Posts Tagged ‘Medellin Cartel’

Interview with DEA Agent #3
Thursday, November 25th, 2010

Context: Research for Cocaine: An Unauthorised Biography
Location: via telephone
Date: August 26th 2000
Interviewee: Senior DEA Agent

This interview, with a senior DEA agent who will no doubt wish to remain anonymous (if you’re reading this, recognise yourself, and would like me either to name you or to remove the transcript altogether, let me know!), took place in August 2000. The agent was one of the key players in the Agency’s Colombia office for a number of years during the 1980s. He is especially interesting on the relationship between Los Pepes and the Colombian establishment, the rise of the Cali cartel, and on the relationships between drug money and Colombian authorities – from chiefs of police all the way to the presidency

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What drugs were prominent when you started your career in law enforcement? Marijuana?

Yes. We would make a case that led to a seizure of 5lbs of marijuana and we would get excited about it. I was in San Diego. By the time I left San Diego – 1971 – I went to Rome. By that time we had made a couple of cases where ton quantities were involved.

Were other drugs around at the time, too?

Marijuana was obviously the drug of choice but there was also brown heroin and also a little cocaine from South America. Most of the cocaine at that time was coming from Chile.

When did you start noticing cocaine in the US?

Around 1968, 1967. Small quantities, ounce quantities. In all the time I was in San Diego we never made a seizure of a pound of cocaine at that time. It was just ounces.

When did you start picking more up?

Towards the end of the ’70s there was a huge increase. When [Salvador] Allende went down in Chile the government purged the drug traffickers and Chile stopped being a major player in the cocaine business – and that’s when Colombia became a major player. The opportunity was there and Colombia became the cocaine maker of the world. That’s important because that’s when the Cali and Medellin cartels had an opportunity to take over the cocaine world. … [but]  I had never heard of Pablo Escobar until the late 1970s, maybe. Perhaps the beginning of the ’80s.

When was Colombia obviously a problem?

Not long after the Chile thing. By the late 1970s. What happened was we started noticing Colombia. The traffickers in Colombia were smuggling cocaine into the country through couriers and they would bring small amounts of coke with them – a pound, two pounds at a time at the most. Most of them were pickpockets. Suddenly we saw an incredible influx of Colombian pickpockets in the United States, and it was tied into the amount of cocaine that was coming in. We started picking up pickpockets at ports of entry – with cocaine. So it became evident that somehow the cocaine traffic had shifted from Chile to Colombia. Also, there was a time when Chile was prominent that Paraguay was also very prominent. Paraguay was the smuggling capital of Latin America and they got involved. They also played a small role for a while, even when the Colombians were involved – but then they just disappeared.

Why?

Basically I think the Paraguayans were not really narcotics smugglers, they were just smugglers. They knew the routes, they had the infrastructure for smuggling anything. They were smuggling refrigerators – everything. They had the aeroplanes and the routes so they were used as the conduit for a while. But I would imagine that the traffickers in Colombia at one point thought ‘Hey, we can do this ourselves!’ and cut them off the loop. That’s the only explanation I can think of.

And Cubans?

Mostly centred in Miami. But I never worked there myself so I don’t know to what extent.

Do you recall the famous cocaine White Paper during the Carter administration? I’m guessing that led to some degree of disillusion inside DEA?

Yes, we were [disillusioned]. 1976 was a tough year. There were a few years there where we were wondering what was going to happen as far as drugs were concerned. So there was a certain amount of disillusionment. I don’t think we really recovered from this until Reagan…

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Interview with DEA Agent #2
Thursday, November 25th, 2010

Context: Research for Cocaine: An Unauthorised Biography
Location: Los Angeles
Date: October 4th 2000
Interviewee: Senior DEA Agent

This interview, with a senior DEA agent who will no doubt wish to remain anonymous (if you’re reading this, recognise yourself, and would like me either to name you or to remove the transcript altogether, let me know!), took place in Los Angeles in the summer of 2000. This agent is very interesting on the development of the ‘Kingpin’ strategy that eventually collapsed the Medellin cartel – and the ensuing rise of Cali. He also explains the emergence of some of the main Mexican cocaine cartels – and how ignorance of the ways they were operating in tandem with the Colombians gave them a relatively free hand. The brief section in which he deals with corruption in Mexico is pretty eye-opening.

