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Cocaine lands in America from secret airports, lining the pockets of violent cartel bosses, and an infamous "black widow", as the CIA's shadow wars have unintended consequences. President Reagan cracks down as crack invades the USA.
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00:00:00Now, on America's War on Drugs.
00:00:11Cocaine is the atom bomb of Latin America.
00:00:14He was given a cellmate with whom he would go on to change the drug world.
00:00:18I confess my hope to get the whole world back.
00:00:24Pablo Escobar had tremendous political ambitions.
00:00:27If you're gonna mess with Pablo, you know, Pablo will kill you.
00:00:31I must speak to you tonight about a mounting danger in Central America.
00:00:35This is an outlaw regime.
00:00:37They're flying secret shipments of weapons down.
00:00:41And then coming back with cocaine.
00:00:43I'm going after the drug dealers that they were protecting.
00:00:49They were really playing Russian roulette with our lives.
00:00:52I knew he went all the way to the White House.
00:00:55I do not deny that I engaged in shredding on November 21st.
00:00:59You basically have a secret CIA operation laid there.
00:01:03It was really hard for me to fantasize that something so small could be so valuable.
00:01:10Pots big enough to cook me in.
00:01:12It was like, this is what I was made for.
00:01:15It's important to think about cocaine almost not as a drug.
00:01:31But what it really was, was a currency.
00:01:34Any valuable currency has an inherent power to it.
00:01:39And cocaine became that currency.
00:01:43Two years after Richard Nixon declares the war on drugs,
00:01:47the Watergate scandal rocks the nation.
00:01:50Nixon's on his way out.
00:01:54And drug use is on the rise.
00:01:59In the early to mid-70s, because Nixon had been obsessed with marijuana and heroin,
00:02:05nobody talked that much about cocaine.
00:02:07And within a very short period of time,
00:02:12it became one of the biggest money makers in drug smuggling in the world.
00:02:17And it caught everyone by surprise.
00:02:23The story of how cocaine took America by storm starts here.
00:02:28In a Connecticut federal prison.
00:02:31Where this man's doing time for car theft.
00:02:36Carlos Lader.
00:02:38Son of a German father and Colombian mother,
00:02:40Carlos Lader is a man of contradictions.
00:02:43He worships Hitler and John Lennon.
00:02:47He was a car thief in the beginning.
00:02:49He used a lot of coke himself.
00:02:51He had delusions of grandeur.
00:02:53He was crazy in many ways.
00:02:55But also, he was a visionary.
00:02:57At a fairly young age, he went to jail in Danbury in Connecticut.
00:03:00And that might have been the end of his criminal career, but it wasn't.
00:03:04He was given a cellmate with whom he would go on to change the drug world.
00:03:12Later, cellmate is an American with a passion for aviation.
00:03:17You know what the best part about 172 is?
00:03:21They're eating steel.
00:03:23George Jung.
00:03:25A hippie misfit who specializes in smuggling marijuana from Mexico into the U.S. on small planes.
00:03:31Young had been importing cannabis from Mexico to the United States using light aircraft.
00:03:37He'd never thought of importing anything else.
00:03:40These relatively unknown criminals hooked up together and became partners.
00:03:46It was this match made in heaven.
00:03:49Because Jung had experience with airplanes and with smuggling marijuana.
00:03:54And later had experience with cocaine.
00:03:58The combination of these two guys resulted in the conclusion to revolutionize the cocaine trade in the United States.
00:04:04What if I told you I could get us enough coke to get the whole world high?
00:04:11You ever hear the case called Medellin?
00:04:13Medellin is the center of Colombia's burgeoning cocaine underworld.
00:04:29And the home of the man with whom Carlos Leiter and George Jung will revolutionize the cocaine trade.
00:04:34Pablo Escobar Gaviria, as a teenager, was already a petty thief, allegedly stealing gravestones and then sanding them down to be resold.
00:04:47He sells contraband cigarettes on the Colombian black market.
00:04:50Then he moves on to cocaine.
00:04:55Pablo Escobar was sort of like if you founded a company, you need a chief of operations.
00:05:00Escobar's job was to help manage this network of cocaine processing labs and then to help manage the smuggling of the cocaine product into North America.
00:05:15And Escobar is looking for a better product to compete in the North American market.
00:05:20Escobar's meeting with the Chilean chemist who just fled a bloody coup.
00:05:39In the early 70s, Chile, not Colombia, is the center of the cocaine trade.
00:05:43Chile is also a Cold War hotspot, where the U.S. is worried a left-wing government will turn communist.
00:05:54On September 11, 1973, a CIA-backed coup overthrows the democratically elected government.
00:06:03An American ally, Augusto Pinochet, begins cracking down on criminals and those he considers to be enemies of the state.
00:06:18The best chemists in the world for making cocaine from coca were in Chile.
00:06:24When they cracked down on them, they split and left and went to Colombia.
00:06:31America's attempts to foster the replacement of left-leaning governments with governments that were more friendly to the United States backfire.
00:06:41That, ultimately, was the beginning.
00:06:47Welcome to Colombia, sir.
00:06:50Medellín, Colombia.
00:06:52Sit there, if you can, señorita.
00:06:55With help from the Chilean chemist, Escobar and his partners in Medellín are soon making some of the best cocaine in the world.
00:07:01There was a lack of attention initially paid to drug trafficking in Colombia by the U.S. intelligence services because they weren't communists.
00:07:12The basic policy was capitalism is good, become capitalist and everything will be okay.
00:07:18But that was exactly what the narcos were doing, right?
00:07:20Carlos Leder is out of prison and he's convinced Pablo Escobar to allow him to distribute his cocaine in the U.S.
00:07:39Inside this luggage is 50 kilograms of Pablo Escobar's nearly pure cocaine.
00:07:45It'll be worth more than two million dollars if later his old cellmate, George Jung, can get it out of the airport.
00:08:00Excuse me.
00:08:01Excuse me.
00:08:12Using his old marijuana connections, Jung tests the market of L.A.'s party circuit.
00:08:18George Jung came out to California with cocaine and found himself at the head of this party and nightclub scene.
00:08:26Cocaine was the drug of doctors and lawyers and famous people were using it in discotheques.
00:08:34Jung and people like him selling cocaine, distributing it, they became rock stars.
00:08:43Cocaine, inhaled as crystalline powder, causes a buildup of dopamine, the feel-good neurotransmitters that kick in when you're eating chocolate or having sex.
00:08:53Jimmy Carter's top drug policy official was a cocaine user and said there's just as much reason to legalize cocaine as there is to legalize marijuana.
00:09:04Greed and pleasure were on the rise and the consciousness expansion of the late 60s were waning.
00:09:11George Jung quickly unloads his entire 50-kilogram stash.
00:09:22In just two weeks, he makes $2.2 million, worth over $9 million in today's money.
00:09:29It's like a lightbulb goes off in his head and he's like, oh my God, this is the business that I need to be in.
00:09:36But whenever I got involved with anybody who was in the cocaine business, bad stuff happened every single time.
00:09:42George Jung delivers the cash to his old cellmate, Carlos Lader.
00:09:52I would have just disappeared.
00:09:54His successful trip to L.A. just proved that demand for cocaine in the U.S. far outstrips supply.
00:10:00And they'll soon become Pablo Escobar's main U.S. distributors.
00:10:06But there's a weak link.
00:10:08Transportation.
00:10:10Stewardesses and other civilians are being used to smuggle coke in luggage on commercial flights, but it's not enough.
00:10:18Large amounts of cocaine are also snuck in on cargo ships hidden inside wood or other merchandise.
00:10:23But ships are easy targets.
00:10:27It's all about logistics.
00:10:29It's all about moving the product from one place to another.
00:10:33Anybody who can figure out how to get it there, that's what it really comes down to.
00:10:42Carlos Lader is about to make one of the most audacious moves in the history of the war on drugs.
