The Rest Is Classified - 79. The Hunt for Pablo Escobar: Killing the Cocaine King (Ep 6)

Episode Date: September 2, 2025

In the final months of 1993, the hunt for Pablo Escobar reached a fever pitch. On the run and isolated, Escobar is under immense pressure from both the Colombian search bloc and the shadowy death squad, Los Pepes. But it is his family, now targeted and in danger, that becomes his ultimate weakness. With his wife and children desperately seeking asylum abroad, Escobar's deep-seated need to connect with them becomes his undoing. In this final episode of our series, Gordon and David recount the climactic final days of the manhunt. They detail how the search bloc, with the aid of US intelligence, hones its direction-finding technology to pinpoint Pablo’s location. This is the story of how a single phone call, a desperate family, and a relentless manhunt led to the death of the world’s most notorious criminal. ------------------- Join The Declassified Club: Start your free trial at ⁠therestisclassified.com⁠ - go deeper into the world of espionage with exclusive Q&As, interviews with top intelligence insiders, quarterly livestreams, ad-free listening, early access to episodes and live show tickets, and weekly deep dives into original spy stories. Members also get curated reading lists, special book discounts, prize draws, and access to our private chat community. To sign up to the free newsletter, go to: ⁠⁠https://mailchi.mp/goalhanger.com/tric-free-newsletter-sign-up⁠ ⁠ ------------------- Order a signed edition of Gordon's latest book, The Spy in the Archive, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠via this link.⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Order a signed edition of David's latest book, The Seventh Floor, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠via this link.⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ------------------- Email: [e-mail] Twitter: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@triclassified⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Assistant Producer: Becki Hills Producer: Callum Hill Senior Producer: Dom Johnson Exec Producer: Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For exclusive interviews, bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, first look at live show tickets, a weekly newsletter, and discounted books, join the Declassified Club at the Rest Is Classified.com. Victory over drugs is our cause, a just cause. And with your help, we are going to win. Pablo Escobar, the head of the Medellian drug cartel. He was in many ways a terrorist. This is an economic power concentrated in a few hands and in criminal minds.

What they cannot obtain by blackmail, they get by murder. And I don't think he expressed any regret at all. He tries to portray himself as a man of the people, this kind of like leftist revolutionary outlaw. Nearly everyone in Medellin supports the traffickers. Those who don't are either dead or targets. If you declare war, you've got to expect the state to respond. This is the moment where he goes too far. 13 bombs have gone off in since the weekend.

By the end of 87, Bogota is essentially a war zone. U.S. spending for international anti-drug efforts is going to grow from less than $300 million in 1989 to more than $700 million by 1991. It is the certain knowledge that no one is really safe in Colombia from drug cartel assassins. It's a conflict where the goal wasn't even to stop the flow of cocaine. It was to bring down this narco-terrorist. Everything has turned against him after this point. The whole thing he was building is collapsing.

Do you believe in God and the hereafter, in heaven and hell? speak publicly about God. God to me is absolutely personal and private. I think all the saints help me, but my mother prays a lot for me to the child Jesus of Atocha. And that is why I built him a chapel in Barrio Pablo Escobar. The largest painting in the prison was of the child Jesus of Atocha. Why have you been willing to have yourself killed? For my family and for the truth. Do you accept that you have ever committed a crime or had someone killed? That answer I can only give confession to a priest. How do you think everything will end for you? You can never foretell that, although I wish the best. If it depended on you, how do you like to end your life? I would like to

die standing in the year 2047. Do you accept that they say you are a drug dealer or a criminal? Or don't you really care? My conscience is clear. But I would respond as a Mexican comedian once said, it is completely inconclusive. Welcome to the rest of this class of our dumb, Gordon Carrera. And I'm David McCloskey. Not Pablo Escobar. That was a great exchange between Pablo Escobar, and I played it as quite a nervous journalist. Yes.

Because you're basically asking him, have you ever killed anyone, Mr. Escobar? I can just imagine the conversation. But that was a conversation, which I guess is Pablo's desire to live a long and happy life. But as we approach the end of this story, you can perhaps guess that that may not I don't want to give anything away, but it may not be how it ends for Pablo. Because we've been looking at this story of the hunt for Pablo Escobar after his escape. The US, the Delta Force are in on the hunt. They're going after him.

They're trying to geolocate him. We've had this shadowy group, Los Pepepes, who are also putting pressure on Pablo and his family and his entourage. And I guess by the time you get to 1993, Pablo is feeling the pressure of being on the run, listening to David. He is, Gordon, and he is in particular feeling the pressure as it's hitting his family. You know, they haven't played massive roles in the story up to this point, although we've set them up. He has his wife, Maria Victoria. He has a young daughter, Manuela, and he has his teenage son, Juan Pablo. But Pablo is deeply committed to his family. Despite his other indiscretions. Despite his life of crime and his serial infidelity with teenage prostitutes,

he is deeply committed to his wife and children. And the reign of terror that Los Pes in particular is inflicting on Pablo really convinces him, I think by the spring of 1993, that his family needs to get out of Colombia. This shows you just how effective this sort of asymmetric warfare campaign has been against Pablo. Because up until early 93, his family was not a viable target. I mean, the search block was not trying to intimidate them. But now he's afraid for their safety. So in mid-February, Maria Victoria Juan Pablo and Manuel, who has with her a small fluffy white dog, try to board a plane for the United States. And at the airport, there's, of course, a massive hullabaloo. a bunch of arrests. There's bodyguards that are fleeing. The U.S. of course, is not going to let

