I was introduced to him as Pablo Escobar’s pilot. As I was to discover, he was sixty-seven years old, a Colombian by nationality, and had already spent five years in Arthur Road jail. He spoke slowly, softly, with a slight smile that seemed permanently fixed to his face. I was wary, kindness in a place like that is currency, and currency is leverage. Men here didn’t offer their time freely. Everything had a price, even if it wasn’t stated until you were too deep in the conversation to walk away clean.
“You are surprised,” he said, before I had said anything at all. His English was careful, each word set down like a chess piece. “Everyone is surprised. They expect a monster. I am only an old man who flew airplanes.”
I asked how he’d ended up here, six thousand miles from Medellín, in a colonial-era jail that smelled of damp concrete and boiled rice. His smile widened, and for a moment I saw something under it — not menace, but a patience that unsettled me more than menace would have.
“That is a long story,” he said.
I had nothing but time and the particular hunger of an observer who has stumbled onto something whose shape he doesn’t yet understand.
The story, once it came, was straightforward enough. When Escobar died the gang cannibalized itself, and he went underground with what remained of his share — a stockpile of cocaine and a pilot’s instinct for knowing when the sky was the only safe place left. He flew out of Colombia low and quiet, hopped the length of Africa on fuel and nerve, and set down in India only to refuel on his way to Australia, where the prices were the best in the world. Even now he could recite them by city, the way other men recite scripture. The Mumbai police found thirty kilos on him. He mentioned the figure the way you’d mention a disappointing golf score. India had never been the destination only the place he happened to be standing when the story stopped.
On another afternoon I asked if he was married, and watched the question land somewhere complicated behind his eyes.
“Four times,” he said, and smiled, and then, seeing my face, took pity on me and explained.
Around thirty years of his sixty-seven had been spent inside one jail or another, and along that corridor he’d collected a family in each. Colombia first — four years, a wife, two children. Then Bolivia, seven years, a second wife, two more children, and a detail he delivered with something close to tenderness: Bolivian prisons let families come Friday evening to Monday morning, husband and wife together in a one-room condominium built into the complex for exactly that purpose. For seven years, that had been his marriage — three days a week, forty-eight weekends a year, a life measured out in visiting hours.
Brazil was where the smile finally left his face. “The guards do not go into the barracks,” he said. “You are handed to the gang at the door, and after that you belong to them, or you belong to no one, and no one does not survive.” Gunfights broke out without warning, and the unaffiliated learned to read the air for trouble — flattening under bunks, going still, waiting it out. He survived eight years of it on the strength of the Escobar name, and on a third wife, a lawyer who fought for him with a persistence he still seemed faintly astonished by.
Then America, where the current ran on color instead of gangs — white, Black, Latino — three currents you swam in one of or drowned between. Nine years. A fourth wife. And then the road again, flying for what remained of the organization across the Americas, the U.S., Canada, Europe, Russia, until the night he lifted off with thirty kilos and a flight plan that was supposed to end in Sydney.
India, he said, was almost gentle by comparison — no guns, no color lines, no gangs waiting at the door. The dangers here were duller: overcrowding, sanitation, food that in five years had never once tasted of anything he recognized. He missed meat the way other men missed their children, and said so without irony.
It was only then that I registered what should have been obvious from the first afternoon the leanness of him, the density packed into a frame that carried no waste anywhere. “I train every day,” he said, catching me looking. “Two, three hours, without fail. It is the only thing in here that is mine. They can take the cell, the visits, the years. The discipline, no.”
Mid-sentence, almost as an afterthought, he reached up and closed one hand around the iron grille of the window behind him. “Move,” he said pleasantly, and I stepped clear before I’d quite decided to. He took the second bar with his other hand and, unhurried, lifted his body off the ground, no swing, no borrowed momentum, just a slow contraction of muscle drawing him level with the earth, perpendicular to the wall, parallel to the floor he’d left behind. He held it there. Then his legs began to move, a slow walking motion through the air, one knee drawing to his chest and then the other, followed by scissors, open and closed with a control that had nothing frantic in it. I watched, saying nothing, while a man who had buried four marriages across four continents’ worth of prisons hung sideways off a jailhouse window. Then he lowered himself, landed without a sound, and picked the conversation back up exactly where he’d left it, as if I’d just watched him clear his throat.
“I want to go legit,” he said, and there was something boyish in it — a man pitching a business plan across a prison bench, three moves ahead, as if the planning itself were the pleasure. “Help me. First, a wife — an Indian wife. Second, a business. Bolivia grows the finest avocados in the world, always more harvest than the market can take. My wife there ships to me, you handle the India side. Win-win, no?”
I laughed, because it was absurd, and because some part of me wanted it to be true : wanted there to be a version of this story where a man traded thirty kilos of cocaine for a crate of avocados and simply walked out the other side of himself. Arthur Road held its own small United Nations of the trade: three more Colombians, a Brazilian, an Argentinian, all filed under the same charge. Watching him talk avocados with the same unhurried confidence he’d used to quote cocaine prices in Sydney, I understood something about him that no amount of biography had told me: he had not stopped thinking like a trafficker. He was only imagining a legal supply chain instead of an illegal one.
A few days later another inmate mentioned he’d had an interesting talk with the Colombian. The avocados, he said, weren’t only avocados. The shipments were being discussed as cover for something else. India was becoming a market worth cultivating.
I never saw him again. I heard, later and secondhand, that he’d been convicted, fifteen years, and moved from Arthur Road to Nashik, where the sentenced go to serve out lives spent, almost without exception, learning how to survive one institution after another.
I think of him sometimes, hanging sideways from that window grille, walking on air.