The Connect- with Johnny Mitchell - Miami's Cocaine Godfather Reveals How He Became America's BIGGEST Drug Trafficker

Episode Date: January 26, 2025

Dive into the extraordinary story of Jorge Valdez, the original "Cocaine Cowboy" who pioneered the cocaine trade in the United States during the 1970s. From his beginnings as the Medellín Cartel's accountant to running multi-million-dollar operations, Jorge franchised the drug trade and left a mark on history. But his story doesn’t end there. After a life-changing spiritual awakening, Jorge walked away from a dangerous empire, forfeiting millions and serving a decade in federal prison. During that time, he found faith, earned a doctorate, and emerged as a motivational speaker, author, and philanthropist. Join us as Jorge shares untold truths about the Medellín Cartel, his encounters with figures like Griselda Blanco, and how he turned his life around to inspire others. From harrowing betrayals to heartfelt reflections, this is a story of redemption you won’t want to miss. Go Support Jorge! Book: https://a.co/d/ebowmZJ IG: https://www.instagram.com/drjorgeluisvaldes YouTube: @JorgeValdesPhD This Episode Is #Sponsored By The Following: MUD\WTR! Start your new morning ritual & get up to 43% off your @MUDWTR with code Mitchell at https://mudwtr.com/Mitchell BetterHelp! Give online therapy a try at https://betterhelp.com/CONNECT and get on your way to being your best self! Join The Patreon For Bonus Content! https://www.patreon.com/theconnectshow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

They looked at me and they're like, with drug dealers. This is just the front. That group of gentlemen is the group that later on would become known as the Medelligen Drug Cartel. Suddenly, Mani told me, here's this contact. At 5 o'clock in the morning, he's going to deliver you a big old U-Haul, and that average 600 kilos. Jorge Valdez is the original cocaine cowboy.

He was the first Cuban-born drug trafficker to link with the founding members of the Medellin cartel when they first arrived in Miami back in the mid-1970s, when Coke was still six. $60,000 a key wholesale. He began as their accountant and established the first international banking system for cocaine money laundering until eventually he opened his own drug routes and started moving blow by the tons to every major market in the United States. Jorge was to cocaine what Ray Kroc was to McDonald's hamburgers. He didn't invent the product, but he franchised it, made it a brand, and now you can find it on every street corner. He wasn't as much a cowboy as he was a cocaine pioneer. He was living the life of an untouchable drug lord until one day,

he'd had enough. Having had a spiritual awakening, Jorge voluntarily walked away from the business, forfeiting tens of millions of dollars and spending the next decade in federal prison, where he received a doctorate in theological studies. Today, he's a successful lecturer, author, and philanthropist, and lives happily and legally in Florida, surrounded by his children and grandchildren. I just finished his autobiography Coming Clean, the true story of a cocaine drug lord and his unexpected encounter with God. I'm telling you guys, it's fantastic. It is one of the best narco books I've ever read, you can go get it on Amazon or on Jorge's website right now. And for a bonus chat with Jorge, where he exposes the truth about players like Willie Falcone,

Griselda Blanco, and the other alleged Miami cocaine cowboys made famous by the Netflix series, head over to patreon.com slash The Connect Show. You're not going to want to miss that one. He gives the dirt and spills the tea about the truth about that era. And also, do me a favor if you could. Leave us a like and a comment. it really helps the video out. I'm here in our new studio in Austin, Texas, excited for a new year and a new slate of guests with incredible stories like Jorge's.

Ladies and gentlemen, there's nobody in the game like him. Enjoy Jorge Valdez right here on The Connect with Johnny Mitchell. I had a hawker jet, I'm milled out with the cars. I spent my whole life just Playboy life. I get arrested in Panama. I get kidnapped and get tortured. And the prosecutor said to me, I want it all.

Wokes over, opens the door, D-A, FBI, IRS. and customs comes out. It was the first time in my life that everything just crumbled. I don't miss the consequences that the life brought in the emptiness. Do your sons wear suits like you? No. I know. It's a lost art form.

I wore suits since I was 20 years old. Yeah. All my life. I just trying to imagine you being this 20-year-old kid walking around in a suit all day, setting up shell companies. Three different suits a day. I change through that. When the government sees my suit, they seized.

100 bryoning suits you're setting up foreign shell companies overseas bank accounts i mean you would have been could have been a great legit entrepreneur i think most cuban immigrants seem to be great entrepreneurs don't you agree yeah you know i think because we have this adventurous spirit and a big part of it was, you know, seeing our parents lose everything that they have built and start all over again and realizing that, see, the biggest thing about failure as an entrepreneur or what makes a good entrepreneur is being convinced that you can fail and it's not a failure, right? It's a learning experience. I mean, Disney went bankrupt seven times before he created Mickey.

but knowing that you can do it again. See, like I'm convinced today, I'm 69 years old, I'm convinced that if I lose everything, and you drop me butt-naked in China, in five years I'm going to own some Chinese restaurants. I have no doubt. I was walking out of prison in 1994, and I never forget my counselor.

He looked at me and said, why are you going home? You're a legend here. everybody loves you admire you you got free food housing you don't have to worry and who's going to hire you? Nobody's hiring convicted accountants

I looked at him and I said and I actually was joking at this moment I said you know God told me he's going to grant me favor before kings and he's like there's no more kings I said of course there is the president of the United States is a king he said oh it'd be a cold day in hell

before you enter the White House three years later I had White House clearance I addressed the Congress the Senate. I addressed the flag officers at the Pentagon. You know, I'd done the National Day of Prayer. I did an event with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in Washington. I was the keynote speaker. So I'd done a lot of events. And I walked out of that prison, dead broke. Didn't know how I was going to feed my family. For the first three years, while I was doing my Ph.D., I was living literally, I got full

scholarship at Loyola University, and I was given $7,000 a year stipend. per semester. So I was living off of that, and then the Pew Foundation named me the doctoral student in America, and they gave me $7,000. And I was teaching, I was professors assistant in the Greek department at Wheaton College. I told myself Greek in prison, and they gave me a card that I could eat at the library for free. And $25 at the end of the week. And for three years, this was my first.

food. I would go to the cafeteria. They had the best guy. They had named the number one cafeteria in college in America. And I would eat, and then I'd take a baggie. And I would be praying, God, you know that David stole to the temple. I'm not stealing. They were told us away. And that was our dinner for my wife and I. And then on Sunday when the cafeteria was closed, I used the $25 to buy me a Giordano's pizza with the leader of Diet Coke. Our dates, for those three years, for my wife and I, our dates was We go to Bonzo Noble on Friday nights, and we take our own coffee because we couldn't afford

to buy a cup of coffee. And I had one of the students that I would tutor in the Greek department. She worked at the movie theater, and like every couple weeks, she let my wife and I go and go and go to the movie for free. And this is coming from a guy that owned planes, helicopters, million-dollar horses,

just a generation before that. I mean, literally five years before that. Five years before that, when I was arrested in Mobile, Alabama, which I'd never been in my entire life in 1990, I walked into the U.S. Attorney's Office. Jeff Sessions was the U.S. attorney at that time. And my attorney said to me, we can beat this case. There's only one witness against you made up a case.

The guy was making it up. He said he took this friend of mine, Dickie Land, who had brought in a lot of loads with me. And he said, yeah, Dickie Lane came to my, I flew him to Miami. George Valdez picked him up. Then 8 o'clock at night, Dickie Link comes back without George Valdez

and a suitcase with $3 million and said, look, George just paid me $3 million. Well, everyone knows that's bullshit. That doesn't happen like that, right? But that guy, that was going to be the witness, that night died in an airplane crash. While he was muggling, while he was a witness for the government,

he was muggling cocaine in D.A. airplanes. Wow. So, my doctor said, no case, but, you know, I just become a Christian three months ago. I've been an atheist all my life. And I had a man witness to me for three years, every day. And I had to turn my life around.

You know, the thing with a lot people, they come out of prison, and they said, like, oh, I'm sorry, I'm never going to do it again. No, really, they're sorry they got caught, right? Because I lived with thousands of them. If they had a chance to go back to their life, they would. Well, I walked away from that life, making a million

a month for doing nothing. Wow. Nothing. And I walked away because I had to save my family. That wasn't who I grew up to be. That wasn't the kid that the parents sacrificed so much working in factories to put through school, to give an education, to give unbelievable morals and integrity. So when all that came to clash, and it was coming to clash for a long time, I actually believed that my mother's prayer.

You know, I think that the prayers of a mother are the most powerful thing in the world. You know, kept working inside me. I was on turmoil. I mean, I wrote a blog about a few years ago. I said, I'm 21 years old. I made between a million to $3 million a month. I got planes, yachts, million dollars a car, mansions, and I go to bed with the most beautiful woman in America every day.

And I want to die. I want to die. So this epic starts in 1966. You're 10 years old. You come from a middle class Cuban family. Family, right. Yeah, very wealthy family. During the Bautista era, where there were,

was still wealth to be made in Cuba. Your father owned furniture manufacturing facility. Worked very hard, but you come from good stock. And everybody's educated and smart as a whip. I mean, my mother was one of four women to graduate for University of Havana. Wow. You know?

Back in that day. Back in those days. That was unheard of. Well, the thing about back in those days, if a woman didn't get married at 16, 17, she was considered Lucy Nisi and saying, my mother didn't get married to she was 30. Wow.

Now, my mother had an apartment of Fifth Avenue. She dated a guy that played for the New York Yankees. So my mom was very educated, very religious, very religious. But also breaking social norms. Oh, yeah. Which is it, and that is fascinating because her son is kind of a chip off the block in many ways, as we'll see. Do you think, so 66 Castro has been in power now for seven years. do you, and they're becoming

communists, this is after the Bay of Pigs, they've turned to the Soviets, and they've announced, hey, we're a collectivist society. Do you think they would have seized your father's businesses? Oh, yeah, I know that about it. My, I had two godfather. My Colombian godfather, who I called my godfather, and my godfather who baptized me.

Oscar Perez, who baptized me, was the wealthiest family in Cuba. His father came in the 1800s from Spain, built a $10 million mansion in Havana. He founded the Havana Country Club, the Yacht Club, the pony club, very wealthy family. He's the one. My dad was very poor. He worked at a cafeteria.

And Oscar would have breakfast and lunch there every day. Eventually, Oscar said to my dad, after so many years, listen, my dad said, if I don't get a job, he's going to disown me. Let's start a company. You have any idea? My father said, yeah, let's start lumber company. And they became very wealthy. Well, my godfather, Oscar was very wealthy. My dad became very wealthy.

And that's the type of, you know, very entrepreneur, you know. My dad left school when he was six, but by that time that my brother and I were 10 years old, my dad had made us read every major autobiography of every great world history. Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Napoleon, Jose Foucher. I guarantee you, out of the millions of people going to watch this podcast, I wonder how many know who Jose Foucher ever was. It was one of the biggest figure, you know, in the Napoleonic era. He's the guy after who Macabellic term comes about.

So he had made us read all that. And my dad read ferociously, you know. So he saw the writings on the wall, though. And interestingly enough, just like how you turned in all your drug money, you know, he kind of forfeited everything that he had to the communists. and you guys hopped on a plane to Miami with millions of other Cubans. Back then in the 60s Cuba,

they were still allowing people to leave, right? Yeah, Fidel made a deal. We were like the last of what they called the freedom flights. He made a deal that if you had a relative in the United States and this was after the Bay of Pigs, they could claim you. And so my dad didn't want to come. That's the funny thing. My dad didn't want to go.

He didn't think the communists was going to ever take over his companies and do all that. My mom did because my mom was very anti-communist. You know, we were school, and in school, Fidel, very smart. He started by the equivalent of the Bush Cows, what we call the pioneers. So the pioneers were always, you know, telling about communism and, you know, which ideally, if you read calls Mark, that's capital and the Communist Manifesto. In paper, they're great. I mean, everybody wants to be a comment, right?

It just doesn't work that way. Right. But we come home and tell my mom all this great communist stuff and that God doesn't exist and that's all BS. And my mom is like, that's full of shit. You know, God is everything. And so she was very anti-comical. So she's like, I'm not raising my kids in a communist country.

And she was willing to leave it all. And my mom had been rich since little birth. Yeah. Because her father was a big figure in the War of Independence from Spain. Wow. So that's incredible. Well, yeah, communism's really antithetical to the Latino culture, which is very religious and, you know, very pious and very, you know,

everything that Karl Marx was not. Right, exactly. So you're here in Miami and you struggle, yeah, for a good five, seven years in your adolescence and early high school, your family is poor and they're really living the immigrant story, which is poverty. Oh, man, listen, we went through, And that's, that's, so the funny thing at the airport, my mother gets left behind. And my father did not want to come.

My father, my mother grabbed my hand. I was 10. My brother, nine and my sister five. And she said, take him to America. I'll see you one day. Now, mind you, my father, when I became my best friend very close in Cuba, I hardly spoke to my father. I had to ask for an appointment to speak to my father. That's that type of generation.

So we became close in Miami. When my dad saw me getting on the airplane with my brother and sister, then he came. But 11 of us went to live in a one-bedroom apartment in Little Havana, riding down a one time we're going to piss because everyone had to go to school at work. That day, I became an atheist. That day I said to myself, if we're coming to America, my mom said we're coming to America to be with God,

and this is God. We're living a very comfortable life in Cuba now. We have nothing. and literally going hungry, we would have two raw eggs in the morning with this Vietnam powder milk that never makes, I can't even drink milk till today I threw up.

And we wouldn't have nothing until dinner time. At dinner time, we would have rice, beans, and a vegetable. That's it. If you were living in America, how most Cubans live in Cuba. Oh, my God. I remember a friend of mine, show you how my dad was.

I remember a friend of mine saying, seeing him bringing a sandwich. hand sandwich to school. And I thought, Michael, at that time, that that was a Wadio Prime rib eye. That sandwich, man, I wanted that sandwich so bad, you know? And finally I had the guns to ask him, like, hey, where do you get the money for your parents?

How do you get money? Because we have none. We don't have no lunch. He said, oh, the government gives you food stamps. I'm like, what is that? He said, well, you take the stamps? the grocery store and they give you grocery. Man, I thought I discovered America.

I couldn't wait to see my dad when he got home from work. Dad, we got free food. Now, my dad, who came from being very wealthy, was working at Jay Byron's, like J.C. Penny's, as a janitor. $0.85 cents an hour. I said, Dad, you know how I tell you that my friend has a sandwich? And my dad says, he's not, yes. He said that his family gets food stamps.

