Cartel Leader Reveals Secrets of Drug World

Playing the role of a latter-day Joseph Valachi, Carlos Lehder held a federal courtroom spellbound Wednesday as he revealed the secrets of a murderous cartel that ruled the drug world for more than a decade.

Like Valachi, the American mobster who ripped the veil of secrecy from the inner council of the Mafia at nationally televised Senate hearings in 1963, the dark-haired Lehder became the first Colombian mobster to speak with first-hand authority about Manuel A. Noriega, Fidel Castro and others that his criminal organization dealt with in the 1980s.

Testifying at the racketeering and drug-smuggling trial of Noriega, the deposed Panamanian dictator, Lehder said that Castro mediated a bitter 1984 dispute between Noriega and Colombia’s Medellin cartel that saved Panama’s strongman from probable assassination.

Lehder, the only cartel chieftain to be held in U.S. custody, also declared that he and his colleagues--not depending upon Noriega alone--worked with and bribed Cuban government officials to ship tons of cocaine into the United States.

In his first full day on the witness stand, Lehder corroborated allegations that Noriega was paid more than $5 million to allow the cartel to build a cocaine laboratory in Panama and that the military strongman welcomed cartel leaders to the sanctuary of Panama City after gunmen employed by Pablo Escobar, the cartel’s top boss, had assassinated Colombia’s minister of justice.

Asked to explain how he knew of such events, Lehder interspersed his testimony with phrases like “Pablo Escobar told me personally” or “I was present when. . . .”

“I never thought I’d see anything like this,” said one federal official in the crowded courtroom. “If you’ve followed drug trafficking, it’s truly historic. It takes my breath away.”

Lehder, 42, the cartel’s transportation chief, was one of only nine ruling members of the billion-dollar organization when Colombian police raided his well-guarded ranch and extradited him to the United States on a federal indictment in February, 1987.

He was convicted of conspiracy the following year after a seven-month trial but never took the witness stand, sitting in stony silence with his ankles shackled. Facing a sentence of life plus 135 years, without possibility of parole, he agreed last August to testify at Noriega’s trial in return for a recommendation of leniency from prosecutors.