Crime
Why Escobar set $2 million on fire
The son of notorious Medellín cartel boss Pablo Escobar claimed that his father once torched $2 million in crisp banknotes just to keep the family warm.
As the child of one of the wealthiest drug lords in history, Juan Pablo Escobar, 38, who has since changed his name to Sebastián Marroquín, grew up amid immense luxury and narco-trafficking violence.
In a 2009 interview with Don Juan magazine, Marroquín described what life was like on the run with the “king of cocaine,” whose cartel supplied 80% of the world’s cocaine and brought in an estimated $420 million a week in revenue.
According to Marroquín, the family was living in a hideout in the Medellín mountainsides when Escobar’s daughter Manuela became hypothermic.
Escobar decided to burn $2 million in cash to keep his family warm.
According to the interview, the paranoid cocaine baron had his family blindfolded and relocated every 48 hours between 15 different hideaways throughout Medellín because he didn’t want them to know where they were.
Once the family arrived at a designated home, they were instructed to inspect the site in fine detail to see if they recognized the area. If they did, they were immediately relocated and the site was eliminated as a future hideout, Don Juan reported.
In the case that Escobar’s relatives were captured and tortured, they would not be able to divulge information about the locations of their hideouts simply because they were never allowed to know where they were being kept.