I said, Dad, do you know about food stamps? He goes, yes. I said, Dad, why don't we get food stamps? It's like, because, son, that's for poor people. Spring weekends are all about family, sunshine, and evenings on the patio. Before everyone arrives, I stop by my local total wine and more to grab a great bottle to share. With such a wide selection and the lowest prices, it's easy to find something amazing for everyone to enjoy. If you're not sure what to pick, their friends.

family guides can help. Find what you love and love what you find only at Total Wine and More. Shop total wine and more in store or online. Spirits not sold in Virginia and North Carolina. Drink responsibly. Be 21. And I'm like, holy shit, we're not even poor yet. We got to work a way out of poverty. He's got to be kidding me. I said, I said, dad, we're not poor? He said, no, son. We just don't have. have money. You get up early in the morning and help feed your family. I was 10. Skin as a rail. And I've been working since 5.30 in the morning all my life. That's the type of principle my dad gave us. You know, you can make it. Work hard. If someone's working 10 hours, work 14, work 16.

Like I told my kids, all my kids are very successful. I've always told us little, do what others won't and you'll get to do what others can't you know and that is a gift what he gave you the we're not we're not poor we're just broke right now this gift however i would argue that you were traumatized by that poverty and i think it contributed to the choices that you would make a little later on well you know i sold to what i believe to be the american dream so two days in america my cousin drives up with the most beautiful car I had ever seen. It was an orange, candy apple red, white interior, GTO. And I looked at that car, and I said to myself, 10 years old,

the day I get that card, I made it in America. Wow. And, you know, for the next two, three years, I realized one thing. You know, back then, a lot of humans can't even go to the bathroom that the white people went to a bathroom in Miami. Right. The racism was horrific. I don't think much has changed.

But anyway, the interesting thing was that I was so focused that I was going to make it because that was the American dream that we kept seeing, right? If you have this car, you need another car, you have this house. If you got this woman, you need another one. You got a half, half, half to be happy. That's why when I wrote that article, I want to die is because I reached the Senate or what any human being can reach. And I realized it's not there. That ain't the American dream.

the American dream of the World War II generation, the greatest generation, who did not believe in the war but felt that going to war was an honor, had marriage problem, but divorce was not an option. They wanted, you know, we're honest, they work hard, they saved, had a little house, they retired, they raised their kids, and all that matter was truth, honor, and integrity. But the boomers, in contrast, was driven by materialism. And that's what's so interesting about your story, the duality of going from this highly educated, spiritual, religious environment in Cuba to now the most materialistic place on Earth, Miami. And so you have competing values, you know, what you see in the home and what you learn from your parents and your outside influences.

and that got the better of you. And I think we can all kind of understand that, even though you made your choices and they were wrong in hindsight, but I certainly have empathy for what happened to you. And it is because I was driven. See, I knew one thing. I knew it would never be accepted. I would always be an immigrant.

I knew that. Even my children were born here. But I knew one thing. I was going to make them respect me. That's right. That's right. And that's what drove me. that's what drove me to work at the age of 17 at the Federal Reserve Bank,

full time and go to University of Miami full time, had no life, no life for four years. Okay, so let's talk about this. So you're 17. Things are turning around for your family. They're getting a little better. Your dad owns a little business. And you are in high school still when you're taking college courses

and you get a job working at the Federal Reserve Bank. Can you tell us what that is? Because when most people hear Federal Reserve Bank, we think about the Central Bank in Washington, What is the Federal Reserve Bank of Miami? What is that? So when we came from New Jersey, I had enough credits to finish high school in three years. But Freud requires English for four years. So while I was taking my English class to finish my high school, I was already attending at that time in Miami date and then transferred to the University of Miami.

So my first job was a gentleman that was the first supervisor of my father had when we came from Cuba. Now he was a lieutenant at the Federal Reserve Bank. The Federal Reserve Bank is the banking machine of the United States, the central bank of the United States. So basically every bank has to have deposits with the Federal Reserve Bank, and that's how they control. Monetary policy, right? Yeah.

And we see a lot, maybe people know more about it now because of all the deal with Jerome Powell and interest rates being high. So they literally control the economy by the tools they have to raise, you know, interest rates and to have, you know, the money that every bank has to keep X amount of money in deposit with the Federal Reserve Bank, right? So they control that deposit rate and that's how they control the economy. And this guy's a genius. He's done an unbelievable job.

I just didn't know there were different branches of it. Yeah. So it's all over the United States. So the main office is in Washington, D.C. Then we are one in Miami. I believe we had another one in Jacksonville. Then in New Orleans and New York. and, you know, different cities.

And that's what you call Federal Reserve Bank presidents. Right. And he is the chairman. He is the Fed Chair. He's the chairman of all those presidents. Okay. So I was, the youngest in probably 17, I started in Czech election. And then I went on to the accounting department.

And they were paying for me. I was on full scholarship at the University of Miami. And the Federal Reserve Bank was paying for my tuition also. So I was making money every semester. Right. And I had a tremendous career. I knew, I was convinced I could become Fed president one day. Yeah.

There was no doubt about it. I mean, I was just going right through the ranks like nothing. And that was the plan. And that was the plan for me. I was going to work really, really hard, save money to go. Because back then there was no student loans, right? So that's another thing. So I was going to save me no money to go to law school.

I'm going to graduate from law school by the age of 23. And by 30, I'm going to be a millionaire. And that was my focus. I didn't go to parties. I didn't drink alcohol I never smoked a cigarette in my life I never smoked marijuana in my life didn't do drugs, didn't do nothing

I was actually You never even been with a woman And I had never even had sex I had to join a drug hotel to be able to have sex So, but the interesting thing is that I was a nerd I had braces

I mean when I went to with the Tallahassee when the first person I went to they jammed my braces off I mean if you look in the internet I mean in the dictionary back then a picture of a nerd, that was me. You look at it. Yeah, glasses.

All my friends are like, oh, man, let's go party. You're wasting your life? I'm like, no, I'm not. I'm very focused on what I am. I'm not wasting my life. I'm doing something. Same as when I went back to prison. Inmate said, hey, sleep 12 hours. You sleep half of your sentence. I'm like, that's stupid.

I sleep 12 hours. I'll sleep half of my life away. That's right. So I decided just going to become better and earn another bachelor's in and all like that. So I was very, very focused on success. And because at the same time, you know, we all have an innate need to be respected, right? We see it in the inner city with the kids and the gangs and all that, you know.

It's everybody wants to belong. Everybody wants to be part of a family. Everybody wants to be important, you know. And I knew that the only way I would be somebody in America wasn't because I had degrees. I was how much money I had. That's right. So your things are shaping up to all come true. You start basically, I believe, a side business, an accounting service already as you're working defense. I was doing it. Well, we were going for the first or bank. I was doing it out of the basement. Not the basement. My bedroom at that time was a one car garage divided in half.

My brother had one half. I had the other half. And we had a wall in between because my brother a mess. I adore my brother's my best friend in the whole world. And then I had, and my sister, who was 13, would do the accounting for me. Yeah, she was working for you. Yeah. And I had, I go visit on the weekends. So you're doing the clients. You're doing the accounting for other Hispanic businesses. A little business, right. Little grocery stores in Miami. Yeah. And this, this is where all fate starts to come together. Take it over from here. How did this lead to you first meeting, you know, Colombians that were washing money. My first accounting professor, the University of Miami, a guy named Jackson A.

He came to me when I was graduating and he's like, hey, leave the bank. Don't work for me. He was a partner of Price and Waterhouse in Michigan, Detroit, I believe. And they have moved and opened an office in Miami. And he said, look, if you do my Spanish, because he and his partner did not speak Spanish. If you do my Spanish clients, I'll give you an office. You can have your secretary, copy machine, all the stuff. I only dream that could have one day, right?

Copy machine? Yeah. Wow. Everything, you know. And all I have to do is Spanish clients. And I have my own business, which is what, you know, I've always dreamed of. You know, my father was adamant against it. My father is like, no, you got a great job at the tremendous future.

My mother is, son, you're never going to be anybody by working for somebody. Go for it. And if you fail, you can start again. You can get a job anywhere the way that you have been prepared. So listen to that. So your mother is the one who told you to leave the Fed, the secure thing where you would have been president and making a cool seven figures.

She's the one that told you to go into business for yourself that eventually led to you being a drug lord. Totally against the irony. The irony. And I never even thought about it. I never even thought about that, which is so ironic. Do you think she ever blamed herself? No, no, I don't think she ever.

Put that together? She was, you know, the greatest thing about my mom was, and I've done this with my kids, and I thought this two parents, there's tremendous power in words. Whatever I told my mother I wanted to do, she would look at me and said, son, you're going to be the best. Mom, I want to be a carpenter like my father. Now imagine, we lived in a mansion in Cuba.

We have, my father was selling furniture, a bedroom room set, living room sets at that time that were $10,000, $20,000 in the 60s. My mom said, you want to be a carpeter? No problem. She moved literally all the furniture out of the living room and let me set up a shop for about two weeks. You know, because I want to be a carpenter like my dad. I wanted to make beds.

I wanted to make, you know, just an eight-year-old, nine-year-old kid. And baseball player, you're going to be the best baseball player, whatever. And I always, and I grew up believing that. Yeah. And no matter what I did, I was going to be the best. Yeah.

I had no doubt. And it's very important for parents because I've seen the opposite. I've seen parents tell their kids they're a piece of shit. They're nothing. They're worthless. And they grew up believing that, no matter how brilliant they are. I know. They become podcasters.

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What do you want to implement that's going to improve your life? It all starts with your mental health. I know that for a fact. It was very reluctant to go into therapy for all. obvious reasons. I don't like confessing. You guys know my past. I don't like telling an authority figure my secrets. But guess what? That is what a therapist is there for. Okay. And the burden of finding therapy of actually getting a recommendation, getting in your car, driving to a therapist office, that's all very daunting. Well, thank God for BetterHelp. BetterHelp is fully online,

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I think it's in like a retail space in Miami, right? I haven't, no, I had an office at the accounting offices of, of Jackson Aie and his partner. And then the first client, they asked me to do for them, was a little grocery store in Miami, in a little strip mall, not where they have strippers. That's how they call the Miami strip malls. And it was just a little grocery store.

and I walked in there I was supposed to They were going to pay me $1,000 a month For going every Monday And I thought like wow I hit a jacket I had like back then I think minimum wage was like $1.80 And I was making almost $4 at the Federer So I was like rich

According to people And I'm driving in Chevrolet Vega With a big hole on the side The only air condition was $2.80 Lower the windows and hit 80 So I walked in there in the first, but I was so freaking innocent, man. I walked in there in the first day was like, I don't know, a couple hundred thousand dollars. We got hundreds of my thousand dollars.

And I'm like, okay. So I count all the money. I count all the receipts. I opened up, let's just did all that for him. And went to Barnett Bank and deposited the money. Next Monday, I come in in another astronomical 75,000, whatever. All together, I think it was over 300,000, three weeks. Finally, the third week.

I had to ask him. I'm like, look, there's no way. I just deposited $300,000 this month, but I've also only written checks for about $2,000 worth of merchandise. You know, I said in America, you buy a can of Campbell soups for a dollar, you sell it for $3, and you make $2 profit. Here we're making hundreds of thousands of dollars of profit. We're not selling any Campbell soups.

And, I mean, just straight out. They looked at me and they're like, we're drug dealers. And these are Colombians? Yeah, Columbia. This is just the front. And I'm like, and then they asked me, do you know how to open foreign bank accounts? So I knew from the Federal Reserve Bank how you open foreign bank accounts and where, because of the different audits that had happened where people had, at that time, came in Ireland.

Later on, I started with Tortola. you know, you hear all this people talk about all this stuff that they've done in the past. And, you know, I like to see the receipts, you know. I like to see the proof. But they asked me if I couldn't. I say, yeah, and open three and Grand Cayman. And I dad called me 750. I told him 10,000.

They said, we won three. And then I'm like, that was like my big pay day. Wow. $30,000. And I'm like, wow. Just to open these accounts. Open those accounts. So you started off, you kind of reverse engineered it.

You started, your drug career began with money laundering. Yeah. And at that time, there was no money laundering. Remember? There was no money laundering until the 80s. Right. They didn't even call money laundering. No, there was no such thing.

And, I mean, I could walk into a bank. The way that you see the movie Scarface with Tony Montel walking in with those paper bags, that's how we did. After three o'clock, I'd give the bank president $1,000, $1,000. He saw the freaking moon. And he deposited a couple hundred to $300,000, whatever it was. Steve March in there with burlap or sacks filled with duffel bags.

Hundreds of thousands of dollars. And he'd have one cashier after four o'clock. And then he'd count all the money. And then that's how it was. And it was no, because at that time there was no stigma about cocaine. And amongst us, nobody used, right? So I walked in there and I started doing that. But these people were literally like what you would consider the local office for the big guys that went on to become a group name of the main drug cartel.

Okay. So this is 1974, 75. 1976. Okay. So 76 is when you're 20. That's actually when you joined the cartel when you started with them. So let's paint this era because there's a lot of misconceptions about the. Medellin cartel about the evolution of cocaine trafficking from Medellin to Miami.

Who were the first people? The OGs, the originators of cocaine trafficking in Miami. In Miami, if we were to classify in large quantities, right? What I consider large quantity? 600 kilos. That's enormous. There was, let me retract and I'll get to that. So they asked me that the two husband and wife, who were running the little grocery store,

to meet their partner, their bosses. And that's where I met Manny Garces. I met Manny Garces. I met Jorge Doniz. I met two other gentlemen, right? Ulyarando and Carlos Botero. Nobody heard about those people back then. And I was the fifth.

They asked me, they wanted to start a shipping company because they wanted to start importing bananas from Columbia. If I was willing to open this company, and I did, I was the president. We started a banana company called UniPlat, you know, Union of Platanados, and we went to California to buy

this cargo ship landing craft, what it was, that you can just come up to shore. You know, the military used to use it to come up to shore and offload their military equipment, right? Well, for them it was great because they could come, it had real law draft, and this area of Columbia called Turbo, they can go in there and load up the map.

I had no freaking clue that these people had no interest in selling bananas, that all they wanted to do was sell bringing in cocaine. Now, you're a sharp guy, though. You knew that in your early money laundering days, that you were opening up bank accounts for Colombian drug dealers, you must have suspected surely that these four gentlemen were involved in that. I knew that that group, that group of gentlemen, and then when they enlisted me at the L-76, that five is the group that later on would become known as part of the Medelline Drug Hotel.

Right. There was no Medellin Drug Hotel to the 80s. You know, you see Griselda, you see, I last up, if you really want to see the most accurate depiction I have that I, myself can tell you, I was there when it all began was Billy Corbyn's Cocaine Cowboy Kings of Miami. They probably know more about that era than anybody else because they lived there. Their young filmmakers, they lived that era. Billy's best friend going to a baseball game, his father was one of the, you know, one of the most notorious attorneys in Miami. They know that.

