Readers of Black Hawk Down know Mark Bowden can tell an exciting story about as well as any writer at work today. Killing Pablo is further proof. It describes the rise and fall of Pablo Escobar, a notorious Colombian drug lord who became one of the narcotic trade's first billionaires. Pablo--Bowden refers to him by his first name throughout the book--started out as a petty thief and wound up running a massive smuggling empire. At his height in the 1980s, he owned fleets of boats and planes, plus 19 separate residences in Medellin, each with its own helipad. Violence marked everything he did: "He wasn't an entrepreneur, and he wasn't even an especially talented businessman. He was just ruthless." He bought off police, politicians, and judges throughout his country, and killed many others who wouldn't cooperate. The Colombian government tried to capture him, but without much luck; he evaded them time after time. "Now and then the police achieved enough surprise to catch him, literally, with his pants down. In [1988], about one thousand national police raided one of his mansions," writes Bowden. "Pablo fled in his underwear, avoiding the police cordon on foot." He got away, again, but his days were numbered. He was making powerful enemies in both Colombia and the United States. The final straw probably came when Pablo's men murdered a popular politician and, three months later, planted a bomb on a plane, killing 110 people, including two Americans.

Compelling Account of Massive Yet Short-Sighted Manhunt

Mark Bowden has a knack for finding riveting real-world tales and bringing them to life. "Black Hawk Down," his depiction of the ill-fated Ranger/Delta Force assault on Mogadishu, Somalia in the early days of the Clinton Adminstration, gets better with every read. "Killing Pablo," Bowden's treatment of the Columbian-American manhunt for Pablo Escobar, rises almost to the heights of "BHD," and that is a compliment.

"Killing Pablo" describes the rise and fall of Pablo Escobar. We meet Escobar in the early days and watch with fascination as he rises from street tough to cocaine warlord, generating income of almost $2 billion per year. Not content to make tons of money, Escobar wants to become a cherished Don of the nation, and even gets elected into the national government. His rise to power (and his iron-fisted hold on it) is due to his twin gifts for terrorism and public relations. Despite the fact that Escobar was personally responsible for the murder, kidnapping, torture, and rape of hundreds if not thousands of Columbians, many Columbians saw him as a beloved Robin Hood figure. Some of the most excruciatingly frustrating passages in the book come when listening to Escobar play the put-upon do-gooder to the mass media, which he was able to play like a maestro.

Bowden follows both Columbians and Americans in this book, which is a strength. According to Bowden, there's no denying that America was heavily involved in this manhunt, but due to political realities both in the U.S. and in Columbia, that involvement was on the hush-hush. It's hard to tell who is more frustrated during the search for Escobar -- the U.S. military "advisers" who have to deal with Columbian policemen and military forces who won't suffer the indignity of crawling in the dirt for concealment as they launch a surprise raid on one of Escobar's luxurious villas, or the Columbian deputy justice minister who has his own bodyguards draw weapons on him as he tries to negotiate Escobar's surrender.

Prepare to be stunned as you read "Killing Pablo." I have never read a description of one private individual so thoroughly controlling an entire nation. Capitalizing on the corruption inherent in the Columbian government, Escobar was in complete control of every branch of government, and it was harder to find an honest man in the government than it was to find a corrupted one. (Actually, that's not right -- it was very easy to find the honest men, because Escobar had so many of them killed.)

Bowden excels in fly-on-the-wall, "you are there" reporting of events. This places Bowden at the mercy of his sources, many of whom have considerable axes to grind, both to protect their own reputations for honesty as well as to make sure they get credit for their role in the Escobar manhunt. This is particularly chilling during 1993, when the vigilante grous Los Pepes starts taking out Escobar's friends and family in ruthless fashion . . . possibly through the illicit use of American intelligence.

Of course, as we all know, the official story is that Escobar gets killed by the Columbian police. Bowden offers a tantalizing hint or two that suggests that our Delta Force may have been in on the kill, but nothing is proven.

In what proves to be an uninspiring coda to this story, Bowden tells us the truth -- that while the hunt for Escobar was ultimately successful in getting its man, at the cost of hundreds of lives and hundreds of millions of dollars, the killing of Pablo Escobar may have merely set the stage for the Cali cartel to take over all drug trafficking in Columbia. Like the legendary hydra, the drug business is simply too massive for the death of someone like Escobar to matter all that much.

Others have accused Bowden of shoddy research in some areas. I cannot quibble with his research, except in one minor area. Early on, Bowden uses the death of college basketball's Len Bias, star at the University of Maryland, of a cocaine overdose to demonstrate that American attitudes towards cocaine started getting officially more negative in the 1980's. Bowden refers to Bias as the top pick in the NBA Draft. This is not accurate -- Bias was the #2 pick in the NBA Draft, by the Boston Celtics, but the #1 pick was North Carolina's Brad Daugherty. While this is a minor mistake in a large book, it is a basic fact that Bowden and his editors should have caught . . . and this does call Bowden's research on harder-to-prove points into question.

