discovered later there was good reason for that. A DAS agent who was helping run the prison security discovered that Cali had bought four 250-pound bombs from people in El Salvador and was trying to buy a plane to drop them on us. They were not able to, but on occasion our guards suddenly would begin firing their weapons at airplanes hovering too long in the area or coming too close to the Cathedral.
Time passed very slowly. I exercised, rode my bicycle, continued to read everything possible about AIDS and making my research, and I worked with my brother. Pablo would spend his days on the telephone, reading, and visiting with his attorneys. He even began studying Mandarin. In the evenings we would sit in rocking chairs watching the lights come on in the buildings of Envigado. At those moments, when we watched the normal life of others, it was hard not to think about people being with their families in an ordinary but comforting way.
As before, Pablo continued to try to help the people who most needed it. He received hundreds of letters every day. The world knew he had surrendered and wrote to him with their requests. Letters came from around the world, from Europe, Asia, and basically everywhere else, and most of them asked for money or advice on how to make money. Four or five of our employees did nothing but organize these letters. They were put in piles for family, for friends, for people who needed help with their health especially with cancer, for students needing money for education, and for business letters. Pablo would read most of these letters and often send a crew to investigate the cases and verify the information. If it was real they would hand money to the people.
I remember a few of the letters. One odd letter came from a man in Africa who owned the elephant that was the mother of the elephant we’d had at Napoles. It was his idea to have the mother and daughter together living at Napoles. He included a picture of his elephant and his request for money.
A person wrote from America that he had seven different bank accounts and would be very happy to hide Pablo’s money in his accounts.
There was a letter addressed to myself and Pablo; it included a photograph of a gorgeous seventeen-year-old blonde wearing a wedding dress. She wrote something like, “I’m a good girl. I have just finished high school and my dream is to be an attorney but I don’t have the money. I am a decent girl, but it would be an honor if one of you can take me. I am a virgin and that is all I can offer. I am not a whore, but I need the money for my college career.”
Pablo sent a representative to her house. Although we never became involved with her in any way, we did pay for her college. But that was typical. The pleading letters were hard to read: I am dying and my children have nothing . . . I need an operation so I can walk and support my family . . .They are coming to take away our house . . .The government helped none of these people, so their only hope was Pablo.
Countless other people would gather at the first gate at the bottom of the mountain and send handwritten notes, boletas, with the guards to ask for assistance. Sometimes they wanted money but other times they just wanted Pablo’s advice about the problems of their life. To them, Pablo was a man of the streets like they were who had risen to the very top of the mountain.
Most important for our daily lives was the fact that we were able to receive visitors regularly. This was not supposed to happen, the only official visiting days were Wednesday and Sunday when our families came, but it seemed like there were always people there. We had bought two trucks, a Chevrolet and a Mazda van. In the back of them we built a fake wall, leaving a space we called the tunnel that was big enough to hide as many as twenty people. The people who used this method to come see us were those who did not want their visit known publicly, others who had committed crimes and were not legally allowed to be there, or people we did not want our enemies to know were there. Usually they would be picked