Escobar was the son of a peasant and a schoolteacher, and grew up in a suburb of Medellín. He became involved in criminal activities from an early age, stealing cars and even, it was said, gravestones, which he sandblasted before selling them as new. He graduated to minor fraud, selling contraband cigarettes and forged lottery tickets, and then in the late 1960s, as demand for cannabis and cocaine multiplied, he saw an opening in the drug trade.
During the first half of the 1970s Escobar became increasingly prominent in the Medellín Cartel, in which a number of crime syndicates cooperated to control much of Colombia’s drug-trafficking industry. In 1975, a leading Medellín crime lord, Fabio Restrepo, was assassinated, and Escobar soon took over his operation.
In May of the following year, Escobar was charged with organizing a drug run to Ecuador. He tried to bribe the judges who were presiding over his case, but when that failed he murdered two officers who had arrested him and the chief witnesses, thereby ending the proceedings. This became part of an established pattern, a strategy called plata o plomo (silver plate or lead bullet—i.e. accept a bribe or face assassination). He killed many thousands, on his orders or personally, often with astonishing savagery.
Escobar was a savvy political operator, aware of the need to grease the palms of local politicians. In Medellín he was also a Robin Hood populist, contributing small but significant portions of his personal fortune to local building projects or struggling football clubs, gaining him some popularity among the people of the city. He briefly ran his own newspaper, and in 1982 he became a deputy for the Liberal Party in the Colombian Congress.
By the early 1980s Escobar’s cartel monopolized the South American drug trade, and was responsible for an estimated 80 percent of cocaine and cannabis shipped to the United States, Mexico, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. His operation involved purchasing coca paste in Bolivia and Peru, processing it in drug factories dotted across Colombia, and then smuggling thousands of tons every week out of the country and into the United States, by sea, air and road.
In 1989 Forbes magazine listed Escobar as the seventh richest man in the world, with an estimated fortune of $24 billion. He owned many beautiful homes, a private zoo, numerous yachts and helicopters, a fleet of private airplanes and even two submarines; he also kept a private army of bodyguards and assassins on the payroll. He was utterly unforgiving to those who threatened his position, even in the smallest possible way: after catching a servant stealing silver from one of his palatial homes, he had the unfortunate man tied up and thrown into the swimming pool, leaving him to drown.
It was not long before Escobar began to be targeted by the United States authorities. In 1979 the USA and Colombia had signed an extradition treaty, as part of a tougher approach to the drug trade. Escobar hated this treaty and began a campaign of assassination against anyone who supported it or who called for stronger policies against the drug cartels. He was widely believed to have been behind the storming in 1985 of the Colombian Supreme Court by left-wing guerrillas, which left eleven judges dead. Four years later Escobar ordered the murder of three presidential candidates, as well as the downing of an airliner, which killed 107 people, and the bombing of the national-security building in Bogotá, killing fifty-two. The same year two of his henchmen were arrested in Miami, trying to buy missiles.
In 1991, as the net seemed to be closing in around him, Escobar offered a deal to the Colombian authorities: in order to avoid extradition he would accept five years’ imprisonment. As part of the deal, Escobar was allowed to build his own “prison,” which naturally turned out to be another luxurious palace, from where he could direct his drugs empire by telephone. He was allowed to leave to attend the occasional football match or party, and was also permitted to receive visitors, including prostitutes (the younger the better) and business associates, two of whom were murdered on his premises—he liked to torture his victims personally.
On July 22, 1992, as he was being transferred to a tougher prison, Escobar managed to escape. The Colombian authorities launched a massive manhunt, with help from the USA, and also from Escobar’s enemies, including Los Pepes (People Persecuted by Pablo Escobar), a paramilitary group composed of his victims and members of the rival Cali Cartel. During the sixteen-month search, hundreds of people—both policemen and Escobar’s henchmen—were killed. Escobar was eventually tracked down to a safe house in Medellín and shot in the leg, torso and head as he attempted a daring rooftop escape; he died instantly. It was December 2, 1993, the day after his 44th birthday.
Escobar’s supporters regarded him as a hero and a champion of the poor, but in reality he was an outlaw of unrivaled greed and sadism. His token gestures of philanthropy did not disguise his scant regard for human life, and at the height of its influence his cartel was responsible for an average of twenty murders every month.
OSAMA BIN LADEN
1957–2011
The pieces of the bodies of infidels were flying like dust particles. If you would have seen it with your own eyes, you would have been very pleased, and your heart would have been filled with joy.
