American Desperado (42 page)

I was more hurt than angry. I’d just become friends with the best boat maker in the world, and now he wanted me out of his life. A couple days later Don asked me back to his shop. He said, “After you left, I spoke to somebody about you. I had no idea who you were. I apologize.”

We never had a problem again. Don was not a bad guy. He grew up in Jersey. He did not come from money, but he married a wealthy girl whose father started him in home building. He did good with that and moved to Florida to make his name in boats.
^*

Don was a born hustler. He sold boats to smugglers because his engineering and design made them so fast. And he used his friendship with George Bush to sell the government boats to catch the smugglers. What made Don a genius was, he sold the government boats that were a hair slower than the ones he sold the smugglers.
^†
No way could he let the smugglers get caught. They were his best customers.
^*

At the same time that Aronow was helping the government fight the war on drugs, he installed a fifty-thousand-pound boatlift behind his shop that he rented to weed smugglers. The smugglers would drive up to his shop with tons of weed in their boat, and he could lift the whole boat out of the water and put it on a truck that could then be unloaded in the privacy of a warehouse. Unloading boats exposed smugglers to the greatest risk of being caught. Don’s boatlift solved the problem. In the end, smuggling caused some problems for him, but he had a good run.
^†

I never used Don’s boats for smuggling. They were strictly for pleasure. But his shop was like the main smuggler’s den in Miami. Everybody in the drug business hung out there. Once in a while Don would have to clear out the shop when his buddy George Bush would visit. The rest of the time, the place was ours. Everybody got to know Don’s sons. They were great kids. One got crippled in a car accident but managed to become a very good horse trainer after that. As far as I know, neither of his boys was ever involved in the coke business, but they had an idea what I was about. One day one of them came to me and said he’d met a guy at the boat shop who he thought I ought to meet.

By that time in 1978 Phyllis and I were still together, but I kept my own condo in Coral Gables for partying. I told Don’s kid to send the guy he wanted me to meet over there. In walks a stocky little Colombian guy in his twenties named Pancho. He looked like
a peasant who someone had bought a suit and tie that they stuffed him into even before teaching him to tie his shoes. His English was terrible. When he smiled, he showed crooked gold teeth. He was a rough guy. I liked him.

My Spanish, which I’d learned from hanging out with Cubans, was better than Pancho’s English. We went out to some clubs. We chased some girls, we did some lines. After a few nights of this, he said to me, “You know, I can get coke really cheap.”

I hadn’t told him what my line of work was, but it was obvious enough. I asked what price his coke would be, and he named something that was way too high. I laughed at him. He said, “Okay. I’m going to bring you a friend. Maybe he can help you get a better price.”

A week later Pancho shows up at my place driving a Rolls-Royce convertible. Next to him is a little kid with a face that probably couldn’t grow three beard hairs. The kid has long black hair. He almost looks like a girl.

When I step up to the street, Pancho walks around and opens the door for this kid. The kid is wearing an electric blue jacket. He walks up to me, reaches his hand in, and pulls out a flask.
“Beve, beve, beve”
—drink, drink, drink—he says.

I think he’s amusing, so I take the flask and drink. It tastes like I’ve swallowed a Molotov cocktail. My whole chest is on fire. I found out they call that drink
aguardiente
,
^*
and it’s like the national drink of Colombia. They drink it like Gatorade.

I’m coughing and fucking dying, and the kid laughs. He pats my back and says, “Hey, man. I’m Fabito. Let’s go have some fun.”
^†

F
ABITO WAS
twenty-one years old when I met him. He had recently arrived in Miami to help out with his family’s business. His father
was Don Ochoa, the godfather of the Medellín Cartel.
^*
In 1978 the Cartel was getting started. There were three sons in the family, Jorge, Juan, and Fabito, the youngest. Fabito came to Miami to help grow the family’s business. They were looking for people to help move their coke—to import it and distribute it. They already had Colombians in Miami and other cities moving coke. The harder part was getting it into the country. So Fabito was sending his bodyguard, Pancho, around to scout for guys to help him, and if they seemed reliable to Pancho, Fabito would meet them.