00:10:48John's convinced him that small planes hold the key to their takeover of the American cocaine market.
00:10:58Carlos Lader was a visionary when it came to logistics.
00:11:02The man who figured out the best smuggling routes into the United States.
00:11:07The round trip flight from Columbia to Florida is too far for a small aircraft to make without refueling.
00:11:13So Lader finds a small Bahamian island with a long runway.
00:11:20It's called Norman's Key.
00:11:23And Norman's Key was a stroke of genius because nobody was watching planes laden with cocaine flying from Columbia into Norman's Key.
00:11:33He buys up half the properties on the island in cash and then threatens to kill anyone who won't leave.
00:11:39Carlos Lader took over and threw all the normal people who were living here out and brought his boys in and it became just a completely insane situation.
00:11:48It's an insane situation.
00:11:51All right, all right, we'll call someone jewel.
00:11:53Drop 500.
00:11:54You're coming in too slow.
00:11:57All right, 8-4-0.
00:11:59The Medellin cartel now has their own island.
00:12:05Planes land and take off around the clock,
00:12:08carrying hundreds of kilos of cocaine destined for Florida.
00:12:13Later's bringing in $20 million a month.
00:12:17It was nuts. It was crazy.
00:12:19They were bringing women in there.
00:12:20There were orgies, and it was party central.
00:12:23Party central with a lot of cocaine.
00:12:30He was getting high on his own supply, but hugely so.
00:12:35I mean, these guys would party for days
00:12:37and became nuts, completely insane.
00:12:41Carlos later was so coked up at that time.
00:12:45He was getting really paranoid.
00:12:47George Jung, the guy who really got him started in this whole thing,
00:12:50later kicks him off the island.
00:12:56Despite the madness, Carlos later's now head of logistics for Pablo Escobar.
00:13:01Carlos later went on to really pioneer the explosion of cocaine traffic in the US.
00:13:10But few people at the time realized later in Escobar are just middlemen
00:13:17and a much larger cocaine production network,
00:13:20allegedly protected by the highest level of the American government.
00:13:25I'm going after the drug dealers that they were protecting for central intelligence.
00:13:30They were really playing Russian roulette with our lives.
00:13:34The foothills of the Andes, one of the only places in the world where the coca place is.
00:13:39The foothills of the Andes, one of the only places in the world where the coca plant grows.
00:14:04The greatest drug lord no one knows is about to launch a revolution in the war on drugs.
00:14:19Roberto Suarez, descendant of the rubber baron of Bolivia.
00:14:23His family's plantations were more than four times the size of New Jersey.
00:14:28Roberto Suarez was a handsome, very charismatic leader.
00:14:35The Bolivian people, among the poorest people on earth, loved him.
00:14:40Why? Because Roberto feeds the people.
00:14:43In the mid-70s, Suarez switches his empire to a more lucrative crop, coca.
00:14:50He was a rancher in the Beni region of Bolivia, where I happened to live for many years.
00:14:56He began buying up large quantities of land, began mass producing.
00:15:02They had huge labs in the jungles.
00:15:04They had airstrips hidden under the jungle canopy.
00:15:07Roberto Suarez was in control of 60 to 80% of the global cocaine market.
00:15:15Pablo Escobar was just a customer of Roberto Suarez.
00:15:21DEA agent Michael Levine is based in South America, working undercover on some of the biggest cases in the growing cocaine trade.
00:15:30I was part of an undercover team that had penetrated the Roberto Suarez organization.
00:15:36Posing as half Sicilian, half Puerto Rican mafia don from the U.S.
00:15:43I had made deals face to face with Roberto Suarez and company.
00:15:48We were in position to take them down.
00:15:51Enter American special interests in the form of the CIA.
00:15:57By the mid-70s, South America is not only the center of the cocaine underworld, it's also become a Cold War battleground.
00:16:06The Cold War brought a conscious fear on the part of our leadership of the encroachment of communism.
00:16:16The U.S. backs right-wing dictatorships against the perceived communist threat.
00:16:23In the Cold War, everything was viewed through who could take advantage of what.
00:16:27If we didn't do this, would the Soviets take advantage?
00:16:29So, we propped up dictators across the hemisphere.
00:16:32And it's here in Bolivia, the U.S. worries a leftist president is leaning toward the communist side.
00:16:45Roberto Suarez was realizing that this access to money gave him political power.
00:16:52And so he offered to pay off all of Bolivia's debt.
00:16:55And the government said no.
00:16:58Roberto Suarez decides to take over the country himself.
00:17:03But he needs muscle to do it.
00:17:05So he turns to one of the 20th century's most notorious war criminals.
00:17:09Klaus Barbie, one of Hitler's top Gestapo officers in occupied France, known as the Butcher of Lyon.
00:17:19After the war, Barbie becomes a U.S. intelligence asset.
00:17:24And like many high-ranking Nazis, he flees to South America.
00:17:29Living under an assumed name in Bolivia, he's part of Operation Condor, the CIA-connected covert plan to eliminate communists across South America.
00:17:39Barbie's now working for Roberto Suarez.
00:17:46His team of Nazi mercenaries, known as the fiancés of death, help capture and torture Suarez's enemies.
00:17:55Other drug lords, anyone in the way.
00:17:58They were all serial killers.
00:18:04They were part of the Bolivian bloody revolution.
00:18:07They were killing, they were torturing.
00:18:11I'm working on a guy who is powerful enough to take over his country that CIA is helping him.
00:18:19What do I do with it? Who do I turn to?
00:18:22Where are the camps?
00:18:28I don't know. I swear to God.
00:18:38Roberto Suarez overthrows the Bolivian government with the help of CIA assets.
00:18:46I'm going after the drug dealers that they were protecting for Central Intelligence.
00:18:50They were playing Russian roulette with our lives.
00:18:53People in the Bolivian government were murdered, raped, exiled.
00:18:58I look up to heaven and say, is anybody keeping track of this ?
00:19:07Suarez installs his own president and cocaine production goes into high gear.
00:19:13It was a seminal moment because it showed that these guys actually take control of the country.
00:19:18Roberto Suarez essentially turned Bolivia into the first fully functional narco state.
00:19:23Suarez plies children with cocaine cigarettes to stomp the coca leaves.
00:19:26Kerosene is used to isolate the active ingredients of cocaine.
00:19:30Once in a hard pace, Suarez flies his cocaine by the ton across the border and into the hands of Pablo Escobar and his partners.
00:19:37They needed a huge supply of cocaine.
00:19:38They needed a huge supply of cocaine.
00:19:39So when the coup takes place in Bolivia, perfect timing for them.
00:19:40They needed a huge supply of cocaine, so when the coup takes place in Bolivia, perfect timing for them.
00:19:42Now they've got access to huge amounts of cocaine that they could then smuggle into the United States.
00:19:45They needed a huge supply of cocaine, so when the coup takes place in Bolivia, perfect timing for them.
00:19:49Now they've got access to huge amounts of cocaine that they could then smuggle into the United States.
00:19:56They needed a huge supply of cocaine, so when the coup takes place in Bolivia, perfect timing for them.
00:20:03Now they've got access to huge amounts of cocaine that they could then smuggle into the United States.
00:20:18The Medellin cartels now out to take control of South Florida's drug trade from the Cubans and the Mafia.
00:20:24And one of their own is on the ground doing their dirty work.
00:20:29Griselda Blanco, raised in the slums of Medellin, she made a name for herself designing and manufacturing undergarments to smuggle cocaine.
00:20:39July 4th, 1976, when over a thousand ships from around the world fill New York Harbor to celebrate America's bicentennial,
00:20:48Blanco reportedly slips six kilos onto a ship sent by the Colombian Navy.
00:20:54She earns the nickname the Black Widow for allegedly killing two of her husbands.
00:21:00Griselda Blanco, from all my experience with her and her group, was an animal.
