The Team House - Inside the Take Down of the Cali Cartel w/ Chris Feistl | Ep. 306

Episode Date: October 27, 2024

Support the show here:⬇️https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouseChris Feistl is a retired DEA agent who spent 26 years stationed in Miami, Colombia and Phoenix. He also has field experience in the Caribbean, Central and South America.Subscribe to the new EYES ON podcast here:⬇️https://www.youtube.com/@EyesOnPodcast/featured—————————————————————-Today's Sponsors:GhostBed⬇️https://www.ghostbed.com/houseFOR 50% OFF!!!Ketone IQ ⬇️https://ketone.com/TEAMHOUSE for 30% off your first subscription and a free 6 pack!My Bookie ⬇️https://www.mybookie.agUse code “TEAMHOUSE” to double you first deposit.____________________________________Pre-order Jack Murphy's new book "We Defy: The Lost Chapters of Special Forces History" today! ⬇️https://www.amazon.com/We-Defy-Chapters-Special-History-ebook/dp/B0DCGC1N1N/——————————————————————To help support the show and for all bonus content including:https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse-AD FREE AUDIO-AD FREE VIDEO-Access to ALL bonus segments with our guestsSubscribe to our Patreon! ⬇️https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouseOr make a one time donation at: ⬇️https://ko-fi.com/theteamhouseTeam House merch: ⬇️https://teespring.com/stores/my-store-10474963Social Media: ⬇️The Team House Instagram:https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_linkThe Team House Twitter:https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePodJack’s Instagram:https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_linkJack’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21Dave’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/dave_parke?s=21Team House Discord: ⬇️https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6SubReddit: ⬇️https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTeamHouse/Jack Murphy's memoir "Murphy's Law" can be found here:⬇️ https://www.amazon.com/Murphys-Law-Journey-Investigative-Journalist/dp/1501191241The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links):⬇️ https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/Intro music by https://www.youtube.com/user/RemixSampleWant to sponsor the show?Email: ⬇️[e-mail]#narcos #dea #calicartelBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

Hey guys, it's Jack. I just wanted to talk to you today about a way that you can help support the podcast if you're not already. To support the channel is to become a Patreon member. So we have Patreon memberships that start at just $5 a month. And when you sign up, you get access to all of our episodes ad free. That's the big bonus for that. I mean, we also do some Patreon bonus episodes for our subscribers. But this is the biggest and best way that you can support the Team House. channel and podcast if you'd like to. And we really appreciate that. So go it and check us out at patreon.com slash the team house. Special operations. Covert ops. Espionage. The team house with your host, Jack Murphy and David Park. Hey, everyone. Welcome to episode 306 of The Team House. I'm Jack Murphy here with David Park. And our guest on tonight's show is Chris Feistel. Chris served 26 years, if I recall correctly, in the DEA. And he, many of you may remember his character in Narcos, the season about the Cali cartel. We're going to talk to him all about that in just a moment. First, I just want to tell

you guys about one of our sponsors, ketone IQ. Ketone IQ is a clean shot of energy with no sugar or caffeine. I used this recently on a trip to Central Asia where I was super jet lagged, but also wanting to go and do things outdoors, you know, backpacking and horseback riding and everything else. And I threw a box of these in my backpack and took them with me. So there's the original ketone IQ, and then there's this one peach flavor that actually does have 100 milligrams of natural caffeine in it derived from green tea. But the main thing is that is. thing about this energy drink is that the ketones in it help oxygenate the red blood cells. So this thing was developed in conjunction with the special operations community, especially

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probably 100 interviews at least involved in this with primary sources, covers the Backpack Nuclear Weapon Program, Greenlight. It covers... America's first counterterrorism unit, Blue Light, Debt A, the guys that were undercover in Berlin, and DetK, the liaisons, special forces liaisons that we have in Korea. So books coming out December 9th, please go check it out. So with that said, Chris, welcome to the show. Good to be with you guys.

So, Chris, you know, as we, our traditional question here, we ask our guests about their origin story. Tell us a little bit about your upbringing and how that took you towards law enforcement. Well, I was born in Newark, New Jersey, grew up in 44 Pennsylvania, which is a small town, about an hour and 45 minutes northeast of Philadelphia. I went to high school there, played basketball on track. Went into college, majored in criminal justice and government while I was in college. I also played basketball in college, too.

Started for four years in college. Did an internship as a seasonal police officer in Wildwood, New Jersey, back in 1984, 485 and 86. And that was what kind of got me on the path to being in law enforcement. I originally wanted to go to law school. I wanted to be like a sports agent. And so during the summer, when I was doing this internship, internship. I had a chance to work undercover. And I was 20 or 21 years old at the time. They let an intern do undercover work. Well, it was, you know, things were a lot different back then.

But check this out, man. This is pretty cool. So we did a one week training through their, like, this abbreviated academy. They gave us a gun. You know, we were driving around in police cars. one week and we were out there you know what either walking a beat or driving in the car responding to calls and doing stuff and and I remember even looking back at that then I think like how the hell can they let 20 21 year old kids carry guns and go out and arrest people it was crazy but uh I was in a bar wasn't an unusual occurrence for me back then or even now but um and I met this girl and we got to you know talking and we set up this deal she wanted to sell methamphetamine. So I ended up doing this undercover on the boardwalk.

And I thought, you know, hey, this is, this is pretty cool. And then I started looking into DEA, you know, FBI, CIA, different things. And I applied to DEA. And, you know, a year and a half, two years later, I got, well, it was more than that. It was a couple of years later that I got hired. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So you, so you went from that sort of like internship relationship, applying for federal law enforcement? Correct. So it was my junior year in summer of my junior year in college, I think. So I did it in my junior year and then the summer after I graduated and then the summer

after that. But in the meantime, I had been applying for different jobs. So in 1986, I got hired by the Virginia Beach Police Department. So I just kept working my way further south down the beach. And I worked there for about a year and a half. half and then finally DEA called me in early 1988 and that's when I when I jumped to federal. So at that point, was your kind of like first landing, I guess, with DEA? Was that Miami?

Yeah, so I got hired out of Norfolk, Virginia, which is, you know, bordered Virginia Beach. And I went to the FBI Academy up in Quantico, Virginia for back then it was 13 weeks. And then my first permanent assignment out of the academy was Miami, Florida. there in in summer of 1988. So Miami 1988 is kind of the height of the whole cocaine cowboys thing that is going on down there. I mean, what was that like as a young DEA agent? Well, I mean, for me and for a lot of others, that was the place to be, right?

Everybody was watching Miami Vice and, you know, Sonny Crockett and Tubbs are running around Miami and these nice cars. They're like, dude, this is, you know, you want to be the age, and you got to go to Miami. So, yeah, we got there, and, you know, we always used to joke around. It's like, hey, man, you know, cocaine is, like, falling out of the sky. And literally, it was. I mean, it was so much, you know, Colombian cocaine there at the time. And, but it was a great place to get started.

It was a great place to learn the job. You know, I always look back and said that, you know, guys who went to big offices like L.A., Miami, New York, out of the academy, especially back then in the 80s. you were kind of light years ahead of everybody else because you just got exposed to so many different kinds of cases there and uh you know Miami too you were traveling all the time we were in the in the Caribbean we were in Central America you were in South America following up on cases or you know pursuing leads meeting with assets so uh that was for me that was the place to be in the late 80s early 90s yeah I mean it must have been super exciting to say the least yeah I mean it was fun

I mean, you were always busy. You were doing, you know, a couple different deals a day. You know, you were doing large-scale transportation cases, wiretaps, you know, conspiracy cases. So there was no shortage of work back then in Miami. Any, from that time period, you know, your rookie days with DEA, any like interesting stories or things that stick out in your mind from that time period? Well, I mean, there's a lot of stories. I don't know how many I can get into here without you.

without, you know, really getting people in trouble or doing stuff. But it was, you know, it's kind of like what you always saw on television stuff. It was pretty much the Wild West. I mean, it was wide open. Everybody was out running and gunning. And, you know, I always used to tell people, too, that, you know, from the time I got out of the academy until the time I went to Columbia, which is a little story there we can get to later.

But I didn't get a haircut. So I didn't get a haircut for basically six years. You know, I had, you know, the ends trim to clean it up. But so, you know, after five, six years, I had hair, you know, all the way down to the middle of my back. You know, and, you know, it was a typical Miami Vice Day, you know, with the earrings and the chains and, you know, driving around in a Mercedes. And, you know, just every day was, I mean, it was really, really fun to go to work back then. And it sounds like you were doing a lot of drug buys. Yeah, we did a lot of undercover in Miami from, you know, did a lot of street level deals, you know, helping out some of the PDs like Coral Gables, you know, Broward County Sheriff's Office.

