by David Fisher
Pablo’s attorney informed him of this the day before the transfer was to take place. Pablo became concerned; he didn’t know anybody in Pasto who could help him. It was possible he wasn’t going to be able to make a deal for their freedom. So late that night he told one of the guards that he couldn’t sleep and needed to take a walk around the soccer field. “I need to relax,” he said. “I need to stretch my legs.”
He stretched them a long distance. He escaped that night. I can imagine that people were paid to help him. He walked out of the jail. Several hours after his escape the director called my mother to plead for assistance. “I don’t know what to do. I’m expecting an airplane from the air force to bring the boys to Pasto,” he told her. “If he isn’t here they might put me in jail myself. He has to return. I promise, nothing is going to happen to him.
“I was so good with them,” he said. “I let them walk wherever they wanted to go. And now I’m going to be punished for it.”
When Pablo finally called our mother to tell her he escaped she was angry. “I wonder who you think you are? You’ve got to do things right. You have to go back,” she explained. “Things will be okay.” Pablo agreed and she went to meet him. Many years later our mother would risk her life meeting without security with our enemies from Cali and from a group organized to kill Pablo, Los Pepes. Hermilda Gavíria was a brave woman who would do anything to protect her children.
She took a taxi to meet Pablo. She was worried how the director would explain his absence to the military, but Pablo came up with a plan. Instead of returning immediately to the prison they went to visit a doctor. Pablo paid the doctor a lot of money to make up some documents that Pablo had been very, very sick, some problem with his digestive system. The doctor put Pablo’s name on X-rays of a patient who really had a problem. And by 11 A.M. Pablo and our mother showed up at the prison. Pablo apologized to the director and confessed he had been feeling very bad. “I thought I was going to die,” he said.
Thankfully the air force plane had not been able to fly because of bad weather. Eventually Pablo and Gustavo and their drivers were taken by truck to Pasto. He was lucky because the government changed the system and he had the opportunity to use his money there. He bought the judge, although I don’t know how much money it cost him. As part of the arrangement the driver, Frank, who had been caught with the merchandise in the truck, agreed to plead guilty to trafficking drugs and say that Pablo and Gustavo were not involved in the deal. Frank the driver was sentenced to less than five years.
Pablo told him, “During the time you’re in jail you’re going to have everything and your family is going to be taken care of. It’s like you’re working hard and there is money in the bank.” Pablo arranged for him to be held in a nice jail. And for his family he gave them a house and car and a good bank account. It was my job to make certain that Frank and his family regularly received the payments.
The first Sunday Pablo was out of jail we had dinner together at our mother’s house. It was then I tried to talk him away from cocaine. “This is bad. Don’t do this,” I told him. “There’s no need. You’re making so much money in contraband. Why do you want to get messed up with this stuff?” That’s when he told me how everything had started.
But he promised me, “Don’t worry, brother, I’m not going to do this for long. It’s just to make some money. Then I’m going to stick to contraband, because if they catch me they just take the merchandise, they don’t put you in prison.”
I told him that he was hurting me too. I was a successful businessman, my stores were selling my bicycles and I was receiving my salary from the government for coaching. I wondered if the government would allow the brother of a drug dealer to coach the national team. He promised me that he was done with the cocaine deals. I don’t remember if I believed him.
Pablo went right back to the business. By this time he was known to the police. More than a month later the same two DAS agents who had arrested Pablo and Gustavo earlier stopped them once again. This time their plans were different. They took them to El Basurero, the desolate area where a mountain of garbage was being created, tied their hands together, and made them get down on their knees. They were very hard with them. Pablo believed he was about to be murdered, but he stayed cool. He never begged for his life, rather he negotiated. Eventually the DAS kidnappers agreed to accept one million pesos to let them live. They set Gustavo free to go get the money. While waiting for Gustavo to return they spoke, and Pablo offered more money to learn who had set him up. The purchased answer was surprising: El Cucaracho. The man who had put Pablo in this business was worried that Pablo was taking control. To protect his business he had bought their death. Unfortunately, that also was the way this business was done.
Eventually they were paid their ransom and allowed Pablo and Gustavo to go free. The legend makes it clear that this was an insult Pablo could never forgive. Kidnapping for ransom was an accepted part of our lives, but by making him go down on his knees they paid him no respect. The story is that Pablo promised, “I’m going to kill those motherfuckers myself.” Only a few days later these corrupt agents were planning to kidnap another worker of Pablo’s. At that time the name Pablo Escobar wasn’t known, so no one had reason to be afraid of him. For the agents he was just another drug dealer. But instead of being successful in this attempt, they were caught themselves. Pablo never told me this whole story. I have heard from others that Pablo had them brought to a house, made them get down on their knees, then put a gun to their head and killed them. Maybe. But I do know that the newspapers reported finding the bodies of these two DAS agents who had been shot many times.
