Original subtitles

Gangs rule their territories through ruthless enterprises, fear, and a strict code.

Deviate from this code, or challenge their power, and retribution soon follows.

Especially for the world's first narco-terrorists, the ultra-violent Menin Cartel.

Here are three stories that track the organization's

astronomic rise and calamitous fall.

First, the Medellin cartel buys a piece of land to

create a billion-dollar global drug operation.

A trafficker purchased in an island to traffic cocaine? That was unheard of.

Next, the cartel goes to war with the Colombian government.

Pablo had a belief that he could bring the government to its knees.

And last, the DEA joins the fight and helps the

Colombians back Pablo Escobar into a corner.

He knew that his enemies were here.

He was on his own with nowhere to go.

These are the stories from inside the Medellin Cartel.

This is Gangland Chronicles. 1976.

Medellin, Colombia.

What will become one of the world's most vicious criminal organizations is born.

The Medellin Cartel.

The cartel will rise to dominate the world's cocaine market,

killing as many as 50,000 along the way.

These are folks that have no compunction about

murdering people to get what they want.

There is no remorse. That's business.

The Medellín Cartel is led by several kingpins.

The enterprising Ochoa brothers, paramilitary expert José Rodríguez Gacha,

and Gustavo Gaviria, the cousin of the cartel's

infamous boss of bosses, Pablo Escobar.

Pablo Escobar could be a charismatic type person to get what he wanted,

but he could turn evil in a heartbeat and you might be dead.

Escobar controls Medellin's bloodthirsty hitmen, known as Sicarios.

Their targets include law enforcement and government

officials who are given a stark choice.

Very famous word established by Pablo Escobar, plata or plomo, bullet or money.

You either accept the bribe or you get killed.

Anybody who went against Escobar would die.

He was a well-rounded bad guy,

and I think cocaine became his lifeblood in terms of profit,

and that's the direction he went.

With cocaine selling for $60,000 a kilo, $400,000 today...

By the late 1970s, the Medellin cartel is focused

on cornering the surging American market.

And the key to the U.S. is an associate with a checkered

past, a pilot's license, and a wild idea.

1976, Medellin.

After serving time in an American prison,

German-Colombian pilot Carlos Lader is deported back to Colombia.

When Lader meets Pablo Escobar, they both see an opportunity.

Carlos was able to introduce himself to Pablo as an accomplished pilot who

could transport large loads of cocaine from Colombia to the United States.

They gave him some test runs. It worked out great.

Escobar invites Lader into the Medellin cartel,

and they use Lader's small airplane to smuggle cocaine into Florida by the ton.

Carlos was willing to do back-to-back trips, probably snorting coke to stay awake.

Carlos was loving it, just making money hand over fist.

But delivering the huge volume of product this way poses new problems.

One of the challenges in flying an aircraft from

Columbia to South Florida is your fuel capacity.

The Medellin cartel needs a Caribbean pit stop

that is under the radar of law enforcement.

Lo and behold, Carlos finds a place in the Bahama Island chain.

Norman's Cay is perfect because it's not a tourist destination.

It's isolated, it's small, it has an airstrip, a small marina,

and it's surrounded by sharks.

Later scares off the locals and buys up the entire island.

By 1978, Norman's Cay is the Medellin cartel's cocaine distribution hub.

Carlos Lehder not only enlarged the airstrip,

but he also bought a fleet of small planes,

and he became an incredibly useful member for the cartel.

But when the island goes from smuggling hub to party location, the DEA takes notice.

1981, Norman's Cay, Bahamas.

With over three tons of cocaine smuggled through the island,

the Medellin Cartel is now the world's number one cocaine supplier.

But Carlos Leiter's distribution center is no longer a secret.

Carlos Leiter installed fuel tanks. He has a couple hangers built.

The armed guards are carrying AK-47 automatic rifles. But at the same time,

he is enjoying the fruits of his labor.

And this becomes known as a real party place.

Not only the operation became much more visible,

but also the behavior of Carlos Lehder made it more outrageous to the entire world.

Because of that attention, the Bahamian government came in and seized the island.

