Blow (3 page)

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.

Viewed as a problem in industrial engineering, the main challenge in cocaine manufacturing concerns transportation. Not only have few roads been put through to the growing regions in Bolivia and Peru, but those that do exist are regularly patrolled by the authorities and don't do you much good if your cargo's illegal. Under these conditions, pack animals and airplanes—llamas, burros, and Cessnas—are relied upon to transport material via mountain trails and jungle landing strips. In leaf form, however, cocaine is a bulky cargo. Depending on the concentration of the cocaine alkaloid in the leaves, it can take anywhere up to five hundred kilos of leaves, about what you can grow on an acre and a half of land, to make a single kilo of cocaine hydrochloride—the white powder that goes up your nose. For this reason, interim laboratories, some of them portable, are set up close to the growing fields to reduce the leaves down to a cocaine paste, which can be shipped more easily.

Brewing up a batch of paste involves a several-stage process wherein the leaves are treated with successive solutions, of lime or potash, kerosene, sulfuric acid, then more lime, to begin separating out the cocaine from the thirteen other alkaloids in the plant. The resulting paste consists of a grayish muck, resembling joint compound used in drywall construction, wherein the bulk of the product has been reduced by about one-hundredfold, 250 kilos of leaves boiling down to about 2.5 kilos of paste. The cocaine alkaloid content has also been jacked up considerably, from 1 to 2 percent in the coca leaves to 40 to 90 percent in the paste. Known in this form as
basuco,
the paste can be marketed as a nice little drug product in itself, much cheaper than refined cocaine, since it hasn't gone through the final works. This is why it appeals to native Colombians, who mix the concentrate with tobacco and smoke it like a joint, attaining a high part of the way toward euphoria.

The leaves have now been reduced enough so that the product can be easily flown from the growing fields to the finishing laboratories in the forests of western Colombia. Here the paste undergoes more baths in solutions of kerosene and sulfuric acid, of potassium permanganate and ammonium hydroxide, successive soakings and dryings, to produce an interim form of cocaine called “base.” Although grayish and gluey like the paste, the base is now 100 percent pure cocaine alkaloid, and very potent. Indeed, the base is so powerful that before the discovery of crack, some people—most notably the comedian Richard Pryor—employed a volatile procedure involving the use of fire and ether to treat the cocaine powder imported into the U.S. so as to transform it back into its prior form, no pun intended, which they could place into a little pipe and smoke, or “freebase.”

But while base can provide a memorable high, from a marketing standpoint it lacks versatility. It won't dissolve in water, so you can't shoot it. And it refuses to be absorbed through the mucous membranes, so it's no good to snort. To create the cocaine of song and legend requires one more operation, the grand finale. This involves dissolving the base in ether—seventeen liters to the kilo is the formula—then combining it with acetone and hydrochloric acid, and once more allowing it to sit out and dry into a white, crystalline substance. The end result is Colombia's
primo
export product, cocaine hydrochloride. When it's pressed into a rocklike form for traveling, the material glows with an ethereal opalescence, like some kind of gem. At the user end, chopped with a razor blade on the face of a mirror and marshaled into inch-long lines of the famous marching powder, the drug emerges as a substance that is light, fragile, and flaky, like new-fallen snow.