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Tonight, one of the most notorious narcotics traffickers in history, Pablo
Escobar. By the early 1980s, Pablo Escobar is responsible for 80 % of the
cocaine that is bought and sold in the United States of America.
He was 100 % ruthless.
He was capable of pulling out a gun and opening fire without a moment's remorse.
But to others, they saw him as their savior. He would tell people, you have a
choice. You can take my silver, my money.
Or my lead?
After years trying to capture Escobar, he is finally taken down. But there are
still a lot of questions about what actually happened.
Now, we'll explore the top theories surrounding the mysteries of Pablo
death and the fortune he left behind.
Who was it that really killed Pablo Escobar that day? Many say he was simply
executed. It was the Colombian government.
working against him with a rival cartel. At the cartel's height, 20 % of all the
U .S. $100 bills in circulation were somewhere in Colombia.
This guy had billions of dollars in cash.
And there is a good reason to believe that some of it, if not a lot of it, is
still buried out there, ready to be found.
Who killed Pablo Escobar? And what happened to his fortune?
Medellin, Colombia, 1974.
24 -year -old Pablo Escobar is already a hardened criminal.
In 1974, Medellin, Colombia, is known as a hub for smuggling contraband all over
North and South America. And Pablo Escobar is...
24 years old, and he grew up very poor, so he is always thinking about new ways
of muscling his way into businesses and making money.
He has already established himself as a career criminal, is engaged in auto
theft and fraud and kidnapping, and he's coming of age at a really important
time for Colombia because cocaine has taken off in the United States.
And Colombia is a major supplier of that drug.
In the 1970s in the United States, people find cocaine to be an attractive
drug because attractive people are using it.
Models, politicians, people on Wall Street. And suddenly it became the
drug of the era. And it was insanely addictive and also highly profitable.
Escobar sees that some smuggling operators are getting a lot of money
cocaine. The problem is Escobar does not know how to make cocaine and who to
sell it to.
What Escobar does know is how to muscle in on an operation.
The one thing Pablo Escobar was very good at was violence.
And he learned at a very early age in his criminal activities, with violence
comes control.
He was willing to kill the individual's families, their friends, abducting.
and murdering to prove a point in that he is the one that is in control.
He was 100 % ruthless.
He was capable of going from jovial and friendly to pulling out a gun and
opening fire without a moment's remorse. So he used extreme violence to take
over the emerging cocaine producers, small laboratories in the jungle, into a
cartel under his control called the Medellin Cartel.
Now, Escobar is top dog in charge.
He's the one who is bribing the cops, judges, and they're afraid of him. He
knows how to kill. His method was often referred to as plato o plomo, silver or
lead. If you did what he wanted you to do, you would be handsomely rewarded for
it. And if you didn't do as he wanted, well, someone would plug you full of
lead.
The Medellin cartel becomes an incredibly sophisticated organization.
It has a network of cocaine labs shown all over Colombia. They have airplanes,
helicopters. They also have an island in the Bahamas that serves as a launch
point for shipments of cocaine to the United States.
By the early 1980s, Pablo Escobar is smuggling 15 tons of cocaine into
the U .S. every day.
And pulling in 400 million U .S. dollars a week.
He is responsible for 80 % of the cocaine that is bought and sold in the
States of America. So he is swimming in cash.
We're talking billions of dollars in cash.
Paper money. It's so much money, they don't know what to do with it.
They buy property.
Escobar builds this massive estate.
the Hacienda Napoles, there's an airstrip, there's a soccer field,
mansions, a zoo.
He was spending $2 ,500 a month on rubber bands to hold the stacks
of money together.
Escobar actually gives millions of dollars away to the poor to help them
health care, schools, housing, and he really becomes known as somewhat of a
local homegrown Robin Hood.
At first, Colombian officials were not going against Pablo Escobar. Many of
them were bought off almost immediately, and they liked the money. And Colombia
is flooded with Escobar's cocaine money.
