The Accountant's Story

by David Fisher

  During the political debate about hot money in August 1983, Jairo Ortega held up for everyone to see a photocopy of a check for one million pesos, about $12,000, to the campaign for the Senate of Lara Bonilla signed by the chief of a drug group in Leticia, the capital of the Colombian Amazon, who was known for bringing in paste and other chemicals from Peru. He had once served a sentence in Peru for smuggling. Pablo knew this drug chief and some people accused him of getting this copy of the check. It is possible that this money had been donated to Lara’s campaign with this accusation in mind. It was an amazing moment—Lara was being accused of taking hot money!

  In response, he denounced the drug chief and Pablo. This was the first time that Pablo had been accused in public of being a drug trafficker. A few days later a newspaper in Bogotá reported, also for the first time, that Pablo Escobar had been arrested for smuggling thirty-nine kilos in 1976. Pablo told me he was not surprised at any of this. “The people running this country don’t want me to succeed. I’m a threat to the same politics. They’re going to be against me because they’re used to robbing and I’m going to transform the system. Everybody in Medellín knows that I have real estate businesses and that’s how I get my money for politics. I love my country, and we want to make this country beautiful. I admire the United States, but I don’t agree with the way they are doing politics here in Colombia.”

  Lara, the justice minister, told the newspapers that the United States had made charges against Pablo accusing him of being a drug trafficker. Pablo had a response for everything. “That’s not true,” he replied. “As a matter of fact, here is the visa I got three days ago from the American embassy.”

  Within a few days, however, the U.S. canceled that visa. Two months later Lara requested that the Congress take back Pablo’s immunity from extradition. Pablo never returned to the Congress. His political career was over.

  At first President Betancur was against extradition. This was a very controversial issue. Many agreed with Pablo and the other leaders of the cartel that our country should not allow the Americans to enforce their law on our territory.

  Pablo remained calm throughout and denied all of Lara’s charges, continuing to proclaim that he was a real estate man. But this was what Gustavo and myself had most feared. The attention being paid to Pablo Escobar had shone a bright light on the business. Now people were asking hard questions and the police were looking around.

  For many of the Colombian people the facts were simple: Pablo and the other business leaders provided more to them than did the government. Even if they believed the stories, the drugs were not hurting them as much as ending the drug trade would hurt them. Later, when we were trying to make peace with the government, an important drug trafficker of Medellín explained this to a representative: “This is a business like any other business. The cocaine that leaves from Colombia is not being used in Colombia. The cocaine that leaves is giving many peasants a source of work. People who have no other means to survive. Right now there are more than 200,000 people in the plantation.”

  So naturally there was very mixed reaction to Lara Bonilla’s call. But the justice minister continued his campaign mainly against the drug traffickers. He named thirty politicians he claimed had accepted hot money. He insisted that Aerocivil, the government’s aviation agency, take back the licenses for three hundred small planes owned by the leaders of the Medellín cartel, and eventually the deputy director of this department went to jail for assisting the traffickers. Lara even proclaimed that the drug mafias were helping control six of Colombia’s nine professional soccer teams. No question he was making an impact. In Colombia, our secret had finally become public knowledge.

  Until that moment we were doing business pretty easily. The operation was smooth. We were well established in the U.S.—just like in Colombia, in Florida and New York we owned many stash houses and apartments. Usually we got old couples that no one would suspect to live normally in them, except that in their closet was three hundred or four hundred or even five hundred kilos of cocaine. It was stored there until the time and place for distribution. The market just couldn’t stop growing. Sometimes we worked in cooperation with other cartels like of that of Pereira in Colombia, and those of Peru and Bolivia to fill the needs. All of our employees were making incredible sums. A pilot could earn $3 million for a single trip. Tito Domínguez, who was one of our main transporters, had a fleet of thirty airplanes, including a 707; he owned one of the largest exotic car dealerships in the world, which had Clark Gable’s $6 million Duesenberg on his lot; and he owned entirely a new housing development of more than one hundred houses. Domínguez owned personally four Lamborghinis in different colors and each day he would drive the color that matched the shirt he was wearing. Another pilot when he was arrested admitted he owned thirty cars, three houses, some warehouses, twelve airplanes, and millions of dollars in cash.

