Back in the 1980s, I was leading a double life. By day, I owned and operated the largest Lamborghini dealership in the United States. But by night, I was secretly flying tons of cocaine for Pablo Escobar and smuggling it into South Florida.

I never set out to be a cocaine smuggler. My dad was a real estate developer in Miami and my mom was a homemaker. I had a great childhood. But becoming the victim of a duplicitous con artist completely changed the trajectory of my life and turned me into a different person. And a few years later, I was making tens of millions of dollars every month in the cocaine business.

At the height of my success, I owned 30 airplanes, dozens of boats, multiple mansions and Lamborghinis. I even had a pet mountain lion named Top Cat.

But it all came crashing down in April of 1988 when I was arrested in an early morning raid by federal agents. As I was crouched on my knees getting handcuffed, and as federal agents surrounded me with guns drawn pointing at my head, I thought to myself, “How the hell did I get here?”

I was born in Cuba back in 1952. At that point my father was a senator, a really respectable and noble man. And all I wanted to do, all I ever wanted to do was follow in his footsteps. The brutal dictatorship of Fidel Castro forced my family to flee Cuba and make a new life for ourselves in South Florida. My dad started working in construction, and before long he became a very successful real estate developer.

When I was 17 years old, my dad decided to get into the sugar business. He purchased land in Haiti to build a sugar mill and spent the next few years trying to get that sugar mill up and running.

I was my dad’s shadow. I followed him everywhere. He wore a suit and had a briefcase. I wore a similar suit and carried a similar briefcase. I was with him at every single business meeting, and he taught me everything he knew. He was the best father any son could have asked for.

But tragically, when I was 19 years old, my father got cancer and died quickly over the course of a few months. On his deathbed, he made me promise him that I would get that sugar mill in Haiti off the ground. And I swore to him that I would.

Before he passed away, my dad had secured a $14 million loan for the sugar mill in Haiti. But after his death, the bank refused to honour that loan and refused to acknowledge me as a capable heir. They dismissed me as a “kid” and wished me luck finding the $14 million at another lending institution.

I was grieving the loss of my father, and I was desperate to keep the promise I had made to him. I worked all my contacts and my dad’s contacts and eventually found a banker willing to loan me the money. All he needed was a $100,000 “good faith” deposit.

I was young and desperate, a truly dangerous combination. I didn’t suspect that once I made that deposit, that banker would stop talking to me. And then he would start avoiding me. For months. When I eventually showed up unannounced at his office one day, I was stunned to see other victims there demanding their money back, too. That banker turned out to be a ruthless con artist. I was devastated.

At that point, I was defaulting on loans my father had already taken out for the sugar mill, for the land and for the machinery. And I was severely in debt to the government of Haiti. I needed money and I needed it fast.

It was the mid-1970s and I knew that selling marijuana could make me a lot of cash in a short amount of time. So, I bought a boat and set sail for the Bahamas, where I knew all the pot being sold in South Florida was coming from.

I was fortunate to make a great contact when I got there and sailed back to South Florida with a few hundred pounds of weed stashed away in my boat. I paid $25,000 for all that marijuana and sold it for $100,000. It wasn’t the $14 million I needed to get the sugar mill in Haiti off the ground, but it was definitely a good start.

At that point, I started making regular trips to the Bahamas. But then the weed supply there started to dry up. You see, the marijuana that I had access to in the Bahamas was marijuana the government confiscated ― which ultimately ended up on the black market, where I would purchase it. But there were months when they didn’t confiscate much pot ― so there wasn’t much I could buy.

So I decided to go where the pot grows: Colombia. But to get to Colombia, I would need to buy an airplane and learn how to fly it. So that’s exactly what I did. I opened the classifieds section of the newspaper (remember those?) and found a little twin-engine Beechcraft for sale for $50,000. It was a real bucket of bolts, but I bought it and repaired it and quickly learned how to fly.

My first trip to Colombia in 1979 was a huge success. I brought back a ton of marijuana and sold it and made a few hundred thousand dollars. At that point I was able to get credit for more marijuana. So, I flew back and got another $800,000 worth of pot. On credit. That turned out to be a huge mistake because I ended up losing that marijuana.

I was flying at night and I thought I dropped the marijuana out of my plane onto my boat that was waiting below off the coast of Florida, but it turned out to be someone else’s boat. And they made off with my marijuana.

I owed those Colombian suppliers $800,000 for that weed. Two weeks later, they sent thugs to kidnap me. And those thugs put a gun to my head and told me that if they didn’t get their $800,000 — in 48 hours ― they would kill me. And then kill my entire family.

Up until that point, I had avoided anything to do with cocaine. Because in my mind, the cocaine guys were the “bad guys.” The cocaine guys were the killers. I was just smuggling marijuana to make enough money to get my dad’s sugar mill off the ground.