The funny thing is that now everybody's a kingpin, right? Everybody started the cooking traffic. Everybody's a genius. Everybody, you know, and it's all BS. How do I tell people? I never told people how much cocaine I ever brought in. That's stupid. Why is there out there people saying that I brought in 85% of all the cocaine that came into America?

Because the United States government said that. I didn't say it. I would never say that. Like people that I see get out there and said, oh, I didn't bring in 70 tons. I brought in 700 tons. I said, I think you're stupid for saying that. I mean, why would you even say that? I wouldn't even say to myself.

The interesting thing about it is that it started in a very different way. It started by four people that were not what you consider typical narcos or anything like that. No, these are gangsters. Businessmen. Everyone was a businessman. And they're all, all these four gentlemen, Manny is the most significant. Mani is their boss. I want people to remember the name Mani because he is a central figure in your life and your trafficking career.

Manny is the boss, but these guys, all from Medellín, Colombia, did they set out to Miami to open up the cocaine markets, or were they just there as immigrants? No, no, no. They have businesses in Miami. There was a big case in 78, video canary. You see it on cocaine cowboys, right? Where they arrested just about anyone that was dealing cocaine in Miami, right?

Right towards the old 78, I believe. They never mentioned my name. in that case at all. Now, go to 1979, three months later, four months later, I get arrested in Panama, I get kidnapped, and get torture, et cetera, et cetera, we'll go into that. I brought to the United States, and the government, no one in that case, no one in those cases got over $50,000 bail, maybe $100,000

out of all of them, the government asked for $7 million bail for me. I'm 23 years old. There's not, all those people had been recorded. There was a guy in an apartment in, not in Brickle in Coconut Grove, and he recorded everybody that came into his office. So there was recordings of everyone that got arrested. The government never, ever had a picture on me, never had a recording on me.

So they're asking for $7 million. They finally leave it at $3 million. 23-year-old kid, worked for the Federal Bank, college grad, never had a traffic ticket in my life, why? Why would I get such a huge bail when Reseda never had that bail? Right. None of those people ever had that bail?

Nobody, why? Maybe perhaps the government knew more than what people tell. I think they did. And I don't want to. And I hate to give this up because it's in your book, but it turns out that your lawyer was feeding the government information.

And I didn't even find out for us. Seven years. And I mean, this guy, so give you an idea. Melchazet was his name, right? Very notorious. It was probably the most famous drug lawyer in Miami in the 70s, right? And very flashy. He and I were like brothers.

He came to my office one day to pick me up for lunch. We went out to lunch. I come back. And there was one of the hitmen that worked for some of my associates. But I had known him from Columbia. right? He was waiting in my office and he was like, don't ever get in a car with anybody again. His name was Victor. I said, why? I said, I had a bomb

underneath the car because Mel has screwed his boss's brother told him to come to the United States that everything was fine, that he arranged everything and when the guy came, he got arrested and went to prison. So I changed his life and he knows because I'm the one that called the guy that put the head and I asked him, look, as a person of favor to me, take it off and how much, and I paid it for him. And I told Mel, all of this, I never knew a lot of different things. Number one, why didn't Mel not represent me when I was paying him thousands of dollars prior?

Why did Mel stay away from me? Why when my brother was going to take the money to Panama to get me out? Why did Mel tell my brother to go with somebody else? because you're going to get arrested. How do you know that? All right? And at that meeting, it was Willie Falcone and Salm McClura

and another gentleman, Randy Solza. And the first person, my brother told me, the first person to jump up and said, I'll go with him was Salm McCluta. Everybody else? Yeah, you should have seen the writings on the wall with your lawyer. You know, this is the kind of...

But imagine he and I were like brothers. Yeah. I would have never believed in a million years that this guy would ever rat me out. So let's get back really quick to these, the four, who really are the four godfathers of cocaine in the United States. It's Manny and his associates. Right. They were Colombian immigrants who had legitimate businesses and then they realized that this thing, cocaine was about to be a huge business. And they got into it, it sounds like.

Yeah, Manny started in the marijuana. Man, he started way back smuggling. He's been smuggling all his life. Right. Very religious, daily mass. Right. Yeah, these aren't gangsters. No, they're not gangsters, man.

These are very, like, upscale, old school mafioso. They really are gentlemen. Yeah. And so they saw that marijuana was very bulky to handle. You had a lot of people, so a lot of people were getting arrested in Miami at that time. And you could make some. much more with cocaine. Really, they stumbled into it with cocaine because nobody ever thought that there was going to

become this cocaine craze in 1977, 77 in Miami. Right. That was unbelievable, you know? Yeah. And really, it wasn't even in Miami because people talk about like all that. The cocaine crazy started in California because out of the 600 kilos that I received every week or every month, one day or the month. I never say one day of the month because someone else is claiming he received them.

And I want to ask him, what did he receive? But anyway, those kilos that came in and used to come in this big caterpillar engines, right? Inside a drum, inside those engines, I would send three-fourths of it to California. Right. Because California was paying me $70,000. Right. Miami was $45,000 wholesale. So, because in California, Coke was so expensive in these early, early days that California, you know, it was the craze of money.

amongst the elite movie stars. The demand was unbelievable. They're sucking it all up. So that was the primary market at the very beginning. The biggest market, I would say 70% of the cocaine that came into America

went to California. Wow. Now, who are the, if Manny and Crew are the biggest, are the bosses in the United States, who is there connect in Colombia? Is it anybody and everybody?

Or who is the original family that was supplying the United States? So in Colombia, so this were the original families from Colombia that control the cocaine trade that sold the United States. Until 1980, Colombia did not produce any cocaine. Colombia, all the cocaine, all the pays came from Bolivia and Peru. Colombia, what they would do is crystallize it and make it into cocaine. So many and them would have people go to Bolivia and to Peru

and bring it over, crystallize it in Colombia, and then they would ship it to the United States. Oh, so they were literally vertically integrated. Yeah, vertically. Because later on... There was not a single family that could... If you want to call a single family control or want to control a major amount of cocaine,

I would say it was Roberto Suarez in Bolivia. Tell us about him. So Roberto Suarez is the guy that you saw in Scarface that comes and kills Tony Monta. That's Sosa. Right. So Roberto Suarez, He was our partner.

When I went to do a deal that I got busted in Panama in Bolivia was with Roberto Suarez. And he was the king of cocaine. He was the guy that controlled all the fields and all the cocaine fields and the cocoa leaves. You know, the cocoa leaves back then were used a lot by the farmers. They would chew it so that they, yeah, give him energy to work and all that. So he was the first to really be able to create, he over through four governments. unbelievable.

And the entire Bolivian government back then was a narco state. Oh yeah, he controlled it. The military was all controlling it. The general that that was the intermediary between him and us,

it was a general named Koka. That was his last day. Unbelievable. General Koka. Was he also crystallizing it or did that all happen? That all happened in Columbia. Why do you think it was the Colombians

that were the first to take the business international, to take it, turn it into crystal, and blow it up as a final end product, as cocaine, cocaine, coccania. You know, why didn't the Bolivians do it or the Peruvians? What do you think of it is about that? I would imagine later on because the interesting thing is that in 1979, or 1980, the end of 79, because I went back to prison. I got arrested in 79. I was in prison for six months, and I finally got bailed for three months, and then I got convicted

in February of 80. I went back to prison. At that time is when the cocaine totally took. change from Columbia and all that. Prior to that era, it's a good question. And honestly, I have no clue why Bolivians didn't do that.

My theory is balls. Colombians got balls. You know, I love Colombia. My wife is Colombian. So my children, I have Colombian. And Mani, who is my father, literally raised me. I was just a kid. But man,

they are the most innate gangsters. I mean, They control the kind of fit trade. Right. You know, everything that had to do with anything. They were a dust. They're criminals. They're very innate.

They got very ingenious. Entrepreneurals skills. That's right. Unfortunately, it's on time for the forbidden product. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So, Mani's crew is basically through the, the Bolivians, they're basically had their

own labs in Colombia that are supplying, sending the end product to Miami. Yeah. And there was all kinds of people in Colombia, setting up small labs and crystallizing and many will buy from them, right? So we never, until I got arrested, to 1980, we never had a shipment that came in that was like, oh, from one place. Right. It was all kinds of different stuff. Sure, sure. And I think that's important for people to know is like this, the government and history makes it seems like this was one giant organization. It was all, even back then, very bifurcated and independent. There was a ton of different groups getting in on the action.

So now you at 20 years old are now brought in by Manny as an associate. First of all, as the accountant and president of the shipping company. That's right. And the banana company. It wasn't until the end when I was about. towards the end of 76, beginning of 77, that I get put in charge of everything. Now, why did it become that? Why didn't they just keep you as the account?

Why do they actually bring you in? The interesting thing is that Mani kept saying, you know, I was happy with just doing that because I was making more money than I ever thought I would ever make. You know, and I thought I literally, the banana in the shipping company could legitimately become a multi-million dollar company. Right. You know, I could, look, my wife is very, very, creative, right? I can create nothing. I can paint a straight line. But I can see a business.

It's real simple. I never invented anything. I became a 21, a multimillionaire cocaine, and then I got a person that broke, they didn't have nothing, and in 10 years I built a multimillion dollar company, they didn't invent nothing. You know, I got certain principles that I use and I have learned from my father and started through our life, and I have a vision for business. I can see a business and say, yeah, that's going to work or not work. And, you know, I asked Manny, and in my interview for my documentary coming out next year, Shadow the Wall. What did you see in me?

Why? Because he can't put in this pressure. I want you to handle everything for me. I want you to handle everything for me. And here's the word. He said, look, I saw a young kid that was very honest, very educated, very disciplined, and I thought he could become a right-hand man. Wow.

And that's exactly what happened. And that's what he did. And so you, you began. And you also had made contacts with cocaine customers in California. You were the first one out of these Colombian guys to do that. And that's how I even get started with Manny. Yeah, exactly. I made that job.

Yeah. You had an account. You had. I was out there overseeing the, the refrigeration of the boat. And I met the guy doing the refrigeration for me. It was about my age. I was 21 years old and a really good guy. and I was living in Stockton, California for eight months.

And he kept saying, hey, I know this is a cocaine boat. And I'm like, no, it's not. And, you know, since I played baseball a lot, I played with his softball team, I would go to barbecues at his house, became very very close friend. And he kept harassing me. You know, I know it is, I know it is. Finally, I asked, I got at the grocery store, right?

I asked them, I said, hey, how much is cocaine? I mean, how much does cocaine sell for? and he's like, well, in Columbia, it cost at that time 23. 2300? 23,000? 23,000 a key in Colombia? In 977. Wow.

Then it went down to 21, 18. And then 45,000 in Miami, right? Yeah, 45,000 in Miami. So it's 21, and then it was 5,000. Usually the cost to transport it. So, you know, figure at that time, 28, and it was selling for 45,000. So I'm going to get rid of this guy. I'm just going to get rid of Mel.

His name was Mel, once and for all. And he finally comes up and when he hits me again, hey, come on, man. I know this is going to be a cocaine boat. I said, you're right, man. We're cocaine dealer. Now, we're close enough. We've known each other enough for months.

And yeah, we are. And I said, but we only handle the best. I have no clue. I have never seen cocaine. I don't know. I couldn't tell the difference between sugar, cotton, and cocaine. and he said, well, can you sell me? So I'll say, how many you want?

He says, I start out with 10 or 30. What's the price? I said, 70,000. I just threw a price to get the guy to leave me alone. To just fucking stop bugging me, you know? I'm happy doing what I'm doing. And he comes back and he says, I'll take 10 and I'll take 30 the next time. And I went back and told, at that time, I didn't even have the guys to tell many.

I told Luis, the guy running the grocery store. I said, hey, you want to do this? This guy says, he wants to do it. And he's like, oh, hell yeah. I'll take him out there myself. And that's how we got started. That's how I got started in that. Does it occur to you that not only did you open up a whole new market for cocaine in the United States?

You literally set the market price for cocaine. You just made up a number. In California, I said. And that was the price. Listen, I can, I don't like to name names, especially of innocent people because even though they're dead, they got family and kids. But I have sat with the most famous movie stars, most famous models, most famous artists in California, and seeing them pay $70,000 to all-distributed there for two, three kilos. And I was blown away. I'm like, what the fuck these people are doing?

So now your price, once it lands in Miami is 28,000. that's the buy price, including the freight, which is how you guys refer to the transport. And now you're moving them to California for 70. So you're profiting $42,000 a kilo. And you're, I think, moving, what, $600 a week? We're doing, no, we're doing $600 a month is what we're getting in Miami. I see.

But that's towards probably the following year. We started out 30, 40, because they started out bringing it like in banana boats, real banana boats that were coming, cruise ships, stuff like that. Commercial flights. Right. Yeah. Pilots, you know, they would bring 10 kilos, 15, 20 kilos. So it was very piecemeal at the beginning.

But within seven months, eight months, is when suddenly Mani tells me, here's this contact. He's going to call you a certain day of the month. At 5 o'clock in the morning, he's going to deliver you a big old you haul with this

engines inside. And that average 600 kilos. Right. Just in one. And at that time, out of 600 kilos, we were sending 400 to California. At that time, we lowered in California the price to $65,000. Okay. So, and then the rest of the cocaine stayed, it was just given to you, whoever the Colombians wanted to give it to in Miami, it was your job to make sure they got it,

right? Yeah, exactly. And were those Colombians as well? Yeah. Everyone was Colombian. you the only Cuban at the beginning to be working with the Colombians? At that time, with this group, I was the only one. Wow. Okay.

And the Bay, the Cubans don't work for me. That work with me. Now, how did the smuggling start to evolve besides the, you know, putting them in these, these big engines that would come through customs? Did was Manny primarily the one that was responsible for kind of, yeah, evolving that and perfecting that sort of the business? So 7778, all of that, that's strictly how. All the cocaine I got in the United States came in. That day of the month, again, I don't want to say that day

because the people that I claim they received that day. I want to know what day. Anyway, that day of the month, and that was it. That was our only source at that time. Now, I started to develop a route through Bolivia, and I had an opportunity, and that was really my downfall, Because when I went to Manny, he says to me, why? You're making millions of dollars.

Yeah. Well, we were going to be able to Bolivia. The deal that worked out with the guy that represented Suarez was, for every kilo that we bought at $10,000, they will give us a kilo on credit. Right. So we're going to make, you know, $7 million a month profit. Right. And unfortunately, or fortunately for me, thank God. But I got it.

