The Medellin Cartel is infamous in history for successfully infiltrating the US borders
and exploiting billions of dollars from the country thanks to their supremacy at drug
trafficking. However, as they say, no crime is possible without an insider’s help. Today Nutty
History brings you the story of the USA’s insider who helped the Medellin Cartel to
revolutionize drug traffic like never before. This is the story of “El Americano” aka George Jung.
Boston George was born George Jacob Jung in the small but significant town of Weymouth,
Massachusetts, not very far from Boston. Frederick Jung, George’s father, ran a small business in
Weymouth while George was mostly raised by his mother. Back in the day, George was your usual
stereotypical jock of the 50s. Below average in academics, but a star football player.
His classmates called the young athlete a natural leader and his popularity was off the charts
among the students. But too bad, like any other antagonized jock from the era’s Hollywood movie,
George fell for easy vices. In high school, he tried to solicit a prostitute who turned
out to be an undercover police officer. This was George’s first of many arrests. After graduating
from high school in 1961, he got admitted into the University of Southern Mississippi.
He joined with an ambition of becoming an ad man or as John Hamm would like to call it,
a madman. George Jung was considering studying advertising, but he soon dropped out.
Still, it wasn’t like university time was all for nothing. George did learn something out
of it. Selling drugs was more fun than doing them. He found that out by selling the stash
of Maryjane he had procured for himself during his time in College. It was like a lion tasting human
blood for the first time. The money was easy, big and George felt like he found his calling.
By 1967, he was smuggling cannabis from California to New England, where it fetched a higher price.
Most of it was transported by a girlfriend who was a flight attendant and packed it in her suitcases.
But that was not enough, ambitious George was dreaming bigger. In search of even greater
profits, he expanded his operation to flying the drugs in from Puerto Vallarta, Mexico.
He began using airplanes he would steal from private airports on Cape Cod and professional
pilots. At the height of this enterprise, Jung and his associates were reportedly making
$250,000 a month. Adjusting for inflation,
this would be about a quarter short of two million a month today.
However, his gold streak came to an end in 1974 when Jung was arrested in Chicago for
smuggling a whopping 660 pounds of Marijuana. Now for the rest of the world who do not use
crazy scaling units like Americans, that would be a round total of 300 kilos. George Jung was
staying at the Playboy Club and he was supposed to meet a connection who would pick up the stash.
The connection got arrested first for heroin smuggling, but he informed the authorities
about Jung when he was lured with the promise of a reduced sentence in return for cooperation. Now
in court, Jung decided to take matters into his own hands and he argued in great lengths with the
judge about the purpose of incarcerating a man for crossing an imaginary line with a bunch of plants.
Obviously, the judge was not happy with the sass, and Jung was sent to the Federal
Correctional Institution in Danbury. George Jung called his sentence for drug trafficking at FCI,
learning at the crime school. I mean who could blame him? If your cellmate turns out to be Carlos
Lehder, the co-founder of the Medellin Cartel and a close associate of the drug lord Pablo Escobar,
the sentence is not a punishment for smuggling drugs but a chance to get better at it.
And that’s exactly what George did. Now if you do not know who Carlos Lehder is, here’s a little
history on Medellin Cartel’s German Colombian Drug Lord. He was a neo-nazi and a Beatles fan,
and Carlos Lehder revolutionized drug smuggling in the late 1970s. He bought a small island in
the Bahamas called Norman's Cay which is merely 211 miles off the Florida coast.
Carlos Lehder bribed Bahamian authorities and began moving tons of white Colombian snow to
the US in small airplanes. The planes flew low, escaping the view of watchful US authorities.
The risky and far-less profitable method of having drug couriers carry cocaine on or in their bodies
on commercial flights, which was a popular method and was invented by Griselda Blanco,
but it became a thing of the past. Instead,
Carlos Lehder's method allowed traffickers to move unimaginable quantities of cocaine.
At one point, it was estimated that four out of every five bags of cocaine that made it into the
US were delivered by Lehder's fleet of planes. While in Prison with George Jung, Lehder taught
Jung everything he could about cocaine and Jung convinced Lehder to fly coke in the US themselves.
The cellmates became business partners and they figured out everything they could about transporting
cocaine down to the last detail, including how to launder the money they would make.
After their release in 1976, Carlos Lehder took Jung to Columbia to meet Don Escobar. The drug lord liked
their idea of having their own air courier service for transportation of drugs beyond US borders
and with his money and product. Jung and Lehder altered the American drug scene. The two totally
revolutionized the business by being capable of transporting much larger quantities of coke,
which also boosted the production of the drug and helped Pablo Escobar and his associates to
turn the business into a billion-dollar industry. Now, there was a routine to their smuggling operation.
