Killing Pablo: The Hunt for the World's Greatest Outlaw

by Mark Bowden

  The pressure had notched tighter in late October, when de Greiff threatened to withdraw his protection. Increasingly at odds with the Gaviria administration, the crafty, pipe-smoking attorney general was playing a complicated game. He was still trying to engineer Pablo's surrender before he could be found by Colonel Martinez's men, and he was not above playing hardball with the drug lord, who had just engineered the kidnapping of two teenage boys from wealthy families in Medellín and extorted $5 million in ransom. De Greiff informed Juan Pablo that unless his father turned himself in by November 26, the guards would be withdrawn. Maria Victoria, Juan Pablo, and Manuela would "only be entitled to the same security as any other Colombian citizen," he said. Everyone knew how unsafe it was to be an average Colombian citizen.

  Maria Victoria was terrified. In a letter she wrote to de Greiff on the 16th, she asked the attorney general to come in person to Altos del Campestre, pleading with him to give her husband more time to surrender. She wrote that the family was "anguished" and "worried," and argued that they were not responsible if her husband refused to give up and should not be punished for it. She reminded de Greiff that she and her children were not criminals, and said that they were trying to get Pablo to turn himself in.

  The same day, de Greiff received a note from Juan Pablo that began, "Worry, desperation, anguish and anger are what we feel in these confusing moments." He urged the attorney general to investigate the kidnappings and killings of several close family associates, who he said were victims of the Search Bloc and Los Pepes. He wrote that on November 5, his longtime childhood friend Juan Herrera, who was living with the Escobars at Altos del Campestre, was kidnapped and was probably dead, although his body had not been found. On November 8, the administrator of their apartment building, a close friend, was kidnapped and killed. On the same date, the family's maid was kidnapped and killed. On November 10, he said, masked men kidnapped their personal tutor, who was presumed dead. On November 15, Juan Pablo argued, the police attempted to kidnap one of their chauffeurs. Ten armed men surprised and tried to take him, but the chauffeur exchanged shots with them and escaped. He urged de Greiff to investigate and prosecute these crimes as vigorously as the state was pursuing his father.

  Juan Pablo had grown increasingly imperious. He comported himself as his father's protector, spokesman, and heir. He was suspected of having been personally involved, along with his father, in a bombing that had killed a top Search Bloc officer a year ago, in December. In negotiations with the attorney general's office, Juan Pablo vigorously defended his father's honor. By early November the son (speaking several times a day with his father) was hammering out a secret deal with the attorney general for the long-awaited surrender, a compact so secret that de Greiff did not share the plan with President Gaviria or the U.S. embassy. In it, the attorney general agreed to several of Pablo's terms: to transfer Roberto Escobar from isolation to a part of the Itagui prison where other Medellín cartel members were housed, to place Pablo in the same section upon his surrender, and to allow him twenty-one family visits each year. The deal hung up over a disagreement on getting Pablo's family out of Colombia. Pablo was insisting that he would not turn himself in until Maria Victoria and the children were flown to a safe haven. De Greiff was promising to help the family flee, but only after the surrender.

  Word of these manuevers leaked in early November, and was received with alarm at the U.S. embassy. In a November 7 memo, DEA agent Murphy wrote:

  Obviously, if the above is true, and the BCO [Bogotá country office] has no doubts about its accuracy, then the GOC [government of Colombia] and particularly the [attorney general's] office has not been straightforward with the BCO or other American embassy personnel. Should Escobar agree to the one remaining condition regarding his family's departure from Colombia, his immediate surrender may be imminent.

  Surrender, of course, was what the Americans, the national police, and Pablo's other enemies hoped to prevent With his wife and children baiting the trap, and Los Pepes waiting in the wings, Pablo was isolated and desperate. If he managed to get the family away to safety, there was no telling what would happen. Free of his worst fears, Pablo could go underground, disappear completely from Centra Spike's screens. The Colombian government feared a renewed bombing campaign in Bogotá and an even bloodier phase of the struggle.

