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  Because no one knew of his plans that night, because he came into the house through the backyard where the neighbors couldn’t have seen him, because of her edginess and her suspicious movements while he was there, George has always believed that it was his mother who turned him in. Either she phoned Trout directly or she gave a prearranged signal for someone else to make the call. If the latter were true, George suspected the someone else would have been his father’s brother, Uncle George Jung of Melrose. A retired U.S. Navy commander and George’s namesake, Uncle George was the family patriarch and benefactor; for a number of reasons he had little use for his nephew and had treated George from his late teenage years with an ill-masked dislike. George never wanted to confront his mother on the matter. Trout says the voice he heard that night was male. “It was not the mother,” he says. “Not directly, no.”

  * * *

  George had been processed through Receiving & Discharge and sitting alone in a holding cell for about an hour, chewing on a dried-up baloney sandwich, no mayo, when Wong, a trustee from New York’s Chinatown who was doing several years on a heroin charge, ushered him into a shower stall, hosed him down, then poofed him all over with delousing powder. From the supply room he issued George a plastic razor, a toothbrush, and a towel, and a set of regulation prison duds, consisting of khaki hand-me-downs from the U.S. Navy. The shoes were two sizes too big—a far cry from the comfort and suppleness of his five-hundred-dollar Bruno Maglis, and at the first opportunity George replaced them at the commissary with a pair of tennis shoes.

  The next day, carrying his bedroll and personal gear in a plastic bucket, George was taken down to Massachusetts House, a large open dormitory lined with double-decker bunks. Here new inmates spent two weeks getting filled in on what to expect from prison life. George dumped his stuff on an available lower bunk and sat down to consider his surroundings. The room contained about a hundred men, some sleeping on their beds, others playing cards, reading, or talking in groups, or watching TV in a glassed-off television room. The Latinos were off by themselves, as usual, engaged in a game of dominoes. That pastime exceedingly irritated the Anglos in the room, for they kept it up nonstop all day and up to bedtime, slamming the pieces down with a great whack, accompanying the play with continuous shouts and whoops.

  About an hour later another new inmate walked in. He had arrived the same day but on another bus and had spent the night in a holding cell on a different floor. He was short, about five feet six inches tall, and looked to be in his mid-twenties. A Latino of some kind, he was clean-shaven and very handsome in a sultry way. George was struck by two other things about him. First, when he came over to the cot next to George and asked if it was free, he spoke quite formally and politely, as if he were introducing himself at a dinner party. “How do you do?” he said in only slightly accented English. “My name is Carlos Lehder.” He said he lived in New York City but that his real home was in Colombia. Carlos also seemed unusually open and talkative, exuding none of the wariness prisoners instinctively feel when encountering an unfamiliar environment. “Usually you’re a little careful about who you talk to in the beginning,” says George. “You don’t know who’s who or what’s going on. In prison you want to hang back a little, take your time about what you say.”

  Carlos’s friendly manner invited quick intimacy. Right away George found himself explaining why he’d been sent to Danbury, all about the farmers in the hills of Mexico, the California desert, Amherst and the college kids. Carlos responded that he also was in prison for possession of marijuana—nothing, to be sure, on the scale of George’s operation. In addition, he’d been charged with trying to smuggle a stolen automobile over the border from Detroit into Windsor, Ontario, whence he’d planned to ship it back to Colombia.

  The two spent the next hour, until the public-address system called them to line up for supper, talking animatedly about their experiences in the marijuana trade, even forming some vague plans for when they got out. George had arrived at Danbury with a single thought in mind—to return to the smuggling business just as bloody fast as he could get free. In his mind, the smuggling itself had begun to transcend the material rewards of his trade—the money and the drugs and the Porsches and the women. Confronting physical danger, often of a high order, confounding the system, defying the straight world, staring down the terror he felt well up each time he landed in the desert or risked getting caught—these were the accomplishments on which his self-esteem had come to be pegged. Smuggling itself was the drug now, the therapeutic activity that got him through the day. Lacking a load to run or routes or schedules to devise, he felt as down and desperate as an alcoholic separated from his booze. Drug smugglers, George liked to say, shouldn’t be sent to prison, they should be carted off to debriefing centers, to get their brains altered, their obsessions modified. Using prison as a chance to pay his debt to society and going straight thereafter had never entered his mind. He was looking to Danbury to further in some way the criminal enterprise that had become his life. “I wanted very badly to make something out of being there, to bring something back,” he says. “I was looking for an opportunity, and I didn’t want to spend all that time and come away empty-handed.”

