Ten
THE DAYS WERE LONG FOR ME. There were times it seemed like I was flying through time without any destination. I had been in jail for fourteen months but almost all of that time I had lived with hope that Pablo would be able to find a way for all of us to be free one day. So this was not just the death of Pablo, it was the death of my hope. Now each day seemed longer than all the days I’d been there.
Pablo had been the center of the universe for so many years it was difficult to find any solid land without him. At night I would lie in bed thinking about Pablo when we were kids, remembering our many escapes, feeling the special days of Napoles. I thought about our father and the things we used to do at his farm when we were only seven years old, and sometimes when I did I would remember his face and talk to Pablo as if he were in my cell with me, “Pablo, remember what we did.” At night I would tell him that I missed him, and pray for him, “God be with you, you shall be with God.” And then I would sleep and dream about him.
In my mind, he was there with me.
For the next weeks I was too sad to worry about my own legal situation. The days were so long for me. On December 18, I went to the prison’s church to pray for my brother. Afterward I began speaking with the church’s priest, and he told me, “Mr. Escobar, I’m going to tell you something true. I had a dream of Pablo and he told me to play the number 21 for a raffle for a motorcycle. I won that motorcycle.” There had only been one hundred numbers in the drawing, but it was still shocking to me because that number had meaning: Pablo was born on the 1st of December and died on the 2nd of December.
I was thinking about the meaning of this when I returned to my cell. But as I went there a guard said to me, “Mr. Escobar, you got a letter from the prosecuting attorney.”
“What is it?”
“It’s in there,” he told me, pointing at a small room. “You have to read it in there.” I walked into this room. A prison guard of the government gave me an envelope with the initials INPEC, the prison system, written on it, and the other required seals from the control posts. Because of security I always had been careful not to open my own mail; instead I had paid someone to do it for me. But this, this I was sure was an answer to an appeal that I had made and I was anxious to know the outcome. I picked up the envelope, which was heavier than I had expected. I remember the weight in my hand. I tore it open and when I did the only thing I saw was a green wire. Maybe I knew it was a bomb before it exploded. That I don’t remember.
The bomb exploded in my face. My eyes were gone. The explosion had lifted me off my feet to the ceiling, breaking the ceiling tiles with my head. The world was black. I smelled the blood. God, I thought, don’t let me die here.
No one came to help me. I began to crawl to the door, but when I reached down to support myself with my right hand I knew my hand was badly damaged; my fingers had peeled like a banana, the fingernails had been blown off. I knew I had to live. I tried to drag myself the few feet to the door. I heard people shouting my name. Roberto! Roberto! But they seemed so far away. Later I learned that the bomb had blown all the electricity or perhaps somebody had switched off the electricity thus preventing my rescue. Nobody could help me right away; they were looking to find me. Finally they came.
I was left alone for several hours in a room in the prison. I think they were waiting for me to die. Earlier that day a doctor friend of mine had come to visit. I had told him that I was going to start my research on AIDS again, and he had been pleased to hear that. Then the doctor arrived in the room where they had left me and began working to save me. He wiped away my blood and gave me some medication for the intense pain I felt all over. Three excruciating hours it took them to take me to the clinic. I asked for a mirror but of course I couldn’t see anything. The bomb had also damaged my hearing. At the clinic they did the work necessary to save me. My family came there quickly and I told them to leave right away for their own safety. They refused. “If you die, we die with you,” my mother said.
The doctor offered little hope. After his examination he told my family that it was not possible I would get my vision back. My eyes were as dark as raisins. “We have no option,” he said. “We have to take his eyes out. They are completely destroyed. If we don’t remove them they’ll get infected and he could die from that.” My face and hands were burned, my nose was in pieces, and my ears had been sliced. I had shrapnel all over my body.