  Until this time the problems had been pretty simple to deal with. They weren’t exactly the normal problems, for example the operation was consistently losing product that was dropped into the water to be picked up by the fast boats, because no matter how well it was packed some of it got wet. And definitely we did not have the benefit of other businesses of firing employees who stole supplies. But Lara brought other problems to the organization.

  The biggest thing Lara accomplished was the raid on Tranquilandia, which was one of the largest jungle laboratories. It was owned mostly by Gacha, but all the others of Medellín contributed to it. About 180 people lived there full-time, making cocaine. Deep in the Colombian jungle, Tranquilandia was 250 miles from the nearest road. Its advantage was it was the bridge between Colombia, Bolivia, and Peru, the place where all the chemicals and raw product from those countries met to become cocaine, and could easily be flown out. The chemists at Tranquilandia could turn out as much as twenty tons of cocaine each month. In only two years it had produced $12 billion worth of product. The existence of this place was well known, even to the authorities, but they had not been able to locate it in the canopied jungle until March 1984, when two helicopters carrying forty-two armed men landed and destroyed it completely.

  It was only many years later that I learned how Tranquilandia was located by the authorities. One of the chemicals necessary to make cocaine is ether. Seventeen liters of ether are required to produce one kilo of coke. At this time the supply of ether in the world was limited. Only five companies in America and seven others around the world produced it. The U.S. government and the Colombians, using turncoats, wiretaps, and inside agents, learned that a company in Phillipsburg, New Jersey, supplied most of the ether for the cartel. Eventually they sold ninety-five drums of ether to the American representative of the owners of Tranquilandia. What nobody knew was that inside two of those drums were transponders to signal their location.

  In March, while Lara continued his campaign, the transponder signals came from a ranch. Two days later the signal had moved to the jungle. Tranquilandia. The raiders followed the signal and arrived in force. They burned down the entire camp, destroying almost twelve thousand drums of chemicals and fifteen tons of cocaine. At that time it was the largest seizure of cocaine in history. The impact on the marketplace was severe. For the first time in three years, the price of cocaine in Miami went up.

  There are many pieces of the business that Pablo kept from me. I was the front man to the world for Pablo and so as much as possible he kept me away from certain parts of the business. In his mind, I believe, he thought he was protecting me. And, in fact, he did. When we surrendered finally to go into our own prison we had to invent a crime for me to plead guilty to. My real crime, as I told them then, was that Pablo Escobar’s blood ran in my body.

  So to tell the whole story of Pablo I sometimes have to refer to information provided by other people. Such as the assassination of Lara Bonilla. Wherever there are great amounts of money there are always people who want to take some of it for themselves. In Colombia, in addition to the normal greed we have st
ruggled with kidnappings. So from the beginning the organization had to have people able to protect the money and protect the leaders. These were the security people, the bodyguards, the people able to do whatever jobs were necessary to protect the organization. They were people capable of violence. Men with ready guns who took nicknames like Chopo, Arete, El Mugre, Peinina, La Yuca, La Kika and his brother Tyson, named for the American boxer. Sadly, it was not difficult to find young people to do these jobs. They wanted these jobs. As the Lion once described the process: “These were mostly the poor people from Medellín, people who lived in the mountains. Recruiting them was simple because they had nothing to lose in life: ‘You have no money. Your mom is broke. Your sister is pregnant and she doesn’t even know who the father is. There’s nothing to eat. Tomorrow I’m going to give you a motorcycle and I’m going to give you some money and help you find a clean apartment, but today you’re going to work for me.’ Who is going to say no? They said, ‘Okay, patrón.’”

