Partying with Pablo

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He's dropping five hundred pound bombs on the city because by that time, his philosophy is, if we just kill everybody, we don't have a revolution.

Welcome back to the Journalista Podcast. I'm Steve Vestev, your host. We've talked a lot about Nicaragua and the events that make Cookie who she became, and I mentioned that she always seemed to be at the crossroads of history. But the story you're about to hear is absolutely insane, a dangerous secret that most of her friends and her news colleagues never knew. Yes, everybody knows she partied, but did

I am in New York City, I'm modeling, I'm having a very successful career and partying.

Obviously, where did you like to go fifty four?

Of course, this was a club that you had to book a certain way and obviously have a certain lifestyle. And in fifty four they had the dance floor, the bars, But then downstairs was the Special Room, and that's where VIPs were doing all kinds of drugs, crazy things. At any given night, you could be with David Bowie, Calvin Klein. And one of my best friends was a celebrity, Bianca Jagger.

Mick Jagger's wife was She from Nicaragua.

From Nicaragua, That's where I knew her from. She took me with her and we went on the whole tour.

Yeah you do.

Rules.

I took a quick trip to Miami and ran into an old childhood friend, Gino, and we hooked up.

I never went back.

What I didn't know is that he was already deep in the game, the drug game, part of the mede ying Columbia cartel.

What was his job? What would you say?

He did fly to Colombia, you know, meet with the big wigs, place the orders, have the orders shipped. There were many different ways of getting product here to the United States. And then once here we had his slew of clients that he would sell to in bulk. He didn't have to get his hands dirty, but he liked to. You know, I would tell him, why are you, you know,

Did you ever go to Columbia?

No?

I was smart, never never got my hands dirty. I was just having fun at the parties and the shady characters and a couple of hit men here and there.

Pablo Escobar, what was he like?

Just one on one at the.

Time, we only called him ilhefe the boss, and he wasn't Pablo Escobar like everyone knows him now. He was kind of quiet. Sometimes he would get a little boisterous. He wasn't a very book smart guy. He was It's interesting, just like when you're doing blow the co crap and you know, talking. He was sort of protective over me.

When Cookie meets Pablo Escobar. He's not yet a household name. He doesn't have a Netflix series about his life or even much of a criminal profile. He had a mansion near Miami in his own freaking name, he was selling cocaine, lots of it. At his peak, he was making four hundred and twenty million dollars a week, and his net worth was estimated at more than thirty billion, making him, by all accounts, the wealthiest person in the world. Of course, it's hard to measure since it was all illegal and

I was Missus Scarface.

When you have that much product and that much money, it gives you power.

When you were with Chino in that time period, did you feel like you were partners in the game or was it his thing and you were just along for the ride.

Well, I was the one calling the shots because he was very bright, and he had a very bad habit that if he started doing blow, he started to drink and he would get stupid drunks.

So it's kind of like managing a multi million dollar.

Corporation given my two cents, which once he was drunk he wouldn't listen to. But guys like Pablo Escobar and other people in the game, they would listen to me. Because they knew that what I was saying made.

Sense in those days when you were rolling with Chino and those guys. But did you ever run up against any you know, bullshit, anything bad that was happening you.

Mean with the cartel guys.

Exactly.

Let's put it to you this way. These cartel guys were my friends. Obviously I must have had an inkling of what kind of people they were, what they were capable of. But as long as I had a seat at the table and allowed to party and had unlimited amounts of blood, it was pretty standard friendship relationships.

Well, you talk about having a seat at the table, did that ever go wrong?

You know, I'm a local girl from New Orleans. I would always insist to Chino and to others, You've got the whole country to do business in. Please don't go to New Orleans, and please don't go to Louisiana. That's where I'm from. My dad is very well known, my family is a prominent family there. Can we just leave my stomping grounds out of the business. And for the most part, Gino would listen, But as soon as he'd start having a cocktail or two and then doing blow all,

So basically they're doing a drug deal, of.

Course, and I begged them don't do it. So sure enough, something goes wrong.

Are you talking about a big chunk of product?

Big chunk of product? Not only my local friend got popped, but the son of the top government official got popped and he's in jail. So at that point, the top state government official decides he's going to run his own private investigation so he could save his son's future, get him out, and find out who was behind this huge drug deal. And he's getting close. So this one particular evening, we're at my house, we're talking, and one of our employees decides, you know what, let's just get rid of

Were you aware of the DEA the FBI?

All, Oh, yes, immensely. I mean we had all these gadgets, you know that you'd plug into your phone and it would tell you if they were listening in a red light would start beeping. We had all the latest gadgets.

