Original subtitles

♪

AJ: So here I am. We're riding in a Chevy Blazer.

We're halfway around the world by myself

to meet with a new client in the country of Colombia.

AJ had a customer who really loved his suits and he said,

"Hey, my boss loves what you're designing for me.

He'd like to meet you."

AJ: I have absolutely no idea who I'm getting ready to see.

And we pulled up to a ranch.

So I walk in there, and I was absolutely in shock.

I was standing in front of my new client,

Pablo Escobar.

I thought, "Oh, my God."

Here was a guy that I'd heard a lot about in the news.

I really was not that comfortable.

And there was an entire kilo of cocaine

right there on the table.

I thought, "I hope I get out of this alive."

♪

♪

♪

I was sitting on a ranch of Pablo Escobar.

AJ knew who the heck he was dealing with --

the king of cocaine.

But it was strictly to make clothes

because Escobar was also trying

to be a somewhat mainstream politician

and not, you know, the street thug.

Murphy: Pablo Escobar -- he was the head of the Medellín Cartel.

In the early 1990s.

I was one of the two lead investigators

on the Medellín Cartel and the demise of Pablo Escobar.

[Camera shutter clicks]

He introduced a business model of drug trafficking

that eventually made him responsible

for 80% of the world's cocaine.

His business model is, "I'm telling you to do something.

If you don't do it, I'm gonna kill you. And you know what?

I might kill your family, your children, and your dog."

He's nothing more than a mass murderer in my book.

Manna: And AJ knew he could help change that a little bit

by the clothes he wore.

Escobar hated wearing a tie.

So almost all the photos you see of Escobar,

he's got, you know, an open shirt.

Except for the tie that AJ made for him.

The fact that AJ could make suits

that made him look presentable, like a businessman,

uh, pleased him.

But AJ knew that it's not like Pablo

was suddenly gonna be some sort of clothes horse.

He said that, uh, Pablo was, [chuckles]

as far as clothes was concerned,

it was just kind of secondary.

Sciutto: So Pablo and AJ became friends.

They hit it off because they were two similar guys in a way.

AJ had come from nothing.

He had come from the middle of nowhere, Arkansas.

No electricity, no money -- not a dime.

Hitchhiked and became his own man.

He made his own image,

like, he became the person he wanted to be.

And Pablo was similar in that he came from nothing

and was the wealthiest man in the world at the time.

But you have to remember, he was one of the most wanted men,

as well as being the wealthiest man.

So he couldn't fly to Vegas.

So he lived vicariously through all these stories

that AJ told about hanging out with celebrities

and designing for showgirls.

Murphy: If you're a criminal like Pablo Escobar,

when somebody's telling you about a place known as Sin City,

well, holy cow. That sounds like a place

where they might enjoy cocaine, doesn't it?

It's no doubt in my mind

that the wheel started turning in Pablo's head,

and he's like, "This is gonna be my man in Las Vegas."

AJ: Uh, so I was back in Colombia

delivering the wardrobes for Pablo.

Pablo said, "I'd like to make you a very, very good offer."

Pablo actually said to AJ,

"Listen, you should get into the cocaine business

and make as much money as you can right now

while you're young so you can enjoy it as you get older,

which is what I'm doing here."

And this was Pablo Escobar. Of course, that frightened AJ

because he knew what kind of a man this was.

But AJ thought, well, he could make a lot of money.

Now, the thing to remember, too, is AJ started with nothing.

AJ always said that he was someone who,

when he saw an opportunity in front of him,

he tried to maximize that opportunity.

AJ: At that moment, it sounded like more than I could handle.

I had my fashion business going so well.

But at the same time, my mind was going,

"Yeah, he's right, he's right."

AJ did not always recognize consequences,

you know, and what the risk and reward was.

AJ: But I already, needless to say,

was involved with very dangerous people in the Mob.

So the challenge

and the excitement and the danger of this offer,

it sounded very intriguing, very interesting.

And after the things that happened to me

when I was younger in Wichita, I basically was fearless.

What happened was he fell in love with a woman named Linda.

AJ: I met Linda when I was 20 years of age.

