Original subtitles

BONNIE: Cocaine is being produced at greater quantities than ever.

JEREMY: Invisibles are the future of the cocaine trade.

They don't want to gold plated Uzi.

They don't want to touch a kilo of cocaine.

They've realized their best protection, is just not being on anyone's radar at all.

PETER: Don Berna is without a doubt the world's most feared, dangerous,

and influential narco trafficker that you've never heard of.

DEREK: Don Bernardo. Den Berna.

Diego Murillio. All the same character.

PETER: He operated in the shadows.

DEREK: Tremendous power, tremendous influence, tremendous amount of violence.

PETER: He knew where all the bodies were buried, but he didn't talk about it.

DEREK: He's like the ultimate crime boss.

PETER: It was a very very tense period.

We were completely jacked up on adrenalin.

From flash to bang, it was a question of hours.

It was one of those once in a lifetime experiences.

Flashes of what happened still haunt us all.

JAY: Failure was not an option.

DEREK: It was a fascinating story because, it was a two kilo deal in New York City

that led to the identification of this massive Colombian organization.

In the DEA, we don't go after users of drugs, we don't go after distributors of drugs,

we go after the network.

And John Barry had that mentality.

JOHN: I was a New York City detective assigned

to the Manhattan North Narcotics Major Case Unit.

Back in the day in this area, a lot of cocaine.

In the early 2000s, Washington Heights was a very busy drug area.

The further North you went, the more stash houses these guys would use.

They'd try to get to a more quieter area to put their stash houses

so they don't get robbed.

My specialty in the early 2000s was wire taps and confidential informants.

We had information that this guy was a major trafficker.

He had connections outside the New York area.

JOHN: Yeah, we could call him Eduardo is fine. Yeah.

Got a court authorized wiretap on his phone.

We then began listening to his phone.

We learned that Eduardo had a shipment of cocaine that had just arrived.

He was sitting on it in an apartment in Washington Heights.

There was nothing that stood out about the conversation,

just other than him detailing that the buyer was to come

to the second floor of the building.

We set up surveillance at that location and we waited for the customer to come

and pick up those two kilos.

So the buyer was parked right over here where this black car is.

Parked his car, he exited his car.

He walked over here up the sidewalk and into the building.

He was there a short time and then he exited the building carrying a bag.

Came back the same direction, back into his car,

which I was across the street observing all this stuff.

I was calling it out to the field team what I was seeing.

(sirens) (radio chatter)

We orchestrated a car stop of that vehicle where we recovered

two kilos of cocaine and arrested the driver.

This type of operation was an everyday operation

that we did as part of a major case team.

So initially we believed it was just any other arrest for the day.

DEREK: John Barry, he understood that street deals if focused

and investigated properly

can lead to the highest level of the organization.

JOHN: Eduardo was a tough cookie.

He was difficult.

It took some time to get him to come around and tell us everything.

We finally built a rapport with him where he trusted us

and he gave us all that information, and basically spilled his guts.

So Eduardo's mother was Dominican, his father was German.

Late 60s, early 70s he came to the US and he joined the army.

He was in Vietnam in the US Military.

DEREK: He was a pilot, and this particular guy wound up flying loads

for the big Colombian kingpins Pablo Escobar and others.

JOHN: We were interested in who was the big people in Colombia that were bringing

the drugs into the US.

He mentioned a person named Don Berna.

I had no idea who Don Berna was, I had never heard of him before.

But he told me that he was a very significant trafficker in Colombia,

and was part of the reason that Pablo Escobar was killed.

Eduardo's stories seemed a little farfetched.

From a guy that I arrested on a two kilo deal in Washington Heights,

but the more I talked to him we figured out that his story was true.

I immediately went back to the DEA office and started to do research,

because he didn't know his real name, but I quickly learned

that Diego Fernando Murillo Bejarano, was Don Berna.

JEREMY: Of course, most people had never heard of Don Berna

JEREMY: because for many years Don Berna was an invisible.

DEREK: He was your traditional transnational organized crime boss.

