Lehder spent most of his time in Colombia with Pablo. They were together at farms, and offices; they traveled through the country together. The bold Carlos that we had met a few years earlier was now gone. The government froze almost all his accounts and took over his properties and possessions. Once his fortune had been estimated at $2 billion, but now he was nearly bankrupt. While he was on the run he had to go into the jungle and there he got sick with fever. It was feared there was nothing that could be done to help him. He was dying there. Pablo sent a helicopter for him and brought him back to Medellín where he received the proper treatment to save his life. Even then he was very weak.
When he finally recovered, Pablo gave him work to do. Basically he became a trusted bodyguard, although he was given the respect he had earned. Once he was recovered he decided to start making a second fortune at a farm. One of Lehder’s new employees who was running the farm called the police, and Carlos was captured and extradited him to the United States. I was saddened, because I cared for him, because of his intelligence, and the great friendship he gave my brother Pablo. After his trial he was sentenced to life in prison without parole, plus 135 years, so all of us now knew how we would be treated if we permitted ourselves to be extradited to the United States. With the government refusing to negotiate, our choices were only to fight until the state canceled the treaty or die fighting. As far as is known to anyone, Carlos Lehder remains hidden somewhere in the American prison system, still making appeals of his sentence.
During that time we were careful about where we stayed, and we moved often, but we didn’t feel under tremendous pressure. Pablo still returned to Napoles, although now he only remained there for brief periods of time. It was in this period that all the good deeds Pablo had done for the people began to pay off. The people who loved him refused to help the police or the military find him. In fact, many members of the police and the army remained on his payroll while they were searching for him.
We always had a great amount of security around us, whatever we did. In our family security, it was normal to have the men with the mustaches and the solid bodies, but we also had several beautiful women. In those days nobody in Colombia would think that a beautiful girl having a drink at the bar could actually be looking over the place to see if it was safe. One, I remember, was a tall blond girl with gorgeous blue eyes known as Lorena, and after working for me for two years we helped her become a model in Italy. Lorena, who later helped save my life, looked like a Barbie. She was very strong, very serious. To answer the unasked question, no, there was never a sexual relationship between the security and the principal.
The reason for using the women was that they could easily go to public places without raising any suspicion. When we had a meeting in a hotel or a restaurant they could check it out without bringing any attention. If we wanted to go to a nightclub we would always send two of these women with two nicely dressed male bodyguards an hour before we wanted to show up to check the place. They acted like couples, but they were watching carefully. Later, when it became very risky for us to go out we would send as many as ten different couples, who sat at different tables and let us know if there were any problems. One night I was going to a club and sent a few couples to look the place over. They called and told me, “Everything’s cool. You can come ahead.” But just to be sure, I decided to dress like a bodyguard without using any expensive jewelry or watch, unlike one of my own bodyguards, who always wore lavish clothes and accessories. I dressed more casually. So when we got to the club, the well-dressed bodyguard with the pretty girl was invited inside—and they wouldn’t let me in! I had to go to the corner and called them inside, and everybody left.
To increase security we would also pay the club security $500 to make sure nobody with a gun got into the club. “If they show a permit,” my people told them, “tell them to walk away.” Remember, there were no cell phones then, but we had the big military phones and used them.
Although the fact that we were often on the move made it more difficult to manage the operations, our business didn’t seem to suffer. Our organization had been well established and could continue to operate smoothly. We had secure routes, guaranteed transportation, and good distribution. And we had more customers than we could supply.
When the DEA began making more drug busts in the U.S. some people thought that meant they were defeating the cartels. But the real reason they were successful in making more intercepts was because more drugs were being sent into America. It was said that Medellín was responsible for shipping 80 percent of the cocaine in the world. For example, the DEA found a Colombian cargo plane carrying one thousand kilos hidden in cut flowers and wood products and said its value on the street was $20 million. Twenty million dollars! That was one shipment. With that amount of profit the business could never be stopped, there would always be people ready to take their chances to earn their fortune, even risking a prison term.
The big problem we had then was that we could supply more than the demand, so the price went down. From $35,000 or $40,000 a kilo it went down to $9,000. The profit was almost nothing but still the flow didn’t even slow down. So instead of paying the delivery men a fee for each kilo, it was better to give them ownership of part of the load. Transporter Tito Domínguez stockpiled his share when the cost was low. And when there was a big bust, like the cargo plane, the price went up quickly, and people like him would sell their product.
Pablo’s people were always able to make moves ahead of the U.S. government. Sometimes there were as many as eight different agencies trying to stop the drugs; besides DEA there was Customs, the Coast Guard, the local city police department, the state police, and the military. When Domínguez was caught he was charged with crimes by seven different agencies. One thing that helped us was that these agencies got to keep the equipment they seized, so instead of working together they were all in competition with each other for the publicity and the materials they could seize and own. They had airplanes and speedboats and fishing boats and cars that sometimes they sold and used their profits. But Pablo’s people continued to outsmart all of them.
Domínguez explained: “The government worked three men minimum on a speedboat pretending to be fishing. When we had a shipment arriving we had eight or nine boats in the area. We would check out every boat in the area and if a boat didn’t have any fishing equipment or looked suspicious they would radio, ‘Tito, mother-in-law’s in the driveway. How far out are you?’ I would shut down and wait until I got the word that mother-in-law had left the area.
“We had real good intelligence. When the talk of the town became that the government was doing speedboat busts we switched to sport fishermen. When we found out they were focusing on the Miami coast we moved a few hundred miles up to places like Cocoa Beach.
