SMUGGLER: Barry Seal

On March 27, 1986, a state grand jury in Baton Rouge indicted Miguel Velez, Bernardo Antonio Vasquez, Luis Quintero, Jose Renteria-Campo for the first-degree murder of Barry Seal. The grand jury did not think there was enough evidence to indict Heliberto Sanchez or John Jairo Cardona-Garcia.

A month later, a sheriff's deputy was arrested for trying to help Velez escape. Velez had promised the deputy, a guard at the jail where Velez was being held, $10,000 for helping him get two diamond ropes he could use to saw through the bars of his cell.

In July, Jorge Ochoa was extradited from Spain, where he'd been held since November, to his native Colombia and charged with the illegal importation of bulls. A customs judge gave Ochoa a 20-month suspended sentence and freed him after the cocaine kingpin posted $11,500 in bail.

Seal's lawyer, Lewis Unglesby, said the Medellin cartel killed Barry Seal to stop Spain from sending Jorge Ochoa to the United States.

"It worked," Unglesby said. "Ochoa wasn't extradited."

Baton Rouge prosecutor Prem Burns agreed. "Because of Barry Seal's murder, Spain decided not to send Jorge Ochoa to the United States."

In May 1987, amid extraordinary security, a jury found Miguel Velez, Luis Quintero, and Bernardo Antonio Vasquez guilty of first-degree murder. The jury could have recommended the death sentence, but instead, after just 20 minutes of deliberation, jurors chose to send the three assassins to prison for life without parole.

The fourth defendant, Jose Renteria-Campo, was sent to Miami to face a host of federal weapons charges.

In 1993, Colombian police and military, with significant U.S. help, cornered Pablo Escobar at a house in a middle-class neighborhood in Medellin. Escobar died in the ensuing shootout.

In 2001, Fabio Ochoa was extradited to the United States on charges unrelated to the murder of Barry Seal. In 2003, he was convicted and sentenced to 30 years in prison, where he remains today.

Carlos Lehder was also convicted in the United States and sentenced to life in prison.

Jorge Ochoa remains in Colombia, having served a five-year sentence there for drug trafficking in the 1990s.