Pablo worked in the contraband business for almost three years. During that time he earned more money than any of us had thought possible—except Pablo, of course—and to save it he had to open a lot of different bank accounts, many of them in assumed names. At that time our government paid little attention to the amount of money Colombians had in banks. No one tracked it. No one had a legal right to ask any questions about where money came from. Eventually Pablo asked me to manage this money. It was my job to make payments to all his employees, deposit the money in banks and other secure places, and to begin making smart investments. This was the time I first became the accountant.
Generally Pablo and I would meet once or twice a week. With my encouragement we eventually began investing the money in real estate, buying land and buildings and financing construction. This was something Pablo would do for the rest of his life. At one time, for example, he owned as many as four hundred farms throughout the country. I used the real estate deals to protect Pablo’s money. If his contraband business should be discovered the government had the right to take the money he had earned from it, so I created a new set of books to prove he had earned his money from real estate. For example, if we sold an apartment for $50,000, in those books the sale was recorded as $90,000. In this way we were able to create very complicated paths that were impossible to follow to the source. I don’t remember precisely how much money Pablo earned in the three years he worked in the contraband business, but in addition to becoming a wealthy man himself, he improved the lives of many people who worked with him.
It was during this time that we got guns for the first time. Pablo was given his gun by the contraband boss known as El Padrino. And Pablo gave me the first gun I owned as a birthday present, a Colt, in a gift bag along with a nice suit, tie, and shoes. “You need it,” he said. “You’re carrying around a lot of money. You gotta be careful, you gotta protect yourself.” Growing up on the farm we had fired a gun at birds, but we didn’t really know how to use it. Certainly, I didn’t. A friend of Pablo’s, a captain in the police, helped me get a permit to carry it. I was not comfortable with it, I hid it from my wife, but Pablo was right. I carried around a lot of cash. I had to be able to protect myself. Fortunately, at that time I never needed it.
Had his involvement in contraband continued anything might have happened. It’s possible he would have used his profits to go directly into politics. He might have done special things. But the business ended suddenly. What happened was that a corrupt police official with whom he had been doing business betrayed him. This high-ranking member of the police force had been on Pablo’s payroll for several years, being well paid to facilitate passage of goods through his region. But when he was transferred to another city he knew he would lose these payments, so to gain favor with his bosses he told them everything he knew about Pablo’s business. Their plan was to intercept the next convoy. That would be worth a fortune to them.
By this time Pablo’s convoys included as many as forty trucks. One thing about my brother, he always had luck. Usually he drove in his jeep in front of the trucks. But on this trip he decided he was going to stop for lunch in a nice restaurant. He told the drivers to keep going and eventually he would catch up and make the payoffs to the local police in towns along the route. At that time the police trusted Pablo so there should have been no problem with this. But while Pablo was eating, under orders from superiors, the police stopped the convoy and seized thirty-seven of the trucks. One of the three drivers who got away called Pablo and told him what had happened. “Tell the drivers not to say anything to anyone,” Pablo said.
Alvaro accepted the loss. “Forget about the trucks,” he said. “Just come back to Medellín.”
There was nothing Pablo could do to save the merchandise. Instead of driving the jeep back to the city he took a public bus, which allowed him to get past the police who were waiting for him. Alongside the road he saw the thirty-seven captured trucks. Eventually Pablo hired lawyers and paid officials to get the drivers released. Their defense was that there was no proof they knew they were transporting contraband. They were just simple truck drivers. Eventually all the drivers were released. But for Pablo, this was the end of the contraband business. And the beginning of the life that made him infamous.
Today the cocaine business is a well-established part of the world culture. Everybody knows about it. Storms of cocaine use have rolled over countries like the United States. Because of Pablo and the Medellín and Cali cartels Colombia has become known mostly for the export of cocaine. But when Pablo started working in the cocaine business it was not that way at all. In the United States cocaine was not considered a big problem; in fact, most people didn’t know very much about it at all. While in Colombia we knew much about cocaine, primarily because the paste from which it is made came from our region, the distribution business had not spread much beyond our borders. The cocaine we made was mostly sold and used in our country. No one was sending cocaine from Colombia to the United States. No one was earning a billion dollars’ profit from it.
Once cocaine had been widely and freely used in America. A small amount was part of the original Coca-Cola and some cigarettes; it could be bought in drugstores. The first laws were passed against it in America in 1914, when people were told it made black people in the South crazy and caused them to attack white women. But mostly the police left people who used cocaine alone. Only in 1970 did the American government make it a so-called controlled substance, which caused the police to start making arrests for selling it and using it. Doing this made it more dangerous for dealers and more difficult for users to find it, which made it more expensive to buy. And much more profitable to sell.