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There was cocaine in 1965 but very small amounts, mostly from Peru. Mostly by seamen arriving in the New York who were smuggling in a couple of kilos at a time. We didn’t see any large shipments. The biggest I saw back in those days was 5 or 6 kilos at a time. It was a drug used mostly by folks in the entertainment world. Artists, writers, musicians – a cachet drug. It wasn’t highly abused, we didn’t see many ODs or criminal activity other than the smuggling itself. I was in New York City. Half of all the heroin addicts in the US were in the New York area and probably a good portion of the cocaine crowd.

When did the cocaine trade in the US really pick up?

Around 77, 76. When we began to see several things. First of all there was the violence in Florida. We began to see the Colombians and the Cubans shooting it out with each other on the streets in broad daylight, pretty much as they had been doing in their own countries for years. We hadn’t seen that level of violence in the States. Sure, we had a lot of gun violence and drive-bys and that sort of thing but for the most part we have never really had the machine-gunnings and the sort of group-against-group violence that is typical in other parts of the world, particularly in South America. And that was a wake-up call. A lot of the policymakers began looking at this and saying ‘What’s going on?’ and we began to realise that cocaine was flooding the country, that organisations were bringing in 100 kilo shipments at a time and what probably retarded our attention to this somewhat was that heroin had re-emerged, even though the French Connection was out of business for a few years by then and we thought we had made a significant progress on heroin (which we had) our friends in South east Asia began to  produce a lot more than they normally produced and the Mexicans began to ship a lot of better quality heroin into the US and so we were really geared up to go after the heroin when all of a sudden we were hit on our left side – blind-sided – by this flood of cocaine. And as a law enforcement officer, the two drugs present a completely different challenge…

You were a heroin specialist?

Yeah, chasing the French Connection. I was in New York for that interregnum between the demise of the French Connection and the rise of cocaine, when there was almost a sort of a Pax Romana for a couple of years and we actually thought, in the words of Nixon, that we had turned the corner. Well, we turned the corner – to find another corner!

Was there any special incident that drove home to you the new threat?

There were some murders. There was a very interesting case in Queens back in the early 1970s where two young children were found slaughtered in the basement of a family residence in Queens. In a residential area that normally would not see this kind of violence. Even though New York City is a violent place there seems to be some level of violence that it will not stoop to. And that was one that captured the attention of the city for weeks. This incredibly brutal – I think the kids were strangled to death and found hanging from the plumbing pipes in the basement. This was headline stuff for weeks, mostly because the family seemed like it was so normal. It was an immigrant Colombian family that – a man and a woman. I want to say that he was a schoolteacher or something. I know he had a job and they were portrayed as average middle class ordinary people and how could something like this happen to them? All of a sudden about a month or so later it started to come out that this guy was heavily into the cocaine traffic and that he had owed the group some money and he had reneged on paying them and that this was their way of showing revenge. This was sort of an intense symbol that this was something a little bit different.

Even with the heroin trade there was never that degree of violence. If there was a killing it was a mob killing, it was – in their way – justified by their rules. It was not indiscriminate, it was never against a family member. If Lucky Luciano didn’t like Carlo Gambino he wouldn’t kill Carlo Gambino’s wife or mother or child. He would go after Carlo and if he couldn’t get Carlo, he’d leave him alone. This was the way we had been educated to expect the way crime operates and all of a sudden we were visited by this alien variety of brutality and violence. I know it may sound strange coming from a country that has more violence by handguns very year than many others, nonetheless there are some levels and instances of violence that are absolutely out of hand. This was one of them – and it captured the imagination of the people. And then when the public found out that this was drug-related, it ushered in a whole new era of thinking about this drug… All of a sudden we realised that there was this growing criminal culture behind [cocaine] that was alien in both the literal and figurative sense.

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Interview with Hugo Martinez – the man who ‘got’ Pablo Escobar
Wednesday, November 24th, 2010

Context: Research for Cocaine: An Unauthorised Biography
Location: cafe in Bogota, Colombia
Date: November 2000
Interviewee: General Hugo Martinez

This interview is with Hugo Martinez – the man who ‘got’ Pablo Escobar. General Martinez explains the rise – and rise – of cocaine trafficking in Colombia, and how he came to be in charge of the operation to kill the richest, most violent, criminal in history. This interview took place in a cafe in Bogota in November 2000.

