Declassified Untold Stories of American Spies_5of8_The Norte Valle Cartel
Transcript
00:00Cocaine is merchandise.
00:12Merchandise to be bought or sold, used, like any other commodity.
00:19Cocaine is money.
00:22And money is the root of many, many evils.
00:29Cocaine is a business.
00:30And every dollar that moved told a story.
00:34And when we started this case, we had no idea that it would ultimately lead to dismantling
00:39one of the most violent, most prolific cartels in Colombia.
00:44You had no idea what you were getting into?
00:48No, we didn't.
00:49We were babes in the woods.
00:54As a former FBI agent and chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, I had oversight
00:58of all 16 of our nation's intelligence agencies.
01:02My name is Mike Rogers.
01:05I had access to classified information gathered by our operatives.
01:10People who risked everything for the United States and our families.
01:14You don't know their faces or their names.
01:16You don't know the real stories from the people who live the fear and the pressure until now.
01:29Public enemy number one in the United States is drug abuse.
01:35In order to fight and defeat this enemy, it is necessary to wage a new all-out offensive.
01:42So in the 70s, heroin, it's the big issue.
01:46It's the big problem.
01:47It's why DEA becomes an agency to unify the government's efforts against the heroin epidemic.
01:55Cocaine wasn't an issue.
01:56It was, you know, rich bankers in New York and Hollywood types in LA.
02:00The user market is kind of small.
02:01Cocaine's very expensive.
02:03Drug traffickers are making money on it, but not a huge amount.
02:07Then in the 80s, when you make it into crack cocaine, it becomes much cheaper.
02:10What was $100 a gram is now a $10 rock.
02:14It's more addictive in that form as well.
02:18And the user base was massive.
02:20And when you have that huge, massive user base, that made the profitability skyrocket.
02:26This, this is crack cocaine seized a few days ago by drug enforcement agents in a park just
02:35across the street from the White House.
02:39That abuse of crack cocaine is really what fuels this huge rise in exportation of cocaine
02:44out of Colombia.
02:46Now they are sending tons and tons of cocaine to make crack.
02:50All the cocaine coming into the United States fuels violence in the streets of the city.
02:57It fuels addiction.
02:59It fuels the breakup of families.
03:01It's not something that is good for society.
03:05The crack cocaine epidemic in the United States produces massive profits for the Colombian
03:10cartels.
03:12Drug lords like Pablo Escobar, head of the Medellin cartel.
03:15They're making hundreds of millions, possibly billions of dollars at this point.
03:19They'll stop at nothing.
03:20American authorities say it was the Medellin cartel that ordered the murder of nine Colombian
03:27Supreme Court justices and the attorney general.
03:30The murder of a key federal witness in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
03:34And the murders in Miami of dozens of rival drug bosses.
03:381993, Pablo Escobar is killed on a rooftop in Medellin.
03:43Drugs coming to the United States out of Colombia didn't slow down a bit.
03:47In fact, other cartels stepped right into that void.
03:50You have basically about two years where the Cali cartel is the undisputed kings of cocaine.
03:55When the Cali cartel was captured in 1995, this is when the North Valley cartel decides
04:01we're taking over and continue to supply the United States with cocaine.
04:08Cocaine is a cash business and the cartels needed to get the cash back to Colombia.
04:15I was an IRS criminal investigation division special agent in New York City.
04:20I was doing tax cases and I wanted more action.
04:24I want to knock down doors.
04:27And in 1994, my boss sent me to the El Dorado task force.
04:32I was a customs agent and I was a member of the El Dorado task force.
04:36It was composed of the New York City police department, state troopers, IRS, customs.
04:44And the El Dorado task force was put together in the mid-1990s to investigate financial
04:50crimes and money laundering.
04:53Around 1996, a confidential source told me this one money remitter in Queens, Tello Austin,
05:01was receiving bags and bags of cash and was sending it back to Colombia.
05:07What is a money remitter?
05:09Western Union, MoneyGram.
05:11It's an easy way to send money overseas.
