Tito Domínguez, who ran a smuggling operation for the cartel in Florida, remembers how simple it was to recruit the people we needed and deliver the cocaine. When he was making preparations to land planes in the Bahamas to refuel he wanted to guarantee the safety of this part of the operation. He found out from a Customs agent that he had been working with in the marijuana business that the government official who ran the airport would go to a certain bar every Friday afternoon. Tito often traveled with his pet mountain lion, by the name of T.C., which could be an intimidation, but this time he went there by himself and sat two seats away from this official at the bar. He didn’t need the threat, he had a better weapon: cash. He didn’t speak to him for a time, then finally said, “Excuse me, but I’d like to talk to you for a second.”
The official said, “About what, man?”
“We have a mutual friend who said I could speak to you about something sensitive.”
“What’s his name?” the man asked carefully.
“Frankie,” Tito told him.
The man shook his head. “Nah, I don’t know any Frankie.”
Tito stood up. He was holding about $20,000 in hundred-dollar bills in his hand. One by one he started laying them out on the bar. “You might recognize his picture,” he said.
“Stop, man. What do you want to talk about?”
It was that easy. “I want to talk about making you rich.”
The man moved over one seat and spoke in a low voice. “What do I have to do for this, man?”
“Nothing. You do nothing when I land my airplane full of cocaine at your airport. You go get a cup of coffee and you do nothing at all.”
He considered that. “What does this mean?”
Tito told him flat out: “$500,000 up front.”
The official nodded. “How many times a month can you do this?”
That was the way Pablo built up the organization. The money he earned brought even more money. At this time, in the late 1970s, there was no Medellín cartel, just Pablo running his own business. And drug smuggling was not nearly as difficult or dangerous as it was to become because the United States was very slow to recognize the size of the business. They still believed it was mostly small shipments, and operated that way.
There were some other people selling small amounts of Colombian coke to the United States but it was only Pablo who controlled the entire operation from buying the paste in Peru to delivering the product to Miami. And once Pablo had set up his system he invited others to take advantage of it. For example, he would allow other Colombians to invest their money in the business. If someone that could be trusted wanted to invest $50,000, Pablo would tell them he would return $75,000 in two weeks. He would use that $50,000 to finance a drug run. Because his operation was so safe, he also was able to guarantee to people that if the American DEA or Customs intercepted the shipment he would refund 50 percent of their money. It was very profitable for everyone who invested with Pablo. Mostly for Pablo, though, who would own the biggest share of the profits. There were so many people who were almost begging him to take their money, regular people with all types of normal jobs. These people didn’t know about drugs, they knew about Pablo. People were handing over to Pablo their life savings, they were selling their car and their house to raise money to invest with him. And nobody lost money. Nobody. Pablo helped many people have their dreams come true.
Pablo was starting to build a much bigger operation. Two of the other dealers in Medellín were a good friend of Pablo’s named Dejermo and another person Pablo did not know named Rodrigo. Dejermo was good at bringing drugs from Panama into Medellín by car; he had made valuable connections with the police in the city. Rodrigo was a great pilot. These two men started fighting a war between them, for what reason I don’t know. They wanted to kill each other but didn’t succeed, so instead they started killing each other’s families and the innocent people who worked for their enemy, cutting off the heads of the bodies. Dejermo went to Pablo, who by then was getting a reputation in the city for being very strong in doing whatever needed to be done, and having the men with the ability to get it done. He asked him to be the middle guy and negotiate an end to this war.
Pablo spoke with Rodrigo. “You guys have to stop this war,” he said. “Dejermo wants me to be on his side to use my guys to fight you.” Rodrigo knew that Pablo was strong enough to crush him so he agreed to meet with Pablo and Dejermo in Panama. “Let’s start working together,” Pablo told them both. Pablo put them in charge of a route from Panama to Haiti and Haiti to Miami. While the two men never became friends, they did become partners—working for Pablo Escobar.
