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00:00Tonight, one of the most notorious narcotics traffickers in history, Pablo Escobar.
00:13By the early 1980s, Pablo Escobar is responsible for 80% of the cocaine that is bought and sold in the United States of America.
00:23He was 100% ruthless. He was capable of pulling out a gun and opening fire without a moment's remorse.
00:28But to others, they saw him as their savior.
00:32He would tell people, you have a choice. You can take my silver, my money, or my lead.
00:38After years trying to capture Escobar, he is finally taken down.
00:43But there are still a lot of questions about what actually happened.
00:48Now, we'll explore the top theories surrounding the mysteries of Pablo Escobar's death and the fortune he left behind.
00:56Who was it that really killed Pablo Escobar that day?
00:59Many say he was simply executed.
01:02Was the Colombian government working against him with a rival cartel?
01:06At the cartel's height, 20% of all the U.S. $100 bills in circulation were somewhere in Colombia.
01:15This guy had billions of dollars in cash.
01:18And 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.
01:26Who killed Pablo Escobar? And what happened to his fortune?
01:30Medellin, Colombia, 1974.
01:4824-year-old Pablo Escobar is already a hardened criminal.
01:53In 1974, Medellin, Colombia is known as a hub for smuggling contraband all over North and South America.
02:02And Pablo Escobar is 24 years old, and he grew up very poor.
02:06So he is always thinking about new ways of muscling his way into businesses and making money.
02:12He has already established himself as a career criminal, is engaged in auto theft and fraud and kidnapping.
02:22And he's coming of age at a really important time for Colombia because cocaine has taken off in the United States.
02:31And Colombia is a major supplier of that drug.
02:34In the 1970s, in the United States, people find cocaine to be an attractive drug because attractive people are using it.
02:44Models, politicians, people on Wall Street.
02:48And suddenly, it became the glamour drug of the era.
02:52And it was insanely addictive and also highly profitable.
02:57Escobar sees that some smuggling operators are getting a lot of money from cocaine.
03:02The problem is Escobar does not know how to make cocaine and who to sell it to.
03:09What Escobar does know is how to muscle in on an operation.
03:14The one thing Pablo Escobar was very good at was violence.
03:17And he learned at a very early age in his criminal activities, with violence comes control.
03:22He 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.
03:31He was 100% ruthless.
03:33He was capable of going from jovial and friendly to pulling out a gun and opening fire without a moment's remorse.
03:40So 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.
03:51Now, Escobar is top dog in charge.
03:55He's the one who is bribing the cops, judges, and they're afraid of him.
04:01He knows how to kill.
04:02His method was often referred to as plato o plomo, silver or lead.
04:07If you did what he wanted you to do, you would be handsomely rewarded for it.
04:13And if you didn't do as he wanted, well, someone would plug you full of lead.
04:17The Medellin Cartel becomes an incredibly sophisticated organization.
04:22It has a network of cocaine labs drawn all over Colombia.
04:27They have airplanes, helicopters.
04:29They also have an island in the Bahamas that serves as a launch point for shipments of cocaine to the United States.
04:38By 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.
04:51He is responsible for 80% of the cocaine that is bought and sold in the United States of America.
04:58So he is swimming in cash.
05:00We're talking billions of dollars in cash.
05:04Paper money.
05:05It's so much money, they don't know what to do with it.
05:09They buy property.
05:11Escobar builds this massive estate, the Hacienda Napoles.
05:16There's an airstrip, there's a soccer field, multiple mansions, a zoo.
05:23He was spending $2,500 a month on rubber bands to hold the stacks of money together.
05:31Escobar actually gives millions of dollars away to the poor to help them with health care, schools, housing.
05:39And he really becomes known somewhat of a local, homegrown Robin Hood.
05:45At first, Colombian officials were not going against Pablo Escobar.
05:51Many of them were bought off almost immediately, and they liked the money.
05:55And Colombia is flooded with Escobar's cocaine money.
05:59But 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.
06:09According to official records, Pablo Escobar killed over 1,000 police officers, more than 200 judges, politicians, journalists.
06:18He blew up an airliner in an attempt to kill a presidential candidate.
06:21Pablo Escobar is also accused of the November 27th bombing of a Colombian jetliner just outside Bogota.
06:28That killed all 107 people on board.
06:31And at that point, Pablo Escobar had initiated a war with the Colombian government.
06:36In the United States, the American government has identified the drug trade as a major threat to U.S. national security.