05:15I took that information and I had one of the task force analysts run the figures.
05:21I believe at that time it was like $60 million in one year.
05:25I mean, for a money remitter that's sending $60 million is odd.
05:30As part of my investigation, I went to Tello Austin, the money remitter.
05:36I asked the super across the street, do you have any empty space?
05:40He goes, no.
05:41You go on the roof.
05:43So I dragged my partner, we went up the roof and stayed out there for a week from when
05:50they opened to their close and see how many people went into that business.
05:54If they're sending $60 million, I expected 100 people, 200 people like lining up in front
05:59of that door like you're buying liquor on before New Year's Eve or something.
06:04But there wasn't.
06:07I went back to the other auto task force.
06:09I asked the analyst, hey, can you give me a report on Tello Austin on such and such
06:15date?
06:16How many people went in?
06:17How many people sent cash?
06:18And how many GTOs were filed?
06:21Which is the geographical targeting order.
06:23What's a geographical targeting order?
06:25Do I really have to go through this?
06:27This is like brutally boring.
06:29You want to hear it from me?
06:30What's a geographical targeting order?
06:32Prior to the geographical targeting order, you wanted to send more than $3,000 through
06:37a money remitter.
06:38You needed to show ID.
06:40When we realized that there was all this money going through the remitter community, we had
06:43it lowered to $750 to send any money to Columbia.
06:49Why Columbia?
06:5090% of the transactions that were going through all of these remitters was going back to Columbia.
06:57So that underlined the drug connection to us.
07:02So when I got the report from the week that I was watching Tello Austin, it reflected
07:08that hundreds of people went into that business and sent cash to Columbia, which dumbfounded
07:16me because I'm like, what the heck?
07:18I was out there.
07:19And there's no way that hundreds of people went there.
07:25Because I sat out there on the roof, you know, peeing in a bottle, watching that location
07:31for a week.
07:33I knew I had a big case here.
07:36I took my record of how many people went in and out.
07:39And I took the analyst reports from the Eldorado Task Force showing that hundreds of people
07:44went in to a prosecutor.
07:47But at that time, the prosecutor didn't think that I had enough.
07:52And I was complaining to Remedio.
07:54I said, Remedio, this is bullshit, that I took all this and I can't get a search warrant.
08:00And Remedio says, Danny, I know a great prosecutor.
08:07She's the queen of money laundering.
08:09The empress, I would call her, not just a queen, I would say an empress.
08:19My role in the investigation was as the prosecutor, the assistant U.S. attorney in the Eastern
08:26District of New York.
08:27And I was a member of the Eldorado Task Force.
08:31And Danny explained how he'd identified a store that was moving an extraordinary amount
08:37of money.
08:39Once I looked at the documents, it was obvious that Telle Austin, on its surface, was a regular
08:45money remitter store.
08:48But that was really a front.
08:51Telle Austin probably did 3% legitimate business.
08:55And the other 97% was running drug money through the store, sending it back to what we eventually
09:03came to know as the Norte Valle Cartel, one of Colombia's most violent cartels.
09:16We know we must do more because the drug cartels will do more.
09:20After all, there's a lot of money in this.
09:22Thank you very much.
09:24During the early 90s, there was the crack epidemic.
09:29A dramatic shootout took place in a neighborhood in Colombia on Tuesday.
09:34Cocaine is what fueled violence in Colombia and in the streets of America.
09:39And this is what I signed up to do, was to go after these guys who were responsible for
09:42sending drugs to the United States.
09:46On our line of work, they always talk about two things.
09:48You can follow where the dope goes, and you can follow where the money goes.
09:51If you follow where the dope goes, you're going to get some underling.
09:54But if you follow where the money goes, you're going to get the head of the group.
09:59Money is what this is all about.
10:01One day I was sitting in my office, and an agent named Danny Min came in with the statistics
10:07for a store called Telle Austin, a money remitter store in Queens.
10:13Telle Austin was receiving $60 million in one year and was sending it back to Colombia.
10:19When you see a lot of cash going to Colombia, a lot of it was drug money.
