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We live in a world that has become
somewhat fascinated with drug lords.
After all, one of the most popular series
on Netflix is Narcos.
But, although those shows are entertaining,
we sometimes forget that they're based on real people,
who did some insane and really bad things.
People who built an entire empire off of illegal drugs.
(soft piano jazz)
- (maniacal laughter)
- Here are the 10 most notorious drug kingpins of all time.
Number 10 is Augustus Owsley Stanley.
The Oxford English Dictionary added the word 'owsley,'
which means the purest form of LSD,
named after Augustus Owsley Stanley.
Owsley first tried LSD back in 1964
while listening to Meet the Beatles!,
which inspired him to teach himself how to make the drug
and manufacture the greatest acid ever made.
He provided the original LSD
for the Merry Pranksters' acid tests,
and was the first sound guy for The Grateful Dead.
He was considered to be magic personified,
and funded the band's early days with LSD's greatest hits,
like Monterey Purple and White Lightening.
He was a megalomaniac who controlled
the hippie underground throughout the 1960s,
that is until his arrest at the end of 1967.
So by the time he got out of prison in 1972,
The Grateful Dead had moved on.
Here's a little tiny PSA for you,
you might have an issue if
the dictionary names a drug after you.
Might wanna slow down a little bit.
Number nine is Griselda Blanco.
Griselda Blanco is one of the most violent drug lords
in history, and pioneered the Columbian sourced
cocaine trade from Miami in the 1970s and 80s.
Sometimes called 'black widow' for killing her husbands,
she was a key member of Pablo Escobar's Medellín Cartel,
working with the Cocaine Cowboys,
bringing in 80 million dollars US a month
by the early 1980s.
Blanco was instrumental in the Miami drug war,
a battle for control of the lucrative trade,
and was responsible for at least 200 murders
before she was finally apprehended in 1985.
Now you might think, "Oh, it's over.
"She didn't get any farther."
Nope, she actually continued to traffic in prison
until her release 20 years later.
Listen, I know I'm behind bars,
but I still got that good-good.
The irony in this is that the godmother finally met
her grisly end on September 3rd, 2012 by being shot
by a motorcycle gunman, the assassination method
that she's credited for inventing.
Number eight is Frank Lucas.
Frank Lucas was known as 'Superfly',
because he was a badass black gangster,
who bypassed the New York Italian mafia
and ended up dominating the heroin game in the early 1970s.
After his mentor, Harlem mob boss Bumpy Johnson, died,
he took over the syndicate and leveraged contacts
that he made in Southeast Asia to get heroin
right from the source.
He used his army within the US Army
to fly his product on military transport,
sometimes in soldiers' coffins from Vietnam.
No, don't, don't look in there!
It's just, it's a dead body.
It's scary, so don't look in there.
But Lucas was also a brilliant marketer,
labeling his product 'blue magic'.
So with the best product and the best marketing,
he was making millions of dollars a month.
He was also a master at laundering his money
into legitimate businesses, notorious for the cruelty
to the competition, and had half the NYPD on his payroll.
Unfortunately, that corruption is what led
to a probe and ultimately his downfall.
Number seven is Christopher Coke.
Okay seriously, his last name was coke?
He couldn't have picked something
a little more inconspicuous?
In June of 2010, Jamaican and US authorities
had finally apprehended the notorious Christopher Coke,
the leader of The Shower Posse.
When they found him, he was dressed as a woman
at a roadblock outside Kingston,
but prior to his arrest, Coke, known as Dudus,
had amassed a fortune upwards of 30 billion dollars
from smuggling guns, cocaine, and marijuana
into the United States and Canada.
The Shower Posse's name derives from showering
their supporters with gifts, particularly the poor,
who considered him like Robin Hood,
and their enemies with bullets.
Coke's arrest and prosecution became a major headache
for Jamaica's prime minister Bruce Golding,
Coke's childhood friend.
Dudus was eventually extradited to the United States
in June of 2012, and sentenced to 23 years.
If he wants to be that obvious,
why didn't he just change his last name to
'Definitely Not Doing Anything Illegal.'
Yes, Christopher 'I'm Definitely Not Doing Anything Illegal'
'cause it's just as obvious.
Number six is Robert Platshorn.
Today, you can buy medical marijuana pretty much anywhere
in the United States with the proper ID,
but 40 years ago reefer madness was a real thing.
That made it profitable for entrepreneurs
like Robert Platshorn, who ran the Black Tuna Gang,
the original weed ballers.
Big Tuna, as he was known, had dozens of yachts,
fleets of aircraft, private airstrips,
and 300 million dollars in profit.
What makes it really impressive
is that he ran it all from his penthouse
in Miami Beach's swanky Fontainebleau hotel.
Boop bip boop, ring ring.
Oh hi there, can I get a grilled cheese sent up,
and also can you ship out a kilo of coke for me?
He was finally nabbed in Columbia in 1977
in a DC-3 loaded with two tons of marijuana,
destined to fly back to Florida,
and was the first pot dealer
to be prosecuted under the Kingpin Statute.
However, today he's now free and Big Tuna is back
in the game promoting medicinal marijuana
to the Florida elderly as part of his Silver Tour.