them enter the country. Police take the children off the plane. The U.S. Embassy takes out newspaper ads the next day and explain that both children could be issued visas. If only Pablo and his wife Maria Victoria show up in person at the U.S. Embassy, then they'll give the children visas, right? So it doesn't pan out, but we already get by February the sense that they're feeling the pressure here and trying to get the kids and Maria Victoria out. out of the country. Pablo's a human, right? This is a very interesting and relatable weakness, I guess, if you want to call it a weakness. And it's going to be really important for the hunt because Juan Pablo, his 16-year-old son and kind of air, is increasingly Pablo Escobar's only

link to the outside world. I mean, this is how thinned out his circle has gotten by the time you get to the spring of 1993. What practically is happening in the family life in this period is that while Pablo is moving around from safe house to safe house, he's speaking via a radio phone to his family, and in particular to Juan Pablo, who are living under heavy guard at an apartment building in Medellin called Altos der Campestre. And we remember from the last episode that, you know, Hugo Martinez in the search block have shut down cell phone service in Medellane, which I guess would not have been that dramatic of a move in 1993. I can't imagine that many people are using cell phones. But he's shut down all of the repeater stations for

transmitting signals, which forces people to use the standard phone lines, which of course Pablo wouldn't use. And it limits radio communications to point to point, meaning that effectively to have one radio connection between transmitter and receiver, you really need a line of site. And so Pablo, who both wants and I think needs to be in contact with his family, is rotating and moving between safe houses that have a line of sight to the apartment building where his family is living. So that communications tether is going to be absolutely crucial to the hunt to come. So summer of 1993, the CIA Gordon, God bless them. They deliver six new direction finders to a surveillance unit that's attached to the search block. And here we've got to

set up another member of the search block who's really important, which is Hugo Martinez's son, Hugo Jr., who is part of the search block's own direction finding unit. And it's a fascinating bit of symmetry, isn't it? Because you've got Pablo Escobar talking to his son, and then you've got Hugo Martinez and his son doing the direction finding of trying to find Pablo and his son. It's weird two-far-the-son combos with Hugo Jr. being the one actually out in the field, driving around in these vans, you know, looking for a strong signal. It's very kind of World War II how they did direction-finding, with people in vans looking for the strength of the signal and trying to triangulate it. That's basically what Hugo Martinez Jr. is going to be out there doing

on the streets. This is kind of a death struggle between the Martinez family and the Escobar family who are locked together in this really, really high-stakes dance. Now, Juan Pablo is spending a lot of his time up in that apartment, observing the neighborhood with binoculars. And he's doing so in part for security reasons, because in one case, three men, probably from most babies, have fired a rocket-propelled grenade up at the apartment. No one's hurt, but of course that would be a frightening thing to experience.

Juan Pablo is writing down all the license plates of cars that go by. He's noting when the search block has surveillance teams outside. as far as he can see them, and he's relaying all of this to his dad, sending it to Pablo so it can get to the organization. Now, there is a Medellin prosecutor, a man named Correa, who is meeting regularly in this period with Pablo's family in Altos der Campestre, the apartment building that they're in. And this man, Correa, has noticed that there's a radio transmitter and receiver that's hidden behind a trap door on the ceiling of the building's elevator. It's not totally clear from Mark Bowden's account, but kind of piecing it together from

the DEA memoirs. I think it's possible that Correa was communicating with the DEA and feeding some of this information into the kind of U.S. search block task force that way. But he's noticed this transmitter receiver that's hidden in the building. And the search block encourages Correa to note the make and model and the frequency range of the radio. And from Correa, they get some of the frequencies that Pablo and Juan Pablo are using. They obviously get a lot of technical detail on the radio phone. They also get, importantly, a rough sense of the rhythms of when Pablo and his son Juan Pablo are speaking. And as they're

listening, they're finding that the code that father and son use, the fact that they switch frequencies often is making it really hard to actually direction find and locate Pablo. And And there's some great detail on this in Mark Bowden's book where he says, you know, every time father and son switch frequency, the signal would be temporary lost. The direction finding cars would drive around in random fits and starts throughout the city. They would race a few blocks in the direction of a signal and pull over to the curb when they lost it. And after a few days of this, it became clear that with so many walls, overhead wires, high rises, and other obstructions, a city like Medellin is a terrible environment for direction

finding. Listeners should not think of this as something that's showing a map of the city that's got a dot on it where Pablo is, right? They're having to use a fairly archaic system of sort of screens and dials to try to get closer to where the signal is emanating from. And Hugo Jr. and his team in the search block begin these kind of round the clock shifts paired up with those CIA teams, right, who've brought in more equipment to monitor the frequencies used by Juan Pablo. And then I guess crucially, I mean, they're going to discover the code that they're using because, I mean, that's one of the problems they've got is that they switch frequencies to avoid being discovered, Juan Pablo and Pablo Escobar. And that is the problem because it's that classic thing, isn't it? If you stay too long on the same frequency, you're going to get located.

