Pin Kings

The astonishing story of how two wrestling teammates came to oppose each other in the cocaine wars—one as a drug smuggler, the other as a DEA agent.

- Brett Forrest, Additional reporting by Jon Fish

Kevin Pedersen’s wrestling days were 15 years behind him, and yet he still couldn’t let the sport go. Miami was full of change in the early ’90s, not much of it any good, but these high school wrestling meets were locked in time, their rituals the same as Kevin remembered. Kids in headgear, sizing each other up. Always some dad in the stands letting loose. A hush as a match began, and ultimately a ref raising a winner’s hand. At every meet, a wrestler crying at the outcome.

There’s no purer contest, Kevin thought. One guy against another, no teammate to draft off of or accuse: This is how you know if you measure up. Little Kevin Pedersen, 5-foot-4, buck-oh-five, smallest guy in the room. There had always been a champion inside of him. Without wrestling, he would have been the only one to know it.

And now here he was: a decorated agent for the Drug Enforcement Agency, with a gun on his hip and another tucked in his boot. Out there in South Florida, always on call, he saw the worst in people, the price paid for an undisciplined life. Back in these gyms, wrestling’s ceremony reassured him, relaxed his mind enough to let him dip into his past.

But Kevin’s past wasn’t his alone. At the meets, someone would inevitably recognize Kevin and remind him of his curious bond with a teammate. What about Alex? Kevin would grin and gosh-dang along with them, reminiscing, although he could never understand the appeal of the outlaw.

IN THE WINTER of 1991, Alex DeCubas emerged from the arrivals lounge at El Dorado International Airport in Bogotá, Colombia, carrying a fake Dominican passport. Alex worked his bullish chest and shoulders into a brown leather coat as he scanned for his driver among the desperate faces of a country shattered by the cocaine wars.