So back then there was not an airplane commercial flights as often. So I was in Colombia with the pilots, showing them the strip where they were going to refuel in Colombia. Then we were going to go to Corn Island, where Somosa, who I had a deal with, had given us an air strip, and then we're coming to the United States. Well, I was only going to show the strip in Colombia, and then I was going to go to Nicaragua. And then after I had my meeting with Samosa, I was getting on a jet and I was headed to Europe. Hold on. You had a meeting with Samosa of Nicaragua?

I had a meeting with General Samosa. I was supposed to have a meeting with General Samosa when we never arrived in Nicaragua. Okay. So you actually never met him. He never had a meeting. He was going to, he was going to allow us to bring in kilos of cocaine to Nicaragua. And he had a big fishing household.

fish company that he was owner, you know, and in those diplomatic containers that were going to send it to the United States. What was his end going to be? What did he want out of that? I would imagine. I don't know, but I knew it was going to be a lot. I figured at that time, we figured that any president we dealt with, we're given $500,000 a load.

Right. You know. Right. So. And what kind of volume did you expect to get with this air route? We're going to bring in 300 kilos every month. Okay. And, I mean, that was like, I mean, that's not the route with Nicaragua.

This was the route from Bolivia, Columbia, Nicaragua, and the United States. But here's the thing. 300 kilos, we're only putting up 150, you know, 1.5 million, you know, and getting another 1.5 on credit. Now, you take that 10,000, and it was going to call me $6,000 is what I was paying the pilot, because I hire a whole crew because many would not let me have any of our transportation. I had this own crew. True Mel Kessler. Yeah, you're worried.

Introduce me to a guy named Harold Rosenthal. And so we're going to have $16,000 a kilo in the United States already. So you're making and you're so you're basically stood to make a $50,000 profit per kilo. On each one. And half of them were on credit. Didn't even have to have our own money. That's incredible because 300 kilos now is like kind of small potatoes. You know, these are like 1,000 kilo low.

but the difference is the price was so high back then that you could make off of 300 kilos what it would take somebody now flipping 2,000 kilos to make. Yeah, exactly. It's just a lot more. So, but what ended up happening, so I was at theirstrip in Colombia when I called Sal, because Sal was in Bolivia waiting for the airplane, when I called Sal to ask him to tell him that the airplane,

and he told me, hey, they fuck you. The money, the kilos that they were supposed to have on credit, they don't have them on credit. The only thing is here, I take it a million 300,000. All they had was 130 kilos that you paid for. So I decided I'm going to go on the airplane to Bolivia and strain them out. Here's a 22-year-old kid, a punk. Yeah.

I had not even turned 20, I had just turned 23, two weeks earlier. And you had braces. Yeah. So I'm going to go straight out of God that's overrun four governments, right? That's how crazy you become. Well, got to Bolivia. They told, hey, listen, the next load. And I thank God it was providential because I would have ended up owing, you know, 1301.3 million because it went down.

But they ended up saying, hey, the next load will give you the whole 300 kilos on credit. So everything was fine. So now I didn't have enough time to get on a commercial flight to Nicaragua. to make my meeting with samosa. So I ended up saying, I'll just go on the airplane. Yeah. Nothing can happen.

Which was a mistake. You went on the plane with the Coke in it. Yeah. And when I got, when we got to Columbia, and Mani saw me on the airplane at that airstrip, he went nuts.

Yeah, he was furious. He didn't want you anywhere near the work. He had never been around it. Yeah. So he went nuts. And I'm like, Mani, nothing's going to happen to me. And so I got on the airplane,

And unfortunately, both alternators were out. We couldn't get the jet fuel out of the inside. We have bladders inside to get us to give the distance from Bolivia to Colombia. And then from also from Nicaragua to, we were coming to Fernandina Beach right here in Florida. So we didn't have enough fuel. And when both alternate went out, we crashed over the jungles of Panama. We went down at 5,000 feet. Did you think, I mean, were you free falling or were you gliding?

Oh, yeah. No, we glided for a while. But after a while, you don't glide anymore, right? You go down. Yeah. I mean, you can see the pictures. The DA picture, the airplane is, I mean, we thought we'd die. There was no way. I mean, with crash and all that fuel would just blow up. Yeah. So you bury the keys. You didn't bury them because we have to jump off the airplane. So we knew no one unless they brought a ladder, they couldn't get inside the airplane to see. Right. My mistake was, and I had a briefcase with $150,000 that always carried with me, right? It was a Samsonite that had a false bottom. My mistake was not. telling that little lieutenant in that little town, hey, listen, man, we got drugs here. Here's $20,000. I'm going to have some people coming and pick it up tomorrow.

Right. And that was my mistake. Yeah. Because he saw us, you know, and I gave him a couple hundred bucks to take me to a hotel. We gave him my passports so that he would stamp him like we had just come in legally, right? Right. And basically what we're going to go is we're going to go to Costa Rica, which was literally, I don't know, less than 100 miles away. because we had given a million dollars

to the president of Costa Rica to become president. And he had just become president. Jorge Moje. You got your organization paid him that. Yeah, a million dollars. Does history know that? Well, I mentioned it two or three times, but, you know, remember now,

I wrote my first book in 1998. And I didn't go into a lot of detail because the purpose writing the book was not to tell this autobiography. or how big I was or anything like that. It was basically to tell my kids who I was. And to get my ex-wife to quit threatening me that she was going to tell the university

and everybody what was. My whole purpose, my whole thought in life was no one's going to know my past. I got a PhD. I'm respected. I'm a college professor. I'm going to have a bunch of pretty girls begging me for an A.

Life is wonderful, right? The big snitch had not been born. Google. Yeah, right. So nobody would have known. Was the point of paying off all these Latin American dictators and presidents so that you could use them for if you needed favors? No, and we could open laboratories. We can open.

This was just the beginning of an explosive era that I did not see. So you gave the Costa Rican president a million dollars just because you knew in the future. I knew a very close friend of mine who introduced me to ministers of finance because he was. He was a member of the World Bank, this Costa Rican, a very close friend of mine. Wow. That was in our payroll. And he was backing the campaign Jorge Mohe. So we gave him a million dollars for the campaign.

And he did. He introduced with me the minister of finance in Tortola at that time, a guy named Cyro Rodney. And, you know, that's how I met all these people, all this foreign bank account that I opened. Wow. Through that gentleman. Now, what about Noriega? So when I get arrested in Panama, so what ended up happening when they sent the passport

to get to Panama City, Panama City said, the DA had a hold on. Panama City said, arrest him. He's one of the most notorious druglords in the world today. How did they know that? My attorney, he had been arrested by driving a judge and was trading me for that judge. So long story, the Attorney General come to see me.

See, recently someone else told the story how I went, but I can tell you the story how I really went, because I was there, and my brother took the money. The Attorney General came to see me the next day. And I said, don't waste my money, my time, or your time. How much money to get out and how much money to buy the Coke bag? And he said, $250,000 for you four to get out, and the cocaine, Norregor already sold it.

It's two days after being arrested. So Noriega took the Coke that was in the plane that crashed and it already sold it out. That's why they didn't have a gram of it in the court in the U.S. Hey, he kind of saved your ass in a way. They had a picture. Yeah, right. Which could have been from anything, right? So we arranged.

I gave a number to this guy. This attorney to call and said in Miami, my family and my brother, so that he could bring the money over and that's how it happened. So ended up being that actually saw my brother and another guy brought the money over. they paid the money. So my, that attorney, that the attorney, so the attorney general sends me his private attorney, one of his closest friend.

So that attorney comes and said, look, everything has been paid. They're going to take you to the city of Panama. They're going to rough you up a little bit. And they just stick to your story. Our story was that we were bringing in guns to fight the Sandanistas. That's our story. You know, I didn't know what was inside that airplane. So he comes.

And he's good. They're going to take it to Panama. My mistake again is I go back to the cell and I tell the two pilots and their boss, Harold Rosenthal, hey, it's all taken care. We're going home. I already paid the Attorney General and they're going to take us to Panama and they're going to rough us up a little bit and we're going home.

All right. All right. So sure enough, the next day they come, take us to Panama City, right? This is already after Sal and my brother had left Panama. So they take us there and they put us in a room. It was like, I don't know, maybe 12 feet wide by 30 foot long. Look, a big conference roll empty, four shares against the wall. And we're handcuffed and we're there.

The DA is there. The head of the G2, which is our intelligence agency in Panama. And they bring this kid about 80 pounds, sucked and wet. It looked like he was no other 80 pounds soaking wet. He was 5'2 naked, slammed them in the floor. and they took a broomstick and stuck it up his anus and blooded just splattered all over the place. They looked at us and said,

we caught them with 50 pounds of marijuana. Now, mind you, we had already 200-some-odd kilos of cocaine because we picked up coke in Columbia. Imagine what's going on your ass. The two pilots, there's two big old six-foot, two, six-foot three. Georgia boys cracked quickly. Right, right. They're like...

They told the whole story. We'll tell you. Not only we're not sending either, that Jordan Valdezzi is the biggest drug leader in America and and he bribed the Attorney General. So here's the guy that could help me

now on the run. Yeah. Fucker. So they took us to a dungeon and for the next 15, 20 days they tortured us two, three times a day till they would come and beat us that we would pass out and then come again and beat us again and

you know, and I was convinced that I was going to die. Yeah, they nearly killed you, right? Yeah. It's shocking that they didn't actually. I think they were stopping on your head. They were breaking your, you know, two things happen. Go back to the words of my parent. My dad used to always say to my brother and I was little, son, in life, you got no control whether you're rich or poor. And we're like, no shit. You can figure that out, right, at 10. Whether you're sick or healthy, dead or alive, there's only one thing in life. You got absolute control. Your word. And only you can break your word.

And once you break it, you're not a man any longer. So that was drained into my head. So here I am with this guy getting beat over and over and over again. Now, mind you, I'm just 23-year-old kid. I'm not a street kid. You know, I grew up in poverty, but I wasn't in gangs or anything like that. So all of a sudden, and I think it was right after the time that they came and they put electricity to my testicles. And I jumped up about that high and passed out somehow.

And I had this vision that I was shaving. And my son, my son, I was just six months old at that time. But it was like five or six in that vision. He comes home crying. Look at me. And I'm like, Turkey, why are you crying? He's like, dad, because my friend said, my father is not a man. And Michael, I swear to you on every Bible today, that moment in time I made a decision.

I will die here, but I will not crack. Wow. They were trying to get you to confess. They asked many in my interview. Did you think he would crack? He said, I was absolutely convinced he would not tell on anyone. But let me tell you something. No one has any idea how brutal those Latin American countries are.

And to what extent they go to, to get what they want out of you. And it takes not that I was a very tough guy or nothing like that. it's just that I convinced myself that it was better to die than to live all my life in shame. And you fought back. You were screaming at him. Well, the guy that was arrested. That's the mistake they made.

They left me in the cell with this guy. He was a real tough guy. I mean, he was a Jewish guy, American, but he was a colonel in the Colombian military forces. Wow. I mean, in the guerrillas. Wow. And, I mean, he was a businessman in Atlanta.

And Robert Kennedy called him to bond out, Martin Luther King out. They got was just unbelievable guy, right? A true gangster related to Meyer Landsky, you know, just, and he would tell me, fight back. And I was like, how the fuck we fight back, man? Where's like I cough, hands and feet? She said, spit on him, scream at him, talk to him. The more you fight back, the stormer you get.

And that was the mistake. Had they separated us? I don't know if I would have just given up and died. because there's just no way to explain. Unless you go to some, you know, people say, oh, I can't imagine how that feels like. No, like, I can imagine what a woman goes through when she has a baby.

No, I cannot imagine. Never had a baby. You know, you have no idea. No mentor. You're in a dungeon like, let miss. Yeah. No light. No food.

You know, no bathroom, no water. You pee and poop. After a third day since you didn't eat because they didn't feed it for 17, 18 days. There's no, you know, you don't have to even go to the bathroom, thank God. And they just come in, no light, dark, just a little dim light in the hallway, and they just beat you, merciless. And you were, I think, urinating blood for years after that, right? For five years. Every time I piss. Kidney damage. I pass blood. And so after about three weeks of this,

which is unimaginable, this kind of torture, I think Noriega, comes to your cell. Well, what happened, the last time they were coming to, so my mission now, this last three days, my mission was to get killed. I just wanted him to kill me. Get this shit over with, because I can't, you know, I'm losing my mind.

And there was a kid across the street, across the, not the street, across the cells, and he spent all day leaking the bar, young kid. And he had been there for seven months and lost his mind. And I said, I don't want to ever be like that for my parents. I don't want to be that. I want to die. You just keep, you know,

I was convinced at that time when I entered the world that I would die by 23 anyway, so kill me. It doesn't matter. So I told the guard before me, tell him Noriega that if he doesn't kill me, when I get out,

he knows he got the power that I'm going to get him and I'm going to rape his wife and kids in front of him. I knew that that would trigger it. Yeah. He came the next day, laughing.

Yeah, right. Somebody's laughing. Yeah. And what's interesting is he was so dirty and so corrupt and a gigantic, one of the biggest drug traffickers of that era as the dictator, the president of Panama. But he was also taking money from the DEA. Oh, yeah. And he had to feed people. He was other people.

So he betrayed you. You said you were going to send money to him. Well, he asked me, he walks in, he walks to the cell and he says, you pay, why are you threatening me? You paid the wrong guy. Right. And I said, how much? He said, $250,000. Dumbed.

I'm like, the same thing. I said, well, that was for four. Now we got for two, the same price. Yeah. And we paid it the next $250,000. And he says, where do you want to go? I said, Costa Rica. And he's like, all right, tomorrow, you're going to Costa Rica.

And he took us from the cell. They host us down with a fire hose, which hurt more than the tortures, by the way. You're naked, and they're hosting you down to get all the filth and crud off for you. And he's like, takes us to the airport, and I thought, wow, we made it. And literally, man, within 10 minute Interpol, 10 agents. George Valdez, Harold Rosenthal. I said, who was asking?

Interpol, come with us. I said, no, I'm waiting for my plane. No, you're not. Your plane's over there. You're going to Miami. And for the next six, eight months, you're fighting your case. So they bring me to Miami, and they charge me. That's public record.

People can read it. was heading the largest drug conspiracy in the history of America, 1979. The government asked seven million dollars bail, we set on three million. Yeah. And told my attorney, we know he can post it,

but if he posted, we're going to take that money and raise the bail. We appealed it all the way up to the Supreme Court. I had the best attorneys in the country. The chief judge, the Supreme Court said, or it was the Fifth Circuit, the court of appeal, which at that time was in New Orleans, said, this is their opinion. In this court's opinion, Mr. Valdez, it's a financial genius.

