THE MIAMI NEWSCASTS went live with it in July 1991. From the Old Man to Alex DeCubas and on down, a federal grand jury would indict more than 200 suspects in the Nerma operation. But by the time of the broadcast, Alex was gone, having disappeared on the highways of the American West.

After months on the run in an RV, Alex entered Tijuana, Mexico, in style, by limousine. By the end of 1991, he was in Medellín, Colombia, an international fugitive at 33, burrowing into the one place he felt safe, the most dangerous city in the world.

The head of the Medellín cartel, Pablo Escobar, was waging war against the government and his rivals in the Cali cartel. Assassinations, mass killings, bombings -- Escobar's tactics plunged Colombia into chaos. By the time Alex arrived, Escobar faced new government pressure. He agreed to do time but in a jail of one, a hacienda outside Medellín called La Catedral. There, he continued to conduct his affairs, now from behind a monsignor's desk.

Alex's Medellín contact, Felix Chitiva, a former partner of his with the Old Man, knew a guy who manufactured coke for the Medellín cartel. But no matter how much cocaine anyone processed, it was worthless if you couldn't get it to market. Alex was worth 1,000 hands plucking coca leaves on the Andean slopes. DeCubas remotely reassembled his frayed Florida network, and he and Chitiva resumed moving product into Miami, now for Escobar's Medellín cartel.

Ultimately, Escobar's network noticed the work of his new soldiers. To remain on Escobar's good side, Chitiva arranged a visit to La Catedral, sneaking past the government guards in a supply truck until he was face-to-face with the greatest trafficker of them all.

Pablo Escobar addressed Chitiva. I heard about you guys. You're good people.

Chitiva laid a $150,000 tribute on the desk to stay off of Escobar's hit list. He'd return to La Catedral time and again, always with a cut of the action.

But in the end, Escobar grew restless and fled his prison, and Colombia's many traffickers didn't see the point of paying extortion fees to a man on the run. Alex and Felix aligned with an equally dangerous outfit called Los Pepes. Instead of paying Escobar, Alex now funneled proceeds to this new group, renegades bent on destroying Escobar.

Now Escobar was the hunted. With information from Los Pepes and others, Colombian cops pinpointed his position in Medellín. Firing from many angles, they took his life on an orange-tile rooftop on Dec. 2, 1993. Escobar's bloated corpse signaled the end of an age.

Alex DeCubas would live on into the next.

KEVIN JOINED THE DEA on Oct. 4, 1991, not long after Alex had split Miami. The agents carrying the DeCubas case knew all about Kevin and his ties to the kingpin: the state championship at Palmetto, the page out of Sports Illustrated. And Kevin's DEA superiors believed his energies should be directed elsewhere.

They started him on local stings. He cruised with cops, making busts in counties across South Florida, which led to cash seizures in the millions, his name inching up the monthly bust rankings back at the DEA compound in Doral. Kevin infiltrated a ring that was moving product to Italy: He packed 30 kilos of coke in his bag to Rome, where he bartered for 10 kilos of heroin in return. At trial, the target, Giovanni Tummolillo, threatened Kevin and his new family -- his wife, two daughters and Danny, whose custody he'd won from Betty. Kevin was learning that a DEA agent lived and died by the quality of his confidential informants. This was all preamble to a first-of-its-kind DEA operation that would soon be his to lead.

ALEX DROVE DOWN the Kilometer 18 Highway, heading toward the country retreat of the Cali cartel, which he had worked with in Florida. But now he was on their turf. The cartel's soldiers eyed Alex suspiciously when his vehicle emerged out of the Andean fog and came to a stop at the compound. Some of these men knew Alex as Juan. Some knew him as the transporter. Now they would put him to the test.

They tossed Alex a soccer uniform, and he followed them over to a groomed field along a plateau, lights punching through the night. They placed Alex in goal. His knees were shot from wrestling injuries, but his instincts and reflexes were still there. The Cali boys found that they couldn't get a ball by the big man from Miami. They played games until 2 a.m., downing shots of aguardiente. Alex DeCubas, shutout goalie of narco soccer -- the lieutenants of the Cali cartel took him in.

Over the next five years, Alex, working with various partners under various aliases, would expand their reach into Western Europe, then deep into the Mediterranean. Alex went to their weddings. He went to their funerals. And it was standing over a coffin, looking into the face of a murdered friend, when Alex wondered, Will this ever happen to me?

