Three
THE MOST FAMOUS AMERICAN INVESTIGATIVE REPORTER of the time, Jack Anderson, once wrote, “The Colombian-based cartel, which does $18 billion worth of business every year in the United States, is a greater menace to America than the Soviet Union.”
Eighteen billion dollars? Maybe, but perhaps more. It is impossible to know. I know that Pablo was earning so much cash that each year we would simply write off approximately 10 percent of our money because the rats would eat it or it would be damaged beyond use by water and dampness.
There was never any shortage of customers for our merchandise. The market was always bigger than we were able to supply. Each step of the operation, getting the paste from Peru to our labs in Colombia where it was processed into cocaine, smuggling it into the United States and having it distributed throughout the country, while all the time being smarter than the law enforcement agencies, required the cooperation of many people. And a lot of money. Each person who dealt with the merchandise got his nice cut. At one point, for example, because so many people had to be paid, the minimum amount we could transport on each flight was three hundred kilos, anything less would result in a loss.
To supply the cocaine to the rest of the world Pablo and his partners in Medellín built many laboratories hidden in the primitive areas of the Colombian jungle, places that nobody went unless they intended to go there. Some of these places grew to become small cities with only one purpose, to produce drugs for the world. These cities had their own dining areas, a school for their children, medical attention, and even rooms to watch satellite television. One of Pablo’s biggest and best hidden laboratories was built in the desolate area on the Venezuelan border called Los Llanos Orientales. Pablo bought a huge farm there, I’m guessing it was about 37,000 acres. What we built there was my concept. In addition to the central areas we constructed seventy very small houses. Really they were only one room with a bed, electricity but no plumbing. What made them different from anything that ever existed before was that they were built on wooden wheels and stationed directly on top of the longest of the seven runways on the farm. This runway was used for large aircraft. These houses had wooden walls and straw roofs; on the outside of one wall we attached a metal bar with a hook. From the sky the only thing that could be seen were two long rows of these small houses; it was not possible to see the runway. The rule was that one person had to remain in the house at all times. When a plane was arriving to deliver paste and then take away product it would signal its arrival and the owner of the house would then have three minutes to roll it off the runway. Most of the houses were so small they could be pushed by one person; it was no more difficult than pushing a stalled car. But for the others we had five small trucks that would attach themselves to the metal hooks on the house and pull them off the runway. Clearing the whole runway could take as much as one hour. At the end of the runway was a canopy of trees. The planes would land and immediately taxi under the trees, where the paste they brought would be unloaded and finished merchandise put aboard. The planes would also be refueled from gasoline stored in underground tanks. The turnaround could take less than a half hour, and when the planes departed the homes would be rolled back into place on the runway.
Eventually about seventy couples, including their children, as many as two hundred people, lived there. A few of them actually worked as farmers, but the others worked in the laboratory manufacturing, packaging, and transporting the cocaine. The children went to the school, Pablo hired two teachers. The laboratory was located about fifteen minutes away from the runway; it was above ground but hidden completely by the trees. Almost all of the workers were recruited from the poorest neighborhoods of Medellín; they received a salary as well as shelter, food, and medical care. Basically, we could produce and ship ten thousand kilos every fifteen days.
Getting those drugs from Colombia into the United States always required forward thinking. We had to stay ahead of the DEA. So Pablo was always searching for new methods of smuggling drugs into the U.S. Through the years Pablo created so many different systems: He bought hundreds of cheap refrigerators and Sony TVs from Panama, emptied out the insides, and filled them with the same weight in drugs, usually about forty kilos, then shipped it as regular freight. One of Peru’s biggest exports is dried fish, which is sent on freighters all over the world; so Pablo mixed his product with the dried fish, a method that was very successful. In one shipment he sent 23,000 kilos, which until much later was the biggest single shipment he ever made.
The chemists discovered that cocaine could be chemically blended into products made of plastic, metals, and liquids, and when it reached the destination other chemists would reverse the chemical process and purify the cocaine to its original state. It was a chemical circle: paste to cocaine to liquid form, delivery, then liquid to paste to cocaine for sales. So from Guatemala he mixed the coke with fruit pulp, in Ecuador he mixed it with cocoa. The chemists discovered how to liquefy it and Pablo then added it to tons of Chilean wine—in this process only pure cocaine could be used or telltale particles would float on the surface, and even then about 10 percent of the drugs would be absorbed. After the success of this method was proved it was used to create products in almost every country in South America—liquid cocaine was added to everything from the most expensive liqueurs to the cheapest bottles of beer. Pablo’s chemists mixed it with flowers, chemically soaked it into Colombian lumber exports, with soft drinks; the cooks even soaked clothes like blue jeans in the liquid and when they arrived at the destination the coke would be washed out of the fabric. There was one person in Florida we called Blue Jeans whose only job was to receive these pants and collect the product. The chemists also figured out how to make cocaine black, which was mixed with black paint. We used a method of chemically blending it into plastic and forming it into many different items, including PVC pipe, religious statues, and when we started shipping to Europe by ship, the fiberglass shells of small boats. About 30 percent of the cocaine was lost in this transition. The big advantage to this method was that when we shipped product by this means we no longer had to pay a percentage of the value to the transporter.
Pablo was always employing new chemists to create methods of smuggling the product. I remember the day in the warehouse the chemists showed us this method of embedding cocaine in plastic. They created a sheet of plastic about one meter long with cocaine inside to prove to us how easily it could be done. It could be made of anything imaginable of plastic or fiberglass. Like the DEA, we had drug-sniffing dogs of our own that were used to test methods of hiding. One beautiful dog was named Marquessa, and we walked the dog right past the fiberglass and it did not detect it. “This is good,” Pablo said, with very little emotion. “This will work.” Pablo was all business, always.
What started as a few kilos hidden in the fender of his Renault had become a very sophisticated operation. Pablo—and his other partners too—had some of the smartest chemists from Europe and America creating these methods for the business. Any product you could think of that was transported from South America to the United States and Europe, they would almost always find a means to include cocaine in it.
