by David Fisher
One other thing we did was take our entire family to Disney World in Orlando, Florida. We were about twenty people, including our mother, sisters, and my children. I don’t remember all the rides we rode on, or other places we visited, although we did go to a dog show, but I remember the joy we shared. For my family this was one of the first of our many dreams that came true. Before the nightmares, of course. When we were growing up, like most Colombians, we had greatly admired the United States. But once we finally got here it seemed even more amazing than we had imagined. Everything we saw seemed so big and so beautiful, all of the people seemed to be so successful. And Disney World, I remember that it was so clean and so well organized. And most of all I remember how much fun we had and how free of worries we were.
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
ISAW 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 ru
nning 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.
