amount of money. Usually they ran two loads a month and Pablo could earn as much as $120,000 from each of them. And so he was able to achieve his teenage vow that he would become a millionaire by the time he was twenty-two. It’s very difficult to explain to anyone who has not experienced it, the incredible feelings you have of being rich after you’ve grown up with having very little. Most people have some dreams come true, but suddenly Pablo was in a situation where he could pay for more than all his dreams. The first things he did was make a down payment on a house for our mother, he bought a car for himself, he bought a taxicab for our cousin, and for me he bought a very expensive titanium bicycle from Italy, a bicycle that weighed so little I could pick it up with two fingers. One day I went with him and some of our friends to an outdoor food market; we filled up a truck with lettuce and meat and fish and took it to the poorest neighborhood in Medellín. There was a large garbage dump where the rejects from the city were thrown and these people survived by picking through this mountain of trash for food or clothing that could be repaired and worn or goods that might be cleaned and sold. We went there and Pablo handed out this food. The people loved him for it. That was the type of thing he would often do with his money. Pablo would eventually do many terrible things, but he never forgot the poor people, and they loved him for it. And even until today they remember him and celebrate his life.

One other thing we did was take our entire family to Disney World in Orlando, Florida. We were about twenty people, including our mother, sisters, and my children. I don’t remember all the rides we rode on, or other places we visited, although we did go to a dog show, but I remember the joy we shared. For my family this was one of the first of our many dreams that came true. Before the nightmares, of course. When we were growing up, like most Colombians, we had greatly admired the United States. But once we finally got here it seemed even more amazing than we had imagined. Everything we saw seemed so big and so beautiful, all of the people seemed to be so successful. And Disney World, I remember that it was so clean and so well organized. And most of all I remember how much fun we had and how free of worries we were.

Pablo worked in the contraband business for almost three years. During that time he earned more money than any of us had thought possible—except Pablo, of course—and to save it he had to open a lot of different bank accounts, many of them in assumed names. At that time our government paid little attention to the amount of money Colombians had in banks. No one tracked it. No one had a legal right to ask any questions about where money came from. Eventually Pablo asked me to manage this money. It was my job to make payments to all his employees, deposit the money in banks and other secure places, and to begin making smart investments. This was the time I first became the accountant.

Generally Pablo and I would meet once or twice a week. With my encouragement we eventually began investing the money in real estate, buying land and buildings and financing construction. This was something Pablo would do for the rest of his life. At one time, for example, he owned as many as four hundred farms throughout the country. I used the real estate deals to protect Pablo’s money. If his contraband business should be discovered the government had the right to take the money he had earned from it, so I created a new set of books to prove he had earned his money from real estate. For example, if we sold an apartment for $50,000, in those books the sale was recorded as $90,000. In this way we were able to create very complicated paths that were impossible to follow to the source. I don’t remember precisely how much money Pablo earned in the three years he worked in the contraband business, but in addition to becoming a wealthy man himself, he improved the lives of many people who worked