How Cocaine Came to America (Full Episode) | Narco Wars

oh a [Music] it's not [Music] foreign foreign foreign [Music] foreign [Music] shake this square world and blast off for kicksville public enemy number one is drug abuse just say no halting the drug problem in america is like carrying water in a sieve take my word for it this scourge will stop there's now an understanding that the war on drugs was an abject failure you have to stop and ask yourself how did we get here we will build a wall [Music] i grew up in a town like happy days there were any drugs no guns no violence and when i went up to california my intention was to go to long beach state college and complete my degree in marketing suddenly everybody was smoking marijuana and i saw the value in selling the marijuana more than getting high off of it [Music] my name is george jacob young spelled j-u-n-g okay and what i'm known for is being one of the major drug smugglers in the world [Music] the money was just rolling in and you know of course it was tax-free but i became bored with that as a matter of fact i wanted more i wanted more thrill more adventure so i convinced my college buddies to get involved let's get on to mexico and get our own pot [Music] we went to a place called puerto vallarta [Music] and couldn't speak spanish and after five days we couldn't even find a joint [Music] my ego was kind of shrunk down to zero and a little yellow volkswagen pulled up out front the bar and this little blonde girl got out and she came right to our table she said you know i've been watching you guys for like five days she said you've asked everybody in puerto vallarta for marijuana except the police chief she said you need help i said yes i do and she said i live with the guy who can give you all the marijuana you want and i said let's go [Music] we went over to meet him and he said are you going to get it out of here and i said fly it he said you have a plane and i lied and i said yes i do i said i can get one i'll be back with it so then it was time to learn how to fly [Music] i did this for considerable amount of time and i was making a ton of money [Music] but they finally caught up with me i was looking out five years in the federal system [Music] the judge was about to sentence me and i got up i said it's ludicrous that i should be sentenced for taking a plant across an imaginary line and he said that may be true mri he said unfortunately it's against the law so i got the five years [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] my mother grew up in this part of town which was the only place that you can actually smoke reefer you know have a couple drinks bet a little on numbers watch rooster fights and maybe go and have a good time with the prostitute i'm talking about 1950s there were still muddy streets horse-drawn carriages my name is michael colemblanco i'm the youngest surviving son of juan griselda blanco also known as the queen of cocaine [Music] she told me that she remember being so poor she didn't have no shoes or sandals and my mother said to herself the day i have children i'm gonna make sure they live in the lap of luxury the neighborhood was divided between these two local street gangs and she started to date a kid from the other part of the neighborhood pestanitas pestanita ran bootlegging he ran a couple prostitutes sold some weed and he met this little girl she was uh 14 when she fell in love with him they got married and he introduced her to marijuana they've been drug dealing together right [Music] they were getting money but pestanitas told my mother we're making peanuts here if we can get this weed to new york we could make a big load of money [Music] so they relocated to new york and they started doing deals in new york when they start making serious money my mother goes back to colombia and she meets a gentleman who was a club owner and the gentleman tells him you might want to think about this drug called cocaine this is jackson heights in the borough of queens it's one of the places where cocaine comes home to the united states this has become the central distribution point for majority of all the cocaine distributed in northern united states if you just stand here and watch these people that's exactly what they're doing right now because they're doing business in the early 70s resell griselda becomes the queen of queens queens new york [Music] she's selling cocaine my mother realizes that this is the future [Music] cocaine was on the rise the demand was starting to increase at jfk airport the seizures were from a pound or so or two pounds on the body to two or three kilos in the suitcases we were starting to see other methods anything that could conceal cocaine was starting to make its way in more frequently and brazil the blanco's fingerprint was on that i was sentenced to danbury federal correctional institute and that was how i met the infamous carlos later khals was there for stealing cars and shipping them illegally to colombia i said well basically you're a car thief and he said what about you and i said i flew plane loads of pot out of mexico he said do you know anything about cocaine i didn't he said you can buy it for three to four thousand dollars a kilo in colombia and i said well how much is it all for the united states and he said sixty thousand a kilo and i said you know what goes i think you and i got to go into business together [Music] [Music] brazilda entrepreneured the cocaine industry as we know it from the jungle to the street corner to the nightclub to the household my mother did that what's the first place people are gonna buy drugs at on the corner what's the second place people are gonna do and sell drugs at the disco it's the epitome and the era of disco music [Music] it's three in the morning in manhattan and still at studio 54 people crowd the doors hoping to get in my mother like to rub elbows with the elite of the time society columnists adore