He was a neat freak who loved sex toys, fancy bathrooms and cartoons ridiculing America.
Along with selling tons of cocaine and slaughtering people, of course.
Those are just some of Pablo Escobar’s secret passions, according to two DEA agents who hunted the drug lord for months, but only really got to know him after he’d escaped from prison.
Agents Steve Murphy and Javier F. Peña learned much about Escobar’s operation in the year and a half they spent searching for him in Colombia in the early 1990s. But personal details about the man himself were elusive.
Suddenly, in a shrewd move, Escobar surrendered in 1991 and agreed to a five-year jail term. Soon after, he built swanky suites for himself at the prison in Medellin and put his own people in charge of the facility while he carried on running his drug-dealing empire.
A year later, when the government tried to move him to a real jail, Escobar escaped.
What he left behind was a treasure of insights, write Murphy and Peña in their book “Manhunters: How We Took Down Pablo Escobar” (St. Martin’s Press), out Tuesday.
“The prison was pretty much what we suspected — a country club filled with luxury items, such as state-of-the-art televisions, refrigerators and stereo equipment,” Peña recalls in the book. “Escobar never slept in the same place for more than two consecutive nights. That included his own prison ‘cell.’ ”
“He used the nearby cottages for parties and alternated sleeping in each of them. They were all beautifully appointed, with planters, hanging baskets and luxurious upholstery and drapes. One of them had a bathroom built like a bunker, with reinforced cement walls that must have been more than 3 feet thick.”
Apparently, the murderous kingpin was particular about where he did his business.
“Escobar had a thing about clean and well-proportioned bathrooms, and each time we raided a safe house that Escobar used, we always found a curiously sparkling bathroom with brand-new fixtures.”
His bedroom and office were also “surprisingly neat.”
“In his adjoining office, we found a film canister in the trash. When we had the film developed, we found pictures of Escobar, which we turned into wanted posters,” Peña writes.
It turns out their fugitive embraced his outlaw image.
“He had every wanted poster that had ever been issued against him in Colombia and just about every article that had appeared about him in his files,” Peña says in the book.
We found letters from mothers offering up their daughters for sex with the drug lord.
“There were also stacks of self-published hardcover books signed by Escobar and his sicarios (hit men),” Peña recounts. “The leather-bound volumes, featuring satirical cartoons making fun of the United States, were each signed by Escobar and encased in gift boxes, which were also made of the finest, supple leather.”
In addition, notes Peña, “we found volumes on how to take care of homing pigeons. Several pigeon coops were located throughout the prison, including outside of Escobar’s cell. The pigeons were used to deliver messages to various Escobar associates and members of the cartel.”
More personal items were discovered in the kingpin’s office at the prison known as La Catedral (The Cathedral).
There, the agents and police came across “lace negligees and sex toys, including vibrators, all neatly arranged in a closet. In Escobar’s correspondence files, which were surprisingly neat and methodically organized, he kept all the threatening notes from his enemies,” says Peña in the book.
He adds: “We also found letters from mothers offering up their daughters for sex with the drug lord.”
And yet “despite his philandering,” Peña writes, “he was devoted to his children.” In 1991, Escobar’s son, Juan Pablo (also known as Sebastian) was about 14 and his daughter, Manuela, was about 7, and they played on the prison’s grounds. “Outside the drug lord’s cell was a sitting area that overlooked a playground, complete with a playhouse that had electricity and running water.”
The two agents worked with Colombian cops who dared Peña to spend the night in the drug lord’s bed.
“I never thought I would enter the lion’s lair,” Peña writes. “I only managed one night in Escobar’s bed.”
He reports that “it was comfortable — large and custom-made, with a base of concrete and two firm mattresses stacked on top of each other.”
“I made sure to change the sheets and when it was time to hit the sack, I crawled under the colorful comforter. An eerie silence enveloped the bedroom, and I tossed and turned, wide awake. Sleep wouldn’t come.”
So he got up, turned on a lamp and found himself staring at a ceramic Virgin Mary clutching a baby Jesus in her arms.
“I couldn’t help thinking how a guy who killed thousands of innocent people could pray to the Virgin Mary, could dare to seek her protection, her blessing.”
The book features a couple of photographs of the hastily left-behind bounty.
One has Peña posing with the cartel leader’s solid-gold gun amidst stacks of money. Another shows Murphy sitting at Escobar’s white desk in the office at La Catedral, surrounded by framed photos, files, a Rolodex and small figures of Colombian National Police officers, which Escobar owned “as a joke to show that he owned the police as well as the entire Colombian government,” Murphy told The Post.
Meanwhile, Escobar was on the lam — and his luck was running out.
Five months after his escape, Colombian authorities tracked him down and local cops killed the drug lord in a shootout.
Murphy, who was nearby but didn’t participate in the shootout, took photos of the body.
“He looked almost nothing like the stocky, mustachioed, smirking villain in the wanted posters,” he writes.
When Escobar had entered prison in 1991, he was chubby-faced and barrel-chested, standing on his 5-foot-5 frame.
But he had “put on a huge amount of weight in hiding. He had a scruffy beard. His blood-splattered blue jeans looked new and were neatly rolled up at the ankles, obviously too long for him.”
The two agents survived their time in Colombia — despite each having a $300,000 bounty on their heads — and their work formed the basis of the hit Netflix show “Narcos.” Murphy retired from the DEA in 2014, while Peña retired one year later.
Looking back, Murphy still can’t believe they lived. More than 400 Colombian cops were killed during the 16 months of their search, “murdered by Escobar’s henchmen.”
Writing from the safety of retirement, Murphy, now 62, remains dazed by his encounter with Escobar.
“Did we really do this? Was it really over?” he writes. “It felt like a dream.”