Pablo Escobar, aka the “King of Cocaine,” is in the news this week because one of his infamous mansions is being demolished. Escobar, who used to make half a billion dollars per week importing drugs, left a pink mansion in Florida, which was purchased by Christian de Berdouare and was completely torn down.
Pablo Escobar, a late Colombian drug lord, who made billions of dollars in the 1980s is in the news after it was revealed that one of his former mansions was demolished, and cocaine was discovered in the rumbles.
This week, Christian de Berdouare, the owner of the Chicken Kitchen fast-food chain, decided to demolish a piece of history. In 2014, Mr. de Berdouare purchased a pink mansion in Miami Beach, Florida, which once belonged to Escobar. The chicken expert paid $9.6 million for the 6,500 square feet, four-bedroom house, which was built in 1948.
The owner of the mansion has access to the Biscayne Bay and counts celebrities like Bee Gees singer Barry Gibb as neighbors. During the demolition, construction workers discovered a safe hidden under a marble floor containing a sack of cocaine.
The safe, which most likely belonged to Escobar, was stolen from the house shortly after it was discovered. Authorities did warn de Berdouare that there was a significant possibility that Escobar’s crew might return to the house to steal whatever might remain from the cartel’s heyday.
During the late 1980s, the kingpin supplied over 80% of the cocaine smuggled into the United States and earned the title of the wealthiest criminal in history with a net worth of US $100 billion by the early 1990s. De Berdouare, who plans to build a new mansion on the waterfront property, explained:
“I think they used the cover of a very residential neighborhood in order to conduct their illicit trade,”
De Berdouare’s wife, journalist Jennifer Valoppi, who made sure that a Roman Catholic monsignor blessed the multi-million dollar property revealed:
“A lot of people forget what life was like in Miami in the 1980s, when people were literally doing cocaine out in the open in bars, and no one wanted go to South Beach at all and there were shootouts in the street.”
According to authorities, it is unclear how much time Escobar spent living in Miami Beach even though he had the property in his name. On December 2, 1993, Escobar was shot by Colombian National Police, but some say he committed suicide.