So the switching of frequencies is the problem. But it's the ability to work out when they're using it and therefore what the code might. be that suggests how they're going to change frequency, which is going to allow them to start to zero it in a bit more on who they are, on where they are. Even with those advances and sort of understanding, like Pablo might say, let's go up to the next floor or the evening has ended, and that's kind of a signal to shift to another specific frequency. They also learned that Pablo and Juan Pablo are speaking typically the evening between 715 and 8.15, but the tech is still really finicky, and it does sometimes lead them in the wrong direction. So, for example, there's a

There's a raid on a seminary that's conducted on the basis of Dugo Jr.'s direction finding, and Pablo's not there and potentially had never been there. And then a few days after that failed raid, both Centra Spike and the Colombians trace Pablo's radio to the top of a hill. And the surveillance team loads up a direction finder. They take a helicopter up there and pick Pablo up right as he's making a call with the chopper flying overhead, which of course means he might have been spooked. by the sound of the helicopter. Colonel Martinez orders a raid on the mountain the next day after they hear Pablo's voice again, but he's not there. It's very frustrating.

Or is he? So Martinez cordons off the mountain. They drop deer gas and absolutely rake the forest with machine gun fire because Pablo could be hiding somewhere. 700 search block and police officers and soldiers search around. They use dogs. Pablo's not there. He's escaped again.

but interestingly, the assault teams had assumed that Pablo would be in the main house up in this compound. And it turned out that in order to get a better signal, every time Pablo Escobar had called his son, he would hike away from the home and kind of go into the woods further up the hill. And he says he'd seen the chopper's descending, he'd been hidden in the woods and then fled in the darkness. And later he'll actually send his wife Maria Victoria a battery from the flashlight he'd used to tell her to keep it because, quote, it saved my life because he had literally like run through the woods to get away. And so that is a close call. But the crucial thing is it suggests that even though they didn't get him that time, he had been there. In other words,

they got close. And they're starting to kind of tighten that net on it. But of course, he knows that they're tracing him by this way. So he's bound to take precautions. as well, his need to try and avoid being tracked. This is the problem though, right, is Pablo needs to talk to his family in order to have any ability to communicate with the outside world. And frankly, I think he actually just wants the connection with his family. He loves his family. And what he should do, I guess if he wants to guarantee that he won't be found, is stop

talking to them. But it's like the one thing he won't do. Pablo is immensely concerned about his family. they find documents to suggest this. He's also short of cash, right? So, again, this kind of the net is tightening around him. And to your point on precaution, I mean, he's not going to stop talking to the family, but he's going to take periods of time where he doesn't speak to them as much, right?

And he vanishes from the airwaves or the radio waves after that. The next day, his son Juan Pablo is on the radio, urging his father to sort of just indicate you're alive by, like, keying the microphone. And Pablo Escobar is nowhere to be found. So this direction-finding equipment, which is going to be so critical to the hunt, it has been finicky. So big Hugo Martinez since Hugo Jr. to practice on an easier target. There's a middleman in the Medellin cartel who lives in Bogota, this guy's named Zapata. Hugo Jr. and his team go down there and they kind of play around with the equipment to try to get this working so they can bring it back to Medellin.

And to give you a sense of just like how tough and technical this is, they use this equipment as they're targeting Zapata and Hugo Jr. starts to get to a point where he can discern very subtle shifts. There's like a line displayed on the monitor, right, that helps with the direction finding. So he's trying to discern subtle shifts in that line. How do you distinguish interference patterns caused by electrical wires, for example, right? Or of nearby water. How do you determine why a signal might be weak? And it could be because it's far away or it could be coming from a weaker power source, right? So you're having to discern all of these kind of minutia of the equipment. And Zapata spends a long time on the phone speaking as one does to a

witch. And Hugo Jr. has a lot of time to practice down there. And as he fine-tunes the equipment, so they work on Zapata, Hugo Jr. dials it in and it works. There's an assault team that raids a house based on the direction finding and they kill Zapata. So they're getting better and better with the tech. Now, November of 93, the heat on the Escobar family has been dialed way up. One of Juan Pablo's childhood friends is kidnapped. The apartment building administrator is kidnapped and killed. The family's maid is kidnapped and killed. Juan Pablo and Manuel's personal tutor is kidnapped and killed. So these are people who are not in the cartel. But this is exactly what the cartel would do

if they were trying to put pressure on you. Juan Pablo, amid all of this heat, has been negotiating that deal we mentioned with the Attorney General. And it's so secret that the Attorney General has not shared it with the Colombian President or the U.S. embassy. So you have potentially a negotiated surrender in the offing for Pablo Escobar. And in it, the Attorney General has agreed to several of Pablo's terms. One of them is transferring his brother, who's in prison from isolation to be co-located with other members of the cartel, guys like Popeye, to place Pablo in the same section as the rest of his cartel mates when he surrenders, and to allow him 21 family visits each year. So we do see here that Pablo's terms have changed.

He's not trying to go back to La Cateedral. He's accepting a conventional sort of Colombian prison, right? But he still has terms. And the deal gets hung up over a disagreement on getting Pablo's family out of Colombia. He wants the family out. He wants his wife and son and daughter out. Pablo says he won't turn himself in until Maria Victoria and the children are flown out to a safe haven. And the attorney general in the negotiation has been promising to help the family flee, but only after Pablo surrenders. And they've been going back and forth over this point, but it seems by late November of 1993 that a deal is imminent. Which the U.S. is not that keen on, obviously.

I mean, this has all been done outside of the U.S. search for him. And it feels like the Colombians, there's still that faction which want to draw things to a close rather than see it to the kind of deadly conclusion, which clearly the U.S. wants. I think it's fair to say the U.S. is appalled when it realizes that a deal might be happening. And an agreement actually does end up getting reached. Pablo agrees to surrender himself at the AG's office or at the family apartment. And the Colombian Attorney General begins crafting plans to get the family out of the country. As this becomes known inside the Colombian government and word gets to the U.S. Embassy, there's horror.

