After serving a reduced sentence in the U.S., a former crime partner of deceased Colombian drug kingpin Pablo Escobar has left the country for his new home in Berlin.
One of the pioneering “cocaine cowboys” of the ’70s and ’80s, 70-year-old Carlos Lehder was captured in Colombia in 1987 after Escobar tipped off authorities to his whereabouts and was extradited to the U.S. to stand trial. During his trial in 1988, prosecutors alleged Lehder was responsible for shipping 80 percent of the cocaine into the States.
Lehder was sentenced to life plus 135 years in prison, but had his sentence reduced after he agreed to cooperate with the authorities and was placed in a witness protection program in a Florida prison. Lehder’s father, an immigrant to Colombia, was German, so he also has German citizenship. He will face no legal action from the country’s authorities after already serving his prison sentence in America.
A self-described admirer of both John Lennon and Adolf Hitler, Lehder is believed to have been instrumental in setting up the private island of Norman’s Cay off the coast of Florida as a drop-off point for cocaine-laden planes.
“He was always crazy but he was also very smart,” Richard Gregorie, a former U.S attorney in Miami who indicted several Colombian drug traffickers, told the Associated Press. “He’s old but I wonder much craziness he still has left.”
Unlike Lehder, Escobar never saw the inside of a U.S. jail cell, as he was killed in a shootout with police in Medellín in 1993.
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