by Chanel Smith
“There’s another question that I have.” My investigative prowess was in full swing. It was because of that particular characteristic of mine that Ellen kept me around; that and to lug around all of the equipment. “What is significant about November 23 through December 1? Is there some special tradition? You don’t really celebrate Thanksgiving here, since that’s a U.S. holiday. There are Christmas decorations going up, but why now, why does he only come during this week?”
“I can answer one part of your question,” Ariel said. “December 1 is Escobar’s birthday. It also happens to coincide with another tradition of Medellin, La Alborrada, which takes place at midnight to welcome in December. On that night, the entire valley and even up into the hills is lit up by fireworks and globos being released into the sky.”
“Okay, you need to define a word for me,” I cut in. “But, first, December 1 is his birthday? Could this be connected to his birthday? Is he having a week-long party? Don’t most people party after their birthday starts, if they’re going to extend it, rather than in anticipation of it?”
“The anger doesn’t track with a celebration,” Ellen said. “Anger would more likely be present in and around the anniversary of one’s death; theoretically, of course.”
“Escobar was killed on December 2,” Ariel added.
“He was killed the day after his birthday?” That was something of an oddity. It almost seemed like someone had planned it that way. Like, maybe they were going to kill him on his birthday, but couldn’t get the job done on that day or someone, at the last minute decided that a man hadn’t ought to be killed on his birthday. Still, you rarely saw the birth and death dates on a tombstone so close together.
“Why stop his activity here on the first, then?” Ellen asked in an exhausted tone.
I shrugged in response. We’d created a lot more questions than we had solutions. “Not much else we can do here,” I said, knowing that Ellen would be drained after having connected to the spirit of Pablo Escobar or whoever it was. “We’ll do some more research on Escobar and see if we can’t come up with something else that is significant about this week.”
We started down the corridor to leave El Castillo and I remembered the word for which I needed a definition. “What is a globo?”
“Globos are small, hot air balloons, some of them have firecrackers of sparklers attached to the bottom of them,” he smiled. “They release them throughout the month of December and on New Year’s Eve too. When they start descending, you can see the children running through the streets hoping to be the one who gets to the balloon first; they’ll save it and get it ready to release it later.”
Chapter Eight
“That was Ariel,” Ellen said, disconnecting the call. “He just got word back from Jovani. First of all, she was impressed that nothing was destroyed last night and hoped that we had already dealt with the situation. She thanked us for getting rid of the ghost and is ready to settle up. I let Ariel know that this isn’t over and asked him to let her know that we still needed to go back there tonight. He’s supposed to get back to me with the arrangements for this evening.”
“Yeah,” I replied. “This certainly isn’t over, especially when it comes to answering the questions.”
“There has to be something that we aren’t seeing; some significance in the life of Pablo Escobar that begins the week before his birthday and ends on his birthday.”
“I have a more immediate question,” I grinned.
She raised her eyebrows, waiting for me to ask the question.
“What was the second thing that Ariel told you?”
“The second thing?”
“Yes. You said, ‘first of all,’ but you never gave me a ‘second of all,’” I chuckled.
“Oh,” she added quickly. “Jovani didn’t find any past records of Pablo Escobar being a contributor to El Castillo.”
“You wouldn’t tear up something that you put money into anyway. Well, most people wouldn’t, but Escobar was a narcissistic nut-job, so who knows, right?”
“Narcissistic, yes,” Ellen replied. “But I don’t know that a nut-job could have built and sustained the drug empire that he did.”
“Okay, maybe nut-job is the wrong term,” I backtracked. “But you have to admit that his plata o plomo policy was way off base where normal behavior is concerned.”
“Well, money is power and power corrupts,” Ellen replied. “You get a little power and you just can’t stop trying to get more. It’s referred to as Hubris Syndrome.”
“They have an actual syndrome for that?”
“Yes,” she replied. “It is characterized by a narcissistic propensity to see their world primarily as an arena in which to exercise power and seek glory. They have the tendency to take actions that seem likely to cast themselves in a good light. They sometimes refer to themselves in third person. And they show contempt for the advice or criticism of others.”
“Wow, yeah,” I responded. “That is a pretty good description of Escobar and my former chief.”
“It’s pretty common for persons in positions of leadership. That is why placing a limit on a leader’s power is important. Where power corrupts, absolute power…”
“Corrupts absolutely,” I interrupted, finishing the saying. I pondered the definition of Hubris Syndrome a moment. “So, Escobar’s benevolence was in order to cast himself in a good light?”
“That and it fed his ability to control those around him. As long as the majority of people saw him as being benevolent and good, it made it extremely difficult for the political leadership to go against him. Look.” She turned her own laptop toward me. “It says that because of his benevolence, even the local Catholic Diocese recognized him as being a good man. That lends a great deal of power in and of itself, but that Robin Hood image, similar to Mexico’s reverence of Pancho Villa, made it so that he was close to untouchable.”
“But how did they balance out the murder and the destruction that he caused?”
“Blind eye syndrome,” Ellen responded with a smile and a twinkle in her eyes.
