January 3, 2025 • 38 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, after running the North American cocaine trade for the cartel in his early 20s, Jorge Valdes found salvation rather than death. Here he is to tell his remarkable story.
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Speaker 1 (00:11):
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American people,
and we love to hear your story. Send them to
our American Stories dot com. There's some of our favorites.
And now we bring you the story of doctor George Valdez.
He's the author of Coming Clean, the true story of
(00:31):
a cocaine drug lord and his unexpected encounter with God.
Here's George to tell his story.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
You know what's really interesting about my life is that
a lot of times in life we believe that only
bad things happen to bad kids. No one could ever
imagined that good things can happen to good kids. You know,
my story is very very different. My story starts when
I was a young boy in Cuba. My parents were
out very wealthy family. My dad was very a mental,
(01:04):
tremendous integrity. Didn't talk to him very very much. My
mother was everything in our lives. And my mother was
the one that wanted to leave Cua. She did not
want her church. She was very religious. Did I want
her children to grow up in a home that just
did not was not allowed to worship God because he
was a communist country. And my father. In the other hand,
(01:24):
he really just thought that communists was not going to
affect them. And he was forty years old and I
want to come to United States, and my mother said, well,
if you don't want to come, that's fine, but I'm
not going to raise my children here. My mother applied
to leave Qua when I guess in nineteen sixty two,
right after the revolution, which would have made me six
years old. We did not get to leave to October eleventh,
(01:45):
nineteen sixty six. And I tell them my life, I
look at it in three very traumatic or three shifts
of my life. Were different occurrences happened that would define
the next decade of my life. The first one was
being waked up in the morning early and my mother saying,
get up, get up, We're leaving Cuban. I mean, I'm
(02:06):
in shock. I'm ten years old, my brother's and nine,
my sister is five, and I had no idea. So
I went to pack some toys and my mother's like, no, no, no,
only the clothes on your back. So as I was
going towards the airport and I'm like, mom, where are
we going? She said, We're going to Miami. We're going
to be with your relatives, and I'm like, really, I
mean constantly like looking at like wondering. Everything is going
(02:27):
through my head. Why am I leaving my toys? Why
am I leaving my friends? Why are we leaving our relatives?
We get to the airport as we are waiting for
our name to be called out, and all of a sudden,
towards the end of just about everybody had boarded. I
see my mother and my father crying, and my mother
coming to me, and my father all I could hear
(02:47):
him say was I'm not going. I'm not going. I
couldn't understand what he meant by that, but my mother
grabbed my hand I was ten, and she put it
with my brother and my sister, and she looked at
me and said, oh, hey, you take your brother and
sister to Miami. I will meet you there one day.
And at that moment in time, my father who was
just crying and just shaking his head, and I'm walking
towards the airplate and I was complete shocked. I mean,
(03:09):
like my whole world had shattered. What was happening to me? What?
Why am I? Where am I going? Who am I
going to go? See? Why is my mom and dad
staying behind. Well, my dad ended up joining us by
God's grace at the last minute, and we were right
in Miami. And you know, we used to live in
a house that was one square block in Cuba. We
had cars, we had color television in our house. And
(03:30):
we went to live with some relatives and it was
a total of e living on us and we went
to sleep in the floor, one bedroom, one bathroom, and
eleven of us had to go to work or go
to school. And at that moment in time, I made
a decision in my life. And the decision was, you know,
there's no God in the world. God is whoever I
make him out to be. My mother's crazy Fidel was
right when he said that God was only for weak
(03:51):
people that need a meaning for their lives. But still,
you know, I ended up doing things with tremendous integris.
The age of seventeen, I became the youngest employee of
the Federal Store Bank. I was a straight A student,
and I went to school at University of Miami and
UH and worked at the Federal sal Bank full time.
And I did that for almost four years and literally
(04:14):
never had seen drugs in my life, never drank alcohol.
I had a girlfriend that I would see here for
two hours on Saturday night and about four hours on Sunday,
and that would be about it. I was just set.
My life was defined, because my life was going to
be I was going to reach the American dream. And
the American dream was really defined to me two days
(04:35):
after I came from Cuba, when I saw my cousin
one day come and he had his gorgeous candy Apple
read gto with a white interior inside, and he had
only been there about a year before us. And I
began to say to myself, Oh my god, if my cousin,
who just came from Cuba year ago has this beautiful car,
(04:58):
the day I have a car like this, be somebody.
Because at that time I met what I called a
pseudo American dream, that American dream that told me, George,
whenever you have beautiful cars, whenever you have a beautiful woman,
whenever you have mansions and cars and planes and all
those great things, you'll be somebody. And I was so
focused on being that somebody that I really did not
(05:18):
think about nothing else but that goal in my mind.
Time passed and I'm about to graduate from yours from Miami.
My accounting professor at that time. He came out to
me and said, George, I want you to come work
for me. I just moved from Miami. I did not
speak Spanish. You can have secretary office, all those wonderful
things that I thought that one day I would have
(05:38):
when I own my own business, and all you have
to do is do my Spanish clients for me. And
to me, it was probably the first evidence that there
was a god in this world. So I went to
work for him. I left the Federalsur Bank. You know,
my father, again very conservative, did not want me to leave.
He thought I had a tremendous career. And my mother
the other way was different. My mother was You're never
(06:00):
going to be somebody working for somebody, so do whatever
you have to do, son, and so she encouraged me,
and I went to work for that man. And I
remember going the first I mean the first job I
had was a little grocery store in Miami. I would
say it was about twenty five feet wide by forty
feet long in the middle, just really really Cuban land,
(06:23):
I called it at that time. And I went to
work for him and called La Porta and Soul and
the first day that I went in there, he had
a little office set up in the back, a little
room in the back of the store. And I go
there and the first thing that I see is a bag,
and I begin to count the money, and it was
over one hundred thousand dollars. Now, imagine this is nineteen
(06:45):
seventy six, when you could buy a gorgeous home in
Miami for twenty five thousand dollars. So I looked at
that and I was like, Wow, amazing that a little
place like this is making so much money.
Speaker 1 (06:59):
And when we come back, how did that one hundred
thousand dollars land in a bag in Miami? You're wondering,
I think you already know the answer. Here on our
American Stories, Folks, if you love the great American stories
(07:32):
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(07:52):
the great American stories coming. That's our American Stories dot com.
And we returned to our American stories and the story
of George Valdez. When we last left off, George had
(08:16):
gotten a job working with money, with a lot of
money with let's just call it funny money. Let's get
back to the story. Here again is George Valdez.
Speaker 2 (08:30):
I mean, apparently this is definitely not what they taught
us at school. So I let it pass and I
did my books. I said at the journals, I did
all that stuff that an accountant does. Come back the
next monday. And when I came back the next monday,
I find another back in the back of seventy five thousand.
This time I looked it on the store. I looked
at her the receipts the guy had bought. It didn't
(08:50):
add up to about five hundred dollars. And I'm like, man,
how the heck is this guy turning into five hundred
dollars into so much income? I mean, I was da naive.
Third week, it was just the where the road where
the rover met the road. I come in again, and
this day was like one hundred and ten, one hundred
and towe thousand dollars, and I just I can't take
it anymore. And again, at the same time, nothing wrong
(09:13):
would cross my mind. So I called him in. I said, hey,
al Bro, let me ask you a question. You know,
in accounting, there's a very basic formula. You buy a
dollar worth a product, and if you sell it for
three dollars, you have two dollars profit. If you sell
it for four dollars, you have three dollars profit. I mean,
this guy couldn't even read it right, I said, but
(09:34):
we have a problem here. Or the entire month, all
you've bought is about eight hundred dollars, and so far
I'm counting almost three hundred thousand dollars. And literally he
just started laughing in my face. He said, George, what
do you think with droid dealers? And you can imagine
how shocked I was. And I thought we always shocked
(09:56):
for about ten seconds. I was shocked for about ten second,
because that's how quickly I was able to convince myself, Hey, George,
don't get excited. You're an accountant, you were trained to
count money. As long as you don't break the law
and do nothing wrong, you're fine. And then again I
remember during this time there was no money laundry laws.