Pablo was always looking for unsuspected means to send thousands of kilos in each shipment. Someone, I don’t remember who, came up with the idea to ship the drugs inside huge electric industrial transformers, which normally weighed more than eight thousand pounds. Pablo bought the transformers in Colombia and shipped them to Venezuela, where the inside machinery was removed and four thousand kilos were installed in its place. The transformers were sent to America. After the drugs were unloaded the Americans complained the transformers had technology problems—of course they did, there was nothing inside—and shipped them back to Colombia where the process was repeated. But then he had a problem; while the drugs were being loaded in Venezuela the men responsible for transporting a transformer to the docks were drinking. They got drunk and on their way to their port they made too much noise and got stopped by the Venezuelan police—who were both surprised and happy to discover four thousand kilos of cocaine. That was the end of that method.
But the primary method of transport was by airplane. After the system of used tires was abandoned Pablo decided to open other routes from Central America to America, building support systems in Panama—with the assistance of Panamanian police—and Jamaica, as well as using Carlos Lehder’s services at Norman’s Cay. Pablo’s first airplane was the one for which he always kept the most affection, so much so that when he built the grand house Hacienda Napoles, he mounted this plane over the front gate. It was Pablo’s way of suggesting that this plane was responsible for the riches at Napoles that the visitor was about to enjoy. The plane was a Piper Cub–type, powered by a single propeller. When he bought the plane from a friend it was already well used, but he had it completely redone. With the exception of the pilot’s chair all the seats were removed and the floor was reinforced, leaving a compartment hidden under it for suitcases and extra fuel that allowed the plane to fly much further than was common. This plane was used almost exclusively to fly between Colombia and Panama. Pablo used Panama as a key point to drop off drugs to then be shipped to the United States and pick up cash being sent from America. The small size of the plane and the ability to safely fly low to the ground made it able to avoid radar detection.
Pablo didn’t just pack the plane with drugs. Instead, he would buy thousands of dollars’ worth of gold from the Indians in Chocó and put the gold on the floor of the plane—with the drugs stored beneath it. Then the plane would fly to Panama. In Panama the gold would be sold for a profit and the drugs would be unloaded for the next stage of their journey to the United States. Getting cash back from America to Colombia was as difficult as getting the drugs into that country. Maybe even more difficult because cash took more space than kilos of coke and there was so much more of it. Suitcases packed with cash from America would be put into the compartment and televisions and stereos would be packed on top of them. If the police had discovered the money, supposedly it was the profit from the sale of the gold. While the gold cost Pablo thousands of dollars, the plane could carry as much as $10 million in cash. Pablo used to say that the plane had brought more than $70 million back to Colombia.
Within two years Pablo would replace that one plane with fifteen larger planes, including his own Learjet, plus six helicopters. Each of these planes could carry as much as 1,200 kilos per trip. In addition, the other leaders of the Medellín organization had their own airplanes; even the Ochoas had their own fleet of planes. With Gustavo’s supervision, Pablo continued to buy new and larger airplanes, eventually purchasing DC-3s. But no matter how big the planes, it was never enough. One plan that Pablo never had the chance to turn into reality was to hide the cocaine in the wing of a DC-6. The idea was to take the top of both wings off and hide the merchandise in a huge fuel cell, then make a bypass to an extra fuel system, and finally put the wing back on. The thinking was it was possible to put thousands of kilos in each wing. When the plane arrived in the United States the top of the wing would be taken off and the drugs removed. The DEA or Customs would never find it. There was no reason it would not have worked. Pablo just ran out of time.
Of course the business could not operate on a regular schedule like an airline. Each flight had to be carefully planned and arranged. There were about eight different routes that were regularly used and each of them was named. And at times parts of two or more routes were combined for a flight or even new routes attempted. People had to be notified a shipment was going to be made from wherever the drugs were loaded to wherever they landed. Pilots had to be hired for the trip; some of them were Vietnam veterans and they were paid by the kilos they carried. At the beginning there were maybe two or three flights a week, but by the end airplanes were almost continually taking off and returning with cash.
There were generally between four hundred and five hundred kilos shipped on each flight. Each load was made up from drugs belonging to several different members of the organization. Pablo would decide how much each person was permitted to send. For example, on a flight Pablo might have two hundred kilos, Gustavo might get two hundred, others the rest of the available space. Everyone paid Pablo a percentage for this transportation. Each group would put its own brand on the cocaine, the brands were called names like Coca-Cola, Yen, USA, and Centaito, there were many names. When the shipment arrived the kilos were separated by these markings and distributed to the people designated by the owner of the brand. The pilot carried with him a list of what brands each person was to receive.
Arranging for secure landings became a difficult problem after the DEA finally realized how many drug planes were coming to America every day and instituted new strategies. We used different methods to outsmart the government. At first the planes landed in Jamaica, where there were enough people on the payroll to ensure they would not be bothered, and then raced to Miami on sleek speedboats, or cigarette boats. The planes also dropped the merchandise packed into green military duffel bags by parachute, sometimes onto farmlands owned by friendly people or other times just off the beaches of Miami—this method was known as El Bombardeo, the bombardment, where they would be picked out of the sea by people waiting for them in speedboats, then brought to shore.
There were also small landing strips hidden all over Florida. One that was used often was in the Everglades near the city of Naples. There was an area called Golden Glades that was going to become a large housing development. The streets were paved and sewage systems were installed before environmentalists got the project stopped. There was nobody living nearby—so at night we used the empty streets as runways. It was almost our own airport.
It would be impossible to even guess how many people were on the Medellín payroll, including airport managers, ground crews, truck drivers, security patrols, even Customs agents. American Customs agents began using AWACS aircraft, airborne warning and control system, which were surveillance planes used to detect all incoming aircraft. Their radar couldn’t be avoided. So instead, Pablo paid a Customs agent for providing the schedule the AWACS would be flying, the region they would be patrolling, the range of their radios, and the radio frequencies on which they communicated so our pilots could listen to them. So we knew when and where they would be in the air and could avoid those times and areas. Pablo often purchased this type of information. People could make more money in one day than from years of their salary. The agent was paid approximately $250,000 for information about the flights, but still he was greedy. He wanted even more money. It was refused—and the next flight was intercepted. Often two planes flew together, one to carry the merchandise and the other to fly high and watch over that plane as well as conceal its presence from ground control radar. This time the AWACS caught the drug plane on radar. The pilot in the cover plane warned the drug pilot that Customs had got him, so the drug pilot turned around and dropped his merchandise of about five hundred kilos over Cuba. When the plane finally landed in the U.S. and was captured one pilot confessed and was sentenced to forty years in prison. The second pilot kept quiet and eventually walked away free.