But we also did a lot of, you know, international stuff too. I used to pose as a boat handler, you know, that we had like a 37-foot Midnight Express that we would use to transport. We had an undercover house in the Florida Keys. So we did a lot of transportation. cases where we were meeting people in different countries, you know, providing the transportation for some of the cartels to bring, you know, cocaine and marijuana. And so it was a good time. You got a lot of travel and a lot of good experience. What was the, like, I mean, I know that you were a junior guy at this time, but what was your sense of, like, the DEA's strategy

and the war on drugs at that time was it really just to take the drugs off the street by nabbing these big, you know, making these big drug busts? Yeah, well, DEA, I mean, they always would refer to DEA as going after the biggest and the baddest drug traffickers on the planet. So we tried to focus on, you know, large-scale organizations or, you know, top-level groups that were distributing, you know, cocaine, heroin, marijuana, whatever. And we didn't just try to arrest those people. We tried to knock out the whole organization because, you know, even today, if you take out one guy, somebody else is going to step right up. and take their place. But if you can knock out the whole organization,

you know, cripple them, take their money, arrest everybody, you're making, you know, an impact. So, you know, back then, you know, the Caribbean was the main entry point of cocaine into the United States. You know, Carlos later established Norman's K there, which, you know, they portray him below some of the movies and in Narcos too. And, you know, that just in and, Florida and the East Coast with cocaine.

So you were always trying to target those transportation cells, you know, the money laundering cells and try to knock out, you know, that entire organization. I don't want to gloss over. You mentioned an interesting case, Operation Millennium. Was that around this time frame? Operation Millennium was in 1999. Oh, okay. We're jumping forward then.

Yeah. Yeah. forward, but we can talk about it now or later. I mean, just briefly, it was kind of a joint operation that we did with the Columbia National Police and some other U.S. intelligence agencies. And it was a really significant case back in the day because we ultimately indicted, I think, 44 people and extradited, you know, almost 40 people from Colombia, including Fabio Cho, who was actually still in prison on that case, who was one of the founders or one of the one of the main people of the Ochoa clan and the Median cartels.

So again, Colombia, again, no shortage of cases and high-level cartels to work. I have heard some, like, interesting stories about these extradition cases where, and I want to hear your perspective, if any of this sounds true or not, that, you know, oftentimes the person that's being indicted is kind of like ready to get out of the game, and we will send a government representative down there to, Columbia to meet with their lawyers. And then the thing is that they all want to surrender in Panama because Panama has no death penalty built into their extradition treaty. Do you have any recollections about that process and how that works? Well, I mean, what you're talking about, it has happened

a few times. A lot of times people who are indicted in Colombia, they'll go to Panama and adjoining country there, just so they don't have to go through the extradition. process because if you get arrested in Colombia or say even surrendered to authorities and you're going through the extradition process you're going to sit in a Colombian prison for you know when extradition first started you know it

it was reinstituted in 1997 for crimes committed after December 17th 1997 so in all essence it didn't it didn't really take place until 1998 but so a lot of guys would go to Panama

so that they wouldn't have to sit in prison for a year they would surrender and we would get them on a plane or they would make their own arrangements we would get them to the U.S. and boom, here they are. They can start cooperating. They can do whatever they needed to do. But it's in Colombia and I think in pretty much every country, there is no death penalty. There are provisions that are incorporated into the extradition treaties with these countries that most of them is that you can't serve. more than 30 years. You can, but it's unusual that you're going to see somebody sentenced to more than 30 years.

And also, part of the extradition requirement for, like, Columbia, for them to agree to extradite a Colombian national, they can't get the death penalty. That's off the table. So, in essence, the max, for lack of a better term, would say 30 years, the maximum sentence they're going to get is 30 years. So there is no death penalty. Otherwise, they wouldn't allow their citizens to be extradited. I mean, regardless of what your thoughts are about the death penalty per se, I mean, it is pretty wild that you can be a drug lord.

And the maximum sentence you get is 30 years. I mean, not just an international drug ward, but all of the things that come along with that, the money laundering to the executions, right? Yep. So to use your example, now there have been several cases. You know, I can think of several off the top of my head without mentioning names where traffickers, go to Panama and they negotiated or they surrendered and they got ultimately extradited to the U.S. But it's if if major traffickers were smart like that and they knew that they were going to at some point be extradited to the state. So a lot of them think they're never going to get caught

so they don't do this. But you could quietly and you use your example, go to Panama, quietly, you know, have your attorneys get with DEA or FBI or whatever, surrender, get extradited, come here to the States, have your little surrogates on the ground, cooperate, and, you know, depending on how you do it, people might not even know you're, you're even in custody in the whole time. You've surrendered, you're cooperating, you're cutting a deal, and you're lowering that potential 30-year sentence, you know, quite a bit. I mean, in some cases, maybe running a car dealership in Albuquerque a year later, right? Well, it's been none to happen.

So in your case, Operation Millennium, how did that sort of go down? I mean, I think you said you extradited 40 people on that one. Yeah, it was, that was kind of like an old school mafia show. So you can imagine there was a place in Bogota that these traffickers used to go to. And these were like the highest level traffickers anywhere. I mean, these were like the biggest of the biggest, Fabio Cho, Diego Montoya, you know, many like really, really high level guys. And they would go to this apartment.

And they would just sit around in there and talk all day long about doing this load and doing that load and sending cocaine here and money coming back there. So we were able to, without getting into too much detail, we were able to kind of get bugs listening devices into that place. So we were hearing everything that these guys were talking about. And it was really remarkable to hear, you know, the amount of cocaine that these guys were smuggling, where they were sending it, how they were concealing it.

And we used all that evidence, which we had. I judicialized with the Columbia National Police there. And we ended up indicting, I think it was 44 of the biggest traffickers in Columbia at the time. And most of them got extradited. There was one or two in Mexico. But most of them got arrested, if not all of them at some point, and they all got extradited. So let's start to talk about, you know, you told me that you spent 12 years in Columbia, tell us about your first assignment getting sent down there and where at what point does the

cali cartel start to come up onto your radar well i mean the cali cartel and the median cartel came up on your radar the day you stepped foot in miami in 1988 because those were the two cartels that were dominating the cocaine trade back then i mean they were pretty much the only game in town they you know without exaggerating they were responsible probably for 100 percent of the cocaine coming out of Columbia into the U.S. between both of those cartels. So the minute you got there, you knew who the Cali cartel and the Medellin cartel were. And I had worked on several transportation case, maritime smuggling cases where we were targeting, you know, kind of mid-level lieutenants or transportation coordinators for both the Cali and Medellian cartel. So I had a pretty decent background

on on who Cali was, who Medellin was. I had got there. well, yeah, Escobar was still alive in 88. So they were, you know, we were targeting those guys. So when I got out of the academy, like I said, to be a DE agent, to me, there was only one place to go, and that was Miami. So after six years of working in Miami and targeting some of these cartels, I said, well, if I really want to be a DEA agent, I got to go to, I got to go to Columbia. I mean, I got to get, I got to get in the shit. I got to get down there and start working against the, you know, the Cali-Oemitting cartel. And by that time, Escobar had been killed.

So I was selected to go to Columbia and I started working on the Cali cartel with my partner, Dave Mitchell. But, you know, funny story. Just trying to get into Columbia, I had applied probably in mid-93 to go down to Columbia. And I'll take you back to when I said about, you know, the long hair and the earrings and everything. And I had applied and the first selection came out. I didn't get selected. I was like, what the hell can I not get selected? I mean, you know, worked on the, you know, Cali targets.

I know all the players. You know, I speak a little bit of Spanish. You had good evaluations, everything. And then I called down to Steve Murphy. You know, he's one of the agents in Narcos, Season 1 and season 2. him in Javier Pena. And they said, Murph, what, you know, how can I not get selected? He's like, hey, man, Joe Toft, who was the country at Deshae there, he's like, hey,

Toff runs a tight ship, I'm paraphrasing here. So he's, he runs a tight ship. You know, he's probably afraid you're going to roll into the embassy with your board shorts, your flip-flops and a surfboard on your shoulder. And, you know, you got to get that haircut, bro. You got to, you know, you got to clean it up a little bit. So I was like, shit, you know, six years I had my hair. By that time, it was like, yeah, it was about six, five and a half years.

So I went out at lunch one day and I just got my haircut. They lopped off like a good foot my hair. And I walked back into the, into the DEA office. And, you know, like the secretary, people were looking at me like, dude, did you have like a breakdown? I mean, what happened? Why did you get your haircut? And I'm like, I don't really know. I was like in shock.