(10:16):
So he looked at me and he said, look, we
have currency restrictions in Columbia. We can't take our money there.
So we know that you work for the federal government.
Do you know how to open form bank accounts? I
looked at him, I said, of course, I know how
to open form bank accounts. He said, well, how much
does it cost? And so now I knew that you
could open a form bank account and I had heard
(10:37):
that because you about seven hundred dollars in grant came in.
But I didn't want to get involved in any of
this because this was just way beyond my means. I mean,
I was the ultimate nerd hold I ever did his
study and work. I knew nothing about life. I knew
nothing about drugs. I knew nothing about big business. And
They're like, well, can you open three accounts for us?
And I'm like, sure, not a prop. And of course
(11:01):
I'm going to give them this really stupid offer. And
with that offer, they're just gonna go ahead and leave
me alone. So I go ahead, and I said ten
thousand dollars apiece. Now, remember I knew that all they
cost is about you know, seven hundred bucks. So I
knew for sure that they would tell me, hey, forget
about it, there's nothing here to it, so just good health. Well,
(11:25):
they looked at me and said, can you open three?
And so I'm trying to, you know, portray the big guy.
I worked for the government after all, so I'm a
big shot, and I'm like, not a problem. It probably
takes me a couple of weeks. Well, you know, I
think he's one of the gravest mistakes in my life
because I've looked at life. I've never looked at life
that I can't do something. I always thought, well someone's done,
and I can do it too. And that was the
(11:47):
wrong mindset, because all of a sudden, here they give
me right up front thirty thousand dollars. I had never
seen money like that in my life. At that time,
I think minimum woods was like a dollar twenty and
I was making three, twenty three, twenty five an hour
at the Federal store bank. All of a sudden, I
see thirty thousand dollars in my pocket. Well, it didn't
take me long to make a connection head out to
greenk came and open those bank accounts, and my world
(12:11):
began to change. And that's something that I talk about
crossing lines in life. You know, when we cross the
line in life, it's just so easy to cross that
little thin line, but then it becomes so hard. But
once we crossed that thin line one time, then it
just becomes easier and easier. And all of a sudden,
I was opening form bank accounts, these people managing millions
and millions of dollars. You know, my world started to
(12:33):
drastically change. And then came the second shift in my life.
I went to a party and I saw this federal
judge that would give people hundreds of years for any
drug offense, snorting cocaine, and I said to myself, you
know what, George, there is no God in this world,
and there's definitely no morals, so whatever you do is fine.
(12:56):
And then that's where my life just drastically starts to
space and out of control. But then again, at the
same time, I'm saying to myself, well, I'm making a
lot of money. I just bought a brand new Mercedes.
I'm going to buy my parents a house. And again,
I'm not doing anything wrong. And it's very important to
go back to that era sixth in the mid seventies,
cocaine was not even in the Dea radar. It was
(13:18):
not even a thing. It was something that was for
the rich and famous. And I began to justify my actions,
as we all do whenever we do something that just
deep down inside we know is quite not right. So
I began to justify my action by saying, list, if
rich people want to do this stuff, that's their problem.
At least, I'm not involved with the drug part. I'm
just involved with the money. And I went on like that. Well,
(13:40):
next thing they did is they asked me to if
I was interested in opening a banana important company. Little
did I know that the least thing they were thinking
about important was bananas. And I said sure. I said,
you know, if you want me to head be the
president of the company, if you want me to do
the whole visibility study and the whole infrastructure, then I
(14:01):
got to be the president. And it was four people.
It was for them. And these four gentlemen were the
group that originally the original group that would one day
go on and become the medazine drug cartel. And they
were different though there were Manuel, who was the head
of the cartel at that time, was a gentleman. He
was a man that went to mass every day. He
(14:24):
had enormous businesses. He was worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
In nineteen seventy six on coal mines. Emerald Mindes and
I start doing all the infrastructure for the company, and
then I went all over Europe to look for a
ship that we called the landing ship, because it had
to be something that would have load draft so that
we'd go in low waters. Because all along, all they
(14:47):
cared about was not important. Bananaic couldn'tive it down if
we threw all the bananas in the ocean. What they
wanted to do was import cocaine. I had no idea,
totally clueless. But we went on like that, and as
I started to get to know those people, they started
to say to me, you know what, George, we want
you to handle all our operations in the United States. Now,
(15:08):
I imagine, here's a twenty year old kid. I have races,
I've never never cost any I've never done anything wrong
in my life. I had a perfect record. I didn't
even have a speeding ticket. All the alcohol in my
life did not even fit in a teacup. Being asked
to handle all drug operations in the United States for
the most powerful criminal organization in the world at this time.
(15:31):
No way, there was just no way that I even
thought would cross my mind. But they kept that in
averse sut of way, in a sort of way, till
one day I came up with this brilliant idea. So
I'm gonna say to him. I said, you know what,
I know what I'm gonna do next time that they
asked me if I want to do that, I'm gonna say, okay,
I'll do it. But here's the deal. You guys put
up all the money, and I want equal parts. In
(15:53):
other words, you're four, now we're gonna be five. No
doubt in my mind, no doubt in my mind that
they would tell me just good help, because there no
way in the world the mid forties, multi millionaires, very
very powerful people would go ahead and let a twenty
year old punk kit dictate to him that he's gonna
be go partners with them, and they got to put
(16:14):
up twenty percent of his money, which at that time
would have been each load was costing three four hundred
thousand dollars per person to bring in. So I left.
They told me, well, we'll think about it. And I
went back to my hotel and I'm saying, well, you
know what, that's wonderful. Finally got rid of the headache.
Not a problem, and I go on and I went
went to bed and I was just had this amazing
(16:37):
feeling of relief. In the morning, when I went to
go to the airport, they send the driver for me,
and the driver said, we got to stop at Manual's
office because he wants to talk to you. So I'm like, Okay,
We're gonna stop over there and uh and see what
he wants. So when I go over there, I'm like, yeah, Manuel,
(16:57):
is there anything that you need? Hold on, let me
cut that out of this dog started barking here for
a second.
Speaker 1 (17:04):
And you've been listening to George Valdez tell the story
of his own life, and he talks about crossing lines
in life and that first time it's hard, but then
each time you cross it, and we all know it
because we've crossed the line or two in our lives,
it just gets easier to cross the line. And then well,
from that first step, he finds himself approaching that job
(17:27):
of handling all the drug operations for one of the
largest drug cartels in world history. When we come back
more of George Valdez's story here on our American story,
(18:08):
and we returned to our American stories and the story
of George Valdez. When we last left off, George had
become fully exposed to the world of narcotics, more precisely,
the world of cocaine, importing and selling it and then
laundering and hiding the money. Things are about to get
even wilder, though, for this accountant turned drug dealer. Let's
(18:30):
pick up when we last left off.
Speaker 2 (18:33):
So when I went to meat Manuel in the morning,
He's like, uh, George, come in. So I went in
there and he says to me, you know what, we'll
accept you go ahead and handle all the operations for us.
We'll make you equal partners. We need someone like you
in the United States. And I'm like, what the hell's
wrong with this? Figging people? I'm twenty years old. What
(18:55):
do you mean they need somebody like me? I don't
even know what the hell cocaine looks like? Hand will operate? Shit,
what does that mean? I mean who brings it in?
Who takes you to where? Who buys this? How the
hell does this? And then what happens with the money
because at the end, later on in level, we find
out that the easiest thing was bringing it in, the
(19:15):
hardest thing is what we do with hundreds of millions
of dollars in the seventies. Now I'm petri find I mean,
I'm so scared right now that I'm like, there's nowhere
to work and tell these people know. So I'm like, fine,
let me go take care of the Uh, we're remodeling
(19:39):
this ship in California. I said, let me take care
of the ship and once we've done that, I'll come back,
or we'll meet in Miami and we can go over
what exactly is that you'll need. So when I go
to California, all along there, the gentleman I had hired
the refrigeration had kept asking me, Hey, you know what,
(19:59):
I know that you bought for cocaine. And I'm like, no,
you're crazy. How would this boat be to bring in cocaine?