She was a petite, beautiful, very intelligent,

and an extremely interesting young lady

[stutters] that I just -- I was --

I was rather smitten with.

They went on to marry.

AJ: We started a family, and we had two kids,

my son, Todd, and daughter, Michelle.

They were a happy family here for a short time,

but there was a tragedy that happened.

AJ: It was my daughter's birthday.

As I was pulling in the drive,

I could see Linda in the kitchen window.

In her excitement, she ran around from the kitchen

to the front door and out of the house.

And the door starts to close on her,

and she just used her elbow to shove the door aside.

And her elbow just barely nicked that metal.

And she caught tetanus,

and she later died of it in the hospital.

Carroll: He loved that woman with all his heart.

And he said, "Something came over me."

And he said, "I just didn't care anymore."

Sciutto: He started talking differently,

walking differently.

He started to dress a very particular way.

He got the mustache.

He, uh, slicked back his hair.

And he created AJ the tailor.

David: And his children were raised by our parents.

And I do believe down the road, it, uh --

it caused some relationship problems with the kids.

♪

AJ: I returned to Las Vegas.

And I was informed in Colombia

that somebody would pick up part of the wardrobe

that I was designing for Pablo.

So one afternoon, a young man called for an appointment.

I had him over to my studio.

He had a box, and inside the box,

four kilos of pure cocaine.

And he said, "This is for you."

That was the first delivery

that I knew that came directly from the source itself.

The introduction of cocaine to the United States

was slow and gradual until the Pablo Escobar came along.

-Our top story tonight... -...cocaine...

...has become the number-one illicit drug

in the United States.

Cocaine is now becoming the "in" drug.

In the 1970s, cocaine kind of took

the United States by surprise, especially law enforcement.

Nobody really cared about it, 'cause they were worried about

all the weed that was being imported from South America

into South Florida. That was their focus.

So when cocaine came on the scene,

well, cocaine already existed for medicinal purposes.

Man: Although cocaine enters through

a massive criminal network,

there is virtually no evidence

that cocaine users commit crimes to get it,

probably because cocaine, unlike heroin,

is not physically addictive.

I think we know now they were completely wrong.

We didn't know what we were in for.

Nobody knew, especially AJ,

how cocaine would go over in Vegas.

But it was a big hit right away.

Russo: The introduction of cocaine

seemed like it happened overnight 'cause once --

once it got out there, everybody accepted it,

especially the entertainment world.

♪

♪

AJ: Of course, all of the connections

that I had from making clothing -- the showgirls,

the working girls, valet guys, uh, the pit bosses,

anybody that was part of Las Vegas was all over me.

Just to give you an idea of the volume,

there was times in Las Vegas that I could go through

a kilo of cocaine in less than 18 hours.

The money was so sensational.

David: Well, AJ realized he'd found something there

in the cocaine business.

When AJ used to come to town in Wichita,

we'd party a little bit.

Of course, he was such a salesman, he could --

he'd start telling a big story about it and, uh,

[chuckles] and how great it was,

and then he'd have us -- we'd both have a little taste of it.

Time just slips away.

You don't even know where time's at.

The next thing you know, I mean, I was working at the time.

I had to get up and go to work, no sleep, no nothing.

But I'd do it.

Sciutto: He's selling out of this cocaine instantly.

So in order to keep that up,

Pablo's sending him shipments through his guys.

AJ: And now I have two of these guys

making these trips from Colombia.

And I was using flight attendants,

especially in South American countries.

He actually set up a cartel of his own

where the delivery people, the so-called "mules,"

were stewardesses.

And they would travel from Miami or Fort Lauderdale

to various other places -- Denver, Chicago, Cleveland --

where AJ then had someone else

just simply pick up the suitcase.

He had a whole system set up.

But not everybody knew everything.

People knew only their little piece,

so that if anything ever happened,

it would never come back to him.

AJ: I never considered myself, um,

like, a drug dealer, just because I would never

sell anything to anybody that didn't have

one hell of a lot more to lose than I did.

He compartmentalized his life.

It was his way of not taking responsibility

for what he was doing,

which made it easier to -- to live.