So you had the highest tech that could be had.

Yeah. And security in our homes, you know, because we had several homes, you know, one in Miami, one in La what is San Francisco. We had boats, racing cars, we had race horses, we had everything. As much as we had, we wouldn't hesitate in a second to leave it and move on to the next city.

Because the money was gonna come anyway.

Always you could lose it, throw it away, flush it down, the toilet didn't matter. You'd have it all back the next day. He would get a car Mercedes, bring it in from Miami. It would be San Francisco, and then they didn't need it, they would send it on fire. The money was just never ending. I remember that my allowance quote unquote was ten to grand a week, and that was it to pay rent or bills. That was just fun money, fun money I could do with as

Was there danger constant? So you get pregnant? Was that good news to me?

It wasn't, because I just said, I can't bring a kid into this environment. You know, this constant partying. We'd stay up for days and there was a constant flow of cocaine people coming in and out any given house that we owned. You know, I'd wake up and these strangers walking around in my house.

You know.

I remember once in Beverly Hills somebody coming up to me asking me where the bathroom was, and I said, well, who are you. He goes, well, who are you? I said, I'm the damn owner of this house. Get the fuck out of my house. So it was sort of that kind of thing. I was not happy about it. I was still partying pregnant. I'm not proud of it, but I did.

For the record, her baby boy was born healthy and happy. So you guys decided to get married.

What we did was we were planning a wedding at the house where we were living at, which was with Nordman Manessas.

I have to stop here as if this story isn't create enough. Norway Manessas, Cookie's husband Chino and another friend from Nicaragua, Danilo Blandon, were the guys smuggling cocaine into the US for Pablo Escobar and the Median cartel. Cookie was aware of that and definitely enjoying the party. But these guys would become very famous a few years later when they made a deal with the CIA to introduce crack cocaine into south central Los Angeles through a local drug dealer by the name of Freeway.

Ricky Ross, facing life in prison, LA's biggest crack dealer now is saying he was a pawn in a CIA plot, and his argument was convincing enough that a federal judge postponed sentencing to consider evidence that he's a name supplier, was an agency operator.

You know, his whole intentions was for me to make more money.

The more money I made, the more money he made, and I guess the more money that he would have to help sponsor the war. FX made a television series called Snowfall based on some of that story.

I on America accusations underscore the word accusations that are nothing short of explosives. They are that the CIA knowingly and intentionally did what amount to pump crack cocaine into Los Angeles to help fund rebels in Nicaragua. The Justice Department in Congress are investigating, and so is CBS newsed it.

Was the beginning of a drug explosion that ravaged black communities all over America. Gary Webb putitur Prize winning reporter for the San Jose Mercury News, wrote a controversial three part expose and later a book called The Dark Alliance, detailing the connection between the CIA, the sale of crack cocaine, and funding the contrasts. In this clip, he's asked about the CIA involvement.

Did the CIA put drugs into the black community.

We don't have any evidence so far that they did it directly. And what we have evidence of is that men working for a CIA run army did.

Do that with the knowledge of the CIA. That's the part we don't know. That's the part we don't know.

I mean, what we know is that these guys were working for a CIA army. They were meeting with CIA agents before and during the time they were doing this. What happens from there is sort of where we ran into the wall of national security.

The CIA and the mainstream media went after him, eventually destroying his career. He died from two gun shots to the head. It was ruled a suicide. Two shots. Think about it, Is it all true? I don't know for sure.

In Norwen's home. He was going to be the one that walked me down the aisle. Chapito d As from Satana was the best man. I flew in some people from New Orleans, not a lot. It was just going to be a small gathering and we initially wanted a judge to come. Well, judges don't come, so we found Mark de Wolf Gay minister perfect. Chipito pulled out his rolls. Royce Pablo gave me half a pound of cocaine for

Did Pablo come or do you just send me there? Wow?

Of course everyone's starting to party immediately. My husband, Richino, he was lost. He was downstairs because Freebase had started out in Cali at that time, so he was downstairs doing that. And I remember that at some point the Minister comes up to me and says, look, I've got another event. You know, I can't find my Bible. And of course the people were using his Bible with the Cooke lines on it. And I said, I think your

I'm some serious hippie shit there, yeah.

But elegant hippie shit. Finally, when we get ready to do it, I had to get Gino up from downstairs, and he was already all fucked up nor being walked me down the aisle. Gipito ass is crying, you know, because he could just cry with one tear coming down one eye.

So you're eight months pregnant, you're walked down the aisle by Norman Manessa's the best man.

Is the the bongo player of said tad bongo player. First from Nicaragua.

It's from Nicarago, okay. And you have a non denominational minister.