When he's in my name? Am I that stupid? You know?
He and I get pretty friendly because I used to
play baseball really well and he had a softball team,
and so we became really really good friends. And he
just kept kidding me about that. So when all those
time I find myself that I'm gonna be head of
(20:19):
all operations, I'm like, you know what, this guy wants
cocaine in California, but let me do the same thing.
Let me make him a stupid offer one. He says no,
and I can come back to the MANUS said, look,
I like to help you guys out, but I don't
have a buyer. I don't know anything. So I got
to mail and I say, hey, Meil, you know all
this time you've been harassing me about the boat being cocaine,
(20:40):
and you know now that we're close friends, let me
tell you it is. Man. In the meantime, I had
found out that cocaine in Miami cost forty thousand. It
was twenty thousand dollars in Columbia at that time, and
it costs about five thousand to bring it to the
US twenty five and wholesale it will sell about forty
two forty three Aquilo. So I go up to and
I said, hey, Mal, I want to come clean with you,
(21:03):
and he's like, oh, man, I knew it all along.
I knew it all alone. How many can you sell me?
And say, how many do you want? He said, well,
how much. I said, seventy thousand. It took an act
of God for me to not pee my pants from
laughing when I came up with that number. And he's like,
that's a lot of money. I said, exactly, we only
had the best quality. Ever, so he said, well, let
me get with my people. It wasn't about four hours
(21:26):
later he says, we'll buy five kilos and I'm like,
I don't know if I can supply that little and
I'm like, man, at that night, I couldn't even go
to bed. I was just in such turmoil. I might
either going to get killed by the buyers. I'm going
to get killed by the sellers, or somebody's gonna kill me.
I didn't believe in God at the time, but I
was sort of like, jeezuz, just go ahead and kill
me right now, because you know, take away the misery
(21:48):
lo and behold. I go to Miami and one of
the representatives from that grocery store his name was Hyman,
and I'm like, hey, ma, I got this problem. This
guy already wants to buy three kilos. Now they want
to put me in charge of all this operation. I mean, like,
I don't know what the hell to do. He said, oh,
that's easy, man. He wants three kilos. We'll get him
to California. Sell them to how much? I said seventy?
(22:09):
He said seventy? Are you crazy? You should? They're gonna
pay and that rip you off? I said, I have
no idea said, I said, man, I've never saw the
candy bar in my life. How the hell do I
know if they're gonna pay me a lot? He said, man,
you better act like you can kill each and every
one of them, because it's not somebody's gonna kill you.
I mean, I just couldn't sleep for a week. They
took the three kilos. I made sixties on one thousand dollars,
(22:31):
and then I came back and within six month I
was us head of all operations. I was importing over
eighty five percent of all the cocaine that came into America.
I was twenty one years old, and I was making
between a million and three million dollars a month. Now,
it's very, very important to realize that's nineteen seventy seven money,
you know, which is a little bit different than in
today's money. But you know, the interesting thing for me
(22:54):
was that now I knew I was gonna be happy. Now.
I just knew that my world would change and that
I be somebody that I'm somebody important. I mean, after now,
all our clients were Hollywood celebrity movie stars. Cocaine was
not even in the DA radar during this time. So
I was not even feeling guilty about doing anything wrong.
I had the business, I had the office. I went
(23:14):
to the to my office every morning at eight o'clock.
I had done all my life. I put on my
suit and I left the office at six o'clock. And
I ran the biggest empire, and created the biggest drug
empire in America, and created the most intricate financial web
that there was. But why was I miserable? Why was
it that? For example, I remember one time I got
(23:36):
a phone call and like George, the Corvet convertible just
came out, and I mean I was like so excited.
It was like, uh, you know, it was like if
it was bar Mitzvah or my baptism. And I put
on a suit, I put on cologne. I told one
of my bodyguards, I said, hey, load up a briefcase
with money. Were gonna go find my happiness. And we
get to a dealer. And also I when I get
to a dealer, I see that they got three colors,
(24:00):
and I'm like, what the heck If my joy is
dependent upon one of these colors? And I picked up
row one, how am I going to be happy? So
I did what any accountant would do. I just bore
one of each color. And when people would say, well,
what's the hardest thing you do every day, Joe, I said, well,
of course, the hardest decision I'm making in the morning
is what damn car's going to drive? And I looked
around one day and I had a million dollars with
(24:20):
the cars, and I just couldn't understand why I was
not happy. Well, I realized then I was married to
one woman, and I'm like, well, I'm a good Cuban guy,
so how can a Cuban gud be just happy with
one woman? And I started dating all the most beautiful
supermodels in America, and I hated them all and could
not understand why all of a sudden I hated women
treated them the way I did. I mean, I did
(24:40):
not abuse them or anything like that was just to
me that was just so insignificant. When I adored my mother,
who was my entire life, and I had the almost
respect in this world. You know, everybody in the world
wanted to be like George Valdaz. You know, I was
considered the most powerful person, well one of the most
powerful in America at that time, and no one even
knew that I existed. But I tell people, every day
(25:01):
of my life, I would lay down in my bed,
wake up in the morning, see the mirror. Just did
not like what I see. Then one of my associates
comes up to me and says, we have an opportunity.
The government of Bolivia wants to make a deal with you.
So I was in Columbia with the pilots and I
showed him what the airstrip was, and I was going
a fly back to nic Rouak, who's had a meeting
with General Somosa where we were going to bring some
(25:23):
drugs through a corn island and he was going to
send it in in his refrigerator cargo ships to us.
We landed in Columbia and everything was fine. Then all
of a sudden, as we loaded up the cocaine. We
spent overnight tied up to a tree at night, and
we were on the airplane in about half an hour. Afterwards,
(25:45):
we lost contact with Columbia because we lost both alternators.
And eventually we're over the country of Panama about five
thousand feet when both engines just went off and we
crash landed, and it was a miracle that we even lived.
And we jumped from the airplane, and then a military
officer Caine, and I took out three hundred dollars and
(26:06):
I gave it to him. I said, look, we were
looking for cattle ranches and we had problem with the
airplane and we crash landed. But all I need to
do is if you could take me to a hotel
and he'd take my passports, sign him and tomorrow I'm
going to send someone. I'll have someone come and fix
the airplane. He took me to a private office and
split us apart, and they came in there, and it
(26:28):
was the head of the DEA, the General Consul of Panama,
and the head of the G two, which was the
intelligence division for Noriega. They lined up all the cocaine
in a table. They took pictures of us. When I
got to Miami, I would charge with heading the largest
drug conspiracy in the history of America and given the
highest bond ever in the history of America, seven million dollars.
(26:49):
I was just twenty three years old.
Speaker 1 (26:51):
And you're listening to the story of George Valdez and
what a ride he's taking, and then his life literally
comes crashing to the ground in a plane in Panama.
And now he's back in Miami with the highest bell
ever posted on a criminal in this country's history, seven
million dollars. When we come back, what happens next in
(27:12):
the life of George Valdez. Here on our American stories,
(27:37):
and we returned to our American stories and the final
portion of our story with George Valdez. He's the author
of Coming Clean, the true story of a cocaine drug
lord and his unexpected encounter with God. When we last
left off, George had been caught with pounds of cocaine
in Panama after his plane was forced to crash land
(27:58):
in a field. Let's get back to the story.
Speaker 2 (28:05):
You know, I hired the best lawyer that money could buy.
I hire every name lawyer that you can ever imagine
in America, spend a million dollars at that time, But anyway,
did that matter. I was sentenced to fifteen years in
jail for krins prison, which was the most that you
could give to anyone because they didn't have a wire
toob they didn't even have the cocaine. The cocaine disappeared
the same day and no Riga sold that quickly. I
(28:25):
go off to prison, and you know, people think that
prison would change you. Prison doesn't change you. People. I
went up to prison, I was the same guy I
always was. When I got out after five years in change,
I went back to the same thing. And really, I
look back now, there was no need for I was
a multimillionaire. I couldn't spend the money that I had.
But it was this thing that they thought they had
(28:46):
beat me. But I'm going to beat them in the end.
