've been accused in real life.

And this is why. And if you see the show, you'll see some, I guess, some degree of me associating with Los Peppers, right? I mean, a lot of people, Europe, when we do our shows and Steve is there, man, they think I'm a dirty DEA agent. And, you know, I explained to them, you know, and I'll tell you a little story here later on. But anyway, those people was a right-wing vigilante death squad. They were made up. Their boss was a guy named Donberna. In Donberna's two big bosses were a guy named Moncada Galliano.

There were Pablo Escobar's traffickers. So Pablo, when he was in jail, thought that these two guys who were running the distribution organization, right, the Coke, thought they were stealing from him. So he calls him into his prison. One day, he says, no, no security, I just want to see what's going on in. This is a friendly meeting. And they come in and Pablo, there's a bag of money on the ground. And the guys, the two guys, Moncada especially, sees this, Pablo is not what you're thinking. This money, we're not holding out on you.

Pablo thought they were holding out on the money. So it was money they had buried, you know, and they forgot all about it. But Pablo became so incensed that he kills one of the guys himself. The Sicario was coming and kill the other guy. So their head of security, Domberna, so he vows to kill Pablo Escobar family. Their main goal was to kill his wife, his mother, his two kids. And they would kidnap people, kill them, then put a placard that Los Papers. That way Pablo knew it was them who was them who was.

kill him. They were able to kill about 30 of his friends, family members. Oh, wow. So he basically had a gang that was just about revenge against him, killing everyone. And I remember in the Netflix show, they would kill even journalists that were kind of doing Pablo's bidding, right? There's a, that woman who was always kind of, I guess she had an affair with him. I don't know if that was real or just for Netflix, but she ended up dead too and with a little like cardboard around her neck that said Los Pepe's or something like that on it. Yeah, very true. Los Pepepe. Cardboard, that way, The news would publicize it. They would kill anybody.

Yeah, journalists especially because Pablo was trying to get journalists to go on his side, saying he's a good guy. Let's let him surrender, give him the conditions again. There's one incident where they killed Pablo's. There's two attorneys, and one of his attorney had his 10-year-old son with him. They killed him, too. I'll be honest at the beginning when Fepa's first came on the scene, people in Columbia loved it. They were like, man, Pablo, they're fighting you with your own medicine type.

And then all of a sudden is they went too far, but they had already killed like 30. And that was the reason Pablo was trying to get his family out of Columbia. When did you know you wanted to get Pablo Escobar? In real talk, were you thinking, all right, we're going to arrest this guy and bring him to justice? Or was it more like, we're going to end up putting a bullet in this guy and we just know it? Like if he ends up surrendering, great, but we're probably going to end up killing him. Did you think that or was it you weren't sure? You know what?

For me, I knew that they were going to end up killing him because of everything he had done and all the hatred towards him. And also, Pablo remember, I mean, he was not going to let himself surrender be taken to the United States. The whole war of Pablo Escobar is based on the extradition. Columbia wanted to extradite him, and that's when he started the war. Columbia backed down on the extradition. So for me, personally, I always thought Pablo would never be taken alive. What about you, Murphy's same thing, just knew it was going to end up with him, Diane. Yeah, and you think about it. I mean, this guy, he's vowed that he's not going to be taken alive and all this stuff, you know, but you hear that on a regular basis, believe it or not, in this line of business. Yeah.

But here's a guy that's responsible for we estimate 10, 15, maybe 20,000 murders, Pablo Escobariz. There was a, his last remaining Sakari that we're aware of passed away several months ago. He was known by the moniker of Popeye, John Hira, Velasquez Vasquez. He was on a documentary that we were on. He says the number is more like 50,000. thousand murders that Pablo Escobar is responsible for. You know, you read the statistics, he is responsible for as many as a thousand police officers being killed in Colombia. So you know where their focus is. They're not looking to give him his due process in court, I don't think. Like Javier said earlier, they made it clear to us. This is all about killing Pablo Escobar. I was going to ask how many cops he killed, a thousand. That is. And that's a low number. I think it's a little bit more, but we pretty much have a thousand. And also remember. You know, the car bombs, he was placing them at where cops were going to right outside our base.

And then, you know, he started a bounty on police officers. What's a bounty? He put money. And all he just told his Chicago, I won as many police officers killed as possible. I'm looking for numbers. And at the end of the day, I'm going to pay you $100 a hit. Can you believe $100 for human life? I mean, it was just pathetic.

Sicarios were killing police officers. Yeah, I read that pretty girls would lure, they'd go to bars, look for cops, say, hey, why don't we go back to my place, torture the cops, kill the cops for a hundred bucks. I mean, life is just so cheap. It is. A hundred bucks, I just can't believe it. It's nothing. I mean, it's nothing. Yep.

And I have a little story. I helped arrest in a 15-year-old thug, Sicario. And he told me the same thing. He says, I work for Pablo Escobar. He says, I will die and kill for Pablo Escobar. He gave my mother money. She's got a little house. We have food.

