 You can now follow me on all my social media platforms to find out who my latest guest will be and don't forget to click the subscribe button and the notifications bell so you are notified for when my next podcast goes live. But we've got the bodyguards with us and they shoot this guy in front of me. There's a couple of things we do agree on and one of them is that our father, right, worked for the Secret Service. So what is Don Paolo Escobarra? He's a pedophile and a rapist, okay? It saddens me to have to admit that because there are people out there that think he's a hero. He's a mass murderer responsible personally for at least 5,000 personal deaths blowing up, I don't know what, killing people all over the place, right? Raping young girls, he raped my mother at 12.5, 13 and he's got one of these young girls pregnant and he orders Popeye his killer to go out and kill her because he doesn't want any births within the marriage from illegitimate children. 26,000 people there and the rest of it because he bought all these votes with money in a poverty stricken third world country which it was really. And today's guest we've got Roberto Escobar, Roberto. Hola, hombre, cómo estás? Hola, brother. First of all, we'll promote the book, first book, first born son of Escobar. Fascinating read. You've kicked a secret son, would we say? Yeah, I mean, I really was in denial about it all for a long, long time. You might wonder why I've got an English accent. Well, we'll get into that. But yeah, I was born Roberto Sendoya Escobar, 100% Colombian but a set of incredible circumstances made me into an Englishman which is part of my story. But yeah, I was in denial for a long, long time and then it's a kind of creeped out and eventually I thought, I've got to just get it out there and write a book. Yeah, I say, like, Escobar son, mum was killed in a shoot out raised by an MI6 agent, English accent. But people are probably thinking you're going to sound like Scarface. But fascinating story. This is your story. But before we get into all the madness, always like to go back to the start of my guess. Where you grew up, how it all began? Right. Well, what's quite interesting is that to answer your question, obviously I have to tell you a bit about the story. So, you know, when I was a very young boy, you know, I mean, I'm talking about, you know, seven or eight months old. Even now, I remember having dreadful nightmares. I couldn't sleep. I slept, walked, constant headaches. You know, I was not a well or happy little baby. And as I grew up and as I was older, I kept asking my adopted father, who we'll get into later, why I had all these problems. Of course, eventually, you know, I broke through the shell and he told me the truth about my beginnings. We're young school. So, before school, I, you know, I was actually born to a young girl called Maria Luisa Sendoya, which is why I've got Roberto Sendoya in my name. And she's 13. And my, and her boyfriend is a young hoodlum called Pablo Emilio Escobar Gavira. Just a young hoodlum. He's 16. They're shacked up in this place and he's just a robber, basically a thief running around in a little gang. And that's all it is when they have this little baby. And life gets much more complicated quite quickly. So that's how it all began. And it began in a little village outside Bogota City in between Bogota and Medellin. And it's a little village of no consequence in its day. It's got bigger now as everything does. But in its day, it was a little village of no consequence and an incredible story that is my life and was my life back then. Started then in that little village in 1965. What age was your mum killed? So I don't know exactly how old she was, but she was 14 and something. Yeah. And this goes back to part of the story about my real father. He had a potions for young girls even at that age. But it's not uncommon for young girls at 14, 15, 14, 13 to get pregnant. I mean, it's just not an amazing thing. It's quite common. And it was then and it still is today. So who raised you? Every question you ask has a massive answer. I have to kind of go forwards and then flash back. Yeah. If you don't mind because it's the only way I can sort of explain it. So basically, you know, I have this kind of life that's unusual, but I think it's normal, which we'll get into. But later when I'm old as an adult, I start asking all these questions and that's how I know the answers to your questions because I get told later all about this stuff. So it's not like I remembered everything as a baby. Otherwise people think it's just crabs. No way you can remember all that. And that's true. You have flashbacks. And I had flashbacks and things like that. And I, you know, I ask these questions time and time again. And eventually the answers start coming back. So who raised me? So I have to take you back to 1965, but I have to take you back a bit further than that. So I have to take you back to 1959. So I don't know if you're ready for this, are you ready? I'm ready. 1959, a six foot four Englishman, right? In a Savile Rose suit, walking down Regent Street. How do I know all this stuff? Because he told me. Okay. And he goes into an office, 86 Regent Street, which is now a shop, which is sad. But in those days it was the head office of Thomas De La Rue. At Thomas De La Rue, a security firm. They do printing. They print bank notes. There's great history behind Thomas De La Rue. And the other thing that Thomas De La Rue does, they employ high ranking members of MI6, which is quite well known. You don't have to take my word for it. And so he's going in there. He's a policeman. And he's going into this office to be told in 1959 that he's no longer going to be a police officer. He's now going to be working for De La Rue as a managing director of a new company that they're forming called Security Express. And you know when you get your, you order something on Amazon and it's brought to your house by a van. Over a driver. Yeah. So that originally was called a courier service. Okay. Now the courier service originally came from Wells Fargo. Do you know in the John Wayne movies where they've got this wagon and they've got this box of money on the top and they whip in the horses and they're getting chased by the robbers okay, quite often in these movies if you look carefully on the side of the wagon it says Wells Fargo, which is an American firm that became an armored car firm and they transport money. So in the old days they used to transport money and people across the plains and you know the guy would be riding shotgun and you know. So some of the movies actually quite real to true. But so he was employed by Thomas De La Rue to set up the Wells Fargo equivalent called a new company called Security Express. And this guy's name was Patrick Philip Whitcomb. Okay. And he's from Hull. His father was a tailor in Hull and his mother was an Irish woman from I don't know much about his mother. But anyway, that was it. And he was from Hull and he was evacuated during the war to Devon Farm. He lived in Devon and a farm with a lot of other kids as normal in those days. And then he went to join the RAF and then he joined the police force and then he got recruited into all this business. So basically I've caught that very short because that's a whole another story and I haven't written a book about that yet. But the fact is that we've got to a stage where this guy, right, this Englishman is now being recruited into De La Rue with a job which is to set up an armored car service. Okay. And he gets this idea because in those days there was no electronic banking. In those days, banks would owe each other money and every two weeks they would pay each other back and an armored car would transport the cash from one bank to another and the debts were paid. And that's how the banking system operated for a long time before electronic transfers and all the sudden other nonsense went on. So there was a lot of money being carried about and a lot of promissory notes going on. So there's RWADs and RWAs ready, willing and able to deliver documents with secret codes on them for the banks. And these documents had to be delivered to the banks and so dad, as I call him, my adopted father, invented this idea where, you know, the bank would employ a company to transport in a van these documents safely so they'd be in like little packets and the guy would come up to the reception and you'd sign for it. So this was a new idea then, right? This was called a courier service. Of course it's blown up into a massive proportion where everything's delivered by courier. We don't even call them couriers anymore. They're delivery drivers, aren't they? Whatever. But they were called couriers and so he sort of came up with that idea. I wish he'd patented it because he'd been one of the richest guys alive. But then they wouldn't have gone to Columbia and they wouldn't have found me. So perhaps a good idea they didn't. Hold on, do you find you? Yeah, so I'm getting to that. But, you know, this is a long story. Everything about my life is in here, you see. I don't have to refer to it in any documents or anything. It's all in my brain. You can fact check all this. It's not an issue for me at all. I will make slight mistakes because I'm just recalling my life. So, you know, bear with me on that. But so to answer your question, what was the question again? How did they find you? So he gets to the office in Regent Street upstairs. Bang, bang, bang. And he goes into this office and there's a woman typing there and he goes into this padded door. Right, office. And I tell the story like this because it's important that you understand. The guy on the other side of the door, right, is a guy called Arthur Norman who later becomes Sir Arthur Norman, Sir Arthur. And Arthur Norman turns out to be an MI6 agent who is head of Thomas de la Rue and he becomes my adopted father's handler. And my adopted father is recruited into MI6 as an operative. And it turns out that Arthur Norman knew during the war in the Far East a guy called Ian Fleming. So that might ring a bell. And the Regent Street office is very much like the office in Dr. No where he comes in, throws a hat on you and all this money pennies, you know. So they take the sort of idea from there. Not the whole Bond story is taken from that idea and so there are lots of other. But this idea of the office and that is taken from that. And Arthur Norman and Ian Fleming did all sorts of, I don't know what they were doing out in the Far East. Anyway, so I am answering your question. So what happens is he gets sent to this place, the other side of the world, to find out what's going on with the Colombian government and something or other. They're not quite sure yet. But they've been asked by a guy called Gregorio Bautista who is one of the sort of kingpin businessmen in the area in the 50s in Colombia, in Bogotá. So basically I'm explaining to you a bit about Bogotá and Colombia first. So Colombia is the size of France and Spain put together. It's a huge country. But more interesting than that is it has a huge height differential. So you've got 9,000 feet above sea level, the capital. And then you've got coast level, right? And in between these cities and towns thousands of miles of rainforests. And this is in the 50s. So the government in Bogotá can't control what's going on, you know, a thousand miles away through rainforests in a place called Barranquilla. There's no control. So you end up with feudalism, which is what you had in England. You end up with a lord in each city who runs it and pays homage to the, you know, you end up with that system because there's no central control as such. You just have lords in each area who kind of, you know, provide and pay homage and eventually you get problems with this. So Colombia was in a perpetual state of civil war at the time. You had a lot of these sort of area controllers who had their own private armies. M19 is one of the most famous private armies, still in existence today. They call it the FARC, I think. I don't know why they call it that, but FARC. Anyway, so you've got a situation where Colombia is in a serious problem and the central government are trying to create a country, but it's not a proper country as we know countries today. And you know, there's a problem. You can't just pick up the phone and call the police. You know, it's not a proper country as a whole country. So it's a war zone and the upper classes of the country are trying to establish what we now recognize as a country. And they can't do that without full control of the monetary systems of the country. So you've got to have banks and you've got to have, you know, monetary systems. So up until then it was all a bit sort of bandido country, you know, bandidos. So there's a situation which needs to be rectified and the upper echelons of Colombian society recognize this and they call in Tom Stilaru, famous for banknote printing and experts in banknotes and all the rest of it and all that dodgy paper that can't be forged and all this stuff, right? They call these people in to go and set up the business and help the Banco de Bogota control the monetary system. Great idea. It was the right move for the Colombian government at the time. Now, because of the civil war and all the murders and the killings and all the goings on out there, they eventually come to an agreement where they will then decide every four or five years who would be president of Colombia so that there's no more war. So like if you're my enemy, I'd say, well, you know, you can decide who will be president of Colombia for the next four years and then we'll decide in a few years. So you had this sort of situation and you had mock elections to make the public think it was all democracy. And there was this agreement going on. Sounds like we're doing it here in America. But anyway, it was designed to stop the killing or the civil war. And it sort of worked in a way. But there were uprisings and all sorts of problems and Colombia still got problems today. But anyway, so we got a situation where now we've got professionals coming out from London on the BOAC 707 out to Colombia and he's going to come up