Osama bin Laden, at the wedding of his son following the murder of seventeen US soldiers in the suicide bombing of the USS Cole, October 12, 2000
Osama bin Laden was the fanatical mastermind of the murderously spectacular 9/11 plane-bomb attacks against the Twin Towers and Pentagon that killed thousands of innocent people in the name of an intolerant and dogmatic distortion of the Islamic faith. Promoting a jihadi ideology that glories in killing and endorses a nihilistic cult of suicide, he aimed to eliminate American and Western power, wipe out Israel and restore a caliphate over any part of the world ever ruled by Islam. But his only real practical policy was terrorizing innocent people and destroying tolerant democratic societies, using impressionable youths as living bombs against victims chosen solely because they are citizens of the free, democratic West.
Bin Laden was born in Riyadh in 1957, the son of Muhammad Awad bin Laden—who acquired huge wealth after his construction company secured exclusive rights from the Saudi royal family to religious building projects within the country—and his tenth wife, Hamida al-Attas, subsequently divorced. The only son of that marriage, though with numerous siblings on his father’s side, Osama—after his mother’s remarriage to Muhammad al-Attas—was raised as a Sunni Muslim, displaying uncompromising piety from an early age. He studied at an elite school and then King Abdulaziz University, marrying his first wife, Najwa Ghanem, in 1974. He has had another four wives, divorcing two, and has fathered between twelve and twenty-four children.
In 1979, bin Laden, together with thousands of other devout jihadists—known collectively as the mujahedeen—traveled to Afghanistan to repel the Soviet Union’s invasion of the country. He joined fellow militant Abdullah Azzam and established Maktab al-Khadamat, a paramilitary organization devoted to fighting what he saw as jihad. The war was also backed and funded by the United States, ever fearful of Soviet expansion, and when bin Laden returned to Saudi Arabia in 1990, he was widely feted for having resisted the forces of communism. Already, though, he was making plans for a new organization to further his goal of driving America (“the Great Satan”) out of the Muslim world. It would become known as Al-Qaeda (the Base).
Following the Gulf War of 1991, bin Laden denounced the Saudi royal family for allowing US troops to be stationed in the country, upon which, in 1992, they expelled him. He moved to Sudan, from where, working with the Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ), he masterminded the December 29, 1992 attack on Aden in which two people were killed. Following an unsuccessful assassination attempt, however, on President Mubarak of Egypt in 1995, the EIJ were expelled from Sudan, prompting bin Laden to return to Afghanistan, where he allied himself with the Taliban, bankrolling training camps for thousands of jihadists.
In 1997, he sponsored the infamous Luxor massacre of November 17, which killed sixty-two civilians, and the following year Al-Qaeda bombed US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing
nearly 300 people. A more sinister trend emerged in October 2000 when, once more in Aden, a suicide bomber attacked the US Navy ship USS Cole, killing seventeen. Such bombing swiftly became Al-Qaeda’s weapon of choice, militant young Muslims being indoctrinated to seek martyrdom. Later the same year, bin Laden, with his lieutenant Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri—whom he had first met during the Afghan war—co-signed a fatwa declaring that Muslims had a duty to kill Americans and their allies.
Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri subsequently concocted their most ambitious plan yet. Early on the morning of September 11, 2001, two teams of jihadists boarded four passenger jets at airports in Washington DC, Boston and Newark. Authorities learned shortly afterward that the planes had been hijacked by nineteen Middle Eastern men. At 8:46 a.m. local time, American Airlines Flight 11 flew into the north of the Twin Towers in New York, the biggest buildings in Manhattan. Then, as television cameras were trained on the unfolding disaster, United Airlines Flight 175 slammed at 9:02 a.m. into the south tower. Thirty-five minutes later, news filtered through that American Airlines Flight 77 had crashed into the Pentagon in Virginia, and at 10:03 a.m. United Airlines Flight 93, destined for the White House, was brought down over Pennsylvania by heroic passengers who had heard the fate of the other planes as they frantically called their relatives on onboard telephones.
Apocalyptic scenes followed in New York. The Twin Towers, both of which had been fatally weakened by the impact of the jets and ensuing fires, collapsed to the ground—the south at 9:59 a.m. and the north at 10:28 a.m.—killing thousands of victims still trapped inside, and sending out a cloud of dust that engulfed the south side of Manhattan. Excluding the hijackers, nearly 3000 people died that day—246 on the jets, 125 in the Pentagon and 2603 in the Twin Towers (including 341 heroic firefighters and 2 paramedics).
