In late 1984, cocaine transformed from a rich man’s luxury into the cheapest high in America. A crack epidemic swept through poor neighborhoods in Miami, Houston, San Diego, New York, and Los Angeles. By the end of 1985, another million Americans were hooked, and the streets were torn apart by crime and gang warfare. The long-term effects were a ticking time bomb: babies born to crack users, the so-called crack babies.
Drugs were menacing society, threatening values, and killing children. The DEA faced one big question: who was responsible for smuggling this lethal drug into the country? The answers began to surface during a raid on a house in Van Nuys, California. Agents found $1.
9 million and about 174 kilos of cocaine. But they also found incriminating documents. Ledgers inside the apartment indicated that in the last nine months alone, nearly one and a half tons of cocaine worth $73 million had been smuggled into the US and stored in that house. Most importantly, buried in the ledgers was the nickname of the supplier: El Negro, the black one.
That was the code name used by Juan Ramón Matta-Ballesteros, known to the DEA as a low-level Honduran drug smuggler. Up until now, his name had never been linked to any major cocaine shipments. This new information put him right in the DEA’s crosshairs. Agent Mike Vigil was appointed to hunt Ballesteros down.
Vigil knew it would be no easy task. This was a man who had hundreds of millions of dollars, so he could travel and hide anywhere. He was a very elusive drug trafficker. But Vigil had a spectacular track record.
Across his career, he had seized over 100 tons of marijuana, cocaine, and heroin in countries as far-ranging as Colombia, Mexico, and Afghanistan. He was the perfect guy to bring Ballesteros to justice. “We were coming after Matta-Ballesteros, no question,” Vigil said. “Justice may be blind, but she has a very long reach.
”
Matta-Ballesteros started his life of crime as a kid on the poverty-stricken streets of Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras. His mother was very poor. His father had either died or abandoned the family. The mother sold fruit, small amounts of vegetables, and penny candy.
Surviving on the streets of Tegucigalpa was tough, and Ballesteros had to learn to live by his wits. He began his career as a delinquent by committing petty crimes, basically making his living picking pockets. Theft was one of his specialties. In a bid to escape the poverty of his home city, Matta moved to Colombia, where he started working for the criminal underworld.
He was smuggling gems, the best emeralds in the world. Smuggling across Latin American borders was dangerous work; bandits and crooked cops could be lethal. But Ballesteros had nerves of steel. He earned a reputation for getting the job done, and using his contacts in the Colombian underworld, he quickly graduated to smuggling drugs into the US.
But that’s when his rapid rise as a gangster hit the skids. Matta-Ballesteros flew into Dallas Airport carrying two dozen kilos of cocaine in his luggage. At trial, he claimed the drugs were put there by someone else. He dodged the smuggling charges but was found guilty of another crime: illegal entry into the United States using false documents.
He was sent to Eglin Air Force Base, a minimum security prison in Florida, to serve five years. But five months later, the low-level drug smuggler somehow escaped and returned to South America. This was significant. It may have given him some standing in the Latin American drug trade to have been in prison in the United States and to have escaped and come back to Latin America.
By the mid-70s, Ballesteros turned up in Cali, Colombia, a city known for its cocaine trafficking. Matta was already married, but as a cocaine packer, he met Nancy Vasquez, a young woman whose family had links to the Cali Cartel. The two fell in love and got married. Through his second wife, the smuggler was introduced to the Cali kingpins.
The drug lords were impressed by the cool-headed Honduran and put Ballesteros to work as a cocaine chemist. A cocaine chemist takes the coca leaves and turns them into coca paste and then into refined cocaine that can be sold. It was something that a person like Matta, who had very little formal education, could become skilled at. He carried through on his obligations.
Little by little, he built a reputation for being very, very trustworthy. Eager to expand their cocaine network into the US, the Cali Cartel bosses decided to send Ballesteros to Medellin to open negotiations with a rival cartel run by Pablo Escobar about a joint venture. It was a risky move, but the Honduran chemist seemed to have a magic touch. Even though he was not formally educated, he was street smart.
He was savvy, and he had an amazing ability to manipulate people. He had a charisma and an authority which was hard to match. Now entrenched with both the Cali and Medellin Cartels, Ballesteros was in a unique position. He had a formidable network that grew by leaps and bounds as he became more wealthy and more influential.