00:21:06Blanco engineers a wave of violence across Miami.
00:21:11Two men are dead.
00:21:29The shop clerk wounded.
00:21:32Bullets are everywhere.
00:21:35Investigators make an alarming discovery when they inspect the van the shooters leave behind.
00:21:45The van's a killing machine.
00:21:48Armor-plated siding for protection.
00:21:51Specially designed window slats for sniper fire.
00:21:54Bulletproof vests and an arsenal of high-caliber automatic weapons.
00:21:59The Dadeland shooting really jarred the public consciousness in Miami and the rest of the United States.
00:22:08Any time you've got that massive amount of drugs flowing into one geographical area, you're gonna have war.
00:22:17While the cocaine cowboy war body count mounts in Miami, so does the money.
00:22:34The cocaine trade is now worth four times more than Florida's orange harvest.
00:22:40Miami's booming.
00:22:42Miami's booming.
00:22:43It's just cash just flowing through that city like nothing you've ever seen.
00:22:49It's important to think about cocaine not as a drug, but what it really was, was a currency.
00:22:55It's easily transportable, easily smuggled, and you can trade it for dollars anywhere in the world.
00:23:02It's one of the most universally convertible currencies that exists in the world.
00:23:07Any valuable currency has an inherent power to it.
00:23:11And cocaine became that currency.
00:23:14But their new wealth and fame has made the drug lords into targets.
00:23:19Private islands, enormous mansions, unlimited amounts of women in booze and coke.
00:23:28You can't do that and not attract notice.
00:23:35Deep in the jungle, leftist rebels known as M-19 are desperate to finance their war against the Colombian government.
00:23:42They hatch a risky plot, kidnap Marta Ochoa, the sister of three of the Medellin Cartel's leaders.
00:23:54The rebels demand $12 million for her safe return.
00:23:58When Marta Ochoa gets kidnapped, the cartel guys get together and make things happen that even the government of Colombia couldn't do.
00:24:18The cartel leaders respond by putting together a team of assassins they call Death to Kidnappers.
00:24:25Cartel hitmen hunt down and execute M-19 rebels one by one.
00:24:31When they can't find one, they kill their families.
00:24:35The brutality is shocking, even by Colombian standards.
00:24:40When the Colombians had a grudge, they would break into the house, they would kill the guy they wanted,
00:24:45they would kill his family, they would kill the maid, they would kill the dog, they would even kill the fish.
00:24:51The rebels finally back down, and a deal is brokered. Marta Ochoa is set free, unharmed.
00:24:58The kidnapping of Marta Ochoa also brings the cartel leaders together.
00:25:04Faced with the common threat of kidnapping, the Medellin Cartel leaders call a meeting with their main rivals, the cartel from the city of Cali.
00:25:24When they sit down and they carve up the United States and they say, okay, you'll get that area, we'll take New York City and the East Coast.
00:25:33Cali will get New York, Medellin will get Florida and the Southern States. California is left up for grabs.
00:25:46Cartels generally don't make peace with each other, they're usually at war, but in some cases they get together and decide that they've got more to gain by a ceasefire.
00:25:59With the cartels aligned, cocaine distribution reaches new highs.
00:26:20Blanco's pushed the violence too far. Police say she might be responsible for more than 200 murders.
00:26:38Griselda, being the bloodthirsty person that she became, also pioneered the methods of violence that really wreaked havoc in South Florida.
00:26:50Blanco was also known for repopularizing an old mob technique.
00:27:01The drive-by shooting.
00:27:03The steady flow of cocaine coming into the city has turned it into the murder capital of America.
00:27:14By 1981, Miami really is a paradise lost. The burgeoning hot zone for the drug wars.
00:27:24Over the last year, the murder rates reached an all-time high.
00:27:28By the end of July, the medical examiner's office is forced to rent a refrigeration truck from a local rider.
00:27:35The morgue's overflowing and the public is in a state of panic.
00:27:46When President Reagan takes office, this is a crisis.
00:27:50These types of things don't happen in the United States. You don't have bloodshed in the middle of the streets.
00:27:54All the agencies and law enforcement will be brought together in a comprehensive attack on drug trafficking and organized crime.
00:28:01What kind of shape is this guy in?
00:28:02This is one sear on a groin area, another one down on a...
00:28:07As cocaine trafficking and murder rates soar in South Florida, the new president's forced to confront a growing crisis.
00:28:17Nixon, the 70s, that's the first stage. That kind of plateaus. In the 1980s, Reagan initiates a second war on drugs.
00:28:27One of the most critical duties that we faced upon taking office was controlling the influx of illegal drugs into this country.
00:28:37Ronald Reagan, a former actor who goes on to become the governor of California.
00:28:40As president, he promises to restore the crumbling economy, fight the communist threat, and relaunch Nixon's forgotten war on drugs.
00:28:46That's the first stage. That kind of plateaus. In the 1980s, Reagan initiates a second war on drugs.
00:28:51One of the most critical duties that we faced upon taking office was controlling the influx of illegal drugs into this country.
00:28:57The sort of Miami Vice era of drugs running pretty freely between the Caribbean and Florida.
00:29:13And so President Reagan put George Bush in charge of it and told him to do his best.
00:29:18George H.W. Bush, the blue blood son of a powerful U.S. senator.
00:29:23George Bush was a fighter pilot.
00:29:27He later gets into the oil business and in the 70s under Gerald Ford is made head of Central Intelligence.
00:29:36Now, Vice President Bush is put in charge of a special task force to stop the flow of cocaine into South Florida.
00:29:44Those who have been asking for a fight are now going to get one.
00:29:48Now, the war will be fought with a brain trust of expertise, with federal, state and local resources pitted against the criminals and drug traffickers and hired assassins.
00:30:00It's a young task force, a task force that has just begun the battle of the drug war in South Florida.
00:30:08Bush has elements of the Army, Air Force, Navy, DEA, FBI, Coast Guard, and local police under his command.
00:30:20Police!
00:30:22It's your hands up, man!
00:30:23Almost overnight, Miami starts to look like a military occupation.
00:30:28But the real battle will be fought in the shallow waters of the Caribbean.
00:30:33When Carlos later bought Norman's key and was flying cocaine from Columbia into his island,
00:30:40a lot of that cocaine moved out into Florida via airplane.
00:30:45A lot of it also went by boats.
00:30:47The Coast Guard's being outrun by the smuggler's speedboats.
00:30:53So Bush turns to an old friend for help.
00:30:56George Bush had a fascination with boats, you know, that sort of blue blood, Connecticut lifestyle.
00:31:02And Don Arenau was the boat guy.
00:31:04Don Arenau, a legend in South Florida.
00:31:09He built some of the fastest speedboats in the world.
00:31:12Popular with Miami's elite, Hollywood stars.
00:31:16We have Cary Grant running one of our cigarettes, you know?
00:31:19And increasingly, cocaine smugglers.
00:31:23Don Arenau was the premier raceboat builder.
00:31:28He built raceboats that George Bush enjoyed.
00:31:32They were fast.
00:31:33They could make round trips between Miami and the Bahamas in a matter of hours.
00:31:39And so all of the drug smugglers were gravitating to the fastest, most badass boats on the water.
00:31:45And these were built by Don Arenau.
00:31:48Bush asks Arenau to build him a fleet of chaseboats faster than the smugglers.
00:31:53Arenau calls the boats Blue Thunder and outfits them with two 650 horsepower engines, promising Bush they are the state-of-the-art in pursuit watercraft.
00:32:04When you want to look tough on drugs, having your picture snapped aboard Blue Thunder is one way to do it.
00:32:10The Blue Thunder fleet is dispatched from the command center built exclusively for the war on drugs.
00:32:28We have an unidentified vessel just west of West End, Grand Bahama.
00:32:32A state-of-the-art radar monitoring system tracks suspected smugglers.
00:32:37The Coast Guard soon realizes they have a problem.
