He became a gangster. There was a long tradition of shady business practices in Medellín. The stereotypical paisa was a hustler, someone skilled in turning a profit no matter what the enterprise. The region was famous for contrabandistas, local heads of organized-crime syndicates, practitioners of the centuries-old paisa tradition of smuggling—originally gold and emeralds, now marijuana, and soon cocaine. By the time Pablo dropped out of school, in 1966, drug smuggling was already serious business, well over the heads of seventeen-year-old hoodlums. Pablo got his start conning people out of money on the streets of Medellín. But he had plans. When he told his mother that he wanted to be big, he most likely had in mind two kinds of success Just as the contrabandistas dominated the illicit street life of Medellín, its legitimate society was ruled politically and socially by a small number of rich textile and mining industrialists and landowners. These were the dons, the men of culture and education whose money bankrolled the churches and charities and country clubs, who were feared and respected by their employees and those who rented their land. Catholic, traditional, and elitist, these men held high public office and went off to Bogotá to represent Medellín in the national government. Pablo's ambition encompassed both worlds, licit and illicit, and this marks the central contradiction of his career.
The standing legend of Pablo Escobar has it that he and his gang got their start by stealing headstones from cemeteries, sandblasting them clean, and then reselling them. He did have an uncle who sold tombstones, and Pablo evidently worked for him briefly as a teenager. In later life he was always amused when the sandblasting stories were told, and he denied them—but then there was always much that Pablo denied. Hermilda has also called the story a lie, and, indeed, it doesn't seem likely. For one thing, sandblasting sounds too much like honest labor, and there is little to suggest that Pablo ever had an appetite for that. And he was deeply superstitious. He subscribed to that peculiarly pagan brand of Catholicism common in rural Antioquia, one that prays to idols—like Hermilda's child Jesus of Atocha—and communes with dead spirits. Stealing headstones would be an unlikely vocation for anyone who feared the spirit world. What sounds more likely are stories he later admitted to, of running petty street scams with his friends, selling contraband cigarettes and fake lottery tickets, and conning people out of their cash with a mixture of bluff and charm as they emerged from the local bank. Pablo would not have been the first street-smart kid to discover that it was easier and more exciting to take money from others than to earn it. He was exceptionally daring. Maybe it was the dope, but Pablo discovered in himself an ability to remain calm, deliberate, even cheerful when others grew frightened and unsteady. He used it to impress his friends, and to frighten them. On several occasions as a youth, Pablo later boasted, he had held up Medillín banks by himself with an automatic rifle, bantering cheerfully with the clerks as they emptied their cash drawers. That kind of recklessness and poise is what distinguished Pablo from his criminal peers and made him their leader. Before long his crimes would grow more sophisticated, and more dangerous.
The record shows that Pablo was an accomplished car thief before he was twenty. He and his gang took the crude business of pinching cars and turned it into a mini-industry, boldly taking vehicles (drivers would just be pulled from behind the steering wheel in broad daylight) and chopping them down to a collection of valuable parts within hours. There was plenty of money to be made in parts, and no direct evidence of the theft remained. Once he'd amassed sufficient capital, Pablo began simply bribing municipal officials to issue new papers for stolen vehicles, eliminating the need to disassemble the cars. He seems to have had few significant run-ins with the law during this period. The arrest records have vanished, but Pablo did spend several months in a Medellín jail before his twentieth birthday, no doubt making connections with a more violent class of criminals, who would later serve him well. Clearly the stint behind bars did nothing to dissuade him from a life of crime.
By all accounts, Pablo was enjoying himself With their wide inventory of stolen engines and parts, he and Gustavo built race cars and competed in local and national car rallies. His business evolved. In time, car theft in Medellín was practiced with such impunity that Pablo realized he had created an even more lucrative market. He started selling protection. People paid him to prevent their vehicles from being pinched—so Pablo began making money on cars he didn't steal as well as from those he did. Generous with his friends, he would give them new cars stolen right from the factory. Pablo would draw up false bills of sale and instruct the recipients to take out fake newspaper ads offering the cars for sale, creating a paper trail to make it appear as though the cars had been obtained legitimately.