The Colombians and the Americans start working the phones to prevent the Escobar family from leaving and finding safe haven elsewhere. The Colombians say, look, we have no legal basis to prevent the Escobar family from leaving Columbia, but we can try to work contacts elsewhere to ensure that they are not accepted. Yeah. I mean, it's this crazy bit where they actually do get on a flight to Frankfurt, don't they? And when they arrive, the U.S. has lent on the German government and basically says, don't let them in, keep them out. I mean, it's a very, you know, deliberate campaign to prevent there being a deal to kind of keep the pressure on because they know this pressure on the family from this Pepe's, is their best route to kind of tracking Pablo. And it's kind of

working, isn't it? Because they've stopped the family getting away. It absolutely is. But if the family is given asylum in Germany, let's say, Pablo gets his deal with the Colombian AG, Pablo surrenders, his family's safe, he goes to prison and all the sudden it's over, right? You're resetting this thing back. I mean, he's not in luxurious surroundings of like but he's able potentially and frankly most likely to reconstitute the cartel. And also what's so interesting is that this strategy of using the family also they know it's going to flush Pablo out, don't they? Because he is trying to negotiate for his family and to deal with the way in which his family is being stopped going places. So it's forcing him

to communicate, which allows them to track him as well, doesn't it? Oh, absolutely. And the communication, as soon as it's clear that the family is been sent back from Germany is going to spike. So Pablo calls the Colombian presidential palace and asks to speak to the president, right? He just literally calls the operator at the palace. The operator thinks it's a joke, wouldn't you? This is Pablo Escobar on the phone. Eventually, the operator realizes it's not, right? But the president is not going to speak to Pablo. Pablo goes insane on the phone. He goes insane. He says he'll detonate bombs all over Bogota. He says he'll bomb the German embassy. He says he'll start killing Germans. Minutes later, he calls the German embassy

and the Lufthansa office and make similar threats. Now, on the tarmac in Frankfurt, the Escobars, of course, lose their petition for political asylum. They are put back on a plane to Bogota. They put up at a hotel in Bogota. The defense minister in Colombia basically tells the attorney general, look, we're going to pull state protection on them. This is getting even nastier. The hotel Unsurprisingly, in Pocetta, where they're saying empties out. Yeah, as soon as you know, Pablo Escobar's family are in the hotel. Don't want to be there. And state protections being withdrawn.

Your romantic weekend in the hotel is over, isn't it? So the hotel is cleared out. It's just empty, right? His daughter Manuel reportedly wanders around the empty halls, singing a Christmas carol to herself, right? Because this is early December, substituting the traditional chorus with one of her own that went in part, quote,

Los Pes want to kill my father, my family, and me. And she's, what, nine years old? She's young, isn't she? Yeah, she's nine. Now, with the family at the hotel, though, Pablo's going to call. Pablo's going to call, right? So the search block puts an officer on the hotel switchboard.

All the calls will go through there. Pablo calls six times in the first four days. And Centra Spike and the search block get a fix on his location. That's a neighborhood in Medellin called Los Olivos. And Pablo is very cleverly trying to throw office pursuers by speaking on his radio phone, from the backseat of a moving taxi. And that radio phone is linked to a large transmitter that his men are moving constantly from place to place.

Now, the taxi is being driven by his sole bodyguard, a guy known as Limon. And thanks to the direction finding of Central Spike and the search block, they know now that Pablo has moved into a row house on street 79A. And he has moved in there in this neighborhood called Los Alibos about a month after his flight

from that kind of wooded compound in Aguas Frias. So they're getting close. They are getting close. They are getting close. And Martinez in the search block quietly begin to infiltrate hundreds of men into Los Alibos. And we should be clear. They know the area, but they don't know the exact place yet, do they? No, that's a good point.

That's a good point, Gordon. He has moved into this row house on Street 79A, but the search block just knows the neighborhood. They haven't got the exact fix yet. And that's going to be crucial, isn't it? because they've still going to do that last bit. They've got a pretty good idea with these, but give these escape before. It's not a done deal until they've got it.

Yeah. Now, where's Delta Force? Gordon, I think that's a good question. We know that Delta Force has been accompanying the search block on raids, but Martinez and his team, Hugo Jr. sets up listening post in a parking lot with all of his vans in Los Alibos. And on December 1st,

the task force tracks Pablo as he speaks to his family, on his 44th birthday, and they trace this call to a spot in the street near a traffic circle because Pablo has been riding around in that cab driven by Limon. So Pablo is 44. He has celebrated his birthday with a birthday cake, some wine, and marijuana to kick off his 44th year. And so there, as we approach the final denouement of the hunt for Pablo, let's take a break. And when we come back, we'll see how the final hours unfold. Welcome back. It is December the 2nd, 1993.