06:44And so, President Ronald Reagan formally declares the U.S. will engage in a war on drugs.
06:50I am today proposing a massive legislative program aimed at stepping up the battle on these two fronts, in our neighborhoods and our schools.
06:59The U.S. government is putting in hundreds of millions of dollars to support the Colombian effort to break the Medellin cartel.
07:05Under pressure, the Colombian government finally turns up the heat.
07:10By 1990, there is essentially a civil war going on in Colombia between the cartel and the government.
07:17The Colombian government, they get some people who are close to him, but they can't get the man himself.
07:23He's extremely slippery.
07:25So, at this point, the United States Drug Enforcement Agency, the DEA, gets involved.
07:30They partner up with SearchBlock, a group of the most elite of Colombia's national police.
07:37And SearchBlock has received from the U.S. this high-tech surveillance that allows them to track Pablo Escobar's phone calls.
07:48On December 2, 1993, the SearchBlock tracks Pablo Escobar in a two-story house in Los Olivos, Medellin.
07:56What happens next is in dispute, but we do know that within a very short time, news spreads around the world, Escobar has been killed.
08:06Escobar is declared dead at age 44, but his story is far from over.
08:12The official word is that the Colombian National Police were the ones responsible for taking down Escobar.
08:18The Colombian government wants to assume responsibility because there's a perception that if the Americans have credit for killing Escobar,
08:32to come in and kill a Colombian folk hero would be beyond the pale.
08:37The Colombian political elite want to try to use the killing of Escobar as proof that Colombia has reformed its ways.
08:45The Colombian government wants to be able to take credit.
08:49The U.S. government wants to minimize its own involvement and play up the idea that this was Colombia's matter.
08:55They take care of it.
08:55So the idea that Escobar is killed by a member of the Colombian National Police serves everybody's interests.
09:04In 1993, there is a lot of pressure on Colombia to capture Pablo Escobar.
09:10They've spent years trying to track him down.
09:12He's been on the run.
09:13There's been a lot of investment by the United States that's providing funding for this high-tech equipment
09:18that SearchBlock has been able to use to track Pablo Escobar's phone calls.
09:23So the U.S. government is really putting the pressure on Colombia to take Pablo Escobar down.
09:31Pablo Escobar was endeared to his family, especially his son, Juan Pablo.
09:35He would talk to Juan Pablo almost every day.
09:38He was also talking to his wife.
09:39She was talking to the Colombian press, relaying his messages.
09:43This was a fatal mistake because his phone calls were being traced.
09:48Escobar decides that he's going to talk to his son.
09:51And it's a much longer phone call, so they're on the phone long enough that they can really track the call to its source.
10:01The SearchBlock van, which was the unit they were using with their equipment,
10:04then went by that location and did a physical ID.
10:07They identified Pablo Escobar standing in a window.
10:11To surround the area, they put troops on the roof across the street, in the back of the house, and then they went in.
10:18As soon as they entered the residence, a shootout occurred.
10:21And Pablo ends up going to the second story, hops onto a roof, and according to the official story,
10:28he'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.
10:38One of the senior members of the SearchBlock, whose name is Hugo Aguilar,
10:43makes a much disputed claim that he was the one who delivered the deadly shot that killed Pablo Escobar.
10:50In order to strike an individual while running in the head, we'll require a high level of marksmanship.
10:56So some have questioned whether Aguilar was actually that skilled and could have made that shot that killed Pablo Escobar.
11:03In his book, Killing Pablo, Mark Bowden questions whether those shots actually are fired by members of the Columbia National Police.
11:13The bullet went clear through his brain, from his right ear to his left.
11:17That's a really difficult shot.
11:20There are a lot of people speculating, well, what actually happened?
11:25And who might have been there?
11:27And could somebody else have fired the shot?
11:33When cocaine trafficking kingpin Pablo Escobar dies from a gunshot wound to the head
11:39after a shootout with Colombian police in 1993,
11:43many in Colombia and the U.S. see it as a cause for celebration.
11:47The Colombian government has been chasing this guy for years.
11:51He's responsible for just this wave of death and destruction throughout the country.
11:58So when he dies, there are countless parties, including the United States,
12:03that are thrilled about the fact that Escobar's finally been taken down.
12:07But the question still remains, who actually shot and killed Pablo Escobar?
12:13According to the Colombian government, it's the National Police Force, specifically an elite unit known as Search Block,
12:21that is solely responsible for killing Escobar.
12:25The scene of Escobar's death left us with a lot of unanswered questions.