And I went back to the same thing. But something
very dynamic started to happen right now. And what happened
was my mother found out for the first time that
I was a dog dealer alone. Before that, oh, she
thought I was a international businessman because I had a
lot of business. When she found out, it destroyed her.
(29:07):
It is the most painful thing I ever been through
my life. See my mother walk into the courtroom and
hearing that her baby kid was charged with being this monster,
being this the most powerful man in America, you know,
heading the larger druct conspiracy in the world. She said, son,
you destroyed us. But here's the interesting thing about my mom.
And this is a message that I tell to a
lot of parents. My mother not one single time would
(29:30):
take a dollar from me. My mother, not one single
time stopped telling me that what I was doing didn't
please God and that I destroyed them. But in the
same breath, my mother will say, well, what do you
want for dinner tonight, son, Because she let me know that, yeah,
I could become a monster, I could become whatever, but
in her eyes, her God was bigger than anything, and
(29:50):
in her eyes, her God would change her child. Forty
years later, I see this genius of it, because I
see we get mad at our kids, and we kick
him out of the house and we find our children
but George, and we call it tough love, and it
really doesn't work. We gotta be tough, but we got love.
So it's not tough love. It's tough but love. And
that's how I raised my children. But you know, and
(30:14):
and it went on that, and there was not one
chance that my mother would not ever stop telling me that.
And She's like son, if I get killed, you kill
me because what you do doesn't please God. And I'm like, Mom,
what God? God ain't real? Where was God when we
came from Cuban and we were going hungry every day?
(30:34):
Where was God when you came from Cuban? Lady in
the hospital dying of throat cancer? What was God? Mom?
And I just left and I went back to my operations.
One night, I'm partying in my house with some movie stars,
and all of a sudden, the head of the security
at the gates says, George, your's wife just dropped. Your daughter,
(30:56):
not like my daughter. I said, just bring her over.
So she over. I tell the babysitter that lived with us.
I said, go ahead and put it to bed, make
sure she doesn't get out of her room, and the
morning I'll have breakfast with her. And I went back
to my party. Two or three hours later, I hear
this knock on my door, said, Daddy, it's Crystal. And
(31:16):
for the first time in my life, I began to
feel filthy. I began to feel dirty. It was the
feeling the more she knocked, it was almost a feeling
that you see your baby child, You're going to drown.
On the boat and you're reaching out and touch the
fingertips and you just can't grab a hold over their hands.
And I couldn't open the door because if I opened
the door would contaminate her. I told the woman to
get out of my room. They went to get out
(31:37):
of the door. I said, no, out the window. And
when they get out, I went into the shower. He's
the man that never feared anything in his life. All
of a sudden, in the shower, I started to shake
and I started to tremble. I started to try to
scrub the filth off of me. Now wondering what the
hell was going on in my life. I went underneath
my sheets and I began to shake and shimmer. And
when I come down and I was dehydrated. I went
(31:57):
to get water and I saw my baby girl in
the throat crying, and I said to myself, this will
stop today. And I didn't know what change meant, you know,
And this is what I tell people. When you know
you got to make a change in your life, don't
worry about what that means. Just know this. For me,
it was simple. If I'm going north, I'm going to
start going south. If I'm going east, I'm going to
(32:18):
start going west. And I called my mother in the
middle of the night and I said, Mom, I'm done,
and she knew what I meant, and she's like, God
has answered my prayer. And I'm like, God, Mom, God
had nothing to do with this. This is crystal. Did
I not to do with God? Or so I thought?
And then I called in the morning. I called the
head of the hotel and I said, I'm finishing. Now.
Imagine the desperation in my life at this point that
(32:40):
I knew the most likely I'd be killed within a month.
And I just moved over to my ranch. I sold
my house in Miami and I went to live in
my ranch and wait till someone came around. Didn't care
anymore because my desperation was so much that my life
just had to find some type of a change. Anyways,
I hired this guy to teach me karate. He said,
(33:00):
I'm gonna teach you about the sword. And I'm like, man,
I done karate a lot when I was younger, and
I'm like, man, I'm really smart. I can't believe I
hired this guy. I love weapons. He's not gonna waste
his time trying kicks we're gonna get into weapons right away.
All of a sudden, he turns around and he has
a Bible, and I'm like, I look at him, and
(33:20):
I'm like, Sir, first and foremost, I need to tell
you two things. Number one, I don't believe in that book.
Number two, I don't believe in God. And number three,
I'm paying you a lot of my teaching me karate,
So tomorrow, would you please leave that sword home and
bring the real sword. He got up into my face
where I could smell his breath and was the first
man that had done that. And I said, well, here's
(33:43):
a seven degree black brother. You're gonna start whooping Jesus
into me and I'm gonna be paying for it. So
I'm like, hey, dude, dude, don't get excited. Let's just
go ahead and wait and go waste your time. And
I said, well, the steam room heats up. You can
talk to me, read to me, do whatever you want.
He says, deal, he read to me for almost three years.
And people say, what did he say that made you
(34:05):
come around? I said, really, honestly, absolutely nothing, because I
was just getting over the butt whooping and he had
given me to even think about what the hell he
was talking about? But it was everything that I saw.
You see, I saw a man that lived in a
very little world. I saw a man that had a
fourteen fifteen hundred squirret foot out and he was so happy.
And I lived in this fifteen thousand dollars squirret foot mansion.
(34:27):
I was miserable. I wanted to find out about this
God that I didn't know nothing about. And I started
to study theology and I started. I taught myself Greek.
I ended up getting another bachelor's in prison, and five
almost five years later, I had started a master's from
Wheaton College, graduated, I mean when when I was released,
I went to Wheaton College and uh and finished my masters,
(34:48):
became an adjunct faculty there and met the most amazing
woman on God's Earth, my wife of twenty five years now.
Then from Wheaton College, I decided that I wanted to
keep going and I wanted to be the best geologian
in the world. And I applied to Loyola and I
was accepted, and I got a PhD in Early Christianity
and New Testament and Ethics, and I became one of
(35:09):
five Hispanics in America with a PhD in Bible. You know,
I'm here to tell the world, listen, the only thing
our children need, the only thing I shouldn't truly want,
is our presence. It costs nothing, but we keep and
we fall into this horrific cycle of destruction. And you know,
(35:30):
like the old saying, Americans are so amazing about sacrificing
their health to create wealth, and then they spend their
wealth trying to get their health back. And we abandon
our family, who abandon our homes, we abandon our wives,
and at the end of the day, doesn bring us
a bit of joy, which just as miserable as we
ever were, because there's a hunger within us, inside of
(35:50):
us that to me cannot only only be filled with
the love of God and whatever God might be. Twenty one.
I talk to people all over the world. I don't
care what any is. I don't care the Jewish, I
don't care if there Muslim. I will care the Christian
or Atheist. I don't care if they're straight or gay.
All I care to tell people is listen, I'm just
gonna tell you a story about me. My story, not
(36:12):
for you, not for anyone, my story. My life drastically
changed when I fell in love with a Jewish carpenter.
So my story is about nothing but falling in love
and the fact that there is redemption, that there is
hope in this world, and we don't have to sell
to that message that, oh, I was a twice convicted
drug dealer, who's going to hire you. We're not defined
by our failures. We're defined by how we get up
(36:34):
from our failures. We're not defined by how much wealth
we achieved. I think that we're defined by how many
lives we impact at the end of the day. But
I tell people is when the pages of history are written,
will history ever remember your name? And if we care,
the history will remember our name. History will only remember
(36:54):
our name because we've impacted the life of somebody else. Now,
because we have achieved great wealth, now, because we're very rich, now,
because we have mansions and homes and vacation homes and
three and four cars. No, if all we do is
impact the life of our children so that they become
decent human beings, they believe in integrity, believe in the word,
(37:18):
and above all, love others. If I can do that,
I've changed the world, and so can anyone listening today.
O'h blessed.
