Velásquez said he found the question painful. When a viewer asked, “When can the victims of the drug war of the Medellín cartel meet you - the ones who lost brothers or fathers in the police force?” Mr. In one video, he seeks forgiveness from a relative of one of his victims. “I was resocialized: When I changed my way of thinking, I changed my way of being,” he added. Now, he said, he “respects life and society.”
“Being an assassin is not normal,” he said in the interview. “I created this channel with the intention to be able to talk day to day about my process reintegrating into society as well as my process with true remorse,” he wrote. Velásquez, however, said he felt reborn after being released on parole in 2014, according to a description of his YouTube account. Velásquez as “an astute self-promoter” who had capitalized on his infamy by claiming to have been reformed while glorifying narco-culture. Gotti died in 2002 while serving a life sentence.) But one expert described Mr.
Most hit men do not turn up on YouTube seeking a second act by spilling secrets about past misdeeds. The underlying message (there were 81 videos as of Sunday) is one of forgiveness.
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Velásquez, 54, is trying to rebrand himself as a sort of truth-telling evangelist in a series of Spanish-language videos he began posting on YouTube last year. Velásquez spent more than 20 years in prison for plotting the killing of a Colombian presidential candidate in 1989 and goes by the nickname Popeye. He is a former enforcer for the Medellín drug cartel who has boasted of committing hundreds of murders on behalf of his boss, Pablo Escobar. For Colombians, the real-life equivalent of such an unlikely YouTube sensation can be found in John Jairo Velásquez. Imagine if he used that channel to become a video star by portraying himself as a penitent hit man and regaling viewers with tales of violence while seeking forgiveness for homicides past. Imagine if the former Mafia boss John Gotti, who went to prison for murder and cultivated the public’s fascination with his flamboyant New York lifestyle and menacing charm, had a YouTube channel.