by Mark Bowden
"The countries have denied entry because they don't know the real truth," said Pablo.
"Yes," answered Juan Pablo, taking notes as his father spoke.
"We're gonna knock on the doors of every embassy from all around the world because we're willing to fight incessantly," Pablo continued, "because we want to live and study in another country without bodyguards and hopefully with a new name."
"Just so you know," said Juan Pablo. "I got a phone call from a reporter who told me that President Alfredo Christiani from Ecuador, no, I think it is El Salvador—"
"Yes?" Pablo got up and moved to the window, mindful that this conversation had gone on for several minutes. Twenty seconds was usually the rule. Pablo looked down at cars moving on the street below as he listened.
"Well, he has offered to receive us. I heard the statement—well, he gave it to me by phone."
"Yes?"
"And he said if this contributed in some way to the peace of the country, he would be willing to receive us, because the world receives dictators and bad people, why wouldn't he receive us?"
"Well, let's wait and see, because that country is a bit hidden away."
"Well, but at least there's a possibility, and it's come from a president."
"Look, with respect to El Salvador."
"Yeah?"
"In case they ask anything, tell them the family is very grateful and obliged to the words of the president, that it is known he is the president of peace in El Salvador."
"Yeah."
Pablo stayed at the window looking out. When Juan Pablo related a question about the family's experiences under government protection, his father answered, "You respond to that one."
"Who paid for maintenance and accommodation? You or the attorney general?"
"Who did pay this?" Pablo asked.
"Us," said Juan Pablo. "Well, there were some people from Bogotá who got their expenses paid by [de Greiff], but they never spent all of it, because we supplied the groceries, mattresses, deodorants, toothbrushes, and pretty much everything." Juan Pablo rattled off two more of the questions, but his father abruptly ended the conversation.
"Okay, let's leave it at that," Pablo said.
"Yeah, okay," said Juan Pablo. "Good luck."
"Good luck."
The signal pointed Hugo straight ahead. The line of the screen lengthened and the tone in his earphones grew stronger as they proceeded up the street. They drove until the signal peaked and then began to diminish, the line pinching in at the edges of the screen and the tone slightly falling off. So they turned around and crept back the other way more slowly. The line stretched gradually until it once again filled the screen.
They were in front of a block of two-story row houses. There was no telling which was the one that housed Pablo. They cruised up and down the street several more times. Hugo stopped staring at his screen and instead stared intently at the houses, one by one.
Until he saw him.
A fat man in the second-floor window. He had long, curly black hair and a full beard. The image hit Hugo like an electric shock. He had only seen Pablo in pictures, and he had always been clean shaven except for the mustache, but they knew Pablo had grown a beard, and there was something about the man in the window that just clicked. He was talking on a cell phone and peering down at traffic. The man stepped back from the window. Hugo thought he had seen a look of surprise.
The face of Pablo Escobar assembled slowly in Hugo's brain. For a split second he was confused, disbelieving. Him! He had found him! Years of effort, hundreds of lives, thousands of futile police raids, untold millions of dollars, countless false leads and man-hours, all of the false steps, false alarms, blunders…and here he was at last, one man in a nation of 35 million people, one man in a rich, ruthless, and regimented underworld he had virtually owned for nearly two decades, one man in a city of millions where he was revered as a legend, a task literally more difficult than finding a needle in a haystack.
Hugo leaned out of his van and called to the car behind him, "This is the house!"
It was in the middle of the block. Hugo suspected Pablo had been spooked by their white van cruising slowly down the street, so he had told his driver to keep on going down to the end. Shouting into the radio, Hugo asked to be connected to his father.
"I've got him located," Hugo told his father.
The colonel knew this was it. Those were words he had never heard before. He knew Hugo would not be saying it unless he had seen Pablo with his own eyes.
"He's in this house," said Hugo.
Hugo explained excitedly that only he and one other car were there. He thought Pablo had seen him and that his gunmen were probably on their way. He wanted to clear out, fast.
"Stay exactly where you are!" Colonel Martinez ordered his son, shouting into the radio. "Station yourself in front and in back of the house and don't let him come out."
Then the colonel got word to all his units in the area, including those still thrashing through the office building blocks away, and told them to converge on the house immediately.
Hugo's two men got out of the car and positioned themselves against the wall on either side of Pablo's front door. Hugo drove the van around the block to the alley, counting the houses until he could see the back end of Pablo's. Terrified, with weapons ready, they waited.
It took about ten minutes.
There was a heavy metal front door. Martin, one of the lieutenants assigned to the Search Bloc assault team, stood ready as his men applied a heavy steel sledgehammer to it. Martin had not worn his bullet-proof vest today, and he had a moment of anxious regret, just as the hammer crashed into the door. It took several blows before it went down.
Martin sprinted into the house with the five men on his team, and the shooting started. In the din and confusion, he quickly sized up the first floor. It was empty, like a garage. There was a yellow taxi parked toward the rear, and a flight of stairs leading up to the second floor. One of Martin's men stumbled on his way up the stairs, and everyone stopped momentarily. They thought the man had been hit.