From this time forward Pablo was in the business of distributing cocaine, at first only in Colombia but eventually to at least fifteen countries and through those countries much of the world. Toward the end of his life the cartel was even beginning to move into Eastern Europe, into the communist nations. At the height of its business the Medellín cartel was producing and delivering tons of cocaine weekly, tons, but for Pablo it began by producing a few kilos by hand in a small house.
I don’t remember the day Pablo told me the whole truth about his business. It was soon. As I was the man taking care of the money, of course I had to know. Transforming the alkaloid from the coca leaf requires a process of several steps. It is a chemical process but it does not require experts to do it, just people who can follow simple steps. It is no more difficult than baking a cake. The process is done in a laboratory, which is called the kitchen. It is a laboratory in word only, as the process can take place anywhere from a nice house to the jungle. Eventually Pablo built many very large labs, employing hundreds of people, deep in the Colombian jungle, far away from any normally traveled roads. But his first lab was inside a two-story house Pablo purchased in the town of Belén. This was a normal house set in a residential neighborhood. The workers, known as the cooks, lived on the second floor and the kitchen was most of the first floor. Pablo had turned several old refrigerators into simple ovens that were used to cook the powder. What made this house different was that all the windows were covered all the time, making it impossible for anyone to see inside. In the beginning there was no need to pay anything to the police, who had no knowledge of what was going on.
The only problem was the very strong smell of the chemicals. Pablo was afraid the neighbors would complain to the police, so that’s when he decided to build his laboratory in the jungle. This was when the business really began to grow. At that time there was no way of imagining what it would become, what incredible riches he would earn. There was nothing to which it could be compared. The president of Colombia, Virgilio Barco, would later call it “a great and powerful organization the likes of which has never existed in the world.”
Within only a few months Pablo and Gustavo had earned considerable money. I was putting Pablo’s money in different banks, spreading it around as best I could. But there was no way for me to prepare to handle this amount of money. For anyone. P
ablo had started purchasing nice things for himself; he bought a Nissan Patrol, which is a large jeep-type vehicle, and a beautiful house for himself in the wealthy neighborhood El Poblado, living among the wealthiest citizens of Medellín. I still tried to convince him not to continue in this business. Pablo and I were both very strong soccer fans, although we supported different teams from Medellín. Our whole lives we would go to the stadium whenever possible. Once, I remember, early in Pablo’s story, we went together and were sitting side by side in the sun. There was just the two of us, two brothers, no bodyguards, no wives or children. This was one of the last times we were ever able to do this. I made one last plea: “You have enough money now,” I said. “You can buy what you need. Why don’t you just focus on the real estate business?”
He smiled to himself. As we were to learn, there are different ways to be addicted to drugs. Once Pablo was in the middle of the business, once he had tasted the power and the money and the renown, there was no way he could ever get out of it.
It was as he established his name that Pablo’s life changed in another, very different way. In 1974 he had fallen in love with the most beautiful young girl of the neighborhood, María Victoria Henao. The difficulty was that Pablo was already twenty-five and she was only fourteen, and because of that age difference María Victoria’s mother was very much against this relationship. She refused to speak with Pablo and tried to make it difficult for María to be with him. But Pablo was very much in love and pursued her very strongly. I remember one night he and a guitar player got very drunk and like a scene in a cheap movie serenaded her. In 1976 María Victoria became pregnant. One day, just like that, they decided they would be married. At that time I was outside Colombia, traveling with the national cycling team, so I missed the ceremony. It was a simple event. There was no planning, nothing special was organized. Three months later their son, Juan Pablo, was born. It took a couple of years before his mother-in-law would finally agree to join their new family, but eventually she accepted that Pablo truly loved her daughter.
It would be wrong to say that Pablo was always the most faithful husband to María Victoria, the world knows that, but there was not one day that he stopped loving his wife, his children, and his family. In fact, years later it was this love for his family and his fear for their safety that caused him to change his usual behavior and allow himself to be found and killed.
For the entire family, our lives changed forever the day my brother decided to send his drugs to America. By that time there had been a long-established marijuana business between Colombia and the United States, but there was not much of a market for cocaine. That began to change when Americans began growing much of their own marijuana, so the profit from the large loads was greatly reduced. Pablo had gone into his business at just the right time to take advantage of that. Some of the routes and the customers were already in place. Cocaine was the perfect product to replace marijuana: It was much easier to smuggle because it required so much less space, yet it was more profitable. One small load that could be carried by a “mule,” a person carrying the drugs with him, or on a small airplane, was worth a lot more money than many bales of marijuana secretly packed onto a freight ship.
Also at that time most people didn’t see much difference between cocaine and marijuana. They were both experience-enhancing drugs. This was before there was any violence attached to the cocaine trade and before cocaine had addicted America, long before the even stronger crack cocaine had been introduced to the American streets. Nobody thought it was much of a big deal. For smugglers it was just a more profitable substitute for marijuana. And in Colombia, there was the belief that sometime soon cocaine would be made legal both in our country and in America, just like it had been in the past. So when Pablo first came up with the idea to ship cocaine to America no one there seemed very worried about it.
