Two
ISAW THE STRANGE PRIEST IN MY MIND for the first time the night in 1976 I was driving from Manizales to Medellín to try to get Pablo out of jail. He had been arrested for smuggling cocaine. But from that night until today the priest will still visit me with warnings.
All of this happened because people wanted cocaine. Pablo found he could easily sell as much as he could bring into our country. The business grew very rapidly, but at the beginning it was just Pablo and Gustavo. In fact, I remember that my brother asked our mother to make him a jacket with a double cover, a secret lining, so he could hide the merchandise and the cash he had to carry. One member of Pablo’s organization, the Lion, remembers carrying as much as $3 million in cash in the lining as he made more than twenty flights between Medellín and New York, bringing the drugs to America and the cash back to Colombia. Hermilda, who made the first such jacket, certainly did not know what this jacket was for, she was very innocent about all of this. One night the family was at the dinner table when Pablo handed her some money. “Pablo,” she said, “I heard you are washing the money. Is this money laundered?”
“Yes, of course,” he said.
She shook her head. “Then why is it not wet?” I can still hear our laughter.
Soon the Renault 4s were too small so Pablo bought trucks that could carry as many as twenty kilos each journey. The drugs came through Ecuador to the agricultural city of Pasto in southwest Colombia. One of the biggest products of Pasto is potatoes and Colombians are used to seeing large trucks carrying loads of potatoes from the border. Pablo had the idea of secreting many kilos of cocaine in a large spare tire carried by the trucks. It worked very well for several months. Still at this time I didn’t know what Pablo and Gustavo were doing.
Pablo and Gustavo hired several drivers and helpers, each pair of them being responsible for a different section of the trip, because they didn’t want anyone else knowing their route. One of the drivers was known as Gavilán, meaning Vulture. Gavilán was stupid; with the money Pablo paid him he bought a car and a motorcycle and expensive clothes. Gavilán had an uncle who worked for the DAS, the Departamento Administrativo de Seguridad, Colombia’s FBI, and he wondered what his nephew was doing to earn so much money. “It’s nothing,” Gavilán told him. “I’m working with this guy and all I do is drive a truck with potatoes from Pasto to Medellín.” The DAS agent started an investigation. All the details were never known, but somehow they found out the truth. One day the DAS and the police stopped the truck outside Medellín. They told the driver that everything was set; he just had to call the boss and tell him that he had to pay a bribe for the truck to continue. As Pablo told me later, he was not surprised when he got the phone call, as this was often the way business was done in Colombia. But when he and Gustavo showed up at the designated meeting place they were arrested.
I didn’t learn about this until the next day. I was in the city of Manizales meeting with the coaching staff of the national bicycling team, preparing for a speech I was to give that evening, when I saw the police picture of Pablo on the front page of the newspaper. I was stunned; I knew he was doing contraband, but not drugs. My first fear was what this would do to my own position with the team. I was worried I would be fired. But then I realized that no one at this meeting knew Pablo was my brother. I decided to be cool. I’d give my speech and then I would try to help.
I called my mother, who had been crying for hours. Remember, we had no cell phones then and she had not been able to find me. I told her I knew nothing about it, but that certainly I would do whatever I could to help my brother.
I tried to give my speech that night, but it was impossible. I apologized and said I was feeling sick and had to leave. The drive from Manizales to Medellín took about eight hours. I was with a good friend who eventually would work for Pablo in the cartel. We were driving a Dodge truck. I drove for several hours, then allowed my friend to take over. Today Colombia has nice highways, but at that time it was mostly narrow old roads. I sat back in the passenger seat and began thinking about what I would have to do right away. As soon as I got back to Medellín I had to make sure our financial records were the way we wanted them to be. The government was not going to check the source of Pablo’s funds, but they might want to see how much he had earned from drug deals. I had to make sure that all the money he had in the banks was based on recent real estate transactions.
It was 3:30 in the morning and we were the only car on the road. I saw that we were running short of fuel and began looking around for a gas station. As I did I saw a man dressed in black, with a round black hat on his head, standing by the side of the road. To me, he looked like a priest. I thought that was very strange: What was a priest doing standing alone on the road in the middle of the night? As we came close to him my friend didn’t even slow down. “Hey,” I practically yelled at him, “stop the car! Stop the car!”
We raced right past the man. I saw his face looking at me. I said to my friend, “Man, I’m telling you to stop the freaking car!” Then I turned around and looked back—and the man was gone. He had disappeared.
A little while later we drove past an open gas station—and again he refused to stop. He didn’t stop until we finally ran out of gas. I was furious with him. “What’s the matter with you? Why didn’t you stop to pick up that guy? I told you to stop at the gas station.”
He looked at me like I was crazy. “What are you talking about? You never told me to stop. There was no guy on the road.”
I got goose bumps. Even now when I think about it my body goes cold. I know what I saw that night. And more important, that was only the first time I would see the priest. And I would learn to understand what it meant when I saw him.
