Blow (37 page)

George found flying into Medellín an interesting experience, since the plane had to circle round and round in order to descend low enough into the bowl formed by the surrounding mountains so it could land. Located on a hill about fifteen minutes out of town, the Intercontinental is the most exclusive hotel in Medellín, with a lavish bar by the pool, tennis courts, and its own riding stable. The next morning Guillermo picked George up in—what else?—a Chevy Blazer, and off they went on the ninety-minute drive to Escobar's seven-thousand-acre Hacienda los Nápoles. The car drove through the soon-to-be famous gate at the ranch, topped with its Piper Cub airplane—one of the planes Pablo had used in the early days to fly in coca paste from Bolivia—over the arch. The car was stopped by bodyguards with side arms, some carrying M-16s, and escorted down a long dirt driveway to the house, which was a sprawling one-story affair, about fifteen rooms, with a tiled roof. George was told to wait in the living room, which was floored in a red mosaic tile and filled with Spanish-looking furniture, mostly oak upholstered in cowhide. There was no glass in the windows, since it never got very cold in this part of the Andes. Several pictures of Pelé, the soccer hero, adorned the walls, reminding visitors that Escobar supported several soccer teams in Antioquía Province. Soon George was ushered down a hallway and into Pablo's office. Escobar stood up in back of his large oak desk when George entered the room. He was about George's height, tall for a Colombian, with dark wavy hair and a slightly cheeky face, and when he came out from behind the desk to shake hands, George saw he wore snakeskin cowboy boots fitted with solid gold tips.

Pablo's English was about as good as George's Spanish, and so the two stumbled through the conversation in both languages. “He told me it was a pleasure to meet me and that he'd heard a lot about me. ‘And now you are here,' he said. ‘We can do a lot together. You have the planes and the pilots and I will take you and show you where they will land and where they will stay. I will personally supervise it and make them feel very comfortable.' He said that I would stay the night in his own house. And he asked me if I would like some
perico,
which means ‘the bird that talks a lot.' And I said yes, I would very much, and he reaches into a drawer and takes out this big fucking rock of cocaine and slams it down on the table. I'd never seen anything like it, it was as big as a softball, and he took a machete and hacked it in half. It was pure cocaine, even better than the stuff we had handled, tinged blue, like the inside of a cave lined with ice. He chopped some up into a little pile and he handed it to me and I sniffed it and said,
‘Muy bueno, sí, amigo.'
We each had a couple of large hits from his spoon. I got the feeling he was trying to see if I became insecure after doing the drug. ‘
Tu quieres más?
' he said—‘Did I want more?' And I said I ‘
quiero mucho más,
' and he laughed, ‘
Muy bien. Ha ha ha.
' He said he liked me and that I was a ‘good
gringo.
' He said he knew of the feud with Carlos and said it was ‘
un problema,
' and that he felt Carlos had wronged me, but that he couldn't take sides. He said he respected me for coming down here.”

Pablo then took George around in a jeep to see the spread. The tour included the stables where he kept Arabian horses, a miniature bull ring, about fifty yards across, with seats for two to three hundred spectators. He had a helicopter pad, with a Huey 500 parked to one side. The landing strip was paved, about a hundred yards wide and nearly a mile long. Sheds were built in under the trees as temporary storage for some of the cocaine. Fifty-gallon drums of 80- to 100-octane aviation fuel, or avgas, were stacked everywhere, along with electric fuel pumps and generators. He also had a powerful radio transmitter, capable of reaching all the way into the United States. Everywhere were men with guns. “He said everything was protected here, the police were taken care of, that they wouldn't dare come near the place. They really didn't have a choice. They earned almost nothing for pay, and here they were asked, ‘Do you want to make $250,000 and have a ranch for your family?' And if they didn't want that, it was, ‘Do you want to be dead?'”

Staying over at the ranch proved fairly uneventful. After a lot of Glenlivet Scotch and a supper of rice and beans and a Colombian stew called
san cocho,
made of beef and carrots and potatoes, George and Pablo and a half dozen others adjourned to one of the bedrooms, where Pablo put on a Betamax cassette of the movie
Patton,
starring George C. Scott, in English. George had already seen it, but it was Pablo's favorite movie, a taste he shared with the former gringo
presidente,
Richard Nixon, and he watched it at least once a week. After the first run-through, he asked George if he wanted to see it again. George begged off, said it had been a long day and that he'd just as soon get some sleep.

