“Escobar was the CEO, very charismatic, very powerful, very demanding,” says former U.S. Escobar was a master at wielding loyalty to get what he wanted. The loyalty, often laced with violence, replaced the courts that a legal corporation would use to enforce contracts. That first element was fierce, almost irrational, loyalty to the syndicate’s leaders, especially Escobar. “You start with an ordinary manufacturing and sales business, and then you overlay it with three other things to make up for the fact that you are working outside the legal system.” “What the Medellín cartel did is exactly what any global pharmaceutical firm has to do,” says Philip Heymann, a Harvard Law School professor who fought the drug cartels as a deputy U.S. It was not only a lethal purveyor of stimulants and mayhem, it was also a brilliant business, no different in many ways from a Fortune 500 corporation, but built to operate wholly outside the law. Pablo Escobar and his partners called their business a cartel, but instead of controlling price and supply, it behaved far more like a criminal syndicate that pumped an endless supply of cocaine into the market and let the market set the price. At its height, it earned as much as $4 billion a year-most of it cash-for its members and controlled 80 percent of the cocaine supply in the United States, leaving tens of thousands of corpses in its wake. The Medellín Cartel was an empire of stunning sweep and unimaginable violence.
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