Pablo Escobar has just turned 44, but I'm not sure he's going to hit 45. His days is hours of number. Spoiler alert, Gordon. Spoiler alert, sorry. He's not going to make it to 2047, like he said in that wonderful interview with the journalist that we were. off the ep-width. Well, this day, though, it starts off bright for Pablo Escobar. He wakes up just before noon. It's a little early for him, I think. He wants to get an early start. He eats a plate of spaghetti, Gordon. For breakfast. It's sort of a lunch, I guess. You know, he gets up late. And then

he gets back into bed with his phone, like everybody, you know, like a teenager. Pablo has gained maybe 20 pounds while he's been on the run. He's lounging in bed. He is spending a lot of time on his phones. He's spending a lot of time with teenage prostitutes. He is having trouble finding jeans that fit. Okay? So if you're picturing Pablo as he's lounging there in bed,

he's got jeans that have super wide cuffs on them because they're too long. He's got to get really big long jeans to accommodate his waist size. And then he rolls the cuffs up, right? So this isn't a great period for Pablo Escobar, and he doesn't look so good either. Now, Limon, the bodyguard, is there with him. There have been two others staying at the house, one of them his courier, and another is his aunt and cook named Luzmila. And both the courier and the cook had left the house after breakfast. So it's just Pablo and Limon there.

At 1 p.m., Pablo tries several times to phone his family, posing as a radio journalist. but the switchboard operator at the hotel in Bogota, where the family is staying, per instructions from Colonel Martinez in the search block, have told Pablo that they've been instructed to block all calls from journalists. Pablo's put on hold, then asked to call back, but finally he gets through on the third attempt, and he speaks briefly to his daughter, Manuela, and then to his wife, Maria Victoria, eventually he'll talk to Juan Pablo. Now, unsurprisingly, Maria Victoria is exceptionally sad and depressed in this phone call. and is around this point that Hugo Jr., the sort of tech and direction-finding whiz from the search block is awakened by a phone call from his dad, the search block, commander, who says Pablo is on the phone, right? And remember, Hugo Jr. is in this sort of listening post, in Los Alibos, in Medellin, waiting for just an occasion like this.

So after Pablo finishes talking to his wife, his son gets on the phone, and they have some business to discuss because Pablo has received a list of questions from a journalist, and there are a lot of them, there's like 40, and so it's going to take a while for him to dictate the answers to his son, Juan Pablo. Now, Centra Spike has tracked the calls to Los Alibos, but the problem is there are dozens and dozens of dwellings within a few hundred meters of the pinpointed location, right? So you can't really plan a raid based on the Centrospike equipment alone. Yeah, it's not close enough, yeah. Pablo calls back his son at around 3 p.m.

And they start to go through the questions with Pablo dictating the answers. And now Hugo Jr. and his team are moving out of the parking lot along with a team of search block assaulters. The tone in his earphones and Hugo Jr.'s earphones and this little line on the scanner are directing Hugo Jr. who's sitting in the passenger seat of one of these vans, send them to an office building a couple blocks away from the parking lot. And Assaulters hit that building, but Pablo was still on the phone with Juan Pablo, going through these questions, right?

So Jesse's not there. A journalist may have played a role in this, Gordon, and Hugo Jr. is looking at his screen. He's seeing his little, you know, noticing slight wiggles in the white line that stretched from side to side. The line spans the kind of entire screen, and it means the signal is being transmitted close by. But Hugo Jr., from his experience, again, you know, targeting that other member of the cartel down near Bogota, he's thinking, okay, well, this vibration means maybe I'm picking up a reflection. It's like very slight.

And sometimes this happens when the signal is reflecting off the water. The line has this kind of slight squiggle in it, but this line has no squiggle. So he's looking around to his left. There's a drainage ditch. Cross over the other side. where Hugo Jr. was now convinced that the signal originates, his driver has to go up a block or two and turn left to get over a bridge. And when the van has gotten to the other side of the ditch, Hugo Jr. realizes that only one car has followed him. So maybe the others have ignored him or

they didn't hear him. And as he's kind of trailing around this neighborhood, Pablo and his son are still going over the questions. And they're mulling answer to a question about why so many countries have denied the Escobar family safe haven, right? And the conversation at this point, importantly, has gone on for minutes. Usually, Pablo speaks to his son for about 20 seconds, right? It's gone on for a long time. It's giving these guys a while to direction find and locate the signal. It also gives you a sense of how little time they typically had to work with, right? Seconds, but now they've got minutes, right? Pablo, though, sensing it's gone on for too long, cuts off the conversation. Meanwhile, Hugo Jr. is still in the van. He's working on the signal until the line on the screen stretches to sort of fill the whole screen. And he finds himself in front of a block of two-story row houses. At this point, Hugo stops staring at the screen. The van's cruising the street. He's looking up at the homes.

And it's such a dramatic moment, isn't it? Because he's looking up at the windows of these homes. And then suddenly, in a second floor window of one of them, he sees. someone, a big man. He sees a big man. He sees a big man in the window. But crucially, a big man with curly long black hair and a full beard and which they know is what Pablo looks like. It's amazing, right? I mean, I think the sort of essential account of this is, again, in Mark Bowden's wonderful book, Killing Pablo, where he was able to interview Hugo Martinez and get his account of everything that happened on this fateful day. But there's a big man up in the window. It's Pablo, right? He's talking on a phone and looking down at traffic.

And Hugo puts the call in and says, this is the house. Now, should note that later on, the Centra Spike guys are going to be some of them, at least. We convinced that Hugo Jr. found Pablo not because of his mastery of this direction finder, but by dumb luck. They were driving around the neighborhood and saw him, right? And he calls his father, I think, doesn't it, to get a team to come in? but basically they're going to go in fast. You don't want to lose Pablo. If your first time you've really had eyes on him.

You can't lose him. So minutes later, the assaulters are there, right? And the front door of this row house is made of heavy metal. So they use a heavy steel sledgehammer on the door. They send in a six-man assault team. The first floor is kind of empty. Now, Limon has jumped out a back window. It's a 10-foot drop down.

