'Popeye,' the Colombian hitman who killed over 300 people for Pablo Escobar, dies of natural causes
National Post
February 6, 2020
He killed hundreds of people for Colombian kingpin Pablo Escobar and his Medellín Cartel, but in the end the assassin known as “Popeye” went out not by a bullet but by natural causes, dying of stomach cancer at a Bogotá hospital.
Jhon Jairo Velásquez, 57, died Thursday, Colombia’s National Penitentiary and Prison Institute confirmed to media outlets. The mass killer, who got his nickname because he had once reportedly done a stint in the Colombian navy, had been in hospital since Dec. 31. He had been re-imprisoned in 2018 after first being released from prison in 2014, having served an initial 23 years after turning himself in in 1992.
The hitman admitted personally killing over 300 people for the cartel boss who lorded over Colombia in the 1980s and early 1990s. Escobar would be riddled with bullets on a Medellín rooftop in December 1993 after Colombian forces, America’s Drug Enforcement Administration and Escobar’s one-time drug world partners conspired, loosely, to finally end his reign. A constant presence at Escobar’s side, Popeye had been one of his main go-to hitmen — known as a sicario — helping the boss to set up hits on politicians, judges, prosecutors and police, as well as bombings that terrorized a nation descending into chaos fuelled by the drug trade.
Two of the biggest crimes Popeye was associated with were the murder of presidential hopeful Luis Carlos Galán in August 1989, and the infamous Avianca plane bombing which came later the same year.
Galán, a revered figure in Colombia to this day, was viewed as being on the verge of a political breakthrough when assassins with machine guns stormed a political rally he was speaking at.
The Avianca bombing saw Escobar’s cartel explode a jet liner as it travelled from Bogotá to the western city of Cali, killing all 107 people on board and three people on the ground.
Presidential candidate César Gaviria, believed to have been the bomb’s target, wasn’t even on board, having decided against the flight at the last minute. Popeye told the Daily Beast in 2018 that the briefcase bomb was “a work of art.” It had been set off after the cartel persuaded an impressionable youth to open the case in mid-flight, by telling him they wanted to use it to record a passenger’s conversation. Instead, it triggered the explosion. The cartel had been bent, at that time, on taking out politicians who indicated that they would be willing to extradite cartel members to the U.S. Gaviria and Galán were two such politicians; Gaviria would go on to become president.
“We were all aware that if the bomb exploded in the wrong place it wouldn’t ignite the plane’s fuel tanks, and the captain could save the plane,” Popeye told the Daily Beast. “So we created a domino effect with the fuel stored in the wings of the plane, the dynamite in the briefcase and the pressurisation of the aircraft — a lethal composition.”
Popeye said the bombing — around which a number of unverified claims, some of them made by criminals, have swirled over the years — was masterminded by the warlord Carlos Castaño. Castaño would later turn against Escobar and help to hunt him down, before going on in the mid-1990s to lead his own drug-running paramilitary death squad made up of 30,000 fighters.
Another Escobar hitman, Dandeny Muñoz Mosquera or “La Quica” was convicted of the bombing in a U.S. court, after being arrested in the U.S. on separate charges in 1991. He was later deemed eligible for trial in Brooklyn — though the flight bombing happened in Colombia — because two passengers had been citizens of the U.S. Given ten life sentences, he remains in a U.S. prison.
After being released in 2014, Popeye had released a book, called ‘Surviving Pablo Escobar,’ and become an Internet personality. In his YouTube clips (his “Popeye Repentant” channel, at the time of his death, has 1.2 million subscribers) he railed against leftist politicians, with one clip including a threat against backers of former presidential candidate Gustavo Petro, the Associated Press reported. In interviews with reporters he even re-enacted — to the horror of the families of Escobar’s victims — his methods of killing.
Long after his newfound fame and clumsy attempts at political activism had begun to disgust much of the nation, Velásquez had been re-imprisoned from May 2018 on charges that he conspired to commit extortion. Colombian outlets report he had been held at the maximum security prison in the city of Valledupar; it is believed he maintained links to Medellín’s underworld even as he preached forgiveness and reconciliation since first being released.
In an interview with the Guardian in 2016, he defended using a slow motion bullet to open his YouTube clips. In fact, the hitman had enough of a following, even by that early point, that he was earning an income from the site, he told the outlet.
“It may seem like an glorifying crime but it’s to attract young people,” he said. “There is a certain degree of morbid curiosity about the killings, especially from young people.”
By the time he died, Popeye had only ever been convicted of one murder — that of the politician, Galán.
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