The next day, before Guillermo arrived to drive him back, George and Pablo were walking over by the landing pad with some Colombians, including an interpreter assigned to George, when they heard the thwacking noise of a helicopter. Soon a small Bell model appeared over the jungle canopy and settled into a landing. In the cab beside the pilot were two other Colombians, one of them in handcuffs and not appearing terribly happy to be there. The interpreter told George the man was a police informer and to stand back a little. Pablo barked an order and the man was brought over to him, hanging his head. Pablo then yelled a lot of things at him, of which George caught only a few, all of them negative. “I heard
rata,
which I knew was ‘rat,' and he called him a
maletón,
which was a ‘bad' something, maybe just a general son of a bitch, and also
cabrón,
and that means someone who allows another man to make love to his wife but doesn't do anything about it. It also means ‘faggot.'” It grew quiet all of a sudden, and in a move that seemed prearranged, someone handed Pablo a large automatic pistol that looked to George like a U.S. Army Colt .45. With no further ado, standing about five feet away from the informer, Pablo casually raised the pistol and shot him square in the chest. The force of the impact hurled him backward to the ground, where he quivered a little and then lay still. This was the first person George had observed being shot to death, and he recalls spending the moment trying to compose his facial expression into some kind of appropriate response. “I mean, in their eyes I was supposed to be this big fucking American gangster, and they were all these really macho guys, acting casual about it, so I was trying to be casual, too. Inside, I'm thinking, ‘Holy shit! I'm glad he doesn't think I'm a
maletón.
'”

The interpreter explained to George that the dead man, although a stool pigeon, had actually acted very courageously. It had been his choice to come out there to the ranch instead of fleeing Medellín, or seeking the protection of the police. Had he run, he knew they would almost certainly have come after his wife and children. Such a serious offense against Pablo could not be allowed to go unpunished. So in what must have been a stark moment, the man had chosen to sacrifice his own life for those of his family.

While the body was being dragged away, Pablo came over to shake George's hand and tell him good-bye. He made no reference to the killing and instead said that right around the corner from the Intercontinental Hotel was the best steak house in all of Medellín. “He said you could get châteaubriand there that you could cut with a fork, and that I shouldn't fly back to the States without tasting what a Colombian steak could really be like.”

*   *   *

It was after returning from Medellín that George had his first run-in with one of the Miami Colombians, a situation that threatened to erupt into serious hostilities. The issue arose with a protégé of Humberto's named Victor, who wanted to contract with him for a load to be flown in and also to front a number of kilos for George to sell directly on his behalf. Now that he was back in transportation, George didn't like playing the role of dealer anymore, but he performed the service now and then, moving the kilos through Mr. T or his contact in Ann Arbor, strictly as a favor, to maintain good PR with the clientele. He got Barry Kane to do the flight. Kane had also fallen out with Carlos in the past year and was available now for other missions. The load was 250 kilos, for which George charged Victor $3,000 instead of $10,000, the balance going to Kane, who had his own plane and did nearly all the work. Victor also handed George 25 kilos to sell, which would net him another $250,000 in commissions, meaning the whole transaction added up to an even million, his customary minimum. He stayed up in Eastham during the actual flight and got the call up there that the “marriage” had been performed with the “children”—Colombian code for reporting a successful trip—after which Kane drove the kilos to Florida to exchange them for the transportation fee. It was there that things got off the track.

Kane received payment from Victor for his own work, but instead of holding on to part of the shipment until he got George's money as well, he accepted the promise that Victor would take care of that part himself. It was a big mistake. When George called down the next day to inquire as to the whereabouts of his $750,000, Victor told him that, well, he didn't have it yet and that George would have to wait until the kilos were moved on the street. Fine, said George, only in the interim he'd just hold on to Victor's twenty-five kilos as collateral, and if his payment didn't arrive very soon, he planned to sell them and keep all the money for himself. And, quite frankly, now that he'd given it a second's thought, he was going to do that anyway, since Victor was being such an asshole, not playing according to the rules. “We then had a little conversation in which Victor said I couldn't do that, and I said, ‘Fuck you, Victor, I already have. You're really a stupid son of a bitch to pull this when I've got all your stuff. I'll see ya later.' And I hung up. In a little while Humberto called to tell me that Victor was very angry and said he was going to kill me. I told him, ‘Good. Come ahead. My gun's right here.' And that's when the war started.”

