Pablito...what a silly boy!

[Crenshaw_blvd]

Pablo Escobar was arguably the richest and most violent criminal in history. Forbes Magazine in 1989 listed him as the seventh-richest man in the world.

A small-time gangster and car thief from Medellin, the second-largest city in Colombia, Escobar violently consolidated the cocaine industry there in the late 1970s. Elected as an alternate to Colombia's Congress in 1983, Escobar enjoyed widespread popularity among the poor in Colombia, especially in his home state of Antioquia.

He turned his violent methods against the state in 1984, when Colombia began cracking down on the cocaine exporters and extraditing them to the United States for trial.

His campaign of murder, kidnapping, bombing and bribery from then until his death in 1993 forced a constitutional crisis in Colombia. He cowed the government into banning extradition, and his murder campaign against judges and prosecutors so intimidated the nation that it abandoned trial by jury and began appointing anonymous, "faceless" judges to prosecute crimes.

At the height of his power in the late 1980s, Escobar and his Medellin drug cartel controlled as much as 80 percent of the multibillion-dollar export of Colombian cocaine to the United States.

Escobar was blamed for assassinating three of the five candidates for Colombian president in 1989, and for instigating a takeover of the Palace of Justice in Bogota in 1986. More than 90 people died in the subsequent siege, including 11 Supreme Court justices.

When one of Escobar's bombs brought down an Avianca Airliner in Colombia in November 1989, killing 107 people, he became one of the most feared terrorists in the world.

Men working for Escobar were caught that same year trying to buy Stinger antiaircraft missiles in Miami.

A heavy pot-smoker, Escobar cultivated a relaxed, informal style with his friends and associates, but he was so vicious to his enemies that he was feared by everyone. In his battle with Colombian police, he placed a bounty on the head of officers in Medellin, paying higher rewards for killing those of greater rank. By the time of his death at age 44, Dec. 2, 1993, Escobar was considered responsible for thousands of deaths in Colombia, yet he was mourned publicly by large crowds in his home city.

[Crenshaw_blvd]

*A former ally offers a profile of Escobar*

After her husband was murdered by his former boss Pablo Escobar, Dolly Moncada began providing valuable information to the Americans who were helping direct and finance the hunt for the fugitive drug lord. Among her suggestions was that the authorities talk to Colombian drug traffickers held in American jails.

Soon after Dolly was debriefed by the DEA in Washington, D.C., in late 1992, an incentive was offered to jailed Colombian drug dealer Carlos Lehder, a former associate of Escobar's. Lehder, seeking a reduced sentence, responded with his own suggestions for closing in on his former ally.

In a letter to the DEA from federal prison in Leavenworth, Kan., where he had been given a new identity under the federal witness protection program, Lehder recommended that the Americans create a Colombian "freedom fighters brigade, controlled by the DEA, and independent of the Colombian politicians, police or army." Lehder wrote that "the rich, the poor, the peasant, the political left, center and right are willing to cooperate" in the effort to bring Escobar down.

Of more immediate use was Lehder's description of Escobar's daily routine while in hiding - how he would move from safe house to safe house, how he would almost certainly stay close to his home base in and around Medellin. He drew a crude map and provided insights into Escobar's habits and preferences:

"Escobar is strictly a ghetto person, not a farm or jungle person. . . . Escobar always tries to keep within distance range for his cellular phone to reach Medellin's phone base. That's approximately 100 miles, so he can call any time.

"Generally, P. Escobar occupies the main house with some of his hit men, radio operator (Big High Frequency radio receiver), cooks, hores [whores] and messengers. For transportation they have jeeps, motorcycles and sometimes a boat. I have never seen him riding a horse. Escobar gets up at 1 or 2 p.m. and goes to sleep at 1 or 2 a.m.

"Fugitive Escobar uses from 15 to 30 security guards, with arms and WT [walkie-talkies]. Two shifts of 12 hours each. Two at the main road entrance, some along the road, the rest around the perimeter of the main house (one mile) and one at his door. . . .

"The main house always has two or three gateway paths which run to the forest and thus toward a second hideout or near a river where a boat is located, or a tent with supplies and radios. Escobar is an obese man, certainly not a muscle man or athlete. He could not run 15 minutes without respiratory trouble. Unfortunately, the military police has never used hunting dogs against him."

Lehder told the agents that any time the lookouts on the far perimeter saw a vehicle approaching or a low-flying airplane or helicopter, they would "scream through those walkie-talkies" and Escobar would immediately flee.