Tremendous power, tremendous influence, very very difficult to get near,

very difficult to infiltrate.

JOHN: He had the Colombian Government protecting him.

The United States, no matter how much we asked, we couldn't get anywhere.

He was completely untouchable.

DEREK: John Barry was like a pit bull.

He told me early on that he was going to get an indictment on Don Berna

and he always delivered.

He was one of the best investigators that I've ever worked with.

JOHN: I was in shock that I took a guy from the streets of Washington Heights

who gave me information on a kingpin like Don Berna in Colombia.

He was a huge fish.

One of the worst of the worst, that's ever been on DEAs radar.

Eduardo turned me on to Don Berna, and once I latch on I don't let go.

PETER: Medellin is deceptively beautiful.

It really is the land of eternal spring.

Tragically, bubbling under that relatively serene surface is an incredibly violent,

terrorist and narco trafficking movement.

JEREMY: Don Berna, he wasn't from Medellin.

He was from Tulua, on the other side of the country by the Pacific Coast.

But he comes here and started working the lowest rung in the drug business,

for an important element in the Medellin Cartel known as the Galeano Clan,

led by Fernanda Galeano.

Don Berna attracted the attention of his boss,

when a guerilla group tried to extort from him, and there was a fight.

Berna in a shootout took up to 17 bullets and lost his leg.

JOHN: He also lost partial movement in his face,

and the reason that you always see him in all his pictures

with that towel on his shoulder is because he drools,

so he has to constantly wipe his mouth.

There's a famous story that even after him being shot, he got up with guns a‐blazing,

and killed the guys that shot him.

It was one of the incidents that made him who he is,

and how he rose to power and why people feared him.

JEREMY: His reward was to be made head of security for the Galeano Clan.

suddenly he became a significant player in the Medellin Cartel.

JEREMY: Pablo Escobar believed that certain drug traffickers

in the Medellin Cartel were not paying him his dues.

Don Berna's boss, Fernando Galeano,

was summoned to the prison and killed in the prison,

and this detonated a civil war within the Medellin Cartel.

And Don Berna was the key element in that civil war.

By this point everybody wanted Escobar dead

and no one really cared how that was achieved.

And so the Pepes were formed.

People persecuted by Pablo Escobar, and this became a vigilante group dedicated

to bringing down Escobar.

And as soon as he left The Cathedral, he fled the prison,

they were all over him.

Don Berna became the heart, the key element in the Pepes,

that then took on Pablo Escobar.

PETER: Pablo Escobar targeted well known politicians, blew up police stations,

blew up apartments, blew up social clubs frequented by Colombia's elite.

JEREMY: Don Berna turned Pablo Escobar's tactics against him.

The Pepes began to hit his support structure, they hit his lawyers,

they hit his accountants, they hit his friends, and on the day he was killed,

he had just one bodyguard with him.

There are many different theories,

as to how Pablo Escobar was killed and by who.

Don Berna's version is the Pepes were there first.

And it was his brother alias Semilla,

who actually shot Escobar as he ran across the roof.

Don Berna was the guy that sought to collect up all the different elements

of the Medellin Cartel, and keep them together.

He was able to create an extraordinarily sophisticated criminal syndicate,

and an innovative one.

He learnt from Escobar's mistakes.

The first was 'Don't be visible.' Live in the shadows.

The second, 'Do not take on the state.' Don't attract attention.

PETER: Don Berna realized that he's not a particularly charismatic person,

but he could use that lack of charisma to remain anonymous.

And he used bribes much more often than he used bullets.

And he attempted to use violence in a much more selective, surgical way,

then Pablo Escobar did.

JEREMY: He had powerful friends in the police and in the political world,

who were prepared to support him against other criminal elements.

So this helps him to cement his power.

JAY: The amount of drugs that he was responsible for moving,

we are speaking of tens of thousands of kilograms a month.

Not a year, a month.

The numbers that he ultimately had oversight of was staggering.

JOHN: In 2002, DEA put him on the CPOT list,

which identified him as one of the largest traffickers in the world,

and they also put him on the OFAC list.

