Talent for Business, Violence Brought a Fortune in Drug Money : Cocaine: Escobar was shielded by a network of loyal supporters during the long police manhunt.

Pablo Escobar started out as a teen-age entrepreneur reselling tombstones he had stolen from a cemetery and sanded flat. Keeping one step ahead of the police, he became the world’s most violent and successful cocaine merchant--and Colombia’s most wanted criminal.

It was more than ingenuity and ruthlessness that fostered Escobar’s rise from small-time hood to cocaine king. Along the way, he briefly entered politics and nurtured a Robin Hood image, winning thousands of admirers in the ghetto-like comunas of his native Medellin by providing jobs, housing and sports facilities.

Shielded by a network of loyal supporters, Escobar kept refining and exporting tons of cocaine during a seven-year police manhunt with a $500,000 price on his head. The 41-year-old drug lord’s surrender Wednesday was less a defeat than a truce--on terms of leniency that evolved from both sides’ exhaustion in a brutal war.

At their peak in the late 1980s, U.S. officials said, Escobar and other traffickers loosely associated in the so-called Medellin Cartel produced 60% of the cocaine in Colombia, which in turn supplied 80% of the American market. Bypassing the American drug traffickers, Escobar set up the first Colombian-run drug-distribution ring in the United States. Forbes magazine listed him among the world’s richest individuals in 1990, with a fortune of $3 billion.

Escobar became the prime target of Colombia’s drug war after the 1984 assassination of Justice Minister Rodrigo Lara Bonilla. His band is far more closely associated with such violence than the country’s other major cocaine cartel, based in the city of Cali.

Besides the justice minister, Escobar and his henchmen are accused of killing an attorney general, a newspaper publisher, three presidential candidates and scores of judges and police--and of exploding hundreds of terrorist bombs, including one aboard a jetliner in flight. The bombing in November, 1989, of a Colombian airliner killed all 107 passengers and crew aboard.

“He represents all the bad in drug trafficking,” said Bob Martinez, director of the White House’s Office of Drug Control Policy. “He has left a cemetery full of people.”

Escobar was born Dec. 1, 1949, in Rio Negro, 25 miles east of Medellin. His father was a farmer, his mother a teacher. A year later they moved to the blue-collar Medellin suburb of Envigado, where Escobar finished high school and went to work as a security guard for a local businessman who smuggled stereo equipment from the Panama Canal Zone. Young Escobar was first arrested in 1974 for stealing a car.

Behind a facade of soft-spoken politeness, he came to be known, to associates and enemies, as an under-schooled but brilliant, ambitious man, a quick learner with a talent for business and an unforgiving memory.

By 1976, he was an established drug smuggler with an expanding fleet of airplanes. He was caught that year with 39 pounds of cocaine in the spare tire of a pickup truck but walked out of jail three months later when his arrest order was mysteriously revoked. Both officers who arrested him were later murdered; he was charged with ordering the hit.

With his potbelly and greased-down hair, Escobar, who stands 5 feet 6 inches and weighs about 160 pounds, never outgrew the look of a lower-class thug. But he put on airs. In 1980, he bought a Miami Beach mansion for $762,500; a year later he paid $8.3 million for an apartment complex in Plantation, Fla. He filled his Medellin condominium with Chinese porcelain and expensive paintings.

His favorite estate was a 7,000-acre ranch in Colombia, near Puerto Triunfo, said to cost $63 million. He landscaped the property with artificial lakes and turned loose 200 imported exotic animals, including camels, giraffes, bison, llamas, a kangaroo and a pair of black cockatoos.

Escobar hid his drug dealing behind claims of legitimate business wealth and a benefactor’s image promoted on his own radio show. Accompanied often by Roman Catholic priests, he installed lights at soccer fields, built roller rinks and handed out money in the comunas where his cartel quietly recruited teen-age hit squads. Under a plan called Medellin Without Slums, he built a 600-unit, low-income housing project named after himself.

From that power base, Escobar won election to Congress in 1982 as an alternate representative. For many in the Establishment willing to tolerate his drug business, that was one step too far. He was forced out of office two years later when Lara, the justice minister, exposed his criminal record. The minister’s vengeful slaying was the opening salvo of the drug war.

The government retaliated by extraditing Colombian drug dealers to the United States for trial on trafficking charges. Escobar, facing eight American indictments, disappeared from public view. His properties in Florida and his zoo ranch in Colombia were confiscated.

Twice the government rejected his offers to dismantle the cocaine empire--in 1984, when he and other Medellin bosses demanded amnesty in return, and in 1989, when they insisted that extradition be outlawed.

As the war intensified, Escobar made a new offer: $4,000 for every police officer killed. The government militarized his hometown of Envigado after finding its entire police force to be in his pay. An elite corps of national police took up the pursuit. So did rival drug traffickers, who car-bombed Escobar’s condo, forcing his wife and two children to flee.

But the drug lord kept himself and the legend of his elusiveness alive, moving from house to house in the rugged Middle Magdalena Valley north of the city whenever his informants gave word that police were close. An army brigade searching for leftist guerrillas stumbled into an Escobar hide-out in March, 1988, but the drug lord fled in his underwear.

By early this year, Escobar was the last big Medellin boss still at large. Carlos Lehder had been arrested and extradited to the United States; Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha had been killed; the Ochoa brothers--Jorge Luis, Juan David and Fabio--had surrendered under a 1990 leniency offer by President Cesar Gaviria.

The terms of Escobar’s surrender grew from that offer: Traffickers who come in and confess avoid extradition and can get their sentences cut by as much as half.

Father Rafael Garcia Herreros, who arranged the surrender, said he knelt in prayer with the Medellin boss at a ranch hide-out in May. The priest described him as “a Christian man of good” who was tired of running and “wants to leave the country in peace.”