In addition to Dolly Moncada and Lehder, the DEA noted with approval the cooperation of another former Escobar associate with a grudge. Colombian paramilitary leader Fidel Castano was a charismatic assassin who occasionally exported drugs and smuggled diamonds. A onetime friend of Escobar's who had helped him hide during the government's first war against the narcos, Castano turned against Escobar after the murders of Castano's friends, the drug-dealing Moncada and Galeano brothers.

In a dispatch to DEA headquarters on Feb. 22, 1993, DEA agent Javier Pena identified Castano as "a cooperating individual who was once a trusted Pablo Escobar associate." He reported that Castano had actually accompanied the Search Bloc on a raid 10 days earlier, when one of the unit's top officers drowned as the raiding parties crossed the Cauca River. Castano had reportedly made heroic efforts to rescue the man.

In Castano, Lehder and the Moncada and Galeano families, the hunt for Escobar had gained allies willing to play by the bloody rules of Medellin's underworld. The Colombian government and the U.S. Embassy used them throughout the fall and winter of 1992 to gather information about Escobar and his organization.

As early as September, the search effort seemed to be acting on Dolly Moncada's suggestion to go after Escobar's lawyers. On Sept. 26, the Search Bloc raided an estate owned by Escobar's attorney, Santiago Uribe, one of those named by Dolly. The raiders were in the process of ransacking the place when Uribe himself drove up. He was arrested and questioned.

Uribe acknowledged that he was one of Escobar's lawyers but denied knowing his fugitive client's whereabouts. Among Uribe's files the Search Bloc found letters from Escobar and tapes linking him to drug dealing, bribes and murder - including the assassination just days before of Judge Myrian Velez, one of the "faceless" judges in Medellin, who had been appointed, supposedly in secret, to investigate the murder of a crusading newspaper editor. Velez had been preparing to indict Escobar as the "intellectual author" of the murder.

The evidence added to the government's criminal case against Escobar, but by now few in the government - and virtually no one within the Search Bloc - were talking about arresting Escobar and putting him on trial. As a DEA memo pointed out in summarizing the raid against Uribe, the Colombian police officer in charge "relayed a message that they were continuing their search for Escobar and preferred that Escobar not surrender."

As determined as its leadership was, the Search Bloc was still a step or two behind its prey. The team simply could not close the last one hundred yards.

This was the assessment delivered by "Col. Santos," the chief Delta operator assigned to the Search Bloc headquarters in Medellin. After the first blundering raids in 1992, when Escobar and his entourage had driven down one side of a mountain while the Search Bloc lumbered up the other, the unit had blown one good lead after another.

Despite these failures, the Americans were impressed with Col. Hugo Martinez after he took command following Escobar's escape. None of the Americans assigned to the Search Bloc headquarters had been in Colombia during the first war against Escobar, so they didn't realize at first how far back went this war between the colonel and the drug lord.

The colonel knew how the game was played. American soldiers working closely with the Search Bloc knew that when Martinez grabbed somebody associated with Escobar, the man had better start talking fast. If the man did talk, he would end up arrested instead of having his photo added to the growing pile of photographs of bloody corpses in the colonel's desk drawer.

Between October and the end of December 1992, 12 major players in Escobar's empire had been killed by the Search Bloc. Often the photos in the colonel's drawer would show the victim with a bullet wound in the forehead, or through the ear. Each one was reported killed "in gun battles" with the Search Bloc.

[Crenshaw_blvd]

By January 1993, the Americans directing the search for Pablo Escobar had managed to produce elaborate organizational charts for his Medellin drug cartel. The charts were displayed in the secret vault at the U.S. Embassy in Bogota and inside the Delta Force outpost in Medellin.

Some of the information had been gleaned from months of electronic eavesdropping on Escobar and his associates by Centra Spike, the secret U.S. Army unit. Some had been coerced from people interrogated by Col. Hugo Martinez and his police Search Bloc, and some came from informants recruited by the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Search Bloc to work in Medellin. Of these, according to an informant known as "Rubin," some were members of Los Pepes, the death squad that was methodically killing Escobar's hit men, relatives, lawyers and business associates.

The embassy's charts laid out Escobar's financial network, his businesses, his extended family, his legal teams. Many of those on the charts were not known to be criminals, or had not been indicted for crimes, but they were part of the mountain that propped up the drug lord. Such information would have been useful to a group like Los Pepes, and more than one American at the embassy believed it was finding its way to them.

The pattern of Los Pepes' hits corresponded neatly to the charts, and it wasn't just whom they were killing, but whom they were not. Some of the top names on the embassy's organizational charts were now under almost constant surveillance - and seemed immune to Los Pepes.

"It sure seemed to us like they knew who we were watching most closely, because they left those people alone," one of the Centra Spike operators said.