The great desire from America for coke created the market, and others in addition to Pablo went into the business. There is a great misunderstanding about what is known as the Medellín cartel. Generally it’s believed that the cartel was a typical business, with management at the top giving out the instructions and employees carrying them out. The profit is returned to the company. The Medellín cartel was actually many independent drug dealers who got close together for their mutual profit and protection, but each of them continued to run his own operation. But it was never discussed how much money each of the main people earned or their total wealth. Often they would use each other’s manufacturing, supply, and distribution capabilities. For example, Pablo would charge other traffickers 35 percent of the value of the shipment if they contracted with him to bring it into the United States, but he gave them the insurance that if the load was intercepted by the DEA he would refund to them their losses. This was an easy deal for Pablo to make because at the beginning no drugs were stopped. And it was incredibly profitable for him because the others were doing all the preparation work. So the Medellín cartel was an association by choice instead of a unified business. But the person at the top of this loose structure was Pablo, because he had started the business and had the best way of shipping the drugs and the most people loyal to him. The others have said that they were afraid of him. But they all made a lot of money with him.
The Medellín cartel was very different from the cartel running in the city of Cali, which got started around the same time. The Cali cartel was a much more traditional business structure, with four recognized leaders, and under them they had accountants, engineers, and attorneys, and then the workers.
The other independent drug operators who were recognized as the leaders of the Medellín cartel were Carlos Lehder Rivas, the Ochoa brothers, and José Rodríguez Gacha, who everyone knew as the Mexican. Each of these people built up their own business before joining the others. Carlos Lehder was a real smart guy who developed his ideas about smuggling coke into the United States while he was in prison there for smuggling marijuana. Carlos was probably the first to use his own small airplanes to fly the coke into America and was making millions of dollars even before working with Pablo. He was an excellent pilot, but I don’t think he flew the loads himself. In 1978 he bought a big house on the island of Norman’s Cay in the Bahamas for $190,000 and with the cooperation of the government authorities that he paid, he established his base there. Soon he controlled the whole island, which was like his kingdom. And from there he was in charge of the entire Caribbean. The stories were that he often had parties there that lasted for days, and always with lots of beautiful, mostly naked women. He built a protected runway and this island was used by everyone in the business as a place to transfer drugs from Colombia from big planes to small planes or to put them on speedboats for the two-hundred-mile trip to Florida. To use his island each person had to pay Carlos a percentage of the load.
Pablo and Carlos knew each other and they liked each other before they needed to work together. Eventually they would become close friends and Pablo would save his life, but they had very different thoughts; Pablo admired the United States but Carlos wanted to destroy it with drugs. Carlos called cocaine “the atomic bomb” that he was going to drop on America. This was because of his politics; his father was German so Adolf Hitler became Carlos’s hero. And while Pablo only occasionally smoked marijuana, Carlos smoked all the time. A pilot for the cartel, Jimmy Arenas, once said about Lehder, “The three schools of thought he got was Hitler, Jesus Christ, and Marx. . . . When you mix that in one pot with marijuana it would be a big explosion.”
Pablo and Carlos got together around 1979, when Lehder was kidnapped by the M-19 guerrillas. At that time M-19 was one of the four or five left-wing guerrilla groups operating in Colombia’s jungles. Pablo knew some of the guerrilla chiefs because he paid them a percentage to protect the laboratories he built in the wild. If the guerrillas had wanted to destroy these laboratories they could have easily, instead they became the guards. All of the traffickers paid them. M-19 raised some of the money it needed to survive and grow by kidnapping wealthy people for millions of dollars’ ransom. When they demanded $5 million for Lehder’s freedom, another person in the drug business asked Pablo for assistance. Pablo’s contacts found out that Carlos was being held in a farmhouse in Armenia and Pablo organized a team of six men to rescue him. When the guerrillas found out they were coming to battle them they escaped out the back, pushing Lehder into the trunk of their car. As they tried to race away Carlos was able to free himself, but while running away was shot in the leg. Two of the kidnappers were captured. And after that Pablo and Carlos became close friends and often worked together.
