to see the runway. The rule was that one person had to remain in the house at all times. When a plane was arriving to deliver paste and then take away product it would signal its arrival and the owner of the house would then have three minutes to roll it off the runway. Most of the houses were so small they could be pushed by one person; it was no more difficult than pushing a stalled car. But for the others we had five small trucks that would attach themselves to the metal hooks on the house and pull them off the runway. Clearing the whole runway could take as much as one hour. At the end of the runway was a canopy of trees. The planes would land and immediately taxi under the trees, where the paste they brought would be unloaded and finished merchandise put aboard. The planes would also be refueled from gasoline stored in underground tanks. The turnaround could take less than a half hour, and when the planes departed the homes would be rolled back into place on the runway.

Eventually about seventy couples, including their children, as many as two hundred people, lived there. A few of them actually worked as farmers, but the others worked in the laboratory manufacturing, packaging, and transporting the cocaine. The children went to the school, Pablo hired two teachers. The laboratory was located about fifteen minutes away from the runway; it was above ground but hidden completely by the trees. Almost all of the workers were recruited from the poorest neighborhoods of Medellín; they received a salary as well as shelter, food, and medical care. Basically, we could produce and ship ten thousand kilos every fifteen days.

Getting those drugs from Colombia into the United States always required forward thinking. We had to stay ahead of the DEA. So Pablo was always searching for new methods of smuggling drugs into the U.S. Through the years Pablo created so many different systems: He bought hundreds of cheap refrigerators and Sony TVs from Panama, emptied out the insides, and filled them with the same weight in drugs, usually about forty kilos, then shipped it as regular freight. One of Peru’s biggest exports is dried fish, which is sent on freighters all over the world; so Pablo mixed his product with the dried fish, a method that was very successful. In one shipment he sent 23,000 kilos, which until much later was the biggest single shipment he ever made.

The chemists discovered that cocaine could be chemically blended into products made of plastic, metals, and liquids, and when it reached the destination other chemists would reverse the chemical process and purify the cocaine to its original state. It was a chemical circle: paste to cocaine to liquid form, delivery, then liquid to paste to cocaine for sales. So from Guatemala he mixed the coke with fruit pulp, in Ecuador he mixed it with cocoa. The chemists discovered how to liquefy it and Pablo then added it to tons of Chilean wine—in this process only pure cocaine could be used or telltale particles would float on the surface, and even then about 10 percent of the drugs would be absorbed. After the success of this method was proved it was used to create products in almost every country in South America—liquid cocaine was added to everything from the most expensive liqueurs to the cheapest bottles of beer. Pablo’s chemists mixed it with flowers, chemically soaked it into Colombian lumber exports, with soft drinks; the cooks even soaked clothes like blue jeans in the liquid and when they arrived at the destination the coke would be washed out of the fabric. There was one person in Florida we called Blue Jeans whose only job was to receive these pants and collect the product. The chemists also figured out how to make cocaine black, which was mixed with black paint. We used a method of chemically blending it into plastic and forming it into many different items, including PVC pipe, religious statues, and when we started shipping to Europe by ship, the fiberglass shells of small boats. About 30 percent of the cocaine was lost in this transition. The big advantage to this method was that when we shipped product by this means we no longer had to pay a percentage of the value to the transporter.

Pablo was always employing new chemists to create methods of smuggling the product. I remember the day in the warehouse