My mother refused to let him have my eyes. She promised she would go anywhere in the world to find the doctor to help me. Immediately she began this search. It was in Bogotá that she found Dr. Hugo Pérez Villarreal, a military doctor. In this clinic they did the surgeries on soldiers wounded badly in the war against the guerrillas, so my injuries were not unusual for them. Dr. Pérez agreed he would operate, but he did not offer me much hope for recuperation.
Two or three days later I was taken to Bogotá from Medellín for the first of my twenty-two operations. That was the beginning of the most terrible time of my life.
It was never discovered who had sent the bomb. But this jail was maximum security. In that prison there were five different control posts to get through; it was guarded by the army, the police, the DAS, the correctional officers, all equipped with cameras, metal detectors, and X-ray machines. When you passed all that there were still many steel bulletproof doors. Nonetheless, they were able to introduce the bomb without any suspects ever being apprehended. The government was so corrupt it could have been sent to me by anyone. Many of our enemies would have wanted my death.
I had no future. I was in prison where my enemies could reach me. My brother, who might have forced protection, was dead. I couldn’t see to help myself. I recall that the former president Cesár Gavíria had guaranteed my life but still that happened without any corresponding consequences. In 1994, the former president of the United States, George H. W. Bush, was coming to visit Colombia and to impress him with how strong our justice system was, my sentence was made fifty-eight years, although by Colombian law the maximum was thirty years. That difference didn’t matter at all, for me it was longer than life. I kept fighting and after time they reduced my sentence to twenty-two years and finally after much negotiation, to fourteen years and eight months.
So many of these years are buried deeply in my memory, where I don’t want to find them. Two months after my first failed operation the doctor tried a cornea transplant. At that time the doctor didn’t give me just a new eye, he gave me hope. The transplant failed, mainly because I was immediately transferred back to the prison when I desperately needed thirty days of bed rest and care in the hospital. In the jail the prison officials failed to give me the required eyedrops for the new cornea. But the hope survived. I knew that I needed to live, not for me, but for my family. They had depended on Pablo and Pablo was dead. It was my responsibility.
There was unbearable pain. After the first operation on my cornea one of the nurses, I don’t know if by mistake or on purpose, put alcohol in my eye. I don’t have the words to describe my pain. There were days then I felt certain I would die, and it was not an unwelcome thought. On the way back from the second operation on my cornea one of the guards let the stretcher fall onto the floor. On the ground I couldn’t move, afraid I would destroy the cornea. In addition to destroying my body, the government tried to destroy my hope. My sentence had been reduced to fourteen years, eight months, but that had been challenged. I remember one day before Bush had arrived in Colombia, I had gotten a letter from the government. A guard had to read it to me. It said that the government was never going to give me a reduced sentence, execute me in the electric chair, or release me. There was no hope for me, this letter said. No matter how long I lived, it would be in prison.
I had nothing left but hope so how could I give that up? I was moving back and forth too often between the prison in Medellín and the hospital in Bogotá. It was a perilous time for me. Although I was blinded and wounded badly, that was not enough for our enemies. I was being protected at that time by the Colombian army, not by the police. It didn’t make a difference, no one would be sorry if Roberto Escobar was dead. My enemies made several efforts to make that happen. Once a cook in the hospital said he had been offered $100,000 to put poison in my food.
There are three things I fear the most: surgeries, prison, and glasses for vision (as I had been so proud of my athlete’s good sight), and I was suffering from the three. I am grateful to two plastic surgeons, Dr. Juan Bernardo and Dr. Lulu, because they reconstructed my hands, fingers, nails, and face almost to perfection.
I was in a special part of the prison with members of the guerrillas. Not the leaders, but important people with power. They helped me survive, doing everything for me from helping me get dressed to even giving me the injections. And also I had my mother, a very remarkable human being.
She would die for me. After we knew about the plot to poison me I wanted to eat only food brought in specially for me from the outside stores. “Oh don’t worry about that,” my mother said. “I already ate the food a half hour ago and nothing happened to me.”