and set up this business. Anyway, it turns out that MI6 have realized that this is a great idea to also infiltrate the bandido money laundering and the what-have-you operations that are all going on under cover out there. The government can't control. There is a massive problem beginning to happen and that is there's a lot of... And it's not the cocaine that we recognize today. It's a lot of... I mean, it all started with hashish and that kind of stuff and also contraband of other types. Going to America. Because Americans were getting into this happy stuff, California, beach boys. It was all going on in the 60s and it was like, hey, man. They all needed these drugs. These drugs were coming from a place called Colombia whereas perfect coca leaf growing country. But they hadn't really invented a system. You can't just put a whole load of leaves in a bag. So they had this sort of stuff you could smoke. And so the local drug lords of their lords... They weren't drug lords. They were lords of their manner. Because today would be like a baron or something like that. They controlled an area in Birmingham or something. I don't know. But you have that situation in Colombia back in the late 50s. And this answers the question. No, just keep going. And so what happens is is that the CIA operation in Colombia starts and it's called Operation Durasno. And it's run by a chap called Manuel Noriega who works for the CIA. And he's a Panamanian of no real consequence publicly at the moment. Later on he becomes president of Panama. But at the moment he is a CIA operative and they're having a lot of trouble with money that's not coming back to America. So for example, when you go abroad on holiday you take your dollars or whatever and you go to your travel agent, you take this dollar. You take those and eventually those notes find their way back to the country of origin. That wasn't happening in this case. These notes are disappearing. And so if you start printing more notes to supplement the ones you've lost your currency becomes less valuable. You can't do that. So there was quite a serious problem. There's hundreds of millions of dollars disappearing into the system. I don't know where I was going. So they didn't know. So they had to find out what's going on. So it turns out that the printing of the bank notes in Colombia which was being done sort of a bit ad hoc by the Banco de Bogota is now being printed by Tomas de la Roos. So they go down, you know, Pat Wickham goes down there, meets all the people. It's all in my book. And so he goes and meets the American guy down there and so on. And so they set up this business in 1959. The very beginnings. And they need a local lawyer to do all the paperwork and all his usual stuff. And this local lawyer is called Carlos Escobar. You might recognize the name. He's much older than the famous Pablo Escobar. He's much older. But, you know, he's there and he's their lawyer. Sorry, he's their accountant. Forgotten mistake. He's their accountant and their accountant and their lawyer, Echeveri Carlos Echeveri who is a very famous lawyer because Echeveri was also the Colombian representative at the United Nations. And he was also, he had quite a few very senior positions in Colombia. So he's a big shot in Colombia. And Echeveri is also listed as one of the witnesses on my adoption papers which is very interesting. Echeveri was also very friends with JFK. So we're talking about the top people in the world at the time. And the top company with security printing experience is Delaru. And Delaru are now in Colombia and they're about to set up a huge printing operation to print Colombian banknotes for the Colombian government. So you can imagine now, whoever's managing director of Thomas Delaru in Colombia is going to be a very powerful man, right? Going to be able to have access to everything. So this guy's there. So now they start transporting this newly printed banknotes to the banks. Unfortunately, it's a bandit country, of course. So they've got to be armed to the teeth in these trucks that are like, you know, almost indestructible. And they're carrying this money across the country. So of course the young bandidos, they decide they're going to rob one of these armored cars. And of course, you know, their armatures, their kids, right? And you know, this is about who runs the country. So when one of the armored cars gets robbed, they have to get, you know, intelligence from where the money is kept. And they find out that the money from one of these robberies is held in a little house in a village just outside Bogota. And that there's a gang guarding the money. They find out, I don't know exactly how they did that, but it would be intelligence, paying people in the street, money to get, find out where it is. Anyway, so they mount, they decide that they've got to actually tell everybody who's boss. They mount this serious operation. And they want these Belle Huey sort of Vietnam type helicopters full of guys armed to the teeth, you know. And in the first helicopter is the MI6 agent, and his Savile Rose suit sticks out like a sore thumb. And in the second helicopter is this pop face, you know, a Panamanian fellow who works for the CIA called Noriega. And in the back, they've got all these armed guys armed to the teeth. And they're going to teach these guys a lesson because they can't keep getting their armored cars robbed. Obviously the whole business would collapse, wouldn't it? Because it's based on trust. So they hit hard, they land in this village and they really go for it. And they kill everybody. Two people escape. And this is key to the future of the drug business. Two boys, I say boys, they're sort of grown-ups because of their experience in life. But they're still kids, 16, 17. They escape. Off they go. The rest of them get killed. It's a bloodbath. It's hell. And then the MI6 agent gets out of the helicopter. It's all clear. It's fine. He goes into the house. It's a little house. He has to duck down because it's quite a tool for that era. He's still four now. There's nothing. But in the 60s, six foot four in Columbia where everyone's two foot six, he stood out like a sore bum. He's got an English suit on. Dark glasses. He looked like... It's just incredible. I can show you pictures of them. We should put some pictures on the thing of him because he really did not hit it. He wasn't very secret. But I suppose if you're in disguise, you can be in disguise and not be in disguise. It doesn't matter, does it? He was surrounded in bodyguards. He had all his team with him. And they go into the house to check out. So Norea and his boys pick up the money. They get the money back. There's big black sacks put in a helicopter. And he goes, you might ask how I know all this because obviously the agent becomes my adopted father. So he tells me the story. So they go into the back room and there's a woman or what he thinks is a woman lying on the floor. And he told me this story in Madrid and he was in tears when he told me this story because he realized that he had been responsible for what happens in this woman. And he's an Englishman. He's not someone who... He's old school English and he's got morals and, you know... So he goes up to the woman to see if she's alive. It's a natural instinct, isn't it? She's on the floor. And he... Well, later on when I was older I asked him about these flashbacks that I had of a woman in a red dress. And eventually he told me what that was about. And this is where this story has come from because even today I wake up with those sort of flashes. They're only little flashes but then she proves that the brain absorbs information from when you're born to when you die because these things are, you know, in your head. Many of you out there listening to this will realize and will remember, you know, you get these little memories that you can't quite explain. It turns out, I mean, you know, to cut this long story a little bit shorter, it turns out that the woman is a girl and she's 13, 14. And it's not a red dress. She's covered in blood and she's bleeding to death. And, you know, this is a guy that with no experience in these sort of things. He's come straight out of Regent Street and he's got all this going on. He's a violent country and he's learning fast. And he sees this happen in front of him and, of course, he feels responsible for it. She's copped a bullet. She's just ricocheted off the wall or something. I don't know. And she's dying. And, you know, in her last breaths, she says, look after my son Roberto. And in the corner, just over there in the corner, is a little boy in a cot. And that's me. And I only remember noises and flashbacks, but that's what that was. So as a kid, I must have seen the death of my mother as a girl. But, you know, it's really weird because you kind of disassociate from it. It's almost like it was just a movie and not real. But I know it's real because I have these little memories in my head that are nothing to do with what I was told. They're just memories. And they've caused me a lot of trouble over the years. Mainly the noises. Not seeing a woman dying because you don't know what it is when you're a little kid. You don't know it's someone dying, do you? It's someone that you don't even know what's going on. So anyway, that was pretty heavy. So he feels very bad about this. And he takes the boy, puts him in a helicopter. I mean, this is one of those moments in life. What if he'd just left the boy there? The boy would have died. This is Columbia. This isn't like the NHS come and pick you up and put you in a home or anything. This isn't the social workers. No social workers or police. Oh, yes, call the police. None of that. This was like Wild West Country. I would have just died. I probably just died of dehydration or something, you know? So anyway, he picks this little boy up. You know, I don't know. I'm six months old or something like that. I could stand up, apparently, I was told. I had the strength to stand up. So I must have been about it. Yeah, right. So it's certainly not a year old anyway. So he picks this little kid up and into the helicopter. And he will take off, bugger off back to Bogota. Money, job done. Everyone's learnt their lesson. Dead people everywhere. That's going to get out. Because it's like bongo drums. That's going to get out all over the place. Everyone's going to hear about this. So off they go to Colombia, to Bogota. It's about 15 minutes in a helicopter. And that little house is very important later on in my story. And the significance of it. And that little house, believe it or not, is still there today. It's extraordinary. Someone sent me a photograph of that house about a year ago. I couldn't believe it. It just freaked me out. It's like what? That's amazing. So I get put in an orphanage in Bogota. And the orphanage is, it's not there now. It was a church. Now I think it's a museum now, but it was a church opposite the military hotel. So because it's such a violent place, all the generals and the colonels and all the people that mattered in the army in there, they stayed in, they lived in an apart hotel complex called Hotel Tecundama, named after Tecundama Falls, which is like the Niagara Falls of Colombia. And this hotel is owned by the military. And it turns out that the MI6 agent has an apartment in the hotel Tecundama given to him by the Colombian government. And this is key as well to remember later on as Don Pablo Escobar Gavira is dying, just before he dies. He makes a phone call, right? It's quite well documented. He makes a phone call, which actually is his suicide by cop plan, to his son, to his other son, my half-brother, in that apartment. It's pretty weird how things come around in full circle. Anyway, so going back to this, the boy gets taken to an orphanage, which is opposite their apartment and they're upstairs discussing him and his wife what to do with the kid. So that answers your question about how I came to become part of an English family. So what happens is, I mean, you know, I could get into every detail, we'd be here for a week, but the fact is that they decide to adopt the child. But there are lots of reasons why they decide to adopt the child. It becomes a political thing. But with Carlos Escobar and the family situation and the violence that is being perpetrated, they decide to try and take control of this emerging drugs business. Because someone in their great wisdom has worked out how to turn the coca leaf into a product that you can sell in the shops. They've decided that they get this great idea. And so they get these little factories in the middle of the jungle. I mean, it's disgusting stuff. You put this stuff into your body, you're going to kill yourself. They mix it with petrol, they mix it with carbonates, and they mix it with that and all sorts of crap. And they turn this stuff into some really nasty stuff that blows your brain down. And we know that now as crack cocaine. I had a drug lord Dawn who used to ship gear from Columbia, and he was saying they put tires on it. Well, it actually causes cancer, rat poison, cement, petrol. It's madness. So your mum dies, you've been rescued by an MI6 agent. How long did you stay in Columbia for? Oh, so I'm in Columbia until things get dodgy. So probably about 10 years. But we as a family lived in Columbia for another 15 years. So you've unknown the wiser. You just thought that was... Right. So, I mean, there are two sides to this story now. So there's what he's doing as a secret agent with this operation and all that going on. And then there's the memories and the life of this little boy. So why have they got this little boy? What's the deal? Why adopt him? Leave him in the orphanage, someone will buy him. Because in those days, you just went to a third world country like Madonna. Didn't you buy a kid, right? I use the word buy, but it is. You pay some money to the priest and he gives you a kid. And you take the kid home, register with the papers in your country. You know, citizen of the United Kingdom, blah, blah, blah. Change the name, change the date of birth, change everything. Bang, bang, bang. Boom. We've got a new person, new kid, a little English