00:32:46Don Arenau had two sets of customers then.
00:32:49He was selling to both the federal government that was trying to interdict drugs, and he was selling to the dopers who were bringing the drugs in.
00:32:58While the Blue Thunder boats fly over the calm waters of Miami Harbor, their wide-hole design slows them down in the open ocean.
00:33:07The cigarette boats Arenau sells to Narcos beat them every time.
00:33:11Was the flaw in Blue Thunder something that was intentional to help sort of the other customer base, or was it something that was unintentional and just pure happenstance that ended up putting a crimp in law enforcement efforts?
00:33:28It was just so Miami because here was this rich, colorful figure seemingly playing both sides in law enforcement and with the dopers bringing in cocaine.
00:33:49Don Arenau was gunned down near his boatyard in North Miami.
00:33:53Witnesses said a man in a Lincoln pulled alongside Arenau's Mercedes and shot him five times.
00:33:58Don Arenau ended up getting murdered.
00:34:01And many of those questions that we may have about Blue Thunder and sort of what was going on ended up, you know, dying with him.
00:34:08I am the first to admit that we have not shut down the drug smuggling into South Florida.
00:34:15But nobody denies that we've made it much more difficult for these smugglers to do business.
00:34:22But with the heat on in South Florida, the Colombians look to find other routes to bring cocaine into the United States.
00:34:37The small plains just crossed the Arkansas state border, and a new era in the drug war is about to begin.
00:34:44The flight's manifest says the pilot took a pleasure trip to Florida for the weekend.
00:34:53See the legs down there?
00:34:54He did have fun.
00:34:56But he wasn't in Florida.
00:34:59We set your words.
00:35:00Count to ten.
00:35:01Place the zen.
00:35:02We're ready for it.
00:35:03We beat your words.
00:35:04Start again.
00:35:05My old friend.
00:35:06Barry Seal.
00:35:07A legend in the world of drug smuggling.
00:35:08Seal becomes the youngest pilot ever for TWA.
00:35:12Until he's arrested for attempting to smuggle explosives to anti-Castro Cubans, but he's never charged.
00:35:31Barry Seal had a long history of both working for the CIA, working as a commercial airline pilot, and also for smuggling drugs.
00:35:41He would fly weapons for the CIA.
00:35:43He would fly drugs for cartels.
00:35:46It didn't matter what.
00:35:47The exciting thing in life to me is to get into a life-threatening situation.
00:35:52Now that's exciting.
00:35:53In Colombia, Seal makes a deal with Pablo Escobar and the Medellin Cartel.
00:36:12It's hard to come up with a more colorful character than Barry Seal when it comes to smuggling.
00:36:20With the cartel looking to bypass South Florida, Barry Seal provides an answer using a small airport in the tiny city of Mena, Arkansas, where Bill Clinton's governor.
00:36:31Seal pilots his own plane to Colombia 500 times to ferry drugs to the United States, earning an average of a million and a half dollars a trip.
00:36:40With demand for cocaine growing across the country, the U.S. government decides to take the fight directly to the source.
00:36:56Flying fast and low over the jungle, Colombian National Police narrow in on a remote drug lab called Tranquilandia.
00:37:05It's the size of a small town.
00:37:07It's owned by Pablo Escobar and the Medellin Cartel.
00:37:12On one of its first major international raids is the DEA.
00:37:23The DEA is part of the Department of Justice.
00:37:27Sort of like international FBI agents trying to catch people that are breaking the law by smuggling or facilitating the illegal drug trade.
00:37:36DEA is the only agency in the world that can enter into hostile zones and develop an investigation and a prosecution.
00:37:43The DEA and the Colombian National Police have carried out a raid on Pablo Escobar's jungle cocaine labs with deadly effect.
00:37:56The DEA and the Colombian National Police have carried out a raid on Pablo Escobar's jungle cocaine labs with deadly effect.
00:38:08When the shooting's over, 11 are dead, 40 are arrested, including an American pilot, and they begin destroying the labs.
00:38:21The takedown of the Tranquilandia drug labs, by far the biggest anyone had seen.
00:38:26It was a significant blow to actual production of cocaine on a worldwide level.
00:38:31That just pissed Pablo off.
00:38:36The DEA's growing role in Colombia's war on drugs is largely thanks to the country's Minister of Justice, Rodrigo Lara Bonilla.
00:38:48A fearless crusader against the cartels.
00:38:51He's teamed up with American law enforcement to arrest and extradite cartel leaders to the U.S.
00:38:57Lado Bonilla grasped the magnitude of what Colombia was facing in ways that most of the political elite didn't or simply didn't care to.
00:39:06He was a brave guy who took on the cartels, took on Pablo Escobar, and everybody knew that the cartels were going to get him.
00:39:13Less than two months after the Tranquilandia raid, Laura Bonilla's car is ambushed.
00:39:31He's shot seven times and dies instantly.
00:39:38The young shooter arrested at the scene tells police Pablo Escobar promised him a payment of two million Colombian pesos, the equivalent of just $650.
00:39:50Killing the attorney general of the country, that was unprecedented.
00:39:57It showed if you're going to mess with Pablo, you know, Pablo will kill you.
00:40:01It doesn't matter really who you are.
00:40:02It doesn't matter if you're in downtown Bogota.
00:40:04It doesn't matter if you have bodyguards.
00:40:06It doesn't matter if you have an armed car.
00:40:07We're going to get you.
00:40:08And that was a powerful message to the elites in ways that terrified them.
00:40:15There's no limits to which these guys won't go.
00:40:18And they have the money, they have the power, they have the weapons.
00:40:21So you either play along with them or you're going to die.
00:40:25I actually met with Pablo Escobar Jr. years later, who went back to Colombia and met with Laura Bonilla's son to apologize for that murder,
00:40:34which is a pretty amazing story.
00:40:37As the country mourns Laura Bonilla's death, the Colombian government doesn't back down,
00:40:43forming an alliance with the Americans to begin extraditing drug lords for trial in the United States.
00:40:49The United States decided that it wanted to begin extraditing people out of these countries
00:40:54because it was clear that the judicial systems of those countries couldn't handle the pressure.
00:40:59But it became really hated by the narcos.
00:41:02Escobar and the other cartel leaders band together, launching a public campaign against extradition.
00:41:12There was so much power within this group of guys.
00:41:16Pablo Escobar had tremendous political ambitions.
00:41:19He put together a group of drug dealers that were going to pay off the national debt of Colombia.
00:41:25If they would agree to block any extradition of Colombian drug lords to the United States.
00:41:32Escobar's head of logistics, Carlos Leder, even starts his own political party and eventually runs for office.
00:41:38Carlos Leder began to hate the United States and became psychotic.
00:41:47Cocaine is the atom bomb of Latin America.
00:41:50He ultimately saw cocaine as a way of destroying the society in the United States.
00:41:57Colombia could have been taken over by Escobar and his people.
00:42:0030 gunmen have launched an attack on the Colombian Supreme Court and have taken 300 hostages.
00:42:22The attackers are left-wing M-19 guerrillas.
00:42:30The same group who kidnapped the sister of Pablo Escobar's partners.
00:42:34Now they're fighting for the cartel.
00:42:37Escobar's allegedly paid them $2 million to wage war on the Colombian government.
00:42:43When the battle's over, more than a hundred are dead, including eleven judges.
00:43:09And the court buildings in flames, along with all the evidence the government had compiled to extradite the cartel leaders.
00:43:18All of those documents were destroyed.
00:43:20That probably made Pablo Escobar and the Medin cartel extremely happy.
00:43:25But before the government can retaliate, the cartel leaders flee the country.
00:43:32Carlos later finds sanctuary in Nicaragua, where the M-19 rebels have connected him to their allies, the communist Sandinistas.
00:43:43Escobar goes to Panama, where he's long been laundering his money with the corrupt president Manuel Noriega.
