had insulted his mother in the street. They’d placed him in a cotton sack and taken him at midnight out into the cane fields. Swigging rum up in the cab of the stolen pickup, the three brothers laughed at the man bouncing around in the back of the truck’s bed as they careened through the tall cane.
His two brothers held the man’s arms. Manso suddenly stepped forward and whipped off the sack covering the man’s head. When the man saw a glint of moonlight on Manso’s upraised blade, he started begging. He was still pleading when Manso casually lopped off his head, spraying the three boys with blood. It was Manso’s first taste of blood and he found that he liked it.
He’d had the head delivered in a pinata to the Soviet embassy. This spectacular crime, and the ensuing manhunt for Manso and his two brothers, had caused them to flee their homeland. They headed straight for their uncle’s village in the mountains of Colombia. Their mother, a Colombian, had a brother who was a coca farmer in a thriving little hamlet called Medellin.
In the long chain of lucky events that would mark his life, the murder of the Russian brought Manso to the attention of Fidel Castro himself. Normally, this would have resulted in his capture, torture, and execution. The Soviets wanted Manso’s head, that was certain. They’d even sent investigators and detectives all the way from Moscow in search of the murderous de Herreras brothers.
By the time the Russian investigators reached Cuba, Manso and his young brothers were in Colombia, at the forefront of a burgeoning new industry. They were using high-powered speedboats, committing acts of sea piracy, and running cocaine for a Colombian madman called el doctor.
9
El doctor, it didn’t take Manso long to discover, was not a doctor at all.
He was a murderous psychopath. A squat little man who’d gotten his start stealing headstones from the local cemeteries, sandblasting them, and then reselling them. El doctor was the honorary sobriquet given to the young drug kingpin Pablo Escobar in honor of the first man he murdered, a man who happened to be a doctor.
Murder was not an unusual way to earn a nickname in Colombia. But this particular murder would mark the beginning of a reign of terror that would end only when Pablo himself was murdered at age forty, in 1989. At the time of his death, the former tombstone salesman, Pablo Escobar, was the richest, most powerful criminal in the world.
Manso had found his role model.
Shortly after fleeing Cuba and arriving at their uncle’s farm in the tiny mountain village of Medellin, the three de Herreras brothers began learning the thriving new coca business literally from the ground up. They planted and tended the shrubs, native to the Andes, with the pretty yellow flowers. Among other alkaloids, the leaves of Erythroxylum coca yielded a miracle powder called cocaine.
They worked in their uncle’s fields at first, and then graduated to the corrugated tin labs where the miracle money dust was refined and processed.
It wasn’t long until the brothers’ ingenuity, intelligence, and ruthlessness brought them to the attention of el doctor himself. Six weeks after arriving, they had officially been taken under the wing of Pablo Escobar and his Medellin cartel. Pablo was the vicious but wily thug whose murderous assassinations of judges, journalists, and presidential candidates would one day almost topple the Colombian government. Eventually, he blew an Avianca jetliner out of the sky and rocketed to the top of the world’s most-wanted list.
Pablo Escobar was the first billionaire Manso had ever met. He was also a legend to his people. The Colombian Robin Hood took millions in drug money from the stupid norteamericanos and used a small portion of it to build villages and soccer fields for the poor campesinos of Medellin. To the terrorized and oppressed poor people of Colombia, Manso saw, Escobar was a national hero.
Neither a revolutionary nor an idealist, Pablo was merely an outlaw. But in a country where the laws are hated, a charismatic and benevolent desperado can find himself a figure of adulation. Even worship.
Manso kept a keen eye on every move Pablo made. He was mesmerized, like all the rest, by Escobar’s penchant for casually extreme violence. He watched the ruthless Escobar with endless fascination as he went about the daily business of creating and embellishing his own mythic stature.
Manso immediately understood what worlds were opened once a man decided to make his own laws, his own rules. The young Cuban machetero in the thrall of el doctor now had a philosophy to live by. It was simple. You accepted either Manso’s plata or Manso’s plomo. You took his silver. Or you took his lead. It made not the least bit of difference to him which one you chose.
Under Pablo’s tutelage, the three de Herreras brothers became ever more lethal and sophisticated assassins. Before you killed a man, for instance, you first made him scream and beg. Or, even better, before you killed him, you first killed those he loved most.
Before you raped, you assembled an audience. Fathers and mothers, sisters and brothers were forced to watch. It was work his two brothers took to with enthusiasm. Manso had far grander ideas.
A very bright and keen observer of things, he saw that the norteamericanos’ seemingly insatiable demand for the Colombian product was rapidly overcoming supply. He sensed that this was only the beginning. The American appetite for coca powder was proving to be enormous. Many billions would be made in the next five or ten years.
The demand was there. How to supply it became increasingly problematic. Pablo even built a fleet of remote-controlled submarines, each capable of carrying two thousand kilos of cocaine from the shores of Colombia to the waters off Puerto Rico. It wasn’t enough. Manso had an idea.
It was obvious to him that Pablo would need ever increasing numbers of pilots to ferry the huge loads of his product north. So, he’d learn how to fly. But Pablo’s pilotos were a close-knit group and shunned the young Cuban hothead. He begged the pilots for flying lessons. But, another pilot meant less money for them, so they resisted.
He finally persuaded one of the younger pilots to teach him to fly by abducting the man’s sister. The man took his case to Pablo, who applauded Manso’s audacity. The next day, Manso was airborne.
He soloed after only six hours of instruction.
Pilots were in fact paid a lot more than the mere sicarios, or paid assassins, that Pablo employed in ever increasing numbers. It was the happiest time of Manso’s life. He was a swaggering piloto in gleaming aviator sunglasses, playing the narcos version of aerial cat and mouse with the government troops on his weekly runs to Managua in his C-123 transport plane.
With his newfound wealth, he purchased an American Cigarette speedboat. When the weather was too bad for flying, Manso and his brothers took to the sea to make their deliveries. Once the product had been delivered, they went in search of isolated tourist yachts, robbing and murdering at will.
The de Herreras brothers had become the deadliest pirates in the Caribbean. But it was not to last.
After an ill-considered midnight run north to Cuba to see their mother, a bloody shoot-out with Cuban gunboats off the Isle of Pines finally ended in their capture. The three brothers were taken to Havana. They were whisked from the airfield directly to the Palacio de la Revolucion and brought before el comandante.
Castro stood up behind his massive desk and stared at them, his hand on the sidearm that always hung from his belt.
“Ah,” Castro said. “The three little boys who murdered the Russian diplomat? Si?”
“Si, Comandante,” Manso said, smiling. “It was a great pleasure. The man was a pig. He insulted my mother in the street.”
“So, you cut his head off and sent it to the Soviet embassy in a pinata,” Castro said, walking around the desk.
Manso stiffened. Waiting in the anteroom outside the Maximum Leader’s office, under the guns of the elite guards, he’d concluded that they were all to be shot where they stood. “We will die like men,” he had told his brothers. Now, it was simply a matter of waiting for the bullets to come. He’d seen men die badly. He didn’t intend to disgrace himself.
“Si, Comandante. I used my machete. It was a clean cut! I am a Machetero! So are my brothers. We are