I connected with Fabito at the time the coke business was taking off. He was in Miami to build his family’s empire, and I helped him make it. In this, I found my true life passion. It was beating the U.S. government. That’s what smuggling was about. It got me off harder than anything I’d ever done. I was never addicted to coke, but I definitely got hooked on smuggling it.

*
“Between 1963 and 1975, Aronow won two world powerboat racing championships, 3 U.S. titles, set numerous speed records, and became known as ‘the godfather of the powerboat industry.’ ” Elizabeth A. Ginns, “The Tale of Two Cities,”
Power & Motor Yacht Magazine
, June 2003.

*
Aronow moved his family to Florida in the early 1960s, after he became obsessed with the idea that New Jersey was going to be destroyed in a nuclear war. Shortly after he arrived in Miami, the Cuban Missile Crisis pushed Florida to the brink of a nuclear attack. But Aronow stayed, because by then he had taken up his new obsession, racing boats.

*
The powerboat industry was decimated by the oil shocks of the 1970s. Purchases by drug smugglers were key to the industry’s survival.

*
Aguardiente
is a contraction of the words meaning “water” and “fiery.” In Colombia it is mainly consumed by people from the mountainous parts of the country—also where the coca leaves grow the best.

*
His name was Fabio Ochoa Restrepo, but he went by the honorific nickname “Don Ochoa.” Ochoa, who died in 2002, was from a long line of wealthy landowners and politicians in Colombia. For his entire life he denied he had any involvement with the Medellín Cartel. His sons, Fabio, Jorge, and Juan, were all key members.

†
Thunderboat Row, along the main channel into Biscayne Bay on 188th Street, was “a quarter mile long street once redolent with the smell of curing fiberglass and the sound of big engines.” From the previously cited “The Tale of Two Cities.”

†
There is no evidence that George H. W. Bush had improper dealings with Aronow. However, when Bush became vice president and served as President Reagan’s point man for the war on drugs, the Customs Service did award Aronow’s firm a lucrative contract. He built them a fleet of trimarans, which were theoretically faster than his Cigarettes, but only on flat seas. On rougher seas the Cigarettes that Aronow sold to smugglers easily outran the boats he sold to the Customs Service. The program was widely regarded as a boondoggle, as well as an embarrassment to Bush, who had, with great fanfare, personally run vice-presidential speed trials of Aronow’s boats and had pronounced them “unbeatable.”

†
Aronow was gunned down outside his Thunderboat Row boat shop on February 3, 1987, by a drug dealer who felt he’d been swindled by him.

†
Fabio Ochoa Vasquez. Jon refers to him as Fabito, the affectionate form of his name, which loosely translates as “Little Fabio.”

‡
George H. W. Bush, then CIA director, was—like Jon—a devotee of Aronow’s race boats and has owned several.

42

J
.
R
.:
Fabito’s father, Don Ochoa, was a great big fat man who loved to ride those small white horses, Paso Finos. Some fat guys, when they ride horses, look ridiculous. Don Ochoa was not a ridiculous figure. He was a fine breeder of racehorses,
^*
but his greatest accomplishment was building the Medellín Cartel. The Colombians made more money in a few years than the Mafia did in a hundred years.
^†
To understand what the Ochoas did, I need to break down a few things for you. Drug smuggling in Florida was invented by the Cubans. Many of the Cubans that the Mafia brought to Miami when Castro came in got recruited by the government to fight in the Bay of Pigs.
^*
When the invasion didn’t work out, they went back to working the nightclubs on 79th Street.
^†
When American kids started smoking weed in the 1960s, the Cubans, trained by the CIA in how to use boats and planes for the Bay of Pigs invasion, decided to put their skills to use by smuggling weed.
^‡
That’s how the smuggling business started. They’d go down to wherever the pot grew in Jamaica, Colombia, or Mexico and pick it up and take it to Miami.

