Manuel de Dios Unanue (died 1995) was a Cuban-born American journalist who investigated illicit drug production in Brooklyn, New York City.
Manuel had identified that local drug producer Victor Crespo was in fact Colombian drug lord José Santacruz Londoño of the Cali cartel, and began observing him. After one of Santacruz's lab exploded due to an electrical accident, de Dios extensively reported on it, revealing Crespo was Santacruz and that he had taken over the lab from a local Dominican gang.
Later, he was told to meet an informant in a restaurant. However, he found Santacruz there, and the drug lord asked him how long it would taken him to go to the airport. Manuel replied that he did not know. Chepe then remarked that both of them were similar as they were immigrated to New York from Latin America, to which de Dios replied that his parents moved to the United States because they believed in freedom, while Chepe moved to sell cocaine, and declared that they don't share any similarity. Santacruz then shot Manuel twice in the head and left for Colombia.
Behind the scenes[]
Real life
Manuel de Dios was Born in Cuba on January 4, 1943. He voluntarily exiled from the island in 1967 as a political refugee and came to the United States in 1973, he started his journalism career in 1977 as a reporter for El Diario-La Prens. He was actually shot to death in a restaurant in Queens on March 11, 1992, while sitting on the bar he was approached from behind and shot twice in the head by hired gunman Wilson Alejandro Mejia-Velez. Mejia-Velez was acting on orders given by Cali Cartel boss José Santacruz Londoño in retaliation for the hard hitting stories he had written about their drug and money laundering operations. [1]