00:43:51Central America increasingly becomes the cartel's transit hub.
00:43:59And Barry Seal's now one of the cartel's most trusted pilots.
00:44:03It was very easy for Barry Seal to fly drugs into North America, throughout Central America, for narco traffickers.
00:44:11That was one aspect of his life only.
00:44:14What Pablo Escobar doesn't know is Seal has another, even more powerful employer.
00:44:23The United States government.
00:44:44At home, President Reagan's waging a reinvigorated war on drugs.
00:44:55Abroad, the administration's main focus is the communist threat.
00:45:00And Central America's the new battleground for Cold War covert operations.
00:45:06Central America in the early 80s is basically a hot mess.
00:45:10We've got atrocities, we've got insurgencies, counter insurgencies, all kinds of nefarious groups with different motives.
00:45:19And we get elbow deep in all of that.
00:45:25Nicaragua is run by the Sandinistas, Marxist rebels who overthrew an American backed dictator in 1979.
00:45:32Reagan almost immediately starts painting for the American public a very vivid and very ominous picture.
00:45:41This idea that if the Soviets gain influence in Central America and Nicaragua, a week from today they could be on the beaches in Texas.
00:45:51The White House is eager to paint Nicaragua's communist leaders as drug traffickers.
00:45:57And they enlist an unlikely accomplice, Barry Seal.
00:46:01The cartel smuggler has been busted and is now a government informant.
00:46:06One of the strangest missions that Barry Seal ever flew occurred when the Reagan administration sent Barry Seal into Nicaragua in an airplane that had cameras where he could film Nicaraguans handling cocaine that was being shipped to the US.
00:46:27Let's get those in the back, okay?
00:46:30The purpose of Barry Seal's mission was to frame the Nicaraguan government as narco traffickers.
00:46:36Barry Seal became a very important part of this because he claimed to have knowledge that Pablo Escobar and the Medellin cartel was actually supplying the Sandinistas with cocaine.
00:46:48The CIA outfits a military transport plane with hidden cameras.
00:46:53And Seal takes off to record a deal with Sandinista officials and Pablo Escobar himself.
00:47:00Ten seconds. Stand by, please, sir.
00:47:06My fellow Americans, I must speak to you tonight about a mounting danger in Central America that threatens the security of the United States.
00:47:16The communist government of Nicaragua has launched a campaign to subvert and topple its democratic neighbors.
00:47:23The Sandinistas have even involved themselves in the international drug trade.
00:47:27This picture, secretly taken at a military airfield outside Managua, shows Federico Vaughn, a top aide to one of the nine commandantes who rule Nicaragua, loading an aircraft with illegal narcotics bound for the United States.
00:47:43No, there seems to be no crime to which the Sandinistas will not stoop.
00:47:48This is an outlaw regime.
00:47:50They return to some of the original tactics of the CIA.
00:47:56We can back insurgency groups that are against our enemies.
00:48:02We can give them money.
00:48:03We can give them training.
00:48:04We can get them to conduct the dirty war.
00:48:09The CIA starts training and funding a secret army to take back the country from communism.
00:48:17They're called the Contras.
00:48:19The Contras were people who had been disenfranchised.
00:48:24A lot of these people were elites, people with money, people with connections, sometimes people with a high level of corruption.
00:48:32Things start to go awry.
00:48:36It starts to emerge that they're committing a number of atrocities, mining harbors, torturing people.
00:48:47When the brutality of the Contras is made public, Congress passes the Boland Amendment.
00:48:53The Boland Amendment says the U.S. can only give humanitarian, non-lethal support to the Contras.
00:49:01So what develops out of this is an effort to covertly raise money to buy military supplies.
00:49:10Yet again, the agency finds itself in that moral quagmire.
00:49:16We need to find other ways to fund these operations.
00:49:28Ilopongo Air Base in El Salvador.
00:49:32The American military's hub for its battle against communism across Central America.
00:49:40Arriving on this plane is an undercover DEA agent.
00:49:45Solerino Castillo.
00:49:49A second generation combat veteran from South Texas.
00:49:53He earns a Bronze Star in Vietnam.
00:49:57Then joins the DEA in New York and goes undercover as a trafficker.
00:50:02But when his fellow cops pocket sees drug money, Castillo refuses.
00:50:07Supervisor came up and says, look, everybody gets a handful.
00:50:11Just a handful.
00:50:12And I says, I can't do that, man.
00:50:14Because if I do that, then I am just like that.
00:50:20Working undercover, Castillo infiltrates the base where he's heard rumors of large scale cocaine trafficking.
00:50:27The Ilopongo Airport in El Salvador was like the O'Hare Airport.
00:50:33The traffic was enormous, crisscrossing.
00:50:37People would land with permission, without permission.
00:50:40Some of them crash landed.
00:50:42The safe houses were all over the place.
00:50:45The girls were everywhere.
00:50:48The partying was huge.
00:50:51I had an informant, which I paid a lot of money, who actually believed in what I was doing.
00:50:59He was a tower controller at Ilopongo.
00:51:05And he was able to give me the tail numbers of the planes that were coming in with the drugs.
00:51:10Castillo starts photographing the planes the tower controllers identified.
00:51:14We started to identify the pilots.
00:51:21He identifies one of the pilots as Barry Seal, the cartel smuggler.
00:51:25Barry Seal would fly his fleet of planes without being questioned at all.
00:51:31He was very well known.
00:51:33He was just one of many American pilots that were running out of Ilopongo.
00:51:39When Castillo begins to identify other known cocaine smugglers, he alerts his superiors.
00:51:46When I got all the intelligence, I went to see the U.S. ambassador.
00:51:52Ambassador, this is what we have.
00:51:54You have a guy here in Salvador who's running a large amount of drugs into the U.S.
00:52:01Gave him the guy's name. He said he works for Felix Rodriguez.
00:52:04Felix Rodriguez. His family was forced to flee Cuba after the revolution.
00:52:11Rodriguez has devoted his life to killing communists.
00:52:15He fights in the Bay of Pigs and helps in the hunt to kill Che Guevara.
00:52:21He's on the front lines in Southeast Asia and now Central America.
00:52:25Many of the characters who had shown up in Southeast Asia, like Felix Rodriguez, now appear in Central America.
00:52:36But Castillo begins to suspect Rodriguez is part of a larger covert operation.
00:52:42He went around bragging that he was connected to the Vice President George H.W. Bush and that he only answered to him.
00:53:02Castillo develops a source close to Rodriguez.
00:53:05The best places to get my intelligence were the whorehouses where Sandra worked.
00:53:16Sandra was Felix's regular girlfriend.
00:53:20Sandra allegedly tells Castillo when Rodriguez leaves town and when he returns.
00:53:25He compares Rodriguez's travel with the flights of suspected cocaine smugglers.
00:53:35The pilots were running drugs all the way from Colombia into Central America.
00:53:40Silopango turned out to be the trampoline.
00:53:42The drugs coming in, they bounce right there and go to every part of the United States.
00:53:48Castillo believes he's discovered something shocking.
00:53:51Some CIA contract pilots illegally arming the Contras in violation of the Bolan Amendment.
00:53:59Are also smuggling cocaine to help the cause.
00:54:03Castillo believes much of the operations under the command of Felix Rodriguez.
00:54:09It turned out to be arms coming south and cocaine going north and the C-130s.
00:54:14In a shadowy war, you're moving supplies and personnel into these theaters of war.
00:54:23So you're establishing smuggling reach.
00:54:26And you have a group of armed men who are ready to do illegal and dangerous things.
00:54:33So layering drugs on top of that is very easy.
00:54:37I started getting intelligence from U.S. Customs.
00:54:40They were getting the same information. We were sharing information.
00:54:43The FBI was doing the same thing.
00:54:46And when I questioned the CIA, they would say it's a covert operation being run by the White House.
