The main story in this book is the hunt to find and kill Pablo, a Columbian drug billionaire. This is a true  story and interesting in itself.

But like so many good books there are other stories threaded through the book.
One story is about how the American embassey is a shadow government that directs the Colombian government.
How thousands of Americans from a score of different Federal agencies are involved in the hunt and in government policy.

The DEA, CIA, FBI, Rangers, Delta force, army, navy, air force and more.
After the fall of the Soviet Union the defense budget is shrinking and everyone wants to show that his agency is an important one for budget dollars during the next era.
Compitition is strong, cooperation is not.

It is also a story about technology.

Small 4 seat planes like the Beach Bonanza are outfitted with
50 million dollars of electronics and hover all day above a city.

Out of sight, out of sound to the people below, they scan cell phone calls and when they lock on to their target,
they can fly an arc around the signal and triangulate the
location of the cell phone so police/troups on the ground
can storm that building.

Also the American government has the technology to
"turn on" any cell phone in the world without the owner
knowing it.
When turned on the phone emits a silent signal that can
be tracked as long as wanted.
Or a cruise missile, smart bomb, drone rocket can be
sent to the phone location.
A present from uncle sugar.

No rating. This book was very thought-provoking and I enjoyed comparing and contrasting to Narcos documentary.

Ocena: 4⭐️
Format: papier

To jest książka do wciągnięcia na raz, No dobra objętościowo może na dwa razy

An excellent and nearly unbelievable account of the costly hunt for Pablo Escobar.

I think I bought this audio from an Audible sale, because #1 Mark Bowden wrote Black Hawk Down so how can this be bad and #2 I love true crime and learning about sociopaths. I've watched some of Narcos (not all of it, but I shall return) and I'm a student of Godfather and Scarface, so I kinda knew what I'd hear in this book. Still, this is crazy crazy stuff that never ceases to shock me.

Bowden gives us a little background of the type of Colombia that Pablo Escobar was raised in. Between 1948 and 1958, there was a bloody civil war between two political parties called the La Violencia. Basically it was a free-for-all...think The Purge movie...where 25,000 soldiers, police and rebels were killed plus over 200,000 civilians. Born in 1949, this is what Pablo saw as normal. He smoked dope and got in trouble, escalated to auto theft, then drifted into drugs. Drugs, particularly cocaine, was how he ultimately made his money (he was worth $30 million when he was killed in '93). But it was the violence left in his wake that made him one of the most wanted men in the world. He bribed police, political officials and judges. If that didn't work, he killed them. He killed politicians, then became one himself. He built housing and soccer pitches and fed the hungry one day, the next day he'd kidnap an enemy's family for ransom then kill the hostage anyway. He spent a great deal of his last years on the run from the Colombian and US military, and even a vigilante group called the Los Pepes formed that declared open season on all of Escobar, his family and his business associates. Ultimately he was shot and killed in the ongoing manhunt by Colombian National Police. Because of the Robin Hood image he had cultivated throughout his life, Escobar's death was extremely controversial and he was greatly mourned by the country's poor.

Bowden seems to do a pretty thorough job of recounting the details of this reign of terror. It feels like it came straight out of the movies. The writing, however, was dense...full of names and facts...and was hard to focus on this via an audio format. Additionally, Bowden narrated the audio, and he wasn't the most dynamic voice to present this information. I found my mind wandering. Authors are not always the best choice, I wish publishers would rethink these decisions.

Szczerze to nie wiem jak to ocenić. Cały czas z tyłu głowy miałam serial, który był o niebo lepszy od książki. W sumie niczego nowego się nie dowiedziałam, wydarzenia już nie były dla mnie tak ekscytujące i jedyne co, to końcoweczka mnie poruszyła.

This is a thorough and well researched book. First we follow the life of Pablo Escobar - the man synonymous with cocaine trafficking - his upbringing, his family, his involvement in the drug trade and his role in the Medellin cartel, his short career in politics. Then we learn about the Colombian police and then military tasked with capturing Escobar, and then the involvement of the USA.

