Greg Pahules wrestles his powerful frame into a classroom chair in his spartan apartment above a nail salon in central Florida. Aged 68 and bald, save for a string of grey hair pulled into a ponytail from the back of his head, he is practically twitching. He fixes me with cloudy blue eyes and asks if I think he’s “normal”.

An hour earlier, over lunch, Greg had suddenly remembered that he may have killed someone in Colombia in the 1980s, when he was deep enough into the cocaine trade to be on Pablo Escobar’s radar. He’d told me the story of coming upon a car crash on a winding mountain road one evening. As they slowed to help, a man jumped out and started shooting, hitting the driver’s hand. Greg put two bullets in the guy and sped away. The memory burrowed itself in a corner of his mind, until our conversation jogged it free.

I think of the dozens of hours and hundreds of texts, sent at all hours over the past year, which Greg had spent telling me his extraordinary life story. Normal? Not exactly.

His story started in a hospital bed in 1978, when Greg was a 20-year-old college football player at the University of Kentucky. A head-on collision during practice sent him there on a stretcher, and his coaches feared he might not be able to play again. Until then, football had been Greg’s path out of a childhood on the margins. His father left when he was five, and his mother remarried a former marine, who was violent with young Greg, regularly sending him to school with bruises. “He beat you, slapped you around, cussed at you, told you you were a piece of shit,” Greg recalled. “It was brutal.”

When his mother finally left, she took Greg and his sister to live in a bare apartment in a rough part of Miami. She worked round the clock to keep them afloat. Greg talked his way into a sports scholarship at a private school, and dreamed of driving the flashy cars that his schoolmates’ parents owned. Eventually, he managed to get into the University of Kentucky.

In his hospital bed, Greg saw a news segment about Miami becoming “the cocaine capital of the world”. The programme said the epicentre of the city’s cocaine boom was a hotel where Greg had worked parking cars as a teenager. “I was sick and tired of being poor. Sick and fucking tired. Right then and there, I said, ‘I’m going back home.’”

Greg managed to get his old job back, where he kept his eyes open for an opportunity. Over a few months, he charmed four Colombian regulars with his gift of the gab and limited Spanish. They threw him $50 tips and told him to take special care of their keys.

One night, detectives came and asked for the keys to the Colombians’ car. Greg misdirected them and then darted into the hotel’s club. He found the men, hurried them through a back door to a borrowed car and gave them the keys. Later, when no one was watching, Greg moved their Cadillac back to his grandmother’s house.

The next day, when the Colombians came for their car, they opened the trunk and pulled out a brick of cash. It was $50,000. Greg bought himself a Rolex and a Porsche, along with some cocaine to sell and an air conditioner for his grandmother.

The money was his stepping stone into the drug world. He was soon working for the Leon family, associates of some of the most powerful people in the Medellín cartel. (Most of the Colombian names in this article are pseudonyms.) They were upper-middle-class guys with college degrees, but knew little English and were somewhat lost in Miami, selling top-quality coke to Cuban middlemen at lousy margins. Greg, who knew all the richest kids in town from high school, quickly became invaluable.

He grew especially close to Gabriel Leon, the middle brother of five, driving him around town and teaching him English, learning Spanish in return. Gabriel asked Greg to move in with them. They became like family.

By late 1979, Greg was a partner in the family business. In December that year, Gabriel flew Greg out to see “his country”, where Greg says he was whisked through a two-week whirl of parties. Greg quickly befriended Javier Leon, the family’s rakish youngest brother. Their gallivanting earned them the nickname los vaqueros borrachos, “the drunk cowboys”.

One day, the Leons brought Greg to a ranch owned by the Ochoas, members of the Medellín cartel’s leadership group. In the midst of all the narcos, and their habitual shit-talking, was an unusually quiet group. They were hanging on every word one man was saying. He was short and plump, and sometimes punctuated his sentences with a wolfish smile.

“The way that people were around him, I knew he was a big deal,” Greg recalled. “When this guy is standing over there, he blocks out the sun.”