And about a week later, I got a call from Joe Toff. And he said, hey, I heard you got your haircut. And I said, yes, sir, I did. You know, show you and I want to come to Columbia. I want to work. He goes, yeah, don't worry about it. You know, things will work out for you. And then I finally got selected on the next go-around and ended up in Columbia.

So, yeah, I had to cut my hair to go to Columbia, man. Holy shit. Well, I was going to say maybe the reason was because you look, be even more Irish than I do. And that could be a bit of a problem down there. Well, you know, and it's funny you say that because, and here's a, here's another story, too, is that, you know, when we got selected, we had a lot of the supervisors in Miami and in headquarters and even some of our friends were like, dude, how the hell are you guys, you know, and I'm like six two, six two and a half. Mitchell was my partner. He's like six three. He's like, dude,

how the hell of got you guys going to work in Cali? You can't blend in there. You guys stick out like a sore thumb. You're not going to be able to blend in. And we said, you know, hey, we'll, we'll figure it out. We'll make it happen. And when I first got to Columbia, like the first day, and I talked to my boss, who was Ruben Prieto at the time. And I said, like, hey, you know, when can we go to Cali?

I got some leads. I got to follow up on. We had some pretty good assets that we were working in Miami that, you know, had direct contact with the Rodriguez-old of the Weila brothers, two of the founders of the heads of the Cali cartel. and he said, hey, well, you know, we're not sending anybody to Cali right now. I'm like, what do you mean? I mean, how can we investigate the Cali cartel if we can't go to Cali?

It's like, well, you're going to have to do it from Bogota. What kind of strategy is that? That's like the craziest thing I've ever heard. And he said, well, we're not sending anybody to Cali right now because it's too dangerous. Why is it so dangerous? I mean, I mean, I knew why, but I'm like, well, what do you mean? he said, well, we had two two like veteran Hispanic agents

who were working over there before we got there and they had their photo taken while they were there and they were coming out of I think it was out of like a, it's coming out of an office building and the photograph made its way back to the embassy where, you know, the ambassador saw it, the EA saw it and it was

perceived as like an implied threat that, hey, and the person who brought in said, look, these guys in this photo are DEA agents which they were. It's a pretty good photo actually. And he said the cartel knows where they stay. They know where they eat. They know where they rent their cars.

They know everything about them. So when DEA heard that, they were like, that's it. The embassy, you know, said, nobody else is going to Cali until this thing kind of passes over or, you know, until we deem it's safe to go back. So that was my, like, welcome to Columbia when I got there, all excited to go to Cali and work on the Cali cartel. And they said, no, you can't go. It's too dangerous. Besides, you don't blend in. Did you have any sense of the U.S. military presence?

Because I know J.S. had guys down there doing, like, surveillance and working with the Colombian police, I believe. Yeah, they were there. They had a pretty good presence there. There was, they were also there because there were several U.S. citizens who were taken hostage by the FARC, which was one of the guerrilla groups that was operating down there. And they were down there a lot, you know, advising them, training some of the, like, their equivalent of like HRT teams.

Yeah. There were also a couple of big bases there, Appiah and a couple other Ptolemaida where, you know, you had some U.S. military forces there that, again, doing training and, in a lot of different stuff, which, you know, I don't want to get into too much what the military was doing there. But that was basically it. But yeah, they had a pretty large presence there. Go check out our previous interview years ago with George Hand, who was one of the operators down there. You guys will enjoy that one.

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Yeah, so it's a good thing to bring out because a lot of people probably don't realize is that, you know, when you're overseas. the ambassador is the king. He, he is the law and what he says goes. So he pretty much dictates what we can do and what we can't do. So yeah, I mean, we get there. And because of, you know, his, what happened with the photograph and his determination in conjunction with the EA is that, you know, we can't go to Kali. So, you know, we're busy photocopying a lot of documents from seized raids. We're doing this. You know, I'm talking up offices and trying to get sources and get some information. So me and my partner, Dave, we just keep prodding like, hey, we have to go to Cali.

We have to go to Cali. And like I said, we had one good asset who was meeting directly with Hilberto and Miguel Rodriguez, the heads of the Cali cartel in Cali. So I said, look, we got a couple locations. We got to follow up on. We can't investigate the Cali cartel from the embassy. So after, you know, a week or 10 days or two weeks of coaxing, we were finally able to go to Cali. But this is what they tell us.

They said, okay, we're going to approve you guys to go to Cali. We're going to start sending people back. But you can't leave the base without an escort. You must be accompanied by, you know, police or military officials at all times. And, oh, we had to be back by nightfall, right? We couldn't even spend the night. We had to fly over, try and establish liaison with the police and the military, and then fly back that night.

And then, of course, we got the, you know, the whole, you know, DEA, no cowboy shit, you know, no unilateral action. And, you know, the man's field amendment prohibits you from participating in arrests in a foreign country. So the whole nine yards. So we, our first trip to Cali was a day trip where we met with the head, the colonel in charge of the military search block. who was in charge of going after the Calais cartel. And we also met with the police colonel who was in charge of the police search blocks.

So there were two independent search block forces going after the Calais cartel. That must have been difficult to navigate. I mean, because I had met, I mean, you have two different units with the same mission. That always results in some sort of tension. It does, but it was kind of an all-hands-on-deck approach. Even on the U.S. side, you know, the CIA was involved. We were involved. Everybody was on board. And, you know, the agency had more of a relationship with the military. So we, and because of what, you know, what happened with Palo Escobar, the police, and we worked very closely with the we, meaning DEA, you know, with the police to take down Escobar.

So we kind of started to drift a little bit away from the military and establish liaison. and, you know, a working relationship with the police, the police search block. But as we soon found out, they were heavily infiltrated by the Calais Cartel. And, you know, our main liaison, who was a captain at the search block, was one of the Cali cartels most coveted spies. So they pretty much had eyes on us 24-7 no matter where we went. And, you know, and we didn't know it at the time. we found out, you know, a year later that this guy was actually an asset. We had our suspicions.

I mean, all the raids we were doing were compromised. You know, it was super frustrating, you know, and it's like some of the times you see, like in the movies, right? You hit a place and we'd go in and there'd be like a cup of coffee there, like still steaming, you know, like the typical shit, you know, food on the half-eaten food and like there's nobody here. obviously it got compromised. So it was very frustrating.

The corruption was systemic throughout the Colombian security forces. And it really complicated what we were trying to do. And so, I mean, dealing with this compromise that you didn't even know that you had initially, how do you start making progress on this case? I mean, it sounds like an uphill battle, to say the least. It was an extremely uphill battle. over time, like I go back to what the ambassador told us, right? We had to pretty much violate every order that the ambassador gave us, and even DEA.

We had to start going off base. We had to eventually we got safe houses in the city. We were doing unilateral surveillance. We were doing pretty much everything unilaterally. And then once we got the information, then we pretty much were lying as like how we got it. You know, we're saying we need to do an operation here. So it took us a year, pretty much, on the ground to finally start to figure out how to circumvent the corruption there. And, you know, once we got Jorge Salcedo, who was, you know, he was ahead of security for the, for the Cali cartel.

We were able to recruit him as an asset. And he laid the groundwork about everything. And that's how we found out about the corrupt captain, some of the other corrupt. people within the security forces. And that's when we really, you know, really had to modify our M-O-1 on what we were doing. And we were, like I said, we were basically operating unilaterally. Yeah, I mean, it sounds like at the end of the day, you had to get on the ground and do cop shit. Like there's no getting around it.

We, toward the end, some of the operations we were doing, we were meeting with Salcedo. We were doing our own unilateral surveillance. We were planning, you know, operations, how we were going to get to the buildings. Like, and the last one we did was really, you know, it's just out of a movie. You know, we had to, we had to insert into like a flood control channel. We had to, you know, come down a mountain. It was, it was really, you know, it was tough terrain. And, but we did all this.