I was angry. It wasn’t only me she had; there was the rest of the family. I told her that was the wrong thing for her to do. And she said to me, “I’m an old woman. I’ve lived a long life. I don’t want to see another of my sons die.” And so to save the life of her son my mother would risk poison.
There were other attempts to kill me. I was outside on the patio with one of the guerrillas when I heard the noise of a bullet hitting a wall. It wasn’t a big sound because the shooter had used a silencer. When we heard the spat against the wall the guerrilla threw me to the ground for protection. The guard who fired the shot was not captured and there was no investigation. I was told later that he had been hired by Pablo’s enemies.
There were nights of terror. Two days after I had been through another surgery I was lying in my bed in a military hospital in Bogotá with many tubes stuck into my arms and legs. At seven o’clock all the visitors were supposed to leave, but with money that easily could be changed. So at about that time a member of my family went out to bring me some food. I lay there by myself, in my own darkness, listening to the radio.
I heard only the shot. A loud snap that echoed through my body. Then I heard a lot of screaming from the guards and I thought they were trying to kill me once again. Without pause I jumped out of my bed and the tubes got pulled out of my body. I pushed myself against the wall and started feeling for the door to the bathroom. I moved along it as quickly as possible, knowing any instant another shot might be made, until I found the door. I put myself inside and locked the door. Then I lay down on the floor. And I waited helpless for whatever was going to come.
In a couple of minutes I heard people coming into my room and crying out. “They killed Roberto too,” someone said. “They killed Roberto.”
I screamed for help and the door to the bathroom opened right away. Thank God, one of the guards said. I found out what had happened. Not too far from my room two young guards were playing gun games. One of them had taken his gun and put it under his chin, saying that “if I take a guerrilla I’m going to kill him like this.” He was just joking with his friend, this kid. And boom, he accidentally killed himself.
There was a lot of running after that. When the tubes ripped out of my arms I started bleeding. There was blood all over the place and when the guards came into the room they guessed I had been shot too.
But these situations were happening too often. There were people who believed that without Pablo’s power behind me there would be no danger to them to assassinate me. Because it had been the government’s fault that a bomb had destroyed my eyes and my ears they eventually agreed to let me live in the hospital clinic. So from 1994 to 2001 I lived inside the clinic.
I also remember when I was being transferred to Bogotá from Medellín for my third cornea transplant. I was traveling in a private plane, and when I arrived to the airport at 7 P.M. there was supposed to be an army unit waiting for me with an ambulance to take me to the hospital. The plane arrived but there was not anybody there waiting for me in the darkness. There were six people, my mother, the pilot, the co-pilot, two guards, and myself. The pilot, co-pilot, and one of the guards got off the plane to get to a phone and find out why nobody had come to pick us up. I was totally blind and needed that transplant urgently, because my cornea was almost perforated; my eye had collapsed and had been reinflated by gas extracted from some rooster’s crest. I was in Dr. Hugo Pérez Villarreal’s silk hands. When I was sitting in the plane with my mother, behind us a guard was playing with his gun, and it went off, the bullet hitting the plane’s cables and barely missing the gas tank. My mother threw me to the ground trying to protect me, and so did the guard, who had frightened himself.
I believe that accidental shot saved my life. I think they left me alone in order to set me up and kill me by an armed force, but with that noise the airport security arrived to see what had happened. My mother and I were on the floor of the plane. On the radio the guards said that there had been an attempt on my life.
After the ambulance arrived I was taken to the military hospital and put in a room to prepare for my surgery. Five days after my transplant, when I was a little better, a nurse came in to bathe me. She closed the door and whispered to me that she was really grateful to my brother, who had given her mother a house. She was trembling when she told me that a man had approached her and told her to inject me with something to kill me.
That night the priest, who was always by my side, said to me, “Roberto, you are going to suffer plenty, but nothing is going to happen to you. I am always going to be by your side.”