We had to walk back to the gas station but eventually we got home. I saw Pablo a day later at the Itagüi prison, one of the toughest jails in Medellín. He didn’t want to talk about his situation, just telling me that he would take care of it. He spent eight days there, then paid someone to arrange his transfer to a more relaxed prison. This was more of a farm than a jail; the prisoners were allowed to walk free, play soccer, even eat their meals outside. He spent more than two months there waiting for his trial. During that time, I believe, some arrangements were made with the local judge. In addition, my mother became friends with the director of the prison, bringing him meals, because she was there so often. Unfortunately, because the crime began in Pasto, it was decided the trial would take place there. But that was much more dangerous for Pablo, as he was going to be tried by a military judge, and those judges were difficult to corrupt. If Pablo and Gustavo were convicted in a military court it was possible he would receive a long sentence.
Pablo’s attorney informed him of this the day before the transfer was to take place. Pablo became concerned; he didn’t know anybody in Pasto who could help him. It was possible he wasn’t going to be able to make a deal for their freedom. So late that night he told one of the guards that he couldn’t sleep and needed to take a walk around the soccer field. “I need to relax,” he said. “I need to stretch my legs.”
He stretched them a long distance. He escaped that night. I can imagine that people were paid to help him. He walked out of the jail. Several hours after his escape the director called my mother to plead for assistance. “I don’t know what to do. I’m expecting an airplane from the air force to bring the boys to Pasto,” he told her. “If he isn’t here they might put me in jail myself. He has to return. I promise, nothing is going to happen to him.
“I was so good with them,” he said. “I let them walk wherever they wanted to go. And now I’m going to be punished for it.”
When Pablo finally called our mother to tell her he escaped she was angry. “I wonder who you think you are? You’ve got to do things right. You have to go back,” she explained. “Things will be okay.” Pablo agreed and she went to meet him. Many years later our mother would risk her life meeting without security with our enemies from Cali and from a group organized to kill Pablo, Los Pepes. Hermilda Gavíria was a brave woman who would do anything to protect her children.
She took a taxi to meet Pablo. She was worried how the director would explain his absence to the military, but Pablo came up with a plan. Instead of returning immediately to the prison they went to visit a doctor. Pablo paid the doctor a lot of money to make up some documents that Pablo had been very, very sick, some problem with his digestive system. The doctor put Pablo’s name on X-rays of a patient who really had a problem. And by 11 A.M. Pablo and our mother showed up at the prison. Pablo apologized to the director and confessed he had been feeling very bad. “I thought I was going to die,” he said.
Thankfully the air force plane had not been able to fly because of bad weather. Eventually Pablo and Gustavo and their drivers were taken by truck to Pasto. He was lucky because the government changed the system and he had the opportunity to use his money there. He bought the judge, although I don’t know how much money it cost him. As part of the arrangement the driver, Frank, who had been caught with the merchandise in the truck, agreed to plead guilty to trafficking drugs and say that Pablo and Gustavo were not involved in the deal. Frank the driver was sentenced to less than five years.
Pablo told him, “During the time you’re in jail you’re going to have everything and your family is going to be taken care of. It’s like you’re working hard and there is money in the bank.” Pablo arranged for him to be held in a nice jail. And for his family he gave them a house and car and a good bank account. It was my job to make certain that Frank and his family regularly received the payments.
The first Sunday Pablo was out of jail we had dinner together at our mother’s house. It was then I tried to talk him away from cocaine. “This is bad. Don’t do this,” I told him. “There’s no need. You’re making so much money in contraband. Why do you want to get messed up with this stuff?” That’s when he told me how everything had started.
But he promised me, “Don’t worry, brother, I’m not going to do this for long. It’s just to make some money. Then I’m going to stick to contraband, because if they catch me they just take the merchandise, they don’t put you in prison.”
I told him that he was hurting me too. I was a successful businessman, my stores were selling my bicycles and I was receiving my salary from the government for coaching. I wondered if the government would allow the brother of a drug dealer to coach the national team. He promised me that he was done with the cocaine deals. I don’t remember if I believed him.
Pablo went right back to the business. By this time he was known to the police. More than a month later the same two DAS agents who had arrested Pablo and Gustavo earlier stopped them once again. This time their plans were different. They took them to El Basurero, the desolate area where a mountain of garbage was being created, tied their hands together, and made them get down on their knees. They were very hard with them. Pablo believed he was about to be murdered, but he stayed cool. He never begged for his life, rather he negotiated. Eventually the DAS kidnappers agreed to accept one million pesos to let them live. They set Gustavo free to go get the money. While waiting for Gustavo to return they spoke, and Pablo offered more money to learn who had set him up. The purchased answer was surprising: El Cucaracho. The man who had put Pablo in this business was worried that Pablo was taking control. To protect his business he had bought their death. Unfortunately, that also was the way this business was done.