“That’s a syndrome too?” I asked. It was one that I’d never heard of.
“Well, yeah,” she laughed. “But it’s not a psychological term, it’s a medical one.”
“Okay,” I countered. “Since we’re talking about syndromes, Escobar appears to have had Domicile Syndrome.”
“You made that up, but go ahead,” she laughed.
“Escobar had several very nice homes, not only here in Colombia, but also in Miami, the Bahamas and Spain.”
“He certainly had the money to spend, so, why not? Made it hard to predict where he’d be next as well, I suppose.”
“Well, two of those homes were complete islands. One of those islands was in the Bahama’s group, called Norman’s Cay, and the other was on the Grand Island, which is in the Rosario Islands group off the coast of Cartagena. He also had a home along the Magdalena River to the east of here called Hacienda Nápoles. Hacienda Nápoles had a zoo; in fact, that’s sort of what it is now and they make major dollars, or, actually, pesos, off of it. It’s a major tourist attraction in Colombia. Two more of his houses are fairly close by and we could probably get a tour of them, if you want.”
“I don’t know,” she replied. “I’m not really up for a tour of Escobar’s homes. They have a tendency to cloud the reality a great deal in order to have greater tourist appeal. I doubt it would do us much good.”
“Well, one of the two is very intriguing,” I grinned. The tidbit of information that I had dug up about that particular house was astonishing.
“Okay, tell me,” she rolled her eyes at me, wondering what I had up my sleeve.
“They call it by three different names; la Catedral, el hotel or Club Medellin.” I was proud of the fact that I pronounced the first two in Spanish rather than translating them.
“Okay?” Ellen wrinkled her brow, wondering what the significance the names had. “Am I missing something here?”
&
nbsp; “You’re missing a lot,” I responded. “In 1991, the U.S. had really turned up the heat on the drug war. That was in the wake of the Reagan administration’s ‘war on drugs.’ The U.S. was conducting significant operations in Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia and Peru at the time. You see, the cocaine that was handled by the Medellin cartel was usually bought in the form of paste from one of those other three countries. There were covert U.S. forces all over the place down here during that time and they were supported, though quietly by the governments of all four countries.
“Pablo Escobar’s biggest fear, at the time, was of being caught and extradited to the U.S. to stand trial. He’d made some attempts at knocking out the entire court system of Colombia in order to prevent that from happening. The attempts failed, but the Colombian legislature got the message. They passed a law in their newly written constitution that Colombians could not be extradited to other countries for crimes that they committed. That law was part of a deal that the government was trying to make with Escobar in order to get him to stop his operations and turn himself in. In short, he agreed to the terms, but had his own, private prison built in the mountains above Medellin.”
“So, you are telling me that Escobar was put in prison?” Ellen asked. “I thought they hunted him down and shot him.”
“That was after he escaped,” I replied. “Like who wouldn’t have seen that coming. He had the place set up for him to enjoy the high life. He had parties, hookers and pretty much anything else that he wanted, including the selection of who would guard the place.”
“So, it wasn’t really much of a prison.”
“Not to speak of,” I answered.
“Why escape?”
“He escaped because the Colombian government got word that he hadn’t stopped any of the operations of the cartel; surprise, surprise, right?”
“Not really.”
“They sent some people to transport him to a different facility, but, of course, Escobar probably knew about their plan before they did. Escobar’s forces wiped out the force that came to transport him and he walked out of his prison. But that isn’t the most intriguing part of it all. Just try and guess what Escobar’s private prison is being used for now.”
“I won’t even try.”
“It’s a Benedictine monastery.”
Chapter Nine
“So, where did he die?” Ellen asked.
The question came as something of a surprise to me, since our conversation had been about Escobar’s houses and his special prison, but I could see the wheels turning in her head and I smiled as I started to catch on. “He died on the rooftop of a house in a middle-class suburb of Medellin.”
“Can you be more specific?”
“Well, let me read what they have here and see if there is more,” I replied. I read the passage about how Escobar was killed aloud:
The war against Pablo Escobar ended on December 2, 1993, amid another of Escobar's attempts to elude the Search Bloc. Using radio-triangulation technology, a Colombian electronic surveillance team, led by Brigadier Hugo Martínez, found him hiding in a middle-class barrio in Medellín. With authorities closing in, a firefight with Escobar and his bodyguard, Alvaro de Jesús Agudelo (a.k.a. "El Limón"), ensued. The two fugitives attempted to escape by running across the roofs of adjoining houses to reach a back street, but both were shot and killed by the Colombian National Police. Escobar suffered gunshots to the leg and torso, and a fatal gunshot through the ear. It has never been proven who actually fired the final shot into his head, or determined whether this shot was made during the gunfight or as part of a possible execution, and there is wide speculation about the subject. Some of Escobar's relatives believe that he could have committed suicide. His two brothers, Roberto Escobar and Fernando Sánchez Arellano, believe that he shot himself through the ears. "He committed suicide, he did not get killed. During all the years they went after him, he would say to me every day that if he was really cornered without a way out, he would shoot himself through the ears.”
