by David Fisher
As before, Pablo continued to try to help the people who most needed it. He received hundreds of letters every day. The world knew he had surrendered and wrote to him with their requests. Letters came from around the world, from Europe, Asia, and basically everywhere else, and most of them asked for money or advice on how to make money. Four or five of our employees did nothing but organize these letters. They were put in piles for family, for friends, for people who needed help with their health especially with cancer, for students needing money for education, and for business letters. Pablo would read most of these letters and often send a crew to investigate the cases and verify the information. If it was real they would hand money to the people.
I remember a few of the letters. One odd letter came from a man in Africa who owned the elephant that was the mother of the elephant we’d had at Napoles. It was his idea to have the mother and daughter together living at Napoles. He included a picture of his elephant and his request for money.
A person wrote from America that he had seven different bank accounts and would be very happy to hide Pablo’s money in his accounts.
There was a letter addressed to myself and Pablo; it included a photograph of a gorgeous seventeen-year-old blonde wearing a wedding dress. She wrote something like, “I’m a good girl. I have just finished high school and my dream is to be an attorney but I don’t have the money. I am a decent girl, but it would be an honor if one of you can take me. I am a virgin and that is all I can offer. I am not a whore, but I need the money for my college career.”
Pablo sent a representative to her house. Although we never became involved with her in any way, we did pay for her college. But that was typical. The pleading letters were hard to read: I am dying and my children have nothing . . . I need an operation so I can walk and support my family . . .They are coming to take away our house . . .The government helped none of these people, so their only hope was Pablo.
Countless other people would gather at the first gate at the bottom of the mountain and send handwritten notes, boletas, with the guards to ask for assistance. Sometimes they wanted money but other times they just wanted Pablo’s advice about the problems of their life. To them, Pablo was a man of the streets like they were who had risen to the very top of the mountain.
Most important for our daily lives was the fact that we were able to receive visitors regularly. This was not supposed to happen, the only official visiting days were Wednesday and Sunday when our families came, but it seemed like there were always people there. We had bought two trucks, a Chevrolet and a Mazda van. In the back of them we built a fake wall, leaving a space we called the tunnel that was big enough to hide as many as twenty people. The people who used this method to come see us were those who did not want their visit known publicly, others who had committed crimes and were not legally allowed to be there, or people we did not want our enemies to know were there. Usually they would be picked up in the night and driven to our bodega. From there those people who could show ID to guards were placed in the seats and those who could not were put in the hidden tunnel. At the checkpoint the guards would ask, “What are you taking there?”
The password was “Materials.”
Each time a truck left the bodega we were called and told who was coming up.
In addition to our family and friends, politicians visited us, businessmen, priests, the greatest soccer players, and some of the most beautiful women in the world. There were many parties and in attendance were the beauty queens of Colombia and other countries, including famous actresses, models, and the prettiest girls at the universities. We would see a beautiful woman on television or in the newspapers and she would be invited. There was never any danger to them and for their visit they would receive a very nice gift. Often by their own choice they would stay the night, and leave after breakfast the next morning in the tunnel. In fact, between many of our bedrooms we had built small hideouts, so the girls could stay there without anyone being suspicious.
No one was ever pushed to come if she felt uncomfortable. One of the girls at the university remembers being approached by a friend who asked her if she wanted to go to a lovely party, for which she would be well paid. “What do I have to do?” she asked.
“Nothing. Just be beautiful.”
There is a magazine in Colombia called Cromos that publishes pictures of beautiful women. We would pick out women from the pages and invite them to the parties. One of the very first women to stay at the Cathedral was a twenty-year-old beauty who had just been fourth in the Miss Universe pageant who I had invited—she arrived there and stayed for five days. From these visits several people fell in love and there were some marriages at the Cathedral. And one of these women I fell in love with, she was a beauty queen and we had three beautiful children together before our marriage had a bad end. As I learned eventually, she had not fallen in love with me, but instead with my bank account.
It should not be surprising that there was a lot of sex at the Cathedral. We were young men, many of us rich, and confined inside the walls of a prison. Who could protect a woman better than the men of Pablo Escobar? Even our parties were moderate, with nice music and dancing.
Later, photographs found at the Cathedral after we’d escaped, of blow-up sex dolls and some of our men dressed as women, were printed in magazines to try to embarrass us. The impressions of those photographs were not true at all; these toys were jokes, the dress-up part of a costume day we had as our entertainment.
The beautiful women were never invited there during the weekly family visits. During the years we’d been running we had only been able to spend brief periods with our families. Being in prison allowed us to finally spend time safely with our wives, children, and families. In fact, Pablo had three beds put into his bedroom so his whole family could sleep in that room with him when they visited. He even had a small playhouse built for his daughter and a go-kart for his son.
