A rare photo of one of history's wealthiest drug lords posing in front of the White House

Table Of Content

• How Pablo Escobar’s House Became A Family-Friendly Attraction
• Pablo Escobar Facts That Reveal The Outrageous Story Of The Fearsome ‘El Padrino’
• NEW — Colombia Discovery: Coffee, Art & Music
• Did Pablo Escobar Go To Prison?
• Iconic Singer And Rocker Eric Carmen Dead At 74
• Tornadoes collapse buildings and level homes in Nebraska and Iowa

Resting atop the blue and white arch that welcomed guests to the estate, the plane served as a reminder — to all who passed under it — that Colombia was under the control of the cocaine king. While Hacienda Nápoles wasn’t Pablo Escobar’s only house, it was clearly his favorite. And since he was bringing in millions of dollars each day, he had plenty of cash to ensure that the property was outfitted with every single amenity he could ever dream of.

How Pablo Escobar’s House Became A Family-Friendly Attraction

The Oficina de Envigado—the closest successor to the Medellín cartel—was run, until recently, by Juan Carlos Mesa, alias Tom, a shadowy figure who almost never appeared in public. Colombian special forces pursued him for years, without success. Then, in early December, police raided Tom’s fiftieth-birthday celebration. (They were tipped off to the party by informants, who noticed unusually generous purchases of twenty-one-year-old Chivas.) There were some fifteen guests at the party, and, to the authorities’ surprise, Popeye was among them.

Pablo Escobar Facts That Reveal The Outrageous Story Of The Fearsome ‘El Padrino’

Escobar was shot and killed by authorities eight months later in Medellín. Escobar’s weakness, Bowden says, was that he believed his own propaganda about being a populist hero who provided Medellin’s poor with housing and soccer fields. He could easily have left the country after his surrender in 1991 but instead stayed and fought, like Macbeth, adding another chapter to Colombia’s century-long history of La Violencia. If his story has heroes, however flawed, they are Colombians such as Col. Hugo Martinez, head of the special police unit that pursued Escobar, who could be neither bought nor scared and who kept going when the situation seemed hopeless. The Americans were technically adept but prone to interagency squabbling, tolerant of human-rights abuses and contemptuous of the host country. Investigators didn’t believe this story and Marroquín’s mother spent two years in prison on money-laundering charges.

NEW — Colombia Discovery: Coffee, Art & Music

Who is Otoniel, Colombia`s `most violent` drug lord since Pablo Escobar sentenced to 45 years in US? - WION

Who is Otoniel, Colombia`s `most violent` drug lord since Pablo Escobar sentenced to 45 years in US?.

Posted: Wed, 09 Aug 2023 07:00:00 GMT [source]

Then I found out the guides were telling their tourists that it was where Pablo burned people! For example, he talks about the asado de los Moncada”—the Moncada barbecue. When Escobar’s men burned the bodies of Moncada and Galeano, they arranged to have a barbecue the same evening, to disguise the smoke and the smell. At the same time, he traveled with his family on a first-class vacation to Disneyland.

I was reminded of a YouTube video of Popeye paying homage to Escobar after he got out of prison. He knelt in front of the tomb, his eyes closed, like a choirboy about to receive the Sacrament. In December, 2016, he appeared in a video wielding a semi-automatic pistol and telling his followers, “Hello, warriors. It’s a doll, a beauty.” Popeye complained that Medellín’s mayor had made a fuss, despite the fact that it was a stunt gun. Popeye stood and retrieved the gun, and, holding it by the barrel, he handed it to me.

Did Pablo Escobar Go To Prison?

In the 80s, more than 600 police officers were murdered after Esobar offered a bounty of over 2 million pesos for each one. On December 2, 1993, police traced a phone call between Escobar and his son, Juan Pablo, to a safe house in the Los Pinos neighborhood of Medellín. Escobar was killed at the house, felled by three bullets as he stood on its red tiled roof. He was bearded and barefoot, in jeans; a photograph circulated of him lying face down, his belly spilling out of a blue polo shirt. The Colombian artist Fernando Botero, noted for his fleshy, whimsical portrayals of people and animals, reimagined the scene in a heroic oil painting. “The Death of Pablo Escobar” shows him standing on the rooftop with gun in hand, while bullets whiz around him, like insects pestering a giant.

A rare photo of one of history’s wealthiest drug lords posing in front of the White House. Seal surrendered to federal authorities at the end of April 1983 and attempted to make a deal, first with the Florida task force, then with the Baton Rouge task force. Both rejected any deals, even though Seal told them a little about his involvement with the Ochoa family. [18] Without a deal, Seal was tried in February 1984 and after a month-long trial was convicted on all the counts in the first indictment. Adler Berriman "Barry" Seal (July 16, 1939 – February 19, 1986) was an American commercial airline pilot who became a major drug smuggler for the Medellín Cartel.

