SMUGGLER: Barry Seal

If the Ochoa brothers and Pablo Escobar thought things were hot in Colombia when they met with Barry Seal in early April, they must have thought the very air was on fire by the end of the month.

On April 30, 1984, cartel gunmen, on the orders of Escobar, assassinated Justice Minister Rodrigo Lara, the man who had cracked down on them so hard the month before and who had cost them so much money. But Escobar had miscalculated. Far from ending the government's attack on the cartel, Lara's killing intensified it.

The very public murder of Rodrigo Lara shot dead while sitting in the back of his chauffeured Mercedes in the capital city of Bogotá, by a machine gun-wielding ex-convict on a motorcycle galvanized Colombian public opinion against the cartel, which until then had looked at the cocaine trade as just another homegrown business, like coffee.

After the Lara assassination, Colombian President Belisario Betancur redoubled the country's efforts to crush the Medellin cartel. He ordered government forces to seize the cartel's property and promised to arrest its leaders and extradite them to the United States, something the drug kingpins feared greatly.

Terrified of being captured and sent to rot in U.S. prisons, Pablo Escobar, the Ochoa brothers, and Gonzalo Rodriguez-Gacha fled across Colombia's northern border to Panama, where they had already worked out a multimillion-dollar deal with Panamanian Army commander General Manuel Noriega.