I made an agreement with the government in 1995. For my safety they allowed me a whole floor of a clinic in Medellín. They supplied me with twelve security officers, six from the police and six from the army. In addition, I always had six of my personal bodyguards. I had eighteen people next to me every day, seven days a week, for six years. In the clinic I had fourteen bedrooms and I had to pay the state $1,400 a day for every single day. But I was safe there, and I had my operations, one after another after another.
But before I could move there I knew that somehow I had to make peace with our enemies. The war was done, Pablo was dead, Gustavo was dead, Gacha was dead, the Ochoa brothers were in prison, and the Medellín cartel had become fixed in history. But still the enemies threatened to kill our family. There was no reason for all of us to be living in fear. I thought, if they kill me okay, but what about my mother and my children and Pablo’s children? I tried very hard to make contact with the leaders of Cali. I sent letters to the people through my lawyer, Enrique Manceda. I spoke with people who could reach them and asked to be heard. But I got no answer back. It was always silence.
Enrique Manceda was one of the few good lawyers who had survived the Cali attacks. At that time he was living protected from Los Pepes on one of the farms my family still owned. I didn’t trust the telephones, so I sent him a fax asking, “Do you have the guts to go and face the Cali cartel?”
Enrique responded to me, “I have family too. I’ve been at this farm for more than six months. If they want to kill me they are going to have to kill me face-to-face.” This brave man went to Cali only with a very well known sports journalist and there they met in a nice restaurant with an attorney for the Cali cartel. All of those years of fighting, the billions of dollars earned and spent, the way Medellín and Cali changed the world, and here it came to two lawyers sitting opposite each other in a fancy restaurant.
Their lawyer, Vladimir, listened and agreed to speak with the heads of Cali. He believed they would listen to him and said to come back a week later.
To make my point strong, I suggested that Enrique return to Cali, but this time with my son Nicholas. And when my mother learned that Nico was going to go there she insisted she go with him. Living with a death sentence every day was not a real life, she said. Let it end. There was nothing to be done to stop my mother when she was determined. These were two people the cartel wanted to kill, so we were saying that here is your opportunity to stop the killing.
They met with the leaders of Cali, the Rodríguez Orejuela brothers, José Santacruz, and Spatcho. It was a big big surprise to these men when my mother and son showed up. At first the meeting was very cool, except for Spatcho, who most accepted the possibility of peace between the warring groups. My mother was not afraid of them, which made them wary. “Whatever is done is done,” she said to them. “Too many people have been killed. We don’t want that anymore. Roberto is very ill. Somebody sent him a letter bomb and he is only just alive.
“We have only two options. Either you say okay and let’s live in peace or you can kill me now because you want us dead and here I am. You can kill me and my grandson, Roberto’s son, or we can make peace.”
For Cali there were reasons to have peace. The members of the Cali cartel told my mother that the worst thing they had done was collaborate with the government by giving information that helped them kill Pablo, because now there was not anybody to take the blame for the drug trafficking.
She told them that they had made a big mistake because “Pablo wanted to end the extradition. That was for everybody. He wanted to be part of the government and end that.”
Santacruz then said, “That was not a smart thing for us. Now that Pablo is dead every single thing that happens in this country will be blamed on us. Now the DAS will be after us.”
That was true. With Medellín gone, the government had started looking for Cali. Rewards had been posted. They were on the run and there wasn’t time to worry about revenge. Spatcho spoke for them. “Ma’am, I feel a lot of respect for you. I have a mother also and she worries about me. This is the end of the war. I give you my word.” He told the others that it was time to make peace, that maybe it should have been done sooner.
Then they hugged and kissed, like in the movies. The meeting lasted less than a half hour. And that is how the peace was achieved with the Cali cartel.
Two weeks after this agreement I got a letter from one of the leaders asking me for $2 million to seal it. That had never been part of the discussion. I wrote back telling him, “You’re breaking your word because you said you were going to be in peace and now you’re asking for money. Two things about that: I won’t send you a dime and if you continue with the war you’re going to have to kill all of us because nobody is going to fight back.” I sent a letter to some members of Medellín’s cartel who were in jail, telling them that nobody was going to fight back.