But unfortunately with that money came more violence as well because Escobar by
then had his own army who would kill anybody who stood in his way. According
official records, Pablo Escobar killed over a thousand police officers, more
than 200 judges, politicians, journalists.
He blew up an airliner in an attempt to kill a presidential candidate.
Pablo Escobar is also accused of the November 27th bombing of a Colombian
jetliner just outside Bogota. That killed all 107 people on board.
And at that point, Pablo Escobar had initiated a war with the Colombian
government. In the United States, the American government has identified the
drug trade as a major threat to U .S. national security.
And so President Ronald Reagan formally declares the U .S. will engage in a war
on drugs.
I am today proposing a massive legislative program aimed at stepping up
battle on these two fronts, in our neighborhoods and our schools.
The U .S. government is putting in hundreds of millions of dollars to
the Colombian effort to break the Medellin cartel.
Under pressure, the Colombian government finally turns up the heat.
By 1990, there is essentially a civil war going on in Colombia between the
cartel and the government.
The Colombian government, they get some people who are close to him, but they
can't get the man himself. He's extremely slippery.
So at this point, the United States Drug Enforcement Agency, the DEA, gets
involved. They partner up with Search Block, a group of the most elite of
Colombia's national police.
And Search Block has received from the U .S. this high -tech surveillance that
allows them to track Pablo Escobar's phone calls.
On December 2, 1993, the Search Block tracks Pablo Escobar in a two -story
house in Los Olivos, Medellin.
What happens next is in dispute, but we do know that within a very short time,
news spreads around the world, Escobar has been killed.
Escobar is declared dead at age 44, but his story is far from over.
The official word is that the Colombian National Police were the ones
responsible for taking down Escobar.
The Colombian government wants to assume responsibility because there's a
perception that if the Americans have credit for killing Escobar, to come in
kill a Colombian folk hero would be beyond the pale. The Colombian political
elite want to try to use the killing of Escobar as proof that Colombia has
reformed its ways.
The Colombian government wants to be able to take credit. The U .S.
wants to minimize its own involvement and play up the idea that this was
Colombia's matter. They take care of it. So the idea that...
Escobar is killed by a member of the Colombian National Police.
Serves everybody's interests.
In 1993, there is a lot of pressure on Colombia to capture Pablo Escobar.
They've spent years trying to track him down. He's been on the run.
There's been a lot of investment by the United States in providing funding for
this high -tech equipment that SearchBlock has been able to use to
Escobar's phone calls.
The U .S. government is really putting the pressure on Colombia to take Pablo
Escobar down.
Pablo Escobar was endeared to his family, especially his son, Juan Pablo.
He would talk to Juan Pablo almost every day. He was also talking to his wife.
She was talking to the Colombian press, relaying his messages. This was a fatal
mistake because his phone calls were being traced.
Escobar decides that he's going to talk to his son.
and it's a much longer phone call, so they're on the phone long enough that
can really track the call to its source.
The search block van, which was the unit they were using with their equipment,
then went by that location and did a physical ID. They identified Pablo
standing in a window. To surround the area, they put troops on the roof across
the street, in the back of the house, and then they went in.
As soon as they entered the residence, a shootout occurred.
And Pablo ends up going to the second story, hops onto a roof, and according
the official story, he's running across the roof, and he's shot three times,
once in the leg, once in the back, and he dies from a gunshot to the head.
One of the senior members of the third block, whose name is Hugo Aguilar, makes
a much disputed claim that he was the one who delivered the deadly shot that
killed Pablo Escobar.
In order to strike an individual while running in the head would require a high
level of marksmanship.
So some have questioned whether Aguilar was actually that skilled and could have
made that shot that killed Pablo Escobar. In his book, Killing Pablo,
Bowden questions whether those shots actually are fired by members of the
Columbia National Police.
The bullet went clear through his brain, from his right ear to his left. That's
a really difficult shot.
There are a lot of people speculating, well, what actually happened?
And who might have been there?
And could somebody else have fired the shot?