10:25Telle Austin started with Telle Austin 1.
10:28It expanded to a second store, Telle Austin 2, to a third store around the world.
10:34There was just so much money running through these stores that one store couldn't handle it.
10:40I said, we need a search warrant for these stores.
10:43And right from the get-go, she was all for it.
10:46She wanted to put bad people in jail.
10:49Telle Austin was one of the first GTO warrants.
10:52The GTO put in place a $750 reporting requirement.
10:57And in the case of the Telle Austin stores, their records showed multiple remittances
11:03just under $750.
11:06What is the likelihood that $8, $9, $10 million is sent through one store in a matter of days,
11:14always in $740 increments?
11:19We did three raids of the three stores, Telle Austin 1, 2, and around the world communications.
11:27We did them simultaneously that morning.
11:30We went in, secured the premises.
11:34There were, I think, two female employees.
11:38It was such a small place, like, I didn't see cash, like, piled up in the corner.
11:46But we found a phone book, Spanish-language phone book.
11:52And we saw so many names highlighted.
11:54It was weird.
11:56It hits you right there.
11:57You know it right away.
11:58They're using these names to send money to Colombia.
12:03Someone would come in with a bag, a duffel bag of half a million dollars with a list
12:08of names randomly pulled from the phone book.
12:11The phone books were used to make up dummy receipts to cover the transactions.
12:16And on the flip side of it, in Colombia, they would be given, usually, a fax of names.
12:24And when they got it on that end, they would know that that list of names was all meant
12:30for whoever was coming to pick it up.
12:32This is classic money laundering.
12:34And it's not peanuts.
12:35I mean, it's millions of dollars.
12:38We got to now find out who is it going to.
12:41So we had to keep on digging.
12:45Romedio and I began interviewing the women.
12:49It was exclusively women that worked at these stores.
12:53But they wouldn't make any statements or give up any information.
12:59The women were petrified.
13:02As a prosecutor, I'd seen people concerned about deportation.
13:06I'd seen people concerned about being charged with a crime.
13:10But the level of terror that I witnessed in these women was something I hadn't seen before.
13:19And it took all of our interviewing skills to get them to speak.
13:26They would not take well to a typical cop approach of a man coming in screaming and
13:31yelling and insulting them and calling them names.
13:35And Romedio and I had a different approach.
13:38To me, these girls just saw it as a business.
13:42They saw it as a way to make money.
13:44They were just poor people from Colombia who were being offered work.
13:48They just see it as a job.
13:50And so I've always kept that in the back of my head when I have interviewed these people,
13:54that it wasn't they were inherently bad people.
13:58It's a moral dilemma.
14:00Treat the witnesses with respect, be mindful of their concerns, and you'll get back from
14:06them.
14:07I heard that you bake cookies for informants.
14:10Are you really going to ask that question?
14:13People relax.
14:14You know, it makes people feel more comfortable.
14:16It makes the atmosphere less formal.
14:19And if it's less formal and people feel comfortable, they talk.
14:24And one of the things they talked about was a man named Ignacio Lobo.
14:31Mr. Lobo, which is Wolf in Spanish, he was the manager on paper of the stores.
14:38And we got an arrest warrant for Mr. Lobo for money laundering.
14:43When he was brought up and arraigned, I remember distinctly telling Bonnie, this guy is not
14:48the man.
14:50He looked like a lost soul.
14:52And he was afraid.
14:54And I think that's why for months he didn't speak to us.
15:00If we thought the women were terrified, Lobo was equally terrified.
15:07So then we had to determine who or what was behind Ignacio Lobo.
15:12So we went back to interview one of the ex-employees of one of the stores, a girl by the name of
15:18Isabella.
15:19Was that a real name?
15:21Yeah.
15:22Was she in danger?
15:25Yes.
15:26Imminent danger of being killed.
15:29Isabella told us that the real owner was a fellow by the name of Juan Monsalve, also
15:39known as Belduro or El Loco, which means hard one or the crazy one.
15:46We had to arrest Monsalve, but we had no idea who Monsalve was.