He kind of starts running. He's shot by search block guys who are. are outside, right, who have taken up positions around the sort of back exits of the home. Limon apparently falls off the roof as he's shot and into the grass below. Now, Pablo comes out next, out this back window, kicks off his flip-flops. I guess that's what you want. When you're on the run, slides, kicks off his flip-flops, jumps down onto the roof. He probably saw Limon get shot, so he's kind of hugging a wall up there for

cover. And it seems like initially shooters on some of the roofs around the building couldn't get a clean shot. So it's kind of quiet for a moment. And Pablo kind of oaches along the wall creeps along to get closer to the straight. And he gets to a corner of the wall. And then Pablo breaks into a run to try to clear the crest of the roof. And there is a volley of gunfire. The search block shooters are just shooting up the brick around the rooftop and the tiles around the rooftop. And it takes a few moments for the search block to realize that they are actually the only ones shooting. So someone gets a ladder to scale up because it's gone silent. The team inside that had gone in the in the home through the front jumps down from the window for a look who's up there

on that roof. Search block major turns the body over. There's this big bearded face covered in blood, curly black hair, and the major calls out into the radio, Viva Colombia. We have just killed Pablo Escobar. It's over. He's dead. And they're sure it's him. They don't have to do that thing like they did with Bin Laden where they lie next to him because he's tall. They know it. They know it's him. But let's just pick a path for a moment what we think actually happens. Because I think it's fair to say, there's still a few elements. I mean, you give us a great description of the actual shooting. But whether there was a gun fight and quite how it unfolded and even perhaps who did it and how exactly he came to be shot. I mean, because, you know,

there were some stories of the search block teams are claiming that he came out running from the wall, you know, with guns in both hands, firing and screaming, comes out shooting, as it were. You didn't use the dialogue I wrote for you, Gordon. Well, we need Callum's bleep gun. If we're going to do that. Yeah. Okay. You do it. one note before I do the line of dialogue that Gordon refused to read. It's the search block version of what happened, right? Which does get a lot of the details right. But one of those details that I did not include in sort of the narrative I just read through is that the search block teams on the scene claim that Pablo came running out from the wall with guns in both hands, true outlaw fashion,

firing and screaming. This is where Callum gets your bleep gun ready. Police, motherfucker. It's the Butch Cassidy and Sundance Kig. It's the end of the film, isn't it? Where you go out shooting. But one of the things we know about him, he's a runner, not a shooter.

In all of the times that Pablo has fled throughout this entire series, has he ever done anything like this? No. No. The next clue that that might not be right also comes from the autopsy report, doesn't it? Because he takes three shots.

shots. Now, one is on the back of his right leg just above the knee, another in the back below the right shoulder blade, which would suggest that to me looks like someone who's shot while they're running away, which is, again, in character of Pablo. But the third is entered at the centre of his right ear and went right through his brain. So that is a kill shot, basically. I think people have suggested who've looked at this, that that would be a hard shot to manage by chance such a precise shot it would it would almost seem like you would need like really really good marksman to do that well trained marksman from a different unit you think or something called a unit is that what you're suggesting or do you think this is more of a question

of he's down you know he's shot twice in the leg or in the back as he's running and then someone just comes up to him and just kills him that is the question right it's not a question of whether Pablo Escobar was just shot and gunned down as he was up on the roof. I think it was either he was killed by a highly trained marksman, a sniper, or he was executed in a kind of coup de grace after he had gone down by the search block, probably. And those first two shots, you know, the one in the legs above the knee and in the back, probably wouldn't have killed him, right? So it's the shot to the head through his brain that would,

have been instant death. And Bowden writes, quote, a round in the right ear of a running man from a distance demonstrates either extraordinary marksmanship or luck, a similar amazing shot Feld Limon, who died of a bullet wound to the center of his forehead, right? So it's either a highly trained. Amazing shot. Sniper, an amazing shot. Or they're injured and then executed. Which, to be honest, as we've always known, was the intent was not to let him get out alive. You know, it's a bit like the bin Laden raid was ostensibly a capture or kill, but everyone knew it was kill. This is the same. It was always a kill mission, wasn't it? And I think everyone went in there with that suspicion. I mean, there are some also questions about whether Americans

might have been present, whether this was all search block. The interviews that have been conducted by Bowden and others of the search block members who were there, they are divided on whether Americans were present that day. Some of them said, yeah, Americans were among the assault force. Others said no. There's a theory that has it that Delta had staked out the neighborhood, because of course they'd known that he was in Los Alibos for a few days by that point, right? So they kind of knew the general area, right? So there's a theory that Delta had helped stick out the neighborhood, perhaps even knew the house, and perhaps position teams around it, Right. So I think, though, it's one of those things that if Delta had a role, they are never going to admit it.

I mean, Jerry Boykin and his memoir emphatically denies that Delta played any role in it. He would say that, wouldn't he? Well, you'd have to. But it also might be true. Because also the whole point is from the Colombian point of view. I mean, you know, you remember the guy going, Viva Colombia, we have just killed Pablo Escobar. The whole thing is it's got to look like the Colombians have done it themselves. You do not want the sense that some secretive American unit has played any role in this, whether they did the final shot or not. So you could absolutely see why that narrative is there that it was search block, even if it was more complicated than that. I think we don't know for sure.

