Held Responsible for 80% of Cocaine Entering U.S. : Reputed Drug Lord Faces Trial in Florida

A man alleged to be the most influential drug dealer ever seized abroad and brought to the United States, is scheduled to go on trial today, and federal officials are hoping his case will send a clear message to other major narcotics traffickers:

You can’t escape us.

Carlos Lehder, a broad-shouldered, curly-haired man of 38 who authorities say was the kingpin in a huge Latin American drug operation, was trapped last February when Colombian national police and U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency agents joined in a dramatic pre-dawn raid on his Colombian jungle headquarters. From there, he was spirited to Florida in the first use by Colombia’s new government of a 6-year-old extradition treaty with the United States.

Lehder, a reputed billionaire, will enter a heavily guarded courtroom in Jacksonville, Fla., to face charges that he smuggled and distributed 3.2 tons of cocaine as a leader of Colombia’s notorious Medellin cartel.

Federal officials contend that Lehder’s cartel has been responsible for 80% of all cocaine smuggled into the United States in recent years.

Colombia Cooperates

Robert W. Merkle, the U.S. attorney for the Middle District of Florida, who will prosecute Lehder, said the case signifies “the emergence of a national will” in Colombia to cooperate with U.S. authorities in cracking down on the unbridled power of drug traffickers and their murderous activities.

“What drug traffickers fear most is extradition to the United States where their money and influence mean nothing,” Merkle said in an interview.

“The toughening attitude (by new Colombian President Virgilio Barco) in following through on the extradition treaty shows the traffickers they’re not immune from arrest and prosecution.”

A co-defendant, Jack Carlton Reed, an American citizen, is charged with one count of conspiracy.

Merkle and other officials said that Lehder’s cartel, in trying to dissuade Colombian officials from using prosecution or extradition, resorted to widespread bribery. Where that failed, he was held responsible for murdering more than 25 judges, a cabinet minister, the editor of Colombia’s second most influential newspaper and hundreds of police officers and informants.

‘People Getting Fed Up’

“Evidently the Colombian people are getting fed up with this increasing violence, and a new national will is taking hold,” Merkle said.

Lehder, who has pleaded not guilty, has been held for months in isolation--under 24-hour guard--in a series of maximum security prisons, most recently in Atlanta. Officials said they feared he might either be assassinated by former associates, or that an attempt might be made to spirit him out of U.S. custody.

His total wealth abroad has been estimated at more than $1 billion, including land holdings in the Bahamas, a yacht, three airplanes, 12 haciendas and 15 automobiles and trucks. In addition, officials suspect that extremely large drug profits are being held in secret foreign bank accounts.

Lehder had been a fugitive for three years when Colombian police and U.S. drug agents swooped down last Feb. 4 on his remote ranch where he and some companions were sleeping off the effects of an all-night dope party. DEA agents working with national police hustled him aboard a plane for extradition to the United States.

Bare Surroundings

Lehder’s present bare surroundings are in stark contrast with his situation in 1980 when, flushed with cash from three years of smuggling drugs from Norman’s Cay in the Bahamas, he returned home to develop a large tourist complex in northwest Colombia. The Bavarian-style tourist center, still operating, features a life-sized bronze statue of his hero, slain Beatles’ star John Lennon, complete with a guitar and bullet holes in its back and chest.

Lehder, in fact, owned a five-bedroom ranch house with Beatles music piped to each room, and is said to view himself as a kind of folk hero. An avowed admirer of Adolf Hitler, he tried to launch a neo-Nazi party in Colombia with himself as its head but was unable to get elected to the National Assembly.

Even with his failures, though, it was not bad for a former Detroit car thief who had been born in Colombia, the son of German immigrants. Three years in Danbury, Conn., federal prison on car theft and marijuana charges started him on a big-time crime career in his homeland, authorities said.

Returning to Colombia in the mid-1970s after his release from the U.S. prison, Lehder allegedly helped develop a criminal organization known as the Medellin cartel, named for the picturesque Andean town of Medellin northwest of Bogota where the cocaine trade sprang up.

Cartel Run by 4 Men

According to U.S. authorities, the cartel has been run by Lehder and three other men, all of them still in their 30s. Lehder complained bitterly to his court-appointed lawyer in Florida that one of his associates, Pablo Escobar, betrayed him by tipping off Colombian police to his whereabouts.

Merkle refuses to comment on this claim but some DEA agents familiar with the cartel believe Lehder’s flashy style and reputation as a womanizer ultimately alienated Escobar, a quiet, conservative figure known as “the Godfather.”

Information has reached the DEA that the Medellin cartel, the rough equivalent of an organized crime “family” in the United States, used more than bribery to quash drug cases. When payoffs fail, officials say, the cartel has not hesitated to use assassination and the threat of assassination.

Last Nov. 17, former narcotics police chief Jaime Ramirez, one of the few law enforcement officials to stand up to the drug traffickers, was ambushed by gunmen while on an automobile trip with his family. The murder of Ramirez followed a pattern almost identical to that of Rodrigo Lara, the minister of justice, who was assassinated in his car three years ago by two motorcycle riders identified as Medellin cartel hoodlums.

More than two dozen other prominent murder victims have included Supreme Court Justice Hernando Baquero Borda and Guillermo Cano, editor of the respected newspaper El Espectador, which has campaigned for the prosecution of cocaine traffickers.

Corporate-Style Techniques

Federal court records allege that Lehder’s cartel has often used corporate-style management techniques to earn an estimated $8 billion in profits from U.S. cocaine smuggling. After buying coca paste in Bolivia and Peru, the criminal group refines it in laboratories hidden in the Colombian jungle, then smuggles it into the United States on its own fleet of ships and small aircraft.

In a second indictment obtained against Lehder and others last year, U.S. authorities said Lehder personally “managed cocaine processing laboratories and supervised transportation of finished cocaine product to locations from which it would be imported into the United States.” From 1978 through 1980, he directed these transshipments from his small island base in the Bahamas, the court papers said.

As if discussing the activities of a legitimate multinational corporation, the indictment described the cartel’s orderly business methods as follows: “Upon arrival in the United States, the cocaine is distributed by the cartel’s U.S. representatives who would organize and supervise the transportation, protection, stash house sites and the distribution. The proceeds are collected and returned to the cartel via cash to Panama, Colombia and Nicaragua on private aircraft.”

John C. Lawn, the DEA administrator in Washington, said Lehder’s capture clearly has reduced the strength of the criminal group.

“But I can’t say we have crippled it,” Lawn said. “It will continue to operate.”

More importantly, said Lawn, the Lehder case “sends a message to all international drug traffickers that ‘you can run but you can’t hide.’ It shows that these powerful drug lords are not untouchable.”