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.