little kid, the smallest of us all, but he had no fear of talking directly to the commander.

Many of the friends we made as children would end up in the business with us, among them Jorge Ochoa, who with his brothers built his own organization, and Luis Carlos Maya, Mayín, we called him, who was very small and very thin. El Mugre, which means “dirt,” which was the right name for him. Vaca, the cow, my closest friend, was tall and blond and had intense blue eyes and was the one of us the girls liked the most. When I was bicycle racing Vaca was my strongest supporter; before a race he would steal chickens from the local market and bring the chicken and some oranges to my house because he wanted me to be healthy for the competition. Our very close cousin Gustavo de Jesús Gavíria was the one who eventually started Pablo in the business and became his closest associate. Gustavo’s father was a musician who was well known for his serenades, so Gustavo learned to play the guitar and sing so well that when he was eleven years old he won a talent competition on a popular radio station.

For some time I lived with Gustavo and his family. We would ride our bicycles together and one day as we reached a hill we grabbed on to the back of a bus to be pulled up. The driver had a different idea and after gaining speed he put on his brakes—Gustavo and I lost control and we went sailing through an open door into a house. We broke two vases and the lady called the police. But my grandmother paid for the damage and we went laughing into the streets.

We were good kids. We spent much of our time after school together, playing soccer until late at night, going to bullfights, flirting with beautiful young girls from our neighborhood. We all had our dreams; for me, I never wanted to get off my bicycle. The bicycle represented my freedom and I raced like the wind through the city. I wanted to be a professional bike rider; I wanted to represent Colombia in famous races in South America and Europe. But from our mother we learned the importance of an education. Even when we had nothing she knew we would go to college. For my profession I intended to be an electronics engineer. Mathematics has always been easy for me; I understood the language of numbers and enjoyed doing calculations, often in my head. I have always had the ability to remember numbers without having to write them down, which proved to be extremely important in the business. Pablo too knew what he wanted. Knowing poverty, he wanted to be rich. Even as a very young boy he would tell our mother, “Wait until I grow up, Mommy. I’m going to give you everything. Just wait until I grow up.” And as he got older he decided, “When I’m twenty-two years old I want to have a million dollars. If I don’t, I’m going to kill myself; I’m going to put a bullet in my head.” Pablo had never seen a dollar bill in his life; he didn’t know what a dollar bill looked like or how it felt in his hand. But he was determined to have a million dollars. And his other great ambition was equally improbable: He intended to become the president of Colombia.

As I’ve said, from our father we had learned the importance of hard work. One of the first true jobs that Pablo and I had was making deliveries on our bicycles from a factory where they made dentures to dentists all over Medellín. We’d race from dentist to dentist. I don’t remember how much we were paid, but even after giving half of our salary to our mother, for the first time in our lives we had some money in our pockets to spend as we wished. The question was, what did we want the most?

We were teenagers, I was sixteen and Pablo thirteen. So that answer is obvious: girls. Pablo and I knew very little about sex. Our grandmother had a young and beautiful maid that we both admired. As young men sometimes will do, when she was taking a shower we would put a chair by the window and take turns silently watching her. Once, I remember, when it was Pablo’s turn he was standing on the chair when I heard