While we get a thorough background of Escobar, we see it from a strictly criminal and political perspective. We hear about his lavish lifestyle, his predilection for teenage girls, the fact he is a marijuana smoker, but doesn't meddle in the cocaine that makes him his millions of dollars. What we don't get is a wider picture of Escobar - the private zoo with the exotic animals, his car collections (other than when the authorities destroy them to taunt him), so not such a human picture. It does talk about the ebb and flow of public support for Pablo - as he poured his ill gotten money into housing, sports fields and the like he was seen as a Robin Hood figure, but violent bombings and public executions turned many against him.

The second part of the book outlines the authorities actions to take Pablo down. People who act against Escobar have a strange habit of winding up dead. Particularly judges. Policemen fare poorly too. Between targetted assassinations and bribe money, Escobar remains relatively free to carry out his business. As the Colombian police prove ineffective, the more they open up politically to the option of assistance from the USA. George Bush has ramped up his war on drugs and has decided that stopping cocaine at the border, or going after people distributing within the States was not yielding results - he wanted to target the source. To me this seems like America blaming Colombia for the American's who are buying drugs...

So Bush signed off on a heap on ambiguous requests for the US Embassy, DEA, CIA, NSA, Delta Force and an outfit called Centra Spike, who were a specialist digital surveillance team with high tech planes to use cellphone detection to trace the location of targets. I say ambiguous because typically the agreed scope it to either provide training or to provide expertise in surveillance, but clearly not to be taking part in missions / raids / executions (!). I am happy to admit I cant write a simple explanation of each of the above American parties, how they interacted with the Colombian authorities, and who did what. It was a complex web of people and politics. What is obvious is that the US was far more involved than legitimately authorised, they were morally well across lines (for example knowing about the kill squad called Los Pepes who claimed to operate as an independent vigilante organisation, when it was obvious the Colombian Police were feeding them information, and the US operatives were aware of this, and almost certainly knew that the leaders of that origination and financing was from the Cali cartel).

I probably need to leave my description of the details of the book there, as i will only get it tangled. I will say that the above sort of covers the middle part of the book, and that the last part is the demise of Pablo Escobar, and then these is a chapter of the aftermath. Lastly are pages and pages of the source material, and a thorough index.

So overall I enjoyed the book. It was quite fast paced, but also shared the drudgery of constant surveillance and lack of results etc, so contained some flat parts. It mixed it up enough following events from both sides of the story - we hear plenty about what Escobar, his cartel and his family are doing, and plenty about those pursing him.

I was certainly entertained while reading; I enjoyed the detail about the pursuit and ultimately elimination of Pablo Escobar. The politics and complexities added to the intrigue, and the source information gave reassurance of the legitimacy. As other have mentioned the tv series Narcos is a fictionalisation of events, and not intended to be a documentary, so people shouldn't assume it is accurate.

Finally, a couple of quotes I liked:
P30n  

He was violent and unprincipled, and a determined climber. He wasn't an entrepreneur, and he wasn't even an especially talented businessman. He was just ruthless. When he heard about a thriving cocaine-processing lab on his turf, he shouldered his way in. If someone developed a lucrative delivery route north, Pablo demanded a majority of the profits - for protection. No one dared refuse him.

n
P33

Pablo was establishing a pattern of dealing with the authorities which would become his trademark. It soon became simply Plata o plomo. One either accepted Pablo's Plata (silver), or his Plomo (lead).

4 Stars

Mark Bowden is a masterful storyteller and Killing Pablo: The Hunt for the World's Greatest Outlaw is no exception. I listened to it on audiobook and it is narrated by Mark Bowden. I love it when authors narrate their own work. I have read several Bowden books including Huế 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam, The Last Stone, The Case of the Vanishing Blonde: And Other True Crime Stories, and Life Sentence: The Brief and Tragic Career of Baltimore’s Deadliest Gang Leader. Many of his other books are on my TBR list.

I am currently watching the Netflix docuseries, Griselda, played by Sofia Vergara. The first episode begins with a quote from Pablo Escobar, "The only man I was ever afraid of was a woman named Griselda Blanco." Both Griselda and Pablo were leaders in cocaine trafficking.