There were always many people there when our families visited. Pablo would stay in his bedroom, which was right off the main living room, and invite those people he wanted to see into his room. Often through one of the trusted people there with us, he would hand out cash to the family. One of those people who came to visit was his seventeen-year-old cousin, who he called Pelolindo, the girl with the pretty hair. She came there dressed in her high school uniform with her mother and sisters. Like other members of the family, they had not seen Pablo in all the years we’d been on the run. And during that time she had become very beautiful. “When we were invited into his room,” she remembers, “he looked at everybody but he focused on me.” He said he didn’t really remember too much about meeting these girls when they were children. “The way he looked at me that day, I felt shy.”
She returned a few days later, this time dressed as a young woman. At first she was invited into his room with her two sisters. Each of them spoke of their wishes, although Pelolindo asked for nothing, and then returned to the living room. As they were about to leave Pablo asked her to return to his room. Her two sisters moved with her but he stopped them, “I didn’t call you.” When they were in his room he wondered why she hadn’t asked for something. Everybody always asked him for something, he said.
“I don’t see you like that,” she said. “I’m not here to ask you for anything. I don’t like to do that.” In response he planned and sponsored her high school graduation trip to a Colombian island in the Caribbean, San Andrés. All that he asked in return was that she would call him when she returned.
When she returned from the island he invited her to come back. This time she went with her cousin. To go up the mountain they were hidden in a false area of a jeep. “I went up there because I felt something special with him. I know he felt something too. But he was always respectful to me. And it did not feel like we were in a prison; instead I felt like we were in a very private place. I was nervous and anxious. But then I began to visit him often, sometimes four or five times a week. One day with him felt like a week.” And thi
s continued for several months.
The truth is that their relationship never was sexual. Many stories have been written about Pablo and young women, but he was very quiet about that. In public he was always a gentleman. And with Pelolindo it remained sweet and innocent. When she came to the Cathedral they would take walks and talk. As she remembers, “Sometimes at night we would go to the soccer field and he would turn on the lights, and the two of us would play soccer. He’d pretend to be the goalkeeper and he would challenge me to score a goal. Score a goal! After showing me he could stop me, he would let me score.
“Sometimes after that we would cuddle and hug and watch TV,” she tells. But there was never sex between them. “If he had not been killed that probably would have happened in time, but it did not.” This girl suggested to Pablo that he put together albums of all the political cartoons about his life, an idea he embraced, and together they began putting together these books by hand. A few hundred were done, but only ten were done by hand and those had Pablo’s signature and thumbprint in gold on the cover. One night as they were working together she said to him, “The way I know you, sweet and romantic and caring, I can’t believe the other side of you is true.”
He smiled, she said, then responded, “Do you know who I am? Do you know who you’re talking to?”
“I know. But right now I see you as Pablo Escobar.” Often he asked to give her things. Once two of his men showed up at her school with a new car for her. And Pablo gave his word that he would use his contacts to help her have a successful career as a singer. Pablo’s wife knew about these visits and was not happy about them. But there was nothing she could do—and it remained a flirtation. A happy innocence.
He never told Perolindo he loved her or he’d missed her when she wasn’t there. But each night when she left he wanted to know exactly when she was coming back.
Pablo eventually came to trust her so much that he allowed her to have the combination to the safe in which he kept many thousands of dollars and pesos. Several times he let her open the trapdoor below his bed and go down alone into the hidden room where cash was kept. There was always a lot of money going out of the room, she remembers, but it stayed full of piles of cash.
Within a few months she began cutting his hair and taking care of his nails. In fact, there was a night Pablo decided he should be a blond, so she returned the next time with blond dye—but also black in case he didn’t like it. She dyed his hair blond to hide his white hairs. He looked in the mirror and hated it. He would be even more of a target as a blonde than black-haired. “Put it back black,” he said instantly, deciding the blond made him look too much like a woman.
As they became close, they talked about the hardest topics. One night he asked her, “What are you going to do if they kill me?”
She was surprised at that question. Pablo thought about life, not death. One time he had showed her the photograph of himself and Juan Pablo taken in front of the White House and told her that in the future he was going to go there and do business with the American president. He said, “After I get back on track, I’m going to be president of Colombia.” So she hadn’t expected a question about death. She tried to laugh it away. “Oh Pablo, I don’t think you’re going to get killed. If they take you to another prison I know with the power you have you’re going to escape from there.”
“I’ll try,” she remembers him saying. “But if something happens to me what are you going to remember most?”
“I will remember the way you look at me. The intenseness of your eyes, because I know you don’t look at me as your cousin.” To that, Pablo did not respond.
Their relationship changed because of a second cousin. This cousin was killed by Pablo’s enemies when they got of ahold of him and he would not snitch on Pablo. For that he was killed. That event scared Pelolindo and she suddenly stopped going up there. Instead she had excuses. When Pablo called her home her mother would tell him, “She has gone to a party.” After a week of such excuses he said he needed to talk to her immediately. She came up to the Cathedral but Pablo could see there was a distance. “You’re afraid,” he said.
