On June 24, 1988 Texas oilman Jake Gambini was kidnapped in Colombia by a group of guerrillas. For the next six months—during which time the guerrillas never revealed what political group they belonged to—Gambini’s employees and his Colombian brother-in-law, Herbert “Tico” Braun, would engage in protracted ransom bargaining. By the time Gambini was kidnapped, guerrilla abductions of well-heeled Colombians and foreigners were so endemic that maneuvering for a captive’s release had become as commonplace and stylized as the give-and-take that occurs when one buys or sells a house or a high-end used car. Braun, a history professor at the University of Virginia, later wrote Our Guerrillas, Our Sidewalks (University Press of Colorado), an account of the kidnapping from the point of view of those who represented Gambini’s interests during the bargaining. Following are excerpts that illustrate a new institution in Colombia: the art and science of hostage negotiating.
June 24
Jake Gambini: I thought they were workers from a rig who were looking for me. Then I saw all the guns and I knew. The leader, a bearded man, told me to hurry up. “This is a kidnapping,” he said. “Quick. Nothing’s gonna happen to you.”
June 26
Tico Braun: Through the oil companies in Bogotá [Gambini’s wife] has learned about organizations that make a living out of negotiating with guerrillas and terrorists. They’re located in Miami. It’s a good thing that the Colombian government doesn’t get much involved. This has to be kept within the family. It’s a private matter, a financial transaction.
July 3
Braun: We are beginning to learn about the clearly defined steps and stages that families go through. What stands ahead is predictable. The guerrillas will ask for an astronomical sum of money, we’ll make a counter offer, and so it will go. That’s the way it works. It turns out that families apparently end up paying around 10% of the guerrillas’ initial demand. Once a sum is settled on and the guerrillas have their money, they return the person.
July 4
Braun: Almost everybody we talk to wants to know whether Jake has kidnapping insurance. No, we answer. The insurance company would have paid everything, including ransom payment, all our expenses and even these professionals whom [Jake Gambini’s wife] is paying, [but] Jake had concluded that the insurance policy was too expensive, something like $100,000 per person per year. Jake figured he’d have to pay the guerrillas less for the ransom.
July 11
Gambini: I tried to figure out what the company was worth. They said they usually took 50% of a family’s net worth. The guy with the beard told me that. I wrote a note authorizing [my employee] to do the negotiating.
July 30
(Gambini’s employee’s first meeting with a guerrilla representative):
Guerrilla: I have been assigned to negotiate this matter. Don’t worry, this is a purely economic thing. We’re a group that has suffered a lot, and this is a struggle that we must continue.
Gambini’s employee: Yes, sir. We understand your position and we know that this is a business. We also want to solve this quickly. Please keep in mind that the company is not a multinational, as the newspapers reported. It’s a small company.
August 2:
(After the second negotiating meeting )
Braun: The phone rings. It is [Jake Gambini’s employee].
“Five,” he says.
“Five what?”
“Five big ones.”
Five million dollars.
“Don’t worry,” Nelson [a hired professional from the hostage-negotiator company] says, almost nonchalantly. “It’s only their opening gambit.”
August 4:
(Third negotiating meeting)
Guerrilla: What are your people offering?
Gambini’s employee: “Eighty million pesos.”
Guerrilla: “No, that’s very little. I told you not to start so far down. Our new petition is three million dollars. Verdes. Greenbacks.
Braun: I’m ecstatic. I feel as though we’ve made two million dollars.
August 13:
Braun: We go up ten million pesos, to three hundred thousand dollars.
August 30
Braun: They wouldn’t budge from the three million [dollars].
September 23
Braun: They are not moving an inch [from the three million dollars]. I go up to 105 million [pesos]. That, I tell him, is as far as we can go. And I want a quick response. I’m not here to waste my time. I have my job [at University of Virginia] to return to.
September 29:
Braun: A note arrives, and a Polaroid photograph of him. Their note insists on “the three” [million dollars]. [Nelson, the professional hostage negotiator] lets us know that we should be glad it’s a picture. He knows of a case where the family received a finger in a box through the mail.
October 4:
Braun: We try everything in today’s call.
Guerrilla: Well, look, we are going to go down to 2.8 million [dollars].
Braun: Those figures are so unreachable for us that the difference between one and other is nonexistent. I let him know that we might be able to go up to 115 million [pesos] …[The professional hostage negotiator] keeps saying that they’ll come down suddenly, out of the blue. They have to. They need us.
October 20:
Guerrilla: We want this to be settled at 150.
Gambino’s employee: 150. We’re talking in Colombian, right?
Guerrilla: Yes. Yes. Yes. But of those 150 we want 300, ah, 300,000 dollars and the rest in pesos.
Braun: The rest was somewhere between 46 and 53 million pesos, depending on the exchange rate.There is no question about it. They want to close a deal. It takes eight calls to work out all the details. We continue to negotiate, we can’t just suddenly agree to what they want. But the differences are not substantial. They know they will get close to their 150 million pesos—460,000 dollars or so.
November 7:
Gambini’s employee: We flew to this small airport. It wasn’t an airport exactly, but a pretty good runway with a hut next to it. This was their place, and you could tell they used it a lot. One of them came up to me. Just a kid, not more than 20 years old. I carried the suitcase. He opened the zipper. The kid smelled the bills. He rifled through them like he was the most experienced bank teller in the world. He had done this many times before. He knew exactly what he was doing. He put the bills back in the suitcase and closed it. He smiled.
(Hours later, after the family learns that the guerrillas have freed Gambini)
Braun: Boy, luck had been with us….No. It wasn’t luck. The rules had worked. We did everything the way we were supposed to. We had gotten him back. Everything was fine.
