How Pablo Escobar Kept His $500 Billion Away From The Cops’ Eyes

Imagine smashing a hole in your. A foul smell escapes, “a hundred times worse than something that had died.” Inside you find a typewriter, a gold pen, satellite phones, and stacks and stacks of cash – $18 million.

This is what happened to Nicolás Escobar, nephew of the famous drug cartel kingpin Pablo Escobar. According to an interview with Colombian TV channel Red + Noticias Nicolás learned about the stash of money from a vision.

Who was Pablo Escobar?

Pablo Escobar was the founder and leader of the Medellín Cartel, which made him arguably the most powerful drug trafficker in the world through the 80’s and early 90’s. Although it is impossible to exactly pinpoint his net worth due to the extreme lengths that Escobar went to in order to prevent his money from being found, it is estimated at $30 billion or $420 million a week in revenue. He used these funds to support a luxury lifestyle that included many properties, featuring everything from exotic animals to bullfighting arenas. Once the 7^th richest person on the planet, Pablo Escobar was on the Forbes list of global billionaires for seven years. Despite being notorious for acts of violence, he also used his wealth to fund charity projects, which helped earn him an alternate seat in Columbian Congress.

What happened to the fortune?

Escobar had such an excess of wealth that it couldn’t all be laundered quickly enough for him to use it. According to Escobar’s brother, the only way for Escobar to keep his fortune safe was literally by burying it in the ground and stashing it in the walls of properties he owned. In his book The Accountant’s Story: Inside the Violent World of the Medellín Cartel, Roberto de Jesus Garavis Escobar wrote, “The biggest headache was hiding the money … I created the system of caletas, small hiding places in the walls of houses and apartments … there could be as much as $5 million in cash hidden in a single caleta.”

Unsurprisingly, these hiding places were not always the most secure places to keep funds. Despite reports of stacks of cash being shrink-wrapped and put into plastic barrels, Roberto Escobar also wrote, “we would write off 10% of the money because the rats would eat it in storage or it would be damaged by water or lost.” Nicolás Escobar noted in his interview that some of the money he discovered was damaged and unusable.

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It is common knowledge that Escobar strategically cached his fortune, and since Pablo Escobar’s death in a shootout with the police in 1993, there has been public obsession with the location of his fortune. Unconfirmed reports of millions shrink-wrapped in barrels in basements and gold bars buried in the jungle have encouraged many treasure-seekers since his death.

One such treasure hunter is Roberto Sendoya – but Roberto is no ordinary fortune hunter. He is the secret son of Pablo Escobar, looking to claim his father’s billions. As a child, Roberto was saved from the shoot-out that killed his mother, only to be adopted by an MI6 agent stationed in Columbia. He was sent away to the UK to avoid any chance of kidnap by the Cartel. He didn’t learn who his biological father was until he was in his twenties. On his adopted father’s deathbed, the retired MI6 agent gave him a coded note with all the information he had on how to find Escobar’s millions. With the help of his adopted father’s information, Roberto is on a hunt for his biological father’s fortune.

Even without the help of Roberto’s secret code or Nicolás’s visions, treasure hunters have had success. During the demolition of Pablo Escobar’s former mansion in Florida, the current property owner and his crew discovered a locked safe. Whether anything is inside is still unknown.

The discovery of a verified $18 million in the walls of Nicolás Escobar’s home is likely to revitalize the public obsession with finding the missing Escobar fortune. It is estimated that 10 times the amount that has been recovered by authorities may still be hidden. While the allure of gold bars and stacks of unmarked bills behind the walls has undeniable appeal, finding Escobar’s fortune is not without risk – even if it were possible. While the current property owner and his demolitions crew were able to salvage one safe from Escobar’s former mansion in Florida, they also reported one stolen from the property. While Nicolás seems to have had tremendous good luck in finding money in his walls, in the same interview he described an incident before his uncle’s death, where unidentified individuals who were looking for Escobar abducted him. “I was tortured for seven hours. Two of my workers were attacked with a chainsaw,” Nicolás told the interviewer. While Escobar is now dead, uninvolved parties may wish to think twice before involving themselves with the cartel.

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