plane had brought more than $70 million back to Colombia.

Within two years Pablo would replace that one plane with fifteen larger planes, including his own Learjet, plus six helicopters. Each of these planes could carry as much as 1,200 kilos per trip. In addition, the other leaders of the Medellín organization had their own airplanes; even the Ochoas had their own fleet of planes. With Gustavo’s supervision, Pablo continued to buy new and larger airplanes, eventually purchasing DC-3s. But no matter how big the planes, it was never enough. One plan that Pablo never had the chance to turn into reality was to hide the cocaine in the wing of a DC-6. The idea was to take the top of both wings off and hide the merchandise in a huge fuel cell, then make a bypass to an extra fuel system, and finally put the wing back on. The thinking was it was possible to put thousands of kilos in each wing. When the plane arrived in the United States the top of the wing would be taken off and the drugs removed. The DEA or Customs would never find it. There was no reason it would not have worked. Pablo just ran out of time.

Of course the business could not operate on a regular schedule like an airline. Each flight had to be carefully planned and arranged. There were about eight different routes that were regularly used and each of them was named. And at times parts of two or more routes were combined for a flight or even new routes attempted. People had to be notified a shipment was going to be made from wherever the drugs were loaded to wherever they landed. Pilots had to be hired for the trip; some of them were Vietnam veterans and they were paid by the kilos they carried. At the beginning there were maybe two or three flights a week, but by the end airplanes were almost continually taking off and returning with cash.

There were generally between four hundred and five hundred kilos shipped on each flight. Each load was made up from drugs belonging to several different members of the organization. Pablo would decide how much each person was permitted to send. For example, on a flight Pablo might have two hundred kilos, Gustavo might get two hundred, others the rest of the available space. Everyone paid Pablo a percentage for this transportation. Each group would put its own brand on the cocaine, the brands were called names like Coca-Cola, Yen, USA, and Centaito, there were many names. When the shipment arrived the kilos were separated by these markings and distributed to the people designated by the owner of the brand. The pilot carried with him a list of what brands each person was to receive.

Arranging for secure landings became a difficult problem after the DEA finally realized how many drug planes were coming to America every day and instituted new strategies. We used different methods to outsmart the government. At first the planes landed in Jamaica, where there were enough people on the payroll to ensure they would not be bothered, and then raced to Miami on sleek speedboats, or cigarette boats. The planes also dropped the merchandise packed into green military duffel bags by parachute, sometimes onto farmlands owned by friendly people or other times just off the beaches of Miami—this method was known as El Bombardeo, the bombardment, where they would be picked out of the sea by people waiting for them in speedboats, then brought to shore.

There were also small landing strips hidden all over Florida. One that was used often was in the Everglades near the city of Naples. There was an area called Golden Glades that was going to become a large housing development. The streets were paved and sewage systems were installed before environmentalists got the project stopped. There was nobody living nearby—so at night we used the empty streets as runways. It was almost our own airport.

It would be impossible to even guess how many people were on the Medellín payroll, including airport managers, ground crews, truck drivers, security patrols, even Customs agents. American Customs agents began using AWACS aircraft, airborne warning and control system, which were surveillance planes used to detect all incoming aircraft. Their radar couldn’t be avoided. So instead, Pablo paid a Customs agent for providing the schedule the AWACS would be flying, the region they would be patrolling, the range of their radios, and the radio frequencies