And it forced Carlos to flee.

Carlos burned down basically everything on the island.

That was the end of the most successful route of the Medellin Cartel for four years.

Carlos Lader returns to Colombia in 1982,

but his home country is no longer a safe haven.

The Colombian National Police get a tip of where

Carlos Lader is located and take him down.

Getting back to Bogota, where the DEA has a plane waiting,

and they immediately extradite him to the United States.

After moving on from Norman's Cay,

the Medellin cartel finds new routes and new partners

to export more cocaine than they ever have before.

Pablo is organizing his drug distribution through all the different fronts,

Colombia, Central America, the Caribbean.

And Pablo was declared as the number one trafficker in Colombia.

The Medellin kingpins are raking in $4 billion a year, $12 billion today,

and living the lifestyle that goes along with it.

Pablo offered to pay the national debt of Colombia two different times.

Billions of dollars. That's how wealthy this guy was.

But Pablo Escobar wants more than wealth.

He wants power.

And if he can't take it legally, he'll take it by force.

1982, Colombia.

Pablo Escobar wins a seat in Colombia's Chamber of Representatives.

His goal is to use political power to influence Colombia's

laws on extradition for drug traffickers.

He really believed at some point he could legitimize

himself and be a national treasure

in terms of business and all the economic things he brought to the country.

No one in the Medellin cartel wanted Pablo to run for Congress.

They didn't want the additional attention that that was going to bring.

But within months, Escobar is thrown out after Attorney General Rodrigo Lara Bonilla

exposes his criminal activities.

A disgraced Escobar vows revenge.

On April 30, 1984, Escobar sends his sicarios after the attorney general.

His car was stopped in traffic.

A motorcycle pulls up with two riders.

The guy on the back shoots and assassinates him in the back of his car.

In response to Lara Bonilla's assassination,

The Colombian government moves to extradite Escobar to America.

There is a saying, better die in Colombia than rot in prison of the United States.

That's when Escobar decided to declare war on his own country.

Through the mid to late 1980s,

the Medellin Cartel kills hundreds of police officers, judges, journalists,

and anyone else who gets in their way.

Escobar made his choice to use terrorism to intimidate

not just the state, but the entire society.

Then Pablo Escobar plots his most audacious terrorist act yet,

a hit on presidential candidate Luis Carlos Govan.

Luis Carlos Golan, his platform was pro-extradition.

Let's do something about the narcos in our country that are causing all the murders.

He was going to be the next president of Colombia.

Golan knows the Medellin cartel is after him.

But he's determined to attend a campaign rally.

As he walks out on stage in front of 10,000 people, shots ring out.

August 18th, 1989, Soacha, Colombia.

Presidential candidate Luis Carlos Galan,

enemy of Pablo Escobar and the Medellin cartel, takes the stage at a campaign rally.

Pablo Sicario's were there waiting on him.

They shoot him there on stage.

Several other people are wounded.

They tried to get Luis Carlos Golan in the car to get him to the hospital,

and he didn't make it through the night.

The Medellin cartel then targets Golan's replacement, Cesar Gaviria.

By putting a bomb on an airplane.

Gaviria was not on board, but the bomb kills 110 people.

This absolutely terrified the nation, and the support for Escobar,

if there was any, was really weakening with how

he was killing everybody indiscriminately.

Fueled by public anger, Gaviria wins the 1990 election in a landslide.

And now, the Colombian government is out for blood,

systematically going after the Medellin cartel's leaders.

December 15th, 1989.

Cartel kingpin Jose Rodriguez Gacha is killed during a police operation.

A few months later, Gustavo Gaviria is gunned down in a shootout.

The Ochoa brothers go into hiding.

With the Medellin cartel leadership crumbling,

Pablo Escobar makes a surprising move.

Pablo Escobar calls up the government of Colombia and says, Mr. President,

this is Pablo Escobar, and I am willing to self-surrender.

In exchange for not being extradited,

Pablo Escobar agrees to serve five years in prison with certain conditions.

He will imprison himself in his own prison, built and protected by his own people.