15:51We ran him through various databases, and he really wasn't on anyone's radar.
15:58Lobo was our key to Monsalve, and eventually Lobo opened up to us.
16:05And during our conversation, we said, the boss is Juan Alberto Monsalve.
16:12Who does he work for?
16:14And Lobo looked at me and said, he's the guy in Queens for the Norte Valle cartel.
16:23That was the first time any of us had heard the name Norte Valle.
16:29And we came to the realization that this was something more than just a money laundering
16:35case.
16:40It was the first time I heard the name Norte Valle cartel.
16:44This was something more than just a money laundering case.
16:48This was something really big.
16:51I didn't know at that time Norte Valle cartel from anything.
16:55I didn't know what level, what kind of a cartel it was, if it even existed, if it was just
17:01something Lobo was making up.
17:04But once the El Dorado task force discovered that there was an entity such as the Norte
17:09Valle cartel.
17:10We pulled intel reports.
17:12We looked for any place that that name had popped up anywhere.
17:16I had a very good working relationship with DEA.
17:19They helped us immensely.
17:21We had our own independent investigation into the Norte Valle cartel.
17:24So we had already identified who the leadership was.
17:27Other people that we had already arrested had basically been informing us of how the
17:31organization worked, how the hierarchy was organized.
17:34Some of those people had had contacts with the Norte Valle, and they made them readily
17:39available to us.
17:40Anytime we saw mention of the cartel, we reached out to the agent, we reached out to
17:45the prosecutor, and we began interviewing witnesses.
17:52From their witnesses, we learned that the Norte Valle cartel was a drug cartel that
17:57arose in the mid-1990s.
18:01They made a lot of money.
18:03They shipped tons of cocaine to the United States.
18:08And there was a lot of bloodshed.
18:11While the Norte Valle cartel aren't household names here in the United States, they were
18:14just as mean and nasty and formidable as Escobar.
18:18In fact, in the 80s, this civil war happens between the Medellin cartel and the Cali cartel.
18:24The Cali cartel would form a death squad to kill all the members of the Medellin cartel.
18:28You know who those individuals were?
18:31The future members of the Norte Valle cartel.
18:35The Norte Valle cartel were all murderers and hitmen.
18:39Then with the demise of the Medellin cartel and the subsequent demise of the Cali cartel,
18:44this is the moment when the Norte Valle cartel rises up.
18:471995, they are the premier cartel operating in Colombia.
18:52And during the 90s and into the early 2000s, our intel analysts estimated that 60 to 70
19:00percent of the cocaine entering the United States from Colombia was sent by the Norte
19:05Valle cartel.
19:08These individuals in the Norte Valle cartel, they're the ones at the end of the day who
19:12are responsible for fueling this crack epidemic, for fueling people in the United States abusing
19:18drugs.
19:19Okay.
19:20They are at the pinnacle of ordering murders, organized crime, millions of people abusing
19:26narcotics.
19:28These are the kingpins.
19:30The top individuals responsible for all of this, they have to be taken down.
19:36It never dawned on us that the search warrants at Tela Austin would lead to one of Colombia's
19:43most violent cartels.
19:45But once we identified Norte Valle, we wanted to figure out who was behind the cartel and
19:50bring them to justice.
19:52Now our focus was not just on taking down individuals.
19:57We knew shutting down one money remitter, two more would open the next day.
20:01So we focused on the organization itself.
20:05But we couldn't go after the cartel until we had the link between them and the stores.
20:13One of those links was Monsalve.
20:15But we still had no idea who Monsalve was.
20:18We queried all the federal databases and found nothing on Monsalve.
20:24But we queried the local NYPD database, and there was Monsalve.
20:33We reached out to the NYPD officers who worked with the Red Rum squad.
20:38That squad was tasked with solving violent murders in the Queens area.
20:45And through our work with Red Rum, we identified a witness who was the head of a squad of assassins
20:53that Monsalve used to murder people in Queens.
21:01The assassin was in custody in federal jail, and he was cooperating to get a sentence reduction.
