Carlos Lehder, Medellín Cartel Boss and Pablo Escobar

The Colombian authorities released the former head of the Medellin cartel on Monday, Carlos Lehder, after a judge ruled that a drug trafficking sentence issued in Colombia against the 75 -year -old man had expired.

Lehder, one of the original “cocaine cowboys” and Pablo Escobar’s Criminal partner, he was arrested Friday night shortly after landing at Bogotá airport on a flight from Germany, and immigration officials said he was still wanted in the South American country for drug trafficking charges and smuggling of arms.

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 United States in 1987, where he served more than 30 years in prison. In 2020, Lehder was released after serving two thirds of his American sentence. He was Deported to Germanywhere he is also a citizen.

Lehder had not returned to Colombia since his extradition to the United States. His lawyer, Sondra Macollins, said he was trying to visit the relatives when he arrived on Friday.

“It 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.”

Colombian authorities condemned Lehder for drug trafficking in 1995, while serving the sentence separate in an American prison. The head of the poster was sentenced to 24 years in prison in Colombia, which means that his sentence expired in 2019, according to Colombian law.

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 his boss, Escobar. He is portrayed in the Netflix series “Narcos” as a wild and ruthless criminal who established a cocaine transit center on a private island in the Bahamas, called Cay Norman, which became a crucial point of crucial scale for cocaine flights.

In Colombia, he owned a luxurious rural hotel known as the German inn, who had cured Lions on his land and a great statue of Lehder’s favorite musician, John Lennon.

In the US, Lehder was initially sentenced to life imprisonment, but managed to reduce his sentence by providing US researchers with information that was used to prosecute the Panaman dictator Manuel Noriega.

As News reported in 2015, the prosecution of Lehder and Noriega was helped by the intelligence gathered by Carlos Toroa former member of the high -ranking poster became an undercover operation of DEA who assumed many false identities.

Lehder’s launch occurs only a few months after another key operator of the Medellin cocaine poster was stopped leaving an American prison. Records of the United States Prison Office show Fabio Ochoa Vásquez was release In December after completing 25 years of a 30 -year prison sentence.

Ochoa, 67, and his older brothers accumulated a fortune when cocaine began flooding the United States in the late 1970s and early eighties, according to US authorities, to the point that in 1987, they were included in the multimillion -dollar list of Forbes magazine. Living in Miami, Ochoa directed a distribution center for the cocaine poster led by Escobar.

In:
• Drug posters
• Colombia
• Pablo Escobar
• Cocaine
• Sign