foreign here we go today we have Steve Murphy and Javier Pena the two DEA agents responsible for hunting down and eventually killing Colombian drug lord and mass murderer Pablo Escobar both of whom were depicted in the Netflix series narcos played by Boyd Holbrook and Pedro Pascal welcome to Vlad TV thank you Vlad yeah appreciate it well it's your first time here so I want to start in the very beginning and I'm gonna I have both of your stories which run kind of separately and eventually kind of merge together so I'm gonna sort of start with
each of you and kind of work my way down okay so Steve I'll go ahead and start with you so you grew up in Memphis well I'm from Memphis I grew up in Murfreesboro which is just south of Nashville until I was going to high school and then my mom and dad are from West Virginia and they decided to move back home so I went to high school college in West Virginia so I tell the world I'm a cross between a redneck and a hillbilly okay and uh you went to college and then was it
your freshman year you decided to do an internship with law enforcement it is I went to start out at West Virginia University um with finished up my first semester my dad said he doesn't pay for academic probation had me come home ended up going to Bluefield State College which is now Bluefield State University and they just started their criminal justice program so I was one of the first enrollees in that and then the next summer so that was in the summer of 75 I was the first student to partake of their I did five weeks
with the sheriff's department on an internship in five weeks with the City PD okay what made you want to go into law enforcement because your dad was like a preacher right he was you know it's uh and after he resigned from them or retired from the ministry he and my uncle opened a carpet store in West Virginia that was one of the reasons they went back and I was the only son of both families and it was always expected that I would take over the business I don't know if you've ever done carpet work it
sucks it's hard work it's manual labor I didn't like it at all you know I was a teenager so you you know Dad was paying me to do it but you started off sweeping floors and cleaning the bathrooms and all that and then you had to work your way up you know my dad didn't believe in handing you anything you had to earn it but when I was 10 years old and I think this is in our book manhunters I think this is more in line with what got me interested in law enforcement when I
was about 10 year old 10 years old some buddies and I were camping out in our backyard in the summer in Tennessee and we're going on our bikes it's midnight one o'clock in the morning we're riding around the neighborhood and there's an all-night laundromat and we wanted to stop and get some sodas and some peanut butter crackers and of course nobody had any money so one of our guys said hey he said I got money in my house let's go break in we said break in and he said yeah because if I go in the
front door my dad will make me stay in he won't let me come back out so we go out there to break in this kid's house and uh I guess we weren't cut out to be criminals the police showed up and they hit us with the spotlight and we froze like a deer in the headlights nothing we didn't run or anything we were too scared to run so the police came up two guys and and we told him her story and they said we've always got a decision to make you can either go to prison
for the rest of your lives or we can take you home to your parents we all looked at each other and said take us to jail because we knew what was going to happen when we got home and sure enough it did I had a hard time sitting down for a couple weeks after that but all that I think I was impressed by the police officers and that's when they could use their own discretion to make decisions where it's not so much like that nowadays everything's more black and white but uh I think that's probably
what got me interested in since then since 10 years old never wanted to do anything else gotcha now Javier you were going to school at Texas A M University yeah it's the the first one was a Texas A and I uh University in Kingsville Texas and later on I transferred to the a m branch in Laredo Texas yes got it and I guess early on you had a three-month internship at the Department of Corrections yes I had a three-month internship at Texas Department of Correction at Ellis unit which is famous for their house uh death
row inmates and my first tour I think they were message when I said Penny you're gonna work uh the death row uh unit so you got to do roll call right so it was all this there were some well-known violent criminals so I'm doing uh I said roll call and one guy goes boo I throw that clipboard and I run the hell out of there man so I learned a lot I did uh three months uh there at uh Ellis unit in in Huntsville then uh that's where I went back and finished my degree at
Laredo and it was Laredo State University which is now a a m branch okay what made you wanna actually do this internship in a hardcore prison because from what I understand your parents kind of stopped talking to you because the whole thing yeah yeah they didn't they didn't want me to go and you know I'm from a small family uh you know I'm Hispanic we grew up in uh hebronville Texas population 5 000 very close and you know I was going to Huntsville and you know the whole family they wanted me to stay close and
you know yeah I always remember that day they did not talk to me and you know what later on they appreciated that I left and I think I learned a lot by by leaving yes okay and what made you want to go into that field though I was a sociology major you know not even criminal justice I was a sociology Psychology major and it was just a uh posting uh the my sociology professor said hey anybody interested in an internship it was money it was basically uh get a college credit and earn some money and
that's the only reason I I took the job just to make a little sense me and us you know we're all broke in college barely making it so that there was strictly uh Financial got it okay now Steve you go and join the police department and uh you know you start getting actually drawn to the drug part of the job and this was like the mid 70s when cocaine was starting to really make its way uh and you know to the country and so forth so what was happening early on uh in terms of your