Speaker 1 (37:28):
And a terrific job on the production and editing by
our own Monty Montgomery. And a special thanks to George
Veld as what a story of transformation. Why we do
this show actually is stories like this and the power
of God, the power of love, could change everything. George
Veld does his story here on our American Stories
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American people,
and we love to hear your story. Send them to
our American Stories dot com. There's some of our favorites.
And now we bring you the story of doctor George Valdez.
He's the author of Coming Clean, the true story of
(00:31):
a cocaine drug lord and his unexpected encounter with God.
Here's George to tell his story.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
You know what's really interesting about my life is that
a lot of times in life we believe that only
bad things happen to bad kids. No one could ever
imagined that good things can happen to good kids. You know,
my story is very very different. My story starts when
I was a young boy in Cuba. My parents were
out very wealthy family. My dad was very a mental,
(01:04):
tremendous integrity. Didn't talk to him very very much. My
mother was everything in our lives. And my mother was
the one that wanted to leave Cua. She did not
want her church. She was very religious. Did I want
her children to grow up in a home that just
did not was not allowed to worship God because he
was a communist country. And my father. In the other hand,
(01:24):
he really just thought that communists was not going to
affect them. And he was forty years old and I
want to come to United States, and my mother said, well,
if you don't want to come, that's fine, but I'm
not going to raise my children here. My mother applied
to leave Qua when I guess in nineteen sixty two,
right after the revolution, which would have made me six
years old. We did not get to leave to October eleventh,
(01:45):
nineteen sixty six. And I tell them my life, I
look at it in three very traumatic or three shifts
of my life. Were different occurrences happened that would define
the next decade of my life. The first one was
being waked up in the morning early and my mother saying,
get up, get up, We're leaving Cuban. I mean, I'm
(02:06):
in shock. I'm ten years old, my brother's and nine,
my sister is five, and I had no idea. So
I went to pack some toys and my mother's like, no, no, no,
only the clothes on your back. So as I was
going towards the airport and I'm like, mom, where are
we going? She said, We're going to Miami. We're going
to be with your relatives, and I'm like, really, I
mean constantly like looking at like wondering. Everything is going
(02:27):
through my head. Why am I leaving my toys? Why
am I leaving my friends? Why are we leaving our relatives?
We get to the airport as we are waiting for
our name to be called out, and all of a sudden,
towards the end of just about everybody had boarded. I
see my mother and my father crying, and my mother
coming to me, and my father all I could hear
(02:47):
him say was I'm not going. I'm not going. I
couldn't understand what he meant by that, but my mother
grabbed my hand I was ten, and she put it
with my brother and my sister, and she looked at
me and said, oh, hey, you take your brother and
sister to Miami. I will meet you there one day.
And at that moment in time, my father who was
just crying and just shaking his head, and I'm walking
towards the airplate and I was complete shocked. I mean,
(03:09):
like my whole world had shattered. What was happening to me? What?
Why am I? Where am I going? Who am I
going to go? See? Why is my mom and dad
staying behind. Well, my dad ended up joining us by
God's grace at the last minute, and we were right
in Miami. And you know, we used to live in
a house that was one square block in Cuba. We
had cars, we had color television in our house. And
(03:30):
we went to live with some relatives and it was
a total of e living on us and we went
to sleep in the floor, one bedroom, one bathroom, and
eleven of us had to go to work or go
to school. And at that moment in time, I made
a decision in my life. And the decision was, you know,
there's no God in the world. God is whoever I
make him out to be. My mother's crazy Fidel was
right when he said that God was only for weak
(03:51):
people that need a meaning for their lives. But still,
you know, I ended up doing things with tremendous integris.
The age of seventeen, I became the youngest employee of
the Federal Store Bank. I was a straight A student,
and I went to school at University of Miami and
UH and worked at the Federal sal Bank full time.
And I did that for almost four years and literally
(04:14):
never had seen drugs in my life, never drank alcohol.
I had a girlfriend that I would see here for
two hours on Saturday night and about four hours on Sunday,
and that would be about it. I was just set.
My life was defined, because my life was going to
be I was going to reach the American dream. And
the American dream was really defined to me two days
(04:35):
after I came from Cuba, when I saw my cousin
one day come and he had his gorgeous candy Apple
read gto with a white interior inside, and he had
only been there about a year before us. And I
began to say to myself, Oh my god, if my cousin,
who just came from Cuba year ago has this beautiful car,
(04:58):
the day I have a car like this, be somebody.
Because at that time I met what I called a
pseudo American dream, that American dream that told me, George,
whenever you have beautiful cars, whenever you have a beautiful woman,
whenever you have mansions and cars and planes and all
those great things, you'll be somebody. And I was so
focused on being that somebody that I really did not
(05:18):
think about nothing else but that goal in my mind.
Time passed and I'm about to graduate from yours from Miami.
My accounting professor at that time. He came out to
me and said, George, I want you to come work
for me. I just moved from Miami. I did not
speak Spanish. You can have secretary office, all those wonderful
things that I thought that one day I would have
(05:38):
when I own my own business, and all you have
to do is do my Spanish clients for me. And
to me, it was probably the first evidence that there
was a god in this world. So I went to
work for him. I left the Federalsur Bank. You know,
my father, again very conservative, did not want me to leave.
He thought I had a tremendous career. And my mother
the other way was different. My mother was You're never
(06:00):
going to be somebody working for somebody, so do whatever
you have to do, son, and so she encouraged me,
and I went to work for that man. And I
remember going the first I mean the first job I
had was a little grocery store in Miami. I would
say it was about twenty five feet wide by forty
feet long in the middle, just really really Cuban land,
(06:23):
I called it at that time. And I went to
work for him and called La Porta and Soul and
the first day that I went in there, he had
a little office set up in the back, a little
room in the back of the store. And I go
there and the first thing that I see is a bag,
and I begin to count the money, and it was
over one hundred thousand dollars. Now, imagine this is nineteen
(06:45):
seventy six, when you could buy a gorgeous home in
Miami for twenty five thousand dollars. So I looked at
that and I was like, Wow, amazing that a little
place like this is making so much money.
Speaker 1 (06:59):
And when we come back, how did that one hundred
thousand dollars land in a bag in Miami? You're wondering,
I think you already know the answer. Here on our
American Stories, Folks, if you love the great American stories
(07:32):
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(07:52):
the great American stories coming. That's our American Stories dot com.
And we returned to our American stories and the story
of George Valdez. When we last left off, George had
(08:16):
gotten a job working with money, with a lot of
money with let's just call it funny money. Let's get
back to the story. Here again is George Valdez.
Speaker 2 (08:30):
I mean, apparently this is definitely not what they taught
us at school. So I let it pass and I
did my books. I said at the journals, I did
all that stuff that an accountant does. Come back the
next monday. And when I came back the next monday,
I find another back in the back of seventy five thousand.
This time I looked it on the store. I looked
at her the receipts the guy had bought. It didn't
(08:50):
add up to about five hundred dollars. And I'm like, man,
how the heck is this guy turning into five hundred
dollars into so much income? I mean, I was da naive.
Third week, it was just the where the road where
the rover met the road. I come in again, and
this day was like one hundred and ten, one hundred
and towe thousand dollars, and I just I can't take
it anymore. And again, at the same time, nothing wrong
(09:13):
would cross my mind. So I called him in. I said, hey,
al Bro, let me ask you a question. You know,
in accounting, there's a very basic formula. You buy a
dollar worth a product, and if you sell it for
three dollars, you have two dollars profit. If you sell
it for four dollars, you have three dollars profit. I mean,
this guy couldn't even read it right, I said, but
(09:34):
we have a problem here. Or the entire month, all
you've bought is about eight hundred dollars, and so far
I'm counting almost three hundred thousand dollars. And literally he
just started laughing in my face. He said, George, what
do you think with droid dealers? And you can imagine
how shocked I was. And I thought we always shocked
(09:56):
for about ten seconds. I was shocked for about ten second,
because that's how quickly I was able to convince myself, Hey, George,
don't get excited. You're an accountant, you were trained to
count money. As long as you don't break the law
and do nothing wrong, you're fine. And then again I
remember during this time there was no money laundry laws.
(10:16):
So he looked at me and he said, look, we
have currency restrictions in Columbia. We can't take our money there.
