"Pablo Escobar had a bounty on my head": Steve Murphy Pt.2

and honest, just like the people I talked to. Some of the content and language might be confronting. That's because no one who comes into contact with crime is left unchanged. Join me now as I take you into this world. In the second part of my chat with former DA agent Steve Murphy, we talk about how Pablo Escobar was tracked down and killed in a violent shoetout. We talk about the impact the investigation had on Steve and his partner Javier, and the Columbian police who put their lives

on the line to restore peace to their country. We also talk about his experience in the investigation being portrayed in the hugely popular TV series Narcos. It's a fascinating chat. Steve, welcome back to part two. If I catch killers. Thank you, Let's continue this wild story. And yeah, no wonder they made a TV series out of this investigation, and we're going to talk about Narcos TV series and it's a

great series, I've got to say on Netflix. But before we do, there's a bit of work to do before you start swamping round as the person that's portrayed on the TV series we've talked about Pablo Escobar, is there one thing that defines him, like how ruthless he was? You talk in part one that he didn't have a conscience and that he could just kill without a second thought. Is there one thing that demonstrates to the listeners what was the evilness or something that typified the evilness of the man.

hold on a minute. He covers up the you know, I assume he cover up the receiver, and you can hear him say cover his mouth, shut him up, and then he gets real quiet, so you know, they killed the guy. And then he's just right back on a yeah. Well, you know, I'll come and see you guys soon, and you know, you guys have to come to visit me, and just you know, like nothing happened.

and I we were spawn down there. We get a phone call about it, We take off and go down there, you can't get very close. You can see the black smoke from where the bomb went off, but you can't get very close because traffic just bogs down. So we park and we get out, and we were walking in and as you get closer, you start hearing the sounds associated with tragedy, you know, the screams and the crying

and the begging and all that kind of stuff. And then you get closer and you actually start seeing body parts laying around. And then you get up to the scene and you see the firemen and the police officers carrying the lifeless bodies of little children who just simply were in the wrong place at the wrong time. That's probably the most horrific thing I saw while we were down there. Just it's there's there's no way you can justify something like that.

primary lieutenants. And there was another guy named Fernando Galliano. Well, when Pablo went into prison, he imposed attacks or war tax on all the other drug draftickers, and he said, you know, look, I've fronted myself out for the good of all of you. I've embarrassed myself. I'm in prison now, you know, country club prison. He said, So what's going to happ happen is every load that you send up, I get half of it, or you pay me four hundred thousand dollars cash. Okay. So then they were doing

it well. After a while they got tired of doing it. Well. One day hits the carrios going out and they find a cave that there's this money US dollars that have been shrink wrapped and hidden in a cave, and the shrink wrap has come loose, and so air and moisture has been getting in there, and all this money is rotting away. And we've heard this anywhere from ten million to twenty three million dollars. So they bring it in. They show Pabula like, look, this is Kiko and Fernando's money,

and they're holding out on you. You know, here you are fronting yourself out and you're not making all the billions that you were before because you've taken a stance against the government. You're trying to do good for everybody else. And they get him all fired up. So he has somebody make phone calls and they call the Galliano's and they call him Moncadas and said, hey, come on up to the prison. We're going to have a barbecue. No business discussed. We're just gonna have good time. Bring some

hookers in and we'll have some mariachis. Come men or whatever. No need to bring security details. Everything's good. So they show up. Well Kiko, according to our source, Kiko comes walking in and he sees the money there on the floor, and he looks at Pablo and sees a look on his face and he starts saying, Pablo, that's not what you think it is. We're not holding out on you. That's money that's been buried for a long time. Quite honestly, we had forgotten about it. And if you think about it.

