[ Two weeks after Mr. Escobar and nine of his cohorts escaped, police officials are increasingly pessimistic that the nationwide manhunt will have any success. On Aug. 4, the authorities announced that overflights of Medellin by United States military spy planes had ended. "It's very difficult to predict the outcome," Fernando Brito, director of Colombia's intelligence police, said in an interview in Bogota. "Escobar is a very wily man and he has very great economic power. We are confronting the world's most powerful criminal." ]

Short of domestic servants in luxurious prison, Mr. Escobar impressed several of his guards to serve as bartenders and waiters during his parties, photographs confiscated at the prisons indicate.

The police also found a large selection of women's underwear, leading them to conclude that the prisoners received frequent visits from prostitutes. But one photograph taken at a prison party shows a male trafficker dressed up in women's clothing.

"The whole spectacle is disgusting," Colombia's Attorney General, Gustavo de Greiff, said after inspecting the prison and reviewing a series of party photographs. "It is absolutely incredible that no one rang the alarm bell, that no one said anything."

The authorities suspect that a food truck with a false bottom may have smuggled in the contraband items seized from lockers after Mr. Escobar's escape: computers, pistols, tear-gas masks, radiotelephones, a cellular phone and bundles of United States currency.

But not all of Mr. Escobar's comforts were obtained illicitly. Correspondence between officials and lawyers for Mr. Escobar in the period leading up to his surrender to the authorities shows the lawyers won guarantees of Mr. Escobar's freedom to choose his guards and to design his jail, nicknamed The Cathedral.

Inside the jail, 17 members of the 28-man guard service were picked by Mr. Escobar's allies in the municipal government of Envigado, his power base for two decades. Dressed in civilian clothes, these 17 guards patrolled the jail's innermost security ring, a report issued on Thursday by Colombia's National Association of Prison Guards said.