boy. Right? And when you've got that kind of power and authority, you can do these things in a notary. You just go to the notary and the government lawyer says, do this, do this, and they do it, you know. So the little boy starts growing up in this family in Columbia where his father, his adopted father, who he sees as his father, has got his own private army. He's got, you know, everybody who's anybody comes to the house and he's like his father is Mr. Big running the whole business. But he has a godfather. Now, in the Catholic world and in England, it's probably not, doesn't have the same meaning. But in a country like Columbia, if you're somebody's godfather, you are somebody's godfather. You are a godfather. And you have the responsibilities of a godfather if your parents die to look after that child and all this sort of stuff. The traditional sense of a godfather. But this guy was also a godfather. He actually was. He was a little guy, thin striped suit, bowl on his cheek, he looked the classic godfather, but he was a godfather. And he was, turns out to be the senior partner in Tomas de la Rue, transportador de valores, sociado anonima in Columbia. But he was also my godfather. But this guy was chairman of every single company that operated a business in. So Texaco, mobile oil, you name it, whoever it was, he was on the board of directors. And he was the guy that gave these people their licenses to operate in Columbia. So if you wanted to run a, whatever business you wanted, if you were, I don't know, let's say you were Shell Oil and you wanted to operate in Columbia, there's a lot of oil in Columbia. You'd have to see someone like Don Gregoria who would then make it happen for you. But you'd have to give him a seat on the board and a share of the company. And so he had a seat on the board of all the big operations and he had power. This guy had so much power, he could decide who would be president of Columbia. That's how much power this guy had. And he was a multi, he was a billionaire. You know, we here in Narcos, you know, this story about the Americans made about my father, that the Pablo Escobar was the richest criminal in the world and all this stuff. Most of that is total crap. Okay. Yes, he had a hell of a lot of money and his later life when he become more successful. But, you know, that is not true. We're going to go into all that later. But we got to a stage now where you've got a little kid growing up in an English family in Columbia and you know, I've got bodyguards, I've got maids, servants, you know, I've got everything. I don't go to school yet, but I've got everything I want. And these people that I live with, they're speaking this weird language. I can only speak to our servants and the bodyguards. These people that I'm living with who tell me they love me and the rest of it, they've got this funny broken Spanish that they speak to me. I don't really understand what they're talking about. And they're clearly not part of us. Because I'm a kid, right? I'm like four, three, four years old and they're clearly not us. They're what I now know to be foreigners. But obviously at the time, you don't know. You just know, don't know. But they're different. They're like really white and they're tall and the rest of us are all short and slightly brown. So, you know, we understand that these people are foreigners. But when you're a little kid, you don't see it like that. You just see these people being a bit different. It's a little bit tricky. But eventually I find out that I've got to learn this out of that language called English, which is a nightmare to learn. And I grew up with this family basically surrounded in bodyguards and this really weird life. But to me, it was normal. I didn't know what money was. I didn't know what needing things were. You just had everything you needed. And, you know, some of the richest people in the world would come to our house and like Uncle List and Uncle Met, they were just people. So, I grew up and it was quite very strange. I look back now as really weird, but at the time when you're kids normal, you know, I could see the poverty, but I didn't know it was poverty. It was just them and there was us, you know. And a lot of people that we knew didn't work as such. They didn't have jobs. They were gentlemen. Because I know you used to go to school and you had bodyguards with you. Even today you had two bodyguards with you. Has that always been going on with you? Well, I have bodyguards. If I think I need one somewhere. I mean, I'm going on tour soon in the UK with Chameleon Jedstone. We start the tour. It's done in weekly segments. And I have security with me all the time. Not because I'm afraid of being assassinated. I mean, someone puts the bullet through your brain and what are you going to do? Nothing. It's the end. No more taxes to pay, right? Then you're feeble then. Yeah, in a way, you know. Not that you want to die, but you know, it's the end, right? So the thing is, right, the bodyguards are more for... Because when you... I don't want to sound bigheaded about this, but when you become quite well known, for some reason people want to do stuff like they want to... I don't know. They want to invade your life or something or other, which is fine because you're a public figure. You have to accept that. But you need to have someone to help you out. In these events where there's like 500 people, you need to be a little bit careful about. Sometimes you get a few, you know. John Lennon didn't think he needed it. And look what happened. So you've got to be a little bit sensible, but no, I don't feel like I'm in any real danger because I'm not offending anyone. Well, apart from a couple of my half-brothers, but you know, what the hell? We have a continent each. So there's a great big piece of water between us and it's better like that. You can cut that bit out. See when you're going through it then, like raised from the family, you've got bodyguards with you, going to school, it was another time you started to question it. Well, not incumbent, you know, because it's just normal. But what's quite interesting is I formed a relationship with my servants. Sounds dreadful thing to say now. But with the people that looked after me, who were paid to look after me, who were paid to look after me, I had a relationship with them. These were my friends. I loved these. I loved my bodyguards. You know, he was like a lovely uncle. And you know, I loved even more when I saw him in action because when I was very, very young, I saw some dreadful, dreadful things. I mean, I was in my bedroom as a picture which I want you to show. I was in my bedroom reading one of my tinting books because I used to travel around the world reading tinting books. Because tinting traveled around the world. I lived in a tinting world. It was fantastic. I think sometimes, you know, I still look at some of the tinting books and think how amazing it was, you know. Of course, a bit taboo, you know, now. You can't say some of the things they said then. I lived in this world where I would sit up and read in my room a lot. And because actually, when you grow up in one of these sort of really, really rich families, it can be quite lonely because you can't just go out in the street with your mates. That's not going to happen, right? You're in this house. So it's almost like you're trapped, like a prison. But you don't know any better, so you don't know. But you got to do things. And we didn't have television, so I read. So I read Tarzan of the Apes, Tintin, I did a lot of drawing and painting and stuff like that. So I'm like, I've jumped a bit, but three or four years old, I start drawing and painting and reading tinting books. Maybe I couldn't really read probably, but I'd look at all the pictures and stuff like that. And my bodyguards were my best friends. And there was a moment. And the first one I remember was, when you're a kid, you see things so differently to when you're an adult because I thought it was amazing, but I can't. Now I look back and think, shit, that wasn't good. So we're walking through the street. My adopted mother's got my hand. And I can't be more than... I mean, I'm just walking. I'm not very old. And a guy comes up and takes a photograph with this. He goes like this. So he's got one of these cameras with a kind of accordion thing on it. I don't know, it's quite strange. And this flash bulb goes and he takes a picture. And my adopted mother is obviously horrified. I don't know what goes on. But we've got the bodyguards with us. And they shoot this guy. In front of me. And I actually remember hearing, more than anything, I remember hearing the gunshot. Because he tries to run away. And he runs into a clothing rail. I remember this. We were in the Chico Shopping Centre. And there's someone coming out with a clothing rail and he runs into it. You know what I mean, a clothing rail. It's full of suits or whatever. And he runs into it. And I remember seeing my bodyguard on the right pull his revolver out. And we're in a shopping centre. I mean, the guy runs through the clothes and as he comes out at the other end. And the noise, you can't believe. Gunshot is really loud. The noise inside a shopping centre. Everyone's screaming. And this guy goes down. It's like in a movie. He literally goes down. And when you're like a young kid, you remember stuff like that. And you think it's amazing. Of course it isn't. It's the death of someone. But at the time, when you're a little kid, you think it's like drama. It's amazing. So, you know, what happens is you become immune to blood, guts and death. Your mind just, it's like part of life. So, you know, later on I'm in my bedroom reading my Tintin book. And the maid, we had a maid with her. I really loved her. Her name was Ortelia. And she came up to the room and she was shaking like a leaf like this in my room. And I've got a photograph of me sat in that bed, which we should put on the thing with my Leeds United banner on the wall. And so I'm a little bit older now. And she comes up to the room. And so, it's horrific really. There's a bloke standing behind her. And he's got a gun to her head. I'm sitting in my room reading my Tintin book. I thought my parents must have gone out for the evening. I don't really remember, but they weren't there. So clearly they were now. They were always at social events. And I'm left with the servants. Or I don't call them servants. They were my people that looked after me. And she's in tears, shaking. And there's a guy there. And he's got bandages. Like, you know, like a bandage when you sprain yourself and the nurse puts a bandage around her, or whatever. I don't think, like that. And there's blood coming out of his somewhere. And the bandage has got blood on it. Anyway, he gets to our room. My bedroom with Ortelia, the maid. And she says, you need to come with us. Of course, I don't know. You just do it. I remember this so well. And, well, I mean, she's like all clammy and cold. And it's horrible. So we get taken down the stairs, because my bedroom was on the second floor. We get taken down the stairs. I remember the stairs creaking. Funny how you remember things, isn't it? You remember the floorboards creaking on the stairs. And she's weeping. And holding me tight. And we go down the stairs. And so the next thing is just extraordinary. The next thing you hear is, I go! That's that sound I heard. And that was my bodyguard. And then the next one bang. And this guy just dead. That was it. And I couldn't believe it. I could see the guy on the floor. Blood on the floor. I don't know where it's coming from. And he's dead. That was it. In the hallway, in our house. So I'm not sure how this guy gets in, but he's got in, but he gets caught on the way out. And he's shot from behind the mate. There's that Akadnappin. There's that Aransum. There's that Escobar trying to get you. Like, why were they trying to get you? So then, about, I'd say a short while later. All the sirens, all this crap turns up. My dad gets out of the car. My adopted father packed with him. And they all come running in. Because the front entrance hall has glass windows. They could see to the street before this. There's like two doors. It's in the street. And it was all going on. All the De La Rue personnel turn up with all that machine guns. And it's all like, yeah. It's like the whole house is surrounded. Because he's got his own private army. And it's like, right, that's it. No one's getting in or out. And Colonel comes in. So you miss in your yard and all the rest of it. And he comes in with all this stuff on him. He looks like one of these tinpot military dictator colonels with all his gear on and scrambled eggs on him. He's got all the uniform, right? Nice guy, though. Big moustache like this one. And he comes along and they start talking. And he talks to me. This is all in Spanish. And later on they tell me that, oh, I have to describe, tell the events and stuff, which is quite difficult for me at the time. But when your kid just say, well, the guy, this and that, you know. And then so it turns out that this was a kidnap attempt. And they find out that this guy has come on orders someone in Medellin to come and get this boy. And that's all they know at that time. Later on, of course, we find out what really was going on, which effectively was my real father, now becoming a bit of a menace to society and beginning to get a bit of power. In his early 20s, late teens, he starts to get quite a lot of authority. And the rise of Escobar is sort of documented, but not really. The very early days are not told. Well, I want to tell that story here in this interview because in the famous Narcos thing that Hollywood made, Escobar is 23 or 24 and he's already a kingpin threatening the police and running drugs and other. No one really knows what went on in the early days. You know, we can read about that he stole this and he stole that and he was a thief. But how does this guy, right? I know it's a bit random, but how does this guy, who's a school dropout with not the greatest intelligence in the world, a violent, nasty kid who's got to survive on the street, right? Not approved of by his mother or