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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
Was Escobar an extremely intelligent man, or just gifted with an abundance of good luck and low cunning?
I don't think he was all that intelligent. He was smart and ruthless, and he was in the right place at the right time. One of the guys I interviewed, who was a member of [the vigilante death squad] Los Pepes, and who had known Escobar from the very beginning, made a point of stressing to me that Pablo Escobar didn't create the cocaine business. He had no entrepreneurial or management skills to speak of. It was just that everybody was afraid of him. If anybody discovered a trade route or a new way of doing things, Pablo would come knocking and say, "OK, you work for me now." You couldn't say no to him.
What about the people who surrounded Escobar -- were they just thugs or was there someone who was the equivalent, say, of Meyer Lansky in the American mob: the brains of the operation, but not at the top?
I've heard, though I can't know this for sure, that both Escobar's brother, Roberto, and his cousin, who was later killed, were very shrewd and bright; and also his brother-in-law, who was college educated and kind of intellectual. He was the one who supplied the political rationale that Pablo liked to employ -- that he was sucking the gringo dollars out of the corrupt North Americans and bringing the money to Colombia, which needed it more.
How were you able to meet people who knew Escobar? Was it hard to make those contacts, to gain their trust?
Yes, it was really hard to make those contacts. People are still not comfortable talking about him. Geraldo Reyes was a big help to me, he's a Miami Herald/El Herald reporter from Colombia. And when I was down there with him, he knew certain people who knew other people who knew Escobar. They would meet us in hotel lobbies or at airport restaurants, places like that. There was always a furtive nature to those interviews.
People are sometimes a little put off or confused by a reporter like myself. In the case of Escobar's acquaintances, they expected to be interviewed about certain things, which I did talk to them about, but I also wanted to know what Escobar was like ("What was it like the first time you ever met him? What did he say to you? Did he ever make you laugh?") and when you ask questions like that, people wonder, "Why is he asking me this?" They're doubly suspicious when you're talking about someone as charged as Pablo Escobar.
In 1989, Forbes magazine listed Escobar as the seventh richest man in the world. He was fabulously wealthy. Even Idi Amin managed to retire. Why wasn't Escobar able to buy some kind of refuge? Why didn't he get out of Colombia?
Because he was essentially an extremely provincial person. He wouldn't have been happy anywhere else. He said he'd rather have a tomb in Colombia than a jail cell in America. He wasn't just defying extradition, he was in effect saying, "This is where I come from, this is who I am." It was also arrogance. He just didn't believe that he could be defeated, and he felt strongest in his own country.
And it was true for a long time -- he couldn't be defeated.
Oh yes. He was an outlaw in Colombia from 1984 to the day he died [Dec. 2, 1993]. It was only when the United States [became involved] in 1989 that he started having to really run. For a number of years he was very comfortably ensconced. He was technically an outlaw, but Colombia couldn't arrest him because he was just too powerful; he had his own army of gunmen.
What's become of the Escobar fortune?
My guess is that it's still there. The family probably still has money in Swiss bank accounts, and they may have money buried in places. But I suspect they have trouble getting at it. [Escobar's wife and son] have been arrested in Argentina, trying to launder money. My hunch is that the Escobar family has a lot of money, but there are international police agencies and other organizations that watch them very closely, that want to know where the money is so they can seize it. Although, I'm not certain of that because Colombia is an extremely legalistic country. It may be that, due to the amount of money Escobar had and the quality of the legal talent representing him, the family has been able to hold onto a sizable portion of his fortune. But I think also that a lot of the money was tied up in the business, it wasn't liquid.