So I owe my life to Pablo Escobar. And he admitted already that he had killed 10 police officers at $100 a head. And then he said, you know what? I will be dead by 22, 23 years old. So I'm going to work. I love my boss. And I will die and kill for him. Jeez.

So that was the attitude. Now, I know Murphy, I'm not sure about you, Penny, but I know Murphy, you grew up extremely conservative, religious, usually cops and especially drug agents, don't you have to learn how to think like a criminal, right? It seems like somebody from a really conservative background. It's a little bit of a leap, right? Did you read that part in the book where I had my first run in with the cops when I was about 10 years old? Probably, but go ahead and refresh our memory here. Oh, no, it was just, you know, I was like 10 or 11 camping out with some buddies living in middle

Tennessee, just south of Nashville. You know, in the middle of night, we were going, there was a laundry mat in our neighborhood where you could go buy sodas and peanut butter, crackers and things like that out of the machines. But none of us had any money. So we went to break into one of the guy's houses. Now, the guy was with us. We were trying to get into his mom and dad's house. Somebody called the cops on us and, I mean, just scared us so bad, we didn't even run. We just froze. The policeman came up to the two guys and they're just acting like this is the most serious thing that ever happened. And they said, so boys, you've got a choice here. We can either take you to jail and you go to prison, the rest of your lives, or we're going to take you home to your mom and dad.

we all looked at each other and said, take us to jail. Because we knew what was going to happen when we got home. And, you know, you hear the sayings, preachers kids, PKs are the worst kids out there. I might have fit that mold for quite some time. That's funny. I mean, did you find it difficult learning how to think like criminals when you literally grew up like an altar boy or a preacher's kid? Not me. I always viewed it as a challenge.

You know, so we were both uniformed cops before we became federal agents. I call that the real police because they have to respect. respond to whatever incident comes up at the moment, plus they're out looking for to get into trouble, you know, to find trouble and try to prevent it. Whereas as DEA agents, we kind of plot the investigations that we do. Some of it's reactive, but most of it's proactive. I didn't think it was quite as dangerous. I mean, being in Columbia was dangerous. Being in Miami was dangerous. Not like a uniform policeman that's out there every day, answer multiple calls, not knowing what you're going into. But being with DEA, I always viewed that as a challenge. Can I outsmart these

guys. And let me tell you, drug dealers are not the brightest bulbs on the tree out there, right? Yeah. Some of them are, but I mean, some of them are intelligent or they surround themselves by intelligent people, and that's the smart drug trafficker that does that. You guys mentioned seizing a bunch of cocaine that was riding through Cuba. And I thought that was interesting because I remember when I was younger, Castro's big, one of his big bragging points and the guy bragged about a lot of stuff that made no sense. But one of the big bragging points was, look, we don't have drugs here. We're the only country in South America that doesn't have drugs. and now he's gone, especially.

It looks like they had tons of drugs. The people just couldn't afford him, but they were shipping him and smuggling them through Cuba constantly. Right. They were a major transshipment point between Columbia and the United States. And that was the, when I first joined DEA in 87, I was stationed in Miami. Now, I've been a cop for about 12 years by the time I get to Miami.

The most powder cocaine I'd ever seen at one time during that, you know, before DEA was two ounces. So a baggie about this size. I go down there, my senior. partner's been working this case for quite some time. And the goal of the case is to prove Cuba's involvement as a transshipment point of cocaine. So we go, that was my first undercover with DEA. We took an undercover boat, a 53-foot hatter sport fisherman. I didn't even know what that was. Went to the Turks and Caicos Islands, which I'd never heard of. Took us five days to get there.

Long story short, the bad guys flew in 400 kilos. So I go from two ounces to 880 pounds of cocaine. I mean, you talk about being addicted. I was addicted in a different way, right? I was addicted to the job. But so we were going to indict Raul Castro, Fidel's brother in Southern District of Florida. And we being the senior partner, because I'm the new guy. I'm just, I'm kind of the gopher for everything, you know. But before he ever got to the courthouse, they got a call from the White House saying, stand down.

You're not going to indict him. The whole thing is outlined in our book, Manhunters. But the reason I mentioned that is because we had a ghost writer, Isabel Vincent, who wrote our book for us. We told her all the stories and everything, but she's an excellent researcher. So she documents in the book where she went back and found the media articles in Cuba, where when all this came out in the press, Fidel Castro blamed that on a couple of Army generals. One of them, the leader was a guy named Mochoa, believe it or not, and they put him in front of a death squad and shot them.