I love how this guy reformed,
but he's still called Big Tuna.
Hey Big Tuna, what's happenin'?
Number five is Manuel Noriega.
Back in the 1980s when the Cold War was still going on,
the CIA supported just about anyone
that helped their proxy wars against the USSR,
fighting communist upstarts around the world.
For a while, the United States employed
democracy Panamanian general Manuel Noriega,
who served as a CIA spy and was involved
in the Iran-Contra scandal, swapping guns for drugs
with the Nicaraguan contras.
He ended up becoming the military dictator of Panama
from 1983 to 1989, running a narco-kleptocracy
with the implicit approval of the United States.
This is because while drugs are bad, communism is worse.
In 1985, he nullified a general election to maintain power,
and after providing support to Cuba's Fidel Castro
and Libya's Muammar Gaddafi, President George HW Bush
finally had it, and the United States
invaded Panama and arrested Noriega in 1990.
Uh, yeah, George Bush here, ain't gonna do it,
not gonna be prudent, better take 'em down.
Number four is Ricky Ross.
Not the rapper, not the (grunts),
not him, this is the real guy.
Americans have 'Freeway Rick' Ross to thank
for the crack cocaine epidemic of the 1980s and 90s
that led to all those hyper-colored
'Just Say No' commercials.
Freeway Rick could've actually been a tennis star,
but he was functionally illiterate,
so after his scholarship prospects dried up,
he turned to selling cocaine
and cornered the Los Angeles market.
Then, he met Oscar Danilo Blandón Reyes,
a Nicaraguan financing the Contra Revolution
with Columbia cocaine, smuggled into the United States
on military planes, which, by the way,
he sold to Ross at bargain basement prices.
Ross was buying 400 kilos of cheap coke a week,
and with the advent of crack, he was making
two to three million dollars a day.
He was conquering American cities by undercutting
his competition, creating a generation of crack babies
and almost got out clean, but his
greed led to his arrest in 1989.
He also spawned pretty decent rapper.
(grunts) Rosé!
Number three is Amado Carrillo.
Known as the lord of the skies, Amado Carrillo Fuentes
had a fleet of 22 commercial airliners, private jets,
and decommissioned military aircraft,
to transport cocaine from Columbia
to the United States through Mexico.
Originally the son of a peasant,
he filled the vacuum left by the collapse
of Pablo Escobar's Medellín Cartel
and the Cali Cartel in the mid-1990s.
He became the largest shipper of cocaine in the world,
and Fuentes may have been on the DEA hit list,
but he was a folk hero for many in Mexico,
and not just the poor people, in fact especially
to the countless local, state, and federal
government officials, whom he paid
100 million a month in bribes.
That wasn't even that much to him,
because he was worth over 25 billion dollars.
He ended up dying during a botched plastic surgery
to change his appearance, but even in death he was a lord,
so the failed surgeons wound up
being stuffed inside oil drums.
(Spanish accent) Hello señor, can I please get nose job?
And if you screw it up, you die.
(laughs) Okay, let's do it.
Number two is Joaquín Guzmán.
El Chapo, which means 'shortie',
Guzmán was the largest importer
of cocaine, marijuana, methamphetamine,
and heroin, making him a billionaire.
Raised in a narco-family, Guzmán was busted in 1993,
where he lived comfortably until his elaborate
escape in 2001 that involved bribing 78 people
and two million dollars to an engineer.
By 2003, as head of the Sinaloa Cartel,
El Chapo was the most powerful drug lord
in the crowded Mexican trade.
But in 2006 he assassinated a rival cartel leader,
starting the Mexican Drug War.
This war led to more than 60 thousand violent murders.
El Chapo was eventually captured again in 2014,
but in July of 2015 he made an even more elaborate
prison escape, with underground train tracks,
threatened Donald Trump while on the lam,
and was apprehended again in January of 2016
and extradited to the United States.
Man, this guy's like a drug lord ninja.
He's like "I'm over here, now you gotta catch me over here."
(high pitched mocking noise)
And number one is Pablo Escobar.
Like I said, if you watch Netflix, you knew this was comin'.
No discussion of the most notorious drug lords
would be complete without the narco-terrorist Pablo Escobar,
the world's greatest outlaw.
Saint Pablo, as he was known to the poor,
ran the Medellín Cartel during the 1970s,
and was the source of 80% of the cocaine
flowing into the United States.
Peaking his business at 15 tons per day,
the DEA shot him on a rooftop in 1993.
But in 1989, Forbes magazine declared him
the seventh richest man in the world,
with an estimated fortune of over 25 billion dollars
that he tried to make legitimate
by muscling his way into the Columbian Congress.
In addition to the countless rivals
Escobar's violent crew killed,
he assassinated 30 judges, over 400 police officers,
and 110 people in the bombing of the Avianca flight 203,
trying to assassinate the Columbian president,
which turned the public tide against him.
See kids, never become a drug lord.
You'll just end up dying horribly.
You'll get a special or two named
after you, but you're gonna die.
So those were the 10 most notorious
drug kingpins of all time.
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Thank you guys for watching,
(Spanish accent) and I'll see you later, bye bye.