Limón leaped out a back window to the orange tile roof as soon as the team burst through the front door. The way the house was constructed, there was a back roof surrounded by walls on three sides that could be reached by dropping about ten feet from a second-story window. Limón hit the tiles and began running, and as he did the Search Bloc members arrayed in the street behind the house opened fire. There were dozens of men up and down the block with automatic weapons, some of them standing on the tops of their cars. One Search Bloc shooter had climbed to the second-floor roof of the house next door.
Limón was hit several times as he ran. His momentum carried him right off the roof. He fell to the grass below.
Then came Pablo. He stopped to kick off his flip-flops, then jumped down to the roof. Having seen what had happened to Limón, he stayed close to one wall, where there was some protection. The shooter on the roof overhead could not get a clear shot directly down at him, so there was a break in the firing momentarily as Pablo quickly moved along the wall toward the back street. No one on the street had a clear shot at him yet. At the corner, Pablo made his break.
He went for the crest of the gently sloping roof, trying to make it to the other side. There was a thundering cascade of fire and Pablo fell near the crest. He sprawled forward, dislodging orange tiles.
The shooting continued. Martin's team inside the house had found the second floor empty. When he stuck his head in the open window to look out on the roof, he saw a body and then heard an eruption of more gunfire. He and his men fell prone on the floor and waited as rounds from the street below crashed through the window and into the walls and ceiling of the room. Martin believed he and his men were taking fire from Pablo's bodyguards. He shouted into his radio, "Help! Help us! We need support!"
Everyone was shooting on automatic from below. Rounds chewed up the brick walls around the enclosed rooftop. It felt as if it took minutes for the
shooting to die down, for the Search Bloc to realize they were the only ones shooting. Finally, it stopped.
The shooter on the second-floor roof shouted, "It's Pablo! It's Pablo!"
Men were now scaling the roof to see. Someone found a ladder and placed it under the second-floor window, and others climbed down to the roof from the window. Major Aguilar grabbed the body and turned it over. The wide bearded face was swollen, bloody, and wreathed in long, blood-soaked black curls. The major grabbed a radio and spoke directly to Colonel Martinez, loudly enough for even the men on the street below to hear.
"Vivá Colombia! We have just killed Pablo Escobar!"
AFTERMATH
Police on the scene said that Pablo was hit as he ran across the roof by men shooting from the alley behind the house and by one, Major Hugo Aguilar, who had climbed to the next-door rooftop. Lieutenant Hugo Martinez, who watched from the street, said that Pablo came running out from the wall with guns in both hands, shooting and shouting, "Police motherfuckers!"
It makes for a theatrical ending, and it might be true. But throughout his years as a fugitive, Pablo Escobar was a runner, not a fighter. His response whenever the police descended was to disappear as fast as he could out a back door or, as in this case, a window. He had never tried to shoot it out and he would have known how futile—indeed, how fatal—this had been for scores of his sicarios. It is possible that he realized he was surrounded and, seeing Limón shot down, decided on an attempt to blast his way clear. But for him to have emerged with guns blazing, like the bad guy in an old Western, would have been strongly out of character.
Autopsy reports showed that Pablo was hit three times. One round entered the back of his right leg just above the knee joint and exited the front of the leg about two inches below the kneecap. Another round struck him in the back, just below the right shoulder blade, and did not exit his body. The third entered at the center of his right ear and exited just in front of the left ear, passing straight through his brain.
The shots to his leg and back most likely would have knocked him down, but probably would not have killed him. The shot to his head killed him instantly. So either all three shots hit Pablo roughly simultaneously or the killing shot was administered after Pablo was down. The exact placement of a round in the right ear of a running man from a distance demonstrates either extraordinary marksmanship or luck—a similar amazing shot felled Limón, who died of a bullet wound to the center of his forehead. It is more likely, given the placement of these death wounds, that both men were shot in the head after they fell.
Colonel Martinez has pointed out that a shot fired from within three feet would have left telltale gunpowder marks on Pablo's skin, which are not evident in autopsy photographs. But a shot fired from three to four feet away is consistent with a shooter administering a coup de grâce while standing over a downed man. One telltale sign of a shot fired from such close range would be a spray of blood. Hours after the shooting, DEA agent Steve Murphy recalled a member of the Search Bloc offering to sell his shirt and pants for $200 as souvenirs because both had been sprayed with Pablo's blood.
Killing Pablo had been the goal of the mission from the beginning. No one wanted to see him taken prisoner again. Seven years after the shooting, Colonel Oscar Naranjo, who was chief of intelligence for the Policía Nacional de Colombia at the time, said that Pablo was executed at close range after he went down.
"You have to understand, the anxiety of that team was so high," he said. "Escobar was like a trophy at the end of a long hunt. For him to have been taken alive…no one wanted to attend that disaster."
As for Pablo exiting with two guns blazing, photos of the death scene on the rooftop do show two weapons near the body. But his pursuers acknowledge altering the crime scene in at least one significant way: they carefully shaved off the corners of their victim's whiskers to give him that peculiar Hitler-style mustache that would be featured in all the news reports of his death. It was one final indignity for the man who had embarrassed them for so long.