21:08We interviewed him, and he told us Monsalve had several people gunned down because he
21:14was concerned that they were stealing his money or they were not moving his drugs properly.
21:20He would have hitmen walk into a bar and pull out a gun and shoot people.
21:26And the assassin said there was one woman who'd worked at Tela Austin, and Monsalve
21:32suspected that she was what Colombians call a sapo, a snitch.
21:37He had an associate of his offer her a ride on a motorcycle, and he sent a truck and a
21:44car to run down the motorcycle, and then ran over her several times to make sure she
21:50was good and dead.
21:53Monsalve was a bad boy.
21:54You know, he had killed two people or ordered the death of two people here in New York,
21:59and he was the Norte Valle cartel's representative in Queens for receiving shipments of cocaine
22:06and laundering the money back to Colombia.
22:09And he lived here in the United States.
22:13So we issued an arrest warrant for Monsalve for murder, money laundering, and drug trafficking.
22:22But at that time, Monsalve had left the country and had gone into hiding.
22:27He was sort of like a phantasma.
22:29He was sort of like a ghost, and we had no belief that he would ever be coming back because
22:34we had heard he had moved back to Colombia, period.
22:41Two years later, in February of 2000, we received a tip from an informant who was living in
22:49the same building as Rebecca.
22:52And Rebecca was Monsalve's girlfriend, and she had had a child with him.
22:58And the informant heard through the grapevine of the building that Monsalve was intending
23:03to come back into the United States through Mexico.
23:08The building was in Flushing, a 100-family building that Monsalve had used over the years
23:16as a stash house.
23:18A few days later, I received a call from this informant.
23:24She said Monsalve was back, not only in the United States, but he was back at the building.
23:31We commenced surveillance of the building, 24 hours a day, waiting for him to come out.
23:39But he never did.
23:42Finally, one morning, Rebecca left with the child, and I dispatched an agent to follow
23:51her.
23:52So I decided I was going to try to get into the building and see if I could hear any noise.
23:59And if we did, let's just knock the door down and go get him.
24:03So I went into the lobby.
24:05Somebody walks out past me.
24:07I turn around, and I said, son of a bitch, I think that's Monsalve.
24:18Monsalve is back at the building, and we have to arrest him.
24:22So I went into the lobby.
24:24Somebody walks out past me.
24:26I turn around, and I said, son of a bitch, I think that's Monsalve.
24:37And I go running up into the street, and I don't see him.
24:42So I go running to my car, because I want to go on the radio and tell the team that
24:47he's out.
24:48Find him.
24:49Look for him.
24:50I've screwed up, and I missed him already.
24:55And as I get to the car, I see a state trooper from the team out on the street with his gun
25:00drawn.
25:03He saw him, in fact.
25:05And what Monsalve had done is he had walked across the street, gotten into a car with
25:08another person who was waiting for him.
25:11They started to pull out of the parking spot, and that's when the team stopped the car,
25:17and we arrested him.
25:19Monsalve was the first individual we arrested who had a direct connection to the Norte Valle
25:27cartel.
25:28And once we started, we weren't going to stop until we got to the head.
25:34If you want to capture and indict a top cartel leader, you don't follow the dope.
25:40They distance themselves from that.
25:42You go after the money.
25:43Our endgame was not arrest Juan and seize 50 kilos.
25:47Our endgame was not shut down this store and seize a million dollars.
25:51Our endgame was to dismantle an entire cartel by following a money trail from a street-level
25:59money laundering investigation.
26:02What was unique about Tela Austin was that these stores were owned by the Norte Valle
26:08cartel itself.
26:10There had been banks in Miami that had been co-opted by traffickers, but the Norte Valle
26:15cartel didn't need to rely on others.
26:18It could handle the money itself.
26:22So Monsalve was a crucial piece of the puzzle because he was the brains behind the stores,
26:28and he could speak directly about the Norte Valle cartel.
26:33However, Monsalve did not cooperate.
26:38Monsalve just told us to pound sand.
