Pubdate: Mon, 16 Mar 2009
Source: Daily Record (UK)
Copyright: 2009 Daily Record and Sunday Mail Ltd.
Contact: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
Website: http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/111
Author: Annie Brown
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/coke.htm (Cocaine)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/people/pablo+escobar

AMAZING STORY OF HOW PABLO ESCOBAR CAME TO BE THE RICHEST CROOK IN HISTORY

The brother of the infamous Colombian drug baron Pablo Escobar has
revealed the ingenious smuggling methods he used to flood America with
cocaine.

Roberto, who was to become known as his brother's "accountant", said
Pablo's Medellin drug cartel was making so much cash, it spent ?1200 a
month on rubber bands just to hold the wads of dollar bills together.

In his new book, The Accountant's Story, published this week, Roberto
reveals how Pablo came from poverty to become the seventh richest man
in the world.

The brothers were the sons of a teacher and a farmer and were so poor
that once Pablo was sent home from school because he had no shoes.

Roberto said: "Our poverty made an impression on our lives that
neither my brother nor I ever forgot."

They lived in Envigado, in an area populated by liberals, so they were
targeted by the Chusmeros, the mobs on the conservative side. Families
were slaughtered in their beds just for living in the wrong place.

Roberto said: "The most we could do was lock our doors at night. Our
only weapon was our prayers."

A year after an attack on their home, Pablo and Roberto were sent to
live in the city of Medellin, where they were raised in a large house
with their loving, but strict, grandmother.

Roberto said: "In those early days, it was impossible to believe that
one day Pablo would rule the city and make it known throughout the
world as the home of the Medellin drug cartel."

Pablo was well educated, but his vocation lay in crime and his first
step on the ladder was to work for the multi-millionaire contraband
smuggler Alvaro Prieto.

Through his dedication and guile, Pablo became a millionaire by the
time he was 22.

Roberto's book is an invidious account which glosses over the true
villainy of the evil and murderous Escobar.

A judicial "Truth Commission" convened by the Colombian government
concluded Pablo ordered the murder of 30 judges, 457 policemen and as
many as 20 ordinary people a day, because they had fallen foul of him.

He organised the assassination of a presidential candidate and helped
a leftwing guerrilla group execute an assault on Colombia's Supreme
Court, with the murder of half of the judges.

But he was generous with his money and the trucks of gifts and food he
would distribute in the poorest neighbourhoods of Medellin would buy
him loyalty and, to this day, a reputation among the poor as a hero.

He built churches and football pitches and kept villages alive with
work from his deadly trade.

In the Seventies, when Pablo decided to get into the cocaine business,
America was still only dabbling in the drug.

Roberto maintains Pablo fell into the business simply because
contraband became too dangerous to traffic.

He could make more money with one truck loaded with cocaine than 40
carrying booze and cigarettes.

There were no drug cartels and only a few drug barons, so there was
plenty of business for everyone.

In Peru, they bought the cocaine paste, which they refined in a
laboratory in a two-storey house in Medellin.

On his first trip, Pablo bought a paltry ?30 worth of paste in what
was to become the first step towards the building of his empire.

At first, he smuggled the cocaine in old plane tyres and a pilot could
earn as much as ?500,000 a flight depending on how many kilos he could
smuggle.

With one flight a week, the profit was a staggering ?1million a week,
but soon the flights tripled.

Pablo was to become the pioneer in the use of drug mules. People
became vital carriers - sometimes just travellers, at other times
airline crew, and it was not uncommon for the pilot and cabin crew to
be carrying drugs.

He ensured loyalty by paying big money to anyone he needed, from the
military and police to airport managers.

The manager of one small Colombian airport was paid up to ?300,000 for
each Pablo flight that was allowed to land unhindered.

When he was finally arrested, the airport manager had ?15million in
his bank account.

In the early days, few stood in Pablo's way - especially not the
authorities, who were easily bribed.

Roberto said: "From an early age, we learned the rules were for
sale."

There was so much cash, it became impossible to simply pump it into
real estate or banks.

Roberto and a team of 10 accountants took care of the money and they
were forced to store wads of notes in warehouses and secret
compartments under swimming pools, in bins and in the walls of gang
members' homes.

Coffee was scattered across the money because, after a while, cash
develops a distinctive smell The cartel would write off 10 per cent of
the money to soilage because it would lie untouched for so long that
rats would eat it or it would be water damaged.

Labs employing hundreds of people were built deep in the heart of the
jungle. These bases became small cities, with schools, medical centres
andcanteens.

One of the biggest and most efficient was a huge farm on the
Venezuelan border, where the little houses were on wheels.

When a flight was due in to pick up or drop off, the houses would be
wheeled back to expose a landing strip and then wheeled forward again
when the plane took off.

One of the camp's rules was that the houses would have at least one
occupant at so they could be wheeled back at short notice. About 200
people lived there helping produce 10,000 kilos of cocaine every fortnight.

Pablo even employed teams of chemists to come up with new ways of
smuggling his drugs.

He sent 23,000 kilos mixed with dried fish from Peru, one of that
country's biggest exports.

Chemists discovered cocaine could be chemically blended into products
made of plastic, metals and liquids and, when it reached the
destination, the process was reversed and the cocaine purified.

Liquified cocaine was added to Chilean wine, it was mixed with flowers
and chemically soaked into Colombian lumber exports.

Even jeans were soaked with the liquid and the coke would be washed
out at the destination.

And when it was chemically blended with plastic, it was shaped in to
the most ordinary items from PVC pipes to religious statues.

Pablo bought his own fleet of planes to transport the drug. Freight
ships and speedboats were also used and drugs were even parachuted on
to boats mid-ocean.

Roberto said: "The question I am asked most often is how much money
Pablo had. The answer is billions. More than any man could ever spend
in a lifetime."

In 1989, Forbes magazine listed Pablo as the seventh richest man in
the world, estimating that the Medellin cartel earned as much as
?20million a year. Pablo had cornered 80 per cent of the global
cocaine market.

Roberto said: "There was so much money that when we lost it, we still
slept soundly."

On one occasion, ?5million was put on the wrong ship and was snaffled
by the crew.

But when Pablo heard the news, he shrugged his shoulders.

"Some you win, some you lose," he said.

It was to be many years before Pablo would eventually lose it all,
when his notoriety made it impossible for the Colombian and US
Governments to allow him to continue.

A Colombian police task force, known as the Search Bloc, was created
specifically to hunt him down and, in December 1993, after cornering
him on a rooftop in Medellin, he was shot in the leg, torso, and
fatally in the ear.

To this day, Roberto maintains money remains undiscovered in hiding
holes and bank accounts long since forgotten.

Millions upon millions of dollars simply left to rot.

The Accountant's Story, ?11.99, is on sale on Tuesday and is published
by Hodder & Stoughton.
__________________________________________________________________________
Distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in
receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.
---
MAP posted-by: Larry Seguin


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