He was a star in his own right, and he went out like a supernova. A ruthless killer,
loved by his family and hated by many, his actions changed our world.
But what happened after his death? What happened to his beloved family? What went
down with his cartel? Was he really connected to the CIA? And what happened to those billions
of dollars he made as the world’s most successful drug-trafficking entrepreneur?
On December 2, a day after his birthday, thanks to the help of US intelligence, Colombian special
forces found Escobar at a house in Medellin. He tried to escape but was gunned down on a
roof. That’s the official story, anyway; you’ll hear later what his family thinks about that.
25,000 people, believing Escobar was more of
a Robin Hood than a cold-faced killer, attended his funeral.
After all, he’d built schools and hospitals and invested money in much-needed infrastructure,
which some people said was more than they ever got from their corrupt government.
Escobar was gone, but the drug trade was barely interrupted. Americans didn’t go without their
fix. Europeans still piled into their discotechs. Before we talk about homeless hippos, the CIA,
family, and billions of dollars that went missing, we should discuss what happened
to the coke business. During Escobar's time in power, it was said that about 80 percent of the
world’s cocaine came from his Medellín cartel. When it folded, it didn’t mean 80 percent of the
world’s cocaine users were suddenly left wanting. If you walk down the streets of Medellin today,
you’ll no doubt come across hawkers shouting "rocks" (cocaine), “wheels” (benzos),
“blones” (ganja joints), or maybe even “tusibi” (a ketamine, ecstasy, mescaline mash-up). The
drugs didn’t stop being sold in Colombia and elsewhere after Escobar was dead, far from it.
Sure, murders decreased in Colombia, from 350 per 100,000 in 1992 to 15.5 per 100,000
in 2022, but drug consumption has never really changed. That’s why critics of
the Drug War call policing it a game of “whack-a-mole.” You take out one head honcho,
and he’s immediately replaced. Queues stretch for miles of folks wanting in on the very lucrative
business of selling and trafficking drugs. During Escobar’s heyday in 1991, it was reported
that there were about 574,000 first-time users of cocaine in the US. In 1998, when Escobar was
long dead, there were 934,000 first-time users in the US. That is an increase of a whopping
63%. If you look at various charts and graphs, coke use has remained steady over many years.
After millions upon millions of dollars had been spent chasing Escobar, someone else just took over
the reins. There was a power vacuum, which always means violence, but the Cali Cartel soon took over
most of the cocaine business. Once many more millions had been spent on getting rid of those
guys, the Norte de Valle cartel did the business, and so on and so on, the vicious cycle continued,
and it continues today because the black market is just too alluring for folks without
many options in life. It’s too alluring for the cops and politicians who regularly take bribes.
As a DEA agent who chased Escobar and later the Cali Cartel explained, “We're taking down cartels,
and another cartel is born, and what we tell people is as long there's a demand for this
nasty type of drugs that are out there, there's going to be people that are going to take a chance
in sending their dope to make a quick dollar.” Nothing really changed after Escobar bit the dust
in terms of Americans and Europeans being able to hoover up rails with abandon. Killing Escobar was
about as useful as taking out 100,000 locusts when your crops are being eaten by six billion of them.
It did end the Medellin cartel, though, thanks in part because of the actions of Maria Escobar.
She took her family to Africa, Germany, and other places,
but they didn’t want her or her kids there. She had a bitter taste in her mouth in those days,
in some ways loving Pablo but also hating him. She said many years later, after she’d
changed her name to Victoria Eugenia Henao: “I endured affairs, insults, humiliations,
lies, loneliness, raids, death threats, terrorist attacks, kidnapping attempts on
my children, and even long periods of confinement and exile. All for love.”
Still, she liked the cash when it was coming in. She didn’t mind sending helicopters out
on errands when she was at the Hacienda Napoles. She was ok with hippos. She didn’t like much of
the other stuff, though, especially when both she and Pablo knew the end was coming for him.
She loved him enormously at that point, so it was heartbreaking for her when he finally took her in
his arms and said he had to hide out for a while. She later said that was the first time she’d ever
seen him cry in their long relationship. Pablo shook his son's hand and kissed him on the cheek;
that was the last time the family saw him. He was dead 75 days later.
