away from certain parts of the business. In his mind, I believe, he thought he was protecting me. And, in fact, he did. When we surrendered finally to go into our own prison we had to invent a crime for me to plead guilty to. My real crime, as I told them then, was that Pablo Escobar’s blood ran in my body.

So to tell the whole story of Pablo I sometimes have to refer to information provided by other people. Such as the assassination of Lara Bonilla. Wherever there are great amounts of money there are always people who want to take some of it for themselves. In Colombia, in addition to the normal greed we have struggled with kidnappings. So from the beginning the organization had to have people able to protect the money and protect the leaders. These were the security people, the bodyguards, the people able to do whatever jobs were necessary to protect the organization. They were people capable of violence. Men with ready guns who took nicknames like Chopo, Arete, El Mugre, Peinina, La Yuca, La Kika and his brother Tyson, named for the American boxer. Sadly, it was not difficult to find young people to do these jobs. They wanted these jobs. As the Lion once described the process: “These were mostly the poor people from Medellín, people who lived in the mountains. Recruiting them was simple because they had nothing to lose in life: ‘You have no money. Your mom is broke. Your sister is pregnant and she doesn’t even know who the father is. There’s nothing to eat. Tomorrow I’m going to give you a motorcycle and I’m going to give you some money and help you find a clean apartment, but today you’re going to work for me.’ Who is going to say no? They said, ‘Okay, patrón.’”

When you live in poverty in Colombia or Peru or anywhere in our region there is no time to be a child. You survive, that’s all it is. The men and sometimes the teenagers who protected the organization became known later as sicarios, assassins, or in Mafia talk, hit men. They could be very young, and too many of them did not survive to become old. In the poor parts of Colombia many children have their own guns by age eleven. They get them where they get them. Guns are easily available in my country. Sometimes these are machine guns.

It wasn’t only Pablo who had these young guns working for him. All the organizations needed the protection and fear that they offered. So long as they kept their work within the business the police would leave them alone—and as long as the police continued to be paid their fees. The police in Medellín were paid $400,000 monthly to cooperate and offer some protection.

One of these young sicarios told the American court trying La Kika how he got into this world. “I was working at a garage making 300 pesos a week, approximately one dollar. So I quit to hang out at El Baliska, the pool hall where the hit men from the Antioquian neighborhood fell out.” Someone there gave him an assignment to locate a gunman who had betrayed the organization, and paid him about $300 to do so. When this gunman was found, he contacted La Kika, and told him, “I have already located him. And he told me he didn’t need him alive. That he should be killed. I went over and I looked for two hit men I knew so they would kill him. I hired Tribi and Paleo to kill him. Tribi and Paleo were more or less thirteen to fourteen years old. I told them where he was and they went over and killed him. I was a few blocks away and I heard the shot and went over to see what happened. The gunman was lying on the floor. I was paid 1,500,000 pesos, I kept 500,000, which was between $3,000 and $4,000 then, and paid the rest to them.”

There were always people near Pablo ready to do whatever he told them to do. When he said something needed to be done, no one questioned, they did it. Pablo never told me a word about the assassination of Lara Bonilla. It was not something I wanted to know too much about. And I was still living with my family in the city of Manizales and was not with him every day. But Lara’s murder changed the lives of