A man who ended up being a cocaine pilot who ended up being Pablo Escobar revealed that he first turned down a job offer for the infamous Colombian drug drug man because he was content with the $4MA month he earned when flying for his competitors.

But in a new podcast, he is considered his first interview since authorities arrested him at a Florida mansion in 1988, Tirso “TJ” Dominguez tells how he changed his mind about working for Escobar when the so-called patron or boss gave him five times the salary, which was five times higher: $20 million.

“I have 30 Lamborghini people and I’m dressing up well,” Dominguez said of his subsequent lifestyle in the eight-part documentary podcast, called Cocaine Aviation, a copy of which has been provided to The Guardian. “They brought me a car that matched the shirt I decided to wear.”

Dominguez awarded interviews to cocaine Air Force host Johnathan Walton after more than a decade of imprisonment for drug trafficking and money laundering, a stark, first-hand claim that it prompted someone to work for one of the world’s most notorious criminals. Escobar murders, kidnappings and bombings before Colombian Special Forces shot him in 1993.

As he told Walton, Dominguez was involved in drug smuggling only in the late 1970s after his father, a South Florida real estate developer, died of cancer unexpectedly in the middle of building a sugar factory in Haiti.

Dominguez said he was 20 years old and later he was cheated out of $100,000 by two ruthless Miami bankers who refused to give his father a $14 million loan before his death. Desperate to raise funds for the sugar factory, Dominguez's mother was a housewife - learned to fly planes so he could make money from drug dealers by illegally smuggling marijuana from the Bahamas and Colombia.

He said he graduated from the U.S. sky illegally flying cocaine because he threw $800,000 worth of marijuana onto a wrong smuggling ship, prompting his supplier to kidnap him and threatening if he didn't make them all quickly. According to what he said, the fastest way to regain investment loss is to fly a Coke aircraft on behalf of another supplier, so Dominguez did so.

"I never wanted to get into cocaine because cocaine (smugglers) are bad guys ... do all the killings," Dominguez said on Walton's podcast. "I don't tolerate drugs. I've never done any drugs. I'm a victim of a scam, which actually takes me in the direction I end up going."

He said that despite this, the flight brought Domingus a cool $1 million to pay back his angry weed supplier. He said that was enough to make him decide to start smuggling cocaine full time, proving that he was punctual and professional - he never lost his cargo.

Dominguez said his reliability eventually caught the attention of Escobar, who tried to recruit him to his Cartel. However, Dominguez, also nicknamed Tito, was initially immobile, saying that he had good flight times per month, in 1mm of flow units.

"I'll tell you the truth - Pablo Escobar doesn't mean anything to me," Dominguez said on Cocaine Airways. "I'm full of myself. I'm walking on the water, you know? I've earned 4mA months. What the hell is going on?"

Escobar then offered to pay four flights to Dominguez on a 5mA $5mA trip. Dominguez believes that $20 million a month (the equivalent of $60 million when considering inflation today) is too much. He said that was when he chose to fly exclusively to Escobar.

Even for Escobar, the fee obviously became too much, who later started paying Dominguez on cocaine. At that time, Dominguez changed from a cocaine smuggler to a dealer, which meant he could drive the product, sell the product, collect income, launder money and invest money without counting on the middleman.

“I did something other smugglers had never done in smuggling history,” Dominguez bragged to Walton, whose previous projects included the Scam: The Irish Heife Podcast series.

In a particularly noteworthy moment in the opening series of Cocaine Air, Dominguez reads a memoir written by Escobar’s brother (a memoir written by his accountant Roberto Escobar), who claimed that TJ owned 30 aircraft and was the “main transporter” of Pablo’s medicine empire.

Dominguez recalls accumulating luxury homes, a company that sells cell phones at a time when equipment costs $5,000 per piece, housing development, aircraft rental and ship operations, and exotic auto dealerships at the height of his power. He even raised the mountain lion, whom he called the top cat.

But it all hit in the early morning of April 1988, when federal investigators equipped with rifles and helicopters descended onto his house and arrested him. Prosecutors have accused him and 12 colleagues of illegally placing more than five tons of marijuana and cocaine from July 1984 to December 1985, according to the Miami Herald and Sun Sentinel.

Officials argue Dominguez’s exotic dealership in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where his other operations in the area are the multi-million-dollar drug smuggling ring fronts. They caught two dozen luxury cars - Lamborghini, Ferrari, Excaliburs and Panteras - and five aircraft, worth nearly $3 million in total to auction them, and other consequences for Dominguez.

In 1991, about two years before Escobar's murder, Dominguez pleaded guilty to distribute cocaine and marijuana and illegal money laundering. One of his inmates reported Dominguez, who included two solitary confinement, had reported Dominguez after he managed to buy a helicopter from his cell and was mapped for free flight.

Dominguez explained on cocaine air that before being caught, he instructed the helicopter pilot to land on the ground in the prison and “jump me to the fence.”

"There is a canal, not too far away - I have a car waiting for me," Dominguez said on Cocaine Airways, premiering Wednesday, with the plan to release new episodes on July 23 on podcast platforms such as Apple and Spotify.

Dominguez, 73, told the podcast that he believes he pays off his debts to society and aspires to become a legal entrepreneur.

“Failure is when you quit,” Dominguez said of his desire to write a new chapter in his life. "Are you going to fall? You fell. This means you've got two steps.

“The glass is always half full to me.”