Eventually they were paid their ransom and allowed Pablo and Gustavo to go free. The legend makes it clear that this was an insult Pablo could never forgive. Kidnapping for ransom was an accepted part of our lives, but by making him go down on his knees they paid him no respect. The story is that Pablo promised, “I’m going to kill those motherf*ckers myself.” Only a few days later these corrupt agents were planning to kidnap another worker of Pablo’s. At that time the name Pablo Escobar wasn’t known, so no one had reason to be afraid of him. For the agents he was just another drug dealer. But instead of being successful in this attempt, they were caught themselves. Pablo never told me this whole story. I have heard from others that Pablo had them brought to a house, made them get down on their knees, then put a gun to their head and killed them. Maybe. But I do know that the newspapers reported finding the bodies of these two DAS agents who had been shot many times.
From this time forward Pablo was in the business of distributing cocaine, at first only in Colombia but eventually to at least fifteen countries and through those countries much of the world. Toward the end of his life the cartel was even beginning to move into Eastern Europe, into the communist nations. At the height of its business the Medellín cartel was producing and delivering tons of cocaine weekly, tons, but for Pablo it began by producing a few kilos by hand in a small house.
I don’t remember the day Pablo told me the whole truth about his business. It was soon. As I was the man taking care of the money, of course I had to know. Transforming the alkaloid from the coca leaf requires a process of several steps. It is a chemical process but it does not require experts to do it, just people who can follow simple steps. It is no more difficult than baking a cake. The process is done in a laboratory, which is called the kitchen. It is a laboratory in word only, as the process can take place anywhere from a nice house to the jungle. Eventually Pablo built many very large labs, employing hundreds of people, deep in the Colombian jungle, far away from any normally traveled roads. But his first lab was inside a two-story house Pablo purchased in the town of Belén. This was a normal house set in a residential neighborhood. The workers, known as the cooks, lived on the second floor and the kitchen was most of the first floor. Pablo had turned several old refrigerators into simple ovens that were used to cook the powder. What made this house different was that all the windows were covered all the time, making it impossible for anyone to see inside. In the beginning there was no need to pay anything to the police, who had no knowledge of what was going on.
The only problem was the very strong smell of the chemicals. Pablo was afraid the neighbors would complain to the police, so that’s when he decided to build his laboratory in the jungle. This was when the business really began to grow. At that time there was no way of imagining what it would become, what incredible riches he would earn. There was nothing to which it could be compared. The president of Colombia, Virgilio Barco, would later call it “a great and powerful organization the likes of which has never existed in the world.”
Within only a few months Pablo and Gustavo had earned considerable money. I was putting Pablo’s money in different banks, spreading it around as best I could. But there was no way for me to prepare to handle this amount of money. For anyone. Pablo had started purchasing nice things for himself; he bought a Nissan Patrol, which is a large jeep-type vehicle, and a beautiful house for himself in the wealthy neighborhood El Poblado, living among the wealthiest citizens of Medellín. I still tried to convince him not to continue in this business. Pablo and I were both very strong soccer fans, although we supported different teams from Medellín. Our whole lives we would go to the stadium whenever possible. Once, I remember, early in Pablo’s story, we went together and were sitting side by side in the sun. There was just the two of us, two brothers, no bodyguards, no wives or children. This was one of the last times we were ever able to do this. I made one last plea: “You have enough money now,” I said. “You can buy what you need. Why don’t you just focus on the real estate business?”
He smiled to himself. As we were to learn, there are different ways to be addicted to drugs. Once Pablo was in the middle of the business, once he had tasted the power and the money and the renown, there was no way he could ever get out of it.
It was as he established his name that Pablo’s life changed in another, very different way. In 1974 he had fallen in love with the most beautiful young girl of the neighborhood, María Victoria Henao. The difficulty was that Pablo was already twenty-five and she was only fourteen, and because of that age difference María Victoria’s mother was very much against this relationship. She refused to speak with Pablo and tried to make it difficult for María to be with him. But Pablo was very much in love and pursued her very strongly. I remember one night he and a guitar player got very drunk and like a scene in a cheap movie serenaded her. In 1976 María Victoria became pregnant. One day, just like that, they decided they would be married. At that time I was outside Colombia, traveling with the national cycling team, so I missed the ceremony. It was a simple event. There was no planning, nothing special was organized. Three months later their son, Juan Pablo, was born. It took a couple of years before his mother-in-law would finally agree to join their new family, but eventually she accepted that Pablo truly loved her daughter.
It would be wrong to say that Pablo was always the most faithful husband to María Victoria, the world knows that, but there was not one day that he stopped loving his wife, his children, and his family. In fact, years later it was this love for his family and his fear for their safety that caused him to change his usual behavior and allow himself to be found and killed.
