August 11, 2021 • 15 mins
Transportista manages to return from Colombia and deliver the “Señor de los Cielos” merchandise. The pilot gains his trust and the kingpin introduces him to his associates. One of them asks him for a favor: to arrange a "vuelta" but the mission did not turn out as expected.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
Bernando Blanks got his start in the illegal drug shipping
business in early nineteen eighties, refueling planes for Salvador. Before
all this, I already knew who Chaua was, a faminous
pilot from Antena. After three refueling jobs, blank Hill took
advantage of an unforeseen opportunity to be Covarruvias co pilot
(00:32):
on a flight crossing into the United States. Supposedly, soul
philosopher Romero was going to be Chavs compilot into the
United States, but he got cold feet and skilled himself,
saying he had diarrhea. That single co piloting gig paid
quite a bit more than fixing motorcycles. Were using small
aircraft to spot tune off the coast. I was given
(00:56):
that time. One day, Blenkio's father told him that his
friend Carlos Bega, the nephew of then President Miel de
la Madridin, wanted to see him in Mexico City. Blank
Hill said that he went to see Vega at his
penthouse office in Mexico City. Vega asked how he was doing,
and Blinkill said he was working hard in the fishing
industry in Baja California. Vega then handed Linkill two envelopes
(01:19):
and said, open them. In one bank, you found his
pilot's license completely restored, without any record of the incident
in kan The other envelope contained a job offer with Michikana,
then Mexico's largest airline. Blenkhio says that he returned the
offer letter to the envelope and handed it back to Vega,
(01:40):
who said, what about your license? Thank you, I think
I'll hold on to it. Blinkill responded, and the job
offer as Vega, You've already done so much for me,
Carlos Blenkill said, I'm going to make my own way now.
Blenkio says that he and Vega partied on good term.
With his license restored. Linkia was ready, indeed to make
(02:04):
his own way now, being in bold with Chava after
having cross with him to the state, was when El
Toronpoolo told me I was ready for the major leagues.
Is Rompolo was Blankio's friend in contact with Colorubias and
the major leagues. Nearly nineteen eighties. Men flying cocaine from
Columbia to Mexico, so I was introduced from there. The
(02:25):
first boilt down South happened as I compiled or keen
Air two hundred. I don't recall if it was two
hundred or seven hundred killers they were carrying. With his
international pilot's license restored in this record, white clean, Blankio
could fly as a co pilot and mean fifty thou
dollars of flight. Once he started flying as a captain,
(02:49):
we made two hundred and fifty thou dollars of flight.
There are moments in his interviews when blank Hills says
things like and everything was going well. These moments are
secularly interesting to me. I would like to ask Lenkio
to describe in detail what those moments were like, what
did the drug trafficking industry at that time look like
(03:09):
from the inside when everything was running smoothly. But unfortunately,
I think he does not often pause and delve deeper
into the mundane. Instead, he hurries onto the dramatic, which,
to be fair, is surely a common and understandable impulse.
And thus, in his interviews of Manuel time and again,
think he jumps between events that were certainly dramatic and
(03:33):
one suspects also quite traumatic for him and others. In January,
two colleagues at the Dicta reached out to me about
a curious individual they've been interviewing using a Klandestine cell
phone from inside of prison in North Carolina. The man
(03:56):
claimed to have worked as a pilot, entrepreneur and air
Leges six coordinator in the international drug trade for some
thirty years. My friends at Ditictive produced a podcast in
Spanish and wanted to know if I'd be interested in
working on a sister podcast in English looking into this
man and his story. Sure, as hid, but I need
(04:17):
to do my own investigation to see what I can find.
If even invited the legendary Mexican actor Joaquin Coil to
read the English translations of Transportista's quoted interviews with Manuel Laius.
My name apparently is John Gibbler, and this in a
sense is Transportista episode five. Everything was going well. Linkio
(04:44):
said that he didn't work forty hour weeks flying cocaine. Rather,
he would take say one drug flight a month unless
he had plenty of time in his hands, and making
two d and fifty thou dollars on each drug flight.
