Pablo Escobar: 5 Things You Didn't Know

Pablo Escobar:

5 Things You Didn't Know

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In most businesses, seeing a return on investment (ROI) of 100% would be more than enough for a company to thrive. By some estimates, notorious Colombian cocaine kingpin Pablo Escobar enjoyed an ROI of as much as 20,000%. Put another way, for every $1 he put into his business, he got about $200 in return.

That is one seductive ROI, for certain. It doesn't account for risk, but for most of Escobar's professional life at the head of the Medellin cartel, the risk wasn't his, nor was it financial: The risk fell to the lives of Pablo's rivals and to the lives of the (mostly) American dealers who pushed his product to the users who snorted it. Only after his wealth, notoriety and brutality made him the target of both big governments and small (but determined) vigilante groups did Escobar finally endure some risk. Not surprisingly, on December 2, 1993, a day after his 44th birthday, it caught up with him in the most permanent way after a rooftop chase-down in a middle-class part of Medellin.

As Hollywood eyes 2011 as a possible release date for a biopic based on Mark Bowden's Killing Pablo, we present five things you didn't know about Pablo Escobar.



1- Rats ate $1 billion of Pablo Escobar's profits each year

The first thing you didn't know about Pablo Escobar testifies to an uncommon, staggering degree of wealth. According to Roberto Escobar, one of Pablo's closest brothers, at a time when their estimated profits were circling $20 billion annually "Pablo was earning so much that each year we would write off 10% of the money because the rats would eat it in storage or it would be damaged by water or lost."

If that weren't enough to drop your jaw, Roberto adds that the cartel spent as much as $2,500 every month on rubber bands to "hold the money together."



2- Pablo Escobar's paradise now houses refugees and hippos

Near the small northwestern Colombian town of Puerto Triunfo, Pablo Escobar once built himself a holiday getaway befitting a man of his stature. Hacienda Napoles was just shy of paradise, spread across almost 5,000 acres (7.7 sq-mi.) and featuring everything from pools to a bullring to an exotic zoo with hippos, giraffes, elephants, and more. Stories of enormous drug-fuelled parties at Hacienda Napoles with some of Colombia's most powerful and most beautiful in attendance continue to circulate, contributing to the legend of Escobar.

Today, though, that paradise is in ruins. Everything that could be gutted has been gutted by people looking for rumoured stashes of coke or cash. Its only residents are families of refugees from the country's war against guerrilla fighters and about 20 hippos which roam the area with the same kind of impunity that Pablo enjoyed decades ago.

How did Escobar manage to get his millions back to Columbia from the U.S.? That's next...