He can move all around the world and will never be able to catch him again. Because I'm telling, look, I got companies in the United States. You know, I got roots. I got family. I got children. You know, there's no reason. At that time, you give a murder a $100,000 bail. Why $3 million?

And of course we know That it was your lawyer Who was feeding them info So when I hear all these people Talk about how big they were And how powerful they were And how they were the one There's so many people that claim that they started

The drug business in Miami But I asked all of them Well, how come I never saw your bill be more than 100,000, 50,000 or Resada If you were so powerful How was it that the government let you out in five years. Would they have let Pablo Oscoba on five years? You know, when they come out and they said,

on the show with Griselda, there's only one person that Pablo Escobar fear, and her name was Griselda. I'm like, I know personally, for a long time. That's how basically didn't fear the devil. Okay, let's talk about that. Because we have not, when people think of the Medellin cartel and Colombian cocaine trafficking, they immediately think of Pablo Escobar.

and the Ochoas and then Grizilda in that order. What was your relationship with Pablo Escobar? Well, here's the thing. So I never met Pablo until after I got out of prison. Right. I think I met him in Columbia, Mani's office one time, but he was nobody. He was nothing at that time, 1978. And Mani said that we had, that we had lunch over there.

But he was no one of significant, like so many I met at that time. When I went to prison in February of 80, and that's when really San Willie Be exploded, become the biggest drug, drug lords in the U.S. Willie Falcone and Salman, and Sama Guta. And let's talk about that really quick. You are responsible for giving those guys their start in the cocaine business, truly. If you listen to the prosecutor in Cocaine Cowboys, Kings of Miami, usually the government knows more about the history of drug dealers because they,

spend a lot of money and they have a lot of niches. If you listen to him, he says one thing that's really funny, he said, there's two ways in life to get rich. He said, you work very hard or you get very lucky? He said, Sal and Willie got very lucky. That George Valdez went off to prison and handed him the keys to the kingdom. I see. I see. So Sal was a very close friend of mine, right?

I love Willie. I love Sal. I don't think I ever met with Willie four or five times in my life. And when I was bringing in all this, and we had a company, we had a shipping company, we had an airline company, we had many had the biggest coal mines in Colombia,

the biggest emerald mines, construction company. My dad was best friends with Sal's father and another gentleman. And Oscar, oh, my God. And they came from Cuba, and every day after, dinner, they would go to each other's house for coffee, right? One day to my dad, one day to Manolo,

Sal's father, one day to ask, they did that until they died. And, uh, and of course, my dad didn't know what I was doing, but it was always bragging that I was flying all over the world and had jets and all that. And Sal put two and two together and said to my dad, hey, add George to give me a break. Now, I swear this on every Bible that there is. And, uh, so I finally, I was, what I was afraid was, Sal, because my kid died and said, hey, I went to, uh, my old South and I saw Sal and I quit seeing each other when I went to University of Miami. He dropped out of high school, so we didn't, we didn't keep in touch. And what I was afraid was that Sal was going to tell my dad, hey, your son is dealing in drugs,

man, thought him to give me a break. So I met with Sal. And, uh, and we had lunch and at my office and I'm like, well, how much money do you have? And this is what he said to me. He said, I have $30,000. And I laughed. And this is 1978. Because at that time, a kilo in Miami was 45.

And I said, look, let me see what I can do. And I'll put something here and see how I can help you out. That is the God's honest truth. And for people that want to see receipts, I'll show you. You can post a new documentary. And we will. And accounting that the DA discovered in my briefcase of how much kilos I was given Sal and how much they were paying me days.

Okay, so they became one of the distributors of your and Manny's cocaine brought over from Columbia. So I ended up, I ended up a month later. We had 30 kilos that we were supposed to deliver to someone. They got busted. And I'm like, I'm going to Europe again. And I called Saul and Willie. That's the first time I met Willie before. And another gentleman who was their first partner who then later they cut out, the guy named Ramito,

which you'll see in the picture in Bolivia with me. And I said, look, you want to get started, I'll give you 30 kilos. And South did I want to take the 30 kilos. Willie said, I think we can handle that. I said, look, you got a month. I'm going to be gone for a month. You got a month to pay me.

And when I came back, they paid me. And then from there on, till the day I go off to prison and I realized I couldn't handle things anymore and South, the only person I trust. And I introduce him to Manny. I introduced him to the sheriff in, in Cluiston. You know, all those people testified to this.

I introduced him to the sheriff, who would protect the loads. When I did that, at that time, I was getting him 25 kilos at a time. I'd give him 20. I'd give them 10. And they pay me 100 every other day, every day. Okay.

So they really exploded into gigantic traffickers after you went to prison. And it sounds like you basically gave them your operation. I'm giving the entire operation. Your routes, your connections. Who did sell it to in California? Oh, you gave them your time. California buyers, too.

And you know how to deal with them. And the deal was that, so sales said to me, I'll give you one-third. Emmanuel just talked about that in my documentary. I'll give you one-third of everything that comes in. I said, I don't want a third, because I'm going to be in prison. You guys are going to be risking your ass, and you're going to have in prison. So I said, but here's the deal. I'm going to give you, at that time, kilo was $18,000 in Colombia.

I'm going to give you $20,000, I'm going to give you $320,000 to buy me 20 kilos. And every time you bring in a load, buy me my 20-kidl, sell them, and give me the profit. Wow. And hold the profit. That's it. That's all I want. Okay. So you were making still hundreds of thousands of dollars while you were in prison?

Well, when I was in prison, I didn't want to touch any other money. They wouldn't give me any money while I was in prison because, you know, I don't want, I had a lot of money. Right. But they were. I went to prison. I had 10 million dollars cash. So, you know. You're making, we'll call it passive income that you weren't touching.

Well, they're supposed to be holding this for me. royalties. Right. Which is according to the sheriff and all the different loads they brought in and according to many who told me that they told him that they had this money over $7 million. But I got out of prison and I went to see Sal. He says

we got out. I don't have any money. Things went bad for us. I'm sorry. I'm going to see if I eventually I can get some money. That's exactly. It didn't give me a dollar. I actually saved my life because if Sal would have done what I would have done which would have been, hey, you had to prison, you took tortures for us, you didn't rat us out, you handed everything to us,

you treated us like royalty, here, here's the business, take over. But you know what? It was a blessing. It was a blessing from God because I separated myself from them and I was able to honestly say, I don't think, you know, when I was asked by the attorney, do you think that they get out, did they get out of the drug business? I had to say, I had to believe they did because if they didn't, there would have been a bunch of a son of a bitchus for betraying me. Right. Okay, so tell me about Pablo Escobar now.

When you go to prison in 79, 80, you go do, you get sentenced to 15 off of, and you do about five, off of 15. Back then you do one third. So is this the era that Pablo Escobar now becomes the key guy feeding? That's the era that,

that's the era when different groups surfers, not only Pablo Escobar, Pablo Escobar's surface Gatshap, who I worked with a lot afterwards. The Oshoa brothers, which should have never got involved because they were rich from the cradle. Right. And other groups, there was another guy just as powerful

who when I came out of prison who I went to work with at the beginning. I brought 32 laws for him. Who was that? Which was a guy named Frank Jimenez. Okay. Called Enegro, and he was very, very rich and very powerful. Quiet guy, a gentleman. The legend goes that he was out of Christmas party

got drunk and said, Pablo's got the fame, but I got all the money. And Pablo hadn't killed. Wow. You know. Okay. So the early 80s, when you're down, is when what history knows as the Medellín cartel formed.

Right. Which was it sounds like, correct me if I'm wrong, was just this loose association of different drug trafficking organizations out of Medellin. Yeah. I think, if you look back to 1980, OPEC,

was in the forefront of all television, the oil cartels and the oil cartels. So my thought pattern was, there was no such thing as a Medellín cartel. As a matter of fact, here's interesting. You know who said that about three years ago after I said it for the first time? Horat Ochoa in an interview.

He said, that was never a Medellin drug cartel. Right. The Oscewas had their organization, their accountants, their routes, their assassins. Pablo had his. Gacha had his. You think Pablo was powerful. Gacha was 20 times more powerful and deadlier than Pablo.

The thing about, I'll tell you why Pablo becomes the person. And then, yeah, then you got Pablo. And so those different groups, and then you have your choice, and then you have Manuel Gars. So all those different groups at their own organization. In Cali, there was three families that ended up creating their own. But to me, the Americans were like, okay, we can't focus on going after Pablo or after Gacha or after the Shoa, say that today,

gacha is our enemy, tomorrow is our enemy. So why don't we just group them together, call it the managing drug cartel. Now, there's one organization we can go after. Right. And that's what becomes things. Pablo becomes notorious when he decided to run for Congress, which was stupid, you know,

because they called them out, they embarrassed them. I mean, his reason for running for Congress was legitimate, man. He wanted to really make a difference. You know, he grew up in the poorest of all neighborhoods in Colombia. But they knew that he was a drug dealer, right? And they called them out, and then that's why he declared war on the government. And then the government passed that extradition treaty. Because here's the thing.

You guys say it's the only country in the world that will extradite people. Columbia says you can't extradite a citizen for a crime that's not a crime in our country. So the only country in the world that has a crime called conspiracy is America. Started by the Kennedys, right?

I mean, you don't have to do nothing. You and I can right now, Michael, talk about hey, I want to go back. You say, I got buyers in California. You make a phone call, hey, guys, I'm going to have a route. And I'm like, okay, I'm going to call my deep people. Nothing ever happens. We'll both go to Jeff.

That's enough. That's enough. We have one over that. Yeah. We had two. You made one phone call. I made one phone call. We had intent.

Now, Pablo is saying it's like India extraditing me for killing chickens or cows in Colombia. Yeah. You know, America said that because it's our people that are getting poison with drugs from these men. That's not saying it's right, but I'm saying that's where they get that line of thinking from. But even during Pablo's notorious era of violence and infamy, it's all of these different organizations, gotcha the Ochoas, Frankie Meadows, that are all sending product via the Caribbean to Florida.

Where does Manny now, your godfather during this time? So when I come out of prison, Manny's in prison awaiting extradition. Okay, so Manny actually went back to Colombia. Right. And left you in a... Miami. Yeah, he went back to Columbia. And so I get out of prison and Manny is in prison. So he's my contact, right? But I called his right-hand man who was also handled, used to handle things for us.

And that's how I get started. I get started with Frankie Menace again. Okay. And I was given many. It was me. When I came out, there was another friend of mine. I got that I had met years ago named Junior. And I said, look, I'll make you equal partners because I can't be around this stuff. And I'll handle all of it over in Columbia. And I'll, we'll go back to my chain buyers. And then we created new buyers. And then you handle all the operations. You received the coconut. So how did you get back your buyers though? After you come out of prison, where were the Falcone? Where was Willie? Where was Sal? They ended up having their all, all complete set of organization. Okay. So you, you were able to get back your old clients plus new customers.

Yeah. Now you have your cheaper Coke, more established routes. The industry by 84 is now... And at that time, so what ended up happening in 85, I was in prison with a guy named Dickie Lynn, just a great guy. The guy's doing life, you know, it was very, very sad. But Dickie Lynn and I brought in over 30 loads straight to Louisiana. If you see like the airplanes in American Made that supposed to come in during the... when the, so helicopters go to drop people at the oil platforms, right?

Yeah. So these people had to set up that the airplane will come back at the same time at the same altitude as the helicopters. So the rate I would think it was just helicopters. Just the helicopter. And we brought in 30-some of loads. How much coke and a load? We're bringing in 500, 400, 500 kilos.

Wow. Sometimes some months we brought in three loads. Wow. That was your primary route at that time. That was my primary route at that time. Wow. And okay. And who were you buying from down there?

Was it still just Mani or were you dealing with other members? So at that time, so many came out and he took over again. And what ended up happening is that we decided, we said, okay, here's what we're going to do. We knew a lot of stuff that was going on. For example, Pablo, if Pablo found out he had a route and even as much money and powers he had, And you would not take his drugs on your route. He'd have you kill. Wow.

And he did that to a lot of people. Yeah. And including a lot of other stuff later on that we found out, you know, where he was telling the DEA about loads coming to the United States that were his competitors. So I told Mani, said, Manny, if we're going to bring in 600 kilos, let's say, why don't we bring in 300 of ours and take the 150 and let Gotcha take 150 and let Pablo take 150? I see. So to avoid keep Manny safe?

Well, in that way, they were my cheerleaders instead of I was a target for them. Right. So I did that with them. I brought in a lot, at the beginning, a lot with Frank until he, until Pablo had him killed. Wow, I see. And then these guys, Pablo and Gotcha, they had their own buyers set up. So all you had to do was deliver their product. I just delivered to the one guy.

They had one guy. I would deliver. And you wouldn't even take a fee? Oh, hell yeah, I'd take a fee. What was your fee off of that? Back then, Dick Alain was talking to me five. I was talking to them seven. You were talking, gotcha.

Yeah. Okay. Pablo, wow. So this is your really height, even though you were making millions before you go to prison in 79. I started making millions again. You were making, and that didn't take you long. No, it took me six months. Wow.

And in the sad part, I didn't have to. I didn't have to because I had set up. I had a horse operation. that was making me a million dollars a year. I had set up orange groves. You know, I had a business that legitimately was making millions of dollars. On its own. On its own.

Not even washing money through it. Not washing money or nothing. Yeah, I mean, I used to allow my old drug money to buy the horses and build a ranch and all that stuff. So we did that. And at that time, all of Southern Willie loads were coming through the Bahamas like they did in cocaine cabo and the speedboats. Right. I didn't bring a single load ever through the Bahamas, ever. I didn't drop one in the water.

I didn't drop any yet. From the time that I worked with Dickie Land, we also worked, I brought in about 10 loads through Mexico at the beginning. I'm not going to say I was the first person to bring in loads through Mexico because I have no idea if anybody had before, but I can tell you that we were bringing loads in 1984

when most of the cocaine coming to America was coming through the Bahamas in those speedboats. And we were bringing in, literally, we were renting from the shores of Mitsubishi, and we're bringing in 6,700 kilos to Juarez, Mexico, and then transporting over. I brought in complete loads for, Gotcha, complete loads for Pablo, you know, and just charge the freight. What was, how did you get the Coke from Columbia to Juarez? Flying.

Okay. And then you could go straight? You could go straight in the Mitsubishi 200. Okay. Wow. Wow. I think you probably were the first one, at least of the. major traffickers to do that.

