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The extraordinary life of Pablo Escobar’s secret son

Pablo Escobar an his son Roberto - Getty/ Bruno Daureo
Pablo Escobar an his son Roberto - Getty/ Bruno Daureo

Phillip Witcomb believes there will be a film made of his life one day. ‘It’s amazing, amazing…’ he says of his 55 years, shaking his head in disbelief. ‘It’d make a fantastic movie, don’t you think?’

He can see it now: part espionage caper, part globe-trotting crime thriller, part family saga with several twists, mostly tragedy but with a peaceful end for its hero, packed with violence, glamour, drugs, and a small digression into Spanish golf-course design. Basically, solid-gold blockbuster magic.

The man at the centre of that story – a gregarious, occasionally obtuse and short-tempered, but marvellously moustachioed presence on my Zoom screen – goes by two names. The first, Phillip Robert Charles Witcomb, comes from his adoptive father, Pat, who was an MI6 agent working undercover as a businessman. This is his everyday moniker, and it is as Phillip Witcomb that he sells hyperrealist paintings, mainly depicting the area around his home in Majorca, where he now lives with his second wife, Julie, two spaniels, four tortoises and four goldfish.

The other, Roberto Sendoya Escobar, comes from his biological father, Pablo, who was the most notorious drug lord and narco-terrorist that ever lived, arguably the richest criminal of all time, inflicter of decades-long horrors from which Colombia is still recovering, and inspiration for countless films, documentaries and dramas – among them Netflix’s Narcos. This is his birth name, and it is as Roberto Sendoya Escobar he has written a memoir, First Born: Son of Escobar, telling the extraordinary tale of how those two identities came to collide.

‘I thought about [writing it under Witcomb], but my publishers soon put me straight on that,’ he says, ‘they’re a business, I get it.’ At their request, I’ll refer to him as Roberto from now on.

Roberto Escobar surrounded by his paintings at home in Majorca last month - Bruno Daureo
Roberto Escobar surrounded by his paintings at home in Majorca last month - Bruno Daureo

‘What you have to understand about the book is that I just sat down, went “Once upon a time, la la la…”’ Roberto says, miming prodding at a typewriter. A stout man with a lined face, he considers himself Colombian, but speaks with the voice of Sir Alan Sugar playing King Lear. He is in his office, surrounded by paintings, dogs and papers.

‘La la la’ does a disservice to the opening of the book, which describes Roberto’s earliest memories: ‘Lime-green paint peeling off a wall, a window with bars on it, a milk bottle on the windowsill, and just lots of very loud noises and screaming, and a woman in red.’

It is how I imagine the big-screen adaptation will begin, too, and is as good a place as any to start his story. Scene: dawn in the countryside near Facatativá, a city outside Bogotá, 1965. The sound of helicopter rotors. Two choppers packed with armed men descend on some rural dwellings where a criminal gang is hiding. One group is led by an English MI6 agent working undercover in a security company called De La Rue; the other by Manuel Noriega, then just an officer with the Panamanian military. The mission is to retrieve some stolen cash.

In a flurry of gunfire, all gang members are slain. Before leaving, the secret service man does a last sweep and finds a teenage girl wearing a dress turned crimson with blood. She is dying but has a baby son in a cot next to her. The agent is urged to desert them but, concerned the baby would also die, decides to take him back to Bogotá.

 in Colombia, 1972 - Courtesy of Roberto Escobar
in Colombia, 1972 - Courtesy of Roberto Escobar

The agent was Pat Witcomb, the woman was Maria Luisa Sendoya, and the baby was Roberto. Pat initially gave him to a Catholic orphanage, but later it was decided it could ‘benefit’ everybody if he and his wife, Joan, adopted Roberto. Having a Colombian child would embed him further in the culture, for one, and if his biological father – some kid named Pablo Escobar – turned out to have a connection to the gangs, then even better.

‘The adoption was a set-up. I was used, almost, as a pawn in a bigger game. And, whatever, I’m not bitter about that, I understand why now,’ Roberto says today.

The book is a product of memory, research, explanations from his adoptive father, and I suspect a little sprinkle of artistic licence for any Hollywood producers reading.

