Dolly knew exactly how to hurt Escobar. In a series of debriefings conducted in Washington and recorded by the DEA, she outlined in detail Escobar's entire criminal organization. She was impatient with what she considered the gentle tactics employed by the Search Bloc, which was authorized to go after only those suspected of criminal activity. Dolly wanted to go after everyone associated with Escobar, his family members, his lawyers, anyone. She wanted people killed.
She gave the names of the key members of Escobar's inner circle. If they had been indicted, she said, they should be arrested. If not, she suggested, they should be killed.
Dolly listed five lawyers who, she said, 'handle Escobar's criminal and financial problems and are worse than Escobar. These attorneys negotiate with the Colombian government on his behalf and are fully aware of the scope of activities since he consults them before he carries out any action.'
She provided a list of Escobar's most prized properties and assets, his antique cars, country homes, apartments, aircraft and airports.
Dolly also offered what she considered helpful advice on how to bring Escobar out into the open, where he could be trapped and killed: 'He needs to be provoked, or angered and made desperate so that he wants to strike back. . . . Escobar may then make mistakes,' a DEA memo said, quoting Dolly. She recommended confiscating his assets - or destroying them.
The memo said Dolly also advised, wrongly as it turned out, that Escobar would attribute any deaths of his associates not to the authorities, but to the rival Cali cartel. 'As a result,' Dolly predicted, according to the DEA memo, 'the Escobar organization would turn on itself and begin killing itself again.'
There was one other piece of advice proffered by Dolly Moncada: Perhaps the U.S. should take another look at some Colombian drug traffickers held in American prisons. Although these narcos had been talking to U.S. authorities in hopes of earning reduced sentences, Dolly said, they knew a lot more than they were telling about Pablo Escobar.
After her husband was murdered by his former boss Pablo Escobar, Dolly Moncada began providing valuable information to the Americans who were helping direct and finance the hunt for the fugitive drug lord. Among her suggestions was that the authorities talk to Colombian drug traffickers held in American jails.
Soon after Dolly was debriefed by the DEA in Washington, D.C., in late 1992, an incentive was offered to jailed Colombian drug dealer Carlos Lehder, a former associate of Escobar's. Lehder, seeking a reduced sentence, responded with his own suggestions for closing in on his former ally.
In a letter to the DEA from federal prison in Leavenworth, Kan., where he had been given a new identity under the federal witness protection program, Lehder recommended that the Americans create a Colombian 'freedom fighters brigade, controlled by the DEA, and independent of the Colombian politicians, police or army.' Lehder wrote that 'the rich, the poor, the peasant, the political left, center and right are willing to cooperate' in the effort to bring Escobar down.
Of more immediate use was Lehder's description of Escobar's daily routine while in hiding - how he would move from safe house to safe house, how he would almost certainly stay close to his home base in and around Medellin. He drew a crude map and provided insights into Escobar's habits and preferences:
'Escobar is strictly a ghetto person, not a farm or jungle person. . . . Escobar always tries to keep within distance range for his cellular phone to reach Medellin's phone base. That's approximately 100 miles, so he can call any time.
'Generally, P. Escobar occupies the main house with some of his hit men, radio operator (Big High Frequency radio receiver), cooks, hores [whores] and messengers. For transportation they have jeeps, motorcycles and sometimes a boat. I have never seen him riding a horse. Escobar gets up at 1 or 2 p.m. and goes to sleep at 1 or 2 a.m.
'Fugitive Escobar uses from 15 to 30 security guards, with arms and WT [walkie-talkies]. Two shifts of 12 hours each. Two at the main road entrance, some along the road, the rest around the perimeter of the main house (one mile) and one at his door. . . .
'The main house always has two or three gateway paths which run to the forest and thus toward a second hideout or near a river where a boat is located, or a tent with supplies and radios. Escobar is an obese man, certainly not a muscle man or athlete. He could not run 15 minutes without respiratory trouble. Unfortunately, the military police has never used hunting dogs against him.'
Lehder told the agents that any time the lookouts on the far perimeter saw a vehicle approaching or a low- flying airplane or helicopter, they would 'scream through those walkie-talkies' and Escobar would immediately flee.
In addition to Dolly Moncada and Lehder, the DEA noted with approval the cooperation of another former Escobar associate with a grudge. Colombian paramilitary leader Fidel Castano was a charismatic assassin who occasionally exported drugs and smuggled diamonds. A onetime friend of Escobar's who had helped him hide during the government's first war against the narcos, Castano turned against Escobar after the murders of Castano's friends, the drug-dealing Moncada and Galeano brothers.
In a dispatch to DEA headquarters on Feb. 22, 1993, DEA agent Javier Pena identified Castano as 'a cooperating individual who was once a trusted Pablo Escobar associate.' He reported that Castano had actually accompanied the Search Bloc on a raid 10 days earlier, when one of the unit's top officers drowned as the raiding parties crossed the Cauca River. Castano had reportedly made heroic efforts to rescue the man.
In Castano, Lehder and the Moncada and Galeano families, the hunt for Escobar had gained allies willing to play by the bloody rules of Medellin's underworld. The Colombian government and the U.S. Embassy used them throughout the fall and winter of 1992 to gather information about Escobar and his organization.
As early as September, the search effort seemed to be acting on Dolly Moncada's suggestion to go after Escobar's lawyers. On Sept. 26, the Search Bloc raided an estate owned by Escobar's attorney, Santiago Uribe, one of those named by Dolly. The raiders were in the process of ransacking the place when Uribe himself drove up. He was arrested and questioned.
Uribe acknowledged that he was one of Escobar's lawyers but denied knowing his fugitive client's whereabouts. Among Uribe's files the Search Bloc found letters from Escobar and tapes linking him to drug dealing, bribes and murder - including the assassination just days before of Judge Myrian Velez, one of the 'faceless' judges in Medellin, who had been appointed, supposedly in secret, to investigate the murder of a crusading newspaper editor. Velez had been preparing to indict Escobar as the 'intellectual author' of the murder.
The evidence added to the government's criminal case against Escobar, but by now few in the government - and virtually no one within the Search Bloc - were talking about arresting Escobar and putting him on trial. As a