She and the kids eventually settled in Buenos Aires,
Argentina, where they changed their names. That at least gave them anonymity, but then in 1999,
Maria was arrested with her son Juan on charges of money laundering. They both did a stint in prison,
although there wasn’t much evidence against them. Juan got out early,
but Maria was locked up for nearly two years. She said it was all a setup. They’d been done
just because of who they were. She didn’t have any of her husband’s cash. On her release, she said:
“They want to try the ghost of Pablo Escobar because they want to prove that
Argentina is combatting drug trafficking.” She managed to stay out of the spotlight
after that but was back in it again some 20 years later when she wrote a book called “Mrs. Escobar:
My Life with Pablo.” In it, she explained her relationship with this prince of darkness,
whom she still loved despite what he’d done. She might have been naïve as a kid, but she knew how
they got their money. She said, “I wasn’t having such a good life,” and explained that having a
giraffe at home isn’t as great as it might sound. To rub salt in her wounds, she and Juan got
arrested again in 2018 and charged with money laundering again, but nothing came of it. Being an
Escobar, even after a name change, was never easy. Juan said airlines wouldn’t even allow him on
flights before he changed his name. He was cursed and likely will be for the rest of his life.
Manuela Escobar is 38 now. She also didn’t mind all that money when things were good.
It felt pretty cool when she was young when she got everything she ever wanted for her birthday.
There’s a story about how she asked her dad for a unicorn, so Pablo stapled a cow’s horn to a
horse’s head and glued some wings to its back. Apparently, the horse died from an infection.
There’s also a story that says one time Pablo and Manuela and the rest of the family were high up
in the Medellin mountainside when it started to get really cold. They ran out of firewood,
and Manual complained she was cold, so Pablo burned money to the tune
of two million dollars. He was earning an estimated $70 million a day at that point,
so burning two million was like you throwing a couple of dollars into a fire.
She changed her name to Juana Manuela Marroquin Santos. She’s tried to stay out of the spotlight
all her life, especially after her mother and brother were imprisoned. She knows better than
to bring attention to herself, so it’s unlikely you will see her starring in TikTok videos anytime
soon. She lives in constant fear even now, suffering from bouts of severe depression,
always scared someone will recognize her. Her brother is completely different. Juan has
spoken in detail about his life, culminating in a book called “Pablo Escobar: My Father.”
A talented guy; he isn’t just an author but also an architect and entrepreneur. Now in his mid-40s,
he will talk to anyone who asks about his father’s sins. He’s apologized for what happened,
but he’s also critical of the people who chased his father around for so many years.
Juan certainly isn’t afraid to speak his mind, appearing on podcasts and talking about his
strange upbringing. He’s said he’s just thankful his father’s enemies allowed him to stay alive
because they could have killed him so easily. He once said, “My father was just trying to be my
father.” Juan was once asked, who trafficked the most drugs in the 1980s, your father or
George Bush? He answered, “Haha…You did your homework.” For him, governments and officials
were sometimes just as dodgy as his father. Juan was once in a house with his sister and
mother when the Cali cartel blew it up, thinking Pablo was still there. “There was a lot of dust
and glass everywhere,” said Juan, “Everything was destroyed.” He looked up from his bed,
and instead of seeing the bedroom ceiling, he saw the sky because the explosion had taken
off the ceiling and the house roof. He said it was a “miracle” that they weren’t hurt.
Juan also said that the TV show Narcos glamorized his father’s life,
which he said was unfortunate because the reality is that life was not pleasant
at all. It was brutal, despite the fancy houses and flamingos in the garden. Still,
he also said his father always showed him lots of love and was always honest with him.
When Juan was about nine, Pablo told him, “I am a bandit. That’s what I do.” What’s amusing is that
he said his father was extremely vain, spending hours doing his hair and looking at himself in the
mirror. He cheated at Monopoly, and when he played soccer, the game wasn’t over until he was winning.
He said his father knew he’d be killed when he started using the phone to contact his family, but
he was willing to sacrifice himself. Otherwise, his family would likely get murdered. Juan
actually believes the Colombian forces didn’t kill his father. That’s a lie, he says. Pablo Escobar,
he said, embraced the ultimate sacrifice. But what about those houses? Did
Juan get any money when they were sold? The answer is no, or at least not very much.
In 1991, when Pablo made a deal with the Colombian government so he wouldn’t be extradited to the US,
he agreed to be imprisoned. There was a caveat, though. He wanted to build his own prison. So,
he did, and it was a place of sheer luxury and opulence called La Cathedral.