Before, well, there were no cartels. There were a large cartel before any of those. There was a guy, a guy that, I'm not going to say anything because he's still in prison, just a great guy. And he was actually, he managed some of the biggest entertainers in Mexico at that time. And one of the loads, the first load, we landed it in the farm of one of the most famous Mexican entertainers that it was. So, but, you know.

Wow. That was at a time between that and the fact that by that time I had stopped working with Dickie. And Dickie went on his own. He started just bringing on his own loads, his own Coke. He made some collection. And then it was a time that I just couldn't deal with it anymore. You know, I had a friend of mine that used to come over to the ranch. He had been in the horse business, in the pot business years ago.

And he would bring 10 mares to breed to my horse. And his name was Lazaro. I would always ask him. He moved from Miami to Ocala. He was part of the old Cuban box smugglers, right? Which is how the whole drug trade started in the U.S., right? It was the Bay of Pig soldiers that want to go to save Cuba from Fidel, and then they started smuggling marijuana and forgot about Fidel.

So anyway, long story, I would ask him, how did you get out? And I never forget until today, sitting there in the porch of my ranch, and he's like, like being pregnant. You either pregnant or not. I'm like, that really doesn't answer the question for me, but I'll take your word for it, you know? And it was in the back of my mind, I had to get out. Yeah, because it was eating at you. I mean.

And my mother, my mother constantly. Right. You know, and now it was a different world. There was no violence when I started. Now I had to go around with bodyguards with machine guns and stuff like that. So. Yeah, you were sleeping with a gun under your pillow. You had a losing next to your bed.

Yeah, next to me and Barretta, 9mm. You had a mansion in a gated community in Miami with cameras everywhere. I think your son, Jorge Sito, had to go to school accompanied by bodyguards. Yeah, I had to pay the school money so that the bodyguard could stay outside the classroom. Yeah. And it was, you know. I recall this excerpt in your book where you're up late at night and you're alone and you're sniffing coke and you're watching porn. and it reminded me of truly Tony Montana and Scarface sitting there miserable.

This Cuban refugee, this Mario Lito, who came to America with holes in his shoes, and now he's worth tens of millions of dollars, and he's just fucking, there's nothing inside. He's empty. That reminded me of that excerpt from your book where you had it all. You had you, everything you wanted. I'm the American dream, and it was,

you wanted to kill yourself. You know, I never did Coke till the end there. And that was probably at a moment where it was like, and I probably did it very little because all of a sudden I realized that it could control me. And I've always been, I have an addictive personality. So anything that can control me,

I still wait fast. And, but I'm looking at the world. And, And I just can't make sense of the world anymore. And I've always been very introspective. And I've always like, what was I creative for? You know, what the heck, man?

You know, nobody has two fingerprints alike. An amazing creator creates us so differently like that. We're so perfect, right? How can we come to the world to be born, suffer, and die? Because if you put our life, we suffer more than we have joy, right? will bury our parents. God forbid we bury a child? Why? What is our purpose?

And nothing made sense for me. None of this. I thought that when I had that beautiful car, I'd be happy. Now I got three Gambala worth a million dollars and I'm miserable. I thought when I had this beautiful, and now I got mansions. I got a mansion in Fort Myers Beach. I have a house in Vail, Colorado.

I have a multimillion dollar ranch. And I'm miserable. I have everything. Women mean nothing to you. My mother is, I adore me. my mother. The highest respect I ever have for anyone and I have no respect for women. Yeah. You know? And then my daughter's born. And I remember the guy, I had a guy that all he would do

is build furniture for me with hidden compartments where within 10 feet. I'd have a gun, right? And so it's like in one of the video, my son, George Hiljito talks about he said, you know, I remember walking around the backyard and there was bodyguards with machine gun and dogs. I remember finding a panic room. And he said, it freaked me out. You know, it was guns, tons of money, cocaine. And, you know, it was a point that I'm like, what sense does life really matter?

Yeah. You know, in reality, honestly, I was looking to get killed. It's really what my only answer is like, you know, we all wake up, we all go to bed at night and look in the ceiling. And we wake up and look at a mirror, and we have to ask ourselves, do we like what we see? Yeah. And I knew that I had, that I was, you know,

I see kids that had no chance would end up for, you know, similar life or even much lesser, but that trajectory. But I had no excuse. Yeah, you're very much. I had everything, man, education, parents, morals. And that life where you have bodyguards roaming your house and you have to, you can't sleep at night because you're so paranoid, That's kind of being in a prison in itself.

You know, it's not really freedom. I heard of Jelly Roll one day. I never knew who he was or nothing, but I heard of him because I saw that when he won New Artist of the Year, he didn't show up to get his award. And people said, why? And he's like, because I went to a detention center

because these kids are used to people coming and they never show up. And I became a big fan of his. Wow. Because like tomorrow, I'll head off to Louisiana State Penetetitiers at Angola, where I built the first church inside any United States prison

for my 25th consecutive year. And so I became a fan, but specifically, because when he sings in that song, somebody saved me, that was me, man. Wow. But you know what was so sad, Michael?

Everybody wanted to be me. Everybody told me how great I was. Women told me how beautiful I was. I could go in a club and pick any girl I wanted. Do whatever. had nothing any value. And deep down inside, I was like jelly roll saying,

somebody saved me, you know. I am broken beyond repair. You know, and that's how I felt. I felt there was just no-out. And the moment where you said enough, I think you had like, you had been with your mistress and I think your daughter stumbled in.

Well, what happened, whenever my daughter, who became the eyes, became my eyes, carpet. I forgot. I skipped it. When she was born, he came up to me and says, everything you stand for is everything you're going to stand against as of today. And I'm like,

oh, man, you're crazy, right? So whenever I'm a daughter, I had no woman around me. This time, I wasn't visiting with her. And I was in my ranch and I had a bunch of born actresses. And I was just partying.

And in the middle of the night, my ex-wife dropped her off at the gate. and it freaked me out. When the security guy said, hey, your daughter's here. So I'm like, oh, I bring her. So he brings her to the house. And I tell the nanny, because I had a full-time nanny, I said, take her to her room and make sure she doesn't get out.

And she was asleep, so she went to her room, took her to her room. And about 3 o'clock in the morning, I would have given anybody a million dollars if they could have come to that bedroom door and knock. If they could get to me, I would have given a million dollars. She got there and started knock. and started saying, Daddy, Daddy, it's Crystal.

And you know, it was the first time in my life that everything just crumbled. I felt so filthy, so dirty. I said, you know, here's the only thing in my life that's sacred and pure. And if I open that freaking door, I'm going to contaminate her. I chased the woman out the window.

I called back to get them the hell out of here. And I went into the shower and I thought I was going to try to scrub the filter for me. come off. I went back into my bed and a guy that people said eyes ran through my veins, I started quiver and shaking. And when I thought that she stopped crying, about an hour, 45 minutes, I went out to get water and she was in the floor crying. And it was like, I saw this baby like sinking and I'm trying to touch the fingers to save her and I couldn't. And I said, fuck it. My life

changes today. I have no idea what that meant. I knew most likely that I'd be killed because we didn't have a good retirement program. Why did you think you'd be killed? Well, just for leaving the game. Because at that time, if there's one thing a lot of people cannot

tolerate, is uncertainty. Why is George walking away? There's no investigation. There's no indictment. He's making a million dollars for doing nothing. Why is he walking away? Why? When they can't answer that why, it's better to eliminate that why. But I didn't care, man.

I had to save my daughter. And I moved from Miami to my ranch, didn't go back to Miami for three years. I believed that the sun used to rise and fall in Miami. That's how much I love that city. I still believe that. At that time. Then go back. And I hired this guy to teach me karate.

I remember the first day he came. He was like, I'm going to teach him by the sword. And I'm like, I was excited. I'm like, man, I love weapons. I think the right karate guy. Here we're going to start getting right into weapons. So I'm putting on my karate. You know, I've done a lot of karate before.

I was a brown belt before in New Jersey. I competed for years. And I'm like, I want to get into it right off the bat. And when I turn around, he pulls out of Bible. And I was so freaking mad. And I raped. I'm like, look, dude. I'm paying you a lot of money to come teach me two hours of karate every day.

I don't believe in that sword. I don't believe in that book, what the book says. Tomorrow, take that sword and bring the real sword. He walked out to me this close. First person that long, many, many years ago, that close to him. He said, son, what I got to give you, you got no money to pay. I quickly realized this guy's a seven-degree black belt. he's going to be able to introduce Jesus into me

by kicking me through the walls. So I'm like, all right, brother, don't get excited. Wow. After a karate lesson while the steam room is heating up, where's your time? I'm talking just like that. I don't believe. And he kept coming back for three years, every day.

And I did everything in the world to chase him away. And I couldn't understand how this man that had a little bitty thousand square foothouse, an old beat-up car and married to the same woman for 25 years and tell me he was in love with her. I'm like, she's 45?

Hell no, man. You can't love a 45-year-old woman. Look, I'm surrounded by 20-year-old, 23-year-old, and I hate him all. Yeah. Why was he so happy? And you know, he didn't bash her into me. You got to become a Christian.

You got to go to say, none of that crap. Which is the problem we have today. Why people don't want to become a Christian, not because of Jesus. Because the Christian. All he would say to me is, I'm like, man, why are you so happy? Look how I live in. I'm miserable.

And you got nothing and you're happy. He said, I have an intimate relationship with Jesus. And I was like, what the fuck is that? I'm surrounded by people. I have no intimate relationship with anyone. Do you have a relationship with a ghost? Because back then, I'm thinking we came from Cuba to be with Jesus, and we left a life of luxury with the communists.

to go hungry in America. So where the hell is Jesus, you know? And then, of course, you create all kinds of things, right? Why good women can have baby and why whores have babies in crack houses? You know, white parents, buried children, and criminals live a long life. You know, all the stuff that you do to justify why you don't want to have faith. But I believe deep down inside, like I said, there's no atheists in a trench hole. You know, we all have a desire for a higher being, you know.

for me is my relationship with God and my relationship with Jesus, you know. I tell people I'm not Christian. I'm just a lover of Jesus, man. And I just follow two commandments, man. I love God and I love my neighbor. I don't care if you're a Republican, Democrat, black, white, gay, transsexual, transgender, triple sexual, whatever. So this karate teacher really sent you, began your journey to theology, to God, back to God, and to theology. how, though, did you actually get out of the game?

Did you tell Manny? Yeah, I made a phone call. I made a phone call to Manny in the middle of the night that night. I said, I'm done. And I called my partner, the guy that was handling everything in the United States. I say, so are yours. Who was your partner?

Can you tell us? And it was Jr. Yeah, he got murdered. I'm like, so yours. Again, how much do you want? I don't want anything. Because if you're out, you're out. What did Manny say?

He said, I understand. And I think at that time he also walked away. Because man, he's a very, very, very, very, look, he's 96 years old today. You know, he never had, he was the richest men in Colombia at one time. He never had a bodyguard. He walked five miles every day, went to church every day. The good, loved him, the politician loved him, the crooked loved him, Pablo loved him, everybody loved it. He was just that kind of a man.

He was just, we said our. camera before we started this interview, Manning, when he was bringing loads and you started working with him at the beginning, he would say if you got 300 bricks through, he would leave five kilos and the profit off that would go to... So he had two systems that were nuns. Yeah. And every load, there was two bricks with an, with a M for Moja, which was for the nuns. I was to sell that, get the money and send it off to a person. And they built radio station, the Amazon's, they did all kinds of stuff, schools, everything with it. I mean, they don't make gangsters like that anymore.

No, to me, it was, I don't know. I didn't understand it. I'm like, man, we're bad. We can be with Satan and Jesus at the same time, buddy. But I guess he saw it differently. He didn't. He saw it as a business, so he never thought that he saw with Satan. He wouldn't do the things that most people did.

I mean, he was taken many times. People robbed him many times. never ordered anybody's death. You know? And, yeah, it was. So you think after you left the game, that's when he started to make his way out of the game, too. I mean, he was so wealthy, man. Right.

So wealthy. And he didn't do any real prison time, it sounds like. No, he did about three, four years awaiting extradition. How did he not get extradited? He was the next guy to be extradited when they overthrew, when public got the government to overthrow the extradition treaty. Wow. He was the next on the plane.

Wow. He's got a lot of cases pending in the U.S. for money laundering. The first money laundering cases were the United States versus Mani Gossess. Wow. So he's never coming back here. Oh, no, no, no. So he has the story much like the Ochoas, much like Pablo could have had, if he had any sense, which was stack your wealth and take your little itty-bitty prison time and then retire. Because the Ochoas got away with a ton of money. You know, they basically just laid their arms down to the government.

One just got out a couple days ago. Yeah. And they speculate he's going to go back and be living his life as a wealthy man. But they were very wealthy to begin with. Sure. They were horse for science of horse-breeding families. It was the biggest Pasoferno breeder in the world. Can you tell us this for the camera?

Did Old Man Ochoa, the patriarch, was he ever involved in cocaine trafficking? You know, I never, that's the only group I never worked with. I don't believe so. Okay. I don't believe so. There were rumors. I believe the kids, there were young kids, got involved just like all of us did at that time, thinking that it was a harmless crime.

You know, it's like everything that we do in life. I always say an alcoholic doesn't stop by drinking a gallon of vodka, right? He's going to die. He starts a little bit of time. No one's just an ounce of heroin, you know? And it's like that. And I believe it's because we come into the world. This is my theory.

We come into the world with a hole. An emptiness. And that emptiness society jumps up and says, hey, I got, I got what it takes to fill it. Women, drugs, alcohol, power, murder, whatever. To me, I had that whole too. At the beginning, it was easy to get involved in the cocaine trade, right? Because it was a, we were bull, we thought we were the candidates of the 20th century. We thought we're bootleggers, right?

We're not harming anybody. But one thing leads to another. before you know it, you're down a rabbit hole that you can't get out. You know, and that's, I saw it happen with me. I had that hole, and it wasn't until the moment, honestly, you know, once I got out, and I'm living on my ranch, I'm breeding horses. I own the best study in the world at that time. I paid a million dollars for horses, not even knowing that that was a good deal,

and it turned out to be, I was breeding 300 mares at 150 mares at $3,000 apiece, and bringing some of the best show me. I had them sold for $6 million for 80% when I got arrested. Wow. So, but tons of time, right? Because I'm not doing nothing. Right. Finding my business, building orange groves.

And you think a lot about your life. Yeah. About my purpose. You know, it wasn't until I went to a person that I found joy in my life. When I lost everything, when I walked into that, and and the prosecutor said to me, I want it all. I said, do you know how much I got?