After a hiatus following the first dramatic raids on Escobar's properties the previous autumn, Los Pepes went on a killing rampage. The group had actually been killing people quietly for months, but now a decision was made to go public. On Feb. 3, the body of Luis Isaza, a low-level Medellin cartel manager, was discovered in Medellin with a sign around his neck: "For working for the narco-terrorist and baby-killer Pablo Escobar. For Colombia. Los Pepes."

Four other low-level cartel workers were found murdered in the city that day. The next day the bodies of two men known to be Escobar's business associates were discovered. There were more murders the next day, and the next, and the next. It was a controlled bloodbath. All of the victims had one thing in common - Pablo Escobar.

Among them was a former director of the Colombian National Police, Carlos Casadiego, who had been publicly linked to the Medellin cartel. On Feb. 17, one of the dead was Carlos Ossa, the man thought to be financing Escobar's day-to-day operations.

On the same day Ossa's body was found, a government warehouse burned to the ground, destroying Escobar's collection of 17 antique and luxury cars, valued at more than $4 million. The vehicles had been seized by Colombian police in 1989, but it was assumed that Escobar would one day reclaim them.

Fidel Castano, a paramilitary leader cooperating in the search, told the Americans in Medellin that Escobar was now in bad shape because so many of his men had been killed or jailed. A memo by DEA agent Javier Pena that February quoted Castano:

"Escobar was having trouble getting his hands on cash as he was spending a great deal of money in his present war with the government of Colombia."

The day Ossa's body was found, one of Escobar's most notorious assassins, Carlos Alzate, turned himself in. A day later, a man thought to be one of Escobar's chief money launderers, Luis Londono, was found murdered with a Los Pepes sign around his neck. Two weeks later, Jose Posada, the man Ossa had replaced, also surrendered.

As the pace of killings and surrenders mounted, Los Pepes publicly offered cash rewards for information on Escobar and his key associates and began broadcasting threats against the drug lord's family.

American soldiers and agents in Medellin believed there was a direct connection between the Search Bloc and Los Pepes. They observed men they associated with the death squad meeting with officers at the Search Bloc base. The men carried radios and appeared to maintain communications links with Col. Martinez's men.

DEA agent Pena knew their leader only by the name Don Berna, a stooped, fat man with buck teeth and bad skin who always had pretty girlfriends and wore an expensive watch. Don Berna had been at the compound from the earliest days after Escobar's escape. He presented Pena with a gold watch as a gift of friendship.

Col. Martinez, now a general, denies all this. He calls Los Pepes criminals, former associates of Escobar's who turned against him, originally working as informants, and then as killers.

"They began to employ against Pablo Escobar the same kind of terror he employed," Martinez said recently. "Pablo Escobar would set off a bomb in Bogota, and Los Pepes would set three against Escobar's interests, his family, or the criminal group he headed. It was a black spot on the Search Bloc, because Pablo Escobar manipulated the media very well. Whether writing or speaking, he always publicly claimed that the Search Bloc was in fact Los Pepes. However, Los Pepes and our group did not share any links at all."

In any case, it was clear that the vigilante group had spooked Escobar more than anything the government had been able to do. One sign that the fugitive was feeling the heat came Feb. 19, when Pena learned from the prosecutor's office in Medellin that Escobar intended to send his children to Miami. Escobar's wife, Maria Victoria, had purchased tickets for their son, Juan Pablo; their daughter, Manuela; and a woman friend named Doria Ochoa on an Avianca flight scheduled to leave Medellin at 9:30 a.m.

Ambassador Morris Busby moved fast. He believed that Escobar's most vulnerable pressure point was his family. If they were tucked away in relative safety in the United States, it would ease a tremendous daily psychological burden on the fugitive.

Meeting with Colombian Defense Minister Raphael Pardo at his residence early the next day, Busby explained that he did not want the family to leave.

They had visas to enter the United States, but Busby wanted them stopped. Since they had been issued tourist visas, Pardo and the ambassador discussed turning them back because what they were doing, in fact, was fleeing from danger. This could not be called "tourism."

Then Busby's public affairs officer suggested, "Why don't we poke fun at him?" Why not turn them away on the grounds that children under the age of 18 could not travel to the United States without both parents?

DEA agent Pena was at the airport in Medellin when the children arrived, surrounded by bodyguards and accompanied by Ochoa. Manuela carried a small, fluffy white dog. They were allowed to board the plane before police moved in. Three of the family's bodyguards were arrested, and four others fled. The Escobar children and Ochoa were escorted off the plane.

It created a raucous scene in the airport. Doria Ochoa argued vehemently with Pena, who took their passports. Juan Pablo, a tall, chubby 16-year-old, joined in the commotion.

