Barry Seal : The American Pilot who Smuggled for Pablo Escobar

Barry Seal: The American Pilot who Smuggled for Pablo Escobar

Hello everybody, welcome back. I'm bikash and I am back with another topic. Today, we are going to know about Barry Seal: The American Pilot who Smuggled for Pablo Escobar.

He's one of the most successful smugglers in u.s history in the late 1970s and early 1980s louisiana native barry seal made a fortune trafficking unbelievable quantities of cocaine onto american soil a born pilot seal was able for years to outwit the dea the fbi u.s customs and any other federal agency that tried to stop him loosely connected to pablo escobar's notorious medellin cartel seal lived a life of adventure riches and excitement in far-off lands until suddenly he didn't in 1983 seal was caught boasting in a wiretap and indicted for smuggling facing a minimum of 10 years he realized his only escape was to flip to go from being america's top drug runner to its top dea informant it was a decision that would lead him from the battlefields of nicaragua to the rainforests outside medellin and bring him face to face with pablo escobar a twisted fun house mirror ride through the darker side of the 1980s this is the story of barry seal louisiana's cocaine cowboy it was a sultry day in baton rouge when adler berryman seal known all his life as barry seal was born on the 16th of july 1939. and that is one of the last uncontested facts you're going to hear during this entire story thanks to his pension for aliases possible connections with the cia and love of spinning tall tales it's surprisingly hard to get a definitive account of barry seal's life we found sources that contend he was nothing but a glorified con man others that insist he was a long-term cia asset and yet others that implicate him in everything from the bay of pigs to the jfk assassination in other words we've had to do a lot of picking and choosing with this one trying to tease a narrative out of a true mess of sources while we've hopefully got something approaching the truth please do keep one crucial fact in mind no one on earth could talk as much crap as barry seal and barry seal sure liked to hear himself talk from his earliest days the young boy was obsessed with the planes that buzzed through the skies above baton rouge by his teenage years seal was spending all of his free time hanging around the airport talking to any pilot who'd pay him some mind it helped that even at this young age he was naturally charismatic with a storyteller's instinct and an affable charm but charisma wasn't barry seal's only talent aged just 15 seal started pilot lessons he turned out to be such a natural that his instructor was letting him fly solo after only eight hours of training because of course it's not like letting an untrained teenager take command of flying bomb could somehow go wrong and go wrong it really could have despite his talent seal was a crazy risk taker pushing his aircraft to its very limits his instructor even noted he seemed incapable of grasping how his actions had consequences but apparently borderline sociopathy isn't a disqualification for flying in louisiana because seal was a qualified pilot by the time he was 16. when he graduated high school in 1957 his yearbook noted he was full of fun full of folly how right his classmates would turn out to be after dropping out of college seal set up a business flying advertising banners over baton rouge on august 10 1958 while trying to show off seal misjudged a maneuver and sent his plane slamming into the ground the young pilot lost several teeth and spent a week in the hospital for any other teenager this could have been the wake up call the moment when they realized they weren't invisible and that bad things could really happen but not barry seal in 1961 seal joined the louisiana national guard signing up for additional pilot training there he got so good at pushing an aircraft past its limit so good at executing death-defying stunts that he could fly in almost any conditions it was a skill that it put to good use in vietnam or would he depending on who you ask seal either spent the mid-60s flying special forces missions in vietnam or he spent the time as an army reserve in the u.s quietly improving his pilot skills and lying about his military service both tales seem plausible seal would turn out to be such an expert at flying through the jungle that it's tempting to think that he must have had prior experience on the other hand his military record shows no signs of duty in asia let alone in a combat zone whatever the truth it's generally agreed that by 1967 seal had been honorably discharged and gotten himself a job flying with the commercial airline twa there he became one of the youngest command pilots that the fleet had ever seen but his initial excitement soon wore off flying commercial you were forbidden from doing the stunts that seal loved so much for an adrenaline junkie being a professional piler was like you or i professionally watching paint dry no seal needed excitement in his life some outlet to stave off the boredom luckily adventure was just around the corner by 1972 barry seal was a twice divorced pilot with a string of failing businesses in baton rouge and a deep desire to do something interesting it was at this point that he met murray morris kessler kessler had some connections in mexico with a bunch of anti-castro cubans these guys needed a capable pilot to fly 1 350 pounds of plastic explosives down from the united states and well they were willing to pay big here it was the excitement seal had been craving the danger what else was this overweight under-stimulated schlub from louisiana going to do with such an offer of course he said yes and that's how on july 1 