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.”