  When you live in poverty in Colombia or Peru or anywhere in our region there is no time to be a child. You survive, that’s all it is. The men and sometimes the teenagers who protected the organization became known later as sicarios, assassins, or in Mafia talk, hit men. They could be very young, and too many of them did not survive to become old. In the poor parts of Colombia many children have their own guns by age eleven. They get them where they get them. Guns are easily available in my country. Sometimes these are machine guns.

  It wasn’t only Pablo who had these young guns working for him. All the organizations needed the protection and fear that they offered. So long as they kept their work within the business the police would leave them alone—and as long as the police continued to be paid their fees. The police in Medellín were paid $400,000 monthly to cooperate and offer some protection.

  One of these young sicarios told the American court trying La Kika how he got into this world. “I was working at a garage making 300 pesos a week, approximately one dollar. So I quit to hang out at El Baliska, the pool hall where the hit men from the Antioquian neighborhood fell out.” Someone there gave him an assignment to locate a gunman who had betrayed the organization, and paid him about $300 to do so. When this gunman was found, he contacted La Kika, and told him, “I have already located him. And he told me he didn’t need him alive. That he should be killed. I went over and I looked for two hit men I knew so they would kill him. I hired Tribi and Paleo to kill him. Tribi and Paleo were more or less thirteen to fourteen years old. I told them where he was and they went over and killed him. I was a few blocks away and I heard the shot and went over to see what happened. The gunman was lying on the floor. I was paid 1,500,000 pesos, I kept 500,000, which was between $3,000 and $4,000 then, and paid the rest to them.”

  There were always people near Pablo ready to do whatever he told them to do. When he said something needed to be done, no one questioned, they did it. Pablo never told me a word about the assassination of Lara Bonilla. It was not something I wanted to know too much about. And I was still living with my family in the city of Manizales and was not with him every day. But Lara’s murder changed the lives of all Colombians. There are many stories how it went down. During the trial of Alberto Santofimio in 2007, one of the people testifying claimed that Santofimio had taken part in the planning.

  It was on the night of April 30, 1984. In the weeks before there had been many threats made on Lara for him to back off. He had many enemies. So for his safety, earlier that day he had been told that he was to be Colombia’s ambassador to Czechoslovakia and would be moving there with his family.

  There was a new method of assassination that was becoming common in Colombia. It was to become known as parrillero: A man with a machine gun riding on the back of a motorcycle sprayed his victim—usually in a cart—with bullets. The safety helmets gave the assassins a good disguise and the bike provided the best way of escape after the shooting. Eventually this method became so common in Colombia that the government passed a law against people on motorcycles wearing helmets, so they could be identified. The new law never made any difference, as no witness would testify against cartel assassins.

  This is the way Lara was killed that night. He carried a bulletproof vest in his car with him, but he wasn’t wearing it. The justice minister had been assassinated, and because of that many thousands of others would die.

  As a tribute to Lara Bonilla, President Betancur agreed to sign the extradition papers, allowing for the first time Colombians to be arrested and sent to the United States for prosecution. The name on the top of the list was Carlos Lehder, who was in hiding. I know I should remember all the details of those days, but there were so many moments when each decision determined our fate that they slip through my mind. I remember pieces of days, more than the events. After knowing that Lara had been killed I remember the feeling that I had, that the structure of our lives had been undone. I had a feeling of emptiness, I had the sense that something was coming toward us, but not knowing what it was.

  About six on the morning of May 4, 1984, I left my house in Manizales to go to a hotel I owned, the Hotel Arizona. My wife, Dora, and my young son, José Roberto, remained at home with Hernán García, who would drive my son to school. The Hotel Arizona had been built completely with clean money from my bicycle stores and factory. It was top-of-the-line; the rooms were as big as apartments. They had full kitchens, cable television from the United States, large beds, some rooms with waterbeds, many mirrors. The amateur bullfighters stayed there during the Feria de Manizales, the annual carnival held the first days of January. Wealthy people stayed there and sometimes the expensive prostitutes with their dates stayed there. The hotel was a successful business and I worked hard to make it profitable.

