Colombian authorities launched former Medellin Cartel boss Carlos Lehder on Monday after a choose dominated {that a} drug trafficking sentence issued in Colombia in opposition to the 75-year-old had expired.
Lehder, one of many authentic “cocaine cowboys” and Pablo Escobar’s crime associate, was arrested Friday night time shortly after he landed in Bogota’s airport on a flight from Germany, with immigration officials saying he was nonetheless wished within the South American nation on drug trafficking expenses and weapons smuggling.
Lehder turned the primary Colombian drug trafficker extradited to the USA after he was arrested throughout a celebration at his ranch.
The previous drug trafficker was extradited to the U.S. in 1987, the place he served greater than 30 years in jail. In 2020, Lehder was launched after serving two-thirds of his U.S. sentence. He was deported to Germany, the place he’s additionally a citizen.
Migracion Colombia by way of X/Handout by way of REUTERS
Lehder had not returned to Colombia since his extradition to the USA. His lawyer, Sondra Macollins, stated he was making an attempt to go to family members when he arrived Friday.
“He’s recovering from most cancers and has hypertension issues,” Macollins advised Colombia’s Blu radio. “We’re speaking about somebody who spent years in darkish cells.”
/ AP 
Colombian authorities convicted Lehder for drug trafficking in 1995, whereas he was serving the separate sentence at a U.S. jail. The cartel boss was sentenced to 24 years in jail in Colombia, which means his sentence expired in 2019, in response to Colombian regulation.
The son of a German immigrant who arrived in Colombia within the Nineteen Twenties, Lehder started his legal profession within the Nineteen Seventies when he lived with family members in New York Metropolis.
He used his contacts and his information of English to open cocaine markets for the Medellin Cartel and have become a key ally of its boss, Escobar. He is portrayed in the Netflix series “Narcos” as a wild, ruthless legal who arrange a cocaine transit hub on a non-public island within the Bahamas, known as Norman’s Cay, that turned an important stopover level for cocaine flights.
In Colombia, he owned an expensive rural lodge often called the Posada Alemana, which had caged lions on its grounds and a big statue of Lehder’s favourite musician, John Lennon.
Within the U.S., Lehder was initially sentenced to life in jail however managed to scale back his sentence by offering U.S. investigators with data that was used to prosecute Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega.
As CBS Information reported in 2015, the prosecution of Lehder and Noriega was aided by intelligence gathered by Carlos Toro, a former high-ranking cartel member turned undercover DEA operative who assumed many false identities.
Lehder’s launch Monday comes just some months after one other key operator of the Medellin cocaine cartel was set free of a U.S. jail. Data from the U.S. Bureau of Prisons present Fabio Ochoa Vásquez was released in December after finishing 25 years of a 30-year jail sentence.
Ochoa, 67, and his older brothers amassed a fortune when cocaine began flooding the U.S. within the late Nineteen Seventies and early Nineteen Eighties, in response to U.S. authorities, to the purpose that in 1987, they had been included in Forbes Journal’s record of billionaires. Dwelling in Miami, Ochoa ran a distribution middle for the cocaine cartel as soon as headed by Escobar.