1972 barry seal came to be sat in a hotel room with seven other accomplices when u.s customs agents broke down the door and arrested the lot of them kessler's cubans had just been a front for a federal sting operation and now the government was going to throw the goddamn book at barry seal in the summer of 1974 the case went to trial by now seal had been fired from his job at twa who'd heard all about his aborted mexican adventure he'd lost most of his savings on legal fees and on top of that it now looked like he was going to go to prison the only reason he didn't was thanks to a miracle years later seal would boast his cia buddies stepped in and quashed the trial on grounds of national security but the reality is that seal almost certainly had no connections with the agency at this point and it's not like the trial never happened the case played out in public court for five days no what really saved seal wasn't friends in high places but good old-fashioned government incompetence during the trial the prosecution brandished an assault rifle before the jury claiming that it belonged to seal the defense pointed out that this was prejudicing the jury the judge declared a mistrial and seal walked free it was the single luckiest break barry seal would get in his entire life had the government's prosecution team not been so dumb there'd be no story for this post at all that same year seal married deborah ann dubois with whom he eventually had three children but while it was great to be not just a married man but a free married man seal was still in a bad place twa wouldn't take him back thanks to the smuggling trial he'd been blacklisted with the other airlines too he was a broke unemployable fantastically talented pilot with nothing to do but that was gonna soon change as 1975 dawned demand for talented unscrupulous american pilots south of the border was about to explode it was the beginning of the era of cocaine and it would transform barry seal's life in june of 1971 richard nixon stood before congress to declare drug use was america's public enemy number one it was the beginning of the war on drugs just two years later in 1973 the dea was created but if nixon thought the drug scene was bad in 1971 with all those damn hippies smoking pot things were about to get a whole lot worse cocaine had been around for a while but it had always been too expensive to out of step with the 1960s but as production methods improved the price began to drop even as the purity went up by the time barry seal was in court cocaine was no longer something only hollywood royalty could afford and as the usa turned away from pot and lsd demand for cocaine was beginning to creep up however it would take a very specific set of circumstances to turn coke into the linchpin of barry seal's life a specific set of circumstances in a specific country colombia from the outside colombia in the early 1970s looked relatively stable with a growing economy and little violence but this outward appearance masked a deeply fractured society all power was concentrated in the hands of a tiny elite since 1957 the country's two major parties the liberals and conservatives had been in a power-sharing agreement that blocked everyone else out of politics the reason for this had been something called la violencia a decade-long undeclared civil war between two parties that had killed two hundred thousand people but while the 1957 agreement had ended the war the fighting had still left the nation deeply traumatized level incia had been marked by extreme brutality police were publicly decapitated and their heads used soccer balls to give just a single chilling example pablo escobar had grown up among this spending his first decade in a world of gruesome lynchings and state-sanctioned murder he also lived with the aftermath with the economy bottomed out in the early 1960s and many of the poorest turning to crime to survive yet even this potent mix of traumatized desperately poor people locked out of political power might not have exploded had it not been for sheer bad luck just as cocaine was starting to bring in serious money the traditional mexican gangs that supplied the states had been driven underground by a government crackdown down in colombia where blow was actually produced criminals saw a chance to fill the void the first warning sign of things to come came in november 1975 when colombian police seized 600 kilograms of cocaine in retaliation drug gangs gruesomely murdered 40 people in an event known as the medellin massacre but the real turning point came in 1977. that year the wealthy ochoa brothers approached pablo escobar now a local drug kingpin about uniting all the gangs in medellin under a single umbrella group one that would control every stage of cocaine from production to trafficking to distribution it was the beginnings of the medellin cartel soon to become so powerful and so dangerous it made the sinaloa cartel look like a bunch of prancing girl scouts but the medellin cartel would soon become something else too barry seal's employer hal barry seal came to be employed by escobar is a right place right time sort of deal by 1976 the disgraced pilot had started a smuggling operation flying down to honduras and returning with marijuana it was small time enough that no one bothered seal allowing him to get plenty of practice at using the legs and buys of the jagged louisiana coastline for drug drops but it wasn't small enough to keep him completely under the radar in late 1979 seal touched down in honduras to find his plane suddenly surrounded by cops it was only thanks to dumb lux that he wasn't flying any pot that day although police did find an illegal rifle thanks to that rifle barry spent the next seven months in a honduran jail incredibly