The man walked over, and Gabriel introduced him to “Gregorio from Miami”.

“I know who he is.”

The man looked the American over and said, “Gringorio.” A few people laughed. Then the man added: “That’s his new name.”

He was Pablo Escobar.

It’s 3.30am and pitch black in the sleepy middle-class beach town where Greg now lives. I drive to a gas station and find him outside, sipping coffee at a standing table, his back so straight he appears hung from the sky. He is already fizzing with energy.

Greg gestures at the hunched figures on either side of him, a retired 70-year-old doctor and a trainee pilot in his thirties. “These are my only two friends,” he says. They meet here, at this eccentric hour, five days a week.

Soon we’re in a windowless room, sweating profusely. As I wonder what the hell I’m doing there, the distinctive bass of Creedence Clearwater Revival starts throbbing out of the speakers. The next thing I know, we are standing up in our spinning bikes, asking if you’ve ever seen the rain.

We leave Greg’s friends and head to another workout, one so intense that you can only participate after taking one-on-one classes beforehand. I retreat to my car and catch some sleep, before he continues telling me his story.

In early 1980, Greg was summoned back to Colombia and sent to a party at the ranch of a man who was having issues in California. Greg was told he should try to help, and was dispatched with two “bad dudes” to look after him.

The morning after the party, where Greg was the guest of honour, he sat in the front passenger seat of the car whilst they said their goodbyes. As the host leaned through the window to shake Greg’s hand, a gun went off. Greg felt the man’s hand go limp. One of the “bad dudes” had shot him to death.

Back in Medellín, Greg was told the man had stolen the girlfriend of one of their friends. “That was a lesson,” Greg said. “They were warning me.”

The Leons had shown signs they were wary of Greg’s hedonism. Most nights he got home in the small hours, coke coursing through his veins, then slept off a hangover and got to work. But they couldn’t argue with his results. Over two years, Greg says he quadrupled their sales in Miami from 25kg a month to 100kg.

Greg, just 21, became rich. The proceeds from Miami alone netted him about $1mn a year, worth nearly $4mn today. The Leons were stashing millions more in a Panamanian account for him.

The Colombia trip in December 1980 was a more serious affair. “They put me in school,” Greg recalled. A carousel of narcos was brought to meet him, teaching him various aspects of the business: how to keep ledgers; who to call if there was a problem; where to deposit cash. And, strictly, not to go out on all-nighters. Finally, Gabriel told Greg, “I’m not coming back. You’re going to run the whole show.”

But by the time Greg got home to his new fiefdom, trouble was brewing. He had recently bought a condo and moved everything out of the house he’d shared with the Leon family. The timing was fortunate; a few weeks later, the empty house was raided by the feds.

Pedro, one of the Leons’ guys still in Miami, asked Greg if he knew anyone who could do odd-jobs in his house. Greg put him in touch with a nice-but-slow-witted friend from football, telling Pedro to under no circumstances get the guy involved in the family business.

Soon after, another ex-teammate appeared at Greg’s house, urgently asking for his help. Pedro and their buddy had asked him to bring a package of coke to Illinois, and he had no idea what he was doing.

Desperate to get rid of him and furious that Pedro had ignored his instruction, Greg quickly wrapped it up in cellophane, put black pepper on each layer to ward off sniffer dogs and sent him away.

A couple of days later, the same friend showed up again. He was soaking wet and frantic, telling Greg he had to flee. He said he had just swum across a canal after escaping from the car of a DEA agent, who was arresting Pedro. They were coming for Greg next.

Greg grabbed two duffel bags of cash and an emergency go-bag with some coke, tens of thousands more dollars, spare clothes and a gun. He drove to a phone bank and made two calls. First, to the marina, telling them to get his boat running. Second, to a number in Colombia. “Pedro is sick and in the hospital,” he told the person who picked up.

With a gun in his waistband, Greg headed to his boat and took it 50 miles to the Bahamian island of Bimini.

I wake to Greg tapping on my car window. Fuzzy morning light is creeping into the sky behind him. I follow his rattling pick-up truck to a diner, where we reconvene with the doctor and order greasy, soul-warming breakfasts.

