by Mark Bowden
Centra Spike suffered in the bureaucratic wars following its success in Colombia. Its former commanders believe that the unit's ability to get better results than the CIA with smaller, cheaper equipment led to harassment, internal investigations (into expense-account fraud and accusations of fraternization), and trumped-up charges. Whether the charges were trumped up or not, the unit was effectively disbanded. Careers ended, and many of the men involved in the manhunt for Pablo Escobar are now out of the army. Some are still doing the same kind of work for the Pentagon as contract employees.
The army still has the unit that was then called Centra Spike. Its former leaders feel that its effectiveness has been much reduced.
The death of Pablo Escobar may have been cause for celebration in official circles in Washington and Bogotá, but for many Colombians, especially in Medellín, it was an occasion for grief. Thousands of people attended the funeral and followed his casket through the streets. They swarmed to get closer, and sometimes mourners opened the lid to stroke his face.
There were chants of "We love you, Pablo!" and "Long live Pablo Escobar!" and shouts of anger directed toward the government, promises of revenge. The mob followed the casket to the cemetery, where Pablo's sister told a TV reporter that her brother had not been a criminal and that any violence attributed to him was necessary to "defend" himself from government persecution.
Pablo's grave in Medellín is still carefully tended. On the simple stone there is a photograph of a mustachioed Pablo in a business suit. There are flowering bushes framing the grave, and ornate iron bars that stretch over it supporting three flowerpots.
Eduardo Mendoza again works for César Gaviria, who is general secretary of the Organization of American States. The former Colombian president had lost touch with his old friend but tracked him down when I asked for help finding him.
Just as the judges at his indagatoria recommended, the disillusioned former vice minister of justice left Colombia. His innocence before the law did not clear his name in public. People would come up to him in restaurants in Bogotá and tell him, "Get out. They are going to kill you." Some would say, "You are a crook." The army still blamed him for Pablo's escape. They claimed that the only reason Pablo got away was because they had to storm the prison to rescue Mendoza. No one would hire him. Many of his old friends would no longer speak to him. He was an outcast.
So he flew back to New York, stayed at the New York Athletic Club for several weeks, and then enrolled as a graduate student at Yale University, studying Latin American literature. He ran out of money after four months. When he met with the dean to tell him why he was leaving, the school offered Mendoza a scholarship, and he spent three years earning a master's degree.
It was there, on a cold December afternoon, that he learned of Pablo's death. He returned to his apartment—he called it his "monk's cell"—after classes and checked his voice mail. Usually there was just a message from Adriana, but on this day the recorded voice said he had twenty-five messages.
The first was from his brother.
"They've killed Escobar!" he said. Every other recording carried the same message. In some, he could hear partying going on in the background.
He reflected on how much his life had changed since that day he'd agreed to go to Envigado to "formalize" the transfer of a prisoner. Over the years, Mendoza had worked up a greater sense of anger at the officials who had scapegoated and persecuted him than for Pablo himself. His friends had hurt him worse than Pablo ever had. In the end, it all just made him sad. He couldn't feel any sense of satisfaction about Pablo's death. It was just a footnote for him now, a final detail from a story that for him had already ended badly—but not as badly as it might have.
After finding Mendoza, Gaviria hired him. Eduardo married Adriana and they have twins, a boy and a girl. He now works as a lawyer for the Organization of American States.
About the way his administration treated his old friend, Gaviria says, "It was a difficult time for us all."
Roberto Uribe, the Medellín lawyer whose work for Pablo had made him a target of Los Pepes, was still in hiding when his former client was killed. Uribe had long since realized how much Pablo had pulled the wool over his eyes. He saw him now as a vicious criminal. When he heard the news on a car radio, he felt not sadness but relief. It meant he had made it.
After his initial elation, Joe Toft felt a knot in his stomach. He felt it the entire time he was smiling, embracing colleagues, talking to the Colombian press. He and Busby hurried over to the Presidential Palace, where a party was in full swing. They sipped champagne and exchanged hearty rounds of thanks and congratulations, embraced drunken colleagues, slapped each other on the back. But even as he went through these motions of victory, Toft was haunted by the feeling that somehow they had lost. Pablo was dead, but the good guys had lost.