It was this danger of being caught and going to jail that kept the commissions so high. But if someone was arrested and kept quiet Pablo would continue to take care of him. The Lion, who would later help run New York and Madrid, remembers that when he was in jail in Colombia he continued to get messages from Pablo. “Don’t worry,” he was told by a guard on the payroll, “Pablo said be cool. He’ll get you out of jail.” Pablo arranged for him to be transferred to an easier prison. And every week a guard would hand money to him and say, “This is from the patrón,” from the boss. After six months he was set free. There was always someone willing to take our money. In some situations prisoners were permitted to stay in hotels and return regularly to the jail. In most countries we purchased the cooperation of authorities. In the Bahamas, for example, we had someone who worked closely with the government officials. “I took several people out of prison,” this person remembers. “For $50,000, or for $75,000, I would just walk them right out. The American government knew about it, but there was nothing they could do.”
After Customs began using AWACS, Pablo decided to change routes again and began bringing merchandise into the U.S. through Mexico. Pablo helped establish the Mexican cartel, telling people he knew there, “I’m going to bring my nine planes to Mexico and from there you take over.” The Mexicans established their own routes into America. Pablo’s planes brought about one thousand kilos each flight into Mexico, and from there the Mexicans smuggled it into Miami, New York, and Los Angeles. When it reached those cities, individual dealers would take it and distribute it to the smaller cities. In this way it spread through the United States.
We also depended greatly on ships. Of course we used the traditional methods of sending the drugs on freight ships, especially for those drugs embedded in other products—like lumber and wine—usually sent by the sea. But we also had our own ideas. We attached small containers—PVC tubes that could hold as much as fifty kilos—to the hull of the ship and filled them with merchandise; when the ships reached their port our divers would open them and retrieve the drugs. When the DEA learned about that method Pablo instituted a system in which the tubes would be held against the hull by an electromagnet. Before the ship reached port the magnet would be turned off and the tubes would fall harmlessly to the bottom, where they would be retrieved by waiting scuba divers.
In addition to the freight ships we had a small navy of speedboats, cigarette boats that would carry loads from Jamaica to Florida, or pick up loads at sea and race them to the Florida shore. Sometimes, like in the movies, they would land them on the beaches at night, but often we used the docks of friends who owned homes on the water. We also had many fishing boats working for us, bringing paste from Peru to Colombia, then proceeding to Mexico with as much as 15,000 kilos mixed with Ecuadoran fish flour.
There had been many drug traffickers before Pablo, but no one before had ever had the organization this size or was able to find so many new ways of smuggling the product into the United States. For comparison, a big load for the most famous drug organization before Pablo, the French Connection, was about one hundred kilos of heroin. We were bringing in tons of cocaine every week. Perhaps the most unusual method we employed came from a James Bond movie. Pablo loved the James Bond movies and watched them over and over. Sometimes while we were watching one of these movies and Bond or the villains would use an ingenious method, Pablo would say suddenly, “Oh, maybe we could do something like that for the business.” That was where his idea to transport product by submarine came from. When I think about it now, it seems too much to believe—a submarine? Who could buy a submarine? But in our business anything was possible. So when Pablo said we should transport by submarine, no one thought it wasn’t possible. No one questioned him. Instead we decided it was a wonderful idea and then had to figure out how to get a submarine.
In fact two submarines. Certainly we couldn’t purchase a used submarine without drawing attention so we knew we had to manufacture them. It didn’t matter how much it might cost, money was never a bar to anything Pablo wanted done. We hired a Russian and an English engineer to design this for us. From my education I was involved in the creation of the electrical systems. Two were built in the quiet back of a shipyard near the coastal city of Cupica. For certain reasons, in the past we always explained that these vessels were operated by remote control, but in fact they had pilots on board. They were small and they weren’t very pretty inside, but every two or three weeks each of the two submarines could carry 1,000 to 1,200 kilos. The submarines couldn’t come too close to the shore, so divers would meet the boats and transport their loads to the beach.
Pablo invented this method, but it remained so effective that in August 2008 the U.S. Coast Guard still intercepted a submarine of drugs coming from Colombia worth $187 million. A month later they caught a second sub with cocaine worth $350 million.
Pablo never ceased trying to expand the business. He usually had between twenty and thirty different regular routes through all regions of South and Central America, but besides Gustavo very few people knew about all of them. He changed these routes frequently. To build these routes he made deals with many different countries to cross through their airspace or land planes there. In 1984 he made a deal with the Sandinista government in Nicaragua to build a laboratory on an island off the coast. That was never built, but like Norman’s Cay, the island was used as a place to refuel planes and transfer drugs from small planes to bigger planes. For that right each member of the Medellín group paid a great amount of money.
The general we worked with in Panama had control over everything we needed. But this general would charge for everything. Every helicopter that arrived or departed, every connection, he charged for every single thing. Plus he received a percentage of every kilo passing through his country. For a while this general was a good partner. When Pablo would tell him, “I need to talk to you in two days,” he would immediately come to Colombia. But we learned this general was loyal only to himself. Once Pablo paid him $1.5 million for a large shipment to pass through the country, but it was intercepted by the Panamanian army. Drugs were confiscated, a laboratory was raided, and a young employee named John Lada was arrested and placed in jail.
Pablo was angry at this betrayal. He told our general: “We don’t need these headaches. You have to clean up the issue.” The general corrected this mistake, perhaps paying a judge to close his eyes to the situation. The drugs eventually were returned.
In Haiti another powerful general worked with Pablo to make certain our flights to his country would not be bothered. He was paid $200,000 for each plane that landed and took off without difficulty.
I remember particularly when Vladimiro Montesinos, the chief of Peru’s intelligence service, visited Pablo. His first night with us Pablo entertained him with five beautiful young Brazilian dancing girls. The following day they raced Jet Skis and finally Pablo got down to business. “We need places in Peru where our planes can land and take off,” he told him. “Places that won’t be bothered by the Peruvian air force.” Pablo agreed to pay $300 for each package of cocaine, which would amount to about $100,000 for each plane that landed in the Peruvian jungle. All the transactions had to be done in cash. Montesinos would keep 40 percent for his share and the rest would be distributed to the military.
