Carlos Enrique Lehder Rivas or simply Carlos Lehder is a Colombian drug lord currently
imprisoned in the United States, having been co-founder of the Medellín Cartel.
Born in Armenia, Colombia, Lehder eventually ran a cocaine transport empire on Norman's
Cay island, 210 miles off the Florida coast in the central Bahamas.
Some people have said that Lehder, with German ancestry, was allegedly also active in the
small Quintín Lamé Movement, an indigenous guerrilla group that was related to the FARC
and the M-19, but this allegation has not been proven.
Lehder was one of the founding members of Muerte a Secuestradores, a paramilitary group
whose focus was to retaliate against the kidnappings of cartel members and their families by the
Gerrillas.
His motivation to join the MAS was to retaliate against the M-19 guerrilla movement, which,
on November 19, 1981, attempted to kidnap him in order to ask for a ransom, but he escaped
from the kidnappers and they only managed to shoot him in the leg.
He was one of the most important operators therein, and is considered to be one of the
most important Colombian drug kingpins to be successfully prosecuted in the United States.
Lehder is of mixed German-Colombian descent, his father a German engineer and mother a
Colombian schoolteacher.The family owned a semi-legitimate used car business in the Medellin
area in which Carlos got his start as a criminal by supplying it with stolen American cars.
Early activities and prison
Lehder started out as a stolen car dealer, a marijuana dealer, and a smuggler of stolen
cars between the US and Canada.
While serving a sentence for car theft in federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut, Lehder
decided that, upon his release, he would take advantage of the burgeoning market for cocaine
in the United States.
To that end, he enlisted his bunkmate, former marijuana dealer George Jung, as a future
partner.
Jung had experience flying marijuana to the US from Mexico in small aircraft, staying
below radar level, and landing on dry lake beds.
Inspired by the idea, Lehder decided to apply the principle to cocaine transport and formed
a partnership with Jung.
While in prison, he set out to learn as much information as possible that could be useful
to him in the cocaine business.
Lehder would sometimes even spend hours questioning fellow inmates about money laundering and
smuggling.
George Jung allegedly said that Lehder kept countless files and constantly took notes.
Lehder's ultimate scheme was to revolutionize the cocaine trade by transporting the drug
to the United States, using small aircraft.
Previously, drug dealers had to rely on human "mules" to smuggle the drug in suitcases on
regular commercial flights.
In Lehder's vision, much greater quantities could be transported directly by small private
aircraft, with far less risk of interception.
Starting his empire After their releases, Lehder and Jung built
up a small stream of money through simple, traditional drug smuggling - they enlisted
two American girls to take a paid vacation to Antigua, receive cocaine, and carry it
back with them to the US in their suitcases.
Repeating this process several times, they soon had enough money for an airplane.
Using a small stolen plane and a professional pilot, they began to fly cocaine into the
United States via the Bahamas, increasing their financial resources and building connections
and trust with Colombian suppliers while spreading money around among Bahamian government officials
for political and judicial protection.
Their unconventional method of drug-smuggling began to gain credibility.
Norman's Cay In the late 1970s, the Lehder-Jung partnership
began to diverge, due to some combination of Lehder's megalomania and secret scheming
to secure a personal Bahamian island as an all-purpose headquarters for his operations.
That island was Norman's Cay, which at that point consisted of a marina, a yacht club,
approximately 100 private homes, and an air strip.
In 1978, Lehder began buying up property and harassing and threatening the island's residents;
at one point, a yacht was found drifting off the coast with the corpse of one of its owners
aboard.
Lehder is estimated to have spent $4.5 million on the island in total.
As Lehder chased away the local population and began to assume total control of the island,
Norman's Cay became his lawless private fiefdom.
By this time, he had forced George Jung out of the operation, and international criminal
financier Robert Vesco had allegedly become a partner.
Jung used his prior connections to take up a more modest line of independent smuggling
for Escobar and stayed out of Lehder's way.
From 1978 through 1982, the Cay was the Caribbean's main drug smuggling hub and a tropical hideaway
and playground for Lehder and associates.
They flew cocaine in from Colombia by jet and then reloaded it into the small aircraft
that then distributed it to locations in Georgia, Florida, and the Carolinas.
Lehder was believed to receive 1 kilo on every 4 that was transported through Norman's Cay.
Lehder built a 3,300-foot runway protected by radar, bodyguards, and Doberman attack
dogs for the fleet of aircraft under his command.
In the glory days of his operation, 300 kilograms of cocaine would arrive on the island daily,
and Lehder's personal wealth mounted into the billions.
Indeed, he accumulated such staggering wealth that on two occasions he offered to pay the
Colombian external debt.
In 1978, he made an offer to do so to President Alfonso López Michelsen, in exchange for
a free space for drug trafficking; in 1982 through Pablo Escobar, by then a Colombian
Congressman, he did so again, this time in an attempt to prevent his extradition.
Downfall Their government's approval of the extradition
of Colombians encouraged Escobar and Lehder to participate in politics.
