It would be impossible to even guess how many people were on the Medellín payroll, including airport managers, ground crews, truck drivers, security patrols, even Customs agents. American Customs agents began using AWACS aircraft, airborne warning and control system, which were surveillance planes used to detect all incoming aircraft. Their radar couldn’t be avoided. So instead, Pablo paid a Customs agent for providing the schedule the AWACS would be flying, the region they would be patrolling, the range of their radios, and the radio frequencies on which they communicated so our pilots could listen to them. So we knew when and where they would be in the air and could avoid those times and areas. Pablo often purchased this type of information. People could make more money in one day than from years of their salary. The agent was paid approximately $250,000 for information about the flights, but still he was greedy. He wanted even more money. It was refused—and the next flight was intercepted. Often two planes flew together, one to carry the merchandise and the other to fly high and watch over that plane as well as conceal its presence from ground control radar. This time the AWACS caught the drug plane on radar. The pilot in the cover plane warned the drug pilot that Customs had got him, so the drug pilot turned around and dropped his merchandise of about five hundred kilos over Cuba. When the plane finally landed in the U.S. and was captured one pilot confessed and was sentenced to forty years in prison. The second pilot kept quiet and eventually walked away free.
It was this danger of being caught and going to jail that kept the commissions so high. But if someone was arrested and kept quiet Pablo would continue to take care of him. The Lion, who would later help run New York and Madrid, remembers that when he was in jail in Colombia he continued to get messages from Pablo. “Don’t worry,” he was told by a guard on the payroll, “Pablo said be cool. He’ll get you out of jail.” Pablo arranged for him to be transferred to an easier prison. And every week a guard would hand money to him and say, “This is from the patrón,” from the boss. After six months he was set free. There was always someone willing to take our money. In some situations prisoners were permitted to stay in hotels and return regularly to the jail. In most countries we purchased the cooperation of authorities. In the Bahamas, for example, we had someone who worked closely with the government officials. “I took several people out of prison,” this person remembers. “For $50,000, or for $75,000, I would just walk them right out. The American government knew about it, but there was nothing they could do.”
After Customs began using AWACS, Pablo decided to change routes again and began bringing merchandise into the U.S. through Mexico. Pablo helped establish the Mexican cartel, telling people he knew there, “I’m going to bring my nine planes to Mexico and from there you take over.” The Mexicans established their own routes into America. Pablo’s planes brought about one thousand kilos each flight into Mexico, and from there the Mexicans smuggled it into Miami, New York, and Los Angeles. When it reached those cities, individual dealers would take it and distribute it to the smaller cities. In this way it spread through the United States.
We also depended greatly on ships. Of course we used the traditional methods of sending the drugs on freight ships, especially for those drugs embedded in other products—like lumber and wine—usually sent by the sea. But we also had our own ideas. We attached small containers—PVC tubes that could hold as much as fifty kilos—to the hull of the ship and filled them with merchandise; when the ships reached their port our divers would open them and retrieve the drugs. When the DEA learned about that method Pablo instituted a system in which the tubes would be held against the hull by an electromagnet. Before the ship reached port the magnet would be turned off and the tubes would fall harmlessly to the bottom, where they would be retrieved by waiting scuba divers.
In addition to the freight ships we had a small navy of speedboats, cigarette boats that would carry loads from Jamaica to Florida, or pick up loads at sea and race them to the Florida shore. Sometimes, like in the movies, they would land them on the beaches at night, but often we used the docks of friends who owned homes on the water. We also had many fishing boats working for us, bringing paste from Peru to Colombia, then proceeding to Mexico with as much as 15,000 kilos mixed with Ecuadoran fish flour.
There had been many drug traffickers before Pablo, but no one before had ever had the organization this size or was able to find so many new ways of smuggling the product into the United States. For comparison, a big load for the most famous drug organization before Pablo, the French Connection, was about one hundred kilos of heroin. We were bringing in tons of cocaine every week. Perhaps the most unusual method we employed came from a James Bond movie. Pablo loved the James Bond movies and watched them over and over. Sometimes while we were watching one of these movies and Bond or the villains would use an ingenious method, Pablo would say suddenly, “Oh, maybe we could do something like that for the business.” That was where his idea to transport product by submarine came from. When I think about it now, it seems too much to believe—a submarine? Who could buy a submarine? But in our business anything was possible. So when Pablo said we should transport by submarine, no one thought it wasn’t possible. No one questioned him. Instead we decided it was a wonderful idea and then had to figure out how to get a submarine.
