‘René and Juan Carlos set out to convert their Colombian megachurch to Orthodox Judaism. This is what happened.’

Essay: With its decaying two-story homes and grazing cows, Bello looks like just another sleepy suburb of Medellín, Colombia. Thirty years ago, though, it was known as la capital de los sicarios, the capital of the assassins. Pablo Escobar, the leader of the Medellín cartel, which supplied most of the world’s cocaine, recruited many of his sicarios from Bello, paying them to eliminate his adversaries. Mostly teenagers, they rode motorcycles, prayed to La Virgen María Auxiliadora, and killed their victims in the streets. René Cano grew up in Bello at the height of Escobar’s reign.
Born in 1978, René was the child of a textile factory worker and a housewife, both observant Catholics. At 13, he was so tall and self-possessed that he passed for an 18-year-old and, by his own description, was sexually precocious. He could talk anyone into anything. When his father announced one evening there was no money, nothing for dinner, René ran outside with a chair and came back with cash.
His cousins were sicarios and so were his neighbors; almost everyone he knew was on drugs. His mother understood it was only a matter of time before René would join them, and she feared for his life. “Don’t hang out on the corner,” she told him one day, “because they will come.” Five minutes after she called him into the house, men gunned down seven boys on the spot where he had been standing. The stench of their deaths lingered for weeks.