He also had money to invest in his own legal
businesses like the motorcycle repair shop and flying for fisheries.
These businesses, in turn, could be used to launder drug money.
(05:08):
Blank You also took jobs flying for Regional Airlines, an
Assault export company. While working for Ido California, he went
to Minnesota to take a DC nine flight course. He
met his first wife on an executive flight he piloted.
She was working as an accountant for the company that
audited Assault Export business. At this time, one of Blenkio's
(05:30):
colleagues in the cocaine business, Omar Medina, was arrested. Blankio
decided it would be best to leave her California for
a bit and moved to Mexico City. There, he went
to visit at a federal prison located in the northern
part of the city known as Eldreco North. Thing prisons
offer all kinds of business opportunities, mostly for those doing
(05:53):
the imprisoning, but also on a much smaller scale, for
those being imprisoned. Blenkio told Meno that he's running errands
for friends in the federal prison system in Mexico City,
taking messages from one prison to another. This would lead
him to meet someone who would change his life. A
my local reader I met in the Big prison and
(06:13):
the southern part of Mexico City. As a reward for
our favor I did for his company. Local font was
a drug trafficker known as El Lolos or the Lord
of the Skies, do precisely to his then innovative use
of aircraft to move large quantities of drugs across borders.
(06:34):
When link you met him in prison, my Localio's power
was on the rise. Are a plenty of favors there
in prison. I'm the messenger for many, many things. That's
where my friendship with a mother begins. And with the
friendship came work opportunities. From then on, I even did
some jobs for him, to call it Columbia. Blankio describes
(06:55):
his aptitude for taking advantage of opportunities he might not
have been entirely prepared for. So that just when one
of our careers partners asked him if he knew how
fas for for one conquest too, and I venture to
say that I knew how to fly the conquest, but
I didn't. And then I spoke on the phone with
my company. He was in ically and I was in Ensena,
(07:19):
hanging there for hours on the phone trying to give
me directions and how to operate those turbines. He sent
me by facts at the time, a bunch of instructions
from the conquest for from one manual. But at the
end of the day, after several hours, he says to me,
look sucking. COMPARI everything that says off goes to one.
(07:43):
Just don't dump the fuel and go Cabron, you know,
and you can't do it. And so sitting down, I
just did it. Blank yours or a lot of Bioge
is rife with misadventures and brushes with major international figures
(08:03):
and events. For instance, he describes getting stuck in war
torn Columbia with eights of a Melo cocaine. One of
the pumps was damaged, a mechanical fuel pump with a
hundred kilos of Amado Carrillo's cocaine on board. Soon after takeoff, blink,
he realized the fuel pump was damaged and not fight
(08:25):
in Mexico. The Norkety land the plane was too heavy
filled as it was with fuel and cocaine. He had
to find circles of a Columbia to burn fuel. We
had to fly around for about seven hours when we
finally landed in the colandestine run way that we dubbed
Mr Benson's runways, and then they told us about the storm.
(08:59):
In what we heard the news that Louis Carlosmiendo has
been murdered. Alonz Armienzo was a liberal politician and journalists
who promised to extradite drug traffickers to the United States
if elected president. He was shot dead on August eighteen
in front of ten thousand people as he took the
stage of the campaign event. His murder was ordered by
(09:22):
Pablos Cobart, and it would come out decades later members
of the Colombian security forces. The murder plunged the country
into deeper political strife. Thus well, Colombians spent a night
of terror. Blank you not entirely unlike Forrest Gump, was
flying a load of cocaine and circles over the country.
When those ten shots rang out in work, the whole
(09:43):
country was in shock. We have to hide the plane.
I went to Pereida, from Pereta to Palma Second Gli.
Then we left it there and went into hiding because
of tales and homes were being rated. Thanks God Ugly.