But there's no doubt in anybody's mind. Those guys were allowing their airstrips to be used, their military-based airstrips to be used as a transshipment point for cocaine. Why did the White House call and say stand down? I mean, that's the part that I don't get, right? Hey, let these guys run drugs. Were the guys that were running it maybe informing on Cuban activity or they were watching them and they didn't want to lose their source? I mean, what do you suspect was going on? You know what? I was a GS-Zero back then. I mean, I'm about as low as you get on the poll. I have no say-so in anything. It's just politics. I have no idea. Nobody ever explained it to us. We just got an order to stand down. It just seems bizarre. I mean, you assume.

that there's a reason for it, right? Like, hopefully a good one and not just, eh, we don't feel like dealing with the political fallout of indicting the brother of Fidel Castro, but who knows? You hope. Hard to say. You hope that's not the reason. Yeah, you do hope that's not the reason. We hear a lot of things just being in the media and being people that grew up in the 80s and 90s, that, hey, you know, the CIA runs drugs and you hear like, okay, whatever, this doesn't really, this could just be a conspiracy theory, but CIA versus DEA, there's always this beef, this conflict, right? There's never any intel sharing from the CIA. You guys thought they maybe were even tapping your phones. What do you think of the accusation that the CIA was maybe involved in the drug business to fund rebel insurgencies in South America, Central America? What do you think about that? Having been kind of in that area, well, not kind of, having been in that area at that time. Do you want to take this for JP? Go ahead. Oh, love.

You know, so our dealings with the CIA in Colombia, basically the problem was the chief of station. The chief of station is the head of the CIA in the local area, okay? He did not want to recognize the crossover between the narcotics groups in Colombia and the insurgent groups. Well, when you've got FARC guerrillas provide security on Pablo Escobar cocaine labs in the jungle, in law enforcement, we call that a clue. So when we come out, we kind of give CIA a hard time, and I'm sure they do us as well. It's not the entire, we don't mean to indict the entire organization. Personally, I happen to think they do a pretty good job, be quite honest with you.

It's just because of what they do, they don't have the opportunity to defend themselves to the public, you know, like other people do. So they just take it on the chin and they keep going. After we left Columbia and got away from that chief of station, we've never had a problem with the CIA since. In fact, we've worked with some in retirement that have just been phenomenal to work with. So now, get back to your question about Central South America. Could they have been involved in that? You know what? It certainly seemed like there was an awful lot of smoke back then, and usually where there's smoke, there's fire.

We know that Oliver North, you know, was kind of used as a scapegoat when it came to all that stuff. I happen to know Oliver North. I know him personally, and I think he's a pretty decent person. I would never disrespect him by asking him what his involvement was in that. But if you believe what you read in the media, you know, it certainly seems suspect. And that's why at every show we do, when we explain a story, we encourage the audiences, go do your own research. Don't accept what we say as fact.

Do your own research and then you make the decision what's true and what's not true. It makes sense to me that there's not just one person pulling the strings in any big organization like that. It's hard to tell. I do have Oliver North coming on the show. Well, hopefully. So I'm going to have to ask him that question that you didn't want to. So wish me luck on that one. We'll see how that goes over.

Maybe I'll save it for the end of the interview because, you know, it's hard. When they're not sitting in front of you, they can just go click and then you go, oh, what happened? It looks like we got disconnected. That's actually never happened. He doesn't seem like the kind of guy who would shy away from that. I mean, he's dealt with worse, you know, Congress and all that, but maybe he's sick of talking about it. Hard to say. Well, you know, make sure you're asking about his nonprofit Freedom Alliance, because I've

supported that personally by speaking to some of his contributors, and it's phenomenal what he does for a disabled veteran. So that's a good thing about Oliver North. Well, we can definitely focus on that, too. And look, it's a complicated issue, right? Because if you're trying to save hostages and you're trying to stop the creep of communism in the 80s and you say, look, we sold some drugs and it got out of hand, I mean, I don't want to excuse illegal behavior, but I kind of understand the calculation that would have been made there in somebody's head at that particular time. 2020 hindsight, it's kind of hard to judge somebody for something that they did when they thought they were doing something for the greater good. So maybe that was the case. I do wonder on a different

note here, why do countries like Mexico and Colombia resist extradition to the United States when they catch a big fish drug trafficker? What's going on here? You know, you see like, oh, we're going to move El Chapo. We're not going to do it now. No, we're going to do it now. Now we're not going to do it. What the hell's going on here? I mean, if you can't keep the guy in prison because he's got a freaking tunnel. You know, why can't the president or the highest law of the land just say, we can't control this guy? I know it's embarrassing, but isn't it more embarrassing to lose the guy five freaking times?

Jorn, you know what? You asked the perfect question, why don't this countries want to give up some of their traffickers? And also, you know, and we go back to the corruption, the money, and some of these traffickers in some of this third world countries, they're living like kings. You know, Pablo Esquah was a great example. Mexico, we got guys, there was a case, not too long ago, it wasn't in Ecuador. Top trafficker had his own mansion, you know, had the prostitutes, had personal chefs. You know, they can get away with whatever they want with money.

Columbia, Mexico, extradition, we're starting to see some, you know, in Mexico, they're starting to extraditum, but they're, I mean, it takes a while. The process will take two to three years. You need all sorts of proof. what do they call the extradition request. I mean, it's a legal situation. Columbia was kind of unique because it was unconstitutional at the time when Pablo Escobar was there. It was written in the Constitution.

