Public attention only fed his megalomania. In 1989, while Escobar was still in his thirties, Forbes magazine listed him as the seventh-richest person in the world. While other cartel bosses preferred to work in secret, Escobar cultivated celebrity, becoming the figurehead of the industry, as his hero Al Capone had been the front man for Prohibition-era bootleg booze. Although various cartels competed to satiate Americans’ newfound obsession with the glamorous white powder, Escobar emerged as the dominant supplier, controlling 80 percent of the business. Clubs in Miami-just a two-hour flight from Bogotá-and New York drove the demand that launched a billion-dollar industry. By 1979, two years after Eric Clapton released his hit cover of the song “Cocaine,” twenty-two million Americans were using the drug, a fourfold increase from five years earlier. Crime may not pay, but for Pablo Escobar, the man synonymous with the Colombian cocaine trade in the 1980s, it certainly did.
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