In fact two submarines. Certainly we couldn’t purchase a used submarine without drawing attention so we knew we had to manufacture them. It didn’t matter how much it might cost, money was never a bar to anything Pablo wanted done. We hired a Russian and an English engineer to design this for us. From my education I was involved in the creation of the electrical systems. Two were built in the quiet back of a shipyard near the coastal city of Cupica. For certain reasons, in the past we always explained that these vessels were operated by remote control, but in fact they had pilots on board. They were small and they weren’t very pretty inside, but every two or three weeks each of the two submarines could carry 1,000 to 1,200 kilos. The submarines couldn’t come too close to the shore, so divers would meet the boats and transport their loads to the beach.
Pablo invented this method, but it remained so effective that in August 2008 the U.S. Coast Guard still intercepted a submarine of drugs coming from Colombia worth $187 million. A month later they caught a second sub with cocaine worth $350 million.
Pablo never ceased trying to expand the business. He usually had between twenty and thirty different regular routes through all regions of South and Central America, but besides Gustavo very few people knew about all of them. He changed these routes frequently. To build these routes he made deals with many different countries to cross through their airspace or land planes there. In 1984 he made a deal with the Sandinista government in Nicaragua to build a laboratory on an island off the coast. That was never built, but like Norman’s Cay, the island was used as a place to refuel planes and transfer drugs from small planes to bigger planes. For that right each member of the Medellín group paid a great amount of money.
The general we worked with in Panama had control over everything we needed. But this general would charge for everything. Every helicopter that arrived or departed, every connection, he charged for every single thing. Plus he received a percentage of every kilo passing through his country. For a while this general was a good partner. When Pablo would tell him, “I need to talk to you in two days,” he would immediately come to Colombia. But we learned this general was loyal only to himself. Once Pablo paid him $1.5 million for a large shipment to pass through the country, but it was intercepted by the Panamanian army. Drugs were confiscated, a laboratory was raided, and a young employee named John Lada was arrested and placed in jail.
Pablo was angry at this betrayal. He told our general: “We don’t need these headaches. You have to clean up the issue.” The general corrected this mistake, perhaps paying a judge to close his eyes to the situation. The drugs eventually were returned.
In Haiti another powerful general worked with Pablo to make certain our flights to his country would not be bothered. He was paid $200,000 for each plane that landed and took off without difficulty.
I remember particularly when Vladimiro Montesinos, the chief of Peru’s intelligence service, visited Pablo. His first night with us Pablo entertained him with five beautiful young Brazilian dancing girls. The following day they raced Jet Skis and finally Pablo got down to business. “We need places in Peru where our planes can land and take off,” he told him. “Places that won’t be bothered by the Peruvian air force.” Pablo agreed to pay $300 for each package of cocaine, which would amount to about $100,000 for each plane that landed in the Peruvian jungle. All the transactions had to be done in cash. Montesinos would keep 40 percent for his share and the rest would be distributed to the military.
The main thing that Pablo demanded from anyone who took his money was total loyalty. Many people made their fortune working for him, but they knew that the penalty for betrayal was harsh. When one of Pablo’s main security people, Dendany Muñoz Mosquera, known as La Kika, was put on trial in the United States, prosecutor Beth Wilkinson said about Pablo: “He let everyone in the organization know that if they cooperated with the government, if they stole money or merchandise from him, there would be one simple punishment: death to the employee and his family. To make that organization work, the threat had to be carried out when someone violated the rules, so he hired bodyguards, killers, and hit men from throughout Medellín . . . and his hit men killed and terrorized those who did not follow his orders.” Much of that statement is true. During that time no member could snitch or steal from Pablo without their life being in jeopardy.