For the entire family, our lives changed forever the day my brother decided to send his drugs to America. By that time there had been a long-established marijuana business between Colombia and the United States, but there was not much of a market for cocaine. That began to change when Americans began growing much of their own marijuana, so the profit from the large loads was greatly reduced. Pablo had gone into his business at just the right time to take advantage of that. Some of the routes and the customers were already in place. Cocaine was the perfect product to replace marijuana: It was much easier to smuggle because it required so much less space, yet it was more profitable. One small load that could be carried by a “mule,” a person carrying the drugs with him, or on a small airplane, was worth a lot more money than many bales of marijuana secretly packed onto a freight ship.
Also at that time most people didn’t see much difference between cocaine and marijuana. They were both experience-enhancing drugs. This was before there was any violence attached to the cocaine trade and before cocaine had addicted America, long before the even stronger crack cocaine had been introduced to the American streets. Nobody thought it was much of a big deal. For smugglers it was just a more profitable substitute for marijuana. And in Colombia, there was the belief that sometime soon cocaine would be made legal both in our country and in America, just like it had been in the past. So when Pablo first came up with the idea to ship cocaine to America no one there seemed very worried about it.
The first way Pablo smuggled cocaine into the United States was by packing between twenty and forty kilos into used airplane tires and sending them to Miami on a small plane. He would find or buy used airplane tires in Colombia and store the drugs in them. When they arrived in Miami the pilots would throw them out as useless and buy new tires. In Miami the used tires had no value to anyone, so they would be thrown on a truck, driven to a garbage dump, and thrown away. An employee of Pablo’s would follow the truck, and retrieve those packages from the garbage. It was a simple plan that worked well.
What was nice for Pablo was that he never touched the drugs. He had decided that he no longer was going to be doing the dirty work, he didn’t want to risk going to jail again, and now he could afford to hire people to take those risks. It made the business much safer for him. So he employed regular people to bring the paste from Peru to Medellín and he had his cooks there to make the paste into the valuable powder. But some of the people who took the drugs from there to Florida later occupied important positions in the organization.
There were a few different people who drove the merchandise from the laboratory to the airport. The man in charge was Alosito and one of his main drivers was called Chepe. Chepe drove the big flatbed trucks and worked for Pablo from the beginning almost to the end. During the war with the enemies of the cartel Chepe was caught. We never knew exactly which of the many organizations fighting us had captured him, but we knew that they had tied his arms and ran over him with his own truck. They killed him like an animal in the street.
At the airport the men in charge of wrapping the cocaine into packages and packing those packages into the used tires were Prosequito and Juan Carlos. Juan Carlos was called Mr. Munster. Pablo named him that because he was tall and ugly, like Herman Munster from The Munsters. These two would write the brand name on the packages of cocaine; Pablo used names like Emerald and Diamond, so that if American drug agents overheard Pablo discussing a shipment they would believe he was referring to precious stones rather than drugs. Years later Prosequito was killed in just the same way as Chepe. For these jobs each of these people was paid $150 to $200 per kilo.
Pablo depended on several different pilots, and they were flying small private airplanes. The pilots mostly were paid by the kilo, at first about $2,500 per kilo but later as much as $6,000. For some flights a pilot could earn more than $1 million. Eventually Pablo and his partners in the cartel would have their many large airplanes and helicopters, but on these small planes it was only possible to carry three or at most four old tires.
The person who opened up Florida for Pablo was Luis Carlos, who had been a friend of his for a long time. It was Luis Carlos’s job to get the drugs out of the tires and begin the distribution. Luis didn’t speak English, but with all the Latinos in Miami that was not necessary. Particularly as long as he had a lot of money to give to the people who were needed. I remember that once he returned home to Medellín and brought some canned food from the market for Pablo to try. “You gotta eat this,” he said. “It’s delicious. It’s what I’ve been eating for the past two months.”
Pablo knew enough English to know that Luis Carlos had been eating cat food.
After Luis Carlos set up the operation in Miami he did the same thing in New York City.
At the beginning Pablo was sending only one airplane a week, but since the profit for each kilo was about $100,000, he was still earning almost $2 million a week. The business grew up so fast, much faster than anyone knew, and within a few months he was sending shipments two or three times a week, and even that was not enough to satisfy the fast growing market. Americans wanted cocaine. At first it was mostly high-class people, people of the entertainment business, people doing advertising, the Wall Street people, the record business, the people who went to the clubs like Studio 54. All people who could afford it easily. But soon everybody was doing it. The demand only went up. And because Pablo was almost the only person bringing coke into the country the supply was very small, so people were willing to pay big money for it. The further away it traveled from the route, from Miami, the more expensive it became. In the late 1970s in Colorado, for example, the cost was $72,000 a kilo. In California it was $60,000, in Texas $50,000. Anytime another person put his hands on the merchandise the price went up $1,000.
