Biography

By the mid-'80s Escobar owned 19 different residences in Medellín alone, each with a helipad. There was so much money rolling into his enterprise that figuring out how to invest it was more than he could handle; millions were simply buried.

Tracked down by a joint US/Colombian task force, Escobar was spotted talking on a telephone standing by a window on the second floor of a house by an officer passing by in a truck who was tracing the very phone call Escobar was making. Police burst through the front door of the house, killing his bodyguards, and Escobar attempted to escape by climbing up on the roof of his house. A police captain saw him, ordered him to halt, then shot and killed him when he didn't (the officer's identity has never been made public). After he was killed the officers in the unit trimmed his mustache--the normally clean-shaven Escobar had grown a thick, bushy mustache and a beard to disguise his identity--to make him look like Adolf Hitler, then gleefully posed for pictures with his dead, bloody body.

Forbes magazine listed him as the seventh richest man in the world in 1989.

Like most cocaine traffickers, Escobar himself rarely used the drug and was only a moderate drinker. His lifelong recreational drug of choice was marijuana.

Married his wife when she was 15; he obtained a special dispensation from the local bishop (such dispensations were routinely offered by the Church for a fee)).

I'm a decent man who exports flowers.

Life is full of surprises, some good, some not so good.

There are 200 million idiots, manipulated by a million intelligent men.

Sometimes I feel like God . . . when I order someone killed--they die the same day.

Only those who went hungry with me and stood by me when I went through a bad time at some point in life will eat at my table.