When cocaine trafficking kingpin Pablo Escobar dies from a gunshot wound to the
head after a shootout with Colombian police in 1993, many in Colombia and the
.S. see it as a cause for celebration.
The Colombian government has been chasing this guy for years. He's
for just this wave of death and destruction throughout the country. So
dies, there are countless parties, including the United States, that are
thrilled about the fact that Escobar has finally been taken down. But the
question still remains, who actually shot and killed Pablo Escobar?
According to the Colombian government, it's the National Police Force,
specifically an elite unit known as Search Block, that is solely responsible
killing Escobar.
The scene of Escobar's death left us with a lot of unanswered questions.
There's a lot of chaos, a lot of anarchy, a lot of confusion as they're
to recover Escobar's body and at the same time collect any evidence.
You have all of these officers that are posing with the photo, allegedly
tampering with the body. You have all of these other people that are there,
plainclothes officers, members of the media, civilians that are just trying to
walk near the body and pose for photos. So a lot of people begin to question the
story due to all of the rumors and all of this activity that's happening near
the body of Pablo Escobar.
Perhaps the official narrative is wrong.
Perhaps the Columbia National Police are not the ones who fired the fatal shot,
but rather members of some other elite agency operating in Columbia.
Some people say that it was in fact the DEA who killed Escobar.
This allegation is not coming out of nowhere.
DEA not only sent his own agents to Colombia, they lived in the headquarters
together with the search block. They participated in many raids.
They were present there at all times except for that final moment, allegedly.
When it comes to the DEA's involvement, there are conflicting accounts.
The official narrative is that the DEA agents were not at the scene. However,
there are members of search block.
who say there were some Americans on the scene.
Javier Pena and Steve Murphy are the two leading DEA agents actively working
with the search block to find and apprehend Escobar.
There is this famous photograph taken of Steve Murphy right next to Escobar's
body after his death, which makes everyone think that perhaps they were
in the killing of Pablo Escobar. But he says he was in the headquarters of the
search block and he could hear everything happening through the unit's
Murphy says that, yes, I did take this photo with Pablo Escobar. It is real.
I only posed with the body after I got to the scene because Colombian officials
wanted me to take a picture with the body knowing that I had invested all of
these months over a year in trying to capture Pablo Escobar. They've been
embedded for months with the search block.
They've been telling them how to do raids. So after all of this association
the search block, why in the world wouldn't Murphy or Pena be there when it
finally happens?
But there are some people that speculate that while maybe Murphy and Pena
weren't there, perhaps there were other Americans that were on the scene.
In Mark Bowden's book, Killing Pablo, he theorizes another idea.
These other Americans were actually part of American special forces.
Army Delta Force.
Delta Force is the most elite U .S. Army force in existence.
They are quiet, scary, competent operators who go down to Columbia at the
request of the DEA and start participating in training Colombian
take down Escobar.
Delta Force goes on countless raids with the search block up to this point. So
it wouldn't be surprising to learn that Delta Force is present when Escobar is
finally found.
One thing that points to Delta Force's involvement in the killing of Escobar is
the kill shot. And the kill shot is a very, very precise shot. To pull off a
shot like this, you have to be somebody that has an extensive amount of training
when it comes to marksmanship. They're also incredibly stealthy.
So... The likelihood that a Delta Force sniper was on the scene that day and
search block didn't know about it is very plausible.
Still, it's clear American officials want the kill attributed to the
not the U .S.
Murphy, in his book, writes, The photo made it seem that an American had killed
Escobar when all the work had actually been done by Colombian law enforcement.
U .S. officials want to conceal the extent of their involvement because they
want to promote the idea that Colombia takes care of Colombian problems.
People from the search bloc, particularly its veterans, are offended
idea that it could have been Americans who killed Pablo Escobar. And it was
disrespectful to the Colombian police who was supposed to take the sole credit
for his death.
However, there's another story.
that angers these veterans even more. And it's the idea of Search Block
alongside other criminals to take out Escobar.