uh police career well you know this this was only a 35-man police department we only had three detectives on the on the department um excuse me we really didn't have anybody working narcotics in West Virginia you go to the West Virginia State Police Academy to get your basic police training and you got to come you had to live there during the week but you could come home on weekends so I came home one weekend and my best friend had gotten hired with me but he was on standby to go to the academy after I graduated
his name's Jackie and uh I was out it's a Saturday night I was out running around he was off duty and we stopped my friend when I was working at a gas station and he said hey you guys he said there's a guy there's a kid running around here he's wanting to sell pound quantities of weed and uh we thought well okay uh can you order up he said yeah I'll call him right now and I said will he bring it here and they said yep so so we he could the our friend called him
and the guy said I'll be there in five minutes we go in the back rooms you know the back end of this gas station we're hiding like in a broom closet and sure enough the kid shows up 17 years old um has a pound of weed hands up to everybody we step out of the closet wasn't any of this slam the door and take him down or anything that we just stepped out and said how you doing pal and uh so what you got there and we picked it up and I opened the bag he
did a field test it tested positive and said kids are under arrest how old are you say 17 years old now um here's kind of there's a more to the story that all these years later so this was in 1976. we ended up dismissing the charges on that because the kid his father came down and his family were solid citizens no criminal records anything like that and the dad promised us he would take care of the issue and again this was in a time when you could use police officer discretion to make decisions like this
so we let the kid go well about three or four years ago I got before we retired from from DEA we were no social media at all you couldn't find anything about Javier opinion Steve Murphy but now because of our businesses and our speaking events and all that stuff you know we're all over social media and that kid I'm not gonna mention his name but it's now a grown man successful businessman and he contacted me via Facebook and he's I mean he couldn't have been nicer he couldn't have been uh more appreciative of what happened
he said you know you you had sympathy or you know you recognized that I wasn't going to be a loser and you cut me a break and you know and just honestly just made me feel like I hadn't made the right decision all those years ago because it's not about running people's lives that's not where what DEA is all about it's about trying to protect the public great story man great story we need more cops like you out there I don't know about that but thank you okay so so Javier you graduated from Texas A
M yeah and then you joined the Sheriff's Department yeah no I was working at the Sheriff's Office and going to school you know basically like a lot of us I was working the night shift in Laredo Texas Webb County and I was going to college during the day and I was living with my grandparents you know I had it made you know I thought my grandma Great Cookie and she took care of me so uh you know I was living there going to school and working the night shift at the Sheriff's Office and basically what
what happened next is getting close to my you know graduating I see a a poster and back you know college guys you remember when we went to college back in the 70s they used to post the the jobs on the bulletin board right you know so I see this uh uh dea's hiring and I didn't know what DEA was I had to ask a buddy I remember he said stupid those are the federal marks oh okay how do you know that you know but what intrigued me was you know I always remember it was paying
17 000 a year to become a d agent while I was making like 9 000 at the Sheriff's Office and I had had some uh I'm gonna just try to be vague about it some girl problems and I needed to uh get out of uh Laredo basically I had a little some people looking for me for the wrong reasons so uh anyway I applied and wow about you know I I got accepted you know and and I was like you know I had to uh I left Laredo in my first uh uh job was in
Austin Texas and if you remember in the 60s I mean the 70s 80s Austin was the music capital of the world I mean I got to see George Strait I Got I mean it was great living in Austin and I was there for four years before I I went foreign okay so you joined the DEA in 84 right and during that time that's when crack really started to hit all over the country so what was really the effect of crack based on your job as a DEA well crack was region but you know what what
was the the the drug of choice at that time was meth in Austin was the methamphetamine capital of the world crank we used to call it crank it was easy to cook we'd have people were cooking it at hotel rooms we we'd had people cook it in just little you know a little uh you know makeshift little room see what I'm saying so it was an epidemic crack was reaching and also black tar heroin was big in Texas in Austin Texas coming in from Mexico so I learned a lot did a lot of undercover I
almost got killed in one of my undercover deals you know working the first time and so I got to see all the smaller type situations you know and uh as a rookie agent you do everything undercover surveillances put cases together so uh then what intrigued me is I wanted to go see what the big traffickers go into the major leagues you know go see the the major traffickers how they work so that's why I I applied and uh basically I mean uh say I applied to go to Mexico and da made a mistake and they
sent me to Colombia which uh my boss is Xavier you want to fight us and now let me had to go look at the map where Colombia was at so with me was strictly a mistake uh headed to Colombia