It was during this period, as a young crime boss on the make, that Pablo developed a reputation for casual, lethal violence. In what may have begun as simply a method of debt collection, he would recruit thugs to kidnap people who owed him money and then ransom them for whatever was owed. If the family couldn't come up with the money or refused to pay, the victim would be killed. Sometimes the victim was killed after the ransom was paid, just to make a point. It was murder, but a kind of murder that can be rationalized. A man had to protect his interests. Pablo lived in a world where accumulation of wealth required the capacity to defend it Even for legitimate businessmen in Medellín there was little effective or honest law enforcement. If someone cheated you, you either accepted your losses or took steps yourself to settle the score. If you grew successful enough, you had to contend with corrupt police and government officials who wanted a piece of your profits. This was especially true in Pablo's new illicit business. As the amounts of money and contraband grew, so did the need to enforce discipline, punish enemies, collect debts, and bribe officials. Kidnapping or even killing someone who had cheated him not only kept the books balanced; it sent a message.
Pablo became expert at taking credit for crimes that could not be linked to him directly. From the start, he made sure that those he recruited to commit violent acts were never certain who had hired them. In time, Pablo grew accustomed to ordering people killed. It fed his growing megalomania and bred fear—which was akin to the respect he seemed to crave more and more.
Kidnapping for debt collection evolved soon enough into kidnapping for its own sake. The most famous case attributed to young Pablo was that of Envigado industrialist Diego Echavarria, in the summer of 1971. Echavarria was a proud Conservative factory owner, widely respected in higher social circles but disliked by many of the poor workers in Medellín, who were being laid off in droves from local textile mills. At the time, wealthy Antioquia landowners were expanding their country holdings by simply evicting whole villages of farmers from the Magdalena River Valley, leaving them no alternative but to move to the slums of the growing city. The unpopular factory owner's body was found in a hole not far from the place where Pablo was born. He had been kidnapped six weeks earlier and had been beaten and strangled, even though his family had paid a $50,000 ransom. The killing of Diego Echavarria worked on two levels. It turned a profit and it doubled as a blow for social justice. There is no way to prove that Pablo orchestrated this crime, and he was never officially charged with it, but it was so widely attributed to him that in the slums people began referring to Pablo admiringly as Doctor Echavarria, or simply El Doctor. The killing had all the hallmarks of the young crime boss's emerging style: cruel, deadly, smart, and with an eye toward public relations.
In one stroke, the Echavarria kidnapping elevated Pablo to the status of local legend. It also advertised his ruthlessness and ambition, which didn't hurt either. In coming years, he would become even more of a hero to many in Medellín's slums with well-publicized acts of charity. He had a social conscience, but his aspirations were strictly middle class. When he told his mother he wanted to be "big," he wasn't dreaming of revolution or remaking his country; he had in mind living in a mansion as spectacular as the mock medieval castle Echavarria had built for himself. He would live in a castle like
that, not as someone who exploited the masses but as a people's don, a man of power and wealth who had not lost touch with the common man. His deepest anger was always reserved for those who interfered with that fantasy.
2
Pablo Escobar was already a clever and successful crook when a seismic shift in criminal opportunity presented itself in the mid-seventies: the pot generation discovered cocaine. The illicit pathways marijuana had carved from Colombia to North American cities and suburbs became expressways as coke became the fashionable drug of choice for adventurous young professionals. The cocaine business would make Pablo Escobar and his fellow Antioquia crime bosses—the Ochoa brothers, Carlos Lehder, José Rodríguez Gacha—and others richer than their wildest fantasies, among the richest men in the world. By the end of the decade they would control more than half of the cocaine shipped to the United States, netting a return flow measured in not millions but billions of dollars. Their enterprise became the largest industry in Colombia, and bankrolled the candidacies of mayors, councilmen, congressmen, and presidents. By the mid-eighties, Escobar would own nineteen different residences in Medellín alone, each with a heliport. He owned fleets of boats and planes, properties throughout the world, large swaths of Antioquian land, apartment complexes, housing developments, and banks. There was so much money rolling in that figuring out how to invest all of it was more than they could handle; many millions were simply buried. The flood of foreign cash triggered good times in Medellín. There was a boom in construction and new business start-ups, and unemployment plummeted. Eventually, the explosion of drug money knocked the entire country of Colombia off balance and upended the rule of law.
