‘He who controls the cash controls the country.’ Pat often thought of those words as he watched another delivery safely make its way to De La Rue’s HQ.
He knew that once the box of US dollars reached its destination it would be easy to mix the bags in the back of the armoured truck. The cash from the gangs and from the banks became indistinguishable. Which, in effect, they were. Moving the legitimate cash and the illegitimate. That was the business Pat had found himself in. It was all part of the same economy in Colombia. In the time he had been in the country he had asked himself the question, where did you draw the line? It was so blurred. Who was to say what was corrupt and what was not? There were so many bribes and backhanders going around it was impossible for Pat to keep up. Sometimes he felt all they did was move the same money around between the lawful and the criminal operators – and with it the intelligence.
Pat wasn’t wholly happy with this arrangement. Transporting the cash was one thing. Influencing the cash generators – the gangsters – was something else. In that regard, ‘control’ was something he didn’t feel he had. Silvio had been JB’s contact and he provided the route into an increasingly volatile criminal gang. From what they understood in the intelligence they had received so far, the Medellín mob was making vast amounts of money, more than anyone on the De La Rue side had predicted when they began Operation Durazno. Pat knew that these sums of money would not only make them stronger but more dangerous too.
Until now, Silvio had played the role of the ideal informant, the go-between, and he was being amply rewarded for his efforts, but Pat suspected he was only telling them half the story of Pablo Escobar’s operations. As reported through JB, Silvio was keen to play down Pablo’s expansion but Pat could see for himself – by the money that De La Rue alone handled – that they were surely cornering the cocaine market. He knew he would feel a lot better if he could get closer to the main man in that operation – Pablo Escobar. Cut out the middleman. Deal face-to-face – de hombre a hombre – with the man Pat heard people in Medellín were now calling ‘El Doctor’.
According to sources, in the summer of 1971 Escobar was behind the kidnapping of a wealthy textile factory owner, Diego Echavarria. He was a high-profile figure, with a successful business and an expanding property empire, feted in polite society because he appeared every bit the caring philanthropist, funding a number of projects in his native city, Itagüí, and throughout Antioquia. Most notably he had gained plaudits and sympathy for opening a school and an educational foundation in honour of his daughter, Isolda, who had died of a rare condition. The kidnap heaped further torment on his family.
That the Echavarria family had the funds to pay the $50,000 ransom was not in question. They would have paid double that to have him back alive and well. But in the weeks he was held hostage another story began to emerge, that Echavarria’s success owed much to the exploitation of his workforce. Factory workers – those who still had a job – complained of terrible conditions and pay. They said the reason he was able to expand his property empire and fund his charitable projects was because he was squeezing the ordinary people out of every peso. Those who had the terrible jobs were the lucky ones, however. Many workers had been laid off as advances in technology made them superfluous. At the same time, factory expansion meant that farmers had been evicted from their land and ordered to move into city slums.
When news of Echavarria’s kidnapping reached the slum-dwellers’ ears, they rejoiced and this unexpected situation left the gang with a dilemma. The ransom was duly paid, but should they simply return the controversial figure to continue his ransacking of decades’ old traditions or take the opportunity to rid the region of a scoundrel?
Pat could well imagine that it wouldn’t have taken Escobar and his gang long to decide what to do. This was too good an opportunity to miss. It was a chance to make a statement. When Echavarria was finally found a month later it was in a ditch, his body battered, bearing all the hallmarks of being throttled. For his family, it was devastating. For those workers who felt wronged by him it was justice. For Pablo Escobar, it was a public relations triumph.
When word got out that the body had been dumped not far from where Escobar was born, people assumed he was behind the killing – and they loved him for it. In criminal circles his name was already known but now his reputation was spreading throughout Medellín and Antioquia. For the first time people, recognised a crime had been committed for something more than immediate gain. This was social justice. Who was this man of the people who was willing to stand up for the lowest of the low?
People in the barrios started to call him El Doctor. Pat could well imagine that Escobar had swiftly noticed that the people of Medellín – his people – were crying out for a champion to look out for their interests. Pat wondered if the original plan to kidnap Echavarria was even Escobar’s idea. He knew how people’s morals could become skewed once they started to attach some kind of moral justification to their criminal acts and, when he heard the details of the murder, part of him didn’t want to believe it. Yet, having met the man, deep down he suspected it was all true. And the reaction of the local people? Escobar couldn’t have planned it – no one could have foreseen that. Even given Echavarria’s poor reputation among his workers, it was off the scale.
The wealthy factory owner’s home had been called el Castillo, an ostentatious mock Bavarian castle he had built for himself from his ill-gotten gains. Ironically, it wouldn’t be long before ‘hero-of-the-people’ Pablo Escobar created a similar palace for himself, built from his own fortune, amassed from other people’s misery.