You will not, we cannot extradite. You know, there's sovereignty. However, once Pablo Escobar proved and other traffickers in Colombia that they could get away with murder, and I'm talking literally, bombs, murders, kidnappings, whatever. they wanted to do. I think the first Attorney General Lara Bonilla talked about hey, we can't control this traffickers

because they have the money of the world. So let's think about exraditing them to the United States. What happens? The guy gets killed. Attorney General, two guys on the motorcycle. Can he imagine an attorney for just saying that? Then the famous newspaper editor

in Colombia, Guillermo Conno, the Inspector Lor, which was like the biggest paper in Colombia, writes on our bad saying, guys, fellow Colombians, we need help. We need to extradite him. They put a bomb at the newspaper building. They killed him. Luis Carlos Galan, the guy who was going to be the president of Colombia.

His campaign is, I will bring back extradition. Colombians love them. What is what happens to him? Pablo's Vars and Sicario. They shoot him on stage while he is campaigning. Unbelievable. So it was the Constitution once published. Escobar killed the presidential candidate, Luis Carlos Galan, just for, you know, historians.

There's a, the president was Barco Vargas who said, what, you know what, Columbia, I don't care. He signed a piece of paper saying, let's get rid of this traffickers and we had a field day. You know, we extradited about 30 of Escobar's traffickers to United States. I've always said no one's going to escape from our justice system. They're going to try, right, in the U.S. Some have been successful, of course, but the majority are going to, you know, If you look at the Supermax where I think it's in Colorado, where Chapo is there, there's no chance these guys are going to escape.

So, you know, me personally, I wish more of these countries would start saying, what, let's get rid of these traffickers. We can't deal with them. Mexico's starting to do it. It takes a little bit longer. But, you know, we saw Chapo. We've seen other Mexican traffickers. And Columbia still, you know, they're starting to extradite some of their top traffickers.

to the United States. We've seen FARC members getting extradited. So they're coming along, but there's still other countries that because of their sovereignty laws, they're not going to do it. This is the Jordan Harbinger Show with our guests, Steve Murphy and Javier Peña. We'll be right back. Hey, I just want to thank everyone for supporting the show. Your support of our advertisers, that's what keeps us going. That's what keeps the lights on around here, as you've heard me say many times. By the way, all the discounts, all those codes, you don't have to rewind or deal with any of that. if you want to support a sponsor, and please do, go to Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. All the codes there, all the sponsors are there, new and old.

Also, we have worksheets for every episode. If you want to get some of the drills and the takeaways, the exercises talked about during the show, they're all in one easy place. They're always in the worksheets. Those are linked in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com slash podcast, again, along with the sponsors for these episodes. And now, for the conclusion of our episode here with Javier Penya and Steve Murphy. I know that Escobar, when he finally surrendered in Colombia, he got his own prison.

And we see that in the Narco series, right? Where he basically builds this luxury prison. And you guys can't eavesdrop on it. You can't fly over it. You can't drive up. You need permission. I mean, he's safer in there than he probably was anywhere else. And he's got everything he wants in there.

And it's just like, how is this not embarrassing, more embarrassing, than sending the guy to the United States and admitting you can't control him? I mean, he might as well be the president of the country at that point, or like the attorney general. If he's going to, and then he walks out of the prison and escapes again via tunnel when they finally try to crack down. I mean, it's just kind of, it's pathetic, really, is what it is. It is. And the agreement he reached with the Colombian government, you know, we call it the deal of a lifetime. It's the most outrageous plea bargain that we've ever heard in our lives.

But you know, here's a little tidbit that a lot of people don't realize. Once Pablo surrendered and he was in prison for one year before he killed the Moncada and Galliano brothers, the bombings stopped. You know, that was part of the deal. The bombings would stop. And so he did live up to that one thing. But, you know, the fact that what he calls a prison, we call a country club. If you've seen it in the Narco series, in real life, is much, much nicer than what you see on television.

He got a five-year prison sentence. That's all he had to do. He got to choose the crime he wanted to plead guilty to. And then he was absolved of every other crime he ever committed, including multiple murders, thousands and thousands of murders. He built his own prison. He paid the guards. I wonder where their loyalty lies, right? To the paymaster.

He handpicked his fellow prisoners. There was no stipulations for him to give up any of his assets. So, you know, Forbes magazine estimated his wealth as high as $30 billion. He gets to keep the $30 billion. I mean, it's just, it's outrageous. But the goal was to protect Colombian lives. And so, you know, we challenge our audiences. Put yourself in the shoes of Louise Carlin.

Carlos Galan, who, is that right? Sezar Gaviria, who became president. You know, what would you do if you see all your citizens being murdered? You ran on the campaign of trying to stop the violence. Would you take that step? I mean, it's a double-edged sword. I don't think I would, but I don't know. I wasn't in that man's shoes.

