A Netflix series, “Surviving Escobar,” was adapted from one of his books.
“It’s not about monetizing my life story but about telling the stories, the things that happened,” Mr. Velásquez told The New York Times in 2016, referring to his videos and his second career.
Jhon Jairo Velásquez Vásquez was born on April 15, 1962, in Yarumal, 50 miles from Medellín, in northern Colombia. He wanted to be a police officer and joined the Colombian Navy because, he said, he had loved firearms since he was a child. It was in the navy that he acquired the nickname Popeye, for his wide jaw and strength.
He resigned, he told RT in 2017, because the navy “only had old wooden boats and no warships.”
“I only wanted to shoot, kill and get adrenaline kicks,” he said.
He started working for Mr. Escobar when he was around 17. He said Mr. Escobar was “a genius — an evil genius, but a genius anyway.”
Under Mr. Escobar’s orders, Mr. Velásquez said, he kidnapped, tortured or murdered journalists, judges, politicians and rivals. He said he also organized the kidnapping in 1988 of Andrés Pastrana Arango, who later became president, and the murder of the presidential candidate Luis Carlos Galan in 1990. He was sentenced to 30 years in prison for the murder.
Mr. Velásquez joined Mr. Escobar when the drug lord agreed in 1991 to be held in a resortlike prison, La Catedral, which he had his own engineers design. Living in luxury, Mr. Escobar ran his drug business from the jail but escaped months later. Mr. Velásquez turned himself in to the police shortly after, in October 1992.
Mr. Escobar was killed 16 months later in a rooftop shooting in Medellín, his hometown, surrounded by 500 police officers and soldiers.
Source : Nytimes
