Drug Crazy - The River of Money - Page 119

Bolivia, but in Colombia, the wide open network of drug labs and smuggling operations was much more vulnerable. If these outfits could be decapitated—if the men at the top could be neutralized—it would surely do more than anything to stem the flow. This had been the centerpiece of U.S. drug policy under Reagan, and when Bush took over, the man in the crosshairs of Washington’s interdiction effort happened to be a 39-year-old former car thief named Pablo Escobar.

Unlike some of his flashier comtemporaries, stocky, hazel-eyed, moustachioed Pablo Escobar Gaviria drove a cheap Renault and dressed simply: rugby shirts, sneakers, chino pants and a diamond-studed Rolex.^[28]  Like his idol, Al Capone, he possessed a first-rate criminal mind, voracious ambition, and an unforgiving memory.  But Escobar’s penchent for violence would have left Big Al agog. The term “ruthless killer” has probably lost some of its impact at this end of the twentieth century but Escobar would give it new definition. On one occasion when he needed to rub out a couple of suspected informers, he planted a bomb on their flight from Bogota to Cali, blowing up an Avianca 727 along with a hundred passengers and crew.^[29]

But he had a pleasant side. He built more public housing in Medellin than the government.  His showcase project, “Medellin Without Slums,” put up hundreds of two-bedroom cement block houses, new schools, sewers, streetlights, clinics and sports plazas, capping it off with fifty thousand trees for the city’s barrios.^[30] He did okay for himself as well. He had 16 houses in Medellin alone, with heliports, and his country getaway was big enough to sleep a hundred. The swimming pool was flanked by a marble statue of Venus, and a mortar emplacement. The surrounding 7000 acres contained the finest zoo in all Colombia, with camels, lions, giraffes, bison, llamas, and a kangaroo that played soccer. ^[31]

Known affectionately as “The Godfather,” Forbes magazine listed him as number 69 among the world’s 125