anybody. How does this guy become one of, at the time, one of the wealthiest drug dealers that's ever lived? Well, we can talk about drug dealers today. How does he become this person? And the answer is there's no way someone like that could do that. He becomes this person because he's made this person. He's been made the person he was. People forget that Pablo Escobar Gavira did not set up the Medellin Cartel. The Medellin Cartel was set up by Gustavo Gavira. And a couple of other guys, perhaps I don't want to mention right now, but Pablo Emilio Escobar Gavira. So Gavira is his mother's family name and Escobar is his father's family name. So there's a cousin much older than him. Now we talk about Escobar Gavira having what is it? They say that he had 20 billion or 30 billion. I have a million billions he had. Escobar Gavira, fine. It became very wealthy. But his cousin, who was his closest confidant and much older than him, and his idea to set up this cartel. And I explain what a cartel is because a lot of people, they think it's some kind of company or something. It's not that at all. They set up this. He sets it up, Gavira. And Gavira had a lot more money than him. He was much wealthier. So, you know, I mean, when Gavira... Well, he got basically been up and killed by the police in prison, but that's another story. But, you know, when he died, they found billions and billions in different bank accounts all around the world in Switzerland and parts of Geneva, parts of Switzerland and America. Over 50 bank accounts in America with hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars in there belonging to him and his pseudonyms. You know, he was much wealthier than Don Pablo. And he effectively set up what we call the Medellin cartel. Now, cartel is a loose affiliation of crooks, if you like. And they agreed to work together and control a certain business. When did you decide... It's like the House of Lords, really. The House of Lords cartel, isn't it? When did you go to the UK? So, we got to a stage... Well, I was going to get through my stage in Columbia first because my life in Columbia... I mean, I went to boarding school in the UK. And the reason I remember this is because of decimal currency. It was 1971. But before that, my life in Columbia was just an extraordinary life. Which, you know, I'm going to be talking about life in my tour in the UK on stage. But some of the things that happened to me in Columbia are just like unbelievable. This is surreal. I mean, you know, an example. The President of Columbia used to come and visit me and shower me with gifts. And I'm a little kid. What's that all about? So, this is the kind of authority and power. Later on, when I start looking into this, I mean, so I've got to leap forward and back all the time to explain how I know these things. Later on, when I start looking into this as an adult, I realize that the money that was being filtered off the drug business, and I'll explain what that is as well, some of that money is being used to prop up the presidency. So, now we know how the drugs trade is supporting the presidencies of Columbia. I say presidencies because there were more than one president in time that was supported by the drug business. There was a little section of my life which became very, very, it was even more very dangerous. There was a time when, and I don't really understand exactly why this is, but I can sort of use logic. We used to go to a place called Medellin. We used to fly to Medellin. It was really nice because Medellin was much lower and hotter, so it was nice. Columbia was very high and low, so in Bogota it was always about 20 degrees, maybe 15 degrees, whereas in Medellin it was nice and hot, so I used to like going to Medellin. And we used to go to this hotel in Medellin, it's continental. It's right on the cliff on the side of the mountain overlooking Medellin, and I like going to Medellin. And we used to go and visit, we used to go to this hotel, and we always used to meet these people. And they were, what was quite funny was that this guy that I was, my godfather, we used to sit in this great big room. So I'm telling the story as I saw it as a child. We sit in this great big room with chandeliers, which is a shame because they're not there anymore, but the chandeliers have gone, but the room's still there. And there's a ballroom basically. And at the end there was a stage, and on the stage was a platform, a chair, and a group of chairs, and there was a guy sat, long way away I couldn't really see who it was. And people would line up to see this guy, right? And like, you know, kiss him like this and give him gifts and stuff. It was like Don Corleone movie, you know, it was pretty weird because I don't know what was going on. I just thought what was going on there. I used to think, oh, it must be his birthday or something because they're all giving him presents, you know, and you're kidding, don't. And so this is basically the swearing of allegiances once a year. And at that time, my real father, Pablo Escobar Garbida, had grown from being a common thief to a bodyguard, guarding some of the elites of Medellin. And that's quite funny, really, because, you know, he'd got to a stage where he, instead of kidnapping people and demanding a ransom, once he actually kidnapped a very prominent politician and businessman in Medellin, and instead of, and when the family paid up, he just took the guy out into the woods and killed him anyway, right? And this got, and he did this for a reason. So now people are paying him, right, not to kidnap them. So he actually hasn't got to do anything. They just give him money. So we call this bodyguarding, but actually they're paying him not to kidnap him. See, I think he's worked out, it's quite clever in a way, he's worked out that now he's getting paid, it's racketeering, really, isn't it? He's getting paid not to kidnap people. He hasn't got to go and actually do the deed anymore. So he's sitting there, so-called bodyguarding, with this little gang of ruffians, and he'd be sat at this table, but you've got to remember that they're still relatively inexperienced and they're sort of bandits. And there's a very serious guy there with Thomas Del Arou, my adopted father, with all the security guys, you know, in their uniform and guns and machine guns and the rest of it. And they had these belts with bullets on them. I used to think that was cool, just like the Westerns. So I used to go and sit at this table. I used to go, now you go with Baron D, go and see that, and go and sit over there and talk to an uncle, what did they used to call him? I can't remember now. It'll come to me in a second. I've got to the edge where I forget things. Anyway, so we had to go and sit at this table. Nice to sit next to this guy who's putting his hand around me and give it a show like that. And there were times when he used to say to me, you know, he used to say things like, almost like he's showing off in front of his mates. But of course I had my bodyguards there and there and there and there. So I think there was a situation where he was being allowed to see his boy, but then it was taken off him back. And the grown-ups were just telling him, you can see the kid, but that's it. And that's quite interesting because we used to go also in helicopters to this finker outside Medellin, just a helicopter ride for me. And we used to go with a lot of security, a lot of... And they'd pick up money from this finker. Boxes, cash. They'd put them in the helicopter and we'd go off again. And I just thought it was great. But whilst they were doing that, I used to get off the helicopter and go with my bodyguard to sit just in this room in this finker. And I would meet another guy. And we called him in my book. We gave him an alias. And this is... Gustavo Gavira. Okay, so this was the real boss, the guy who was really in charge. Once he got taken out, then Don Paolo became a bit more and he took charge. But at that time, they were mates in this business together. But he was sort of in charge. So it's a very interesting time in Colombia. But I lived in this bubble world where I didn't live in the real world. I lived in this bubble world. So you were getting to meet Escobar. Was he paying to meet you? I don't know. What we were talking about then, we were having discussions. I was just for you to bend the room. It was for him to see me he couldn't touch me. Well, he touched me, but he couldn't take me. So I think that the British Secret Service were holding me. So you get a very strange line between right and wrong. And when you get into these things for real, there's a weird... because you don't know who's doing the kidnapping. It's quite weird. You were getting used then? Of course. My adoptive father. My adoptive father. I love you. I'm coming here. I'm used as a tool. That is the sad reality, I'm afraid. I grew later to love my adopted father when he was older and I was a big grown-up. And I felt sorry for him in many, many ways. But at that time there's no doubt about it. See when you were under the orphanage did your adoptive father come and get you? Well, it was only a few months later. So he came and got you and then he raised you? And then Escobar used to pay money to see you? Yeah, well I don't think it was money. I think they had this collaboration. So they would get him to do stuff. For him. So basically, let's just go back to what a cartel is. A cartel is a loose affiliation of gangsters that run drugs, stealing, whatever it is they do. So they get together and they sit around the table and they all agree that we're going to do this and we're going to do that and we're going to do the other. No one fucks around with each other and they've got this rule, you pay this, I pay that and they're like, any one who fucks around they get taken out. And it's not like you're fired by Alan Sugar, it's like you're dead. Okay? So it's a sort of more dangerous version of that. So you didn't fuck around no matter whether you were the boss or not. So there wasn't a boss. This is what there's this kind of, oh, he was the no, he was the biggest bully boy in the room by the end of it all. But there's no boss, there's a group of an affiliation of people who agree to work together and they run their own businesses and they all pay. But you see what happened was is the British and the Americans realized that if they gave the route to Panama through Panama to America and nobody else he would become the richest and most powerful of the cartels and so they would all have to pay homage to him because he'd be the boss because he could get all his stuff in and out without getting caught. They used Noriega to do this. And so that's how they made Paolo Escobar a king because they gave him the routes. But they also gave him the means to pay his people. So you just imagine, right, this is what a lot of people forget. He's getting paid in dollars for all this money. It's fucking bundles of it like that. Millions and millions of dollars. What do you do with that? It's just paper. You come to anything with it. Actually it was estimated there was meeting over 400 million a week. True as that. That's too much. But it was a lot. But you know how Hollywood can get people talking and stalking. You know, you can imagine I'm not going to get into the nastiness of what cocaine is and that. But you imagine, right, cocaine was a lot cheaper, easier to get hold of locally but not easy to get hold of in America. Right? So then these people got together and thought, franchise what we do is we'll supply someone over there, Don Corley only or whatever and Don whatever in LA. He'll be our man and we'll supply him with the goods and he'll pay us. He then organizes gangs in each area and they sell this stuff and it's flowing through America like water. Okay? But there's, you know, every deal that's done $20. $20. $20. $20. $20. $20. Before the end of it, at the end of the week you've got hundreds and hundreds of millions of these $20 notes. Okay? So they just pack them all together they keep the profit and they, to keep the money, the drugs coming back they pack it all in the same plane that they brought it over and the lorries, because this plane thing is like peanuts. It's the lorries going through Panama that really did it and they got these packs of dollars. Use dollar notes. We've got zero numbers on. Proper notes from someone who's done and bought some cocaine. So it's like, what do we do with all this shit? It's flying into these fingers. It's coming back into Medellin. It's coming into this finger in the rainforest which we used to go and collect these dollars. Baro Escobar has got to pay his people. Well they don't want dollars. What are they going to do with dollars? They can wipe their asses with it. That's about all they're good for. They want pesos. Brilliant. We've got them. Dollars? Convert the dollars to pesos. Huh? You need a company that's printing the pesos. Oh, Thomas De La Rue. So the company and the MI6 agent that is managing director of transport of the lorries, Thomas De La Rue this company, right, unbeknownst I suspect, but I don't know and that's the scandal of it all. We don't know how much London knew but what went on was shocking because they facilitated this man's rise to prominence by allowing him to convert a lot of his money, not all of it. There's millions and millions of dollars where he had to bury in walls because he couldn't do it all. They actually facilitated his rise to prominence on purpose so that they could control the business. He who controls the money or the debt of a country controls that country. The Americans do it today. That's what Ukraine is all about. Running up massive debt then they control the country. When did you start asking the questions about it? When did it start making sense when you adopted file I started telling you things about it? What age will you? Well, yeah, so these questions are really big questions that you'll ask me. I'll answer that question if you'd ask me that question again in a minute but I still want to get on to this shocking truth about what actually happened in Colombia because we have such violence in society today. Now it's