So we know that you work for the federal government.
Do you know how to open form bank accounts? I
looked at him, I said, of course, I know how
to open form bank accounts. He said, well, how much
does it cost? And so now I knew that you
could open a form bank account and I had heard
(10:37):
that because you about seven hundred dollars in grant came in.
But I didn't want to get involved in any of
this because this was just way beyond my means. I mean,
I was the ultimate nerd hold I ever did his
study and work. I knew nothing about life. I knew
nothing about drugs. I knew nothing about big business. And
They're like, well, can you open three accounts for us?
And I'm like, sure, not a prop. And of course
(11:01):
I'm going to give them this really stupid offer. And
with that offer, they're just gonna go ahead and leave
me alone. So I go ahead, and I said ten
thousand dollars apiece. Now, remember I knew that all they
cost is about you know, seven hundred bucks. So I
knew for sure that they would tell me, hey, forget
about it, there's nothing here to it, so just good health. Well,
(11:25):
they looked at me and said, can you open three?
And so I'm trying to, you know, portray the big guy.
I worked for the government after all, so I'm a
big shot, and I'm like, not a problem. It probably
takes me a couple of weeks. Well, you know, I
think he's one of the gravest mistakes in my life
because I've looked at life. I've never looked at life
that I can't do something. I always thought, well someone's done,
and I can do it too. And that was the
(11:47):
wrong mindset, because all of a sudden, here they give
me right up front thirty thousand dollars. I had never
seen money like that in my life. At that time,
I think minimum woods was like a dollar twenty and
I was making three, twenty three, twenty five an hour
at the Federal store bank. All of a sudden, I
see thirty thousand dollars in my pocket. Well, it didn't
take me long to make a connection head out to
greenk came and open those bank accounts, and my world
(12:11):
began to change. And that's something that I talk about
crossing lines in life. You know, when we cross the
line in life, it's just so easy to cross that
little thin line, but then it becomes so hard. But
once we crossed that thin line one time, then it
just becomes easier and easier. And all of a sudden,
I was opening form bank accounts, these people managing millions
and millions of dollars. You know, my world started to
(12:33):
drastically change. And then came the second shift in my life.
I went to a party and I saw this federal
judge that would give people hundreds of years for any
drug offense, snorting cocaine, and I said to myself, you
know what, George, there is no God in this world,
and there's definitely no morals, so whatever you do is fine.
(12:56):
And then that's where my life just drastically starts to
space and out of control. But then again, at the
same time, I'm saying to myself, well, I'm making a
lot of money. I just bought a brand new Mercedes.
I'm going to buy my parents a house. And again,
I'm not doing anything wrong. And it's very important to
go back to that era sixth in the mid seventies,
cocaine was not even in the Dea radar. It was
(13:18):
not even a thing. It was something that was for
the rich and famous. And I began to justify my actions,
as we all do whenever we do something that just
deep down inside we know is quite not right. So
I began to justify my action by saying, list, if
rich people want to do this stuff, that's their problem.
At least, I'm not involved with the drug part. I'm
just involved with the money. And I went on like that. Well,
(13:40):
next thing they did is they asked me to if
I was interested in opening a banana important company. Little
did I know that the least thing they were thinking
about important was bananas. And I said sure. I said,
you know, if you want me to head be the
president of the company, if you want me to do
the whole visibility study and the whole infrastructure, then I
(14:01):
got to be the president. And it was four people.
It was for them. And these four gentlemen were the
group that originally the original group that would one day
go on and become the medazine drug cartel. And they
were different though there were Manuel, who was the head
of the cartel at that time, was a gentleman. He
was a man that went to mass every day. He
(14:24):
had enormous businesses. He was worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
In nineteen seventy six on coal mines. Emerald Mindes and
I start doing all the infrastructure for the company, and
then I went all over Europe to look for a
ship that we called the landing ship, because it had
to be something that would have load draft so that
we'd go in low waters. Because all along, all they
(14:47):
cared about was not important. Bananaic couldn'tive it down if
we threw all the bananas in the ocean. What they
wanted to do was import cocaine. I had no idea,
totally clueless. But we went on like that, and as
I started to get to know those people, they started
to say to me, you know what, George, we want
you to handle all our operations in the United States. Now,
(15:08):
I imagine, here's a twenty year old kid. I have races,
I've never never cost any I've never done anything wrong
in my life. I had a perfect record. I didn't
even have a speeding ticket. All the alcohol in my
life did not even fit in a teacup. Being asked
to handle all drug operations in the United States for
the most powerful criminal organization in the world at this time.
(15:31):
No way, there was just no way that I even
thought would cross my mind. But they kept that in
averse sut of way, in a sort of way, till
one day I came up with this brilliant idea. So
I'm gonna say to him. I said, you know what,
I know what I'm gonna do next time that they
asked me if I want to do that, I'm gonna say, okay,
I'll do it. But here's the deal. You guys put
up all the money, and I want equal parts. In
(15:53):
other words, you're four, now we're gonna be five. No
doubt in my mind, no doubt in my mind that
they would tell me just good help, because there no
way in the world the mid forties, multi millionaires, very
very powerful people would go ahead and let a twenty
year old punk kit dictate to him that he's gonna
be go partners with them, and they got to put
(16:14):
up twenty percent of his money, which at that time
would have been each load was costing three four hundred
thousand dollars per person to bring in. So I left.
They told me, well, we'll think about it. And I
went back to my hotel and I'm saying, well, you
know what, that's wonderful. Finally got rid of the headache.
Not a problem, and I go on and I went
went to bed and I was just had this amazing
(16:37):
feeling of relief. In the morning, when I went to
go to the airport, they send the driver for me,
and the driver said, we got to stop at Manual's
office because he wants to talk to you. So I'm like, Okay,
We're gonna stop over there and uh and see what
he wants. So when I go over there, I'm like, yeah, Manuel,
(16:57):
is there anything that you need? Hold on, let me
cut that out of this dog started barking here for
a second.
Speaker 1 (17:04):
And you've been listening to George Valdez tell the story
of his own life, and he talks about crossing lines
in life and that first time it's hard, but then
each time you cross it, and we all know it
because we've crossed the line or two in our lives,
it just gets easier to cross the line. And then well,
from that first step, he finds himself approaching that job
(17:27):
of handling all the drug operations for one of the
largest drug cartels in world history. When we come back
more of George Valdez's story here on our American story,
(18:08):
and we returned to our American stories and the story
of George Valdez. When we last left off, George had
become fully exposed to the world of narcotics, more precisely,
the world of cocaine, importing and selling it and then
laundering and hiding the money. Things are about to get
even wilder, though, for this accountant turned drug dealer. Let's
(18:30):
pick up when we last left off.
Speaker 2 (18:33):
So when I went to meat Manuel in the morning,
He's like, uh, George, come in. So I went in
there and he says to me, you know what, we'll
accept you go ahead and handle all the operations for us.
We'll make you equal partners. We need someone like you
in the United States. And I'm like, what the hell's
wrong with this? Figging people? I'm twenty years old. What
(18:55):
do you mean they need somebody like me? I don't
even know what the hell cocaine looks like? Hand will operate? Shit,
what does that mean? I mean who brings it in?
Who takes you to where? Who buys this? How the
hell does this? And then what happens with the money
because at the end, later on in level, we find
out that the easiest thing was bringing it in, the
(19:15):
hardest thing is what we do with hundreds of millions
of dollars in the seventies. Now I'm petri find I mean,
I'm so scared right now that I'm like, there's nowhere
to work and tell these people know. So I'm like, fine,
let me go take care of the Uh, we're remodeling
(19:39):
this ship in California. I said, let me take care
of the ship and once we've done that, I'll come back,
or we'll meet in Miami and we can go over
what exactly is that you'll need. So when I go
to California, all along there, the gentleman I had hired
the refrigeration had kept asking me, Hey, you know what,
(19:59):
I know that you bought for cocaine. And I'm like, no,
you're crazy. How would this boat be to bring in cocaine?
When he's in my name? Am I that stupid? You know?