  Pablo and de Greiff did finally agree. The attorney general decided to accept Juan Pablo's solemn promise that his father would surrender on or before the November 26 deadline, either at de Greiff's office in Medellín or at the apartment building. De Greiff began laying plans to get the family out of the country.

  When he learned of the family's pending flight, Ambassador Busby went to work. He was assured by Defense Minister Rafael Pardo that the Colombian government was opposed to letting the Escobars go, but there was no legal reason to prevent them from leaving. So the government concentrated on slamming doors of entry to all the family's known destinations. Maria Victoria had purchased tickets to both London and Frankfurt. Since the London flight, if they took it, stopped over in Madrid, Pardo contacted the Spanish, British, and German ambassadors, formally asking that they refuse entry and return the family directly to Colombia if possible.

  The attorney general was now working in open defiance of the president. He had told Gaviria that he disagreed with effectively holding the Escobars hostage, and because he was officially an "independent entity," he was going to help the family leave Colombia in order to complete the deal for Pablo's surrender. When word spread that the family was looking for a haven in Canada, Pardo contacted the Canadian ambassador, only to learn that de Greiff had called to request that the Canadian government allow the family to enter. The Colombian government was now split on the matter, so Busby threw his support behind Gaviria, contacting the various governments himself and winning assurances that the Escobars would be turned away.

  At the same time all this was going on, de Greiff informed the U.S. embassy that Pablo was in Haiti. News reports leaked out that Pablo had managed to escape Colombia. The embassy traced de Greiff's sources to Miami, and dispatched Agent Peña to investigate. In the light of what happened over the next two days, the story appears to have been a ruse, an effort to distract the authorities and create enough confusion to help slip the Escobar family out of Colombia. But if Pablo had been planning to lie low in order for the Haiti ploy to work, events soon conspired to flush him back out on the airwaves in Medellín.

  6

  DEA special agent Kenny Magee was friendly with the security chief for American Airlines at the El Dorado Airport in Bogotá, so he was picked to follow the Escobar family. A blue-eyed former Jackson, Michigan, cop who had come to Bogotá four years earlier, Magee had flunked Spanish in his senior year of high school; he had told his teacher, "I'm never going to need Spanish," and she had said, "You never know." He showed up at the airport on Saturday, November 27, with two plainclothes PNC colonels, and with Agents Murphy and Peña. Magee had purchased tickets on both of the early evening flights booked by the Escobars. The planes were leaving within ten minutes of each other, and they didn't know which one the family would take, so they pocketed their boarding passes and waited for the Escobars to show up.

  It wasn't hard spotting them. The family's plans had evidently been leaked to more than just the national police and the U.S. embassy, because when their plane from Medellín landed in Bogotá early in the afternoon, they found about three dozen reporters waiting inside the terminal. The small plane, a regular commercial flight, stayed out on the tarmac and all of its passengers except the Escobars were let off. Members of the attorney general's bodyguard detail carried the Escobars' luggage to a waiting Avianca Airlines bus followed by a force of more than twenty heavily armed men escorting the family—Maria Victoria, Manuela, Juan Pablo, and his chubby twenty-one-year-old Mexican girlfriend. The family members held jackets over their heads to avoid being photographed, boarded the bus, and were driven to a remote entrance to the airport where th
ey could wait out in private the six hours until their overseas flight.

  Five minutes before the Lufthansa flight to Frankfurt was scheduled to depart, the family emerged from the room surrounded by their bodyguards and were hustled through the main terminal. All but Juan Pablo held jackets over their heads. Pablo's son shouted threats at the mob of reporters pushing around them and then disappeared down the jetway. Magee and the Colombian policemen followed, taking seats in business class. It was the first time Magee had seen the family. Maria Victoria was a short, fat woman with glasses, very conservatively and stylishly dressed. Nine-year-old Manuela was tiny and cute, and clung to her mother. Juan Pablo and his older girlfriend stayed with each other, apart from his mother and sister. Magee was wearing blue jeans and a long-sleeved shirt and carried a shoulder bag with a camera built into the bottom. He began snapping pictures of the family surreptitiously. An enterprising journalist had the seat next to Juan Pablo, trying to interview him, with what appeared to be little success.