Committing itself to a war on terror, America vowed to hunt down bin Laden, who already topped the FBI’s most wanted list. Allied forces soon toppled the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, where Al-Qaeda had been allowed to operate for years, but bin Laden fled to the mountains bordering Afghanistan and Pakistan. A chance to capture him there was missed in late 2001 when advancing troops failed to search the Tora Bora caves where he was almost certainly hiding. When the caves were subsequently raided in August 2007, he was gone.
Since 9/11, radicalized Muslims, led by bin Laden’s twisted message of hate and violence, have relentlessly continued Al-Qaeda’s murderous campaign. On October 12, 2002, three bombs exploded in Bali, killing 202 people and injuring a further 209. Then, in 2004, a series of bombs exploded on the Madrid rail network, killing 191 people and wounding 1755. The following year, on July 7, London was the target, three bombs exploding within a minute of each other during the morning rush hour on the London Underground system and another on a bus in Tavistock Square less than an hour later. Besides the four suicide bombers, fifty-two commuters were killed and 700 injured. Further carnage was only avoided a fortnight later when the bombs of four would-be suicide bombers failed to explode. October of the same year saw a second attack on Bali, twenty people being killed and 129 injured. In Iraq, through a ruthless campaign of bombing, Al-Qaeda has focused on fomenting sectarian slaughter between Sunni and Shia Muslims to foil American plans for Iraqi democracy. On May 2 after the biggest manhunt in history, US commandos raided a house in Abbottabad, the town in Pakistan that houses Pakistan’s military academy, and killed bin Laden. His body was buried at sea.
ILLUSTRATIONS
Alexander the Great, from “The Alexander Mosaic,” 1st Century BC. (Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples, Italy, / Giraudon / The Bridgeman Art Library)
Suleiman II, oil on canvas, 16th century. (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria / The Bridgeman Art Library)
Elizabeth I, c. 1600. (Private Collection / Photo © Philip Mould Ltd., London / The Bridgeman Art Library)
Akbar the Great giving an audience, by Husays Naggash and Kesu, from the “Akbarnama,” Mughal, c. 1590. (Victoria & Albert Museum, London, UK / The Bridgeman Art Library)
Louis XIV in Royal Costume, 1701, by Hyacinthe Rigaud. (Louvre, Paris, France / Giraudon / The Bridgeman Art Library)
Grigory Potemkin, courtesy of author.
Portrait of Alexander Pushkin, 1827, by Orest Adamovich Kiprensky. (Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Russia / The Bridgeman Art Library)
Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield, photographed by Jabez Hughes at Osborne House, Isle of Wight. (Private Collection / The Bridgeman Art Library)
Wilhelm II on a picture postcard, 1905. Author: Reichard und Lindner; publisher: Gustav Liersch & Co. (http://www.dhm.de/lemo/objekte/pict/95007746/index.htmlD)
Sarah Bernhardt, c. 1900 (Photo by APIC/Getty Images)
Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt. (Photo by Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images)
King Ibn Saud, of Saudi Arabia pictured with his four grandchildren, 1935. (Photo by Popperfoto/Getty Images)
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and Joseph Stalin. (Photo by SSPL/Getty Images)
Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru and Gamal Abdel Nasser. (STAFF/AFP/Getty Images)
Elvis Presley recording in the studio. (Photo by Don Cravens//Time Life Pictures/Getty Images)
Idi Amin Dada, the president of Uganda, takes the oath of allegiance of twelve British ex-army officers who are to serve in Amin’s armed forces. November 3, 1975. (Photo by Keystone/Getty Images)
Kim Jong-Il and Kim Il-Sung inspecting a soccer ground in Pyongyang. (AFP/Getty Images)
Mao Zedong shaking hands in 1974 in Beijing with Deng Xiaoping. (AFP/Getty Images)
The Shah of Iran adorned with diamond-encrusted regalia for his coronation. (Photo by James L. Stanfield/National Geographic/Getty Images)
Ruhollah Khomeini, Supreme Leader Of Iran, 1978. (Photo by Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images)
Libyan leader Muammar Kadaffi salutes his soldiers during a five-hour military parade in Tripoli to mark the 30th anniversary of the Libyan Revolution that brought him to power. September 7, 1999. (MARWAN NAAMANI/AFP/Getty Images
Aung San Suu Kiy after her victory in the Parliamentary Election In Yangon, Myanmar. April 2012. (Photo by Amandine Roche/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)
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