Welcome to the Living the Dream Podcast with Curveball, if you believe you can achieve. Welcome to the Living the Dream with Curveball Podcast, a show where I interview guests that teach, motivate and inspire. Today, I am joined by author and former DEA agent, chris Feistel. Chris served in the DEA for 26 years and in 1994, he got sent on an assignment in Colombia to go after the most dangerous criminal organization in the world called the Cali Cartel TV and podcast projects. So we're going to be talking about his book after Escobar and talking about his experience of going after the most dangerous criminal organization in the world. So, chris, thank you so much for joining me.
Speaker 2:Thanks for having me. Curtis, Pleasure to be here.
Speaker 1:Why don't you start off by telling everybody a little bit about yourself?
Speaker 2:everybody a little bit about yourself.
Speaker 2:Well, I grew up in northeastern Pennsylvania, kind of a small town there, went to college in Wilkes-Barre, pennsylvania, at a place called King's College, played basketball while I was there, majored in criminal justice and government. Initially I wanted to go to law school but I had an internship I guess it was my sophomore or junior year as a seasonal police officer in Wildwood, new Jersey, on the Jersey Shore, which you can imagine, some of those shore towns in the summer they get pretty radical and pretty out of hand. So they hire a lot of seasonal or part-time police officers. So I did that, a lot of seasonal or part-time police officers. So I did that and I had a chance to work undercover by some methamphetamine on the boardwalk and that really got me interested in law enforcement. I initially wanted to go to law school and, you know, after that experience I worked as a police officer in Virginia Beach, virginia, and I had applied to DEA to, you know, to work as a special agent because of that undercover assignment and I got hired by the DEA in 1988.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Well, you know, first of all, tell us you know why you wanted to write this book and tell us you know how you got sent, were working in in Columbia against the Cali Cartel.
Speaker 2:I'll jump ahead a little bit. And uh, you know, we always thought while we were down there we said, man, this is like a really interesting story, some of the things that we did and and we talked even back then and this is 30 years ago about, you know, writing a book or trying to make a movie out of the whole Cali cartel hunt. So we had that idea early on and ever since then, especially with the explosion of the Netflix series Narcos, it really became kind of a cult following and we did several podcasts and stuff and and there was always a lot of interest, a lot of questions. You know people that just couldn't seem to get enough of the whole, you know, going after the drug cartels in columbia. So we decided to to write the book and you know it kind of is the real story. It is the real story behind behind season three of Narcos on Netflix. So you get the real story here with the book in After Escobar.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, kind of tell us about that book, tell us where we can get it and what listeners can expect when they read it.
Speaker 2:It's currently available right now for pre-order on Amazon, barnes, noble and a couple of other sites. It's scheduled to be released on June 24th. That's the actual publication and the release date, and you know what it really is is. You know myself, my partner, partner Dave Mitchell, and some of the other DEA agents that were in Columbia. The story focuses on our efforts in conjunction with the Columbia National Police and Columbia Security Forces, going after what our administrator at the time called the biggest and most powerful crime syndicate in history. And you know this book is unique in that it gives you that on the ground, firsthand perspective from the agents who were there. You know what we did, why we did what we did, how we planned operations, how we got around some of the obstacles and challenges that we faced. So it's really that unique. You know firsthand behind the scenes look from the agents on the ground as to actually what went into trying to bring down the Cali cartel. And you know how we did that in conjunction with the Colombian security forces.
Speaker 1:Well, tell us about the leaders or the godfathers of the Cali Cartel. You know who were they.
Speaker 2:So the Cali Cartel was headed by four leaders and they called them the godfathers of Cali or the gentlemen of Cali.
Speaker 2:They were Gilberto Rodriguez-Sorabuela, his brother Miguel Rodriguez-Sorabuela, jose Santa Cruz Londoño, who went by Chepe, and Helmer Herrera, who went by Pacho Herrera.
Speaker 2:And these guys got started early on as a criminal band of kidnappers and car thieves and stuff. And you know they got a ransom of about seven hundred thousand dollars from the kidnapping of two swiss citizens and they used that money to parlay the themselves into the uh, into the drug business. And you know they started off, you know, in the early 70s, taking just a few kilos of cocaine up into New York and the price of cocaine in New York in the early to mid 70s was $50,000, $60,000 per kilo, sometimes even more. So they started generating this huge, huge profits and after a while, in the 80s and 90s, they were responsible for, you know, 80 to 85% of the cocaine that reached US soil and 90% of the cocaine worldwide. So you know they were dominating the cocaine trade on six continents. And you know, had Antarctica had a cocaine problem, it would have been seven continents. So these guys built a massive, massive empire that they controlled until the mid-1990s.