Like Pablo, Carlos had his own way of living. For instance, a few years later when the Bahamian government arrested several Colombian drug traffickers and put them in jail, he got so angry he flew a plane over Nassau and emptied boxes of cash over the capital city. He literally rained money. That was his way of reminding people how powerful he was, that he could do anything he wanted to do. That was Carlos.
José Rodríguez Gacha was the son of a poor pig farmer from the city of Pacho who also made more than a billion dollars in this cocaine business. Like Pablo, he was named one of the richest men in the world. While the Ochoas were educated people, Gacha had dropped out of grade school. Because he loved everything with Mexico—he owned the Bogotá soccer club the Millionarios and had a mariachi band to perform for the fans—and eventually established the routes through Mexico, he became known as El Mexicano, the Mexican. He made that name infamous. The Mexican was ruthless. Many of the terrible killings that Pablo has been blamed for were done by Gacha. But also like Pablo, he gave away much of his money to the poor people for health and education, to pay for farm equipment and seed to survive, and so the people of his region loved him.
The Mexican came up in the emerald business. Most people don’t know that in Colombia there has always been more violence for the control of emeralds than there was for drugs. But killing in that business is very casual. Gacha became known in that business for having no fear of anyone and killing people to succeed. At one time he worked in a bar in Medellín that some members of Pablo’s organization liked to go to. Even these people, very tough people, were impressed by the Mexican. He started doing small favors for them, and eventually came to run his own organization, opening new routes through Mexico to Houston and Los Angeles. It was the Mexican who first set up Tranquilandia, one of the largest and the best known of the jungle laboratories where more than two thousand people lived and worked making and packaging cocaine.
As poor as the Mexican was growing up, the three Ochoa brothers, Jorge, Juan David, and Fabio, came from a respected wealthy family. They had no needs that weren’t satisfied. The main business of the Ochoa family was raising horses and there is a story I have heard told that early in the business they would send drugs to the United States in the vaginas of mares. The Ochoas were in the business in a small way for a long time. Like many others, they had no thought that this business would grow so big so quickly. And because the cocaine business was not considered a terrible crime in Colombia, Pablo met the Ochoas when he began being successful in the business. Pablo and Gustavo would often go to Bogotá for the auto races, where the Ochoas owned a popular restaurant, and met them there. Pablo and Jorge became friends. “I met him in the business. Medellín is a small town,” Jorge said once. “And everybody knows each other.” Later on Jorge became one of Pablo’s closest friends. In the early times there was no competition between the dealers because the American market was so big each person could sell all the merchandise they could smuggle into the country. So rather than fighting over territory they helped each other. The Ochoa brothers eventually headed operations in Western Europe.
There were others who were part of the business, like Kiko Moncada, Pablo Correa, Albeiro Areiza, and Fernando Galeano, but they were not the main people. What brought all of them together into what became known to others—but never to them—as the Medellín cartel was the kidnapping in 1981 of Martha Nieves Ochoa, the sister of the Ochoa brothers, by M-19. The guerrillas had begun kidnapping the drug dealers and their families because they were rich and could not go to the police for help. After Martha was kidnapped Pablo called a meeting of all of the drug people at his grand home, Hacienda Napoles. More than two hundred people agreed with his idea and contributed to the forming of an army to fight the kidnappers, an army that was called Muerta a Secuestradores, MAS, Death to the Kidnappers. Because Pablo was known to have the toughest men working in his organization, everyone agreed that he should be the head of it. Nothing was going to stop Pablo from dealing with the kidnappers. While Pablo had been working with some of the M-19 people, he told them that this was a war and he would destroy them. Pablo told a newspaper reporter, “If there was not an immediate and strong response, the M-19 were going to continue screwing our own families. . . . We paid law enforcement 80 million pesos for the information they had at this moment and the next day they began to fall. My soldiers took them to our secret houses, our secret ranches and people from law enforcement went there and hung them up and began to bust them up.”