Legendary parties, women, drugs, neo-Nazis – and a body in a boat
New book lifts lid on one of Escobar’s most ruthless lieutenants
Before he was 30, Carlos Lehder had amassed so much money from crime that he bought his own island in the Bahamas.
The parties on Norman’s Cay became legendary, with women flown into the island to join in the fun as Lehder frolicked in his yachts or speed boats.
He bribed police, ministers and even the president of the Bahamas to ensure his privacy was not disturbed.
The residents of the island were harassed to force them away. When a yacht was found adrift off the island with a blood-stained corpse inside, it worked: the locals left.
But it was not just a playground for a drug smuggler; the island was a key staging post to ship cocaine to the United States.
Lehder was a central figure in the Medellín Cartel which, during the 1980s, ruled the world of cocaine. He made billions of dollars and at one point he offered to pay off the national debt of Colombia.
Led by the drug lord and narco terrorist, Pablo Escobar, the cartel dominated the hugely lucrative cocaine trade during the late 1970s and 1980s, selling the drug to millions of Americans. Such was its power, it threatened to overturn the Colombian state.
Escobar was finally brought down when he was shot by police in 1993.
Lehder had more luck, in a way. In 1987, he was arrested and extradited to the United States where he was sentenced to life in prison for introducing cocaine into North America.
After serving 33 years in a maximum-security jail, he was released in 2020 and has written a book about his life inside the Medellín cartel at the side of the world’s most notorious drug kingpin.
Carlos Lehder, Life and Death of the Medellín Cartel, which has just been published in Spain, tells the no-holds-barred story of a life of excess lived just a whisker from death.
Lehder could have regaled readers with stories of gore but instead prefers to portray himself as a kind of figure from the 1980s television series The A Team; he is armed and dangerous but prefers to use his head instead of spilling blood and shows mercy to his enemies.
However, other accounts of the Medellín cartel tell a different story. Lehder is portrayed as an impulsive and highly violent man who was feared by other drug smugglers.
Now 74, white-haired and well-dressed, Lehder lives in Frankfurt and could pass for any other elderly man seeing out his twilight years. From a GermanColombian family, he cut his teeth in the world of crime by stealing cars in New York while still a teenager. He had dropped out of school after reading books like The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli and Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler.
When he returned to Colombia, he became immersed in the world of cocaine smuggling and was later jailed for two years in the US, then returned to his homeland to resume his criminal career.
“The moment I decided to accept that tempting offer marked a before and after in my life. It ended up being the decision that marked my destiny, my debut in the world of crime,” he writes.
“These first steps in crime also led me to prison where I did not rehabilitate myself, but rather acquired new knowledge to emerge in the world of crime.”
Lehder confesses that a moral failing led him to descend into the world of Escobar’s cartel.
“The reason why I continued to immerse myself in drug trafficking was, mostly, a mixture of situations and a lack of morals in my heart,” he admits. “I didn’t have the willpower that most Colombians had to go out to work honestly every day. Yes, I was a bandit.”
In 1981, the US Drugs Enforcement Agency (DEA) and the Bahamas police raided Norman’s Cay and dismantled the drugs staging post set up by Lehder, but they failed to catch the kingpin. He got his revenge by bombing Nassau in the Bahamas with leaflets reading “DEA go home”, some of these with $100 bills.
Lehder details in his book how he did deals with Raul Castro in Cuba, the Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega and the Sandinistas in Nicaragua who were keen to help the cartel get their drugs to the US in return for a cut of the profits.
Unafraid to fight back against rival cartels, Lehder was one of the founding members of Muerte a Sequestrators (Death to the Kidnappers), a paramilitary group which retaliated against the kidnappings of cartel members or their families.
In 1981, the M-19 guerilla group tried to kidnap him. He escaped but was shot in the leg.
At one stage he turned to politics, setting up the neo-Nazi political party, the National Latin Movement, whose sole aim was to force Colombia to scrap its extradition treaty with the United States.
His luck ran out when his whereabouts was betrayed to the police. The informer is believed to have been none other than Escobar, who wanted his rival out of the picture.
Other cartel leaders believed Lehder’s involvement in politics was bad for business.
His arrest led to the fall of one of the Medellín cartel’s most important figures and it was a warning sign to the other leaders of what would happen if they were caught.
This was the beginning of the end for Escobar’s empire which came under fire from the Calí Cartel, the US drugs enforcement agency and Colombian authorities.