Free The Accountant's Story by Roberto Escobar Page A

spoke with Rodrigo. “You guys have to stop this war,” he said. “Dejermo wants me to be on his side to use my guys to fight you.” Rodrigo knew that Pablo was strong enough to crush him so he agreed to meet with Pablo and Dejermo in Panama. “Let’s start working together,” Pablo told them both. Pablo put them in charge of a route from Panama to Haiti and Haiti to Miami. While the two men never became friends, they did become partners—working for Pablo Escobar.
    The great desire from America for coke created the market, and others in addition to Pablo went into the business. There is a great misunderstanding about what is known as the Medellín cartel. Generally it’s believed that the cartel was a typical business, with management at the top giving out the instructions and employees carrying them out. The profit is returned to the company. The Medellín cartel was actually many independent drug dealers who got close together for their mutual profit and protection, but each of them continued to run his own operation. But it was never discussed how much money each of the main people earned or their total wealth. Often they would use each other’s manufacturing, supply, and distribution capabilities. For example, Pablo would charge other traffickers 35 percent of the value of the shipment if they contracted with him to bring it into the United States, but he gave them the insurance that if the load was intercepted by the DEA he would refund to them their losses. This was an easy deal for Pablo to make because at the beginning no drugs were stopped. And it was incredibly profitable for him because the others were doing all the preparation work. So the Medellín cartel was an association by choice instead of a unified business. But the person at the top of this loose structure was Pablo, because he had started the business and had the best way of shipping the drugs and the most people loyal to him. The others have said that they were afraid of him. But they all made a lot of money with him.
    The Medellín cartel was very different from the cartel running in the city of Cali, which got started around the same time. The Cali cartel was a much more traditional business structure, with four recognized leaders, and under them they had accountants, engineers, and attorneys, and then the workers.
    The other independent drug operators who were recognized as the leaders of the Medellín cartel were Carlos Lehder Rivas, the Ochoa brothers, and José Rodríguez Gacha, who everyone knew as the Mexican. Each of these people built up their own business before joining the others. Carlos Lehder was a real smart guy who developed his ideas about smuggling coke into the United States while he was in prison there for smuggling marijuana. Carlos was probably the first to use his own small airplanes to fly the coke into America and was making millions of dollars even before working with Pablo. He was an excellent pilot, but I don’t think he flew the loads himself. In 1978 he bought a big house on the island of Norman’s Cay in the Bahamas for $190,000 and with the cooperation of the government authorities that he paid, he established his base there. Soon he controlled the whole island, which was like his kingdom. And from there he was in charge of the entire Caribbean. The stories were that he often had parties there that lasted for days, and always with lots of beautiful, mostly naked women. He built a protected runway and this island was used by everyone in the business as a place to transfer drugs from Colombia from big planes to small planes or to put them on speedboats for the two-hundred-mile trip to Florida. To use his island each person had to pay Carlos a percentage of the load.
    Pablo and Carlos knew each other and they liked each other before they needed to work together. Eventually they would become close friends and Pablo would save his life, but they had very different thoughts; Pablo admired the United States but Carlos