For moisture and water to get in there, to start writing away paper. That doesn't happen in a few days, I mean that takes months and months and months of time. So the Cicarios are egging Pablo on he he cheated you, Pablo, kill him. You need to kill these two, and so eventually they go back and forth, and Pablo gets so incensed that he grabs a stick and he kills his childhood best friend, Kiko Moncada, beats him to death. Then the Ccarios they jump on Fernando Galliano. They do the

same to him. Then they started cutting parts of their bodies off and sending them to their families and saying, you owe me this, You owe me that you know, and if you want, everyone want to see him again, and this is what you got to do. You know, the families didn't know they were already dead. Well, eventually word got out to us about it through this informant, and we went to our bosses and the ambassador, and eventually it went to the President of Columbia, and the

message was do something about this. This is ridiculous. This is embarrassing to your country. It's embarrassing to your administration, you've got to do something. So they come up with an idea that they're going to tell Pablo, Okay, we're going to temporarily move you to a different prison so we can reinforce your prison to make it more secure for you. And it's all a ruse. Well, they send the deputy Justice minister up there. This kid, Mendoza is

like twenty five years old. He goes up with a Columbian colonel, military colonel to take like twenty troops up there. Get to the gate outside. Now, remember who's paying the guards on inside the gate, So they're not.

Pablo tells the Justice minister, get the president on the phone. Well, he's calling. Before the president would take Pablo's calls, believe it or not, but this time nobody's answering the phone. So Pablo kind of sees the writing on the ball. They realize that they don't have enough troops up there to assault the prison, so now they send an elite group of military folks called the Copas, and they go

in and they assault the prison, big firefight. Not a single good guy was wounded that day, believe it or not. And the deputy Justice Minister, they were able to get him out unscathed, which is just a miracle. Some of the guards were killed, Pablo's guards. A lot of cacarios were able to escape, not all of them. Some of them chose to stay in the prison. So recently, Jama had done some work for one of the Spanish speaking stations down to Columbia about the Escobar story, and in exchange,

they had access to these photographs. So the press had shown up at the prison because you know, the words out that something's going on up there at the cathedral, and this one photographer he got up there, he saw everybody, you know, all the other presses there, worldwide press, and so he goes around and he somehow knows how to get around to the backside of the prison and he's walking in and here comes Pablo and some of his henchmen and the guy the story is the cameraman. He

laid his cameras down and put his hands up. He says, Pablo, Pablo, please don't kill me. You know, I went to this front gate. My producers told me to go get pictures. It's crowded up there. I thought I'd just come around and see what's happening. Prob washed to get your camera, take your camera and take pictures of me. I'm a dead man walking, so that camera and held onto those pictures. He died recently and his family gave him to this.

I think he was a Univision Univision and so because of the work Hobbier had done with them, they gave us license to use these pictures. So we now have three photographs that this camera took of Pablo, and I think it's four of his henchmen making their escape, and you can see some of them have guns, you know, pistols tucked in their waistband. It's not like they're running,

you know, scared, they're just they're just getting away. Well, you know, I'm always I've always wondered if you know there wasn't some green passed hands along the way, because how do you escape from the prison surrounded? How do you escape?

guys and the search block. This is a quote from your book when he was on the run, just to give you a sense of what happened after he escaped. Between the twenty second of July nineteen ninety two, when Escobar escaped and mid March nineteen ninety three, one hundred and thirty six police officers had been killed in the line of duty by Escobar's hitmen. So that's one hundred and thirty six police I'm talking about. The death tolls

throughout the country had also increased. Columbia had seen it steadly this year, with nearly twenty nine thousand homicides reported in nineteen ninety two, compared to twenty five thy one hundred and ten for the previous year. In Medelline and Bogata, one hundred and twelve Savilians had died from random car bomb attacks and four hundred twenty seven had been injured.

It's just on the sky that's hired to comprehend, and that that's in that passage of time when he was on the run, when you guys were part of the team, uh tas we're tracking him down.

get him cuffed up, and take him out. Well, this kid talks, you know, he doesn't know he's not supposed to talk. He said, he had already killed I think it was something like ten police officers. And how you're asking, he said, how do you do this? He said, Well, you just you know, these uniform guys they're walking the streets and they stop and talk to each other or stop to talk to people in the street, and you just walk up behind him and shoot him in the

back of the head. He said, the most I've killed him one day was three and then you go to an address and you tell him, and you know, they give you one hundred dollars for each cop that you've killed. And HWY said, what do you do with the money? He said, well, most of it I give to my mom because she had you know, she was one of those people living on the edge of a trash dump. And he said, I keep enough money for myself. I don't have a nice pair of tennis shoes, nice pair

of jeans, and I need beer money. But everything else, she gets everything else. And I thought, just no remorse whatsoever. But or a woman that's brave enough to put a uniform on and your life is worth one hundred dollars.

