In a way, the infamous drug lords of the Medellin Cartel were no different than the top brass of
a corporate company. Pablo Escobar was the charismatic CEO and face of the syndicate,
the Ochoa brothers were the quality controlling CFOs and kept the organization in order,
but the operations were taken care of by a man who was known for his love for Beatles and Adolf
Hitler and he went by the name of Crazy Charlie. In this video, Nutty History brings you the story
of the man who created the stereotypes of the chaotic, blood-thirsty gangsters, Carlos Lehder.
Carlos “Crazy Charlie” Lehder was born in Armenia. No, not the country Armenia, but a district called
Armenia in Colombia. His father, Klaus Wilhelm Lehder, was a German expat who moved to South
America in 1928. An engineer, Wilhelm was quite efficient at his job and participated in the
construction of several buildings with elevators which was a modern and unusual characteristic for
the 1930s and 40s Colombia. His success earned him a good reputation in the caste-based society
of Colombia and helped to marry Helena Rivas, daughter of a jeweler from Manizales. To get
accepted into Colombian society, Wilhelm changed his first name to Guillermo. Soon the couple had
four sons and started a small business producing vegetable oils, importing luxurious foreign goods,
and owning an inn. In 1943, 6 years before the birth of Carlos, US intelligence was looking into
the operation of Lehder’s inn, and the family was suspected of having links with the National
Socialists movement, or in simple terms, of being Nazis. However, despite a lot of accusations,
nothing was ever proven against the Lehders or their business but given that Carlos grew
up reading and fantasizing about Mein Kampf, the accusations were perhaps not that far from
reality. Carlos, third of Lehders’ kids, stayed with his parents until they separated when he
was 15 years old. Soon after, the teenager emigrated to New York City with his mother.
Carlos left school early, he did not believe conventional education was his way.
His mother wanted her children to continue the path traced by generations of a prosperous cradle
and contacts to become an industrialist like his father and grandfathers. However, Carlos had other
plans. After moving to the US, the freckled-faced Lehder soon started smuggling stolen cars.
He took his first steps in the crime by smuggling cars stolen in the United States to Colombia,
where they were marketed in a dealership run by his brother. Ah yes! The family business.
He was operating from Canada to the East Coast of the USA and would blast Beatles music as he
would ride the stolen cars across the border. Soon after he became the ringleader of car smugglers,
he also picked up smuggling marijuana. In one of his operations to provide vehicles to his
distributor in South America, he was captured in 1973 by the Police. He was sent to a prison
in Danbury, Connecticut. This brief stint in jail would forever alter the US and the world.
During his sentence at Danbury, Carlos ended with another drug trafficker as his cellmate. George
Jung. Lehder endearingly named Jung “El Americano” instead of using the usual slang they had for
Americans, gringo. George Jung, the now-famous drug smuggler, and subject of the movie "Blow,"
described the Colombian-American as well-mannered and well-dressed. In an interview with PBS,
Jung recalled Lehder having an ambitious mind and immense confidence for someone who was sentenced
for minor crimes. As the two cellmates grew closer in friendship, Carlos opened about his
plans for smuggling cocaine after getting out of Danbury. Jung had an experience of flying
drugs past borders and he became interested after Lehder revealed that coke can be sold
for sixty thousand dollars in the United States. But the cash register started ringing for real in
Jung’s head when Lehder explained that the cost of producing the same kilo of coke in Colombia
costs only 4 to 5 thousand dollars. Jung later described meeting Lehder in that prison as destiny
and a partnership was struck. As they both were released in the late 1970s, the two wasted no time
heading down to Colombia and meet the don, Pablo Escobar himself. As their operations expanded,
Carlos grew closer and closer to the cartel and became one of its founding members.
Lehder and Jung were smuggling drugs through Nassau, Bahamas. A plane would reach Escobar’s
ranch on Friday and after being loaded with drugs return to the Bahamas on Saturday.
On Sunday afternoon, the same plane will depart from the Caribbean for the mainland
by flying low and slipping under the heavy air traffic. This new method of transporting drugs
totally revolutionized the workings and success of the Medellin cartel. Carlos Lehder was hailed as
the Henry Ford of Drugs. I’m pretty sure the Ford family was more than thrilled to hear about that.
Norman’s Cay is a small spit of land, about 200 miles southeast of Miami. It was perfect
for Lehder’s vision for transporting Colombian snow and to feed his megalomania. Lehder used
every tactic from bribing to threatening to actual violence to have residents of Norman Cay
leave their homes and flee the island so he could take over the entire island and
start his little kingdom there. By 1978, Carlos Lehder was sending an armada of planes laden with
drugs to abandoned airstrips in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina. On a good day
for the Medellin cartel, Lehder was transporting 2500 to 3000 kilograms of Colombian cocaine every
hour! Carlos had turned Norman’s Cay into his headquarters where he would not only operate
his business at an unprecedented scale but also would hold the wildest of parties and sexcapades.