After spelling hiding link, he was able to get back
to work and only the things got back on track.
(10:06):
I finished the flight. I finished it successfully. Everyone was happy,
My mother was happy. I was happy, or at least
everyone was happy with the arrival of the conquest to
from Colombia. The eight hundred kilos, however, went into a
few problems on the next stage of the journey. It
was complete chaos. And the thing is they took six
(10:28):
hundred out of eight hundred kilos, only two hundred made
it to the States, and six hundred got stuck into
them Chihuahua. That's when I was forced to flee, so
to say, to hide. I lived at the time in
Mexico City and and I moved to Lose Cows back
(10:50):
back a California link. He was busy with both as
legal and illegal businesses, collaborating with a colleague, Michel Basan.
Let's say that was a relatively peaceful period when Magella
and I were together. We did several jobs together. Everything
went wonderfully well. It was a short period of peace
(11:11):
and quiet, enjoying also well settle legal flights, so to say,
growing my fishing business, my mechanic chop, my aerial taxi company,
and everything was going well. This was sometime in n
when asked him for a favor. A mother finds me
(11:32):
and asked me to assist Please biases more than a
club owner in Tijuana. And Kali, I want to blank
you to a coordinate a large cocaine shipment from Colombia.
And so he explains how the world is going to happen,
and I live for Colombia to coordinate the welta. But
on Leoni does bartagas or five tons support of the
(11:54):
C six Welta as a commentary for making a little trip.
And Don Leonidas was then a major Columbian drug trafficker,
but I guess was murdered in the hospital bed while
and please custody in Spain in two thousand nine. At
that time, Blankill says logistics coordinators like him were prohibited
for making a lot of calls to Columbia. He would
(12:17):
need to travel there to set things up for this
particular trip. They chose to land on a hidden, improvised
runway in the desert near Elisa, right in the middle
of the Baha California Peninsula. It took the months to
get things ready, so we were coordinating everything, fixing up
the round way, fixing up the infrastructure, a plain like that.
(12:41):
Carrious forty thou leaders of fuel. Once they had everything
set up and all the pieces in place, with the
plain in Columbia loaded and ready to go some five
thousand kilometers to the north, the skies of Obaja California
began to darken. We were practically ready. One of those
unexpected stunts came about and the round ways were completely floated,
(13:06):
and we had already postponed since December. Thenk you wanted
to postpone the site, but said no, tell him to
take off. So we were confronted with the giving orders.
Given the order, the play was already practically immediate and well.
We made a tremendous afford to try and dry or
(13:29):
fix the runway, which was practically impossible. It was still raining.
A DC six pilots couldn't find the pains taking the
prepared and then quickly ruined clandestine runway. Electronic navigation wasn't
that common end. On top of that, they didn't have
very good communication equipment. We heard some murmurs, but they
(13:52):
couldn't find the roundway. I had to bally land the
aircraft in the dome, so DC six, it's crew and
the five tons of cocaine belonging to Amdo, Carrio's friend
were lost somewhere out in the desert. We just spent
two days and nights trying to locate the plane. At
least it remains we hoped to find. Unfortunately, the bodies
(14:18):
and what was left on the Garaguan, we couldn't find anyone.
Next Time, Transportista is a defective at production with Exile
(14:40):
Content Studio in partnership with iHeart Radios Michael Dura podcast Network.
Directed narrated by John Kibler, Transportista's voice by Hacken Cosio,
editing in sound design by Ferdando La Rossa and Pedro Garcia.
Reporting by John Gibler and Manuel Adios. Produced by Juli
Gonzalez Always recording by Ugo Merino and Rene Garcia. Transports
(15:06):
interviews translated by Carlo ris ar Guys. Production supervision by
Nanda La and Alva Rospis. Associate producers Alonzo Hilar and
Alexandro Duran Diego and Drique Sorro Is the creator and
executive producer, along with Daniel Eilenbert and e Sactley. Executive
producers for I Heart Media are Conald Burne and just
(15:26):
Sell Bunces. For more podcasts from my heart is that
the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows.