Spatcho spoke to this man and fixed the situation. He called me in the clinic to tell me it was done.
But Spatcho was correct that with Pablo dead the government would move after Cali. Within two years, on July 4, 1995, José “Chepe” Santacruz Londo?o, one of the three leaders of Cali, would be arrested. In January 1996 he escaped his prison in Bogotá and in March he was killed in Medellín.
At the beginning the police blamed the killing on Medellín, which was not true. But that talk was very dangerous for us, as the peace was very thin. One of the very first people to know about Chepe’s death was my son, who was told by a friend and confirmed it with the newspaper. Nico called people in Cali to tell them and even broke the news to Santacruz’s wife. The problem for Cali was that it was still too dangerous for anyone to come to Medellín to bring home the body. So Nico and I decided that this was a big opportunity for us to show our good faith. Nico was going to bring Chepe’s body home to Cali. There was still a great hatred in the air because of the war, many Cali people had died too, so this was a very brave thing to do.
There was a woman in Medellín who was in charge of the funerals of each person in the cartel. She had made hundreds of thousands of dollars burying our people. Nico asked her to do the same honors for Santacruz. “We don’t want to make a big deal,” he told her. “We don’t want the media to know.”
She didn’t want to do it. “Why are you bringing him here? This is the worst enemy you ever had.” She was afraid the Cali people were going to show up and start shooting.
Nico told her it was safe. He had conferred with the wife and it was agreed that he was going to bring the body home. But the first problem was finding a coffin. Chepe was a huge man, tall and big. The woman had one coffin big enough but it was very expensive. Nico told her he would buy it, choosing it as if it was for himself.
I knew this war had to end and this was the best way. “It was a weird feeling,” Nico told me. When Pablo had been killed he was out of Colombia, “but when I saw the body of Chepe, even after all the terrible things that had happened, I felt very sad. I saw this person who had been so powerful, so rich, who had always been surrounded by people, so all alone. I had tears.”
The second problem at the funeral home became clothes for the body. Nico recounted, “The man from the funeral home told me, ‘We cannot do the service with these clothes. Everything is destroyed.’ There was blood all over. He was wearing blue jeans and a T-shirt all covered with blood. He didn’t even have shoes on. It was three o’clock in the morning, and where could I buy clothes for a man that big at that moment?
“I’m also a big man and I was thinking maybe some of my clothes would fit him. At first I thought jeans and a shirt but then I had an idea. The only time I wore a tie was on my wedding day. As I looked through my closet I took out the tuxedo I had worn that day. I ironed it myself. I brought it to the funeral home and it fit perfectly. So he would go home in my tuxedo.
“At 4:30 in the morning a very gorgeous young woman arrived at the place. She was crying and screaming that she needed to see Chepe. She was devastated and couldn’t believe that Chepe was dead. He had given her everything, paying for her education and helping her family. When I allowed her inside she became even more hysterical. She started kissing his body and pleading with him to not leave her alone. She climbed into the coffin and was hugging and kissing and wouldn’t let him go.
“There was always a question why he was hiding in Medellín. I think he made the decision to spend his last days with this beautiful girl.”
It was difficult finding a way to move the body to Cali. Nobody in Medellín wanted to rent us their airplane, for fear of retribution from Cali. It finally cost a lot of money, but we had given our word that Nico would go to Cali and return the body of Santacruz to his wife.
It was almost dawn. The journalists had begun showing up at the funeral home but still nobody knew that Pablo Escobar’s nephew was caring for the body of his once hated enemy. Nicholas was careful to stay away from the TV cameras and the journalists. To bring the body home without incident he rented four funeral cars and put coffins in each one. Two cars left the place and the journalists went after them. While they were driving around the city Nico lay down in the back next to the coffin and the car went directly to the airport. At the airport the police stopped the black car for inspection. And when they opened the back they were shocked to almost heart attacks to find Nicholas Escobar hiding there. The police told the journalists, who came quickly. It became a mess at the airport as the officials did not want to let Nico go, but he paid a lot of money and everything was approved.