12:29There's a lot of chaos, a lot of anarchy, a lot of confusion as they're trying to recover Escobar's body and at the same time collect any evidence.
12:38You have all of these officers that are posing with the photo, allegedly tampering with the body.
12:44You have all of these other people that are there, plainclothes officers, members of the media,
12:48civilians that are just trying to walk near the body and pose for photos.
12:52So 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.
12:59Perhaps the official narrative is wrong.
13:02Perhaps the Colombian National Police are not the ones who fired the fatal shots, but rather members of some other elite agency operating in Colombia.
13:12Some people say that it was in fact the DEA who killed Escobar.
13:22This allegation is not coming out of nowhere.
13:25DEA not only sent his own agents to Colombia, they lived in the headquarters together with the Search Block.
13:30They participated in many raids.
13:33They were present there at all times except for the final moment, allegedly.
13:39When it comes to the DEA's involvement, there are conflicting accounts.
13:44The official narrative is that the DEA agents were not at the scene.
13:49However, there are members of Search Block who say there were some Americans on the scene.
13:56Javier Pena and Steve Murphy are the two leading DEA agents actively working with the Search Block to find and apprehend Escobar.
14:06There 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 involved in the killing of Pablo Escobar.
14:19But he says he was in the headquarters of the Search Block and he could hear everything happening through the unit's radios.
14:27Murphy says that, yes, I did take this photo with Pablo Escobar.
14:31It is real.
14:32But 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.
14:48They've been embedded for months with the Search Block.
14:53They've been telling them how to do raids.
14:55So after all of this association with the Search Block, why in the world wouldn't Murphy or Pena be there when it finally happens?
15:05But 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.
15:13In Mark Bowden's book, Killing Pablo, he theorizes another idea.
15:17These other Americans were actually part of American Special Forces, Army Delta Force.
15:29Delta Force is the most elite U.S. Army force in existence.
15:35They are quiet, scary, competent operators who go down to Colombia at the request of the DEA and start participating in training Colombian operatives.
15:47Delta Force goes on countless raids with the Search Block up to this point.
15:53So it wouldn't be surprising to learn that Delta Force is present when Escobar is finally found.
15:58One thing that points to Delta Force's involvement in the killing of Escobar is the kill shot.
16:05And the kill shot is a very, very precise shot.
16:08To pull off a shot like this, you have to be somebody that has an extensive amount of training when it comes to marksmanship.
16:14They're also incredibly stealthy.
16:16So the likelihood that a Delta Force sniper was on the scene that day and Search Block didn't know about it is very plausible.
16:25Still, it's clear American officials want the kill attributed to the Colombians, not the U.S.
16:32Murphy, 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.
16:44U.S. officials want to conceal the extent of their involvement because they want to promote the idea that Colombia takes care of Colombian problems.
16:54People from the Search Block, particularly its veterans, are offended with the idea that it could have been Americans who killed Pablo Escobar.
17:03And it was disrespectful to the Colombian police, who was supposed to take the sole credit for his death.
17:10However, there's another story that angers these veterans even more.
17:17And it's the idea of Search Block working alongside other criminals.
17:24To take out Escobar.
17:30Ten months before narco-kingpin Pablo Escobar is finally taken down, he commits one of his worst atrocities.
17:38Previously, the Medellin cartel would often be almost surgical in its application of violence against a specific target.
17:45By the early 1990s, they seem to have abandoned a lot of that mindset.
17:49Specifically, when they detonated a car bomb loaded with 100 kilograms of dynamite in downtown Bogota.
17:55The attack is just one in a campaign of intimidation run by Escobar since his escape from jail last year.
18:02At least 20 people were killed.
18:04Many were children being kitted out for the new school year in this crowded shopping area.
18:09Escobar sets off this bomb as revenge.
18:13His family attempted to leave the country.
18:16They made it as far as the airport in Frankfurt.
18:19And then they're forced to turn around and go back to Colombia, where they are under guard constantly.
18:25So, uh, bombing's designed to send a message to the authorities.
18:29Mess with my family and I'm going to get you.
18:32The day after that car bomb explodes, there is another retaliation, but this is not from the Colombian government.
18:44This is someone else.
18:46A car explodes outside of Pablo Escobar's house and his mother's home is burned to the ground.
18:53A group quickly takes credit for the attacks.
18:56They call themselves Los Pepes.
19:00Los Pepes stands for people persecuted by Pablo Escobar.
19:05So these are his victims.
19:07People 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.