Pablo was perfectly positioned to take advantage of this wave. He had spent more than a decade building his local criminal syndicate and learning the ways of bribing officialdom. The cocaine boom initially attracted amateurs for whom cocaine was a glamorous flirtation with crime. But crime was already Pablo's element. He was violent and unprincipled, and a determined climber. He wasn't an entrepreneur, and he wasn't even an especially talented businessman. He was just ruthless. When he learned about a thriving cocaine-processing lab on his turf, he shouldered his way in. If someone developed a lucrative delivery route north, Pablo demanded a majority of the profits—for protection. No one dared refuse him.
A young Medellín pilot who went by the nickname "Rubin," and whose skills naturally led him into the cocaine business during those years, met Pablo for the first time in 1975. Rubin had grown up in a well-to-do family that had sent him to the United States to get an education. He had earned his pilot's license in Miami, and he spoke English fluently. When some of his friends, the Ochoa brothers, Alonzo, Jorge, and Fabio, started shipping cocaine north, Rubin fell easily into the business with them. Before long he was buying and selling small planes in Miami, recruiting pilots to make the low-level flights. Rubin and the Ochoas were not professional tough guys, like Pablo and his gang, but playboys, relatively well educated young Colombians who considered themselves fashionable and smart. Very soon they were also rich.
Their very stylishness is what enabled them to ship and move cocaine, not any genius for business or connections with Antioquia's criminal class. They were comfortable in the upscale social circles in Miami where American buyers congregated. Rubin was perfect. He was handsome, fearless, even dashing. His boss at the time was a Medellín entrepreneur named Fabio Restrepo, one of the first paisa cocaine chiefs. In 1975 Restrepo was pulling together shipments of forty to sixty kilos of cocaine once or twice a year—and a kilo would sell for more than $40,000 in Miami. Whenever that much money is being made illegally, it attracts sharks.
Pablo originally contacted Jorge Ochoa to see about selling Restrepo some uncut product. Rubin accompanied Jorge to a small apartment in Medellín, where they were met at the door by a chubby young man with a thick mop of curly black hair who strutted alongside them comically, like a typical street tough. He wore a big pullover polo shirt, blue jeans that were rolled up at the cuff, and tennis shoes, and the apartment where they met him was a sty, strewn with trash and discarded clothing. To these two rich young dandies, Pablo was nothing but a local hoodlum. The fourteen kilos of cocaine he showed them in a dresser drawer was strictly small-time. They bought the cocaine from him and moved on, unimpressed—until Restrepo was murdered two months later. It was shocking. Somebody had simply killed him! And, just like that, there was a new man in charge of the cocaine business in Medellín. Rubin and the Ochoa brothers were surprised, after Restrepo's death, to find that they were now working for Pablo Escobar. There was, of course, no way to prove that Pablo had killed Restrepo, but he didn't seem to mind if people drew that conclusion. The playboy cocaine traffickers had underestimated the local hoodlum. The low-class, strictly small-time dealer had brutally and efficiently muscled his way in.
"There was not a single aspect of the business that was created, designed, or promoted by Pablo Escobar," Rubin says. "He was a gangster, pure and simple. Everybody, right from the start, was afraid of him. Even later, when they considered themselves friends, everybody was afraid of him."
In March 1976, Pablo married Maria Victoria Henao Vellejo, a shapely, pretty, dark-haired fifteen-year-old, so young that Pablo had had to obtain a special dispensation from the bishop (such things could be had for a fee). At age twenty-six, married, wealthy, and feared, if not respected, Pablo was on his way to achieving his dreams. But his rapid rise had already earned him dangerous enemies. One of them tipped off agents of the DAS (Departamento Administrativo de Seguridad), who arrested Pablo, his cousin Gustavo, and three other men, just two months after the wedding, as they returned to Medellín from a drug run to Ecuador.