  We had heard rumors that the government believed Pablo was involved in the assassination, but there had been no action taken. But at seven that morning the police showed up at my house. They wanted to do a search but they had no legal authorization. When my wife asked for their papers they arrested her. They came into the house and basically destroyed it. When my four-year-old son started crying one of the police hit him, almost breaking his nose. He was bleeding. Hernán García told them to leave the boy alone, and the police said, “Stay quiet, we do what we want,” and then they started hitting him hard. They hurt him.

  They were searching for guns or drugs, anything to attach me to the business. During those days everyone believed my work was in real estate. There was nothing to be found there, so they put some guns they had brought with them down on a table and they threw an army uniform on the floor, then they took pictures. Those pictures were published in the newspapers. They wrote that those pictures showed that I was trying to help the guerrillas by giving them guns and uniforms, which was totally untrue.

  They stole some paintings from my house by Colombian and Latin American artists and took away my wife.

  At the same time the police were searching my home other police squads were coming to the Hotel Arizona as well as Gustavo’s house in Medellín. It was all coordinated. When I saw them approaching the hotel I called my wife; when no one answered I knew something was wrong and escaped from the back. The police burst into the hotel, they knocked down doors of people sleeping and having sex, and everybody was screaming and had to go into the street without their clothes. It was terrible. Again, they searched for guns, uniforms, drugs, anything that might associate me with the organization. They found nothing, for there was nothing there for them to find.

  They put yellow police tape around the hotel and it was closed for a year.

  I hadn’t committed any crime, yet they were looking all over for me, including going to my bicycle factory. They went to Gustavo’s house, pushing people around, making threats, setting up phony pictures and arresting his wife. Gustavo also managed to leave. The two wives were put in jail.

  From my hotel I went to a farm that I owned just outside Manizales. I thought I would be safe there and have time to decide what to
do. But soon after I got there the police showed up. This time to escape I tossed two car tires into the nearby river and floated safely downstream to the house of a friend. We made some phone calls so I could find out what was happening. My wife was taken to prison, my son had been hurt. I would never again have even a little trust in the police. I borrowed this friend’s car and drove to Medellín to speak directly to Pablo. What was happening? Gustavo was already there. My mind was in a terrible condition. When I found Pablo I was very upset: “I don’t understand what’s going on. We’ve got to get my wife out of jail. What’s going to happen?”

  Pablo was calm. Pablo was always calm. “Okay,” he said. “I want you two guys to go to this farm and hide there for now. Let me see what I can do.”

  This farm was not known to many people. It was just outside the city. Pablo had kept it as a good place to hide when he might need one. Gustavo and I got to the farm. We had to be careful but we were desperate for information. Both of us were worried terribly about our families. Gustavo wanted to call an attorney he trusted one hundred percent to try to get his wife out of jail. “Don’t do anything,” I said. “Nobody knows about this place. Let’s give Pablo some time.”

  But Gustavo insisted. He gave the attorney directions to our location. We spoke with him at length and he decided, “Let me study the case. I’ll come back tomorrow.”

  That night the little priest visited my dreams again. He told me we were in danger. The next morning I told Gustavo, “You know what, man, you made the biggest mistake. I don’t trust this guy. I think they’re going to come for us.”

  A few hours later one of the bodyguards came into my bedroom. “Mr. Escobar, somebody called me from the town to say they saw a lot of police and army guys coming toward us.”

  “See?” I told Gustavo. “See? I told you, man. Let’s go.” We ran. The sewer and water pipes from under the city ran near the farm to the river. These are huge round pipes that you can stand inside. We had no choice but to escape through this system. It was nasty, dirty, and disgusting. I had on shorts; Gustavo was wearing jeans but no shoes. We knew there were rats but we didn’t see them. We walked for a long time. Any connection with my old life, that life as a bicycle champion, El Osito, ended as we hurried through the filth.