19:14Many of the leading figures in Los Pepes are themselves cocaine suppliers.
19:20The Cali Cartel was the main rival to the Medellin Cartel.
19:23They're totally involved in Los Pepes.
19:27Los Pepes were matching the level of violence that Pablo Escobar had been known for.
19:32So they were abducting and murdering any individual that was associated with the Medellin Cartel.
19:39They would kill them, execute them, hang them from bridges with a sign saying this is the work of Los Pepes.
19:45If you work for Pablo Escobar, you will be targeted and you will be killed.
19:49This death squad places the Colombian government and these various U.S. agencies in a bit of a dilemma.
19:56On the one hand, it's nice to see Escobar getting a taste of his own medicine, so to speak.
20:01On the other hand, if it seems like they are supporting Los Pepes, that's also going to look bad.
20:09Because this is a death squad that's really doing awful things.
20:14The DEA and the Colombian national government have rules that they must adhere to.
20:19Los Pepes had no rules.
20:21The only rules were to use extreme violence in order to weed out and kill Pablo Escobar.
20:27In 1993, Los Pepes continues their campaign of killing anyone associated with Pablo Escobar and their families.
20:34And then there are these rumors that perhaps SearchBlock and the Americans are sharing intel with Los Pepes.
20:42And that Los Pepes were on the scene of Pablo Escobar's killing.
20:46And perhaps it wasn't anyone from the Colombian government and it wasn't an American who took the kill shot.
20:52In 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 his prison cell.
21:12According to Don Berna, his brother Rodolfo, who is also a member of Los Pepes, is the one that delivers the fatal headshot to Pablo Escobar with an M16 rifle.
21:21He implies that it was a good distance, and it did happen while Pablo was running.
21:27According to Don Berna, after Rodolfo fires the killing shot, the police say, get out of here.
21:35Because the Colombian National Police don't want anyone to know that it's actually a member of Los Pepes that killed Pablo Escobar.
21:44Could Los Pepes have been working alongside SearchBlock at the scene of Escobar's death?
21:49Several sources raised concerns that these two forces were directly collaborating for months leading up to the Escobar raid.
21:57Some of the official records indicate that there was some collaboration trying to locate Pablo Escobar.
22:05There's very much a mindset in SearchBlock that the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
22:09If they are collecting information from groups like Los Pepes or from the Cali cartel, they're willing to take information anywhere they can get it.
22:17So this sharing of information leads people to speculate that maybe on the day that Pablo Escobar was shot and killed, Los Pepes was on the scene and possibly could have fired the shot that killed Pablo Escobar.
22:31The idea that the Colombian government might have been partnered with a criminal element like Los Pepes to kill a different criminal kind of suggests that Colombia hasn't really put aside its violent and corrupt ways.
22:42Soon after Don Bernat made his statement, someone even closer to Escobar comes forward to offer another view of how Escobar died.
22:52In 2014, Escobar's son, Juan Pablo, claims that his father told him multiple times that he would shoot himself in the right ear to avoid being captured alive.
23:03He's already been shot in 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 to Juan Pablo, is he finishes himself off.
23:21Escobar's mantra was,
23:23Mejor una tumba en Colombia que una cárcel en Estados Unidos, which means, better a grave in Colombia than a jail cell in the United States.
23:33Given 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.
23:41He was a king. He was an emperor. And when you think about putting him in a cage for the rest of his life for Pablo Escobar, it was inconceivable.
23:50Supermax prison in the United States is no picnic.
23:55El Chapo, the famous Mexican drug lord, is in one now.
23:59He spends 23 out of 24 hours every day in solitary confinement.
24:04It's a miserable experience.
24:06It's not entirely out of the realm of possibility that he would have chosen to take his own life rather than be captured,
24:12especially once he knew he was cornered and there was no way out.
24:14The photos of Escobar on the rooftop the day he died shows him lying next to his Sig Sauer pistol.
24:22And that's exactly the same gun that Juan Pablo said his dad would use to kill himself.
24:29Escobar's family claims more evidence points to suicide.
24:32They say that when his body was exhumed for DNA analysis in 2006, the nature of his fatal gunshot wound confirmed Escobar took his own life.
24:44Yet, others insist his wound is inconsistent with suicide.
24:49Experts say there's no way Pablo Escobar took his own life.
24:53If he did, there would be gunshot residue, and there wasn't any.
24:57But still, the family is adamant that Pablo Escobar went out his own way on his own terms.