It was an awful feeling, but Toft couldn't shake it. In the weeks after Pablo's death, Agent Kenny Magee had official certificates printed up for all of those directly involved in the manhunt. "Because of your selfless dedication and willing sacrifices, the world's most sought-after criminal was located and killed…." the proclamation began. It had a space at the lower right to be signed by Toft, and to the left, a touch of wit: the signature and thumbprint of Pablo Escobar. Someone in the Colombian press obtained a copy and felt it was in bad taste, particularly the thumbprint, but Toft and many of the others had their copies framed.
The DEA station chief's pride was mixed with regret. He felt that to get Pablo they had sold their souls. For months now the information had piled up in his office, evidence that his friends in the Colombian government had been taking payoffs from the Cali cocaine cartel—even his friend General Vargas was suspected of taking bribes—and that they all had been behind the murderous campaign of Los Pepes. Toft admired the solid detective work that had finally found Pablo, the technological wizardry of Centra Spike and Delta Force, the patience, courage, and tenacity of Colonel Martinez and the Search Bloc. In retrospect, now, he wished they had just relied on all that legitimate effort to get the job done. It might have taken them longer, Toft believed, but it would have been better. It would have been the right way, and they would have gotten him in the end just the same. Instead, they had taken this terrible shortcut.
Toft felt guilty himself. He knew that his agents Peña and Murphy had seen Don Berna and the other Los Pepes contacts at the Holguin school. He knew that the death squad hits matched the intelligence reports gathered at the embassy and passed along to the Search Bloc. He knew that some of the DEA's own sources were founding members of the group. Still, Toft was torn. On the one hand, Los Pepes were effectively dismantling the Medellín cartel and stripping away the layers of protection around Pablo. But on the other hand, he couldn't in good conscience support the group's violent, illegal methods. So he had morally held his breath. He had done nothing and had kept the worst of his misgivings and evidence to himself Inside the embassy, he had been the most gung ho all along. When Busby had raised doubts about the colonel and Los Pepes, it had been Toft who, behind the ambassador's back, had pushed to keep the colonel in place, and who had reassured the Colombian government of continued American support. Now, with Pablo dead, Toft worried that they had created a monster. They had opened a bridge between the Colombian government, its top politicians and generals, and the Cali cartel that would be difficult, if not impossible, to shut down.
Agent Murphy had spelled it out in a memo to headquarters three months earlier, after meeting with a high-ranking Colombian police official he did not name:
As stated by the CNP [PNC] source, sometimes it is necessary to talk with the worst sections of society in order to catch a criminal. [He] continued by saying that they feel they have spoken with "the devil himself" in this investigation…. Fidel and Carlos Castaño, who are the alleged leaders of the illegal anti-Escobar group known as Los Pepes, as well as some of the world's foremost cocaine traffickers and money launderers…. While this kind of activity may
be extremely revolting for the CNP, at the same time, it is necessary.
Murphy went on to write that the Cali cartel had also gotten involved in the manhunt, noting, "This only makes good business sense." Murphy predicted that the alliance between Cali and the government, forged during this manhunt, might combine to create "a super cartel."
Should this ever happen, the GOC and CNP would be virtually helpless in their attempts to corner such an organization. This, too, would be devastating for the U.S.
Others at DEA headquarters had the same concerns. Four months earlier, in the same cable he had received from Gregory Passic, chief of financial investigations for the DEA, relating Rodolpho Ospina's description of how Los Pepes were formed, Passic had written, "Luis Grajales [one of the cartel leaders] told [Ospina] that Cali basically controls everyone in the government outside of [Attorney General] de Greiff." Another of the cartel bosses told Ospina that they had "an impressive library of audio and video recordings, mostly recordings of bribes paid to police and politicians," the memo said. At one meeting the leaders had discussed advancing $200,000 to a Colombian police general. The advance would cover four months, it was explained, because, Passic wrote, "they pay the police generals $50,000 each per month to 1) ensure they continue their hunt for Escobar and 2) provide Cali with information on DEA's efforts against Cali."
