PABLO ESCOBAR MOTHER SERIES

“When there’s a police shooting in London it’s all over the news, but in Colombia it didn’t even make the back pages. “You don’t understand those traumatic moments, they are just stuff you’re scared of,” he says now. The family ended up moving to a safer location and there were no more trips to the shopping centre. They were covering the young man with newspapers… I saw a pool of blood seeping out under the newspapers covering the man’s head,” Witcomb writes. “All I could hear was this screeching sound. After a brief tussle, his armed escort gave chase and shot the man, who had doubled back towards the young boy. On one occasion as a young boy, while out with his adoptive mother Joan at an upmarket shopping centre in Bogotá, a man took a picture of him and then grabbed his arm, trying to wrench him away. There were several kidnap attempts, Witcomb, now 55, recalls. They thought it was cool for me to have men with me who had guns.” I couldn’t understand why some of my school friends in Colombia didn’t have all this stuff. “I’d been placed with this English family and from a very young age was put into this situation which became normal to me. “It’s very difficult for people outside my funny little world as a child to see that as normal, because obviously it isn’t. “Heavy security was the norm for me,” Witcomb recalls. It wasn’t long before Escobar senior got wind of his young son’s whereabouts and the boy narrowly escaped being kidnapped by the drug lord’s dangerous henchmen on several occasions. The president of Colombia gave me presents,” he recalls. My father was very influential and wielded a lot of power. I didn’t know what money was, I just clicked my fingers and waiters came up and gave me food. With his adoptive family, the young Phillip was transported into a world of privilege, private schools, luxurious houses, private planes and exotic holidays, constantly shadowed by armed bodyguards and escorted by armoured vehicles. He worked with the British and US governments, going undercover and even helping Escobar squirrel money away from his own family and cartel, to infiltrate the drugs operation and gain his trust.

His adoptive father, Patrick – who worked for a firm that printed banknotes and ran an armoured car business in Colombia – continued to live in various locations in Colombia and elsewhere after the shoot-out. Well, you can’t do that without help from governments, and that’s what my story’s about really.” It doesn’t tell you how basically a school dropout with no education, who could hardly read and write, suddenly becomes the world’s greatest billionaire drug smuggler. But the problem with it is, it tells you that suddenly there is this 25-year-old super-hard-case drug dealer.

PABLO ESCOBAR MOTHER SERIES

The Netflix hit series Narcos may have brought Pablo Escobar back into the spotlight, but his son says the portrayal is quite different from the real criminal he describes in his new book, Son Of Escobar. Today, Phillip Witcomb, as Escobar’s first-born is known, is an acclaimed fine artist living with his wife in a remote finca on the Mediterranean island of Mallorca. The baby, Escobar’s first-born son, was rescued and adopted by the MI6 agent who led the mission, Patrick Witcomb. Roberto Sendoya Escobar was in a cot beside his teenage mother when she was killed in a shoot-out during a secret mission led by a British MI6 agent to recover a cash hoard from a safe house used by a young criminal, Pablo Escobar, the man who would become the world’s most notorious drugs lord. He has been witness to gun violence, a victim of attempted kidnappings, and has a birth heritage that would make some shudder.

Roberto Sendoya Escobar, first-born son of drugs lord Pablo Escobar, reveals his life growing up in the shadow of his birth father.

Pablo escobar mother