‘I AM PABLO ESCOBAR'S SECRET SON'

When his mother was killed, he was adopted by an English MI6 agent and survived multiple kidnap attempts. Now living a quiet life, Phillip Witcomb (aka Roberto Sendoya Escobar), son of notorious Pablo, tells the story of his extraordinary life

-  GUY KELLY

HE BELIEVES that one day a film will be made about his life. Phillip Witcomb can see it now: part espi­ onage 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 Span­ ish golf­course design. Basically, solid gold blockbuster magic.

“It would make a fantastic movie, don’t you think?” he asks.

The man at the centre of that story, Phillip – a gregarious, occasionally ob­ tuse and short­tempered but marvel­ lously 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.

His other name, Roberto Sendoya Escobar, comes from his biological father, Pablo, who was the most notorious drug lord and narco-terrorist that ever lived. He’d been arguably the richest criminal of all time, inflictor 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 that he has written a memoir, First Born: Son of Escobar, telling the extraordinary tale of how those two identities came to collide.