Selling of cocaine gave AJ a world of possibilities

that not even the Mob could offer him,

and certainly making clothing for people could not offer him.

He was measuring the inseams

of some of the most dangerous people on the planet.

The Mob knew that he always seemed to have access,

but they did not know the extent of his involvement

with the cocaine happening in Vegas.

He did not want them to know that,

'cause he knew that they would be knocking on his door

and saying, "Hey, we want a piece of that."

Green: Once you are into the Mob,

once you're involved with things,

you do realize you're expected to be loyal to the family.

So there's the old Mob,

who supposedlywas not interested in the drug trade,

but there was a new crew --

Spilotro was one of the younger people --

who were willing, if it made money,

"Why not?" kind of thing.

What's -- What's the harm?

It got on the street, and they wanted it.

Green: Now, in AJ's case, he understood

that if the Mob -- Spilotro --

found out what was really going on with the cartels,

they would end up getting very angry at him.

That's a sign of disrespect,

and it could be a big problem for him.

[Chuckles] That's really risky

because the people around him --

AJ couldn't control who's talking to who.

These are the guys who are gonna roll over on him.

You're going down, not them.

AJ: I'd been called over to have breakfast

at the Tropicana, and Joe Agosto was there.

Joe was entertainment director,

and he was handling the skimming from the Tropicana

for the bosses in Kansas City, Chicago, and other areas.

And I heard him make a statement like,

"The balls this guy's got. The nerve this guy's got."

It scared the hell out of me.

♪

AJ: I was at the breakfast room in the Tropicana,

and Joe Agosto says,

"The balls this guy's got. The nerve this guy's got."

David: AJ was living a very risky life.

If they found out that AJ was making all this money

off this cocaine and he wasn't cutting them in on the deal,

it wouldn't be good.

♪

But AJ was very lucky the Mob didn't know about

his drug smuggling and his double life,

because their focus was dealing with bigger issues with the FBI.

So the FBI had finally got on the tail of -- of the Mob

and their skimming operation that was happening in Vegas.

Green: How do you explain your money?

If you are skimming, it's illegal.

Remember, that's how they got Capone --

tax evasion.

They were skimming a lot of money out of Las Vegas.

And that's helping to finance

a lot of the other things they do.

So you might think of it as something like a flowchart

circling around Las Vegas. Money goes here.

This money comes to Las Vegas for them to do this.

But Las Vegas is crucial.

We were doing some business, and DeLuna,

with his big mouth and talking about things

he shouldn't be on the phone...

Green: Federal agents -- they have a wiretap

on "Tuffy" DeLuna.

Russo: Joe Agosto and DeLuna ran the Tropicana Hotel

for the Civellas.

Green: On the wiretap, they're discussing some sort of murder.

That's what their wiretap is for.

But then they're able to get Tuffy explaining,

"Oh, this is how we do the skim, and this is what we do

and when we do it and why we do it."

I can just imagine the guy sitting there

with the headsets on, going...

They had struck the mother lode.

And then the Nevada Gaming Commission

let them be aware of it --

"We don't want you here no more."

Manna: The hotel owners were told,

"You need to relinquish your ownership of certain hotels,

or else we're gonna close them down."

Sciutto: That left these guys with 30 days

to sell the Tropicana, uh, in order to reclaim the money

they had invested in it, otherwise they would lose

hundreds of millions of dollars.

But they couldn't just sell to anyone.

The Nevada Gaming Commission

had to approve of the buyer.

The Mob found one legitimate buyer,

and that was the squeaky-clean Ramada Inn Corporation.

But they also needed a broker to be the middleman

to make this deal happen.

So the Ramada Inn sends someone to Vegas to broker the deal.

AJ: So the night before, the CEO of the Tropicana

and Agosto and their dates,

they had made dinner arrangements with this guy

to talk about buying the Tropicana.

In comes this guy with his fiancée,

takes a look around the table for just a few seconds,

then snaps his fingers, and he summoned the maître d.

He said, "We want to be moved from this table.

We don't want to sit with these animals."

So they actually got up from the table

and were seated someplace else.