into it Hispanic country. You know. I'm six to two, I have light colored eyes. I used to have brown colored hair. I just kind of stick out.

they're military, so they follow orders. We kind of looked at them as strong suggestions instead of orders. And so I mean, just just to match, You're still on the job there and in uh Australia, and I come to your country, and I tell you, Gary, I heard there's Pablo Escobars down there at the pub. Man, go see if he's down there. I'm gonna get a couple of coffee and come back and tell me what you find. What are you gonna tell me? I know what you're gonna tell me that.

reward for information on Pablo. It was it was exciting. I mean, it's very exciting. There were times, especially if we were in the city, they would they had an armored personnel carrier, and so if we were doing stuff in the city, especially for going over into the barrios where Pablo's you know, he's the hero, they would put me inside the armored car just to protect me a little bit more. But you know, and you had a

machine gunner on top. And but then when you know, when it's trying to clean up my language, when the ship hits the fan, you know, you don't run away. You got to stand there and fight.

The problem back then was was these massive marijuana grows, the ones up in the mountains. The quality wasn't as good, but the Mexican traffickers learned about sinsimilia, which is something that American marijuana growers just developed, and it basically they took the seeds out of the plants and it made it a much more potent strain of marijuana. So, through payoffs and so forth, they bought this desert land and they had to drill these massive wells to get water

because marijuana grows require a lot of water. So Kiki gets information through an informant, and at one point the government of Mexico would let the United States do flyovers looking for marijuana fields or poppy fields because of Mexican heroin. Well, a new president comes in and he bans all that. So now Kiki's relying on informants, and apparently he had the knack for dealing with informants. He has one that's a pilot. He gets information where there's this massive marijuana grow.

I think that one was two hundred acres. They do a couple of flyovers which were illegal, and confirmed it was there, got the Mexican police to go raid the place, and I forget how much it was capable of producing, but two hundred acres of marijuana plants just massive. Well, then as time goes on, he finds out about this other grow. This time it was twenty five hundred acres, two five hundred acres, just massive, and they rated that.

I think they said that that field alone was capable of four billion dollars of weed per grow, and I think you could grow it at least twice a year down there. So that led to him, you know, he was ready to rotate out of Guadala horor back to the United States. But these three drug traffickers Raphael carl Countero, Miguel On Hell Felix Gayardo, and the third guy's name was Fan Saic I can't remember his full name. Those are the three guys that started the Guadara Guadalajara cartel

in Mexico. So they orchestrated a kidnapp had Kiki came out of the consulate in Guadalajarra to go meet his wife for lunch. They surrounding kidnapp him, taking him to a house. He's torture for over thirty hours. He's actually killed three different times. They've got a doctor there that when the first two times when he died, they would inject adrenaline into his heart to restart his heart so they could kill him again. It's just horrific what they did to Kiki. And they also did the same thing

to the pilot I think his name was Zavala. Then you know, of course Dea realizes that Keiki's missing because he didn't show up for wife, his lunch with his wife, and then he done show Homan that night, and so this massive man hunt is underway. The United States starts supplying pressure to the Mexican government. Finally they create they just designate somebody to be a scapegoat and they kill them and throw them out and said, okay, there's the

guy killed Kiki and the pilot. Well, the United States knew that wasn't true. So our president back at the time, and I'm not sure we have presidents that have these kind of honas now, but the president back then shut down the border between the United States and Mexico. It took less than one day for the Mexican government come back and say, okay, okay, we're back in. I think it took thirty days before they finally found Kiki's body.

Him and the pilot were wrapped up in plastic. Seeing that what the response of the United States was, and it might be the same now because we have a new president. But past administrations would certainly not have gone to those links because the d agent was killed. So if you think about it, the drug traffickers are in business to make money. If you shut down the border, they can't get the product into the United States, where you know, we're the leading consumer country of ill legal

narcotics in the world. That's a reputation we truly enjoy having. It's outrageous. But they knew that if I mean we had wire taps, one wire tap, we're Pablo's talking makes reference to the two gringos, and then a short time later he actually mentions the name's Penyon Murphy. That was worse than finding out there's a three hundred thousand dollars bounds in just guys knew your name.