Greg asks about my previous posting as a correspondent in Mexico City, telling me he used to hang out in the seedy Zona Rosa neighbourhood. I raise my eyebrows, and the doctor asks me why.

“That’s where all the cathouses are,” Greg cheerfully interjects.

“That thing’s recording you,” the doc says, pointing to my phone.

Greg gives a shrug and an impish smile. “They want me to be myself!”

Though they are only a couple of years apart in age, you would struggle to find two more different men. Gene, a grey-haired grandfather with a gentle face, was the son of the seaside town doctor and followed in his footsteps. “I was in a parallel universe,” Gene told me.

They met in 1991, when Greg emerged from the Colombian jungle, pale, withered and unable to shake a staph infection. Gene, a friend of Greg’s sister, helped treat him. Gene shows only a passing interest in tales of Greg’s escapades. But he is not conflicted about being friends with a former narco. “I’m on Greg’s side no matter what,” he says.

He heads to an appointment, leaving Greg halfway through a story about helping someone escape the DEA through Mexico. When I ask for the bill later, I find Gene has already paid.

After Greg’s daily breakfast with Gene, he heads home, takes a shower, puffs on a weed vape and starts his shift. He works as a street cleaner, using a grabber tool to pick up cigarette butts and other stray trash. His sister found him the gig after his job flyering for Las Vegas stripclubs ended in the pandemic, leaving him on the brink of destitution. When his shift is over, he naps and either goes surfing or back to the gym. In the evenings, he watches Westerns and old film noir movies.

On Bimini, Greg found a plane waiting for him. A hitman known as El Cuchillo, “The Knife”, was in the front seat. The Leons had got Greg’s message and were taking him back to Medellín.

In the air, he was hit by exhaustion. “All of a sudden, I’m wanted. The whole world changes,” he says. “There’s no more going out to the strip club. There’s no going out to my local bars. There’s no more going in my boat. Life is changing right now, right in front of me.”

As they circled the runway in Medellín, Greg counted seven Toyota Land Cruisers waiting for him. “In Colombia, if you see one Toyota Land Cruiser, you should be aware. If you see two or three, you need to get the hell out of there. And if you see four or five, someone’s getting killed,” he says. “And there’s seven of them.”

An employee of the Leon family met him on the landing strip. “He goes, ‘Get in the last car and shut the fuck up.’”

The convoy drove to a nondescript building, in which Greg was ushered into an elevator, which opened straight into an office. Behind the desk was Escobar, who was then becoming one of the world’s most powerful narcos.

Greg was told to sit and translate a legal document from English. It seemed bad. The DEA had found about 60kg of coke at Pedro’s house, worth some $3mn. Pedro had ratted on Jair, a relative of the Ochoas, who had been swiftly arrested.

At the mention of Jair, the narcos breathed a sigh of relief. He was an old-school gangster who would never talk. “Everyone started pouring drinks,” Greg said.

Escobar pointed at Greg’s duffel bags, asking what was in them. Greg opened them up to reveal $2mn of cartel money, adding to the giddiness: he had just wiped out a large chunk of Escobar’s losses.

Escobar walked up to Greg and put his arm around him. “He says, ‘Hey Gregorio, you know what? You can never go back to the US again. We’re your family now.’”

Greg’s new life entailed showing up at the Leon family’s office at 9am in a jacket and tie. If you took one door at reception, you found the people managing the family’s above-board real estate business. The other led back to the rooms, lined with original Botero paintings and pictures of the family’s horses, where the real work happened.

Narcos from across Medellín would come to do business with the Leons and then shoot the shit with their token gringo. They quickly realised he was a fount of information about US trafficking routes. It was made clear to Greg he was to keep a low profile. But he went out partying with Javier, chasing women and showing up hungover at the office.

As we talk in Florida years later, Greg interrupts his tale to neck cranberry juice straight from the bottle. He serves me water in his only glass. In dim light, muddled by the blinds, the smell of stale weed hangs in the air. His furniture was either saved from old rental apartments or rustled up by his sister. I spend three afternoons on his squeaky black couch, watching him re-enact his pulp thriller tale as a one-man show.