With pot, the easy part was growing it, and the hard part was smuggling it. Cocaine was different. Coca leaves only grow in certain parts of Colombia and Bolivia, and you can’t just pick the leaf and snort it up your nose. Making cocaine is a process. It takes chemicals. It takes workers. It takes time. You need a factory to make it in.

At the end of that process you get a product that in the 1970s was worth ten times its weight in gold.
^*
Many Colombians rose to the challenge of making cocaine. The smarter ones didn’t just want to throw a $50,000 kilo onto a boat driven by a Cuban and wave good-bye. They wanted to control the whole process.

When Don Ochoa, who was based in the town of Medellín, started off, he had advantages. He was already rich. He owned ranches all over Colombia. He owned a chain of restaurants. The guy had judges and politicians in his pocket from the start. As a businessman, he knew how to run an organization.

Other Colombians weren’t as smart. They’d harvest the leaves but couldn’t make factories to process them properly. That was why Albert’s cocaine had quality problems. His cocaine was made by half-assed Colombians.

Don Ochoa ran his business like IBM. If he sent five hundred kilos into the United States, each one was marked with a symbol. The symbol told the people smuggling it who that kilo was going to and how much money the Colombians were supposed to get for it. The symbol also told the Colombians where that kilo was made, how much the chemicals cost to make it, where the leaves came from, what kind of purity it had. Ochoa’s people knew everything about every fucking kilo they ever shipped. They controlled the kilo from the time it was leaves on the tree until right before it got snorted up some idiot’s nose in a bathroom in Los Angeles or Des Moines. They had their business correct.

Don Ochoa was like the CEO of the business. His oldest son, Jorge, was like the president. When they started off, everybody in Colombia was fighting each other. But the Ochoas ran their business so good, when they went to their competitors in Medellín and said, “Let’s band together, and we’ll all make out,” the other guys decided to join them. Obviously, the Ochoas had to fight a few battles to get on top, but that’s basically how the Cartel started.

People in the Cartel had different skills. In the beginning Carlos Lehder was their best transport guy.
^*
Pablo Escobar was a street guy who started off fighting the Ochoas, but they made peace and he took over running the processing labs.
^†
Tough as Pablo was, the Ochoas always had the upper hand because they owned the leaves.

Don Ochoa sat in the background. He put everybody out in front of him. Pablo Escobar became the top enforcer for the empire. He took the limelight. But Don Ochoa was the smartest of them all. While everybody else was out fighting his wars, he sat at his ranch and let the money come to him. He rode his horses and ate great food. He was just like any other fat fucker sitting on top of a big corporation.

*
In his self-published autobiography, Don Ochoa wrote of himself, “Don Fabio [Ochoa] is to Colombia’s horse world what Garcia Márquez is to Colombia’s world of letters.”

*
The Bay of Pigs was the failed 1961 invasion of Cuba undertaken by a CIA-trained army of Cuban exiles. Many of those exiles worked for Mafia-controlled businesses in Miami before and after the botched operation.

*
Gold hovered at around $200 per ounce in the mid-1970s, meaning a kilo of gold was worth about $7,000. With a kilo of cocaine wholesaling for up to $50,000 and going for two or three times that amount on the street, it was far more valuable than gold.

*
Lehder was a Colombian of German extraction. Originally a car thief in Medellín, he pioneered use of the Bahamas as a transport hub for moving the Ochoas’ cocaine into Miami. He was among the first Colombians to push aside Cuban smugglers. By the late 1970s, he fell out of favor with the Ochoas because of his megalomania—insisting he sit on an enormous gilded throne during business meetings—and because of his adoration of Adolf Hitler, which he expressed by wearing swastikas and greeting associates with Nazi salutes. In 1987 he was extradited to the United States, where he is serving a long prison sentence despite his requests to be transferred to prison in the “Fatherland”—Germany—where he believes he would be more comfortable.