Ten months before narco kingpin Pablo Escobar is finally taken down, he
one of his worst atrocities.
Previously, the Medellin cartel would often be almost surgical in its
application of violence against a specific target. By the early 1990s,
seemed to have abandoned a lot of that mindset.
Specifically, when they detonated a car bomb loaded with 100 kilograms of
dynamite in downtown Bogota.
The attack is just one in a campaign of intimidation run by Escobar since his
escape from jail last year.
At least 20 people were killed.
Many were children being kitted out for the new school year in this crowded
shopping area.
Escobar sets off this mob as revenge.
His family attempted to leave the country. They made it as far as the
Frankfurt, and then they're forced to turn around and go back to Colombia,
they are under guard.
Constantly. So bombing's designed to send a message to the authorities, mess
with my family and I'm going to get you.
The day after that car bomb explodes, there is another retaliation, but this
not from the Colombian government.
This is someone else. A car explodes outside of Pablo Escobar's house and his
mother's home is burned to the ground.
A group quickly takes credit for the attacks.
They call themselves Los Pepes.
Los Pepes stands for people persecuted by Pablo Escobar. So these are his
victims, people who've been affected by his violence, who are coming to avenge
all of the damage that's been done to victims that they know. Many of the
leading figures in Los Pepes are themselves.
cocaine suppliers.
The Cali cartel was the main rival to the Medellin cartel. They're totally
involved in Los Pepes. Los Pepes were matching the level of violence that
Escobar had been known for. So they were abducting and murdering any individual
that was associated with the Medellin cartel. They would kill them, execute
them, hang them from bridges with a sign saying, this is the work of Los Pepes.
If you work for Pablo Escobar, You will be targeted and you will be killed.
This death squad places the Colombian government and these various U .S.
agencies in a bit of a dilemma.
On the one hand, it's nice to see Escobar getting a taste of his own
so to speak. On the other hand, if it seems like they are supporting Los
that's also going to look bad because this is a death squad.
really doing awful things.
The DEA and the Colombian national government have rules that they must
to. Los Pepes had no rules. The only rules were to use extreme violence in
to weed out and kill Pablo Escobar.
In 1993, Los Pepes continues their campaign of killing anyone associated
Pablo Escobar and their families.
And then there are these rumors that perhaps search blocking the Americans
sharing intel.
with Los Pepes and that Los Pepes were on the scene of Pablo Escobar's killing
and perhaps it wasn't anyone from the Colombian government and it wasn't an
American who took the kill shot.
In 2014, so more than 20 years after Escobar's death, a leading figure of Los
Pepes, Diego Murillo, more commonly referred to as Don Berna, spoke up from
prison cell.
According to Don Berna, his brother Rodolfo, who is also a member of Los
is the one that delivers the fatal headshot to Pablo Escobar with an M16
He implies that it was a good distance, and it did happen while Pablo was
running.
According to Don Berna...
After Rodolfo fires the killing shot, the police say get out of here because
Columbia National Police don't want anyone to know that it's actually a
of Los Pepes that killed Pablo Escobar.
Could Los Pepes have been working alongside search block at the scene of
Escobar's death?
Several sources raise concerns that these two forces were directly
for months leading up to the Escobar raid.
Some of the official records indicate that there was some collaboration trying
to locate Pablo Escobar.
There's very much a mindset in search block that the enemy of my enemy is my
friend. If they are collecting information from groups like Los Pepes
the Cali cartel, they're willing to take information anywhere they can get it.
So this sharing of information leads... people to speculate that maybe on the
day that Pablo Escobar was shot and killed, Los Pepe was on the scene and
possibly could have fired the shot that killed Pablo Escobar. The idea that the
Colombian government might have been partnered with a criminal element like
Pepe's to kill a different criminal kind of suggests that Colombia hasn't really
put aside its violent and corrupt ways.
Soon after Don Baranath made his statement, someone even closer to
forward to offer another view of how Escobar died.