Pablo was smart enough to understand that he could not depend on one method of delivery for too long. The more people who knew even some of the details of his operation the more chance there was it would be betrayed. He used to figure that the United States Drug Enforcement Agency was between two and three years behind him, so before that amount of time passed he would find other ways of bringing cocaine into America. When the DEA started asking people at the airport questions he knew they were getting information from somewhere and that was the end of the used tires scheme. Instead he would send ordinary people with drugs in their suitcases or in their clothes on regular commercial airplanes. It was even more simple than it sounds. The travelers had to be people Pablo knew or who were recommended by people he trusted. The people who recommended them were responsible for their actions. The only requirement was that they already had to have a visa. They were both Colombian citizens and American citizens. People who were traveling from Colombia to the United States carried drugs in their suitcases, people coming to Colombia from America brought back the money in their suitcases. Anybody who wanted to come to the U.S., boom, drugs, anybody who wanted to go to Colombia, boom, money. Back then it wasn’t that risky, the DEA or Customs was not looking for these people. They were much too busy searching freighters for big bales of marijuana. It was also much less expensive for Pablo to make his shipments this way than it had been with the tires. He didn’t have to pay for the airplanes and the large fees. These people were paid around $1,000 plus their tickets.
In addition to the passengers, also the crew of the regular commercial airplanes carried suitcases for Pablo. That was even easier because they could just walk on and off the plane without having to go through a search. On some planes two or three stewardesses and a pilot or co-pilot might be carrying merchandise for us, but they never shared that information with each other. Each of them believed they were the only one on that flight. For these people it was an easy way of making additional money, particularly because they would fly both parts of the route and maybe make the trip twice a week.
The suitcases they were given were specially made. They had double walls and it was possible to secret as many as five kilos in one suitcase. All they had to do was make sure they handed the suitcase to the correct person at their destination.
Some people also were given special shoes made with hollow bottoms in which the drugs were carried. The grandfather of someone in our organization had a shoe manufacturing corporation; when he got sick his son took over and began working with us. In this factory they would make these shoes with the merchandise sewn inside. There was almost no way they could ever be discovered. We even put people in wheelchairs to carry the drugs, which was safe because no one ever suspected that they were sitting on close to a million dollars in cocaine. Sometimes our mules were dressed in costume, like a nun, for example, or even a blind person—who would be using a hollow walking stick filled with merchandise. Rarely were there any problems or discoveries with these people.
When Pablo started doing it this way he would send a few passengers every other day. Then it was an everyday thing and then twice a day. Only once did the DEA discover the cocaine in two suitcases, but nobody picked up those suitcases so they didn’t catch anybody.
Another method, which eventually became well known, was having the mules eat the cocaine. The cocaine would be put in condoms and the mules would swallow them. The drugs were undetectable inside their bodies. When they arrived at their destination they would go to the bathroom and then, boom. While there were always enough mules willing to make this trip, this was the most dangerous method for them. If any of the condoms would start leaking, or if one opened up, the mule could die. People did die this way. It was written about in the newspapers in America and got a lot of attention.
But eventually Pablo decided it was not even necessary to send people with the suitcases; we could just send the suitcases. This was many years before the attack on 9/11 so security was easy, we paid the right people to put our suitcases on the flight. At the destination our people would just pick them up. One thing that Pablo found right away was that it was simple to convince people working in the right jobs to cooperate with us. Almost from the very first day Pablo knew he had to pay big bribes, just like in the contraband business. Pablo was generous with these payments, he wanted to make it so rewarding for people that they would never betray him. So many people earned their fortunes working for us that no one ever learned about. For example, when Pablo was flying our own airplanes the manager of a small airport we used in Colombia was paid up to $500,000 for each flight he arranged to land without any difficulty. This was a man who earned a small salary from his job, but when he was finally arrested the authorities found he had $27 million in all his bank accounts. So obviously it was never a problem recruiting the people we needed. People in positions to assist would come to us and make offers. These people would include airplane maintenance people who would put our merchandise aboard the plane for us, military and police officers and guards who would look in a different direction when they were told to, even an American who sold Pablo the flight schedules for the surveillance planes that flew above Florida searching the skies for our planes.
Tito Domínguez, who ran a smuggling operation for the cartel in Florida, remembers how simple it was to recruit the people we needed and deliver the cocaine. When he was making preparations to land planes in the Bahamas to refuel he wanted to guarantee the safety of this part of the operation. He found out from a Customs agent that he had been working with in the marijuana business that the government official who ran the airport would go to a certain bar every Friday afternoon. Tito often traveled with his pet mountain lion, by the name of T.C., which could be an intimidation, but this time he went there by himself and sat two seats away from this official at the bar. He didn’t need the threat, he had a better weapon: cash. He didn’t speak to him for a time, then finally said, “Excuse me, but I’d like to talk to you for a second.”
The official said, “About what, man?”
“We have a mutual friend who said I could speak to you about something sensitive.”
“What’s his name?” the man asked carefully.
“Frankie,” Tito told him.
The man shook his head. “Nah, I don’t know any Frankie.”