Right. Like, you don't get justice, but you get the result of now school buses aren't getting shot up by machine guns and newspapers and shopping malls aren't getting blown up because this guy is pissed off at the government. So he's kind of holding a wolf by the years, and I guess he's saying, at least we know where he is. Yeah, he's still doing everything wrong, but what we need is to not have a civil war, which is what they had, really, against these narco traffickers. That is correct. And the civil, the war was innocent people getting killed every day, you know, car bombs, 10 to 15 on a daily basis. That was his war on Columbia. And it was just all innocent people being at the wrong place at the wrong time.

You guys mentioned that some of the drug traffickers had small armies of bodyguards imported from Israel. I did not know that Israeli mercenaries and foreign mercenaries were imported to guard drug traffickers. I mean, I knew there were other South American gangs guarding them, but I didn't know that there were actual military and special forces professionals from other nations working down there. That's one that seems like a risky gig. And two, what the hell? I'm shocked by this. You know, you would think like, one, you've got to be an idiot to take that gig, I guess, but it must have paid through the no. Otherwise, it's just not worth it for these guys.

I mean, you can't just fly back home and go, yeah, I just had a brief five-year stint protecting Pablo Escobar. And this were guys were mercenaries. They were good at what they did. And really, the guy who recruited them was Pablo Escobar's first partner, Jose Gonzalez-Rourriguez, Gacha. They called him a Mexican. And Gotcha was mourned to the military. So he's the one, and I don't know how he recruited them. I know they paid them a lot of money, but there were about 10 guys who came, and they said up,

camp in Colombia and Medellin, and they taught this guys how to shoot, how to kill people. They used to have training classes because we had informants later on who participated in this training classes, you know, fiscal exercise. But their main goal was to teach the cicarios, the assassins, how to shoot, how to kill, how to place bombs. They weren't actually doing the work. They were training these guys. And like I said, I know that, yeah, how much money did they make?

I know it was a lot. but Gacha was really more responsible. Escobar knew, of course. He helped pay this guys. But, you know, these guys were some of the best in the world. You know, this Israeli mercenaries. I know there's a colonel, Yaira Klein.

I mean, it's all over in the press. He got indicted. They never arrested him, but it was about 10 of those guys. I mean, it's despicable. How bad do you need money when you're going to help that guy? That's like working for Osama bin Laden at that point. Mm-hmm.

It was. Back during that time, Medellin was the murder. capital of the entire world. That's how dangerous it was. And it's primarily because of Pablo and the Median cartel. And this is during the Lebanese Civil War. So, like, you're not competing with Chicago or something. You're competing with actual hot war zones that have active conflict, and you're still the murder capital of the world, and you're supposed to be just a regular town in South America. That's unbelievable. It's so sad to me. A side story here, you talk about getting Manuel Noriega of Panama. I used to live in Panama, so I've heard a little bit about

this, people are still actually really pissed off at the United States for the operation because it killed a bunch of people in a very poor area of the city. But this guy was making $2 billion a month in drug money, had a pipeline for cocaine to the United States. I think the most interesting part of the story is that the guy flees to the Vatican Embassy, and then the United States flushes them out with rock music for three days. Van Halen, U-2, the clash. My mom put up with Loud Van Halen for years and Noriega lasted three days. This guy's a whip. You know, come on. You're right.

I mean, Noriega, I remember the Vatican. And, you know what? There was a lot of dope coming through Panama and Noriega blessed it. You know, they paid him off, of course. The traffickers did. And the loads were safe. And then they'd be piecemeal into the United States. And, you know, then there's another side of the story that Noriega was also helping the

U.S. government. We've all heard that in the press, right? I can't say, hey, I'm very. I'm sure there was something there, but it was just the amount of cocaine. And with Panama, you know how close it is coming to the United States. And so, yep, a lot of people made money through Noriega in Panama. Who comes up with the plans to use the music like that? Like, okay, here's what we're going to do.

We're going to blast Van Halen because that's going to get him out of there. It just seems like it's such a dumb plan and then it works in 72 hours. Good question. I have no idea. They have fun. It's part of their psychops operation. there in the military. So I don't know. Yeah. It just that that part's bizarre. And the other thing that surprises me is the Vatican, right? So the Vatican lets him just flee inside there. Is the Vatican less

cooperative to the United States? That's what it sounds like. It seems like that's the last place you'd want to go. Some place it's supposed to have high moral authority, you know, work from for the church. It's like, go to the Colombian embassy. Go to the Ecuador embassy. Go to the Russian embassy. Why are you fleeing to the Vatican? It's just that sort of paints them pretty poorly. honestly. I think it's him looking for a place of refuge, and he feels like the church, I'm not Catholic, but I think he feels like the church is going to protect him. You know, you can see what they did. I saw his private jet in Panama after the raid, and there's a hole right next to the door where a rocket went right through the body of his plane, so he knows they're trying to kill him. And I guess he felt,

you know, that, you know, you think about it, if he draws too much heat on the Russians or the communist or whatever other embassy he would go to, they might say, you know what, you're bringing an awful lot of problems down on us that we don't need. So here, you go. But I guess he felt with the Vatican behind him that he wouldn't have that problem. That's the only thing I can think of. I really don't know. Yeah. Yeah. Also, the other thing is our embassy is usually in fancy neighborhoods. I mean, that's the way that I've seen it in other countries. So I think it's kind of funny that the United States sets up a giant speaker system and keeps up the entire city in the fancy area where all the embassies are. They're usually in one cluster. They keep everybody up for three straight days.

