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Imagine working for Pablo Escobar, and coming out as a hero. That is exactly what John Jairo Velasquez Vasquez is. Known as “Popeye”, he was a hitman for Escobar in the heydays of the infamous Medellin drug cartel.
After serving a sentence in prison for 22 years, he is now a free man. And he works as a YouTube star. Imagine John Gotti coming out of jail and becoming a YouTube star. That is Popeye for the Colombian people.
By the time he was arrested in 1992, he had killed more than 250 people with his own hands, and ordered a murder of another 3000 people. He even killed his own girlfriend. He detonated more than 250 car bombings, organized kidnappings of people such as Andres Pastrana (later a president of Colombia).
Now, at the age of 54, he is trying to rebrand himself as the truth-telling evangelist in a series of Spanish-language videos. He posts these videos on YouTube, hoping that he will tell the stories that happened. And with that, his nickname changed to Popeye Arrepentido (Remorseful Popeye).
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