A squat little man who’d gotten his start stealing headstones from the local cemeteries, sandblasting them, and then reselling them. El doctor was the honorary sobriquet given to the young drug kingpin Pablo Escobar in honor of the first man he murdered, a man who happened to be a doctor.Murder was not an unusual way to earn a nickname in Colombia. But this particular murder would mark the beginning of a reign of terror that would end only when Pablo himself was murdered at age forty, in 1989. At the time of his death, the former tombstone salesman, Pablo Escobar, was the richest, most powerful criminal in the world.Manso had found his role model.Shortly after fleeing Cuba and arriving at their uncle’s farm in the tiny mountain village of Medellín, the three de Herreras brothers began learning the thriving new coca business literally from the ground up. They planted and tended the shrubs, native to the Andes, with the pretty yellow flowers. Among other alkaloids, the leaves of Erythroxylum coca yielded a miracle powder called cocaine.They worked in their uncle’s fields at first, and then graduated to the corrugated tin labs where the miracle money dust was refined and processed.It wasn’t long until the brothers’ ingenuity, intelligence, and ruthlessness brought them to the attention of el doctor himself.
