Pablo escobar
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The photographs were from Escobar’s police files, images recording the scene at his private prison in Medellin after his escape. Then he said, “I have a bag of Pablo Escobar photographs-would you like to see them?” When I told the boss, Manuel Dario Aristizabal, that I was taking pictures because this was once Pablo Escobar’s house, he proudly informed me that his office used to be Escobar’s bedroom and that the beat-up leather sofa I was sitting on was originally Escobar’s sofa. It turned out that the building was now the local headquarters of the Fiscalia, Colombia’s public prosecution service, and I was in breach of security rules. I set up my tripod in the street outside, and was soon apprehended by security officers who confiscated my camera and escorted me off to see “the boss.” The place looked more like a concrete office block or a six-story bunker than a home-ugly and characterless. By comparison to their legend, these buildings were invariably dull, even shabby, and none more so than the last on my list, Edificio Monaco, which had been Escobar’s residence until his Cali Cartel enemies bombed it. I made a tour of properties reportedly built by drug smugglers in Medellin-lavish fincas, extravagant nightclubs, blocks of flats with swimming pools on their balconies. My next project in Colombia was to photograph “narcotecture”-the influence of drug money on the country’s architecture. In 1989, when Escobar said, “Death to the police in the city,” Popeye enlisted subcontractors for a volume of assassinations that he could not personally handle: “It was Col$1million for a dead policeman, $2 million for a dead corporal, $3 million for a sergeant, $4 million for a lieutenant, $5 million for a captain, $10 million for a major, $50 million for a colonel and $100 million for a general,” he said, and added, “Pablo Escobar always thought big.” Popeye was a personable hitman, who told vivid stories of his years in the employ of Escobar, who had killed half of the country’s top judges, stormed the Supreme Court to destroy evidence, bombed the national intelligence headquarters and one of the leading newspapers, and blown a commercial airliner out of the sky. I found him reading Homer’s Iliad in the prison’s high-security wing. Popeye was held responsible for at least a hundred and fifty murders. During my visit I met the prison’s most notorious inmate, a man known by his alias, Popeye, who had spent much of his working life as the “head of security” for Pablo Escobar, the godfather of the Medellin cocaine smuggling cartel. A few years ago, during a visit to Colombia, I wanted to photograph a prison, and I wound up at Valledupar, a state-of-the-art facility, designed and paid for by the United States.