Lehder founded the National Latino Movement, which managed three congressional seats and
popularized itself by making speeches against extradition.
The April 30, 1984 assassination of Rodrigo Lara Bonilla, the Colombian Minister of Justice,
initiated the beginning of the end for Lehder and the Medellín cartel.
Lara had campaigned against the cartel's activities, and his murder marked a change in Colombian
politics.
President Belisario Betancur, who had previously opposed extraditing any Colombian drug lords
to the United States, announced that he was now willing to extradite.
Carlos Lehder was the top name on the crackdown list.
Other major Medellín cartel associates fled to the protection of Manuel Noriega in Panama,
but when Pablo Escobar discovered Noriega was plotting to betray him to the U.S. in
return for amnesty, the cartel associates then fled to Nicaragua to seek the assistance
of Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega.
Escobar had paid some of Noriega's closest colonels to inform him of Noriega's intentions.
Carlos Lehder's downfall was assisted by his blatant bribing of Bahamian officials and
the attention the activities on Norman's Cay were attracting.
Fugitive, capture, trial and whereabouts In 1982, after Brian Ross' CBS report on U.S.
television made public the corruption of Bahamian government leaders, Lehder could not return
to Norman's Cay.
The government had frozen all his bank accounts and taken over his property and possessions,
and he went from being a billionaire to nearly bankrupt.
While on the run in the jungle, he got sick with a fever.
Pablo Escobar sent a helicopter for him and brought him back to Medellín, where he received
medical attention to save his life.
Even so, he was left very weak.
When he recovered, Escobar hired Lehder as a bodyguard.
Eventually, Lehder wanted to rebuild his fortune, but he was captured at a farm he had just
established in Colombia when a new employee of his informed the police of his location.
Another theory is that fellow members of the Medellin Cartel wanted him out of the picture
due to his radical military-like behavior, which they believed would jeopardize their
cocaine empire, and Escobar himself provided Lehder's whereabouts to the police, leading
to his capture.
Having captured one of the Cartel's most powerful members, the U.S. government tapped him as
a source of information about the details of the Cartel's secret empire, which later
proved useful in assisting the Colombian government to dismantle the Cartel.
In 1987, he was extradited to the United States, where he was tried and sentenced to life without
parole, plus an additional 135 years.
Now all of the other cartel leaders knew what would happen if they were extradited, and
soon afterward, the Medellín Cartel organizations split up.
These smaller organizations, especially Pablo's, were later attacked by the Cali cartel, by
the Colombian police/army, and soon the U.S. became involved as well.
A violent war began as the Cartel leaders tried to protect themselves by fighting back.
In 1992, in exchange for Lehder's agreement to testify against Manuel Noriega, his sentence
was reduced to a total of 55 years.
Three years after that, Lehder wrote a letter of complaint to a Jacksonville federal district
judge, complaining that the government had reneged on a deal to transfer him to a German
prison.
The letter was construed as a threat against the judge.
Within weeks of sending that letter in the fall of 1995, Lehder was whisked away into
the night, according to several protected witnesses at the Mesa Unit in Arizona.
While many believe he could have been released, others consider that this is not true.
Carlos Lehder's brother, Federico Guillermo Lehder Rivas, who operated on the periphery
of the business, might have been mistaken for Carlos, causing the reports of Carlos'
being free and living overseas.
According to journalist and author Tamara S. Inscoe-Johnson, who worked on the Lehder
defense during the time in question, Lehder was simply transferred to another prison and
has continued to be held in WITSEC, the US Bureau of Prisons' version of the federal
Witness Protection Program.
Inscoe-Johnson argued that Lehder had not been released, despite Internet rumors to
the contrary.
Inscoe-Johnson's work on Lehder, titled Norman's Cay: The True Story of Carlos Lehder and the
Medellin Cartel, details why the author believes Lehder will never be released: allegedly,
Lehder would be privy to secret information regarding the CIA's and his own involvement
in the Iran-Contra affair.
Carlos Lehder's ongoing legal battles confirm Lehder remains imprisoned in the US, and that
he is not likely to be released anytime soon.
On July 22, 2005, he appeared in the US Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit to contest
his sentence.
Lehder appeared pro se, arguing that the United States failed to perform its obligations under
a cooperation agreement he had entered into with the United States Attorney's Office,
after he held up his end of the deal..
In May 2007, he requested the Colombian Supreme Court to order the Colombian government to
request his release from the United States because of the violations of his cooperation
agreement.
In May 2008, Carlos Lehder's lawyer declared to El Tiempo that a habeas corpus petition
had been filed, alleging that Lehder's cooperation agreement had been violated, and that "a court
in Washington" had less than 30 days to respond to the notice.
In popular culture In the 2001 movie Blow the character Diego
Delgado was based on Carlos Lehder, the cellmate of the main character George Jung at Danbury
federal prison, who became Jung's good friend and business partner, and later his nemesis.
In the Colombian TV series Pablo Escobar, el patrón del mal, Lehder is portrayed as
Marcos Herber.
See also Cocaine Cowboys
References