And they said, no, but I know who does. Walks over, opens the door. DA, FPI, IRS, and Customs comes out. They knew how much toilet paper I consumed. They said, we want it all. He's all the deeds. All the money, all the bank account, everything, all the cards, everything.

And I remember the only guy that was nasty was the customs agent. The other guys were great gentlemen. I said to me, what do you mean by all? And the guy said, I want your underwear so I can burn him. I looked down and said, you don't want to smell him before you burn him. You know, it was like stupid.

Okay. Yes, this is what's fascinating is the fact that you were tired, you did something. I was gone away from the business for three and a half years. That's so crazy. You're literally the only drug trafficker, I think, in popular culture that's ever done that, that's ever quit while they're ahead. I can't think of anybody else. Jorgeo is maybe the close. You literally picked up the phone.

You told me and you were done. You gave the business to your associate. And you were out for three and a half years. You're doing karate. I believe you're becoming more religious. You still have problems with your wife. Yeah, I didn't. I wasn't becoming religious yet.

But it wasn't what he was saying. Because honestly, everything he was reading to me in the Bible, I didn't remember none of it because he would beat the crap out of me for two hours, man. I mean, I have big holes in the sheetrock, in the walls of him kicking me through it. Wow. But see his life and seeing that, but perhaps there is joy. Right. I can tell you the moment when my life drastically changed.

I can tell you the moment, end the hour and exactly what I said. This was September 1st, 1990. My divorce, I'm sorry, July 1st, 1990. My divorce was final. My wife is dragging my baby girl away, who's my life. It was everything in my life, right? Crystal. I mean, I used to drive 12 hours from Miami to Fort Wall Beach where she moved when we separated.

To pick up, my daughter, drive 12 hours back because she couldn't fly, keep her for a week, drive 12 hours to take her back and 12 hours back, running a big drug empire at the same time. Wow. Okay? She is crying and she's dragging her away. And at that moment, I went into my room and I got him. my knees and I'm about 11 o'clock in the morning and I'm like God first of all I want to tell you I don't believe I don't believe you exist that's number one number two if you do exist

you're probably looking at me and say it's so bad stay down there but number three if you are the reason that man has got that joy kill me or save me so what did he do Nothing happened. I thought, except three months later, now I'm supposed to become a better man. I'm going to study the Bible. I'm going to become a better person, right? I'm not going to see them my wife. I'm not going to, you know, do the things that are not right.

And I get arrested. I had no clue. Were they building? They were investigating. They were investigating for five years, yeah. Based off of... The fact that they could stand. that I had retired

and was living this Playboy life. Right. $3 million house in Vail, $2 million housing on the ocean, $40 million,

$30 million ranch. Horses worth tens of millions? Yeah, I had $5 million worth of horses. Well, if you count the price of the real,

what I paid for, but if you count the price of my horse, I built a hospital at the ranch. And then I was just building the most modern orange groves

had a contract where? In the ranch. I was building 600 acres of groves. So I was going to be making three, four, five million dollars a month, I mean a year legit in 1987, 88. So. You're still only 32 years old at the time. Yeah. That's crazy.

I had a hawker jet. I had a million dollars with the cars. I spent my whole life just playboy life. I go skiing in Colorado for a month. So how are they compiling the evidence? I mean, I know that the feds need scant evidence. really want you, they're going to get you. I mean, they didn't really even have enough to convict you on the first,

your first prison sentence, but again, it's, it's the feds. The first prison sentence was totally made up, man. They took me in Michigan, which I never been, and said I was part of Harold Rosenz and those organizations, which I had just met. Right. Like a month earlier, and he had been a fugitive for three years. And they didn't even have any evidence, Noriega had sold all the keys. Nothing. Zero.

Well, enough to the point that they couldn't get on it. The grand jury in Miami met three times, could not indict me. Right. The grand jury in Central Florida, met three times, could not indict me. The grand jury in Northern Florida met twice could not indict me. They were about to let me out. After nine and ten months on a sworn complaint when making, well, actually, they were letting me out. The judge was dropping all.

I was not on an indictment. I was almost called a sworn complaint. With no one supposed to be there longer than 30 days, I was there for nine months. Yeah. And I was getting out. The judge dropped all the charges when the marshals came in. says arrested. Making Georgia has just returned an indictment. They said I was partnered with Harold Rosenthal. Harold Rosenthal, the guy that was transporting for us, had faked his death

three years earlier. He had a case in Macon, Georgia, faked his death, comes into the courtroom with me from Panama, said, Your Honor, I'm the second due to come back from the dead. And they're like, oh, that's the guy I used to supply his drugs. They kidnapped in Panama, the captain of the Bolivian Air Force, right? Who was the guy that handled the cook to us in Bolivia, right? Brum into the United States. Here's the man that sold the cooking into George Valdez. Right?

Guess what? He just found innocent. And I'm like, if this is a bitch didn't sell nothing, what did I buy? Right, right. So what did they do this time that was difference? Well, now they have been following me forever. Right. Because I was on the parole.

Right. You're on parole. Yeah. And they know, like, for example, they even know how much clothes. My ex-wife, I would give her $10 a day to go shopping. And what did she do? She goes out and gets a loyalty card. I'm like, what do you think I'm giving you cash?

Right. So they're like, hey, she bought $100,000 at cash at a clothing store in Miami. So they were, so this second time after you're already out of the drug business, there basically, it sounds like it's a money laundering IRS, criminal IRS kind of case that they're trying to stick on you. He said, little money, lots of time, lots of money, a little time. All along, all the water was the money. Right.

And so, and what my attorney asked is like, look, he's willing, he walked away on his own years ago. Now, he has a chance to beat you and he's willing to plead guilty with no recommendation from you. And I tell you what the judge said when I walked into the junk. And yet, all we ask is that you charge them with a parole violation, right? So I did 15. Out of the 15, I did five, right? I had 10 years left. Yeah.

So I had already been on parole for four years, right? I had six left. But when you violate, you start over again. So we asked the prosecutor that I want to plead to the 10 years, the parole violation. And I'll tell you what, Jeff Session, who became Trump's Attorney General, was a gentleman with us. He and the prosecutor were amazing. But I walked in front of the judge when I'm willing to plead guilty. And you know what the judge is warning?

Look up the transcript. Mr. Valdez, before you plead guilty, I want you to know that I reject any deal you reach with the government now or ever. I want you to know that is my intention to sentence you to a life sentence. I want you to know that you will die in a federal prison. How did you feel? I would numb. I would numb. I didn't care.

I realized I've been walking dead for a lot of years. I said, Your Honor, you can only give me what God wants to give me. Whether I die in a prison on the streets, it doesn't matter. I've been dead for a lot of years. Wow. Did that impact him, you think, when you said that? What happened is when they did all their, when the pro-law, you know, then you go to a parole officer.

that does all the pre-sentencing investigation, all that. And when he became aware, because he was the guy that sentenced Dickie Lynn to life. So this technique is the same case. I said there was 101 people really convicted and done with. They come and give me at the end on a made-up case. You know, if they thought they really had a case, they would have got me and tried with Dickie.

Right. Which literally they should have. Because I brought in 30 loads with Dickie. Right. But anyway, when I got sentenced, he said, the reason I'm going to give the sentence I'm going to give is because I'm convinced that the man I'm sentencing is not the man who committed this crimes and gave me 10 years. Yeah. And so he did see that. And was an unbelievable judge.

A year and a half later, my daughter was having nervous breakdown and I couldn't get a permit. to go see her from my parole officer. So my attorney, I said, I said to, to my pro officer, who was a really great guy in Chicago. I said, look, I'm going to go to my daughter's graduation. Little graduation, I said, he said, I'm going to have to violate you. I said, I don't care. I said, when I come back, I'll turn myself in, but my daughter needs me.

He said, look, the only way you can go is have your attorney write the judge a letter, asking him to give me permission to let you go. Now think about it, this judge is sent me to me knowing that I brought in 40, 50 loads while on the parole. Yeah. And all that. You know what the judge did? He took my parole off.

Wow. Wow. So he went to your daughter's graduation. I went to my, I said, look, I got it. I was preaching. In a lot of place, I said, look, I got to go see my kids. I got to preach and

and he was just it was just a great great judge but you know he saw that I went back to school he saw that

you know the difference between if you take this why I never wanted to write I turned down two one million dollars from Hollywood

you know one right when the book came out I mean I even had a huge offer from Chuck Norse who wanted to play the Quran instructor to let me to the Lord And I never wanted to tell that story at that time

Because I didn't want to glamorize the life Yeah, I can tell stories that will blow people's mind away But I'm cognizant of the pain that this caused Forget about anybody else Forget about my torture I deserved it In prison, I had a hell of a good time in prison I had a mistress inside the prison

You know, I had fun But my parents suffer My brother gave out 10 years of his life To bring my kids and my parents to visit me You know, and I always come Congress and that, how do I glorify that at the cost of the pain of so many people, you know? So therefore, I didn't want to tell the story, this drunk story that everybody wants to tell. Could have done that in 1998.

I want to tell the story that you can mess your life up big time like I did. But you know what? There's God. There's faith. There's a God who forgives. There's redemption. You can become better. Your life must not end the way that it begins.

And, you know, I look back throughout my life now, you know, I walked out of prison, dead broke, didn't have a dollar, went back to school, you know, earned my PhD, and then my father passed. He was my best friend in the world. And I'm there in the shower crying, and actually it was a month before my wedding to my wife of 27 years, the love of my life. And I was there crying. I mean, like, man, you know, he never gave me anything physical. He had nothing to give me. I said, but you know what he gave me his presence? And I told my wife, who she was on,

she was getting ready to start her PhD. And I said, I'm moving to Georgia. We're going to, I'm going to leave my job. I was one of five Hispanic with a PhD in Bible in the whole United States, recruited by every university, because at that time they wanted to get Spanish students. And I said, I'm going to leave that.

and when you're going to move to Georgia, I'm going to be a full-time dad to my kids. Because otherwise, how are my kids going to remember me? Someone who sent a check every month and had a great summer, I want to be there all the time. What are we going to do? I said, I have no idea, but God will provide.

And I said, I know what we can do. We know how to clean. Let's start a little cleaning company. And we started a little cleaning company, and we started then a little franchise. And in 10 years, I built it into a multi-million dollar national international company.

Wow. And when I walked away, we just done $55 million that year. Wow. He sold it? No, I had two partners, my brother and another brother from another mother I call. And at that time, our company had no value in the sense of, because it was a large catastrophe. It isn't like you have contracts where, you know.

So, you know, it either pours, you know, or you start. Easter family. Right. Easter family. But, you know, I got the millions of dollars that we had in equipment. Wow. So, but I sat there in our life. last job in Louisiana. I've been gone for two and a half years away from home.

Went home to Christmases for two days each Christmas. And I sat there and I'm paying off everybody, you know, all the bills. And I said to myself, if I continue, all I'm going to do, we have no debt, we got plenty of money to live a heck of a life. I said, all I'm going to do is to add zeros to my bank account. Now, when we started the company, I told my partners, what makes a great company? I said, let's go off for a weekend and define. Because I want to create a great company. We sat there and then, like, what makes a great company?

Great employees, great technology, great customers? No. I said, you know what makes a great company? One that gets back. So we're going to take 10% off the top. Not the profit, because then we can be created with the profits. Off the top, and we create a foundation called Treas and a Mount Foundation. And then we're going to use this money to help those that can't help themselves.

And we did. We ended up, you know, we built the only church inside the United States prison at Angola, Louisiana State Penitentiary. You know, we did programs to get kids of drugs. You know, we created in Mexico, you know, a whole nursing home because back in Mexico, in Hispanic culture, you go live with your parents. But what happened because of what we're living is people came from. tourism. So they didn't have no family. They got older and they had no one to take care of them. So we built in conjunction with the Catholic Church that we built a nursing home for for those

people that had no family there. And and then I got called me to send books to prisoners. And we sent $175,000. My wife and I to 983 prisons so far. And at the end of the day, that's what motivated me. What motivated me is to make a difference in the world. I get $25,000 speaking fee. I haven't kept a dollar of my book revenue, of my speaking fees, of commerce, nothing I've done from my story. I told God I would never keep a dollar, including the proceeds of my IP for my, you know, for my artistic rights. Because I don't want people saying, oh, he was so, he made so much money selling cocaine. Now he's doing it selling Jesus. I'm not selling Jesus. I don't care. People say Jesus or that. That's their problem.

I'm nobody's savior. You know, I can tell you. I ain't going to die for no one. I didn't die for no one. All I can tell people is what's happened to my life. You know, and I thought, look, if the shoe fits wear, man. If not, buy another pair shoes. Yeah.

You know? All I can tell you is that the only thing that matters. See, I got this beautiful home. I mean, I live like a pauper compared to how I used to live. But I live a heck of a life now. But I'm going to die one day and I'm going to lay in that bed. and my Richard Mill Watch in coming with me all my bourbon collection

didn't come with me but you know what's coming with me? All those lives that I have impacted for God. All those people had no hope and I showed them hope. You know? I believe people change

when they see that someone has changed and I can show you hundreds of emails. Hundreds of email. Just recently I got one of the most powerful one. I'll read it to you and I'll send it to you. When I was in the jail and panel in Miami, there was a young card.

Good looking kid. Italian kid, about 20-some of years old. And, you know, he was talking about he was a big partier and he had all these women. And he was reading a book and I walked by by him one day. I said, hey, Mr. Emilio, quit reading that crap, man. I read the Bible. And he laughed at me and says,

ain't nobody read the Bible to me. But I can talk it. And then he knew who I was, the reputation I had, and he would come at 11 o'clock at night and open myself, so I could read out of the Bible. I said, look, read the Bible. Don't read it as a religious book. I said, I started reading it as a book of war stories, historical book.

And then when I went to read the New Testament, I just read it as a book of morals. That's it. And I did, and I did. And then I left. He recently just reached out to me. Now, this was 1984. He reached out to me, 94, I'm sorry, he reached out to me and says, When you left, I went to a club that night, and I couldn't stay there.

I had to leave. And then I went back to my house, and I turned out TV, and it was about the Ten Commandment. Then I go to sleep, and I get this feeling that someone's praying for me. Because I told him, I said, look, I don't want to pray for you. God's going to change your life. Well, long story is he turned his life around, became a Christian, and has a beautiful family. And he says, I want you to know, I'm still walking in the same footsteps you taught me back in 1994. Wow.

94.04. 04, 14, 24, 30 years ago. And look at you now. I mean, you've got six kids that are beautiful and incredibly successful and educated. I mean, despite, you know, that era, you really achieve the American dream, materially, spiritually, and familial. Was your dad proud of you before he passed? Oh, yes. He passed in my arms.

