Reminder: 7 Famous Figures Who Were Absurdly Hard To Kill

How He Went Down

A special task force consisting of U.S. Delta Force operators, SEAL Team 6 and the Colombian police was formed with the explicit purpose of taking Pablo down. They were known as the Search Bloc, and they were in no way fucking around.

We are in no way fucking around.

They joined a posse of vigilantes known as Los Pepes, made up of the friends and family of the people that Pablo had murdered. They tracked Escobar to a barrio and a bullet festival ensued.

The shootout led to the rooftops of Medellin, with Escobar jumping from building to building, absorbing gunshot wounds to the legs and torso. Finally fed up with the hail of gunfire, he shot himself in the head to avoid capture.

However, the authorities claim that the fatal shot was from one of the several thousand they fired at him, a story which is supported by the painting below depicting Escobar as a King Kong-sized Jack Black being attacked by rubber space capsules.

There was also a book written about Escobar called Killing Pablo. Chances are if the title of a book about you refers to how you were kicked off the planet, you probably stepped on a few too many toes.

The only thing missing from this picture is Richard Dreyfuss measuring his bite radius.

It should be noted he shot the three policemen while trying to escape an attempted murder charge. So it was like punching your wife in the face to get her to stop lying about being punched in the face.

How He Went Down

Ned Kelly and his gang took over seventy hostages at the Glenrowan Inn after learning a train full of policemen were on their way to arrest them. Despite an attempt to derail the train, the police managed to corner Kelly and his men in the inn. The outlaws, taking the next logical step, donned homemade suits of motherfucking battle armor.

Kelly marched straight outside and started firing at the police while the rest of his gang remained behind. Bullets pinged off Kelly's armor, but his legs and groin were comparatively unprotected (a huge oversight, in our opinion).

Body armor as designed by Cracked Staff.

Kelly took enough shots below the belt that he eventually went down. But while the rest of his gang was killed during the shootout, Kelly survived and was arrested. Two weeks later they put him on trial and ordered his execution.

When the judge handed down the death sentence, Kelly responded, "I will see you there when I go." The judge died a few weeks later, proving that on top of everything else, Kelly was a dark wizard.

Quiet, I'm reading this shit.

After Lenin died, Trotsky was expelled from the Communist party and kicked out of Russia. In return, Trotsky attempted to enter the United States to testify before Congress that Stalin was a major douchebag. Upon hearing this, Stalin decided his next move would be to expel Trotsky from life.

How He Went Down

Trotsky was denied entry into the U.S. and eventually found his way to a home in Mexico City. It was there that he was attacked by Ramon Mercader, an assassin working for Stalin.

While Trotsky was home reading some shit, Mercader buried an ice axe into the back of his skull.

This just pissed Trotsky off.

He stood up from his desk, axe in head, and spit on Mercader. Then he went after the assassin, wrestling with him. Trotsky's bodyguards heard the commotion (where the fuck were they a few minutes ago?) and came running in to subdue the assassin and get Trotsky to the hospital.

"I gotta say, you seem- Oh. Okay, I see the problem."

Trotsky made it to the hospital and underwent surgery before finally dying a day later from complications related to being brained with a goddamn ice axe. We're hoping he lived long enough to fire those bodyguards.

How He Went Down

As he left the cathedral in Quito, Moreno was brutally attacked by a group of assassins. Armed with machetes, the group sliced through the president's neck, skull and brain, and severed his left arm and right hand.

He stayed on his feet. The man was the Black Knight from Monty Python.

Undeterred, his attackers shot him six times in the chest. He was slashed a total of fourteen times before he finally fell to the ground. Even then he was alive enough to write "God does not die" on the ground... in his own fucking blood.

After the assassins fled, the cathedral priests took Moreno back inside the church, where he lived for fifteen more minutes. When his body was examined after death, physicians observed he had balls of wrought iron [citation needed].

Moreno's left testicle, artist's conception.

Magellan was hit with a poison dart almost immediately, but he trucked onward into the mass of native warriors, possibly shouting the Portuguese equivalent of "MOTHERFUCKERS!" as he did so.

He was stabbed in the face with a bamboo spear, to which he responded by burying his lance in the attacker. Magellan tried to draw his sword to keep fighting, but his arm was slashed and soon his leg as well, and he fell to the ground more or less mortally wounded.

Actual photograph of Magellan.

The natives then surrounded him and began stabbing and clubbing him as he lay defenseless. He kept looking up to see if his crew had made it safely back to their boats and, upon seeing that they finally had, Magellan allowed himself to die. We like to think that with his last breath, he screamed and chucked a spear that left a single cut in Lapu's cheek.

How He Went Down

After Rasputin recovered from the by-all-accounts gnarly stab wound delivered by the prostitute, a group of Russian nobles decided to finish the job by poisoning him to death with tainted wine and cake. History cannot agree whether any of the poison ever entered Rasputin's system (the poison in the cakes probably evaporated during baking), but this did little to diminish the conspirators' surprise when Rasputin didn't die.

So, Rasputin continued to hang out, eating cake, until one of the nobles finally grew impatient and shot Rasputin in the back. Content that he was dead, the murderers left the palace. One member of the party forgot his coat though, and when he returned to collect it, Rasputin sprang up from the floor like Skeet Ulrich in Scream and started strangling him.

The others arrived in time to shoot Rasputin three more times in the back, dropping him to the floor. But was he dead? Fuck no. He was still struggling to stand, so the conspirators clubbed the everloving shit out of him.

They wrapped Rasputin's body in a sheet and dumped him in the freezing Neva River. When they found Rasputin's body later, riddled with poison, gunshot holes and club wounds, they determined he had died... of hypothermia.

It was evident the bastard had managed to partially claw his way out of his wrappings, and if he had done it a few minutes faster, he probably would have wound up on the assassins' doorstep, dripping wet and pissed off.

We're guessing the conspirators slept with the lights on every night for the rest of their lives.

I am under your fucking bed.

You can read more of Tom's stuff at startthemachine.tumblr.com.

For more historical badassery, check outThe 5 Most Badass Presidents of All-Time. Or have a look at some truly bizarre deaths in history in The 5 Historical Figures Who Died The Weirdest Deaths.