But my life was on the line now, and so were the lives of my family. And flying cocaine was 100 times more profitable than flying marijuana.

So I flew to Colombia, picked up a load of cocaine, and flew it back. And I made $1 million from doing that one trip alone. I paid the Colombians back their $800,000 and saved my life. But the realisation that I could make $1 million a trip flying cocaine changed everything for me. Suddenly my marijuana smuggling days were in the rearview mirror.

As a full-time cocaine smuggler, I was making $1 million a week. I quickly developed a stellar reputation in the world of cocaine pilots. Primarily because most cocaine pilots during that time partook in the cocaine they were smuggling, and they were always high.

I, on the other hand, had never done drugs in my life. Not marijuana. Not cocaine. Not any drug. That really seemed to separate me from the other pilots of the day who were constantly late and constantly crashing their airplanes, losing loads of cocaine. I was never late. And I never lost a plane load of cocaine. Ever.

In 1983, Pablo Escobar sent one of his underlings to summon me. He had heard of me and heard about my reputation for never losing a load and he wanted to hire me to smuggle cocaine for him. After a tense back-and-forth negotiation in his secret lair deep in the Colombian jungle, I agreed to fly 1,000 kilos of coke for Pablo Escobar. And he agreed to pay me $5 million to do it.

After I started making weekly $5 million trips for Pablo Escobar, he stopped paying me in cash ― and started paying me in cocaine. The cocaine that Pablo Escobar paid me with, I sold in South Florida and all over the country, becoming a cocaine kingpin in my own right.

Sadly, by the time I had enough money to resurrect my father’s sugar mill, it was no longer salvageable. The government of Haiti had taken it over years earlier and run it into the ground. This was during the rule of Haitian dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier, and the nation was in steep decline. As I walked through the rubble where my father’s sugar mill once stood, I realised it would never, ever be.

So I flew back to Miami and parlayed all the money I was making into a Lamborghini dealership, and I bought a cell phone company ― in the mid 1980s, when cellphones cost $5,000 each. I also started building and selling homes in the Miami-Ft. Lauderdale area and became a real estate developer.

In the end — adjusted for inflation — I was grossing nearly $100 million a month at the height of my cocaine career — smuggling and selling tons and tons of cocaine every week. Keep in mind, back in the 1980s, cocaine was selling for as much as $600 per gram. And there are more than 900,000 grams in a ton (plane load) so I was swimming in money.

But then one of my underlings got addicted to the coke we were smuggling and got very sloppy. And then he got busted. And he served me up to the Feds on a silver platter in order to get a lighter prison sentence for himself.

I was arrested in April of 1988. And in early 1991, I pled guilty to multiple felonies including the distribution of marijuana, the distribution of cocaine and money laundering. I ended up serving a total of 13 years in federal prison.

Going to prison was devastating for me. Not just because of the loss of my freedom. But because my family and friends discovered my secret. And I was so ashamed and embarrassed.

After I was arrested, my mom came to see me. With a heartbreaking look of pain and disbelief on her face, she said, “Son, tell me what they’re saying about you isn’t true.” I still tear up thinking about that moment.

Before that, my double life was fuelled by compartmentalisation. There was “the good me” that my family knew, who was running successful legitimate businesses and making a lot of money, and who they were extremely proud of.

Then there was the “cocaine kingpin me” who was smuggling and selling tons and tons of cocaine for Pablo Escobar. I meticulously hid that side of me from them, because I knew they would be so ashamed of that version of me they never would have accepted it.

As the years passed, I painstakingly kept both worlds, both versions of myself, separate. And as long as these two versions of me never collided, I was able to feel good or at least, OK, about each one of them. But after my arrest, only one version of me remained – the cocaine smuggler. And my family was heartbroken over it for a long time.

My family has since forgiven me for the past. But I still can’t forgive myself. It haunts me every single day.

I’ve served my time, and I’ve learned a lot about life being behind bars for 13 years. If I could do it all over again, I would try to pursue a different path in life. As a 19-year-old kid, I made some really bad decisions that snowballed into a series of other really bad decisions that I regret.

I’m 73 years old now. I still love Lamborghinis. But my life has taken me in a whole new direction. I’ve been speaking at high schools and colleges. And for the past few months I’ve been working on producing a podcast about my life called “Cocaine Air.” Because I want to share my story with the world, especially with young people, about how one bad decision can lead to 1,000 more and send you in unimaginable directions.

But I truly believe there’s no mess that can’t be cleaned up. And that’s how I plan to spend the rest of my time on this Earth. Trying to do good, trying to have a positive impact on the world and using my story to teach young people how not to make the same mistakes that I did.

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