Original subtitles

[tense music]

- 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 Escobar's death,

and the fortune he left behind.

- Who was it that really killed Pablo Escobar that day?

- Many say he was simply executed.

- Was the Colombian government working against him

with a rival cartel?

- At the cartel's height,

20% of all the US$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?

[tense music]

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.

He's 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 glamour 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 from cocaine.

The problem is, Escobar does not know how to make cocaine,

and who to sell it to.

- [Laurence] 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 was 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.

[shot firing]

- The Medellin Cartel

becomes an incredibly sophisticated organization.

It has a network of cocaine labs strewn 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.

- [Laurence] By the early 1980s,

Pablo Escobar is smuggling 15 tons of cocaine

into the US every day,

and pulling in US$400 million a week.

- He is responsible for 80% of the cocaine

that is bought and sold in the United 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,

multiple 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 with healthcare, schools, housing,

and he really becomes known

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 to official records,

Pablo Escobar killed over 1,000 police officers,

more than 200 judges, politicians, journalists.

He blew up an airliner

in an attempt to kill a presidential candidate.

- [Reporter] 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 US national security.

And so President Ronald Reagan formally declares

the US will engage in a war on drugs.

- I am today proposing a massive legislative program

aimed at stepping up the battle on these two fronts,

in our neighborhoods, and our schools.

- The US government is putting in

hundreds of millions of dollars

to support the Colombian effort

to break the Medellin Cartel.

- [Laurence] 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 Bloc,

a group of the most elite of Colombia's national police.

And Search Bloc has received from the US,

this high-tech surveillance that allows them

to track Pablo Escobar's phone calls.

- On December 2nd, 1993, the Search Bloc 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.

- [Laurence] 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.

[tense music]

- The Colombian government wants to assume responsibility

because there's a perception

that if the Americans have credit for killing Escobar,

to come in and 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 US government 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,

it's providing funding for this high-tech equipment

that Search Bloc has been able to use

to track Pablo Escobar's phone calls.

So the US 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,

and 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 they can really track the call to its source.

- The Search Bloc van,

which was the unit they were using with their equipment,

then went by that location and did a physical ID.

They identified Pablo Escobar 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 to 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 Search Bloc,

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,"

Mark Bowden questions whether those shots actually

are fired by members of the Colombian 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?

- [Laurence] 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 US

see it as a cause for celebration.

- The Colombian government has been chasing this guy

for years.

He's responsible for just this wave of death and destruction

throughout the country.

So when he dies, there are countless parties,

including the United States,

that are thrilled about the fact

that Escobar's finally been taken down.

But, the question still remains.

Who actually shot and killed Pablo Escobar?

- [Laurence] According to the Colombian government,

it's the National Police Force,

specifically an elite unit known as Search Bloc,

that is solely responsible for 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 trying to recover Escobar's body,

and at the same time, collect any evidence.

- You have all of these officers

that are posing with the body,

allegedly tampering with the body.

You have all of these other people that are there,

plain-clothes 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 Colombian National Police

are not the ones who fired the fatal shots, but rather,

members of some other elite agency operating in Colombia.

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 its own agents to Colombia,

they lived in the headquarters together with the Search Bloc.

They participated in many raids.

They were present there at all times,

except for that final moment, allegedly.

- [Laurence] 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 Bloc

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 Bloc

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 involved

in the killing of Pablo Escobar.

But he says he was in the headquarters of the Search Bloc,

and he could hear everything happening

through the unit's radios.

- Murphy says that,

"Yes, I did take this photo with Pablo Escobar.

It is real.

But 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 Bloc.

They've been telling them how to do raids.

So after all of this association with the Search Bloc,

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.

[upbeat action music]

- Delta Force is the most elite US Army force

in existence.

They're quiet, scary, competent operators,

who go down to Colombia at the request of the DEA,

and start participating in training Colombian operatives

to take down Escobar.

- Delta Force goes on countless raids

with the Search Bloc 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 Bloc didn't know about it is very plausible.

- [Laurence] Still, it's clear American officials

want the kill attributed to the Colombians, not the US.

- 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."

US 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 with the idea that it could have been Americans

who killed Pablo Escobar.

And it was disrespectful to the Colombian police

who were 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 Bloc working alongside

other criminals to take out Escobar.