Which means he couldn't conduct any financial transactions through

the world, anything in his name.

JAY: So he's at the top of that target list.

He's a designated foreign terrorist.

A major, significant narcotics trafficker,

and then he's designated by Treasury as a King Pin.

That's the trifecta.

It doesn't get any bigger.

They don't get any badder than that.

JOHN: Don Berna came up from the bottom.

He was untouchable for many many many years.

There was no question in my mind Don Berna was the biggest target in Colombia,

and I wanted to make that case that was going to bring him down.

JEREMY: Colombia's been in the grip of a civil conflict for the last 50 years.

We've got the left‐wing guerillas, right wing paramilitaries,

but they've all been fed by drug trafficking,

and cocaine has been the fuel on the fire.

DEREK: I don't know what this paramilitary stuff means.

I guess at first they had a certain ideology,

but that fell apart when they realized how much money

they can make from the drug business.

PETER: Don Berna is by no stretch of the imagination an ideologue.

He was a practical person, very pragmatic,

so his creating the AUC was more of a practical consideration,

in order to consolidate power and control

over the narco trafficking trade in Colombia.

Not because he had some firm belief in right wing political ideology.

(speaking Spanish)

JAY: Under Don Berna the AUC was out there committing massacres.

Literally crimes against humanity.

It is hard to get your head around how much destruction

and violence and mayhem this guy has caused.

JOHN: These guys were all traffickers,

they just hid behind the AUC to protect themselves from the government.

The AUC controlled every route that went to the coast,

and any drug trafficker that wanted to move cocaine

through that zone had to pay a tax.

And there was no way to get it out of Colombia without going through one of their blocks.

They had a staggering percentage of the entire Colombian production

and staggering percentage of the amount of cocaine that flowed to the United States.

PETER: Colombia was at the risk of becoming a narco state.

It was a very very dicey situation.

GEORGE W BUSH: Drugs attack everything, that is the best about this country.

And I intend to do something about them.

We're putting the fight against drugs in the center of our national agenda.

PETER: The Justice and Peace law of Colombia was created in order to convince

the members of the AUC, to come in out of the jungle,

to lay down their arms, to turn themselves in,

and to re‐enter Colombian society.

President Uribe gave his word that if the AUC members did not commit

any more acts of crime, they would serve out their relatively short sentences

in Colombia and not be extradited to the United States.

JEREMY: Don Berna made a mistake, he came out of the shadows.

As part of a paramilitary peace process he suddenly became visible.

From that moment things began to go wrong for Berna.

The AUC enters peace talks with the government.

It's a long drawn out peace process from 2003 to 2006.

Don Berna was one of the promoters of the peace process with the government,

and indeed the first paramilitary unit

that demobilized was one of Don Berna's.

Why did he do this?

He obviously felt that he was going to get the golden parachute.

The golden parachute that the paramilitaries were looking for was,

one, no jail time, two, no extradition,

and three, 'Can we keep some of our money?'

JAY: There's only four things you had to do in order to get

all the entitlements that the Justice and Peace offered.

You had to voluntarily law down your weapons, you had to admit to your wrongdoings,

you had to make reparations to the victims, give back the property,

and ultimately you had to stop being engaged in criminal activity.

You do those four things and you will serve no more than eight years in prison,

no matter what you did.

And then you'll live happily ever after.

It's all you had to do. The ultimate sweetheart deal, right?

PETER: they were not forced to spend time in prison, they were forced to spend time

in fairly lax essentially work camps of sorts, spread throughout Colombia.

DEREK: The demobilization of the AUC to me is just a big joke.

Bottom line is he went to some 'prison', which was really not a prison.

He got to hang out with the beautiful women and he got the drinks

and he had his phones, he had his communications.

He continued to do his business.

But he was "in prison" in Colombia.

JAY: It is the ultimate deal. And guess what?

Don Berna and his brethren, they literally couldn't stop being criminals.

They'd been terrorists and they've been drug traffickers so long in their life,

that when they have a good deal, all they're thinking of is

how they can game the system.