Oh, I mean, Joe Agosto was boiling.

He was just gonna put a contract on him,

just because of how this guy treated him with disrespect

the night before.

What I could quickly see was you're not gonna make a sale

by the deadline if somebody's got a contract out on him.

Sciutto: So AJ had a vested interest in this deal happening.

The Mob, who's financing his fashion business,

they would lose millions of dollars

if this deal doesn't happen.

So it really came down to having his business do well.

AJ: The next thing I hear, one of the guys said,

"Oh, w-where's this guy from?"

They said, "Somewhere in Kansas."

That got my attention.

And it turned out AJ knew the guy.

He had done suits for him in Wichita.

He'd known him for years.

AJ: Joe Agosto looks at me and says, "Call this guy.

See if this is the guy you know."

So I pick up the phone.

And he says, "Who's calling?"

I said, "This is a voice from the past."

He says, "Like, what past?"

[Chuckles] And I said, "Wichita, Kansas."

And I said, "This is AJ Pratt." He said, "Where are you?"

I said, "I'm down in the breakfast room."

"You get up here."

Mann: As soon as he said that, the Mob guy said,

"Make this deal."

And they say, "If you can do this,

we will make you the cleanest made man ever."

AJ: And I knew that I would also get a little bit of respect

from the Kansas City side.

AJ was supremely confident.

He believed that he could talk his way

out of just about everything.

And the broker has no respect for the Mob, okay?

He doesn't care. He's like, "[bleep] those guys.

They don't have any class.

I don't want to deal with these people."

AJ has the cocaine. They do some.

The guy's like, "Where'd you get this?"

This guy loved it, so he said,

"I will do this deal on one condition."

He says, "That you take my plane and fly to Colombia

and bring me back as much as you can get."

Right. See, that's the story I was told.

I mean, it's crazy.

AJ could make you believe anything he told you.

Well, I wasn't aware of a lot of things at the time.

I was told many things later in life.

His stories were so far out, I mean,

but they were so believable.

♪

Sciutto: So according to AJ, the one guy who can

broker this deal to sell the Tropicana

to a huge hotel chain says,

"I will make this deal with you on one condition.

You take my plane, fly it to Pablo in Colombia,

stuff it with cocaine, and bring it back for us to sell."

Mann: So, actually, that's not true.

I'm always skeptical of what any interview subject tells me,

and I try to check any facts I can check.

In this case, what had happened was

there were two different people.

The broker for the hotel chain

was a businessman, somewhat shady.

He had a long history of odd real-estate deals.

This other guy, the one who offered AJ the plane,

was a Wichita oilman who did a lot of cocaine.

But he had nothing to do with the Hotel Tropicana deal.

Now, both of them did cocaine with AJ, and did a lot of it,

but they're definitely two different people.

I asked AJ, "What's your explanation for that?"

And he said, "I'm sorry. I-I -- That's the way I remember it."

Sciutto: I think I'm kind of fine with that

'cause AJ was the penultimate storyteller.

We all want a good story,

and it's okay to go along for the ride.

It's a memoir. It's not a biography.

It's his story the way he sees it.

Sciutto So, back to the plane.

This guy liked the cocaine so much,

he actually gave AJ the keys to his nearly new airplane.

AJ's not a pilot. Like, he thought, "What am I gonna do?

I don't know how to fly an airplane."

Mann: But he also saw an opportunity in front of him

to expand his own business -- cocaine smuggling.

But how do you do that?

He wasn't an expert in this business.

He was just starting out.

David: Well, the real deal is cocaine's not the first thing

AJ ever smuggled.

He smuggled silk.

♪

Sciutto: He actually snuck into China

at a time when there was an embargo

to find silks that they needed for these showgirls.

AJ: I do a lot of designing with silk,

and, uh, I've always known the best silk in the world

is in Shanghai, China.

In those days, it was a shopping extravaganza.

Things that you could buy for the prices

and the quality was incredible.

But we were in a cold war with China.

It's impossible to get these silks.

So I thought, "Well, how can I smuggle

the silk from the People's Republic of China

and to a duty-free port, which was Hong Kong?"

