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Pablo Escobar’s cartel made an estimated $420 million a week. His son says that at the end, they were hiding with $5 million in cash and starving.
In the video below, he tells Michael Franzese what the last days with his father looked like.
Juan Pablo Escobar now goes by Sebastián Marroquín. He says he has spoken in almost 50 countries.
Everywhere he goes, teenagers tell him the same thing.
“He was so successful. He was so rich. He was so powerful.”
His answer: “He had all the money in the world and all the power, and he could never buy just a simple minute of peace for himself and his family.”
He says his father became a billionaire. Then he describes the end.
“We were hidden with $5 million in cash, and we were starving.”
His father was the most wanted man in the world. His men had left.
“We could have bought every supermarket in our town. But we were starving.”
“You cannot eat the dollars.”
He says that before “Narcos” was filmed, he offered Netflix family letters, home videos and thousands of photos. They weren’t interested.
The chapter he wishes the show had included: “Pablo starving, dying, no food, but full of money.”
Escobar was killed in December 1993. His son was 16.
$420 million a week. $5 million in a hideout. Nothing to eat.
The case for the fans: Escobar came from poverty and built one of the richest criminal empires in history. For years, no one could touch him.
The case for his son: he died hunted and abandoned, sitting on cash he couldn’t eat. Thousands of families were destroyed on the way.
So was Pablo Escobar a success story, or a man who had everything and could buy nothing?
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Phil Jackson says Michael Jordan would be so worn down after a game that he needed teammates to help him get to his room, and says Jordan would still want to play the next night because it might be the fans’ only opportunity to ever see him play
“We got out on the road, we were winning games. Michael played a great game in Sacramento and literally had to be kind of carried, not physically carried, but his arm around the shoulders of two of his teammates to get to his room. Oh, he’ll be back, he’ll play tomorrow. There’s no way he’s going to stop playing.”
“He’ll want to play just because this is the only chance the fans out here in Golden State or Portland, or wherever he was, are going to see him. And he knows that, and he wants to perform and play the best he can in front of them. That was a remarkable part about the effort he gave. And we have effort now from NBA players where they literally take time off.”
“‘I don’t think I can play two games in three nights.’ As basketball players, we used to play. One of our finishes to a road trip, we played Golden State, Portland, and Seattle, three games in three nights. And now, with literally back-to-back games, a lot of players take off because they can’t play back-to-back games.”
“And that’s a remarkable thing about the performance level of the game that became like Michael Jordan’s muse, was that I need to perform to show these people why I’m the best player in this game, or to have my impact on the game itself that we’re playing. One time, we were at the end, before the All-Star break, and we had a game in Seattle, a double-overtime game. Michael bumped a referee, and he was suspended for one game, the last game of this road trip in Phoenix. And the hue and cry from people that had bought tickets from all around the Arizona area just so they could go watch Michael Jordan.”
“Our only time he played in Phoenix, you know, it left the league a little bit embarrassed about the suspension because it was a minor event, a minor thing, accidental as a matter of fact. So that was perhaps one of the most remarkable things about the effort that Michael put in.”
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Between 1979 and 1981, someone was killing Black children in Atlanta. Mostly boys. Some as young as 7. Bodies turned up in rivers, in the woods, by the side of the road. Almost 30 victims.
The city put kids under a curfew. Parents walked their children to school. Nobody let a child out alone after dark.
In the video below, Isaac Rogers speaks for the first time in nearly 40 years. He was 11. His 16-year-old brother Patrick was one of the victims.
Isaac says the man came for him too.
He was walking out of a neighbor's apartment with two cousins. A man blocked the stairs. His cousins got away. Isaac was left alone.
"The only thing I couldn't do was turn back around."
He started beating on the neighbor's door. The man was still coming toward him when someone finally opened it.
Today Isaac says he knows exactly who that man was. Wayne Williams.
He kept it to himself for decades. Out of fear.
In 1981, police staking out a bridge heard a splash in the Chattahoochee River. Williams was on the bridge. Two days later, a body washed up downstream.
He was convicted of killing two adult men. He was never tried for a single child. Police closed more than 20 of the children's cases anyway and said it was him.
Williams is still in prison. He still says he didn't do it. In 2019, Atlanta reopened the cases.
Almost 30 dead, and he was only convicted of killing two adults. Did Atlanta catch the right man, or did the real killer walk free?
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Max B says the worst thing he lived through as a kid in Harlem during the crack era was selling crack to his own mother. It happened one time, and he calls it the worst shit right there. His dad, in his telling, was a coke and heroin addict and an alcoholic, his mom was a super fiend, and his granddad and his aunt dabbled too, until it felt like everybody around him was getting high. From about age 8 his grandmother mostly raised him, and for three of those years she sent him away because he never went to school and kept getting picked up for truancy. He ended up at Hawthorne Cedar Knolls, a residential campus outside the city, and he loved it. Up there he rode horses, went boating and skiing, shot arrows and went to church, things he says middle-class kids get, while back in Harlem all he did was stand on the corner. Cam'ron lived a couple of floors below him in the same building.
His older brother Eric used to bully him, which Max now reads as Eric toughening him up. Eric handed him a bag of 120-minute cassette mixtapes full of late-80s R&B blends, Frankie Beverly and Michael Jackson, told him to take care of the tapes and said he'd be back at ten, and never came back. Eric was 16, Max was 13, and the wrong people lined him up. Those tapes, Max says, laid the groundwork for the artist he became. After the murder another brother went out, shot some shit up and did about 15 years. Asked if the killers were ever caught, Max thinks they were and figures they're probably home by now, but he never looked into it and doesn't want to. He still claims zero regrets about how he grew up.
