and I might take a house in return.” She accepted this; as far as she was concerned, Pablo was a real estate man. When Hermilda saw this house she fell in love with it.

Our mother was part of a singing group with her older women friends called the Golden Ladies of Antioquia. All of them were teachers. After finalizing the deal for the house, including all the furniture, Pablo invited our mother and the ladies to the house for a mass in celebration of this new house. Our priest was there to bless it. After the singing was over Pablo handed the keys to Hermilda. “This is yours, Mother,” he said. She cried with her friends out of happiness.

That’s the way Pablo gave things away to our family. At Christmas in 1981 he bought an entire block and built houses for members of the Gavíria family, about forty houses total. He wanted the family living close together. He gave our family many presents, including nice cars. Not Porsches or BMWs, but regular cars for safe transportation. The children in the family had their education supported. For Maria Victoria, his own wife, he would give anything. Whatever she wanted he would have for her—beautiful clothes, jewelry, paintings, and many houses.

For himself, Pablo was not that interested in fancy clothes. He wore jeans and white sneakers pretty much every day, although he always had new sneakers. But Pablo bought pleasure. He had a lot of beautiful cars and so many farms and houses and we had many people to serve us at all times of day and night. We ate food prepared for royalty. And when possible we traveled; Pablo loved to travel with his family and friends. In 1982 we went all over Europe and then to Hong Kong. It was in 1983, when it was still safe for us to travel, that we made our second visit to the United States—and that was when we went to Disney World and the White House and Las Vegas where we made friends with Frank Sinatra.

This was years before Pablo became infamous in America. Pablo, Gustavo, and I took all our families, including our wives and children, our sisters and cousins, nieces and nephews, and our mother to Florida. We visited Disney World and other tourist places, and we had some business meetings too. One night we almost got killed. Pablo, Gustavo, and I and a couple of the guys went to a monster truck rally. We were sitting there happily right in the front row, in the best seats we could buy, watching these huge trucks smashing cars, when I got the feeling that we should move. “Come on,” I told him. “We need to move now.” Pablo thought I was silly, but he moved. We all moved.

A few seconds later a monster truck smashed into the place we had been sitting. If we hadn’t moved we would have been killed. Pablo just looked at me with wonder, and said, “Are you a magician or what?” How did I know to move? There was no answer, I just felt that we had to.

Another night in Miami we almost got arrested. Pablo and I and our two bodyguards, Otto and Pinina, went to a nightclub to meet some associates. I always carried cash with me wherever we went. That night I had at least $50,000, hidden at the bottom of a camera bag under a nice camera and souvenir T-shirts for the kids. When we left the club we got into a large van. While we were waiting for the remainder of our friends the driver fell asleep or skidded, and the van went crashing into several other expensive cars. The event was bigger than the damage, but people got scared and started yelling. The police came racing toward us. Pablo said to me, “We don’t need this, let’s get out of here.”

We ran away, not wanting to answer questions about the cash we were carrying. Maybe running wasn’t such a good idea. The police stopped us half a block away. “Somebody told us you were involved in the accident,” they said. They frisked us, but just casually. They didn’t find the money. Pablo denied we had been in the van. He explained innocently that we were just plain tourists from Colombia. The police locked us in the back of their police car and returned to the scene. This was a dangerous situation for us. The police did not know who we were