begin the distribution. Luis didn’t speak English, but with all the Latinos in Miami that was not necessary. Particularly as long as he had a lot of money to give to the people who were needed. I remember that once he returned home to Medellín and brought some canned food from the market for Pablo to try. “You gotta eat this,” he said. “It’s delicious. It’s what I’ve been eating for the past two months.”
Pablo knew enough English to know that Luis Carlos had been eating cat food.
After Luis Carlos set up the operation in Miami he did the same thing in New York City.
At the beginning Pablo was sending only one airplane a week, but since the profit for each kilo was about $100,000, he was still earning almost $2 million a week. The business grew up so fast, much faster than anyone knew, and within a few months he was sending shipments two or three times a week, and even that was not enough to satisfy the fast growing market. Americans wanted cocaine. At first it was mostly high-class people, people of the entertainment business, people doing advertising, the Wall Street people, the record business, the people who went to the clubs like Studio 54. All people who could afford it easily. But soon everybody was doing it. The demand only went up. And because Pablo was almost the only person bringing coke into the country the supply was very small, so people were willing to pay big money for it. The further away it traveled from the route, from Miami, the more expensive it became. In the late 1970s in Colorado, for example, the cost was $72,000 a kilo. In California it was $60,000, in Texas $50,000. Anytime another person put his hands on the merchandise the price went up $1,000.
Pablo was smart enough to understand that he could not depend on one method of delivery for too long. The more people who knew even some of the details of his operation the more chance there was it would be betrayed. He used to figure that the United States Drug Enforcement Agency was between two and three years behind him, so before that amount of time passed he would find other ways of bringing cocaine into America. When the DEA started asking people at the airport questions he knew they were getting information from somewhere and that was the end of the used tires scheme. Instead he would send ordinary people with drugs in their suitcases or in their clothes on regular commercial airplanes. It was even more simple than it sounds. The travelers had to be people Pablo knew or who were recommended by people he trusted. The people who recommended them were responsible for their actions. The only requirement was that they already had to have a visa. They were both Colombian citizens and American citizens. People who were traveling from Colombia to the United States carried drugs in their suitcases, people coming to Colombia from America brought back the money in their suitcases. Anybody who wanted to come to the U.S., boom, drugs, anybody who wanted to go to Colombia, boom, money. Back then it wasn’t that risky, the DEA or Customs was not looking for these people. They were much too busy searching freighters for big bales of marijuana. It was also much less expensive for Pablo to make his shipments this way than it had been with the tires. He didn’t have to pay for the airplanes and the large fees. These people were paid around $1,000 plus their tickets.
In addition to the passengers, also the crew of the regular commercial airplanes carried suitcases for Pablo. That was even easier because they could just walk on and off the plane without having to go through a search. On some planes two or three stewardesses and a pilot or co-pilot might be carrying merchandise for us, but they never shared that information with each other. Each of them believed they were the only one on that flight. For these people it was an easy way of making additional money, particularly because they would fly both parts of the route and maybe make the trip twice a week.
The suitcases they were given were specially made. They had double walls and it was possible to secret as many as five kilos in one suitcase. All they had to do was make sure they handed the suitcase to the correct person at their destination.
Some people also