not just cocaine anymore and there's a fentanyl problem and all sorts of other problems but this whole franchise operation was facilitated by the operation that allowed this gangster to launder and change a lot of his money into pesos. In exchange for that the British and American security services had control of that country because they had control of the monetary policy the printing of the money so they had control of the country and this was empire building the same way they did in Iraq in many countries when the guy gets too big for his boots they take him out. You name them all. Now this is the empire building that's going on as soon as Zelensky outlifts his gone. It's the way these old-fashioned western ideals work. Do you think these big words get used? They get killed. How many of them are still alive? How many of them are still alive? How many of them have become too powerful because I think Gaddafi was wanting to change the currency he was wanting to come away from the dollar. Now you've hit the nail on the head. This is the same in Colombia. The dollar if you want to change from the main currency to Colombia which is where America and Britain incidentally they work together on this. Control your country because you control the money, you control the country. There's no other way. You control the money, you control the country. You can decide who's going to be president, you can decide everything. Colombia, the CII and the Secret Service, MI6 they had Colombia by the balls. They printed the money, they transported the money or had in their hands the guy that ran most of the drugs business. So they've got control of the country. They can decide whether Texaco or whether BP get contracts. They've got control of this massive country emerging from the third world. They've got control of it. And this is what they do. So to answer your question, yes, get hold of the currency. But if you get someone who decides to get the currency to pre-war Kuwaiti dinars, that's it, we're not having that. We'll send the troops in. When did you start asking a question? When did the adopted father come forward and told you everything? Well, it's funny how things happen. I've got so much more to talk about. Let's take a big gap there, a holiday gap there and go to answer your question. So it's now 1989. Just a big leap forward and I'm a grown-up and I've got I have a wife called Susan and two little kids and a step kids. So there's like three kids and we're now living, a massive jump. We're now living on the Costa del Sol in Spain. I'm a resident of Spain. It's 1986, I've got my residency and I'm now designing a golf course, doing the drawings for a golf course because I'm a drawer painter but because I'm a hyper-realist painter I can draw things as they really are. So before the golf course is built they got me to do the drawings. They is Peter Alice. Unfortunately, their old piece has died now but it was a lovely man. I had lots of great, great times with Peter Alice. Now Peter Alice had had a little design company called the Peter Alice and Clive Clark Design Team and you know, they got paid piles of money to do golf courses around the world. Best commentator there's ever been, I think, on golf. So anyway, so Peter Alice is down there doing a job for Costain and Peter Costain who was the boss of Costain at the time they've got paid a load of money from Hong Kong to do this big motorway in Hong Kong harbour with concrete they're concrete experts and they got all this money in Gibraltar so clearly it's the 80s, what do you do? You build a load of houses and hey-ho all the money gets cleaned. So this British company bought 10,000 acres of prime real estate land on the Costa del Sol next to a place called Sotogrande between Sotogrande and La Lina and it is a long story how I got there, which we should tell but anyway, I'm there because you want to know how it is that I found out about this. So what happens was is that I'm on the Costa del Sol great time making money and get paid loads of money to just draw pictures of golf courses. Peter Alice and I get to know Tony Jackson we have great fun with and he and his son and I we just we got on fine and I set up a design and it's all going well and they got a wife with kids, dog and everything else right? Great life I mean you know I'm making money it's like really cool and I'm 23 years old I'm just a kid but I'm like well yeah I've got a Mercedes I've got the lot right and Dad, my adopted father we know we keep in touch everything's fine we're all we're all mates and everything I didn't know him very well still you know he's out there on stuff doing things but I used to go and visit him and he said to me oh I've got an apartment in Madrid now you know I come up and see me I say oh Madrid fantastic because the Costa del Sol was like you know a dustball in those days I mean the shops were shit you know so you know I mean we used to go to Gibraltar just to get stuff from Spencers which is gone unfortunately and we were really backward I mean I had a brick like this with a phone on it with an aerial like two meters high hello can you hear me oh shit you know we lived in the dark ages no internet nothing so you got your newspapers or a bit of Gibraltar TV news which is like two years old so I'm out there making money designing golf courses you know I'm going to see my dad in Madrid and my mother adopted mother's living in Walton on Thames in Surrey I don't know what's going on there he's like living there most of the time so I don't know who knows I never got the answer to that one but anyway he's in Madrid and I'm living in Spain under my adopted name Philip Charles Robert Whitcombe and I used to love phoning up his secretary in Madrid and say oh can I speak to Mr. Whitcombe please and she used to say who's calling I used to say Mr. Whitcombe she used to think it's some joke anyway it was brilliant because so dad's now working for Brinks the security company Brinks until I who Brinks what's going on here so that's strange alright so he's got a new job with Brinks for Reiner so I'm up in Madrid do a bit of shopping in the Corte de Inglés lovely proper like city with like stuff you know I'm one night so there's several years of a relationship with dad quite nice and mother used to fly over to Madrid and then they used to come down to our place and something around there for Christmas we used to have a lovely family Christmas that sort of thing so it was going alright and I've got the wife and she's pregnant she's going to have another kid and it's all like great it's 1989 now and phone rings hello hi son you need to come to the office quite quickly we need to have a chat so Spain's a big country I've got to get on a plane can't just like go down the road so up to Málaga airport big deal you know up to Madrid and he said I need to talk to you about something so I said alright and he said well let's go out for dinner alright so we're just two guys I'm growing up now but I'm 24 it's 1989 I've got money I'm doing alright good life, wife and kids life's cool and then you know my adopted father basically throws a fucking great big hand grenade into my life and he says now what I'm going to tell you I went on over a longer period of time than what it sounds like so we started a conversation that lasted three and a half years roughly maybe four I can't remember now but basically a fair old time but this was the culmination of his whole life something in his head and he's got to talk to me now something very interesting happened in 1989 that you may know about and we may not know about but I'll tell you anyway so in Colombia the other side of the world it might as well be on Mars as far as I was concerned because I'd finished with all that in Colombia on the other side of the world and another planet far far away Ahudlam by the name of Pablo Escobar Gavina who had become some big drug lord had got himself into a lot of trouble and as you alluded to earlier it's become a bit too big for his boots and they were trying to cut him down to size so they had now I don't need to go into his life but he was a nasty piece of work you'll ever meet in your life this is not you know we'll go into that in a minute because I don't want people to think that this was like a good guy or anything because there's no way but anyway we'll go into that later so we're in 1989 and we go to see opposite the apartment in Madrid Calle Goya, number 6 very nice, very very nice and he was literally living like a bachelor almost and Brinks had an office in Madrid and he was doing stuff which we will find out about later so we go to see Full Metal Jacket you remember the Vietnam War movie Chocolates, popcorn lovely, had a great night his night out and we're walking home so it must be in about 20 minute walk and we're walking past this well Madrid's all apartments isn't it we're walking down this road chatting about Christmas you're coming down, you know, the rest of it because this was later 1989 and at the time this drug lord this drug dealer in Colombia had got himself into a lot of trouble so I'm going to cut this long very short to stop himself getting extradited he does a deal and they allow him to go to prison but he built his own prison which is called the Cathedral and it's like a billion dollar house it all goes wrong for him but basically he goes to his own prison and lives like a king inside his own prison but he does lose control of a lot of his business empire and of course, as I said before a cartel is a loose affiliation of people they just take over his business so he's lost a lot of control but he's got some loyal people so he's got Popeye out there killing people still I think actually it was Popeye or someone else but anyway, we get on to Popeye later but he's lost control he's got himself in a bit of trouble that's as far as we need to go for now so I'm now in Madrid and dad's telling me stuff so he's about to tell me something quite extraordinary we're walking down the road and he says to me well, I'm 24 years old my whole life is making as much money as I can I'm going to be a multimillionaire you can't just tell me boy that's where we keep the money I've got some money coming to me no, no, that's where we keep the money so I wrote this in a lot of detail in my book because I just thought it was a great story to put in some stories he's kind of told loosely but some stories he had a lot of detail to anyway it ends up that he allows me to come the next morning to go and see this the way we keep the money we go into this basement apartment where we've walked past here the next day, the day before and well, I mean, I've described it in great detail in my book but to get down to it we go down this lift and down into a basement and it's a bit smells and it's cold and all that stuff, you know and we get down there and there's piles of money in sacks, big, big black sacks and these sacks I remember them I mean, they're really old and knack at these sacks but they're the same sacks that they used to use De La Rue Sacks, something in Christ is this the money so, yeah, and so he started to explain to me what's going on so there's this pile of money in Madrid and we're talking about hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars in big denominations, not little denominations so they've changed this money over somewhere and it's in big denominations sitting in massive great big black sacks in a basement in Madrid 10 minutes from our apartment and he's the only one who knows about it I don't know there's no way he could carry these black sacks everywhere so somebody's helping him, I don't know what's going on but he tells me that this is the money that they got out of Colombia for a guy who we used to go and see in Madrid what the guy that I used to sit at the table yes and that guy there do you remember we told you we were adopted and you didn't understand at the time he said well, you know what adopted means now he said well, that guy there was your real father and it's just like a bombshell hit incredible just when something hits and you suddenly realize that this sort of mystical character that used to visit who you used to talk to and you can remember the smell and you know this guy turns out to be your dad problem is he's now in trouble and since we knew him in Colombia he got married and he had two other kids and they've had to run away because they're death threats serious problems so his wife and his two children from his marriage I can't remember they went to the Caribbean and they went to somebody else and nobody wanted to give them a home eventually they did some deal with Argentina and they snuck in there on the false names not in the Wales but there's a problem with anyone who's his family and my adopted father is an honorable man who has to tell me all the story and say we need to protect you now so my wife and my two little children living this great life suddenly special forces bodyguards armed to the teeth turn up at the door standing there like bloody whatever she's phoned me up what's going on here it's alright it's cool I'll explain it all when I get back down incredible he starts to tell me about his life and I start to ask him questions and that's answering your question and that's when I say to him what about the woman in the red dress and that's how it all starts when he starts to tell me about my life so we've gone round now and this is the moment where he tells me about my life and he tells me what this money is this money is money and this is something that you know so Pavlos Kovar Gavira was not going to be always in this business he had a plan I loaned a several hundred million or whatever it was and I'll get this secret agent British agent to take this money to Madrid and I'm going to get out of this that was his plan but he got called and he had to kill himself in here but you know his real plan was to get out of the business and to set himself up somewhere else no idea what that was but what this money was for it was his going away money and he had the MI6 agent and this was the favour that the MI6 agent did for him in return for the information as to where the cartel the rest of his businessman who would