Bernando Blanks got his start in the illegal drug shipping
business in early nineteen eighties, refueling planes for Salvador. Before
all this, I already knew who Chaua was, a faminous
pilot from Antena. After three refueling jobs, blank Hill took
advantage of an unforeseen opportunity to be Covarruvias co pilot
(00:32):
on a flight crossing into the United States. Supposedly, soul
philosopher Romero was going to be Chavs compilot into the
United States, but he got cold feet and skilled himself,
saying he had diarrhea. That single co piloting gig paid
quite a bit more than fixing motorcycles. Were using small
aircraft to spot tune off the coast. I was given
(00:56):
that time. One day, Blenkio's father told him that his
friend Carlos Bega, the nephew of then President Miel de
la Madridin, wanted to see him in Mexico City. Blank
Hill said that he went to see Vega at his
penthouse office in Mexico City. Vega asked how he was doing,
and Blinkill said he was working hard in the fishing
industry in Baja California. Vega then handed Linkill two envelopes
(01:19):
and said, open them. In one bank, you found his
pilot's license completely restored, without any record of the incident
in kan The other envelope contained a job offer with Michikana,
then Mexico's largest airline. Blenkhio says that he returned the
offer letter to the envelope and handed it back to Vega,
(01:40):
who said, what about your license? Thank you, I think
I'll hold on to it. Blinkill responded, and the job
offer as Vega, You've already done so much for me,
Carlos Blenkill said, I'm going to make my own way now.
Blenkio says that he and Vega partied on good term.
With his license restored. Linkia was ready, indeed to make
(02:04):
his own way now, being in bold with Chava after
having cross with him to the state, was when El
Toronpoolo told me I was ready for the major leagues.
Is Rompolo was Blankio's friend in contact with Colorubias and
the major leagues. Nearly nineteen eighties. Men flying cocaine from
Columbia to Mexico, so I was introduced from there. The
(02:25):
first boilt down South happened as I compiled or keen
Air two hundred. I don't recall if it was two
hundred or seven hundred killers they were carrying. With his
international pilot's license restored in this record, white clean, Blankio
could fly as a co pilot and mean fifty thou
dollars of flight. Once he started flying as a captain,
(02:49):
we made two hundred and fifty thou dollars of flight.
There are moments in his interviews when blank Hills says
things like and everything was going well. These moments are
secularly interesting to me. I would like to ask Lenkio
to describe in detail what those moments were like, what
did the drug trafficking industry at that time look like
(03:09):
from the inside when everything was running smoothly. But unfortunately,
I think he does not often pause and delve deeper
into the mundane. Instead, he hurries onto the dramatic, which,
to be fair, is surely a common and understandable impulse.
And thus, in his interviews of Manuel time and again,
think he jumps between events that were certainly dramatic and
(03:33):
one suspects also quite traumatic for him and others. In January,
two colleagues at the Dicta reached out to me about
a curious individual they've been interviewing using a Klandestine cell
phone from inside of prison in North Carolina. The man
(03:56):
claimed to have worked as a pilot, entrepreneur and air
Leges six coordinator in the international drug trade for some
thirty years. My friends at Ditictive produced a podcast in
Spanish and wanted to know if I'd be interested in
working on a sister podcast in English looking into this
man and his story. Sure, as hid, but I need
(04:17):
to do my own investigation to see what I can find.
If even invited the legendary Mexican actor Joaquin Coil to
read the English translations of Transportista's quoted interviews with Manuel Laius.
My name apparently is John Gibbler, and this in a
sense is Transportista episode five. Everything was going well. Linkio
(04:44):
said that he didn't work forty hour weeks flying cocaine. Rather,
he would take say one drug flight a month unless
he had plenty of time in his hands, and making
two d and fifty thou dollars on each drug flight.