The main thing that Pablo demanded from anyone who took his money was total loyalty. Many people made their fortune working for him, but they knew that the penalty for betrayal was harsh. When one of Pablo’s main security people, Dendany Mu?oz Mosquera, known as La Kika, was put on trial in the United States, prosecutor Beth Wilkinson said about Pablo: “He let everyone in the organization know that if they cooperated with the government, if they stole money or merchandise from him, there would be one simple punishment: death to the employee and his family. To make that organization work, the threat had to be carried out when someone violated the rules, so he hired bodyguards, killers, and hit men from throughout Medellín . . . and his hit men killed and terrorized those who did not follow his orders.” Much of that statement is true. During that time no member could snitch or steal from Pablo without their life being in jeopardy.
There have been many stories told about Pablo, especially after his death, that I do not believe are true. When people were on trial they offered these tales to help themselves, knowing people would accept anything about Pablo and there would be no retribution. The bigger the stories they told, the better it might be for them. For example, a pilot the DEA captured agreed to testify in an American trial to reduce his own sentence. He told the prosecutor that after a shipment had been intercepted he said to Pablo, “It’s strange. Every time Flaco [who was a trusted worker for my brother] has something to do with things, the government comes in and they take it, or they were there taking pictures. You need to find out what the deal is with Flaco.”
A few weeks later this pilot asked Pablo what he had learned about Flaco. As he told a courtroom: “He said, ‘It’s been taken care of.’ One of Pablo’s sicarios [hit men] had three color photographs, Polaroids, and he handed them to Mr. Escobar and Mr. Escobar handed them to me. He pointed to one of them. He said that was Flaco.
“There were three men. One of them was a heavyset man, one was tall and slim like Flaco, and the other one was a short fellow. They had all been skinned alive. Their testicles had been cut off and their throats had been cut.”
The only way the pilot knew for sure it was Flaco was because Pablo identified him. “I asked him what kind of person would do this to another human being. He looked at the sicario. The sicario looked back at him and smiled and that was the end of it.”
This was his testimony. It would have taken a brave man to sit at Pablo’s table and insult him like that. But stories like this one have been told, and have helped build the outlaw legend.
The markets for the Medellín cartel expanded as fast as a shadow sweeping over an ocean. New York was a very important territory, and it was opened to Pablo by a friend known as the Champion. Champion had been sent to New York from Medellín in the 1970s by his mother, who was concerned because he was spending his time on the streets. He was learning from the wrong people. So she sent him to live in America with his successful older brother, intending that he would go to college. Champion lived in New York for five years while becoming an engineer for air-conditioning systems. It was while Champion was studying in New York that Pablo established his presence in the business in Colombia. When Champion returned to Colombia he hooked up with the same rough friends—and started fixing air conditioners. When he learned about Pablo Escobar he decided, I’m going to make some money with that guy.
Pablo agreed that Champion would handle his business in New York, taking charge of the distribution when the merchandise arrived and collecting the payments. One of Pablo’s strong senses was his ability to know who would work well for him, and to put them in the right position to be successful. To assist him in New York, with Pablo’s permission Champion brought his own cousin the Lion into the business. Lion had been living in New York City for a few years, working as a busboy at the fancy French restaurant La Grenouille. At that famous restaurant he had poured water and cleaned up for the rich and celebrated people of the city, among them former mayor John Lindsay, the actor George Sanders, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, and Peter Lawford. He would tell us that one night Mrs. Onassis ordered a large steak but ate only the carrots. Later in the kitchen he ate Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s untouched steak. In that job he was an invisible man, providing service to the most famous and wealthiest people in New York. But within a couple of years he was storing $25 million in cash in an apartment. We sometimes wondered how some of those famous people would feel if they knew their busboy was now richer than many of them—and was supplying the cocaine that many of them enjoyed.
The most important person for the cartel in New York was Champion’s older brother, who we knew as Jimmy Boy. Jimmy Boy was well educated; he was a professional economist, an elegant, calm man who worked on Wall Street. He was a respected member of an important country club. His friends ran major corporations—which is why he became so necessary.
Champion and the Lion ran the business on the streets. They were in charge of shipments, distribution, and collection of the money. The biggest problem they had was how to handle the money. At times they would have more than $20 million in cash in the apartment they kept two blocks from the United Nations. They had whole rooms with cash stacked in boxes; they were running out of space. Jimmy Boy was the man who laundered most of that money. He began using some of the cash to buy stocks in companies, always under a false American name—nobody was going to find Pablo Escobar in the stock market. Soon Jimmy Boy began making straight investments in the companies of the big people he knew. He would tell them, “I’ve got a friend who wants to invest $3 million in your company.” There were some people who wouldn’t accept cash, but enough people would, especially owners of factories. Jimmy Boy also was dealing with the managers of banks. Banks like money. Jimmy Boy was able to open up lots of accounts under many names. So the money came through the American financial system and got cleaned.
After New York was in business, in 1982 the Lion went to Pablo and told him, “Champion has New York. Miami is taken care of. I have a girlfriend in Madrid, I have family there, so let me open Europe.” Pablo agreed. Spain was to open the door to the rest of Europe.
A friend of the Lion’s from Medellín had become a popular bullfighter in Spain. “I’ve known you for thirty years,” the Lion said. “Now would you like to make some good money?” The bullfighter knew people of stature in Madrid: the executives, the promoters of the bullfights, the businessmen, the rich people who loved the nightlife, the actors, the high-class people and, maybe most important, the beautiful women. The men always followed the beautiful women. The bullfighter held parties and dinners and opened the connections for the Lion. In the beginning, before the routes were established, cocaine was so expensive that only the rich and celebrated people could afford it. But when the celebrated people of Madrid, the people known to live the most exciting lives, began using the product and talking about it, the regular people wanted it. The Lion began supplying the street people with product to sell. It took some time, but eventually Madrid became like Miami. Spain was open. From Spain, Portugal and the other countries followed. The continent of Europe was open.
I know cocaine is bad. I understand the damage, now. But then, it was different. Pablo had no feelings of guilt about it ever. “This is a business,” he would say. “Whoever wants to use it, fine. You use it when you want to feel good, you get high, you have a good time. But alcohol and cigarettes kill more people than cocaine on the average.”