He is a sublime storyteller, leaping around the room with the face and energy of a silent film star. His bad guys have wild eyes and gnarled features. The weak cower, their hands clasped in innocent desperation. Gun shots go “Boom! Boom! Boom!”

When I ask a question, he disappears into his eidetic memory, pulling out tiny details of his outfits, food, the weather, time of day. Asked to repeat Escobar’s quotes in Spanish, he sprays out virile Medellín slang.

In 1982, Greg was caught on the Canadian border, trying to sneak back into the US on a tourist bus. After six months in pre-trial detention, Greg’s lawyer persuaded the prosecutors to accept a single guilty plea for conspiracy to traffic drugs. Miraculously, the judge let Greg walk out of jail with six months’ time served, and four-and-a-half years’ probation. He ordered Greg not to move back to Miami for that period.

When Greg finally moved home in 1986, he found his operation in disarray. The older Leons had retired, drying up Greg’s supply. Hard-partying youngest brother Javier had gone to work direct for Escobar. He had his own dealers in Miami, but threw Greg the kilos he could spare.

Greg’s margins were collapsing. A kilo now sold for just $34,000, and he was buying them for $30,000. He says he was earning about $100,000 a year, a tidy sum but a fraction of his previous income. Even worse, the $15mn the Leons had stashed away for Greg in Panama was then nationalised by the Noriega dictatorship.

By mid-1988, Reagan’s war on drugs was taking its toll on Miami, and the Medellín cartel’s supplies finally stopped coming. Greg had to sell all his assets, and moved into a friend’s abandoned house. He had a closet full of Versace clothes but was too skinny to wear them. There was no electricity, and one night, he got so hungry he ate dog food.

In 1989, he wrangled the money to fly back to Medellín to try to get his coke shipments flowing again. But it was not the city he had roamed around seven years before. Escobar was at war with the Cali cartel and terrorising the Colombian government. His men had just murdered an anti-narco presidential candidate at a campaign event. In November, they blew up a passenger plane, killing more than 100 people, in the mistaken belief another candidate was on the flight. The police often tortured suspected narcos or killed them on sight.

Greg thought he was going for a week to arrange a new supply route. Or even just get one or two big shipments through to Miami that he could sell and have enough money to walk away. But everyone was on the run, and even some of his friends worried he might now be DEA.

“I could not get a sit-down with anybody. Everybody thought I was there to rat on people,” he said. “So one week turned into a year and a half.”

Escobar’s people got word that Greg might be on a police unit’s shoot-to-kill list. After that, a sweet kid called Leonardo showed up at his door, telling Greg he was his new bodyguard.

Wherever they stayed, Leonardo would sleep on the floor by his bed. When Greg went to brothels, Leonardo would wait outside with a machine gun. “He never fired it. He never hurt anybody. He was a poor kid and this was just a job that was available to poor kids,” Greg said.

For his safety, Greg spent no more than a week a month in Medellín, instead flitting between Cartagena and his friends’ ranches.

He kept trying to track down Javier, but the youngest Leon was elusive, disappearing for months at a time and never seeing Greg one on one. Greg managed to get hold of 17kg — worth about half a million dollars at the time — and shipped them to Miami, but the cops busted the traffickers in the US.

One day at the Leons’ ranch, Greg’s TV stopped working. He sent Leonardo into Medellín to get it fixed. The kid never came back.

“The police took him to the station and they wanted information, and he wouldn’t give them any. So they took him out to a garbage dump, and they shot him in the back of the head,” Greg said.

They had a closed-casket funeral. “I loved this kid,” he said. “That knocked me down. I wanted to get out of there,” but he was worried the police could pick him up at the airport. And he refused to go home to Miami with nothing.

One night, Miguel, one of the Leon brothers, showed up ashen-faced at Greg’s house. He took Greg’s passport and said he had to drive him somewhere. “He looks at me and goes, ‘Man, I love you. I hope you didn’t do what they think you did,’” Greg says. Miguel wouldn’t tell him anything more.