KEVIN BEGAN TO pose his own questions in those years, ones that everyone else had been asking: Where is Alex? Is he still alive? He would have to wait to find answers; his bosses had set him to work under an alias on Operation Cali-Man. This was new ground for the DEA, a covert money-laundering operation. On street corners in cities along the East Coast, he would pick up bags of cash -- $1 million, $2 million -- and then run these cartel funds through U.S. banks, wiring the money to accounts in South America. In the process, Kevin would compile reams of banking data that enabled the DEA to identify and target high-ranking members of Colombia's drug underworld.

The traffickers would often ask Kevin to buy goods and then send them down to Colombia by container ship. This was another way of laundering. Sometimes it was refrigerators, but usually they wanted cars. Sometimes those vehicles made it through to Santa Marta, Colombia. Other times Kevin had to inform a contact that the assets had been "lost." Kevin pulled into a Toyota dealership one afternoon and bought 10 new vehicles with the $1 million he had just brought in from Manhattan in a canvas bag. Kevin then persuaded a contact of his to plant a story in a Florida paper, reporting a tropical storm that had never reached land. Those Land Cruisers, fancifully washed into the sea by a phantom storm, were then put to use by the DEA.

One day in 1997, Kevin found himself on a flight to Bogotá, where he would oversee an informant during a cash drop. Kevin accompanied the snitch to the city's main shopping mall. He sat a good distance away from the target, inside the food court, biding time until the exchange. And as the people bustled all about, speaking a Spanish that Kevin struggled to understand, his mind turned to the familiar. He asked himself, Does Alex ever come to the food court?

IN 1997, ALEX was in Cali, 300 miles west of Bogotá. Six years in Colombia and Alex wanted more control, a bigger cut. At a stoplight, a truck pulled up alongside Alex's Toyota pickup. It was a tanker, hauling a load of fuel in its cylindrical trailer. Alex looked at the fuel tanker and thought ... submarine.

If he could build one, and pack it with coke, he would be the greatest trafficker of all. Through his contacts at the port in Cartagena, Alex imported steel from Belgium. Outside Cali, a factory rolled the steel into three cylindrical sections, more than 100 feet long. Alex transported the hull to a cow pasture in Facatativá, a town outside of Bogotá. In a warehouse there, following designs for a diesel-electric WWII-era Nazi U-boat, Alex and his team began building a narco sub.

Alex took on an engineer who had served in the Russian navy. When the Russian arrived in Facatativá, he looked at what Alex had done and shook his head: Blyat. Aluminum had to come out; it'd kill the batteries. The fluid transference must be reworked to maintain proper ballast. But the hull was sound and the motor looked good. The work carried on.

Alex's submarine took three years to build. It cost him nearly $5 million. By 2000, the sub was 60 percent complete. It was designed to hold 10,000 kilos of cocaine. Alex planned to send it to the coast of Spain, 4,500 miles away, where a kilo cost $40,000. A single load's worth: $400 million.

But keeping a secret about a submarine designed to hold 10,000 kilos was nearly as impossible as building the sub itself. On Sept. 7, 2000, the doors to the warehouse flew open, and in walked the commanding general of the Colombian police and the local DEA chief. Alex was nowhere to be found. The authorities were mystified at what they'd discovered, until they brought in a naval attaché, who marveled: You got a submarine, and it's a big one.

NOW ALEX WAS vulnerable: The submarine was lost, and so were the millions of dollars and hundreds of hours he had given to its construction.

He was running low on cash when a call came in from an old associate. He told Alex about a group from Cali that wanted to run an operation to Europe. Sounds good, Alex said. While we're at it, you mind lending me $40,000?

Sept. 2, 2003, was a hot day in Medellín. Alex put on a gray Armani Exchange T-shirt and hopped into his white Jeep TJ. He was 45 now, puffed out and balding. Life as a fugitive was showing.

Alex met a contact at Santa Elena Bakery, in the wealthy El Poblado section of Medellín. They went over the particulars of the Cali operation. It all sounded routine to a man who had run dozens of these maneuvers. Alex's contact slipped him an envelope with the loan inside it.

On his way home, Alex drove down the tree-lined Avenida Bolivariana. A man was waving his arms up ahead. There were flashing lights, a few motorcycles. As Alex drew closer, he could see cops in riot gear.

