Pablo Escobar: 5 Things You Didn't Know

Pablo Escobar: 5 Things You Didn't Know

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Some people could argue that the infamous drug dealer Pablo Escobar ran one of the most successful business's of all time. In case you weren't that financially literate a return on investment (ROI) of 100% would be more than enough for any company to thrive and succeed. And by some estimates, notorious Colombian cocaine kingpin Pablo Escobar enjoyed an ROI of as much as 20,000%. Put another way, for every $1 he put into his business, he got about $200 in return. That's an astronomical sum for sure. 

Now while that is one seductive ROI. It doesn't account for risk, but for most of Escobar's professional life at the head of the Medellin cartel, the risk wasn't his, nor was it financial: The risk fell to the lives of Pablo's rivals and to the lives of the (mostly) American dealers who pushed his product to the users who snorted it. Only after his wealth, notoriety and brutality made him the target of both big governments and small (but determined) vigilante groups did Escobar finally endure some risk. Not surprisingly, on December 2, 1993, a day after his 44th birthday, it caught up with him in the most permanent way after a rooftop chase in a middle-class district of Medellin.

Seeing as though Netflix just announced the release date of the second season of its Escobar centric drama — Narcos — AskMen is here to get you prepared by showing you five things you didn't know about Pablo Escobar:

1. Rats ate $1 billion of Pablo Escobar's profits each year

The first thing you didn't know about the world's most famous drug lord is a perfect example of his uncommon and staggering degree of wealth. According to Roberto Escobar, one of Pablo's closest brothers, at a time when their estimated profits were circling $20 billion annually, "Pablo was earning so much that each year we would write off 10% of the money because the rats would eat it in storage or it would be damaged by water or lost."

If that weren't enough to drop your jaw, Roberto adds that the cartel spent as much as $2,500 every month on rubber bands to "hold the money together."

2. Pablo Escobar's palatial residence now houses refugees and hippos

Near the small northwestern Colombian town of Puerto Triunfo, Pablo Escobar once built himself a vacation getaway befitting a man of his stature. Hacienda Napoles, as he named it, was just shy of paradise, spread across almost 5,000 acres (7.7 square miles) and featuring everything from pools to a bullring and an exotic zoo filled with hippos, giraffes, elephants, and other critters. Stories of the enormous drug-fueled parties held at Hacienda Napoles with some of Colombia's most powerful and most beautiful in attendance continue to circulate, contributing to Escobar's legend.

Today that paradise is in ruins. Everything that could be gutted has been, by people looking for rumored stashes of cocaine or cash. The only people who live there are families of refugees from the country's war against guerrilla fighters and about 20 hippos which roam the area with the same kind of impunity that Pablo once enjoyed decades ago.

So wait — how did Escobar manage to get his millions back to Colombia from the U.S.? Well that's next...