in order to get Noriega. And I'm half thinking maybe the Vatican isn't the one that buckled. And maybe it was just like, look, we're not listening to any more Van Halen. Because you got all these wealthy people with influence. And they're saying, look, you know, this is an international incident at this point. Hey, I like Eddie Van Halen. I like this music. I like, hey, I mean, it's just not that bad. Right. If they told me they were playing Scrillex or something, you know, those like electronic dance music for three days, it's like, okay, I understand. It's not everybody's thing. But Van Halen, I mean, it's mainstream, especially at that. Maybe if it was Alice Cooper or ACDC, who knows, you know. Right, exactly. Like, then it's like, okay, all right, fine, you know. So, yikes. You guys actually helped a bunch of people get to the United States in exchange for their help. And some of them actually, they just vanish inside the United States. I mean, these people are garbage, right?

They're just garbage. Do we ever catch up with those folks? I know you mentioned in the book that they kind of vanish as soon as they get to the United States, but how much can you vanish in the United States for decades at a time? I don't know. Well, I mean, some of this are under that witness protection program, which is run by the Marshalls. So I just vaguely know a little bit about their program. Other informants I know were given visas.

And one of the main things I remember in Columbia in this time is everyone wanted a better life, wanted money, and where too. They used to call the U.S. what, Disneylandia, Disneyland, right, coming to the United States. you know, the big Walmart, the big targets, you know. And so there was a lot of people trying to get a new life, basically, here, with money and giving information on Pablo Escobar. But I know some escaped without giving you the info, right? They would just fly here and then they would slip out of the hotel and you never saw them again. Yeah, that is correct, you know, and we were supposed,

we failed on our taking care of them security-wise. So they took off and who knows if they made it back or they stayed. here. I mean, that's a good question. Tell me about killing Pablo. I mean, I think I don't want to spoil the whole story here because people can see it on Netflix. They can see it in the book. But after he's dead, the murder rate drops by 80%. 80%.

That's insane. Just one guy is responsible for 80% of the murders in the whole country. If they didn't get rid of narco-traffickers or drugs, just Pablo Escobar, 80% murder rate drop. That's crazy to me. It is. It's outrageous. And to this day, I mean, we get a lot of comments on our social media sites and we'll get emails and we've even had people yell at us during our shows, derogatory things. But people are still out there that think Pablo Escobar is some kind of hero.

A lot of these people that think that weren't even alive when he was killed. So a lot of young people, and especially in the social media sites, it's amazing. Some of the things you just end up, if I can delete them, I do because it's just nasty. But they have no idea what they're talking about when they're talking about. he's a hero, oh, he did this for his community. He didn't do anything. He killed people. Did he build hospitals and housing and schools and soccer fields and things like that for people, for poor people in Medellin? He did. He ran a program called Medellin without slums. But there's a payback when he needed new Sicario's because the other Sicarias are being killed by the Colombian National Police, by the

military, by rival gangs. Where do you think he went to? He went right back into that barrio because those people thought he was some kind of God. And so he would say, hey, but you know, my friends, he'd hug him, he'd kiss him, he'd say, I need a hundred people that are willing to come and work for me, that will kill for me, that will die for me. And the sad thing was, you might have three or 400 young people step up. I'll do it, Pablo, I'll do it, Pablo. So, when everybody says he might be this Robin Hood persona, which is, you know, complete BS. What he was in reality was a manipulator. He was a master of manipulator because he manipulated these people and to give him up themselves and their lives for his benefit. This is all about him. It's all about promoting Pablo.

It's not about promoting the organizations. It's about promoting that one person, Pablo Escobar. And Robin Hood didn't put a bomb on a commercial airline, killed 110 people. Robin Hood didn't kill the next president of Columbia, the Doss building bombing. I mean, yeah. And you know what, Jordan, I was going to say something when you're talking about the Catholic Church. And I'm Catholic. to go to church more often. You know that. All of us is practicing Catholics, right? Anyway, but the Catholic Church in Medellin had a great campaign on Pablo Escobar. You talk about the church getting involved? They would say Pablo was a good person, just a little misunderstood. There's a famous priest in Medellin, Father Garcia-Reros. He had a TV show every afternoon where

Pablo, he would talk about Pablo's goodness. Why? Because of all the money that Pablo gets. to the Catholic Church. So yeah. So you were correct when you're talking about Panama and the Vatican. Yikes. I mean, that's just, it's just Mafia 2.0, but that's probably another podcast and now I just defended like millions of people, so I'm going to leave it there. But I wonder, you know, sort of in closing here, do you think it's possible to dismantle drug cartels entirely or are Mexico, possibly Columbia, just destined to become narco states because of the demand, among other reasons because of the demand we have here in the United States for these substances. Look at Colombia. We dismantled Pablo Escobar. What happened? Cali cartel took it over, right?