And then we would have to, we'd have to, we'd have to. pretty much lie to the prosecutors about what we were doing. We couldn't tell them what we were rating. You know, we tell them, well, we'll let you know when we get there. You know, we could only brief the head of the Columbia National Police and, like, the Attorney General on who the target was. We never told them the locations. It was, I mean, you talk about, what's the word I'm looking for? Compartmentalization, yeah, of information and, like, need to know, you know, we're foreigners in the country and we're having to go through all.

this stuff where we can't even tell, you know, the main people that we're working with, what we're doing, where we're going, how we're going to get there. We're just, you know, meet us here, get in the truck, follow us, and we'll lead you to where we're going. And that's no exaggeration. I mean, that's exactly how we were doing things toward the end, just to combat the corruption. Do you want to lay out that? You mentioned one of the later raids that was,

you went into a flight controlled airspace. And I mean, do you want to tell us a little bit more about how that transpired? The coming down the mountain one? Yeah, yeah. So this is actually the operation where, well, let me backtrack a little, just to give you, like, to lay the roundwork. So after we got Salcedo, again, he used to head of security for the Kelly Cartel, we did a raid in July of 95 on an apartment and there's a whole backstory to it but I'll

keep it as brief as I can. No, it's okay. You have as much time as you want. Yeah. So we were able to identify the building by doing surveillance up from the mountains and seeing which lights went off last because as we talked about like in the pre-interview, you know, Miguel used to stay up until 4 o'clock, 4.30 in the morning talking with European crime families, mafia bosses, the Russian mob. And so we were able to pinpoint the apartment.

And we did a raid the next day. And we were in the apartment basically for probably pretty darn close to 12 hours. And we were looking for hidden compartments. We knew he was there. The source told us he was there. All the signs, everything that we had gathered ahead of time in our recon and our surveillance. indicated he was there, you know, his assistant was there. He had like a 25-line telephone switching station, which would route calls from anywhere,

and you couldn't trace it. It would come back to like a place downtown when he was, you know, 15 miles away. So everything, you know, we found, we actually found, again, I'm talking about the corruption, we found the license plate of our car in the desk. And it said, in Spanish, it said, Blue Toyota Land Cruiser had the license plate, and it said the car that carries the gringoes, which was us, which was the EF,

which was me and my partner. So at one point, and they show this very well in Narcoe season three, we're able to locate a desk, and inside the desk is a hidden compartment. And, you know, we're knocking on the desk and, like, looking for latches, how could there be a hidden compartment?

It was a big desk, but how can it be a hidden compartment here? So one of the agents here with Jerry Salomon, he picks the desk up and he crashes onto the floor and it breaks apart. And in the back, there's three briefcases we find full of documents, like fucking explosive documents with corruption. And in the briefcases, ultimately there's a list of, check this shit out, 2,800 names of corrupt officials, police, military, judges, governors, you know, journalists. The Rosetta Stone, yeah. Yeah, yeah, well, yeah, exactly. It was it was the, you know, the Pandora's box, too.

So we find that. And, you know, the captain, now this is a year later, where I'm telling you now when we first got there, the captain is like he's nosing around and he keeps following us and he's looking at us. And we're able to pinpoint where we think there's a hidden compartment and let me tell you what you could see that like the architects who built these compartments like into walls they're called caletas you know these these rooms you know they're

amazing they're i mean some of them you could i i could still be there 30 years later and it'd be not you wouldn't be able to find you can you tell us a little bit about that like go you said it's coletas that's called that like yeah like how are they concealed and how do you open them up well I'll tell you the ray where we actually got them coming down the mountain there was so you can picture this and I wish I had a photo of it and I do somewhere but so imagine going into the master bedroom of your house right and in the master bedroom you have like built in wall you know built in cabinetry right where you would have you know hangers you would have dresser drawers and stuff you know to put your socks underwear shorts whatever so in this this particular case, they would remove, and they had the one dresser, had four cabinets on each side, so eight total. They would pull the four drawers out, and they were like, they're like the big Mosler safe cap, you know, so they were like about this deep. And in the back was a door and a big concrete door, eight inches thick, and it would swing open and it went into a room.

and the room was it couldn't have been more than like three or four feet by three or four feet it was small but they had it piped in like the air conditioning was coming in so it was basically a room for him to go and hide so when he would get in this vault or this coleta there were four like steel bar horizontal bars that would close and kind of lock him from the inside but he obviously he can open him from the inside So once that door was closed, then they would put those dresser drawers back in. So when you walked into the bedroom, all you would see was like a dresser. You wouldn't know, unless you had advanced intel, there was no way that you would know there was any kind of hidden compartment or secret room back there. So like I said, you could, I could have been there until this day 30 years later and you never find it.

So, and it will jump ahead. We'll get back to this on how we. actually caught them that day. But, um, so we, we finally get word after literally like 11 hours in there that day. We get word that the, the hiding spot in this apartment, the different apartment is in the bathroom. So we're like, how could it be in the bathroom? And there were like four or five bathrooms in this apartment.

So, you know, we're like knocking on walls. We're doing everything. So finally I opened the, like the sink, the cabinet door to the sink. And it hits the toilet. and you know and we're so like exhausted now again this is where you're on the ground we're working you know and i'll kid you not you mean in the lot line in the book very well you know 18 20 hours a day we got no sleep or we're up for days in a row where you know we're exhausted so i'm thinking like man look at this like shoddy construction how can they build you know something where it hits the

toilet. It's just horrible. So finally I started thinking, you know what, it's probably because they had to modify the wall to build the compartment. So we're finally able to locate where we think the compartment is, and it was there. But the captain, the corrupt captain, he was talking to the cartel while we were there, kind of updating them on what we were doing. You know, we found the documents. So they had a pretty good read on what we were doing, but we didn't know that at the time. And as we're, you know, we start drilling holes into the wall. We find a void. Ruben Prieto, one of the other agents there, gets a sledge hammer. He starts knocking the wall down. We're like, dude, we got him. We're like high five. And, you know, and then you can't make this up.

The prosecutor basically bursts into the bathroom and tells us that, we are conducting a unilateral operation violating Colombian law. We're damaging property. He basically arrests us. Shuts the ray down. And we're inches away probably another minute or two we would have had them. Shuts the ray down, goes to the front door, locks the door, puts the keys in his pocket, takes out his typewriter, and starts typing up a complaint against the four of us, the four agents that were there.

and basically shuts the ray down. We leave. There's a lot of other details, but check this out. So as we're at the airport waiting to go back to Bogota, we're thinking like our informant's dead, you know, we're probably going to get, we got arrested, the ambassador's probably going to throw us out of the country. We're screwed. We get a word that they're going to try a rescue operation to get Miguel out of the compartment out of the Coletta.

So make a long story short, the corrupt captain. is able to go back into the apartment, they kind of, you know, destroy the Coletta. Miguel gets out ahead of the Cali cartel. And he basically, the cop, the captain, walks him down the steps into the garage, puts him in the trunk of the car, and drives him away.

So that's how we missed him the first time. Unreal. And so that's your one in Columbia. Holy shit, man. And so what happens next? What's the next step for you guys? Oh, I mean, we go back to Bogota. The ambassador has a tirade.

You know, he threatens to throw us out of the country. And then he says, which caught us by surprise, he says, well, you're lucky that the police found what they did or you guys would have been gone. You'd have been on the first flight back to Miami. And that's when we found out about the documents and the, you know, the 2,800 corrupt officials. We learned that the compartment was broken into and Miguel was extracted. But we didn't learn exactly how that happened until days later, a week later, until we were able to get back in touch with our asset and go to Cali. And we finally figured out what was going on.

But, yeah, so that was the level of corruption that we were dealing with. You know, anytime we left the police, not anytime, but often when we left the base to do our stuff, if we were followed by the Cali cartel, you know, they were surveilling us all the time. You know, our safe houses, too. We were always constantly worried that, you know, they were going to find out where we were and, you know, maybe try to do something against us.

Even though we thought it was unlikely, you're always, you know, had that in the back of your head. And, you know, at the time, there were, there were no Americans in Cal, right? So me and my partner, right, we can't blend in. We're six foot two. You know, it's anytime anybody saw, anywhere, they immediately be associated us to DEA or CIA.

And if you were a poor, you know, British backpacker who was in Columbia at the time and they saw you, they associated them with, you know, DEA or CIA because there were just, there was no American presence in Cali. So it was, at times, like, overwhelming, the stress, just, you know, operating in that environment, almost like behind the, you know, the Berlin Wall that it was, you know, all eyes were on you no matter where you went and what you did. So what was the next step for you guys? I mean, this is kind of, I mean, it's a major setback.

