Former DEA Agent & Author of After Escobar — on Taking Down the Cali Cartel, Surviving a Year of Daily Failures in the World's Most Dangerous Country, and Why Thinking Outside the Box Is the Only Way Forward
Chris Feistl spent over 26 years as a DEA special agent. He began by accident — a summer job as a seasonal police officer in New Jersey, a single undercover assignment buying methamphetamine on the boardwalk, and suddenly a career path took shape. By the late 1980s he was in Miami, working undercover against the Medellín and Cali cartels, seizing cocaine in quantities measured in hundreds of kilos. By 1993 he and partner Dave Mitchell were selected to go to Colombia — the most dangerous country on Earth — to take down the four godfathers of the Cali Cartel.
What followed was nearly a year of daily operations that failed — not because Chris and Dave weren't working hard enough, but because the Cali Cartel had corrupted every layer of the Colombian government, including the presidency itself. Every time they mounted an arrest operation, it was compromised from the inside. This episode explores what kept them going through that relentless failure, how they eventually found a way around the corruption by thinking radically outside the box, and why those lessons apply directly to entrepreneurship, creative work, and building anything meaningful over time.
The conversation also covers the drug trafficking landscape of the late 1980s, how Colombian cartels revolutionized cocaine smuggling through island refueling bases and containerized cargo ships, what it meant to be a six-foot-tall blonde American trying to operate covertly in a city with zero American presence, and what career advice Chris would give to anyone considering federal law enforcement today.
Chris Feistl served as a DEA special agent for over 26 years. He began in 1988 after stints as a seasonal police officer in New Jersey and a full-time officer at Virginia Beach PD. His first assignment after the FBI Academy at Quantico was Miami — the epicenter of the cocaine trade in the late 1980s — where he spent six years working undercover operations against the Medellín and Cali cartels, seizing cocaine in quantities measured in hundreds of kilos per case and in tons from maritime shipments.
In late 1993, Chris and partner Dave Mitchell were selected to go to Colombia — the most dangerous country in the world at the time, leading globally in both homicides and kidnappings — to take down the four godfathers of the Cali Cartel. What followed was nearly two and a half years on the ground, including almost a full year of daily operations that failed due to systemic cartel corruption that reached the Colombian presidency. They eventually succeeded by thinking outside every conventional boundary, and their story became the basis for Season 3 of Netflix's Narcos.
Chris is the co-author (with Dave Mitchell) of After Escobar, an award-winning account of their time in Colombia and the operation to dismantle the most powerful drug cartel in history. He is one of the real-life figures portrayed in Narcos on Netflix and has spent years sharing the lessons of that experience with audiences in law enforcement, business, and beyond.
The level of corruption right that the Cali cartel had in the Colombian government was staggering.
We're not leaving this country until every one of those four are in handcuffs or dead.
Don't be afraid to go outside the box. Go outside your comfort zone. Try things — take calculated risks. Weigh your options.