He also had money to invest in his own legal
businesses like the motorcycle repair shop and flying for fisheries.
These businesses, in turn, could be used to launder drug money.
(05:08):
Blank You also took jobs flying for Regional Airlines, an
Assault export company. While working for Ido California, he went
to Minnesota to take a DC nine flight course. He
met his first wife on an executive flight he piloted.
She was working as an accountant for the company that
audited Assault Export business. At this time, one of Blenkio's
(05:30):
colleagues in the cocaine business, Omar Medina, was arrested. Blankio
decided it would be best to leave her California for
a bit and moved to Mexico City. There, he went
to visit at a federal prison located in the northern
part of the city known as Eldreco North. Thing prisons
offer all kinds of business opportunities, mostly for those doing
(05:53):
the imprisoning, but also on a much smaller scale, for
those being imprisoned. Blenkio told Meno that he's running errands
for friends in the federal prison system in Mexico City,
taking messages from one prison to another. This would lead
him to meet someone who would change his life. A
my local reader I met in the Big prison and
(06:13):
the southern part of Mexico City. As a reward for
our favor I did for his company. Local font was
a drug trafficker known as El Lolos or the Lord
of the Skies, do precisely to his then innovative use
of aircraft to move large quantities of drugs across borders.
(06:34):
When link you met him in prison, my Localio's power
was on the rise. Are a plenty of favors there
in prison. I'm the messenger for many, many things. That's
where my friendship with a mother begins. And with the
friendship came work opportunities. From then on, I even did
some jobs for him, to call it Columbia. Blankio describes
(06:55):
his aptitude for taking advantage of opportunities he might not
have been entirely prepared for. So that just when one
of our careers partners asked him if he knew how
fas for for one conquest too, and I venture to
say that I knew how to fly the conquest, but
I didn't. And then I spoke on the phone with
my company. He was in ically and I was in Ensena,
(07:19):
hanging there for hours on the phone trying to give
me directions and how to operate those turbines. He sent
me by facts at the time, a bunch of instructions
from the conquest for from one manual. But at the
end of the day, after several hours, he says to me,
look sucking. COMPARI everything that says off goes to one.
(07:43):
Just don't dump the fuel and go Cabron, you know,
and you can't do it. And so sitting down, I
just did it. Blank yours or a lot of Bioge
is rife with misadventures and brushes with major international figures
(08:03):
and events. For instance, he describes getting stuck in war
torn Columbia with eights of a Melo cocaine. One of
the pumps was damaged, a mechanical fuel pump with a
hundred kilos of Amado Carrillo's cocaine on board. Soon after takeoff, blink,
he realized the fuel pump was damaged and not fight
(08:25):
in Mexico. The Norkety land the plane was too heavy
filled as it was with fuel and cocaine. He had
to find circles of a Columbia to burn fuel. We
had to fly around for about seven hours when we
finally landed in the colandestine run way that we dubbed
Mr Benson's runways, and then they told us about the storm.
(08:59):
In what we heard the news that Louis Carlosmiendo has
been murdered. Alonz Armienzo was a liberal politician and journalists
who promised to extradite drug traffickers to the United States
if elected president. He was shot dead on August eighteen
in front of ten thousand people as he took the
stage of the campaign event. His murder was ordered by
(09:22):
Pablos Cobart, and it would come out decades later members
of the Colombian security forces. The murder plunged the country
into deeper political strife. Thus well, Colombians spent a night
of terror. Blank you not entirely unlike Forrest Gump, was
flying a load of cocaine and circles over the country.
When those ten shots rang out in work, the whole
(09:43):
country was in shock. We have to hide the plane.
I went to Pereida, from Pereta to Palma Second Gli.
Then we left it there and went into hiding because
of tales and homes were being rated. Thanks God Ugly.
After spelling hiding link, he was able to get back
to work and only the things got back on track.