Tito stood up. He was holding about $20,000 in hundred-dollar bills in his hand. One by one he started laying them out on the bar. “You might recognize his picture,” he said.
“Stop, man. What do you want to talk about?”
It was that easy. “I want to talk about making you rich.”
The man moved over one seat and spoke in a low voice. “What do I have to do for this, man?”
“Nothing. You do nothing when I land my airplane full of cocaine at your airport. You go get a cup of coffee and you do nothing at all.”
He considered that. “What does this mean?”
Tito told him flat out: “$500,000 up front.”
The official nodded. “How many times a month can you do this?”
That was the way Pablo built up the organization. The money he earned brought even more money. At this time, in the late 1970s, there was no Medellín cartel, just Pablo running his own business. And drug smuggling was not nearly as difficult or dangerous as it was to become because the United States was very slow to recognize the size of the business. They still believed it was mostly small shipments, and operated that way.
There were some other people selling small amounts of Colombian coke to the United States but it was only Pablo who controlled the entire operation from buying the paste in Peru to delivering the product to Miami. And once Pablo had set up his system he invited others to take advantage of it. For example, he would allow other Colombians to invest their money in the business. If someone that could be trusted wanted to invest $50,000, Pablo would tell them he would return $75,000 in two weeks. He would use that $50,000 to finance a drug run. Because his operation was so safe, he also was able to guarantee to people that if the American DEA or Customs intercepted the shipment he would refund 50 percent of their money. It was very profitable for everyone who invested with Pablo. Mostly for Pablo, though, who would own the biggest share of the profits. There were so many people who were almost begging him to take their money, regular people with all types of normal jobs. These people didn’t know about drugs, they knew about Pablo. People were handing over to Pablo their life savings, they were selling their car and their house to raise money to invest with him. And nobody lost money. Nobody. Pablo helped many people have their dreams come true.
Pablo was starting to build a much bigger operation. Two of the other dealers in Medellín were a good friend of Pablo’s named Dejermo and another person Pablo did not know named Rodrigo. Dejermo was good at bringing drugs from Panama into Medellín by car; he had made valuable connections with the police in the city. Rodrigo was a great pilot. These two men started fighting a war between them, for what reason I don’t know. They wanted to kill each other but didn’t succeed, so instead they started killing each other’s families and the innocent people who worked for their enemy, cutting off the heads of the bodies. Dejermo went to Pablo, who by then was getting a reputation in the city for being very strong in doing whatever needed to be done, and having the men with the ability to get it done. He asked him to be the middle guy and negotiate an end to this war.
Pablo spoke with Rodrigo. “You guys have to stop this war,” he said. “Dejermo wants me to be on his side to use my guys to fight you.” Rodrigo knew that Pablo was strong enough to crush him so he agreed to meet with Pablo and Dejermo in Panama. “Let’s start working together,” Pablo told them both. Pablo put them in charge of a route from Panama to Haiti and Haiti to Miami. While the two men never became friends, they did become partners—working for Pablo Escobar.
The great desire from America for coke created the market, and others in addition to Pablo went into the business. There is a great misunderstanding about what is known as the Medellín cartel. Generally it’s believed that the cartel was a typical business, with management at the top giving out the instructions and employees carrying them out. The profit is returned to the company. The Medellín cartel was actually many independent drug dealers who got close together for their mutual profit and protection, but each of them continued to run his own operation. But it was never discussed how much money each of the main people earned or their total wealth. Often they would use each other’s manufacturing, supply, and distribution capabilities. For example, Pablo would charge other traffickers 35 percent of the value of the shipment if they contracted with him to bring it into the United States, but he gave them the insurance that if the load was intercepted by the DEA he would refund to them their losses. This was an easy deal for Pablo to make because at the beginning no drugs were stopped. And it was incredibly profitable for him because the others were doing all the preparation work. So the Medellín cartel was an association by choice instead of a unified business. But the person at the top of this loose structure was Pablo, because he had started the business and had the best way of shipping the drugs and the most people loyal to him. The others have said that they were afraid of him. But they all made a lot of money with him.
The Medellín cartel was very different from the cartel running in the city of Cali, which got started around the same time. The Cali cartel was a much more traditional business structure, with four recognized leaders, and under them they had accountants, engineers, and attorneys, and then the workers.
The other independent drug operators who were recognized as the leaders of the Medellín cartel were Carlos Lehder Rivas, the Ochoa brothers, and José Rodríguez Gacha, who everyone knew as the Mexican. Each of these people built up their own business before joining the others. Carlos Lehder was a real smart guy who developed his ideas about smuggling coke into the United States while he was in prison there for smuggling marijuana. Carlos was probably the first to use his own small airplanes to fly the coke into America and was making millions of dollars even before working with Pablo. He was an excellent pilot, but I don’t think he flew the loads himself. In 1978 he bought a big house on the island of Norman’s Cay in the Bahamas for $190,000 and with the cooperation of the government authorities that he paid, he established his base there. Soon he controlled the whole island, which was like his kingdom. And from there he was in charge of the entire Caribbean. The stories were that he often had parties there that lasted for days, and always with lots of beautiful, mostly naked women. He built a protected runway and this island was used by everyone in the business as a place to transfer drugs from Colombia from big planes to small planes or to put them on speedboats for the two-hundred-mile trip to Florida. To use his island each person had to pay Carlos a percentage of the load.