Even the short flight to Cali was difficult. A large airplane came too close to their small plane and it started shaking. Nico almost laughed at the thought of dying right next to Chepe Santacruz’s body. Finally they landed and a crowd of journalists was waiting. Nicholas was looking for the wife but she was nowhere. After a moment a cab driver approached him and said, “Nicholas, a lady sent me. Please get in my cab.”
The body of Chepe had been returned, and the peace between Medellín and Cali was now solid.
It was also Nico and my mother who ended the fighting with Los Pepes. Even after Pablo was dead they continued to exist, becoming an army. Nico was living in a beautiful apartment in Medellín, an apartment that now belongs to the Colombian government, who seized it even though Nico was never involved in anything illegal. In that apartment Nico got a phone call from a friend who told him the son of his neighbor was scheduled to be kidnapped. Nico went to the neighbor and told him this information. This neighbor then told another person what Nico had told him, and that person went to Carlos Casta?o and said by mistake, “Nico was going to kidnap this person.” A few days later Nico received a telephone call from Carlos Casta?o, who had worked for Medellín before founding Los Pepes. “I need to talk to you,” he said.
Nico and Carlos had known each other for years. They agreed to meet to talk about this problem. When my mother heard this plan, again she insisted on going with him. Also going with them was the man Nico had warned.
They met at Carlos Casta?o’s farm in Montería. “I’m not kidnapping,” Nico said. “I don’t believe in that. My uncle is dead and we just want to live in peace.” To prove that, Nico introduced Carlos to the neighbor, who was sitting right next to him.
Everything got cleared up and my mother told Carlos she wanted to talk to him. Carlos agreed, but only after a game of pool with Nico. He had heard that Nico was the pool master of Medellín and wanted to challenge him. They played; Nico won two games. Then the conversation began with Hermilda. She started talking to him like a son, never raising her voice. “You don’t know how much I’ve suffered in this war,” she said. She was crying but she kept her composure. “And I cannot imagine the pain your mother is feeling. Please, can’t we go back to a normal life?”
Carlos agreed and they prayed together. Then she kissed him on the cheek, the man who had been a leader in killing her son. But she accepted that, she understood the reasons, and wanted it to end. All of it. And after this meeting, it did. She had forgiven Carlos.
The Medellín cartel was done. Pablo was dead. Our enemies had moved to other wars. And I was alone in prison, blind and wounded.
It was difficult in prison filling all the empty hours. In the clinic-prison my life was basically talking to lawyers and having operations. After one of the many efforts to fix my eyes I opened them and, for the first time, I could see light. It wasn’t much, it wasn’t total sight, but it was amazing. It felt like someone had opened a window on life. I could see shapes and movement. It was very dim, but it was there. It was beautiful. But strangely I didn’t feel that excited. I had been through so many unbelievable experiences that I no longer could get excited or feel very sad. I had learned to be calm no matter what happened in my life. I was happy, but not like most people would imagine.
That same day the strange priest appeared again in my dreams. Why I have never known. He has been there for me for the good and the bad, but he stays with me.
I did different tasks in prison. I learned braille. I renewed my knowledge of electronics and fixed the radios and televisions and CD players for the police guards. Once I even built a traffic signal that worked by battery; just like a normal one with green, yellow, and red. (Truthfully I did need some help from my bodyguards to put the right connections together.) In the prison they had an exhibition and this traffic light won first prize.
I also made candles. In Colombia you can take years from your prison sentence if you study or do good works. I sent my bodyguards, Sander and Germán, who were like my guardian angels, who helped me do everything in the hospital, to buy all the materials I needed to make candles. Making candles is easy. Soon my bodyguards were so bored they were making them too. It was funny, all the people sitting there making candles. And then the nurses saw that and they started making them also. Most of the candles we would give to the church and they would give them to the poor people to sell for milk or bread. The poor people did not know that the brother of Pablo Escobar had made the candles, although the priests kept some of them as souvenirs.