On a Friday night, a plane would fly from the Bahamas to Escobar’s ranch in Colombia
and stay there overnight. On Saturday, the plane would return to the Bahamas. On Sunday afternoon,
hidden among the herd of heavy air traffic departing the Caribbean for the mainland,
a lone radar dot lost among all the other dots, the plane would remain unnoticed before it finally
slipped down below radar detection and landed on the mainland. However, with the higher stakes came
on a heightened sense of danger and excitement. In the late 1970s, the partnership became strained
and difficult as Lehder’s megalomania became too overbearing for El Americano George Jung. Carlos
Lehder was beginning to outgrow the need of Jung as well. As he continued to muscle and threaten
the residents of Norman Cay out, Lehder decided to skip Jung and went straight to Richard Barlie.
Richard Barlie was Jung’s contact in California. Jung would fly out 300 kilos of coke from Pablo
Escobar’s Colombian Ranch to California, and from there it was Barlie’s responsibility to distribute
the product. Every run that George Jung made earned him about $15 Million. Even when Lehder
cut Jung out, Jung continued to smuggle drugs on his own and continued reaping millions in profit.
Jung described this partnership as a marriage made in heaven or perhaps,
hell. Jung later betrayed Carlos Lehder in the end by testifying against him
to manage a reduced sentence for himself. Boston George, he sure got the last laugh.
According to Jung, the coke mania of the 70s and 80s brought him not only money and power but
also fame. In his own words, he said he was popular with women despite having the looks
of Bella Lugosi. According to him, the women were in love with coke, money, automobiles, clothes,
dinners, and the lifestyle he was offering. He was not a rock star, he was not a movie star
but he sure was their “Coke Star”. Now the Jung household was not so happy about their son’s
rising fame or notoriety. To his family, George Jung was an embarrassment. Moreover, the constant
heckles and harassment George’s parents received from the federal agents of the FBI and DEA was no
help either. George’s mother had forbidden him to visit the house until George’s father died
in 1988. However, George wanted to stay in touch with his family,
and to do so he would send them audio tapes filled with messages about missing them,
his well-being, and attempts of making amends. Despite the disappointment of
the family, George never apologized to his parents for being a drug trafficker.
His father would play his tapes every day in his car to listen to his son’s voice. Later George
called himself a screwup regretting breaking his father’s heart with his career choices.
By 1987, Jung was sitting on $100 million and paying minimal taxes thanks to an offshore
account in Panama. But the glamor wasn’t supposed to last. Yet again an undercover
officer would become Jung’s downfall as he was arrested later the same year in his home.
The squad sent to arrest him found just enough cocaine at that time to bust him. Jung tried
to skip bail with his wife and one-year-old daughter but he was caught. Luckily, however,
he was offered a deal if he testified against Carlos Lehder. Initially, George Jung refused,
afraid of what would happen to him if he fell out of Pablo Escobar’s good graces. But as fate would
have it, things were not so good among Escobar and Lehder anymore. Carlos Lehder had killed one of
Escobar’s hitmen over a woman in a Medellin cartel party in front of Escobar and the rest of the top
brass of the cartel. Lehder apologized to the don but Pablo Escobar had had enough of Lehder’s
endless coke-snorting and animalistic attitude. The day after the party, Escobar sent Carlos
Lehder to a secret hiding place, promising him that he would be safe there — but then, he turned
around and ratted him out to US authorities. Later, Escobar vehemently denied dropping his
right-hand man in the lap of the DEA but everybody knew what happened. The only surprise was the
subtle approach instead of making an example out of him. Like Pablo Escobar was known to do.
Later Escobar also sent his blessings to George Jung during the trial and so George Jung now had
no more reason to NOT testify against his former business associate. After testifying, George Jung
was released. However, he simply couldn’t stay out of it. The thrill of the drug business just pulled him right back in and he took
a smuggling job with an old friend. Unfortunately, that friend was working with the DEA.
Man, George Jung never learned the lesson to vet his friends and associates, did he? This
time Jung was in for the good. Now while Hollywood made a not-so-successful movie on a book written
about him in 1993, the drug dealer did get a 60-year sentence. After being released in 2014,
George Jung enjoyed a pleasant and peaceful life in his home town Weymouth. At first, he had
reservations about public opinion on the question of going back to Weymouth but the town welcomed
him like a celebrity and he spent his last days like a worn-out star making money from the movie,
documentary, books, and other pieces of pop culture based on his life until he died in 2021.
So, what do you think, do criminals deserve a pedestal and celebrity status we often provide
them? And would you like to know more about George Jung’s crazy ex-partner Carlos Lehder,
tell us in the comments. And thanks for watching Nutty History.