They basically demobilized a percentage of their membership,

and they left their best drug traffickers

and their best fighters out in the field, to continue operating.

PETER: Don Berna in particular continued massive narco trafficking.

From his relatively serene camp he was able to maintain operational control,

and as he had done his entire career, he operated in the shadows.

JOHN: In October of 2003, it was the initial indictment on Don Berna.

Once the peace and justice was signed in 2005

I thought the likelihood of us getting him was diminished greatly.

But at that point I did take a step back and think about it and say to myself,

'These guys can't stay out of trouble.'

And it was only a matter of time before they'd slip up.

JAY: Don Berna self‐surrendered, and it was all about maintaining that

sweetheart deal and maintaining reigns on his empire.

And what does he do?

While he's in captivity he ordered the murder, of a politician,

the politician's wife and their driver.

JOHN: It was a turning point, and the Colombian government started to turn up the heat,

and he felt it.

JAY: And that's when they had him removed into a real prison.

JEREMY: The rest of the paramilitary leaders went into prison soon afterwards,

but this is where we see, Don Berna's power beginning to diminish.

(speaking Spanish)

PETER: President Uribe was now under considerable political pressure

to extradite Don Berna.

and the rest of the AUC leadership to the United States to face justice there.

DEREK: In the DEA, in the US attorney's office,

we believe very strongly in extradition.

We believe in the rule of law, and we believe in developing evidence

against these kingpins, and we want them to face justice in America.

PETER: The members of the AUC, like Pablo Escobar decades before,

understood that if they were extradited, tried, convicted,

sentenced and incarcerated in the United States for their crimes,

that was end of the game for them.

DEREK: They can't corrupt the officials,

they can't get the girls, they can't get the booze,

they can't run their business.

So they don't want to come to America.

PETER: Many of them are dead serious when they say,

"Better a grave in Colombia than a jail cell in the United States."

JOHN: Things began to change in 2007 when other traffickers wanted

to come in and surrender to the United States.

We brought one of those witnesses in who had a wealth of information on Don Berna.

Really turned up the heat, because now we can start to send leads and information

down to Colombia that they didn't even know about.

JAY: There was overwhelming proof that was obtained by DEA

and shared with the Colombian government, of the AUC leaders

reconstituting themselves, and retooling themselves into

a formidable transnational criminal network from behind bars in prison.

This new organization was going to be as violent and as dangerous and cause

as much mayhem as the former AUC.

And the AUC leaders were controlling that from prison.

They were directing it, they were devising it, they were scheming about it.

You've now created a new generation of criminals that are the next level.

It was the ultimate betrayal by the AUC.

PETER: I met with President Alvaro Uribe on almost a weekly basis,

and he became increasingly frustrated.

JOHN: I think the president of Colombia finally got fed up

with these guys embarrassing him.

They continued to traffic drugs, people were killed,

and I think he just finally said "Enough is enough."

The president in one fell swoop signed the extradition orders,

of the fourteen of the highest ranking AUC members

that had continued to engage in criminal activity.

JAY: My first thought would be "No, no they're not.

This couldn't really be happening now."

There's never been that many criminals, kingpin violators,

and terrorists that have been extradited at the exact same time.

PETER: Meetings regarding extradition were incredibly sensitive conversations

that could, quite literally impact democracy in Colombia.

Because if word got out, there was great worry about violence.

JAY: The moment that the AUC leaderships learned that they're about

to be extradited, they will put out that order to the tens of thousands

of armed individuals that were working for them,

to just commit mayhem in Colombia.

(speaking in Spanish)

PETER: There was no margin for error whatsoever, legally and operationally.

We needed to make sure that we had everything logistically in order

because this was truly a life or death situation.

JOHN: I had a counterpart in Colombia, a DEA agent I worked very closely with

and he had called me and said "Hey, keep this quiet,

there's something going on here.

Something big, I don't know exactly what it is yet, but get ready."

JAY: I distinctly remember Ambassador William Brownfield

the US Ambassador to Colombia.

He looks at me and he said "Can you do this?"