Some territories took longer than others to open. But at the top of the business there were basically fifteen countries that were receiving regular shipments, and from those places other nations became involved. The United States was huge, Mexico was huge, even in Cuba there was some business being done until Fidel Castro found out that some of his colonels and generals were involved and killed three of them.
Only in Canada did the business not take root. Champion tried to open Canada for us, but it didn’t work. Pablo sent Champion and the Lion to Montreal and Toronto to meet some people, but after making these connections they just didn’t sense it was right to go forward. There was no more explanation than that something felt weird. Champion and the Lion had problems with the Canadian police. They didn’t get arrested but they believed the police knew they were there. It was playing with trouble, they decided. Finally they told Pablo, “It’s too risky. We don’t need this.”
Pablo told them to go back to New York.
Canada wasn’t necessary. We were earning hundreds of millions of dollars. In the history of crime there had never been a business like this one. The biggest problem we had with the money was that there was too much of it. It was as difficult to launder the money—make it look as if it had been earned from a legitimate source—or simply transport it home to Colombia as it was to smuggle the drugs into America and Europe. Pablo used so many different methods of cleaning the money. The important thing was there were always people ready to make deals for cash. So in addition to investing in companies, putting it in banks and real estate and allowing it to flow through the money systems of countries like Panama, Pablo bought magnificent art, which included paintings by Picasso, Dali, Botero, and other famous artists, antique furniture, and other very desirable items that could be sold easily for cleaned money with no questions asked.
There were some creative methods that were used with great success. For example, Colombia is the world leader in the mining and exporting of emeralds, supplying as much as 60 percent of the world market. The emerald trade between Colombia and other countries is hundreds of millions of dollars annually. The way this cleaning system worked was that a legitimate buyer in America or particularly Spain would place an order for a few million dollars of Colombian emeralds. It would be a legal contract. But instead of sending real emeralds worth that price, what was shipped were bad emeralds that had been injected with oil to make them shine bright. These emeralds would stay shiny for three months, after that forget it. But only experts can detect when an emerald has been injected. So the emeralds would pass inspection and the legal payment would be sent to Colombia. Millions of dollars were cleared this way.
Laundering money could be very expensive, costing as much as 50 percent or 60 percent of the total value. So there were always people willing to do deals. It wasn’t just Pablo who had to launder money; it was everyone working in this business. We all knew the people who would make deals. Among the groups well known for cleaning money were the Jewish people with the black hats, long curled sideburns, and black coats. One of our pilots used their services regularly—because they only charged 6 percent. They wouldn’t get involved with drugs, so to work with them you had to have a convincing story of where the money came from. “For each transaction,” this pilot explained, “my name was Peterson, his name was made up. He always wore a red carnation; I always wore a red carnation. We’d go to a room I’d reserved under a totally different name. I usually had a few million dollars in cash in a suitcase, which was guarded by two very well armed men. He’d ask, ‘Where are the funds?’ I’d point to the suitcase. I tried to speak as little as possible. He’d pick up the bills and instead of counting them, he’d fan them like a deck of cards. The guy was a human counting machine. Then he’d use the phone and call whoever and say, ‘The transaction is satisfactory. You can go ahead to the next level.’ Then he’d say to me, ‘Five minutes.’
“We’d wait five minutes, then I’d pick up the same phone and ask, ‘Can I tell him to have a nice day?’ He would nod. I’d say that and the transaction was complete. What happened then was that someone in Europe deposited an equal amount of money minus the 6 percent in a numbered Swiss account. At that point the money in the suitcase belonged to him. I had two huge guys there with handguns and this little guy would take that suitcase with millions of dollars in cash by himself and wheel it through the streets of New York.
“It was a great way of doing business. The money never had to be moved physically across any borders. And my money was always there in the account.”
But most of our money came back to Medellín as straight cash in suitcases and green duffel bags. Truckloads of cash. A mountain of U.S. dollars and Colombian pesos, the currencies in which we worked. So much cash that we would spend as much as $2,500 monthly on rubber bands to hold the money together. Cash was brought home by people on commercial planes and in stuffed suitcases and duffel bags; it came by airplanes and helicopters, by speedboat. One of our associates owned a Chevrolet dealership in Colombia and the Chevy Blazers he imported from the United States would arrive with millions of dollars stuffed into door panels and tires, everywhere you could hide it.
The good problem we had was finding enough places to keep it secure. We put a great amount of our money into banks under accounts opened under the names of our employees and relatives. Until 1991 there were no laws in Colombia that allowed the government to check bank accounts. For several years this method was sufficient; no matter what the legal authorities really believed, they publicly accepted the story that we were successful real estate people and our fortune came from business. We paid those people who needed to be paid to assist us or protect us. In fact, so many paisas—as people from our region are called—were employed by the business that it was said, “When Pablo sneezes, Medellín shakes.”
In those early years there was very little violence associated with the business and what there was affected only those people involved in it. The violence was not arbitrary. One of the first people to be killed, maybe even the first, was named José. It isn’t necessary to say his family name. José had an automobile body shop and he used to make the hidden compartments in the cars for Pablo to transport drugs and money. One of the cars for which he had made the hidden stash compartment was robbed and fifty kilos were stolen from it. Later fifty kilos would have no meaning, but this was when Pablo was establishing his business and losing fifty kilos was a serious blow. But what was strange was that the thieves knew exactly where to look in the car. Only José, Pablo, and a few other people knew about this hiding place. Pablo faced José, but he denied being part of the robbery. “No,” he said. “I swear it wasn’t me. I wouldn’t do that to you, Pablo.”
Pablo began his own investigation. With the people he knew on the streets of Medellín it was not difficult to find the person who had bought the stolen drugs—and that person identified José as the person who had sold them to him. There was no question that Pablo had been betrayed. Now, within only a few years violent death would become a common part of the business, but not yet. Not yet. People don’t believe that’s true; it is. José had to pay the full price; the big question was how to do that so the police would not follow the tracks back to Pablo. What happened was that Pablo made a plan in which a fight would start in a café between a few mechanics who were with José and some locals. When that fight ended José was dead on the floor. He had been shot several times. The police believed he had been killed in the brawl. The killing was explained that way.
But at the beginning that violence was unusual. For most of the time, many Colombians were making good amounts of money and no innocents were being touched. There was every reason for the government to stay out of our business. So the biggest headache was hiding the money.
