SMUGGLER: Barry Seal

In 1978, the Ochoa brothers Jorge, Fabio, and Juan along with Pablo Escobar, Gonzalo Rodriguez-Gacha, and Carlos Lehder formed an alliance that came to be known as the Medellin cartel, named for the Colombian city from which the men came. By the early 1980s, the Medellin cartel was responsible for 75 percent of the cocaine smuggled into the United States.

One of the cartel's best smugglers was Barry Seal, operating from clandestine airfields and drop points in south Louisiana.

Seal was so successful that the Louisiana State Police formed a special unit to catch him.

"Mr. Seal was suspected of being the head of a large drug smuggling organization consisting of some 60 people operating in six or seven states and several foreign countries," said State Police Lieutenant Bob Thomasson, head of the special unit.

Thomasson and his team put so much heat on Barry Seal that in late 1982 he moved his operation to Mena, Ark., to the Intermountain Regional Airport.

Mena, with a population of 5,500, is so far out of the way it can be hard to find even on a map. Located on the western edge of Arkansas, Mena sits in the foothills of the Ouachita mountain range. A lot has been written about Mena. Little of it can be proved. As a magnet for conspiracy theories, though, Mena is right up there with the JFK assassination and Roswell.

What's provable is that Barry Seal felt the heat in Louisiana, so he moved his airplanes to Mena. At the Mena airport, he contracted much of his routine maintenance and the special refitting he needed for long-range smuggling flights to a company called Rich Mountain Air. The company figures prominently in many conspiracy theories.