Well, in photos of the scene afterward show those, you know, Pubbo's outlaw guns, right, that he had apparently carried while, you know, screaming. They show the guns on the rooftop, right? So you could say, oh, well, maybe that tracks with the search block version of events. But we also know that the search block messed with the crime scene in at least one way to suggest that they might have put those guns there, right, if they hadn't already been. The search block, after Pablo dies, they shave off the ends of his mustache to give Pablo one last indignity in death so he looks like Adolf Hitler. I mean, so they actually do that at the crime scene. I mean, that's what I find. Yep.

This is not like when they take him to the morgue or somewhere else. At the crime scene, someone gets out a razor blade or some, well, I guess. they're probably not going to use shaving cream because you're going to worry about scratching him too much or moisturiser or aftershave. You forgot the Gillette. Yeah, you forgot the Gillette. It's just going to be. Someone's going to get out a knife or a razor and cut the beard.

I mean, that's kind of crazy, isn't it? Think of how many of their friends and colleagues Pablo had murdered by that point. Yeah, you can see why. There's celebrations, aren't there? I mean, the celebrations in Medellin, in Bogota, in Washington. Yeah, this is a big moment because you're right. You know, this trail of destruction that he'd left in his wake, it finally looks like it's over.

Well, and you remember Major Steve Jacoby of Centra Spike had bought that $300 bottle of Remy Martin Cognac back in January of 1990, right, when Pablo had first come into the unit's cross hairs. And he's actually back in the States the night that Pablo was killed. Apparently, he drinks half the bottle by himself that night at home to celebrate. That's going to be a hangover the next night. And I think it is a bittersweet and kind of grim celebration. some ways, because during this second kind of war, I guess you'd call it, from the point where

Pablo has left La Cateedral to the day he's killed, Los Pes and the search block have killed maybe 300 cartel members. There have been 127 people killed by Pablo's bombs, and there have been 147 police and search block members killed in the manhunt. So you can see why, despite all the conversation we had about, you know, who actually killed Pablo, there wouldn't be a lot of concern on the part of anyone involved in the hunt that Pablo was killed. But it's so interesting. I mean, as we come to an end and to kind of wrap things up, one point to look at is that when it comes to his funeral, the coffin is sworn by mourners who opened the lid to stroke his face with chance of, we love you, Pablo, and long-lived Pablo

Escobar. You know, and his grave is still kept up there. You know, on the grave, set a picture of a mustachioed Pablo in a business suit. There is still this, you know, kind of legend which exists around him, which despite all the violence he inflicted, despite the bombs on bookstores and the bringing down aeroplanes, there is still some residue of that kind of Robin Hood mythology that he'd built around himself, which is still there even at the end of his life, which to some extent still persists. I mean, it is the glamour of the outlaw and the criminal,

despite the fact he'd basically been a terrorist as well as a narco lord. In some quarters, you know, he's still seen as this kind of Robin Hood figure. I don't know what percentage of the Colombian population would see him that way. But in the pieces that have been written on his legacy, this is still a feature, right? And he was successful to a degree in the end to connect his criminality in the minds of some to a bigger social agenda. However false that may have been, and however much it, you know, sort of whitewash, everything else about his brutality and murder and terrorist violence against Colombian civilians in the state. He managed that to a degree. I mean, even today, there are narco tours around

Medin where you can go see the house where Pablo was shot. Some of the tours actually end with Pablo's brother Roberto, who I guess allegedly tells everyone to stay in school and don't do drugs as the message of the tour at the end, right? And there's actually a real, I think, resentment among some of the population of Medellin, that they continue to be associated with Pablo Escobar, right? I mean, it's kind of a long-term stain on the reputation of the city, and yet there continues to be just this fascination. I mean, Popeye, the sort of psychotic cartel associate who had been imprisoned with Pablo at La Cate Deraal, he gets out of prison and actually starts a YouTube channel where he ends up with over a million subscribers, right?

Has he got a podcast? Everyone's got a podcast. Everyone's got a podcast. Even Popeye. He's like this far right guy who likes to reminisce about Pablo and it's exceptionally popular. Now, eventually, Popeye shocker goes back to prison on extortion charges and the YouTube channel isn't active anymore. I think Popeye may have passed away.

But it's like a car accident, right? You kind of like want to look away but can't at the sort of life and crimes of Pablo Escobar. Yeah, hence the hugely successful TV series that, you know, can continue to spread that. I mean, in terms of what the lessons are for the manhunt, you know, because it is this period, I guess we're now in the 90s in which, you know, the CIA's post-cold war is looking for a role and is trying to get involved in those things. But there's also a little bit of squeamishness, isn't there? I mean, you know, this is happening in 93 when he's finally killed around the time of the Clinton administration, I think.

