It was also during my period as a shopkeeper and restaurateur that I made friends with the bigger dealers and finally got to see the cocaine laboratories. The first time I saw them operating, I was so fascinated that they offered me a job working there. It didn’t pay well, but I learned a lot and it kept me out of trouble at night.
I was amazed at how easy it was to make cocaine. Very few people were needed and the equipment used was nothing fancy or scientific: a few buckets, hoses, pieces of cloth, strainers, several lamps and some flat trays for drying the crystals. In fact, the hardest part seemed to be getting hold of the chemicals, which were expensive and hard to find since they had been made illegal as part of the United States’ ‘war on drugs’. But once you had those, the process was surprisingly simple.
The coke came into the prison in the form of pasta básica, a thick, off-white-coloured paste extracted from coca leaves by soaking them in kerosene or gasoline and then adding alcohol, followed by sodium bicarbonate. This process was always carried out where the coca was grown, mainly in Bolivia’s Chapare region. Most of the pasta was then sold and transported to the labs in Peru and Colombia, but a small amount managed to find its way into San Pedro prison. It was usually smuggled through the main gate by the inmates’ wives. Among the hundreds of boxes and sacks of food that arrived to supply the prisoners’ daily needs, it wasn’t difficult to hide a few kilos in bags of sugar or rice, or hollowed-out fruit. The liquid chemicals were more difficult to get in, but the searches were never thorough, especially if the guards had been bribed in advance. Besides, if anyone was caught, the penalty was simply a bigger bribe.
The laboratories were run out of inmates’ rooms at night. The bigger ones could produce several kilos a night, but there were also smaller operators who ran cruder laboratories using makeshift equipment and substitute chemicals, although the quality was never as high.
The whole process, from pasta básica to the white cocaine crystals that you sniff, could take several nights’ work if it was done carefully, or one night if they were in a rush. The pasta básica was first treated with water and sulphuric acid, then stirred to separate out the cocaine solution, before being siphoned off using a hose. Once that concentrated paste had been filtered and dried, you had cocaine base – basé– which was sold to the inmates to be smoked. Or if you added more chemicals, such as hydrogen chloride, ether or acetone, you could then filter it through strainers and pieces of cloth to refine it further and get a better product. The resulting substance would be left to crystallise properly, leaving you with pure cocaine crystals. This final drying process took many hours, which was why they did everything at night, when the other inmates were asleep and there was no chance of the police coming into the prison. The paste was usually dried under lamps or heated to make it crystallise faster.
The chemist – known as the cocinero – supervised each of these steps, but went to sleep in between times. Nevertheless, someone had to be awake the whole time in order to keep an eye on how things were going. My job was to stir the mixture regularly, making sure that it was consistent and dried evenly and that the right temperature was maintained. If any of it settled on the bottom of the tray, it could burn and ruin the whole batch. A single mistake would cost thousands of dollars, so I had to set the alarm clock and wake the cocinero up every hour to check, or whenever something looked like it was going wrong.
The actual steps involved in making cocaine seemed simple when you watched someone who knew what he was doing. But there was a lot of skill and experience involved for the cocinero to get the exact chemical balance, knowing how long to allow for each stage, and when to add more of a chemical. The top cocineros earned good money, but the actual laboratory workers, like myself, were never paid much, and only when the money from a sale came through. Or you could take the salary option I did, which was to be paid in cocaine. At the end of a night, you might be given ten or twenty grams, depending on how much had been produced and how generous the bosses were feeling. Inside the prison, that quantity wasn’t worth much, but if you knew how to get it out of the prison, there was definitely some money to be made.
The final product went out of San Pedro the same way it came in – through the main gates. Sometimes, school children were used as the mules, since they were less likely to be searched properly. Or more innovative techniques might be used, such as the one I later invented, which was virtually undetectable.