{"id":594630,"date":"2026-04-09T01:52:10","date_gmt":"2026-04-09T01:52:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/594630\/"},"modified":"2026-04-09T01:52:10","modified_gmt":"2026-04-09T01:52:10","slug":"dictator-drug-lord-surrenders-after-10-days-of-listening-to-van-halen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/594630\/","title":{"rendered":"Dictator drug lord surrenders after 10 days of listening to Van Halen"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Noriega had played a major role in drug trafficking operations in the 1970s and 1980s, collaborating with South American drug lords to amass an immense personal fortune.<\/p>\n<p>Going from Panama&#8217;s intelligence chief to its de facto ruler to a full-blown dictator, Noriega ruled his country with an iron fist.<\/p>\n<p>Noriega took sanctuary in the Vatican&#8217;s embassy in Panama City.<\/p>\n<p>Rather than break a treaty by invading the embassy, the US Delta Force blasted a Van Halen cassette non-stop for ten days.<\/p>\n<p>Noriega surrendered ten days later.<\/p>\n<p>During his trial in the US it was revealed that for the last few decades, Noriega had been a CIA informant and US collaborator.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>After serving his sentence in the US, he was jailed in France for money laundering, then jailed in Panama for murder.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Noriega had played a major role in drug trafficking operations in the 1970s and 1980s, collaborating with South&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":594631,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[64,63,134],"class_list":{"0":"post-594630","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/594630","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=594630"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/594630\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/594631"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=594630"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=594630"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=594630"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}