this would actually turn out to be his lucky break on the flight home in july of 1980 seal found himself sat next to roger reeves a professional drug smuggler with connections inside the medellin cartel reeves was at the forefront of this new era of cocaine he told seal how the cartel was investigating an island and light aircraft how small planes would soon become the lifeblood of smuggling if seal just happened to know any talented pilots of such aircraft well that pilot might be able to make themselves a lot of money it was an offer that seal couldn't refuse before long barry seal was smuggling cocaine for the medellin cartel and it was everything that reeves had promised seal's income exploded overnight by 1983 he would have made over 25 million dollars the thing is he was worth it even in the early 1980s you couldn't just fly into u.s airspace from south america and not expect to receive the deepest cavity search in customs history to slip in undetected you had to fly so low over the gulf of mexico that you were almost touching the water but even then you might still get picked up by radar so you have to fly slow and make sure you came in near where the offshore oil fields were so any bored air traffic controller who glimpsed you on his screen would assume you were just a helicopter returning from a rig finally you had to drop your shipment without getting caught by now barry seale knew the swampy tangled coastline of louisiana better than anyone he would fly in at night with his lights off using night vision goggles to find his way using a walkie-talkie and gps tracker he'd radio as men exactly where to find the product then he'd drop it into the dark bayou below and fly away into the night sky shortly after a boat would haul the cocaine out of the swamp where it would be loaded onto cars and driven to miami it was a complicated setup but seal pulled it off none of his men were ever caught in the act for the dea still used to a world where smuggling meant shoving blow-ups in mule's arse and hoping for the best seal's advanced tactics left them dizzy this was smuggling as an art form designed to impress seal's employers in medellin not that seal had ever met the guys paying his salary all of seal's contacts with the cartel had been through intermediaries pablo escobar had never seen a picture of him never heard his real name only as alias el gordo or the fat man it would be this crucial missing piece of information that would both spare barry seal a lifetime in prison and sign his death sentence although seal was a clever smuggler he wasn't as clever as he thought he was for one thing while seal knew to use only pay phones to contact people he was far too lazy to keep randomly choosing new pay phones so when the dea decided to start collecting info on him they simply wiretapped the 10 pay phones that are used the most and built their case that way for another barry seal also liked to boast to anyone and everyone it was this last trait that would destroy his life in 1981 a dea agent wearing a wire walked into a baton rouge bar went up to barry seal and was all like hey you look like a sort of fun guy that has really awesome stories about smuggling drugs pablo escobar wanna tell me about them i mean if you could lean in towards me and speak clearly that would also be super helpful incredibly this worked seal started spouting off his mouth and ended the conversation promising the undercover agent that he'd smuggle some drugs for him it was the beginning of the end although the dea and fbi would need over another year to build an airtight case that one conversation was the start of barry seale's downfall the boot finally dropped in march of 1983. that month seal was indicted for cocaine smuggling the following year march 1984 the trial began a 10 year sentence hovering over his head that's a long decade of boredom of being stuck behind bars away from flying away from the life that seal loved so much panicked seal promised to turn informant to give the dea whatever they wanted oh we like to think the dea agents chuckled and what can you give us and seal's answer was pablo escobar it was a desperate gamble although seal worked for the medellin cartel had never met escobar had no idea how he'd even go about setting the drug lord up the dea were likewise unconvinced they shoved seal of phone and basically said go on then prove it so seal called a connection in the cartel pretended to be a pilot called ellis mackenzie who was super into the idea of flying enormous quantities of coke to the usa somehow the desperate bluff worked the connection agreed to set up a meeting between seal and escobar himself suddenly the dea were no longer just looking at nabbing an american smuggler but dismantling the entire medellin cartel faced with such a prize they agreed a plea deal on the 8th of april 1984 seal walked a semi-free man onto an american airfield and took off for colombia that evening he found himself at the ochoa brothers estate face to face with the entire cartel leadership it was the first time a dea informant had ever met escobar face to face luckily escobar had no idea ellis mckenzie was the same person as their old pilot el gordo who'd been nabbed by the americans the drug lord outlined his plans to ellis he would fly 15 000 kilograms of cocaine to america in preparation for selling at the 1984 olympics to load up he wouldn't come to colombia but to a military base in nicaragua which the sandista regime was renting out to escobar this all sounded fine to seal who must have been desperate just to get the meeting concluded and get out of there but if it all sounded fine to him it was going to sound way more than just fine to the cia when word got to the agency about barry seal's adventure things were