And I looked at him and I said, "I can get the resources and I can do this."

Failure was not an option.

Why did this happen in the dead of night?

We had one shot at this.

We wouldn't get a second shot.

There was a real concern that the defense council would get to the courts

and the courts would impede that through an injunction.

We had prisoners in four different locations in Colombia.

We would have to do this after the courts close, after 6 P. M.

and they'd have to be airborne and out of Colombian airspace

before the courts opened the next morning.

From flash to bang it was a question of hours.

PETER: We were extraordinarily worried about the strong likelihood,

of lethal violence being used in those moments and those hours leading up to

extradition of these highly dangerous individuals.

I cannot emphasize enough how dangerous this operation was.

JAY: I had two separate sets of teams that had to go out

depart from Bogota to the three corners of Colombia, to different prisons.

One on the north coast in Barranquilla, one in Medellin and one closer to Bogota.

And then I had a second team that were actually going to be the physical exports,

from Bogota to the next stop outside of Colombia.

JOHN: Not to my knowledge there's ever been this many people extradited

of this level and this caliber at one time.

It was unprecedented.

You know I alerted my supervisor and you know

the whole New York side was at a buzz.

JAY: Colombia is a very large country.

It is the size of California and Texas combined.

PETER: Keep in mind as well that Bogota sits just under 3,000 meters,

and that is complicated for pilots and small planes.

It is also subject to various changes in the weather

to include freak hailstorms and fog.

JAY: Two of my agents inside UH60 Black Hawk said they could not see

their own hand in front of their face,

and at point the helicopter went vertical.

Now they're not on comms with the pilot, and so all they know is they're feeling

the Gs against them, as this helicopter's going vertical

and all they can think of is they're about to smack into a mountain.

And twice the helicopters had to come back because of weather.

Twice. Pilots basically said, "We're going to get everybody killed if we do this."

And the head of the Colombian squad that was in charge of this mission

is looking at his watch.

My DEA folks, they're looking at their watch, and the clock is ticking.

They were going to commandeer a bunch of police vehicles and drive to the prison.

Seems reasonable.

That choice was aborted.

The decision was if they go to the police, everybody's going to know.

There's going to be no secret.

So what did the head of the Colombian National police

of that special unit decide to do?

They commandeered seven taxis.

They loaded up in seven taxis from the airport,

drove to the Itagui prison.

They do go pick up seven of the most notorious, violent, and powerful criminals,

that the world knows.

And now they're driving them back.

I still don't know what was the reaction to the governor of that prison

when, you know, normally it would be a UH60, 20 million, you know,

$15 million dollar Black Hawk waiting,

and he goes out and he sees, seven Colombian yellow taxis.

The warden said, "I'm not releasing this person."

"I don't care what paperwork you have."

"At this hour I wasn't notified of this.

I am not losing my job."

And so a phone call needed to be made.

Whether it was the president, this could be urban legend

but the officer in charge handed a phone over to the warden

and said, "There's somebody on the phone that would like to speak to you."

The conversation went "Yes Mr. President.

Immediately Mr. President. Yes sir.

Thank you, Mr. President."

"Good night Mr. President."

Macaco spent his entire career and his entire life committing massacres.

What can he only be thinking in the middle of the night being pulled out of prison

is going to happen?

He was white as a sheet.

He had the fear of God in his eyes.

He gets to the helicopter, he sees, my folks there, he looks up and he says,

"Are you guys DEA?"

And they go "Yeah we are."

And all of a sudden, he didn't say a word, but a smile comes on his face.

Blood is rushing back to his face.

He probably thought he was going to get what he used to give.

JOHN: Don Berna was deathly afraid of extradition to the United States.

Don Berna more than anybody else had basically given up.

JAY: They were being woken up in the middle of the night without any advanced warning.

PETER: As they were being transported to Bogota their fear morphed into anger.

One individual actually looked at his captors and said, "I've seen your faces."

"Each and every one of you are dead men, and so are your families."

JAY: When everybody had arrived at five o'clock or so in the morning

I headed down.