Pablo was the sole leader of the Medellin Cartel in Columbia. His nicknames were El Doctor, El Patron, and the King of Cocaine. Bowden described the ruthlessness of Pablo as "terror becomes art." Pablo often kidnapped people, held them for ransom, and then killed them after receiving the ransom. However, to many people in Columbia he was viewed as a type of Robin Hood because he built amenities for the poor and advocated for them. Pablo's funeral was attended by 25,000 mourners.

Świetne uzupełnienie po obejrzeniu Narcos. Jest to jednak (jak zresztą sugeruje sam tytuł) historia złapania Escobara - obejmująca okres od 1989 do 1993 - a nie opowieść o powstaniu imperium Pabla czy też kartelu Medellín.

Sensacja w czystym wydaniu. Skala korupcji i bezsilności biednej Kolumbii była porażająca. Niesamowita historia.

I think how interesting you find this will depend on your previous knowledge about Pablo Escobar and/or how he was ultimately caught/taken down. There’s a lot of details in here but if you’ve read another Escobar book or seen a documentary (or even the TV Show Narcos), this won’t be new information.

Killing Pablo has an incredible plot, and very uninspiring writing and shoddy, unforgivable editing. This does not read like a book at all, but a first attempt at a (bad) magazine article. Being non fiction, this story is in the public domain. Yet, the pathetic research done by Mark Bowden puts one off, giving an extremely sketchy, uneven overview of the whole scenario and kills the supposed thrill emanating from the chase.

The story is simple, Pablo Escobar, kingpin of cocaine dealers, big shit in Columbia, extremely violent gangster, dreaded in the US so much so that millions of dollars and hundreds of personnel are poured into Columbia over a period of a year and a half to kill Pablo (without much concern over stanching off the cocaine supply). Escobar is crazy violent enough to affect policy changes in the government favouring himself by violence and bribes (any judge passing a sentence against him is blown away, any journalist writing is bombed, any public servant making any efforts to still Pablo has his entire family blown away with a car bomb, and specially, lots and lots of policemen killed by targeting, along with no concern for collateral damage to civilians. All this while, Pablo is spending on his old neighbourhoods, donating to schools and spreading propaganda for the masses becoming a sort of local hero at defying the USA. Then a rival vigilante organization called Los Pepes crops up which starts specifically targeting everyone ever connected with Pablo Escobar, including family members and civilians who have never been indicted but who prop up Pablo, like lawyers, bankers, corrupt officials. Every bomb that Escobar blows up, a rival bomb blows up at the houses of someone connected to Escobar. All this while, regular electronic surveillance is on, trying to track Escobar down all the while he keeps getting more and more panicked about a possible attack on his own wife and kids. This is Columbia in 1992-1993 where rival bombs are blowing up across the cities, vigilante policemen are picking up information from CIA agents, american soldiers are running around trying to track the world's richest criminal in one of the most poorest and electronically untraceable neighbourhood.

Bowden has not been able to piece together this naturally bombastic thriller of a story into any sort of a narrative. You never get any look into any of the characters, Pablo is nowhere in the book. Even the investigators who are covered in a little more detail have such shoddy, generalised sketches that it is evident that Bowden has never spent any time with any of them. To describe Juan Pablo Escobar (Pablo's 15 year old son), there are at least 10 places in the book that he is referred to as "a 6' tall chubby teenager". That is all he is ever described as.

There are countless frequent repetitions in the book, even so much so as to have used the same sentence over and over again as a rejoinder. And it is surprising how everything has been dumped into any sort of chronological order as if actually writing the book was too much effort for the author and he couldn't be bothered with it. So you would have a long, un-necessary chapter about Lt. Hugo Martinez, and then immediately into the next chapter, you would have a long paragraph explaining who is Lt. Hugo Martinez, and what is he doing in the story right now, as if the reader might have lost him while turning the page.

I had picked this book after seeing it on Breaking Bad, quite enthused by the idea that I could at least pick up a good book recommendation from a shitty show. I should have known better.

It is all the more sad since the background story is really striking, and that this was happening out there in the real world is scary and worthy of having a good book written about it. This is not it.