  It was then, standing in line early that evening, waiting to get into the cafeteria at Danbury, that Carlos looked up at him. “George,” he said, “do you know anything about cocaine?”

  * * *

  In the middle of the 1970s there was no such thing as the Medellín cocaine cartel. At that time, it would have seemed a farfetched notion that a handful of small-time thieves and hustlers from a city few Americans had ever heard of high in the Andes could create an enterprise that would blossom into the most lucrative, ruthless, and deadly criminal empire in the world, responsible for the murder in Colombia alone of fifty judges, including eleven Supreme Court justices, twelve journalists, including the editor of Bogotá’s El Espectador, the attorney general, the daughter of the country’s president, the head of the national police drug squad, hundreds of police officers, and uncounted thousands of civilians. In the United States in the seventies the “drug war” was a political coinage for the effort to eradicate the use of heroin, whose ravages, while serious enough, confined themselves largely to ghetto neighborhoods of big cities rather than permeating the society. There was no such thing as crack. Where cocaine was concerned, the 1975 Report to the President from the U.S. Domestic Council’s Drug Abuse Task Force rated the substance “low” for the “size of the core problem.” It said further that “as it is currently used [cocaine] does not result in serious social consequences such as crime, hospital emergency room admissions, or death.” The demand for the drug, dormant since its previous heyday back at the turn of the century and in the Roaring Twenties, emanated from a thin, rarefied slice of the population—rock-and-roll stars, the Pop Art crowd, Hollywood luminaries, members of Café Society on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. It dribbled into the country in small quantities, often less than a kilo at a time, inserted into the anal cavity of a “mule” flying into Miami International Airport or secreted in a seaman’s bag aboard a merchant ship bound from Barranquilla, Colombia, to New Orleans or Houston. In all of 1974, the U.S. Customs Service seized only 907 pounds of the drug, a little over 400 kilos.

  No one was predicting that cocaine would begin arriving in quantities so large it would have to be lugged around in duffel bags and moved from one place to another in trucks: 125 tons of it a year by 1985, according to a calculation made by Manhattan district attorney Robert Morgenthau. Or that the money generated by street sales of the drug—all cash-and-carry, no layaway plans, checks, credit cards, charge accounts, or promissory notes—would make of the cocaine business one of the industrial colossuses of the world. Selling at $100 a gram, for instance—one twenty-eighth of an ounce, fifteen to twenty lines’ worth, sufficient to induce a heightened sense of well-being for an evening in a party of four—that 125 tons, cut two, three, four times by successive dealers, would generat
e retail revenue somewhere in the amount of $40 to $50 billion a year. By 1985, close to the peak year for cocaine use in the U.S., these earnings would have ranked the cocaine business as the sixth-largest private enterprise in the Fortune 500. General Motors, Exxon, and IBM grossed more money than the cocaine dealers did, but not AT&T, General Electric, Chevron, Sears, Roebuck, Chrysler, Boeing, R. J. R. Reynolds, Procter & Gamble, Dow Chemical, U.S. Steel, or the E. I. Du Pont de Nemours Company.

  Not quite twenty-five when he entered Danbury in 1974, Carlos Lehder was the son of an engineer named Wilhelm Lehder, who had left his native Germany in the late 1920s, set up a construction business, and married a Colombian named Helen Rivas. The youngest of three boys and a girl born to the Lehder family, Carlos was four years old when his parents divorced—his mother charging she’d been beaten by his father, his father that she’d committed adultery. Henceforth he was raised by his mother, helping her run a small rooming house in the 1950s in Armenia, about 125 miles south of Medellín, that catered in part to countrymen of her former husband. Conversations that little Carlos had with the guests not only helped preserve his fluency in German but also implanted in him an admiration for the Third Reich and the leadership style of Adolf Hitler, which he later in life synthesized into “Never give a sucker an even break.”