26:41He didn't want to talk, and he sat in jail.
26:45Monsalve not speaking to us, we needed to look for other links to the cartel.
26:51One of those links was Monsalve's right-hand man called Hector.
26:57Hector had managed Monsalve's drug operation in the United States.
27:04And we knew that Monsalve had dispatched him back to Colombia to assist in laundering the
27:09money back there and had day-to-day dealings with the cartel.
27:14And we had secured an arrest warrant for Hector.
27:19Later in 2001, a very, very half-assed informant who was wrong the majority of the time told
27:29us that Hector's sister-in-law would be having a christening in the Union City area of New
27:35Jersey.
27:36And Hector was going to come back to the United States for it, traveling under fake Mexican
27:41papers.
27:43It was August 6th of 2001.
27:48We sat out there, and the informant called us in the afternoon after the christening
27:52and said Hector was there at the party.
27:57And we arrested him.
28:01Hector made a decision to cooperate.
28:04And I would say of the entire investigation, his courage, his decision was really what
28:11broke everything open.
28:14Hector could paint a picture of the hierarchy of the Norte Valle cartel for us.
28:19He knew not just the leadership, but the lieutenants and the powers that be.
28:26In Colombia, Bonnie realized how important he could be to be able to get arrest warrants
28:33for these people.
28:35The cartel leaders, they don't come to the United States.
28:38They don't come to New York to hang out.
28:42Back in 1997, the Colombian government signed an extradition treaty with the United States
28:46government.
28:48So that meant we were able to arrest, in collaboration with the Colombian government, individuals
28:54in Colombia and send these individuals back to the United States for trial here.
28:59Once we had Hector's information, we began methodically building cases against each member
29:06of the Norte Valle cartel over in Colombia.
29:10It was time to take the investigation overseas.
29:19We began building cases against each member of the Norte Valle cartel over in Colombia.
29:27It was time to take the investigation overseas.
29:31Our goal was to round up the leadership of the Norte Valle cartel, extradite them here
29:37to the United States and have them stand trial for drug trafficking and money laundering.
29:44But there were many skeptics within my office, within law enforcement.
29:48Yeah, you indicted the entire cartel, good luck capturing any of them.
29:54That's where Kevin came in.
29:56The DEA assisted the El Dorado Task Force in capturing fugitives in Colombia.
30:01In early 2000, I was transferred to the U.S. Embassy in Bogota, Colombia, to our office
30:06down there and was assigned as a liaison officer to work with the Colombian National Police
30:12to go after cartel fugitives, drug traffickers.
30:15This person's wanted in the United States, we're going to catch him.
30:19In order to create some jurisdiction to go after drug lords in foreign countries, the
30:22U.S. government passed a law called 21 U.S.C. 959, which makes it a crime to conspire to
30:29export narcotics to the United States.
30:33This law is designed to go after people like the Norte Valle cartel, who are sending tons
30:37and tons of narcotics to the United States, but don't actually ever set foot here.
30:43And one of the tasks I was assigned was to put together the narcotics reward campaign,
30:47which advertised million-dollar rewards for the capture of the leaders of the Norte Valle
30:51cartel.
30:52This is basically the Colombian version of America's Most Wanted.
31:05We create a website, we had TV commercials, we had radio spots, we had newspaper advertising.
31:13And then information starts flooding in.
31:15If you were going to name the three big jefes of the indictments, there was Archangel, Bustamante,
31:26and Carlos Patino, also known as Patimoro.
31:29And Archangel was the first big fish.
31:34And we received some intelligence prior to the advertising campaign that one of the top
31:41fugitives in the El Dorado indictment was hiding out in Panama.
31:45Archangel Henao Montoya.
31:48Archangel was one of the leaders of the Norte Valle cartel.
31:54He was a prime target.
31:56Archangel was hiding out at a ranch called La Porcelana.
31:59We assess the intelligence, decide that sounds very, very, very good.
32:03We then mount an operation with the Panamanian National Police to go down and effect the
32:07capture of Archangel.