His ever-widening network of key contacts gave him the idea to set up his own drug smuggling operation. He knew that cocaine fetched very high profits, and he wanted part of that. So, Matta linked up with two small-time Honduran smugglers, Mary and Mario Ferrari. He set up his own operation to process and smuggle cocaine into the US for the Colombian cartels.
It was a small operation, and Ballesteros often had to smuggle the drugs himself. But while he was away on a trip to Colombia, Ballesteros received troubling news. It seemed that the Ferraris had stolen half a million dollars from him. Ballesteros reacted immediately by cutting all ties with the Ferraris.
Mario vowed to get his revenge. In Colombia, Matta heard the devastating news that his first wife had been sexually assaulted. Enraged, Matta plotted his immediate revenge. He hired thugs to kidnap the Ferrari couple.
The Ferraris were brought to meet face-to-face with Matta. They were tortured. Despite his brutal payback, the drug smuggler refused to have the couple killed on site. He instructed his underlings to take them back to Honduras and to kill them both and to bury them there, because he believed that everyone should die on their native land.
Over the next decade, Griselda Blanco’s drug smuggling empire grew exponentially. Anyone who stood in his way was exterminated. We know that Matta was suspected of more than a dozen murders in Colombia as well as multiple murders in Honduras. Matta was a complete psychopath.
If he had to kill someone that was a threat to his drug empire, he would do it without flinching. In the 1970s, the cocaine supply route into the US had been through the Caribbean into Miami. Colombian traffickers persuaded friends and girlfriends to smuggle cocaine in their luggage. They took a few kilos, put them in suitcases, and shipped them off to Antigua, an island in the Caribbean.
Meanwhile, a girlfriend and a friend of hers flew down to Antigua with suitcases, swapped the suitcases, and brought back the cocaine. It worked. Back in the US, the women handed the suitcase to distributors in exchange for cash. Just one 50-kilo shipment netted them $2.
2 million. When US border controls got wise to it, new methods of smuggling cocaine into the US were quickly devised by stashing the drugs where no one would look. They were creating garments that would allow the drugs to be more smooth around the body, looking like a woman’s natural figure. They selected only women as mules, trained to flaunt their sexuality to distract the border guards.
They would encourage the women to dress very attractively, to be flirtatious with customs agents and immigration agents. The drug mules carried the cocaine aboard flights direct to the heart of Miami and New York. Each woman held 1 kilo of cocaine, $10,000 in net profit. To a regular customs guy, the drug mules were just especially voluptuous.
No one was going to suspect that a young woman who was very nicely dressed was going to be wearing a bra padded with cocaine. Soon traffickers realized they could also exploit America’s unprotected coastline to smuggle cocaine in ever-increasing volumes. With a coastline 8,500 miles long, Florida was wide open to drug shipments arriving by sea from South America. With the help of local law enforcement and the US Coast Guard, many of the drug shipments were intercepted.
But that still didn’t stop the traffickers. Instead of shipping cocaine by sea from Colombia, islands in the Bahamas were used as depots. The Bahamas at that time had 110 small boat harbors, over 700 islands, and 100 airstrips, which was a smuggler’s paradise. Cocaine shipments arriving from Colombia were transferred to light aircraft, which took off for the short flight to Florida.
Commercial flights were leaving, and they were piggybacking underneath these commercial flights and avoiding radar. The drug pilots headed for secret landing sites. These planes were landing on clandestine airstrips out in the Everglades. They would throw duffel bags of cocaine out to waiting counterparts who would then get the cocaine, jump in vehicles and drive off, and then the plane would just take off again.
By the late ’70s, the DEA, using Navy and Coast Guard radar, had become so good at tracking these aircraft that the routes into the US were closing down. At that same time, the Mexican Guadalajara Cartel wanted to partner with the Colombians. They wanted reliable access to large quantities of cocaine that they could then move across the US border. Since the 1960s, the Mexican cartels had made billions of dollars smuggling marijuana and heroin into the US.
But they had been watching cocaine profits skyrocket from a distance. One Mexican in particular was hungry to get in on the action. His name was Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, boss of the Guadalajara Cartel. Gallardo was known as the Godfather of Mexican drug trafficking at the time.
He had many officials that he was paying off for protection, and he had tremendous pipelines into the United States that could be used. But with drug routes through the Caribbean largely shut down by the DEA, Ballesteros suggested another way to skin this cat. Matta offered to become the middleman between the Colombian and Guadalajara Cartels. On a trip to Mexico, Ballesteros agreed to try out a small test shipment of cocaine with Gallardo.
