anybody.

There were some very close escapes. One time Pablo was staying outside Medellín and the American planes intercepted a phone conversation and sent men to the house to grab him. Pablo and a bodyguard escaped into the forest and hid. While they watched from above the house as the soldiers searched for them, Pablo listened on a small transistor radio to the big game between Medellín and Nacional. Suddenly he whispered urgently to the bodyguard, “Listen, listen.” The bodyguard got very nervous. Then Pablo explained, “Medellín just scored!”

In another situation Pablo was staying for a few days at a farm outside the city. I had warned him many times to never spend more than a few minutes on the mobile phone, but sometimes he couldn’t stop himself. He spoke with his son, Juan Pablo, or myself, almost every day trying to find terms of surrender that would be acceptable. But he had learned not to make calls from the exact place he was staying. This time he had walked up into the woods to make his call and could watch from there as the army raided the main house. As always he was listening to a soccer game between Medellín and Nacional on his small transistor radio. Just as his bodyguard approached Pablo and whispered that the police were close and they had to go, Medellín was awarded a penalty kick. Pablo said, “Let’s just wait for the penalty kick.” When Medellín scored Pablo looked up and said calmly, “Now where did you say the police were?”

Several times Pablo had to run away from his life of only a few minutes earlier, leaving everything he possessed behind him. The newspapers would run stories about how close the Search Bloc had been to catching him, finding hot food or making him leave without shoes. That’s what they claimed, but they couldn’t catch him. More than a year went by since my surrender and still the world was looking for Pablo Escobar.

In prison there was little I could do to help him. I know I was watched carefully, hoping that something I did or said would give away his hiding places. But I had my own difficulties. I was trying to fight my legal case while also caring for the safety of my family.

The hardest part of it all was the feeling that in jail I could have no control over my own life. In the Cathedral we had to stay in that one place, but within the fence we could do what we wanted. In this prison my life was controlled completely.

Those feelings I had about not being able to help Pablo were magnified many times when my son, my beautiful son Nicholas, was kidnapped. Nico was never involved in the business, until later when he risked his life to make peace with Cali and Los Pepes. But on this day in May 1993, he was driving with his wife and son, as well as an employee and a bodyguard, from his farm to Medellín. They stopped at a restaurant on the road called Kachotis. Almost instantly after they sat down police cars surrounded the place, and the police yelled for everybody to get down on the floor. Then they came in with guns and took Nico out. Nobody else. So it was clear this was their plan from the beginning.

While this was happening I knew nothing about it. There was little I could have done anyway, and it made me crazy when I found out.

These police put Nico in the back of a car and drove away. As Nico remembers; “Within a few minutes we reached a police checkpoint. They were stopping cars asking drivers for ID. When our car stopped I started screaming, ‘I’m kidnapped! I’m being kidnapped!’ Nobody paid any attention to me, so obviously they were part of the corrupt police group.

“We kept driving. I didn’t think about what was going to happen to me. They drove me to a farm in Caldas, a town near Medellín, and there they tortured me trying to get information to find out where my uncle Pablo was. They tied me to a chair and started kicking me. That was the beginning. I didn’t have a clue where he was so I couldn’t tell them anything. Honestly I was never afraid. Maybe that’s part of my blood, but I was not afraid of death. They returned me to the same neighborhood where they had caught me. I don’t know why they