Carlos Lehder

His father, Klaus Wilhelm Lehder, was an engineer who emigrated from Germany to Armenia, Colombia in 1928, where he participated in the construction of several buildings which had elevators, a rather modern and unusual characteristic at that place and time.

When he married Helena Rivas, former beauty queen and the daughter of a jeweller from Manizales, Caldas, he changed his name to Guillermo Lehder.

In 1943, following intelligence reports from the United States, the Lehders, along with many Germans in Colombia, were suspected of ideological links with the Nazis and were investigated.

The Pensión Alemana was alleged to have been a place where Nazis gathered intelligence.

Carlos grew up in Armenia, Colombia until his parents divorced when he was 15, after which he emigrated with his mother to New York in the United States.

Lehder dropped out of school to devote himself to reading books by authors such as Nicholas Machiavelli and Hermann Hesse, while maintaining admiration for Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf.

Lehder started out selling stolen cars and smuggling them to Colombia, where the vehicles arrived in Medellín, avoiding all customs, and were then trafficked by Lehder's brother.

At the age of 24, Lehder took aviation classes, becoming an expert pilot who would know several air routes, which served as the basis for his growing criminal career, which began with small-quantity marijuana trafficking between the United States and Canada.

While serving a sentence for car theft in federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut, Lehder decided that, upon his release, he would take advantage of the burgeoning market for cocaine in the United States.

To that goal, he enlisted his prison bunkmate, former marijuana dealer George Jung, as a future partner.

Jung had experience flying marijuana to the U.S. from Mexico in small aircraft, staying below radar level, and landing on dry lake beds.

Inspired by the idea, Lehder decided to apply the principle to cocaine transport and formed a partnership with Jung.

While in prison, Lehder set out to learn as much information as possible that could be useful to him in the cocaine business.

He would sometimes even spend hours questioning fellow inmates about money laundering and smuggling.

Jung allegedly said that Lehder kept countless files and constantly took notes.

Lehder's ultimate scheme was to revolutionize the cocaine trade by transporting the drug to the United States using small aircraft.

Roman Varone and Jung had already experimented with bringing marijuana into the United States from Mexico in small aircraft below radar range and landing in dry riverbeds.

Inspired by that idea, Lehder decided to apply the same principle to drug transport.

Lehder's dream was to have a huge resort for people like himself and in turn bring justice to his native Colombia.

After Lehder and Jung were released (both were paroled but Lehder was deported to Colombia), they built up a small revenue stream through simple, traditional drug smuggling.

Specifically, they enlisted two young women who were US citizens to take a vacation to Antigua, receive cocaine, and carry it back with them to the U.S. in their suitcases.

Repeating this process several times, Lehder and Jung soon had enough money for an airplane.

Using a small stolen plane and a professional pilot, the pair began to fly cocaine into the United States via the Bahamas, in the process increasing their financial resources and building connections and trust with Colombian suppliers, while spreading money around among Bahamian government officials for political and judicial protection.

Their unconventional method of drug-smuggling began to gain credibility.

Although the business had serious setbacks due to constant robberies by common criminals in the US, marijuana trafficking; which was in a bonanza, came to an end due to the intense police operations in Colombia and the reduction in income due to the cultivation of marijuana in the US, which would prelude its beginnings in cocaine trafficking, a more profitable business with options easy to transport.

Lehder and his partners in the Cartel would amass enormous fortunes through cocaine trafficking, which is why they were nicknamed Los Mágicos (The Magicians), because they had become rich overnight, although Lehder was better known as the Henry Ford of cocaine.

Carlos Enrique Lehder Rivas (born 7 September 1949) is a German Colombian former drug lord who was co-founder of the Medellín Cartel.

Guillermo and Helena had four sons, with Carlos Enrique, born on 7 September 1949, being the third.

In Armenia, Colombia, the family owned a small inn called Pensión Alemana (which would later inspire Carlos to have his own luxurious Posada Alemana hotel), where German immigrants would regularly meet.

They also ran a small business producing vegetable oils and importing luxury goods such as wine and canned foods.

In the late 1970s, the Lehder-Jung partnership began to diverge, due to some combination of Lehder's megalomania and his secret scheming to secure a personal Bahamian island as an all-purpose headquarters for his operations.

That island was Norman's Cay, which at that point consisted of a marina, a yacht club, approximately 100 private homes, and an airstrip.

In 1978, Lehder began buying up property and harassing and threatening the island's residents; at one point, a yacht was found drifting off the coast with the corpse of one of its owners aboard.

His motivation to join the MAS was to retaliate against the M-19 guerrilla movement, which, in November 1981, attempted to kidnap him for a ransom; Lehder managed to escape from the kidnappers, though he was shot in the leg.

He was one of the most important MAS and Medellin Cartel operators, and is considered to be one of the most important Colombian drug kingpins to have been successfully prosecuted in the United States.

Additionally, Lehder "founded a neo-Nazi political party, the National Latin Movement, whose main function, police said, appeared to be to force Colombia to abrogate its extradition treaty with the United States."

Carlos Lehder is of mixed German-Colombian descent.

Born to a German father and Colombian mother, he was the first high-level drug trafficker extradited to the United States, after which he was released from prison in the United States after 33 years in 2020.

Originally from Armenia, Colombia, Lehder eventually ran a cocaine transport empire on Norman's Cay island, 210 mi off the Florida coast in the central Bahamas.

Lehder was one of the founding members of Muerte a Secuestradores ("MAS"), a paramilitary group whose focus was to retaliate against the kidnappings of cartel members and their families by the guerrillas.