Vanilla Ice Was Friends With Drug Lord Pablo Escobar

Vanilla Ice says he was friends with Pablo Escobar but didn't know he was a drug lord.

Vanilla Ice Talks About Being Friends With Pablo Escobar

Vanilla Ice recently sat down with VladTV for a tell-all interview covering his entire career. In part 12 of the lengthy conversation published on Nov. 30, the Texas-bred rapper opened up about how he's maintained his wealth through the decades. In telling one of several stories from his time spent as a resident of the swanky Star Island in Miami, he explained his friendship with the late Pablo Escobar. According to Ice, he was completely clueless at the time that he was buddy-buddy with a cocaine kingpin.

"I hung out with Pablo Escobar many, many times," Vanilla Ice explains in the video below. "Everybody from Cocaine Cowboys, and we were all friends and I took first place in the Miami Off-Shore Grand Prix. They would land helicopters in my house constantly on Star Island."

He continues: "They would take me in the helicopter, we would go these great events and race boats. I never questioned, we didn't have Google. I don't know who these people are. I thought they were businessmen."

Who Was Pablo Escobar?

While it may have been unbeknownst to Vanilla Ice, Pablo Escobar is one of the most notorious criminals in history. Between the 1970s and the early 1990s, he served as head of Columbia's infamous Medellín Cartel. Outside of running drugs across all types of international lines, Escobar was responsible for countless gruesome murders, kidnappings and political corruption. Before Pablo Escobar died in 1993, his reported net worth was upwards of $30 billion.