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

THE MOST FAMOUS AMERICAN 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