Manhunters: How We Took Down Pablo Escobar by Steve Murphy & Javier F. Peña

Author:Steve Murphy & Javier F. Peña [Murphy, Steve & Peña, Javier F.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: True Crime, Organized Crime, Biography & Autobiography, Law Enforcement, Political Science
ISBN: 1472268342
Google: SCqLDwAAQBAJ
Amazon: B07P8H7YCQ
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2019-11-11T23:00:00+00:00

JAVIER

Joe Toft wanted me to be in the epicenter of drug violence as much as possible, and during my first year in Colombia, that even meant spending Christmas and New Year’s in Medellín.

It was all part of Toft’s grand plan—to prove to Colombian law enforcement that we were squarely behind them and taking the same risks as ordinary cops in the search for the world’s most wanted drug trafficker. The CNP needed to be made aware that the DEA had finally selected the right agents for the job and that we were even willing to sacrifice our personal time to work this case no matter the obstacles we encountered. CIA and SEAL Team Six were also dispatched to Medellín on a regular basis, but our guys in the DEA were convinced that Escobar was uniquely our target.

It was a smart strategy, and I heartily embraced it. Most of the time. But that year, I had my own plans for the holidays—some of them involving an attractive woman—and spending them on a deserted military base with a handful of Colombian cops and U.S. special forces didn’t leave me in the best of moods.

Don’t get me wrong; despite the violence, Medellín was a beautiful city—warm and temperate and surrounded by verdant mountains, its streets full of some of the most attractive women I had ever seen. Before the cartel turned Medellín into an urban war zone, Colombia’s second-largest city was also a sprawling industrial center of some two million people known for its exports of textiles and orchids. But after Escobar and his fellow Extraditables launched their war against the government and the police, the homicides were averaging twenty per day. In 1990, 350 police officers had been killed in the drug violence out of a total of 4,637 homicides. In 1991, the killings would rise to 6,349. There were so many people shot, especially on the weekends, that the city ran out of ambulances. Taxis and private vehicles often came to a screeching halt outside the public hospital’s emergency entrance, the wounded lying on the back seats, which were often soaked in blood.

The car bombs were incredibly scary because you never knew where they were going to be detonated. In that case, you had almost no chance of surviving. One time, a bomb exploded next to the bullfighting ring, killing twenty young cops who were in the area on the back of a truck. At a funeral I attended for some cops I had befriended, there were eight coffins. The elite anti-narcotics cops who died in the line of duty would get religious services at the chapel at the headquarters of the Escobar Search Bloc before departing to their hometowns for burials.

In addition to car bombs, the Medellín Cartel had other methods for killing cops, who each had a bounty of about one hundred dollars on their heads. Often, the cartel hired pretty girls to entice a cop at a bar and then suggest going to her place, where a group of sicarios would be waiting to jump him.

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