'Neat-freak' Pablo Escobar loved fancy bathrooms and had a kink collection including 'lace negligees and sex toys', say DEA agents
Two Drug Enforcement Administration agents, who tracked down Pablo Escobar have revealed some private and kinky secrets about the notorious drug lord based on the way he kept his private chambers. Agents Steve Murphy and Javier F. Peña, who learned much about Escobar’s operation in the year and a half they spent searching for him in Colombia in the early 1990s after he escaped from prison in the United States, say that the drug lord was a neat freak who loved fancy bathrooms and had an affinity for women's lingerie and sex toys.
After escaping the law for many years, Escobar surrendered himself in 1991, in a surprising move, but shrewdly agreed for a five-year jail term during which time he turned the prison into a personal luxury hotel. He built swanky suites at the prison in Medellin and facilitated the hiring of his own people as in-charges of the facility while continuing to run his drug-dealing empire. However, when the government tried to move him into a real jail a year later, he escaped, leaving behind a treasure trove of insights into his unique lifestyle. This became the subject matter for 'Manhunters: How We Took Down Pablo Escobar' which will be out on Tuesday, November 12, under St Martin's Press.
“The prison was pretty much what we suspected — a country club filled with luxury items, such as state-of-the-art televisions, refrigerators, and stereo equipment,” New York Post Peña as recalling in the book. “Escobar never slept in the same place for more than two consecutive nights. That included his own prison ‘cell.’ ”
“He used the nearby cottages for parties and alternated sleeping in each of them. They were all beautifully appointed, with planters, hanging baskets and luxurious upholstery and drapes. One of them had a bathroom built like a bunker, with reinforced cement walls that must have been more than three feet thick.”
"Escobar had a thing about clean and well-proportioned bathrooms, and each time we raided a safe house that Escobar used, we always found a curiously sparkling bathroom with brand-new fixtures," they write. More personal items were discovered in the kingpin’s office at the prison known as La Catedral (The Cathedral). The most interesting details mentioned in the book, however, maybe the “lace negligees and sex toys, including vibrators," that were all neatly arranged in a closet.
The agents also discovered that Escobar prayed to a ceramic Virgin Mary clutching a baby Jesus in her arms seeking her protection and blessing. "In Escobar’s correspondence files, which were neat and methodically organized, he kept all the threatening notes from his enemies,” says Peña in the book. The Post says the agents also claim to have found letters “from mothers offering up their daughters for sex with the drug lord”.
Escobar also had small figures of Colombian National Police officers, “as a joke to show that he owned the police as well as the entire Colombian government,” Agent Murphy told The Post. Five months after his escape, he came to a bloody end when he was shot dead by police and soldiers on a rooftop in his hometown of Medellin in December 1993.