studio 54 for the personalities it attracts studio 54 is practically on the joint studio 54 was lined up for blocks everybody started cocaine in there [Music] saturday i feel with senorita cocaine [Music] it took over america for the rich and famous the number of people snorting cocaine is rising steadily despite the steep price about a hundred dollars for a gram enough for several people to get high at one party [Music] cocaine paraphernalia is selling well right on madison avenue who is buying this everyone from the secretary lawyers businessmen old and young we have customers in the entertainment business but most of them are executives [Music] it's not a serious problem nationwide given the very large number of people who use cocaine it is a serious problem for a certain small minority and those tend to be people who are very wealthy for whom money is is no concern who can get unlimited access to cocaine cocaine at that point really wasn't in law enforcement's radar and so there was a gap in the intelligence that was being developed and this gave the colombians a opportunity to establish a greater foothold for smuggling the drugs into the country and distributing the drugs without being caught my mother makes a fortune in new york city and moves back to colombia [Music] and her and capitan see that their empire has grown so much that they need henchmen they need soldiers and everybody knew that if you wanted to get into the cocaine business you had to get the green light from griselda [Music] pablo escobar's boss was one of those smugglers my mother didn't like him too much so pablo killed him and my mother said pablo you got a future kid it wasn't until later that i realized what a role she played not only in the cocaine business but also in the business of violence she was a psychopath she loved killing people in the beginning i really liked that he was young and well-mannered and educated he had an innocence about him also i would describe my father as a rebel adventurous man he was a chilled person he loved his music he loved to be around friends peaceful sometimes introverted too i figured a great guy to meet and to work with and we can make a lot of money together the next thing i knew we were on our way down to colombia to meet a guy named pablo escobar a lot of people asked me about inr or whatever i mean he could have been a vacuum cleaner sale so i didn't know who the hell he was we talked and he said i have one rule you betray me and i'll have to kill you and i said well you'll never get to kill me because i'll never betray you i mean it's a simple rule right you know people walking around the rancho machine guns and this and that that wasn't my trip i i just wanted to get in and get the hell out of there [Music] [Music] pablo escort industrializes the cocaine trade he gathers a big group of different traffickers based in the city of medellin [Music] and they begin to pull their shipments and work together and then carlos leva brings the mass transport element via planes he provides me air bridge then there's the retailers others in the us they are running the distribution networks and then funneling back the money to the cartel [Music] [Music] carlos later is to the cocaine smuggling business what the wright brothers were to aviation when i first met carlos it was simply to purchase some airplanes for him i never used my real name i went by an alias he got a hold of me and said hey i got this place in the bahamas that's where we're going to operate out of and i need some airplanes so i picked up a couple airplanes for them flew into the bahamas and carlos said hey you want to fly down to columbia fill them up and bring them back to the islands and make a little extra money and so i said okay carlos was very convincing you know the smile on his face and how great it is so consequently you'd kind of insidiously get involved in this i mean i had no desire to be a criminal i had no desire to go to jail one of the most favored routes from colombia to miami is via the bahamas famous for its beaches casinos and hundreds of thinly inhabited keys or islands that have been used for smuggling for centuries [Music] the flying was not nearly as dangerous as hanging out there overnight in columbia out of these little strips around the middle of nowhere i remember sleeping in a hammock with a 38 on my chest because there was some people that would come in with automatic weapons and steal the product if you messed up you weren't getting out if you as others did crash an airplane at some of these clandestine strips in columbia and you were injured the narcos buried you with the airplane they didn't take you to the hospital so there was a great incentive to successfully land and take off this is an old saying that marijuana businesses come with a handshake and the cocaine business was still with a gun people walking around with guns and everybody had one it was very serious and mistakes weren't tolerated [Music] in the drugs business all roads lead to miami florida america's biggest banking center outside new york cocaine dealers regularly pay cash for a fifty thousand dollar car a one hundred thousand dollar yacht or a million dollar condominium one of the side effects of the cocaine trade was the impact it had on the economy and the the amount of cash that was free flowing [Music] the money that was coming into miami was just incredible i remember we would have to go to the federal reserve bank and there were just pallets and pallets and pallets of cash many times the federal reserve bank of miami had more cash than all the other federal reserves banks put together [Music] he purchased norman's key for what i was told at the time was two million dollars so carlos had actually purchased the island and he wanted to build like an empire there a drug smuggling empire using a front company he acquired most of the property on the island and turned it into a drug transshipment