They directed Alex's Jeep to the side of the road. No big deal: Colombia was full of roadblocks, and most every cop was for sale. But now the cops led him to the local police station. They popped the hood of the Jeep, looking in and around it. Standing apart from the group, a man kept an eye trained on Alex, who reached for his wallet and ID, the one that referred to him as Francisco Cruz. The photo on this fake was Alex in a wrestling singlet, 1976.

Don't bother, said the senior cop. There's no need to do that, Alex. And then Alex knew; he hadn't heard his real name in many years. His contact had traded him in for a better fate of his own.

At a government security building in Bogotá, Alex realized that his 12-plus years on the run were over. A heavy metal door cranked opened, and in walked a DEA agent and a U.S. marshal. They explained how extradition would go. The DEA agent had another message: Kevin says hello.

IN 2012, KEVIN PEDERSEN clocked out of the DEA after 21 years. He and his new wife, Michele, owned two tire franchises of their own, with a boat out back and a Mercedes in the driveway. His younger daughter, Lauren, was in middle school, and his older, Krista, was in college. His son, Danny, had followed Kevin to West Point and served in Afghanistan and Iraq. He'd received a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star. Two heroes in the family.

In December 2004, Kevin had attended Alex's sentencing hearing in federal court in Miami. Alex entered the courtroom shackled. When the old wrestling pals locked eyes for the first time since that night at the Crown Lounge in 1980, they exchanged smiles and a subtle wave. Alex pleaded guilty to smuggling 24 tons of cocaine with a street value of roughly $500 million. The judge hit him with 30 years in federal prison.

It was done; Alex was locked up. And there, for the first time, he reflected on his life. He'd be 76 years old when he got out of this place, so Alex decided to cooperate with the government and tell the authorities whatever they wanted to know. The Feds pared his 30 years to nine. With time served, Alex walked free in 2012, the same year Kevin retired.

More Pin Kings Streaming Stream Pin Kings on WatchESPN and on the app beginning Aug. 19. Podcast Check out our 16-episode podcast. Also available on the ESPN App under featured podcasts or on Apple iTunes.

With time on his hands, Kevin found himself back at the wrestling meets. He didn't know the kids, but that didn't matter. And soon he got an idea. He took a volunteer job at Westminster Christian School in Palmetto Bay as an assistant wrestling coach.

One night he got a call from his old coach at Palmetto, Barry Zimbler. He invited Kevin to a dinner party at his house, a reunion of his wrestlers. This would be a welcome-home party for Alex, who Zimbler felt needed support as he set out on his new life. At first, Kevin didn't want to go. Coach Zimbler had never thrown a party for any of the wrestlers who had lived within the rules. A wrestling teammate of theirs, Dom Gorie, had flown on the space shuttle, four times, and there had been no gathering for him when he returned to Earth. Alex was a hardened ex-con who showed little remorse for his actions. I had a good run, Alex would say of his decades in the underworld. The former DEA agent loathed his disregard.

But Kevin also knew the story of the prodigal son and its lessons of forgiveness. So he went to Zimbler's dinner and was surrounded by his old teammates. Kevin found Alex in the kitchen and was quickly wrapped in one of his old bear hugs, each man now barrel-chested. Alex and Kevin chatted, avoiding the heavier subjects of re-entering a society that had changed so much since Alex had skipped town 20 years ago. After the crowd had thinned, the old teammates talked about old times, and Kevin said, Hey, let me show you something. He pulled out his DEA badge, and they held it up for a picture, the laughs beginning to soften years of hard feelings.

Kevin wouldn't be able to shake the camaraderie that he felt at the dinner. He reached out to Alex and started rebuilding a lost relationship, occasionally calling on the phone or meeting for a beer.

When he became Westminster's head coach in 2013, Kevin passed along the rote lessons of sports to his team, about forging lifelong bonds, not placing limits on yourself, the rewards of discipline. He preached that a scrawny JV wrestler can become an All-American. And that even if a kid finds himself on the wrong path, it's never too late to turn around.

On March 19, 2015, the doors to the wrestling room at Westminster Christian School opened to the heat of a Miami afternoon. Kevin was beginning another practice when he saw a blue Jeep Grand Cherokee park outside the entrance to the room. The driver stepped out gingerly, and from the brightness of the day he walked into the dankness of the wrestling room. Kevin gathered his wrestlers.

Guys, Kevin announced, I would like you to meet Coach DeCubas.

Illustrations by Alexander Wells