00:54:52According to Castillo, his superiors refused to follow up on his allegations about Ilopongo.
00:54:59And to this day, Rodriguez denies any involvement with drug trafficking at the base.
00:55:04My supervisor says, don't get involved, man, because we got orders to stay away from him.
00:55:10And I says, this is not what I signed up for.
00:55:13I became a federal agent because I was going to fight. I don't care who's involved.
00:55:18I was in Guatemala at the ambassador's cocktail party.
00:55:24And I didn't want to go because I'm not the type of guy to mingle with people like that.
00:55:30According to Castillo, his superiors refused to follow up on his allegations about Ilopongo.
00:55:37But when the guest of honor arrives, Castillo sees the opportunity to reveal what he's uncovered to the highest level of the American government.
00:55:44I was standing there and he comes up to me and he says, so what do you do here?
00:55:51And I explained to him that I was a DE agent assigned to Central America.
00:55:57And he says, well, that's good for you.
00:55:59And I says, by the way, we have received intelligence that the Contras are heavily involved in the drug trade.
00:56:06And he smiled at me and just walked away from me.
00:56:13It was right there and then that I knew that it went all the way to the White House.
00:56:19By the mid-1980s, cocaine spread from Miami and is now flooding America's inner cities.
00:56:47In South Central Los Angeles and up and coming cocaine dealers about to make a deal that will change his life in the war on drugs forever.
00:57:00Now you're the king.
00:57:05What up?
00:57:07Rick Ross, also known as Freeway Rick.
00:57:11Raised in the projects, he was a teenage tennis prodigy.
00:57:15My dream was to go to a four year university.
00:57:19It's crazy how somebody can fool themselves into believing that they're going to a four year university when they can't read or write.
00:57:25So I found myself on the streets.
00:57:28And it's there where a friend first introduces Ross to a drug few in his neighborhood had ever seen.
00:57:35I couldn't believe a small amount of cocaine.
00:57:38It was probably about the size of a match head.
00:57:42And he was telling me that it was worth 50 bucks.
00:57:44And it was really hard for me to fantasize that something so small could be so valuable.
00:57:48It was like this is what I was made for.
00:57:55Ross finds he's a natural at selling cocaine and soon business is booming.
00:58:04His only problem, getting his hands on enough supply.
00:58:08How much can you move?
00:58:11Much as you can move to me.
00:58:15Everybody liked Freeway Rick.
00:58:17He was someone that didn't have to rely on violence in order to sell his product.
00:58:22It was just relationships that he had.
00:58:24Ross is meeting with a man he only knows by the name Danilo.
00:58:29I would always see Danilo lurking around, you know, kind of like in the shadows.
00:58:33Every now and then he would give me a nod.
00:58:34He offers to sell Ross large quantities of high quality cocaine at a heavy discount.
00:58:41I got like a $2,000 discount per kilo, which for me was like unheard of.
00:58:48You know, my profit margin just skyrocketed.
00:58:57Ross soon realizes he can make even more profit if he uses a new way of processing cocaine
00:59:02that's increasingly popular on the streets.
00:59:06I ran into a guy who was a pimp.
00:59:08What he was doing is he was making it into what we call rock form.
00:59:13Rock, or what will soon be known as crack, is a mixture of baking soda and powder cocaine
00:59:19that delivers an instantaneous and euphoric high.
00:59:22But the high wears off quickly, and soon the user needs another hit.
00:59:33Powder cocaine. It's the cocaine base along with the hydrochloride group attached to it.
00:59:40Remove that hydrochloride group that's attached, then that's just the cocaine base.
00:59:44That's the freeing of the base. You can smoke that.
00:59:48Crack changes the economics of cocaine.
00:59:51Crack rocks are sold for as little as $10 a hit.
00:59:55Cheap to produce and cheap to distribute, cheap to purchase.
00:59:59It also created in some ways more of an addiction because it wasn't really strong enough
01:00:03to get you high for very long, so you needed more of it.
01:00:06Thanks to his sources cut-rate cocaine and rising demand on the streets,
01:00:17Ross expands his operation building industrial-sized labs to cook crack.
01:00:23We're cooking in pots big enough to cook men.
01:00:28It became kind of like an assembly line of production.
01:00:32The demand just kept coming, kept coming, kept coming.
01:00:41His cooks are capable of making 50-kilogram rocks at a time.
01:00:47It takes a pickaxe to break them up.
01:00:51We went from $300 a day, next thing you know we're making a million dollars a day,
01:00:56sometimes $3 million, and the rest is history.
01:00:58He became the most successful coke dealer in South Central Los Angeles.
01:01:03Everybody wanted to be Rick Ross.
01:01:05Everybody wanted to be this big baller.
01:01:07You know, something that, you know, you dream of becoming.
01:01:13But what no one at the time in L.A. knows, including Ross himself,
01:01:17is that his main supplier has a dark secret.
01:01:20His full name, Oscar Danilo Blandon.
01:01:27He's a former Nicaraguan government official
01:01:30who's now part of the CIA-backed Contra war effort
01:01:34to overthrow the communist Sandinista government.
01:01:37Danilo Blandon ended up in California
01:01:40as part of the political wing of the Contras.
01:01:42It was very difficult for the organizers of the political wing of the Contras
01:01:47to get any type of support for their cause.
01:01:50And so some of these guys resorted to very controversial means.
01:01:54Danilo had connections all over the country.
01:01:57It was kind of like this whole little Nicaraguan connect, you know.
01:02:01Blandon told me that money that he made went toward fighting this war.
01:02:04They wanted this war to be won.
01:02:07And that was as far as I went with it.
01:02:09The less you know about somebody, the better.
01:02:12And Blandon starts offering Ross more than just coke.
01:02:16He started bringing Uzis and Mag-10s and Thompsons, AKs,
01:02:22and just an arsenal of weapons that we had never saw before.
01:02:28Blandon even provides Ross sophisticated police radio scanners.
01:02:38So Rick and his henchmen, any time the police started closing in on his network,
01:02:48he was able to find out about it.
01:02:50And every time they did a raid, there was nothing there.
01:02:53By 1986, crack has spread across the country.
01:02:56And Freeway Rick Ross is running a drug empire in 20 states
01:03:02with an alleged income of $900 million.
01:03:06Well, the thing that made Freeway Rick Ross such a successful crack kingpin
01:03:11is the fact that he had a very reliable supply of cheap cocaine.
01:03:15He was selling everything that he was getting as quickly as he got it.
01:03:19And thanks to Blandon's never-ending supply of discount cocaine,
01:03:23Ross helps change the demographics of the drug from a rich man's party favor to a cheap street high.
01:03:29For many of us who fell through the cracks of society, crack was a way out, but it had a devastating effect.
01:03:40It was more like a bomb that was dropped on the black community.
01:03:45Hands out of your back!
01:03:46That drug destroyed families, communities, and eventually destroyed part of the black race.
01:03:55The people that were most involved in cocaine trafficking in the early 1980s to mid 1980s
01:04:01were the very same people that the CIA was employing to help channel weapons to the Contras and support those operations.
01:04:11We had three or four cases where we arrested CIA contract workers with cocaine.
01:04:17And I get a phone call that the charges have been dismissed.
01:04:23You know, we are risking our lives making cases against significant drug traffickers.
01:04:30Then on the other hand, you got another government agency allowing the drugs to come in.
01:04:37And we're not talking about a hundred pounds. We're talking about tons.
01:04:41We're talking about tons.
01:04:44I don't care if you call it national security or whatever.
01:04:47That introduction of white powder was killing black people.
01:05:04Sing it with me, kids. Just sing it. Just sing it.
01:05:10As a crack cocaine epidemic spreads, the White House creates one of the most memorable public relations campaigns in history.
01:05:18What should you do when someone offers you drugs?
01:05:22Say no!
01:05:24Nancy Reagan's Just Say No symbolized the kind of a zero tolerance, puritanical approach that America has always taken.