It was no prison. It was a country club atmosphere

where Pablo had his own apartment,

had his color-coordinated curtains, giant TVs.

He was living in luxury.

The government got a political cushion where they felt they had come,

they had put a bad guy in jail, and Pablo got the ability to continue his business,

live the way he wanted, and most importantly, if he served his term, he was free.

But when Pablo Escobar takes advantage of his light prison sentence,

the country comes after him and the cartel.

July 22nd, 1992, Envigado, Colombia.

Less than a year into his prison sentence,

Pablo Escobar savagely murders two associates at his custom-built jail.

He thought they were stealing from him.

They were tortured, killed and cut into pieces and allegedly barbecued.

That outraged the associates from the Medellin cartel

because they realized he now goes after everybody,

not just his enemies, but his own people.

So that shifted not only the thought process of the Colombians and the government,

but also the world's view of what was going on down there.

When we found out about it,

the United States Embassy went to President Gaviria and said,

something's got to be done.

President Gaviria orders him to be moved to a state prison.

But with the help of his sicarios, Escobar escapes.

The Colombian government has no choice but to respond.

And this time, American DEA agents joined the fight.

For the next 18 months, Javier and I live in

Medellin with the Colombian National Police.

Their only objective was to find, capture, and or kill Pablo Escobar.

But the Medellin Cartel soon has more than the

Colombian government and the DEA after them.

1993, Medellin, Colombia.

Supported by U.S. law enforcement,

the Colombian National Police wages an all-out

assault on Pablo Escobar's Medellin cartel.

We started raiding his money launderers in Medellin and Miami,

where we were picking up financial records, accounts,

and then we started seizing all this money in the United States and in Europe.

First time in history where we're dismantling a whole

organization which had never been done before.

At the same time, a new enemy is giving the

Medellin cartel a taste of its own medicine.

In early 93, A group comes along that everybody now knows as Los Pepis.

And Pepis stands for people persecuted by Pablo Escobar.

Los Pepes, a vigilante group made up of relatives of the Medellin Cartel's

many victims and members of the rival Cali Cartel,

make it their mission to destroy what is left

of the Medellin's once powerful organization.

They would administer their own form of justice in the form of a bullet in the head.

The accountants, the lawyers, the hitmen,

all the inner circle of Escobar was attacked.

With Gaviria and Gaucha dead, and the other kingpins behind bars, by 1993,

Escobar is all that's left of the cartel's leadership.

The Medellin cartel was basically gone.

Pablo Escobar had to feel utterly isolated because he was the last man standing.

Pablo was a bad guy, a bandit, a bandito, whatever you wanna call him from day one.

His view of the world was either domination or you're gonna kill me.

And that characteristic is really what did him in in the end,

because there was nowhere for him to go.

December 1st, 1993.

Without any money and his cartel in shambles,

Pablo Escobar spends his 44th birthday in a safe house hidden somewhere in Medellin.

His gift to himself is to stay on the phone with his family.

Allowing American intelligence to pinpoint the neighborhood where Escobar is hiding.

We're starting to intercept his phone calls.

Escobar would talk to his son every day at 5 o'clock.

And by now, they're starting to hone in on Pablo Escobar.

The next day, the Colombian police flood the

neighborhood with a full-scale ground search.

Then, in a second-floor window of a house, they spot Escobar virtually alone.

When Escobar was finally located, we expected him to have a full army.

It was down to one.

That shocked everybody.

A shootout ensues between the bodyguard and authorities.

As Escobar flees across the rooftop of his hideout, he is shot dead by police.

The death of Pablo Escobar marked the end of the Medellin cartel.

And it's the first time that an entire cocaine production and distribution

cartel had been completely dismantled and eliminated.

But the Medellin cartel's legacy is a blueprint

for cocaine export that many have followed.

Somebody gets arrested, there's another person

that's willing to take over their business,

and it's still going on right now.

Colombia continues to be associated with drug trafficking when they would prefer

the victims to be appreciated and remembered rather than the victimizers.

The nation to this day is living through the trauma of drug

trafficking caused by Pablo Escobar and the Medellin cartel.