Speaker 1:Well, what was the difference between Escobar and his cartel and the Cali cartel, which were their rivals?
Speaker 2:That's a great question. You know the Medellin cartel, you know consisted of Pablo Escobar, the three Ochoa brothers, carlos Lader and Rodriguez Gacha, and the Medellin cartel's main MO was, you know they ruled by violence, intimidation, threats, murder, extortion. You know they declared war on the Colombian government, you know, twice they were. You know Escobar was a narco-terrorist. So they were very, very ruthless and very violent towards, you know, the government. Whereas Cali, you know they were referred to, you know one of their nicknames was the gentleman of Cali. Right, they were these. You know these affluent businessman. They passed themselves off as these entrepreneurs and these tycoons who didn't use, you know, violence.
Speaker 2:The Cali cartel's weapon of choice was to bribe, right, so Remedien was killing everybody. You know Cali was buying everybody. So they curried favor, they bought a lot of influence and they went about, you know, fortifying that infrastructure through that, just by buying as many people as they could. And you know, at their height they were paying thousands of thousands of people in Columbia, police, the military, judges, prosecutors, you know anybody that could influence what they wanted to accomplish. So you know, behind the scenes they were, you know, businessmen, they were these. You know guys who came from, you know, an upper or a middle class family that you know weren't violent. That was their perception, and they were responsible for a major economic boom, not only in Colombia, but in Cali too. They were responsible for 40% of the economic development in Cali alone in the late 70s and early 80s.
Speaker 1:Well, talk about your experience working in Cal cali, columbia during the 1990s, you know. Tell us what your experience and how it was for you well, you know it was.
Speaker 2:It was definitely, uh, a surreal experience. You know, myself and my partner, we, you know, we're both over six feet two inches tall, so you, so we stood out. I mean I looked more like a California surfer and my partner looked like an NFL tight end. So it was hard for us to kind of blend in and get things accomplished early on, not only in Columbia but in Cali where we were working. So there was no American presence in Cali at the time. So anybody who was seen who resembled an American was immediately, you know, whether right or not, were seen as DEA or CIA operatives. So it was very hard to get anything done.
Speaker 2:So if you know, if you're some poor European backpacker who happened to stroll through Cali, colombia boy, all eyes were, were on you because you know they, they thought that they, you know you were there to, you know, try to go after the cartel. But you know the systemic corruption which you know I talked about, that the Cali cartel used was really difficult for us because you know when you're overseas you have to rely on Colombian security forces or whatever country you're in to do enforcement operations. We can't really act unilaterally, even though we had to at some times to avoid the corruption. So it made just operating on the ground very, very difficult. Nothing moved inside of Cali without the Cali cartel knowing about it. It was almost like working behind the Berlin Wall or in Moscow with the KGB that we were followed a lot. It was very difficult for us to get anything done there.
Speaker 1:Well, talk about you know you mentioned it earlier about the Netflix series Narcos. So talk about how what it felt like to be portrayed in that series and you know, kind of let listeners know about the series and kind of let listeners know about the series.
Speaker 2:Well, netflix came out in 2015, I guess, with the first season of Narcos, which focused on Pablo Escobar and the Medellin cartel, and they parlayed that into a season two, again with Pablo Escobar and the Medellin cartel, and season three. They spun off and worked on the Cali Cartel, which, after Escobar's demise in 1993, the Cali Cartel was it. They were the biggest drug cartel in the world, so they focused on that. So actually, it was pretty cool to see, actually watching it, someone with your name doing some of the things that we did, watching how that played out on television. So it was pretty cool.
Speaker 2:And Netflix, whenever they work on a project, they do it 100% and they do a fantastic job, so they didn't spare a lot of expense in putting that series together. Uh, it was really. It was really a neat experience. I was had the opportunity to actually be down in in cali while they were filming, you know, met with a lot of the actors you know, went over the scripts with them, saw how they were filming. We actually filmed on location in several places where we actually did enforcement operations. So it was actually a pretty neat time to be down there and experience that.
Speaker 1:Well, in your bio you talk about how the Cali Cartel had their own counterintelligence service. So tell us how sophisticated was that and how was it for you guys to go up against that?
Speaker 2:So the Cali Cartel's counterintelligence network was something really to behold. Counterintelligence network was something really to behold. They were referred to not only by the CIA but by DEA, as well as the Kali KGB, which was kind of a reference to the Russian security. Uh, that that works. So you know, behind the scenes in, uh, in russia, and they, they did that because, uh, they had, you know, they were able to wiretap 400 telephone lines a month. They were, you know, they corrupted thousands of people. They blackmailed one of the colonels that we worked with. They set him up and recorded like a sex tape and they released it on the news. So they were able to discredit this guy and finally get him to leave Cali because he was making headway against them.
