“I told you,” I said. “I told you. Now we gotta run.” We went out the back way and started running, really running. Some of the bodyguards came with us. Suddenly whoever was coming, we figured it was the police or the military or both, started firing at us. One of the gun shots struck a small stone wall and pieces of the brick hit me in the face. I started bleeding badly. I thought I was mortally wounded. But I was able to keep moving. Another gun shot grazed my leg. There was confusion all around as we ran through the night, people were shouting orders. I was looking for my brother, but in the mess I couldn’t find him. Then I saw him walking calmly. “You guys are gonna kill yourself running where you can’t see,” he said. I couldn’t believe how calm he remained. Some of our people had been sleeping and had fled without getting dressed.
We managed to get to a road down below, where we had some luck. One of the bodyguards had been praying at a nearby cemetery and was coming back in a car. Pablo and I and Gustavo jumped into his car and escaped, others went through the woods, but eight of our people were captured. My wounds were slight and needed only a Band-Aid. But for me this was a major escalation. Because of my position as the accountant I had been far from any kind of violence. Now people were shooting at me. Although I had known the stakes of the business before, the coldness of it had never been so close to me. It was more than just leaving the country, or having to hide, it was living every day with the possibility of instant death.
The question was, How did they find us? What happened to the protection Pablo had paid for? When something went wrong there were always questions Pablo wanted answered. We learned two weeks later that a drug trafficker from Cali had gone from the meeting at the Circle and called someone in the government, believing he could win a guarantee that he would never be extradited by informing on Pablo. And Pablo also discovered that the raid had been directed by Colonel Casadiego Torrado, who Pablo had considered a friend and had been paying $50,000 a month for cooperation and information. But maybe this colonel figured that by capturing or killing Pablo Escobar he could ensure his career. Pablo sent him a message: “Now you are against me and you know what I think about that.” For his own protection the colonel was transferred to another city and worked there. And eventually he was promoted to general and rose to a position of power in the Colombian police. Right at that time there wasn’t too much we could do anyway, we were so busy. A few years after Pablo’s death Torrado got killed near Cali, but I think that was because he got caught up in his own problems.
After this Pablo changed his way of doing business. Instead of keeping colonels and generals on the regular monthly payroll, he informed them he would pay them only for the information they provided.
On the night of the raid at the Circle, at exactly the same time in Madrid, police had arrested Jorge Ochoa, the Cali cartel’s Gilberto Rodríguez Orejuela, and a third man who was a friend of theirs. When I had left I’d given the key to my apartment to Jorge and told him to use it if he needed it. But it was their own actions that attracted attention, so when Torrado informed on them the police knew where to find them.
They were put in prison. The United States requested that Spain extradite Jorge Ochoa to the United States for his participation in drug trafficking. Colombia also officially requested his extradition for the crime of smuggling fighting bulls into our country from Spain. This created a serious problem for the Spanish government about where to send him. If Ochoa was sent to the U.S.—where he had been indicted three times—he would spend the remainder of his life in jail there; if he went to Colombia the penalty would be much less. The Ochoa family hired lawyers in Spain and America and spent twenty months fighting extradition to the U.S. It was well known in Europe and South America that the decision to return Jorge to Colombia was made by Spanish Prime Minister Felipe González. Ochoa