Pablo and Carlos knew each other and they liked each other before they needed to work together. Eventually they would become close friends and Pablo would save his life, but they had very different thoughts; Pablo admired the United States but Carlos wanted to destroy it with drugs. Carlos called cocaine “the atomic bomb” that he was going to drop on America. This was because of his politics; his father was German so Adolf Hitler became Carlos’s hero. And while Pablo only occasionally smoked marijuana, Carlos smoked all the time. A pilot for the cartel, Jimmy Arenas, once said about Lehder, “The three schools of thought he got was Hitler, Jesus Christ, and Marx. . . . When you mix that in one pot with marijuana it would be a big explosion.”
Pablo and Carlos got together around 1979, when Lehder was kidnapped by the M-19 guerrillas. At that time M-19 was one of the four or five left-wing guerrilla groups operating in Colombia’s jungles. Pablo knew some of the guerrilla chiefs because he paid them a percentage to protect the laboratories he built in the wild. If the guerrillas had wanted to destroy these laboratories they could have easily, instead they became the guards. All of the traffickers paid them. M-19 raised some of the money it needed to survive and grow by kidnapping wealthy people for millions of dollars’ ransom. When they demanded $5 million for Lehder’s freedom, another person in the drug business asked Pablo for assistance. Pablo’s contacts found out that Carlos was being held in a farmhouse in Armenia and Pablo organized a team of six men to rescue him. When the guerrillas found out they were coming to battle them they escaped out the back, pushing Lehder into the trunk of their car. As they tried to race away Carlos was able to free himself, but while running away was shot in the leg. Two of the kidnappers were captured. And after that Pablo and Carlos became close friends and often worked together.
Like Pablo, Carlos had his own way of living. For instance, a few years later when the Bahamian government arrested several Colombian drug traffickers and put them in jail, he got so angry he flew a plane over Nassau and emptied boxes of cash over the capital city. He literally rained money. That was his way of reminding people how powerful he was, that he could do anything he wanted to do. That was Carlos.
José Rodríguez Gacha was the son of a poor pig farmer from the city of Pacho who also made more than a billion dollars in this cocaine business. Like Pablo, he was named one of the richest men in the world. While the Ochoas were educated people, Gacha had dropped out of grade school. Because he loved everything with Mexico—he owned the Bogotá soccer club the Millionarios and had a mariachi band to perform for the fans—and eventually established the routes through Mexico, he became known as El Mexicano, the Mexican. He made that name infamous. The Mexican was ruthless. Many of the terrible killings that Pablo has been blamed for were done by Gacha. But also like Pablo, he gave away much of his money to the poor people for health and education, to pay for farm equipment and seed to survive, and so the people of his region loved him.
The Mexican came up in the emerald business. Most people don’t know that in Colombia there has always been more violence for the control of emeralds than there was for drugs. But killing in that business is very casual. Gacha became known in that business for having no fear of anyone and killing people to succeed. At one time he worked in a bar in Medellín that some members of Pablo’s organization liked to go to. Even these people, very tough people, were impressed by the Mexican. He started doing small favors for them, and eventually came to run his own organization, opening new routes through Mexico to Houston and Los Angeles. It was the Mexican who first set up Tranquilandia, one of the largest and the best known of the jungle laboratories where more than two thousand people lived and worked making and packaging cocaine.
As poor as the Mexican was growing up, the three Ochoa brothers, Jorge, Juan David, and Fabio, came from a respected wealthy family. They had no needs that weren’t satisfied. The main business of the Ochoa family was raising horses and there is a story I have heard told that early in the business they would send drugs to the United States in the vaginas of mares. The Ochoas were in the business in a small way for a long time. Like many others, they had no thought that this business would grow so big so quickly. And because the cocaine business was not considered a terrible crime in Colombia, Pablo met the Ochoas when he began being successful in the business. Pablo and Gustavo would often go to Bogotá for the auto races, where the Ochoas owned a popular restaurant, and met them there. Pablo and Jorge became friends. “I met him in the business. Medellín is a small town,” Jorge said once. “And everybody knows each other.” Later on Jorge became one of Pablo’s closest friends. In the early times there was no competition between the dealers because the American market was so big each person could sell all the merchandise they could smuggle into the country. So rather than fighting over territory they helped each other. The Ochoa brothers eventually headed operations in Western Europe.