Cocaine comes from the leaf of the coca plant, which grows best in the jungles of Peru, but also in Bolivia, Colombia, and Ecuador. It was everywhere in the mountains and jungles of Peru long before people started growing it to sell. The Indians have used it for medicine and chewed it for energy for all of known history. It was 150 years ago, in 1859, that a German scientist discovered a way to bring out from those leaves the exact white substance that made people feel so good. The base. He named it cocaine. Other people began adding it to many different products. It was only much later that people understood its dangers, that it was like a magnet, that once you were attracted to it you couldn’t easily get free of it.
Neither Pablo nor I ever used cocaine when we were growing up. As we got older occasionally Pablo liked to smoke marijuana. He had a saying: “I love marijuana because it relaxes me—and it can’t be bad because it comes from the earth.”
Pablo did not tell me he had decided to become involved in the cocaine business. He just told me that contraband was getting too dangerous, that it required too much traveling and there were too many people involved, so he was going to do something different. In fact, I don’t think transporting cocaine was something he had carefully been planning for a long time or even gave much consideration. Certainly he didn’t think that this was going to become his life and he would become the biggest cocaine dealer in the world. I think the opportunity was there and Pablo recognized it. This was simply an easier way to make money than contraband. It was possible to make more money with a single load that one person could transport in a car than with all the merchandise in forty trucks. At that time Pablo was one of the few who brought the cocaine from Peru to Colombia, and then to the United States. But the other people doing it almost never transported more than a few kilos—a kilo is 2.2 pounds—at a time. There was a good profit to be made and it wasn’t too difficult or too dangerous. There was no such thing then as a drug cartel, instead there were just some people who were bigger in the business. One of the most successful and most ruthless was a woman from Medellín that everybody knew about named Griselda Blanco, who was called the Black Widow because three of her husbands had died. Eventually she had moved to the United States and ran her business in Miami. So it took almost nothing to get started in the business except some money and some guts, and the chances of rewards were high.
The idea to do the business came originally from a man known as Cucaracho, the Roach, who asked Pablo and our cousin Gustavo Gavíria to go with him to Peru to arrange a deal. Gustavo’s father was our uncle who owned the shop that produced tombstones. Pablo and Gustavo were especially close and would stay that way until Gustavo was kicked to death by the police in front of his residence in 1990. In the drug organization Pablo built, Gustavo was the closest to him at the top. Gustavo was a partner; the two of them started the business together on this trip. He was a great guy—funny, smart, and very clever. His official job before the business was as an English teacher in a lower school. The two of them spent a great amount of time together, and both of them were passionate about soccer and racing cars. Later, when they could easily afford it, they would often race against each other in anything that moved fast, from cars to Jet Skis.
In Peru, Cucaracho introduced Pablo and Gustavo to people who would sell them the cocaine paste, the base, which would be refined into something pure. Returning with this paste to Medellín required driving through three countries, Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia. To complete this trip in each country Pablo purchased yellow Renault 4s—one of them from me—and put the correct national license plate on each one. I still remember the license plate of my car, LK7272. He drove the first car to the Ecuador border and transferred his package. He drove the second car across Ecuador to the border with Colombia and again changed the package. And then he drove it to its final destination, the neighborhood Belén situated in Medellín where he had prepared a “kitchen,” it was called, to make the drugs.
The Renaults were specially prepared to secret the package. The design of this car had very large wheel wells, meaning there was a lot of empty space right inside the fenders above the front wheels. A stash was made above the wheel on the passenger side to hold the package. On this first trip, and the many that followed, Pablo and Gustavo had to pass through police checkpoints. The police always approached the car on the driver’s side, away from the drugs. Sometimes they would search the whole inside of the car, but never under the chassis. On his very first trip Pablo bought one kilo of the paste, which cost about $60.
To build his market, after the paste had been converted to cocaine, Pablo gave some of it to about ten people to try. Almost all of them liked it better than marijuana. They found out that when they were drinking they could take cocaine and it would calm them down. It also gave them energy. Most of them wanted to use it again and asked Pablo for more, and eventually they shared it with other people and this is how Pablo found his customers. I know Pablo never used it because he didn’t like it.
And this was how Pablo Escobar began in the cocaine business.
Two
I
SAW THE STRANGE PRIEST IN MY MIND
for the first time the night in 1976 I was driving from Manizales to Medellín to try to get Pablo out of jail. He had been arrested for smuggling cocaine. But from that night until today the priest will still visit me with warnings.
All of this happened because people wanted cocaine. Pablo found he could easily sell as much as he could bring into our country. The business grew very rapidly, but at the beginning it was just Pablo and Gustavo. In fact, I remember that my brother asked our mother to make him a jacket with a double cover, a secret lining, so he could hide the merchandise and the cash he had to carry. One member of Pablo’s organization, the Lion, remembers carrying as much as $3 million in cash in the lining as he made more than twenty flights between Medellín and New York, bringing the drugs to America and the cash back to Colombia. Hermilda, who made the first such jacket, certainly did not know what this jacket was for, she was very innocent about all of this. One night the family was at the dinner table when Pablo handed her some money. “Pablo,” she said, “I heard you are washing the money. Is this money laundered?”