But when the government and our other enemies began coming closer we needed other places to keep the money, places we could reach easily that were out of the legal reach of the government. I created the system of caletas, small hiding places inside the walls of houses and apartments, which we used very effectively. These weren’t steel safes; they were just regular walls of normal houses, except that there was Styrofoam between the sheetrock to protect the cash. There easily could be as much as $5 million in cash stored in a single caleta, sometimes much more. We kept the money in at least a hundred different places, most of them houses or apartments that we owned under different people’s names and paid those people to live in them. Many of the people who lived there knew that there was money in their house, and their job was to make sure that the money was not touched, but those people only knew about that one location. That way if the police showed up they wouldn’t be able to say anything about the other places. Only Pablo and I knew the locations of all the caletas. This information was never written down; it was all in our memory. While some transactions took place in banks, when cash arrived I would decide where it should be directed, to a bank or to a caleta.
In addition to these caletas we built other hiding places. For example, we bought a beautiful house in the rich neighborhood called El Poblado. We let people live there to protect the house, that was their only job. They didn’t know about the caleta hidden beneath their feet. When we bought the house it had a swimming pool, but I had the idea to build a second pool for the children. This pool was fiberglass, half below ground, half above ground. It was surrounded by a wood deck. What people did not know was that this kids’ pool was build on hydraulic lifts, and underneath were six large spaces. The base of these spaces was cement, the spaces contained wooden cases wrapped in Styrofoam to keep the storage chest dry. Inside these chests we kept millions of dollars. We also put coffee in each caleta because after a long time cash starts to smell, especially when it’s in a damp place, and we learned that coffee kills the smell of the bills. A fortune was hidden under the pool and Pablo and I were the only ones who knew the combination to bring it up.
We tried to change the money in these caletas at least every six months, sometimes more frequently. When it was time I would call the people living there and tell them, “I’m going to bring my girlfriend there to spend the day. I don’t want my wife to know, so please leave.” They would go away for a day or two and we would exchange the hidden bills for fresh cash. But eventually it got to the point that there was so much money and we were so busy with political problems that we couldn’t change the money that often and the humidity would damage the cash beyond use. I have no idea how much money we lost this way, but for business purposes we would estimate 10 percent each year. That was considered acceptable.
We also put cash in places we could reach quickly if necessary. At Napoles, Pablo’s favorite house, we kept cash inside the old tires of a big truck. On different farms we buried money in plastic garbage cans that nobody knew about. When we surrendered and went to prison we buried more than $10 million in plastic cans inside the prison in different places. The more pressure that was applied to us the more important it was that the money be available. It wasn’t just Pablo who had this problem, it was all of us. Toward the end, when we were escaping from our enemies, our cousin Gustavo went to the home of another cousin, who had nothing to do with the business, and said, “Cousin, I have a million dollars and I need to hide it. I want to have that for my family.” That cousin turned her couch upside down and put the money inside. They wrapped the money in aluminum foil. Every few days Gustavo would have more cash delivered to the house inside television sets that I prepared for him until finally the couch sagged badly. It was not made to hide three or four million dollars. Fortunately for our cousin, Gustavo took out the money and a new couch was bought just days before the special elite task force chasing Pablo arrived to search the house.
To keep control of the money we had ten offices all around Medellín with accountants working in each of them. Again, the locations were known only to Pablo and myself. The offices were in buildings and in private homes. In buildings they were disguised as real estate offices with different names for cover. In the houses we didn’t need to do that. Each office had a special purpose. At one office we would meet the people who hid money, in another office we would meet our friends, and another was for the banks. When we had to meet with people we would always do it at the one place they knew, instead of allowing them to know the location of the different offices.
My favorite office was also in El Poblado. It was an old house on a very large property. We even had a big lake there and sometimes we would catch fish and have an employee prepare it for lunch. That house also had a soccer field, small, but sometimes in the afternoons we would go outside and play. In my personal room there I had a beautiful big desk and a white polar bear fur rug on the floor. We acted inside the office like any other business. I know people think we always had to operate in secret with danger waiting for us, but for many years, except for the fact that our product was cocaine, our offices seemed no different from an insurance office or an importing company. We ran the organization as a business. In the accounting part of it, there was no difference.
I hired the ten accountants. Some of them were relatives; others were friends or strongly recommended professionals. Two of them were young and we paid their costs to go through school to study accounting and then we put them to work. People wonder how it was possible to keep track of everything that was going on. With ten very organized people working full-time we were able to do so. Each of those people had responsibility for only a part of the business. It was my place to review the numbers, to make certain everything was entered. These accountants were very well paid. We didn’t offer benefits, but we gave great salaries. All of our accountants, all of them, were millionaires. They had farms, their kids went to the best private schools. Their lives were very good—until the wars against us started. Seven of the ten of them, including one of the two young people that we put through college, were murdered by the groups pledged to kill Pablo.
The question I am asked most often is how much money did Pablo have. The answer is billions. The exact number is impossible to know because so much of his money was involved with possessions whose value changed continuously. He owned property all over the world, he owned as many as four hundred farms in Colombia and buildings in Medellín, he owned an $8 million apartment complex in Florida, he owned property in Spain, he owned famous paintings and a very valuable collection of antique cars. But certainly many billions. More than any man could ever spend in his lifetime. In 1989 Forbes magazine noted Pablo was the seventh richest man in the world, saying that the Medellín cartel earned as much as $30 billion a year.
There was so much money that even those times we lost millions of dollars we slept soundly. And there were times we lost a lot of money. Once, for example, we were shipping home $7 million in cash from America hidden in refrigerators. Someone put them on a ship that was unloaded in Panama. Can you imagine the guy who opened the refrigerator door? The money disappeared. We couldn’t get it back. When I told Pablo I expected some angry reaction, but instead he said, “Son, what can we do? Sometimes we win, sometimes we lose.”
Another time an airplane flying $15 million in cash from Panama to Colombia crashed in the jungle and exploded: $15 million. We sent people to the site but the plane had burned. The money was gone forever. We also accepted that busts were part of the business. Sometimes we won, sometimes law enforcement won, but mostly we won. We lost tons of cocaine when police raided a warehouse in Los Angeles. The rule was that the people who were responsible for the losses had the opportunity of paying it back. In this situation Pablo sent more drugs to give them a chance of recovering what was lost. If they were not able to pay for their mistakes, they disappeared. This was the accepted way of doing business.