It was getting on toward December—which was when some of Victor's friends flew up to Logan Airport that time and called down to Eastham for George—and Clara Luz, who never liked being north in the winter, wanted everyone to go down to the house in Pompano Beach for Christmas. George agreed to change the family's venue, but since this would take him pretty far off his turf, he resolved to hire a little assistance in this matter with Victor. “It wasn't just going to be Victor who was coming after me, by himself. It would be maybe half a dozen of them with machine guns. People were getting shot in broad daylight all over Florida, in restaurants, in parking lots. We'd go to the Colombians' houses and the conversation was constantly about, ‘Well, so-and-so got it yesterday,' and ‘They just shot so-and-so.' It was getting to be open warfare down there.” George put in a call to a well-known mob lawyer he knew in Boston. The man had made quite a bit on the side investing in a few of George's trips, providing cash up front for planes and other expenses. Like any good investment broker, George never liked to sink his own money into a deal when he could use someone else's; he could make just about as much that way, with no loss involved if it fell through. “I told him, ‘I'm in a little trouble and I need some help.' The lawyer suggested a guy he knew named Hubert, a black man in his late thirties. Normally he was a pimp, but he hired out for jobs like this. He told me I could trust him and that he'd do what I needed. Hubert would also bring along his two sons, in their teens or early twenties. ‘If the shit hits the fan, this guy is a very serious player,' he said.”

Despite the protection it would afford him, George's plan for taking on some backup didn't go over very well in the household. For one thing, the security detail was likely to draw more than casual attention in their exclusive neighborhood of Pompano Beach, where Mirtha was still trying to make friends with the neighbors and the only visible black people were the ones doing lawn work or wheeling around other people's children. “I still loved George, but it was starting not to be the way I thought it was going to happen,” she says. “What we had talked about was he would retire and we were going to buy his sailboat and live on the Cape and write his book. Now, I mean, come on! Here we're living in Pompano Beach in a very nice area, and he's bringing like three black people down, running around with machine guns in our house. I mean what kind of a Christmas is that? And why do they have machine guns? Because we were good people? No. Because someone was threatening to blow us up! What kind of enjoyment was that?”

For her part, Clara Luz was also upset, not so much because of the enforcers—after all, she had always urged George to kick ass a little harder than he was inclined to. It was their skin color; Clara Luz just wasn't a big fan of black people. She hadn't even liked the black maids they'd been getting to take care of Kristina and Clarie and to clean the house. Mirtha went through dozens of them. They'd always ended up quitting because of some run-in with her mother, George remembers. “I mean, they would be hired originally to watch the kids, but she'd have them in the back of the house working in some room moving boxes and furniture around, like moving men, no air-conditioning, sweat pouring off them, and Clara Luz would never be happy about what they did. She'd always complain about them. Mirtha also played a role in this because she kept hiring new ones and they'd always be black, and so Clara Luz was constantly going crazy.”

Hubert and his sons showed up in a cab from the airport on Christmas Eve day, looking not as George had expected. Hubert was a slender guy, a little darker than café au lait, with a close-cropped Afro and dressed in a conservative dark suit, more Brooks Brothers than pimp attire. He spoke in soft tones, and his two boys, younger copies of their dad, leaped to respond to his slightest command. In view of the firepower they brought along—two handguns each, a revolver and an automatic, three Mach-10 machine pistols, and a couple of M-16s, fully automatic—Hubert had chartered a plane for the flight down. They were put up in one of the guest rooms, and when on duty one of the sons sat in a car out front with a Mach-10, the other in the back patio with the M-16. The day after Christmas, however, Hubert determined that the house just wasn't safe—it was too open in the back, people could just come through the hedges and blast away—and so George packed up everything, along with the Christmas tree and all the decorations, the presents, including a huge four-foot-high lion he'd bought for Kristina, and they moved the whole troop down to two suites at the Pier Sixty Six on the inland waterway in Fort Lauderdale proper. The move was a little expensive—five hundred dollars each for the two suites, on top of Hubert's five-thousand-a-day fee, but it provided much more security and was also good in regard to Clara Luz's color-consciousness, since Hubert and the sons could stay in the adjoining room and call up room service for their meals; they all didn't have to live with one another. With his new privacy, Hubert felt it was okay to bring down a girlfriend from Boston, who turned out to be a white woman. Clara Luz was scandalized all over again.