When the Lufthansa plane carrying the family of Pablo Escobar finally landed in Frankfurt, Germany, on a Sunday afternoon in November 1993, it was forced to taxi to a remote spot on an alternate runway, out of the view of press waiting in the terminal.
Colombian President Cesar Gaviria had been on the phone to officials in Spain and Germany, urging them to refuse the Escobars. He explained that if the family was safely removed from Colombia, there would be another vicious bombing campaign by Pablo Escobar.
It was not the kind of request from a head of state that other nations were likely to ignore. There was nothing to be gained by Spain, Germany or any other country in allowing entry to the family of such a notorious outlaw.
German Interior Ministry officials drove out to the plane to process the other passengers' passports and immigration documents, including those of DEA Special Agent Kenny Magee and the Colombian police colonel flying with him. A bus took them to the terminal.
The Escobars were taken by another bus to an office in the international section. Maria Victoria, Escobar's wife, who was carrying $80,000 and large amounts of gold and jewelry, asked for a lawyer and was provided one. The family immediately petitioned for political asylum, then waited through another long night for a ruling.
Magee was met in the main terminal by two DEA colleagues based in Germany and they, too, waited through the night. Early the next morning, the Escobars' petition was denied. The family was escorted by heavily armed German police back out to a Bogota-bound plane that had been kept waiting for two hours.
Also escorted to the plane were three men believed to be personal family bodyguards, whom the German authorities described as "thugs." Magee boarded the plane with four German immigration officers assigned to escort the family back to Colombia. He sat two rows in front of the family and across the aisle.
At some point during this long flight home, the DEA agent sat down with the German immigration officers in the smoking section of the plane. They had seized the Escobars' passports and had agreed to allow Magee to photograph them. He took the passports into one of the plane's lavatories, laid them out on the narrow counter and snapped a photo of each. As he pulled the door open, sticking the passports in his back pocket, he was startled to encounter Escobar's son, Juan Pablo, standing in the doorway. The teenager was just waiting to use the toilet.
Juan Pablo and the rest of the family looked exhausted. They had been on planes or in airports since Saturday afternoon, and all they had managed was to fly in one enormous circle. When the Lufthansa flight landed again at El Dorado airport in Bogota, the weary Escobars were escorted off the plane and turned over once again to Colombian authorities.
Magee inspected the seats where the family had been sitting. He found several large empty envelopes with large dollar amounts written on them, two credit cards, and a discarded note that read in English: "We have a friend in Frankfurt. He says he will be looking for us so he can help us. . . . Tell him to call Gustavo de Greiff" - Colombia's top federal prosecutor. Magee assumed it was a note they had hoped to pass to someone at the airport in Frankfurt, but they had never reached the terminal.
After the family was taken into custody at the airport, Colombia's defense minister ordered de Greiff to drop his office's official protection of them. The Escobars were escorted by the National Police to the Tequendama Hotel in Bogota, a large modern complex that included retail shops and an apartment tower. Guests of the hotel and residents of the apartment tower began fleeing when word spread that Escobar's family was staying there, much to the dismay of the hotel's management and nearby shop owners.
Exhausted and frightened, Maria Victoria told government officials that she did not wish to return to Medellin, and pleaded to be sent anywhere in the world outside Colombia. She said she was tired of living with her husband's problems, and just wanted to live in peace with her children.
Escobar phoned the hotel not long after the family arrived, conveying a brief message to Juan Pablo.
"Stay put there," he said. "Put pressure on the authorities to leave for another country, call Human Rights, the United Nations."
As if to tighten the screws on Escobar, Los Pepes chose this day of his family's return to Colombia to issue another public pronouncement. In a communique to the press, the vigilantes said they could no longer respect the government's wish that they desist and were going to resume actions against Escobar.
Escobar responded bitterly. On Nov. 30, he wrote a letter to the men he suspected of leading the vigilante group. Among those he listed were Col. Hugo Martinez, commander of the police Search Bloc hunting Escobar; the "DIJIN Members in Antioquia" (the Search Bloc); Miguel and Gilberto Rodriguez Orejuela, purported leaders of the rival Cali drug cartel; and Fidel and Carlos Castano, the paramilitary leaders who secretly had been cooperating with the Search Bloc.
He sealed the letter with his thumbprint, and forwarded it to his few remaining front men for public release:
Mister Pepes:
The communique you produced today is full of lies, deceit and falsities, like all the previous ones. You promise to reappear but the truth is that you have always been active because just a few days ago you perpetrated kidnappings, murders and dynamite bombings. . . .
You say in your lying communique that you have never attacked my family and I ask you: Why did you bomb the building where my mother lived? Why did you kidnap my nephew Nicolas? Why did you torture and strangle my brother in law Carlos Henao? Why did you try to kidnap my sister Gloria? You have always characterized yourselves by being hypocrites and liars . . .
The prosecutor's office has a lot of evidence against you. . . . The government knows that [the Search Bloc] is the Pepes' military branch, the same one that massacres innocent young men at street corners.
I have been raided 10,000 times. You haven't been at all. Everything is confiscated from me. Nothing is taken away from you. The government will never offer a warrant for you. The government will never apply faceless justice to criminal and terrorist policemen.
What credibility can Colonel Martinez have . . . if he himself planted a revolver and dynamite in my lawyer's car so he would appear to be a terrorist? The same colonel who tortured and murdered lawyers is now promoted to brigadier. What can be expected of people like you, who don't even show respect for honor and truth?
Regards Pepes.
Pablo Escobar
Copy to national and foreign media, the President, Minister of Defense, Prosecutor . . .
The Colombian police finally had members of Escobar's family exactly where they wanted them. Now that they were out from under the official protection of Fiscal General de Greiff, Escobar's wife and children were in the hands of Los Pepes as far as the fugitive was concerned. The police knew Escobar would be frantic.
Police at the hotel reported hearing Escobar's little girl, Manuela, singing a Christmas carol to herself as she wandered the empty complex. She had substituted the traditional chorus with one of her own that went, in part, "Los Pepes want to kill my father, my family, and me."
After Hugo Martinez's success in tracking down a Medellin drug dealer with his police unit's high-tech gear, his father gave him a few days off to visit his wife and children in Bogota. But on Hugo's first night back, in late November 1993, Pablo Escobar started issuing phone threats, which were traced to a neighborhood in Medellin.
It was bad luck and good luck. Hugo was disappointed at having to cut short his vacation - he flew back to Medellin early the next morning - but he was also excited. He had full confidence again in his unit's special direction-finding equipment, and he knew that with the Escobar family being held at the Tequendama Hotel in Bogota, Pablo would be worried and on the phone often.