By Mark Gray
1:00pm PST, Dec 20, 2023
_
All right, stop. Vanilla Ice has met a lot of people in his day, but he's now revealing that Colombian drug kingpin Pablo Escobar used to hang out at his Florida house all the time in the early '90s.
"I hung out with Pablo Escobar many, many times," he said, adding that many colorful characters made his former Star Island compound a home away from home. "They would land helicopters at my house constantly. I would have food just for them in the refrigerators. I had my maids and everybody clean up after they left."
Keeping clicking to learn why Vanilla Ice didn't think his meetups with Pablo were such a big deal…
MORE: Follow Wonderwall on MSN for more fun celebrity & entertainment photo galleries and content
_
Back in the early '90s, Vanilla Ice (real name: Robert Van Winkle) knew little about Pablo Escobar.
"I didn't have Google," he told Vlad TV in a December 2023 interview. "I didn't know who these people are. I thought they were businessmen. They liked to race boats like I did."
Pablo, Vanilla Ice added, loved competition, so they even raced their cars once. The former rapper proudly recalled when his Porsche "smoked" Pablo's Ferrari Testarossa.
MORE: Follow Wonderwall on MSN for more fun celebrity & entertainment photo galleries and content
_
Vanilla Ice and Pablo Escobar grew so close that the godfather of the Medellin Cartel would pick him up for vacations.
"They would take me in helicopters to these great events and race boats and look at all the cool stuff they were making," he told Vlad TV in December 2023. "That's the kind of stuff we did. We would go out and race boats. We were always on boats. So there was always a bunch of bikinis floating around."
MORE: Follow Wonderwall on MSN for more fun celebrity & entertainment photo galleries and content
_
In a way, Pablo Escobar was the catalyst for innovations in boat racing.
"He did a lot of great things for the boat industry because the money he spread around to I guess traffic the drugs also spread into the racing boat community," Vanilla Ice told TMZ on Dec. 19, 2023.
Due to the impact of Pablo's money and influence, boats got faster and sleeker and racers' lifestyles got more glamorous, Vanilla Ice noted.
_
Right before Pablo Escobar was gunned down and killed in 1993, Vanilla Ice starting suspecting some nefariousness. The "Ice Ice Baby" rapper recalled being questioned by the FBI and being surveilled while having lunch with a friend.
"It's unbelievable how many things that I was just clueless to back in the '90s and you don't ask questions and you're just racing boats," he said. "I was basically young and dumb."