Ballesteros would smuggle it from Colombia through Honduras to Mexico. Then, using his elaborate network of trucks, cars, and tunnels, Gallardo would get the drugs across the border into the US. If there were any kinks, they could fix them before shipping tons. The plan went off without a hitch, and the new allies immediately scaled up their smuggling operation.
They were shipping tons of cocaine on a monthly basis, averaging probably $5 to $10 million every week. The only problem for Ballesteros now was how to launder the drug millions he was making. Matta started to create businesses in Honduras. He started a tobacco plantation, construction companies.
He had a huge cattle industry. He was such a large businessman that he actually made a difference on the Honduras GDP. He was employing as many as 5,000 people, making him the largest single private employer in the country. As his empire grew, Ballesteros permanently sealed his relationship with Gallardo.
Like feudal kings that wanted to ensure loyalty, he had Felix Gallardo baptize his son Ramon Jr. By the early 1980s, Juan Matta Ballesteros was one of the most successful cocaine smugglers of all time, with the money and muscle to maintain it. He had the ability to use bribes, bullets, and intimidation. In his home country of Honduras, he used his vast wealth to buy off key officials.
But Matta also cultivated the loyalty of ordinary Hondurans. Matta Ballesteros followed the lead of Pablo Escobar in playing the role of a Robin Hood. He built new homes and schools for the poor. He did in fact provide thousands of Hondurans with jobs.
This strategic generosity was just another way to make sure he stayed on top. He was basically taking out a security policy. With the help of Matta’s Honduran channels, by 1980, Felix Gallardo’s Guadalajara Cartel was swamping the US with cocaine and its cheaper derivative, crack. But whilst Gallardo was on the DEA’s radar, they had no idea about Matta’s role in his operation.
As far as the DEA was concerned, Matta was just a low-level smuggler. But all that changed in 1981 following the raid on a cocaine distribution depot in Van Nuys, California. The ledgers revealed that El Negro, Matta Ballesteros, was smuggling $8 million of cocaine a month into the US. The DEA assigned Mike Vigil to their Guadalajara office to begin tracking Matta’s movements.
Vigil and his fellow DEA agents knew Ballesteros must travel regularly between Colombia, Honduras, and Mexico. But he was an expert at staying hidden. Then, in February 1985, there was a major development. DEA agent Kiki Camarena, investigating Miguel Gallardo and his Guadalajara Cartel, was kidnapped, tortured, and murdered in Mexico.
The agency vowed to devote every possible resource to the hunt for his killers. 27 days after Camarena’s abduction, the DEA discovered he had been murdered and his body dumped on the outskirts of Guadalajara. There were signs of torture. And there was a hole in his skull that could not have been made by a bullet.
It had to be made by a blunt instrument because of the way in which the bone was shattered. Two months into the search, agents located the Guadalajara residence where Camarena was killed. The FBI sent a forensic team there, and they started to go through all of the evidence, both macro and microscopic. Among the evidence were several strands of hair, which were tested against an international criminal database.
It turned out several of them matched the hair of a drug smuggler still on file from his time in a Florida jail years earlier: Juan Matta-Ballesteros. They tied him to the residence where Kiki Camarena was tortured and killed. At that point in time, we came after him with a vengeance. Ballesteros’ capture was now a top priority.
But DEA agent Mike Vigil knew he was going to be harder to find than ever. Matta-Ballesteros was a student of the game; he knew that when Kiki Camarena was killed, we would be coming for him. DEA informants initially reported sightings of the drug kingpin in both Honduras and Spain. We started to initiate a number of wire intercepts in coordination with many foreign countries, and initially he fled into Central America and then into Europe.
Two months into the hunt, Vigil got a hot tip through wire intercepts that Ballesteros was hiding out in Colombia. The tip also delivered the telephone number of a Colombian cocaine dealer whom they suspected was in business with Ballesteros. His name was Jaime Garcia Garcia, and he was based in Cartagena. Vigil put a wiretap on Garcia’s phone hoping for more information on the elusive drug boss.
We immediately started getting some relevant conversations, primarily between Garcia and his maid. He called and said, “El Senor is coming. Make sure everything is ready. Make sure you have food.
” When they mentioned El Senor, it was like talking about God. Right then and there I knew that there was a very strong possibility that Matta Ballesteros was coming. It was enough for Vigil to take a chance and set up surveillance outside. I got a call from my agents in Cartagena, and they said there’s some unusual activity.