There were others who were part of the business, like Kiko Moncada, Pablo Correa, Albeiro Areiza, and Fernando Galeano, but they were not the main people. What brought all of them together into what became known to others—but never to them—as the Medellín cartel was the kidnapping in 1981 of Martha Nieves Ochoa, the sister of the Ochoa brothers, by M-19. The guerrillas had begun kidnapping the drug dealers and their families because they were rich and could not go to the police for help. After Martha was kidnapped Pablo called a meeting of all of the drug people at his grand home, Hacienda Napoles. More than two hundred people agreed with his idea and contributed to the forming of an army to fight the kidnappers, an army that was called Muerta a Secuestradores, MAS, Death to the Kidnappers. Because Pablo was known to have the toughest men working in his organization, everyone agreed that he should be the head of it. Nothing was going to stop Pablo from dealing with the kidnappers. While Pablo had been working with some of the M-19 people, he told them that this was a war and he would destroy them. Pablo told a newspaper reporter, “If there was not an immediate and strong response, the M-19 were going to continue screwing our own families. . . . We paid law enforcement 80 million pesos for the information they had at this moment and the next day they began to fall. My soldiers took them to our secret houses, our secret ranches and people from law enforcement went there and hung them up and began to bust them up.”
Many of the M-19 were killed in the Colombian way of La Violencia, the most painful way imaginable, with limbs cut off, and within weeks Martha Ochoa was let free without harm. The success of this effort made the drug traffickers realize how much stronger they were working together than independently. And that was when the Medellín cartel came into existence, with Pablo the leader. From that time forward each of them would continue to run their own operations, but they would share their abilities to manufacture and distribute cocaine around the world. But, as I said, while they would meet for business and pleasure, there was no formal structure like Cali.
That also was not the end of the kidnappings. In Colombia kidnapping remained a profitable crime. Pablo’s participation didn’t even make our family safe. In 1985 our father was taken by a group of policemen. Some police were known to be kidnappers, they would use their powers to stop people on the roads and then take them away. Our father was on his way to visit one of Pablo’s farms in Antioquia when six men in a jeep stopped him. They tied up the workingmen with him and then took him away. Our mother was frantic, yelling and praying. The kidnappers demanded $50 million. Pablo spread the word that the kidnappers should be told: “If I find my father with one bruise the money they are asking for won’t be enough to pay for their own burial.”
Pablo did not often show his emotions openly. In the best or the worst situations he was always in control, he always appeared calm. I remember when someone would show up at an office and tell Pablo they had good news and bad news, and asked which he wanted to hear first, he would tell them, “Any one, it’s the same. We’re going to have to deal with all the situations, so just give me the news.” Calm. I have a temper and at times I get very angry, very upset. Even during this kidnapping, when our father’s life was at stake, Pablo remained steady, giving orders and creating the plan to capture those responsible.
Our father had recently had a heart operation and needed special medicine. There were more than two hundred drugstores in Medellín, many of them with security cameras. Pablo made certain that those that did not have these hidden cameras got them installed. Then he offered a good reward for photographs of any people buying that heart medicine. In that way he was able to identify two of the kidnappers. We also knew that the kidnappers were calling our mother’s home from public phones. So Pablo gave out hundreds of radio transmitters to our friends and workers and instructed them to listen to a well-known radio station. Every time the kidnappers called my mother’s home the announcer on the station said, “This song is dedicated to Luz Marina [a code name that was used]; it’s called ‘Sonaron Cuatro Balazos’ and is sung by Antonio Aguilar,” those people were to check nearby pay phones to see if they were being used. In fact, Pablo used television and radio codes to communicate several different times, especially when we were trying to negotiate a peace treaty with the government.
It was my job to negotiate with the kidnappers. I was to try to keep them on the telephone as long as possible, to allow our people to locate the area the call was coming from. They demanded a $50 million ransom. I began by offering them $10 million, but this they did not accept. They knew they had the father of Pablo Escobar and believed he would pay his whole fortune to free him. I negotiated with them for eighteen days while we gathered information. Our mother was absolutely frantic. Finally the kidnappers agreed to accept one million dollars. We put the money into green duffel bags—but in addition to the cash Pablo put electronic tracking devices into those bags. After the kidnappers had picked up the money, they were tracked to a farm near the town of Liborina, about 150 kilometers from Medellín. When the kidnappers returned there with the ransom people working for Pablo attacked the house from several sides. The kidnappers tried to escape but three of them were captured. Our father was unhurt.
Pablo passed sentence on them.
Within a few years the violence for which Pablo was blamed would start. I won’t say Pablo was right in the things that he did, but he believed he was protecting himself and his family and his business. And he also knew that the people of Colombia profited from the success of the drug traffickers. Many thousands of Colombians were employed in the business, from the workers in the jungle to the police. And many others benefited from the public works each of the traffickers did. Eventually Pablo was forced to go to war with the government of Colombia, the Cali cartel, the national police, and special groups formed specifically to kill him. But at this time there was very little violence within the business. Instead it was just making money, making more money than any man in history had ever made from crime before.