Greg had no idea what he had done. Some narcos in Medellín were starting to stir with dissent against Escobar, but Greg had stayed well away from them.

They drove into the lush mountains of Antioquia, through a town on the Cauca river — “where Escobar chops everybody up when he kills them,” Greg said. He felt some relief. Finally, it’ll be over. I can go to heaven, he thought.

They arrived at a clearing and saw five Land Cruisers. Escobar was there, Greg says, with a handful of lieutenants. A man was lying on the ground, tied up and brutalised. Half his face had been burned off with a blowtorch. He was naked but for an intricate gold medallion.

“He’s screaming, he’s crying and he can’t see out of one eye, it’s just burned away,” Greg says. “He looks at me and he sees me: ‘Ohhh, that’s him, that’s him.’ And Escobar goes, ‘Shut the fuck up.’”

The man claimed he had given Greg $5mn of Escobar’s money in California a couple of months earlier. Escobar demanded to know where it was.

Greg grabbed his passport and shoved it in Escobar’s hands.

“I say, ‘Look, boss, I’ve been here for the last 16 months! How could I have fucking been in California and gotten $5mn? He’s a lying motherfucker!’”

Escobar carefully examined the stamps. Then he looked at Greg and Miguel, and said, “Lárgate”. Get out of here.

“We turn around and right away you hear machetes chopping his limbs off while he’s alive,” Greg said. “This guy’s screaming and they’re chopping and you can hear the machetes hitting him and I’m getting sick and Miguel’s getting sick. And we get in the car and we start driving back and we both stop and vomit and we’re crying.”

Recounting the story, Greg tells me he has wanted a replica of the man’s medallion ever since.

I am stunned. “You’ve wanted one since then?”

“Fuck that guy! He was trying to get me killed!”

He is standing up, shouting, wild-eyed.

“This guy gave me a death sentence! Fuck him! I’d wear the chain to celebrate his fucking demise!”

The man looming over me finally feels like a real narco.

Greg is leery of suggestions that his violent upbringing might explain his life choices.

“I would never use that or portray that as an excuse,” he says. “A lot of kids got slapped around in the ’60s by their father.

“That’s very important that you know this — I’m responsible for everything I’ve done,” he says.

“I wanted money.”

And yet he feels almost no guilt over it.

Colombia, he insists, would have been in chaos with or without him, with or without Escobar.

“It’s just a society of violence there. It always has been,” he says, pointing to the country’s lengthy civil war, known as La Violencia, as evidence. The country’s homicide rate is now a fraction of its level in the Escobar era, but Greg insists those figures are manipulated.

His cocaine “ruined many lives”, he says, but “it was their choice to take it”. Asked about the addiction crisis in the US, he recalls bumping into a woman he knew in high school, who had offered him oral sex for drugs.

“I felt terrible for those girls,” he says. “But did I feel responsible? No.”

Despite having taken coke almost every day for three decades, he claims never to have been addicted himself.

As we talk, Greg repeats mechanically that he is “not proud” of anything he did. Eventually, I say that not being proud is not the same as being ashamed. He looks at me earnestly. “Really?”

“Yeah.”

“Let me think about that for a minute. Ashamed.” He rolls the two syllables like a foreign word around his mouth.

“I’m ashamed I humiliated my family in court. I’m ashamed that I was so stupid that I even got involved in this to begin with,” he says.

“But because you’ve asked me the question a couple of times, I’m starting to wonder: should I feel responsible? I don’t know, I might one day, but right now I don’t. And you know what? I can’t really justify not feeling guilty. I’m too busy trying to survive to worry about those things. My life revolves around getting through today.”

He is fervently against drug legalisation, saying that making marijuana legal “was the stupidest thing they ever did” and that “it’s fucking up the youth of this country”.

After months of eluding Greg, Javier Leon finally came to see him in 1990. He did not bring good news. Escobar, he said, wanted them to track down a close friend and have him killed.