You missed the guy because of corruption within the ranks. And then the ambassador choose your ass too. I mean, how do you like recover from that and continue the investigation? Well, to make matters worse, like we said, we didn't hear from our asset for several days. So we think he's dead. or likely being tortured or what. So we're thinking the worst, obviously. And there's a couple details I won't get into,

but I haven't been to book because it's a big spoiler if I bring it out now. So we're able to go back to Cali. We're able to get back with Salcedo. And he tells us, he goes, look, I'm one of the prime suspects. A lot of the people around Miguel don't trust. trust me. They think it's me. Although Miguel was 100% thought it wasn't him. He, you know, so he still had Miguel's kind of blessing, but he was on thin ice. So we're able to ultimately pinpoint where he's at to two to two buildings. And this is a pretty good, pretty funny story,

I'll tell you. So, um, so we're surveilling the buildings at night. We're about a half a mile away, about 1,000 meters away. And there's a statue. There's a very famous statue in Kali where we're at. It's like a park where at night people gather. They drink beer. They have food. And you can watch the burning sugar cane in the distance and watch the light.

So we, you know, and it was at night too, and we always had hats and stuff on. So we're doing surveillance there. And we had a bunch of other intel to indicate it was one of these two buildings. So, you know, we're watching the lights again to see which one goes off. And one of the little tidbits of information we got was from Salcedo was that there were two black maids, two Afro-Colombian maids that he had imported after the raid. He got rid of his assistant. He got rid of the maids. He brought a new, like, staff in.

So it's about one o'clock in the morning, and I'm looking through my binoculars, and a light comes on. And then I see these two maids, like, working in the kitchen. And Miguel was hypoglycemic. so he had to eat like certain foods at certain times. And I'm like, it looks like they're like cooking or washing dishes. I go, that has to be that that's the apartment.

That's got to be because every, we had a bunch of other intel that confirmed it. So my partner, Dave, is, he has these special like KGB binoculars he got. And I used to give him shit about them all the time because I said, Dave, those things are worthless.

They're a piece of shit. He got them out of some spy catalog. And he's like, I can't see anything with these. Are you sure it's amazing? I'm like, I'm positive. I'm looking at him. That's the place.

And he's trying to adjust his little James Bond glasses. You know, so I'm like, that's it. This is it. We got to start planning the raid. So when we left that night, it was about 3 o'clock in the morning. We left. They go, hey, Dave, let me see your super, super spy spec KGB binoculars. You got out of the spike out.

So he gives them to me. And I take them and I wind up and I throw him like as hard as I could down. this hill. You know, and they just like tumble into the abyss. And he's like, my KGB binoculars. I go, Dave, that's where they belong here. A piece of shit. You can use them. Get your DEA binoculars back. So, so that's how we ended up finding that apartment. And then we had we planned to rate. So me and Dave, you know, we go out. We start recon in the area. We had Intel on from the asset to come down this drainage ditch and through the mountain. But, you know, we check it out.

And it's like, man, this is like, it's a high risk operation coming down that mountain that pitch black. It was pretty, it was a pretty gnarly terrain. But, yeah, we did it all on our own. The Colombian, they had no idea what we were doing, what we were surveilling. We planned out a meeting spot. Nobody knew about it. We had our route of approach.

Nobody knew except us to. we had our insertion point nobody knew we had the canal so we basically planned everything and then we had to you know brief the head of the clumbian national police general sarum i don't know who was who was great and so check this out so because of the corruption we have to tell him because he always like to come on the operation afterwards to get his photo taken with the guy right i mean he's the head of the clombia national police and you know hey he was he was he was very good at the at marketing and selling the police story. So he wanted to be there like he had been

when we arrested Gilberto. So we have to tell him like, look, you can't come to, you can't come to Cali for the operation because the Cali cartel is monitoring your movements. And if you come to Cali, they're going to know we're doing an operation.

But the real reason was is because his pilot was corrupt. And any time, Serrano was, coming to Cali, the pilot would call the Cali Cartel. Tell him, hey, Serrano's coming. So they knew something was going on. So we had to basically tell him, hey, you got to stay in Bogota.

And you know what? The thing was like, hey, I completely understand. Don't worry. I'll come afterwards. So we had to take that precaution. We had to, we had a Fiscal, like a Colombian prosecutor with the warrant that we didn't tell her where we were going or who the target was. we said we'll tell you when we get there same thing and then we had to brief the attorney general

and we said look the only way we're going to get this guy because of the apartments is we got to get permission like a no knock warrant we got to knock the door to which they didn't they didn't do in Colombia because especially with the cali cartel these guys lived lived in a lot of mansions and these pricey places they didn't want to damage like what we were doing they didn't want damage property you know we had already been arrested once so we got permission to the door down. So ultimately we, you know, we get the team, we get the group, we take this really secure this route through the city, we go to the insertion point, we get into this flood canal, you know, the prosecutor, it was a female, she breaks her heel, you know, people are falling

behind, and people can't get down the mountain. It's like spiraling out of control real quick because like I said, it was a pretty, pretty rough terrain. So ultimately we end up hitting the building with hitting the guys the head of the Cali cartel with six people. How many did you start out with? Probably 30 to 40. Wow.

Six people, two of which are Americans, right? So we hit the place, we knocked the door down. And one of the, they're the equivalent of like the Navy SEAL. They were like the special commandos for the, Navy. He, going back to the story now with the four drawers, we hit the place where scattered, the apartment was about 4,000 square feet. It was massive. He goes into the bedroom. And as Miguel Rodriguez, the head of the Calvay cartel, is stepping foot into that compartment to close

the door, this guy grabs him and basically pulls him out of the, out of the Coletta, out of the secret compartment and, you know, walks them back to where, you know, me and Jerry were there at the time and, you know, kind of plants them right in front of us. And, you know, we look back and we said, like, you know what, have we not got that permission to knock the door down? And we had to, and the reason why we had to come down the mountain was because they'd catch you on the road. The scouts would see you. Right, because they had perimeter security on the roads, like two or three separate rings of security. And these cartel guys, the Cali guys, they lived on like a road that was always one way in

and one way out and backed up to the mountain. So in their mind, the only way to get there was down this one-way street coming in. And they had their rings of security. So there's no way you can get anywhere near there with troop transport trucks. So we decided, hey, we have to come down that mountain. And that was the only way to get there. And we did. but yeah, have we not knocked the door down

and it took us another minute or two to get in, we thought we would have never found them. That's pretty unreal. So you snatched that dude up and how does that all go down? I mean, with the prosecutor that broke her heel and all this other stuff that happened in the interlude, the infiltration process. How does it kind of play out politically?

Well, if it didn't work, probably that. You know, probably would have ended bad for us. But she didn't show up until probably 15 or 20 minutes after we had arrested them because it took them her that long to, because people were helping her, you know. And again, it's pitch black. Yeah, yeah. You know. And it wasn't like any fault of hers because, and we had worked with her before. And she was a warrior, man.

She was as good as they came. But she had no idea what she was in. for that night, right? This was like a military operation, yeah. It's exactly what it was. And we told her we were like going to, you know, do chemical inspection somewhere. So she comes all decked out. Check it out.

She has this white. It wasn't white for long because she felt was mud and dirt. White jumpsuit on like red high heel shoes and like a nice, like silk blouse. Very professional. She let, you know, there's a prosecutor. And man, when she found out that, you know, know, in that drainage dish and it was muddy and it was wet and it was dark and she was falling. And, you know, even some of the other, the cops couldn't make it either.

But yeah, she was pissed. But so I always said, I don't know whether she was happy, more happy that Miguel was arrested or that she made it to like solid ground there in the apartment. So. But yeah, I mean, in the end, everybody was happy. You know, the head of the Calais cartel was arrested. He was the third out of the fourth to fall. So, you know, the cartel was on its heels. The Columbia National Police were making progress.

They were, you know, they were making headlines nationally for, you know, fighting the war on drugs and arresting the kingpin. So, yeah, it worked out fine. But, like, you brought up a good point. Had it not worked, yeah, we probably would have been in some deep ship. And how did number four get captured? The fourth guy surrendered. Gotcha.

He, uh, the Miguel's brother, Hilberto, we arrested in June of 95. Miguel, uh, in July, Jose Santa Cruz was arrested. Uh, and there's a lot of backstory on this one, too. He was arrested at a restaurant, uh, in Bogota. Uh, Miguel was arrested in August 95. And then Paco Herrera, the fourth horse one of the cartel was arrested or surrendered in September of 96. So, yeah, it took us, you know, from the time we stepped foot in Columbia the first time until we left, it was, you know, just shy, a couple months shy of three years that we were, you know, at this.

But at the same, I mean, it sounds like you spent quite a bit more time in Columbia after that. Yeah, I did two more tours down there. I was there from 99 to 2002, which was the Millennium Operation, Millennium Operation. And then I went back in 2004 until 2010. So in total, it was just over 12 years of total time on the ground in Columbia. Throughout your time in Colombia and even back to Miami, I mean, do you have any thoughts about the general idea or concept of like the war on drugs and what that means politically, socially? What did you kind of come away from that experience with? Well, I mean, I always look at it as, you know, and everybody has their own opinions on whether drugs should be legalized or not.