  Whatever he retained of the Nazi nostrums, Carlos couldn’t help but have been exposed to certain other lessons by virtue of growing up in a part of the country dominated by Medellín. Settled in the early seventeenth century by Basques from northern Spain and also a number of Sephardic Jews driven from the country by Ferdinand and Isabella, the city sits a mile and a half above sea level in a saddle formation of rock among the Cordillera Central Mountains. The temperature averages 72 degrees Fahrenheit year round, earning Medellín its reputation as “the City of Eternal Spring.” From an incoming airplane the place looks like any other modern metropolis; the same glass-sheathed office buildings and hotels loom up from wide avenues and tree-lined boulevards; suburbs sprawl out into the surrounding pine forests. As Colombia’s center for textile manufacturing, the city reigns as its fashion capital, lending it a certain glitter and style. It is also noted for its male prostitutes, leather boys and drag queens who populate the district around Forty-fifth Street. “If you drop a peso in Medellín, don’t bend over to pick it up,” goes one piece of advice. Economically, many residents secure an abundant living from the chemical and steel industries on the city’s outskirts, the gold mines in the hills, and the coffee plantations and cattle ranches in the outlying regions. Unemployement, however, lingers at about 35 percent. And for most of the paisas (the name applied to residents of the surrounding province of Antioquía), life more likely promises to be desperate and mean.

  The two big shantytowns flanking the road to the airport, Comuna Nororiental and Comuna Noroccidental, are filled with drugs, street crime, and violence. Like the other depressed barrios in the city, they teem with desechables, or “throw-away” kids, left by their parents to scratch out what money they can by running basuco, a smokable form of cocaine, or doing just about any trabajito, or little job, for the drug lords or the death squads or the police. Many end up as sicarios, the notorious hired assassins of Medellín, whose now-famous specialty is the asesino de la moto, or motorcycle killing, wherein the driver sidles up to the victim’s car, the kid on the back empties his machine pistol into the interior of the vehicle, and the two take off into the chaos of Medellín traffic. Indeed, the violence level in Medellín seems almost beyond belief, even by American standards. Much of it is generated by the city’s gang wars, which make the counterpart activity in Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York look like some playground imitation. From 1980 to 1990, the number of violent deaths in Medellín rose more than sevenfold, from 730 a year to 5,300. The last figure is startling when one considers that it’s about twice the number of homicide deaths in New York City, which has six times the population.

  Medellín has always played the loutish, second-city cousin to the more refined Bogotá, a situation of deemed inferiority that has long put a chip on its shoulder. Linguistically, the paisas are thought to speak in a crude accent, jabbering in too fast and unmannerly a fashion. Medellín might have three universities and a botanical garden, but little in the category of high culture. The tastes there are less sophisticated than in the nation’s capital, the family trees not so long, if discernible at all. The sons of Medellín, unlike those in middle-class Bogotá, learn early on that the good things in life are not bestowed by inheritance; they have to be wrenched from the world through ingenuity and pluck. Crime, too, if it comes to that. “If you succeed, send money,” Medellín boys are told when they get kicked out of the house to seek their fortunes. “If you fail, don’t come home.”

  The result is a city with a sizable number of hustlers, smugglers, con men, and wheeler-dealers, ranging from the more pathetic sort, such as the one-legged beggars who flag down pedestrians with grisly photographs depicting close-up views of their bodily insults, to the host of pickpockets, sneak thieves, and sharpies pushing smuggled TV sets, stereos, appliances, cigarettes, liquor, and especially emeralds, the national jewel. There is a proud local legend about the Medellín cartel kingpin, Pablo Escobar, the son of a small-time farmer and a schoolteacher, who by the mid-1980s was sufficiently wealthy to offer to personally pay off Colombia’s national debt of $13 billion if the authorities would stop hounding him. As the story goes, he first made his way in the world by digging up gravestones, grinding off the inscriptions, and selling them cut-rate to people in the market for cheap funerals.