have killed him which he was the worst they would have killed him if they'd known he had turned and was working for the secret service now even my half brother he and I we don't agree on almost nothing so Juan Pavlos we agree on basically almost nothing there's a couple of things we do agree on and one of them is that our father worked for the secret service eventually this turned against his cartel and eventually started working for the secret service in return I say working for I mean basically you ask me a question I'll give you an answer that's like working for so he would then tell the secret service gentleman where the money had to be kept so this culminated in the cartel all them what not all their money but 99% of their money was being held in a bank in Panama in dollars most of it billions and billions and billions and billions literally on pallets in the central bank of Panama and that money was being held for them by Noriega who now was the military dictator of Panama now in the annals of history as you know the Americans invaded Panama got their money back thank you very much mission accomplished 27 years mission accomplished we've got all our money back they take it back to America that's all documented invasion of Panama and they take Noriega with them how much somewhere like somewhere between $1350 billion so you adopted father so you adopted father was he friends we ask you about was that a deal for when you are a spy you become friends with whoever you need to become friends with to get the job done so he his main job is to find out where the hell all his money is going for so to find out where the money is let's say you know where the money is let's say you are hiding 50 euros somewhere in this room how am I going to find out where you're finding 50 euros where you're hiding 50 euros well look I'll tell you what I'll do I say you give me another 50 euros and I'll hide it for you in the same place you're going to tell me now where to hide it so I now know where you're hiding places right so that was a very simplistic childish way of saying if I want to know where you're hiding your money I have to get you to trust me and then I have to then get involved in your business to a point so that you then give me some money to hide for you and that's part of being a British Secret Service agent working abroad you have to get involved in the thing that they're doing so that you can then become part of their operation and then you can then divulge the information which he eventually did and then of course the Americans got all that money well you see you've got to remember right that you know I'm knocking on the door of 16 now I'm going to be 58 this year so I'm an older wise been there done it all got the t-shirt guy 23-24 year old kid green dad tells me this stuff I don't know I just thought it was some kind of movie or something you don't it doesn't hit home that it's real he gave me some paperwork I'm thinking it's interesting you know stuff like that you know but you know there's a bit of you that doesn't believe it all there's a bit of you that thinks that's just ridiculous but then you look back you sit down and you think oh yeah I remember when that happened and oh yeah I remember when that happened and so it starts to cross reference in the back of your mind fuck me some of this this might be true but there's always a bit of you that says no way I mean you know it's ridiculous but there you know yeah um sometimes fact is stranger than fiction to a point where it is literally incredible and in the back of your head you want you desperately I mean I spent years this is weird because you think what is he doing I spent years trying to disprove in my head the story but every time I knocked on some door it opened and then something was true yeah because people watch don't think it's fantasy because the thing is as well I've had a man on call Peter McLeese Peter worked for the SCS and they were offered one million dollars to find your father and go and kill them yeah we never have happened yeah but why would they done that their helicopter crashed I was on all minds sat in a chair and people were seeing these telling lies as I found this no no no look you've had someone on your program that says the world is flat right there are people millions of people have died to try and disprove the Bible stories you know hordes of Muslims have tried to kill hordes of Christians and hordes of Christians these are all everything is based on books and stories all the the total some knowledge of humankind comes from stories that are written in books or on parchment paper or whatever it is the total some knowledge of humankind from the first humans to today it all culminates in stories that people tell of what's happened and their lives yes some are untrue and some are true it's not that important you can decide as you say quite often you can decide whether you believe it or not you can do your bit of research on google and you can do your this and you can do that and you can do whatever you want it's not a problem I'm telling the story because it's my life right if you don't want to believe it it's fine now this guy got slagged off by people saying it's not true you know the old guy sitting in a chair well I would say to to Peter good on you mate no worries mate you don't give a shit about what people think right one of the things you must remember never read your reviews even if they're good because it'll affect your mentally for the rest of your life I mean you know how many people read a lot of their reviews and then kill themselves it's not good you need to just blank yourself away from that some people believe we never sent some people to the moon well that's great we don't need to go to war over it it's relax it's cool it's not a problem that's why you're here today tell things from your side so seem you've got all that information did you know who Eskibar was well you see we've got no internet right my adopted father he's now owned up to being an MI6 secret agent but we used to take the piss out of him anyway I used to say I'll write you an MI6 agent you're James Bonnier when Dr. No-Karma I went oh yeah that's him and he kind of had a little smile in his mouth and we were sort of smirking like that and I thought fuck me he really is a secret agent like oh yeah oh shit alright and then suddenly dawned it was real but we didn't have the internet so when he says Don Pablo Escobar Gavira the world's you know great drug lord and all the rest of it is in the shit and now we've got to give you bodyguards I'm thinking who is this because you know now anybody says anything to you oh yeah we didn't have any of that so when he's telling me this stuff that all I had was the memories of my childhood I didn't have all this sort of back up information that I could have access to you know I'd have to go to London and get out the old insert Compedia Britannica and we didn't have that information so although it was an amazing thing that he was telling me which I trusted him and believed him and I could see there were bodyguards at the door and the whole thing went mad right but the fact is that I didn't have the information that we all have today no one had invented Narcasa movie yet or whatever you call it and the whole thing was not a big story because it was kept secret there was a 40 year rule with these secret operations you know there's nothing in the papers nothing like that quite interestingly if you go to the Thomas Gregg & Sons website you'll see that there's a period of this time that I'm talking about there's nothing in there it's a gun mate isn't it no one talks about it it's like no one talks about which member, current member of the royal family used to come out and see us must have known what was going on that's all like so the British establishment today had to talk about these things but I know I'm watched it's quite interesting isn't it now you'll be watched you better give me a couple of your fucking but yeah this guy what's his name again you're telling me about yeah Michael fair play to him because it takes a bit of balls to tell the story like that he used to fly gear for your dad he ended up just finishing at 20 straight and Australian he's in his 80s well I mean and he was talking about women was that the same women but he said she was a fucking knocky she killed people in front of him did I tell you there was a woman in the cartel yeah right so she was I'm not going to name her now but she was worse than him I went to school I went to school in Columbia with one of my dad's girlfriends obviously she was in the senior class and I'm in a kids class right but you know Virginia Viejo wrote a book about how she was raped by Pablo Escobar right and how she was she turned state's evidence she's now living in a safe house in Florida quite interesting that there was a safe house in Florida and there's the same safe house that we used to go to in Boca Raton, Boca Raton is the place how many kids did you actually have right so there is only contention here between myself and my half brother he's grown up thinking he's the one now that's fair I don't have a problem with that but he's not the one okay you're talking about someone who is completely out of control with more money than ever who had a pot chance for little girls now there's a question I'll ask you right if you force yourself on a 13 year old girl what are you? right so what is Don Pablo Escobar he's a pedophile and a rapist okay it saddens me to have to admit that because there are people out there that think he's a hero he's a mass murderer responsible personally for at least 5000 personal deaths blowing up I don't know what killing people all over the place right raping young girls he raped my mother at 12 and a half 13 because it's right if you have sex with a girl like that because they can't they don't know what's going on his wife Maria I can't pronounce it right Juan Pablo's mother she wrote a book and she puts in there that he raped her when she was 13 I'll be corrected if it was 14 or whatever he puts that in there all the girls that have had association with him have had the balls to stand up and say something about it have also they were raped by him when they were young girls this guy rapes young girls rapes young girls he had a thing about it okay now it is said by other members of the family that when he was married he was not going to allow any other children and this is true I accept that but before he was married he had this life as a teenager where he went around shagging anything he could find and he had a thing about young girls and when he was 16 he got this young girl pregnant as my mother and he went on now I have in my phone wherever it is here somewhere I'm in contact with two other kids I've seen their birth certificates okay and one of them contacted me after my book I can't give his name out alright I know you would like me to but I can't one of them contacted me after my book came out and said oh my god I remember you coming to see me at the orphanage and I thought bloody hell you know how you write a book and some of this stuff comes out of the woodwork doesn't it lots of stuff have come out of the woodwork and this kid because he is younger than me so he has been fathered Pablo Escobar you know like 5 6 years later so it's very close to when he got married alright and this kid right was in the orphanage because I used to go back to the orphanage where they took me and take presents to the kids most of them were blind I used to go back and take my so if I got a train set for Christmas which we should put a photograph in there I used to take the train set I used to play football with them in the yard because they had a tin can they played football so they could hear it it was fantastic playing football with the blind they were really good at it I mean they were better than me but you know I just remember that situation and I think to myself this is not a good person just to remember that why did he not want to have any more kids he had this he had this he had this image that he had to portray when he was married right so he gets married and it's like I'm a family man I'm the man he had got to the stage where he became a megalomania it's like a mental disease it's Gaddafi had it Saddam Hussein, Adolf Hitler had it they start out with these sort of genuine intentions of just becoming the president or the head of this or in charge of that and then he goes to the head and they start killing him and start going mad megalomania right this murder has ever lived to Stalin right what is it 25 million or something you killed I mean you got to remember that once he'd married he had this image married man why because he wanted to become president of Colombia so he's now using a lot of his money to buy the votes in his local constituency in Medellin right so he's building houses supporting the football team he's like oh what a nice guy he's paying everybody money and so they all vote for it so he gets a seat in the House of Parliament because that didn't last five minutes because someone went the honorable gentleman is a drug dealer and then the next minute he hasn't killed so we've got to have that it's like in the House of Commons it's like Rishi Shunai having four members of the Labour Party shot on the way home because they're dead to criticise him so that was the demise of Pablo Escobar when he took on the government like that and started killing politicians so that was his big downfall but he had this megalomania thing so he's got this image to portray family, man, kids but he still when he was married had affairs with lots of people and Virginia Leal was one of them she wrote a book and made a film you don't have to come to me for that you know that happened but I tell you what happened which is quite interesting so Popeye was his top drawer assassin he's like head of his killers and he had a couple of hundred kids with motorbikes, guns and they go around killing anyone you, him, that judge over there kill him, stop at the lies $200, thank you very much done this guy Popeye was in charge of that and he did some very interesting interviews like ours, but from