going to get crazier than ever  things started to unravel when seal first flew into nicaragua although the medellin cartel had supposedly cleared it with the send an easter government someone heard forgotten to tell the troops on the ground seal was shot down over the jungle arrested and thrown in a nicaraguan jail while escobar's contacts within the government would get him released it unfortunately wouldn't be before the dea found out unfortunately the dea wouldn't be able to spring seal by themselves instead they contacted the cia for help only to watch the case be taken out of their hands at the moment barry seal crash-landed in nicaragua the sandinista government was american enemy number one a bunch of left-wing rebels who'd overthrown nicaragua's dictator the sandinistas were close to both cuba and the soviet union as a result the cia in the white house had spent years trying to discredit them even illegally funding right-wing death squads known as contras to wage a brutal civil war but while the american public already knew the sandinistas were communists they didn't know they were also cocaine traffickers if the cia could prove this support for regime change would surely grow the upshot was that once barry seal arrived back in the united states it was defined his mission had changed no longer was he going to just act as a dea mole in the medellin cartel he was going to have to use secret cameras to photograph the massive drug deal seal begged them not to make him do this he knew the medellin cartel he knew what they would do to him if they suspected he was an informant if he was lucky they might shoot him if he was unlucky they'd slowly torture him to death and leave his mutilated body hanging from a tree but the cia were determined either seal take these photos or go straight to prison on june 26 1984 barry seal boarded a plane equipped with two hidden cameras and flew back to nicaragua it was likely the longest day of his entire life when seal landed in the airfields he was immediately surrounded by armed soldiers then one of the secret cameras malfunctioned and started making loud noises meaning seal had to find an excuse to gun the engines to cover the sound but the most heart-stopping moment was likely when a vehicle pulled up next to the plane and outstepped pablo escobar for whatever reason the drug lord himself had come to not just watch the loading but personally helped throw duffel bags of cocaine into the hangar it was barry seal's death sentence oh sure he would physically live a while longer long enough to fly his plane back to the u.s but the moment escobar was caught on camera sack of cocaine in hand seal was as dead as a man who unknowingly has terminal cancer when the cia saw seals photos they were ecstatic so ecstatic they promptly leaked them to the press blowing seal's cover by mid-july 1984 the medellin cartel placed a million-dollar bounty on seal's head this would be bad enough if seal were able to go into hiding but he still needed to make his court date on january 24th 1986 seal went on trial and baton rouge for smuggling cocaine while his plea deal meant his maximum sentence was fairly low the judge still decided to go all out seal was sentenced to six months community service in a salvation army center he would be forbidden from carrying a gun forbidden from protecting himself from the wrath of escobar and then the judge did something so utterly stupid it's tempting to think that it was deliberate there in open court the judge read out the address of the center barrie seal would spend six months in it doesn't take a genius to figure out what happened next a couple of weeks later a gang of colombian hitmen crossed into the united states and headed up to louisiana on february the 19th 1986 barry seal pulled his car into its parking bay outside the salvation army center before he could open the door two hit men calmly walked over and aimed their submachine guns at long last barry seal's legendary luck had run out seal was dead even before the men finished firing although the authorities would cash as assassins the game was still over down south pablo escobar would evade justice for another seven years bringing colombia to its knees before finally getting gunned down himself on a medellin rooftop in nicaragua the cia's attempts to destabilize the sandinistas failed the party remained in power until 1990 before returning to government in 2006. at the time of writing they're still nicaragua's leading political party as for the war on drugs well it relocated colombia today is relatively peaceful but you only have to look at mexico to see drug violence is still very much with us but what if barry seal well even now he remains a fascinating figure and a moral adventurer with a near-suicidal disregard for his own safety but he's also interesting for another reason for two or three short years seal stood at the very center of the war on drugs the point where smuggling politics poverty desperation and underhand cia tactics all met his actions had consequences that stretched all the way up to the reagan white house that echoed through bogota's corridors of power for years to come certainly not bad for a fat kid from baton rouge barry seal may have been a loudmouth a show-off and a convicted drug smuggler but he was also a man willing to pay almost any price for an interesting life it's fitting then that in the end the price he paid was the ultimate one so i really hope you found that post interesting. Thats all I Hope you like this post and enjoyed it. let's meet next time with next topic. till then STAY TUNES AND ALWAYS REMEMBER THINK POSITIVE BE POSITIVE THANK YOU. If you like this post share with your friends. Thank and bye.

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