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.
Carlos Lehder rose from a petty criminal to become one of the major players in the Medellín Cartel. Compared to Pablo Escobar, he is one of the lesser-known members of the cartel, but if it was not for him, the cartel’s cocaine smuggling may never have really got off the ground.
The Early Life Of Carlos Lehder
Random HouseThe Lehder family, with Carlos Lehder crouching to the right.
Carlos Enrique Lehder was born on September 7, 1949 in Armenia, Colombia. His father, Klaus Wilhelm Lehder, was a German engineer who immigrated to Colombia in 1929. There, he married Helena Rivas, a Colombian beauty queen, and had four children — with Carlos Lehder being the third born.
The Lehder family owned and operated a small inn called Pensión Alemana, where they produced oils and sold imported goods like wine and canned foods. In the 1940s, the inn fell under suspicion by United States intelligence operations for potentially serving as a meeting place for Nazis.
Random HouseStaff pose outside of the Pensión Alemana.
In 1964, Lehder’s parents divorced, and he moved with his mother to New York City. However, his life seemed to take a turn for the worse after he dropped out of school and discovered the works of Niccolò Machiavelli, Hermann Hesse, and Adolf Hitler. He became obsessed with their ideologies and quickly developed an appetite for creating an empire of his own.
In 1973, he began a two-year sentence in a federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut, for smuggling 200 pounds of marijuana in the trunk of a stolen car. There he struck up a fateful relationship with his cellmate, another drug dealer named George Jung. Together, the two would revolutionize the cocaine trafficking industry.
The Rise Of Carlos Lehder
Eric VANDEVILLE/Gamma-Rapho/Getty ImagesCarlos Lehder pilots one of his planes.
George Jung, who’s drug dealing days are portrayed in the movie Blow, told PBS that Carlos Lehder guided him into the cocaine business:
“I said, ‘Why don’t you tell me about [the cocaine business].’ And he said, ‘Did you know it sells for $U.S.60,000.00 a kilo in the United States?'” Jung added that 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.
American Heroes Channel Lehder (right) sitting with Pablo Escobar at a meeting in the 1980s.
Before Lehder, Pablo Escobar’s Medellín Cartel smuggled cocaine into the United States with drug mules on commercial flights. In the mid-1970s, Lehder introduced the use of small aircraft flying at low altitudes to smuggle far larger quantities of the white powder across borders.
Soon they were working with Pablo Escobar and other drug lords out of Medellín, Colombia. Lehder and Jung handled transportation and distribution, while Escobar took care of production from his Colombian labs. Lehder and Jung’s initial route went through Nassau in the Bahamas, where they paid off corrupt Bahamian officials.
But Lehder wanted to find a more isolated area without limits from authorities, which he found with the purchase of Norman’s Cay, which was located about 210 miles southeast of Miami. The island became the midpoint in the transport route to Florida. It also became a base of operations for Lehder and a private getaway for drug-fueled parties.
Norman’s Cay, the private island of Carlos Lehder.
Lehder, a bisexual man, apparently had frequent orgies, which an associate described as, “five males, 10 females and everybody runs naked and everybody switches partners and everybody drinks and smokes marijuana, and alcohol, and [it’s] three days of Sodom and Gomorrah.”
The island became his private domain. “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,” said Mike Vigil, a former chief of international operations for the DEA to Business Insider.
“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,” said Tamara Inscoe-Johnson, a journalist and author of Norman’s Cay: The True Story of Carlos Lehder and the Medellín Cartel.
An Ideology Shaped By Adolf Hitler And John Lennon
Despite the exponential gains in drug money for the cartel and earning billions himself, his real mission was to lead a neo-Nazi government in Colombia. He was a vocal antisemite and Holocaust denier, and considered Adolf Hitler a genius.
Wikimedia CommonsJohn Lennon and Adolf Hitler.
At the same time, Lehder also idolized Beatle John Lennon. An odd pairing, but Lennon was a vocal anti-war activist who spoke out against the United States government, and Lehder hated the United States. 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 decreed his desire to bring justice to his native Colombia, making up for the way other countries, particularly the United States, had ravaged his country. He also had goals of building a large resort for wealthy Colombians like himself.
On his island, Lehder flew the Colombian flag and frequently sang the national anthem. He enjoyed popularity among Colombians, who admired him for his wealth, employment opportunities, and gifts he often 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.”
His notoriety allowed him to get a foot in the door in Colombia’s political arena. In the early 1980s, he created the Movimiento Cívico Latino Nacional (National Latin Civic Movement), a party founded on anti-communist, neo-Nazi, anti-Zionist, and anti-colonialist principles. The party held three congressional seats at its height, largely due to its denouncement of extradition treaties with the U.S. — then a hot button topic in Colombia.
Inquebrantable/XA meeting for the Movimiento Cívico Latino Nacional.
He held press conferences and pages appeared in Colombian newspapers denouncing the treaty. He publicly championed Hitler and denounced American interference south of the border in Latin America.
His antics were fast gaining unwanted attention from authorities. The Colombian National Police raided a property where they found millions of U.S. dollars, along with wall-to-wall Hitler photographs and memorabilia.
The Fall Of Carlos Lehder
Eric VANDEVILLE/Gamma-Rapho/Getty ImagesCarlos Lehder in 1988.
By the time Lehder was striking it big with Escobar, he had already forced Jung out of the operation. From 1978 to 1980, his island was the Caribbean’s principal hub for smuggling cocaine.
But Lehder started to become more visible through his political involvement and turbulent relationship with the U.S. DEA, who raided Norman’s Cay in 1980. Though Lehder’s plane-based smuggling operation had made the Medellín Cartel a fortune, his actions would soon cause a rift with Escobar.
Despite his success as a politician, Lehder’s fate was sealed when he killed one of Escobar’s sicarios (assassins) at a party at Hacienda Napoles. This was the last straw for Escobar, who was close to his assassins, as they were to him. Lehder had become a liability to Escobar. 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.
From his federal prison cell in Marion, Illinois, Lehder’s attempt to broker a deal with U.S. authorities failed, after his so-called information on Escobar was deemed worthless since his split with the drug kingpin in the mid-1980s. In 1988, Lehder was imprisoned for life without parole plus 135 years.
However, he did prove useful with testimony on one of Escobar’s smuggling partners, former Panamanian dictator Manuel Noreiga, which led to a reduced sentence. Still, Lehder was not happy, stating the U.S. should have freed him according to the deal he struck with them. He unsuccessfully petitioned the Colombian President, Juan Manuel Santos, to repatriate him back to Colombia so he could die in his homeland.
On June 15, 2020, Lehder was released from prison and sent to Germany. While incarcerated, the former drug lord was diagnosed with prostate cancer, and a German charity raised funds to pay for his treatments.
In 2024, he released his tell-all book, Life and Death in the Medellín Cartel, attributing all of the violence that occurred during the height of his career to 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 these rare photos of Pablo Escobar that take you inside the life of the kingpin.
