The only problem was the very strong smell of the chemicals. Pablo was afraid the neighbors would complain to the police, so that’s when he decided to build his laboratory in the jungle. This was when the business really began to grow. At that time there was no way of imagining what it would become, what incredible riches he would earn. There was nothing to which it could be compared. The president of Colombia, Virgilio Barco, would later call it “a great and powerful organization the likes of which has never existed in the world.”
Within only a few months Pablo and Gustavo had earned considerable money. I was putting Pablo’s money in different banks, spreading it around as best I could. But there was no way for me to prepare to handle this amount of money. For anyone. Pablo had started purchasing nice things for himself; he bought a Nissan Patrol, which is a large jeep-type vehicle, and a beautiful house for himself in the wealthy neighborhood El Poblado, living among the wealthiest citizens of Medellín. I still tried to convince him not to continue in this business. Pablo and I were both very strong soccer fans, although we supported different teams from Medellín. Our whole lives we would go to the stadium whenever possible. Once, I remember, early in Pablo’s story, we went together and were sitting side by side in the sun. There was just the two of us, two brothers, no bodyguards, no wives or children. This was one of the last times we were ever able to do this. I made one last plea: “You have enough money now,” I said. “You can buy what you need. Why don’t you just focus on the real estate business?”
He smiled to himself. As we were to learn, there are different ways to be addicted to drugs. Once Pablo was in the middle of the business, once he had tasted the power and the money and the renown, there was no way he could ever get out of it.
It was as he established his name that Pablo’s life changed in another, very different way. In 1974 he had fallen in love with the most beautiful young girl of the neighborhood, María Victoria Henao. The difficulty was that Pablo was already twenty-five and she was only fourteen, and because of that age difference María Victoria’s mother was very much against this relationship. She refused to speak with Pablo and tried to make it difficult for María to be with him. But Pablo was very much in love and pursued her very strongly. I remember one night he and a guitar player got very drunk and like a scene in a cheap movie serenaded her. In 1976 María Victoria became pregnant. One day, just like that, they decided they would be married. At that time I was outside Colombia, traveling with the national cycling team, so I missed the ceremony. It was a simple event. There was no planning, nothing special was organized. Three months later their son, Juan Pablo, was born. It took a couple of years before his mother-in-law would finally agree to join their new family, but eventually she accepted that Pablo truly loved her daughter.
It would be wrong to say that Pablo was always the most faithful husband to María Victoria, the world knows that, but there was not one day that he stopped loving his wife, his children, and his family. In fact, years later it was this love for his family and his fear for their safety that caused him to change his usual behavior and allow himself to be found and killed.
For the entire family, our lives changed forever the day my brother decided to send his drugs to America. By that time there had been a long-established marijuana business between Colombia and the United States, but there was not much of a market for cocaine. That began to change when Americans began growing much of their own marijuana, so the profit from the large loads was greatly reduced. Pablo had gone into his business at just the right time to take advantage of that. Some of the routes and the customers were already in place. Cocaine was the perfect product to replace marijuana: It was much easier to smuggle because it required so much less space, yet it was more profitable. One small load that could be carried by a “mule,” a person carrying the drugs with him, or on a small airplane, was worth a lot more money than many bales of marijuana secretly packed onto a freight ship.
Also at that time most people didn’t see much difference between cocaine and marijuana. They were both experience-enhancing drugs. This was before there was any violence attached to the cocaine trade and before cocaine had addicted America, long before the even stronger crack cocaine had been introduced to the American streets. Nobody thought it was much of a big deal. For smugglers it was just a more profitable substitute for marijuana. And in Colombia, there was the belief that sometime soon cocaine would be made legal both in our country and in America, just like it had been in the past. So when Pablo first came up with the idea to ship cocaine to America no one there seemed very worried about it.