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Was there any cocaine around in Colombia when you started your career in 1964?

No. At that time marijuana was the only drug here – and even then not too many people were using it.

When did you start noticing cocaine?

We started arresting users in around 1971, 1972. But back then a big bust was like half a kilo, a kilo.

Was it dangerous working in drug interdiction back then?

It was dangerous because the people who were working in the drug trade were already delinquents, they were already criminals.

Was it the marijuana traffickers who became the cocaine traffickers, or outsiders?

It was other groups – at least in my area. According to police information we had at the time, marijuana trade was largely located in the Guajira, Sierra Nevada Mountains.

Where did cocaine come from at first?

It started when they brought it in from Peru. That’s where the trafficking started. Peru. It was sold in public in small quantities, like marijuana at first.

When did you begin to notice the increase in power and money behind cocaine trafficking?

In 1971 and 72 the police formed a special anti-drug unit in the Department of Judicial Police. It was especially to tackle cocaine because the US police was already asking Colombian authorities to co-operate. One or two of us were captains who were interested in learning more about cocaine. Sometimes we would find laboratories but only small ones. We would check them out, investigate, and try to find out who was behind them. Medellin had always had a big crime problem, and a bit further south in the State of Caldas, in the coffee areas. And the northern part of Valle Department (Where Cali is). Basically it was the coffee areas. Those were the areas for contrabanding. All types of stuff was coming in from Panama… At that time it was a relatively minor thing.

The first big traffickers and dealers? Santiago Ocampo, Griselda Blanco and the others?

Griselda Blanco! The queen of cocaine! 1973, 1974. That’s when you started to see the traffickers becoming visible for the first time. Most of them are dead now. A few are still alive…

At what point did the violence start?

At the time I was in charge of F2, the sort of secret police, every time there was a big robbery or a killing or a kidnap by then it was always related to drugs. And the majority of the people we were arresting came from Medellin.

It was always a violent trade?

Always violent. We were already seeing a lot of people killed by sicarios. All of these deaths were related to the upcoming of the new heads of the cocaine trade.

Why was this based in Medellin?

Medellin and Cali were the coffee areas. They were always involved in contraband trade. We were also detecting the trade in Bogota, Barranquilla and other cities – but the majority was around the coffee growing areas.

Was there a moment of realisation – when you thought ‘this could be really, really bad’?

Yes. It started with the corruption, especially in the northern departments up by the coast. The army was sent in to fight drugs but the corruption was so bad that you had generals in jail! At that time, 74 and 75, 76, …there was the Coffee Bonanza. The coffee price just shot up. So the traffickers started moving coffee outside of Colombia. So we started trying to control the coffee trade.

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Interview with DEA Agent #1
Monday, November 8th, 2010

Context: Research for Cocaine: An Unauthorised Biography
Location: Washington DC
Date: 18th July 2002
Interviewee: DEA Agent #1

This interview, with a senior DEA agent who will no doubt wish to remain anonymous (if you’re reading this, recognise yourself, and would like me either to name you or to remove the transcript altogether, let me know!), took place in Washington DC in the summer of 2000.

The agent, who had nearly 30 years’ experience, was regarded as one of the Agency’s pre-eminent experts on cocaine cartels. He chats here about the rise and fall of the Medellin Cartel, and the subsequent rise of Cali. He then makes an extremely pertinent comment about Mexican cartels’ involvement with cocaine and appears to predict (entirely accurately, as it turns out) that Mexico was going to head the way of Colombia unless something was done about it. Ten years after the interview took place, exactly that has happened.

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What is a drug cartel? Isn’t the term something of a misnomer? Can’t it generate publicity of the wrong sort?

The fact is there is a lot of debate over whether or not law enforcement should use the term ‘cartel’. ‘Cartel’ came into vogue I think in the late 70s. What happened is cocaine organisations started out rather small – there really wasn’t a cocaine industry in the United States in the early 70s, for example. It wasn’t the preferred drug of abuse. Preferred drugs of abuse were: marijuana, heroin was very popular, methamphetamine, uppers, downers, LSD, hallucinogens. Very popular in the early 70s – a carry-over from the 60s.