port it was full of naked women parties and cocaine everywhere um bodyguards walking around the perimeters with machine guns which he imported from from germany norman's key was approximately 200 plus miles from the east coast of florida so it was a very easy trip for a light airplane which would draw no suspicion whatsoever because a light airplane didn't have the range to go anywhere where this merchandise was picked up in the beginning it was all fine then carlos changed drastically did like a 180 and i told myself this is crazy the other way to do this is to keep on the move and keep changing locations when nobody knows who you are what you are and you keep moving and i said everybody in the world is going to be watching that island and they were it was a madness and that's when i decided it was time to go anybody who thinks they're a drug lord they're living some kind of foolish childish dream once you get on the list it's over [Music] [Music] foreign is the first chicago motorcycle hit it was done by griselda's killers and they weren't young 15 year old 16 year old boys they were grown by deals it was a different time my mother never believed that a boy should get involved in men's stuff [Music] brazilian comes to miami you have an industry that was trying to be established by other latinos but now this corporate entity came into town and said no no this is my town i don't care what you guys think i run all the cocaine my mother always told me you know what's the best way to take care of your competition erase your competition then you have nobody to compete with right now two people are dead and there are others injured i don't know the exact amount police say they don't know what the motive was for the shootings but they are sure it wasn't robbery the shooting occurred in the middle of the day in a very popular shopping mall called dateland inside the liquor store one colombian national and another non-cube in latin suspected of drug trafficking lay face up in a pool of blood they were well armed we can say that and they came prepared to do battle the subjects went inside with automatic weapons killed the intended target in his bodyguard inside the liquor store the shooting continued outside as the assailant sprayed gunfire all around the parking lot shell fragments were found some 40 yards from the store they'd fired automatic weapons into the sidewalk area we'll need two other totally innocent bystanders witnesses were just beside themselves they couldn't believe the fact that they were in minding their own business shopping at a suburban shopping mall and ended up being shot out with machine guns it was totally unprecedented no one had never seen anything like this before on any homicide scene this was the handiwork of griselda blanco she loved to make that statement and the bloody trail continued from that point on that day 1979 i think miami and the united states understood that cocaine would generate so much violence and so much financial gain that people were willing to kill people in broad daylight innocent or not innocent [Music] last week the bodies of two colombians were found majority of murders here are related to drug trafficking colombian drug dealers have opened fire in crowded shopping centers along busy highways in quiet residential neighborhoods this colombian was machine gunned as he sat in his car 514 persons have been murdered in miami this year there's no end to the selection of weapons that they have here they're a lot better armed than law enforcement we became known as dodge city what i see going on here would make chicago in the days of prohibition look like a baptist sunday school picnic our homicide rate doubled from 300 a year to 600 a year we were all overwhelmed not the least of which was the medical examiner's office which had to use a refrigerated truck to store bodies the primary target of metro date homicide was griselda blanco she not only wanted the person shot but she wanted the person's wife and even the children shot she was a monster [Music] initially he'd try a little bit of the product occasionally but it got to the point where he was i believe addicted to it and i think that really distorted his perception of what the operation was and he became a different person he was very paranoid he ran around with the 45 waving it around he never knew what the hell he was going to do he just had this attitude that he was the king that's when i decided that this could get dangerous it means time to say sayonara to this activity colombian drug baron carlos leder had armed guards to prevent outsiders landing by boat or plane for yachtsmen this island had a menacing reputation sometime after i left one of the most famous news anchors in north america walter cronkite sailed into the harbor at norman's key and was met by a couple of fellows that were sporting ar-15s and when he asked what the deal was they told him that he wasn't welcome on the island and he should just get in his little boat and sail on out of the harbor cronkite wasn't going to be put off like that so he opened up his own little investigation and one thing led to another and eventually the bahamian police were convinced by the u.s authorities dean what have you that you need to do something about this island down there [Music] kos became a freudian kaleidoscope of madness because on one of the spectrum he loved john lennon and he loved adolf hitler and that was mind boggling to me [Music] it was on the news on the radio on the streets we had the army coming to our house almost every day looking for him [Music] as she began to create more and more enemies she wasn't able to really enjoy the fruits of her endeavors because she was on the run i would always wonder why we had so many people with me and my brother would tell me you know why why because you're the prince of this family and nothing's gonna happen to you [Music] her husband dario sepulveda is growing weary of