What were the strategies to bring him down? And the people that you're working with to to yeah, find you.

I remember we went to a huge church and just searched that in the middle of the night when we finally we were able to get out, get some troops to go and and just you know, we searched for a couple of hours, couldn't find a thing. And you know, the the lower ranking Columbian officers or they're getting tired and they were just want to go back to the barracks and sleep and and I'm not wanting to leave.

And Taivea is the same way. We got to keep going, got to keep going, got to keep going, and eventually, you know, the commander of the unit comes over and he's like, look, but we're going, we're going. We can't find it. He's not here, and it's it just over and over. There was times when we hit one cabin and the coffee was still warm in the mug, there was a cigarette and the ashtray still burning, you know.

And Pop Poplo was known he liked. He had it this fetish for fancy bathrooms, you know, gold plated fixtures and things like that, you go in these little shannies and and but it had a really nice bathroom. You knew that was Poblo's, you know, one of his places, okay, And he'd always have he'd have a lady in there cooking, and they'd have a young girl in there as the cleaning lady. But more like you know, his personal enjoyment type things.

to figure out. You know, Medine's built in a bowl. So you put three vans up on high spots. They shoot the signal out where the three signals intersect. That's where Pablo's phone is coming from. Because it wasn't three G, four G, five G phones like we enjoy today. They were basically radio telephones. If he wanted to he knew we were listening. If he wanted to thwart our efforts to listen to him, all he had to do is

change frequency. But the challenge to him was he had to get the new frequency to the people he wanted to talk to. So it wasn't quite as easy to spend that dial. So they get they get the triangulation. They triangulate on the signal. The margin of error back that time could be two three city blocks large. So to refine that, to refine that area down, you send somebody in with holding an antenna out the car window,

driving down the street. And that was Lieutenant Martinez. He's he's got a meter in one hand, he's got driver driving him and he's driving down the street. He gets us. He thinks he's found this warehouse, and so they bring the Deheen guys in, they launch an operation. It's an empty warehouse. So, I mean, you know the grief he caught from all the other cops because like, oh, you idiot, you know, I mean, you know how we are.

listening to the phone call on the wire tap. There's never any we listened to this a lot of times. There's never any indication that Pablo saw Lieutenant Martinez or this man driving down the street holding an antenna out the window, which was, you know, something you don't see

every day. And the only explanation we've ever come up with is like when you ask me a question, I'm reliving a lot of things in my mind, and I'm seeing you on the screen, but I'm more in my mind reliving things I don't I mean, you could pick your nose, I probably wouldn't even pick up.

see it. We're in this quad area, and I see the executive staff for the colonel as majors and his lieutenant colonel's running across the squad and that's you know, that's clue something's going on. So I told the gringoes. I said, hey, man, something's happening. I'll be right back. And so I go to the Colonel Martinez's office. And we had in a good enough relationship, a mutual respect that he sees me at the door and he said, come on. He come on in, and he's on the

phone with the lieutenant and he's giving him instructure. He's like, okay, he says, we've got Pablo located without you know, with one hundred percent margin of air or no margin of air whatsoever. Colonel saying, okay, we're loading up the troops. Well, loading up six hundred people takes a while. You know, you can't knock it out in five or ten minutes, he said. But whatever you do, don't let him get away.

Surround it and keep him there. Don't let him get away. Well, these the heen guys, they interpreted to that to meus go get him. The American operators had taught them how to use debt cord to blow doors open. So they this is a three story rowhouse. They line the front door, blow the door off, the engines, they go in. The first floor is a combination garage, kitchen, laundry room or

cleaning room. Maybe made's quarters back there. Then you go to the second floor and there's a living room, there's a couple bedrooms, and the third floors all bedrooms and bathrooms. So as they get up to the second floor, they clear the first floor. They go to the second floor, there's Pablo running up to the third floor. They exchange shots with each other. One police officer actually tripped on the steps, which saved his life because Pablo shot at him right at that time and it went right over

