The Pablo Escobar Theory: Rubber bands roll the market :-)

In most businesses, seeing a return on investment (ROI) of 100% would be more than enough for a company to thrive. By some estimates, notorious Colombian cocaine kingpin Pablo Escobar enjoyed an ROI of as much as 20,000%. Put another way, for every $1 he put into his
business, he got about $200 in return.

1. Rats ate $1 billion of Pablo Escobar's profits each year

The first thing you didn't know about Pablo Escobar testifies to an uncommon, staggering degree of wealth. According to Roberto Escobar, one of Pablo's closest brothers, at a time when their estimated profits were
circling $20 billion annually "Pablo was earning so much that each year we would write off 10% of the money because the rats would eat it in storage or it would be damaged by water or lost." If that weren't enough to drop your jaw, Roberto adds that the cartel spent as much as $2,500 every month on rubber bands to "hold the money together."

2. Pablo Escobar was suspected of bombing the World Trade Center

Another thing you didn't know about Pablo Escobar is that he was named as an early suspect in the 1993 bombing of
the World Trade Center. Shortly after the bombing, which killed six and injured over 1,000, a New York City prosecutor publicly suggested that the bombing could have been carried out by any "enemy of the U.S.," including Escobar's Medellin cartel. Well, Pablo may have assassinated a presidential candidate (Luis Carlos Galán), threatened to kill the
offspring of a sitting U.S. president (allegedly one of Bush Sr.'s sons), blown a commercial jet out of the sky (Avianca Flight 203), and orchestrated the attempted slaughter of the Colombian Supreme Court (Palace of Justice siege), but bomb the World Trade Center? Escobar was sufficiently offended enough so that he sent a handwritten note to the U.S. Ambassador to Colombia declaring his innocence. "You can take me off the list," he assured Ambassador Morris Busby, "because if I had done it I would be saying why I did it and what I want."

3. Pablo Escobar bought a Learjet to fly his cash

The last thing you didn't know about Pablo Escobar is that he had an interesting solution to a very rare kind of cash flow problem. Escobar and his cartel began to see soaring profits rather quickly. His being a cash business, Escobar needed to get that U.S. cash back to Colombia. For a while, the small plane he used to transport that cash was sufficient, as it could hold about $10 million. Keeping in mind Escobar's estimated ROI of 20,000%, and that he was getting cocaine to the U.S. by a wide variety of methods (including a pair of submarines which would each carry about 1,000 kilos), it's no surprise that he needed an upgrade. Escobar thus bought a Learjet, a substantially faster plane and one that could carry as much as 10 times the amount of cash. Problem solved.

In 1982 Escobar was elected as a deputy/alternative representative to the House of Representatives of Colombia's Congress, as part of the Colombian Liberal Party .[12] He was the official representative of the Colombian government in the swearing of Felipe González in Spain.

He was killed while trying to evade arrest in Colombia on December 2, 1993 and thus end the rule of a Tyrant.