It had a casino, a disco, saunas, a swimming pool,
and a soccer pitch that was once visited by the great Diego Maradona – himself a fan of cocaine.
Escobar also used to get vanloads of prostitutes sent up there so he could party with them all
night long. His incarceration was a joke in terms of justice. It rankled the US authorities.
After Escobar died, people looked for all that cash he had, and they turned this
posh prison upside down. There are rumors that some money was found, but we can’t say
if they are true. The place was abandoned for a while until some monks took it over.
The same happened to the luxury house he named after his daughter, La Manuela. It was bombed
with 200kg of TNT just months before Escobar was killed. Reports say the group that did it
was the “People Persecuted by Pablo Escobar” an outfit, hired by the Cali cartel. The cops
apparently turned up after and relieved the house of its money and drugs. Since then,
it’s been abandoned, although it still sees the odd tourist hoping to find some swag.
Pablo even had an entire apartment building in Medellin he named the Monaco Building. Yet again,
after he died, people flocked to it, hoping to find something of value or just wanting to see
how the big man lived. No one found anything. Some 20 years after his death, the mayor of
the city said he was sick of people visiting that place, and he had it blown up. He told the press:
“I would say to people who want to come to our city, you are welcome,
but please respect the story of our victims. They still exist. So much pain still exists.”
He had a point. In a ten-year period, while Escobar was the country’s biggest drug kingpin,
46,612 people died in the related violence, many at the hands of the Medellin cartel. Still,
this is a tiny number compared to how many people in total have died in almost a century of the war
on drugs. Since prohibition started anyway, with the US's racist drug war chief, Harry Anslinger.
This brings us to Escobar’s mansion and zoo. What happened to the thousands of
animals after he was taken out on that roof? As soon as he died, the authorities swooped in to
seize this place, no doubt filling their pockets as they did it. They took all the animals from
his zoo and sent them to zoos all over Colombia, but the hippos were just too big to move around,
so they left them there, hoping they’d just die. They didn’t. They flourished,
and now people talk about the rise of the “cocaine hippos.”
We kid you not. They’ve become an invasive species, living in rivers, numbering perhaps over
100, becoming the largest herd of hippos outside of Africa. Experts say that if there’s no cull,
numbers could go to 1,400 by 2034. Go hippos! Talk about having the will to survive! Still,
with no natural predators around, survival hasn’t been all that tough.
The Hacienda Nápoles is now a theme park, home again to some exotic animals. There is also
an aquarium, a water park, and a museum where you can see stuff relating to Escobar’s life.
It seems some visitors aren’t all that interested in the fact that the guy who built this place
was one of the richest people in the world and possibly the richest criminal ever to live. We
looked at recent TripAdvisor reviews, and not many people mention Pablo Escobar. The last one reads:
“It is very famous for the animals; there were many animals and water attractions.
the service is good; I liked to see different animals; I would come back.”
There were other properties, too, including a 6,500-square-foot mansion in Miami Beach,
but the family saw no cash from it since the US government took it. A house in Tulum,
Mexico, was just left to rot. But what about Escobar’s hidden
cash? Where the hell are all those billions? If they aren’t in his houses
and his family doesn’t have them, then who got them? Surely someone must have
broken bad and is now living like a king. In 2020, Pablo’s nephew, Nicolás Escobar,
said he’d found a cool $18 million of the money. It was hidden in a wall in one of
Pablo’s old apartments. Nicolás had been living there for about five years when he made the find.
This kid deserved the cash for what he’d put up with while running with his uncle
back in the day. One time one of Pablo’s enemies captured him. Nicolás explained,
“I was tortured for seven hours. Two of my workers were attacked with a chainsaw.”
It seems most or all of the cash was unusable, so maybe Nic didn’t get any compensation for
his troubles. Still, 18 million bucks was peanuts to a man that spent the equivalent of the average
American’s entire life earnings in 2022 just to keep his whining daughter warm for an hour or two.
Where’s the rest of the cash? Well, you can bet a lot of it
was taken by officials on an unofficial basis. Drug money the world over, even in the US, is
still often ‘confiscated’ while never being put on the books. Hello Baltimore Gun Trace Task Force…
The Colombian cops would have taken a lot, but most of the cash and assets went to the Colombian
government. Some of his gang looted cash, and what was left was signed over by his family to
his enemies, the Cali cartel and Los PEPES. Juan said after his father’s death,
the cartels went to him and his mother and said, “We are taking everything, all the money we spent
fighting your father. If you don’t give it to us, you are dead.” Juan told them, take what you see,
everything; empty my bank accounts. It’s all yours. He had to hand over $4 million immediately
just to stay alive. Of course, the cartels worried Juan would continue doing his father’s business.