[tense music]

- [Laurence] 10 months before narco kingpin, Pablo Escobar,

is finally taken down,

he commits 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,

they 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.

- [Reporter] 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 bomb as revenge.

His family attempted to leave the country.

They made it as far as the airport in Frankfurt,

and then they're forced to turn around,

and go back to Colombia,

where they're under guard constantly.

So a bombing is 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 is not from the Colombian government.

[bomb exploding]

This is someone else.

A car explodes outside of Pablo Escobar's house,

and his mother's home is burned to the ground.

- [Laurence] 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 Pablo 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 US agencies in a bit of a dilemma.

On the one hand, it's nice to see

Escobar getting a taste of his own medicine, so to speak.

On the other hand,

if it seems like they are supporting Los Pepes,

that's also going to look bad.

Because this is a death squad

that's really doing awful things.

- The DEA and the Colombian national government

have rules that they must adhere to.

Los Pepes had no rules.

The only rules were to use extreme violence

in order to weed out and kill Pablo Escobar.

- In 1993, Los Pepes continues their campaign

of killing anyone associated with Pablo Escobar

and their families.

And then there are these rumors that perhaps Search Bloc

and the Americans are 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.

[tense music]

- 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 his prison cell.

- According 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.

He implies that it was a good distance,

and it did happen while Pablo was running.

[gunshot]

- According to Don Berna,

after Rodolfo fires the killing shot,

the police say, "Get out of here,"

because the Colombian National Police

don't want anyone to know that it's actually

a member of Los Pepes that killed Pablo Escobar.

- [Laurence] Could Los Pepes have been working

alongside Search Bloc at the scene of Escobar's death?

Several sources raised concerns that these two forces

were directly collaborating 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 Bloc

that the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

If 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.

- So 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.

- The 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.

- Soon after Don Berna made his statement,

someone even closer to Escobar comes forward

to offer another view of how Escobar died.

- [Laurence] In 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.

- He's already been shot in the thigh and the back.

He's not gonna get up.

He's not gonna be able to escape this time.

The best thing to do, according to Juan Pablo,

is he finishes himself off.

[tense music]

- Escobar's mantra was [speaking Spanish],

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've gamed out

what he would do if he was ever caught.

- He 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.

- 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've 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 kill himself.

- [Laurence] Escobar's family claims

more evidence points to suicide.

They 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.

Yet, others insist his wound is inconsistent with suicide.

- 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 adamant

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 he'd 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 arts,

but they barely make a dent.

- [Laurence] 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's 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 grabbed the houses, and they grabbed the vehicles,

and they grabbed the boats, and they grabbed 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 cartels,

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 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.

There 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.

- One of those places where you might look

was the prison that Escobar had built to house himself.

La Catedral.

[tense music]

- 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 Colombian government goes for it.

- [Laurence] In June of 1991,

Escobar surrendered to Colombian authorities,

and is subsequently jailed in a lavish prison

called La Catedral.

- La Catedral is a fortress.

This is how Escobar can protect himself,

not only from the army, and the state,

but also from the rival drug traffickers.

- Escobar's prison

has 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,

and 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 burns 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.

- [Laurence] 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 sledge hammers,

and they search for money everywhere,

but they come 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 money man of the organization,

and also Pablo Escobar's brother.

[tense music]

- [Laurence] In October 1992,

while Colombian authorities desperately searched

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 spends 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.

- [Laurence] 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 much 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 US$100 dollars 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.

[tense music]

- 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.

- [Laurence] 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 Mariena 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 it, 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.

- [Laurence] But farm, fields, and caves

aren't the only potential hiding places for Escobar's 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.

- [Laurence] In 2020, 27 years after his death,

Pablo Escobar is once again making headlines

across the world, when his nephew makes a surprising claim.

- Nicolas 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 unearths $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 a 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 using 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 reasons, 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 authorities,

so chances are,

he's probably stashing cash at each place he's going to

because he had 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 did,

especially when he was on the run.

- Roberto says, in addition to all the properties

that Pablo owned within Colombia,

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.

- [Laurence] 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 trafficking activities

was a mansion in Miami.

And the owners found hidden safes in that house.

But when they opened them, they were empty.

But this is an important find,

'cause 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 them.

- 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 Escobar 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 Laurence Fishburne.

Thank you for watching "History's Greatest Mysteries."

[mysterious music]