Wow. You know. But did he realize that? He's like this suffering that me and your mom put ourselves through by leaving Cuba, by leaving the life that we had of opulence, did he realize it was worth it? He saw me turn my life around. He saw me earn my PhD. He did not see me build a company because he passed literally a month before I got married.

27 years ago. And, but he saw me change, and that's all that mattered to him. And my mother did see me build our company and all that. And, you know, but, you know, to me, what is the American dream? Or to me, what is the greatest gift God has given me? Is that fact that my kids want to come home when they no longer need to. And if you can achieve that, if your kids decide to see you when they don't have to,

when they don't depend economically from you, when your kids become better than you, you know, my son, my middle son, he's on his way to become a billionaire. You know, my daughters, they're all successful, attorneys, you know, my oldest daughter will save my life. She, you know, she dedicated her whole life to special needs, developing kids that are hurting,

that have educational, they have issues, you know, have deficiencies, et cetera. So when you see that and when we are constantly together, like two years ago for a 25th anniversary, I took 17 of us between children and in-laws and all that on a Disney cruise and grandchildren. And our grandchildren adore us. And, you know, a lot of that, honestly, I owe to my wife because only two of those six are hers, but my wife never made a difference between those are mine and this are yours. And they adore her. And my grandchildren adore.

I think they love my wife more than me because she loves children. She plays craft. But she always made sure that our kids were our priority. You know, we sacrifice vacation to give them an opportunity. And we had challenges, enormous challenges. You know, that middle son that's going to be so successful overdosed at the age of 16. Wow.

You know, and he was lost. And thank God, I was real tired with the judge because he was out of control in his mother's house. And the judge hadn't sent us to Teen Challenge that was serving on the National Board and for a year and then sent us him to my house.

He said it was the hardest. Living with me was the hardest thing he ever did in his life. But, you know, I thought it was important life. Now he's a tech millionaire and, you know, on his way to inventing new AI companies. And it's just really remarkable everything that you've experienced in one lifetime. And I really deeply appreciate you for letting me sit down with you come into your home and capture a piece of history that will never be repeated again. And to me, besides.

the fact that you achieved the unachievable, which is to be truly a narco godfather and to have escaped death and life in prison and overdose and to be living this life of God and abundance now. Aside from all that, having lived through that very brief, incredible period of world history, does part of you feel honored that you got to go through that? Like, do you see now what you went through as a gift?

You know, it's like people ask me, well, you do it again? I don't live in the past, so I can't answer that. Do you miss your life? Oh, hell yeah. Hell yeah. Listen, every time, tomorrow I'm going to go to an airplane and coach. You don't think that I'd rather drive up to the jet and get on my big old fat hawker or have everything I want it? but I don't miss the consequences that the life brought

and the emptiness and the emptiness. See, in life, if you find meaning and things, you'll never be happy. Meaning must come within you, must be in you. This is why the biggest message that I would like to send to people is, look, it's okay. Look at Narcos, look at Grisela, look at although I enjoy them, their old fiction, it's fine.

But just know that is not reality and it's not my story. See, all those stories is the same. Poor kid. Jumps out of school. Out of high school. Joins the life of crime. Because it's very wealthy. Lives a lot of his lifestyle.

Kills a bunch of people who dies. That in my story. That in my story. You know, I didn't die. I didn't kill anybody. I got an education. And I was able to reinvent my life. Yeah, I did 10 years in prison.

Yeah, I suffered torture that I don't wish all my greatest edit. and I don't have any enemy. I love everybody. You know, Gandhi used to say, I don't defeat people by power. I defeat my enemy by loving him to a point that they no longer see me as an enemy.

And I tell people, even the most heart of all hearts will respond to unconditional love. People need love, man. We need to stop this hatred, all this division that we have. And what I pray that my story does is like, I was on Despietta America,

which is like, Good Morning America. Spanish. And one of the hosts said, you know what's different about this story is this. I got a call from my best friend and said to me, after listening to that story, I now have hope for my son. Wow. And that's all I care, man. All I care is that hopefully one child doesn't have to live without his father.

One father doesn't have to bury a child. You know, one person doesn't divorce their wife. you know, families are not broken, that people stay together, that people love people, and that changed the world for the best. You know, there's a whole generation that's looking at us and they're looking at nothing but hatred.

We're fighting over presidents that ain't going to do crap for you. None of them. I don't care. I started from George Washington to now. If it's up to you, if it's going to be, it's going to be up to you. You know?

And whoever our leaders are prayed, whether you voted for them or not. Pray for them. We need to pray more. And we can change the world. We can make this a better place for our kids. We're going to be gone. I'm 69.

I'm going to have 10, 20, 30 years. I'm going to be gone. I got less than what I've lived. I never thought I lived past 283. So, you know, I just thank God that every day I get an email, every other book that goes out. And it's been very expensive for my wife and I. I mean, we could have bought a house with what we spent.

And people say, why? You don't even know who these people are. Said, I don't have to. On this earth, I might on the second earth. Jorge, where can they find your book? It's on Amazon. It's called Coming Clean. Different books that I have, I have a devotional that I wrote with my son,

who's the tech guy on, you know, how to a journal on how to become better, the principle. Because I use the same principles all my life for building everything, you know. And so I talk a lot of about. about that, but they can follow me on Instagram, Dr. Horstead, Louise Valdez. I post stuff, and on YouTube, my YouTube channel, Jorge Valdez, Ph.D., I guess you'll post it. And, yeah, and the show, stay tuned because the documentary is going to be Shadow the Wolf. So how do you know that my story is true? The first DA agent who went after the war on drugs

says that I was the first target with Manny Garzis. they got to start at all said I was there at the beginning so here I am Cori I hate I hate to just paint you with this one brush because you're so much more than that but you truly were the cocaine

cowboy you are the America's cocaine cowboy you're the real Tony Montana and you're an inspiration and yeah I just I don't know what to say except talks like these make me happy that I get to do this podcast. And I read your book too.

And look, I learned, you know, it's just an extra piece of faith that you instill in me in my own life. So I encourage everybody to go out and read his books. And yeah, we'll switch over to the Patreon now. Do you do a quick little bonus episode. And then you get to go pick up your granddaughter. But thank you. Yeah. You know, and the biggest thing is the fact that, sadly enough, Hollywood has painted every Hispanic as a waiter or landscape person.

And the sad part with the Tony Montana, which a lot of people, a lot of Cuban loved it because it was running to 10y. It was a good. But it's stereotypical. That's not who we are. No. Cubans, we're very hardworking people, man. We came here and we had parents that had unbelievable principles. We saw multi-millionaire parents clean toilets and never complain.

And yes, we messed up because we're young kids. It was the Cubans that created the drug trafficking in the United States. And we messed up, but it's not who we are. That's not who we are as a race. Hispanics have contributed enormous to America. We've gone to wars. We've done so much. And I hope that when my documentary comes, it paints a different picture.

It does paint the picture of a kid that they mess up. You know, because I was a kid. I was hungry. I wanted to be. I wanted to be respected. I want to become somebody. But America loves a comeback story. That's the beautiful part about America.

So you may not have been able to inspire all these people if you didn't have the clout that you did from the drug game. So just think about three years after walking away from a prison. I'm sitting talking. The flag officers of the United States Pentagon are who? The head of the Navy, the head of the Air Force, the head of the Army. all this admiral.

This group is so tight that in that room only colonels could be the waiters and there was no wives allowed or nobody. I had the honor to speak to them.

Wow. You know, just three years out of prison. I've had the honor to address the United States Congress. I've had the honor to address the White House.

You know, to do, I did the Memorial Columbine for focus of the family at that event. I've done events in Chile, Argentina. God's open doors

that are unbelievable. I'll tell you the most powerful one, So the gentleman that handles my book, the name is Brett McGraw, a saint, with number of gym teaching in a little town called Holland, Ohio, 3,000 people. Forever and ever,

one day he called me, I said, God spoke clearly to me, and I'm to dedicate the rest of my life to sending you books to prisoners. And he's the man that has sent out of 170,000 books. But I had this other person, heard me at the, I did the National Day of Prayer in Washington

and asked me to come. come to his high school to talk to his kids. And it was a little high school in bum Egypt. I didn't know where it was. And I kept brushing him off, brushing him off. Finally, I was doing another event about 125 miles away. I think I was not on focus on a fan. I was on with Pat Robertson.

Anyway, I told the guy that was helping with the ministry, guy, call him up and ask you if you want me to go speak to his high school tomorrow. at noon. We can be there by noon and still make the event at night. So he goes and said, yeah, he loved to have you. So I went there and I started talking. So this is after the guy had begged me for five, six times for over a year and a half to go there. I went.

In the middle of my speech, this kid comes on to bleachers, dropped in front of me on his knees, hands me a piece of paper. It was a suicide note. He was going to take his life that day. had a night come, he will not be with us. So that's what motivates me. Yeah. That's what keeps me money.

That's got to, that's got to feel. I've had cars. I've had it all. It's got to feel way better than all that, huh? You know, the fact that when a human being impacts another human being. Yeah. And makes that person's life better, makes that family better, have a guy wrote me a letter and said, all I wanted to be,

he had been in prison 12 years, young, African-American kids, He said, all I wanted to do is get out of me a bigger criminal. I wanted to just kill people and die. And he said, I read your book. And he turned my life around. And I get out and I have a beautiful wife and children. I start a new company. And it's called, we can do it better?

And people say, do you do it better because you guys are better? They do remodeling. He said, no, it's because everyone that works for me is a convict. And I teach him that we can do it better. Wow. And those are the things that keep me moving. a father that just got reunited with his family and said, please keep, don't stop,

because I want to be convinced that I can change. Because he's not sure whether he can change. But he's trying. You know, we change when somebody else has changed. That's true. You know. And that's what keeps me moving. So if the good Lord tells me tomorrow,

I'm going to die, I'm going to say, let me see which of my bourbon bottles? Bring me that ego rare. Let me have a drink. And Jesus, I'll see you on the other side. And I got a lot of questions for Jesus. I do, but I wanted to bring out some of the good wine that he served at that wedding in Cana, and I want to ask him about all the questions that I have.

But in the meantime, I just operate by loving people, man. And all those questions will be answered. Don't worry. Sure. Right now we look through a funky glass. One day we're going to look through as we are seeing. Are you going to be ready to go? Well, I'm ready to go right now.

I was ready to go in Panama. And I didn't know where I was going back then. Yeah. You know, I haven't told you this. Two years ago, they found I have a heart defect. They should have killed me when I was 20. It's called The Widowmaker. And basically, there's two others that come from the ear or to the heart.

This one, I never had it. It grew here. It comes underneath. And you've seen Pete Maravich die from it. And you'll see young athletes all of a sudden die. They think he had a heart attack, but they didn't. And they discovered it here in Orlando because my wife, when we moved from Palm Beach,

wanted us to go to a doctor here. And so he's like, hey, why no one ever did a CAT scan of your heart? And I was with the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio in Palm Beach where we live. And I'm like, I don't know. Actually, my Apple Watch is the one that detected, hey, your resting heartbeat in almost 55. It's been over 120 for a week. Because as you can see, I used to do Iron Man.

And so I'm like, went to cardiology, put me in all this men, they said they can't figure it out. Anyway, this one finds it. So after the CAT scan, the nurse can say, hold on, the doctor wants to see you. So the doctor walks in and he says to me, why are you not dead? So I'm like, you read my book, did you? He's like, what book?

I said, oh, shit. So he goes to explain that I have this heart defect that I could die. I should have died by 20, 30, but I could die any minute. So he says, I need to talk. And he's a college professor. I need to talk to my colleague because we never seen anyone alive with this. Because most people, they realize that you have this defect when you die in autopsy because you have no symptoms.

You're not short of breath. You don't have heart palpitation like a heart attack. So I would go see him with my wife on Monday. And he's like, tell me this thing. He said, look, you need to have open heart surgery. And if I was you, I'd go to one of the big doctors. I said, who? He says, I'd go to the Cleveland.

clinic in Ohio. They're the best in the world. My wife gets on the internet and starts email in the clearing clinic, says, you're a bunch of idiots. You've been seeing my husband for three years, never detected this. This doctor here, his first visit, finds out, I'm going to sue you when he dies. That night, I'm cooking on my pizza oven, and I get a call. And it's the director of Dr. Gabriel, one of the most famed cardiologists in the world. and she's like, can you come here this Monday night?

Can you be here Wednesday morning? I'm like, sure, why? Well, Dr. We got all the records. We got your wife's email. And Dr. Gabriel wants to run a series of tests. I said, what test? And she told me, I said, I just had them done. Not too long as she said, Dr. Gabriel doesn't take anybody's test.

She said, she wants to run tests. Thursday, Friday. A very intrusive test on Monday, Tuesday you meet with a surgeon. Wednesday you have open heart surgery. So they run all those tests. Monday they run a test that, oh my God, man. I thought Panama was a breeze compared to that. And man, they gave me fentanyl three times.

Wow. Because you guys stay awake and they artificially pump your heart to see at what point your heart stops. Fuck. So after, and yeah, through this vein, it's like, I felt like they were putting a close hanger. And you are like in the electric chair. I mean, you're strapped where you can't even move. Anyway, so after the test she comes. And she's like, looks at me like this.

And she said, I want to tell you this. Your chances of dying, she said, now hear me. Dying, not living, dying are the same with surgery and without the surgery. I'm like, so you mean that if I have this surgery, it doesn't guarantee me that I can live? And she's like, no. She said, we invented a valve you need, but we've never had anyone alive to put it in it. As far as we know, you're the only person with this deal. effect. Wow. So I said, Doc, I said all that to get to this. I said, Doc, let me tell you how

you got life. I want to live. I love my wife. I love my children. I love my grandchildren. So I made no rush to die. But if I die, I want to see my mom and dad, some great friends that have died, and I'm going to be with Jesus. Now, I'm estimating that she's not. I believe. you're right. Because the way should look at it. And Doc, listen, carefully. If this Jesus thing is BS, I'm just going to be furturalized like you. So it don't matter.

Give me my release paper. I'm going to Costa Rica. Nice. And I left. And here I am. Man, you are one. I should have died doing my heart can I get above 150. It was 180, 190 for seven hours doing Iron Man.

And here I am. So we're going to die the day that is destined for us. It doesn't mean that we, that's destiny, right? So therefore, you know what? Why worry about it, right? Jorge Valdez, you are one unique son of a bitch. And I thank you. Go get his book.

Go start with his autobiography, come and clean, read his other works. And pour me a glass of bourbon before I get out of here. All right, brother. Thank you so much. Take care. I'll even give you a good bourbon.