The first way Pablo smuggled cocaine into the United States was by packing between twenty and forty kilos into used airplane tires and sending them to Miami on a small plane. He would find or buy used airplane tires in Colombia and store the drugs in them. When they arrived in Miami the pilots would throw them out as useless and buy new tires. In Miami the used tires had no value to anyone, so they would be thrown on a truck, driven to a garbage dump, and thrown away. An employee of Pablo’s would follow the truck, and retrieve those packages from the garbage. It was a simple plan that worked well.
What was nice for Pablo was that he never touched the drugs. He had decided that he no longer was going to be doing the dirty work, he didn’t want to risk going to jail again, and now he could afford to hire people to take those risks. It made the business much safer for him. So he employed regular people to bring the paste from Peru to Medellín and he had his cooks there to make the paste into the valuable powder. But some of the people who took the drugs from there to Florida later occupied important positions in the organization.
There were a few different people who drove the merchandise from the laboratory to the airport. The man in charge was Alosito and one of his main drivers was called Chepe. Chepe drove the big flatbed trucks and worked for Pablo from the beginning almost to the end. During the war with the enemies of the cartel Chepe was caught. We never knew exactly which of the many organizations fighting us had captured him, but we knew that they had tied his arms and ran over him with his own truck. They killed him like an animal in the street.
At the airport the men in charge of wrapping the cocaine into packages and packing those packages into the used tires were Prosequito and Juan Carlos. Juan Carlos was called Mr. Munster. Pablo named him that because he was tall and ugly, like Herman Munster from
The Munsters
. These two would write the brand name on the packages of cocaine; Pablo used names like Emerald and Diamond, so that if American drug agents overheard Pablo discussing a shipment they would believe he was referring to precious stones rather than drugs. Years later Prosequito was killed in just the same way as Chepe. For these jobs each of these people was paid $150 to $200 per kilo.
Pablo depended on several different pilots, and they were flying small private airplanes. The pilots mostly were paid by the kilo, at first about $2,500 per kilo but later as much as $6,000. For some flights a pilot could earn more than $1 million. Eventually Pablo and his partners in the cartel would have their many large airplanes and helicopters, but on these small planes it was only possible to carry three or at most four old tires.
The person who opened up Florida for Pablo was Luis Carlos, who had been a friend of his for a long time. It was Luis Carlos’s job to get the drugs out of the tires and begin the distribution. Luis didn’t speak English, but with all the Latinos in Miami that was not necessary. Particularly as long as he had a lot of money to give to the people who were needed. I remember that once he returned home to Medellín and brought some canned food from the market for Pablo to try. “You gotta eat this,” he said. “It’s delicious. It’s what I’ve been eating for the past two months.”
Pablo knew enough English to know that Luis Carlos had been eating cat food.
After Luis Carlos set up the operation in Miami he did the same thing in New York City.
At the beginning Pablo was sending only one airplane a week, but since the profit for each kilo was about $100,000, he was still earning almost $2 million a week. The business grew up so fast, much faster than anyone knew, and within a few months he was sending shipments two or three times a week, and even that was not enough to satisfy the fast growing market. Americans wanted cocaine. At first it was mostly high-class people, people of the entertainment business, people doing advertising, the Wall Street people, the record business, the people who went to the clubs like Studio 54. All people who could afford it easily. But soon everybody was doing it. The demand only went up. And because Pablo was almost the only person bringing coke into the country the supply was very small, so people were willing to pay big money for it. The further away it traveled from the route, from Miami, the more expensive it became. In the late 1970s in Colorado, for example, the cost was $72,000 a kilo. In California it was $60,000, in Texas $50,000. Anytime another person put his hands on the merchandise the price went up $1,000.