Even now, though, Roberto knows little about his biological mother or her family, other than the fact she was around 13 (a year below the age of consent in Colombia) when she and Pablo, then no more than 15, met in Medellín. After her family discovered she was pregnant out of wedlock, she was sent away to the countryside, where she must have fallen in with the gang that crossed De La Rue. Whether the teenage Pablo knew at that stage is unclear.

at school, 1973 - Courtesy of Roberto Escobar
at school, 1973 - Courtesy of Roberto Escobar

So Roberto Escobar became Phillip Witcomb, and with that, began a far from ordinary childhood. Owing to his adoptive father’s profession, he lived with maids and bodyguards, travelled in armoured cars and took trips to Disneyworld.

‘To me that was normal, but I look back now and think, “That’s ridiculous.” And it’s only glamorous if you look at it from the outside,’ he says. ‘I grew up with the staff – the maids, the guards. They’d explain stuff to me about the poverty and violence around us.’

He felt love from his father, with whom he often travelled but his mother was ‘cold and aloof’ – even after she and Pat adopted another child, Monique, four years later.

His mother was all, ‘“Oh, I’ve got lunch with the ladies at noon, then I’m off to the ambassador’s residence…”’ he says, slipping into a cut-glass accent. ‘She wasn’t interested in us. But Dad was different, he was very down to earth. He loved us, I could tell that.’

with Pat, London, 1977 - Courtesy of Roberto Escobar
with Pat, London, 1977 - Courtesy of Roberto Escobar

Through it all, Roberto never knew Pat worked for MI6, and never noticed anything amiss – despite visits to and from foreign dignitaries, bags of cash and, honestly, a man named Chalky who’d fly in from London to deliver all the latest gadgets. He says that Princess Anne stopped by for tea.

‘He was more like Sean Connery in Dr No – about 6ft 4in, very smartly dressed, and had a side to him that nobody really knew about. He was just a family man that worked for a company, but he had his missions. Even his wife knew nothing about it.’

At times the family was in danger. When Roberto was three, he was shopping with Joan in Bogotá when a man leapt out to take photographs of him and try to ‘wrench’ him away. A bodyguard shot the assailant.

‘You think it was…?’ Roberto remembers Joan saying. ‘Probably,’ Pat replied. ‘Nothing stays secret for long in this country.’

With Joan and Pat in Bogotá, 1968 - Courtesy of Roberto Escobar
With Joan and Pat in Bogotá, 1968 - Courtesy of Roberto Escobar

At this point, Pablo Escobar was rapidly ascending from petty street thief to serious player in the complex world of Colombian drugs gangs. Word had also presumably reached him that the son he’d fathered as a teenager had survived the shoot-out and been adopted by an Englishman.

He may well have wanted him back. The multiple kidnap attempts Roberto describes certainly suggest so. One stands out to him: he was reading in bed one night, aged around nine or 10, when the alarm activated, a guard dog erupted, and all of a sudden a big, smelly bloke with callused hands had him pinned against a wall. Fortunately, the guard dog scared his assailant on to a roof, before two shots rang out and a body fell past his window.

‘I’m totally desensitised to fear now. I’ll be watching TV with my wife and something tragic and dramatic happens and I’ll shout, “Oh what’s wrong with you, get it together woman!”’ Roberto says, laughing.

It was deemed safer for Roberto to go to boarding school in England, so off he went aged six, the same age at which he was told he was adopted. ‘It was hell,’ he says of Lucton School in Herefordshire, which he compares to Colditz Castle, ‘being beaten for the first time when you’re a spoilt brat used to telling people what to do.’

Escobar said he’d be a millionaire by the time he was 22, but ended up a billionaire - Rex Features
Escobar said he’d be a millionaire by the time he was 22, but ended up a billionaire - Rex Features

You could be forgiven for thinking that Roberto was being kept away from his real father throughout this period. They in fact met, via his adoptive father, several times. Pat apparently needed a bargaining chip in the battle with Escobar, and Escobar both wanted to meet his firstborn and stay close to De La Rue. On each occasion, Pat chose a busy venue, filled with onlookers, to prevent Escobar and his cronies from pulling any dramatic stunts.

