Many of the M-19 were killed in the Colombian way of La Violencia, the most painful way imaginable, with limbs cut off, and within weeks Martha Ochoa was let free without harm. The success of this effort made the drug traffickers realize how much stronger they were working together than independently. And that was when the Medellín cartel came into existence, with Pablo the leader. From that time forward each of them would continue to run their own operations, but they would share their abilities to manufacture and distribute cocaine around the world. But, as I said, while they would meet for business and pleasure, there was no formal structure like Cali.
That also was not the end of the kidnappings. In Colombia kidnapping remained a profitable crime. Pablo’s participation didn’t even make our family safe. In 1985 our father was taken by a group of policemen. Some police were known to be kidnappers, they would use their powers to stop people on the roads and then take them away. Our father was on his way to visit one of Pablo’s farms in Antioquia when six men in a jeep stopped him. They tied up the workingmen with him and then took him away. Our mother was frantic, yelling and praying. The kidnappers demanded $50 million. Pablo spread the word that the kidnappers should be told: “If I find my father with one bruise the money they are asking for won’t be enough to pay for their own burial.”
Pablo did not often show his emotions openly. In the best or the worst situations he was always in control, he always appeared calm. I remember when someone would show up at an office and tell Pablo they had good news and bad news, and asked which he wanted to hear first, he would tell them, “Any one, it’s the same. We’re going to have to deal with all the situations, so just give me the news.” Calm. I have a temper and at times I get very angry, very upset. Even during this kidnapping, when our father’s life was at stake, Pablo remained steady, giving orders and creating the plan to capture those responsible.
Our father had recently had a heart operation and needed special medicine. There were more than two hundred drugstores in Medellín, many of them with security cameras. Pablo made certain that those that did not have these hidden cameras got them installed. Then he offered a good reward for photographs of any people buying that heart medicine. In that way he was able to identify two of the kidnappers. We also knew that the kidnappers were calling our mother’s home from public phones. So Pablo gave out hundreds of radio transmitters to our friends and workers and instructed them to listen to a well-known radio station. Every time the kidnappers called my mother’s home the announcer on the station said, “This song is dedicated to Luz Marina [a code name that was used]; it’s called ‘Sonaron Cuatro Balazos’ and is sung by Antonio Aguilar,” those people were to check nearby pay phones to see if they were being used. In fact, Pablo used television and radio codes to communicate several different times, especially when we were trying to negotiate a peace treaty with the government.
It was my job to negotiate with the kidnappers. I was to try to keep them on the telephone as long as possible, to allow our people to locate the area the call was coming from. They demanded a $50 million ransom. I began by offering them $10 million, but this they did not accept. They knew they had the father of Pablo Escobar and believed he would pay his whole fortune to free him. I negotiated with them for eighteen days while we gathered information. Our mother was absolutely frantic. Finally the kidnappers agreed to accept one million dollars. We put the money into green duffel bags—but in addition to the cash Pablo put electronic tracking devices into those bags. After the kidnappers had picked up the money, they were tracked to a farm near the town of Liborina, about 150 kilometers from Medellín. When the kidnappers returned there with the ransom people working for Pablo attacked the house from several sides. The kidnappers tried to escape but three of them were captured. Our father was unhurt.
Pablo passed sentence on them.
Within a few years the violence for which Pablo was blamed would start. I won’t say Pablo was right in the things that he did, but he believed he was protecting himself and his family and his business. And he also knew that the people of Colombia profited from the success of the drug traffickers. Many thousands of Colombians were employed in the business, from the workers in the jungle to the police. And many others benefited from the public works each of the traffickers did. Eventually Pablo was forced to go to war with the government of Colombia, the Cali cartel, the national police, and special groups formed specifically to kill him. But at this time there was very little violence within the business. Instead it was just making money, making more money than any man in history had ever made from crime before.
Three
T
HE MOST FAMOUS
A
MERICAN INVESTIGATIVE REPORTER
of the time, Jack Anderson, once wrote, “The Colombian-based cartel, which does $18 billion worth of business every year in the United States, is a greater menace to America than the Soviet Union.”
Eighteen billion dollars? Maybe, but perhaps more. It is impossible to know. I know that Pablo was earning so much cash that each year we would simply write off approximately 10 percent of our money because the rats would eat it or it would be damaged beyond use by water and dampness.
There was never any shortage of customers for our merchandise. The market was always bigger than we were able to supply. Each step of the operation, getting the paste from Peru to our labs in Colombia where it was processed into cocaine, smuggling it into the United States and having it distributed throughout the country, while all the time being smarter than the law enforcement agencies, required the cooperation of many people. And a lot of money. Each person who dealt with the merchandise got his nice cut. At one point, for example, because so many people had to be paid, the minimum amount we could transport on each flight was three hundred kilos, anything less would result in a loss.