Toft had received information of his own, of course, just a month ago, when one of his trusted sources, the Colombian senator (who was later assassinated), had held that meeting with Gilberto Rodríguez Orejuela. The Cali boss had outlined exactly how much money was being paid to various Colombian police officials as a reward for targeting Escobar. The connections with Los Pepes were all obvious to Toft.
But what good would it have done for him to object? If someone like Passic knew, why should Joe Toft be the one to harp on it? He suspected that if he had made more of an issue out of it, spelled out for everyone that they were all in bed with the Cali cocaine cartel and a ring of vigilante murderers, then the DEA and the army surely would have withdrawn from the pursuit, and Pablo would have remained at large. So he had gone along. He had stressed to his men, Murphy, Peña, Magee, and the others, that under no circumstances were they to provide assistance directly to Los Pepes, but at the same time he knew that everything they gave Colonel Martinez was shared with the vigilante group. It was an ugly business, killing Pablo, and the DEA was certainly no stranger to cooperating with ugly people to get a good job done.
But Toft was convinced that Cali was the big winner in all this. In the years they had focused on Pablo, the southern cartel had consolidated its operations, cemented its relationship with the Colombian government, and become a cocaine monopoly. So the victory was bittersweet. Toft hated what drugs were doing to America. He had always thought that he and the others in the DEA were fighting a war for America's fature. He believed strongly in the cause, and felt as if he had become a point man in the fight. He had gone from busting petty drug users in San Diego to tracking down the most notorious cocaine kingpin of them all. Yet somehow, Toft felt, he had managed to make things worse.
When he had first come to Colombia, to the front lines of the war, Toft had been mesmerized by statistics. The amounts of cocaine they seized were mind-blowing. It took him a full year to realize that even those huge seized amounts were a tiny fraction of what was being shipped north, and that the Colombian officials he had trusted were, in fact, playing a game. They were pleasing Uncle Sam and the DEA by grabbing shipments here and there, but they were into the cocaine business up to their eyeballs. It was then he had realized that Pablo Escobar was the real power in Colombia, and how pervasive and insidious was his influence. He had known it would be difficult to get him, but only now, after Pablo was dead, did he realize how difficult the larger task would be. Killing Pablo had not ended the cocaine industry; it had merely handed it off to new leaders, who had presumably learned from Pablo's mistakes. To prevail now would take…how many men? How many lives? How much money? How much compromise? Those were the questions balled in his gut that afternoon and evening, as they all toasted the death of Pablo.
In the coming months, as the Colombian police refocused their efforts on the Cali cartel, Toft became convinced that it was all a sham. He believed that no one with real power was going to jail unless they chose to do so. They were agreeing to have their hands slapped in order to preserve their multibillion-dollar business. Colombian cocaine shipments hadn't slowed during the hunt for Pablo. The best estimate for 1993 would be between 243 and 340 tons of cocaine available for sale in the United States, with 70 to 80 percent of it shipped from Colombia. An estimated $30.8 billion would be spent by Americans for the white powder by the end of that year. Prices were down for the drug. All in all, there was more cocaine available for sale in the United States at cheaper prices that year than ever before in history. Indeed, throughout the remainder of the decade, cocaine prices in the United States gradually declined. The bottom line was that regardless of the billions spent in the war on drugs, there was more than enough cocaine for everybody in America who wanted to buy it.
Of course, killing Pablo had not primarily been about drugs. His violence was his death sentence. His violence and his ambition. But Toft was a drug man, a cop. He had never lost sight of why he was in Colombia, and as he watched the rounds of congratulations in the days, weeks, and months after Pablo's death, he grew more and more cynical about the whole effort.
Six months after Pablo's death, Toft retired and left Colombia, dropping a small bomb in his wake. Angered by the praise being heaped on Colombia by Washington, embittered by the silent betrayals among his circle of Colombian friends, Toft went on television in Bogotá to accuse the president-elect, Ernesto Samper, of being in the pocket of the Cali cocaine cartel. Toft handed reporters copies of secret tape recordings in which Miguel Rodríguez Orejuela, one of the world's most notorious drug traffickers, talked about transferring $3.5 million to Samper's campaign chest. The new president denied the allegations, even though the tapes were authenticated. He claimed that the money had never been accepted by his campaign. Toft didn't believe him, and neither did Busby or other Americans at the embassy. The "narco-cassettes" tainted Samper's entire four-year term, and strained relations between the two nations.