“That didn’t say much about where he died,” she responded. “However, suicide does tend to lend to a troubled spirit. It makes sense that he would return to haunt, but that was more than 20 years ago. Just more questions, no answers.”
I’d done some more searching and discovered the location of the house where Escobar was shot. “I’ve got it. It’s in a neighborhood called La America and more specifically, Los Pinos, I have an actual address; Carrera 79A #45D-94. I don’t know what all of that means…”
“Not important,” Ellen responded, picking up her cell phone, pressing speed dial and waiting for the connection. “I want to go visit the place.”
“I figured as much,” I replied.
“Ariel?” she said as her call connected. “Cancel what I said about going back to El Castillo tonight. Monty and I want to do something different.”
There was a pause as she listened to whatever it was that Ariel said.
“We want to go to this address.” She looked up at me. “Tell it to me again, Monty.”
As I read the address to her again, she repeated it to Ariel. “Do you suppose we can go there around midnight tonight?”
I could tell by the conversation that followed—at least, the part that I heard—that Ariel wasn’t keen on her request. Telling Ellen no, however, was completely useless; she would get what she wanted.
Later that evening, as we traveled to the private residence where Escobar had met his end, I read some more background information on exactly how he was tracked down and killed. I shared it with Ellen and Ariel aloud:
In 1992, the United States Joint Special Operations Command (who were members of USN DEVGRU and Delta Force) and Centra Spike gathered together for the manhunt of Escobar. They advised, equipped and trained a special Colombian police task force that was called the Search Bloc, which had been formed to locate Escobar. Later, as the conflict between Escobar and the United States and Colombian governments dragged on and the numbers of his enemies grew, a vigilante group called Los Pepes (Los Perseguidos por Pablo Escobar, "People Persecuted by Pablo Escobar") was funded by his rivals and a few former associates, including the Cali cartel and right-wing paramilitaries led by Carlos Castaño, who would later fund the Peasant Self-Defense Forces of Córdoba and Urabá. Los Pepes carried out a bloody campaign fueled by vengeance in which more than 300 of Escobar's associates and relatives were slain and large amounts of his cartel's property were destroyed.
Members of the Search Bloc, and also of Colombian and United States intelligence agencies, in their efforts to find and punish Escobar, either colluded with Los Pepes or moonlighted as both Search Bloc and Los Pepes simultaneously. This coordination was allegedly conducted mainly for the purpose of the sharing of intelligence in order to allow Los Pepes to bring down Escobar and his few remaining allies, but there are reports that some individual Search Bloc members directly participated in missions of the Los Pepes death squads.
“Didn’t you tell me that it was Search Bloc that finally killed him?” Ellen asked.
I started to say yes, just as we arrived in front of the address. There was a white pickup truck with flashing red and blue lights out front. Policia was painted in green letters on the side.
“The police?” I asked. “Are we doing something wrong? Why the attention?” Having been in law enforcement, I was used to police escorts, but flashing lights in the U.S. meant that something was going down.
“It was the only way that we could have access approved,” Ariel answered. “Tranquilo, they are friends of mine. They are providing an escort into the house.”
“So, why the lights?” I asked.
“They are nothing. They always have them on in Colombia. It makes it easier for people to know that they are around.”
That wasn’t exactly what I was used to in police procedure, but it wasn’t the U.S., so I took him at his word.
The introductions to the police were without a hitch. Surprisingly enough, the owners of the
home were very friendly and eager to help out with our investigation, especially after Ellen smoothed things over with them. She had a way of calming people that I admired. The residents, introduced as Don Jaime and Doña Gladis, were curious as to what we were doing, of course, but they smoothed it over with friendliness, offering us coffee, buñelos and a number of other items as we were welcomed into their home.
“Have you encountered any spirits recently?” Ellen asked them through Ariel’s translation.
They hadn’t, but the question caused them a lot of discomfort. There was no way that they had purchased the home and taken up residence in it without knowing the home’s history. Why were they uncomfortable?
The woman of the house finally rattled off what I hoped was an explanation. Ariel’s translation followed and I soon knew why they had become uncomfortable. The family did not want any trouble with Escobar’s spirit and they had had the home cleansed before they moved in. They were afraid that Ellen and I would stir up the kingpin’s spirit again.
“We don’t plan on calling him up or communicating with his spirit,” Ellen explained. “We have reason to believe that his spirit is haunting another place and we are just going to see if there are some energy origins here?”
“El Castillo,” the woman said immediately after hearing Ariel’s translation. She had heard a rumor that there was a ghost in the castle around that time of year for the past two years. “You have seen him, then?”
“We haven’t seen anyone,” Ellen responded. She didn’t go into any further explanation about what we had or hadn’t seen, heard or felt. There was no point in doing that. She simply explained what we were going to do and had me pull out the two instruments to show them to her and her husband.
“This one measures magnetic energy,” I said, showing them the K2 meter. The other was a combination unit that did a number of different things, but I only told them that it measured temperature. Did they really need to know anything else? I decided that they really didn’t and cut it off at those two.