In 2014, Escobar's son, Juan Pablo, claimed that his father told him
times that he would shoot himself in the right ear to avoid being captured
alive.
He's already been shot in the thigh and the back. He's not going to get up. He's
not going to be able to escape this time. The best thing to do... According
Juan Pablo, he finishes himself off.
Escobar's mantra was mejor una tumba en Colombia que una carcel en Estados
Unidos, which means better a grave in Colombia than a jail cell in the United
States. Given Pablo Escobar's fear of extradition, it's not surprising that he
would have gamed out what he would do if he was ever caught.
He was a king. He was an emperor. When you think about putting him in a cage
the rest of his life for Pablo Escobar, it was inconceivable.
Supermax prison in the United States is no picnic.
El Chapo, the famous Mexican drug lord, is in one now.
He spends 23 out of 24 hours every day in solitary confinement.
It's a miserable experience.
It's not entirely out of the realm of possibility that he would have chosen to
take his own life.
rather than be captured, especially once he knew he was cornered and there was
no way out.
The photos of Escobar on the rooftop the day he died shows him lying next to his
Sig Sauer pistol.
And that's exactly the same gun that Juan Pablo said his dad would use to
himself.
Escobar's family claims more evidence points to suicide.
They say that when his body was exhumed for DNA analysis in 2006,
Experts say there's no way Pablo Escobar took his own life. If he did, there
would be gunshot residue, and there wasn't any. But still, the family is
that Pablo Escobar went out his own way on his own terms.
Who killed Pablo Escobar is still debated, but that's not the only mystery
left behind.
In 1993, as authorities were closing in on Escobar, he was featured in Forbes
magazine's billionaire issue, writing, We suspect that Escobar will soon leave
this list, perhaps this earth.
By that year's end, Escobar was dead.
But the questions about what happened to his money live on.
Pablo Escobar is swimming in cash.
We're talking billions of dollars in cash.
Think about that for a second. Paper money.
It's so much money, they don't know what to do with it.
They plow it into all kinds of businesses, land, buildings, into art,
but they barely make a dent.
It's estimated the Medellin cartel loses about 10 % of revenues annually.
amounting to $2 .1 billion because its cash stockpiles are destroyed by pests
and the elements.
We're talking about cash literally rotting away in these secret stashes.
Rats and insects chew their way into the bundles.
Moisture ruins the bills.
Mold gets into these bundles as well.
And Escobar is making so much money that he just doesn't care.
It just gets written off as spoilage. Just another line on the balance sheet.
When Pablo Escobar died, he was worth about $30 billion, but only about
$112 million was actually recovered, which raises the question and the
speculation of...
Where did all of that money go?
The Colombian government can seize all of the physical assets that are
impossible to hide. So they grab the houses and they grab the vehicles and
grab the boats and they grab the airplanes.
But what they couldn't account for was the enormous volume of cash that had
flown into Colombia.
So it's to be assumed that after Escobar's death... members of his family
members of rival cartel other members of his cartel are going to descend upon it
and take whatever they can escobar's operation was notoriously secretive and
compartmentalized no one knew where escobar's money was and in fact perhaps
escobar himself didn't know because there was so much money coming in for 10
years and he was hiding it in so many places that possibly he forgot about
of these places There are many rumors about his money still being up for
so lots of treasure hunters begin to search all the places where he spent
time. One of those places where you might look was the prison that Escobar
built to house himself, La Catedral.
In 1991,
The government is so tired of chasing Escobar. So they agree to a really crazy
deal that Escobar proposes to them.
Escobar comes up with what he sees as a perfectly reasonable compromise.
As long as he's allowed to build his own jail, he promises to stay there. And so
Colombia can take credit for having imprisoned him. And amazingly, the
government goes for it.
In June of 1991, Escobar surrendered to Colombian authorities.
and is subsequently jailed in a lavish prison called La Catedral. La Catedral
a fortress. This is how Escobar can protect himself, not only from the army
the state, but also from the rival drug traffickers.