And they are actually pretty nervous, I think, some of the people in the White House and elsewhere, about the dirty war aspects of this and about some of the other things and human rights abuses and getting too deep into the world of cartels and some of the compromises involved. I mean, it's actually quite a tricky area, I think, in the 90s, you know, for the CIA and others to get involved with. But maybe not as much today. I mean, in some ways, I think the hunt for Pablo and all of the associated kind of legal and political work behind it to make it possible to send Delta Force to collaborate with the

Colombians to use those kind of collection capabilities, which were new at the time, you know, around Centra Spike and all these other platforms that got put over Medellin, right? I actually think you can see a lot of the kind of the seeds of some of the capabilities that will be deployed during the War on Terror a decade later on display in the hunt for Pablo Escobar. Because it is some of the kind of fusion of technical intelligence, human intelligence, special forces operator. I mean, that model of using intelligence fast turnaround with special forces to go after people is something, you know, I think about that got developed in Iraq to fight insurgency there and then in Afghanistan to some extent. But you can see a

model for it here, you know, a slightly different model, but, you know, one on the kind of counter-narcotic side. And you're right. You then start to see the manhunt model used against al-Qaeda and terrorists. And then, you know, it's almost full circle, isn't it? Because we're now in an era in which the CIA and the US intelligence community is being told that dealing particularly with fentanyl coming over from Mexico and the cartels and the crime that's associated with it in people's eyes there, this is now a top national security threat that needs to be dealt with. And we're back to the language of terrorism. The cartels are being designated by. the White House recently in the last few months as terrorist organizations allowing and

prioritizing the use of some of these resources to go after them. And you're hearing about predator drones being flown over Mexico and things like that. So it feels a lot like that period of late 80s and early 90s. I think that's why this is still such a kind of relevant story because we're actually seeing a new iteration of the war on drugs, potentially gearing up out of Washington right now and being thought, maybe not in Colombia this time, but maybe more in Mexico and other places, different drugs to some extent. I mean, cocaine is still going, though, but it's a similar kind of challenge and national security priority for Washington. Cocaine-related violence was killing Americans in the United States while Pablo Escobar was running

the Medellin cartel. He kills two Americans in the Avianca airliner bombing. He's responsible for killing thousands of Colombians, right? Drug smuggled through Mexico kill maybe 90,000 Americans every year, right? So to draw a line from Pablo to the legal authorities that could be used to do things like send Delta Force to Mexico, to go after drug kingpins, or to send armed drones to Mexico, to go after cartel kingpins there, there's a big political decision there. it has a lot to do with our relationship with the Mexican government, but in the hunt for Pablo, and there's a whole bunch of other questions around it, right? So I'm not saying that that's

necessarily a good policy. But you could pretty much draw a straight line from 1993 in the hunt for Pablo and the authorities given, I mean, now that we've had the war on terror, the legal authorities in Mexico would probably be much looser also. And it'd be much easier to get the DOJ and the White Houses and the CIA's Office of General Counsel to sort of agree that it's legal to go after, you know, cartel kingpins in Mexico. And the Mexican component to this is interesting because it's one of the most profound shifts, I think, that happens after Pablo is killed. And it's a not, I think, very widely acknowledged consequence of this hunt is that, of course, after Pablo is killed, the Coke business doesn't go away, right? There's still massive demand for

it. The Medellin cartel is reestablished. There's a cartel in the south, the Cali cartel, that is active throughout this whole time. But what happens is that over time, the Coke trade in Columbia becomes much more professionalized, much more corporate, run by kind of a new type of tracker called the invisibles. They use the legal economy for everything, right? It's actually embedding the Coke business into the actually traditional open economy. And I think that what happens because of this is the Colombian cartels decide, look, we will do a much more consistent business if we, if instead of smuggling all of this stuff into the U.S. ourselves, we let the Mexicans do it and we go wholesale instead of controlling vertically sort of

the whole supply chain into the U.S. The whole supply chain and all the smuggling routes into the U.S. Let's let the Mexican cartels do the smuggling bit. And it's fascinating because it means that you're earning a smaller margin on each shipment because that smuggling route is one of the most valuable pieces of the whole enterprise. but it allows you to sort of deal with this in a much more white-collar way without having to worry about the U.S. sending Delta Force to come and bring the herd on you. Yeah, it's really interesting, isn't it, with the evolution of the way it's worked.

And in a sense, I mean, they got their man and the thing about Pablo Escobar was he was such a kind of individual personification of the drugs trade. He'd become the kind of comic book villain in a way that I don't think anyone has since. but it didn't necessarily stop the flow of cocaine, did it, at the time or after? What? I thought it totally shut down the pipes. You thought that's it. That's it. No, it, dear listener, the killing of Pablo did not really slow down the Coke business. You might be shockler. And so the best estimate for 1993, which is the year that Pablo has killed, is that between 243 and 340 tons of cocaine are available for sale in the United States. States with about 70 to 80% of that coming from Colombia. So didn't really slow it down. There'd be an estimated almost $31 billion spent by Americans on cocaine that year. And over the course of really the rest of the decade, cocaine prices in the states just keep going down,

which indicates that more and more supply comes online. So this is why I think the Pablo story is so fascinating, right, because it's a conflict where the goal wasn't even to stop the flow of cocaine. It was to bring down this narco-terrorist. Yeah, who'd taken on the state was threatening the government of Columbia and, you know, the safety and security of the entire world. Yeah, that's right. It became much more than just about drugs. And so as we bring it to an end, just a reminder, kids, don't do drugs, just say no. It's a good reminder to include in the very last episode of this series. I just feel like you just need to remind people,

don't do drugs, but do join our declassified club. That's the message we're trying to give. That's the message. That's the message. Make our declassified club your drug. And you can do that by going to the rest is classified.com and signing up. If you get early access to series, a bunch of bonus content, in an avain of bonus content,

we have an absolutely smashing interview with Delta Force operator Joe Vega. who was on the ground in Colombia, on the hunt for Pablo Escobar, a wild and amazing conversation with someone who lived the story that we just told. So if you want to hear that, which you absolutely should, sign up for the Declassified Club

at the Rest isclassified.com. We'll see you next time. See you next time.