It also led to a real crackdown on the Cali cartel. Embarrassed by the revelations in Toft's tapes, the United States pressured Colombia for more action. The tainted General Vargas was replaced by General Serrano, who led a rapid crackdown on corruption in the PNC and on the Cali leaders, arresting Gilberto and Miguel Rodríguez Orejuela and six of its other leaders in just two months.
Toft today lives in Reno, Nevada, and plays a lot of tennis. His daughter, Jennifer, is now a DEA agent.
"I don't know what the lesson of the story is," he says. "I hope it's not that the end justifies the means."
SOURCES
I started working on Killing Pablo in 1997 after seeing a framed photograph of a dead fat man surrounded by cheerfully posing soldiers on the office wall of a U.S. military man.
"What's that?" I asked.
"That, my friend, is Pablo Escobar," my source said. "I keep that on my wall to remind me that no matter how rich you get in this life, you can still be too big for your britches."
Until then, I was unaware of the extent of U.S. military involvement in the hunt for Escobar. The bulk of this book rests upon interviews I conducted with Americans and Colombians involved in the pursuit from 1989 until his death on December 2, 1993. There are many important sources missing from my list of interviewees, primarily those of military personnel. I don't like relying on anonymous sources, but in this case I was lucky to obtain detailed corroboration of their stories from more than a thousand pages of mostly secret cables from the U.S. embassy in Bogotá to Washington. The cables are from a variety of embassy personnel, but mostly from DEA agents. The whole amounts to a daily record of the manhunt through the eyes of the Americans who took part, and much of the sec
ond half of this narrative is drawn from it. I received the DEA's permission to interview its agents early on in this process. Joe Toft, Steve Murphy, Javier Peña, and Kenny Magee spent a lot of time helping me sort out this very complicated story. Former U.S. ambassador Morris D.Busby was also extremely helpful, and kindly reviewed an early draft of the story prior to its being published as a newspaper series in The Philadelphia Inquirer. Former Colombian president César Gaviria, now general secretary of the Organization of American States, sat for several interviews and allowed me to poke through his archives, and Eduardo Mendoza, in addition to telling me his own story, served as a patient adviser, chief consultant on Colombian history and politics, translator, intermediary, and friend.
To help me through the mountain of material on this subject generated by Colombia's very courageous journalists, I employed a series of translators and researchers: Julie López, in the United States, and Ricky Ortiz, Maria Carrizosa, and Steve Ambrus in Bogotá. Colombian journalist Gerardo Reyes, of El Herald, was extremely helpful to me on my second trip to Colombia in 2000. In the course of preparing a documentary film on this subject with KR Video Inc., I worked closely with Chris Mills and Wendy Doughenbaugh, and learned a great deal from them as they compiled videotape from a rich variety of Colombian sources. I was also fortunate to have the chance to work with the globe-trotting reporter Mike Boettcher of CNN, an extraordinary raconteur whose wealth of background information and sources was both invaluable and astonishing. I am grateful to them all.
INTERVIEWS
Joe Toft, Steve Murphy, Javier Peña, Kenny Magee, César Gaviria, Eduardo Mendoza, J.J.Ballesteros, Roberto Uribe, General Hugo Martinez, Captain Hugo Martinez, Lieutenant Colonel Luis Estupinan, Morris D.Busby, Judy Busby, Raphael Pardo, "Rubin," Octavio Vargas, General José Serrano, Mike White, Poncho Renteria, Robert Wagner, Gustavo de Greiff, Colonel Oscar Naranjo, General Ismael Trujillo, Major Luis Cepeda, Sergeant José Fernandez, Ambassador Richard Gillespie, Diego Londono, General Jack Sheehan, Brian Sheridan, Walter B.Slocombe, Randy Beers, General George Joulwon, Anthony Lake, Ambassador Robert Gelbard, Mike Sheehan, Richard Canas, General Colin Powell, Jim Smith, Janet Christ, W.Hays Parks, L.H. "Bucky" Burruss.