25:05Who killed Pablo Escobar is still debated, but that's not the only mystery he left behind.
25:11In 1993, as authorities were closing in on Escobar, he was featured in Forbes Magazine's Billionaire Issue, writing,
25:20We suspect that Escobar will soon leave this list, perhaps this earth.
25:25By that year's end, Escobar was dead.
25:28But the questions about what happened to his money live on.
25:32Pablo Escobar is swimming in cash.
25:35We're talking billions of dollars in cash.
25:39Think about that for a second.
25:41Paper money.
25:42It's so much money, they don't know what to do with it.
25:46They plow it into all kinds of businesses, land, buildings, into arts, but they barely make a dent.
25:56It's estimated the Medellin cartel loses about 10% of revenues annually,
26:02amounting to $2.1 billion,
26:05because its cash stockpiles are destroyed by pests and the elements.
26:10We're talking about cash literally rotting away in these secret stashes.
26:16Rats and insects chew their way into the bundles, moisture ruins the bills, mold gets into these bundles as well.
26:26And Escobar is making so much money that he just doesn't care.
26:30It just gets written off as spoilage, just another line on the balance sheet.
26:34When Pablo Escobar died, he was worth about $30 billion.
26:39But only about $112 million was actually recovered, which raises the question and the speculation of, where did all of that money go?
26:51The Colombian government can seize all of the physical assets that are impossible to hide.
26:56So they grab the houses and they grab the vehicles and they grab the boats and they grab the airplanes.
27:01But what they couldn't account for was the enormous volume of cash that had flown into Colombia.
27:08So it's to be assumed that after Escobar's death, members of his family, members of rival cartels, other members of his cartel are going to descend upon it and take whatever they can.
27:21Escobar's operation was notoriously secretive and compartmentalized.
27:26No one knew where Escobar's money was, and in fact, perhaps even 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 some of these places.
27:40There are many rumors about his money still being up for grabs, so lots of treasure hunters begin to search all the places where he spent some time.
27:52One of those places where you might look was the prison that Escobar had built to house himself, la cathedra.
28:06In 1991, the government is so tired of chasing Escobar, so they agree to a really crazy deal that Escobar proposes to them.
28:18Escobar comes up with what he sees as a perfectly reasonable compromise.
28:22As 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.
28:29And amazingly, the Colombian government goes for it.
28:32In June of 1991, Escobar surrendered to Colombian authorities and is subsequently jailed in a lavish prison called La Catedral.
28:42La Catedral is a fortress.
28:44This is how Escobar can protect himself, not only from the army and the state, but also from the rival drug traffickers.
28:52Escobar's prison has jacuzzis, televisions, waterfalls, hot tubs, you name it.
29:00He has every luxury he wants in there.
29:03From within those walls, he can continue to operate the cartel as normal.
29:09His subordinates come and go.
29:11He is still getting money delivered to him by his associates on the outside.
29:16How are they able to get it past the guards?
29:18Well, they're doing that by stashing the money in milk cans.
29:22It 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.
29:36They use this fog as a way to sneak into the prison to bury these milk cans in the ground.
29:43Although being in La Catedral gives Escobar a sense of safety from his rival gang, it also starts making him paranoid.
29:53He starts believing that some of his associates are being disloyal to him and he has them killed right there in the prison.
30:01Of course, this is a bit of a problem because he's got guards outside.
30:05According to one report, he burns the bodies and holds a barbecue outside in order to mask the smell.
30:13Colombian authorities could no longer ignore the fact that Escobar was running his business as usual and killing people in La Catedral.
30:21The 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.
30:36Escobar's hurried exit raises a question.
30:39What happened to the cash they've supposedly been burying for 13 months?
30:43It 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.
30:52He gathered up what he could and headed for the hills.
30:55The moment Escobar escapes, it basically is left abandoned.
31:00And when it's abandoned, the treasure hunters come with pitchforks, with shovels, with sledgehammers, and they search for money everywhere, but they come out empty-handed.
31:10It seems obvious that there should be milk cans full of cash still on the premises.
31:18Why 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.
31:28One person specifically says he knows where it is, and that person is the money man of the organization and also Pablo Escobar's brother.
31:40In October 1992, while Colombian authorities desperately search for fugitive drug lord Pablo Escobar, they get something of a consolation prize.
31:54His brother, Roberto.
31:56For a lot of Escobar's career, his chief money man was his brother, Roberto.
32:04And in 1992, Roberto decided he was tired of all the violence.
32:10He gave himself up and was sentenced to prison.