Escobar's prison has jacuzzis, televisions, waterfalls, hot tubs.
You name it, he has every luxury he wants in there.
From within those walls...
He can continue to operate the cartel as normal. His subordinates come and go.
He is still getting money delivered to him by his associates on the outside.
How are they able to get it past the guards? Well, they're doing that by
stashing the money in milk cans.
It is rumored that as much as a million dollars in cash is stuffed into these
milk cans and using the cover of the Mountain Morning Fog.
that is surrounding the cathedral. They use this fog as a way to sneak into the
prison to bury these milk cans in the ground.
Although being in La Catedral gives Escobar a sense of safety from his rival
gangs, it also starts making him paranoid.
He starts believing that some of his associates are being disloyal to him,
he has them killed right there in the prison.
Of course, this is a bit of a problem because he's got guards outside.
According to one report, he burned the bodies and holds a barbecue outside in
order to mask the smell.
Colombian authorities could no longer ignore the fact that Escobar was running
his business as usual and killing people in La Catedral. The Colombian
government makes a decision to move Escobar to a different prison.
And as the army approaches, Escobar, of course, finds out about it, and he
escapes one night in July of 1992.
Escobar's hurried exit raises a question.
What happened to the cash they've supposedly been burying for 13 months?
It is reported that this was not something that Escobar saw coming.
So he did not have a whole lot of time to prepare his escape.
He gathered up what he could and headed for the hills.
The moment Escobar escapes, it basically is left abandoned.
And when it's abandoned, the treasure hunters come with pitchforks, with
shovels, with sledgehammers, and they search for money everywhere, but they
out empty -handed.
It seems obvious that there should be milk cans full of cash still on the
premises. Why they haven't been found is a real mystery, which leads to the
possibility that there's still a whole lot of money out there to be grabbed.
One person specifically says he knows where it is, and that person is the
man of the organization and also Pablo Escobar's brother.
In October 1992.
While Colombian authorities desperately search for fugitive drug lord Pablo
Escobar, they get something of a consolation prize.
His brother, Roberto.
For a lot of Escobar's career, his chief money man was his brother
Roberto. And in 1992, Roberto decided he was tired of all the violence.
He gave himself up and was sentenced to prison.
Roberto Escobar spent 14 years in jail, but he's not away from the violence
entirely. There is a letter bomb that's delivered to him in prison, and it
severely injures him. He is blind in one eye. In 2009, shortly after his release
from prison, Roberto Escobar publishes his memoir, The Accountant's Story.
The book provides various clues as to where Escobar's treasure could be.
According to Roberto Escobar, the Medellin cartel wasn't laundering that
money. Instead, they were stuffing it in plastic bags and burying it all over
the countryside of Colombia.
We're talking about an amazing amount of cash.
In fact, it's estimated that at the cartel's height...
20 % of all the U .S. $100 bills in circulation were somewhere in
Colombia. There has to be a good chunk of it still scattered out there in these
remote hiding places.
Part of the reason that people don't know where to look for the money is that
Pablo was so secretive about where he hid it. The DEA agent Steve Murphy says
that Escobar would have subordinates shrink -wrap huge stocks
of money, hide them somewhere, and then he would have them killed so that others
wouldn't find out where the money is.
Pablo Escobar didn't keep maps because he didn't want anybody to find these
locations, and he certainly didn't share that information with a lot of people.
And his brother, the accountant, he didn't know as well.
In 2009... Around the same time Roberto publishes his memoir and 16 years after
Pablo's death, over $5 million is found in the Colombian jungle near one of
Escobar's hidden cocaine labs.
A few months later, $10 million is located on the grounds of the Hacienda
Napoles, which is about 90 miles outside of Medellin and is one of Pablo
Escobar's more famous country estates. But it isn't until...
2015 that the biggest find takes place.
65 -year -old farmer Jose Mariana Cartolos was digging a trench
in his land to irrigate it and came upon something buried in the field. He
encounters a bunch of big blue barrels. He opens these up and they're full of
cash. $600 million.