01:05:32America is not good doing nuance. We don't do grays.
01:05:35Hollywood also gets involved with celebrities joining the anti-crack chorus.
01:05:43This is crack. Rock cocaine. It isn't glamorous or cool or kid stuff.
01:05:52It's the most addictive kind of cocaine and it can kill you.
01:05:55What will you do when someone offers you drugs?
01:05:59Just say no!
01:06:01I can't hear you. Louder!
01:06:04Just say no!
01:06:06That's wonderful!
01:06:09What's really ironic is the fact that Nancy Reagan was waging this huge Just Say No to Drugs campaign and making drug use a national moral issue.
01:06:20At the same time that her husband's administration was was elbow deep in the drug trade.
01:06:27Fast forward until the summer of 1986.
01:06:35Lynn Bias, the basketball player, the second overall draft pick of the 1986 draft, dies.
01:06:45Initial reports were that Lynn Bias had taken crack cocaine.
01:06:50And so the reports were this drug is so unpredictable and so addictive that it killed this athlete at the height of his powers.
01:06:58Then a week later, Don Rogers, a Cleveland Brown, dies.
01:07:04In both cases, it was powder cocaine.
01:07:07But it didn't matter.
01:07:08In the American people's conscience, it was crack.
01:07:11And crack was so unpredictable and so addictive that it tucked down these two great athletes at the peak of their powers.
01:07:18Jesse Jackson gives the eulogy at Lynn Bias' funeral.
01:07:23He says that crack has killed more black people than Kluca's Klan robes.
01:07:30Congressman in Harlem, Charlie Rangel, was on President Reagan about not doing enough for drugs.
01:07:38All of these forces are coming together.
01:07:42And so Congress did the only thing they could do when the president signed the legislation.
01:07:47And that's the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act.
01:07:53Well, today it gives me great pleasure to sign legislation that reflects the total commitment of the American people and their government to fight the evil of drugs.
01:08:05Under these new sentencing guidelines, five grams of crack cocaine, often sold by and to African Americans, carries a mandatory five-year sentence.
01:08:18For powder cocaine, often sold by and to white Americans, it would take a hundred times that amount for the same sentence.
01:08:25All of a sudden they just started locking up basically these kids.
01:08:34These guys were coming in for small amounts of crack and getting more time than a guy who was busted with a kilo of pure cocaine.
01:08:44Removing them from the community, what does that do?
01:08:48Now you don't have the people who are breadwinners to support families.
01:08:55The protectors of the community, they're gone.
01:08:59What does the Reagan war on drugs do?
01:09:04Well, consider this.
01:09:05In 1980, African Americans are 12% of the American population and they constitute 23% of people arrested for drugs.
01:09:15Ten years later, they're still 12% of the overall population, but now they constitute 40% of everyone arrested for drugs and 60% of everyone convicted.
01:09:24Authorities believe last night's machine gun killing of top drug informant Barry Seal was ordered by drug bosses in Medellin, Colombia, who sent five men to Baton Rouge to kill Seal.
01:09:46Barry Seal met an ignoble end.
01:09:49Barry Seal met an ignoble end.
01:09:51He was gunned down in the streets.
01:09:55Questions linger over exactly who killed him.
01:10:01Seal was a tough guy pilot who became one of the most important and daring undercover operatives, infiltrating the top Colombian drug operations.
01:10:10Barry Seal was supposed to be a highly protected witness at the time of his death.
01:10:15And yet, the gunmen were very easily able to find him and shoot him down in public.
01:10:22It was Seal who posed as a smuggler and flew into Nicaragua and took these pictures, showing Colombian drug dealers and Sandinista officials loading cocaine on his plane.
01:10:32Seal was scheduled to be the key witness against this man, Jorge Ochoa, the top Colombian drug boss responsible for the assassination of Colombia's Attorney General.
01:10:42And now, the murder in Louisiana.
01:10:45There were a number of people that Seal had begun to infuriate.
01:10:51Barry Seal began telling people that he was flying weapons for the Central Intelligence Agency into Central America in support of the Contras.
01:11:01He also talked about Pablo Escobar, and a lot of people believe that Barry Seal's death was basically a collusion between the U.S. government and the cartels.
01:11:15What's interesting is that a year after Barry Seal's death, the Contra operation unraveled.
01:11:22Deep in the jungles of Nicaragua, Marxist Sandinista soldiers just shot down a military cargo plane.
01:11:37Lo and behold, out of the jungle comes this guy.
01:11:44His plane has been shot down, the two other crew members are killed, and a 17-year-old Sandinista soldier has him bound by the hands and is leading him out of the forest with a rifle over his shoulder.
01:12:00And from that totally spectacular and unexpected moment, a whole series of revelations unfolds.
01:12:12The lone survivor of the crash, Eugene Hassenfuss, is no stranger to covert operations.
01:12:18He's a veteran of Air America, the CIA airline that allegedly helped fuel the heroin trade during the Vietnam War.
01:12:30If you told the average person that there were Americans who had fought in a secret war in Laos doing the same thing in Central America, most people would have thought you were crazy.
01:12:40The very same allegations ended up surfacing that not only were weapons being brought down to Central America to secret bases that the CIA had involvement with protecting and controlling,
01:12:53but also these flights were returning to military bases and drugs were being brought into the country.
01:12:58It probably would have been better if I would have been, if I wouldn't have made it out of that plane.
01:13:05Why?
01:13:06Dead people don't talk.
01:13:08In the wreckage, the Sandinistas find evidence linking the plane to the illegal operation to arm the CIA-backed right-wing Contra army.
01:13:19Congress had very plainly stated to the Reagan administration, you can't send weapons to the Contras.
01:13:31But this plane's loaded with weapons and it began to expose the Contra operation.
01:13:36The plane actually had a more interesting history than that.
01:13:40The very same plane that had been shot down over Nicaragua carrying weapons for the CIA was the plane that belonged to Barry Seal.
01:13:49This was an unprecedented event in American history where you basically have a secret CIA operation laid bare for everyone to look at and to dissect and to criticize.
01:14:04Today, Colonel Oliver North, the key witness in the Iran arms scandal, is due to give evidence in public for the first time.
01:14:15Congressional hearings are called, and the illegal operation to arm the Contras is revealed to be part of a larger conspiracy.
01:14:24The Iran-Contra scandal is one of the most complicated scandals in the history of American politics.
01:14:29It's not just one scandal, it's several scandals wrapped into one.
01:14:34On the one hand, a secret war in Nicaragua, but on the other hand, America's arch enemy, Iran, actually receiving missiles from the U.S. government,
01:14:41the profits of which were used to purchase supplies for the war in Nicaragua.
01:14:46The elaborate operation is run by Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, a highly decorated platoon commander in Vietnam,
01:14:55now a National Security Council staffer for the Reagan White House.
01:15:00Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North was a nobody, effectively, at the beginning of the Contra War.
01:15:06It's a great pleasure that I present to you Oliver North.
01:15:09He got very lucky because he was known by a select group of superiors in the National Security Council
01:15:16as a guy that would pretty much do anything and not ask any questions whatsoever.
01:15:20And so, there's literally a very narrow chain of command from the highest levels of power
01:15:25out of the Vice President Office down to one guy, Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North,
01:15:30that was given free license to run a secret war in Nicaragua.
01:15:35The National Security Council during the Reagan administration was very powerful.
01:15:40Okay, well, let me ask you.
01:15:43Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North was really the one directing a lot of these CIA operations.
01:15:54The nation's transfixed when North is forced to testify.
01:15:57You had the spectacle of this ramrod, straight, patriotic American,
01:16:04true believer Boy Scout, Oliver North, raising his hand.
01:16:08When I saw Oliver North raise his hand to be sworn in, you know, he hadn't worn the uniform in ten years.
01:16:17And that day he put it on to make it look like he was a patriot.
