by David Fisher
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 po
ol 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 us
ed 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.