prison he's got nothing to lose he's in prison for the rest of his life so he tells it's all he has it is and he recounted a very interesting story about a group of young girls that Pablo Escobar had him kill now one of these girls was pregnant with his baby whilst he was married right now this is a great bone of contention that my half brother will have a big moment about whether he can bitch all death he wants, but the fact is we're not talking about a nice guy and he's got one of these young girls pregnant and he orders Popeye, his killer to go out and kill her because he doesn't want any births within the marriage from illegitimate children there's some image, some Colombian thing, I don't know what it is so he has her killed and Popeye talks about this in one of his interviews it's on YouTube, you can look it up it's all in Spanish, so you'll have to learn Spanish I guess, but anyway this is not a person that you should look up to this is a very nasty you know evil person he got maglamania into his head and thought right, I'll get into parliament I need to be voted in, I need to be nice to everyone so he starts putting a lot of money into the local economy and that's why he was revered as a hero in his funeral 25, 26,000 people there and all the rest of it because he bought all these votes with money poverty stricken third world country, which it was really third world, I don't want anyone to be insulted by that but it wasn't the modern state that it is today with all this poverty you take a family living in a shack and you give them five hundred dollars, it's like they've won the lottery and that's what he used to do so when it comes to election day and also he had protection if the police are coming up the road on a raid, it's like all the phone box is start ringing he's protected he had loads of kids I suspect I actually am guessing but it's got to be at least 15 I've heard from four of which two I've had verified so I know that how would you when you phoned out that it was dead the java and the fielder it was funny, I mean 1993 terrible year and I'd found out all this stuff and we'd had to come back to England because my wife had a brain tumor sort of held up well we were sat in our villa everything's going well she gets up to the kitchen and they go and get a drink and starts walking around in circles I thought you've been at the PIMS what's going on with you then I knew I thought if the Mrs's had a few drinks tonight would be okay and we made a joke about it all but then she got this massive headache it was one of the first it was the first CT scan machines they had on the Costa del Sol in Marbella there, paid a guy a load of money and jumped the queue and went in and she had a thing and they found a tumor the size of a tennis ball and a frontal lobe up here so she said she'd be dead within a week wow that was a shock this is the 1991 I remember flying back to England, big panic kids the whole drama it was dreadful relocating house again dreadful massive problem for me business wise and things went really bad and I got from having lots of money to nothing so my life went down the toilet straight away but I looked after her there was this thing that you could fill in forms I heard and the government would give you some money to live whilst you're looking after someone so you don't have to work I thought well that's quite good so yeah I filled his forms and I got I don't know what they were paying me 65 quid a week or something to live on and some rent for my house and I was looking after my wife and I nursed her until she died she died in 1993 but in January and that's the story I would love to get on to in January my adopted father when he was talking to me in Madrid he had this weird thing going on with his hand it was a bit kind of with it or something I don't know what had gone wrong there so I said what's wrong with you he said oh nothing nothing you know anyway it turns out he's still working in Colombia because it's quite interesting when I wrote the book I used my collection of postcards as reference because when you got a postcard they're the whatsapp messages of the day you've got the picture on the front there it is so let's say many in on the back there's a postage stamp with a date and a time so that's cool so you know where that person posted that postcard from then it says on the postcard it said oh you remember when we used to go here or something like that on it signed Papito he always signed Papito which is the dad and then there's the address on there so you've got all this reference material and one postcard and when you're writing the book you've got 400 of these so I know where I was at what time where I lived and everything so it's really good reference material so you know we got all that and I forgot where I was now when your wife took away so when your wife was not well she had the tumour and then you met your dad he was sending postcards his hand was broke that his hand was something along with his hand and anyway he went to a hospital called Mount Alverno in Guilford and they diagnosed him with a thing called motor neurone disease so I said where the hell did he get that from you know what is that so it turns out this is what I was coming to it turns out he's still on operations in Colombia but a lot of the other members of the cartel had been putting this money in stupidly of course in a bank called the BCCI and their headquarters in Karachi so that's gone to Karachi on some secret mission to bring down BCCI and get information I don't know why he's there but anyway so this big operation was run from Madrid and it's the same usual story armored car service usual story but they catch BCCI on the take from the Colombians and it brings the bank down when he's in Karachi he gets a disease and he's in the dangerous diseases clinic in London and I always see the funny sider to a lot of these really tragic stories because it's the best way of dealing with tragedy but he comes back from Karachi with a sore throat and he goes to see the doctor at the health centre and the doctor closes the health centre down and asks everyone out and he's got diphtheria and now diphtheria hasn't been in the UK since the dark ages and he's brought diphtheria back with him from Karachi so fuck me they close it all down and it's a bit like lockdown everyone gets locked down and we're getting phone calls every five minutes you know what have you are you okay whatever and he gets put in the dangerous diseases clinic then he recovers from this it's funny because it was Christmas and Santa threw Christmas presents through the window and he didn't come in he recovers from this but the toxins from diphtheria gave him motor neurone disease which killed him but 1993 you see so in January 1993 my adopted father who I've got to know really well and I loved him really I grew to love him in a different way but just really nice he was a nice guy you know who was it when you talked to when you talked about the do you feel that's connect with half brothers and half sisters no I have a relationship with other half brothers and sisters but my half brother Juan Pablo hates me he just says I'm a liar and a mental case and everything else it's not right he shouldn't talk to me like that he just won't have it that's fine he's allowed to have his opinion I wouldn't speak bad of him but you know we're in back to the story we're in in Walton cottage hospital in Walton on Thames in Surrey you know he's dying he's got motor neurone disease he's got about a couple of days to live maybe and I you know I'm looking after my wife who's dying she's down the road her mother's there and I go to visit dad in the hospital and it's horrible but even in these horrible moments there's some funny moments and I always find comedy in all sorts of places I'm sad on his bed and he's in this room with Arthur and he's there there's two beds and it's morning and Arthur's gonna get his bed bath and these two little nurses come in and they draw the curtain because that's ridiculous you can hear everything and they just go oh yes come on Arthur we're just gonna and then you hear and these two nurses walk out white so they've obviously gone to washes in other regions and he's got over excited and dropped dead so me and dad a lot we're kind of trying not to laugh because it's a tragic moment but it's also funny because you just think you're what way to die you know two young nurses you know doing the business anyway so anyway Arthur dies and I'm sat on the bed with dad and I said I'll come and see you later this evening and he can't speak properly you know he's a bit you know come back later and he's not really not well and he kind of gestures to me about you know and I this is another one of those moments that I describe in a lot of detail in my book because some things really need to be detailed and this is really key to the um we'll have a break in a minute but this is really key to the next part of my life because you mentioned 93 so so my wife's there don't know how long she's got to live but she's bedridden I'm now trying to deal with the issue of this man who I've grown to love who I've realised has led this whole other life which is pretty amazing and then you know he reaches over and asks me to pass him something you know quite sure what he wants and then so I think well he needs his jacket or something so he's got this old Dax jacket you know the Dax jacket I love his Dax jacket and um he reaches over and I pass him the jacket and he fumbles because you know with motor neurone you can't hold things properly and he gets his diary out he's got this little slim line diary which he's kept and in there right it's got everybody's phone number I've got that diary and on one of the pages it said Escobar and he's got a phone number and I've got my dad's phone number on there still got that diary but this piece of paper falls out of the diary which I was telling you about earlier and it's just a home office thing and on the back some numbers and some letters and some dots and stuff so I said like you know and what am I supposed to do with this and he kind of goes like that and he says something and he comes out with this is where we keep the money so I said what money he said the money in Madrid and then he just goes like that and the nurses come in and say you know leave him alone and let him rest all that stuff so I buzz off and come back three hours later he's died and I'm left with that can you imagine that now I know that that money in Madrid is a lot of money but life changing money right and he's come out with that well that just blew my brains out that did so anyway I thought well I'll put that in my pocket and so we go through the whole it's funny when we get to, as you know say when things come out of the woodwork we get to he was cremated in Cobham in Surrey at the crematorium and we're at the crematorium and there's all the you know all the all the adopted family there and the uncles and the whatever no Colombians but there's two guys who like over there in suits like not in black suits just ordinary business suits and they come up to me and they say um is this are you Philip so I said oh yes you said and one of them says to me I've spoken to you on the phone yeah I spoke to you on the phone when we wanted to speak to your father um you may remember and um we were asking him to go somewhere do you remember that I said oh yeah yeah that was um couple of years ago he said yeah so we're from the phone and we just like to offer our condolences and here's my card if there's something I can do for you or you know if you can if we need to speak to you I hope that would be alright all this kind of stuff two MI6 agents that have come to his funeral I'm thinking I want a business card if there's anything I can do for you what am I going to do for these people um turns out a lot later which will come out later but um things do come out of the woodwork so 93 was really shit so this is January and he dies and then that same year I'm answering your question from about three weeks ago and that same year um Sue dies I was on her by her bed ah in her house holding her hand and she died it was really horrible but you know it's really amazing to watch the body fight as it's dying it's a struggle for her you know I mean um it's at moments like that where you think ah yes at this particular time it would be good if she could just take a tablet I was just saying my dad does he and I'm struggling with the Kimi and I just treated it and it kind of messed me up it messes your head up because I know your mental health when you end up in the psychiatric ward like when did it really take tool well we had some moments there as well which is quite funny but um no um so right so here we go so basically she dies and it was a massive funeral and I had the ashes delivered to the house and we were going to take the ashes up to Stoke Poges church in Stoke Poges the other side of Slough where we got married I thought that would be a nice thing to do so I rang the vicar I'm saying I'd like to bury my wife myself I thought it was like I'm going to do this so uh the ashes I rang up the funeral pile and I said for fuck's sake don't deliver the ashes till Friday morning because I don't want them in the house the bloke turns up on Thursday afternoon so we've got this box of ashes on the dining room table and me and the two kids are like upstairs going thinking we're going to get haunted or something but uh we went up to the church the next day and put her in a hole buried on myself with the two kids said a little prayer and all the rest of it and she's there today with the ashes on and um yeah so so I'm like I'm drinking but I'm not I'm drinking I would say like a couple of drinks in the evening you know sit down watch the telly kind of drinking bit of Saturday night piss up with the mates but I'm not saying that I've got a problem yet in my head and then I'm watching the news December the second I think it was best before Christmas on my own that's the bloke that my dad said my whole life went round in circles in my head and it was on the news that he'd been shot of course later I found out that he'd killed