To supply the cocaine to the rest of the world Pablo and his partners in Medellín built many laboratories hidden in the primitive areas of the Colombian jungle, places that nobody went unless they intended to go there. Some of these places grew to become small cities with only one purpose, to produce drugs for the world. These cities had their own dining areas, a school for their children, medical attention, and even rooms to watch satellite television. One of Pablo’s biggest and best hidden laboratories was built in the desolate area on the Venezuelan border called Los Llanos Orientales. Pablo bought a huge farm there, I’m guessing it was about 37,000 acres. What we built there was my concept. In addition to the central areas we constructed seventy very small houses. Really they were only one room with a bed, electricity but no plumbing. What made them different from anything that ever existed before was that they were built on wooden wheels and stationed directly on top of the longest of the seven runways on the farm. This runway was used for large aircraft. These houses had wooden walls and straw roofs; on the outside of one wall we attached a metal bar with a hook. From the sky the only thing that could be seen were two long rows of these small houses; it was not possible to see the runway. The rule was that one person had to remain in the house at all times. When a plane was arriving to deliver paste and then take away product it would signal its arrival and the owner of the house would then have three minutes to roll it off the runway. Most of the houses were so small they could be pushed by one person; it was no more difficult than pushing a stalled car. But for the others we had five small trucks that would attach themselves to the metal hooks on the house and pull them off the runway. Clearing the whole runway could take as much as one hour. At the end of the runway was a canopy of trees. The planes would land and immediately taxi under the trees, where the paste they brought would be unloaded and finished merchandise put aboard. The planes would also be refueled from gasoline stored in underground tanks. The turnaround could take less than a half hour, and when the planes departed the homes would be rolled back into place on the runway.
Eventually about seventy couples, including their children, as many as two hundred people, lived there. A few of them actually worked as farmers, but the others worked in the laboratory manufacturing, packaging, and transporting the cocaine. The children went to the school, Pablo hired two teachers. The laboratory was located about fifteen minutes away from the runway; it was above ground but hidden completely by the trees. Almost all of the workers were recruited from the poorest neighborhoods of Medellín; they received a salary as well as shelter, food, and medical care. Basically, we could produce and ship ten thousand kilos every fifteen days.
Getting those drugs from Colombia into the United States always required forward thinking. We had to stay ahead of the DEA. So Pablo was always searching for new methods of smuggling drugs into the U.S. Through the years Pablo created so many different systems: He bought hundreds of cheap refrigerators and Sony TVs from Panama, emptied out the insides, and filled them with the same weight in drugs, usually about forty kilos, then shipped it as regular freight. One of Peru’s biggest exports is dried fish, which is sent on freighters all over the world; so Pablo mixed his product with the dried fish, a method that was very successful. In one shipment he sent 23,000 kilos, which until much later was the biggest single shipment he ever made.
The chemists discovered that cocaine could be chemically blended into products made of plastic, metals, and liquids, and when it reached the destination other chemists would reverse the chemical process and purify the cocaine to its original state. It was a chemical circle: paste to cocaine to liquid form, delivery, then liquid to paste to cocaine for sales. So from Guatemala he mixed the coke with fruit pulp, in Ecuador he mixed it with cocoa. The chemists discovered how to liquefy it and Pablo then added it to tons of Chilean wine—in this process only pure cocaine could be used or telltale particles would float on the surface, and even then about 10 percent of the drugs would be absorbed. After the success of this method was proved it was used to create products in almost every country in South America—liquid cocaine was added to everything from the most expensive liqueurs to the cheapest bottles of beer. Pablo’s chemists mixed it with flowers, chemically soaked it into Colombian lumber exports, with soft drinks; the cooks even soaked clothes like blue jeans in the liquid and when they arrived at the destination the coke would be washed out of the fabric. There was one person in Florida we called Blue Jeans whose only job was to receive these pants and collect the product. The chemists also figured out how to make cocaine black, which was mixed with black paint. We used a method of chemically blending it into plastic and forming it into many different items, including PVC pipe, religious statues, and when we started shipping to Europe by ship, the fiberglass shells of small boats. About 30 percent of the cocaine was lost in this transition. The big advantage to this method was that when we shipped product by this means we no longer had to pay a percentage of the value to the transporter.
Pablo was always employing new chemists to create methods of smuggling the product. I remember the day in the warehouse the chemists showed us this method of embedding cocaine in plastic. They created a sheet of plastic about one meter long with cocaine inside to prove to us how easily it could be done. It could be made of anything imaginable of plastic or fiberglass. Like the DEA, we had drug-sniffing dogs of our own that were used to test methods of hiding. One beautiful dog was named Marquessa, and we walked the dog right past the fiberglass and it did not detect it. “This is good,” Pablo said, with very little emotion. “This will work.” Pablo was all business, always.
What started as a few kilos hidden in the fender of his Renault had become a very sophisticated operation. Pablo—and his other partners too—had some of the smartest chemists from Europe and America creating these methods for the business. Any product you could think of that was transported from South America to the United States and Europe, they would almost always find a means to include cocaine in it.