We dismantled them, North Valley. Look at Mexico. Chapo, you know, is in the U.S. now. They're still dope coming out of Mexico. Of course. There's other trafficking organizations that are just willing, they're waiting to take over, and they learn. They learn from the old organizations, they learn from history. They're smaller now. They're more independent. They're not like Pablo Escobar with two, three hundred cicarios riding around with him. So they adapt. They're like us. They learn from history. That's a really big question that we get everywhere we go, especially doing these kind of interviews. And, you know, people say, well, just legalize it. And we're starting to see that more and more here in the United States. Havir and I have discussed this ad nauseum because we understand

that we as a world cannot arrest our way out of the drug problem. You know, we cannot put enough people in jail to stop it because there's so many evil people out there waiting to take advantage of you and us. They'll do anything to make money and take advantage of others. So, you know, we're a big proponent of better education for young people at the earliest possible age, you know, show them what the effects are, the negative effects of narcotics, how, you know, whether it's physical or emotional, physiological, the ecological, all the different facets that fall in with that, the evils of narcotics.

But also, it's not fair to look at our police, you know, one group of people and say, go fix this. You know, because the police can't do it alone. You can't tell your legislators, legislate us out of this problem. You can't expect the pharmacist to get us out of the opioid problem, although a lot of, you know, big pharma had a lot to getting us into that problem. So DEA has started this program, and please understand we do not speak for DEA, but we are aware of this program. It's called their 360 strategy. And they go into high-risk cities. And what they do is they bring all parts of the community together.

So you've got your law enforcement, your judicial system, your doctors and your pharmacists, your faith-based community, your moms and dads, everybody comes together to try to address this issue and bring a solution to it. And they've seen some great successes with it. We love the DARE program. I can't tell you how many people we talked to that, oh, yeah, you know, DARE, I remember that when I was in grade school. That was really cool.

The cop was so nice, you know. They brought a helicopter in. We got to sit in the helicopter in. We got to blow the siren on the police car. But one of the political administrations did away with their funding. They are back with funding now. But here's a program that's helping our young people to learn about the evils of narcotics and we do away with the funding. So this all kind of comes back around to that quote of the war on drugs. There's never been a bigger misnomer that the government has come up with. I mean, God bless our men and women in law enforcement. And when we say this, we are

certainly not taking anything away from them. We still need the brave men and women who are willing to put a uniform on to protect you and us, right? Mm-hmm. But a war. When you go to war, you get your allies together, you get all your material, you go on with your troops, you're ready to win, right? Here we're fighting the war on drugs. We're going after a man who is the world's first narco-terrorist, who is the world's most

wanted criminal, a man who's responsible for as much as 80% of the cocaine in the world. I mean, think about that, George. Would you like to have 80% of the podcast market? Yeah, that would be great. Sounds good. We'll have the next interview on my jet. Can I get a ride with it? Yeah, absolutely. Jets for everyone at that point. Here's a man. This is who we're talking about. He cornered 80% of the cocaine market in the world. And what did the United States send? Have your opinion, Steve Murphy. Does that sound like a fricking war? Yeah, make sure you guys bring extra bullets, I guess. Well, that's a whole other joke.

we weren't allowed to carry long guns. We could only carry our side arms. You know, we're going up a guy that has shoulder-mounted rockets that has hand grenades, has RPGs, and we got nine millimeters. Right. And they're like, here's another handful of shells just in case. Saw the handle off a pot and put it in front of your jacket just in case. I mean, it's just, it's like pissing into the wind. No, not to, you know, no offense, but it really is.

Like, there's just not, even if there was a hundred of you guys, a thousand of you guys. a thousand of you guys. Right. It's just not enough. It's not enough. We can't sort of, like you said, arrest our way or shoot our way out of this one. We've got to do something better. But I mean, this is my personal opinion.

Legalization is not the way to do it. That's not going to work. I don't really see how that would work either. I mean, we're just going to end up with a lot. The problem is people like me as a teenager, Teenage Jordan says, well, if it's illegal, it can't be that bad or it would be illegal. So you end up with the effect of that and educating people and saying, a lot of things that are legal is still bad for you, it's just not enough. It's just not enough.

We agree. So it seems impossible. We agree 100%. Guys, thank you so much. This has been really interesting. Getting a look inside this investigation, inside your time in Columbia and inside the DEA is fascinating. Is there anything I haven't asked you where you just, you got to make sure that you leave us with? If you want to find out more about us, go to our website, www.d.d.a. narcos.com. We're hoping next year to compete with you in the podcasting market, so we've got a surprise coming

after the first of the year. Great. Bring it on. And, you know, for people out there visit Columbia, it's a great country, it's a safe country, it's a beautiful country. We encourage it's a beautiful country to visit. And the real heroes in the search of Pablo Escobar were the Colombian National Police. They're the ones who took down Escobar. Absolutely. Interesting. That's an interesting point.