There have been many stories told about Pablo, especially after his death, that I do not believe are true. When people were on trial they offered these tales to help themselves, knowing people would accept anything about Pablo and there would be no retribution. The bigger the stories they told, the better it might be for them. For example, a pilot the DEA captured agreed to testify in an American trial to reduce his own sentence. He told the prosecutor that after a shipment had been intercepted he said to Pablo, “It’s strange. Every time Flaco [who was a trusted worker for my brother] has something to do with things, the government comes in and they take it, or they were there taking pictures. You need to find out what the deal is with Flaco.”
A few weeks later this pilot asked Pablo what he had learned about Flaco. As he told a courtroom: “He said, ‘It’s been taken care of.’ One of Pablo’s
sicarios
[hit men] had three color photographs, Polaroids, and he handed them to Mr. Escobar and Mr. Escobar handed them to me. He pointed to one of them. He said that was Flaco.
“There were three men. One of them was a heavyset man, one was tall and slim like Flaco, and the other one was a short fellow. They had all been skinned alive. Their testicles had been cut off and their throats had been cut.”
The only way the pilot knew for sure it was Flaco was because Pablo identified him. “I asked him what kind of person would do this to another human being. He looked at the sicario. The sicario looked back at him and smiled and that was the end of it.”
This was his testimony. It would have taken a brave man to sit at Pablo’s table and insult him like that. But stories like this one have been told, and have helped build the outlaw legend.
The markets for the Medellín cartel expanded as fast as a shadow sweeping over an ocean. New York was a very important territory, and it was opened to Pablo by a friend known as the Champion. Champion had been sent to New York from Medellín in the 1970s by his mother, who was concerned because he was spending his time on the streets. He was learning from the wrong people. So she sent him to live in America with his successful older brother, intending that he would go to college. Champion lived in New York for five years while becoming an engineer for air-conditioning systems. It was while Champion was studying in New York that Pablo established his presence in the business in Colombia. When Champion returned to Colombia he hooked up with the same rough friends—and started fixing air conditioners. When he learned about Pablo Escobar he decided, I’m going to make some money with that guy.
Pablo agreed that Champion would handle his business in New York, taking charge of the distribution when the merchandise arrived and collecting the payments. One of Pablo’s strong senses was his ability to know who would work well for him, and to put them in the right position to be successful. To assist him in New York, with Pablo’s permission Champion brought his own cousin the Lion into the business. Lion had been living in New York City for a few years, working as a busboy at the fancy French restaurant La Grenouille. At that famous restaurant he had poured water and cleaned up for the rich and celebrated people of the city, among them former mayor John Lindsay, the actor George Sanders, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, and Peter Lawford. He would tell us that one night Mrs. Onassis ordered a large steak but ate only the carrots. Later in the kitchen he ate Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s untouched steak. In that job he was an invisible man, providing service to the most famous and wealthiest people in New York. But within a couple of years he was storing $25 million in cash in an apartment. We sometimes wondered how some of those famous people would feel if they knew their busboy was now richer than many of them—and was supplying the cocaine that many of them enjoyed.
The most important person for the cartel in New York was Champion’s older brother, who we knew as Jimmy Boy. Jimmy Boy was well educated; he was a professional economist, an elegant, calm man who worked on Wall Street. He was a respected member of an important country club. His friends ran major corporations—which is why he became so necessary.
Champion and the Lion ran the business on the streets. They were in charge of shipments, distribution, and collection of the money. The biggest problem they had was how to handle the money. At times they would have more than $20 million in cash in the apartment they kept two blocks from the United Nations. They had whole rooms with cash stacked in boxes; they were running out of space. Jimmy Boy was the man who laundered most of that money. He began using some of the cash to buy stocks in companies, always under a false American name—nobody was going to find Pablo Escobar in the stock market. Soon Jimmy Boy began making straight investments in the companies of the big people he knew. He would tell them, “I’ve got a friend who wants to invest $3 million in your company.” There were some people who wouldn’t accept cash, but enough people would, especially owners of factories. Jimmy Boy also was dealing with the managers of banks. Banks like money. Jimmy Boy was able to open up lots of accounts under many names. So the money came through the American financial system and got cleaned.