“I had one big house in the north and one in the south, each of them on the water with a big dock. These were ports of entry, nothing else. The drugs would go in the back door and right out the front door. These houses were just a doorway to America. They were in expensive neighborhoods because the neighbors’ houses were further away for privacy. The boats would deliver as much as one thousand kilos and be out of there in minutes. It was a system that was never stopped.”
I’m not defending the violence that happened, I’m explaining it. But the leaders of the Medellín cartel believed they had to force the government to change the extradition law and this was the path they chose. Soon all the judges were under protection, but there always was someone willing to inform on them. Until finally in December of 1986 the new Supreme Court found that because of a technicality the extradition treaty could not be enforced; the reason given was that it had been signed only by a temporary president. It was a small victory because the new president, Virgilio Barco, signed it fast, but it proved the impact that the attacks had on the judges in the country.
One thing that is important to remember is that there were good police and bad police. These police were not like the regular police in the United States, who are trained to protect the public. Some of them were not innocent at all. The police sometimes acted more like attacking soldiers than men who upheld the law. There were police who searched houses for Pablo who acted as gentlemen; they would make their search and leave. But others did crazy things. They were hard with innocent people, they stole possessions, they broke things for no reason, and they left after making threats. Or the police would go to a house at random and knock down doors, terrorizing people, and steal their belongings. It was known that even having in your possession a photograph concerning Pablo—even if you weren’t in it—had become a crime. If the soldiers or the police found such a picture in your house or your car, you could be arrested for cooperating with the criminals and your property would be taken. The girl with the beautiful legs remembers that her family burned every picture of Pablo. The searchers came to her house to search at least seven times. This was called
ayananie
, although they were always accompanied by a judge who made it legal. They stopped her many times in her car at roadblocks and they broke into her car while it was parked. But of course they never found anything to associate her or her family with Pablo. Their searches were so tough that when people wanted to get even with their neighbor for any reason they would call the police from public phones and tell them, “Pablo Escobar is living at this address.”
And sometimes the police killed. Our cousin Hernando Gavíria was at his farm with his family for a vacation when the corrupt police arrived looking for Pablo. Hernando did not know where Pablo was, nor was he in contact with him. But still the police started thrashing him. They hung him upside down, and covered his eyes to torture him with electricity, and they also inserted needles in his testicles, all in front of his children and wife, while threatening the children and wife if they didn’t tell them where Pablo was. He died in front of his family.
Even while this was going on, many of the police continued on our payroll. On Fridays the police would line up, some in uniform, and be given a salary. For that money they performed surveillance services. For example, after the war started between Medellín and Cali in the late 1980s, some police in both of those cities worked for the traffickers who controlled those cities. So that when a car came into Medellín with a license plate from Cali, or when strangers would check into a Medellín hotel, the Medellín police would check them out. If they were from Cali sometimes they would take them into custody and if their intentions were innocent they would be released; but if it was suspected they were in the city for a crime, instead of being taken to the police commanding officer they would be handed over to the cartel.
Pablo’s war against the police started with the murder of Diego Mapas, a friend who was one of our associates. He got the nickname Mapas, map, because he was incredible with directions. If you gave him an address, he would find it better than a map.
One afternoon Diego Mapas and two other bodyguards rented a taxi in Medellín to go to Bogotá to make a drug deal. What they didn’t know was that they had been followed from Medellín. The police pulled them over, and took Mapas, his bodyguards, and the taxi driver to a farm near Bogotá, where they were tortured the same way as our cousin Hernando, and disappeared never to be found again. And all these tortures were in order to find out where Pablo was hiding. The Colombian government offered $10 million for both Pablo and myself—dead or alive, but preferably dead.
Pablo learned what had happened from a member of the police force named Lieutenant Porras who would supply information to Pablo, because Porras did not agree with the way the police were carrying out their corrupt methods. Pablo encouraged him to denounce all the crooked cops, so Porras did go to the district attorney, and surprisingly for Porras the DA put him in jail. After a few weeks he supposedly escaped from the prison and then was killed by the police in a barricade near Boyacá. It’s not correct to think of the police in those days just as people keeping the law. Many of them were corrupt—something we know for sure.
Pablo fought the police hard. They were trying to kill him, so he killed them. They put a price on his head; he put a price on their heads. The total war started about 1988. In Medellín the police had hundreds of small stations for about three or four men called CAIs, for Centro de Atención Inmediata, and they were put in intersections all over the city. They were like guard posts or checkpoints, and they would stop traffic. The sicarios would attack these posts with machine guns or sometimes bombs. There would be money paid for the death of each policeman. The amount of payment was figured by the rank of the policeman. A regular policeman was between $1,000 and $2,500.
There were many poor people in Medellín trying to collect that money. It was a big business and sometimes different people made claims about the same shootings. So a system was set up that before the event the assassin would need to inform the head sicario where he would attack, and afterward he would have to present a newspaper story about the attack to receive his pay.
There are many, many guesses about how many policemen were killed, from about two hundred to two thousand. I don’t know the exact number. One reason for that difference was that there was violence done from so many different places. Pablo was the easiest to blame for all the deaths, but many of these assassinations were done by other police trying to get paid, as well as other people wanting to get even.
The police fought back with their own assassins. The secret police death squads would go in black cars into the poor neighborhoods, the barrios, at night. Most regular people would stay off the streets after work, so the police decided anyone on the corner was a bad guy, and that they worked for Pablo. Their secret squads with machine guns would drive around shooting young people for just standing on the corner, or they would take them away and later people would find their bodies. This was every night.