The Colombian organised crime groups begin to get involved on an important scale in the early 70s. Essentially they wrestled the business away from Chileans and others, who had been dabbling in it. But nobody was making a whole lot of money. It really was kind of a niche market for that particular drug [cocaine]. And I think in those days it might have been popular in the arts community and so on but at that stage cocaine wasn’t really a preferred drug of abuse. Of course, all that would change over the course of the following decade. And over the course of that decade, certain groups based in Medellin and Cali began to grab increasingly important shares of the cocaine market and essentially took over and perfected the business of cocaine trafficking in the United States. They were assisted I think in part by an epidemic of a drug called crack. When people first began to realise there was a way to smoke this drug, and what they didn’t realise when they began to smoke it is how addictive it was in that form.

So the cartels, these organised crime groups, had a little bit of luck in that this drug that kind of had a little niche market – the market had now expanded and there was a huge demand for the product in the US. All that coincided with two groups essentially – two or more but two were paramount in this business. And they were able, through traditional organised crime methods, to control the transportation. They controlled the wholesale industry both in Colombia and in the United States, and they began to expand and feed on this market that was demanding this drug in the form of crack. And so over the course of that time two groups emerged, the Medellin Cartel and the Cali Cartel. There were some smaller groups … in other parts of Colombia but the two pre-eminent organised crime groups in Colombia who surfaced as the billionaires in the 80s were from two opposing cities, Medellin and Cali.

Somewhere along the line someone coined the term ‘cartel’. I don’t know where but it seemed to fit because they were truly on top, they were able to regulate the amount of drugs and they were able to regulate price if they wanted to. But generally the market drove the price and it just became a popular term – it began to get popular usage. But are they the same as a traditional cartel like OPEC or something like this? No. And in fact certain law enforcement people felt that the term glamorised the trade and so they preferred to use more traditional verbiage for that – call them mafias or syndicates or organised crime groups, or whatever.

The leadership of the Medellin cartel – power was concentrated at that level of gangster. And much like your traditional organised crime groups they broke down very much like that. In my view the Medellin Cartel – Pablo Escobar, who would emerge as the boss of bosses of the Medellin cartel – established an organisation that ran not unlike the kind of organisation Al Capone ran. Negotiation always ended at the end of a gun. If you went along with him, we’ll become rich together. If not, and you have a disagreement, then somebody’s gonna die. And by the time Escobar died in ’92, he had probably sent to the grave certainly thousands of Colombian police officers, judges, magistrates, prosecutors – you name it. Presidential candidates – and thousands of Colombian citizens.

But they were ALL violent, right? Any more than others?

They were certainly all violent. The least violent were the Ochoas [of Medellin] but even so, they were violent as well… You can’t survive in that business if you’re not violent. This is not a business for a negotiator. Were they party to Escobar’s plan to declare war against his own government? I don’t know if they sat down and had a meeting and he said, ‘Hey, I’m gonna declare war against the government, are you with me or against me?’ – but certainly they didn’t oppose it and they were paying their taxes…

[Escobar had yet to rise to prominence in the early 1970s but] in those days we were working on groups from Medellin who would later become important traffickers (read Kings of Cocaine [by Guy Gugliotta and Jeff Leen] – it does a good history no doubt. That may be the most accurate thing written about the cocaine cartels in the 70s and into the 80s.)

But at the time cocaine was seen as a benevolent drug – non-addictive, certainly. Were you and the DEA aware of the problem? Was there an awareness of the errors of the White House’s 1975 white paper?

… I was certainly aware and I think the bosses were aware and I think it was generally understood that this was gonna come back and bite us in the ass – by a lot of people.

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Interview with George Jung
Wednesday, November 3rd, 2010

Context: Research for Cocaine: An Unauthorised Biography
Location: Federal Correctional Institute, Otisville (US)
Date: Wednesday, June 21st 2000
Interviewee: George Jung

George Jung was perhaps the best-known – and almost certainly the most influential – of the original ‘cocaine cowboys’. Here he tells of his involvement with the cocaine trade, starting with the wholesale smuggling of marijuana in the 1960s, moving on to his fateful meeting with Carlos Lehder Rivas (the young Colombian who introduced him to cocaine and, a short while later, to the rising star of what was later to become the Medellin Cartel, Pablo Escobar), then ending with George’s revenge on Carlos some years later.

