Pablo’s Surprise from the Grave

Just finished Mark Blowden’s wonderful account of the manhunt for Pablo Escobar, “Killing Pablo.” The ultimate end came after months and months of searching, and especially, of listening. There was a young commander in the Colombian Search Bloc who got very adept at using a device provided by the CIA, that allowed him to triangulate a signal from a cell phone or radiophone that “El Doctor” would use when he called his wife and kids who were holed up in a hotel suite. Each night, Juan Pablo, his sixteen year old son, would speak to Pa, and the CIA and Centra Spike would record them, and try to locate Pablo. The listeners heard that sonny wanted Pop’s help answering a series of 40 questions posed by a journalist, and the two arranged a time to go over the answers. They even heard what time Pablo would call back.

Pablo was going through the answers with Sonny and he walked in front of a window in the fourth floor of a Medellin apartment. At that moment, a member of Centra Spike walked by and actually made eye contact with the Don as he was on the phone. Soon they called in artillery and began blasting….a few minutes later Pablo was sprawled out dead like a prize deer on the roof.

A few days later in a bag of items seized from the apartment was a gun. As the police chief’s son took the gun out of the bag, it went off, the shot grazing the youngster’s stomach.