Pablo Escobar might be the most powerful criminal in history, but he wasn’t powerful enough to live to 45

This list is not complete without Pablo Escobar.

He was born to a middle class family in Colombia and started his criminal career as a teenager, stealing gravestones. At 25, he was caught smuggling contraband and subsequently arrested. This is his arrest photograph.

Does he look like a man you want to mess with?
As a young man, Pablo found the cocaine business to be a gold mine for smuggling and was the pioneer in the cocaine drug industry. As the the demand for cocaine in the United States rose, Pablo hired more men to carry out more shipments, and organized more shipping routes to all parts of the country. At his disposal were more than 500 ships, airplanes, and boats, and a few submarines as well. At the height of his empire, he was worth more than $30 billion, or in today’s money, $55 billion. At one point, Forbes put him on the list of the elite crew of the richest billionaires, seen below.

Pablo was also a manipulative politician. He donated millions of dollars to his hometown and built school, soccer fields, and other utilities. When he decided to run for office, it was no surprise that his entire hometown of Medellin was behind him. Unfortunately for him, was denied the chance to become president because of his criminal status, which was exposed by Rodrigo Lara, the then justice minister of Colombia. Pablo later got him killed.
When dealing with law enforcement, Pablo often resorted to “Plata O Plomo”, a phrase he coined, which literally translates to “silver or lead” Silver represents money and lead represents bullets. So effectively, he is warning his target to either accept his bribe or get shot. He also threatened the judges of Colombian supreme court for sentencing his men to imprisonment, due to which the judges had to wear a mask in order to hide their identity while they were conducting trials. Over 1000 officials died because they refused to accept plata, including presidential candidate Luis Galán. His volatile and explosive nature resulted in the bombing of a commercial aircraft in 1989, which was an attempt to kill Cesar Gaviria who became the president in 1990. It led to an all out domestic war.
“In the United States, the mafia makes the witnesses disappear so they cannot testify in court. In Colombia, Pablo Escobar made the whole court disappear.”
In 1985, when there was a case against him for money laundering and drug trafficking in the Colombian Palace of Justice (the supreme court), he ordered a terrorist attack on the Palace of Justice, killing over half the supreme court judges and setting fire to all the evidence files against him (Actually the M19 marxist guerilla group did it, but Pablo paid them to carry out the attack and set fire to the evidence files).
Moreover, he negotiated with the government by bribing them to clear off the national debt of Colombia, but the offer was rejected. Then from 1989–1991 he carried out bombings and police shootings all throughout the country, demanding a private prison built for him and his men which would be guarded by his own sicarios, while no police official should be within 2–3 miles of the prison (he himself could afford it all). It was the most luxurious private prison ever built.
First the government refused but then he carried out mass abductions of the children and close relatives of the members of parliament. He even got Diana Turbey, the daughter of the ex president abducted. He started to kill them one by one until his demands were met. He stayed there for one year and one month, when the government decided to transfer him to a regular prison because his criminal activities continued inside the prison. He escaped from the prison, and lived secretly until 2 December 1993, when he was killed/committed suicide (it is not sure) on the rooftop of a small building in Medellin.
At the peak of his cartel, Escobar raked in more than $70 million and smuggled more than 15 tons of cocaine daily and controlled more than 80% of the world’s cocaine market. The cartel made so much money that they spent over $1000 weekly purchasing rubber bands to tie their money into thousands of stacks that they hid all over the country. Some of those stacks are still being found today.
Pablo Escobar might be the most powerful criminal in history, but he wasn’t powerful enough to live to 45.
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