Metal Safe Discovered Under Demolished Home Of Drug Lord Pablo Escobar

Miami Herald

The former home of a notorious Colombian drug lord has revealed one final mystery while being demolished.

The Miami Beach mansion once owned by the ‘King of Cocaine’, Pablo Escobar, is currently being demolished nearly twenty years after the U.S. government seized it from him, the Mirror reports.

However during the demolition, construction workers discovered a secret metal safe hidden beneath the concrete and weighing around 50-stone.

The safe is now being kept inside a bank vault guarded by armed security until the current property owners decide to open it.

Escobar is infamous for being the wealthiest criminal in history, with an estimated net worth of $30 billion (£21 billion), and approximately $100 billion (£70 billion) when we include money he buried in different places throughout Colombia. His story has also recently become the subject of Netflix drama Narcos.

Fast-food entrepreneur Christian de Berdouare, who owns the home with his wife, television journalist Jennifer Valoppi, said:

This is real. It’s still locked. It’s very, very heavy. We can’t believe it — now Pablito [Escobar] is my best friend. We had left one of the walls… when I started to knock it down, a piece of rubble hit the foundation, the floor sunk and I saw it.  It was something gray. I grabbed it with the excavator’s claw, realized it was a safe and started to yell to tell them.

At roughly 6,500 square feet, the four-bedroom mansion would have been surprisingly modest for a man who called himself ‘The Godfather’.

De Berdouare now plans to build a more modern house on the site of the mansion.

Tom Percival

More of a concept than a journalist, Tom Percival was forged in the bowels of Salford University from which he emerged grasping a Masters in journalism.

Since then his rise has been described by himself as ‘meteoric’ rising to the esteemed rank of Social Editor at UNILAD as well as working at the BBC, Manchester Evening News, and ITV.

He credits his success to three core techniques, name repetition, personality mirroring, and never breaking off a handshake.