I already had a number of contacts in Hong Kong

that I had designed for.

So I had people to help, and I came up with a method.

I would wrap the silk around the waist

of somebody that could be trusted.

David: And then he put them on a train

and sent them to Hong Kong.

Once in Hong Kong, he unwrapped all the silk from them

and took it back with him.

AJ: And as soon as I returned to Las Vegas,

there were 723 calls waiting for me.

David: His business expanded because he had the silk,

which nobody else had, and maybe he saw

the same opportunity with the cocaine.

Manna: So once AJ's got a plane,

where is he gonna go?

'Cause he doesn't know how to fly a plane.

David: He went back to Wichita

because my dad got a job at Boeing.

Sciutto: He's asking all these questions about a plane.

How much fuel does it need? How far can it fly?

What kind of weight can it carry? Et cetera.

And a guy overhears him.

And he says, "Well, I think I know

what you want this airplane for."

Hahn: Barry Seal was one of the major smugglers

in the '70s and the early '80s.

Very successful, but we never caught him with a load.

That's success.

Murphy: Barry Seal was a savant when it came to flying.

I understand he got his pilot's license,

soloed at a very young age,

became one of the youngest pilots

in command at TWA Airlines.

But he also had an extremely adventuresome side.

The exciting thing in life, to me,

is to get into a life-threatening situation.

Now, that's excitement.

Hahn: It turned out that smuggling

was what he chose to do.

When I started working on this case for the FBI,

Barry's first smuggling was mostly marijuana.

And then he got involved in taking munitions,

allegedly, down to Mexico.

He was a good pilot.

He had his skills, and he used them.

He had the reputation of being able to land a plane

and take off in a plane from almost anywhere.

Manna: You wonder how all of this would happen to one guy.

And the only thing I could come up with is,

is it was just a wild coincidence

that AJ met those people.

That was his life.

These guys agree

that they will empty out their bank accounts

and put all their money into rigging planes

so they can stuff it with more cocaine

to get it from Colombia back to the U.S.

Manna: How much did you pick up at that first trip?

Exactly.

Sciutto: AJ said the deal went through.

The Mob sold the Tropicana, and the guy's life

was spared thanks to AJ.

So AJ. becomes the cleanest made man in Mob history.

But this deal only went down because of his cocaine business,

and the Mob was still in the dark about the cocaine business.

So his victory was basically a betrayal of the Mob.

I have no evidence that that story is true.

I don't know the end of that deal, the contracts.

There's no indication that that happened.

It sounds improbable to me.

But, again, who would even make that up?

AJ was very aware what they could potentially do to him.

Now, you disrespect somebody in the Mob,

that could be your life.

Green: There's the story that AJ, as he was told,

could become the cleanest made man in Mob history

by negotiating the sale of the Tropicana,

or at least making the sale possible.

Did it actually happen?

It's AJ's story,, and he was sticking to it.

♪

David: AJ and Barry Seal started doing business,

and then all of a sudden,

Las Vegas was overloaded with cocaine.

He saw the demand, and he supplied it.

Sciutto: You know, he's very, very popular.

He's designing for these mobsters, for their wives,

for their friends, for celebrities,

uh, even politicians.

Clothing for Richard Nixon -- made him a tuxedo.

Even Elvis Presley.

♪

♪ Music and magic and party and come on ♪

♪ Music and magic and party and come on ♪

A man came over to AJ, talking about

there was a guy that wanted to meet him.

AJ: And I turned further to my left.

And much to my surprise...

...it was Elvis Presley.

So you did stage clothes for him, or personal clothes?

AJ put Elvis in his first jumpsuit.

Up until then, he was really

tuxedos with sequins and all that.

They're backstage, and he said,

"You know, I got an idea for you."

Mann: I saw it on one of your old -- the photos you sent,

you had an invoice.

Yes, yes.

Russo: That changed Elvis's whole image on stage.

He never was on stage again without a jumpsuit.

[Chuckles] I mean, AJ did all this.

That was crazy.

But, see, that's another thing where not everything made sense.

