A Colombian-German drug lord, Carlos Lehder helped Pablo Escobar found the Medellín Cartel — but their alliance wouldn't last forever.
Getty Images/Wikimedia CommonsCarlos Lehder and Pablo Escobar, the notorious leader of the Medellín Cartel.
Carlos Lehder rose from a petty criminal to become one of the major players in the Medellín Cartel in the 1970s and 1980s.
Compared to the infamous Pablo Escobar, Lehder is one of the lesser-known figures of the cartel, but if it weren’t for him, the cartel’s cocaine trafficking may never have really gotten off the ground.
Dubbed “El Loco” and “Crazy Charlie” for his wild lifestyle, Lehder also became known for his neo-Nazism. But mostly, he was recognized as one of Escobar’s most feared associates — until their alliance ended.
The Early Life Of Carlos Lehder
Penguin Random HouseA photo showing Carlos Lehder in his early 20s.
Carlos Enrique Lehder Rivas was born on Sept. 7, 1949 in Armenia, Colombia. His father, Klaus Wilhelm Lehder, was a German engineer who had immigrated to Colombia in the late 1920s. There, Klaus Wilhelm Lehder had married Helena Rivas, a Colombian beauty queen, and had four children — with Carlos Lehder being the third born.
The Lehder family owned a small inn called Pensión Alemana. They also produced vegetable oils and imported various products, such as wine. By the 1940s, their inn had attracted attention from U.S. intelligence operations for potentially serving as a meeting place for Nazis.
Penguin Random HouseCarlos Lehder was later inspired to create his own hotel, Posada Alemana, thanks to his family’s inn.
After Lehder’s parents divorced, he moved with his mother to New York City at age 15. There, he dropped out of school and began committing petty crimes, eventually robbing cars in Queens and becoming involved in delivering marijuana. He also became obsessed with a number of disturbing ideologies, including those popularized by Adolf Hitler, and fantasized about creating an empire of his own.
In 1973, Lehder was arrested on drug-smuggling and theft charges. Found guilty, he was sent to a federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut. There, he struck up a friendship with another drug smuggler, George Jung. Together, the two would revolutionize cocaine trafficking.
The Shocking Rise Of Carlos Lehder
Eric VANDEVILLE/Gamma-Rapho/Getty ImagesCarlos Lehder piloting a plane.
George Jung, whose drug-smuggling days are portrayed in the movie Blow, told PBS that Carlos Lehder guided him into the cocaine business.
As Jung recalled, “He asked me if I knew anything about cocaine, and I told him no. And I said, ‘Why don’t you tell me about it?’ And he said, ‘Did you know it sells for $60,000.00 a kilo in the United States?'” Jung said a “cash register started ringing up in my head,” and after the pair’s release in the late 1970s, they revolutionized the smuggling of cocaine by bringing it into the southeastern U.S. from Colombia by the planeload.
YouTubeCarlos Lehder, pictured with Pablo Escobar in the early 1980s.
Around the same time, Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar was making a name for himself in the cocaine trafficking industry. However, Escobar initially used drug mules to smuggle cocaine into the U.S.
Lehder, on the other hand, had developed an airborne smuggling operation, involving the use of a small aircraft flying at low altitudes to smuggle far larger quantities of cocaine across borders. It’s little wonder why Escobar was interested in this operation, and it led to Lehder helping Escobar found what would be the Medellín Cartel.
While Escobar refined and perfected his product in Colombia, Lehder and Jung helped handle the transportation and distribution of the product. Lehder and Jung’s initial route went through Nassau in the Bahamas, where they paid off corrupt Bahamian officials.
But Lehder wanted to find an area that was more isolated, which he found with the purchase of Norman’s Cay. A tiny island, Norman’s Cay was located about 210 miles southeast of Miami. The island became a semi-private domain for Lehder, where he set up his own shipment base. It also served as a secret getaway for wild, drug-fueled parties.
X (Formerly Twitter)Norman’s Cay, Carlos Lehder’s private island that boasted its own private landing strip.
Lehder, reportedly a bisexual man, hosted frequent orgies, which an associate described as such: “Five males, 10 females, and everybody runs naked, and everybody [switches] partners, and everybody drinks and smokes marijuana… and [it’s] three days of Sodom and Gomorrah.”
The island also became a place for Lehder to promote his most disturbing ideologies. “There were other people that lived there, but they started to drive them out, and Carlos Lehder started to develop kind of like a neo-Nazi group there, that would protect the planeloads of coke and intimidate the people that lived there,” Mike Vigil, a former chief of international operations for the DEA, told Business Insider.