Have you ever been back to Columbia on vacation or can you go back or is it kind of like, eh, the juice ain't worth the squeeze? Yeah, no, we've been there. twice. And yeah, oh, we tell people go. It's beautiful. It's changed a lot. It has. Do you feel safe there? You particularly, like I would go, but you particularly, would you be able to go? Or is it like just too much of a residue on this Escobar case for you to feel safe? We went to Bogota during some of the filming of Narco series, seasons one and two. Felt pretty good there. I mean, it's a huge city, eight million people. We did a corporate speaking event, and Cartagena felt comfortable there

walking around the streets because there's a lot of tourists, a lot of greengos out there, so I didn't stick out like a sore thumb. Right. Now, we went to Medellin and filmed a show a couple years ago, and that one was a little bit nerve-wracking. I think, JP, you were there one or two nights and I was there two or three nights. I actually went and watched the Super Bowl at Hard Rock Cafe Medellin, believe it or not, with a bunch of other Americans.

But nobody knows who we are. Yeah. You can ask anybody in the world. Do you know who Pablo Escobar is? Everybody knows who Pablo is. Ask him who, Javier opinion, Steve Murphy, are. most people don't know, and they really don't know what we look like. They think you're the guys from Netflix.

They're not looking for YouTube, right? They're looking for Floyd Pedro. Yeah, yeah. They don't think we're real. They think we're made up. That's right. That's right. Guys, thank you so much.

It's really fascinating to talk with you. And thank you for your service. I know that that was no easy task. And you're under fire for a while. And I hope you guys are able to go back out on your speaking tour after the world opens back up because I think at the very least you're entitled to a few speaking fees here in there for your hard long hours. I hope people hear you, George.

Thank you. Absolutely. It's been a pleasure being on your show. Thanks for having you, George. Yeah, me too. Thank you, George. You're going to hear a trailer for our interview with Frank Abagnale, the inspiration for the movie, Catch Me If You Can.

Frank used psychology and social engineering to pull off a stint as one of the most successful impostors the world has ever known. If you've seen the movie, you know, Frank posed as an airline pilot, a doctor and a lawyer. He even passed the bar exam. It's more than I can say for a few of my law school classmates. Check out episode one of the Jordan Harbinger show. When I put that pilot's uniform on, no one question that I looked too young to be a pilot.

I did walk up to a TWA counter. It was in a uniform. I was getting ready to purchase a ticket. And she said to me, are you buying or riding? I said, I beg your pardon. You want to be in the jump seat? I said, the jump seat. Yeah, I gave you a pass.

Just go on the jump seat. Well, I learned everything as I went. I had no idea you could do this. So then I started riding around on planes in the dump seat. I walked in a bank in a bank and I opened the account and I handed the girl $100 and she said, well, here's some temporary checks. We'll be mailing you or printed checks. Now, because I was young and inquisitive, I just happened to say to her, I noticed that I don't have any deposit slips. Oh, no, if you need to make a deposit in the meantime, just go over there to that table in the lobby and help yourself. to a blank deposit slip, then write your account number in and then use these to you get your printed ones. Well, I wonder what would happen if I encoded my account number on the bottom of all these blanks, and then I went back to the bank, put them on the shelf.

So that's exactly what I did, and everybody who came in put their money in my account. Oh, wow. Frank Abagnale could write a check on a piece of toilet paper drawn on the Confederate States Treasury, sign it, you are hooked, and cash it at any bank in town using a Hong Kong driver's license for identification. I could and I believed I could and I probably would. They only saw that uniform. They paid no attention to the check. If you want to hear more from the mind of one of the most successful impostors the world has ever known,

check out episode one of the Jordan Harbinger Show. Big thank you to Steve Murphy and Javier Penia. The book title is Manhunters. Of course, the series is Narcos. Go check that out. And the book is really good as well. Links to everything will be in the website. In the show notes, please do use our website links.

If you buy the books, it does help support. the show. Worksheets for the episode are in the show notes. Transcripts in the show notes. There's a video of this interview going up on our YouTube channel at Jordan Harbinger.com slash YouTube. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram or hit me on LinkedIn. Love hearing from you there. I'm teaching you how to connect with great people and manage relationships using systems and tiny habits over at our six-minute networking course, which is free over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. Dig that well before you get thirsty. Most of the on the show, they subscribe to the course and the newsletter. Come join us. You'll be in smart company.

This show is created in association with Podcast One. My amazing team is Jen Harbinger, J. Sanderson, Robert Fogart, Ian Baird, Millie Ocampo, Josh Ballard, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show is that you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. If you know somebody who's a narcos fiend or interested in the history of the drug cartels or law enforcement, share this with them. I think they'll get a lot of value out of it. Hopefully, you find a lot of it. Hopefully, you find something great in every episode, so please do share the show with those you care about. In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you listen, and we'll see you next time.

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