In Colombia on December 8 we light candles on the streets to celebrate the beginning of our Christmas holiday. I remember one time we lit more than one hundred of the candles we had made around the clinic. I could see a little bit and it was beautiful. Then we prayed. When I was in the clinic I continued my research on AIDS with the help of a bacteriologist, and Dr. Juan Carlos Tirado from the clinic, a man who became a friend. In the clinic everybody was very nice to me.
I always had hope that one day I would be free. The years passed by and my lawyers argued with the state and my family grew up. In the prison I had three more children, two girls and a boy. Meanwhile the flood of cocaine into America did not slow down, just different people got rich from it.
Pablo was never forgotten. Around the world his name grew in legend. In death he was the greatest criminal of history. In Colombia on the anniversary of his death thousands of people still march in a parade, then go to his cemetery to pray for his soul—and to give him honor. And our mother, until her death, slept each night with one of his shirts beneath her pillow. She was never ashamed to be his mother. As a baby he had told her, “Wait till I grow up, Mommy, I’m going to give you everything.”
But no one could have imagined the cost of making that promise come true.
I served my sentence. I thought about my brother often, but not too much about those days. It was not because of the pain those memories brought, but because it is always better to think about the future. When it was close to my time being served I was taken to the office of a judge who told me, “Mr. Escobar, you might be leaving soon. We need you to talk. We need you to start telling us which members of the government Pablo had paid to change the constitution to cancel extradition. We need to know which members of the army and the police were involved.”
During my term I had spoken with many different people. From New York the prosecutor of La Kika, Cheryl Pollack, came and we spoke. The DEA man on that case, Sam Trotman, came and we spoke. When possible I was able to answer their questions. But never did I mention a single name of the people who had helped my brother. I told this judge, “I can’t do that.”
The government offered me a house outside Colombia and protection for my family if I cooperated with them. “We will maintain your family,” they said.
When still I refused they promised me more consequences. I had spoken to the judge and DA and told him that I was not going to betray any of the many generals, colonels, judges, congressmen, or anybody from the government that had helped my brother or other members from the cartel of Medellín. The government was upset and one day before I was released a government official came to the hospital with two envelopes. The first one was opened and said I would be free the next day. After all those years I would be a free man once again. My mother was there and she kissed me.
The government man started crying. The second envelope was charges of kidnapping against me. Supposedly on August 18, 1991, I had detained a man who owed me money until it was paid. The penalty was between four and six more years.
My mother heard this charge and fell on the floor.
It was a lie. I had been in the Cathedral on that day. In addition, more than ten years had passed since the accused crime, longer than our statute of limitations. But still they brought the charges against me. I served four years more before my full trial on this charge. When these charges were read they were all about Pablo Escobar, Pablo Escobar, Pablo Escobar. Roberto Escobar is the brother of a criminal who committed terrorism, sold drugs, killed people, and committed other crimes.
I told the judge that they were supposed to judge me for who I am. I said, “I’m not here to pay for my brother’s crimes. I beg you, the law of Colombia, to judge me, Roberto Escobar, for the things that I did, but don’t judge me because I am the brother of Pablo Escobar.”
The prosecutor made them focus on the detainment and I presented my evidence to prove I wasn’t guilty. Finally in 2004 they had to allow me to leave the prison a free man. I had to pay large penalties of money and property to the state, but I was free. I was never accused of crimes of violence. In April of 2008 I received a notification from the prosecutor, which said they had made a mistake in holding me for all those years and I also received a $40,000 settlement for their error.
I am living on a farm now, like my father, with some cattle. I own some land. The days of the wars are long behind me. I don’t visit with many people from those days when Pablo seemed to own the world. There are still many people in prisons in my country and the United States who will stay there for the rest of their lives, but others like me have finished their sentences and have moved on.
