Juan Maria Pedro de Guerro Ecabido, El Hefe to his friends, was discussing how he got his start as a drug lord.

“I was selling coffee. I made some money at that. Lived pretty good. Then, I started tossing some cocaine into each sack of beans. It was called ‘The Power Coffee’. ‘Wake up with a blast.’ It sold as fast as I could ship it. Then I started putting more coke in and less coffee. Then I dropped the coffee.”

“But, El Hefe, don’t you worry about the morality of it?”, asked Bishop Alejandro de Sissi, the drug chaplain.

El Hefe and his friends laughed a long time at that one. Normally El Hefe would have killed the person saying that but this was a priest of the Holy Church. Can’t kill him. Maybe break a couple of bones later but not kill him.

“Morality? Oh, yes, morality. We send hit squads to America and force those crackheads to buy our product. Yea, that what we do”, El Hefe said. He wasn’t laughing now.

“But, what of the law. it’s illegal”, the Bishop continued.

“This is Columbia. What law? Here, everything is illegal. You can’t live here without breaking the law. I choose to break this one”, El Hefe answered him and thinking that removing a limb may be acceptable to the Church with a large enough donation.

“But, why not sell coffee? You made a lot of money with that”, the stupid Bishop went on.

El Hefe was getting a headache. “I want all the money, not some of it. I want enough to buy respectability. I have enough to buy any woman I want, any man I need and you. I want respect”.

The Bishop, not knowing he was going to become a cripple, had more to say.

“How do you confess? How do you get forgiveness and absolution so you can receive communion?”

“The priest I use is a cocaine user, that’s how”, El Hefe told him, thinking the Bishop’s head was going to adorn the door of the church.

“But what will you do if the American government succeeds in stopping the trafficking? What if the ‘just say no’ campaign works. What if Hollywood becomes a normal place? Then what?”

El Hefe and his friends laughed a long, long time at that one.