And the war-up drugs, I've heard, you know, so many times it's an abject failure. But, you know, my attitude or philosophy or however you want to describe it always was you look what's happening. Just take today, for example, today meeting, you know, 2024. you have 100,000 people dying of fentanyl a year. You have constant, you know, drug overdoses. You have a homeless crisis. And I always tell people, imagine if like DEA or local police or whoever you want to throw into this equation, if they weren't out there investigating, you know, drug trafficking and going after these drug dealers and drug traffickers,

there would be complete anarchy you know the the number of overdose deaths if there wasn't any kind of enforcement would would skyrocket the healthcare system would be overwhelmed you know and

you would have a lot of you know crime people trying to fuel their half you know crime would go through the roof so you know that's what I always you know I used to tell these congressional delegations and stuff that came to Columbia you know do you guys really think you're making an impact well shit well what if we weren't here

Imagine the impact that would be going on. So that's how I always like to describe it. Are we winning? I don't know. I don't know if you could ever win that war, but at least you're doing something to try to address the problem. I think back when I was a kid in the 1990s, you know, the idea that like if you do drugs once you're going to die

was kind of like propaganda. But today, the way that drugs are being laced with fentanyl, it's kind of true. like you could do something thinking you're doing one drug and the reality is it's glazed with fentanyl and you're going to die. Exactly. And what's the motto now? One pill can kill. That's what's being marketed out there.

And that's not an exaggeration because it's happening 100,000 times a year to mainly, you know, young people. So, you know, and I'm sure there's a lot of people that don't do drugs just because it is illegal, right? People want to try to obey the law. You know, you apply for jobs. You have to take polygraph tests. You have to take urine, urinalysis. So if you're going to, you know, and look at some of the experiments that have gone on, you know, in Portland or Seattle where they've legalized, you know, small quantity of personally used drugs. It's a disaster.

So if you did that across the board and just, you know, like people want to legalize, you know, marijuana or cocaine. It would be, I don't know, in my opinion, you know, again, my opinion from being in law force, right? It would be a disaster. What do you think? I mean, it's interesting because for people who are younger who don't remember the war on drugs, you know, it was every bit as in the public's consciousness like the global war on terror was during its time. What are like some of the things that you thought the U.S. did right and some of the things you thought the U.S. did wrong in hindsight? In the war on drugs? Yeah.

Yeah. well i mean i'll probably get a lot of grief over this one but i think you know some of the the minimum mandatory sentencing uh i thought you know when you if you arrested you know uh people with a certain amount of drugs they got a certain amount of time right they're that's what they call the minimum mandatory sentences so i think back in the day i can't remember i'm going to get it wrong but like over five kilos of cocaine was uh like a minimum mandatory 10 or 15 years in prison. So you were getting people locked up and they were doing that time.

And there was, you know, if you got 15 years in federal prison at the time, minimum mandatory sentence, you were doing 12 and a half, you know, maybe with gain time, you know, a year or 52 days a year, whatever it was earned. But so you were spending a significant amount of time in prison. But again, you know, you have all kind of people. saying that that's disproportionate and the targeted minorities and so on and so forth. But it definitely had an impact because people knew if I get arrested with one kilo or I'm doing this amount of time. If I get five kilos, I'm doing this amount of time. Or if I get caught with

5,000 kilos on a load, I'm buried. The problem with mandatory minimum sentencing, in my opinion, again, was that, yeah, you have that, which, you know, someone gets caught with five. or 10 keys. Right. It's clear what they're at what their intent. But then you'll have a guy who gets caught shoplifting and he has a gram of marijuana in his pocket and he's going to jail for 20 years.

Yeah, but that's not accurate because the threshold for marijuana it was way, it was more than, way more than that. I mean, it was, you know, I don't even know. Was it on like a third offense, though? Well, they had that three strikes. They had those three strikes. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. So, yeah, if you had three convictions, yeah, you got hammered for sure. But, you know, extradition, I think, was another, was another big, big win for the government, you know, getting extradition out of Colombia. I mean, you know, Pablo Escobar said it best, you know, better a tomb in Colombia than a jail cell in the U.S. And, you know, and he went to war with the Colombian government. on two occasions that lasted years where he was, you know, he killed a minister of justice.

Brought down an airliner? They brought down the Avianca flight. They blew up the Doss building. They assassinated Luis Carlos Golan in 89. It was a presidential candidate. They killed Guillermo Kano, the main editor of the Columbia newspaper, because all these people were speaking out for extradition.

That's how terrified that, you know, they were of extradition. And I look at Carlos later, one of the Medellin cartel guys going back to the movie Blow, who would Diego Delgado in the movie, he got extradited to Columbia, I mean from Columbia, and he initially got,

I mean, he's, he, I think he got released recently, but these guys did, you know, multiple, multiple years, 30 plus years, you know, so I thought that was a big win too. And, you know, you look at Chapo Guzman, right? the guy is in a Mexican prison and tunnels his way out, he escapes. You know, I can guarantee you he's not tunneling his way out of the correctional facility in the United States. So you're getting those guys off the street and you're getting them off the street for quite a long time if they get extra died back to the state.

So that's another, was another, I think, big, big win for U.S. Tell us about your last trip down to Columbia. it sounds like it was a bit of like now you're more in like a leadership and managerial type of role. Yeah. So the last time I went down in 2004, I was the assistant regional director for the Andean region, which encompassed, you know, Columbia, Ecuador, Venezuela, Peru. And, you know, for my second time there until then, we started targeting the North Valley cartel, which, you know, was one of the main cartels that came up after we took down.

Cali. And, you know, so we were targeting them. And, you know, by that time, I had a pretty good background on, you know, who the players were, obviously, were spending that much time there. And I had a lot of sources and a lot of assets that were still on the ground. And a lot of the cops that we worked with back then, now they all came into leadership positions. They were, you know, General Naranjo, who I worked with as a mate, he was the head of the Columbia National Police. Some of the other cops we work with after Nadano. They came to be the Columbia National Police, the head of the entire police. So we had a lot of good contacts.

We were able to get a lot done just because of the personal relationships and the dedication to that the Columbia National Police had going after a lot of these cartels. And rightfully so, I mean, I bash Colombian security forces a lot because of the corruption. But you also have to point out on the other side. that there were a lot, a lot of very hardworking, honest Colombian brave officials that wanted to do the right thing. And, you know, no one has really sacrificed more than the people of Columbia and Colombian security forces in the war on drugs with, you know,

thousands killed, you know, fighting drug trafficking, terrorism and stuff. So I don't want people to think that, you know, I'm sitting here, always bashing Columbia. I bash them when they deserve it, but you know, you've got to give them credit when they deserve credit and they had a lot of good hardworking cops that we work with that we got a lot of stuff done with. So I just want to make sure I pointed that out. Yeah, if our judges, politicians and police forces and even journalists were exposed to the same type of threats that they were in Columbia, I mean, we probably have 20% of the judges that we have now. Like not a lot of people would step up for that.

Yep. And the money, too. Yeah. That's another little, like, little good anecdotal story, too, right? Is that when we first got to Columbia, we started working with the military search block. And a lot of the main people that had access to, you know, confidential information. They were all polygraphs, right? So, and then we ended up having these vetted units, these polygraphed vetted units a little bit later on.

but again, when we got there, do you think that these polygraphed units posed a problem to the cartel? Yes and no. But here's how they got around that, right? So what they would do is they knew exactly when these guys were getting polygraphed. So the day after they passed the polygraph,

the day after they were proven to be honest, right, the cartel would go up to all of them with a huge bag of money and say, you know, hey, now is your time to get on the payroll. You're not going to be polygraphed for another 12 to 18 months. So, and what's the worst thing? You fail to polygraph. You just get out of the unit.

But in the meantime, you'll make a lot of money. So they would approach those guys the next day. Some would say yes. Some would say no. But the ones that said yes, they had their spies. And they were loyal. And, you know, one of the, one of the military. sergeants that work for the colonel, that's exactly what happened with him.

