DEA Agents who helped bring down Pablo Escobar come to Cedartown
Life can be stranger than fiction, but the two sometimes come together in time and space to form a story like the one surrounding the world’s first narcoterrorist Pablo Escobar.
His story — a mix of both legend and fact — became intertwined with that of two retired DEA agents who make up the main characters in the hit Netflix series ‘ Narcos,’ which on Friday enters its third season.
Stephen Murphy and Javier Peña are more than just characters on a television show, and their story is much more complicated than what is depicted in the two seasons of the series so far.
That’s t he message they presented to a large crowd of those interested in hearing the real story behind the capture of Pablo Escobar and the destruction of his Medellin cartel after years of fighting the organization responsible for thousands of deaths, billions of dollars in cocaine sales and a long war that the nation of Colombia is still feeling the effects of today.
Murphy and Peña began their Saturday night presentation at t he Cedartown Performing Arts Center by reminding the audience that their topic was both graphic and tragic, but one they still tried to bring humor to despite it’s difficult nature.
“We’re starting t he night with a dead man on the screen,” Murphy said. “So we try to bring a little humor into the story as well.”
Peña provided a rundown of the case history, and the players involved in Escobar’s network of sicarios, or his hired thugs who the retired DEA agent described as murdering police officers in Colombia for $100 a head at the time.
Escobar, who was head of the Medellin cartel until his death, was a major distributor of illegal drugs in the 1980s. Amassing a large fortune via his illicit business, he was directly responsible for thousands of deaths during a long and bloody war against the Colombian government, which included terrorist bombings of airliners, the storming of the Supreme Court, and hundreds of assassinations of police officers, journalists, and even presidential candidates.
His life and crimes, along with the investigators Murphy, Peña, and the countless police officers in Colombia who worked alongside American authorities who tracked Escobar down, were dramatized for the Netflix series about to enter its third season.
Murphy put the fight against Escobar into perspective, reminding the audience that if it were on American soil the threat the narcoterrorist posed in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s would have drawn in American military forces.
“Think about how we would respond if someone declared war on our country,” Murphy said. “He was so powerful, he was able to do that twice.”
Their presentation gave some insight into both their lives and the life of Escobar during his years of power leading up to his death.
Along with providing inside looks into Escobar’s large ranch and “The Cathedral,” his private prison in Colombia he built and stayed in deal with the Colombian government, they also provided a look at the many people who helped Escobar succeed in the drug trade.
One item Murphy said early on was embellished was the opening of his own entrance into the Netflix series telling the story of the hunt for Escobar. The series shows him chasing down drug dealers on the streets of Miami in 1979, when in real life Murphy was still a small town cop working in West Virginia.
“They make us sound like a big deal, but we’re really not,” said Murphy. “We come from small towns that are actually smaller than Cedartown.”
He added that in 1979, he “wished I had been chasing drug dealers in Miami.”
They also fielded questions from the audience about the making of ‘Narcos,’ some real insider information on the case, and more.
Prior to the start of the presentation on Aug. 26, Murphy and Peña also took time out to do something they hadn’t before in their shows around the world in honoring a DEA agent who died in the line of duty in the continuing war on drugs.
In the audience in Cedartown was t he mother and step-father of DEA Special Agent James “Terry” Watson, who died while serving in Colombia. They paid special tribute to Watson’s service before they went into the details of the Escobar case.
The pair made their way to Cedartown via a relationship with two locals that started back in the late 1980s right here in Polk County, when then-GBI agent J.P. Foster was involved in a case involving a drug- smuggling ring.
Back then, Foster and his wife Sherri were partners involved in the investigation, and during that time the GBI sent him to south Florida where the cocaine he was tracking was coming into the United States via the Miami/South Florida area, via the jungles of Colombia where it was being grown and processed for sale across the globe.
Foster received assistance on the case from the Drug Enforcement Agency, which is how he met Murphy. The pair collaborated on a variety of investigative tasks.
“We were much younger then, and we got to know each other well,” Foster said. “Then a few years later in 1991, he was transferred to work in Colombia, which is how he got involved in the investigation into Pablo Escobar.”
Murphy’s involvement with the Cedartown case helped lead to 50 indictments on a local level and millions of dollars in drugs and money seized at the time, Foster said. Later, Murphy’s work with Peña in Colombia ended with Escobar dead on a rooftop in Medellin in 1993.
Since their retirement from the DEA, pair have also been busy in other ways, lending their time to charities, training with the U.S. Navy Seals via a consulting business, and more recently touring around with their story.
Murphy and Peña said they didn’t mind the busy schedule, since it was something they were already used to doing in their past lives.
“It’s a great job to have in retirement, because we get to travel around the world and meet great people everyday,” Peña said.
Their presentation also provided a clear message that the destruction in Colombia could have been avoided had it not been for the world’s addiction to cocaine, one that continues today.
“It’s our way to continue to bring an anti-drug message to the world, one that is important,” Murphy said. “We’ve seen firsthand what illegal drugs can do to a society, and we don’t want to see that happen here in the United States.”
Those who want to hear the entire story behind Murphy and Peña’s investigation will have to go find them at their next scheduled event, for which a schedule can be found on their website at www.deanarcos.com.