The attempted car-bomb assassination of the journalist in Scarface was based on the real 1976 assassination of Chilean political dissident Orlando Letelier in Washington D.C. Letelier was a former Chilean minister and ambassador to the United States who became a prominent opponent of Augusto Pinochet.
Michael Townley, an American expatriate working as a covert operative for Chile’s secret police, planted a C-4 bomb underneath Letelier’s car two nights before the assassination. The bomb was connected to a radio receiver, allowing it to be triggered remotely.
On the day of the assassination, militants followed Letelier’s car through Washington in another vehicle, much like Tony and Alberto do in Scarface. And just as Alberto was instructed to detonate the bomb in front of the United Nations building, they waited until Letelier reached the heart of Washington’s Embassy Row before remotely triggering the bomb, killing Letelier and his 25-year-old colleague, Ronni Moffitt.