There's no question that Bill Belew

designed and inspired, you know,

that famous Elvis jumpsuit.

So my question, though, is,

so Bill Belew designed the first jumpsuit.

When did you get involved?

Okay.

It makes a better story for AJ

for him to be the prime mover

of Elvis's jumpsuit or whatever,

when, in fact, he might have been, you know,

the second-tier person.

But the fact is, he was involved.

But AJ just, uh, gave himself a little more credit, perhaps,

than he deserved.

♪

Argus is, from what I understand,

he's the first one to do the scarves.

In 2005, he had one of them on eBay,

and I'm a collector of Elvis stuff,

so I bought it off him.

He called me right up. We talked for two hours.

And he told me the stories about Elvis.

And that's how Argus and I became friends.

AJ: Elvis, uh -- he had glaucoma.

He'd be sweating so much he couldn't see

the end of the stage. He could not see the audience.

So one night, a lady took a silk scarf

that she was wearing around -- from around her neck,

a very elegant silk scarf,

and she passed it to Elvis.

And Elvis used the silk scarf to wipe his face.

And it was amazing because it felt good against his skin.

So he turns around to his best friend.

He says, "Get the tailor.

We gotta have these silk scarves made."

And then that's how the idea came about doing scarves.

AJ said that the silk was very difficult,

almost impossible, to embroidery.

I guess he said something to Elvis about the fact

that they had to be done by hand.

He said, "I want you to have this

for all the hard work that you're doing."

That was the story he told me.

Rogers: And I think that's why him and Elvis --

that's how you get along, 'cause you appreciate

what people do for you and what you do for them.

That makes the whole ballgame.

AJ: There was a lot of you maybe don't know that.

That's a story, and that's how the silk scarves

came into Elvis Presley's act.

The business increases absolutely tremendously

during the next several months.

And at this point is where these idea

of opening the studios around the country came up.

Sciutto: So the Mob said,

"We're gonna to do something nice for you, AJ."

So what they did was they said they would finance

shops all over the country.

Manna: AJ -- he was aware of who that loan was coming from

and, uh, that he would have to pay it back at some point.

But he had the guts and fearlessness,

and maybe naivety, [chuckles]

to just go with it and see what would happen.

Green: You know, it is so hard to figure out

when dealing with the Mob,

how much they want to be legitimate

and how much they're just talking a good game.

And if they're going into the fashion business,

that looks legitimate,

but are they going to take something

off the top or the bottom?

Tailors could do both, I guess. So could the Mob.

The question in that case is going to be,

just how much is AJ gonna be controlled by them

because he's gone in with them in business?

♪

Russo: AJ was opening these stores,

and you're gonna try to create a brand under his name.

David: The Mob -- they financed the four or maybe five

different shops in different parts of the country.

A lot of these Mafia guys were dangerous, tough people.

It was a real dangerous type business.

Russo: I think legitimately, like, within AJ,

they wanted to help him.

They helped a lot of people without, you know,

shaking them down.

But they knew they'd get repaid.

Probably took a lot of cocaine to work off five shops,

I would imagine.

AJ: I -- There was literally --

I was almost working around the clock.

Still confused --

maybe he just wanted to make a lot of money fast

and got into the drug business?

He didn't need it.

He didn't need to go in the drug business.

He was playing a game, which I never thought he would do.

You know, I knew him as the tailor.

It could have really killed him

if the Civellas and these guys found out.

When you're in my house? Forget about it.

[Mimics cutting sound]

So at this point, his cocaine business is thriving.

His tailor business is thriving.

But at the end of the day,

he was aware of the dangers around him

because of what happened to him a couple of years before.

AJ: I sit down one night.

It must be around 2:00 a.m.

And all of a sudden I hear...

[Banging] ..."Boom, boom,"

on my front door.

I open the door and, uh, immediately

my heart flew to my throat.

I had five very large badges

staring me in the face.

And they just shoved me aside and walked into my apartment.

Everything flashed in front of my mind.

I thought, "Oh, my God!

I've got my career going. Everything is going great.

And now I'm gonna blow it all."

I was scared to death.

♪

♪

♪

♪

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