Not too much of Pablo’s possessions remain. I was able to get back from the judge some of Pablo’s possessions from the Cathedral, in addition to some of the racing bikes my company had made. I still ride, but close behind a car that I can just see in front of me. I also walk to stay in shape, and I don’t drink or smoke. I dedicate my time to my family. I still continue to work on my AIDS project, which has become a reality. I believe I have helped alleviate the suffering of a lot of patients and there is research being done based on my discovery.
I have never returned to Napoles. It is a shell, falling apart and lived in by the homeless. The roof has holes and there are rusted bodies of Pablo’s classic cars. People have come there and pulled apart everything for their use or for memories of Pablo. Only the rhinos have survived; the herd has grown much larger and they live near the river. Some of the rhinos have traveled more than three hundred kilometers upriver, and with those rhinos lives Pablo’s memory. They are too big to move, too dangerous, and the government does not know what to do about them.
And finally there is the money. It is impossible to even imagine how much money remains put away somewhere, probably never to be discovered. People who managed millions of dollars got killed without telling anyone where the money was hidden. Or they took the money and disappeared when Pablo was killed. I feel sure there are undiscovered coletas in houses all throughout Colombia—but also in New York and Miami, Chicago and Los Angeles, and the other cities in which Medellín did business. I am also certain there are bank accounts in countries whose numbers have been lost and forgotten and never will be opened again.
And there is money hidden and buried in the ground.
For me, it’s over. I still have the pains from the bomb and from my memories. I live quietly with the help I need. And also with the knowledge that whatever is thought about my brother, from the people who loved him to those filled with hate, he will live forever in history.
Acknowledgments
This book, with its language and logistical difficulties, required the assistance of many people. For obvious reasons some of them have asked not to be identified. To those people, we certainly respect your wishes, but we also want to express our appreciation to you for your invaluable contributions.
We especially would like to acknowledge the hard work done by Alex Orozco, who was instrumental in putting together this project and who fostered it through many days and nights, and whose phone bill must have been enormous. In addition, Michael Planit brought together many complicated components into one sensible and cohesive unit, creating the business structure that enabled everyone to contribute to the best of their ability.
Our literary agent, Ian Kleinert, originally with the extremely capable Frank Weimann of the Literary Group and later with the newly founded Objective Entertainment, worked diligently to find us the best possible publishing situation, and eventually put us together with the extraordinarily respected executive editor Rick Wolff of Grand Central Publishing in America and Jack Fogg at Hodder & Stoughton in the U.K., both of whom have been tremendously supportive throughout the process—and pushed at all the right times.
Among those people we can thank publicly we especially want to offer our thanks to Magistrate Judge Cheryl Pollack, a relentless prosecutor and a respected judge, who offered us her memories and her transcripts; and DEA agent Sam X. Trotman, who was in charge of America’s investigation of Pablo Escobar, and whose exploits and courage should one day result in his own story being told. In addition we offer our gratitude to Florida attorneys Fred A. Schwartz and Alvin Entin, Guylaine Cote, Ron Cloos, Robert Zankl, and Pat Mitchell for their contributions and Richard Canton for his personal stories.
We would also like to express our thanks for their space to Jerry Stern and Penny Farber. And the amazing work of the Geek Squad of Cross County Mall, in New York, for saving the day.
It would have been impossible to complete this book without the unfailing assistance of Tito Dominguez, who was always there to answer questions, create contacts, and interpret their answers. Tito also has an amazing story to tell—and we can’t wait to see the movie.
Working in two languages is especially difficult, and we would be remiss not to thank Suzanne Copitzky and her crew at the Karmen Executive Center in Seattle, Washington.
And David Fisher would like to express his personal appreciation to Roberto Escobar. What he did was very difficult, but this was a story he wanted told, and I am very proud to have worked with him.
And, and always, David wants to recognize his beautiful wife, Laura, who makes his days shine brightly; and his sons Beau Charles and Taylor Jesse.