  In the end, what many paisas want, by foul means or fair, is to make it across the Medellín River, the city’s social dividing line, to live in El Poblado. Here the good life is lived, in a neighborhood of august boulevards, fine restaurants, expensive boutiques, and houses built on the Miami model, white stucco with lavish use of marble and glass. To appear in El Poblado, ensconced with your Mercedes and your house, dining out at Kevin’s Restaurant on the heights, looking out over the lights of the city—that was the pinnacle of success. And to do it suddenly, to one day be on the streets and the next checking on the armed guards that patrolled your little palace behind a high fence, that was when the people would start talking about you as one of los magicos—the magicians—for the sleight of hand you’d pulled off.

  Carlos hadn’t become quite the magician by the time he landed in Danbury that spring of 1974, but he’d been working diligently in that general direction. When he was a teenager, his mother had taken him with her to New York City, where she set up a life in the borough of Queens. An older brother, Guillermo, stayed behind to run Autos Lehder, the family-owned car dealership in Medellín. From what Carlos told fellow inmates, it specialized in Chevrolets and other American makes, some of which were acquired and sold legitimately, but not all. Carlos also boasted that the dealership served as cover for one of Medellín’s more lucrative enterprises, which involved smuggling American-made automobiles into the country without paying the 100 percent import tax on foreign cars. Colombian car dealers in general felt abused by the tax, since it meant they had to find customers able and willing to pay twice what a car sold for in the U.S., and then hand over the difference to the government. It was much better to skip the tax by bribing a customs official to phony up the import papers so the duty would appear to have already been settled. It was better still to steal the vehicle outright in America and bribe the Colombian official. That way the car could be sold for twice the price.

  Stealing cars was the reason, or part of the reason, Carlos ended up in Danbury. The first time he got caught was at age twenty-two in Mineola, Long Island, where he was given probation on a knocked-down charge of unauthorized possession of a motor vehicle. The following year he was arrested again for stealing a car and trying to smuggle it into Windsor, Ontario. He beat that charge by skipping out on his bail, but was caught once more a year later in Miami, this time for possession of marijuana. In any
case, he was now in federal prison, and scheduled to stay there for some twenty months, until early in the winter of 1976. This gave him plenty of time to share his ideas with George about embarking on another line of work.

  * * *

  Chewed in its natural form, like a plug of tobacco, the raw leaf of the coca plant is perfectly capable in its own right of imbuing one’s life with a rosier hue, and in South America it’s been quickening the spirits of the native population for at least four thousand years. That was the age of a Peruvian burial mound where archaeologists found a quid of cocaine that some Indian had given a going-over right before he died back in 2100 B.C. The practice was also memorialized in the stone figures from 600 B.C. in Colombia’s Valley of the Statues in San Augustin; the statues’ oddly distended cheeks put one in mind of an old-time baseball player getting his mouth around a large chaw of tobacco. Eliciting a commercial-quality high out of cocaine, however, is much more complicated, nothing like in the marijuana business, where you strip off a bud, roll it in paper, and you’ve got yourself a good smoke. To provide customers with the form of cocaine they can smoke or shoot or snort, the pure cocaine alkaloid has to be chemically extracted from the leaf. This involves putting the plant through an elaborate industrial process requiring logistical skills, technical expertise, buildings and equipment, and large financial backing.

  While the plants will grow virtually anywhere in the moist tropical climate of the Andes—Peru, Ecuador, Chile, Bolivia, Colombia—the really good stuff, with the highest cocaine alkaloid content—Erythroxylon coca, or the Huánuco leaf—likes it not so high up, about one to three thousand feet above sea level. One such area is the heavily forested eastern lowlands of Bolivia around the city of Santa Cruz, a remote region with few access roads and a hundred inches of rainfall a year. In the mid-1970s, during an economic crisis in Bolivia caused by falling demand for tin, the area was designated by the government as cotton country, and banks were encouraged to lend money to landowners so they could cut down forests and put large tracts under cultivation. Unfortunately, at just about the time the first crops ripened for harvest in 1975, cotton prices on the world market also plummeted. The landowners scrambled frantically for some profitable substitute. They found one, and after the farmers held discussions with would-be processors in Medellín and Cali in Colombia, the fields that had so recently teemed with cotton boles began to sprout dark green with the high-octane plants of the Huánuco family.