top of his head. Poblo at one time had as many as five hundred cicario as protecting him. On December second, nineteen ninety three, he was down to one guy. His nickname was lemon On I can't remember his real name. Lemon gets to the third floor window. The rowhouse behind him was a two story, so he could jump out that window onto the roof of this two story and then they were going to make their escape out the back way well. The cops had sent a couple guys

around the back. They ordered Lemona to drop his we weapons and surrender. He starts shooting at him from the roof and they tune him up and he falls off dead onto the ground. Now Pablo gets up to that third window, or that third floor, and that window he knows good guys are coming up steps. Now he's heard this shooting outside, so he knows there's good guys out there, and he knows he's in a crossfire. He goes in

and jumps out the roof. The building next to this two story was another three stories, so there's a wall here and Pablo is trying to inch along that wall to see where the guys are on the ground. These guys are coming up to the front window. He's like, screw it. He takes off a run across the roof, shooting at them, shooting at them. They catch him in

a crossfire. He's hit three times, once in the back of the leg, once in the butt cheek, which both of those are knocked down shots, but neither one was a kill shot. And then the kill shot was a two twenty three round through the ear. There's a lot of speculation about that round through the ear. His son, Wan Pablo, would have you believe that his dad committed suicide. I've took the pictures. We don't post those on the

meat on the internet. But you can see them all on the internet because people take pricktures during our presentations and they post them. When I was a city cop, I've worked murders and I've worked suicides. I'm also a former fire arms instructor for DEEA. You know that when you shoot a bullet and it comes out the end of the barrel, there's little bits of gunpowder that follow the bullet out and they'll travel a certain distance before they lose their velocity and follow the ground. Even if

you could hold a gun at arm's length. And remember it's the two twenty three, So now he's going to have to turn a rifle around and shoot himself into ear. There would be powder burns all over the side of his head. You can go online and look those pictures. I promise you there's not a single powder burn on there. So he was killed by the Columbia National Police. It's not suicide, you know, the kid. I don't know why.

You know, maybe if my if Pablo Escobar had been my dad, I think I'd like to change the legacy of his memory too. But that's not true. It's it's a lie.

our boss. I said, go get mister Toff. Oh okay, is everything okay? I'm like, go get mister Toff now, quit wasting time, you know. And so it took two three minutes before he came on the phone, which just seemed like an eternity because I know that they're mounting up the troops and getting ready to go out there. When mister Toff comes on the phone, the first thing he says is they just kill Pablo. I'm like, well, no shit,

that's why I'm calling you. And so I told him what had happened, and he said, listen, get out there, confirm this is Pablo. You know, we've been down this road before where we get our hopes up. Go make sure this is Pablo. So I run back to the barracks to get my gear, you know, a gun and everything, and come running back out and everybody is gone. The only people there are the guards on the gates. I don't have a car, I don't know where they are.

And I said, I need a ride. Colonel He's like, get the jeep, you know. So I ride out with him. We get out there, We go in the door that the Deheen guys had made entry. We searched the first floor, take pictures, go to the second floor, take pictures. Get to the third floor and that's the window. So I get to that wind and I look out and there's all our Deheen buddies out there over the body. And I yelled to them and they're all yelling back, holding

their rifles up. You know, we got him. We got him. It's Bablo. He's dead. Well now thousands of people are starting to come out because they just heard this big, massive gun battle. We've got our six hundred people out there. Then the Columbian military shows up with a couple hundreds. I mean, it's just it's great security, but Eventually I got around back with the colonel and we climbed up on the roof and that's when I took the pictures of Pablo, and the whole purpose of that was for

identification purposes. When that was over, we're standing on the roof and this group of people show up and they're making a commotion and I looked at one of the lieutenant Colonels was up there. Colonel Colias was with me and I said, Colonel, who's that down there? And he said, well, that's Pablo's mom and that's Pablo's sister. Like oh really, so let's just watch them for a minute. So we watch them and they're arguing with the police and the military,

