THE LIFE AND DEATH OF A RUTHLESS DRUG TRAFFICKER

Around the time he dropped out of high school in Colombia at age 16, Pablo
Escobar told his mother he wasn't cut out for an ordinary life. " `I want
to be big,' " journalist Mark Bowden quotes him saying in "Killing Pablo:
The Hunt for the World's Greatest Outlaw."

As Bowden's nonfiction thriller makes clear, Escobar succeeded beyond his
wildest dreams. He became a billionaire gangster who ruthlessly ruled
Colombia's Medellin cocaine cartel and terrorized his country until the
national police assassinated him in 1993 with crucial help from the U.S.

At the height of his power, in 1989, Escobar was ranked the seventh-
richest man in the world by Forbes magazine. He owned fleets of boats and
planes, plus 19 lavish homes in Medellin, each with a heliport. He had even
become a folk hero of sorts, spending millions to help the poor. Asked by
Colombian journalists about the origin of his riches, he said,
preposterously, that it all began with a bicycle-rental business.

The truth was in some ways even more incredible. Escobar had risen from a
two-bit thug to become the most powerful drug baron in the world. He
essentially held a nation of 30 million hostage, killing anyone who
interfered with his drug-running business. He assassinated hundreds of
judges, police officers, journalists and politicians, including a popular
anti-drug presidential candidate. Although the fat, double-chinned hoodlum
lacked the panache of the drug kingpins glorified on "Miami Vice," his
outsized misdeeds made them look like choirboys.

It was only after the U.S. decided that Escobar threatened American
national security that the tide turned against him. Horrified by Escobar's
audacious mid-air bombing of an Avianca airliner in 1989-- two Americans
were among the 110 passengers killed--President George Bush concluded the
U.S. could legally target him for assassination. Bowden's book kicks into
high gear when he painstakingly describes how top-secret military teams and
police officers from the U.S. and Colombia joined forces to carry this out.

Nothing in Escobar's middle-class upbringing presages the international
menace he would become. His father was a self-sufficient cattle farmer, his
mother a respected schoolteacher. The young Escobar loved fast food, movies
and popular music: American, Mexican and Brazilian. But his hero was Al
Capone, not Elvis Presley. Enticed by the gangster life, which had a long,
romantic tradition in Medellin, he became a hoodlum. He began by running
petty street scams with friends, then turned to car thefts and, finally,
the cocaine trade.

Unlike other traffickers, he rarely used cocaine. But he got stoned on
marijuana every day, lighting up after awakening at 1 or 2 p.m. It
apparently did little to curb his ambition or casual impulse for violence.
As a young crime boss on the make, he would recruit thugs to kidnap people
who owed him cash. "If the family couldn't come up with the money or
refused to pay, the victim would be killed," Bowden writes. "Sometimes the
victim was killed after the ransom was paid, just to make a point."

In the mid-1970s, Escobar was the right man at the right place at the right
time. A "seismic shift in criminal opportunity presented itself," Bowden
writes. "The illicit pathways marijuana had carved from Colombia to North
American cities and suburbs became expressways as coke became the
fashionable drug of choice for adventurous young professionals."

By the end of the decade, Escobar and his fellow drug bosses would control
more than half the cocaine shipped to the U.S. The cocaine trade would
generate billions of dollars and become the largest industry in Colombia,
bankrolling the candidacies of mayors, members of congress and presidents.

Meanwhile, the bullet-riddled bodies of Escobar's rivals began to pile up.
But Escobar had little to fear from the law, having cowed or bought off
everyone important:

"He was already de facto above the law. In Medellin he had created a dual
system of justice. The violence committed in the course of his
business--the murder rate doubled in the city during this period--was
studiously ignored by the police. It was considered part of the drug
business, something separate from civil society."

From 1989 to 1991, Escobar and his drug-trafficking cohorts led a reign of
terror as they fought extradition to stand trial in the U.S. When the
Colombian government finally jailed him in 1991, Escobar set the terms of
his imprisonment. He was held for a year in a luxurious mountaintop prison
that featured a bar, lounge, disco, gymanisum, soccer field and
prostitutes. The guards essentially worked for him. When he got tired of
the arrangement, he simply walked away.

Embarrassed and under intense pressure from the Bush administration to curb
the flow of drugs to America, the Colombian national police ultimately
assembled a death squad to find and assassinate Escobar. (Col. Hugo
Martinez, who headed the search, desperately tried to get off it because it
was so dangerous.) The U.S joined the hunt, enlisting the CIA, Drug
Enforcement Administration and special- operations forces from the Army and
Navy.

Meanwhile, a vigilante group known as Los Pepes--People Persecuted by Pablo
Escobar--tried to flush out the fugitive with bombs and bullets aimed at
his family and associates. Bowden says the vigilantes were rival Cali
cartel members who had the backing of the U.S. government, which raises
troubling questions.

The second half of Bowden's book re-creates the 16-month hunt for Escobar.
Bowden, who wrote the best-selling "Black Hawk Down," sometimes veers too
far into Tom Clancy country by dwelling on the high-tech surveillance
equipment used by the hunters. I would have preferred more in the first
half about the peculiar history of Colombia that made it possible for a
hoodlum stoned on marijuana to bully one of the oldest democracies in the
Western hemisphere.

Still, by the time a barefoot Escobar is shot to death while jumping from
the roof of his Medellin hideout, it's hard not to root for the men who
ended Escobar's big, bad life.