  When the plane landed in Caracas for a brief stopover, there was so much security out on the runway that Magee thought it looked as if a head of state was arriving. It was a nine-hour flight from there to Frankfurt, through Saturday night and into Sunday morning, and the family slept through much of it. Juan Pablo slumped deep into his seat and put his head back, alternately dozing and staring at the ceiling. His girlfriend had her head on his shoulder, and, in two other seats, Manuela slept curled against her mother. Maria Victoria spoke only with her daughter, and always in whispers.

  Unknown to the family, just an hour after their flight had left Bogotá, a spokesman for the German Interior ministry had released a statement to the press announcing that the Escobars would not be allowed to enter Germany. Soon afterward, an angry Pablo was on the phone, blowing his Haiti cover story. He called the Presidential Palace in Bogotá.

  "This is Pablo Escobar. I need to talk to the president," he told the operator at the palace.

  "Okay, hold on, let me locate him," said the operator, and immediately patched the call through to the national police. After a delay, a police officer posing as a palace operator came on the line and said, "We can't get in touch with the president right now. Please call back at another time."

  The police officer had sized it up as a joke and hung up. The phone rang again.

  "This is Pablo Escobar. It is necessary that I talk to the president. My family is flying to Germany at this time. I need to talk to him right now."

  "We get a lot of crank calls here," the officer said. "We need to somehow verify that it is really you. It's going to take me a few minutes to track down the president, so please wait a few more minutes and then call back."

  With that, he informed his superiors that Pablo was making calls to the palace. President Gaviria was notified, and he said he would not speak with Escobar on the phone. When Pablo called back a third time, his hunters were waiting, and the call surfaced on the electronic web.

  "I'm sorry, Mr. Escobar, we have been unable to locate the president."

  Pablo went berserk. He swore at the officer on the phone and said he would detonate a bus filled with dynamite in front of the palace and set off bombs all over Bogotá. He would bomb the German embassy and begin killing Germans if his family was not allowed to enter that country. Minutes later he made similar threats on the phone to the German embassy and the Lufthansa office in Bogotá.

  No one had been able to get a precise fix on his location, but he was without a doubt still in Medellín.

  When the Lufthansa plane finally landed in Frankfurt Sunday afternoon, it was forced to taxi to a remote spot on an alternate runway, out of the view of press members waiting in the terminal. President Gaviria had been on the phone to officials in Spain and Germany, urging them to refuse the Escobars. He explained that if the family was safely removed from Colombia he expected another vicious bombing campaign. It was not the kind of request from a head of state that other nations would be likely to ignore. There was nothing to be gained by Spain, Germany, or any other country in allowing entry to the family of such a notorious outlaw. Interior Ministry officials drove out to the plane to process the other passengers' passports and immigration documents, including Magee's and the Colombian colonels', and a bus took them to the terminal. The Escobars were taken by bus to an office in the international section. Maria Victoria, who was carrying $80,000 and large amounts of gold and jewelry, asked for a lawyer and was provided one. They immediately petitioned for political asylum, then waited through another long night for a ruling.