Pablo was always looking for unsuspected means to send thousands of kilos in each shipment. Someone, I don’t remember who, came up with the idea to ship the drugs inside huge electric industrial transformers, which normally weighed more than eight thousand pounds. Pablo bought the transformers in Colombia and shipped them to Venezuela, where the inside machinery was removed and four thousand kilos were installed in its place. The transformers were sent to America. After the drugs were unloaded the Americans complained the transformers had technology problems—of course they did, there was nothing inside—and shipped them back to Colombia where the process was repeated. But then he had a problem; while the drugs were being loaded in Venezuela the men responsible for transporting a transformer to the docks were drinking. They got drunk and on their way to their port they made too much noise and got stopped by the Venezuelan police—who were both surprised and happy to discover four thousand kilos of cocaine. That was the end of that method.
But the primary method of transport was by airplane. After the system of used tires was abandoned Pablo decided to open other routes from Central America to America, building support systems in Panama—with the assistance of Panamanian police—and Jamaica, as well as using Carlos Lehder’s services at Norman’s Cay. Pablo’s first airplane was the one for which he always kept the most affection, so much so that when he built the grand house Hacienda Napoles, he mounted this plane over the front gate. It was Pablo’s way of suggesting that this plane was responsible for the riches at Napoles that the visitor was about to enjoy. The plane was a Piper Cub–type, powered by a single propeller. When he bought the plane from a friend it was already well used, but he had it completely redone. With the exception of the pilot’s chair all the seats were removed and the floor was reinforced, leaving a compartment hidden under it for suitcases and extra fuel that allowed the plane to fly much further than was common. This plane was used almost exclusively to fly between Colombia and Panama. Pablo used Panama as a key point to drop off drugs to then be shipped to the United States and pick up cash being sent from America. The small size of the plane and the ability to safely fly low to the ground made it able to avoid radar detection.
Pablo didn’t just pack the plane with drugs. Instead, he would buy thousands of dollars’ worth of gold from the Indians in Chocó and put the gold on the floor of the plane—with the drugs stored beneath it. Then the plane would fly to Panama. In Panama the gold would be sold for a profit and the drugs would be unloaded for the next stage of their journey to the United States. Getting cash back from America to Colombia was as difficult as getting the drugs into that country. Maybe even more difficult because cash took more space than kilos of coke and there was so much more of it. Suitcases packed with cash from America would be put into the compartment and televisions and stereos would be packed on top of them. If the police had discovered the money, supposedly it was the profit from the sale of the gold. While the gold cost Pablo thousands of dollars, the plane could carry as much as $10 million in cash. Pablo used to say that the plane had brought more than $70 million back to Colombia.
Within two years Pablo would replace that one plane with fifteen larger planes, including his own Learjet, plus six helicopters. Each of these planes could carry as much as 1,200 kilos per trip. In addition, the other leaders of the Medellín organization had their own airplanes; even the Ochoas had their own fleet of planes. With Gustavo’s supervision, Pablo continued to buy new and larger airplanes, eventually purchasing DC-3s. But no matter how big the planes, it was never enough. One plan that Pablo never had the chance to turn into reality was to hide the cocaine in the wing of a DC-6. The idea was to take the top of both wings off and hide the merchandise in a huge fuel cell, then make a bypass to an extra fuel system, and finally put the wing back on. The thinking was it was possible to put thousands of kilos in each wing. When the plane arrived in the United States the top of the wing would be taken off and the drugs removed. The DEA or Customs would never find it. There was no reason it would not have worked. Pablo just ran out of time.
Of course the business could not operate on a regular schedule like an airline. Each flight had to be carefully planned and arranged. There were about eight different routes that were regularly used and each of them was named. And at times parts of two or more routes were combined for a flight or even new routes attempted. People had to be notified a shipment was going to be made from wherever the drugs were loaded to wherever they landed. Pilots had to be hired for the trip; some of them were Vietnam veterans and they were paid by the kilos they carried. At the beginning there were maybe two or three flights a week, but by the end airplanes were almost continually taking off and returning with cash.
There were generally between four hundred and five hundred kilos shipped on each flight. Each load was made up from drugs belonging to several different members of the organization. Pablo would decide how much each person was permitted to send. For example, on a flight Pablo might have two hundred kilos, Gustavo might get two hundred, others the rest of the available space. Everyone paid Pablo a percentage for this transportation. Each group would put its own brand on the cocaine, the brands were called names like Coca-Cola, Yen, USA, and Centaito, there were many names. When the shipment arrived the kilos were separated by these markings and distributed to the people designated by the owner of the brand. The pilot carried with him a list of what brands each person was to receive.
Arranging for secure landings became a difficult problem after the DEA finally realized how many drug planes were coming to America every day and instituted new strategies. We used different methods to outsmart the government. At first the planes landed in Jamaica, where there were enough people on the payroll to ensure they would not be bothered, and then raced to Miami on sleek speedboats, or cigarette boats. The planes also dropped the merchandise packed into green military duffel bags by parachute, sometimes onto farmlands owned by friendly people or other times just off the beaches of Miami—this method was known as
El Bombardeo,
the bombardment, where they would be picked out of the sea by people waiting for them in speedboats, then brought to shore.
There were also small landing strips hidden all over Florida. One that was used often was in the Everglades near the city of Naples. There was an area called Golden Glades that was going to become a large housing development. The streets were paved and sewage systems were installed before environmentalists got the project stopped. There was nobody living nearby—so at night we used the empty streets as runways. It was almost our own airport.