Pablo was smart enough to understand that he could not depend on one method of delivery for too long. The more people who knew even some of the details of his operation the more chance there was it would be betrayed. He used to figure that the United States Drug Enforcement Agency was between two and three years behind him, so before that amount of time passed he would find other ways of bringing cocaine into America. When the DEA started asking people at the airport questions he knew they were getting information from somewhere and that was the end of the used tires scheme. Instead he would send ordinary people with drugs in their suitcases or in their clothes on regular commercial airplanes. It was even more simple than it sounds. The travelers had to be people Pablo knew or who were recommended by people he trusted. The people who recommended them were responsible for their actions. The only requirement was that they already had to have a visa. They were both Colombian citizens and American citizens. People who were traveling from Colombia to the United States carried drugs in their suitcases, people coming to Colombia from America brought back the money in their suitcases. Anybody who wanted to come to the U.S., boom, drugs, anybody who wanted to go to Colombia, boom, money. Back then it wasn’t that risky, the DEA or Customs was not looking for these people. They were much too busy searching freighters for big bales of marijuana. It was also much less expensive for Pablo to make his shipments this way than it had been with the tires. He didn’t have to pay for the airplanes and the large fees. These people were paid around $1,000 plus their tickets.
In addition to the passengers, also the crew of the regular commercial airplanes carried suitcases for Pablo. That was even easier because they could just walk on and off the plane without having to go through a search. On some planes two or three stewardesses and a pilot or co-pilot might be carrying merchandise for us, but they never shared that information with each other. Each of them believed they were the only one on that flight. For these people it was an easy way of making additional money, particularly because they would fly both parts of the route and maybe make the trip twice a week.
The suitcases they were given were specially made. They had double walls and it was possible to secret as many as five kilos in one suitcase. All they had to do was make sure they handed the suitcase to the correct person at their destination.
Some people also were given special shoes made with hollow bottoms in which the drugs were carried. The grandfather of someone in our organization had a shoe manufacturing corporation; when he got sick his son took over and began working with us. In this factory they would make these shoes with the merchandise sewn inside. There was almost no way they could ever be discovered. We even put people in wheelchairs to carry the drugs, which was safe because no one ever suspected that they were sitting on close to a million dollars in cocaine. Sometimes our mules were dressed in costume, like a nun, for example, or even a blind person—who would be using a hollow walking stick filled with merchandise. Rarely were there any problems or discoveries with these people.
When Pablo started doing it this way he would send a few passengers every other day. Then it was an everyday thing and then twice a day. Only once did the DEA discover the cocaine in two suitcases, but nobody picked up those suitcases so they didn’t catch anybody.
Another method, which eventually became well known, was having the mules eat the cocaine. The cocaine would be put in condoms and the mules would swallow them. The drugs were undetectable inside their bodies. When they arrived at their destination they would go to the bathroom and then, boom. While there were always enough mules willing to make this trip, this was the most dangerous method for them. If any of the condoms would start leaking, or if one opened up, the mule could die. People did die this way. It was written about in the newspapers in America and got a lot of attention.
But eventually Pablo decided it was not even necessary to send people with the suitcases; we could just send the suitcases. This was many years before the attack on 9/11 so security was easy, we paid the right people to put our suitcases on the flight. At the destination our people would just pick them up. One thing that Pablo found right away was that it was simple to convince people working in the right jobs to cooperate with us. Almost from the very first day Pablo knew he had to pay big bribes, just like in the contraband business. Pablo was generous with these payments, he wanted to make it so rewarding for people that they would never betray him. So many people earned their fortunes working for us that no one ever learned about. For example, when Pablo was flying our own airplanes the manager of a small airport we used in Colombia was paid up to $500,000 for each flight he arranged to land without any difficulty. This was a man who earned a small salary from his job, but when he was finally arrested the authorities found he had $27 million in all his bank accounts. So obviously it was never a problem recruiting the people we needed. People in positions to assist would come to us and make offers. These people would include airplane maintenance people who would put our merchandise aboard the plane for us, military and police officers and guards who would look in a different direction when they were told to, even an American who sold Pablo the flight schedules for the surveillance planes that flew above Florida searching the skies for our planes.