The show suffered mightily because of this. The men that ran the Cali Cartel, while just as ruthless as Escobar, lacked his charisma and his panache, in my opinion. The show just wasn't the same without him as Escobar. The hardest loss in Season 3 really was Wagner Moura. While Season 3 was equally well done, production-wise, it does suffer from a couple of flaws luckily it was still immensely popular. They were major rivals of Escobar’s and with his death, they moved hard to fill to power (and drug) vacuum left in the wake of Escobar’s death. With Escobar dead, Season 3 of Narcos shifted to the other major cocaine cartel in Colombia, the Cali Cartel, based, obviously Cali. It’s all very much based on the real story and was flawlessly executed, unlike Pablo Escobar, whose execution on a roof in Medellín was anything but flawless or dignified.
Of course, in the end – spoiler alert – Escobar was taken down by a combination of Steve Murphy and Javier Pena’s characters and Colombian police and military forces. It was a dangerous time in Colombia and indeed much of the rest of South and Central America and the Americans, misguided or not, felt righteous in their belief that bringing all-out war to Colombia and to Escobar was completely warranted. The purity of the heroin, combined with the violent tactics of Lucas towards competitors and the corrupt New York City police force of the early 70s, ensured that Lucas was soon making millions of dollars a month.Narcos' season were ominous and serious. (Lucas himself has asserted that heroin was sometimes packed into the coffins of soldiers being flown back from Vietnam). Poppies were grown and processed into heroin and flown in military planes back to the U.S. Using military contacts overseas, he established a distribution network directly from Southeast Asia. After Johnson died, Lucas saw an opportunity to move into the drug trade that had up to that point been dominated by the Italian mafia. Originally from North Carolina, Lucas arrived in New York and soon got involved with local gangster “Bumpy” Johnson. Untouchable” (he wasn’t) and Jemeker Thompson, the “Queen Pin.” Possibly more notorious than all of them is Frank Lucas, who during the early 70s distributed his “Blue Magic” heroin throughout Harlem.
#Pablo escobar the drug lord vs narcos crack#
There was “Freeway” Ricky Ross, one of the men most behind the crack epidemic of the mid-80s “Nicky” Barnes, known as “Mr. With such an organization at his beck and call, Cárdenas’ cartel became one of the most powerful drug trafficking organizations in the world.Īlthough a large proportion of drug traffickers come from Central America, the United States has had its share of homegrown drug kingpins. This army eventually became known as Los Zetas (“The Zs”), a brutal group more likely to behead an official than bribe him.
He infiltrated the formerly incorruptible Mexican Special Forces branch of the military and amassed a private mercenary army that protected his interests and enforced his will. Border Security Handbook describes the Gulf Cartel as “particularly violent,” and under Cárdenas’s leadership, it expanded its reach. Needless to say, the Gulf Cartel soon had a new top man. Osiel Cárdenas Guillén has one of the grimmer ones: “El Mata Amigos,” or “The Friend Killer.” Cárdenas earned the sobriquet by murdering his friend Salvador Gómez, who was in line to assume control of the Gulf Cartel in 1996. Like certain mafiosos, it helps to have a memorable nickname if you’re going to be a drug kingpin.