It’s rather an unstructured interview (George loves to talk!) but covers the main bases in its own way. If you’ve seen ‘Blow’ (starring Johnny Depp) a lot of this will sound familiar: the film was based on George’s life story, as recounted in Bruce Porter’s biography of the same name.

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[George Jung]

I went to several colleges – University of Tennessee, University of South Mississippi. In those days I was a high school jock but my knee was gone and it never came back, so that was the end of my football career. So I was sort of milking time. Then I started listening to Bob Dylan – you know ‘20 years of school and they put you on the day shift’ – and I believed him. I said to my friends, ‘Listen to this fucking guy. Can you get this?’ This was like in 1960. I used to go to the Golden Vanity coffee house in Cambridge and listen to him and Joan Baez…

Were there drugs on the scene back then?

…no pot yet. It was just Budweiser and vodka. And everybody went from the crew-cut to the Beatle-cut. I’m a great Beatles fan… So: University of Tennessee, and I dropped out of uni and went back home to Weymouth and worked a couple of jobs – construction, this and that, in the winter and the whole fucking thing. Tuna – he’s my buddy, he’s like John Belushi in Animal House – and I said ‘This sucks, Tuna’ and he said, ‘Yeah, it does suck’ and I said ‘Let’s go to California’ and he said ‘When? Now?’ I said ‘No. Let’s wait a couple of weeks.’ It was like, after Christmas, and the two of us are like: ‘OK, let’s go NOW.’

So we got in a little TR3 and we drove all across the country and we finally got out there and we went to Long Beach, California. It was like going to a fantasy world, like ‘Holy Shit! What’s happening out here?’ The women, the bathing suits – it was a make-believe world. You’d only read about it or heard about it. It was like it didn’t exist. And I didn’t smoke cigarettes or anything like that. So to smoke pot I had to make a water pipe and fill it with crème de menthe and ice cubes to inhale it.

So one thing led to another and soon we were smoking pot all the time and taking LSD and our whole perspective on everything changed. But I still continued to go to school out there. I went to Long Beach State and I was still torn between trying to be the American straight guy, playing on the edge, going back and forth. And then the army. I was getting ready to get drafted … I had a deferment because of my knee …

I went down to Manhattan Beach and resumed my life of partying and debauchery with Tuna and [a friend, *****] stopped by. We had this punchbowl full of pot. Everybody did. You could buy it for $60 a kilo from Mexico in southern LA. So ***** looked at it and said ‘Where’d you get that? How much did it cost?’ I said ‘$60’. He said ‘The whole thing!? Do you know how much we can get for this back in University of Massachusetts? $300!’ And I said, ‘Let’s go into business, *****!’

We got some capital together, sold our cars and started buying the pot wholesale and transporting it, at first with airline stewardesses. In those days they didn’t check the suitcases. Two large Samsonites – and we were making the money so fast and so quick that we couldn’t keep the stewardesses flying fast enough. Everybody was flying back and forth – hauling suitcases. It was crazy!

Then we thought ‘This is fucking crazy. Let’s get motor homes and drive the stuff across the country.’ So we’d load up motor homes with 1000lbs, 2000lbs – stuff it in there – drive it across the country, listening to Jimi Hendrix, smoking pot all the way. You know? I mean, nobody knew really what the hell was going on. The police were unaware. It was happening so fast. Every kid in America was getting turned on and they didn’t know what the fuck was happening. There was a great innocence to it to because there were no guns or anything. Everybody was dealing to their friends on every college campus all over America. I wasn’t the only one who was doing it. Everyone was doing it. We started to see hundreds of thousands of dollars. And those days if you got a job at $12,500 and a company car – that was a big deal, you know? Really. All of a sudden we had hundreds of thousands of dollars. It was crazy!

So then I said ‘Why don’t we get our own pot in Mexico and make more money? Go down there?’ We had been buying it until then from a barber in California, Richard *****. I didn’t speak Spanish and I didn’t know anything about Mexico but I had seen this movie, Night of the Iguana, with Richard Burton and Ava Gardner and I was a big Richard Burton fan – I thought he was fucking great – and I knew that they’d made the movie in Puerta Vallarta. So I said ‘Why don’t we go on down to Puerta Vallarta? That’s where we’ll find a connection and we’ll go into business.’ We all went down there and took our girlfriends with us. Couldn’t find a fucking joint!