Manuela sat down on the floor in the terminal and quietly petted and cooed to her dog. Pena felt sorry for her. She had a kerchief around her head, covering her ears, and Pena remembered a bomb blast that had reportedly damaged her hearing.

He eventually handed back the passports and the Colombian police informed Ochoa that they would not be allowed to fly.

The U.S. Embassy took out newspaper ads the next day explaining that Juan Pablo and Manuela could obtain visas if both parents, Pablo and Maria Victoria, showed up in person to apply at the embassy.

[BossPlaya]

damn homie u seriously like posting huh  

[Crenshaw_blvd]

damn homie u seriously like posting huh  

.
No,but Pablo is my idol!  

[DreSnoop00]

damn man thats a lot to read i only real the first couple of paragraphs.. lol i'll read the rest later maybe.. yeah right lol.. i dunno

[Crenshaw_blvd]

Escobar, leader of the Medellin drug cartel, was killed as he and his bodyguards tried to elude police by climbing onto a rooftop of the safehouse where they were hiding, Colombian authorities said.

Authorities said Escobar opened fire and was met by volleys of return fire from some of the dozens of police and troops who had stalked the drug kingpin to a house on the west side of the city of 1.6 million people.

Authorities in Medellin told reporters that they had traced Escobar when he telephoned a radio station over the weekend to protest official treatment of his wife and children whose attempt to leave the country was rebuffed.

"This life was taken simply because he resisted being captured," Colombian prosecutor general Gustavo de Greiff said in a television interview from Bogota, monitored in Miami. "Let this be a lesson to all criminals that sooner or later we will catch them."

U.S. Drug Enforcement officials praised Colombian authorities for tracking Escobar down. A leading DEA official said Escobar's death was a milestone, but it would do little to stop the flow of tons of cocaine to the United States.

"This is the end of an era -- if you look at the violence produced by this man," said Tom Cash, special agent in charge of the DEA in Miami. "It will be a long time before anyone takes his place." But Cash said the leaders of the rival Cali Cartel, which has a firm grip on drug shipments to the New York metropolitan area, are likely celebrating a victory with Escobar's death.

"They will have a corner on the market, because no one person will replace Pablo Escobar," he said.

The death of the 44-year-old Colombian drug titan culminated a 16-month search that began when Escobar fled a luxurious prison built especially for him by Colombian authorities on a hillside near his hometown in a Medellin suburb. That began a search by a specially organized 3,000-member security team.

Escobar, reputed to shift frequently from one safehouse to another, was said to elude capture by paying weekly bribes to corrupt officials. The United States and Colombia had offered $8.7 million for his capture.

"It's the triumph of law over crime," said Andres Pastrana, a prominent Colombian legislator. "Escobar ended up being a symbol of violence and narco-terrorism. Now the country can begin to live more peacefully."

Max Mermelstein, a one-time lieutenant in the Escobar's organization, said Thursday in a telephone interview that he thought drug trafficking to the United States could increase in the aftermath of Escobar's death.

"Pablo had a very tight rein on trafficking operations," said Mermelstein, a New York native who became a key informant for the DEA after striking a plea bargain with the U.S. government. Mermelstein smuggled tons of cocaine into southern Florida in the 1980s for Escobar and the Medellin Cartel.

"I think there will be an increase not a decrease," he said. "Now they don't have to worry about paying Pablo off. Everybody is going to establish their own routes."

[Crenshaw_blvd]

Colombians Pablo Escobar and Jorge Ochoa are the leaders of the Medellin Cartel, which is responsible for 80% of the cocaine entering the U.S.
Escobar, known as "Godfather", is a former car thief and gun-for-hire who started his own organization in 1977 and is now believed to be the world's richest criminal. He provides security (a 2000-man police force) for the Cartel.

Ochoa, middle son of the notorious Ochoa clan, once bragged of personally smuggling 4,000 pounds of cocaine a week. The tremendous profits generated from the sale of cocaine, in excess of $3 million a day, enable the Cartel to buy influence and protection. Panama's General Manuel Noriega, to take but one example, received as much as $10 million a month for allowing the cartel to use Panama's airports and launder its profits through Panama's banking system. (Noriega also received $200,000 a year from the CIA.)

The Medellin Cartel and the CIA had a relationship of convenience. The CIA offered airstrips, radar clearance, and no customs inspections. Th Cartel provided pilots, airplanes, and money. According to Ramon Millan-Rodriguez, a convicted Medellin accountant, the cartel gave $10 million to the contras at the request of CIA agent Felix Rodriguez as a "goodwill" gesture (see card #30). Ocean Hunter, the cartel front which dealt with John Hull (see card #12) through Rene Corvo and Felipe Vidal (see card #10), provided $200,000 a month, some of which went to contras on the southern front.