Pablo had been arrested before. There was that stint he'd done at Itagui as a teenager, and he had been arrested again in 1974, caught in a stolen Renault. Both times he had been convicted and sentenced to serve several months in prison. But this was far more serious. The DAS agents found thirty-nine kilos of cocaine hidden in the spare tire of the group's truck, enough to place them in the big league of coke smuggling at that time, and to send them all to prison for a long time.
Pablo tried bribing the judge, who turned the money down flat. So the judge's background was researched, and it was learned that he had a brother who was a lawyer. The two brothers did not get along, and the lawyer agreed to represent Pablo in the case, knowing that the judge would likely recuse himself as soon as he found out, which is what happened. The new judge was more amenable to bribery, and Pablo, his cousin, and the others were freed. The manuever had been so bald that an appellate judge, just months later, reinstated the indictments and ordered Pablo and the others rearrested. But further appeals tied up the case, and in March of the following year, with Pablo still at large, the two DAS agents responsible for the arrest—Luis Vasco and Gilberto Hernandez—were killed.
Pablo was establishing a pattern of dealing with the authorities that would become his trademark. It soon became known simply as plata o plomo. One either accepted Pablo's plata (silver) or his plomo (lead).
None of the party boys in Medellín were complaining much about Pablo's methods, because they were all getting rich. Pablo absorbed the entrepreneurs, the lab rats, and the distributors like the Ochoas. He "insured" them. He oversaw their delivery routes, exacting a tax on every kilo shipped. It was pure muscle, an old-fashioned syndicate, but the result was to create for the first time a unified and streamlined cocaine industry. Once the coca leaves had been grown and refined by independent dealers, their shipments would be added to the loads controlled by Pablo's organization, a service for which they paid 10 percent of the wholesale U.S. price. If a big shipment was intercepted or lost, Pablo would repay his suppliers, but only for what the load had cost in Colombia. If only one or two shipments made it to Miami, New York, or Los Angeles, the sale would more than cover the cost of four or five lost or intercepted loads—and drug enforcement efforts were intercepting fewer than one load in ten. Losses were alway
s far exceeded by profits.
And what profits. The appetite for white powder in America was seemingly inexhaustible. More money than any one in Medellín had ever dreamed of seeing, money enough to remake not just lives but whole cities, whole nations! Between 1976 and 1980 bank deposits in Colombia's four major cities more than doubled. So many illegal American dollars were flooding the country that the country's elite began looking for ways to score its share without breaking the law. President Alfonso López Michelsen's administration permitted a practice that the central bank called "opening a side window," which allowed unlimited quantities of dollars to be converted to Colombian pesos. The government also encouraged the creation of speculative funds that offered exorbitantly high interest rates. These were ostensibly legitimate investments in highly speculative markets, but nearly everyone knew that their money was really being invested in shipments of cocaine. The government played along by turning a blind eye. Soon anyone with money to invest in Bogotá could readily cash in on the drug bonanza. The whole nation wanted to join Pablo's party.
With his millions, Pablo could now afford to buy protection for his cocaine shipments all through the pipeline, from growers to processors to distributors. He began traveling to Peru, Bolivia, and Panama, buying up control of the enterprise from top to bottom. He wasn't the only one. The Rodríguez Orejuela brothers, Jorge, Gilberto, and Miguel, were pulling together the threads of the Cali cocaine cartel at the same time. Competing in Antioquia—and sometimes collaborating—were José Rodríguez Gacha and the eccentric half German Carlos Lehder. Pablo's payoffs went from thousands to millions of pesos (hundreds of thousands of dollars), and there were few law-enforcement officials inclined to resist the juggernaut—especially when one considered the alternative. Pablo was even willing to play along a little, allowing a few shipments to be intercepted, enough to make law enforcement look like it was doing its job. He could afford it. Nobody had a good handle on how much cocaine was flowing north. The estimates tended to be low by a factor of ten or more. American officials were estimating total shipments of five to six hundred kilos a year in 1975 when police in Cali stumbled over six hundred kilos in a single airplane. The seizure triggered a weekend war in Medellín, where various factions accused the others of either screwing up or selling out. Forty people were killed. But shipments of that size had become routine, and the vast majority of it got through. The tide of corruption and drug money simply swept away the relatively flimsy organs of law and authority. It happened so quickly that officials in Bogotá hardly noticed.