32:11I was under the impression this was going to be like other missions that we had done
32:13in Colombia, where it's going to be a remote ranch, very difficult to get to, guards outside.
32:20But literally as we're driving down, there's a huge sign that says Finca La Porcelana,
32:26name of the ranch.
32:29Everything's right in front of the highway.
32:31There's a huge thatched roof eating area next to the pool, and there's about 30 people having
32:36breakfast as we drive by.
32:37I'm just going, oh, that's different than what we thought.
32:41So all the Panamanians are like, oh, yeah, yeah, we're not waiting till Monday.
32:44We're just going to hit this right now.
32:48All right, it's your country.
32:51Let's do it.
32:52So we pull out our vests and our guns and take these four SUVs and drive right up onto
32:57the ranch.
32:58And I think the law has changed, but a Panamanian police officer can't shoot someone until they
33:04give them two warning shots.
33:06So what do you think the Panamanians do as soon as they jump out of the car?
33:12Blasting rounds into the air.
33:14We weren't prepared for this.
33:15I'm thinking I'm in the middle of a real gunfight.
33:18Luckily, no one was hurt, and the Panamanians were able to capture everyone on the ranch
33:22without an incident.
33:24In January of 2004, Archangel was the first major arrest and major extradition of the
33:32case.
33:36And with Archangel Henao's capture, the ball started rolling.
33:42With the help of the advertising campaign that we had launched against the North Lai
33:46cartel, more and more intel starts coming in, and we start using that to pick off these
33:50guys one by one.
33:51Targets begin to get captured.
33:54And slowly but surely, we charged people, had people arrested, flipped them, and charged
34:01the next two and charged the next four.
34:04Starting with Archangel, over the next half dozen years, we ended up arresting some 30
34:12people and extraditing them all from Colombia.
34:17From ground troops to the sergeants to the lieutenants.
34:21Until finally we got to Luis Hernando Gomez Bustamante.
34:24He was better known by his nickname, Rascuño.
34:27He was also one of the kingpins of the North Lai cartel, which was part of the last group
34:32that really controlled almost all the cocaine trafficking in Colombia.
34:38He was untouchable because of his power and because of his reach.
34:46We had to capture Bustamante because we had worked for years trying to climb the food
34:52chain to take down the North Lai cartel.
34:57But where the hell is he?
35:00We couldn't find him.
35:01Bustamante went into hiding.
35:03He moves to Venezuela.
35:06He's hiding out in Venezuela and he decides to go to Cuba.
35:12While entering Cuba on a fake Mexican passport, the official in Cuban immigration realizes
35:18that he doesn't speak like a Mexican, asks him a few simple questions such as, who's
35:22the president of Mexico?
35:24Sing me the Mexican national anthem.
35:26Neither of which Rascuño can answer.
35:28He's then taken into custody.
35:31Bustamante spends two years in jail on the fake passport charge.
35:35Eventually the Colombians arrange for his extradition back to Colombia.
35:40Or were there waiting for him.
35:42And then he was immediately extradited to the United States.
35:48Bustamante was one of the acknowledged top leaders of the North Valley cartel.
35:55And when he was caught, showed us that we could climb the food chain to the end and
36:00be successful.
36:03Even though we had in custody Archangel and Bustamante, Romerio and I just step by step
36:11kept going.
36:12There were other individuals to prosecute.
36:15One of those was a trafficker named Carlos Arturo Patino, alias Patimoro.
36:23Several of the witnesses told us that Patimoro was not happy with Romerio and I because we
36:28caused him to be arrested.
36:31And he had put a contract out on our lives.
36:35There would be a huge reward for someone who would kill me or Romerio or both of us.
36:41It was a big fucking deal.
36:48Towards the end of the Norte Valle investigation, we arrested a trafficker named Carlos Arturo
36:53Patino, alias Patimoro.
36:57He was one of the hierarchy of the Norte Valle cartel and had put a contract out on
37:02our lives.
37:03It was a big fucking deal.
37:05There would be a huge reward for someone who would kill me or Romerio or both of us.
37:13They took it seriously.