Juan said his father had always made sure they’d be left with cash if he died,
but Juan’s aunt Alba apparently stole some of it. Juan once explained, “I needed her to retrieve an
unknown amount of cash that my father had hidden in two stashes at the property we
called ‘the blue house.’ It was time to get it so we could have some financial breathing room.”
Breathing room was about $60 million, of which he saw little. Alba went looking for it and
returned to tell him, “Juan Pablo, there was only a little bit of money at the blue house,
that’s it.” Since Alba had a reputation for dealing with people as her brother did,
Juan didn’t accuse her of lying. Anyway, another guy nicknamed “Fatty” also knew
about that stash. Juan later said Alba probably took the money. Whatever the case,
Pablo’s nearest and dearest were left up poop creek without a paddle after his death.
Another thing we found out after his death was how much Escobar’s smugglers were paid. One of them,
an American named Roger Reaves, said he liked doing business with Escobar. He said Escobar
was always friendly, and if you didn’t cross him, you’d be ok. Reaves’ American family even stayed
in Colombia and got the royal treatment from Escobar. Still, had Reaves cheated, lied, or run
off with the coke, you can bet his family would have been given the medieval prisoner treatment.
Reaves had a plane, and that plane made him quite wealthy. Escobar told Reaves when they
first met that for every kilo that gets to the US, he gets $5000. Reaves asked how much
would be going in one shipment, to which Escobar replied, 300 to 500 kilos. That was $1.5 million
to $2.5 million in one eight-hour trip back in the late 80s. That’s as much as $6 million
today for a day’s work. Now you understand why the war on drugs will never be won.
Reaves dropped another bombshell, bigger than how much cash you could make with
Escobar. He said when former US president Bill Clinton was the governor of Arkansas,
a smuggler and former US special forces soldier named Barry Seal paid Clinton
millions of dollars so he could land coke-filled planes in Mena, Arkansas,
without any trouble. We can’t say if that is true, it’s never been proven, of course, but when you
research what went down in Mena back in the day, it certainly leaves you scratching your head.
Moving on, in 2015, a 65-year-old man named Jose Mariena Cartolos dug up $600,000,000 on
an oil plantation in Colombia, money that was said to be part of Escobar’s fortune. The story
goes that Cartolos told the government and, for his trouble, got $3,000. They took the rest.
This story has been reported in what we might call sketchy media, although it appears in a
book by John Baselmans titled “Drugs” and we can find it in some Spanish language media.
It’s said the farmer was digging a trench for irrigation on the land when he found a bunch of
blue containers filled with cash. That land was his. It had been in his family for 200 years,
but he was told in no uncertain terms that after he got his $3,000 cut, the rest would go
towards social and economic programs in Colombia. There are rumors that some people are living quite
nicely today on Escobar’s hard-earned money, but nothing is solid in terms of evidence. For
instance, a guy on a forum wrote, “There are literally thousands of Colombians out there
in Beverly Hills and other similar places all over the world, and they usually buy the house
with cash. The United States of America turns a blind eye to these real estate purchases and
Mercedes Benz purchases because they already know this money belongs to Pablo Escobar.”
But one thing all our good viewers know is never believe a “guy on a forum” without doing your
research. Guys on forums are the bane of modern existence, and while some might be formidable
investigators, others are formidable fantasists. We investigated what the guy on a forum said, and
we conclude that he has no evidence whatsoever, which doesn’t mean he’s wrong, just that he can’t
prove it, which is as good as wrong. Colombians might tell you stories that
mirror the stories of the guy on the forum. They might say that there are loads of urban
legends in the country about “guaca” (money cache), but they are just legends for now.
If Pablo Escobar is going to make anyone rich today, that person is likely working with Netflix
or another type of media. Winners don’t use drugs, as those old computer games used to say.
Winners obviously don’t sell drugs because sellers all end up dead or in prison, but winners
definitely tell stories about people who use and sell drugs. Let that be a lesson to you all.
Now you need to watch “Hotel Escobar - The Luxury Prison Pablo Escobar Built for Himself.” Or,
have a look at “50 Insane Facts About El Chapo You Didn't Know.”