Gay gay remember where in San Francisco.

I'm just trying to decide if this is a movie, a TV series, or a sitcom right now, all of the above. There's not exactly a happy ending to this wedding story.

I went on the honeymoon by myself because Gino, as soon as he got married, went right back downstairs. So I loved to win on the honeymoon by myself.

Were you pissed off at him?

Not really annoyed?

Maybe back in Nicaragua, another journalist is murdered. This time it's an American. We'll be right back, welcome back. Journalism can be a very dangerous business, especially during war. I want to warn you this segment contains graphic descriptions of violence that are disturbing and hard to listen to. While Cookie was playing Missus Scarface, partying her ass off and trying to stay one step ahead of the Dea in

Firing rockets to soften up antigovernment forces for ground troops. The Nicaragua National Guard wants a major assault in Monagua to retake poor neighborhoods or barrios held by the Gorillas.

He's dropping five hundred pound bombs on the city because by that time his philosophy is if we just kill everybody, we don't have a revolution.

Professor Wolf from Tulane University describes it like this.

Not pinpointed bombs, not bombs that are just killing Santinistas. They're just killing residents of the town, many of whom are strong Santinissa support us, but they're just everyday people. If you need to bomb your own people, you are that afraid of them, you are that dissociated from them. That is the beginning of the end.

Already, kids and men are being stopped. Roll up your sleeve, roll up your pants. If you've got scabs on your elbows or on your knees, you were shot right there, because that meant you were fighting.

The press is becoming increasingly interested. I think that the US press sees the murder of a pressman paid the Jakin Chamoto as a kind of Canarian the coal mine. When they're killing journalists, things are going badly. Something is happening.

At this point.

The networks are down there, International journalists are there, and they're just covering this war with these rag tag revolutionaries who even themselves knew that they would never win. Somosa is now feeding amphetamines to all the Samosa guardsmen to keep them up night and day. They're jittery. They're killing indiscriminately.

This morning in Managua, after some of the heaviest fighting of the war, Bill Stewart and an ABC camera crew went into an attacked neighborhood, which.

Was then calm.

National guardsmen were friendly at the first checkpoint, In fact, they were eager to talk and try to disprove reports of low National Guard morale. But at the next checkpoint, the attitude among the soldiers was entirely different from what Bill and the crew had just seen.

A future driver of mine is driving the vehicle. There's a translator with them, there's a correspondent, and there's a camera crew.

And Bill Stewart is a person that Americans were used to seeing in their evening news.

Yes, he covered wars.

He was at Vietnam, and eat he covered wars.

He was a well known journalist.

Well well thought of. Yeah, a pro in every way.

Roadblocks are an everyday occurrence. So the ABC crew gets stopped at a roadblock. Bill Stewart says, let me get out. I'll go talk to.

The soldiers like he's done a one.

Hundred times in many different battle situations, and the translator gets down with him.

In the news van. The cameraman turns on his camera to film Stuart's interaction with the Samosa guardsmen.

The Samosa guardsmen had been up for weeks with these amphetamines, and they were jumpy and not thinking straight.

Bill showed he was unarmed and presented his press identification. Still, he was forced to kneel and then lie down on the pavement.

One of the soldiers thinks he recognizes the translator he was wrong, but he thinks he recognizes him as being a revolutionary. This guy was a sport schmuck translator making a few bucks. They get nervous. They take the translator around the corner and he's shot.

Bill showed he was unarmed and presented his press identification. Still, he was forced to kneel and then lie down on the pavement.

The camera crew is still filming. They're looking at what's happening, as is the driver who warned Bill Stewart not to get out of the vehicle. All of a sudden, the guardsman aims the weapon at Bill Stewart and shoots him in the head with such force that his body kind of jumped. At that point, the Nicaraguan driver knows we're fucked. He doesn't even know that the camera crew filmed it. The camera crew at this point doesn't even care that

The ABC sound man Jim Cephalou describes them ament, they.

Had us get out shore identification. While we were out, I noticed on the left hand side of the building the interpreter's body. He had been shot in the head.

So the driver, Pablo Pablo, with no fear at all, goes up to these guys and said, damn, y'all made a mistake. Dude, We're from Samosa TV. We were on the same.

Side, lying his ass off.

Lying his ass off, not just to save his life, but the crew whatever.

Balls of stone right there.

But look, I'm gonna make a deal with y'all. What happened here didn't happen the way it happened. I am gonna say that it was the sand Denistas that killed him. Just let us go, you know, We'll go straight back to Samosa TV. And they let him go.

We got back into the van.