The island had a landing strip longer than a kilometer which is nearly half a mile.
The strip was protected by radars, hitmen, and trained dogs. Lehder was making so much money
that he didn’t just buy an island, he converted it into a fortress for himself. Despite being
part of the Bahamas, Lehder had raised the flag of Colombia on the island and the Colombian
national anthem would be sung on every occasion. Norman Cay brought Lehder so much wealth that in
his arrogance the man claimed that he will pay off Colombia’s foreign debt if the government
allows it. In a letter to Colombia's former President Juan Manuel Santos, he even bragged
that drug smugglers had been visionaries that succeeded where millions of chemists had failed.
They turned a kilo of coca leaves into a kilo of gold. Lehder was extremely popular among employees
of the Medellin Cartel and everybody wanted to work for him. His subordinates considered him a
likable mafioso who can be friends despite being crazy and attractive despite being dangerous. At
his manor on `Norman’s Cay Island, he had John Lennon’s bronze sculpture in the nude,
holding a guitar with a Nazi helmet on his head. He constantly partied and consumed
recreational drugs and used to give long hateful speeches against Jews and capitalism
while quoting Mein Kampf. The only thing he liked about America was Coca Cola and justified selling
cocaine to America as a means to suck money from the rich Americans and destroy the US economy.
He also considered terrorism as poor man’s atom bomb as he armed every single man on the island.
The Bahamas authorities could not ignore the humongous amount of drug smuggling through
Norman’s Cay for long and in 1982 the crackdown began. Immense pressure from the US ensured a
joint operation by the local authorities and the DEA against Lehder’s mini-empire.
The intervention put an immediate end to the operations and Crazy Charlie had to flee but
not before he bombed Clifford Park and rained Nassau with leaflets stating “DEA GO HOME”.
On returning to Colombia, Lehder got active in Politics like Escobar
and he started spreading money around his home turf in Armenia and the state of Quindio. But
unlike Escobar who used the democratic system to get elected in the national assembly of Colombia,
Carlos Lehder was trying to create the Fourth Reich in Armenia and abrogate the extradition
treaty between Colombia and the US. However, things were getting troublesome at home,
with Norman’s Cay gone, Pablo Escobar was finding erratic Carlos Lehder of very little use.
The DEA had chased Lehder to Colombia as well. Prosecutor Robert Merkle traveled to Bogota to
present Colombian authorities a large bundle of evidence of Lehder’s criminal activities
and requested extradition. To Lehder’s dismay, the petition was accepted by the Supreme Court
and Lehder was one step away from Guantanamo Bay, a signature of the then President of the Colombian
Republic. As the DEA sought to get that, Lehder was again in the wind. For the next few years,
Lehder hopped from one South American country to another to stay one step ahead of the DEA.
Lehder was staunch anti-communist but ironically Cuba and Nicaragua were the only haven for him
as Colombian Minister of Justice, Rodrigo Lora Bonilla was turning every stone to
hunt down Crazy Charlie. And then the unthinkable happened, Bonilla was assassinated by the Cartel,
and thus began the decline of the arguably most feared and influential Cartel. With every Cartel
member now on Colombian and American crosshair, Lehder returned to the country to participate
in the asymmetric war launched by Cartel against their own government. In early 1987,
when Lehder killed an influential assassin of a cartel over a prostitute in front of the whole
cartel in a party, Pablo Escobar had had enough of the Crazy Charlie. The party went on that
night after Lehder apologized to Escobar and in return, Pablo Escobar promised him a hiding
place in the morning. While Lehder was taken to the hideout in the midst of Colombian forests,
Pablo Escobar reached the DEA and snitched on his long-time partner. If that wasn’t enough
for betrayals to bring Lehder down, his conviction was awaiting the testimony of another old friend
George Jung. With the blessings from Escobar, Jung had no hesitation to point at his old-time partner
in court. In 1988, Lehder was sentenced to life without parole plus 135 years, a term the judge
said was quote "a signal to our society that it will do everything it can to rid itself of this
cancer." However later, Lehder got his sentence reduced by testifying against Panamanian dictator
Manuel Noriega, who had assisted the Medellin cartel with its money-laundering activities.
Based on rebates granted for work done and good behavior, Lehder was released in mid-2020
and decided to move to Germany which makes sense considering what happened to the drug
barons who went back to Colombia. If you wanna know more about that, check out our video on
Griselda Blanco, the drug queen and if you wanna know more about the former partner of Lehder,
George Jung aka El Americano, tune into Nutty History. Smash that like button or the cartels
might just find their way to your doorstep. Kidding. Also, do tell us in the comments if you
think Carlos Lehder should have been released or not. Thanks for watching Nutty History.