And he was the key every time we did something or the military did something, it was compromised because of that guy because he took the money. Yeah. Well, personally, I don't think that a polygraph does any. I don't find polygraphs to be reliable at all. But I know it's a good, you know, it's a good tool. It's a good psychological ploy for the interviewer. Yeah, but I mean, you have to do the best you can.

to try to get the most honest people that you can into the unit. So, but yeah, that's, that's what they would do. I mean, and here's the other thing, too, is that, you know, it only took one person, right? So if you were working with the most elite group, right, in Columbia, which we were, we had, you know, the military and the police, these elite groups, these, you know, special operations groups. It only took one person who had access to that information to completely subvert or sabotage a case, right? Because if you had 10 or 15 or 20, you name your number 30 people in that group and one person had that information that was corrupt, man, it just

completely, you know, sabotaged anything that you were working on because that person would just, you know, tell somebody or, you know, that was the other thing, too, is that, you know, someone even though there were that many honest and hardworking people, somewhere along the line in the chain because of the bureaucracy, you had to tell somebody something, and you never know who you were telling it to. It could have been somebody above you. It could have been an officer, a general, a colonel, anybody,

and that person could be corrupt, but now he's in the flow of the information. So it was very frustrating and difficult to operate in that environment at the time. I'm out of curiosity, because when we look at, In the United States, when we look at some of the counter espionage cases, it's surprising how little the spies are paid, right? Sometimes maybe a 50 or 100 or, you know, whatever. But it's not like life-changing money.

It's always surprising to me. When you saw that in Columbia, was it just like a little bit more than they were making? Was it like setting them up for the next 10 years? What was the money situation like? Well, it depended on who you were, what rank you were, and what kind of access to information that you had. So if you were a high-level officer, a general, and had access to, like, really good information about what DEA was doing, yeah, you were making pretty decent money. I'll give you an example.

The captain that, remember I told you, he went in afterwards, took Miguel Rodriguez out of the compartment, walked him down the steps, put him in the trunk of car, and drove him away. He was, I think, at the time getting, and again, this is 1995, so do the work for, you know, adjusted for inflation and whatnot. But he was getting $1,000 a month. And after he got Miguel out of that apartment, he got, I think he got, I think he got. got up almost $50,000, like, is a bonus. So whether it was 20 grand, 30 grand, 50 grand in Colombia back in the day, 30 years ago, that's a lot of money. Right, right.

Yeah, that is, that's a lot more than 50 or 100 grand in the U.S. You know, when they're already making close to that as their salary. And 50 grand back then is probably, especially in Columbia, you know, with the way things are, not necessarily in the U.S., but 50,000 back then. back then is probably equivalent to like two, three, four, five hundred thousand today in Columbia. You know what I mean? So it was pretty good money.

And again, the higher you were and the more access to the information you had, you might have got a little more, you know, and if you did something that resulted in the made the cartel leaders happy, then you got your bonus, periodic bonuses. Yeah. Tell us a bit then about kind of the tail end of your career after the third Columbia trip. winding down, retiring, and how retirement has been suiting you. So after I left Columbia for the last time, again, after 12-plus years in 2010, I was transferred to Phoenix.

I was an assistant special agent in charge here. And I retired from DEA in January of 2014. I went to work at JP Morgan, at the bank for a while. in the private bank asset management and the anti-money laundering and global financial crime section for a couple of years. And then, you know, Narcos came about.

And then... So I consulted on Narco's season three for a while. Did some other, you know, been in a couple different documentaries on Netflix, you know, Narco Wars on National Geographic. Tell us how all of that came about, like, what the first of the first. process was like working with Narcos and like how they brought you on.

Well, you know, Narcos initially started in I think 2015 and it focused on Pablo Escobar, the Medellin cartel and with DEA agents, you know, Steve Murphy and Javier Pena. So when they started, I think that initially was, and I could be wrong here, but I think they only initially planned on doing like one season with the, that and then it just became so like enormously popular that they they spun it off into season two and then that was you know a massive hit so you know Netflix and the narcos creators are like hey man let's just keep this thing rolling let's let's go and uh so the next logical step in the progression was you know obviously was the cali cartel so um when they got to you know thinking about

doing cali you know they asked steve and Javier you know like hey you know, who are the DEA guys that we should talk to regarding the Cali Cartel? So they, you know, they mentioned my name. And I had done an NPR radio interview. There's an NPR show called This American Life with Ira Glass. It's a pretty good show where they have a lot of different stuff on there. And I did it with the author of At the Devil's Table, which is where they got a lot of the information from Mark Narcos Season 3.

It's kind of a story about Salcedo's life, but obviously we play a, you know, a pretty big part in that toward the end, you know, working with him and taking the cartel down. So they heard that interview and, you know, coupled with Stephen Javier's, you know, recommendation. I, you know, they called me up and I, you know, I went out to California and met with them and sat down for, you know, several days and kind of went over the whole story and, you know, what happened. And so, so they ended up, you know, writing up that story. or just a consultant on the show for that. And then, you know, I kind of parlayed that into, I did like a six-episode show with the Discovery Channel called Finding Escobar's Millions,

where we went down into Columbia and kind of tore up, tore up the country looking for Apollo Escobar's, buried money and treasure, although we didn't find anything. But, you know, and then a couple documentaries here and there that I, you know, drug lords. on Netflix, Narco Wars. There's another one coming out next month called the German cocaine cowboy, which kind of is a four-episode show that focuses on this German national

who was working with the Cali Cartel and was their kind of main point of contact over in Germany. So he's kind of like a career criminal that they made a show about. So, yeah, just doing that, working on the, you know, I'm writing a book right now called The Working title right now is called after after eskabar taking down the notorious callie godfathers and the biggest truck cartel in history so that's taken up a lot of my time over the last year and a half or so and uh you know doing some podcasts hanging out with guys like you and you know talking about uh you know the county cartel and some stuff the the book after eskabar is going to be up for pre-order in january that's the scheduled timeline as well

right now. Okay, gotcha. Pre-order in, more or less January. It was a time frame that I was sold by the publisher, and they're going to try to get it out in time for the summer of 2025.

Do we have any questions for this year? Chris? And Chris, just before we get into the questions, what did you think about the whole, like, Narcos experience and, like, being a character on that show, like, when you watched it, What did you think of it?

So, true story. I didn't watch it initially until a year later. I didn't see it when it came out. I saw the first episode, obviously, when I went to the premieres in Columbia, New York, but I had never watched the series, and, you know, people didn't really believe me. And I was like, well, I mean, I know the story. You know, I kind of know what's going to happen. And, you know, I read some of the scripts.

So finally I got around to watch in it. But let me tell you what, great experience working with Netflix and the creators of Narcos. Those guys, top shelf, you can tell by the product that they put out, extremely well done. You know, the show was very well done. Didn't really spare a lot of expense. And when they wanted to do something, they went all out. And it didn't really matter how much it cost. They were just going to say, hey, we're going to do it this way.

We're going to do it right and get it out there. So it was great dealing with the writers, the Netflix executive staff, the producers, the directors. You know, I was down on set for a while in Cali when we filmed some of the like the sugar cane field scenes, which was shot on location. Yeah, yeah. And we went to like the actual spot where we met Salcedo, you know, which was a good, you know, an hour outside of Cali. the, a lot of the apartments where some of the stuff was filmed in were actual, you know, properties owned by the Cali Cartel. So it was great.

The actors were, you know, all, again, top-notch guys, just a pleasure to be around. And so for me, that was like a great experience. And that's when I said, like, you know, what, I can kind of get used to this consulting on TV and movie shows like this because I'll tell you, there was a lot of, fun and especially when they do it right you know what i mean when when they do it right and they spend the money and they pay attention to detail uh it was just really enjoyable but uh when i finally did watch it i was you know i was uh impressed at how good of a child that they really did not that i had any doubt they wouldn't but it was like i go man that's that's really well done that's cool yeah

questions for yeah i i just wanted to ask you a question in you know as a how do those how i know that for maybe last 10 or 15 years they've said that some of these cartels were moving into like arizona and places like that how does law enforcement manage to deal with that and is there a way of keeping them from gaining a real foothold so it's a good question but per se like you notice that there are no like major cartels with drug kingpins that operate in the state Yeah. Right?

There aren't any. They're in Mexico. They're in a lot of different countries. And I'll give you, take one guess. I mean, there's several reasons, but what do you think is one of the main reasons why that doesn't happen here? Law enforcement pressure. That and the corruption, right? You don't have the corruption like you do in some of these other countries.

Right. Judges that are on the take. Yeah. You know, so those cartels, they can't exist here in the United States like that because law enforcement here at every level is, you know, extremely well trained. They have the resources. And, you know, that's to say there's criminal gangs or groups or whatever, but not like the level that there are in these other. Look at Mexico. These guys have been on the run from, you know, from the 70s.

