- Convicted drug trafficker Carlos Lehder was released from a US prison on Monday, 33 years after his arrest in Colombia.
- Lehder rose to power in the Medellin cartel, alongside Pablo Escobar, but in among a notoriously brutal generation of narcos, Lehder stands out for his violence and cunning.
- Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.
Carlos Lehder, a former Medellin cartel kingpin and partner of Pablo Escobar who was cellmates with George Jung and a fan of John Lennon and Adolf Hitler, was released from a US prison on Monday and flew to a new home in Germany.
Lehder’s lawyer, Oscar Arroyave, told The Associated Press that the 70-year-old left for Berlin after his release from prison in Florida, where he was being held in the witness protection program.
Lehder rose to notoriety in the 1970s and 1980s as a leader of the Medellin cartel alongside Pablo Escobar. His erratic behavior and shrewdness distinguished him among a generation of cartel figures renowned for brutality and treachery.
Mike Vigil, former director of international operations at the US Drug Enforcement Administration, interviewed Lehder at a US prison soon after his arrest in 1987 and said his intelligence was immediately apparent.
"This was not one of the run-of-the-mill drug traffickers," Vigil said Wednesday. "He was always looking for angles ... [and was] probably one of the most cunning drug traffickers that I have ever met."
'A hair-trigger temper'
Born to a German father and Colombian mother in 1949, Lehder relocated to the US at age 15. Living in New York City, he got involved in petty crime and was eventually arrested for car theft, which landed him in federal prison in Connecticut, where his cellmate was George Jung, a fellow smuggler and subject of the movie "Blow."
Jung and Lehder were released in the late 1970s and started working together. Lehder, close with the capos in Medellin, looked for a way station in the Caribbean for airborne-smuggling operation he and Jung set up to move cocaine from Colombia to the southeastern US. They settled on Norman's Cay in the Bahamas, about 200 miles southeast of Miami.
"Lehder embodies the ambition and ingenuity of the cocaine trade," said Toby Muse, author of "Kilo: Inside the Cocaine Cartels," which documents his decades of work as a journalist in Colombia.
"This dude takes over an island - an entire island in the Caribbean - in order to be a transit point to get [cocaine] into the United States," Muse said Wednesday.
But on Norman's Cay, Lehder's instability, fueled by cocaine, came to the fore. He eventually forced Jung out of their partnership. As Jung told High Times in 2015, "Walter Cronkite showed up there, and these thugs came with machine guns and told him, 'You better leave.' It just turned into a freak show."
Even among a generation of very violent traffickers, Lehder was renowned for being erratic. "There were many of these anecdotes about just a hair-trigger temper," Muse said.
The activity on Norman's Cay attracted US attention, culminating in a DEA raid in 1980. Lehder relocated to Colombia, building a hacienda and spreading money around Armenia, the district in west-central Colombia where he was born.
He built a statue of John Lennon on his front lawn and gave the state government an airplane as a gift. Like Escobar, also Lehder had a political awakening in the early 1980s.
Lehder shared Escobar's scorn for Colombia's extradition agreement with the US. But Lehder had other, more reactionary views.
Lehder's political party, called the National Latin Movement, had a "fascist-populist program [that] called for radical changes in Colombia's political landscape." His admiration for Hitler also shone through. Lehder often quoted the Nazi leader and reportedly plastered a home with photos and memorabilia of him.
Lehder also professed to be anti-imperialist, criticizing US actions in Latin America.
"He would say that cocaine was a revolutionary profession because he was bringing down the American empire by getting them hooked on drugs," Muse said. "So he's a real character from that generation."
'Planning a quiet freedom'
Lehder was an innovator when it came to drug routes and transportation methods, Vigil said.
"His legacy is that he stands out as probably one of the most intellectual capos of the Colombian drug trade, because he was definitely smarter than Pablo Escobar. The only thing Pablo Escobar had was wholesale violence," Vigil added. "Of the Medellin cartel, he was definitely the most intelligent."
Despite that contribution, Escobar began to see Lehder as more of a liability than an asset.
Escobar gave up Lehder to the Colombian government, Vigil told Insider in 2017 - though Escobar, before his mysterious death in 1993, denied doing so - and he was captured on a ranch early on February 4, 1987.
Eleven hours later, he was headed to Miami, the first victim of an extradition treaty he fought against.
He was sentenced to life without parole plus 135 years in 1988, which was reduced to 55 years after he testified against Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, who had supported the Medellin cartel while he was in power.
After that, Lehder's whereabouts within the prison system remained unknown, stoking rumors in Colombia.
"His family really suffered as well. His daughter would continually go to the press and give these interviews and say, 'Please stop trying to extort us. We don't have any money,'" Muse said, noting that it became a kind of policy among criminals in Colombia to target the families of high-profile capos who were taken down.
Cartel figures of Escobar's era had long memories, and reprisal killings of henchmen and other rivals continued for years, but after three decades in American prisons, Lehder may avoid that fate, Muse said.
"He's one of the few from that generation that I can think of who actually survived," Muse said. "So it is kind of ironic that the most erratic of them all was the one who actually made it and is likely to die a natural death of old age."
Lehder's daughter told Colombia's Caracol Radio on Wednesday that she hadn't spoken to her father since his release but that he was happy to be out and was "planning a quiet freedom." Arroyave, Lehder's lawyer, told the Associated Press that Lehder, who got German citizenship through his father, is not interested in returning to Colombia.
But Vigil, noting the lucrative European drug trade, was skeptical Lehder would settle into retirement.
"The only thing that Carlos Lehder knows is the drug trade," Vigil said. "It would not shock me that he's going there to open up markets, just like he opened up a transshipment point in Norman's Cay in the Bahamas during his heyday. He's an innovator."