Free The Accountant's Story by Roberto Escobar Page B

wanted to destroy it with drugs. Carlos called cocaine “the atomic bomb” that he was going to drop on America. This was because of his politics; his father was German so Adolf Hitler became Carlos’s hero. And while Pablo only occasionally smoked marijuana, Carlos smoked all the time. A pilot for the cartel, Jimmy Arenas, once said about Lehder, “The three schools of thought he got was Hitler, Jesus Christ, and Marx. . . . When you mix that in one pot with marijuana it would be a big explosion.”
    Pablo and Carlos got together around 1979, when Lehder was kidnapped by the M-19 guerrillas. At that time M-19 was one of the four or five left-wing guerrilla groups operating in Colombia’s jungles. Pablo knew some of the guerrilla chiefs because he paid them a percentage to protect the laboratories he built in the wild. If the guerrillas had wanted to destroy these laboratories they could have easily, instead they became the guards. All of the traffickers paid them. M-19 raised some of the money it needed to survive and grow by kidnapping wealthy people for millions of dollars’ ransom. When they demanded $5 million for Lehder’s freedom, another person in the drug business asked Pablo for assistance. Pablo’s contacts found out that Carlos was being held in a farmhouse in Armenia and Pablo organized a team of six men to rescue him. When the guerrillas found out they were coming to battle them they escaped out the back, pushing Lehder into the trunk of their car. As they tried to race away Carlos was able to free himself, but while running away was shot in the leg. Two of the kidnappers were captured. And after that Pablo and Carlos became close friends and often worked together.
    Like Pablo, Carlos had his own way of living. For instance, a few years later when the Bahamian government arrested several Colombian drug traffickers and put them in jail, he got so angry he flew a plane over Nassau and emptied boxes of cash over the capital city. He literally rained money. That was his way of reminding people how powerful he was, that he could do anything he wanted to do. That was Carlos.
    José Rodríguez Gacha was the son of a poor pig farmer from the city of Pacho who also made more than a billion dollars in this cocaine business. Like Pablo, he was named one of the richest men in the world. While the Ochoas were educated people, Gacha had dropped out of grade school. Because he loved everything with Mexico—he owned the Bogotá soccer club the Millionarios and had a mariachi band to perform for the fans—and eventually established the routes through Mexico, he became known as El Mexicano, the Mexican. He made that name infamous. The Mexican was ruthless. Many of the terrible killings that Pablo has been blamed for were done by Gacha. But also like Pablo, he gave away much of his money to the poor people for health and education, to pay for farm equipment and seed to survive, and so the people of his region loved him.
    The Mexican came up in the emerald business. Most people don’t know that in Colombia there has always been more violence for the control of emeralds than there was for drugs. But killing in that business is very casual. Gacha became known in that business for having no fear of anyone and killing people to succeed. At one time he worked in a bar in Medellín that some members of Pablo’s organization liked to go to. Even these people, very tough people, were impressed by the Mexican. He started doing small favors for them, and eventually came to run his own organization, opening new routes through Mexico to Houston and Los Angeles. It was the Mexican who first set up Tranquilandia, one of the largest and the best known of the jungle laboratories where more than two thousand people lived and worked making and packaging cocaine.
    As poor as the Mexican was growing up, the three Ochoa brothers, Jorge, Juan David, and Fabio, came from a respected wealthy family. They had no needs that weren’t satisfied.