himself but it was on the news I'm thinking shit so my dad's died my wife's died and now that guy who I thought I might be able to get in touch with because I had these ideas he had stupid ideas like alright now he's dead I'll get in touch with my real dad it's like he's now dead but not only has he died he's been shot by the police so that's what came over in the newsreel that he'd been shot by a special forces or some crap like that um he had been shot but he wasn't killed by them so um suddenly you know this whole life starts to it grinds down and it and your whole life just becomes a slow motion of nothingness it's like your brain is like wound down hmm nothing outside that in the world exists anymore it's gone the only person in my family apart from my two kids who's just kids so you don't have an adult relationship with my adopted mother he was a racist cow and I didn't like her at all so I'm like what's she fucking worth I can't I mean there's no racism is just not necessary what I mean you look all the same in the morning have an orange juice and have a shit or whatever we're just we're different but we're the same we're all human beings it's irrelevant what color we are and she was not nice about that so I didn't like that at all so I didn't like her I took it up with oh I mean nice thing about that but you know suddenly there's my whole life went into this weird slow motion thing because I didn't know what's going on but turns out I'm going into depression and where when you get deeply depressed you don't really know what's going on around you become disassociated with the real world it's like nothing's really happening it's like you know there could be a war and it wouldn't matter you wouldn't know but you go through the motions of functioning you know school run cook the dinner clean the house get on with it but you know you're pissed you don't know you're just like and I was drinking I mean I had to drink to stay sober it was that pissed driving as well fucking unterrible I got you know got into trouble for that later but you know we all pay for our sins in the end I don't know how I survived I really don't an angel from hand of an angel came and must have helped me there for a while because I needed help and you know I did my best basically to myself in and I'm still here today so mental health but we had some I decided that I was going to see a psychologist or whatever you call these people psychiatrist and I actually had a good relationship with this psychiatrist he was a nice guy very senior guy you know older than me and he was a nice guy and he said why don't you have a couple of weeks off come to our hospital have a couple of weeks off and we'll look after you so I had the kids looked after and I spent a couple of weeks on this ward well I mean I couldn't I couldn't wait to get out of there I sat first day I sat next to a guy I said hello mate what's your name he said my name's Pete and I said so what you're in for he said well I tried to kill my parents with an axe I thought oh my god I need to get out of here because I didn't you see one of the things about depression is you don't see yourself as a depressed person you just think you're normal so I thought myself I don't I'm not I'm not ill I need to get out here it took me quite a while to get out there couple of weeks and it got out there and made I made a vow to get myself together you're talking about someone with this great life I'm now cleaning cars and cleaning windows to make a few quid so I've got brought down a few bags there but these things teach you a lesson in life you know yeah that's what you grow I think that when you have rock bottom off your space in life especially if you've hit the boat you've ended up in a place and then you make the changes because you're off the booze now that's what it is fair play how did Escobar actually die well so he it's well known and my adopted father told me that you know the man will never be caught he will go down you know he's the mad columbian he won't be caught and columbians some columbians old school columbians to be a bit you know yeah I've still got that in me you know I'm not afraid of death it was quite extraordinary I mean I should be but I'm not I think what happens is you see so much death and you see so much stuff it's a bit like coming back from a war zone I would imagine you become you indoctrinated so much into what went on that you just you don't it's like someone threatens you go yeah what are you going to do about it you know it's like not a problem so I just think that I know it's difficult to difficult to explain really but they ask about their thing yeah I know but it's a different difficult to explain really what he didn't want what I'm trying to explain is the humiliation because it's a lot of pride involved he was never going to allow the Americans to extradite him like he wasn't going to have that, rather die he was never going to be arrested and allow people to you know put him in prison and be one of the other twats that had been in prison and he wasn't going to have that so you know he got cornered like Saddam Hussein in the end they found him in a hole well with him you know there was no way out so he although he was a little bit academically he was thick he was a survivor he knew how to survive so even you and I know that if you make a mobile phone call or you make a phone call of any sort you can be tracked and he knew this so he's come to the end of his tether he's fucked you know basically and so he gets himself tracked he knew this so he finds out his family they track him down and you know they gun him down but he's not dead but there's no way he was going to be taken to hospital or any of that nonsense so he puts gets his 38 straight through the lull because he's been gunned down he's been hit several places and you know they hit him in other places on purpose they wanted to take him alive but he shot himself and it's quite interesting one of the guys that was there that said oh yeah I'm the one that killed Escobar all this bullshit he went to prison in the end so what do you think talk about your life about all that how mad that is people can watch this and make their own assumptions but what do you think about the whole matter it's fucking nuts it's even more nuts in a way because I've since discovered that my adopted father was a totally different person the person I thought he was you know I've met members of MI6 I've met members of the SA you know a guy from herford contacted me he said to me oh my father used to work with your dad and he was in the SA you get all these stories come I think and it all kind of like interlocks well it's quite interesting so although you think it's mad you know it's like well it's not that mad actually it's true and then you realize that this is huge story of sort of empire building and meddling in the affairs of a local country and then you start to realize this amazing stuff and then on top of that you've got a situation where you know that somewhere out there in the world there's like a billion dollars which is yours that your adopted father and your real father were sucking away together you're two fathers if you're I'm the guy with two fathers that's your money well now you know why my real family don't want to acknowledge my existence because they want they want to own the IP rights the Don Pablo Escobar IP rights intellectual property there's a huge problem with Netflix and two guys from Netflix went down to do some reconnaissance before they made the Escobar story and they got killed oh yeah mate it's no joke just go rock up to Cundinamarca man you know we're gonna do it you know this is Columbia it's not it's not sunny Surrey you know it's not Guilford and Goddard do you think Escobar stole that sort of pool even the things that you're saying today could that ever come back and you end up winning well I'm not going to Columbia am I so it's not a problem I mean we're talking about this I did actually look you know when I was writing the book Cundinamarca what are you doing that for you're gonna get killed so you know I thought right two things right hey I'm not actually you know I'm not inculcating anybody that hasn't already been inculcated into the business they already you know really knows who everybody is so it's like I'm not saying anything that's different in that sense I may be creating a situation where you know members of the royal family or members of the British establishment they get the hump about what I've got to say De La Rue haven't said a lot nice and quiet they keep that's their job keep quiet they haven't said much because they know what I'm talking about is the truth and so you know the Escobar family just doesn't exist anymore there's Juan Pablo and two other kids that I know of running around he's making millions out of the this and that and the other all the others have written books but pay is dead and here's the one it would have been fantastic to me I really wanted to meet him Gustavo unfortunately has died you know and so you know the lawyers is the lawyer who looked at the book because you have a legal reason most people have written about it and you haven't actually I haven't slagged anybody off in the book you know Escobar Gavira was not a nice person he was a drug lord he wasn't really a lord he was a drug dealer he was manipulated by the British Secret Service on the specific instructions of members much higher up than him and he was doing a job right it's hugely controversial and we've got a lot more to reveal in the documentary series than we're going to reveal today Roberto welcome people buy your book and you can get it on Amazon and where can people get your tickets for your tour so the tour is being done in slots you know like a week and a week and a week so there's an April tour and in April I'm looking it up because I can't remember what the hell so in April I'm going to be in so they're doing it's quite interesting that dad was from it was a Yorkshireman really wasn't he my adopted father and I'm actually doing Yorkshire so you know for example the Tuesday April 4th I'll be at the Gorilla Bar in Doncaster so you know and you can get tickets at it's all over Facebook I'll leave the link in the description for people to get up I'll send their stuff you'll send us a link in the description so what I'll do is I'll send you venues and stuff for you to add but there's six venues at the first tour and then in July there's going to be much bigger venues so theatres and I'll be signing books and all the rest of it because they've got this book here they've got at the shows you know if you I don't know how they do it but there's a promotion company called Omega Promotions and you can buy my tickets on Skiddle and so you just look up go to Skiddle and look at Roberto Sendoya Escobar and you'll get all the venues there and all that sort of stuff but I'll send you links just before we finish up Roberto I know your a man who struggled with mental health and being through it and came out the other end for anybody that's watching it's maybe on this struggle just now what advice would you have for them there are a couple of things you need to do one you must absolutely come to terms with what's happened don't get into denial about it and you can only sometimes do that if you talk to other people I mean I found some professionals a bit patronizing which annoyed me oh really how sad is that you know I don't need that but you know talk to someone, your best friend or whatever it is about what's going on because you may not realise you're depressed but always also and I know this sounds a bit sort of callous but you must always laugh about things find the funny side to things because there's some really tragic things that happen but there are also some funny sides to this sort of thing like when the nurse said to me that I'm afraid your father now he's dead he's gone to heaven and I said okay so I don't know why I said this but I said so how long does it take to get to heaven and she turned around and said I'm out three and a half hours and I just thought to myself love it I haven't seen it really so you must see the funny side to all the tragedies because when there always is a funny side and I was at a funeral where I walked I backed off by accident at something and knocked a vase over and the water went all over the bloody thing and it's just funny you must see the funny side to life and laugh about it because laughing is great therapy but get help I promise you I wouldn't be here today if I hadn't got help because at the end of the day it's suicide territory you can't deal with it and the thing is you don't know you're depressed you think you're fine but you the person you're just doing crazy things but you don't know that that's depression and that's the problem when you don't know when you're actually sat there and I don't feel that's not depression when you're depressed you might well be actually really elated and happy about life but you might be depressed and so there's a combination of that now if you are in my position where you may well be relatively well known in a public way you're going to get people that slag you off you're going to get people that say you're full of shit you're going to get people that call you a liar Caroline Flack, poor girl I mean a beautiful young lady with her whole life ahead of her and she read her reviews and what happened she killed herself don't worry about what other people talk about behind your back what they say about you because the world is full of very nasty people they're just going to say stuff don't worry about it, don't even listen to it ignore it, it's irrelevant so that's important Roberto, for coming on and then telling your story I've finally enjoyed that good luck with your tour, I know we've only scratched the surface because you've kept my lot of that stuff for your tour but you're coming back one again and it'll reveal a lot more and we've got a lot of things in the pipeline to talk about so I wish you all the best for the future have a great tour and I'll see you soon Hasta la vista amigo Hasta la vista amigo You nearly said hasta la vista didn't you baby