“Yes, of course,” he said.
She shook her head. “Then why is it not wet?” I can still hear our laughter.
Soon the Renault 4s were too small so Pablo bought trucks that could carry as many as twenty kilos each journey. The drugs came through Ecuador to the agricultural city of Pasto in southwest Colombia. One of the biggest products of Pasto is potatoes and Colombians are used to seeing large trucks carrying loads of potatoes from the border. Pablo had the idea of secreting many kilos of cocaine in a large spare tire carried by the trucks. It worked very well for several months. Still at this time I didn’t know what Pablo and Gustavo were doing.
Pablo and Gustavo hired several drivers and helpers, each pair of them being responsible for a different section of the trip, because they didn’t want anyone else knowing their route. One of the drivers was known as Gavilán, meaning Vulture. Gavilán was stupid; with the money Pablo paid him he bought a car and a motorcycle and expensive clothes. Gavilán had an uncle who worked for the DAS, the Departamento Administrativo de Seguridad, Colombia’s FBI, and he wondered what his nephew was doing to earn so much money. “It’s nothing,” Gavilán told him. “I’m working with this guy and all I do is drive a truck with potatoes from Pasto to Medellín.” The DAS agent started an investigation. All the details were never known, but somehow they found out the truth. One day the DAS and the police stopped the truck outside Medellín. They told the driver that everything was set; he just had to call the boss and tell him that he had to pay a bribe for the truck to continue. As Pablo told me later, he was not surprised when he got the phone call, as this was often the way business was done in Colombia. But when he and Gustavo showed up at the designated meeting place they were arrested.
I didn’t learn about this until the next day. I was in the city of Manizales meeting with the coaching staff of the national bicycling team, preparing for a speech I was to give that evening, when I saw the police picture of Pablo on the front page of the newspaper. I was stunned; I knew he was doing contraband, but not drugs. My first fear was what this would do to my own position with the team. I was worried I would be fired. But then I realized that no one at this meeting knew Pablo was my brother. I decided to be cool. I’d give my speech and then I would try to help.
I called my mother, who had been crying for hours. Remember, we had no cell phones then and she had not been able to find me. I told her I knew nothing about it, but that certainly I would do whatever I could to help my brother.
I tried to give my speech that night, but it was impossible. I apologized and said I was feeling sick and had to leave. The drive from Manizales to Medellín took about eight hours. I was with a good friend who eventually would work for Pablo in the cartel. We were driving a Dodge truck. I drove for several hours, then allowed my friend to take over. Today Colombia has nice highways, but at that time it was mostly narrow old roads. I sat back in the passenger seat and began thinking about what I would have to do right away. As soon as I got back to Medellín I had to make sure our financial records were the way we wanted them to be. The government was not going to check the source of Pablo’s funds, but they might want to see how much he had earned from drug deals. I had to make sure that all the money he had in the banks was based on recent real estate transactions.
It was 3:30 in the morning and we were the only car on the road. I saw that we were running short of fuel and began looking around for a gas station. As I did I saw a man dressed in black, with a round black hat on his head, standing by the side of the road. To me, he looked like a priest. I thought that was very strange: What was a priest doing standing alone on the road in the middle of the night? As we came close to him my friend didn’t even slow down. “Hey,” I practically yelled at him, “stop the car! Stop the car!”
We raced right past the man. I saw his face looking at me. I said to my friend, “Man, I’m telling you to stop the freaking car!” Then I turned around and looked back—and the man was gone. He had disappeared.
A little while later we drove past an open gas station—and again he refused to stop. He didn’t stop until we finally ran out of gas. I was furious with him. “What’s the matter with you? Why didn’t you stop to pick up that guy? I told you to stop at the gas station.”
He looked at me like I was crazy. “What are you talking about? You never told me to stop. There was no guy on the road.”
I got goose bumps. Even now when I think about it my body goes cold. I know what I saw that night. And more important, that was only the first time I would see the priest. And I would learn to understand what it meant when I saw him.
We had to walk back to the gas station but eventually we got home. I saw Pablo a day later at the Itagüi prison, one of the toughest jails in Medellín. He didn’t want to talk about his situation, just telling me that he would take care of it. He spent eight days there, then paid someone to arrange his transfer to a more relaxed prison. This was more of a farm than a jail; the prisoners were allowed to walk free, play soccer, even eat their meals outside. He spent more than two months there waiting for his trial. During that time, I believe, some arrangements were made with the local judge. In addition, my mother became friends with the director of the prison, bringing him meals, because she was there so often. Unfortunately, because the crime began in Pasto, it was decided the trial would take place there. But that was much more dangerous for Pablo, as he was going to be tried by a military judge, and those judges were difficult to corrupt. If Pablo and Gustavo were convicted in a military court it was possible he would receive a long sentence.
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.