Colombian authorities released former Medellin Cartel boss Carlos Lehder on Monday after a judge ruled that a drug trafficking sentence issued in Colombia against the 75-year-old had expired.
Lehder, one of the original “cocaine cowboys” and Pablo Escobar’s crime partner, was arrested Friday night shortly after he landed in Bogota’s airport on a flight from Germany, with immigration officials saying he was still wanted in the South American country on drug trafficking charges and weapons smuggling.
Lehder became the first Colombian drug trafficker extradited to the United States after he was arrested during a party at his ranch.
The former drug trafficker was extradited to the U.S. in 1987, where he served more than 30 years in prison. In 2020, Lehder was released after serving two-thirds of his U.S. sentence. He was deported to Germany, where he is also a citizen.
Migracion Colombia via X/Handout via REUTERS
Lehder had not returned to Colombia since his extradition to the United States. His lawyer, Sondra Macollins, said he was attempting to visit relatives when he arrived Friday.
“He is recovering from cancer and has high blood pressure problems,” Macollins told Colombia’s Blu radio. “We are talking about someone who spent years in dark cells.”
/ AP
Colombian authorities convicted Lehder for drug trafficking in 1995, while he was serving the separate sentence at a U.S. prison. The cartel boss was sentenced to 24 years in prison in Colombia, meaning his sentence expired in 2019, according to Colombian law.
The son of a German immigrant who arrived in Colombia in the 1920s, Lehder began his criminal career in the 1970s when he lived with relatives in New York City.
He used his contacts and his knowledge of English to open cocaine markets for the Medellin Cartel and became a key ally of its boss, Escobar. He’s portrayed in the Netflix series “Narcos” as a wild, ruthless criminal who set up a cocaine transit hub on a private island in the Bahamas, called Norman’s Cay, that became a crucial stopover point for cocaine flights.
In Colombia, he owned a luxurious rural hotel known as the Posada Alemana, which had caged lions on its grounds and a large statue of Lehder’s favorite musician, John Lennon.
In the U.S., Lehder was initially sentenced to life in prison but managed to reduce his sentence by providing U.S. investigators with information that was used to prosecute Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega.
As CBS News reported in 2015, the prosecution of Lehder and Noriega was aided by intelligence gathered by Carlos Toro, a former high-ranking cartel member turned undercover DEA operative who assumed many false identities.
Lehder’s release Monday comes just a few months after another key operator of the Medellin cocaine cartel was let out of a U.S. prison. Records from the U.S. Bureau of Prisons show Fabio Ochoa Vásquez was released in December after completing 25 years of a 30-year prison sentence.
Ochoa, 67, and his older brothers amassed a fortune when cocaine started flooding the U.S. in the late 1970s and early 1980s, according to U.S. authorities, to the point that in 1987, they were included in Forbes Magazine’s list of billionaires. Living in Miami, Ochoa ran a distribution center for the cocaine cartel once headed by Escobar.