He and I get pretty friendly because I used to
play baseball really well and he had a softball team,
and so we became really really good friends. And he
just kept kidding me about that. So when all those
time I find myself that I'm gonna be head of
(20:19):
all operations, I'm like, you know what, this guy wants
cocaine in California, but let me do the same thing.
Let me make him a stupid offer one. He says no,
and I can come back to the MANUS said, look,
I like to help you guys out, but I don't
have a buyer. I don't know anything. So I got
to mail and I say, hey, Meil, you know all
this time you've been harassing me about the boat being cocaine,
(20:40):
and you know now that we're close friends, let me
tell you it is. Man. In the meantime, I had
found out that cocaine in Miami cost forty thousand. It
was twenty thousand dollars in Columbia at that time, and
it costs about five thousand to bring it to the
US twenty five and wholesale it will sell about forty
two forty three Aquilo. So I go up to and
I said, hey, Mal, I want to come clean with you,
(21:03):
and he's like, oh, man, I knew it all along.
I knew it all alone. How many can you sell me?
And say, how many do you want? He said, well,
how much. I said, seventy thousand. It took an act
of God for me to not pee my pants from
laughing when I came up with that number. And he's like,
that's a lot of money. I said, exactly, we only
had the best quality. Ever, so he said, well, let
me get with my people. It wasn't about four hours
(21:26):
later he says, we'll buy five kilos and I'm like,
I don't know if I can supply that little and
I'm like, man, at that night, I couldn't even go
to bed. I was just in such turmoil. I might
either going to get killed by the buyers. I'm going
to get killed by the sellers, or somebody's gonna kill me.
I didn't believe in God at the time, but I
was sort of like, jeezuz, just go ahead and kill
me right now, because you know, take away the misery
(21:48):
lo and behold. I go to Miami and one of
the representatives from that grocery store his name was Hyman,
and I'm like, hey, ma, I got this problem. This
guy already wants to buy three kilos. Now they want
to put me in charge of all this operation. I mean, like,
I don't know what the hell to do. He said, oh,
that's easy, man. He wants three kilos. We'll get him
to California. Sell them to how much? I said seventy?
(22:09):
He said seventy? Are you crazy? You should? They're gonna
pay and that rip you off? I said, I have
no idea said, I said, man, I've never saw the
candy bar in my life. How the hell do I
know if they're gonna pay me a lot? He said, man,
you better act like you can kill each and every
one of them, because it's not somebody's gonna kill you.
I mean, I just couldn't sleep for a week. They
took the three kilos. I made sixties on one thousand dollars,
(22:31):
and then I came back and within six month I
was us head of all operations. I was importing over
eighty five percent of all the cocaine that came into America.
I was twenty one years old, and I was making
between a million and three million dollars a month. Now,
it's very, very important to realize that's nineteen seventy seven money,
you know, which is a little bit different than in
today's money. But you know, the interesting thing for me
(22:54):
was that now I knew I was gonna be happy. Now.
I just knew that my world would change and that
I be somebody that I'm somebody important. I mean, after now,
all our clients were Hollywood celebrity movie stars. Cocaine was
not even in the DA radar during this time. So
I was not even feeling guilty about doing anything wrong.
I had the business, I had the office. I went
(23:14):
to the to my office every morning at eight o'clock.
I had done all my life. I put on my
suit and I left the office at six o'clock. And
I ran the biggest empire, and created the biggest drug
empire in America, and created the most intricate financial web
that there was. But why was I miserable? Why was
it that? For example, I remember one time I got
(23:36):
a phone call and like George, the Corvet convertible just
came out, and I mean I was like so excited.
It was like, uh, you know, it was like if
it was bar Mitzvah or my baptism. And I put
on a suit, I put on cologne. I told one
of my bodyguards, I said, hey, load up a briefcase
with money. Were gonna go find my happiness. And we
get to a dealer. And also I when I get
to a dealer, I see that they got three colors,
(24:00):
and I'm like, what the heck If my joy is
dependent upon one of these colors? And I picked up
row one, how am I going to be happy? So
I did what any accountant would do. I just bore
one of each color. And when people would say, well,
what's the hardest thing you do every day, Joe, I said, well,
of course, the hardest decision I'm making in the morning
is what damn car's going to drive? And I looked
around one day and I had a million dollars with
(24:20):
the cars, and I just couldn't understand why I was
not happy. Well, I realized then I was married to
one woman, and I'm like, well, I'm a good Cuban guy,
so how can a Cuban gud be just happy with
one woman? And I started dating all the most beautiful
supermodels in America, and I hated them all and could
not understand why all of a sudden I hated women
treated them the way I did. I mean, I did
(24:40):
not abuse them or anything like that was just to
me that was just so insignificant. When I adored my mother,
who was my entire life, and I had the almost
respect in this world. You know, everybody in the world
wanted to be like George Valdaz. You know, I was
considered the most powerful person, well one of the most
powerful in America at that time, and no one even
knew that I existed. But I tell people, every day
(25:01):
of my life, I would lay down in my bed,
wake up in the morning, see the mirror. Just did
not like what I see. Then one of my associates
comes up to me and says, we have an opportunity.
The government of Bolivia wants to make a deal with you.
So I was in Columbia with the pilots and I
showed him what the airstrip was, and I was going
a fly back to nic Rouak, who's had a meeting
with General Somosa where we were going to bring some
(25:23):
drugs through a corn island and he was going to
send it in in his refrigerator cargo ships to us.
We landed in Columbia and everything was fine. Then all
of a sudden, as we loaded up the cocaine. We
spent overnight tied up to a tree at night, and
we were on the airplane in about half an hour. Afterwards,
(25:45):
we lost contact with Columbia because we lost both alternators.
And eventually we're over the country of Panama about five
thousand feet when both engines just went off and we
crash landed, and it was a miracle that we even lived.
And we jumped from the airplane, and then a military
officer Caine, and I took out three hundred dollars and
(26:06):
I gave it to him. I said, look, we were
looking for cattle ranches and we had problem with the
airplane and we crash landed. But all I need to
do is if you could take me to a hotel
and he'd take my passports, sign him and tomorrow I'm
going to send someone. I'll have someone come and fix
the airplane. He took me to a private office and
split us apart, and they came in there, and it
(26:28):
was the head of the DEA, the General Consul of Panama,
and the head of the G two, which was the
intelligence division for Noriega. They lined up all the cocaine
in a table. They took pictures of us. When I
got to Miami, I would charge with heading the largest
drug conspiracy in the history of America and given the
highest bond ever in the history of America, seven million dollars.
(26:49):
I was just twenty three years old.
Speaker 1 (26:51):
And you're listening to the story of George Valdez and
what a ride he's taking, and then his life literally
comes crashing to the ground in a plane in Panama.
And now he's back in Miami with the highest bell
ever posted on a criminal in this country's history, seven
million dollars. When we come back, what happens next in
(27:12):
the life of George Valdez. Here on our American stories,
(27:37):
and we returned to our American stories and the final
portion of our story with George Valdez. He's the author
of Coming Clean, the true story of a cocaine drug
lord and his unexpected encounter with God. When we last
left off, George had been caught with pounds of cocaine
in Panama after his plane was forced to crash land
(27:58):
in a field. Let's get back to the story.
Speaker 2 (28:05):
You know, I hired the best lawyer that money could buy.
I hire every name lawyer that you can ever imagine
in America, spend a million dollars at that time, But anyway,
did that matter. I was sentenced to fifteen years in
jail for krins prison, which was the most that you
could give to anyone because they didn't have a wire
toob they didn't even have the cocaine. The cocaine disappeared
the same day and no Riga sold that quickly. I
(28:25):
go off to prison, and you know, people think that
prison would change you. Prison doesn't change you. People. I
went up to prison, I was the same guy I
always was. When I got out after five years in change,
I went back to the same thing. And really, I
look back now, there was no need for I was
a multimillionaire. I couldn't spend the money that I had.
But it was this thing that they thought they had
(28:46):
beat me. But I'm going to beat them in the end.
