Mother Delivered Drug for Trip to Disneyland, Witness Says : Odd Moments Lace Tame Lehder Cocaine Trial

Colombian police caught up with Carlos Lehder at a pine forest hide-out in the Andes. He had 16 bodyguards but only one got off a shot. “The Virgin has smiled on us,” a police colonel told his superiors.

Soon there were smiles in Florida too. American lawmen had wanted Lehder a long time, and, in a rare bit of cooperation, Colombia turned him over. Drug agents knew Lehder as one of four Colombian drug lords of the Medellin Cartel, which held a virtual monopoly on the world’s cocaine trade in the 1980s.

To them, Lehder was the prime catch: more than a kingpin smuggler, he was also a political screwball. He allegedly boasted that cocaine was a “Latin American time bomb,” ticking away inside the United States--and that the cartel bosses held the fuse. Bribery and terrorism made them untouchable. Murder had silenced scores of Colombian policemen and judges who challenged their dares.

Braced for Violence

So at Lehder’s bond hearing, federal marshals braced for violence. Bomb-sniffing dogs roamed the corridors. Sharpshooters stared down at the courthouse from the rooftops. Who knew if there would be hell to pay?

Carlos Enrique Lehder Rivas was turned over to U.S. authorities in February of 1987. His trial in Jacksonville--possibly the most important drug prosecution in U.S. history--now is slogging tamely into its 16th week. It is a methodical, civilized business, if also one that occasionally jolts into moments that are frightening and surreal.

George Jung, one-time smuggler, provided one such instance. Lehder’s own mother had appeared on his doorstep in Los Angeles, delivering 8 kilograms of cocaine. “She was upset and shaky, nervous . . . “ he said.

“I called (Lehder) and asked what the hell was going on, and he said something like: ‘Everybody works in this business. She wanted a free trip . . . to see Disneyland.’ ”

If the testimony is laced with such peculiarities, few are present to hear them. The many federal marshals scattered along the courtroom’s wooden benches usually outnumber the spectators.

Scribbles in Notebook

As for Lehder, he appears serene for a man facing a possible life sentence plus 165 years. He smiles when his lawyers cross-examine witnesses and scribbles in a notebook. His face is clean-shaven and his hair trimmed close. In his dark business suits, he could as easily be on trial for insider stock trading.

“He was to cocaine transportation as Henry Ford was to automobiles . . . “ U.S. Atty. Robert Merkle said in opening arguments. “He saw America as a decadent society. He saw cocaine as the wave of the future in the United States, reeling from Watergate and Vietnam, particularly susceptible to the allure of cocaine.”

Lehder, 38, is accused of smuggling 3.3 tons of the drug into Florida and Georgia from 1978 to 1980--an operation he allegedly commanded from Norman’s Cay, his own secluded island in the Bahamas. For protection, he allegedly doled out some of the drug loot as payoffs.

“Carlos Lehder was making payments to Bahamian officials, directly to the prime minister of the Bahamas--still the prime minister--Lynden Pindling,” said Merkle, the husky prosecutor who once played halfback at Notre Dame.

More Than 80 Witnesses

So far, the government has called more than 80 witnesses, many of them convicted smugglers, renegade pilots and swindlers. In exchange for testimony, some have gotten lighter sentences in their own cases--or have been granted immunity.

Edward Shohat, one of the two Miami lawyers at Lehder’s side, has called these witnesses “perjurers” who testify only to earn the benefits of the “Government Express card: Don’t leave prison without it.”

Shohat prefers to call his client “Joe” Lehder. Rather than a drug dealer, just plain Joe was a too-brash businessman who wanted to turn his dream island into a tourist paradise, Shohat insisted.

Sure, Joe Lehder hired a force of beefy security guards, but this was “to help protect him from the monumental dope smuggling going on on that island by other people,” Shohat said.

Whatever his entrepreneurial skills, Lehder honed them in the United States. Born to relatively well-off parents in Armenia, a provincial capital in the Colombian mountains, he ventured to New York at age 18.

Marijuana Possession

Soon he was in trouble, arrested for transporting stolen cars. Then he was collared again, this time for possession of 237 pounds of marijuana.

