He smuggled about 15 tons of cocaine into the US every day.

According to journalist Ioan Grillo, the Medellín cartel smuggled most of its cocaine straight over the Florida coast.

"It was a nine-hundred-mile run from the north coast of Colombia and was simply wide-open. The Colombians and their American counterparts would airdrop loads of blow out to sea, from where it would be rushed ashore in speedboats, or even fly it right onto the Florida mainland and let it crash down in the countryside," Grillo wrote.