And I went back to the same thing. But something
very dynamic started to happen right now. And what happened
was my mother found out for the first time that
I was a dog dealer alone. Before that, oh, she
thought I was a international businessman because I had a
lot of business. When she found out, it destroyed her.
(29:07):
It is the most painful thing I ever been through
my life. See my mother walk into the courtroom and
hearing that her baby kid was charged with being this monster,
being this the most powerful man in America, you know,
heading the larger druct conspiracy in the world. She said, son,
you destroyed us. But here's the interesting thing about my mom.
And this is a message that I tell to a
lot of parents. My mother not one single time would
(29:30):
take a dollar from me. My mother, not one single
time stopped telling me that what I was doing didn't
please God and that I destroyed them. But in the
same breath, my mother will say, well, what do you
want for dinner tonight, son, Because she let me know that, yeah,
I could become a monster, I could become whatever, but
in her eyes, her God was bigger than anything, and
(29:50):
in her eyes, her God would change her child. Forty
years later, I see this genius of it, because I
see we get mad at our kids, and we kick
him out of the house and we find our children
but George, and we call it tough love, and it
really doesn't work. We gotta be tough, but we got love.
So it's not tough love. It's tough but love. And
that's how I raised my children. But you know, and
(30:14):
and it went on that, and there was not one
chance that my mother would not ever stop telling me that.
And She's like son, if I get killed, you kill
me because what you do doesn't please God. And I'm like, Mom,
what God? God ain't real? Where was God when we
came from Cuban and we were going hungry every day?
(30:34):
Where was God when you came from Cuban? Lady in
the hospital dying of throat cancer? What was God? Mom?
And I just left and I went back to my operations.
One night, I'm partying in my house with some movie stars,
and all of a sudden, the head of the security
at the gates says, George, your's wife just dropped. Your daughter,
(30:56):
not like my daughter. I said, just bring her over.
So she over. I tell the babysitter that lived with us.
I said, go ahead and put it to bed, make
sure she doesn't get out of her room, and the
morning I'll have breakfast with her. And I went back
to my party. Two or three hours later, I hear
this knock on my door, said, Daddy, it's Crystal. And
(31:16):
for the first time in my life, I began to
feel filthy. I began to feel dirty. It was the
feeling the more she knocked, it was almost a feeling
that you see your baby child, You're going to drown.
On the boat and you're reaching out and touch the
fingertips and you just can't grab a hold over their hands.
And I couldn't open the door because if I opened
the door would contaminate her. I told the woman to
get out of my room. They went to get out
(31:37):
of the door. I said, no, out the window. And
when they get out, I went into the shower. He's
the man that never feared anything in his life. All
of a sudden, in the shower, I started to shake
and I started to tremble. I started to try to
scrub the filth off of me. Now wondering what the
hell was going on in my life. I went underneath
my sheets and I began to shake and shimmer. And
when I come down and I was dehydrated. I went
(31:57):
to get water and I saw my baby girl in
the throat crying, and I said to myself, this will
stop today. And I didn't know what change meant, you know,
And this is what I tell people. When you know
you got to make a change in your life, don't
worry about what that means. Just know this. For me,
it was simple. If I'm going north, I'm going to
start going south. If I'm going east, I'm going to
(32:18):
start going west. And I called my mother in the
middle of the night and I said, Mom, I'm done,
and she knew what I meant, and she's like, God
has answered my prayer. And I'm like, God, Mom, God
had nothing to do with this. This is crystal. Did
I not to do with God? Or so I thought?
And then I called in the morning. I called the
head of the hotel and I said, I'm finishing. Now.
Imagine the desperation in my life at this point that
(32:40):
I knew the most likely I'd be killed within a month.
And I just moved over to my ranch. I sold
my house in Miami and I went to live in
my ranch and wait till someone came around. Didn't care
anymore because my desperation was so much that my life
just had to find some type of a change. Anyways,
I hired this guy to teach me karate. He said,
(33:00):
I'm gonna teach you about the sword. And I'm like, man,
I done karate a lot when I was younger, and
I'm like, man, I'm really smart. I can't believe I
hired this guy. I love weapons. He's not gonna waste
his time trying kicks we're gonna get into weapons right away.
All of a sudden, he turns around and he has
a Bible, and I'm like, I look at him, and
(33:20):
I'm like, Sir, first and foremost, I need to tell
you two things. Number one, I don't believe in that book.
Number two, I don't believe in God. And number three,
I'm paying you a lot of my teaching me karate,
So tomorrow, would you please leave that sword home and
bring the real sword. He got up into my face
where I could smell his breath and was the first
man that had done that. And I said, well, here's
(33:43):
a seven degree black brother. You're gonna start whooping Jesus
into me and I'm gonna be paying for it. So
I'm like, hey, dude, dude, don't get excited. Let's just
go ahead and wait and go waste your time. And
I said, well, the steam room heats up. You can
talk to me, read to me, do whatever you want.
He says, deal, he read to me for almost three years.
And people say, what did he say that made you
(34:05):
come around? I said, really, honestly, absolutely nothing, because I
was just getting over the butt whooping and he had
given me to even think about what the hell he
was talking about? But it was everything that I saw.
You see, I saw a man that lived in a
very little world. I saw a man that had a
fourteen fifteen hundred squirret foot out and he was so happy.
And I lived in this fifteen thousand dollars squirret foot mansion.
(34:27):
I was miserable. I wanted to find out about this
God that I didn't know nothing about. And I started
to study theology and I started. I taught myself Greek.
I ended up getting another bachelor's in prison, and five
almost five years later, I had started a master's from
Wheaton College, graduated, I mean when when I was released,
I went to Wheaton College and uh and finished my masters,
(34:48):
became an adjunct faculty there and met the most amazing
woman on God's Earth, my wife of twenty five years now.
Then from Wheaton College, I decided that I wanted to
keep going and I wanted to be the best geologian
in the world. And I applied to Loyola and I
was accepted, and I got a PhD in Early Christianity
and New Testament and Ethics, and I became one of
(35:09):
five Hispanics in America with a PhD in Bible. You know,
I'm here to tell the world, listen, the only thing
our children need, the only thing I shouldn't truly want,
is our presence. It costs nothing, but we keep and
we fall into this horrific cycle of destruction. And you know,
(35:30):
like the old saying, Americans are so amazing about sacrificing
their health to create wealth, and then they spend their
wealth trying to get their health back. And we abandon
our family, who abandon our homes, we abandon our wives,
and at the end of the day, doesn bring us
a bit of joy, which just as miserable as we
ever were, because there's a hunger within us, inside of
(35:50):
us that to me cannot only only be filled with
the love of God and whatever God might be. Twenty one.
I talk to people all over the world. I don't
care what any is. I don't care the Jewish, I
don't care if there Muslim. I will care the Christian
or Atheist. I don't care if they're straight or gay.
All I care to tell people is listen, I'm just
gonna tell you a story about me. My story, not
(36:12):
for you, not for anyone, my story. My life drastically
changed when I fell in love with a Jewish carpenter.
So my story is about nothing but falling in love
and the fact that there is redemption, that there is
hope in this world, and we don't have to sell
to that message that, oh, I was a twice convicted
drug dealer, who's going to hire you. We're not defined
by our failures. We're defined by how we get up
(36:34):
from our failures. We're not defined by how much wealth
we achieved. I think that we're defined by how many
lives we impact at the end of the day. But
I tell people is when the pages of history are written,
will history ever remember your name? And if we care,
the history will remember our name. History will only remember
(36:54):
our name because we've impacted the life of somebody else. Now,
because we have achieved great wealth, now, because we're very rich, now,
because we have mansions and homes and vacation homes and
three and four cars. No, if all we do is
impact the life of our children so that they become
decent human beings, they believe in integrity, believe in the word,
(37:18):
and above all, love others. If I can do that,
I've changed the world, and so can anyone listening today.
O'h blessed.
Speaker 1 (37:28):
And a terrific job on the production and editing by
our own Monty Montgomery. And a special thanks to George
Veld as what a story of transformation. Why we do
this show actually is stories like this and the power
of God, the power of love, could change everything. George
Veld does his story here on our American Stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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