Still, a fun, if often frustrating, read.

Good read about an evil man

I enjoyed this book as much as I enjoyed reading Blackhawk Down. This story is fast moving, and at points frustrating because you see the problems created when US law enforcement, intel, and military organizations compete instead of working together toward a unified goal. Bowden also does a great job of showing the reader why the poor of Columbia loved Pablo, and why the rest of the world saw him for the evil man he was.

All of this is played out in a readable and entertaining fashion. You will enjoy this book from start to finish.

Coca Killer

KILLING PABLO is the story of the rise, hunt, fall and death of Pablo Escobar, the chief of the Medellin Cocaine Cartel. Mark Bowden (BLACK HAWK DOWN) is gifted in bringing essentially unknown tales into the public eye, and here he does it again, dramatically. His ability to take the hidden and twisted threads of covert operations and weave a complete story from them is impressive.

Pablo, as Bowden refers to him throughout, was a small-time hood who rose to true if notorious greatness on a ladder stained with blood. At the peak of his influence he had a net worth of billions of dollars.

Pablo cultivated a jolly demeanor and, in truth, lacked couth, though he could be personally disarming. In dress, he preferred white velcro-strap Nike sneakers and blue jeans. He was short and plump. He was hardly the image of the "Don Pablo" he wanted to be. He was easy to underestimate, as the world discovered.

At his zenith, he had all but convinced the ruling oligarchy of Colombia that coca cultivation and processing was a growth industry, even if frowned upon by staid norteamericanos with no taste for trend.

In 1983 Pablo was elected a Congressional alternate from his state of Antioquia, ruled Medellin with an iron fist, and was a serious contender for the Presidency of his nation. Ten years later he was dead.

Pablo Escobar was a study in contradictions. He was 'the most Wanted man in the world' who spent most of his criminal life in the open. A sociopathic megalomaniac, he saw nothing bizarre in blowing up planes and buildings and killing hundreds in the course of targeting one man. He was a devoted husband and father with a penchant for seducing teenage girls.

Unlike some other crimelords who habitually restrained themselves from killing 'noncombatants,' Pablo gloried in taking the lives of his enemies' friends and relatives no matter how uninvolved they were in the drug trade. As a result, no one in Colombia was beyond his reach, and even the U.S. Ambassador had to live in a special security vault while Pablo was at large.

A man who victimized others constantly, he saw himself as a victim of the State. A man on the outside he always wished to be on the inside and bought, bribed and murdered his way into positions of authority. A compleat robber baron, he spoke the rhetoric of Che Guevara, and spent hundreds of millions to rebuild Medellin into a major metropolis and made its citizens into some of the most fortunate of Colombianos. To this day, Pablo is lauded in certain quarters of Colombia as a Robin Hood-type character, but Bowden makes clear that Pablo's hero image was carefully constructed and disseminated through his vast public relations apparatus to insure his own protection.

Pablo was a man incapable of restraint who ultimately overreached himself. Although he had most of Colombia's government in his pocket, he failed to appreciate the need for subtlety in his game of control. For Pablo, the government, the police, and ultimately the United States were just rival cartels to be bossed and intimidated. Never realizing how badly he had outmatched himself, he became the instrument of his own destruction.

His fall came when he simply walked out of the prison he himself had built and staffed after reaching a ridiculously one-sided plea bargain with the Colombian government to stop intra-Cartel violence. Once Pablo escaped, the government of Colombia was virtually forced into a "hunter-killer" mode of operations against him, based on his own untrustworthiness.

Aided by the United States, Colombia hunted Pablo, at first with a notable lack of zeal. Too many ranking Colombians were beholden to him. But as Pablo retaliated by attacking innocent civilians throughout the country, his public support waned and his Cartel associates faded away. Pablo soon found himself hunted by Colombian and American Special Ops troops, and a terrifying vigilante group "Los Pepes," made up of people who had been victimized by him, Cali Cartel competitors, and other shadowy individuals. As Bowden cynically says, we need to "surmise" who they were.

Pablo's fall changed nothing. Cali became the new cocaine epicenter and the government's ties to the drug kingpins were, if anything, even stronger. But Pablo was a clear target. Moreover, he was a man who simply couldn't stop himself from killing. It was decided at the highest levels that, like a mad dog, Pablo needed to be destroyed.

Pablo died ignominiously, shot by a government-backed Death Squad, with his overhanging belly on prominent display in the cover photograph of the book. His hunters shaved his moustache into a Hitlerian brush for fun. Their smiles are both bitter and mocking. That one photograph, hanging in many government offices, Colombian and American, is Pablo's legacy.

Bowden obviously has no love for Pablo Escobar, but he is also clearly equivocal about the methods and results of killing Pablo. The vast energy put into finding and eliminating this one man certainly never blunted the drug culture, but it did rid the world of one of the most powerful and amoral figures in modern history.

There's a lesson here for the post-9/11 world.