According to a journalist and author named Tamara Inscoe-Johnson, who wrote a book about Lehder: “He spent untold hours plotting a political career, aiming at the Colombian presidency. As his goals expanded, so did his fascination with Nazism; after all, Hitler’s goal was to take over the world, and it was the same with Lehder.”
A Twisted Ideology Shaped By Adolf Hitler — And John Lennon
Despite the exponential gains in drug money for the cartel and earning billions himself, Carlos Lehder also hoped to lead a neo-Nazi government in Colombia. He was a vocal antisemite and reportedly a Holocaust denier, and he considered Adolf Hitler his hero.
Bizarrely, however, he also idolized the famous Beatle John Lennon. At one point, Lehder commissioned a bronze statue of a nude Lennon wearing a Nazi helmet as a way of praising both of his heroes.
Wikimedia CommonsJohn Lennon and Adolf Hitler, the two men Carlos Lehder admired the most.
It was a truly shocking pairing of two people to idolize, but Lennon was a vocal anti-war activist who spoke out against many actions of the U.S. government, and Lehder hated the U.S. government. In fact, he saw cocaine not just as a product, but as a weapon that could destroy the United States by causing chaos and disrupting the political system.
He frequently expressed his desire to bring justice to his native Colombia, making up for the way that other countries, particularly the United States, had impacted his country throughout the years.
On his island, Lehder flew the Colombian flag and sang the Colombian national anthem. He enjoyed popularity among some Colombians, who admired him for his wealth, job opportunities, and gifts he gave at random. One taxi driver who grew up in Armenia, Colombia, stated:
“I grew up in a very poor family. When I was about 12, my mother would send me on foot every Saturday along this road to La Alemana. There we would line up and they would give us the weekly groceries. He [Lehder] was there, before they [arrested him]. He always helped those who needed it.”
Lehder’s notoriety allowed him to get a foot in the door in Colombia’s political arena. In the 1980s, he created the Movimiento Cívico Latino Nacional (National Latin Civic Movement), which has been described as anti-communist, neo-Nazi, ultranationalist, and anti-colonialist. The party held three congressional seats at its height, largely due to its denouncement of an extradition treaty with the United States — which was then a hot-button topic in Colombia.
Inquebrantable/XA meeting for the Movimiento Cívico Latino Nacional.
He held press conferences and publicly denounced the extradition treaty whenever he could. He heavily criticized the U.S. for its ongoing involvement throughout Latin America, and he was not shy about his admiration for Hitler — sometimes he even quoted him.
His antics quickly gained unwanted attention from authorities.
The Sudden Fall Of Carlos Lehder
Eric VANDEVILLE/Gamma-Rapho/Getty ImagesCarlos Lehder, pictured in 1988.
By the time Carlos Lehder was striking it big with Escobar, he had already forced Jung out of the operation. From the late 1970s to 1980, his island Norman’s Cay was his principal hub for smuggling cocaine.
But Lehder started to become more visible through his political involvement and outspoken statements against the U.S. Though Lehder’s plane-based smuggling operation had helped make the Medellín Cartel a fortune, his erratic behavior would eventually cause a rift with Escobar.
Lehder’s fate was reportedly sealed after he killed one of Escobar’s hitmen at a party at Hacienda Nápoles. This was purportedly the last straw for Escobar, who now saw Lehder as more of a liability than a reliable business partner and friend. Allegedly, Escobar gave up Lehder’s location to Colombian authorities and, on February 4, 1987, Lehder became the first to be extradited under the treaty between Colombia and the U.S. that he had so fiercely battled as a politician.
Aware that Escobar had likely turned him in, Lehder told a DEA official: “Listen, I can help you capture Pablo Escobar… You can put me under the security of the Colombian army, and I can find Pablo Escobar for you.” But American authorities refused to let Lehder back into Colombia.
From his federal prison cell in Marion, Illinois, Lehder attempted to broker another kind of deal with U.S. authorities, but that also failed, as his so-called information on Escobar was deemed worthless. In 1988, Lehder was sentenced to life in prison without parole plus 135 years after he was convicted of cocaine trafficking.
However, Lehder later proved useful with valuable testimony against former Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, who had assisted the Medellín Cartel, which helped shorten his sentence. He was eventually released from a U.S. prison in 2020 and extradited to Germany — where he holds citizenship — and since then, he’s published a tell-all book.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the 2024 book, Life and Death of the Medellin Cartel, blamed much of the violence that occurred during the height of Lehder’s career on his former boss, Pablo Escobar.
After learning about Carlos Lehder, meet John Jairo Velasquez, Pablo Escobar’s top hitman who killed over 250 people. Then, take a look at rare photos of Pablo Escobar that take you inside the life of the kingpin.
