American Made: Who Killed Barry Seal? Pablo Escobar or George HW Bush by Shaun Attwood

Author:Shaun Attwood [Attwood, Shaun]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gadfly Press
Published: 2016-09-14T06:00:00+00:00

In 1974, Pablo fell in love with Maria Victoria Henao Vellejo, a local beauty. Because of her age, fourteen, and Pablo being twenty-five, Maria’s mother was unenthused. He persisted, including showing up outside her home one night accompanied by a guitar player and serenading her. By 1976, she was pregnant, so they married. Three months after the marriage, Juan Pablo was born. It took two years for Maria’s mother to warm to Pablo, but she did, accepting that he loved her daughter.

Pablo built his own gang, Los Pablos, with a fearsome reputation on the streets of Medellín. His organisation absorbed people who’d previously been rivals. When a war broke out between two cocaine traffickers in Medellín, resulting in workers and their family members getting killed, Pablo brokered a deal whereby they entered a partnership under him.

Initially, shipping cocaine to America was easy for Pablo and far more profitable than smuggling bulky marijuana. Up to forty kilos could be packed into used airplane tyres, which pilots would discard at Miami. They were taken to a dump, followed by one of Pablo’s workers who would retrieve them. The cocaine was distributed through a network of Latinos in Miami.

Pablo no longer smuggled drugs himself. He paid others to do it. On the phone, he used code words such as emeralds and diamonds to frustrate the efforts of drug agencies and to avoid providing any verbal evidence that could be used against him.

To stay ahead of the DEA, he continuously changed his smuggling methods. He stopped using airplane tyres and had Colombian and US citizens board planes with cocaine in their suitcases or in specially made clothes. Holding up to five kilos, the suitcases had double walls. They were paid $1,000 and their flight tickets. Some wore shoes with hollowed-out bottoms. The shoes had been manufactured with the cocaine sewn inside. As well as passengers, Pablo recruited crew members, including stewardesses, pilots and co-pilots, who breezed through airports without getting searched. People in wheelchairs could smuggle up to $1 million worth of cocaine in the frames. Some smugglers dressed as nuns. Others posed as blind people with canes packed with cocaine. Some swallowed cocaine in condoms. If the condom opened, they died. Newspapers reported such tragedies.

With the authorities obsessed with eradicating the drug that had been demonised for decades in America – marijuana – cocaine slipped into the US unnoticed. The federal government had classified marijuana as a Schedule 1 substance, more harmful than cocaine, and equally as harmful as heroin, where it remains to this day.

Over time, instead of sending people with suitcases, Pablo just sent the suitcases. They were checked onto a flight and picked up at the other end. Airport officials were bribed with hundreds of thousands of dollars to look the other way. An official on a meagre salary ended up getting arrested with $27 million in his bank accounts.

To keep expanding, Pablo paid bigger bribes. To enable the police on his payroll to get promotions and pay increases, Pablo allowed them to confiscate massive amounts of cocaine.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.