At that point in time I made the command decision: we’re going to hit this place. Vigil knew that if Ballesteros wasn’t there, the raid would blow their cover. I walked to the front door. I said, “We’re looking for weapons.
” I didn’t want to give them the appearance that we were there for Matta. He was very nervous and didn’t want to open the door. A few seconds later, who shows up at the window if not Matta Ballesteros? I immediately recognized him.
And he started to move away from the window, but I was not going to take any chances. It is the most dangerous part when you move through that door. He could have had bodyguards with AK-47s. Your adrenaline is rushing.
I yelled, “Get down! ” I was just going to shoot him. And he yelled out, “No, no, don’t shoot. ” He said, “I can get out of prison, but I cannot get out of a tomb.
”
After a year-long international manhunt, Ballesteros was finally in custody. The DEA and Colombian police searched Garcia’s house for evidence. Realizing he was out of options, Ballesteros made Vigil an extraordinary offer. He said, “Listen, I’m willing to pay $3 million if you release me.
” I told Matta Ballesteros to show up, and I said, “Even if he gave a bribe of a billion dollars, he was a murderer and drug trafficker and a scourge on mankind. There was no way that he was going to be released. ” Colombian police insisted that Ballesteros stand trial for drug trafficking offenses in Colombia, and that evening Ballesteros was put straight on a plane and flown from Cartagena to the capital, Bogota. He reached across the aisle and said, “Congratulations.
People have been after me for over 20 years, and you’re the first one that has been able to capture me. ” I felt good in that finally he was going to be paying for his transgressions to humankind. In Bogota, Colombia, Ballesteros was held pending trial at the La Picota Penitentiary. But Vigil knew that if the DEA was to secure a conviction against him in the US, he would have to be formally extradited, and that could take a very long time.
And Matta wasn’t going to wait around for that to happen. I was always very concerned about him escaping simply because he had so much wealth and the ability to generate bribes and the close ties that he had with both the Cali and the Medellin Cartels. While in prison in Colombia, Matta concocted an escape plan. But before he could go through with it, the guards got suspicious.
The prison director had a surprise inspection of his cell and thwarted that first plan. Two weeks later, the prison director was dead. The way was now clear for the kingpin to put his plan into action. Matta then pulled off perhaps his most audacious escape ever.
He bribed more than $2 million to 18 prison employees, disguised himself as a prison guard, and walked through seven security checkpoints in the Colombian prison. Matta’s associates took him to an airstrip north of Bogota. I thought that his words about being able to escape from prison and not from a tomb had come true. After chasing Ballesteros across Latin America, this breakout was a crushing blow.
And the DEA feared they may have lost this criminal mastermind forever. Suspicion immediately fell on the guards. They started to interrogate a lot of the prison guards, executing search warrants at their residences, and they found literally bulk currency that they had been paid. It goes back to the old saying of the mafia: plata or plomo, you either take silver or we’re going to fill you with lead.
I was very disappointed because I knew that we had expended a lot of time and energy. The DEA hunt was back to square one. But in 1986, Vigil got a break when informants spotted Ballesteros back in his homeland, Honduras. He went there knowing that he had been charged with the double homicide of Mario and Mary Ferrari, but very quickly he paid bribes and the charges were summarily dismissed.
Knowing Honduras had no extradition treaty with the US, the multimillionaire resumed his luxurious lifestyle. He began to live in a large house in Tegucigalpa, threw opulent parties, but he remained free to operate his drug empire. The DEA refused to give up the chase, but they knew they needed a heavyweight to bring Ballesteros in once and for all. Beginning his law enforcement career in 1965 with the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, Howard Safir rose through the ranks to become assistant director of the DEA in 1977 before joining the US Marshals Service as assistant director of operations.
Safir’s reputation for extracting the most elusive fugitives from countries all over the world was second to none. Jack Lawn, who was the administrator of DEA, approached the agents and said, “We’d like you to look for Ramon Matta Ballesteros. We want you to make it a priority. ” And I said, “Why, Jack?
” He said, “Because he was involved in the torture and murder of Kiki Camarena, and we really want him. ” Howard Safir was all in and geared up his own team of US Marshals to work alongside the DEA. The first thing we wanted to do was get an idea of where he was and what kind of protection and bodyguards he had. Ballesteros’ compound in Honduras was well protected, guarded by a small private militia.
