At some point in the early 1980s, Pablo Escobar built a private zoo. The Colombian drug baron had yet to embark on his campaign of assassinations and bombings that soon terrorised his country, leaving a trail of dead politicians, judges and police in its wake. Business was good. Profits were up. Less than a decade into his career as el Zar de la cocaína, Escobar had cars, planes, sports fields, houses, lakes, farms, all the fine food and drink he could need. An African hippopotamus? Why not? Send one to the ranch – no, make that four. As a local fisherman later said, anything could happen at “the whim of [the] villain”.
Anything, it seems, including an audience with Frank Sinatra. In 1983 Escobar took members of his extended family on a trip to the United States. After queuing for rides at Disney World in Florida and taking a tour of the FBI building in Washington, DC, they embarked on a 760-mile pilgrimage to Graceland, Elvis Presley’s house in Memphis. The wives and children were then sent home and the men went to Las Vegas, gambling their way through $1m of walking-around money and staying at the Caesar’s Palace casino. It was there that the Escobars, masquerading as a group of “important real-estate investors”, were introduced to the headline entertainment.
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