It took them six months to get hold of the friend. They were in Javier’s office in downtown Medellín and he rang. Javier quickly told him to leave the country, go as far away as possible. The friend thanked him and hung up.

They took a deep, grateful breath. Then, Greg says, the phone rang again. It was Escobar.

“I’m gonna kill your whole fucking family!” he shouted.

Greg, who carried his passport at all times, ran out of the building and jumped in the first taxi he saw. Most cab drivers in Medellín reported to Escobar, so he had to hope word hadn’t already travelled.

He made it to his closest civilian friend’s apartment. Fearing Escobar would have his people ready to nab Greg at the airport that day, they hid out in a ranch for a night. Greg called his mum and asked her to buy him a ticket home.

In the morning, he dressed in a Versace suit and headed to the airport, hoping neither the police nor the cartel were waiting for him. As he walked to his gate, he says he saw one of his favourite drinking buddies: Escobar’s chief cocaine cook. The man waved him goodbye.

It was over.

He went to live with his sister by the sea, coaching her nephew’s baseball team and being treated by Gene. Then an opportunity came about. A kid who used to work for him asked if he wanted to partner in a business growing weed in indoor houses in the US. He did.

As Greg pieced his life together, Miguel Leon got in touch with awful news: Javier did not survive Escobar’s wrath. He had been lured out of hiding, then killed.

The Leons turned decisively against Escobar, joining up with other powerful narcos who had lost loved ones to the crazed kingpin. They coalesced into a group called Los Pepes (“People persecuted by Pablo Escobar”) and were working with the DEA, Colombian law enforcement and the Cali cartel to take Escobar down. They wanted Greg’s help.

Greg claims, in an anecdote I was unable to corroborate, that they took him to Washington, to translate an off-the-books meeting with Bill Clinton’s attorney-general Janet Reno. But when they got there, they discovered she spoke enough Spanish to hold the meetings herself. Greg says he sat at the back of the room as Reno promised the narcos immunity in the US if they killed Escobar.

From then, the Leons began sending Greg enemies of Escobar to look after in Miami.

One was Jose, the 15-year-old son of Javier. He had been raised by his aunts and grandmothers, while his wayward dad worked for Escobar and his mother descended into coke addiction. Jose told Greg he had watched as Escobar’s hitmen gunned his father to death.

He lived with Greg, who he called “tio Greg” (“uncle Greg”), for several months, until one day Greg’s beeper started going crazy. When he called one of the numbers, the man on the other end said, “Good and gone”, then hung up. Escobar was dead.

Greg felt some relief, but that was about it. His one-track mind was now on making money from his growhouses.

He sent Jose home, and his ties to Colombia were cut.

The weed business made a million dollars in its first year, with Greg taking home about $200,000. In a few years, he says, he was earning double that. But it was a stressful life, sleeping in the growhouses, on the lookout for the cops, trying to corral his attention deficit disorder into the boring work of caring for plants.

Still, Greg seemed to be getting on his feet. He fell in love with a doctor who lived in another state and, for the first time in his life, prioritised happiness over money by taking a pay cut and moving out of the growhouses. He spent his nights with the woman he loved and bought a beautiful house with a pool. He says he paid for his girlfriend’s daughter to go to private school and loved her like she was his own.

In the 2000s, Mexican gangs started competing with his business and profits shrank. Greg’s self-worth couldn’t take the blow. He drank more and took more coke. His girlfriend told him it made him jealous and cruel, but he wouldn’t hear it. If he saw someone look at her in a bar, he’d angrily confront them. He also cheated on her.

The couple’s fighting got worse until, in a rage one night in 2012, she called Greg’s business partners and told them the FBI was investigating him. The partners cut Greg off. The couple also split up.

Greg spent the next three years in an angry haze of booze and drugs. By 2015, his savings were gone and he had lost his house. He moved to Las Vegas, where he flyered on the street for strip clubs, earning a commission for every person he got through the door. Then the pandemic put an end to that job and Greg found himself cleaning the streets.