That moment is indelibly etched in my mind.

Fourteen criminals located at one place about to be flown out

on a single extradition mission.

PETER: It was chilling because these were individuals

who were entirely capable of ordering their lieutenants,

their sicarios, their henchmen and their assassins to actually kill

not only in Colombia but in the United States.

I would be lying if I said we all weren't a bit nervous.

It was a very, very tense period.

JAY: Because I have lived the Don Berna life for two years since I arrived in Colombia,

I knew exactly what he looked like.

He had no fight left in him.

He knew it was the end of the road.

You had Don Berna, Macaco, Mancuso, Jorge Cuarenta

and then Giraldo Serna.

You literally had the entire board of directors of the AUC at the DEA hangar

in Bogota Colombia.

There has not been to this day an extradition mission,

that's moved so many kingpins and terrorists at one time from the Americas

to the United States. Never.

JOHN: The first question I asked obviously was "Can I get down there?

I want to fly on the aircraft back with him."

And the answer was "Absolutely not."

"This is a super secret thing going on in Colombia.

We've got to move quickly and get him out of the country."

JAY: Until that ATR got out of Colombian airspace and was over the Caribbean Sea,

I was still holding my breath.

That is the real con air flight.

Nicholas Cage has nothing on that mission.

JEREMY: Macaco, Don Berna, the top leaders of the AUC are extradited

to the United States.

It's a game changing moment in the drug world.

Suddenly the big dogs are all gone.

JAY: We fly everybody to Guantanamo Bay

and Don Berna gets his own Lear Jet to New York.

JOHN: It was an unbelievable feeling when that door opened,

the agent walked off and then right behind him was Don Berna.

He looked like a broken man.

I told him my name was John Barry, he knew who I was.

Homeland Security was there to do the paperwork

and then we walked through.

He was very cooperative at the time and he didn't give us a hard time at all.

When we're moving a CPOT, one of the world's top drug traffickers,

I'm not stopping anywhere.

We went directly downtown to the prison.

We knew that we had a dangerous guy here

and there's been escape attempts in the past.

And there was no way I was going to let that happen on my watch.

PETER: It was incumbent on the United States government to provide,

the evidence necessary to convict these individuals in courts in the United States,

and obtain very lengthy sentences.

DEREK: They had all the evidence.

It was sealed up nice.

They put the bow on top of the prosecution.

And the defense attorneys realized there's no way to beat the case.

That's because of detectives like John Barry

and others that worked on this investigation.

They put together an airtight prosecution.

What's amazing about this case, which is unheard of, a month later he plead guilty.

There's nothing he could offer that would deserve a reduction in sentence.

JOHN: When you have the baddest of the bad, the worst of the worst,

Don Berna was not one of those people we wanted to get a break.

JAY: You have Don Berna the drug trafficker, you have Don Berna the terrorist.

He left behind a trail of blood that is unfathomable to the average person.

RUBEN: The Colombian government prevents the United States from,

having a death penalty or a life sentence for their people

that are extradited out of Colombia.

Famously at the sentencing the prosecutor announced to the judge,

that Don Berna was the Osama Bin Laden of Colombia.

And you can imagine what an impact that is when you're saying that after 9/11

in a courtroom in Manhattan.

It was really the death knell to any possibility of Berna

ever being able to cooperate in any case.

JOHN: He got 375 months in prison, which is just over 31 years.

JEREMY: Don Berna tried invisibility on for size to begin with,

and then he set up a criminal infrastructure upon

which today's invisibles can now piggyback off.

This is a watershed moment.

So for me Don Berna is the first in the process of invisibility.

JAY: To the American people and to the world they don't now who Don Berna is.

But Don Berna can go toe to toe with the most well‐known traffickers in the world,

Rodriguez Orihuelas, Pablo Escobar, Don Berna in his own right eventually rivaled

the worst of the worst.

JOHN: His mistake was that he got too big.

You can't kill politicians and you can't kill family members of people that owe money,

and people are just going to stay quiet forever.

And once you're in the limelight, the bullseye's on your back,

and you better look out.

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