01:16:23While North denies working with or protecting drug traffickers, he admits to shredding classified documents.
01:16:30I do not deny that I engaged in shredding on November 21st.
01:16:34I will also tell this committee that I engaged in shredding almost every day that I had a shredder.
01:16:40But some of his diary entries survive, including several in which North appears to be aware
01:16:46the Contras were involved in cocaine trafficking.
01:16:49North ended up taking the fall for a lot of the things that happened.
01:16:54But there were people higher up that were never prosecuted.
01:16:59Vice President Bush denies he knew about any Contra drug trafficking.
01:17:04When Bush is elected president, he pardons six high-ranking officials,
01:17:09including the Secretary of Defense and the CIA's Head of Covert Operations,
01:17:14over their involvement in illegal arms sales.
01:17:17When North is convicted of lying to Congress, he never spends a day in prison.
01:17:27But beneath the Iran-Contra affair lies a deeper scandal.
01:17:32What you ultimately had was a very dark chapter in the United States' involvement with drug trafficking.
01:17:38The Iran-Contra investigation has really, really never been told.
01:17:45You have the bipartisan investigations, people will read, and then they'll forget.
01:17:51They know that nothing's gonna happen, and you saw it with Oliver North.
01:17:55He got indicted, he was convicted, and they got let him go.
01:18:00It was in no way hidden that this mercenary force that was being funded with U.S. tax money
01:18:07was also apparently importing drugs to the U.S.
01:18:12That fact was established, even as it was quickly brushed aside.
01:18:20Looks finally run out for the man who helped Pablo Escobar revolutionize the cocaine trade.
01:18:27Carlos Lader is captured by the Colombian National Police and extradited to the United States.
01:18:33He's convicted of drug smuggling and sentenced to life in prison without parole, plus an additional 135 years.
01:18:46After testifying against Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, his sentence is reduced to 55 years.
01:18:55Lader also tells the government that the Marine cartel had given $10 million to the CIA-backed Contra army in Nicaragua.
01:19:06It's the first public indication that the cartel was connected to the CIA's secret war.
01:19:12The hearing will come to order, please.
01:19:24What is the definition of national security which permits us to sacrifice the war on illegal drugs to support the illegal war of the Contras?
01:19:33After the Iran-Contra hearings, Senator John Kerry conducts a separate and often secret investigation of the government's involvement with drug smugglers during the 1980s.
01:19:45Right on the heels of the Iran-Contra scandal, you had John Kerry, the lone politician willing to try to take this on.
01:19:51In testimony before this committee last year, we heard how it's possible to literally rent an island overnight so that drug planes can land, unload, and transfer their drugs to boats that come into Florida.
01:20:04We will hear testimony about the destabilization of whole countries, regions, the support for terrorism, and the subversion of our own laws and institutions.
01:20:16Contra pilots testify under oath.
01:20:19After the guns were unloaded, was something loaded into the airplane?
01:20:24Yes, I loaded about 17 duffel bags in five or six boxes.
01:20:29What was in the duffel bags?
01:20:31Coke. Cocaine.
01:20:33And in the boxes?
01:20:34Cocaine.
01:20:35Did anybody explain to you what you were loading or did you know?
01:20:39I knew.
01:20:40So we stand in recess for 10 minutes.
01:20:44Despite the admission, Contra pilots were running drugs to finance an illegal system.
01:20:48To finance an illegal CIA war, few in the media pick up on the story.
01:20:53In 1992, Contra supporter Danilo Blandone is charged with conspiracy to distribute cocaine.
01:21:00But to reduce his sentence, he agrees to help the government in a sting operation to bring down his old customer, Rick Ross.
01:21:07It's not until 1996 that a little known reporter named Gary Webb will expose Blandone's Contra connections.
01:21:17I think the public's always ready for answers on this.
01:21:19We got all the DEA undercover tapes. We got the FBI reports.
01:21:22What we found, that it was connected to this Nicaraguan cocaine pipeline.
01:21:31With controversy swirling, the CIA director himself, John Deutsch, agrees to a town hall meeting with the citizens of South Central LA.
01:21:41You, the president, and everybody else should be highly upset and say, how did this cancer get here? How did it happen?
01:21:53The African American community really picked it up and felt that this was confirmation of what they had been suffering through the war on drugs and the epidemic of addiction.
01:22:05The drugs have been coming in this country and they have been sanctioned by our government.
01:22:13Rick Ross' co-defendant confronts the CIA director.
01:22:17Rick looking at life. My first offense, I'm looking at 20.
01:22:21Ed Blandone is out of jail and you paid him $166,000.
01:22:30The co-defendant of Ricky Ross.
01:22:33Ricky Ross is doing George Bush's time.
01:22:36The purpose of the investigation that I described to you was exactly to find out whether CIA officers allowed that kind of traffic to take place knowingly or conspired to do so.
01:22:54That is the purpose of the investigation.
01:22:56If we find anybody who did it, we will bring them to justice.
01:23:00After the town hall, the CIA's inspector general launches an internal investigation.
01:23:05He finds numerous allegations the CIA-backed Contras were involved in cocaine trafficking.
01:23:12But he concludes the operations were never sanctioned.
01:23:15No CIA official is ever indicted for the Contra cocaine allegations.
01:23:20The U.S. media just completely ignored this story.
01:23:24They portrayed Kerry as a conspiracy theorist.
01:23:27Gary Webb loses his job and then his career over the backlash to his story.
01:23:34And later commits suicide.
01:23:37Rick Ross served 13 years.
01:23:41I'm sitting in prison and here they are saying that I was connected to the CIA.
01:23:47How can I be tied to the CIA?
01:23:49You know, little old me, Ricky Ross.
01:23:52It was just a crazy situation to find myself in.
01:24:01Cocaine lives parallel lives throughout the 1980s.
01:24:03It starts this fun player drug in the early 1980s and by the end of the 1980s, it's a fun player drug for a lot of fun players who mostly happen to be white and rich.
01:24:14The Reagan war on drugs had really been dominated by the idea of these foreign boogeymen who were harming America.
01:24:25Even though there's this long history since the very beginning of the CIA of operating in countries where they ally themselves with people that are involved in drugs.
01:24:37If you took every single cartel leader, Pablo Escobar, Carlos Leda, line them up on the walls and you kill them.
01:24:46There would be a line tomorrow of 100 deep to replace each one.
01:24:50There has never been and there will never be a war on drugs because America is more addicted to drug money than they are to drugs.
01:25:07As America's war on drugs enters its third decade.
01:25:11He was owned, locked, stock and barrel by drug dealers.
01:25:14You know who's supporting the enemy?
01:25:16The casual drug use.
01:25:19The militarization begins in Los Angeles.
01:25:22Is this good?
01:25:23We've been partying like a week straight.
01:25:25I got FBI, I got DEA.
01:25:27I said, where's ACDC at?
01:25:29I experimented with marijuana a time or two and I didn't like it.
01:25:32The perfect answer became I didn't inhale.
01:25:35Drugs is big money and NAFTA was big money.
01:25:39Let us stick with the strategy that's working and keep the crime rate coming down.
01:25:45I know I have no idea!
01:25:46You're negative, but you have to do a state of the biggesttable karma.
01:25:48It'll have to be an opportunity in alternative Omones, which is the case that I live now.
01:25:50When you try to break this every single scam with the pesticide and the disp preached over my own country,
01:25:52if you ask terrible, I don't want to break up at that.
01:25:54I'll break it down if you don't care.
01:25:55A lot of people doubt that that you need.
01:25:56They're not going to Urine, but as usual.
01:25:57They live on drugs at the same time.
01:25:58Put your persists on drugs orни Markt up with your霊 eels,
01:26:00you know.
01:26:01Just ask some drug use at the same time and have to make a deal of for you to stay away from a gangree that
01:26:02tournament.
01:26:03Then think that you play Citizenberg has been so happy for you now.
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