Speaker 2:They had a computer, which was seized in May of 1994, which allowed them to track telephone numbers of suspected informants. They were able to run license plates of suspected vehicles that they thought may have been a threat to them. They had the entire Cali telephone directory in the computer. They had numbers of embassy employees and DEA agents employees and DEA agents. They, you know were, they had up to 5,000 taxi drivers on the payroll. So, you know, anytime anybody suspicious got in a taxi. It got back to them. They had people at the airports, they had spies that worked in the hotel, so it was extremely difficult for anybody who wasn't from there to do anything, and that intelligence network that they had was just almost impenetrable.
Speaker 1:Well, talk about you. Know, where did you guys stay when you were in Colombia? Surely you know you just didn't stay in a hotel, or just an apartment or something.
Speaker 2:Exactly so. We weren't. First of all, we weren't allowed to stay in hotels because of the security and secondly, you know, when we first got there, we had to stay with the police at the military base or the police at the police base and the military at the military base, and each one of those entities had a specific search block that they called, which was put together to target the leaders of the Cali cartel. So most of the time we stayed at the police barracks which was in southwestern Cali. After a while, to avoid a lot of the corruption and for us to work more independently and unilaterally, we started to stay in safe houses, which, you know, we had to be very cognizant of our security and to make sure that, you know, the Cali cartel and their surveillance apparatus weren't able to follow us to where we were staying in safe houses. So initially at the barracks on the police and the military base, but later on we were operating more independently. We stayed in safe houses in the city.
Speaker 1:Well, let the listeners know about any upcoming projects that you or you and your partner are working on that they need to be aware of.
Speaker 2:Well, just the release of the book, which is coming out in june. We've got a couple other podcasts and events that we're trying to schedule to promote the book. Um, and you know that that's really about it. As for now podcasts, uh, media interviews. As we get closer to the release, there'll be more, more, more appearances, more interviews.
Speaker 1:Well, so we can keep up with everything that you're up to. Throw out your contact info, any websites or anything like that.
Speaker 2:We do have a website. It's called After Escobar, wwwafterescobarcom. You can pre-order the book there through Amazon and Barnes Noble links. It's got a summary and a little bit of background about the Cali Cartel. It has my bio as well as my partner Dave Mitchell's bio, where we worked, what we did. It's got a lot of photographs from the time we spent in Cali going after the cartel leaders.
Speaker 1:So the website is actually pretty informative and has a lot of information there. Okay, we'll close this out with some final thoughts. Maybe, if there was something about the book or something about you or your partner that I forgot to touch on, that you would like to talk about, or any final thoughts you have with the listeners, and also give out that website again about or any final thoughts you have with the listeners, and also give out that website again.
Speaker 2:uh, the website is wwwafterescobarcom and uh, again, I think anybody who is a fan of true crime, uh, non-fiction stories, you know definitely colombian cartels. If you're a fan of narcos, uh, I think you would be really, really interested in this book. Again, it gives you a behind-the-scenes, first-hand account of everything that we did, all of the failures that we had. We failed over and over and over again until we finally found, you know, find out how to circumvent some of the corruption and to plan operations in secret. So it's very, very detailed. It gives you a very accurate description of the political climate in Colombia at that time, during the 1990s, and how much influence that the Cali Cartel had, even buying the 1994 presidency for Ernesto Samper, where the Cali Cartel helped contribute over $6 million to get him elected, to try to gain favor with the cartel for some of their plans to surrender and get light prison sentences. So anybody who's, again, a fan of Narcos, I think, will really, really enjoy the book.
Speaker 1:All right, ladies and gentlemen, after Escobarcom, please be sure to check out the book when it comes out in June. Check out that Narcos series on Netflix. If you haven't Follow rate review, share this episode to all the true crime fans out there. Share it to everybody. Jump on your favorite podcast app. Check out the show, leave us a review, follow us. If you have any guests or suggestion topics, curtis Jackson 1978 at attnet is the place to send them. Thank you for listening and supporting the show and, chris, thank you for your service and all of your work and all that you do, and thank you for joining us.
Speaker 2:Thank you, Curtis. Appreciate it. Keep up the good work.
Speaker 1:For more information on the Living the Dream podcast, visit wwwdjcurveballcom. Until next time, stay focused on living the dream dream.