KEEPING BOOKS FOR A DRUG LORD

Escobar Brother Tells Of Life As An Accountant In An Illegal
Enterprise Fuelled By Cocaine

THE ACCOUNTANT'S STORY: INSIDE THE VIOLENT WORLD OF THE MEDELLIN CARTEL

By Roberto Escobar, with David Fisher

Grand Central Publishing

289 pages, $299.99

He was a national cycling champion who was good with figures. So,
when his brother called, he reluctantly agreed to provide accounting
services for the burgeoning business. With demand expanding so
rapidly -- it was a billion-dollar operation at its height -- he
eventually had to hire another 10 bean counters to handle the paperwork.

But their life expectancy wasn't too good, not the usual hazard for
the accounting profession. Seven out of the 10 came to sticky ends.

Another problem was the huge amounts of cash the operation generated.
They went though $2,500-worth of rubber bands a month just to bundle
up the banknotes.

Then, there was the problem of what to do with the money -- apart
from bank accounts and investments such as real estate or selling bad
emeralds as good (you inject them with oil). Some of it was secreted
in caletas, little safes hidden in the walls of apartments and houses
and under swimming pools, or buried in garbage cans.

In these circumstances "shrinkage" was inevitable. About 10% was
nibbled away by rodents or became mouldy, despite such remedies as
sprinkling it with ground coffee. Some of the cash is probably still in situ.

That's all in a day's work when your brother is Pablo Escobar, head
of the feared Medellin cartel and still revered by ordinary
Colombians for his Robin Hood-like generosity in a country beset by
violence and corruption.

For the first 20 or so pages, the book reads much like any other
business biography. A young man is born to poor but ambitious parents
who emphasize the virtues of hard work. Despite a hard-scrabble
upbringing, he manages to go to college, where he studies political
science and has hopes of becoming a lawyer.

But before he can take his degree, destiny intervenes: He discovers
money is to be made by importing contraband -- everyday things like
fridges and stoves --evading taxes and fees.

It turns out that Pablo is a natural at managing. He knows how to
motivate people, often by simply treating them fairly, something that
works in all kinds of business. He tells the drivers of the trucks
carrying the contraband he will pay them half what he makes, but they
have to stop stealing the goods. When they co-operate, he asks the
big boss for 50% of what he makes; they eventually agree on 40%.

So far, he's nothing worse than the founders of many other modern
fortunes. The authors point out Joseph P. Kennedy made much of his
money by bootlegging.

As Roberto tells it, his brother's downfall was his decision to start
dealing in cocaine. Initially, the drug was intended for consumption
in Colombia only and the base had to be imported from Peru.

When Pablo started working in the international drugs business, his
brother writes, marijuana was the big earner. Although cocaine became
a controlled substance in the United States in 1970, some people
believed it would soon become legal again.

In addition, cocaine was easy to make and to transport, and for
Pablo, the really addictive thing was the extraordinary profits
- --billions of dollars.

"This is a business," he would say.

"Whoever wants to use it, fine. You use it when you want to feel
good, you get high, you have a good time. But alcohol and cigarettes
kill more people than cocaine on the average."

Everything went more or less merrily until 1979, when the U. S. and
Colombia agreed traffickers could be extradited. Pablo never forgot
the fate of one trafficker who was sentenced to life, plus 135 years,
in a U. S. maximum-security prison. Better a grave in Colombia than a
cell in the U. S., he reasoned.

The rest is history. The book unfolds in a depressing flurry of
murders and mayhem, drug addiction and misery. Pablo died in a hail
of bullets; Roberto went blind and spent years in jail.