37:14They put us under 24-7 protection because Patimoro was of the whole group in the Norte
37:20Valle, the worst of the lot.
37:24We had an informant who had worked for him and he said Patimoro used to have a wood chipper
37:30on his property.
37:31And he said that he would use that wood chipper to dispose of bodies.
37:36And I think it was the assistant who asked him, he said, were the bodies, were they always
37:39dead?
37:41And his answer was, most of the time.
37:44I lived with U.S. Marshals Protection for three months.
37:47Romerio had ICE agents, much to his dismay, following him around.
37:52I tried to keep my life as normal as possible.
37:55I took my kids to school every morning, but in an armored SUV followed by another armored
38:00SUV.
38:01I went to the gym.
38:03Sometimes they would take classes with me.
38:05Sometimes they would wait outside with their rifles.
38:09But I just went about life as normal.
38:14I wasn't scared until it was over.
38:17The day that Arturo Patino was sentenced to 40 years was the first time I allowed myself
38:24to get scared, and then passed because it was over.
38:28Patino went to trial.
38:29He was one of the few guys in the indictment who did not cooperate, and he got convicted
38:36in 2010, and then he got sentenced to 40 years, and he's now gainfully passing his time in
38:43some jail in, I don't know, Pennsylvania, I think.
38:47Ultimately, after 12 years, we convicted 35 members of the Nortevalle Cartel.
38:58This was a massive investigation, and it led to the dismantling of one of the most violent,
39:04most prolific cartels in Colombia.
39:07The El Dorado indictment was one of the indictments used to take down the Nortevalle Cartel.
39:14It also exposed the money remittance system.
39:16The way they started out wiring money back is no longer available to Colombian drug traffickers.
39:21They've clamped down.
39:22There's new rules on the industry.
39:23It was a great example of starting on the streets with a low-level investigation and
39:28taking it all the way to the top.
39:31One domino knocked down another, knocked down another, to the end of the line.
39:35This was the biggest case of my career, and probably the career of every other agent that
39:41had ever walked the face of the earth.
39:44No, just kidding, just kidding.
39:48The irony of this case, actually, we never seized a kilo of cocaine.
39:55Had I not done the investigation, I wouldn't have made less money.
40:00Had I been unsuccessful, I wouldn't have been punished, and taking down the entire Nortevalle
40:07Cartel didn't get me promoted or get me any bonuses.
40:12This was our job.
40:15I was a young man in college and wrote papers about Colombia and the cartels down there.
40:21To be able to get to go down there and participate in these investigations and capture these
40:26fugitives, it was what I wanted to do since I was about 16 years old.
40:33And the Nortevalle Cartel was truly the end of an era.
40:36That was the last cartel in the way we think about it with Escobar or the Cali Cartel.
40:41They were the last group that really controlled almost all of the cocaine trafficking in Colombia.
40:47The end of the story of the Nortevalle Cartel is really the beginning of another story.
40:53As drug-related violence claims lives in Mexico, the governments of the U.S. and Mexico are
40:58keeping an eye on emerging drug-trafficking organizations.
41:01Dead bodies hanging from bridges just minutes from the airport in Los Cabos.
41:06It's a war in which the finest forces Mexico can muster are struggling against well-armed
41:12cartels.
41:13I see a direct line from the Nortevalle Cartel to what we see in countries like Mexico.
41:22The border city is one of the most violent in Mexico as rival gangs frequently fight
41:27for control over smuggling routes into the U.S.
41:30The violence you're seeing today in Mexico is a result of the shift of the route of cocaine
41:35leaving Colombia because under the Nortevalle Cartel, what used to be the major route for
41:40Medellin and Cali through the Caribbean directly into the United States shifts into Mexico.
41:46The Nortevalle Cartel makes a lot of deals with Mexican cartels, and they begin this
41:50whole movement of bulk shipping cocaine into Mexico.
41:54So after the demise of the Nortevalle Cartel, Mexicans take over distribution in the United
41:58States, and where there's a demand, there'll always be someone to give the supply.