If you speak a little Spanish and recently have spent a bit of time anywhere near the border, you've probably heard a narcocorrido, a ballad sung to danceable Norteno-style music with lyrics that romanticize the drug trade.
It's a hugely popular genre, and embattled officials in the violence-ravaged Mexican state of Baja California have gone so far as to keep the songs off the airwaves there. "The Accountant's Story: Inside the Violent World of the Medellin Cartel" is the literary equivalent of a narcocorrido -- without the redeeming virtue of a catchy, polka-inflected beat. The book's cover bears two additional subtitles: one informing us that this is "the true story of Pablo Escobar"; the other that the author, Roberto Escobar, is his brother.
Pablo, for those who decline to retain the biographies of dead thugs among the brain's finite store of memories, was the most successful of the Colombian criminals who accumulated vast wealth and huge body counts supplying the developed world's -- particularly the United States' -- discovery of cocaine as a recreational drug in the 1970s and '80s. In 1989, at the apogee of his criminal enterprise, Pablo Escobar was listed by Forbes magazine as the world's seventh richest man with an estimated personal fortune of $25 billion derived from his gang's control of perhaps 80% of the world's cocaine trafficking.
According to Pablo's brother Roberto -- a onetime bicycle racer, who became the operation's chief accountant with a staff of 10 -- their biggest problem was what to do with all the cash. The cartel, which took its name from the lovely colonial city in the Colombian highlands where the brothers began their criminal careers, quickly exhausted most of the world's capacity for secure, numbered bank accounts through which to launder their profits. They ended up having to store the proceeds in warehouses, ranch buildings, buried chambers and secret compartments in the walls of gang members' homes. They spent, according to Roberto, an estimated $2,500 a month on rubber bands to hold stacks of bills together. Ultimately, rodents and mold took such a toll on their holdings that they simply wrote off 10% per year as spoilage -- sort of like the stock market.
Their smuggling operations were so extensive that they purchased jets from bankrupt airlines and built their own miniature submarines.