The first way Pablo smuggled cocaine into the United States was by packing between twenty and forty kilos into used airplane tires and sending them to Miami on a small plane. He would find or buy used airplane tires in Colombia and store the drugs in them. When they arrived in Miami the pilots would throw them out as useless and buy new tires. In Miami the used tires had no value to anyone, so they would be thrown on a truck, driven to a garbage dump, and thrown away. An employee of Pablo’s would follow the truck, and retrieve those packages from the garbage. It was a simple plan that worked well.
What was nice for Pablo was that he never touched the drugs. He had decided that he no longer was going to be doing the dirty work, he didn’t want to risk going to jail again, and now he could afford to hire people to take those risks. It made the business much safer for him. So he employed regular people to bring the paste from Peru to Medellín and he had his cooks there to make the paste into the valuable powder. But some of the people who took the drugs from there to Florida later occupied important positions in the organization.
There were a few different people who drove the merchandise from the laboratory to the airport. The man in charge was Alosito and one of his main drivers was called Chepe. Chepe drove the big flatbed trucks and worked for Pablo from the beginning almost to the end. During the war with the enemies of the cartel Chepe was caught. We never knew exactly which of the many organizations fighting us had captured him, but we knew that they had tied his arms and ran over him with his own truck. They killed him like an animal in the street.
At the airport the men in charge of wrapping the cocaine into packages and packing those packages into the used tires were Prosequito and Juan Carlos. Juan Carlos was called Mr. Munster. Pablo named him that because he was tall and ugly, like Herman Munster from The Munsters. These two would write the brand name on the packages of cocaine; Pablo used names like Emerald and Diamond, so that if American drug agents overheard Pablo discussing a shipment they would believe he was referring to precious stones rather than drugs. Years later Prosequito was killed in just the same way as Chepe. For these jobs each of these people was paid $150 to $200 per kilo.
Pablo depended on several different pilots, and they were flying small private airplanes. The pilots mostly were paid by the kilo, at first about $2,500 per kilo but later as much as $6,000. For some flights a pilot could earn more than $1 million. Eventually Pablo and his partners in the cartel would have their many large airplanes and helicopters, but on these small planes it was only possible to carry three or at most four old tires.
The person who opened up Florida for Pablo was Luis Carlos, who had been a friend of his for a long time. It was Luis Carlos’s job to get the drugs out of the tires and begin the distribution. Luis didn’t speak English, but with all the Latinos in Miami that was not necessary. Particularly as long as he had a lot of money to give to the people who were needed. I remember that once he returned home to Medellín and brought some canned food from the market for Pablo to try. “You gotta eat this,” he said. “It’s delicious. It’s what I’ve been eating for the past two months.”
Pablo knew enough English to know that Luis Carlos had been eating cat food.
After Luis Carlos set up the operation in Miami he did the same thing in New York City.
At the beginning Pablo was sending only one airplane a week, but since the profit for each kilo was about $100,000, he was still earning almost $2 million a week. The business grew up so fast, much faster than anyone knew, and within a few months he was sending shipments two or three times a week, and even that was not enough to satisfy the fast growing market. Americans wanted cocaine. At first it was mostly high-class people, people of the entertainment business, people doing advertising, the Wall Street people, the record business, the people who went to the clubs like Studio 54. All people who could afford it easily. But soon everybody was doing it. The demand only went up. And because Pablo was almost the only person bringing coke into the country the supply was very small, so people were willing to pay big money for it. The further away it traveled from the route, from Miami, the more expensive it became. In the late 1970s i
n Colorado, for example, the cost was $72,000 a kilo. In California it was $60,000, in Texas $50,000. Anytime another person put his hands on the merchandise the price went up $1,000.
Pablo was smart enough to understand that he could not depend on one method of delivery for too long. The more people who knew even some of the details of his operation the more chance there was it would be betrayed. He used to figure that the United States Drug Enforcement Agency was between two and three years behind him, so before that amount of time passed he would find other ways of bringing cocaine into America. When the DEA started asking people at the airport questions he knew they were getting information from somewhere and that was the end of the used tires scheme. Instead he would send ordinary people with drugs in their suitcases or in their clothes on regular commercial airplanes. It was even more simple than it sounds. The travelers had to be people Pablo knew or who were recommended by people he trusted. The people who recommended them were responsible for their actions. The only requirement was that they already had to have a visa. They were both Colombian citizens and American citizens. People who were traveling from Colombia to the United States carried drugs in their suitcases, people coming to Colombia from America brought back the money in their suitcases. Anybody who wanted to come to the U.S., boom, drugs, anybody who wanted to go to Colombia, boom, money. Back then it wasn’t that risky, the DEA or Customs was not looking for these people. They were much too busy searching freighters for big bales of marijuana. It was also much less expensive for Pablo to make his shipments this way than it had been with the tires. He didn’t have to pay for the airplanes and the large fees. These people were paid around $1,000 plus their tickets.