and finally his sister she's really loud and obnoxious. She's like, I want to see you say that's Pablo on the ground. I want to see him. I want to see that that's my brother. So she goes over to where Limonum, the bodyguard, is laying and she just goes off on the police. She's like, oh, you idiots, that's not Pablo. Whiskey bar, you killed the wrong person. You don't even know what you're doing. And she just lets them have it. Finally she calms down and one of the cops looks

at her and look on the roof. Bitch, that's what Pablo was, was up on the roof. So I stick around watched them. Once the mother and the sister saw Pablo's body brought off the roof, and I saw their reaction, there was no question in my mind whatsoever that was Pablo Escobar. Now the police were worried about my safety because you know, we weren't allowed to wear anything that looked like police and military, so we typically wore, you know,

polo shirts and jeans, tennis shoes, whatever reason. That day I had a red polo shirt on, which really I don't stick out enough, so I wrote, wore a red shirt, you know, go figure.

I mean we went into total lockdown. You were you know, I know you see this on TV, but you literally have your gun under your pillow because you're expecting this retaliatory tax, you know, retaliation from the narcos. Quiet at night, I ever spent money.

high five, congratulations and all that. We were there for a couple hours, and he and I Friday night flew back to Bogota and we weren't supposed to ride taxis down there because of the danger factor. Well, the embassy didn't send anybody out to pick us up, so we jumped to the taxi went back to the embassy. My wife was working in the see at that time, and it's probably six thirty seven o'clock at night, and you know, she had lots of pizzas and lots of cases of beer,

and we celebrated that night. We got home Saturday morning, probably about ten thirty eleven o'clock. It was an all nighter. It was one hell of a party. Well it was, and that was a long story of your short question. It felt like the weight of the world had been

lifted off our shoulders. I mean, it's my wife and I had adopted our first daughter down there in October before Pablo was killed, and then I had to go back to Media Inc. And Monica at that time, she was at eight months old and we got her and I'm you know, I'm not even getting to spend any time with my new daughter. So it was it was it's hard to describe. It's just, you know, Wow, he's finally dead. He's really finally dead.

murder rate, and you can go. I challenge every audience to go check it and see if I'm telling the truth, because what I found and what you'll find, is that the murder rate in Median, Columbia had dropped by almost eighty percent simply because Pablo Escobar was dead. Now did we do we make a difference on cocaine trafficking? We did, probably lasted maybe two weeks at most. The sad thing is here in the United States right now you can go on almost any street corner by cocaine, certain areas

of town you go to. So people say, well, the war on drugs is lost, that it has just been away at coloss a waste of time and human life. Well, what would it be like if law enforced wasn't out there fighting the scourge? You know, would you be safe to do anything? Because there's going to be drug addicts everywhere. They're going to be robbing here, They're going to be still and you're going to kill, you gonna be jacking your car. It made a difference. It's just it didn't

end the war on drugs. That's not going to happen until the demand goes away.

you're assigned. But when I got to Greensboro and I didn't even know where it was, I had to look it up on the map. When I got to Greensboro, I felt like that's when the job got to be a lot of fun. That there had I had no pressure whatsoever to prove myself to anybody. I felt like I survived Miami in the nineteen eighties, I survived the Pablo Escobar man hunt. That's when a job got to

be fun. I mean, we had five agents trying to cover twenty plus counties, so we always worked at our state and local park nurse, which quite honestly, I prefer working with anyway, because they're a lot more fun to hang out with, and you know, they don't complain when it's quitting time. And I mean they're dedicated, and most most d agents are, but not all. So I guess that was the thing for me. It was it was I had come I had become a workaholic, I think.

I mean we were Gosh, if you were in the embassy, we lived off off the coffee and doughnuts, every day. It was that sugar and caffeine kept you going. I'd stop by the nurses station and get my blood pressure checked and it was never high. You know, I say it was I felt like, you know, the good man upstairs was taking care of me healthwise. The Columbia National Police, especially the dehing guys. When the bullets started flying, we knew they wouldn't run off and leave us. I mean

they'd stand there and fight to protect us. But they knew we wouldn't run off and leave them either. So it was just it was one of the I would I never want to do any of that again, especially at this old man age, but I wouldn't trade it for the world. It's what we're doing in retirement is I never dreamt we'd be doing anything like this. It's I mean, being on a podcast with you and you're in Australia. I mean I get to travel the world

just our Kenthon. You're traveling around the world telling the true story about bablu Escobar. We talk about leadership, decision making, teamwork. It's I'm having a blast in retirement. I have to see.

