MIAMI, Jan. 26 (UPI) -- A locked safe was found in the now-demolished Miami Beach, Fla., home formerly belonging to Pablo Escobar, Colombia's most notorious drug trafficker.
Construction worker Miguel Mato was using an excavator to tear down the concrete foundation when he found the two-by-two feet combination safe, which weighs hundreds of pounds.
"I pulled the wall down, and when the wall fell, it's actually like a hollow floor. And when the wall fell on the floor and it kind of broke into it and then I saw it. I saw the safe," Mato told CBS4. "I told the owner, look there's a safe. And he thought I was messing with him, and I said no there's a safe for real."
The owner of the property, Chicken Kitchen founder Christian de Berdouare, said he will take the safe to a security expert for opening.
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The four-bedroom, six-bathroom home on Biscayne Bay was built in 1948. Escobar bought the property in March 1980 for $762,500. De Berdouaré and his wife Jennifer Valoppi, a former local news anchor, bought the property in 2014 for $9.6 million.
The federal government reportedly never searched the waterfront home when it was seized from Escobar in 1987, generating rumors about possibly hidden wealth. Escobar was regarded as the "King of Cocaine" with a net worth thought to be about $24 billion -- recognized by Forbes magazine at the height of his power as the world's seventh-richest man.
The Colombian drug kingpin was imprisoned for about a year before he escaped in 1992. He spent several months on the run before he was shot to death by a special police unit in 1993.