Yeah. You know, so it's that's one of the reasons. But, yeah, just the continual pressure, the expertise of law enforcement, that you're not going to see big major cartels operating in the U.S. like you see in other countries. Yeah. They have to use people like Hells Angel or, you know, so these motorcycle groups or gangs or whatever to distribute. Right. And they're not nearly at the level that you're looking at some of these Colombian-Mexican or even Russian cartels are.

Or the Italian mafia, too. You know, he's not going to have that here. Right. That makes sense. M. Corbyn, thank you very much. Who do you think had better surveillance, Cali or the KGB? Well, they were called the Cali KGB for just that reason. You know, I think the better surveillance, I would say obviously the KGB, the Russian KGB.

But the reason they were called the KGB, too, is that not only were they really good at surveillance and wiretapping is that, I mean, they had the ability to wiretap like 400 telephones a month. I mean, it was incredible. Wow. You know, they had hooks at the phone company. They were able to do that. Their surveillance network was really good. But, oh, the other thing I was going to say is that they were also called the CaliGB

because what they did is they blackmailed a lot of high-level, high-profile, you know, politicians, military figures or whatever is that, to, you know, Cali Cartel, for the most part, they didn't want to go after or kill law enforcement or DEA agents. They saw what happened with Paulo Escobar, how they hunted them down like an animal and killed them. And Callie didn't want any part of that. So their MO was approach you for a bribe, right? That was the Cali Cartel's weapon of choice was the bribe. Medellin's was, you know, threats, intimidation, murder, extortion, kidnapping.

So they'd offer you a bribe. If you didn't take the bribe, they'd try to discredit you, right? And how they discredit you is they try to get compromising information on you, just like the KGB. And they would use that to blackmail you to kind of get their way. And if you were a lower profile person, if that didn't work, then obviously they would kill you. They'd eliminate you and throw you in the river. But if you were more high profile, they wouldn't do that because they didn't want the pressure.

But that's why they were called more so the Cali KGV was. because of all of those things in addition to black men. Was that an issue for Americans, whether it was DEA or military or whatever, going down there, you know, obviously a lot of very attracted women, things like that, that if guys were not, you know, very cautious and acting appropriately, that they could set themselves up? Right. Of course, but absolutely. and right the form of like discrediting I talked about number two on the list those two DEA agents that had their photo taken right yeah yeah took the photo they brought it in they discredit them by saying hey we knew they're DEA they can't go to Cali anymore mission accomplished right they didn't have to resort to violence right right they discredit them and here's a real quick story too talked about the compromise and the blackmail our first contact when we got to Cali my partner me and Dave was a guy by the

name of Colonel Velasquez. Very honest, very hardworking, loved working with the guy. He was really one of the guys who was an unsung hero going after the Calais cartel because a lot of the stuff he did early on paved the way to what happened later. And he was using an informant, a female informant, and he ended up having like an affair with her, and the Cali Cartel found out. Yeah. So they approached her and basically said, hey, you work with us or you're going to be, you know, like sleeping with the fishes, as they said in the godfather.

I remember this. This came out in the Colombian newspapers. It was all over the news. So what they did is they got her to work for him. They, they, she lured him to a, and I mean, they had done it in the past, so it was pretty easy. They went to a nightclub, kind of like a bar. Cali Cartel was there because they set it up. They photographed him with the girl.

she took them back to a motel you know one of those like the Bates motel with the walls you drive your car and you close the gate one of the love motels they had a wired up check it out man they had it wired up with video and audio they recorded the romp there in the hotel room

and they sent him pictures and the video copy of the tape like two weeks later and basically said you know hey you work for us pretty much or you know pay the consequences. And, you know, I told the guy was a stand-up guy. He, uh, he didn't do anything. He, he called his supervisors in, in Boatah and reported what happened, right? So he kind of fell on the sword and said, hey, they tried to blackmail me. I'm not doing it. I admit it to this. I was

wrong. I screwed up. Uh, so he stayed in his position. Wow. But then, like two months later, May, June, July, August, three months later, uh, the cartel released the tape on the news. like national broadcast throughout the country to discredit him right there's your second thing try to go for the money no discredit too so uh yeah that was what they did blackmail they set the guy up they recorded it they videoed it and everything that's wild um sorry so needless to say let me jump in so so you can imagine so if we were in cali and some girl like walked up or even looked at us we were like we wouldn't even look at him because we were like oh could just see what's going to happen here, you know.

So it was something that we certainly stayed away from while we were there. Yeah. Tom Lennon, thank you very much. Love what you guys are doing, raw, unfiltered. Thank you. And by the way, F the haters. Thank you, Tom. Do we have haters?

I don't even know if we have haters. The haters are pervasive. They're everywhere. M. Corbyn, thank you very much. How do you think the recent elections in Mexico are going to affect the trafficking issues in the states? Well, I mean, the recent elections in the U.S. or in Mexico? In Mexico.

Well, I mean, one, I think it depends on who gets in there on the Mexican side. And, you know, two, I think it depends on who gets in here on the U.S. side, too, right? Because I think if, you know, if Trump gets in, I think he's going to be able to exert a lot of pressure on the Mexicans, not only like immigration and drug trafficking and hope on trade, all kind of stuff. So I think that it's going to depend on how much pressure the U.S. can exert on Mexico and whether or not Mexico wants to play ball. It's hard to say. Out of curiosity, do you think that the fentanyl issue and a lot of it is created in China, do you think that that is there is there because it's purely business? Or do you think that there's any sort of just like create chaos ideology behind that?

I think it's both for sure. You know, create instability in the West, you know, in the U.S. And, you know, to make money because a lot of the precursor chemicals to make fentanyl are coming from China. Yeah. And they're going into Mexico and they have the labs and everything there and they're just mass producing it. I remember the days back in like the 80s or 90s where they produced like 100 grams of fentanyl for the entire year. You know what I mean? It was like this like super controlled.

and regulated substance. And now there's just like tons and tons of it being manufactured in Mexico. But yeah, I think it's both to create chaos and instability. Yeah. And to obviously there's look at the demand for it. The Chinese and the Mexicans are making billions of dollars off of the sale of chemicals and fentanyls. Yeah.

There's some. I mean like on so within Russia, there's like a pretty widespread conspiracy theory that the United States is trafficking drugs into Russia in order to weaken the state. And in China, they have their own experience, the opium wars, and that the Western world dumped all this opium into China back in the old days. And so they feel like it's this reciprocity, right? well if anybody's inundating russia with with drugs it's it's the columbian and mexican cartels yeah yeah no i don't think it's america they're doing it you know so uh yeah um thanks uh scotchie thank you very much

um my dad worked with a DE agent in the air group in Miami who showed up to a stakeout dressed exactly like sunny from Miami vice was this common more common than you would think in the 80s. That was, I mean, Miami Vice, whether you like to show or not, did a lot in the cultural world.

Uh-huh. And it did a lot for Miami. It kind of put Miami on the map. You know, I mean, after that series, you know, even a couple of years later,

you know, South Beach exploded, you know, and Miami has not looked back since then. But that, whole fashion trend by Sonny Crockett, you would see people all the time, whether they were DEA agents or not, kind of wearing that outfit, you know, the no socks. And I was a, I was certainly a proponent or child of that too. I never wore socks when I went to work and I had to shoes.

And I didn't necessarily have the Crockett clothing. But you would see that all the time in South Florida. Yeah. So yeah, it was pretty prevalent. And even something. the EA guy's word for sure, yeah. That's awesome. Yeah, it is. Do we have anything on Patreon? Do you know? Okay.

Chris, thank you so much for talking to us and spending your Friday evening with us. Where can people find you if they're looking for you? I know your book is going to be available for pre-order in January after Escobar. And people can go and find it. But if anyone's interested in looking you up, where can they find you? Well, I'm going to have a website come up about the book here, you know, probably in a few months. But, I mean, honestly, to go to Google. I have a pretty big presence on the Internet as far as, you know, the Cali Cartel, Narcos, and some of the documentaries and stuff.

So there's a lot of stuff on there, a lot of information. You know, I'm also on Instagram, LinkedIn, so I'm kind of easy to find there. Awesome. Chris, thanks so much for talking to us and sharing their stories with us. Oh, thanks for having me on. I had a good time talking to you guys. My only complaint is I wish I had a cigar and some rum there with you. Next time when your book is published, come through New York City,

and we'll smoke stogies and we'll have some rum, and they'll be great. That sounds like a plan. I'll certainly take you up on that. Thank you so much again for your time. Who's coming up on Friday, D? Jack barks Jack bark A KGB defector

Yep Formed KGB So we'll talk to all of you guys On Friday Thank you for tuning in Chris thanks again And we'll see all of you Next week

Thank you Thanks for that guys Have a good night Thanks