George Jung met Lehder in prison. After they were freed, they both smuggled cocaine, he said. He recalled how Lehder’s criminal mind began taking on fancies.

“If you’ve ever seen pictures of Che Guevara, (Lehder) was beginning to emulate Che Guevara,” Jung testified. “He was growing his hair long and was wearing combat fatigues.”

Lehder, Jung said, befriended Robert L. Vesco, the wealthy American financier on the lam. Vesco supposedly tutored his young friend in the ways of money-laundering and even introduced him to Cuban President Fidel Castro.

“(Lehder’s) purpose was to flood the United States with cocaine to deteriorate the morality of the country,” Jung said.

In the late 1970s, America’s taste for the white powder was turning to gluttony; makeshift means of supply were too ungainly for the huge demand.

Smuggler John Stolpman used to hide it in scuba gear. “We didn’t realize you could just fly cocaine right into the country without going to all that trouble,” he said.

Fleet of Airplanes

But Lehder knew it, witnesses testified. Rather than haul cocaine in a suitcase or two, his scheme was to gather a fleet of airplanes that could ferry half a ton at a time.

Norman’s Cay was outfitted with a 3,000-foot runway and it became a handy refueling point between Colombia and America. Deliveries usually were made on weekends, when the skies were already busy with air traffic from the Bahamas.

Profits from a single load sometimes topped $1 million. So much cash began piling up at Lehder’s house, witness Stephen Yakovac said, that “very quickly we got bill-counting machines.”

Guards with automatic weapons kept the island free of intruders. One unsuspecting boat skipper turned away was former CBS news anchorman Walter Cronkite.

“I was made to be the most naive yachtsman in the Bahamas (because) I had gone in there at all,” he said outside the courtroom after testifying.

Regular bribes were paid to Pindling, several witnesses agreed. George W. Baron, another smuggler, said Lehder paid the prime minister $200,000 a month--a charge Pindling has in the past denied.

Demand for Bigger Cut Told

Once, in fact, Baron said, the Bahamians demanded an even bigger cut. In return, they promised to send out gunboats to chase off any U.S. Coast Guard vessels “by telling them that it was a Bahamian secret operation going on.”

Despite the alleged bribes, Lehder’s operations on Norman’s Cay came under increasing police pressure. In 1981, he returned to his hometown, Armenia.

There, he was a popular figure openly flaunting his wealth. In his heyday, he raked in $250 million to $300 million a year, Merkle estimated. He bought plantations, houses and apartments.

He also built a resort called Posada Alemana, or German Hotel. Its centerpiece was a nude statue of one his idols, John Lennon. The sculptor fashioned bullet holes into the assassinated Beatle’s chest and back.

“There was an underground discotheque,” said witness Gorman Bannister, further describing a complex that had prize stallions and exotic birds. He was told of a Mercedes outfitted with escape devices like those in a James Bond movie.

Women and Cocaine

By many accounts, Lehder indulged himself in eclectic passions during those heady times. Among them were beautiful women and the best cocaine, two pleasures he was rarely without.

Politics also engaged him. Proud of his father’s German ancestry, he professed a great love for Adolf Hitler. He started his own neo-Nazi party, the National Latin Movement, which boasted 15,000 members.

But many joys of the good life came to an end in late 1983, when the Colombian Supreme Court approved Lehder’s extradition. He went into hiding, living in Colombia’s eastern jungles.

Occasionally, he would grant a TV or newspaper interview, again extolling cocaine as a way to sap American power.

“He wanted to become president of Colombia someday,” Yakovac testified. “He wanted to pull Colombia up by its bootstraps . . . to oust the imperialist Yankees. He wanted to build an empire based on cocaine.”

Instead, he is on trial in Florida, watching rascals from his past tender their versions of his collected misdeeds.

Cocaine Trade Goes On

And, if he is much the man they all say, his solace may be that the cocaine trade goes on quite well without him.

The treaty under which he was extradited has been invalidated in Colombia. The Medellin Cartel thrives. New markets open all the time. The quality of cocaine is up. Prices on the street are down. Demand is brisk.

“The sad fact is, when you get a guy like Lehder, someone else just moves in to take his place,” said Con Dougherty, spokesman for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.

“What else would you expect?”