The driver asked if we wanted to take bills by back to the hotel, said we did so. He and I backed up, put Bill's body in the van, came back here to the hotel.

Chuck Gomez, a young CBS correspondent, was at the hotel when they brought his body back.

When Bill Stewart's body arrived at the Intercontinental Hotel, there was a mixture of incredible sadness and sorrow and also incredible fear. We didn't know at that moment if journalists were being specifically targeted, for example, as Somosa himself had ordered the wounding and the killing of American reporters and camera crews, or if it was something that the soldiers themselves decided to do because they had been you know,

It was the first time that a network had the biggest exclusive video of all time, and they shared it with all the networks and all the journalists that were there. New York Times, Washington Post.

They were all there, to BBC and some of.

The BBC you had international journalists. So it was the first time that a network willingly gave their exclusive to everybody. They wanted to make sure it got out. They didn't even bother to edit. They just needed to get to Samosa TV station and satellite that bitch out of there before Samosa and these people realized what had happened and the video got out.

ABC News correspondent Bil Stewart, thirty seven years old, was killed today in Nicaragua.

I'll tell you this. I saw that footage in a Walter Cronkite broadcast and he showed the entire thing in total, every networked and no one ever showed anything like that, no one.

You could see the body.

Yeah, you could see it, and it was horrific.

The journalists that were in Nicaragua decided, we can't take this anymore. We're boycotting this. It didn't bother the US government tomorrow had been assassinated. That up until that point, fifty thousand innocent and maybe some not so innocent revolutionaries had been murdered. That didn't matter. But one American journalist being killed. That mattered, and that's what turned the tide. The public was outraged at that point. The US government made the decision we can no longer back Simosa.

President Carter said this when he heard the news. The murder of Bill Stewart was an act of barber that all civilized people condemned. Within a month, some Mosa flees to Florida and the dictatorship falls, but not before looting Nicaragua. After he left. The San Denis has found less than two million dollars in the national treasury. Samosa is denied asylum by President Carter and takes refuge in Paraguay. Only one year later, he's assassinated by a Sandinista commando team

You didn't do that kind of work unless you thought you were invincible, which in some ways doesn't make much sense, because all of us, pretty much all of us went through losing colleagues or spouses, family members. But somehow, no, no, that could never happen to us.

Against all odds, the Sandinistas have won the revolution. The Nicaraguan people are celebrating, But Cookie was looking for her own Revolution. We'll be back in a minute. Welcome back. The last time we saw Cookie, she was eight months pregnant, a newlywed and hanging out with Pablo Escobar Nicaragua. Is having a rebirth a Cookie. He was just having a berth What could go wrong? But where the hell is Chino?

That was crazy because the night that night was a half hour night.

You know.

We called him the half hour guy. You know. He says, I'll be back in half an hour, and that half hour could be a week to four months. I start having contractions and going into labor at dawn. He shows up at six seven in the morning, completely high and drunk and passes out. And I got to get to the hospital. I'm, you know, way him up. He can't drive, so we jump in the car. I'm driving and having to pull off on the expressway every time a contraction would hit, you know, and I'm yelling at him in

I knew it.

We get to the hospital, I'm screaming, get this motherfucking kid out of me. It's a Catholic hospital and the nuns are trying to quiet me down, Can you please use different language. I don't give a fuck what's going on. I need to get this kid out. I was asking for the last rites, asking for a priest she knows passed out. And he did go in to see the birth and proceeded to just faint when he saw what he saw. So they had to attend to him and not to me. So and we got the rolling stones

It was a trip.

And now you have this beautiful boy.

Oh yeah, I mean it was worth it.

He's your best friend now.

He always was my best friend. He was my partner in crime and my best friend.

Happy times for Cookie and China. But the thug life is starting to get to her.

Well. It started slowly for me. At first, nothing bothered me. I wasn't scared of anything. And then it just slowly. You know, I'd open up a closet and kilos would fall out. You know, there'd be a box I'd open it was filled with a million dollars in cash, And so slowly I started to get paranoid. It was so slow that I didn't know that it was happening. It would present itself as soon as I would start partying, I would do a line. I'd be fine. I'd do a second line, I'd be fine. By the third or

Okay, so you're beset by paranoia. Yeah, yeah, it's starting to get to you.

It's starting to get to me.

Is there a moment that you can recall that you said, I got to get the fuck out of here.

Yes.

My mother got sick, she got cancer, and she was here in New Orleans. I remember saying to my husband, Tochino, listen, I gotta go visit my I don't think my intention was to leave and never come back, because that would have never been part of my mo my playbook. I had to come back to get more blow, but I remember telling him that I was going to leave. I grabbed all my first editions, all my jewelry, all my furs, I think a million in cash packed it took my baby,

Did they try to get you to come back.