her he's disgusted with her talk about the pot calling the kettle black right he's an assassin himself and even she was too much for him [Music] he's worried about the well-being of his son michael corleone and he takes michael and goes to columbia well griselda wasn't having any of that [Music] and a short time later she pays off police in columbia is driving down a road with little michael in the car and after a couple minutes four cops two motorcycles pull us over he hey cause my father my father goes what are you doing my father looks at his bodyguard and i think right then and there they realized it got that look at my daddy that's your puppy puppy my dad was hit by 27 bullets i saw the holes on his back and there was all blood coming out of him i was about to be six years old [Music] griselda blanco ordered the hit on her husband and there's no doubt in my mind that she didn't care whether her son saw the assassination or not [Music] all he knew was that he was whisked up put on a plane and delivered to his mother in irvine california and shortly thereafter is when we arrest her she was just propped up in bed reading the bible she didn't have the 38 in her hand that was on her nightstand i said hola gore zelda she looked at me with a very bewildered look no miyamo betty i said nah i don't think so and i put the cuffs on her away we went the maid had taken little michael down the street to go play at a park we didn't want him in the house you know it was going to be too traumatic he was as cute as a button playing in a playground just a nice kid and it was so sad and i remember commenting to my wife i said you know i really feel sorry for this child i wouldn't mind taking this kid and adopting him myself [Music] i only had the opportunity to meet carlos leather for one or two weeks in the hacienda annapolis they became very close friends they were both against the extradition they were very close but they always kept their families away from everything sadly carlos led her loose all of his money and power and he was consuming a lot of drugs colombian law enforcement officers have not said exactly how police were led to later's house in medellin but that later was set up by one of his alleged partners in the cocaine cartel pablo escobar the story is that there was a big party in pablo escobar's arrived coked up and one of escobar's cardios makes a pass at one of the girls he was with and later just kills him [Music] and so escobar has to smooth all this over but elements of the medellin cartel then see carlos as a liability escobar sees the need to appease us and colombian officials who are applying increasing pressure on him and his organization and leonard gets offered up as the sacrificial lamb and essentially turned over by escobar and medellin cartel associates i remember the day of my father's arrest i was with my mother and i can still feel how her face turned white and the screams the plane from columbia carrying reputed drug king carlos later touched down in florida early this morning security was heavy gun-toting federal agents circled the courthouse in temple where he was taken justice department officials described later as one of the most violent drug dealers ever captured [Music] i was looking at more than 20 years in prison straight up the judge said when you were young you had a hundred million dollars and he said nobody knew who you were why didn't you just take it and go away and i had the answer because i had figured it out a while back that it wasn't the money anymore my father knew what was going on for years and he said you're a true junkie he said why don't you become a race car driver or something like that [Music] eskimo sent my wife to visit me and she said he wants you to testify and i said i won't she had my daughter who's four years old and with her and she looked at me and she said this time he's not asking [Music] i was six years old when we needed to go hide because escobar was looking for me he knew the love that my father had for me and the perfect way to silence him is to threaten his little girl when his trial started you can't even imagine that it's possible but they say that at war everything goes [Music] it is one of the biggest victories in u.s history for drug agents and federal prosecutors now that he's been convicted later faces a life prison sentence plus 150 years on top of that [Music] they saw him as a trophy i say he wrote his first letter and he promised me that he would be home by christmas and now it's been a 33 christmas waiting for him [Music] when you've done so much bad in your life that type of beef never goes away that type of generational hatred revenge don't go away so after eight years of my mother's release she was killed [Music] some exclusive details for us brian tom pablo escobar is without a doubt the most powerful and ruthless of all the drug bosses it's believed that his cocaine empire has made escobar one of the world's richest men worth estimated at 3 billion escobar's ranch is a monument to his illegal trade the plane over the gate is the first to use to transport illegal drugs those who would challenge pablo at his own game learned he would do anything to win cocaine bought these 10 000 acres of mansions and guest houses quite a haul for a man who began his career stealing gravestones and cars and working as a golf caddy foreign [Music] you

Channel: National Geographic

Views: 3,169,805

Keywords: national geographic, nat geo, natgeo, animals, wildlife, science, explore, discover, survival, nature, culture, documentary, perpetual planet nat geo, photography, full episode, narco wars, cocaine documentary, drug war, cocaine trade, war on drugs, drug trade, drug trafficking, pablo escobar, narco wars pablo escobar, drug trafficking national geographic, drug trafficking documentary, the war on drugs

Id: rNbpuXWKOl0

Length: 44min 24sec (2664 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 19 2022