32:14Roberto Escobar spends 14 years in jail, but he's not away from the violence entirely.
32:21There is a letter bomb that's delivered to him in prison, and it severely injures him.
32:26He is blind in one eye.
32:28In 2009, shortly after his release from prison, Roberto Escobar publishes his memoir, The Accountant's Story.
32:36The book provides various clues as to where Escobar's treasure could be.
32:42According to Roberto Escobar, the Medellin cartel wasn't laundering that much money.
32:48Instead, they were stuffing it in plastic bags and burying it all over the countryside of Colombia.
32:54We're talking about an amazing amount of cash.
32:59In fact, it's estimated that at the cartel's height, 20% of all the U.S. $100 bills in circulation were somewhere in Colombia.
33:12There has to be a good chunk of it still scattered out there in these remote hiding places.
33:17Part 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.
33:28The 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.
33:46Pablo 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.
33:54And his brother, the accountant, he didn't know as well.
33:57In 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.
34:13A 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.
34:27But it isn't until 2015 that the biggest find takes place.
34:3465-year-old farmer Jose Mariena Cartolos was digging a trench in his land to irrigate it and came upon something buried in the field.
34:47He 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.
35:09This 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.
35:23This leads some people to believe that some of it, if not a lot of it, is still buried out there, ready to be found.
35:30When it comes to Pablo Escobar's money, the Colombian government has a very simple message for its citizens. Keep digging.
35:38But farm fields and caves aren't the only potential hiding places for Escobar's cash.
35:45In 2020, another discovery has people thinking that there's a lot out there in various safe houses that Escobar was known to use.
36:00In 2020, 27 years after his death, Pablo Escobar is once again making headlines across the world when his nephew makes a surprising claim.
36:11Nicolas Escobar comes forward. He's been living in one of Pablo Escobar's former estates. He's Pablo Escobar's nephew.
36:18And 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.
36:28One day he goes and he takes apart the walls in this one particular part of the mansion.
36:33And lo and behold, he claims that he unearths $18 million in cash.
36:39This got treasure hunters excited all over the world because they know that there are so many houses that used to belong to Pablo Escobar.
36:47That money is found inside of structure. And Escobar, we knew, liked to bury money and maybe hide it in caves.
36:54But it turns out he's also hiding it inside ordinary buildings.
36:58And this is an age old way of concealing cash that gangsters have been using since time immemorial.
37:04But that means any property that Escobar spent any time at at all might be the hiding place for untold riches.
37:12Just 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.
37:26He hadn't been to the United States in a long time for obvious reasons, but he owned them.
37:31And maybe those places have money stashed in them.
37:34Pablo Escobar had to be hopping from property to property just to elude authorities.
37:39So chances are he's probably stashing cash at each place he's going to because he had so much of it.
37:45The 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 did, especially when he was on the run.
37:59Roberto says in addition to all the properties that Pablo owned within Colombia, there are safe houses in Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami, New York City.
38:10All of these could conceivably have large amounts of cash on the premises.
38:15And Roberto Escobar is not the only one who's confirming this.
38:18Juan 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.
38:29After 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.
38:38So he believes it was taken by others.
38:41But that hasn't stopped other treasure hunters from buying up former Escobar properties and searching for loot.
38:48One of the properties that has been linked to Pablo Escobar's drug trafficking activities was a mansion in Miami and the owners found hidden safes in that house.
38:58But when they opened them, they were empty.
39:00But this is an important find because it goes to show that Pablo Escobar could have other properties in Miami or New York or California in which safes or hidden compartments could have money inside them.
39:12We don't know how thorough the Colombian government was in searching for Pablo's money, cash in these various safe houses.
39:21But Pablo Escobar had so many properties that we don't even know where all of these safe houses are.
39:27And the people living in these homes now probably aren't even aware that Pablo Escobar stayed there.
39:34So 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.
39:41There's probably billions of dollars sprinkled all across Colombia and other places that were central to the drug trade still waiting to be found.
39:50Pablo Escobar's famous mugshot can still be found on t-shirts and knickknacks across Colombia and, in fact, the world.
40:02And 15,000 people live in housing he built for the poor in a section of Medellin still known as Barrio Escobar.
40:10Despite all the suffering and damage Pablo Escobar caused, many people remain fascinated by his life
40:17and will continue to search for answers surrounding his death and for the money he allegedly hid.
40:25I'm Laurence Fishburne. Thank you for watching History's Greatest Mysteries.
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