I know this is something few people will believe. But sometimes Pablo would pardon people who lost money, even people who cheated him. Others, especially Gustavo, would not. With Gustavo there was no forgiveness, no second chance. There was a girl who worked for Pablo known as “the girl with the pretty legs,” and she remembers the story of Memo. Memo grew up with us and was trusted by Pablo. His job was to carry money to the places Pablo directed. But instead, several times he took the money to the casinos to gamble. His plan was that he would keep the money he won, deliver the principal to the destination, and no one would know. Instead, he lost. So the next time he carried money he tried to make up those losses. He returned to the casino—and lost again. Finally Pablo found out that his childhood friend Memo was stealing from him. That could have been a death sentence. The girl with the pretty legs was there when Pablo confronted him. Instead of retribution, she remembers, Pablo told him he was fired and let him leave unharmed.
When Pablo learned about the Forbes magazine list he was surprised, but he didn’t say much about it. Pablo never fell in love with the money. He knew well that in Colombia, where corruption was accepted, money was the best road to power. It was the way he used this power and his wealth that made the poor people of our country love him. Even now, so many years after his death, the greatest majority of the poor continue to love him. Today, go into many houses in Medellín and Pablo’s picture is hanging there or there is a small shrine dedicated to him. Only a few years ago a cousin of Pablo’s was hired to sing mass in a small home. This is a Colombian tradition. These people did not know she was related to Pablo. While she was there she found these people had many pictures of Pablo hanging and asked why. The woman explained, “When we were hungry the boss came here and helped us. He gave us food, he gave us a lot of things. My son used to work for him.”
When the cousin asked where the son was, the woman said, “This mass you are singing is for my son.” She said her son died for his patrón, his boss, but she had no blame for Pablo. “It was the circumstances.”
Yes, Pablo used his money for his own pleasure and for his family, but he also used it to improve the lives of many people. In the town of Quibdó, one of many examples, he established a private social security system. People without a job went to an office to apply for help and Pablo covered some of their expenses for a certain period of time, two or three months. During that period other men who worked for Pablo would search for jobs for these people. But the agreement was that once you got a job you were finished with the program and you had to work for at least a year.
Once in 1982 Pablo and his cousin Jaime were with some friends of the organization at a soccer game when they heard the news that there was a fire in the dump called Morabita. It was a mountain of garbage in the northern part of the city, and the poorest people in Medellín lived there in dirty shacks, surviving by picking through that garbage for items to sell. In the fire many of these huts were burned down, leaving families without even a roof for shelter. Pablo and his people went there immediately. Many politicians were already there, making the usual promises of help that were usually forgotten. When they asked Pablo what he was doing there, he said he had come to help these people who lived in the mud with rats and cockroaches.
Pablo told Jaime to organize a committee and work with these other people to develop a viable solution. “Give me the budget,” he said. “Find the terrain and let’s start building.” This program was known as Medellín sin Tugurios, Medellín Without Slums. Eventually more than four hundred small nice houses were built in the new neighborhood, Barrio Pablo Escobar, and given to these people who needed them most of all.
Where the poor were involved, Pablo became the man of getting things done. He bought a much larger house in the middle of Medellín that became known as the Chocó Embassy because he would bring the very poorest people from Chocó to the city to get them medical care and clothes, to put their lives in shape. Usually there were about sixty people living there and they stayed for several weeks, then others took their place.
Pablo did so much for people. He paid the expenses for those who couldn’t afford the medical treatment they needed; one employee’s only job was making sure the twenty or thirty people a month who asked him to pay for cancer and AIDS treatments truly were sick. He paid for the college education of young people. When the rivers rose during the winter there were many floods and Pablo and Jaime would go around our country replacing everything washed away by the waters, bringing mattresses, cooking utensils, furniture, and the things people needed for living. And then they would bring engineers to find ways to prevent more flooding. Pablo would supply the materials to the villagers so they could help reconstruct the affected areas. Our mother, Hermilda, had been a teacher and she went all over Colombia to work with teachers and build schools and buy supplies for schools. Pablo built hospitals and equipped them, he built roads for small towns that before had been unreachable by car. He built hundreds of soccer fields with bleachers and lights and supplied equipment for the games—and he would often attend the opening of these fields and give a speech to the people. The girl with the pretty legs was charged with buying gifts for children on holidays, and each year at Christmas and Halloween she would go to local stores and order five thousand toys for Christmas. There was no limit. He fed the hungry, he provided medical aid for the poor, he gave shelter to the homeless, jobs to the unemployed, and education to those who couldn’t afford it and they loved him for it.
He became just like the Godfather. People would line up for hours outside his office to ask for his help. And if they truly needed that help, Pablo would provide it for them. When others write about all the good things he did they always give Pablo a sinister reason for doing so: He was trying to make them ignore his real business. He was buying loyalty so no one would report him to the law. They tell endless stories. But the absolute truth is that this goodness was part of Pablo Escobar, as much a part of him as the person who was able to take the violent actions. I’m defending him because it is the right thing to do. The houses he built still stand, the people he paid to educate still have good jobs, many of the people whose medical expenses he paid are healthy. All the good things he did should be remembered. If Pablo had not been so successful as a drug trafficker that he attracted the attention of the world he would have continued his good works. He might have even achieved his goal and become the president of Colombia. And without any question the lives of countless thousands of people would have been made much better. But none of that happened.
I have also been asked what Pablo bought for himself with his money. And I smile and respond: everything. Pablo and all of us lived very nicely. If we wanted something we took the money and bought it. Pablo and I had no salaries, we just took money as we needed it. We took from the bank accounts as well as the caletas. When I wanted to buy something expensive I would tell Pablo, “I’m going to buy this apartment. This is how much it’s going to cost.” He never objected.
It was important to Pablo that our family be taken care of. In one of the deals Pablo made, instead of receiving cash he was offered the deed to a new house. This wasn’t common, but it wasn’t too unusual; most of the time the value of the transaction was far greater than a house. One day Pablo took our mother on an appointment, I don’t remember where, maybe a doctor. On the way he told her, “You know what, I’ve got to check this property because I’m doing a business deal and I might take a house in return.” She accepted this; as far as she was concerned, Pablo was a real estate man. When Hermilda saw this house she fell in love with it.
