States. For comparison, a big load for the most famous drug organization before Pablo, the French Connection, was about one hundred kilos of heroin. We were bringing in tons of cocaine every week. Perhaps the most unusual method we employed came from a James Bond movie. Pablo loved the James Bond movies and watched them over and over. Sometimes while we were watching one of these movies and Bond or the villains would use an ingenious method, Pablo would say suddenly, “Oh, maybe we could do something like that for the business.” That was where his idea to transport product by submarine came from. When I think about it now, it seems too much to believe—a submarine? Who could buy a submarine? But in our business anything was possible. So when Pablo said we should transport by submarine, no one thought it wasn’t possible. No one questioned him. Instead we decided it was a wonderful idea and then had to figure out how to get a submarine.

In fact two submarines. Certainly we couldn’t purchase a used submarine without drawing attention so we knew we had to manufacture them. It didn’t matter how much it might cost, money was never a bar to anything Pablo wanted done. We hired a Russian and an English engineer to design this for us. From my education I was involved in the creation of the electrical systems. Two were built in the quiet back of a shipyard near the coastal city of Cupica. For certain reasons, in the past we always explained that these vessels were operated by remote control, but in fact they had pilots on board. They were small and they weren’t very pretty inside, but every two or three weeks each of the two submarines could carry 1,000 to 1,200 kilos. The submarines couldn’t come too close to the shore, so divers would meet the boats and transport their loads to the beach.

Pablo invented this method, but it remained so effective that in August 2008 the U.S. Coast Guard still intercepted a submarine of drugs coming from Colombia worth $187 million. A month later they caught a second sub with cocaine worth $350 million.

Pablo never ceased trying to expand the business. He usually had between twenty and thirty different regular routes through all regions of South and Central America, but besides Gustavo very few people knew about all of them. He changed these routes frequently. To build these routes he made deals with many different countries to cross through their airspace or land planes there. In 1984 he made a deal with the Sandinista government in Nicaragua to build a laboratory on an island off the coast. That was never built, but like Norman’s Cay, the island was used as a place to refuel planes and transfer drugs from small planes to bigger planes. For that right each member of the Medellín group paid a great amount of money.

The general we worked with in Panama had control over everything we needed. But this general would charge for everything. Every helicopter that arrived or departed, every connection, he charged for every single thing. Plus he received a percentage of every kilo passing through his country. For a while this general was a good partner. When Pablo would tell him, “I need to talk to you in two days,” he would immediately come to Colombia. But we learned this general was loyal only to himself. Once Pablo paid him $1.5 million for a large shipment to pass through the country, but it was intercepted by the Panamanian army. Drugs were confiscated, a laboratory was raided, and a young employee named John Lada was arrested and placed in jail.

Pablo was angry at this betrayal. He told our general: “We don’t need these headaches. You have to clean up the issue.” The general corrected this mistake, perhaps paying a judge to close his eyes to the situation. The drugs eventually were returned.

In Haiti another powerful general worked with Pablo to make certain our flights to his country would not be bothered. He was paid $200,000 for each plane that landed and took off without difficulty.

I remember particularly when Vladimiro Montesinos, the chief of Peru’s intelligence service, visited Pablo. His first night with us Pablo entertained him with five beautiful young Brazilian dancing girls. The following day they raced Jet Skis and finally Pablo got down to business. “We need places in Peru where our planes can land and take off,” he told him. “Places that won’t