The colonel had been feeling especially low that morning. When he had told his son and the other men to go home and get some sleep, it was because he believed that Pablo had escaped again. Only this time it was his fault. On many, even most, of the failed raids, which now numbered in the thousands, Martinez had felt pressured to launch his men prematurely. It ran counter to his nature. The colonel was a careful man. He would have preferred conducting fewer, more selective operations, but his superiors in Bogotá and the Americans were never happy unless the Search Bloc was banging down doors, as though exertion alone meant progress. The Americans in particular were always pushing for him and his men to move faster, even though the target information they gave him was generally imprecise. The colonel had reason to believe that the Americans could pinpoint Pablo with more accuracy than they let on, because they did not want to reveal the precision of their instruments. The data they gave him usually placed Pablo within an area of a few hundred meters, which in Medellín could mean an entire city block. With his son and the portable equipment in the field, the colonel was certain that his men could improve on that information on their own, so he had refused to launch an all-out raid on any of Pablo's previous calls to the Hotel Tequendama until Hugo had obtained a precise fix. He believed that this delay had allowed Pablo to slip away.
Four times that week the colonel had defied orders from Bogotá to launch. In the halls of power, of course, they had their own interpretation of this reluctance. The colonel knew they would be whispering about him, saying that he had sold out to Pablo. But this time, he told his men, he had wanted "zero error."
So he had waited. When Pablo came back up on the radiophone he was elated. He phoned Hugo, who had fallen asleep back at his apartment, and summoned all the other men to return to their hiding places. The colonel's wife was visiting. They had planned to fly back to Bogotá together that day, but now that trip was on hold. Pablo had promised to call his son back.
When he did, the colonel listened on the radio as the men hit the office building, then as Hugo, off on his own, actually spotted Pablo in the window. Over the din of the office-building raid, it was the colonel who picked out his son's voice calling for help. He ordered the bulk of the assault force to move quickly to his son's aid. Then he sweated out the ten minutes it took for them to get there. He listened as the shooting started, and then received Major Aguilar's jubilant confirmation of success.
In the background, the colonel could hear men firing their weapons into the air in celebration. He got on the phone and notified his superiors. After that, word spread quickly around the world.
Defense Minister Rafael Pardo was returning from a late lunch when he entered his office in Bogotá and found all the lights on his phone blinking at once. Most of the lines were dedicated links to his top generals, so obviously something big was up. He picked up the line from the top army commander, who was in Medellín that day to give a lecture.
"Minister, Escobar is dead," said the general.
"What happened?"
"He was killed in a [Search Bloc] operation."
"Is it confirmed?" asked Pardo. He had heard similar premature reports in the past. "Get the fingerprints."
"But Minister, it is him. I am in front of him."
"Get the fingerprints anyway."
Pardo called President Gaviria.
"Señor President, we think we've killed Escobar."
"Do you have confirmation?"
"Not yet. It will be twenty minutes before we can be certain."
But the defense minister knew they had gotten him. When he hung up, he called his secretary into his office.
"Bring me the press release for Escobar's death," he said.
"Death in an operation or death by natural causes?" she asked.
"By operation!" Pardo announced triumphantly. Then he opened a box on his desk and withdrew a big Cuban cigar, lit it, leaned back, swung his feet up, and savored a few private moments of victory.
Ambassador Morris Busby called Washington, asking to speak with Richard Canas, the National Security Council's drug enforcement chief at the Old Executive Office Building, across the street from the White House. Canas was on the phone with a reporter when his secretary interrupted.
"It's Buz," she said.
"We got Escobar," Busby told him when Canas took the call.
"Are you sure?" Canas asked.
"Ninety-nine percent," said Busby.
"Not good enough. Has one of our people seen it?"
"Give me a few minutes," said Busby.
* * *
Days before Pablo was shot, Javier Peña had left for Miami to check out the sources who claimed the fugitive drug boss had fled to Haiti, so Steve Murphy was dispatched to Medellín. The trips north to the Holguin base had become a drug for the two DEA agents. Steve had to leave his wife back in Bogotá whenever he made the trip, and as much as he admired the Delta guys and, lately, the SEALs who rotated in and out of the base, he didn't enjoy sharing the privations of their life there, sleeping on air mattresses or cots, living in a tiny suite of rooms in the barracks. They passed hours reading books and playing cards or video games, eating pizza, and watching movies on the VCR. Sometimes the Delta guys would take a case of hand grenades out to a range and throw them. Murphy had been doing law enforcement work for almost twenty years and he had never lost his enthusiasm for it, but those days in late 1993 were the closest he ever came to feeling burned out.
The base was small enough that everyone knew immediately when something unusual had happened. Murphy and a SEAL were sitting on a bench outside their rooms that Thursday morning when they noticed increased traffic in and out of the colonel's office. Murphy walked over to poke his head in. The colonel had a phone in one hand and a radio handset in the other.
"What's up?" Murphy asked one of the Colombian officers in the room.
"It's the colonel's son. He thinks he's found Pablo."
Then the colonel was shouting into the radio, "Stay exactly where you are!"