Absolutely.

Were they worried about you being a risk?

Oh no, no, no, no no. If anybody would have been worried that I was a risk, I would have been erased.

Cookie takes care of her mom until she passes and finishes her degree at Loyola, still parting her ass off with unlimited supplies of cocaine. She's getting restless again though Nicaragua is calling her name.

I said, well, let me go check out the revolution, And so I went and got to Nicaragua, living with some friends, and sufficed to say, war time was tough.

Who were you rolling with when you went back?

All my old gang friends, all partiers. I'm still a good girl in the eyes of my aunts and uncles, an older family, to.

All the old contacts, all the old people you always hung with their own.

Yeah, and I'm meeting new people, poor people, because now the Sandinistas have made it possible for a middle class to emerge. They're fighting infant mortality, they're fighting illiteracy. But the scarcity of things water was scarce, you know, toilet paper, which we can all relate to.

Now.

I want to ask you a question about the Sandinistas and what they were bringing to the table. When you look back at that time and you think about the changes that were happening in nicarag where you mentioned the emerging of a middle class. The Santanisas were doing a lot of things.

Good things that anybody would want. Medical care for everybody, education for everybody, jobs for people, just what normal human beings want.

If I remember, they were building rural hospitals.

And hospitals schools.

Yeah. But once the Countral War started and the scarcity of things and roughing it, electricity would go out all the time, and you know, it's tough to be in a war in a third world country. So after about three months, I said, you know what, I've had enough of this. I've seen the revolution. I'm ready to go back.

Home to New Orleans.

So I threw myself a going away party. And at this going away party, which was what all my parties were like, so would call it a very eclectic crowd. You'd have poor people, you'd have rich people, you'd have young, you'd have old, you'd have gay, straight journalists were there, soldiers, a little bit of everything, and of course it was a big party with party favors. Had my bag's packed and I was ready to go back to New Orleans.

Were any of your old friends there, like Chino, any of those.

People in Sheino wasn't there, but all the Chino characters were there, people we grew up with.

Cookie doesn't know it yet, but her future is already At this party, an.

NBC producer, Cecilia Alviar approached me and she said, you know, Cookie, I like the vibe I get from you. You know the US culture, you know the Nicaraguan culture. It seems to me like you know everybody who's anybody. She still didn't know that I also knew the elite rulers of the enemy, the Contras at the time, who were also rich kids.

So she's saying this to you while you were just partying.

Well I'm partying. Yeah.

She says, you know, would you be interested in working for NBC and running our operations here? You know, translator fixer? And I said, you know, that sounds interesting. And at the same time, there was another journalist there from CBS named Larry Doyle, a producer.

Doyle did two tours in Vietnam, the epitome of an old school combat news. Producer Dan Rather called him the soul of CBS, one of the all time greats, one tough son of a bitch.

He was my kind of guy, my kind of partier, and he made the same offer to me. He says, Look, the guy we got is a schmuck, never gets his hands dirty, he never goes out into the field. Would you like to have a job working with him, being that fixer translator going out with the cruise, you know, into the boondocks and my party and you know you And I said, you know, this offer sounds a lot better than the NBC offer, And I said, sure, well that sounds good.

So basically you took the CBS offer because they partied. In this NBC offer, they didn't.

Party, and it was the same job, same job description, and good money. Larry says, well, can you come in for an interview at the Intercontinental Hotel, And remember it's the same hotel that the journalists stayed at in seventy nine and then boycotted and left after Bill Stewart was assassinated. I said, sure, I'll come in for an interview.

So I went in for an interview.

The next day was another producer, Carlo Farrell, and I was asked two questions, how do you feel about roadblocks and I've never counted roadblocks, but I said roadblocks. Oh, I can get in and out of anything. And the second question, what would you say is your main quality? And I said adaptability And she said, well, you know, give me an example. I said, well, I could sleep at the Plaza Hotel in New York as easily as I can go into the Jungles and sleep in a

Next time on Journalista.

So I come in the next day all dressed up at pearls and heels, and she says, why are you dressed that way? I said, well, you said I'm going north. I'm going to Miami, right She goes, no, You're going to the Jungles today with a camera crew by your side.

The Journalista podcast features the stories and voice of Cookie Hood. Narrated by Steven Esta, Produced by Sean J. Donnelly, Executive producers Jason Wagensback, Roy Laughlin and Ellen k iHeart. Executive producer Tyler Klang. Written and edited by Steven Estev. Music by Jay Wichel, Associate producer in sound design Stephen Tunt.