work that you're doing. It has the highs, it has the horror, but there's also something that, yeah, it was the right fit for you, obviously doing policing your life after policing, hope, noting a round the world, and yeah, your Netflix series Knockofs tell us how it came about.

nothing happens and you get disappointed. So when I got the call about this guy named Eric Newman and Hollywood wanted to talk to us, I refused to call him to start with. And the guy that called me was an old Breen buddy, and I told him, I said, okay, he cussed me out to what he did, and I's like, okay, I'll call him. I'll call him. So I called Eric and he kind of gave me his little spill on the phone and I said, you know, thank you, but I think we'll pass. And he got real quiet on

the phone. I said to Eric, are you still there? And he's like, I can't believe you just said no. And we've since learned that people will pretty much sell their soul to be on TV in Hollywood. I mean, there's some strange people out there. And so he said, listen, I'm coming to Washington next month. Would you can I take you to dinner. I have a couple of writers. Let's just talk about this and see if we can

change your mind. And againy, you will understand this. I'm thinking that's going to be a free dinner and a really nice restaurant. Yes, I will meet you. That it was as a French restaurant, so we you know, after we talked to them, I just kind of developed a connection with them. They were very open and honest and transparent about everything. And so we're getting ready to leave the restaurant. He says, so what are you going to do?

And I said, well, let me talk to Hoare and let's maybe we'll pursue this and see where it goes. So my initial conversation with Eric was in February of thirteen. In March is when we had dinner. In May, we signed contracts with Netflix, and at the end of June, I retired from DEEA. I retired from law enforcement after thirty eight years. And in July we were sitting in Hollywood starting to write the first season of Narco's with all the writers. So it went just like that.

on a couple of other projects with him. And I think what they would do is they would there are organizations in Hollywood that, you know, their talent Agency, so they represent certain actors and actresses, and so they would bring us these booklets and said here's somebody you know the book that might be this thick and they'd say, here's some of the people were thinking about playing your part.

And he started going through. Then you see John Travolta, and you see Armie Hammer, and you see Jake Jillen Hall, and I'm like, holy cow, I'm not a big TV watcher, but even I knew who these people were. And I think it was just to playcad us, to keep us from asking questions, because that's not who they hired at all.

just straight out and make believe Hollywood. You know, I was never kidnapped. We weren't pushing people out of helicopter doors at three thousand feet. Javier wasn't passing class find information to lost peppies. But like I take you know one on stage, what I joke around about it. What is true is that Javier really is a man slut. And it's funny because when his wife's when his wife's in the audience, I always go before the show and say, Beverly, you know what I'm going to say, Are you okay

with us? It's like, yeah, go ahead, don't know what you're doing.

pays a whole lot more than a podcast. Okay, but coming up on the end of the fourth year here in June, going to start the fifth year. Every show has a guest. It's mostly current or law enforcement. Occasionally a first responder or military. I bring in the military veterans, and even every once in a while I'll bring in a former bad guy and then let the listeners get the perspective from his viewpoint. And most of them, they they have to have a tone for for their crimes.

You know, most of them have done their time in prison and they've changed their lives. And I have one guy that was the just a couple of months ago, that was the president of the Hell's Angels in Los Angeles for thirty five years, and he really wouldn't come off of it. He did his prison time. But you know, I asked him, I said, anything you'd changed in your life, and he's like, Nope, not a thing. So you know, he's the only one that really hasn't come across the you know, to be a good guy.

across the seas. Oh yeah, yeah, anyway, look, thank you very much for your time, and we literally have just scratch scratched the surface of your stories. But from a law enforcement officers point of view, I think what you did, I can see the sacrifices you made, and we haven't really delved into all the sacrifices you made in your personal sacrifices hunting down the world's most wanted man and all the other things that you've done in your career.

But also someone like you, I think inspires law enforcement officers, Like you're this dumb, dumb kid from the country that ended up living the life that you live because of the job that you did.