THINGS YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT PABLO ESCOBAR

- At his extravagant estate in Puerto Triunfo, Escobar also built a private zoo filled with hippos, giraffes, elephants, and other animals. Hippos still roam the grounds today.
- Escobar was responsible for killing about 4,000 people, including an estimated 200 judges and 1,000 police, journalists, and government officials.
- In the 1980s, Escobar’s Medellin cartel was responsible for 80 percent of the cocaine that was sent to the United States
- Before getting into the drug trade, Escobar sold stolen tombstones to smugglers and was also into the business of stealing cars.
- Pablo Escobar was born in Rionegro, Colombia in 1949. His father was a farmer, and his mother was a schoolteacher.
- In 1976, a 27-year-old Pablo Escobar married Maria Victoria Henao Vellejo, who was then just 15.
- While the Escobar family was in hiding, Pablo’s daughter, Manuela, got sick. To keep her warm, burned about two million dolllars
- EscoLa Catedral housed a casino, a bar a nightclub, and even a spa.
- Pablo Escobar bought a Learjet specifically for flying his cash.
- Escobar is said to have smuggled cocaine into plane tires. Depending on how much product pilots flew, they could earn as much $500,000 per day.
- In an attempt to change the laws of extradition, Escobar offered to pay Colombia’s debt–an estimated 10 billion dollars.
- Escobar spent around $2,500 a month on rubber bands used to hold his money.
- Escobar’s earnings peaked at an estimated 30 billion dollars.
- Escobar made the Forbes’ billionaires list of the world’s richest people seven years in a row beginning in 1987 and peaked at number seven in 1989.
- In the late 1980s, Colombian authorities seized some of Escobar’s enormous fleet, including 142 planes, 20 helicopters, 32 yachts, and 141 homes and offices.
- Escobar’s business was so big and so scrutinized that in addition to planes, helicopters, cars, trucks, and boats, he even bought two submarines for transporting his cocaine into the United States.
- At the height of the drug trade, Escobar smuggled up to 15 tons of cocaine each day.
- Pablo Escobar’s support of the poor earned him the nickname “Robin Hood.
- Other popular nicknames for Escobar were “Don Pablo” and “El Patron.”
- Among the possessions that authorities found in Escobar’s home was a Spanish translation of the self-help classic, The Power Of Positive Thinking.
- About ten percent of Escobar’s earnings were lost to spoilage. Rats likely consumed a bulk of those bills.
- Escobar’s luxury prison was referred to as “La Caterdal” (aka the Cathedral).
- Following his death, Escobar’s lavish Colombian estate was transformed into a theme park featuring animals, life-sized dinosaur models, Escobar’s collection of classic cars, and more.
- Pablo Escobar’s greatest fear was extradition. No matter what happened, he didn’t want to spend his final years in an American jail cell.
- Despite his horrific business dealings, Escobar did fund a number of programs to help Colombia’s poor residents. He gave money to churches and hospitals, established food programs, built parks and football stadiums, and created a barrio.
- Escobar used his extraordinary wealth and popularity to get himself elected to Colombia’s Congress.
- The biggest single cocaine shipment Escobar ever made to the United States weighed a whopping 51,000 pounds.
- Pablo Escobar was gunned down at the age of 44. Some people speculate that the wound was self-inflicted.
- About 25,000 people — including many of the poor Colombians to whom Escobar had personally distributed money — attended his burial in Medellin.