Tornadoes collapse buildings and level homes in Nebraska and Iowa

Army intelligence, the CIA, and the Drug Enforcement Administration. Juan Pablo claims that his father’s official autopsy was falsified to make the Colombian authorities look like heroes. He insists that, once his father was cornered, he died by suicide before he could be killed.

So many in the crowd were walking novels—or walking prestige-television series, if you prefer. I met a former TV news reporter who found out she was pregnant and started writing letters to Escobar while she was staking out La Catedral, the luxe prison he had built for himself. He had killed her uncle and her grandfather, and she asked him how he spoke to his children about the horror he inflicted on the children of his victims.

There, determined to make it rich, he gravitated toward crime at a young age. Escobar allegedly falsified diplomas, took tombstones from graveyards to resell, and stole cars. At the time of the photo, Escobar was striving to cultivate the appearance of a legitimate politician. The following year he was briefly elected as an alternate member of the Columbian Congress. But his political ambitions were short-lived, with the source of his enormous wealth proving impossible to hide.

He didn’t have time, he said, to andar con maricadas—to mess around with fairy shit. It’s claimed that Escobar’s Medellin cartel supplied 80% of the cocaine in the entire world during the peak of his rule. Escobar unquestionably earned his place on every ranking of the “wealthiest drug lords of all time”. The second was the “Perseguidos por Pablos Escobar,” which translates to “People Persecuted by Pablo Escobar.” Nicknamed Los Pepes, this group was composed of Escobar’s enemies, including other drug traffickers. One member, Rodolfo Berna, was allegedly credited with firing the shot that killed the drug kingpin, though this account has never been confirmed.

The Story Of Pablo Escobar's Photo In Front Of The White House - All That's Interesting

The Story Of Pablo Escobar's Photo In Front Of The White House.

Posted: Sat, 18 Nov 2023 08:00:00 GMT [source]

Here, he showed off his massive collection of classic cars and bikes, and even built a racetrack for his go-karts. Unlike other famous theme parks, Hacienda Nápoles has quite a seedy history. After all, it was once the location of a Playboy Mansion-like cocaine palace — owned by the notorious Pablo Escobar. Today, Hacienda Nápoles is a family-friendly theme park with water attractions, a wildlife sanctuary, and museums.

The mayor of Medellín is sick and tired of the world’s fascination with Pablo Escobar. Today, Napoles is a theme park, and descendants of Escobar’s hippos roam the towns and rivers nearby. Fueling all this curiosity is a relentless stream of narco television series, on Netflix, Nat Geo, Discovery, and other networks, that narrate Medellín’s history from the perspective of the perpetrators, not the victims. The 2010 HBO documentary Sins of My Father and The 2015 Netflix series Narcos both rekindled public interest in Pablo Escobar, former head of the Colombian drug cartel. The latter also gave us a now-infamous photograph of “the king of cocaine” and his son, Sebastián Marroquín (born Juan Pablo Escobar), brazenly posing in front of the White House in 1981.

So Escobar, his wife, and two children were able to enter the United States without much difficulty in 1981. Escobar may have used a diplomatic passport — or possibly even a fake passport — in order to get into the country with his family. That said, the United States didn’t view him as a great threat at the time. The War on Drugs was unofficially launched in the 1970s under President Richard Nixon, but not expanded until President Ronald Reagan took office in 1981.

During his life, Escobar lived by the mantra of “plata o plomo,” which roughly translates to “silver or lead (bullets),” and describes how he used both violence and bribery to get his way. He and his cartel killed police, politicians, journalists, and ordinary citizens who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. In 1989, the cartel was even accused of planting a bomb on a domestic passenger flight, killing over 100 people on the airplane. That explosion had been planted by revolutionary guerrillas, but Escobar claimed credit for the bombing. For decades, the violence was inescapable, as narcos, guerrillas, right-wing paramilitaries, and assorted opportunists clawed at the illicit billions pouring out of the drug trade.

He built hospitals and housing for the poor and was elected to the Colombian parliament in 1982. As such, he has a somewhat complicated legacy in the country today as both a violent drug lord and a philanthropist. In the 1982 Colombian parliamentary election, Escobar was elected as an alternate member of the Chamber of Representatives as part of the Liberal Party. Through this, he was responsible for community projects such as the construction of houses and football fields, which gained him popularity among the locals of the towns that he frequented. However, Escobar's political ambitions were thwarted by the Colombian and U.S. governments, who routinely pushed for his arrest, with Escobar widely believed to have orchestrated the Avianca Flight 203 and DAS Building bombings in retaliation.