She admitted that she was. Pablo explained that there was no reason to worry, and promised to keep her safe and help her build her singing career. And he gave her a gold comb with “Pelolindo” inscribed on it. She admits, “That was the first time I spent through the night. It wasn’t a night of passion, but the feelings were very deep. I felt loved that night. I told him that love isn’t only sex, that I would make love to him in my own way. I kissed his face and his hands and that night I saw tears in his eyes. I asked him why. ‘After all this that I’ve been through this is what I wanted, this is love. I know my wife loves me, but I don’t think in the same way.’ He asked me, ‘Are you ready for something?’
“‘What for?’ I said. I thought he wanted to have sex, but it wasn’t that.
“‘Are you ready to approach the family?’
“‘No,’ I told him. ‘No, I’m not going to do that. Are you crazy?’ Eventually though, in a different time and a different place, I know we would have had physical love together.”
After leaving the Cathedral in the morning, she went to collect a $2,000 payment for a singing job she had done. She was with a male friend of hers, and on the road called Las Olmos they were kidnapped by four police in uniform, driving in two taxis. These men took everything from them as well as all the equipment in their car. That evening, when Pablo’s man went to her house to pick her up, her mother explained that she had not come home since the morning. Pablo put out the word.
The kidnappers received a phone call telling them, “This is Pablo Escobar’s cousin that you’re fucking with.” They returned the money and gave them back the car. Then they left quickly. The second she got to her home the phone was ringing and Pablo told her, “You have to come here now!” When she arrived she told him the whole story, and learned about his own phone calls to find her.
“I told him, ‘You are my Superman.’ He didn’t say anything, but it was one of the few times I saw him smile. And that was the last night I ever saw him, because at that moment we didn’t know that the government was planning to take him away from there.” This was June 20, 1992.
We spent 396 days inside the Cathedral. We celebrated many events there, including holidays, marriages, and birthdays. Pablo turned forty-two there and we enjoyed a feast including caviar and pink salmon. Musicians played for the guests and our mother gave him a special Russian hat she had bought during a recent trip there. But when I think of it all maybe most memorable were the days Pablo’s beloved soccer teams visited us there.
René Higuita’s Nacional team arrived first, on the celebration of Las Mercedes, the patron saint of prisoners. Pablo wanted us to play a real game against them, except as he warned them, “Games here last about three or four hours, without rest and only two changes are allowed. A tie is settled with penalties.” They wore their official uniforms; we wore the colors of the German team. Pablo was a good player but he was guarded hard by Leonel Alvarez, and when Pablo complained, Alvarez told him, “This is how we play soccer, brother.” Nacional went ahead 3–0, but eventually the game was finished 5–5. In penalty kicks I believe René helped us, missing his own attempt, then allowing my brother’s left-foot kick to get into the goal for our victory. There was no consideration of the fact that maybe they had played easy with us. We won, that’s what mattered.
Within a few days the professional teams from Medellín and Envigado also came to the Cathedral to play against us—and they also could not beat us! From those days until our stay there ended, the flag of one of those teams always flew outside the perimeter. And if that flag was not that of Pablo’s favorite Medellín team, after everyone went to bed he would quietly make certain that it was.
Pablo believed he was serving his time for all the people in the organization. He had given himself up to end extradition. With Pablo Escobar in prison the government could say the war against drug traffic
king was being won. This really wasn’t true.
Because we were in the Cathedral did not mean our business stopped totally. Pablo continued to know what was going on in Medellín and throughout Colombia. People would call him and tell him what was happening. Not one single load left that he did not know about. But it was expensive being there; there were still people on Pablo’s payroll who expected to be paid. Sometimes helicopters from the outskirts of Medellín would land in our prison and fly away carrying money to keep the business operating. But all of that stayed possible because the people doing business paid Pablo his fees in cash.
Two of the biggest organizations paying their percentage belonged to Pablo’s friends Fernando Galeano and Kiko Moncada. They were making a lot of money using the route through Mexico, called Fany, opened by Pablo, and thanks to him without fear of extradition. But then Pablo found out that they had done five loads without paying him a cent. They had cheated him out of millions of dollars. As business that made no sense. They were earning millions of dollars, the money they needed to pay Pablo was nothing for them. So Pablo knew that this was much more than the dollars and the lack of respect, this was an attempt to take control of the whole business. But Galeano and Moncada were friends, men he had trusted. In Pablo’s mind, men he had gone to jail for.
Pablo found out from a friend where Galeano had hidden the money and he sent people to collect it. It was more than $20 million in the coleta. Galeano and Moncada wanted it back, denying what Pablo knew to be true. He told them to come to the Cathedral to discuss the business.
They died as expected. Probably they thought they were safe coming to the prison. They were killed after they left the Cathedral. The sicario Popeye confessed that he killed Moncada and claimed that Otto killed Galeano. It doesn’t matter who killed them, they were still dead. Their families pleaded to have their bodies and they were told where to dig them up. Pablo then called all the accountants for those people and told them from now on they were responsible to him. All the properties of those families, the boats, the planes, the cash, were put in the names of Pablo’s loyal people.