[Eventually George and friends lucked into some contacts and started seeing large quantities of pot. They decided to fly it into the US]

We were 1220 miles south of San Diego. There was no road. … We only took like 500lbs. In a small plane you bulk out before you weigh out. You tear the seats out and you’re sitting on the stuff. Crazy!

We were getting it for $8-10 per kilo, so we were making a lot. Plus, we were on an adventure. And that’s what it was really about. I was about 26. The whole thing was an adventure. It was the romance. We rented a big house on the beach, it was beautiful and we could see Punta Amilla (sp?) from the patio. And after a while I started getting other pilots. We would sit there on the patio watching the whole thing go down, there on the patio with my girlfriends, drinking margaritas – the money pouring in. I thought it was some fucking fantasy world. It was! Everybody else was back in Weymouth shovelling snow!

None of it was serious in those days. That’s what made it so much fun. If you had money and you had lawyers, it wasn’t serious…

[until George met a new contact, who turned him in to the police]

This guy had been busted for heroin and I was sitting at the Playboy Club. It was the first time I had ever gone to a new connection but there was this pilot who flew for us, he said he had a new connection in Chicago. I was at the Playboy club talking to this beautiful blonde and I got this tap on the shoulder and some guy said ‘FBI’. I said ‘What are you talking about?’ ‘FBI. You’re under arrest.’ Then the guy told me, he said, ‘We’re really looking for heroin but this guy turned you in. We’re sorry’. I mean, in those days it was all innocent. Around ’68-69.

[George was incarcerated in Cook County Jail...]

A shithole. I was the only white guy in there. A dungeon. I posted bail in the morning, flew to LA and the next day I was doing another drug flight. I had a girlfriend and the deal was that I was going to get three years. In those days you did eight months on a year, and they had parole, too, so I said, ‘Fuck it – I’ll go and do eight, nine months in a country club and go on my way. It’s nothing.’

[Things didn’t work out that way. George’s girlfriend, Linda, was diagnosed with a brain tumour. He skipped bail to be with her and the pair ran away together. He stayed with Linda for two years. When he returned to his parents’ home in Weymouth, he discovered that the police had been harassing them, trying to get them to reveal his location. Under duress, his mother phoned the authorities – who promptly arrested him.]

I go to the Charles Street Jail in Boston and I had sent Linda to San Francisco to live with a friend. I’m on the phone, talking to my friend in San Francisco and I say, ‘How’s Linda?’ and he says ‘She died this morning.’ I was fucking devastated. It destroyed me. So I went back to Chicago. And I was stuck in Cook County jail this time. There was no bond then.

The deal was for three years. My lawyer said ‘George, you know, just go and plead guilty and keep your mouth shut. Never mind all your cheap political rhetoric and all the shit.’

[But George wasn’t in the mood for advice]

I gave a speech to the judge about how ludicrous it was, taking pot across an imaginary line and the lawyer’s there, like ‘Shut the fuck up!’ and I couldn’t shut up (Johnny Depp does a good bit in the movie about that.) The judge came up. ‘Outstanding views you have. Unfortunately imaginary lines are real and the ‘weed’ as you call it is illegal’ he said. ‘Four years’.

So I went to Danbury in Connecticut, which was like a country club… It was all like white collar crime. It was a crime school for upper class criminals. And they had some big-time smugglers there. They were really good guys. It was great. And that was where I met Carlos…

[‘Carlos’: Carlos Lehder Rivas, a young Colombian with some extremely useful contacts in Medellin]

The gods brought him to me. They brought him to my bunk. You have two bunks, and one was empty. I took the bottom one. You don’t know who’s gonna show up next, could be Rambo or Charles Manson, you know? I’d just got there. It was about the third day. First you go to the hole, where they evaluate you to see if you can go into the population (are you all right, are you afraid of anybody are you homosexual?) Then they send you to the orientation dormitory. Both beds were empty and I took the bottom one. A few hours later, in walked Carlos. Just a kid. Young, handsome, well-mannered, polite – like he’d just come out of fucking prep school. And I was like, ‘Wow, this is great – you know – I got a nice guy.’ I was glad. It could have been an asshole. You know, so it was a relief.

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