This is his first real sit-down since coming home. Max B, born Charly Wingate, walked out of Northern State Prison in Newark on November 9, 2025, after about 16 years, though by his own count it was 18. The case goes back to a robbery at a Holiday Inn in Fort Lee, New Jersey, in September 2006. Prosecutors said Max, his stepbrother Kelvin Leerdam and his ex-girlfriend Gina Conway plotted to rob two men she had just met. Leerdam and Conway barged into the hotel room demanding money, and David Taylor Jr. was shot dead. Max wasn't in Fort Lee when it happened and was charged as an accomplice. In 2009 he got 75 years. Conway testified against him and took 15, and Leerdam, who the jury found fired the fatal shot, got life plus 35. In 2016 Max pleaded to aggravated manslaughter and his sentence was cut to 20 years. His debut album Vigilante Season came out in 2011 while he was still locked up. The day he got out he reunited with French Montana, his partner on the Coke Wave tapes, and a day later he gave a ring to the woman he met and married while inside.
Is Max B a Harlem legend who survived a crack house and a 75-year sentence, or a guy who sold crack to his own mother and got convicted over a robbery that left a man dead?
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Nicky Barnes went to prison for life and asked his right-hand man, Guy Fisher, to look after his girlfriend. Behind bars, he started to suspect Fisher was sleeping with her.
Barnes had run The Council, a seven-man heroin ring in Harlem. In 1977 a jury said it sold $1 million of heroin a month, and a judge gave him life with no parole.
Then the news from outside got worse. His wife and associates were burning through his money and had stopped paying his lawyers.
Barnes said he made at least $5 million in the years before he was caught. Now the people he trusted were spending it.
His ex-wife Thelma Grant later went to prison for 10 years. Their two daughters went into foster care.
So in the early 1980s Barnes started talking. He testified against the men of The Council and wept on the stand. Fisher got life too.
In the video below, Barnes names the Council men he testified against and says what he asked of Fisher: "I gave him a woman of mine that I expected him to look out for and I expected him to take care of her."
Barnes got out in 1998 and spent his last years in witness protection, working at Walmart under a new name. He died of cancer in 2012. Fisher walked free in 2020, after 36 years.
Asked in 2007 if anything was worse than being an informer, Barnes said: "I'd rather be out as a witness than be in there and what they characterize as a stand-up guy."
Was Barnes right to turn on his right-hand man?
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A young man drove 3 hours to sell his supercharged Chevy Camaro to a car dealer for $32,000, only to discover that the employee he had been negotiating with had been fired for allegedly scamming other dealerships 😳👀
The dealer initially refused to pay $32,000 and admitted he didn’t even want to buy the modified car, but eventually agreed to match another dealership’s $30,000 offer. Instead of accepting, the young man convinced him to flip a coin for either $29,000 or $31,000, putting an extra $1,000 on the line. The dealer agreed, lost the coin toss, and ended up paying $31,000 for a car he didn’t even want to buy.
“I’m a gambling man. What if we did some kind of outrageous coin flip?”
“29 or 31?”
“That's pretty good. You got it going on. Come on. All right, I can't say no. Let's do it.”
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Frank Lucas says he paid $4,200 for a kilo of heroin in Thailand. In Harlem, it sold for $60,000 to $70,000.
He says he moved the money through Chase Manhattan.
In the video below, the real “American Gangster” explains how it worked.
Lucas worked under Harlem boss Bumpy Johnson for 13 years. Bumpy wouldn’t touch drugs.
When Bumpy died in 1968, Lucas says he went around Harlem and collected the money people owed. About $3 million to $4 million.
He put it in Chase Manhattan, in different branches. Chase had a branch in Bangkok.
“All I had to do is go over there and draw it out.”
In Thailand, he says, he met a man he only calls “007.” Price of entry: $125,000.
“He showed it to me for the 300 keys.”
He says the heroin came back to the U.S. through military bases.
$4,200 a kilo in Bangkok. Up to $70,000 in Harlem. More than 15 times the price.
Denzel Washington later played him in “American Gangster.”
Asked what he regrets, he talks about the cars, the Rolls-Royce, and a diamond bracelet with his name on it.
“It cost me like 100 grand. What did it do for me? Garbage.”
The case for Lucas: he says he bought turkeys for Thanksgiving, paid rent for women in the neighborhood and sent kids to college.
The case against Lucas: the heroin he brought in by the hundreds of kilos was sold on the same Harlem streets.
So was Frank Lucas giving back to Harlem, or just paying it back with its own money?
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Pudgie had Funny Marco, Gianni Paolo, & Michael Rainey Jr. in TEARS after revealing that he was once KICKED OFF a plane for being too BIG after the white guy sitting next to him SNITCHED on him 💀😂😂
“I asked him like ‘yo, you uncomfortable?’ He reassured he me that he’s comfortable. He’s like ‘I’m good man’… This n*gga went to the bathroom, I didn’t see this n*gga since. I’m just sitting there, I see the lady from the gate that took the tickets. She like ‘can you come with me?’” 🤣
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Man will forever be TC for me
Dylan Sprouse reunited with his Suite Life of Zack & Cody co-star Phill Lewis and reflected on how the cast became like FAMILY after spending nearly 7 YEARS together, revealing how close they were ON and OFF set and comparing the experience to being on a college campus 🔥❤️
“I don’t think you can do a show for almost seven years like we did without having some element of that. You have to kind of be a family.”