Our mother was part of a singing group with her older women friends called the Golden Ladies of Antioquia. All of them were teachers. After finalizing the deal for the house, including all the furniture, Pablo invited our mother and the ladies to the house for a mass in celebration of this new house. Our priest was there to bless it. After the singing was over Pablo handed the keys to Hermilda. “This is yours, Mother,” he said. She cried with her friends out of happiness.
That’s the way Pablo gave things away to our family. At Christmas in 1981 he bought an entire block and built houses for members of the Gavíria family, about forty houses total. He wanted the family living close together. He gave our family many presents, including nice cars. Not Porsches or BMWs, but regular cars for safe transportation. The children in the family had their education supported. For Maria Victoria, his own wife, he would give anything. Whatever she wanted he would have for her—beautiful clothes, jewelry, paintings, and many houses.
For himself, Pablo was not that interested in fancy clothes. He wore jeans and white sneakers pretty much every day, although he always had new sneakers. But Pablo bought pleasure. He had a lot of beautiful cars and so many farms and houses and we had many people to serve us at all times of day and night. We ate food prepared for royalty. And when possible we traveled; Pablo loved to travel with his family and friends. In 1982 we went all over Europe and then to Hong Kong. It was in 1983, when it was still safe for us to travel, that we made our second visit to the United States—and that was when we went to Disney World and the White House and Las Vegas where we made friends with Frank Sinatra.
This was years before Pablo became infamous in America. Pablo, Gustavo, and I took all our families, including our wives and children, our sisters and cousins, nieces and nephews, and our mother to Florida. We visited Disney World and other tourist places, and we had some business meetings too. One night we almost got killed. Pablo, Gustavo, and I and a couple of the guys went to a monster truck rally. We were sitting there happily right in the front row, in the best seats we could buy, watching these huge trucks smashing cars, when I got the feeling that we should move. “Come on,” I told him. “We need to move now.” Pablo thought I was silly, but he moved. We all moved.
A few seconds later a monster truck smashed into the place we had been sitting. If we hadn’t moved we would have been killed. Pablo just looked at me with wonder, and said, “Are you a magician or what?” How did I know to move? There was no answer, I just felt that we had to.
Another night in Miami we almost got arrested. Pablo and I and our two bodyguards, Otto and Pinina, went to a nightclub to meet some associates. I always carried cash with me wherever we went. That night I had at least $50,000, hidden at the bottom of a camera bag under a nice camera and souvenir T-shirts for the kids. When we left the club we got into a large van. While we were waiting for the remainder of our friends the driver fell asleep or skidded, and the van went crashing into several other expensive cars. The event was bigger than the damage, but people got scared and started yelling. The police came racing toward us. Pablo said to me, “We don’t need this, let’s get out of here.”
We ran away, not wanting to answer questions about the cash we were carrying. Maybe running wasn’t such a good idea. The police stopped us half a block away. “Somebody told us you were involved in the accident,” they said. They frisked us, but just casually. They didn’t find the money. Pablo denied we had been in the van. He explained innocently that we were just plain tourists from Colombia. The police locked us in the back of their police car and returned to the scene. This was a dangerous situation for us. The police did not know who we were and definitely we did not want them to check our identities. We didn’t know what the government had on file about us. We had to get out of there.
The police made the mistake of leaving a nightstick in their car. We were able to use that to reach into the front and open the locks. We opened the door and got out of the patrol car. We ran. We took a taxi back to the hotel and got out of there with our belongings, spending the night at the home of a friend. Otto and Pinina stayed at the accident and paid the owner about $10,000 cash, much more than the cost of repairs. But to be careful we left Florida the next morning.
We went to Washington, D.C., and did the tour of the FBI Building, we visited President Kennedy’s grave, and we had our pictures taken in front of the White House. I remember that Pablo was fascinated by the FBI museum, particularly the guns belonging to the famous criminals like Al Capone and Pretty Boy Floyd. From there we went to Memphis to see Elvis Presley’s house, Graceland. Pablo Escobar and Elvis Presley, the two kings! Pablo loved Elvis’s music. He played his tapes all the time and used to try to dance like him. “Look at me, Colombian Elvis!” While we were there he bought the entire collection of Elvis’s music—and years later when we submitted ourselves to arrest that collection was one of the things he took into the prison with him. When we left prison we couldn’t take it with us, which Pablo always regretted. Somebody stole it.
Our families went home and Gustavo, Pablo, and I went to Las Vegas. We had arranged for more than $1 million in cash to be waiting there for us. We stayed at Caesars Palace for five days, and I actually won $150,000 playing blackjack. We had an American friend who made all the arrangements for us, and he was the one who introduced us to Frank Sinatra, who was singing at the hotel. Supposedly our friend, who did big real estate deals, told him that we were important real estate investors from Colombia. It quickly became obvious that Sinatra thought we were involved in the Mafia, but I don’t know if he knew of our involvement in the drug business. I have absolutely no knowledge if Pablo and Sinatra did any business. There are stories, but I don’t know the facts.
I know that we had dinner one night with Sinatra and our translators in a private room in the back of a restaurant. It was an honor for us. When I met him I actually had goose bumps, but I had to be cool to maintain my position. During dinner Pablo told Sinatra that we were going to make a helicopter tour the next day and Sinatra asked to come with us. The next day Frank Sinatra became our guide as we spent about an hour and a half flying all over the area. This is the Colorado River, this is the Grand Canyon. He showed us all the scenery.
We got some of his albums signed by him—and lost those too when we escaped from the prison.
Supposedly, after Pablo became infamous our friend who had arranged this got a phone call from Sinatra. “I’ve been watching TV,” he said. “Is that Pablo Escobar the guy we met in Las Vegas?” I don’t know what happened after that, but I guess Sinatra said very firmly that he didn’t want to be associated with Pablo. And until now he never has.
It was a great life we were leading. We had to be careful with our actions, but nothing like what it would soon become. Although none of us knew it at the time, the wars had actually begun in 1979, when the United States and Colombia signed a treaty that declared drug trafficking a crime against the United States and permitted Colombian traffickers to be extradited to the U.S. It was that law that changed everything.