A first introduction was arranged at a party in Medellín. Roberto, then just four, sat next to his biological father and as they parted he remembers him saying, ‘Goodbye my son, I will see you again. And always remember, little man – you are an Escobar.’ A few years later, meeting again, Escobar enquired after his schooling, and reminded him that his home is ‘in Medellín’.

He had always felt a ‘strange love coming from this man in Medellín. There was something weird about it I never understood until later in life,’ Roberto says.

It wasn’t until 1989, when Roberto was 24, that he would come to learn about his past. He and his father were both living in Spain – Roberto had become a golf-course designer, was married to his first wife, Sue, and had two young children; Pat, meanwhile, had moved to another ‘security’ job in Madrid. Father and son had been to the cinema and were on their way to eat at a bar, when Pat started revealing the truth.

He began by telling him he was in fact a secret service agent. The murky connections, the gadgets, the murmuring, the impressive visitors – that was the reason for all that, he said. Suddenly ‘everything started to come together’ in Roberto’s head.

‘It must have been hard for him; he didn’t really know how to tell me. But he gets some papers out – my birth certificate, with my real parents, named as Pablo Escobar and Maria Sendoya, on. And he says, “The thing is, this guy is really bad. He’s a drug dealer, and his empire is falling to pieces.” It didn’t quite sink in. This was before the internet, so I didn’t really know who Escobar was.’

A mug shot taken by the regional Colombia control agency in Medellin in 1977 - Alamy Stock
A mug shot taken by the regional Colombia control agency in Medellin in 1977 - Alamy Stock

Pat had presumably chosen that moment because Escobar was at his monstrous peak – he had become a billionaire through cocaine smuggling, he had murdered more than 30 judges, and he was after political power, but his empire was crumbling and he had enemies. The threat of someone seeking to harm Roberto loomed.

When Roberto returned home, there were armed guards outside. He explained everything to a confused Sue, though kept their two young children sheltered from the truth.

‘What happens is you go into denial. In those days I drank, and I just made a gin and tonic and watched television. Then something would remind me it was real, like a guard change. And then it all got depressing.’

He didn’t tell anybody, instead just let neighbours speculate why a man who designed golf courses had gun-toting security. ‘There was a time I was frightened, I thought somebody would come and kill me, it reminded me of when I was a kid,’ he says.

Four years later, Sue was diagnosed with a brain tumour. With their two children, Jonathan and Anna, now 35 and 32, they moved from Spain back to the UK, where Pat, by then ill himself, and Joan were living. Sue died in July 1993, in the same hospital where, six months earlier, Roberto had  held  his adoptive father’s hand as he too died. Then, in December of that year, Pablo Escobar was killed in a shoot-out with police that was caught on live television.

‘What a year that was,’ Roberto says. ‘It didn’t sink in for a while. But I was drinking, I got depression, and I got very ill. I had a couple of serious suicide attempts, but if you want to know if it’s possible to come out the other side, I’m here.’

But there was one, final twist. On his deathbed, Pat gestured for Roberto to take a note from a diary in his jacket pocket. Some code, allegedly by one of Pat’s former colleagues, was handwritten on a slip of paper. ‘The cash… remember,’ Pat said.

He was referring to part of the legendary ‘missing millions’ Escobar is said to have hidden, some of which Roberto says he had shipped out of the country via De La Rue. Pat had shown Roberto bags of cash in a vault in Madrid a few years earlier, but they had since been moved and hidden. Pat apparently knew where. ‘Is this where the money is?’ Roberto asked. Pat simply smiled.

Escobar married Maria Victoria Henao in 1976 - Getty
Escobar married Maria Victoria Henao in 1976 - Getty

In his book, Roberto appeals for readers to help him crack the code – a mix of numbers, letter and coordinates – and find the money. It’s partly to leave it open for a sequel, he says.

‘Tell me, how many copies of The Da Vinci Code have been sold to date?’ he asks me. I don’t know – a lot. ‘Go on, google it now.’ I do this, and confirm it is a lot. ‘People love a treasure hunt! And this is a real one. It’s about $110 million. If I can find it, maybe in a documentary TV series, brilliant, but that might need money behind it…’

While researching the book, Roberto learnt that a dozen or so people around the world claim to be illegitimate children of Escobar. Officially, Pablo only had two, Sebastián Marroquín, 43, an architect, and daughter Manuela, 36. They reportedly both live in Argentina. Roberto would love to reunite them all, for another documentary. I wonder if any of them have sought a DNA test.