It must be easy to love Greg. He connects with people in seconds; he is funny and charming, and tells amazing stories. And he is genuinely caring and compassionate. It must also be infuriating to love him. He can be paranoid, erratic and impulsive. And he almost never thinks before he speaks. “I rarely, rarely know what I’m going to say,” he admits. “It’s like breathing; stuff just comes out.”

Many elements of Greg’s story, including his relationship with Escobar, are near-impossible to fact check. But I confirmed the broad contours of his life through public records and interviews with former associates, friends and family members.

I tracked down a convicted former Medellín cartel member who worked with Greg and confirmed that he joined the Leon family and went to live with them in Colombia. An American former dealer who bought large sums of coke from Greg — and remains friends with him — told me the Leons were a “nice family” with a “real good product”.

Court documents show Greg was charged with several offences related to drug-trafficking in 1982 and pleaded guilty to one. A declassified DEA file describes a man with the same name as the Leon family head as a senior member of the Medellín cartel who helped US authorities take down Escobar in the 1990s. And Greg has an old, blood-stained passport with several 1980s Colombian immigration stamps.

Other evidence has been lost to time. In response to a freedom of information request, the DEA said files referencing Greg had been destroyed in 2009 and others appeared lost. But it eventually released one heavily redacted file from December 1992, showing it had investigated a rental car for which Greg was listed as a driver — suggesting he was on their radar even after leaving Colombia. Former attorney-general Janet Reno died in 2016, and one of her top aides told me any American official who might have been able to corroborate Greg’s story of meeting her is no longer alive.

In conversation, Greg flits between self-mythologising and self-critical. His friends and relatives describe him as a masterful raconteur with an extraordinary memory and did not know him to make up stories.

One relative told me she met the Leons and, at one point, found herself agreeing to hide wads of Greg’s cash in her house. “We weren’t of that world,” she said. “We were respectable! We had friends, we belonged to organisations and charities. We did fundraisers.”

They made no serious effort to get Greg to change course, though. “I’m sure it was mentioned to deaf ears,” she said. “They all thought they were invincible.”

But Greg’s bubble of bravado surrounds deep pain. He has never had therapy and doesn’t want it now. “I’m too old for that,” he says. “Before I get better I’ll get worse. I don’t want to relive all the brutality of my stepfather.”

Retelling the story of his time in the cocaine trade takes a toll. At the end of our second day, he was visibly exhausted, convinced he was coming down with the flu. He went to bed early and slept for 14 hours.

Greg had kept his story locked away until, about a decade ago, a man at a party bullshitted about knowing Escobar. Greg couldn’t help but one-up him. From there, he told bits and pieces to his family and friends, and a couple of times recounted everything to writers he hoped might turn his story into a movie. Those efforts petered out. But, I suggest, the years since he began talking about it seem to have been the most stable of his life.

“I never put that together,” he says, voice filled with wonder. “Yes, it has, it really has.

“Maybe,” he considers, “all those years, I was holding shit inside so much, that’s why I snorted and drank.

“This is therapy, telling you this story,” he says. “Reliving it, examining it, trying to understand it.”

Unlike most of his fellow narcos, Greg avoided both an early death and a life in prison. But he has ended up in a kind of jail all the same.

He has given up coke and alcohol. His battered truck struggles with long trips to friends and family.

His sister cooks him food but they rarely eat together; for all their mutual love, they can’t stand each other’s company.

He makes and eats his other meals — variations on tinned tuna, celery, apples and peanut butter — in the one bowl he owns. After years of hedonism, his only extravagance now is the cost of his punishing gym classes.

“I’m 68 years old, I’m broke and I pick up trash for a living,” he says.

His sister also looks after his life savings, which amount to about $25,000. Greg is certain he will end up on the street, though he insists it doesn’t bother him.

“Once you realise that’s what you’re going to be, it’s not that big a deal . . . there’s nobody to blame but me,” he says. “I have no more property, I have no more assets, no planes, no boats, no motorcycles, no gold Rolexes.”

Max de Haldevang is the FT world news desk editor

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