He was shocked to find it. What's more shocking, though, is the fact that he
contacted the authorities and informed them about this money and gave it to
them. This farmer was just out doing his annual planting.
He had no connection to Escobar. He had no idea that this stuff was planted on
his property, but there it was. And that tells us a lot about Escobar's
treasure. This leads some people to believe that some of it, if not a lot of
is still buried out there, ready to be found.
When it comes to Pablo Escobar's money, the Colombian government has a very
simple message for its citizens.
Keep digging.
But farm fields and caves aren't the only potential hiding places for
cash. In 2020...
Another discovery has people thinking that there's a lot out there in various
safe houses that Escobar was known to use.
In 2020, 27 years after his death, Pablo Escobar is once again making headlines
across the world when his nephew makes a surprising claim.
Nicholas Escobar comes forward. He's been living in one of Pablo Escobar's
former estates. He's Pablo Escobar's nephew.
And he says that he has this vision that Escobar is telling him to look for some
of the stashed riches in one of the walls.
One day he goes and he takes apart the walls in this one particular part of the
mansion. And lo and behold, he claims that he unearthed $18 million in cash.
This got treasure hunters excited all over the world because they know that
there are so many houses that used to belong to Pablo Escobar. That money is
found inside of structure.
And Escobar, we knew, liked to bury money and maybe hide it in caves. But it
turns out he's also hiding it inside ordinary buildings.
And this is an age -old way of concealing cash that gangsters have been
since time immemorial.
But that means any property that Escobar spent any time at at all might be the
hiding place for untold riches.
Just within Colombia, Escobar owned 140 different properties, but he was also
known to own them in all sorts of other places, including the United States, by
the way. He hadn't been to the United States in a long time for obvious
but he owned them.
And maybe those places have money stashed in them.
Pablo Escobar had to be hopping from property to property just to elude
authority. So chances are he's probably stashing cash at each place he's going
to because he has so much of it. The theory that money could be hidden in the
walls and floors of the places that Pablo Escobar stayed and his houses is
confirmed by his brother, Roberto, who said that that was something that he
especially when he was on the run.
Roberto says in addition to all the properties that Pablo owned within
there are safe houses in Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami, New York City. All of
these could conceivably have large amounts of cash on the premises.
And Roberto Escobar is not the only one who's confirming this. Juan Pablo, Pablo
Escobar's son, says he also witnessed his father stashing money in some of the
walls and floorboards of the different safe houses where he stayed.
After Escobar's death, Juan Pablo says his family went back and looked in some
of the places he knew that his father had hidden money and it wasn't there
anymore. So he believes it was taken by others.
But that hasn't stopped other treasure hunters from buying up former Escobar
properties and searching for loot.
One of the properties that has been linked to Pablo Escobar's drug
activities was a mansion in Miami.
And the owners found hidden safes in that house. But when they opened them,
were empty. But this is an important find because it goes to show that Pablo
Escobar could have other properties in Miami or New York.
California, in which safes or hidden compartments could have money inside
We don't know how thorough the Colombian government was in searching for Pablo's
money, cash, in these various safe houses. But Pablo Escobar had so many
properties that we don't even know where all of these safe houses are. And the
people living in these homes now probably aren't even aware that Pablo
stayed there.
So this may be one of those George Washington slept here scenarios where he
stayed at hundreds of different places and may have stored cash there.
There's probably billions of dollars sprinkled all across Colombia and other
places that were central to the drug trade still waiting to be found.
Pablo Escobar's famous mugshot can still be found on T -shirts and knickknacks
across Colombia and, in fact, the world.
and 15 ,000 people live in housing he built for the poor in a section of
Medellin still known as Barrio Escobar.
Despite all the suffering and damage Pablo Escobar caused, many people remain
fascinated by his life and will continue to search for answers surrounding his
death and for the money he allegedly hid. I'm Lawrence Fishburne. Thank you
watching History's Greatest Mysteries.
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