(10:06):
I finished the flight. I finished it successfully. Everyone was happy,
My mother was happy. I was happy, or at least
everyone was happy with the arrival of the conquest to
from Colombia. The eight hundred kilos, however, went into a
few problems on the next stage of the journey. It
was complete chaos. And the thing is they took six
(10:28):
hundred out of eight hundred kilos, only two hundred made
it to the States, and six hundred got stuck into
them Chihuahua. That's when I was forced to flee, so
to say, to hide. I lived at the time in
Mexico City and and I moved to Lose Cows back
(10:50):
back a California link. He was busy with both as
legal and illegal businesses, collaborating with a colleague, Michel Basan.
Let's say that was a relatively peaceful period when Magella
and I were together. We did several jobs together. Everything
went wonderfully well. It was a short period of peace
(11:11):
and quiet, enjoying also well settle legal flights, so to say,
growing my fishing business, my mechanic chop, my aerial taxi company,
and everything was going well. This was sometime in n
when asked him for a favor. A mother finds me
(11:32):
and asked me to assist Please biases more than a
club owner in Tijuana. And Kali, I want to blank
you to a coordinate a large cocaine shipment from Colombia.
And so he explains how the world is going to happen,
and I live for Colombia to coordinate the welta. But
on Leoni does bartagas or five tons support of the
(11:54):
C six Welta as a commentary for making a little trip.
And Don Leonidas was then a major Columbian drug trafficker,
but I guess was murdered in the hospital bed while
and please custody in Spain in two thousand nine. At
that time, Blankill says logistics coordinators like him were prohibited
for making a lot of calls to Columbia. He would
(12:17):
need to travel there to set things up for this
particular trip. They chose to land on a hidden, improvised
runway in the desert near Elisa, right in the middle
of the Baha California Peninsula. It took the months to
get things ready, so we were coordinating everything, fixing up
the round way, fixing up the infrastructure, a plain like that.
(12:41):
Carrious forty thou leaders of fuel. Once they had everything
set up and all the pieces in place, with the
plain in Columbia loaded and ready to go some five
thousand kilometers to the north, the skies of Obaja California
began to darken. We were practically ready. One of those
unexpected stunts came about and the round ways were completely floated,
(13:06):
and we had already postponed since December. Thenk you wanted
to postpone the site, but said no, tell him to
take off. So we were confronted with the giving orders.
Given the order, the play was already practically immediate and well.
We made a tremendous afford to try and dry or
(13:29):
fix the runway, which was practically impossible. It was still raining.
A DC six pilots couldn't find the pains taking the
prepared and then quickly ruined clandestine runway. Electronic navigation wasn't
that common end. On top of that, they didn't have
very good communication equipment. We heard some murmurs, but they
(13:52):
couldn't find the roundway. I had to bally land the
aircraft in the dome, so DC six, it's crew and
the five tons of cocaine belonging to Amdo, Carrio's friend
were lost somewhere out in the desert. We just spent
two days and nights trying to locate the plane. At
least it remains we hoped to find. Unfortunately, the bodies
(14:18):
and what was left on the Garaguan, we couldn't find anyone.
Next Time, Transportista is a defective at production with Exile
(14:40):
Content Studio in partnership with iHeart Radios Michael Dura podcast Network.
Directed narrated by John Kibler, Transportista's voice by Hacken Cosio,
editing in sound design by Ferdando La Rossa and Pedro Garcia.
Reporting by John Gibler and Manuel Adios. Produced by Juli
Gonzalez Always recording by Ugo Merino and Rene Garcia. Transports
(15:06):
interviews translated by Carlo ris ar Guys. Production supervision by
Nanda La and Alva Rospis. Associate producers Alonzo Hilar and
Alexandro Duran Diego and Drique Sorro Is the creator and
executive producer, along with Daniel Eilenbert and e Sactley. Executive
producers for I Heart Media are Conald Burne and just
(15:26):
Sell Bunces. For more podcasts from my heart is that
the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows.
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