Pablo Escobar’s nephew finds $18m of cash hidden in drug lord’s apartment wall

A nephew of Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar says he found $18 million of cash hidden inside a wall of one his uncle’s homes.

Nicolas Escobar claimed a “vision” told him exactly where to look for the money inside the Medellin apartment he now lives in, according to reports.

Mr Escobar told Colombian media that it was not the first time he had found cash in his kingpin uncle’s hideouts, where he stashed it while evading arrest.

He also said he had discovered a gold pen, satellite phones, typewriter and an undeveloped roll of film.

“Every time I sat in the dining room and looked towards the car park, I saw a man entering the place and disappearing,” Mr Escobar told Colombian TV station “Red+ Noticias.”

“The smell was astonishing. A smell 100 times worse than something that had died.”

Mr Escobar, who has lived at the apartment for five years, says some of the banknotes are damaged and unusable.

And he told how he used to accompany his uncle on trips and was even once kidnapped and tortured by men looking for him.

Escobar spent decades fighting the Colombian government to avoid extradition to the US and was eventually killed in a shootout with police in 1993.

The narcoterrorist formed his cartel in Medellin in the late 1970s and by the 1908s was smuggling in 80 per cent of cocaine sold in the US.

Escobar, nicknamed the “King of Cocaine”, became one of the world’s richest men as his business pulled in an estimated $420 million a week in revenue.

While verifying Escobar's wealth is impossible because of the nature of drug money, estimates run as high as $30 billion.

Escobar made the Forbes' list of international billionaires for seven years straight, from 1987 until 1993.

In 1989, he was ranked as the seventh-richest man in the world.

Escobar, who also went by” El Patron”, was arrested by authorities in 1991 and held in a self-designed prison called the Cathedral where he could chose inmates and continued to run his operations.

Officials estimate the Escobar’s cartel was behind more than 5,000 killings between 1989 and 1993 alone.

The fascination with Escobar saw more than 60 million viewers watch the Netflix series “Narcos”, which spent three seasons focussing on the drug lord.

In the show Escobar was played by Brazilian actor Moura Wagner, who spoke of his relief when he finally stopped playing the role.

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