  Magee was met in the main terminal by two DEA colleagues based in Germany, and they waited together to see what would happen next. Early Monday morning the Escobars' petition was denied. The family was escorted by a heavily armed contingent of German police back out to a plane bound for Bogotá that had been kept waiting for two hours. Also placed back on the plane were three men the German authorities determined were personal family bodyguards, men the authorities described as "thugs." Magee jumped into another car and followed them out, boarding the plane with four German immigration officers assigned to escort the family back to Colombia. He sat two rows in front of the family and across the aisle. At some point during this long flight home, the DEA agent sat down with the German immigration officers in the smoking section of the plane. They had seized the Escobars' passports and they agreed to allow Magee to photograph them. He took the passports into one of the plane's lavatories, laid them out on the narrow counter, and snapped a photo of each. As he pulled the door open, sticking the passports in his back pocket, he encountered Juan Pablo in the doorway. It gave Magee a start, but the boy was just waiting to use the toilet.

  He and the rest of the family looked exhausted. They had been on planes or in airports since Saturday afternoon, and they had gotten nowhere. When the Lufthansa flight landed again at El Dorado Airport, the weary Escobars were escorted off the plane and turned over once again to Colombian authorities.

  Magee inspected the seats where the family had been sitting. He found several large empty envelopes with large dollar amounts written on them, two credit cards, and a discarded note that read in English, "We have a friend in Frankfurt. He says he will be looking for us so he can help us…. Tell him to call Gustavo de Greiff." Magee assumed it was a note they had hoped to pass to someone at the airport in Frankfurt, but they had never reached the terminal.

  After the family was taken into custody at the airport, Defense Minister Pardo ordered de Greiff to drop his office's protection of them. The Escobars were escorted by the national police to Hotel Tequendama in Bogotá, a large modern complex that besides the hotel includes retail shops and an apartment tower. Fed up and exhausted and frightened, Maria Victoria told government officials that she did not wish to return to Medellín, and pleaded to be sent anywhere in the world outside Colombia. She said she was tired of living with her husband's problems and just wanted to live in peace with her children.

  Pablo phoned the hotel not long after the family arrived, conveying a brief message to Juan Pablo.

  "Stay put there," he said. "Put pressure on the authorities to leave for another country, call Human Rights, the United Nations."

  As if to tighten the screws on Pablo, Los Pepes chose the day of his family's return to Colombia to issue another public pronouncement. In a communiqué to the press, the group said that they had respected the government's wish that they desist long enough. They were going to resume actions against Pablo Escobar.

  Pablo responded bitterly. On November 30, he handwrote a letter to the men he suspected of leading the vigilante group. Among those he listed were Colonel Martinez and the "DIJIN Members in Antioquia" (the Search Bloc), Miguel and Gilberto Rodríguez Orejuela, purported leaders of the Cali cartel, and Fidel and Carlos Castaño. He accused the government of hypocrisy and of targeting his family for persecution, and he complained that his rights were not being respected. "I have been raided 10,000 times," he wrote. "You haven't been at all. Everyt
hing is confiscated from me. Nothing is taken away from you. The government will never offer a warrant for you. The government will never apply faceless justice to criminal and terrorist policemen." He sealed the letter with his thumbprint and forwarded it to his few remaining frontmen for public release.

  By now Pablo's lamentations were music to his pursuers' ears. They finally had his family right where they wanted them. Out from under Attorney General de Greiff's protection, Pablo's wife and children were in the hands of Los Pepes, at least as far as he was concerned. They knew he would be frantic. Police at the hotel reported hearing Manuela singing a Christmas carol to herself as she wandered the empty hotel—which cleared out quickly when word spread of the Escobars' presence. She had substituted the traditional chorus with one of her own that went, in part, "Los Pepes want to kill my father, my family, and me."

  7

  After his success tracking down Zapata, Hugo's father gave him a few days off to visit with his wife and children in Bogotá. But on his first night back, Saturday night, came the Escobar family's ill-fated flight to Frankfurt. With Maria Victoria and the children camped at the Hotel Tequendama, the colonel knew Pablo would be calling there. He summoned Hugo and the other men back to the base. Hugo was disappointed at having to cut short his vacation, but he was also excited. His success had restored his confidence, and he knew Pablo would most likely be back on the airwaves often over the next few days.