And there was another major obstacle: the Marshals had no jurisdiction in Honduras. So, if they were going to extract Ballesteros, they would need the assistance of the Honduran military. But with Ballesteros’ political and military connections, that was going to be almost impossible. So, the Marshals approached the commander of the Honduran forces, General Amilcar Regalado.
It was very important that General Regalado believed that I was an important American official. He wanted to know he was dealing with somebody of substance in the US government. So, Safir came up with a plan. The US Marshal Service at the time had a 727 aircraft that was used to transport prisoners.
And we decided that if I flew down in that 727 to Tegucigalpa and got off that airplane and it was just myself, General Regalado would say, “If he can fly this major aircraft from the US to Honduras just to meet with me, he must be an important person. ”
Just as Safir suspected, the big plane worked its magic. General Regalado agreed to work with the Marshals on one condition. We needed to assure them that if they helped us, Matta Ballesteros would be put in jail for the rest of his life and wouldn’t be able to come back to Honduras and either harm them or their families.
Matta had become so powerful that the upper echelons of Honduran society feared him, and they no longer wanted him to be in the country. The General provided the Marshals with his elite strike force, the Cobras. They put Matta’s compound under intense surveillance. Protected by a private militia, Ballesteros was untouchable.
But they spotted a moment in his routine where he could be vulnerable. That’s when they would go in for the kill. I remember seeing photographs of him jogging. He would run about 6 miles every morning.
Sometimes he would run by himself, sometimes he would run with some bodyguards. And we came up with a plan where the Cobras would grab Matta Ballesteros while he was jogging. But there was still one big problem. Even if the Cobras captured Ballesteros, there was no extradition treaty between Honduras and the US.
And he still had the loyalty of many ordinary Hondurans. Somehow, the Marshals had to plot a way of legally getting Ballesteros out of Honduras and into the US without triggering a popular uprising. Frustrated, Safir played hardball. He warned the general to cooperate or else.
“If you decide that you’re not going to expel Matta Ballesteros, then we’re not going to give you US aid or drop the aid that you’re currently receiving. ” Faced with this ultimatum, the Honduran government finally made the call. They decided that they would give him up. The operation to capture Ballesteros was on.
The Honduran Cobras assembled. The plan was to snatch Ballesteros while he took his morning run before his guards realized what was going on. On the morning of the takedown, Matta Ballesteros was jogging along. Finally, Ballesteros was in custody and smuggled straight to the Dominican Republic.
As soon as he arrived at the airport, he would be deported by the Dominican authorities and legally extradited to America by the US Marshal Service. When Ballesteros arrived in the Dominican Republic, Howard Safir was waiting. After the long hunt and the months of hard work, it was the first time he had seen the ruthless drug lord face-to-face. And I just looked at him and said, “You’re going to the United States.
” I don’t know whether he understood me or not, but it made me feel really good. You have to send them the message that you can run, but you can’t hide. You’re never going to be free. We’re going to get you.
On the night of April the 5th, Juan Ramon Matta Ballesteros was escorted by US Marshals onto a flight from the Dominican Republic to New York. When news broke out in Honduras of Ballesteros’ arrest and extradition, the public was outraged. They broke into the US Embassy and burned some of the outbuildings. There were about five people killed.
There were riots that lasted for several days because Matta Ballesteros gave all these people money, and they were now losing their benefactor. 15 months after his arrest, Matta Ballesteros stood trial for conspiracy to distribute cocaine. The next time I saw Matta Ballesteros was in a federal courtroom. And I traveled there to testify against him.
He stared at me, kind of a glaring look, like if I could kill you, I would. And at one point, it seemed like that’s exactly what might happen. During the trial, the US Marshal Service received credible evidence that a bomb had been planted in the courthouse in an attempt to facilitate Matta Ballesteros’ escape. Well, they conducted a bomb sweep of the building with both electronic equipment and bomb dogs that would sniff out explosives.
Fortunately, no bomb was found, but security remained high as the trial continued. Six weeks later, the judge read out the verdict. It was a very dramatic moment in the courtroom as both sides waited for the judge to speak. “Guilty.
” I looked over at Matta Ballesteros, and you could see his head fall, his chin fall to his chest as he felt the impact of that moment. You’ll never live another day as a free man. Ballesteros was convicted of racketeering and sentenced to three concurrent life sentences plus 175 years. Matta Ballesteros would never see daylight again.
After his conviction in federal court, US prosecutors claimed that he was the most significant narcotics trafficker in custody in the world.
