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Killing
Pablo: The Hunt for the World’s Greatest Outlaw by Mark Bowden Recommendation: • |
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Click on title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Thug When given the opportunity to pursue a
topic at length in book form, some journalists leave behind their short,
episodic style from periodicals, and craft an interesting and gripping flow
of information that keeps the reader fascinated page after page. In writing Killing
Pablo: The Hunt for the World’s Greatest Outlaw, Mark Bowden never leaves
his journalistic style behind. I was bored and frustrated at the piecemeal
approach, and the tedium of two hundred pages of what read like newspaper
articles strung together. I’m not sure who held the contest that
named the late Colombian drug kingpin Pablo Escobar as the “world’s greatest
outlaw”, but Bowden presented Escobar as a thug. Despite the occasional
glimpses of his family life and Escobar’s own claim of always singing in the
shower, the dimension Bowden presents is that of a street criminal: the
greatest nobody. I couldn’t stay interested in this book because the pace was
infuriating. Unless you really want to learn about how hundreds of people and
millions of dollars were devoted to tracking down and killing this thug, take
a pass. Here’s an excerpt: “The record shows
that Pablo was an accomplished car thief before he was twenty. He and his
gang took the crude business of pinching cars and turned it into a
mini-industry, bolding taking vehicles (drivers would just be pulled from
behind the steering wheel in broad daylight) and chopping them down to a
collection of valuable parts within hours. There was plenty of money to be
made in parts, and no direct evidence of the theft remained. Once he’d
amassed sufficient capital, Pablo began simply bribing municipal officials to
issue new papers for stolen vehicles, eliminating the need to disassemble the
cars. He seems to have had few significant run-ins with the law during this
period. The arrest records have vanished, but Pablo did spend several months
in a Medellin jail before his twentieth birthday, no doubt making connections
with a more violent class of criminals, who would later serve him well.
Clearly the stint behind bars did nothing to dissuade him from a life of
crime.” Steve Hopkins, September 12, 2001 |
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ã 2001 Hopkins and Company, LLC |
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