‘Everyone always asks me this question in the end. Obviously what you’re angling at is, “Would I like to do a DNA test?”’ He’s got me there. ‘Here’s the thing, I’ll give you an answer, but I’ll ask a question back: have you had a DNA test to verify who your father is?’

I have not.

‘Why?’

Well…

‘Because he told you who he was, and you’ve got a birth certificate?’

Yes, but he was also present throughout my childhood. And at my age he looked exactly like I do now. And while Roberto does look like Pablo Escobar’s son, he also looks like he could be Robert Winston’s, or Super Mario’s. But I take his point.

‘I’ve got the birth certificate, and it’ll be printed in the book. I’m satisfied that I am who I am,’ he says. ‘Having said that, if the right legal guarantees are in place, if the data my sample would be compared to is above board, then we’d go ahead and do something. But there is a lot of money at stake with the Escobar name, and you have to be careful. I would consider it, though.’

The stranger-than-fiction life of a Narcos child - Bruno Daureo
The stranger-than-fiction life of a Narcos child - Bruno Daureo

Roberto’s adoptive mother, Joan, passed away in 2014, and Monique, his adoptive sister, died of a stroke three years earlier. He lives a relatively quiet life.

‘I am not Pablo Escobar, I’m Phillip Witcomb,’ he says. ‘And my life has been an exact contrast to what it could have been, and what my real father would have wanted for me. You know what it says on the side of Golden Syrup tins? “Out of the strong came forth sweetness.” That’s my life, basically: out of all that evil, there was some good that came of it. I paint utopic pictures of paradise, and I don’t want anything to do with my real family. I am the complete opposite.

‘One of the only things Sebastián and I agree on is about what’s wrong with Narcos,’ he continues. ‘It’s a load of crap. I am not impressed with the lack of genuine research that’s gone into it. But the movie industry is based in America, so what do you expect?’ He panics. ‘I might be screwing myself out of a movie deal now…’

He is confident of his book’s success. It will, he predicts, launch him ‘into the stratosphere, of world tours and documentaries and all sorts’. Then there’s that movie. So, who’s going to play him? He giggles.

‘If it goes throughout my whole life, you’d have a series of people. So, when I’m a baby,  a baby will play me.’ That seems reasonable. ‘Then, as I get older, several people. And right at the end, I’m gonna play me.’ As the closing scene? ‘Yeah, I mean, what do you want? The real guy, sat in his studio, just painting.’

You couldn’t make it up. Roll credits.

Who was Pablo Escobar?

By Guy Kelly

Born on 1 December 1949, in the city of Rionegro, Colombia, Pablo Escobar grew up in a poor family – his mother was a teacher, his father a peasant farmer. As a teenager he was charismatic and ambitious, with a particular talent for theft. He said he’d be a millionaire by the time he was 22, but ended up a billionaire. In 1989, Forbes named him the seventh-richest man in the world.

He grew his empire from a gang of petty criminals to becoming one of the most-wanted men in the world. He sent hitmen to kill presidential candidates, murder policemen and judges, bombed an airliner and, at one time, is said to have controlled half the US cocaine trade.

As head of the Medellín cartel, Escobar was so dominant that some believe he worked with foreign governments before becoming too powerful for them. To some in Colombia, he is also viewed as a Robin Hood figure who gave millions towards infrastructure projects and pursued other seemingly philanthropic activies during his decades of terror.

He was eventually killed in a firefight with Colombian police in December 1993. The fatal wound was above his ear, in the same place he had once said he’d shoot himself if he was ever cornered. That detail has led to longstanding conspiracy theories that his death was suicide.

Escobar was a womaniser, and dozens of people have claimed he is their father.  He married Maria Victoria Henao in 1976, with whom he had two children, Sebastián and Manuela.

First Born: Son of Escobar, by Roberto Sendoya Escobar, is out now (Ad Lib publishers, £14.99). Order your copy at books.telegraph.co.uk